Let's talk about Stardock Magazine's September issue!
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One recent feature of Groupy that I appreciate is that I can now specify how long I keep one window on top of another to group them. Originally, this was instant but I found myself often grouping windows when I didn't mean to. I think I'll request a half second option just to be difficult. 
www.stardock.com/products/groupy
For the release week bnof Villains of Star Control, I absolutely had to show off the Scryve. Ah the Scryve. How I wish we had thought of them before. Thirty years ago, when I was 18, I came up with the Drengin Empire. They are a pretty good villain for the Galactic Civilizations universe. But the Scryve? Ah, there is something magnificent about a race of demigods whose species is slowly dying out. An empire that was once as idealistic as any college freshman's utopian dreams but has become malevolent for no greater reason than time.
They say time heals all wounds. That phrase has a darker meaning to it. Because what it really means is that given enough time you just won't care as much about whatever wound you suffered. The Scryve are the personification of this concept. A race of immortal beings who have ruled for thousands of years has a hard time empathizing with the brief flickers of life that represents the span of time most species exist.
If you are planning for the long...long term, like the Scryve do, it becomes perilously easy to become callous. Combine that callousness with the arrogance of vast experience and you have the Scryve. And like I said, they're dying. And now they're in Galactic Civilizations III. This AAR will tell you a little bit more about them and help provide more insight into how an evil vs. evil game plays.
Doing what needs to be done to protect you since before we had agriculture
The Scryve, like the other 4 civilizations that come with the DLC, get their own ship styles, unique ability (in this case, their ships get tougher and tougher based on the size of your empire when in their own territory) and dialog. Their home system is very similar (intentionally similar) to that of the Terran Alliance.
The Scryve starting location
A couple of weeks into the great expansion something comes up:
It is their duty to go on a colony ship...no matter the cost.
Choosing the Aggression ideology results in a ship.
One comment I have is just how far the art for Galactic Civilizations has come. We originally shipped GalCiv III four years ago! And since then, we've really learned how to use the engine.
The Imperial government choice (from Intrigue)
In this particular game, I got lucky with a great set of planets and no immediate neighbors. As a result, I was able to grab a lot of good stuff quickly.
The Scryve also get their own starbase style.
Future Ward Species
The Scryve consider themselves at a higher level than other species. Being immortal, their rationale is how much wisdom can someone amass in a handful of years? There are also some species that dislike more than others.
The Xraki. Give up trying to be buddies.
The Scryve's good luck continues as they find a Precursor world to colonize.
The Scryve choose the benevolent choice for a change. Hard labor is benevolent...
We are nearing the end of the initial colony rush as we don't have the population yet to continue (we've sent most of our people to other worlds). But we have 3 candidates:
Let's recap:
Harrison I:
Has a Preumbral Beacon. These spawn space monsters in target locations which can wreak havoc on enemies. However they don't really do much for me.
Harrison II:
Not as good as the other two but has a Nanite Transmitted artifact. These spawn Overlord ships which can be a life saver (spawn one when a planet is about to get conquered).
Harrison III:
Has 2 food which is nice and has the same production benefits as Harrison I.
Which one?
I think I'll go with Harrison I. Two extra tiles is too much to pass up and the artifact can still be handy.
(It doesn't ultimately matter, the Phamyst got all three -- we were just too far away).
Lesson learned: Build Hypergates early and often.
This is part 2 of a 4 part series on the villains of Star Control DLC for Galactic Civilizations III. You can see the...unpleasantness that took place in part 1 here. Mistakes were made.
In Star Control: Origins we wanted to make sure that humanity's opposition wasn't simply a set of cartoon bad guys. Each opponent has a pretty strong motivation and a rationale...except for the Xraki. The Xraki are insane. They're not "evil" they were driven insane by events in the distant past and now simply destroy anything they come across.
In this game, I will play as the Xraki against the other villains and see how things work out.
It Begins
We get a pretty good starting location with a number of habitable worlds.
We soon have a couple of colonies and it is time to form a new government.
As you can see here, each species gets their own unique portraits for citizens. They also get their own names.
War is quick
So let me be clear, playing with malevolent civilizations is rough.
I had a colony ship on its way to a planet they wanted. So they killed it. No warning.
The Xraki's technology is based around control of singularities. So at the heart of their ships tends to be something freaky looking.
The Phamyst arrive at around turn 50 in this game. So far, it's just been the Xraki vs. the Scryve. As it should be!
The war between the Scryve and the Xraki is endless skirmishing combined with subtle expansions.
However, the Xraki find one of the best locations to build a starbase that I've ever seen.
And at last at turn 57 we meet the Measured.
And here is the power rating of each civilization at this stage:
But in the background of all this, there is war.
The Scryve and the Xraki continue to hammer it out. We are both equally matched more or less.
The Settlement
With the right payments, the Phamyst and the Measured went to war with the Scryve which resulted in a peace settlement between the Xraki and the Scryve.
This allowed a period of uninterrupted internal growth. Through careful planning, for example, I was able to build Kimberly's Refuge in just the right spot to get a huge boost for it.
Balance of power
The Phamyst and the Measured together were still powerful enough to deal with the Scryve. We had pulled out ahead thanks to our internal buildup. By turn 120 (and thanks to some new multithreaded techniques on AI pathfinding, the turn times are less than half as long as what they were in 3.8) there was a balance of power in the quadrant.
The problem with a balance of power is that some malevolent bastard always wants to upset it. In this case, everyone. By turn 140, all the powers were at war with everyone else. The Scryve quickly took the lead with a coordinated attack / invasion right into the heart of our empire.
Scryve thrusts into my empire.
But we had not been naïve enough to think we had peace in our time. One of our internal improvements was the research of weapons and defense technologies.
We had transports escorted by entropy class frigates which were deadly in numbers.
While a single Entropy couldn't take out a mighty Scryve battlecruiser, they could overwhelm one thanks to each Entropy having very good defenses and a sharp sting.
...Time
Passes...
Many months later, the war continues with back and forth battles. At one point, the Xraki homeworld is conquered by the Measured which has emerged as the super-power of the quadrant.
We have fallen far from our early lead. But we aren't dead yet.
The Chaos class battlecruiser should be able to take on any single ship out there.
It would get its first test in a very important battle:
The Measured had succeeded by using the same strategy the Xraki were. Not too many large ships but lots of deadly small ships. However, unlike the Xraki, their ships had virtually no defensive capabilities. They were designed to be cheap and efficiently mass produced.
The Chaos class ship, however, was massively defended by barrier fields. This would be a good test of offensive investment vs. defensive investment.
The Xraki strategy had succeeded. Other than a tiny disintegrator class ship and a first generation Entropy, the fleet remained relatively untouched.
(Many hours later)
At turn 236 the galaxy remained on fire but we had recovered our lost territory.
Here is the status of the quadrant:
The Xraki ownership and happiness joy region has been reclaimed.
On the other hand, this region represents only a small part of this medium-sized map:
The Xraki are not close to being the most powerful.
However, we are well situated going forward as the Scryve are somewhat over extended and many of their outer colonies are pretty isolated.
Some final thoughts
Having played through the "evil" civs as someone who usually plays as neutral or good, I will tell you that as cool as the unique abilities of each civilization are, they really don't hold a candle to the varied gameplay that you get from the combination of opponents you pick. Playing as a malevolent civilization in a galaxy filled with malevolent civilizations changed the dynamic a great deal. I hope if you're reading this that next time you play, try playing the opposite ideology as you usually do and put in some evil civs.
As the old saying goes: Evil will always triumph because good is dumb.
Greetings!
For this After Action Report I'm going to be playing Galactic Civilizations v3.9 with only the Heroes of Star Control civilizations.
I'll be pointing out notable and interesting things as I go along.
I'm going to play as the galaxy's classiest cannibals, the Phamyst.
The Phamyst have the Ravenous ability which results in them receiving food after every battle which can be used to build cities. However, this food spoils after 25 turns so use it or lose it.
My opponents:
The Scryve,The Measured and the Xraki.
The new civilizations in Villains of Star Control come from Star Control: Origins, sharp-eyed players will notice that the art style has been slightly altered to conform with the Galactic Civilizations style of a bit more realistic.
The villains of Star Control are, as you might expect, pretty malevolent. I normally play Galactic Civilizations as a neutral or neutral-good against a mix of civilizations. This is one of those rare times where it's going to be a bunch of evil civilizations thrown in together.
Each civilization has a very unique ship style. The Phamyst have a very minimalistic aesthetic.
A feature definitely not talked about enough is the fact that each of the four new civilizations provides a ton of new ship parts. And as you can see, we didn't scrimp on them.
I'm going to play the Phamyst a bit darker than I normally play.
Below you can see the unique aesthetic in action.
Phamyst battle cruiser.
First meeting with the Xraki. If you click and zoom in, you can see the subtle art style difference between Star Control and GalCiv in action (if you look at how the Xraki are depicted in Star Control). I.e. we didn't just port them directly from Star Control, we updated their look to match GalCiv's. Look at the veins!
This is probably even more obvious with the Scryve:
I probably should get universal translator.
Starbases (mine and the Scryve's).
What you can't hear (obviously) is that each civilization has their own music track and their dialog was written by the Star Control team.
Scryve Cruiser up close.
A fair trade scary guy.
It was inevitable I suppose.
The Scryve and the Phamyst were neighbors and both are pretty evil.
However...
The Scryve have better ships but my ships are designed specifically to counter the Scryve's favored weapon type (energy beam weapons). So it's not quite the walk over they thought.
One of the changes we've made in recent updates is to make defenses a lot more effective. Not only are defensive values higher but they don't get reduced nearly as quickly during battle. So defenses are a good thing to have on a ship. 
Just in time for me to have researched Orbital Manufacturing which allows for the construction of much larger hulls.
The Measured have joined the Scryve!
Unable to take on both empires at once, we are forced to grovel for an armistice with the Scryve.
Meanwhile, we had just finished the design of a new battle cruiser, the Ravager!
The Measured have conquered most of my planets but we are slowly making our way back thanks to the Patriot. The Measured ships are very business like (see screenshot below).
The Scryve and Xraki ultimately declare war on me as well.
I learned something today.
Evil civilizations put into a shark tank is rough.
And so the Phamyst go down in flames.
Last year we released Heroes of Star Control: Origins, and it proved to be so successful that we're following it up with Villains of Star Control: Origins DLC. The DLC arrives on August 27th and comes with 4 new playable races, each with their own unique abilities, ship styles, and theme music.
The Star Control: Origins multiverse is filled with beings of all shapes and sizes. Here is a preview of some of the darker species coming over to Galactic Civilizations III.
The Measured
The Measured are sentient coral. They once had a rich, thriving civilization before they were modified by the Scryve (who we will discuss in a moment). The Measured are the Bureaucrats of the Scryve sector which makes them fit in with the gameplay of Galactic Civilizations III nicely. They not only get the Bureaucrat ability but receive a new one: Mitotic, which gives them free administrators when they colonize new worlds.
The Phamyst
The Phamyst are the galaxy's most polite cannibals. They find other beings generally intolerable. The galaxy is a messy place and they are just the ones to bring class and refinement to it.
The Xraki
The Xraki are considered fanatical monsters that came from another dimension by most. But things are not quite as they seem. The Xraki were once the shock troops of the Scryve Empire, who harvested them and modified them via the Scryve's exclusive access to the only known Origin in the galaxy (a device that allows its user to go into alternative universes).
The Scryve
The immortal Scryve were not always villains. The Scryve Empire was once full of idealism and hope. Time and events slowly corrupted them. Now, the once all-powerful Scryve Empire is slowly dying. They have controlled our part of the galaxy for so long that few species have been left untouched by them. The Scryve are unlike any villain from the Galactic Civilizations universe. Where the Drengin are brutal, violent and intolerant, the Scryve are civilized, thoughtful and methodical. The Scryve could best be described as a people who followed "the ends justify the means" one too many times.
The Scryve are masters at conquering and then holding. Not only do they have the Conquerors ability, they also receive the new Imperial ability which gives their ships a HP bonus in their territory based on the number of colonies whose zone of control are contiguous with their home planet.
Where to get it...
Villains of Star Control: Origins will arrive for Steam, GOG, and Stardock on August 27th for $5.99. Not only does each new species have their own unique abilities, but they come with their own ship styles, which means lots of new ship parts to play with.
## Contents ##
by Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock
Greetings! I hope this Summer finds you well. Unless you're in Australia or New Zealand, in which case: hope you're hanging in there!
Here at Stardock, the Summer has been dominated by the exciting world of engine upgrading. Every few years, we take several months to refactor, optimize, and update our tech in order to prepare for the next series of software and games.
If you're non-technical, you'll find this boring and can just skip this.
Our core technology stack sits on Nitrous, an engine developed by Oxide Interactive. It was the first company we co-founded after we sold Impulse to GameStop, and its specific mission was to create this engine.
Here is how most software and games work even today:
Your CPU, which might have multiple cores (marketing for multiple CPUs on the same chip). Despite that, only one thread on one core could talk to your graphics card.
Most engines have a dedicated thread for AI, physics, simulation, and handling user input. This was all fine when people only had 2 to 4 CPU cores. But in a world where AMD has just announced a 12 core CPU for $500 you really need software to be designed without fixed tasks for the CPU. This is what Nitrous did for us.
With Nitrous, things look more like this:
That is, every CPU core could be handling graphics or physics or simulation at a given time. This is what let us make Ashes of the Singularity with thousands of units and is the same thing that makes Siege of Centauri possible. Not only does every unit have its own AI task, but every weapon on the unit has its own AI task. If Nitrous controlled a B-17 bomber, for instance, it would have an AI for every crew member, not just one managing the whole ship. This allows for much more sophisticated AI possibilities, which is where Stardock is taking this tech in its product phase (next 5 years).
Here's a fancy drawing showing the difference in a space battle:
The ship on the left has single AI thread that handles where the ship is flying and what its weapons are firing at. The ship on the right is Nitrous-based and has an AI thread controlling the ship, an AI thread for firing weapon A, and another AI thread for firing weapon B. If you have 3 CPU cores free, that means these things happen simultaneously which means faster framerates and having more units.
Cider
On top of Nitrous Stardock has developed Cider which integrates our UI, animation, physics, scripting, and toolchain.
This Summer, our focus has been on adding Lua support. This scripting language allows us to write our screens, AI, gameplay, etc., in Lua, which anyone can modify. We've also been standardizing our internal graphics formats so that our future games will be compatible with what we have in Sins of a Solar Empire (plus the Cider material + animation system and Nitrous's Object Space Lighting system), so assets made for Sins of a Solar Empire should work in our new games.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion assets will work across future Stardock games
This system will allow us to streamline our art pipeline, and as Sins is our most popular modded game, it lets us support the fans who have already invested time learning that art pipeline.
What started out as an expansion for Ashes of the Singularity evolved into a stand-alone game. Siege of Centauri is a tower defense game that takes place in the Ashes universe. It deals with humanity's first colony and their sudden and violent introduction with The Substrate.
With Siege, we're not attempting to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we wanted to re-imagine how tower defense games would be made if designed in 2019 with the hardware and network capabilities that players now have.
Here are the 3 pillars of this game:
The massive scale speaks for itself. Using Nitrous, we don't just have tens of thousands of units on screen - each one has its own AI. You will occasionally see emergent behavior (such as some of them trying to find another way out of the kill zone and fleeing, or trying to find a different path to take).
The strategic intervention means we can have somewhat larger maps than you normally would get in this genre. You can, for instance, send down a giant robot to fight enemies in a particular location and then jump to another area and throw down an EMP to knock out enemies threatening to break through elsewhere.
The last part, Player-made missions, seems like an obvious feature in hindsight. But then again, in order to do that you have to create a scripting system and a full on map editor that people can use to create missions.
Taken together, we are hoping people will find Siege of Centauri a compelling game. We'll find out soon, because it comes out next month!
If you're reading this, you're probably the guy or gal that everyone comes to to ask for career advice. You are, after-all, some sort of "computer genius". I have apparently reached that age where I'm old enough that I'm getting some pretty specific questions on what peoples' kids needs to know in order to succeed after college.
First, let me tell you: unless the kid knows what they want, they don't necessarily need to go to college. College is a pretty expensive way for someone to figure out what they want to do. My sons and daughter have had summer jobs doing landscaping, and that helped them decide pretty quickly what they wanted (or at least, didn't want) to do.
For what it's worth, here's my two cents on the matter:
Marketing
Any Business degree
Computer Science
Art
For all of them:
Black UIs are the new hotness in UI design. In response, we have been updating our software to explicitly support dark mode, starting with our popular window grouping app, Groupy, and our Start menu replacement, Start10.
Groupy with dark mode (Groupy lets you group windows together with tabs)
Start10 with dark mode (This is my particular start menu setup, there are lots of options)
These two programs along with our other popular desktop enhancement utilities (like Fences, DeskScapes, Multiplicity, etc.) are available in Object Desktop.
The Setup
Large map, 12 random civilizations.
The Expedition: the backdrop
In 2253, the milky way galaxy had settled to roughly this configuration.
Blue: Terran Alliance
Purple: Yor
Red: Drengin Empire
Green: Torians
Yellow: Arceans
Cyan: Altarians
With the other major civilizations being located in the vicinity.
Back in the year 2178, humans invented hyperdrive which made per-ship faster than travel possible. This technology replaced the ancient stargate technology that the Arceans and Drengin utilized. It is that technology that allowed for so much of the Orion Spur to be explored.
Hi there!
Just wanted to let you know that Stardock is releasing Start10 v1.75 at 1pm EST. Start10 replaces the Windows 10 (and 8) start menu with one that gives users the option to either go back to the classic start menu (Windows 7) or one that adheres to Windows 10's UI but incorporates the features from the traditional start menu that the default start menu lost.
I've written an article on it that outlines some of the major features that Start10 brings back like jump lists and add program organization, shell integration, etc.
You can read that article here: https://forums.stardock.com/496477/start10-adds-dark-mode-support-to-bring-back-the-classic-start-menu
A few screenshots:
(click to enlarge)
If you're interested a press copy, please let me know.
It's a free download at www.start10.com.
Stardock will be releasing Start10 v1.75 today which, amongst other things, adds dark mode support. Start10 is designed to bring the Windows 10 start menu the full power it traditionally had.
I won't pretend to understand the UX team at Microsoft. It will come as no surprise to those who have been following Microsoft and Stardock for the past twenty years that we've been pursuing often parallel visions of where the Windows desktop should go. When our visions diverge they tend to diverge in a big way and probably the most famous example was the evolution of the Start menu.
Stardock's Start8 was the first, and for awhile, only, program that returned the classic-style start menu. We're not sure what Microsoft was thinking with Windows 8 but luckily, by Windows 10, they had returned to their senses...mostly.
This past Spring Microsoft introduced "Dark Mode" to Windows 10 which is a visual treat for most of us who spend many hours in front of the computer. Nevertheless, the Windows 10 Start menu is still...not ideal.
If you have Windows 10 you already know this but let's recap. Windows 10 with dark mode looks like this:
Image from Walter Glenn's terrific article on customizing Windows 10's Start menu
Walter's article is one of the best out there for trying to make the Windows 10 Start menu usable. The problem isn't just that it's a bad UX, it is also not well implemented. It's basically divorced from the rest of the Windows shell experience.
Where Start10 shines
First, as you can see here, it is important that users quickly and easily be able to choose which presentation of the Start menu they want. That includes Microsoft's Windows 10 style. We want our users to always be able to check out things on Windows 10 easily to make sure that Start10 remains a better solution for them.
Start10: Choose between classic, modern and Windows 10
Personally, I prefer the modern style. When I use Start10, it's not because I'm "afraid of change" in my UX. I just want the most usable, modern experience, period. The classic style (Windows 7) isn't a retrograde either. You can still mix and match UWP programs and such. It just gives you a bit quicker access to elements of Windows that have become hard to directly access.
Start10: Modern Style
vs.
Start10: Classic style
With Start10, you can customize both your taskbar and your Start menu however you'd like both in terms of color and texture. But cosmetics aside here are some of my favorite features from Start10 that I just can't live without:
Jump Lists
One of the best features of Windows was jump-lists. They're still there. The OS still has them. But the default Windows 10 Start men hides them. They allow you to quickly get to a particular document.
Start10: All apps
Whether you organize your Start menu or not, one of the most useful features the start menu was nested folders. I could organize things like Apps->Graphics->Adobe and quickly go through the Adobe apps. These days, I tend to use search for anything I remotely use often so I don't organize to that level of detail anymore. However, it is still very handy to be able to organize utilities and development apps because I often absolutely forget the name of many of my favorite tools (such as Balsamiq Mockups!).
To be fair, Windows 10 is slowly returning some of these features but with relatively little control over how they're displayed:
Windows 10's Start menu for comparison.
This is by no means a comprehensive list of features of Start10. Version 1.75 adds Dark mode support to the app. If you don't already have it, definitely go download it at www.start10.com.
More screenshots
