A world broken in two

The continent of Cartagia was broken into two at the climax of the titanic war between “the powers” in what became known as the cataclysm. From this we now have what the inhabitants simply refer to as “the west” and “the east”.

When the world was broken, all was laid waste and much lore was lost. In the time that became known as the “War of Magic”, we saw Channelers begin to return and carve out kingdoms.

During the War of Magic, the world was again largely split between the Kingdom of Altar in the west and the Empire of Magnar in the east. The near millennium migration of Men going westward and Fallen going eastward made the War of Magic largely unavoidable.

Once the Henge had been crossed, it was only a matter of time before both races would strive for dominion over the whole of Cartagia. This is told in more detail Elemental: War of Magic

Our story so far…

In Elemental, you design your own units. The only units you can create in Elemental are either men or Fallen.

So that we can kill any illusions now: There aren’t cities where you get to crank out armies of Unicorns and dragons or goblins.

There are dragons and trolls and other such creatures in the game. But they are rare, special and have to be recruited.

Your units start out as peasants. And you can train them (which gives them more HP) and you can arm them (which gives them more attack) and you can give them armor (which increase their defense). 

As anyone who has spent time in the military can tell you, one well trained, well armed man is the equal of many many unarmed, untrained men.  So the scale of men in battle is significant.

Of course, when you bring in magic or deal with some of the titanic creatures of the world you quickly see the scope of battle. If you like the Total War series, you can imagine some of what we have in mind except here you can get that Lord of the Rings battle feeling where certain units just make mince meat out of whole squads of enemy units.

Lunch time at Stardock..

 
Demigod QA fire team (or where they sit anyway)

Cari (CariElf’s) workstation working on Impulse Reactor’s NAT code for Demigod

Elemental being worked on

Next free update to Galactic Civilizations being worked on.

I had a nightmare last night that a review of Demigod was released based on playing Beta 3. The reason it’s a nightmare is that while many people think Beta 3 is where Demigod became “fun”, it’s still so much less than what the final game will deliver in terms of an overall experience.

Here’s a recent screenshot of our internal build of Impulse Reactor. As you can see, it’s a lot more than just chatting. Now you’ll be able to look at your profile, check updates, see what DLC is going to be available (that’s how we plan to deliver the 2 additional Demigods GPG/Stardock plan to make – which will be free btw) and of course bringing in Friends into your game.

And of course, that’s just a piece of the overall Demigod experience besides the game itself. Stay tuned.

Whenever someone argues that if you raise taxes too much then most productive and successful people will begin to withdraw their talents, another person will say “And someone else will step up and replace you.”  Every time.

In fact, in the comments section of “Going John Galt on Obama” I wrote "Thus, if the government begins to do things to the movers and shakers of our society, you can be sure that it will “trickle down” to everyone else.” a liberal user responded:

...and a whole new group of "movers and shakers" will evolve and/or the old ones will adapt to the changing conditions and times

Well, Detroit Michigan, starting with the 68 riots and culminating with the long adminstration of Coleman young effectively drove away the “movers and shakers” from Detroit.

It’s still waiting for someone to replace them.

United Artists Theater

Michigan Central Station

Time Magazine article on the issue.

If Obama gets his way, this is a preview of the entire United States.

The Democrats have introduced a bill in congress that will put an end to those Farmer Markets. The bill’s sponsor, Rosa DeLauro (D-CT), is married to the CEO of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research does work for Monsanto.

The bill would force anyone who produces food and transports it (even in state) to register with a new federal agency called the “Food Safety Administration” and have their food inspected prior to sale which would, effectively put an end to those road-side stands or farmers markets.   The big factory farms, of course, would greatly benefit from this and the government takes away just another small liberty from private citizens.

Incidentally, I am a hobbyist beekeeper and it’s already illegal for me to sell my honey without jumping through a bunch of hoops. No biggie for me since it’s just for fun. But to put things in perspective, one beehive can produce around 80 pounds of honey. An 8 oz. jar of honey can sell for about $4. Or put another way, a single beehive could make $320 a year.  Point being, the people most affected by this red tape are people who are poor who could make some extra money growing things on a small scale for local consumption.

Edge-Online did a 6 page article heralding The Age of Steam which got picked up everywhere.  I responded with Why ‘The Age of Steam’ may not last.

Some in the media turned it into a Steam vs. Impulse argument. But it’s not.  It’s not even a Steam vs. Anything argument.

The issue is that at this stage in PC gaming, digital distribution is just beginning. By Valve’s own statistics, only around half a million or so users are using Steam to play a game each day – half of whom are playing Counterstrike.

In other words, no one including Steam has remotely reached critical mass.

Proclaiming Steam as the winner in digital distribution at this stage would have been like proclaiming Friendster as the winner in social networking. That would seem quaint now in the “age of Facebook”.

I’ve seen it argued that the above analogy doesn’t work because when you buy your games with Steam, it’s harder to switch because you become invested in their platform.  They say a better argument would be iTunes and its dominance.

The problem with the iTunes analogy is that iTunes wasn’t first. It wasn’t even close to being first. If we’re going to use digital music as our analogy then we should think about protected .WMA files which came out long before iTunes did. Early adopters bought their music from BuyMusic.com and other services that sold protected .WMA files.  They were similarly invested. But it didn’t matter because there weren’t enough of them to affect where the market ultimately went.

iTunes came out much later. It didn’t need anyone to convert over from BuyMusic to become dominant because it captured the millions and millions of new users who were just getting into digital music. PC game digital distribution is presently at that .WMA level where it’s just starting out.

Nobody knows what the future will bring. Who knows, maybe Blizzard will come out with an all-encompassing digital distribution service and absolutely crush everyone. Or something completely different might happen.

What I do know is that when all these digital services combined are getting less than a million people actually using them to play games per day, that we’re not even remotely close to being in an “age” of anything.

Demigod Beta 3C arrives. Not a lot of changes in this beta but some polish, updated network coding, performance touching, etc.  The main purpose for Beta 3C is for internal infrastructure testing.  But we think you’ll find this update worthwhile still.

• AI

• Teleporting double checks

• Friendly tower wrangling

• Betrayer fixes for Regulus

• Squad attack error fix

• More demigod opportunity handling

• Video options

• “high” preset sets Vsynch on, “medium” set Vsynch off

• “low” set Vsynch off, Global blur forced to 1, god rays disabled, shadows disabled.

• Items

• Wand of speed has a time of 0

• Sound/music level tweaking

• Updated differentiated minion icons

• Updated map loading screens and compression

• Load time improvement in texture compression

• Improved team coloring for High Priests

• Corrected max slot updates for Impulse

• Frozen torchbearer mesh fix

• Aspect autoadjust for credits movie.

• Fixed trebuchet model position

• Demigod animation rate tweaks

• Fixed shopping bug when exiting via escape

• Fast game speed tweaks

• Rook wall pathing fixes

• Set slaughter to 10 for tournaments

• Set flagcontrol to 7000 for tournament

• Removed warscore from XP bar.

Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition is now at retail.  This version combines the original release with the 2 expansion packs into a single integrated game.

The code-based is the latest version if Twilight of the Arnor but the content is the entire saga put together.

 
Ultimate Edition takes the full game and presents it in its 3 acts.

Act I: Dread Lords where the galactic civil war puts the humans from Earth and their friends up against the powerful Drengin Alliance.

Act II: Dark Avatar puts the player in the role of a commander of the Drengin Empire on what to do with those civilizations they have conquered.

Act III: Twilight of the Arnor brings back Jena Casey from the outer rim who must work with the last of the Arnor to put a final end to the Dread Lords menace.

Twilight of the Arnor completes the story of Galactic Civilizations II.

Ultimate Edition’s graphics are vastly better than the original Galactic Civilizations II even though it uses less memory and runs faster than the original.

Design your own ships.

Choose among 12 civilizations or design your own!

 
In GalCiv, you’re not playing in a distant galaxy. It’s the 23rd century and the humans are on planet earth.

Win through superior fire power, better technology, stronger economics, or the clever use of diplomacy. It’s all up to you.

Galactic Civilizations: Ultimate Edition is at a retailer near you or you can buy it direct from Stardock.

If you already have all the expansion packs and the original then you’re all set already.