Merry Christmas everyone!

There is an excellent book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money--That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!

I highly recommend it to people.  In many discussions on-line, it becomes really apparent that most people don't really understand money. They know what it does but they have no idea how it works, where it comes from, and how to make more of it.

Conceptually, it's straight forward: If I have $1 and my goal is to have more than $1 then I need to invest it in things that will generate a greater than 1.0 rate of return. 

Most people make money by converting time into money -- they trade their labor for money.  It is what they do with that money that determines how wealthy they are going to be.

If the average human being takes $1 and makes $1 back that means there are lots of people who take $1 and will turn it into $.50 just as there are people who can take that $1 and turn it into $2.

People who advocate higher taxes on "the rich" usually don't have much of an understanding of money.  The government, at its best, will take $1 and consume it with it being transferred somewhere else.  So it gets $1 in and $1 out.

That means if it is taking capital from people who take $1 and can turn it into $2 they are, in effect, decreasing the overall wealth of society.  Society never realizes this is happening because they don't know what they're missing. 

Of course, prior to the rise of republican government and private property rights in the 18th century, the wealth of world societies grew extremely slowly because tyrannical governments (kings, queens, emperors, whatever) ultimately controlled all the capital they could get their hands on. 

Soviet Russia was the best modern example where the state had, by definition, all the capital thus its society was effectively in suspended animation while the west profited by having those who could take $1 and turn it into $2 have as much freedom as possible.

Online, you regularly see people argue that the government can take $1 from "the rich" and give it to the "needy" but that should only be done as a last resort and only short term since, by definition, the chronically poor are people who will take $1 and turn it into less than $1. They are, literally, consumers.  Over the past few decades, we have increasingly become a society of consumers as most people know. But we have all still managed to benefit because thanks to technology and economic freedom, there are people who take $1 and turn it into $1000 out there.

Nothing threatens the progress our society makes, however, than when people stop realizing how all this progress occurs. It's not government that does that but free men and women. Citizens.

Governments must tax its citizens to provide basic services, security, and law enforcement. When the government moves beyond this, we all ultimately suffer because every dollar taken from citizens is a dollar that is no longer available to be invested in one form or other. 

That is why, as a society overall, we are better off with the smallest government we can absolutely tolerate.

So my tax bill for April is starting to come together and it's looking pretty bad. I've been paying estimated taxes all year but we had a particularly good year this year and since many of our projects run under S-corporations, their profits get tied to my personal return (like most small business owners).

Our company has around 70 people in it. We'd have more but we literally can't fit anyone else in the building.  We're in the process of building out other parts of the building we own but of course, that requires a lot of money.

Some of these projects will have to be put off until mid next year or later depending on how well Demigod, Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment, Object Desktop 2009, and ironically, how well our partner Dell does (buy Dell computers! ).

The reason they have to be put off is not that we don't have the capital to build out more of the building and hire more people, we do. It's that that money is going to go to the government instead in the form of income taxes -- almost $2 million of it in fact.

Now obviously, the government needs money to pay for vital services. I don't begrudge paying taxes on principle.  But too often, people forget where government money ultimately comes from. Worse, they are totally unaware of the consequences of taxation.

Taxes should always be kept as low as humanly possible because when you tax, you are literally taking from the people who are the most productive with capital and often giving it to the least.

Stardock, for instance, is based in the Detroit area of Michigan. So there is a certain sense of irony that the $2 million the government is taking from us is going to be given to the Auto companies and other companies have have absolutely demonstrated that they are terrible with capital.  Heck, our $2 million probably was used up in the hearings leading up to the vote on the bail out for the auto industry which Bush ultimately and unwisely decided to ignore.

So instead of using that $2 million to hire workers to build out another 8000 square feet so that we can hire an additional 24 more people this next year (to open more development teams to work on more projects for OEMs, gamers, and general consumers) we'll have to wait until we make enough money from the sales of our projects next year.  Way to go government...

In Elemental, you design your own units. Give them whatever name you want to give them, equipment them with weapons, armor, helmets along with deciding how much training they need.

Creating a soldier or a scout or a knight or what have you boils down to how long it takes you to have the equipment on hand and training which is raw time. 

There is still "quick build" but that simply, at a cost, gets supplies to that town a lot quicker. It's like having your "stuff" sent to you via Fed Ex Air rather than UPS Ground.

So we're still playing around with this concept so would love to hear thoughts on it.

Corel's full line of award-winning applications are on Impulse.  What sorts of other office applications would you like to see?

For those of you who are new to Stardock beta programs, we will often post in our own forums the bugs and suggestions we have on the games to let other users discuss them.  This was done with GalCiv and Sins of a Solar Empire with very good effect.

Below are some of the bugs / suggestions I (personally) ran into with ideas I think would help the game without making radical changes.  I'm speaking only for myself, not Stardock here so feel free to debate/discuss as you see fit.

1. Lobby needs a chat area that lists players and chat messages.  

2. Selecting hero UI issue (known).

3. New Game Option: All flags start out neutral.

4. New Game Option: War Ranking pacing (slow, medium, fast). Determines how quickly the war ranks progress. (already in)

5. New Game Option: Flag Power (low, medium, high). Determines the amount flags will effect the game.

6. New Game Option: Leveling (Epic, Normal, Hyper). Determines how much XP you need to go up a level. Already in

6a. New Game Option: Starting Reinforcements (2, 4, 8). Determines how many creeps come out of the portal at the start.

6b. New Game Option: Minion base Armor (Light, Medium, Heavy). Determines how tough the creeps are. (already in)

7. Flags need descriptions (known).

8. Clicking on an opposing Demigod should show what they are equipped with.

9. Selection issues (known)

10. Minions of generals should not give out XP when they are killed.

11. Minions of generals should have 2X as many HP for starters.

12. Minions should move as fast as the general (if general is moving fast, so do the minions).

13. Reinforcements from neutral portals should do 4X damage to structures as they currently do.

13a. Alternatively, eliminate neutral portals and replace with flags that affect gameplay.

14. All arenas should have at least 1 flag of experience that causes that team's Demigods to get XP at 3X the normal rate when it's captured.

15. Creeps that your Demigod (or minions) get the last hit on prove bonus gold to that player.

16. There should be very expensive items that allow the Demigod to do 4X damage to structures.

16a. AI should be careful about following a weakened enemy too far to avoid being led to its doom.

17. Wish List

a. Move the Favor Item to the left side and provide 2 more item slots.

b. New Item: Demolitions. Does N points of damage to a structure, is consumed.

c. New Item: Wand of Denial. Cast on friendly creeps that causes those creeps to not provide any XP to the enemy when killed. 30 second cool down.

d. New Item: Want of Learning. Cast on Enemy Creeps, doubles the XP they provide when killed.

e. New Items: Various anti-stun items that reduce stun times or have a chance of avoiding stun entirely.

f. New Item: Ring of Reflection: When activated, causes all missile damage to bounce back at enemy for 20% damage while leaving player unharmed. Lasts 5 seconds, 30 second cool down.

g. New Items: Items that reduce cool downs of abilities and summonings.

As promised, BETA 2 is going out today. Users who have pre-ordered it will soon have access to it as well.

That said, I want to make sure you guys are aware of some issues.  Real life (TM) has inserted itself into our beta process as Seattle (where GPG is located) is experiencing a bit of a snow storm which is reducing their manpower and there's a blizzard on the way to Michigan as well.

As a result, this beta is a lot rougher than we had intended it to be so let me walk you through some of the issues:

UPDATES

The internal build number of what you're getting is 825.  We will be updating it to 826 later today. That's right, there will be an update today.  There will also probably be an update tomorrow depending on the weather.

Build 825 does not filter out games in progress from the Internet Games list which, as you can imagine, means that trying to join those games would be futile resulting in an infinite wait to connect.  That's what 826 will correct.

BUGS

Don't bother reporting bugs for this build. There's a tonof them. We just didn't have time to put this through QA to nail down the zillions of bugs.  Here are some of the more serious ones:

1. The list of Internet games is crashing the game for some people. This is pretty bad since you have to get to this screen to play (even single player against bots).  It's intermittant which means it won't always happen to you so you can keep trying.  It hasn't happened to me but it has happened CariElf a few times and it usually happens to Zoomba. 
2. Because we've focused our attention on #1, we don't yet know just how good the multiplayer connectivity works. You'll note that there are no ports to open here.  As long as you aren't behind some nasty firewall, it is supposed to "just work".  Whether that is the case or not will be something we'll learn from you guys.
3. There are numerous UI issues we're still working through.

As the guy who helped pioneer com-napping and putting a flash tank to die into my opponent's vehicle plant and giving my opponents metal makers in TA, I can assure you that I'm all over working with GPG and the rest of Stardock to get code in for quitters and look for exploits.

One of the challenges in making Elemental has been to create a game with a very distinctive look. A lot of land-based strategy games tend to look pretty similar to one another. 

What we want with Elemental is an art style that someone will instantly be able to identify with this particular game.  To that end, we have developed an art-style that is kind of a water-color look.

One of our challenges is that we want players to be able to zoom in on units as closely as they want or zoom out as well and have the performance be good while still being pretty and have varying degrees of visuals based on the hardware.

At the low end, we want most Pixel Shader 2 cards (ATI 9800 or Geforce 6800 or better or most remotely recent laptops) to run the game fine. But by fine, we don't mean ugly but rather stylized. With stylized graphics, we can do some interesting things to make the game attractive on lower end cards rather than just turning off shadows and lighting and making the game look ugly. 

Today was a good day.  A major book publisher wants to publish my book. That makes me happy. Then, IGN gave our PC game, Sins of a Solar Empire its Best PC Game of 2008 award and Twilight of the Arnor got best expansion pack. And that came on the heels of GameSpy giving those two games its best of the year awards too.

We also closed a major new deal with a major PC manufacturer today too on MyColors which is pretty exciting and Dell let us know they're very happy with the way things are going with the Dell Dock.

I spent much of today between playing the beta of the new chapter in Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment and playing Demigod beta 2.

Today was a good day.

Today Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment BETA 1 goes up and this article will give you a quick run through of some of the features and what we're hoping to get out of it.

First thing to be aware of: Installing the BETA of Sins of a Solar Empire: Entrenchment overwrites your existing Sins install. So you'll want to back up Sins if you want to switch back and forth.

Now, for people who play on-line, we're still working on some of the issues with the ICO server locking up. It's a top priority to nail these down.

We are still working on costs and pacing for BETA 1.  A lot of the costs for star bases and other things are largely placeholders to get feedback on.

One big suggestion we have is to set the rates to Fast otherwise the game pacing is very slow.

In the final version, we'll probably make Normal speed what is currently Fast and Fast will be made even faster.

At first glance, one might think Entrenchment is very much like the original game. But it won't take long to notice some big differences...

First, military research labs get a big boost with the new defensive tech tree which lets players construct starbases and upgrade their weapons in lots of interesting ways.

One of the things you'll probably notice is how much better the AI is, particularly the unit AI.  Ironclad's AI team did a great job on making units a lot more intelligent. You should notice that pretty quickly in battle.