The judges are going through the various icon packages this weekend to rate each one. You can see the public discussion at the link below. See the editorial judging on every icon package as we load them up.
View: Icon Judging
The judges are going through the various icon packages this weekend to rate each one. You can see the public discussion at the link below.
View: Icon Judging
Want some tips and tricks for playing Sins of a Solar Empire, check out the new Sins of a Solar Empire Walkthru. Players are encouraged to add their own tips to the comments area.
This screenshot is of a test on low-end hardware (playing on my laptop) to see how well the game scales between relatively low-end hardware. As incredible the graphics are in Demigod, the hardware requirements are the same as Forged Alliance (Geforce 66x series / ATI Xanything or better).
But here's the first look at the Citadel upgrades coming in Beta 2. The GPG team is working hard to get Beta 2 ready to go, there's just so much stuff coming together and we are pleased to mention that Demigod will be the first Stardock game with a worldwide release in multiple languages which is another reason Beta 2 is running a bit late - we're having to get all the translation stuff put together.
Stay tuned.
Okay, last time to test out the improved AI I did a death match between the major AI personalities and I.
I learned that the Terran Alliance AI is too meek at pursuing weapons based tech early on so that will need to be looked at.
I still lose, however because the Thalan rush researched to large scale building and I was too slow to keep up.
http://frogboy.impulsedriven.com/article/331922/AI_vs_Human_Death_Match_Game_1
This time, I'm going to be a lot more aggressive.
Observation: The Arceans don't expand particularly well.
Observation: Terran AI still isn't aggressively getting military techs.
The Terrans went all the way into the year 2231 without researching any weapons. Mind you they researched large-scale building and other potential military techs but in terms of actual weapons, very slow.
I took advantage of their poor research to attack them and took 2 of their worlds very quickly. I will say I'm surprised how quickly they responded. The AI did react to my attack on them by quickly cobbling together some weapons tech (still quite pathetic) with large scale ships (not pathetic).
So the question is, when should the Terran Alliance AI start building up its military. It has recovered well but it lost two key planets immediately.
To break the Terran Alliance's back, I have designed the Punisher:
In battle, they play a game of keep-ahead with the Terran shield techs.
This results in a bit of a stalemate. They have a lot more ships, I have a lot better ships.
They recognize this.
So I'll just do what anyone else would likely do. Make peace, reload, and sneak attack.
Strangely, the Terrans didn't build the orbital command center which would have made it a bit tougher to take their planets. Another thing to look at for a future update.
And soo...
The answer: The dreadnought.
Ah, just figured out why the Terrans didn't have the orbital command center - I captured their planet that had it.
So combat the Dreadnought, I design a newer, more advanced ship. Still a large ship (not a huge one like the dreadnought) it has armor to combat the dreadnought's mass drivers.
It proves superior in battle by a fair amount to the Dreadnought. Defenses matter.
The problem remains is that the Terran Alliance economy has boomed. I may have waited too long to go after them as their technology is far superior to mine.
The Terrans are wearing me down. I can't believe this.
Maybe I can make peace and rebuild.
Well Yea...but I was hoping you wouldn't realize that.
The tide turns in my favor.
Ah the USS Eagle. My Level 23 mega ship.
The Terrans make a last stand with two dreadnoughts and 2 battleships against 2 "Supper Nanny" and one of the original Nannies.
The Terrans are gone.
Cultural conquest! Whohaha!
So, the AI has gotten a lot of work these past few months. Each race in GalCiv gets its own AI with its own philosophy on how to win. So how effective is it.
Let's find out!
First we need to design a map.
Next, set up the game.
And now...
We shall find out...I am the leader of the Paridians and the galaxy will be ours..maybe.
Who shall be victorious!
June 2227: Terran outreach
The Terrans have done well in taking the lion's share of the planets. Can they hold them though?
Observation #1: The Terran Alliance AI is not very good with constructors.
Observation #2: Terran Alliance should be doing better at military tech. They are researching fine but they're not researching weapons.
Very peaceful game so far...
The Thalan jumped out with a really powerful ship pretty early:
But the Terran Alliance is still defenseless so I'm going to take them out. The Thalan have already declared war.
The Thalan focused right to large ships and it will be interesting to see if it works.
Meanwhile, I've taken two Terran Alliance colonies with my spore ships.
GRR. I coded this part of the game so I know it's not biased against the player but it always seems to be against me anyway!
To defeat the Thalan, I need to design a ship that goes against what they've created. They rushed researched large ships but they can't fit much on them. Moreover, they only have low-end lasers on their ships.
So I have designed the Thalan blade. It should, in theory, be quite effective against Thalan ships -- if I can produce them before the Thalan overwhelm me.
And I do manage to get a Thalan blade out as well as a Thalan-focused fighter out which prove quite lethal.
The Thalans have trouble getting through my shields.
Unfortunately...
The Thalans have gotten wise too and now they have equipped their ships with defenses against my ships.
So game 1 goes to the Thalan!
This next time, I'll be more aggressive...
Sins of a Solar Empire has emerged as one of the most popular PC strategy games of the year. It is that rare real-time strategy game that has enough depth to engage the player long-term in terms of single player gaming and has a very fun multipayer experience.
Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1 was recently released and added a number of new features but definitely the most compelling feature was the introduction of Alloy, Ironclad's new multiplayer system that lets people easily connect together on-line without having to worry about router ports.
Below is an example of a Sins of a Solar Empire game...
In the beginning you can decide whether to play single player or multiplayer. If you have an Internet connection, you're almost better off playing on-line because you can play on the Internet against AI players. The one big advantage of single player is that you can use the + and - keys to control the speed of the game which can greatly affect the pacing of the game.
Once you have chosen to start a new game, you can either choose a randomly generated map, a pre-existing scenario, or create one of your own.
You can also set up your empire. It's pretty straight forward here with the three races being the humans, the Vasari, and the Advent.
The humans are called the Trader Emergency Coalition (TEC). In the distant future, humans have expanded out into the universe and operate as independent planets. Then one day, an alien race known as the Vasari showed up who are fleeing an unknown menace. The Vasari are vastly more powerful than the humans are but luckily there aren't that many of them. The humans band together into the Trader Emergency Coalition. While this conflict is taking place, the Advent show up. The Advent were once humans were were practicing a very particular techno-religion that was deemed a dangerous cult and were banished from Trader space. Over time, this "cult" evolved on its own (and we're not talking a natural evolution here) and has come back to seek revenge.
The TEC ships are the most mainstream in the game. They're relatively cheap but not nearly as good as Vasari ships in 1 on 1 combat. This has caused some people to say that the TEC ships are too underpowered when in fact the TEC are supposed to outnumber the Vasari. The Advent ships are in-between. They tend to require a little more finesse as they rely on various "special powers" to do the max damage. In the hands of a good player, the Advent are very lethal.
Once you select a map then you pick out who you want to play with. The map decides the max # of players. You can have up to 10 people in a game.
Once in the game, you have a shipyard which builds your ships, your home colony and depending on the scenario some additional ships and resources.
The military research screen lets you improve your ships. Often, the values seem small but it's all relative when it comes to one on one combat, a 15% advantage in say armor can make the difference between victory and defeat.
The civilian research tree has all kinds of technologies that expand your economy. Many new players will mistakenly focus purely on the military side of the things and get crushed by a more powerful industrial power.
Build scout ships and then right click on the explore (magnifying glass) to have them auto-scout star systems.
One of the best things about Sins of a Solar Empire is its user interface. It makes it incredibly easy to deal with a vast interstellar empire where you can zoom in and out. Notice there's no mini-map. You don't need one because of this.
Zooming out I can see the entire star system.
Zooming out further I can see two star systems.
And lastly I can see 4 star systems. New players should probably focus on a single star system with a dozen or so planets.
Battles don't look very interesting when zoomed out.
But zoomed in, you can see it all in great detail.
The game is won when you have no enemies left (either by allying with everyone else or wiping out the enemy). There are a ton of different statistics for the stat junkie to look through.
One of the first things we're going to be beta testing for Elemental is a new way of doing computer AI. As some of you know, the main reason I got into development in the first place was to write computer AI for games.
Elemental is an opportunity to try some new things. For example, the initial betas of Elemental are going to require the user to be on the Internet to play. The reason is that the computer AI won't be inside the game itself but instead be implemented as AI players on the Impulse game cloud that we're building.
So you would, in effect, start up Elemental like you would a multiplayer game except that the people joining your game wouldn't be people. They would be AI people. And the AI work won't just be in how they play the game but how they behave -- in the lobby and elsewhere with the goal to make them feel like real people (except not jerks).
These AI players will have their own Impulse accounts with their own standings in the rankings, their own achievements, etc. The code won't execute on your machine, it'll be all server-based.
The final version of the game, of course, will not require the user to be on the Internet. We will bundle a number of the AI players in with the game to play single player, off-line games.
But what I hope to do is to build a cloud of multiplayer AI players that I can constantly be updating and enhancing in near-real time based on the data I get back from them on how they were beat, what exploits were used against them, what chat messages were sent to it that it needs to respond to (I'll probably have it respond "no speako English" for the most part).
In the final version of the game, these AI bots will be out there ready to join on-line games. We will give players the ability to discriminate against the robots if they have some sort of anti-robot issue and don't want them joining their multiplayer games. But the match-making system otherwise won't know which players are controlled by humans and which are controlled by the robots.
The nice thing is that for people who are used to playing with strangers on-line, the robots will help fill out the on-line community with people to play against who are explicitly designed to play like people (well like decent people not the people who drop immediately).
I expect the first version of this to be included with Beta 1 of Elemental (i.e. this isn't some "future" thing) which we expect will be out this Spring.
