So last year I started beekeeping. I got 3 bee hives. 1 died off and the other two survived the Winter. One of the two has egg laying workers which means the hive is probably doomed.

Yesterday we got 4 boxes of bees to install into new hives. Now, we're talking 2 to 3 pounds of bees per box (mostly 3 pounds each).

So how do you get the bees out of the box? You shake them out. Which, of course, means there are bees all over the place.

Here are some pictures.

Alex helping with the bees

 

I was covered with bees. Here's one hanging out behind my ear.

 

I dropped the queen box into a hive accidentally and had to grab it.

 

I typically had on me around 50 to 100 bees.

So you shake the bees into the hive and then some of them in front of the hive and let them walk into the hive (the queen is in the hive and her pheromones attract the others). Then I put the box next to it and hope for the best.

I only got stung 3 times.

So the new bees have arrived. I got 4 packages of them today and my son and I installed them into their new homes. We were horribly inept while doing it as the picture shows (I'm reaching down to pick up the queen cage that I dropped).

Definitely not for the faint hearted.

Who would win if the human player stepped out of it.

Let's find out if the AI improvements are making a difference..

Early game: Gray = Korx. Orange = Arcean.  Dark brown = Korath. Purple = Thalan. Blue = Humans

 

Year 2: Gray = Korx. Orange = Arcean.  Dark brown = Korath. Purple = Thalan. Blue = Humans

 

Year 3: Gray = Korx. Orange = Arcean.  Dark brown = Korath. Purple = Thalan. Blue = Humans

 

Planets:

Human capital:

 

Snathi Capital (previously they weren't building anything):

 

Korath capital:

 

Arcean main world (now building navigation centers after tweaks)

 

Korx capital:

 

Thalan capital:

Overall, a significant improvement in the AI handling of planets over beta 6c.

Just so everyone knows, the Demigod website that is currently up is only temporary. The final one is going to be totally cool. I am hoping we have it up in the next few weeks.

There's me on the left and Chris Taylor on the right immediately following the signing of the Demigod publishing agreement.  

ImpulseDriven.net is an alternative virtual community site much like JoeUser.com. There is a lot of overlap between the two in terms of content but ImpulseDriven has more game and software categories and excludes the political and religious categories.

The two have considerably different UIs as well.

So which UI do you prefer?

a) JoeUser.com

or

ImpulseDriven.net

Over the past few months the AI has gotten access to a lot of new APIs that are letting me significant improve the computer AI in Galactic Civilizations.

Armed with these APIs, I am now ready to revisit the Korx and the Thalan who have fairly unique tech trees which provide different challenges.

One of the APIs now tells me how many of a particular improvement is on a planet. So now I can keep an AI from filling up planets with stuff I don't want it to have.

A lot of the AI issues I've solved have come from string changes in the technology tree. if a tech claims to be a biological thing but really is industrial, the AI can't really do much about that. So I've had to go back and clean that kind of thing up.

The biggest "fix" I've done so far is with the Minor races. They weren't given prerequisite techs so they couldn't really do anything.  Now they're much better off.

 
Bug. Missing thumbnails.

Thalans get better at managing planets.

Another missing thumbnail

 

The minor races are actually pretty tough now. No longer the defenseless lamers of old.

The deadly snathi..

what a mess.

Who's up for a game night?

What day of the week and what time do you think would be the best time to get together and get a massive on-line night of Sins of a Solar Empire going?

Sins of a Solar Empire v1.04 is now available for download.

Use THIS LINK to update to the latest version. If you are in the Impulse Beta, use the link provided here to update, don't use Impulse to update as we're in the process of updating the backend to support fast transfers of lots of little files which hasn't been perfected yet.

View: Change Log

Download: Sins of a Solar Empire v1.04