The sad narrative of our galaxy is that races seem inclined to commit genocide against other races on their home worlds. The Altarians and Drath once shared a home world. The Yor and Iconians once shared a home world. The Drengin and Korath once shared a home world. The Arnor and Dread Lords used to share a home world when they were known as the Precursors. Even the diplomatic humans shared a home world with the Neanderthals who were exterminated prior to the rise of modern human civilization.
But the Krynn are different. The Krynn home world started out with multiple sentient races. The Krynn, you see, are not a race but rather a people made up of many different sentient species. Tied together with a unifying culture, the Krynn (which loosely translates into "the way") believe they have unlocked the secrets to the universe and are on a holy mission to share these secrets with the universe.
The Jihad of Krynn is split between two technological branches. The first branch outlines the laws and order of the Krynn. These allow the construction of powerful centers for indoctrination which uniquely increase morale while spreading influence. The second branch spreads the way into the galaxy in extremely powerful influence modules for starbases.
What the Krynn may lack in technological sophistication they make up for in their ability to convert other species to their way. They can, after all, make the case that the Krynn have learned to share their world successfully for eons. With the galaxy full of evidence that other species, even the peaceful Altarians, ultimately fall into genocidal tendencies, the Krynn way of life has a growing appeal in a hostile galaxy.
The power of the Krynn lies in their ability to work together. This is best shown in their technological advantages in fleet combat where the whole is really greater than the sum of its parts. As the recent intelligence analysis from the Terran Alliance indicates, one could easily imagine a future where The Krynn dominate the galaxy without a shot fired.
The Way represents the ultimate direction for people to live their lives. The Krynn believe in a supreme being (what humans would call "God") who created the universe and then sent 4 guardians to safeguard the universe.
These guardians looked over the a massive crystal that the creator has put into the universe for the time when life would be added to the universe. The crystal would be used at a time when the universe was ready for life to exist. However, a 5th entity, a demon, came into the universe and attempted to corrupt the crystal. In doing so, the crystal was shattered and every tiny fragment of the crystal that came into contact with the right conditions began life across the universe.
The Krynn have put this belief to the test and have proven to their satisfaction the existence of what others call "dark energy". It is the invisible energy that the Precursors use. Their belief also predicted the existence of a "big bang" long before the science existed to provide rationale for that theory.
The Krynn believe that only through intensifying their sentience can they achieve salvation. Salvation, to the Krynn, means being able to exist as a sentient being of energy after the body has perished. The only way to intensify ones sentience is through converting others to The Way. The Krynn believe that all Krynn are connected and thus the more Krynn there are, the more intense the connections between them.
The existence of machinery that can harness the sentient energy of creatures (such as what the Drengin and Korath have) helps prove (according to the Krynn) that The Way ultimately requires no faith once one has full understanding.
Therefore, the Krynn must convert all sentient beings into being the Krynn even if it means bloodshed. The very afterlife of the Krynn is dependent on bringing the universe over to The Way. Even those who have long perished in body gain in sentience when new converts are added. Thus, the Krynn do not convert merely to save their own souls but to save the souls of all the Krynn who have ever lived.
Galactic Civilizations: Twilight of the Arnor is our most ambitious expansion pack ever. While gamers expect expansion packs to add a special unit or technology to different factions in their strategy games, Twilight of the Arnor gives each side its very own technology tree complete with many new ship components, planetary improvements, abilities, and more.
In addition, Twilight of the Arnor delivers a complete graphical make-over to the game while at the same time dramatically reducing memory use. This, in turn, allows us to provide new features like Immense-sized galaxies, Terror Stars, new victory conditions, and more.
This past week, we released BETA 3 of the expansion pack. Below are some of the highlights:
The Iconian civilization were the very first sentient beings in the known galaxy. They were once the servants of the ancient Precursor civilization. When that civilization split into two factions -- the Arnor and the Dread Lords, the Iconians, who had served the Precursors for eons, became pawns in their struggle. During the course of the Precursor struggle, the Dread Lords, fearing the Iconians would side with the Arnor, modified the robotic servants of the Iconians to achieve sentience -- thus was born the Yor.
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| The Iconians start out with Precursor legacy technology |
The Precursors are largely gone now, other than the Dread Lords who remain a shadow of their former majesty. But the Iconians, more than any other civilization, are the inheritors of Precursor technology. The strength of the Iconians is that they start out with some incredibly powerful technologies. Their weakness, however, is that they do not fully understand it. As a result, they have some obstacles to overcome in order to maintain their early advantage.
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| Iconians have access to powerful Precursor technologies |
Beta 3 begins to upgrade the planetary graphics. If you're running at high resolution, you will quickly notice that the planetary improvements now look a lot better than previously. They are much higher resolution than before. Moreover, planets continue to improve in how they look even as they use less memory.
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| More flags and player pictures have been added. |
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| The Iconian hulls have been re-textured to use less memory and look vastly better. |
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| ANIMATED HULLS AND PARTS!!! |
Beta 3 also has a big surprise - animated ship designs. Players can now select any ship component and tell it to be animated. The effect can be pretty stunning on screen. We didn't mention this feature in the "marketing" material because we wanted to make sure we could do it without slowing the game down first. Unless you go nuts with the animations, you shouldn't see any slow down at all (and if you have a high end system, you can go nuts with the animations too). The animated ships are extremely cool to see in action in the game.
Beta 3 also has a ton of new weapon effects in them courtesy of i-Mod productions. There's a lot of new weapons in Twilight of the Arnor and you'll get to see some really cool battles with these.
One request we've received by players is the ability to see more readily what goodies a technology gives. This is particularly important in Twilight of the Arnor on the diplomacy screen when players will want to know what a traded tech does for them.
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| Players can now access information on technologies by right-clicking on a technology on virtually any screen (diplomacy, tech screen , etc.). |
In addition, the ship design screen now lets players set various ship pieces as "favorites". In this way, players who design a lot of ships can easily work with just their favorite ship components.
Terror Stars are the ultimate weapon -- they destroy entire star systems. To build one, one must first research the proper technology for them. Then, one must construct the actual Terror Star which requires a large number of constructors.
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Once the Terror Star has been completed, it takes 10 weeks (turns) to mobilize.
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| Terror Stars can destroy entire star systems |
All that remains are asteroid fields where the planets once were. The terror star must be closely guarded. It moves very slowly (which means you have to build it close to where you want to use it) and has hardly any hit points. Thus, a powerful fleet should be assigned to guard it.
All of the above was just for a single beta release. Wait till you see what we have coming up. There's still 4 or 5 editors to be released, a new invasion screen, several more civilizations, lots of ships and planet improvements, and we haven't even really started the new computer AI enhancements. Plus, there's a bunch of new tournaments in the pipeline. And of course, the campaign itself. And that's just a highlight of what's coming up.
If you want to get Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor, you can purchase it here. You have to have Dark Avatar (or Gold Edition) already to play it.
Tonight's late late game is a test of the Iconians. In theory, the Iconians should be quite impressive to play as. They have access to Precursor technology which no one else in the game does. However, they can't trade that tech so that hurts them diplomatically. They also are relatively weak on weapons technology.
On the other hand, Iconian ships can be a lot tougher than other ships and they have access to self-healing armor. This game is a brief game I played this evening/morning to see how well they worked out and what tweaks need to be played.
To start with I choose Precursor studies. This is the key branch for the Iconians as it houses their industrial and research technologies. It instantly gives me access to the Precursor library -- the Iconians can build their own Precursor libraries.
Within a couple of turns, I've constructed the Precursor archive (which provides this Iconian world with a copy of the Precursor database) and a Precursor library which enables me to research technology even faster.
Where the Iconians are quite weak, however, is their initial manufacturing capacity. The basic replicator is the weakest manufacturing building in the game. However, they do get quick access to the Interstellar refinery which produces 16 IUs (but you can only build 1 per planet and it has 8 maint).
Another area the Iconians are relatively weak early on is economically. They don't start with a decent economic building. On the other hand, they do start out with the Dream Conclave, which is the best morale improvement any player starts out with (25%).
The main challenge for the Iconian player early on is going to be money. Players will likely make good use of the cheap food and cheap morale improvements to make more money via population as opposed to using readily available economic buildings.
My first weaponized ships start coming out. That's when I find a show-stopper:
My organic hull modules aren't showing up which is absolutely crucial to my strategy. D'oh! Back to the drawing board...
But first let's see how we compare:
Thanks to my population, my economy is keeping up. Research is okay. Manufacturing is okay. Approval is the best despite high tax rate thanks to cheap, powerful morale buildings.
My home planet
AI: Terran Alliance
AI: Yor
More soon...
I can't say enough good things about GameSpy. First, as an independent game developer, we don't have corporate overlords to keep us from saying politically incorrect things. So let me say this very plainly: Gamespy rocks. They have always been quick to support games regardless of the size of the company. They have no bias against games that lack multiplayer even though they are best known for their multiplayer software extensions. And their reviews and coverage are independent of advertising. We just love them.
Anyway, they have the latest internal build of Twilight of the Arnor up which has some features that aren't publicly available. You can check it out here.
Between now and the release of the upcoming expansion pack, Twilight of the Arnor, we will be adding a new editor called the Starship component editor. It will let users easily tweak and add new starship componetns into the game. The computer AI will automatically use them.
The addition of this new feature won't affect the release date. What happens is that we just keep coming up with new stuff we want to put into the game and so we end up making it.
We are still on track for tomorrow for Beta 3 which adds the Iconians (read about the new info here) and Terror Stars!
Tomorrow the Iconians will be introduced in Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor Btea 3.
In the creation of the Galactic Civilizations universe (when it was just a series of unpublished stories), the Iconians were one of the first named civilizations. A race of beings who were nearly wiped out of existence by their malevolent creations, the Yor. Even in Galactic Civilizations I, the home world of the Yor was known as Iconia (even though the Iconians were not in that game).
The Yor used a biological plague to destroy the Iconian civilization. In the stories, the Terran Alliance discovers the Yor and Iconians quite by accident when humans begin dying from an unknown disease after discovering the Iconians. This leads the humans far across the galaxy to discover the Yor in an effort to find a cure for the disease before mankind is wiped out.
The Iconian civilization is the only civilization that existed during the noontide of the Precursors. Before the Precursor civil war, which saw that civilization break into two factions now known as the Arnor and the Dread Lords, the Iconians were the servants of the Precursors.
In time, the Precursor war saw the Iconians as unwitting pawns in their struggle. The Precursor civilization resulted in the near extinction of the Iconian race. However, the Iconians have far more knowledge of the Precursors than any others.
Unfortunately, Iconian culture has not lent itself to technological research. Economics, industry, and research as we know them to be are completely foreign to the Iconians. The Iconians replicated the Precursor way of life in all its forms. The Precursors, however, were potent because of their innate being. That is, the source of Precursor power was inherent. By contrast, the Iconians are a biological organism that evolved over millions of years on Iconia. As a result, the Iconians were always little more than a pale reflection of their masters.
The challenge of the Iconians is to develop a modern economic, cultural, and manufacturing civilization. To jump start this the Iconians have access to a great number of partially translated works of the Precursors to call upon.
The Iconians have many many unique technologies, improvements, and ships because frankly, the Iconians are a very unusual civilization. They have, for instance, access to many Precursor technologies in watered down form. They also have their own robotic technology:
The Iconians, in their quest to have servants of their own, constructed ever more advanced machines to labor for them. Just as the Iconians were servants of the Precursors, so to did these near-sentient machines act as servants to the Iconians.
During the civil war between the Precursors, the faction known today as the Dread Lords modified the robotic servants of the Iconians to achieve sentience. Thus was born the malevolent race known as the Yor. The Yor quickly sought to exterminate their creators. They did so first using a biological plague since, at first, the Iconians vastly outnumbered the Yor. With the population of the Iconians decimated, the Yor then set upon the scattered survivors methodically in an effort to wipe out the remaining grops.
With some help from the Arnor, the Iconians escaped to a distant world now known as "New Iconia". To this day, Iconia is inhabited by the Yor.
While the Iconians lost much of their technology, so skilled were they in the construction of robots that this is an area that the Iconians continue to lead. Of course, they are very careful now to construct their servants such that they are no where near what could be considered sentient.
The core of the Iconian strategy is thusly: They are not as good at weapons as other civilizations. But their ships are incredibly tough thanks to access to self-healing armor, organic hull technologies, etc.
In the classic RPG Baldur's Gate, I remember thinking at the end of the game that my character was really impressive. Then I played Baldur's Gate II and realized just what real power meant. That's the essence of Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor. The civilizations are getting more powerful.
This week, Beta 2B for Twilight of the Arnor was released. No new races have been added. But the existing races are much more powerful than previously.
For instance, the Arceans get the Stellar Forge Galactic Achievement. And they get it right away. Once built, it increases the hitpoints of ships made on that planet by 25%.
The Terran Alliance, however, get their own initial Galactic Achievement they can build called the Innovation Complex which makes ships built on that planet go +1 in speed.
The Yor get some love too with some tweaks to their initial improvements and the Maintenance Coordinator which improves their morale.
There will still be balancing needing to be done, but the clear direction of Twilight of the Arnor is that the younger races are starting to become quite powerful in their own right.
I just got back from the future in my time machine. Lots of cool stuff and not so cool stuff too.
But one of the things that surprised me was how eBooks ended up succeeding in ways one didn't expect and failed utterly in the areas it was expected to do well in.
It all started with the Kindle. The Kindle was the first mainstream (seriously mainstream) attempt to get eBooks going. With Amazon getting behind it (just like the did the Segway incidentally) the Kindle became pretty successful in its time. But in the end, it failed as a product once people concluded a few things about books:
I buy about 4 to 6 books per month. I spend a lot of time reading. I'm also a techie. I'm the ideal customer for the Kindle. Besides the fact that the thing is ugly, overpriced, and can't even handle PDF's directly, it does have an important niche use: The ability to read many different things while traveling.
And ultimately, that's where eBooks will end up taking off. In the future, people buy physical books still but they also get a license to the Kindle version (good for Kindle, its format becomes the standard -- Amazon gets rich off of licensing the format even as its device fails).
So when you go on a trip, your iPhone G5 will have your Kindle books on it too that you can read while the physical book remains at home. Which is nice since I don't have to drag with me 2 or 3 hard cover books (that's the problem with non-fiction books, they tend to be big hard covers).
But Kindle, as a device will fail. But once Amazon figures out how to sell Kindle content with the actual book for tiny extra fee, it will succeed as a format.