Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor BETA 2A

Return of the Yor

Beta 2A reintroduces the malevolent Yor.  The Yor are a race of cybernetic beings bent on wiping out all biological life that they consider a threat.

The Yor get a variety of unique technologies. They are strong on manufacturing but a bit weaker on research and colonizing.  One would think a race of machines would be good at research but their problem is that they lack imagination.

The Yor get a unique technology called Synthetic Ingenuity. It describes this situation:

One advantage that the biological organisms of the galaxy have over cybernetic is imagination. For whatever reason, organic based life that achieves sentience is able to make that "leap" that the machines cannot.

Synthetic Ingenuity is the answer to this deficiency. It works by introducing a random element into the calculations of pure research based computational systems. As a result, it simulates truly insightful thinking.

So the Yor end up with a few extra steps to get the technology they want.

The Yor also don't have markets and banks as we know them. As cybernetic creatures, they generate their economic output differently -- through efficiency optimization.  They have a series of efficiency technologies that lead them to being able to build an efficiency center on their planets.

Moreover, as one might expect, the Yor do not use farms.  It should be noted that the Yor can convert food into energy which is a byproduct of how they were originally designed by the Iconians. But they prefer a more efficient way of population growth -- charging stalks.  So rather than researching farming, the Yor research charging stalk technologies.  Charging stalks don't increase population as much as a traditional farm, but they have the benefit of increasing morale amongst the Yor.  Charging stalks give a 2 to 1 benefit.

The Yor also get a handful of unique weapon technologies. Most notably the Scatter Blaster, a space shot gun of shorts that is very cheap but uses a bit more space.  On the other hand, they also get the Seeker missile technology which doesn't do as much damage as say a Stinger missile but it costs less and uses a lot less space.

Better Graphics, Less Memory

Remember seeing before/after images when a next generation console comes out or some sequel.  When you see the screenshots below, consider the level of improvement in graphics quality even as they use less memory and it's not a sequel.

The Yor are the first race with the updated ship textures.  These textures use a new technique that don't just look better but use less memory. A lot less memory.  In a late game, we estimate that it may result in hundreds of megabytes less memory usage when enough ships get into play.  So far, our rough estimate is that a given ship uses about 1/8th as much memory as before even while looking a lot better.

Before & After on the same Yor hull

another example:

Before & After on the same Yor hull

Every Yor hull and many of the components for the Yor have been updated in this way.  The difference in quality is quite significant.  And you should notice an increase frame rate as well due to the way the textures work with the engine.

Charging stalks provide food and morale for the robotic Yor

Torian Love

Our semi-aquatic friends, the Torians, got an overhaul. They were only partially ready for Beta 2. In Beta 2A, they got some much needed attention with lots of new technologies, planetary improvements, and more.

The Torians are a tough civilization to design a technology tree. By tough, I really mean they require a lot of work to do correctly.

The Torians didn't go through an industrial revolution. Their planet was conquered by the malicious Drengin Empire 30,000 years ago in the pre-Hyperdrive era using a Stargate that had been towed out there by an unmanned probe.

When the Drengin left, the Torians inherited a technological legacy that they didn't fully understand but lack the cultural background for large scale research and engineering.  At their heart, the Torians are still a preindustrial society whose people still adhere to rituals of mysticism and folk lore.  As a result, the Torians have some significant challenges they have to overcome.

However, the Torians are not without their significant advantages. They breed very fast and they lack many of the preconceptions that other races have.  For example, the Torians have a philosophical branch to their tree that no other civilization has.

One technology, called "Exceptional Consciousness" puts it like thus:

When we first learned of the Precursor civilizations, we sought out the Iconians who were most familiar with them. According to the Iconians, the Precursors did not really consider them "truly sentient" which would, one assumes, apply to all of us. Over the course of this path of research, we have started to understand what the Precursors would have meant. The reality is, most life forms are only barely sentient -- they are barely aware of their conscious actions. Most of us still merely react to stimuli in the crudest reflexive ways. Exceptional Consciousness helps teach us how to raise our awareness to a level that is indescribable to others. We realize now that there are different levels of sentience and that that sentience carries with it abilities that could one day take us to a whole new level of existence.

The Torians, however, lack research labs. It is completely foreign to their culture. Instead, they have schools, universities, and outgrowths of academic achievement.  The idea of researching new things outside an academic setting is beyond their experience. Teachers teach. Students learn. What more is there? Their universities are not as effective as labs but combined with philosophical technologies, the Torians can still keep up.

However, the Torians are quite weak when it comes to hull design. Large scale engineering is beyond their capacity. They can do it, but they struggle. So if you love capital ships, the Torians aren't likely to be your bag.  However, the Torians are masters of logistics.  And they tend to be very rich thanks to large populations, high morale, which makes them incredibly wealthy compared to other civilizations.  In turn, the Torians tend to be quite good at logistics which results in large masses of ships.  Quantity has a quality of its own.

Lots of new planet surfaces

So in GalCiv II the planet surfaces may have been ugly but they at least used a ton of memory...but...but..they were randomly generated...which means that load times at the start of a new game were much longer too...But now in Twilight of the Arnor, the planet textures have been done by Stardock's art team as well as help from LogicSequence.

Planets look better and use less memory

Better planet surfaces, planet capitals improved

Designing your ships becomes even easier with the improved Extras interface.

Gameplay Tweaks

There have been a number of gameplay changes made in Beta 2A that will interest players.

First off, if a planetary improvement requires a technology that you don't have access to, then that improvement will be destroyed upon conquering a planet. So taking into account what planetary improvements might be missing is now a variable players will have to keep in mind when deciding who to attack. If their means of research or manufacturing is foreign to your civilization, you will have a lot of rebuilding to do.

Secondly, tourism has been modified. In beta 2, it was just over-powered. What we wanted to do is start players off with quite a bit of income via tourism to help get the game going without just throwing lots of money into players hands. This time, the tourism income is derived by looking at what % of the galaxy you control and giving you an amount equal to that plus a tiny bonus for what % of the galaxy's population lives in your areas of control.  So far, we're pleased with the results.

Thirdly, the Yor no longer are subject to plagues. They're robots.

Fourthly, the Dread Lords event is a bit tougher. No longer do the Dread Lords just pop up with an undefended planet. Now they have some defenses in there.

Fifthly, if a planetary improvement is specified as indestructible, it also means you can't upgrade it.

Sixth, some new race portraits were added.  And I for one welcome them and look forward to working in their underground sugar mines.

Seventh, we modified it so that when you focus on research or production that there's more wastage when switching from research units to industrial units or vice versa. Doesn't really make a lot of sense that the two were so fungible. We may do more in this area in the future.

Lastly, the AI hasn't been touched yet.  So as you play and see the AI using the new techs and the new improvements, that's one of the reasons we don't use scripted AI. When players start modding the game they don't have to worry that the AI won't be able to use their mods.  That said, a bunch of AI work will be done in December based on new strategies and ideas players have given us.

Stability-wise, the beta should be pretty rock solid.  Full list of changes can be found here.

There will be a beta 2B next week before Thanksgiving based on feedback from this beta.

Want the beta? Pre-order Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor. 

I recently did an interview with USA Today Weekend Edition regarding my preemptive purchase of a Porsche 911 Turbo in order to be ready for my midlife crisis. 

It never hurts to plan ahead...

(see article below).

 Stardock announced DeskScapes 2.0 today.  DeskScapes is a program that allows users of Windows Vista to have animated wallpaper on their desktop. 

DeskScapes 1.0 was released earlier this year exclusively for Windows Vista Ultimate users.  It supports playing video content as animated wallpaper, dynamic content as animated wallpaper, and more.

DeskScapes 2.0 will run on all versions of Windows Vista that can run Aero (Windows Home Premium, Ultimate, Business).  What makes DeskScapes special is that it can run animated wallpaper and use virtually no CPU and very little memory.

DeskScapes also supports the .DREAM format for animated wallpapers which allow for user configuration of individual animated wallpapers, triggers, author info, and more.  You can see a gallery of .DREAM files here.

DeskScapes 2.0 will be released in February 2008 to the general public. A freely downloable version will be available as well as an enhanced registered version for $19.95 which will also come with Object Desktop. A beta version will be available to Object Desktop users shortly.

Screenshots:

 DeskScapes home page

We put the question to gamers -- which would you prefer: A Christmas release of Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor or a January release with an extended public beta program? To our surprise, the answer wasn't even close: January.  Over 9 out of 10 people preferred having a longer public beta to a Christmas release.

To that end, below is our updated schedule:

The idea is to be able to reintroduce the major new civilizations one at a time and provide maximum time for player input on balancing them.  We plan to have another beta tomorrow which will introduce the Yor, update the Torians, and re-balance some of the updated economics.

If you would like to join in on the beta, simply pre-order Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor.

For those of you who have pre-ordered Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor can get beta 2. Released late last week, the new beta has a ton of new features in it.

We will be rolling out a new beta nearly each week between now and release and highlighting what's new so that players can be re-introduced to the Galactic Civilizations universe as the civilizations evolve with unique technology trees, unique ships, unique planetary improvements, Terror Stars, Tournaments, and lots of other goodies.

To read up on what is new in Beta 2, go here.

On Friday we released Beta 2 of the new expansion pack, Twilight of the Arnor.  From a game play point of view, Twilight of the Arnor is a massive enhancement to the Galactic Civilizations experience. For one thing, each civilization gets its own technology tree which means its own unique planetary improvements, ships, and abilities. 

For the beta of Twilight of the Arnor, we're working on having weekly updates so that we can re-introduce the various civilizations of the galaxy and help introduce the new features bit by bit.

Here's some of the highlights of Beta 2.

Tournaments

Players can finally compete for the best score on very specific tournaments. Upon victory in a scenario, their score is submitted to the Met averse where they can see how well they did compared to others. The first tournament has been released with Beta 2 - Rock & a Hard place which puts the player in the role of the Terran Alliance against the Drengin and Arceans.

Rock & a hard place starts players with nothing.

Starting in December, Stardock will be holding Tournament competitions with the winners winning T-shirts and other goodies.

Updated Technology Tree Display

The technology tree in Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor has been been updated to display to users modules, improvements, and abilities they receive from researching a given technology.

The Tech tree now displays items users get with a new technological advance.

Revised Planet Surfaces

The planet surfaces in Galactic Civilizations II have always been a bit ugly. That was because of the decision to have planets randomly generated each game.  In practice, randomly generated planets looked ugly, required immense start-up time generating them, and used a great deal of memory.  In Twilight of the Arnor, planet surfaces are created by artists including LogicSequence. The game then takes these surfaces and randomizes them to create a wide variety of planet surfaces.  The result is a significant decrease in memory as well as faster game-startups all the while looking much better.

Planet surfaces look much nicer.

 

The Korath

The malevolent Korath have been reintroduced and their technology tree is heinous along with their special planetary improvements.  The Korath are an off-shoot of the Drengin Empire.  The Drengin want to conquer and enslave the galaxy.  The Korath, by contrast, aren't that nice. They want to conquer and exterminate the galaxy.  They have figured out how to use the life force of creatures to fuel their empire.

The Korath Home World isn't nice.

 

The Korath have a planetary improvement that absorbs life force from the biosphere of the planet to generate manufacturing. It reduces planet quality in exchange for a 30% industrial gain.

 

The Torians

The Torians wouldn't even ben a space faring civilization if it weren't for the fact that the Drengin Empire had enslaved their world for 30,000 years.  For beta 2, their technology tree was only lightly changed from the default. In subsequent betas, the Torians will see their technology tree evolve.

The Torian technology tree focuses on having lots and lots of stuff. The Torians won't generally have access to high quality stuff but they will have lots of it. With a very high morale and high population, the Torians are often the richest civilization on the block but with the poorest technology.

The poor Torians have had a rough time, luckily, they reproduce like rabits

 

The poor Torians have had a rough time, luckily, they reproduce like rabbits

Evolution of the Arceans

Each beta, the existing civilizations that have already been added continue to evolve.  For instance, the Arceans received a new technology called Weather Control which enables them to upgrade their planet quality -- at a price.

The Arceans get the Weather Control Zenith

What's next...

This week we plan to release Beta 2A which will bring back the Yor as well as enhance the Torians further.  The Tournaments will get further enhancements as well and we hope to have our first Tournament match starting next week.

Lifelong meterologist and the founder of the Weather Channel has written an article denouncing the "global warming" movement as nothing but the "greatest scam in history".

Read the whole thing.

For those of you who are interested, I have written up a brief tutorial on how to write articles for the Internet.

Since starting WinCustomize ~7 years ago, we've seen a lot of people post blogs, articles, news items, etc. And many people just haven't ever been shown a handful of tips and tricks that can make creating web-based articles much easier.

I learned the hard way, so to spare others the years of grasping at new techniques, I present to you:

"Writing Effective Articles in HTML"

Running a blog community as well as a multiple sites that involve people submitting articles has taught me one thing: most people do not know how to use word processors or web editors correctly.

Programs like Word, Expression, DreamWeaver make it relatively easy for people to communicate with words very effectively provided that you know how to use them.

Today, I'm going to write a brief set of rules on communicating effectively on the Internet.

Rule #1: Use Tags

If you find yourself selecting a line of text, making it bold and making it larger to indicate that it is some sort of header, stop. Don't do that. You just cause everyone pain by doing that.  Instead, use header tags.

Use tags such as heading 1, 2, etc. to make headers.

By using header tags, your document will automatically be supported by any future effort to use the table of contents tools.  Moreover, if you decide to switch fonts, you just have to modify the header tag.  But the big reason they're important is due to the nature of the web -- if you post something to the web using header tags, they will tend to be supported. By contrast, if you simply change your font to bold and change the size, the result may not look right when you post it on-line.

Rule #2: Avoid using Microsoft Word for web documents

I hate to say this but Microsoft Word sucks for writing web documents that are going to go on-line. It's particularly true if you're writing something that is going to be submitted to a site via a web form of some kind (i.e. like when you write an article on WinCustomize.com).

Even if you select "Web Filtered" in Word, to save, you still end up with an HTML file with a bunch of custom class names in it that may interfere with the CSS of the website. Use Front Page or Dream Weaver or some simple HTML editor. You don't need to write it in HTML literally, just write it in a rich editor that saves it as pure HTML if you can.

Rule #3: If you use Tables, use them right

If you find yourself using a table as part of your document, then make it look like a table too.

For example, which of the following is more aesthetically pleasing?

Example 1:

Magic Weather for DesktopX by Stardock Design The Magic Weather is the result of a great deal of time and effort put in by the entire team to create a really cool looking weather widget. It uses data from Acuweather to display the current weather conditions as well as a 5 day forecast.

Example 2:

Magic Weather for DesktopX by Stardock Design The Magic Weather is the result of a great deal of time and effort put in by the entire team to create a really cool looking weather widget. It uses data from Acuweather to display the current weather conditions as well as a 5 day forecast.

Example 1 is how most tables I see posted by users on-line.  But doesn't't example 2 look a lot better? If it's a table, make it look like a table. Put a border around it. To do that, you make a table, and give it a border and then put another table with columns inside. It doesn't't really take any longer.

In addition, control the size of your tables.  If you're showing images that are say 240 pixels wide, then decide precisely how big you want your text to be.  Don't rely on percentages. Give it a pixel size if you can.

Rule #4: Using Thumbnails

I'm amazed how often people will simply use a full sized image that they force size down.

Which of these looks better?

Image where the user simply sizes the full-sized image in HTML. Will typically link to larger image.

Separate thumbnail created for smaller image, links to larger image.

You may also have noticed that I put my screenshots inside of a box. Since I made the entire background a contrasting color to the background of the page, I didn't need to put a border around it. When writing for the web, it's important to break up your writing into bite sized chunks visually.

Rule #5: Using Bullet Points and Number Lists

If you're going to put together any sort of list, use bullet points or numbers. What I mean by that is to use the actual web versions of these.

Example 1: Manual number list

I have 5 things I have to do today:

1) Get up
2) Bathe
3) Eat
4) Work
5) Sleep

Example 2: Using HTML based numbering:

I have 5 things I have to do today:

1. Get up
2. Bathe
3. Eat
4. Work
5. Sleep

Little things like indentions help break up the text and make it easier to read.

• Family
• Religion
• Friendship

Those are the demons you must slay if you want to succeed in business.

Conclusions

Writing for the web does require some adjustment. But with a little practice, you can create articles that are both visually appealing as well as intellectually stimulating.

One final tip about the Stardock sites like JoeUser.com and WinCustomize.com -- if you write your article on another server, completely with images, save it, load it in a web browser, copy and paste it into the GUI editor on a Stardock site, the Stardock site will automatically put in the image paths into the HTML for you which can save quite a bit of work.

Hope this helps.  Good luck!

Brad's Sins of a Solar Empire Beta 4 Preview

Our story so far

Developed by Ironclad, a start-up game developer whose founders worked on Homeworld: Cataclysm and published by Stardock Entertainment, best known for developing Galactic Civilizations, Sins of a Solar Empire is a space-based RTS that aims to combine the depth of 4X strategy games with the pacing and multiplayer goodness of real-time strategy games.

Beta 4 of Sins of a Solar Empire was just released to the beta team and this is a brief preview of what's in it and what still needs to be done between now and it's February 2008 release.

Note that I work at Stardock which publishes the game. But I'm also an avid gamer and game developer. So I'm biased but I suspect that you'll care about the same kinds of things I care about in these games.  

The Core Goal

Sins of a Solar Empire is a game full of innovations. Nearly all those innovations surround a particular goal: To allow an RTS to have unprecedented scale.  Most of the innovations fall into the area of reducing micro management and delivering new ways to manage large empires without any fear of it devolving into a "click fest".

Multiplayer in Beta 4

You know the drill - big name RTS comes out. Multiplayer doesn't work for people behind a fireewall or even behind a router. Patch is released that fixes it kind of. Another patch is released that fixes it further.

Sins of a Solar Empire is no different except in terms of when these problems occurred: A huge public beta months prior to release.  Beta 3 users got to enjoy huge lag, connection problems, router issues, etc.  So a patch was made called Beta 3a which kind of fixed it.  Beta 4 largely (but not completely) resolves multiplayer connection issues.  Kudos to the beta testers who suffered through and reported the issues so that people who buy the game won't have (knock on wood) problems getting multiplayer going.

I will admit, I'm pretty geeked about the ability to SAVE MULTIPLAYER GAMES!  It's obvious in hindsight but but the technical hurdles to smoothly and reliably allow people in a multiplayer game to save their game in progress and pick it up a week later aren't trivial.

Being able to save in a multiplayer setting is a big deal from a game design standpoint. It means you can have maps and scenarios that one can expect to finish in an hour or so as well as maps and scenarios that can take months to play depending on the user's choice.  And the game plays very differently depending on how you set things up. 

Imagine being able to get together with friends on weekends to continue an epic tournament of Sins of a Solar Empire.  That's the kind of thing that multiplayer saved games makes possible. 

Playing Beta 4

The user interface is still in flux.  I am hoping that the late November beta update will get the finalized user interface in.  It's not so much that the current UI is bad (though the research screen needs love), it just needs polish.

The star of Sins of a Solar Empire remains the overall experience though.  The scale of the universe, the incredible battles (seriously, it's like watching a Babylon 5 battle except you control the ships), and the exquisite game mechanics that really make the game feel like a 4X game in an RTS engine.

Scale Scale Scale

Zoomed in on a construction frigate

Zoom out just a bit.

Zoom out further, now I see a planet, ships become icons.

Keep zooming, now I see the planets in the star system...

Zooming further, now I see two star systems, one with lots of planets!

And finally I can see 5 star systems. Now THAT is scale.

The Game Mechanics

Beta 4 is the first beta where the game mechanics are starting to really show their promise. Pacing still needs work but it's getting better and better.

The game mechanics are pretty straight forward but also provide immense strategic choices:

You have planets. Planets provide money through taxes.  There are also planetoids (i.e. large asteroids) which aren't as good as planets but tend to be surrounded by more asteroids. Asteroids have either metal or crystal which players extract. They provide infinite resources (i.e. they don't run out).

With those 3 resources (money, metal, crystal) you can do all kinds of interesting things. But you can't do all of those interesting things at once.  You can only build so many different things around planets based on your logistics capability.  The player has to make some tough choices as to what they want to build around those planets.  Building research labs helps them get new technologies. But there are also orbital stations for trade, culture, defense, ship construction, etc. 

The net result is players take the route of having lots of cheap ships or go the route of having fewer awesome ships.  The ships, however, come in many sizes and shapes and capabilities which we'll talk about in a bit. 

Researching

Here's where the game mechanics in Beta 4 really start to be neat.  So you have planets, they provide your money. Research Labs determine how far up the tech tree you can get. Each race gets its own tech tree. And these techs are very important. So building multiple labs is important (but on the other hand, you can only build so many labs around a given planet).

The Research screen UI still needs some work.

Diplomacy

Most RTS's have very little diplomacy. Sins of a Solar Empire has considerably more than the typical RTS.

The Diplomacy isn't quite done but bounties work nicely already

The new diplomacy system isn't in Beta 4. But what is in there has some cool stuff (we'll talk about the new diplomacy system in beta 5).  The bounty is my favorite part of Diplomacy. The game has NPC units known as pirates who are effectively like Barbarians from Civilization but more lethal.  But you can passively pay them to attack other races by putting a bounty on that race. Best of all, nobody knows who is putting the bounties on people.   Trust me, in a FFA this is totally awesome.

The Ships

You have three classes of ships: Frigates (cheap ships), Cruisers (medium ships), and Capital Ships (incredibly powerful ships).

You start out able to crank out Frigates and you also start out with a capital ship (think of the capital ship as being like the Commander in Total Annihilation, don't bother to rush someone unless you really know what you're doing and your opponent doesn't).

The capital ships are very rare because not only are they expensive but they require specialized crews that you have to train (basically you research a technology which increases the # of capital ships you can control). 

The whole point of battles in Sins is that mobbing someone with lots of ships isn't going to get you very far if your opponent has a good counter to it.  I.e. You send a mob of fighters at your opponent and it only takes a very small number of flak batteries on a cruiser to wipe them all out. 

In a really epic sized game, you will get a lot of ships.  But on the more typical multiplayer maps where there's only a few planets, those capital ships and how they're armed will matter.  Capital ships remind me a bit of the heroes from Warcraft 3 in that they gain experience that allows you to upgrade them in interesting ways. I like being able to visually see the results of my upgrades (the first time you see fighters coming out of your upgraded battle cruiser is a real sight).

The ships in Sins of a Solar Empire work together almost like a single unit. All you have to do is group them and from there, the fleet will act as an intelligent fleet.

The Battles

The battles in Sins of a Solar Empire are pretty incredible as others have reported.  As more and more finalized graphics get in, the battles just look more incredible. They seriously remind me of Babylon 5 style battles.

Not a mockup, that's a real battle in-game

Epic battles, even in beta 4

The Empire Tree

So how do you have an RTS that has epic 4X empire building and not have it become a micro-management nightmare? How do you keep it from being a click-fest?  Honestly, my answer would have been you can't and that anyone claiming you can is just full of hype.

Look at the screenshot below and behold a UI that is going to be stolen over and over (I know I'll be stealing it for Society). This is an innovation whose credit belongs purely to Ironclad. And I've watched this thing in beta for the past 18 months and the Empire Tree UI has been there from the beginning as it is now (which is probably why the icons are so fugly still and need to be improved IMO).

The Empire Tree on the left is a key innovation

Look very closely at it.

The Empire Tree is what really makes Sins of a Solar Empire stand out.

One only needs to read through the forums (it's a public beta) to see the reception of the Empire Tree.  It really is a key breakthru for RTS's.  It is a BIG deal. A really hard core player could literally play the entire game from this UI. It's that powerful.  Yet it can be folded up too, just click on the arrows to roll up a particular planet or star.

So what's left?

Lots. It's going to be a busy couple of months for Ironclad and Stardock to finish this up.  There's a lot of polish that still needs to be done. There is an entire third race that isn't in the game yet. The new UI is needed, the diplomacy still needs improvement, the computer AI still needs work, and there's still pacing needed (the balance looks pretty good though the Vasari and the unreleased Advent still need work).

But with two months left to polish (the stability is very good), I think Ironclad will make their date though I wouldn't want to answer to their spouses this holiday season...

Specifications