We are pleased to announce that Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar, the expansion pack for the award-winning PC strategy game Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords is now available for purchase!
The ship design feature in Galactic Civilizations doesn't just let players put weapons and engines and shields and what not on their ships.
It also lets them design what their ships will look like. I must confess, even now, having played the game countless times, I still always design my ships with lots of extra flair to them and watch them battle it out. It's one of my favorite parts of the game even though it's largely cosmetic.
But I'm not alone. Lots of players with serious talent have been designing their own ships. Below is a link to a thread where players can show off their creations. Here's a few examples of what people have made with GalCiv II. The new Dark Avatar expansion pack adds hundreds of new components to use to design ships.
See more at the link below. Show what you've created. The Library here will let you upload screenshots if you have trouble.
Last year, we had a thread in which people showed off some of the great ship designs they created with Galactic Civilizations II.
With the expansion pack adding so many new components and so much free form support, we'd love to see the cool things players create.
The cool thing in the expansion pack is now you can save your creations as templates and then assign the computer players to make use of those ships in various roles. Combined with the capability of creating your own custom opponents, now you can create your own sci-fi universe within GalCiv without modding.
We have put together a guided tour of what is in the new expansion pack for Galactic Civilizations II (GalCiv II: Dark Avatar).
Check it out and to see some of the things we've done in the expansion pack.
Official release date is about a week!
A Guided Tour of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar.
Galactic Civilizations is a turn-based strategy game set in the 23rd century. Players take on the role of leader of an interstellar civilization. The player must explore and expand into the galaxy and balancing their manufacturing, economic, political, cultural, and military resources in order to survive in a hostile galaxy.
Players can win the game through military conquest, diplomatic alliances, cultural influence, or through a technological victory.
Galactic Civilizations II introduced a ton of new features over the original game which we won't get into here. But a couple of the most notable were ship design and a new "technology forest". The technology tree in GalCiv II forces players to make tough choices. Because economic, military, industrial, logistical, diplomatic, computing, cultural, and other kinds of technologies are in their own separate branches, the order in which players choose to research technologies as well as when they make those choices have a much greater impact on game play than is typical of strategy games. It also requires the computer AI to be far more sophisticated in order to be competitive.
The computer AI in Galactic Civilizations has always been one of its high points. Most reviews will touch on it because, in an age where AI is often ignored (you can't take a screenshot of artificial intelligence), Galactic Civilizations has a computer AI that provides a significant challenge without having to resort to cheating (though super high levels are available for people who truly master the game where the AI does get extra money and resources). The net result is a game where there are a ton of strategic options available that still provides compelling competition from the computer players.
Galactic Civilizations II included a campaign called Dread Lords (the full title was Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords). In it, the Terran Alliance based on Earth in 2225 was working to build an interstellar alliance to ward of the powerful and hostile Drengin Empire. Into this mix came the Dread Lords -- a race of insanely powerful beings who had been imprisoned in a pocket dimension. Suddenly, a three-way war was underway. The Dread Lords only weakness is that they were few in number (as in, only numbering in the hundreds).
Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is the expansion pack to GalCiv II. It includes a ton of new features as well as a new campaign in which players must take on the role of leader of the evil Drengin Empire to deal with an internal challenge to their dominance -- the Korath.
The setup options in Dark Avatar give normal players the kind of power that is normally reserved to game modders. Here's what's new:
The new galaxy setup screen allows users far more options than previous and is much easier to use.
Players can now easily pick and choose from a long list of opponents including ones they've created themselves.
When players create their own opponents they can even decide what ship style they'll have
Still not good enough? Okay, fine, you can even tell the computer player what ship styles they should use for particular roles. Still not good enough? Okay, the ships they use can be ones you designed! So all those ships you made from your favorite Sci-Fi show can now be in the game used by different races that you created!
Still want more? Okay, how about being able to set the intelligence level to the point where you pick which algorithms and how much money they get compared to you? You can even decide whether they get to use more CPU than normal in order to make use of more sophisticated algorithms!
Colonizing planets isn't the "rush" it once was. Half the planets require a specific (and expensive) technology to get. Focus too much on getting those techs and you could find yourself far behind technologically.
The graphics in Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar are significantly better. Military star base from Dark Avatar (left) vs. original (right). And the new ones are more memory efficient.
The technology tree has been greatly streamlined. Gone are repetitive items in the tree like "Laser 1, Laser 2". Instead, technology groups are put together into a single item on the tree that's divided into milestones.
Asteroids are now in the game which can be mined. But the miners are not totally loyal. Make sure you control the space the mines are in or else they may defect! Moreover, decide carefully where to beam the resources from your mines. The further the target planet is, the fewer resources that get there.
Players can now use template ships as the basis of a design. Create a really cool ship? Save it as a template and use it in future games as the basis of new designs!
Ship Design is greatly enhanced thanks to having around 10X as many ship components to put onto ships as were available in the original.
Each civilization has its own unique super-ablity. And they're not afraid to use it. Here, "someone" has persuaded the Altarians to go to war with the Korx. Someone has the Super Manipulator ability...
The Foreign Report screen is much more detailed about why civilizations like or don't like you.
Computer players put even more thought into who they should surrender to and why.
The key to military victory in Galactic Civilizations II has been to keep an eye on what your opponents have on their ships. In Dark Avatar, this has been taken up a notch with the Starship Intelligence Report.
Pretty and useful. Keep track of what the AI has on its ships in style
Want to knock someone down but don't want to go to war? Send in your secret agents! They can disrupt an opponent's economy with them never knowing who did it. Of course, the same can be done to you...
Dark Avatar has a new combat system: Battles take place on a per weapon basis instead of all weapons being summed up into a single shot by a single ship. This makes ship design even more important and makes capital ships more valuable (but also more expensive).
Set where you want your ships to exit orbit at.
Get a pop up map for displaying territory using normal perspective.
My Ranger class starship protects the home solar system.
Manage your military from a super zoomed out position in the abstract...
Or get really close to individual ships
A detailed report on your mining base (and an easy way to show how much better the graphics are than in the original GalCiv II).
Ships in orbit now really orbit on the map
Players now have the option to build not just the latest/greatest planetary improvements but older ones as well
1) IF you plan to switch between the game and something else a lot, run it in a window. You can do this via an option in the game's video settings.
(2) The game will run in any high resolution your system will support.
(3) User created data files and preferences are in the my documents\my games\galciv2 folder
(3a) The Dark Avatar preferences are in the gc2darkavatar folder in the same place.
(4) IF you run into some problem please let us know the following things:
(5) If you run into a serious problem (i.e. game won't start, crashes, etc.) there is a debug.err file in your GalCiv II directory (galciv2 or galciv2\darkavatar depending on which you're playing). Post the contents of it here.
(6) UPDATE YOUR VIDEO DRIVERS. We're serious about this. If someone responds to this post with a "Game occasionally CTDs, here's my debug.err" and there's a video driver from 2004 in it, we'll find you. 
90% of the "bug" reports we get on serious issues end up being some guy who insisted he had the "latest drivers" and those "latest drivers" turned out to be 2 years ago.
(7) The game should run on pretty much any system that supports DirectX 9C. YOU MUST HAVE DIRECTX 9C or later installed.
(8) There are some first generation Intel Extreme adapters that don't work with the game. We're talking very old ones (i.e. <2003). They don't work because they don't support True Type fonts in games. Nothing we can do. There's no work around other than to get another card. Based on the beta, this shouldn't be an issue as nobody ran into it.
(9) DO NOT use this thread to ask whether the game will work on your system. If you have doubts, wait for the demo. If you can play any other recently released game, then you can run this. (last time we put a thread like this up we had people with monster machines asking if they could run the game on it).
(10) IF THE GAME CRASHES ON YOU we want to know why. In Stardock Central in the "free stuff" area there's a program called Smart Exception. Install that, run it, and if the game crashes, it will create a log that will tell us literally what line of code it crashed on. Email [email protected] or [email protected] the file and we will take a look. Don't forget to tell us what you were doing when it crashed to help us figure it out.
(11) IF the game is crashing when it saves (i.e. corrupted save game): Check your virtual memory settings. You can do that by right-clicking on my computer, go to properties, click on the advanced tab, click on the performance settings, ciick on advanced, click on the change button in virtual memory. Make sure your virtual memory is set to at least 2 Gigs. The game won't use all that of course or anywhere near but we have found that those who run into this almost always have either no page file or very low memory.
(12) IF YOU ARE RUNNING ON WINDOWS VISTA. Be aware that the graphics drivers are still in a state of flux. Particularly the nVidia drivers (I wouldn't even consider using Windows Vista on an nVidia based machine until the driver situation gets better which I expect it to be by the end March 2007).
(13) NVIDIA 79xx series video card users, particularly those in SLI may experience freezing. If you do, turn on the hardware mouse cursor in the options. If that doesn't solve it, run the video card in single GPU mode. Keep an eye on the nVidia drivers being updated and report any problems to nVidia. I should know, I'm running two 7950's in Quad-SLI mode on my main machine.
(14) AMD DualCore. Make sure you have the latest bios for this if you run into any problems.
(15) The minimum resolution is 1024x768. If you aren't running at least that, the game won't work.
Good luck! We'll be checking this thread regularly.
PLEASE only post if you're having a problem of some kind. Thanks!
ALSO:
Galactic Civilizations II Knowledgebase: Click Here
General Stardock Knowledgebase: Click Here
Submit A Trouble Ticket: Click Here
While not technically a feature, one of the things in Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar that long time players will notice is the significant improvement in graphics quality.
Military Starbase in GalCiv II: Dark Avatar
VS.
Military starbase in GalCiv II: Dread Lords (original)
These kinds of improvements are present across the entire expansion pack. Moreover, because of improvements in how we did the textures, they actually use less memory.
We are pleased to announce that Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar has gone gold!
It's been a long journey but we think players will be pleased with the results. The expansion pack will be released on February 14th. You can pre-order it here either as a download or have a CD sent to you (and download it while you're waiting).
We'd like to thank all the people who helped beta test the game. You helped us find bugs, balance the game, add new features, and just make the entire project worthwhile for us. Thank you so much!
If you have any questions, ask them here and we'll do our best to answer.
Windows Vista is here and we've been doing so many articles that it's tough to narrow it down to just a handful to recommend to users looking to find out more about Windows Vista.
But we're going to try...
I don't pull all-nighters very often -- only when things are so busy that there's just no way to get critical projects completed.
Today is one of those days. With GalCiv II: Dark Avatar due to go gold today, all the Vista stuff, and new people starting this week, there's just too much to do.
This time, I'm keeping a log in Excel to see how productive I am. When I'm done, I'll post it.