Each civilization is really unique at doing something. The super abilities are:

• Super Diplomat. Civilization is able to secure much better deals through negotiation that other civilizations.
• Super Dominator. When they go to war, they receive a group of Corvette class ships. The number they receive is based on their military power.
• Super Organizer. When they are attacked, all races of the same ethical alignment will come to their aid.
• Super Warrior. When in battles, they get the first strike ability. That is, their ships attack first and if their opponent survives only then do they return fire.
• Super Breeder. If their approval is 100% their population increases at 4X the normal rate
• Super Isolationist. Can colonize barren worlds and no foreign ship can travel more than 3 spaces per turn in their area of influence.
• Super Trader. Gets all the trade techs at start of game and gets 2X from trade.
• Super Manipulator. Is very good at getting other races to go to war with each other.
• Super Hive. Unlimited range and all factories are built in 1 week.
• Super Adapter. Starts out with aquatic and toxic world technologies.
• Super Annihilator. Can build spore ship which when used on a defenseless colony will eliminate all population and turn it into a toxic world of the same class.
• Super Spy. Gets an agent to start with and worlds are immune from agents.

(these aren't all impemented in bta 1 of Dark Avatar).

I'm in the process of updating the Galactic Civilizations II manual for Dark Avatar. The first manual was, as some know, written primarily by Tom Chick. The good stuff was by him and the whacky humor stuff by me.

Well, because time is short, I'm doing the updates myself so there will be more whacky humor stuff this time around.

Here's the description of the races in the rought draft.

• The Terran Alliance. The humans. Or at least, humans from a United Earth in the 23^rd century. They are the diplomats; the negotiators.
• The Drengin Empire. They are not, to put it politely, diplomats. They’ll gladly have you over for dinner as long as you are the main course.
• The Altarian Resistance. The Altarians are not humans though they are genetically very similar. They are doggedly ethical but not terribly tolerant of other points of view.
• The Arcean Empire. These guys are very very tough. Very honorable but not very interested in aligning up with anyone. They are the main rival to the Drengin Empire for galactic domination.
• The Torian Confederation. For thousands of years they were enslaved by the Drengin Empire. But having thrown off Drengin oppression in the pre-hyperdrive era, they now have the problem of the Drengin Empire being able to send massive fleets to their world. They are very erratic.
• The Yor. As sentient artificial life forms, the Yor are unique. They were created by the Iconians to help serve an ancient race known as the Precursors. The Yor have grown to detest all organic life forms and are very dangerous.
• The Dominion of the Korx. These guys will sell their own mothers to you. Or they would if they hadn’t already sold her to the guy who came before you.
• The Drath Legion.  The Drath were a sentient race that developed on the same planet as the Altarians.  But long ago, for reasons we don’t know, they left Altaria after nearly becoming extinct due to constant warfare with the Altarians. Ironcially, ethically, they are very similar to the Altarians. They’d probably get along fine now if it weren’t for that whole near wiping them out thing.
• The Thalan have come from another dimension to keep the humans from destroying the universe. Why they think the humans are going to wipe out creation hasn’t been explained and their PR people haven’t returned our calls.
• The Iconian Refuge are the ones who created the Yor. Unfortunately, they must not have had any science fiction stories on their world because if they had, they would have known that they Yor would have risen up and wipe them out.  The Iconians managed to flee and have only recently returned to the stars.
• The Korath Clan. The Korath are actually ruined Drengin. If, a Drengin can truly be ruined that is.  The Drengin are merely evil, the Korath are evil maniacs. According to extensive interviews, the difference can be summed up as follows: The Drengin and Korath would both want to eat you. The difference is that the Korath would want to eat you while you’re still alive.
• The Krynn Consulate are the new Jihad. As the galaxy becomes more unstable, this enigmatic race has been able to build increasing followings based on their doctrine of ruthless adherence to a strict moral code.

In many Islamic countries, intentionally murdering innocents in the name of Islam is considered acceptable by significant portions of the population. By significant, I mean near majorities or outright majorities.

Read the full report for the horrifying full stats.

The idea behind the Epic Generator feature of Dark Avatar is pretty straight forward:

Turn your game into readable story complete with HTML and images showing how your empire grew. 

But implementation, woha.  By far, this has been the most expensive single feature of Dark Avatar requiring an immense logging system to put together keys that can later be turned into a story. 

And after 5 months of work, I have a feeling it may end up getting cut from Dark Avatar.  It's really a matter of resources -- which is more compelling to players? It's a tough call. But the practical reality is that the Epic Generator really may need AI programming which would bring me into it.

The problem with bringing me into helping with the Epic Generator is that that means I wouldn't be working on the AI. And I think the AI really needs as much time as humanly possible.

So the Epic Generator is on notice -- we'll know within 2 weeks whether this feature is going to have to be cut or not.  It'll be a bummer if it is.  To my knowledge, no game has ever tried to retell the story of a given game with this kind of narrative before.  And there appears to be a reason for that.

If it does get cut, I'm sure there will be a lot of bummed out players. I know I'll be bummed out. I love this kind of thing.  Today, for instance, I spent a lot of time putting in flavor descriptions for ship components and such. It's pure fluff (like the epic generator) but it adds heart to the game.  I love that kind of stuff.

So we'll see how things progress.  We'll know pretty soon.

WinCustomize.com gets millions of visitors a month. But of those millions of users, fewer and fewer of them seem to be using Internet Explorer.  At one time, over 90% of our users were using IE.  Now, it's down to 56%.

Of that 56%, about a third of them have already upgraded to IE 7. The rest are using IE6.

Gamespot got a copy of beta 1 and has just posted their hands on preview of the expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II.

In Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar, we have gone in and added a ton of new features to the base game that radically change the gameplay in ways we hope are for the better.

They conclude: "Dark Avatar has an impressive amount of new content, enough really to merit it being a sequel.."

The expansion pack is due for release in February.

It's been an insane week this week at Stardock. Insane. Cats and dogs living together and everything. For this reason, I'm sending this to you to let you know what's been going on.

Monday

On Monday, Stardock announced a new graphics design team called Stardock Design. It pulls together skinners from SkinPlant and Pixtudio and combines them together.  The idea is to start making skinning much more mainstream and the first thing that was released with it was a branded desktop for Florida State University. A ton of other things are in the works too. If you're reading this, you're probably one of the people who were at the forefront of the cutting edge of desktop customization -- skinning.

Stardock Design also created a consumer oriented suite called Texas Holdem. You definitely should check this out because not only does the suite have a WindowBlinds skin, icon package, boot screen, and logon screen it also has a card game gadget!

Stardock Design: https://www.stardockdesign.com

Texas Holdem: https://www.stardock.com/products/themes/texasholdem/

Tuesday

Tuesday was the day that ObjectDock 1.5 was released. This was the most significant update to ObjectDock since it was originally released. If you have Object Desktop, you can get ObjectDock at a discount.

The new version of ObjectDock supports .Dockzips, has a new resizing algorithm that's faster, works on Windows Vista, has a new image search feature, screen edge reserving, tons of new drag and drop features, and dozens of other features and tweaks.

If you haven't ever tried ObjectDock, give it a shot. It's second only to WindowBlinds in terms of popularity. Last week it passed the 3 millionth download mark on CNET.

ObjectDock home page: http://www.objectdock.com

ObjectDock 1.5 Guided Tour: https://www.wincustomize.com/Articles.aspx?AID=136176

Wednesday

WindowBlinds for Windows Vista was the main event of Wednesday. This came in the form of WindowBlinds 5.5 BETA (5.49 on Stardock Central). As a beta, it's only available to Object Desktop users. Not too many people have Windows Vista yet but if you do, this is the first (and only) way to change the way Windows Vista looks and feels. It makes full use of the new Windows Vista compositor for maximum performance. 

If you have WindowBlinds stand-alone, you can upgrade to Object Desktop at a discount by going to the link below.

Object Desktop Home Page: http://www.objectdesktop.com

Upgrade to Object Desktop from WindowBlinds: https://www.stardock.com/products/odnt/odnt-upgrade.asp

WindowBlinds 5.5 Guided Tour: https://www.wincustomize.com/articles.aspx?AID=136284

Thursday

On Thursday, the beta for Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar was released. There's far too many new features to list here but if you have Galactic Civilizations II, you'll definitely want to check this out. If you don't have Galactic Civilizations II, you can get it at your local store or you can get it at the Galactic Civilizations II home page.

The expansion pack beta is available to anyone who has pre-ordered the expansion pack. This way, players can help give feedback on what sorts of changes and tweaks they'd like before it's released.

Galactic Civilizations II home page: https://www.galciv2.com

Dark Avatar expansion home page: https://www.galciv2.com/darkavatar

Friday

And of course there's Friday. And on Friday Stardock released the Aquarium Desktop 2007.  Aquarium Desktop is similar to those fish screen savers you see seemingly everywhere except these fish exist on your Windows desktop and you can interact with them (grab them, move them around, open chests, move plants around, etc.).  It's been designed to keep from using up very much CPU when covered up so that it doesn't get in the way of your work.

As a bonus, Aquarium Desktop 2007 comes with a brand new very cool WindowBlinds skin. If you have an older version, there are some great discounts to getting the new one.

Aquarium Desktop Home Page: https://www.stardock.com/products/aquarium/

Screenshots: https://www.stardock.com/products/aquarium/screenshots.asp

The end of the week...

And now it's the end of the week. The insanity is over. If you're reading this you already know that Stardock's a relatively small company. We're located up in Plymouth Michigan. Typically, a company like ours would have one product that we just update every year. We should be making some sort of insurance application or maybe a data manager or something that we release minor updates each year. That's what a normal software company of our size would be doing. 

If you are interested in talking to anyone from Stardock in person, feel free to visit us on #stardock on irc.stardock.com (you can reach it through Stardock Central).  You can also interact with us on the Stardock forums.

Stardock Corp. 15090 Beck Rd. Plymouth MI 48170. www.stardock.com.

Windows Vista for me is a must-have upgrade for many different reasons. But some of the reasons it's so compelling are not being trumpeted enough.  Windows Vista includes with it a host of new tools for knowing a lot more about your computer than previously available.

For starters, open control panel:

Under programs look at "Change start up programs".  Under XP there was MS Config but Windows Defender is much nicer about this. Now you can actually control what is getting loaded up on your computer. 

As you can see here, I can now see what loads on start-up. The most common problem normal users run into is that after a period of time, their start up gets clogged full of junk and managing this can be really tedious.  In Vista, that problem goes away thanks to the integration of Windows Defender into Control Panel.  More advanced users will probably want something like TweakVista but as something that you know is there out of the box, this is very handy.

The BETA of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is available now for users who have pre-ordered it.  We are slowly processing all the pre-orders for it.  As usual, we under estimated how many people would pre-order (especially in the last week) since our estimates were based on the pre-orders of GalCiv II.  So it's going to take awhile.

There is no change log. If you've seen the changelogs of 1.1 or 1.2 and such then you can imagine how long the change log is to something we charge money for. 

The features on the Dark Avatar page only go over the major stuff, there's so many changes throughout that it's going to take some time for us to get a handle on even describing them (and documenting them). For example, someone allegedly asked to have control over which tile ships leaving orbit would appear in. So it's in now. But it's not documented.

Here are a few major gameplay changes to be aware of:

1. The combat system has been rewritten. It is now based on weapon instead of ship. That means a given ship could strike N opponents where N is the # of weapons on the ship. Logistics and cost of larger ships have been adjusted to keep fleets of small ships viable.
2. Factories produce a LOT less than they used to. But there are now power plants that magnify production. More emphasis is being put on getting resources from asteroid fields and starbases.
3. There will be a lot of enemy agents floating around. Even in Dread Lords there were agents in your empire, you just didn't know about them. No you actually see them on your worlds. Be wary of trying to swat every last agent on your planet at the expense of your economy.  Agents remain how you are supposed to also learn about a civ overall (i.e. if you have them on an alien world, you automatically start to learn stuff).

Here are the known issues:

1. Alt-escaping/alt-tabbing isn't reliable. If you alt-esc out of the game, it'll likely go boom. We're working on it. (bloody evil developers always play in a window)
2. The actual values and pacing are stand-ins. Don't get used to the economy, cost of things, size of things, or anything. What we want to avoid is anyone getting attached to how much things cost and then yell when we put in the balanced values.
3. Please DO NOT post generated epic stories. They're only partially working and we don't have that much text in.
4. The computer AI hasn't really been updated much. Oh, it handles spies and such but the good stuff really hasn't gotten started yet.

What we do want to hear about are:

• Crashes. This beta shouldn't crash. Ever. If you get a crash, go to the beta forum and post your debug.err and what you were doing at the time. It would also be VERY helpful if you install Smart Exception which is in the "free stuff" area of Stardock Central.
• Bad UI or confusing UI. Is there some way the game plays that does't make sense to you?
• Broken feature. Is there a feature that isn't working right?

The Beta forum can be found HERE.

The BETA of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is available now for users who have pre-ordered it.  We are slowly processing all the pre-orders for it.  As usual, we under estimated how many people would pre-order (especially in the last week) since our estimates were based on the pre-orders of GalCiv II.  So it's going to take awhile.

There is no change log. If you've seen the changelogs of 1.1 or 1.2 and such then you can imagine how long the change log is to something we charge money for. 

The features on the Dark Avatar page only go over the major stuff, there's so many changes throughout that it's going to take some time for us to get a handle on even describing them (and documenting them). For example, someone allegedly asked to have control over which tile ships leaving orbit would appear in. So it's in now. But it's not documented.

Here are a few major gameplay changes to be aware of:

1. The combat system has been rewritten. It is now based on weapon instead of ship. That means a given ship could strike N opponents where N is the # of weapons on the ship. Logistics and cost of larger ships have been adjusted to keep fleets of small ships viable.
2. Factories produce a LOT less than they used to. But there are now power plants that magnify production. More emphasis is being put on getting resources from asteroid fields and starbases.
3. There will be a lot of enemy agents floating around. Even in Dread Lords there were agents in your empire, you just didn't know about them. No you actually see them on your worlds. Be wary of trying to swat every last agent on your planet at the expense of your economy.  Agents remain how you are supposed to also learn about a civ overall (i.e. if you have them on an alien world, you automatically start to learn stuff).

Here are the known issues:

1. Alt-escaping/alt-tabbing isn't reliable. If you alt-esc out of the game, it'll likely go boom. We're working on it. (bloody evil developers always play in a window)
2. The actual values and pacing are stand-ins. Don't get used to the economy, cost of things, size of things, or anything. What we want to avoid is anyone getting attached to how much things cost and then yell when we put in the balanced values.
3. Please DO NOT post generated epic stories. They're only partially working and we don't have that much text in.
4. The computer AI hasn't really been updated much. Oh, it handles spies and such but the good stuff really hasn't gotten started yet.

What we do want to hear about are:

• Crashes. This beta shouldn't crash. Ever. If you get a crash, go to the beta forum and post your debug.err and what you were doing at the time. It would also be VERY helpful if you install Smart Exception which is in the "free stuff" area of Stardock Central.
• Bad UI or confusing UI. Is there some way the game plays that does't make sense to you?
• Broken feature. Is there a feature that isn't working right?

The Beta forum can be found HERE.

And if you want to get the beta and final game, you can pre-order it from us. We'll be letting people who pre-order get the beta for another week at least.  GO HERE TO GET THE BETA.