We're in the process of re-designing WinCustomize.com for the new 2007 edition.

Here are a few features that will be in it:

1. For subscribers: It'll be skinnable.
2. Much faster overall (see forums for a taste)
3. Much lighter (lot less graphical content in the design)
4. Skinners with Master access or higher will be able to optionally sell skins and themes (giving an incentive for classic skinners to keep making new stuff and an incentive for up and coming skinners to release lots of good free stuff to move up -- subscribers will get at least 25% off the price)
5. A simpler UI to get to things more easily.
6. More galleries
7. Featured Skinner section
8. Skinner forum

But what are some things you would like to see? What things of the current site do you like and would like preserved? What things about the current site that you don't like would you like changed or removed? What things from other sites would you like to see added?

Let us know! Thanks!

In today's mission, I am playing the supreme ruler of the Galactic Federation. It is trying to rule a  quadrant with 16 sectors in it.  My opponents include the Terran Alliance, the Drengin Empire, and the Torian Confederation.

My purpose in this is to test out the many balancing changes that have been occurring in Galactic Civilizations II, new user interface enhancements, and updated computer players.  How have things improved over the past few months?

A brave new galaxy

The first thing I wanted to check out was to see how the new player placement code was working. We wanted to put a little more distance between players when possible.

Using the hot key Ctrl-N, I have the galaxy regenerate with the same settings to see how well it does.

The above 3 were typical. Whereas before, you would end up with someone very close more often, now there is more distance.  We actually intended the old code to spit out people right next to you with the idea that players would have more variety this way and could use Ctrl-N to get the galaxy they wanted.  The problem is that such a system falls apart with the feature in 1.2 of hiding where players start as an option. So we decided in 1.3 (build Z right now) to always have a bit more distance between players.

The Galactic Federation resides on planet Thandar. The new city lights code makes the planet look a lot nicer.  I have anti-aliasing turned off so the screenshots will probably be a bit blockier than normal in these screenshots.

And since this is a fresh copy of the game, I don't have my previously created ships saved so I do what I normally do on a fresh load -- build a custom colony ship. It's faster than the default but shorter range.

A couple other changes in build Z of 1.3 beta:

• Starting funds raised to 7,500 (from 5,000).
• Initial population 8 billion (instead of 5 billion)
• Capitals have a 25% morale bonus.

The result...

Happier people with more money to start with.

Ah the Drengin.. No galaxy is complete without them.

A civilization on the grow...

The Torians. They're great. I wonder what they taste like.

My civilization was off to a good start. I had even managed to find a class 26 planet. Each planet class (from 0 to 26) represents the number of useable tiles to build things on. Class 26's are extremely rare.

I decided to call the planet Paridias.

Rise of the Argonots

My strategy was going to be pretty straight forward -- conquer those I can conquer and befriend those I could not.  The Terran Alliance was going to be the ones I would try to befriend. The Drengin and Torians I would try to destroy. To this end I have designed a pretty lethal fighter called the Argonot-X1.

I control the bottom right part of the galaxy. The Drengin the bottom left, the humans the top left and the Torians the top right.

The best laid plans torn assunder

The Terran Alliance is now at war after the assassination of their leader!

The Argonots are able to take our their Vengeance class fighter. But the pesky humans are rampaging across my trade lines.

My first target would be Martzia.  The Humans are not powerful enough to conquer me -- they can only harass. I am going to conquer them.

The humans put up a fight but they never had a chance. Earth would soon be mine.

The humans recognize their folly. But the price for peace is higher than they will accept. I want Earth.

But the Drengin have other plans..

The year is 2228. The Terrans and Drengin are out to destroy me.  I have the humans on their knees but the Drengin are very powerful. I need to finish the Terrans up soon.

The Drengin ships weren't that tough but they did have a pretty nasty Frigate class.

In response I designed the Turon-Z1

With an attack rating of 14, it would be more than a match.

Meanwhile, Earth was now mine and the Terrans were happy to be at peace.

To deal with the Drengin menace, I would build the fleet of triumph. Using 19 of my logistical points, the fleet packed a much stronger punch than any near by Drengin task force.

But as I cleared Drengin out of my space, they struck back with a surgical strike -- attack on a planet to remove defenses and then an invasion same week.

A crippling move to my capital world. Things are starting to look grim.

Until...

Phew!  The Torians, my old friends, have not only decided to help but join the war with me to defeat the Drengin menace.

More bad news for the Drengin Empire...the galaxy has experienced a religious movement.

Unfortunately, one of the planets they took over was Thandard -- my capital world, er former capital world.

But things have gotten messy for me as well.  Someone (i.e. the Terran Alliance no doubt) has paid the Torians to go to war with me as well!

I can't fight off both and the Drengin and us are in a stale mate. So my only option is to make peace with the Drengin and deal with the Torians.

And so the Torians are now against me and the Drengin. How strange war with alien civilizations can be.

The Torians have put together quite a fleet. It destroys everything before it.  But it's deep in my territory and slowly I wear it down.

And I get Thandar back from the Fundamentalists.

Now it's time to make peace with the Torians.  The Drengin should keep them busy while I start to rebuild my civilization.

As 2228 ends, I control the bottom right and much of the top left.  The Torians and Drengin are at war and much more powerful than I am right now but they are busy with each other.

Now was the time to set up my new platforms for war..

The Argonot-X2 would be the new fighter.  All of my ships would use the phasor based weapons platform. Much deadlier.

Meanwhile, a peace has come to the galaxy. No one quite ahead. Billions dead.

It was time to try to wrap this up. The Thalon class battle ship when massed should allow me to conquer my opponents.

End Game

With everyone picking on the Terran Alliance, they eventually surrendered to the Drengin Empire.

And so there were 3 left.

My goal was to befriend the Torians, eliminate the Drengin. The trick was to get the Torians to trust me.

Springing the trap on the Drengin would be delicate. Some AI work has gone in on build Z to improve the AI's detection of human attack patterns and decrease false positives.  Or put another way, you can't just put a huge fleet in their territory.           

I only  need a little bit of time..

They notice. But my main fleet isn't there yet.

Now it's there. This is a good argument for having true political borders in some future sequel so you can't park ships so close like this. The Drengin see what I'm doing and mass ships around mine and prepare for war too. But it does give the attacker an immense advantage.

My massive battle ships vs. their huge fleets.

Their big fleet wins.  But I do take several of their worlds, casualties are higher than expected.

By targeting the Drengin home world, I've utterly crushed their central source of power.

I tell you though, the Drengin ships are quite nasty. Far more advanced than mine. In an ironic twist, I'm defeating them through sheer strength in numbers (that is, in total military strength) which is usually backwards for a game like this.

I find my powerful fleets being broken down by their few but lethal wolf packs.  But I have so many fleets.

And slowly those fleets grind down the Drengin Empire.

The Drengin are all but eliminated but the Torians decide that they want not just the Drengin but the Galactic Federation. It's now an all out war!

And the Torians have the advantage.

By the fall of 2230, the Drengin are nearly gone. The Torians are strong but disorganized.

All for me!

But I just can't quite get the Torians to love me.

Too many wars. I'm sure over time they'd come to like me..

But there are other ways to victory:

With the Drengin gone, I now control 79% of the galaxy. I can win an influence victory instead.

And the ship that conquered the galaxy...

and victory is mine!

My technology was a bit behind (we're the 4th symbol).

Lessons Learned..

From this game I made some changes to the computer AI to be better at detecting threats but have fewer false positives. I also tweaked the planet improvement algorithms and a few other similar tweaks.

A couple people on the forum complained that the AI was building a bunch of stock  markets. They worded their report as if this is something everyone is seeing.  I know I haven't seen it.

Here are some select planet surfaces:

Toria:

Lasitus: (there's nothing "bad" about putting an invention matrix on a food resource)

Kerchen: (located far from enemies, it favored research and money generation)

Westerfeld:

Wardell:

Now, people can debate this tile or that, but from what I see it's doing a pretty decent job.  I'd probably have more factories on some of these planets but overall it seems like a pretty decent use of the territory.

So why did the AI lose?

Basically it boils down to this age old question: Strong offense or strong defense?  The AI, in my opinion, is too defensive. That's what killed it.  Spread around its planets are groups of ships that are quite impressive but not strong enough to defend against a massive fleet. And so it never is able to get a critical mass of offensive ships.  I've made some tweaks there to see what happens.

If you are having problems installing from the CD-ROMs, try copying the files from the CDs to your hard drive and then run the installation from your hard drive.  If you are having problems activating GalCiv2, please read this sticky post:

https://forums.galciv2.com/122873

If you have any other problems installing or activating GalCiv2 and you can't find an answer in a sticky post, please e-mail [email protected]

With all the hardware and configurations out there, it's inevitable that some people are going to run into a problem.  The most important thing to bear in mind that if something is happening for you, it may not be happening for anyone else. Our job is to do our best to make sure the game works perfectly for you.

When you have a problem, the best tools you have is the debug.err that is in the GalCiv2 directory. It will tell us virtually everything we need.  In addition, you can install Smart Exception from Stardock Central (see downloads section here) from the "free stuff" in Stardock Central. If you have that running and GalCiv II crashes or something, it will create a file that will tell us exactly where.

So that we're on the same page - the game should never crash on you. As far as we know, there are zero crash bugs in Galactic Civilizations II.

The first thing to always do is to make sure you have the latest version of the game.

#1 Game crashes immediately.

Happens to approximately 0.5% of users.

Most common cause: Running your desktop at below 1024x768 or running your desktop in 16-bit color.  This resolves 99% of users.  Check your debug.err and make sure you're not running at some really low resolution.

#2 Game crashes randomly while playing!

Happens to approximately 0.5% of users.

Most common cause: People with older video drivers. We weren't kidding, you MUST HAVE A RECENT (past year) set of video drivers. If you don't, the game will crash randomly. The readme says this. The stickies say this. We're not kidding around here. You must update your video drivers. Ignoring all that and running into the forum and saying "How could they ship this piece of #$@#!" is not going to update your video driver. You must update the video driver. 

Ex: If you're running the nvidia 81.95 drivers, update them to 81.98 or better.

You also absolutely must be running at 1024x768 or higher. That means both X and Y must be equal to or greater than those two numbers.

Next most common cause: People who have eliminated their page file or have a very small page file.  That's your virtual memory.  Check the debug.err and near the top it will say how much virtual memory you have allocated. If it's less than a gig (heck, nowadays you should have at least 2 gigs for virtual memory) then there's your problem. 

Next most common cause: Overheating. The game's 3D engine has no polygon count limit, no texture limit. It's designed so that even 2 years from now, you can with mods plug in advanced textures. Some modders have already put in ships from popular sci-fi movies that have over a million polygons and it works.  But it comes at a cost: Your video cards are fully utilized. And that can translate to heat.  This mostly affects people who have built their own machines and thrown in a powerful video card.  Version 1.0X (and later) support GPU throttling which should solve this.

Next most common cause: People with AMD64 Dual Core who haven't updated their chipset drivers. GO here, get your drivers, play game, have fun.

#3 You lose your mouse pointer

People with nVidia Geforce 6X series cards (for the most part) have reported this. We have yet to get it in our internal lab and it doesn't seem to be that wide spread but it's a real show stopper.  The solution is to use the hardware mouse cursor which is in the video options area of the game.

OTHER TIPS:

Read the stickies! Post your debug.err.  Or at the very least tell us what kind of computer you have (though debug.err will tell us all about your computer). 

For more troubleshooting tips, please read this sticky:

https://forums.galciv2.com/127231

List things you have observed in 1.3 beta 3X that you think need to be addressed!

Thanks!

We're starting to nail down designs. I'm still a little wary about the width of it.  The property is very narrow -- 55 feet. The house will end up being 40 feet wide. That means only 7.5 feet of space on each side before you're on someone else's property. That seems pretty tight.  I am losing 6 foot of the width because we really want to have an outdoor bathroom. The cottage is on a sandy beech at Higgins Lake so we really want kids to be able to go "potty" without having to come inside.

The other peculiarity of the design has to do with the fact that the entrance to the property is much higher than the rest of it -- it's on a hill.  So the garage is on the upper floor causing people to have to go downstairs from the garage.  My concern on that is from a resale point of view: Stairs != friendly to older people. However, that is the situation I'm basically faced with - a cottage designed for a family with children or a cottage designed for retired people.  Since we have 3 small children, we wanted a design that had the action area on the bottom floor -- kitchen, great froom, dining room.  That way, someone wants a snack or a drink, they run in from the beech, open the front sliding door (or go up to the outside bar) and get a drink or some food.  If we had the upper floor be the center of activity, you'd have to run upstairs to get anything.  But like I said, having the downstairs be the center of activity means you have to go down steps from when you arrive.  Once you're inside, you can stay on that bottom floor but the entrance of the cottage could prove tricky.

The goal of it is to get this all built by next Spring so we can actually go up north and use it.

They say youth is wasted on the young. As I get older, I start to agree with the wisdom of that saying.

My baby daughter is barely 2 weeks old, but I have some advice that hopefully I can keep in my mind to give her that hopefully she will be able to find useful.

#1 We don't know what we don't know.

The problem for kids, starting in teens and going on through their 20s is that they don't know what they don't know. That's obvious. What's not obvious is that htey often don't realize that they are making decisions based on a lack of knowledge.  Accept that knowledge isn't the same as intelligence and that sometimes understanding simply takes time.

#2 Don't make life-altering decisions hastily.

This sounds obvious but to get more specific -- many of the decisions that we have to live with on a day to day basis for the rest of our lives are made between the ages of 18 and 25. But we are scarcely equipped to make decisions that are going to have to be dealt with for the rest of our lives.  Take care to recognize how decisions will affect the rest of your life. This is particularly true of relationships.

#3 Don't take the path of least resistance.

This is the #1 thing that I have observed that leads to long-term sorrow.  Doing something because it is easiest. Many of life's choices aren't made, people just fall into them.  The success I've had in life can be entirely put towards not taking the path of least resistance.  In my case, I was driven by wanting to have some control over my life.  But many people often end up in dead end jobs or unsatisfactory relationships because there wasn't a compelling reason not to get out of them.

#4 Decide what makes you happy and don't compromise on that.

There isn't a good reason to compromise on things that make you happy. If something makes you happy and it is not doing you any long-term harm and isn't hurting others, consider pursuing it.

#5 Don't let others determine how you view yourself.

It's amazing how people end up falling into choices simply because it is "whast is expected". As soon as you give other people control over how you view yourself you cede your own self-esteem and choices to the whims of others.

We have finally set an official date for Galactic Civilizations II v1.3.  This free update has many dozens of new enhancements over the existing version based on player feedback (see the Journals for lists).

If you already have Galactic Civilizations II, you can try out the latest beta version of 1.3 by downloading Stardock Central from the downloads area and making sure "show pre-release versions" is checked.

Windows Vista looks great but no matter how good an operating system looks, there will always be people who want to personalize it beyond what the OS can provide.  The very first skinnable solution for Windows Vista will once again be Stardock WindowBlinds. 

Stardock is internally working on a new version of WindowBlinds code-named "WindowBlinds Vista".  This new version takes advantage of many new elements of Windows Vista and allows for existing WindowBlinds skins (and msstyles via SkinStudio) to run on Windows Vista.  WindowBlinds automatically extends existing skins to adapt to the new controls (i.e. most existing skins will not need to be updated to look great on Windows Vista).

More screenshots at the link below.