So you've bought the game and you really like it but then time passes and it starts to get old. It's not that the game is boring or bad but that you have figured out how to "beat it".  You crank up the difficulty level but then it's ridiculously hard to the point you know you have no chance. 

If the game has multiplayer, you play people on-line but as you get further away from the original release, the harder it gets to find people and in particular the harder it gets to find normal people -- people who play the game as it was designed to be played as opposed to exploiting every minor game mechanic flaw to their advantage which tends to suck the fun out. 

So ends the typical strategy game.  It's usually a question of when, not if, the game reaches the end of its playable lifetime. 

When we made Galactic Civilizations II, we budgeted some money for after-release work.  We did go a little overboard with that with 1.1 and 1.2 in that the guys just never came down out of "crunch mode" and continued to put in crazy amounts of hours to deliver immense numbers of changes.  Now things have returned more to a normal pace and so we look forward to 1.3.

Version 1.3 of GalCiv II will largely involve computer AI work by me.  It's not just about making it tougher as much as it is about making it play differently and more intelligently. It will also likely involve creating additional difficulty levels and fixing the $@#$@ thing that causes some AI players to be set to stupid while others are at hard in order to average things out (i.e. someone setting the overall difficulty level to "Painful" only to find that 3 of the AIs are set to being really hard and the other 5 are set to being brain dead -- your best solution for now is to set the players you want to be intelligent or better if you're looking for a challenge and control the players rather than having the overall difficulty system try to guess what kind of gmae you want).

I have a lot of ideas on how to make the game play better, particularly with regard to the CPU option for the AI being able to use better algorithms.  The expansion pack, Dark Avatar, will have a LOT LOT more of this kind of thing.  But my job is to make sure that the AI continues to provide an interestig experience for players during the summer months.   

A lot of people don't like the galciv2.com forums. 

Given the expense involved in maintaining the forums, we are considering eliminating the forums entirely and pointing to Civfanatics.com and Apolyton.net (just like Civilization4.com does).

An increasing percentage of "bug" reports are ending up not being about the game itself but related to the website and in particular the forums here.  Most users, myself included, don't think the forums here are particularly good, especially compared to what else is out there.

So I would lke to hear people's thoughts on the idea of eliminating these forums entirely and pointing to CivFanatics.com and Apolyton.net for users who wish to discuss the game and provide feedback.

Thanks.

This Fall Stardock will be releasing the Dark Avatar expansion pack for Galactic Civilizations II.

Dark Avatar is the first official expansion pack to Stardock's award-winning PC strategy game, Galactic Civiliations II.

The expansion pack goes far beyond the typical expansion. Not only does it add new units, new races, new maps, and a new campaign as is expected in an expansion pack, it greatly expands the feature set of the base game in very significant ways.

Here are some of the features that will be in the expansion pack:

• Custom Opponents.  Just as players can design their own civilizations; in Dark Avatar they can design their own opponents to play against. This isn't just cosmetic either, players will be able to set up their intelligence, personality, playing style as well as what they look like, what ships they use, what dialog they use, etc.  These opponents are then saved for later use.
• Agents. Players will be able to hire agents via espionage to wreak havoc on their opponents or to counter enemy agents operating in their own empire.
• Special Worlds.  Worlds in Galactic Civilizations II will have an additional classification -- environment type. Different races will start with the ability to colonize only certain environment types.  Through research and technology, additional planet types can be colonized and conquered but it will totally change the way the initial colonization phase of the game plays out.
• The Epic Generator.  One of the things Stardock has put out that people seem to like are epic stories of game play examples.  Dark Avatar will generate such stories automatically and export them as HTML so that players can share their stories with others and look back at a good game as the epic saga they imagined.
• Asteroid Fields. The economics in Dark Avatar will be altered to make strategic control of additional kinds of resources important. Amongst those will be the asteroid fields which, when utilized, can help the closest colonized planet. In additional, asteroid fields act as a natural barrier slowing down incoming ships.
• New Treaties. Diplomacy will get beefed up with the additional of new diplomatic treaties. These treaties not only provide mutual benefit but give players more tools to forge their relations with other players.
• New Races. Two new civilizations will be introduced to the mix including the evil Korath who are bent on genocide at the galactic scale.
• New hulls and ship components. A ton of hulls and ship components are going to be added. This really can't be overstated enough because not only are there going to be a lot of these components but the quality is far superior to what we've done before thanks to having mastered the art of making ship hulls and components.
• The New Campaign: Dark Avatar. This time, the Drengin Empire are the good guys. You must make the galaxy safe for oppression and tyranny...because the alternative is worse.

The expansion pack will list for $29.95 but users will be able to pre-order it for $24.95.  The expansion will be initally released digital only via TotalGaming.net (and the store on GalCiv2.com). though players can also have a CD sent to them as well. 

The release date is this Fall.

The first official expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II is about to be announced. But for a sneak preview of it, check out the Gamespot interview that goes over some of the plans.

Stay tuned!

Our fiscal end year is June 30th.  Which means that taxes are owed soon after that.  Or put another way, it means earnings in June will quickly be taken away by the government.  By contrast, earnings in July won't be taken away for an entire year.

Contrary to myth, corporations pay a lot in taxes.  Our corporate tax rate is 39%. So we're talking well over a third going to the federal government.  If they accountants are able to do their thing, the corporate rate will be 34% but either way, you're talking a LOT in taxes.

So what is the effect on "behavior"?  Well, in my case, since I know my activities this month will quickly be taken away, I just don't do much.  June is pretty much a dead month.  No major releases. I pretty much hibernate and enjoy the weather.

You might say "Hey, good for you, take a break." And indeed, hey, I get to spend more time with my family. The office is very low stress during June.  But that's at the micro level.  At the macro level, it's not good for the economy and it's not good for job growth. 

I know of other companies that do much the same thing.  Most of the jobs in this country are created by small businesses.  And by small I mean 5 to 100 employees.  We're about half-way up that ladder.  If I worked like I do the rest of the year, our company could probably create another two jobs each year.  2 jobs? Not much right? But taken across the country, that's a lot of jobs.

And as those jobs would be created, the opportunity for advancement at the bottom rung of the latter would move up and demand for people would increase which would push up wages naturally (without the "guvment" naively trying to force it).

But alas, that isn't the case.  The tax rate is high to the point where I make the personal decision that I'm just take June easy and things go on auto pilot.  Why should I work 240 hours in June when 100 of those hours are going to be going to the government.  So instead I work half as many hours and enjoy the sun. 

We won't be doing any sequels to Galactic Civilizations II for a long time still.  But we were interested in getting an idea of what people would want us to focus on in a sequel. Some features that have been requested weren't listed because we plan to add them into the expansion pack instead.

Based on the thousands of players who responded, tactical battles are something people want.  This is something we would definitely look at seriously in a sequel (not an expansion).  The problem with tactical battles in a game that would be played mostly single player (assuming we put multiplayer into a sequel) is that you don't want to force players (like me) who would rarely if ever fight out a tactical battle to have to use it. When people like me play HOMM or MOO or RTW we largely hit auto and let the battles just go.  So you want to create a mechanism in which players can play out the tactical battles if they choose to but that the AI is good enough that the results would be very similar to if you had hit the auto on it.  That means a lot of computer AI work.  And Galactic Civilizations has always taken computer AI very seriously.

Another feature that was surprising to see so high was more diplomacy. The expansion pack will have more diplomacy but clearly future versions of the game should take a fresh approach to it so that you can do a lot more in that realm.  Similarly, politics scored very well and by that we meant domestic politics.  We've always wanted players to have to deal with a cabinet and have more political party elements to deal with.  In "real life" leaders of civilizations don't get to act in a vacuum. They have to deal with domestic pressures as well.  You may want to conquer those Torians but your ability to do so might be hindered by domestic issues (or intergalactic ones as well).  So that is an area I could see us greatly expand on in the future.

Another feature that some people wanted (that I want too) is the concept of heroes.  I have a pretty good outline of the features I'd like to see in the game. The leader of a civilization should have generals who give bonuses to planets and fleets and such and that's an area we'd like to see expanded.

One feature that didn't get as much support as anticipated was multiplayer.  Only 8.6% of players listed multiplayer as the feature they'd like to see the most.  Some people have argued that we're "against multiplayer. That's not the case.  Galactic Civilizations is the only game series we've made that isn't multiplayer.  One of our upcoming game projects, The Political Machine 2008, will be multiplayer.  We've just (correctly I think) viewed that the cost to implement multiplayer versus how many people really want it don't match up.  The main benefit to multiplayer is purely for game reviews. That's pretty much the only justification we have for it -- to bump up our review scores in a sequel (don't get me wrong, we're happy with the 4.5 out of  5 average we have with Galactic Civilizations II!).

Another feature is more complex ship design which was only 7 votes behind multiplayer. Right now, players put engines and weapons and defenses on their ships along with some modules. But you can imagine other kinds of things a ship might have -- targeting computers, target disrupting devices, maneuvering thrusters, mines, breech pods, cloaking, etc.  Not to mention the cosmetic aspects.  When we did the ship design features in Galactic Civilizations II, we had no idea how popular they'd become. I don't think anybody did.  I suspect looking space-strategy games in the future will have the kind of LEGO-like ship design features we have in GalCiv II where ship design involves what the ship looks like at a fundamental level.

So some good feedback there.  No sequels any time soon, but we do have some expansion packs that have some features that I think you'll be excited about.  My favorite feature in the expansion pack hasn't been announced yet but the idea came from Lockdown from CivFanatics.com.  I'll be talking about it over on the GalCiv II forum over there first.

Now back to working on the next version of the game.

Reviews of Galactic Civilizations II continue to arrive.  This week, Game Planet gave GalCiv II a perfect 5 out of 5.  The only 5 out of 5 I could find on their page.

Meanwhile, GamerDad's Bernie Dy reviewed GalCiv II and scored it 4.5 out of 5.  GamerDad is a site designed to review things that might appeal to kids.  GalCiv has always targeted adults but it's a game that can appeal to kids as well (my 9 year old son played through the campaign for instance).

Over in the UK we finally got a review of GalCiv II that didn't conclude that the game was awful. GameCell UK gave it 8 out of 10. While taking points off for not having multiplayer and not liking the tutorial.  We do understand the desire of some people to have multiplayer but as the most recent poll showed, multiplayer was way down the list of wanted features in a future sequel.

Read all three and if you see more reviews, let us know. We always want to send traffic to anyone willing to go through the ordeal of reviewing the game.

Family and friends who have been outdoors with me have commented/observed that I don't get mosquito bites.  That isn't to say mosquitos never bite me but it's pretty uncommon.  I've never had the pleasure of having a mosquito bite to scratch.

Now before someone thinks this is a conceit, consider what this means. Mosquitos don't think I'm good enough for them.  That's a level of rejection that, frankly, I'm not really able to handle well.

This weekend we went up north and me, my wife, and the kids were on this hamock. The wife and kids were getting bitten like crazy by mosquitos even though they had these weird ring things on their wrists that are supposed to do somethign about it. 

So finally I see a mosquito land on my leg.  My moment of triumph at hand. "Ha!" I yell to my kids and wife. "See, a mosquito just landed on me." But then it left.  THE DAMN THING LEFT! I haven't felt that rejected since my 84' Chevette got broken into and all my tapes were spread onto the seat and NONE of them were taken. I wanted to grab the little thing by its wings, stick it on my leg and scream "Suckle now, damn you!"

Which is why I name mosquitos as being nature's snobs. Goddam vermine that's actually picky about whose blood they'll drink.   That's why I like spiders better. I get spider bites. They know how to show the love.

• Draginol is a character in a series of unpublished stories I've been writing for the past 20 years.
  
• Draginol is the main villain in the stories he's in.
  
• My first job was taking out the garbage for my neighbors in the apartment complex we lived in for 10 cents per bag.
  
• I was 5 years old when I started the trash service.
  
• I will tend to lose my equilibrium on airline flights unless I take a prescribed drug.
  
• I was 33 the first time I got a cold serious enough to require me to blow my nose.
  
• My second job was working in a garage cleaning toilets, cleaning windows, weeding, painting the fence around the area in 100+ degree weather.
  
• I was 13 when I got my second job. I made $2 an hour under the table. (that would be $2.50 today).
  
• I was engaged to be married once before I met my wife.
  
• I met my wife in Electrical Engineering class.
  
• I lived with 4 girls at once in my junior year of college.
  
• I do not recommend living with 4 girls at once.
  
• My wife is currently expecting a daughter in August.
  
• No girl has ever been born into the Wardell family as far back as our family tree goes. This is the first one.
  
• I am an only child.
  
• I have had 3 dogs.
  
• The first dog got run over by a car 3 months after we got it. The second one we gave away because it was nuts. The third one we had for 11 years and died when I went to college.
  
• I have not gotten a dog since that dog died.
  
• I have a box turtle named Cuddles that I have had for over 20 years.
  
• The box turtle was estimated to be around 30 years old when I got it.
  
• My favorite author is Raymond E. Feist.
  
• Yes, Stardock is from his one of his books.
  
• I am not really a Republican or a Democrat. I tend to vote Republican but only because they are "Closer".  I am what is known as a "Capitalist". Find out what you are here.
  
• I have no allergies to anything at all that I know of.  I don't have any reaction to poison ivy, bee stings, or any other bites (i.e. not even a bump). I have no idea why.
  
• My biggest fear is something bad happening to any of my children.
  
• One of my missed ambitions is to write a screen play that is turned into a movie or at the very least to finish the stories I've written and publish them.
  
• I have learned that happiness can only come from within. That different people have their own furnace that provides joy.
  
• My furnace could work better.
  
• Loyalty is the trait I value the most in a friend.
  
• I have been told that I am sometimes blinded by my loyalty to others.
  
• I do not believe in ghosts or other "mystical" things but I am starting to believe in extra sensory perceptions to some degree.
  
• I am a big believer in cognitive intution
  
• I believe that the easiest way to be successful is to set things up so that other people are successful if you are successful.
  
• I was born in Texas.
  
• My favorite place to visit is Manhattan.
  
• My favorite vacation spot is the gulf of mexico.
  
• The closest thing to surgery I've ever had was tubed in my ears.
  
• I've never broken a bone though I came very close to breaking my foot (and it's not known if there was a fracture in there or not).
  
• The foot "incident" happened last year.
  
• I was playing jump to get the balloons in the living room and jump very high and into our large, heavy television in full Mary Katherine Galleger style.
  
• I really don't like to travel but I like being in different places.
  
• I type around 120 words per minute.
  
• I still look for approval from my parents for what I do.
  
• I love dove chocolate.
  
• Dove chocolate doesn't love me. It causes me to break out very quickly and very badly.
  
• I had a lot of Dove chocolate yesterday.
  
• I didn't know how to read until 2nd grade.
  
• My first grade teacher told my mom not to expect much from me, I was simply "slow".
  
• I went to a "special" school when I was 4 (not the good kind of special).
  
• I really don't like getting older.
  
• I am proud, and thankful, in hindsight that I had to buy my own first car by saving up from working very unpleasant jobs early on.
  
• I have a similar feeling about college. Working through college helped me appreciate things more.
  
• I don't really like cars very much.
  
• Cars are one of the only good things I can write off on taxes.
  
• My car is an upgraded  Jaguar S-Type R (500hp).
  
• I only drive around 8,000 miles per year.
  
• I am suspicious about people who think other people are just "lucky" and that their own failings are not their own fault.
  
• I like to talk to people either in person or via text but hate talking to people on the phone, especially strangers.
  
• My first computer was a Commodore 64.
  
• One of my favorite games of all time was a text game called Planet Fall.
  
• I tend to be too wordy...