SciFi.com has put up their review of Galactic Civilizations II. And we're pleased to say that they loved it!

The A+ is almost enough to make better able to cope with having to wait until next October to find out what happens to the Colonials on Battlestar Galactica (let alone July to find out what happened on SG1 but that's another issue).

The review covers the AI, the user interface, the campaign and much more.

Check out the whole thing.

  There's a lot of exciting things going on with TotalGaming.net.  TotalGaming.net is Stardock's electronic distribution network for PC games. Galactic Civilizations II is one of the games on TotalGaming.net.  If you purchased GalCiv II directly, you used TotalGaming.net (just re-branded on this site to Galciv2.com).

Like GalCiv II, the games on TotalGaming.net do not use DRM. They're designed to be convenient and use SSD (Secure Software Delivery) which decreases piracy without inconveniencing users like many DRM systems do.

Here are some of the games that have recently come out:

Atlantis Quest Set out on a quest for Atlantis in this dazzling new take on the classic style matching game!   more info

Xpand Rally Drive powerful, customizable rally cars in a breathtaking photorealistic world.   more info

Daemonica Daemonica is an exciting 3D interactive mystery set in medieval England. Take on the role of Nicholas Farepoynt, an investigator who can talk to the Dead.   more info

R.I.P. Take on the armies of Earth itself as you fight to defend the Other World in White Elephant's R.I.P.   more info

Etrom: The Astral Essence Etrom is an epic adventure that will take you into a dark future where warring societies are divided not just by walls, but by laws, secrets, religions and the terrifying Void Lands.   more info

Earth 2150 Trilogy Experience over 200 hours of gameplay in the multi-award winning classic real-time strategy series with TopWare Interactive's Earth 2150 Trilogy.   more info

You can purchase the games individually like you would any other on-line purchase. Or you can become a member of TotalGaming.net for $69.95 where you get tokens to use on the individual games which net typically a 30% discount off the price.

It's a great way to get ahold of indie titles as well as classic PC retail titles and the occasional new title. Check it out for yourself.

We've been analysing Metaverse data and while the scoring was taking the game turn into account, it clearly isn't enough.

That is, even if you're taking the game turn and dividing the score by that, one can still sit on a lead indefinitely.

So for 1.1, the game turn will be squared so that it has a much more significant impact.  In addition, the difficulty level will be applied exponentially.

Existing Metaverse scores posted will be retroactively modified. So, for instance, that 4million score that someone got by playing the system will end up being 13,300 instead (though we're going to delete the score entirely since it was a clear case of abuse). 

In terms of Metaverse scoring, it isn't just the faster you win, there's a sweet spot where you maximize your civilization's various strengths.  I.e. if you were to win on the first turn, that wouldn't really give you a great score because you haven't accomplished much.  I don't know what that sweet spot is.

The scoring system works as follows (in 1.1):

Each turn your population is taken, then multiplied by the difficulty level to the 1.1 power. That amount is then divided by the game turn.  The final result is taken to the square root.

Then your research score is taken into account in a similar way.

And economic history.

And military history.

Overall, population probably counts a bit more than the others.

What's new in 1.1 is the difficulty level being taken to the 1.1 power and that this overall score is then divided again by the game turn.

However, so that scores don't get ridiculously small, we are multiplying 1.1 games by 10. So there will be an advantage to using 1.1 over 1.0x at that point.

This will start with this week's beta of 1.1. We plan to release 1.1 final early next week.

Just a head's up, we have a pretty neat mod that's going to be used for testing out the modding stuff.

It's an alternative main UI!

We've signed on to do a series of 2 page game magazines in Computer Gaming World and Computer Games Magazine. 

But the question is, do ads drive sales? How many people learn about games from game magazines? It's not an easy question to answer because as active as these forums and such are, they represent only the slightest fraction of the people who play games. 

If I were to take a poll here on where people learned about Galactic Civilizations II, I bet places like Penny-Arcade, Gamespot, Usenet, from a friend (who heard it from some on-line source) would come up.

Which brings us back to game magazine advertising and what affect it has on real world sales.  Two page spread ads in game mags aren't cheap as you can imagine.  But let's say you're convinced that they're potentially worth the cost.

The next question is, what kind of ad should it be?  If you're reading this and have access to a game magazine, go grab it.  I'll wait...

(scratches)

(scratches)

(looks around)

(scratches)

(I could do this for awhile, I'll be right back)

(scratches)

Ah, good. So you found your CGW, CGM, PC Gamer, or other favorite magazine.  Look at the ads. Do they catch your eye? I'm an engineer. I don't care about the beauty of an ad. I only care whether it causes the person to subsequently buy the game.  What ads in the game magazines do you think are effective? Not which ones look neat. Which ones actually might have made you go out and buy the game?

Personally, my eyes are trained to avoid ads. If something looks like an ad, I go right by it.  That means if I see artwork that isn't from a game, or a logo that I know isn't part of editorial, I instantly go by the ad.

The best ad I ever saw was the 2-page ad for Total Annihilation. In the spread it was all in-game action. Like a 2 page mega screenshot of a huge battle with minimal fluff.  The game sold itself and the ad let the game do the selling.

For our 2 page spread of Galactic Civilizations II, we're doing something similar for our first crack at it.  It will, in essence, look a lot like what Galactic Civilizations II does on a wide-screen monitor at super-high resolution. Only the bottom corners will explain the points of the game and where to get it.  We figure, players either want this stuff or they don't.  When it's done, we'll put up a screenshot of the ad.

Stardock has released RightClick 1.2.  RightClick is a program that enables users to replace the right-click desktop menu in Windows XP.  RightClick menus can have short cuts, data, even widgets embedded into them.

RightClick 1.2 takes all the internal improvements that have been made to ObjectBar and other related technology and integrates them into the program.  It supports embedding of widgets and should resolve the problem in which some users lost their menus during a system crash or other unexpected power loss.

It's available on Object Desktop.

Since Thanksgiving, I've worked every day, 7 days a week, including Christmas other than last weekend where I took one day off.  Why? 

What drives me isn't money. I'm a computer geek. What money I have I put into computer hardware and other gadgets and most of that is taken care of by the company. I do have a nice car. I drive it the whole 6.2 miles back and forth to the office.  But that's about it.  I don't even have a big screen TV.  My main TV isn't even high-definition. 

And when I have time on the weekend, I enjoy making skins, widgets, and lately computer AI updates to Galactic Civilizations II. 

That's not to say I don't begrudge the excessive taxation of what I do earn. It really irritates me to be driving on Michigan's ridiculously crappy roads after paying hundreds of thousands in taxes each year.  I guess you'd say I'm tight with money and that's why taxes bug me because the government is so much less careful with it than I am.  Give me a million dollars and I'll try to turn it into some cool new stuff.  Give it to the government and they'll waste it on something stupid in all likelyhood.

When I got to dinners that involve "Entrepreneurs" it's the same story. The money they make is largely a side-effect, a by-product of what they do.  It's not the goal unto itself.  They, we, really enjoy what we do and we happen to be lucky enough that what we do makes money, sometimes a lot of it.

The joke around the house is that I need a hobby. A hobby that doesn't involve what I do for a living. Somehow hobbies end up being part of what we do anyway. JoeUser.com, after all, started out as a hobby and then expanded into what you see now.   I don't like boats or fishing.  So I'll have to find something unusual to have as a hobby one of these days.

But in the meantime, I'll continue to just do what I'm doing, reinvesting what I get back to do more of it and groan about the government confiscating 40+ percent of it right off the bat to squander.

They say that no game can be all things to all people. But that doesn't mean one can't try.  When people see our change logs for the upcoming v1.1 they notice they're huge but what a change log can't tell is the overall goal of a particular version.  Taken on their own, a change log can look arbitrary, even casual in what's being changed. Why are we doing this? Is there a unified vision of what's being changed?

So the first question is, why are we doing these updates?  The answer to that has everything to do with word of mouth. Why is an little indie game like Galactic Civilizations amongst the top selling titles at the major retailers? Surely, it must be the awesome, intimidating Stardock marketing juggernaut. Maybe not. Maybe it has something to do with you -- strategy gamers. Strategy gamers who recommended the game to their friends and coworkers for a variety of reasons.  It's a win-win situation.  We do everything we can to make sure you're satisfied with your purchase and we benefit from good word of mouth because of the free user-input updates.

Typically, a person buys a game, plays it for a month, maybe two, and then it's gone.  If they like the game, they may recommend it to their friends. Our updates are about extending the game's lifespan.  The longer we can keep the game interesting to you, the player, the more value you received from your purchase and the better off we are since it extends the time that you're playing the game.  We also see it as our responsibility. It's a single player game. Therefore, we have a duty to keep enhancing it to make it fresh, this is particularly true of the computer AI.

We've been making Galactic Civilizations in one form or other for 12 years now (the original OS/2 version was released in 1994).  And yet it continues to evolve.  We're happy that the game has gotten such good reviews.  And we're very happy most people seem to like it.  But the favorable reception of the game was important for another reason: Doing updates after release, especially ones that add new features naturally beg the question: Didn't they finish the game?  Had the initial reaction to the game been negative, then that would be a very legitimate question. It's one of the reasons we self-published Galactic Civilizations II. We could wait until we were happy with the game to release it. And that way we could do updates without fear of people saying "Well look at all these updates, it must not have been done".

And that brings us back to v1.1. What are we trying to do with it?  There are 5 main goals for v1.1:

1. Better Computer Players. Nearly every review has focused on how good the computer AI is. We're very jazzed about that. But like all strategy games, there are a certain % of people who find it too hard and a certain % of people who find it too easy.  The goal of 1.1 is to make the game play easier at lower difficulty levels so that players can be gradually introduced to the game while making the AI much more challenging at higher levels by being smarter, more sophisticated.  For example, a lot of work has been put onto tech trading, handling of transports, ship tactics, planet improvement handling, etc. We read forums, not just here but all over the net. We lurk. We hear what strategies people employ.  If it's an exploit, we plug it. If it's just a really clever strategy, we extend the computer AI to deal with it.  The goal of 1.1 is to have computer AIs that blatantly play smarter.
2. Cleaner Game Mechanics. The economic system of GalCiv II is essentailly a hold-over from GalCiv I which was a hold over from the OS/2 version.  The goal with 1.1 is to make it clear where the numbers come from, make sure they're intuitive, and make balance tweaks based on player feedback.  We're adding in more tool tips so that players can see where things come from, how they're derived. We're tweaking costs, bonuses, etc.  There is no such thing as a perfect balance.  A good balance to a strategy game is derived by how people play that game. We listen to how people actually play the game and then adjust it based on that.  Nothing particularly dramatic (though social production no longer being wasted is a pretty big change but it's something we've had months to think about), mostly things that just make the game feel...better.
3. Better User Interface.  When you read how people in the real world are playing your game, it makes sense to try to cater to those playing styles. For example, the ship designer has become incredibly popular. We had no idea it would be such a big deal to design your own ships in a free form way.  So we've put in time to make it better. Other players wanted better ways of managing units, selecting units, keeping track of where units were going, so we have been working on that as well. More hot keys have been added, more buttons added, and so forth.  The overall goal is to improve the game so that you're focusing on having fun (it's a game after all) and the user interface stays out of the way.
4. Modding.  The long-term viability of many games is modding.  We see it as our job to make sure that modding isn't just something techies can do but rather something anyone can do to the game.  We have some experience in this given that we do run the world's largest Windows modding community. When the modding is done, players will be able to download a mod and then from the game point to that mod and make use of all its changes without having to mess around with editors and images.  To help in mod creation, 1.1 will include a pretty significant set of mods in itself to use as examples.
5. More Gameplay options. This is something that will be an on-going thing.  We don't want to have a crazy # of options, but we do want people to be able to have the game play the way they want. For instance, some people don't like tech trading. So we put in an option to eliminate it.  Other people didn't like that you could see where the other empires were from the first turn, so we put an option to not be able to see controlled territories until those areas were explored. Some people don't like minor races, so we put an option to not have them.

Our schedule right now is to have another beta this week which should introduce the modding.  We will continue to iron out bugs in the beta, tweak balance, and then after that we'll release it as a non-beta. Originally we wanted to get 1.1 "done" by the end of March. But we wanted to have some extra time to tweak and balance things, which in turn add bugs, which in turn have to be fixed.  But we're getting pretty close now. Hopefully users of v1.1 beta 2 like what they see. And soon it'll be done.

And then what? Then we'll start in v1.2 with features we haven't even thought of yet.

Update: The Modding UI may got into 1.2. Mod docs will go out with 1.1.

Expert skinner, RomanDA has used DesktopX Pro to create 3 Galactic Civilizations II gadgets.  DesktopX Pro is what was used to create the user interface in Galactic Civilizations II. All the screens are in .DXPack format in your \screens directory.  But DesktopX Pro can also export your creations as actual stand-alone programs.

Below is the first set of Galactic Civilizations II gadgets. They're free!  More to come! Have fun!

Drive Meters	Calendar	Weather
[Download]	[Download]	[Download]