Q: I want to purchase the game at Stardock and download immediately but I still want the box. Can I do this?

A: YES. If you purchase the second option (CD purchase) you still get a serial # to download the game. That serial # is temporary (i.e. will expire) but will let you play the game until the box arrives.

 

Q: If I bought the game for download only, can I still get the box/CD later?

A: Yes. Just requires shipping and handling.

 

Q: If I pre-order at will I get the Collector' Edition?

A: In North America, as far as we know, ALL pre-orders are being fulfilled with the Collector's Edition. Walmart, EB, and Gamestop explicitly mention it on their sites for instance.

Bear in mind: We don't control retail.  So here's some help on knowing which the store is getting you:

Collector's Edition SKU:
708192010332

Standard Edition SKU:  
708192010325

That said if you pre-order the game at reatil and they still get you the standard edition, Stardock will do what it can to help you out by getting you access to the additional content (because we know which serial #s were in the first batch to go to retail and can use that to give access to players in a pinch).  So if a store messes up, please avoid returning it. It's not easy for indies to get into retail to begin with, so if a bunch of people start returning the game, the store isn't going to think it's because they messed up but because it's a bad game.

The best route is to keep an eye on the SKU. Many stores are taking pre-orders but are using the regular SKU.  Like I said, we will make sure you get the extra downloadable goodies. 

Q: If I buy it at retail can I still download the entire game directly?

A: YES. Using Stardock Central you can enter in your retail serial # regardles of where you bought it and download the full game.

 

Q: I heard the retail boxed version has no copy protection. Is this true?

A: Yes. The retail version has no copy protection whatesover. You don't even have to enter in the serial # if you don't want during the install (people lose serial #'s anyway). You will need the serial # to get updates however.

 

Q: I don't want to use Stardock Central to get updates. Do I have to use it?

A: NO. You will also be able to get updates via the website using the traditional "patch" method other games use. You will still need your serial # though.

 

Q: I live in Europe, how do I get the game?

A: Our friends at Paradox are handling GalCiv II in Europe. They will be mirroring our release and have a collector's edition box and have the same sorts of goodies in there we think (should talk to Paradox for specifics).  Users who purchase in Europe can also still use Stardock Central to download updates.

Q: What about Australia/New Zealand?

A: Auran is handling it down under.

 

Q: What about foreign language support?

A: Paradox is in the process of translating files now.  We will also be putting up our translation kit here so people can translate it however they want.

 

Q: Do I have to pre-order to get the collector's edition?

A: Somewhat.  Direct CD orders will be fulfilled with the collector's edition until we run out of stock which should last for a couple months at least.

 

Q: Should I buy at retail or direct from you? Which is best for you guys?

A: Whatever is best for you, the customer is best for us.

(Sorry if the site is slow, one of our ISPs is switching their network and so some parts of the site are very slow - hopefully will be solved in a couple of hours).

Gamespot has a very cool look at the gamma of GalCiv II.

So what makes Galactic Civilizations II such a promising game? It takes all the great ideas found in Master of Orion II and expands on them to deliver a deeper and richer experience. In this turn-based strategy game, you'll play as one of the galaxy's primary races, or you can create your own custom race, and you'll attempt to expand from a single star system to conquer the galaxy peacefully or militarily. It won't be easy, though, because there's a whole lot that can happen between the start and the finish of a game.

Over in this journal entry I talked about how when it came time to design GalCiv II that we had to decide whether we were going to try to just expand on GalCiv itself or try to bring elements in from other games.

You see that a lot in games where some features in a given genre become widely accepted but franchise developers are wary of adding them because they almost seem like they don't want to acknowledge the existence of those other games.

When we made GalCiv II, we thought carefully about what kinds of features we wanted and then gave some thought to how other games tried to implement those features.  Sometimes the game had a great implementation, other times there were side effects that could never have been foreseen that we wanted to avoid. 

At the end of the day, we wanted to create a game that would appeal to more of the 4X fan base.  More story.  More control.  More strategic options.  A cleaner interface.  Better grapihcs.  Resolution indepedence. Longevity and replayability.

Whether we succeeded in this remains to be seen.  That's not our call.  Only you can make that determination.  We hope you like the end result. 

That said, we don't look at GalCiv II to be the heir to anything other than Galactic Civilizations I.  Master of Orion along with the other classics are special on their own merits.  

We hope you're as excited to play GalCiv II as we are for you to get your hands on it.

So what can you do to make sure you have the best possible experience? Here are some suggestions:

1) If you have an integrated video card and you have a free AGP/PCIE slot, do yourself a favor and get a good video card.  For less than $100 you can get a decent ATI or nVidia video card that will make all your games run much better.  You MUST have at least 32 megs of memory on your video card. If it's a really old (i.e. >3 years) Intel Graphics extreme you may not be able to run the game because it won't support DirectX 9C.

2) If Option #1 isn't available, make sure you have the latest video card DRIVERS.  We're serious about this.  The game uses some fairly new graphic features that only recently are well supported by video drivers. We found during the beta over and over people having some problem and it turning out their video drivers were 2 years old.

3) Make sure your desktop display is running at 32bit color.  To do that, go to control panel, display properties, and choose 32bit.  We found that on some systems running in 16bit color won't run the game (or most other games, we have no idea why).

4) We did a lot of memory optimization to make sure the game runs on pretty low end hardware.  Still, if you're running around with a PC with less than 512MB, see if you can upgrade. The game will still run but it'll be slower.

5) The game will default, if it can, to 4X anti-aliasing so that things look nicer.  But if you have an older video card (a Geforce 5600 is an older video card incidentally) you may want to turn that off, especially if you're watching the video cut scenes or video tutorials (The 3D engine itself works fine). The game runs fine on Geforce 5x, but 4x anti-aliasing may be too much for some of the high resolution cut-scenes YMMV. Most of our testing boxes were this series (or ATI equivs) so don't take what I'm saying here as the game not running well on it.  It's just that 4X anti-aliasing is probably overkill on such a setup.

6) If you have Mcafee anti-virus, be aware that if you have VB script detection on it will give a warning when you run the game the first time. It's not on by default but it's useless anyway (it detects ALL VB Script as "a malicious script").  Our game launcher uses VB Script.

7) The game does not have copy protection but it does come with a serial #.  When the installer asks for it, it's optional but we recommend putting it in because it'll make it easier to get upgrades. Since it's optional, the installer doesn't check for the accuracy so be careful when entering it in (don't worry, there's an easy way to update your serial # if you do make a mistake).  The serial # is only needed to download updates.  That said, PLEASE DO NOT give your CD to others.  We are really trying to avoid putting copy protection on our games and every sale counts.

8) The game takes two CDs to install so you will want to make sure you have enough disk space (two CDs worth).

9) If you pre-ordered from us and plan to download the game, we expect to start letting people preinstall most of the game prior to release (next week) to decrease bandwith needs. We recommend taking advantage of this.

10) If you do run into a problem of some kind, there is a file called debug.err in your GalCiv directory that should tell us a lot of info about what happened.

11) The game will run at any resolution >= 1024x768.  So 1440x1050 or 1600x1200 or 3072x2200, it doesn't matter.  But the game will start at 1024x768.  Go to options and select the resolution you want to play and then reload.

IT'S GONE GOLD. IN STORES FEBRUARY 21

Check out the last few days..

 

Last Friday we went code-complete.  That means, no touching the code except to fix something. 

We had spent the past 2 weeks in the final QA process -- fixing bugs, typos, grammar, optimizing performance, and adding usability features.  We had also used that time to continue improving the AI here and there along with tweaking the campaign missions, game mechanics, etc.

So over the weekend we went through the really hard tests.  That is, making it as solid as it can possibly be.  Running it on the absolute worst systems we could find.  Trying to crash it.  Having it run on its own (forced turn mode) to see if it would crash.

This is one of the reasons why I'm glad we're self-publishing.  Total control over when and if it goes to manufacturing.  No one to tell us when it has to go to retail.  We had the luxury of being able to make sure we were happy with it.  Plus, our experience in testing and debugging is pretty significant.  After all, most game developers release one product every 2 or 3 years.  Stardock releases new software it develops every few months in the form of Object Desktop and related components.

Of course, even with all this testing and testing and testing you know there's still going to be someone who runs into some problem.  I recall reading on forums about Civ IV being "buggy".  For me and I suspect for Firaxis's internal testing people, Civ IV was rock solid other than the ATI issue that was quickly resolved.  That's the thing, with so much hardware out there, you never know what you're going to run into.

Since I'm an engineer I'm going to tell you the horror stories we ran into during testing. The marketing people when they read this will probably have a heart attach...

Win98, 2K, and ME..

"Why are there so many, songs about about compatibility.."

Most games these days only support Windows XP.  And for good reason.  If you're running Windows 98 or ME you should upgrade. Really. Stop reading this and do it.  But we said we'd run on Windows 98 and ME and we meant it.  But what a pain.

First off, the December Microsoft DirectX SDK says it supports Windows 98/ME.  It doesn't. Not as far as we can tell anyway.  We had thousands of beta testers and NONE of them were running Windows 98Draginol that we could find.  So we were totally on our own.  And luckily we were able to figure out the issue and for Windows 98/ME users we were able to go back to the August 2005 SDK and it was happy.  There's nothing new in the December version that I can tell that's significant.  Certainly nothing that would affect the game.  Beta 5 of GalCiv II was built on my machine that sadly was running a 2004 SDK. 

But it did mean we had to make a special build just for Windows 98Draginol users.  When you install it from CD, it'll look at your OS and install the proper one.  By the time the game ships, we expect to have a unified EXE again (i.e. figure out what DirectX issue it was and deal with it).  Not that it's particularly necessary but because it's a hassle to maintain more than one EXE.

Meanwhile Windows 2000 had a different issue with regards to how it handled critical sections.  It too required its own EXE for installation in which we removed a background thread and put it into the main thread.  It's a bit redundant now anyway.  At one point in development, GalCiv II took like 7 seconds to go from clicking on the icon to seeing the title screen on a decent system. Beta 5 was slow like that.  So we added a background thread to speed that up.  But through performance optimization, we got the time down to about 1 to 2 seconds (i.e. very very fast).  So the background thread isn't really necessary (though I must say I think some people will be impressed at how fast the game comes up).

Only about 5% of the beta group has Windows 2000.  But we think plenty of buyers out there in absolute numbers are still running Windows 2000 so we wanted to make sure they were taken care of.  The last problem we had to solve on Windows 2000 may not have necessarily come up because of the artificial conditions of the testing box.  On one of the test boxes running Win2K, the game would crash if you clicked on New game too fast (the thread timing problem).  Of course, how many 3 Ghz machines are running Windows 2000? On slower machines, it didn't come up or at least a lot less often. That's why it was hard to track down.  Once we found that the issue was loading of models -- that the main thread zipped through to the main screen so fast that the semaphore controlling it wasn't working on Win2K, it was just a matter of making it not threaded.  But definitely a weird issue since Win2K and XP are so similar something like that was unexpected.

XP, it's good to be the king

The people who really benefit from this are Windows XP users (well technically everyone).  Because while we were futzing to make sure Win98/ME/2K were working well, the rest of the team was able to keep tweaking things.

For instance, once we nailed down making sure it was bullet proof on Win98/ME, I used the weekend to keep tweaking missions.  My favorite campaign mission is called Apocalypse.  In it, you have to take on the Dread Lords directly.  And it had to be balanced just right.  So I was able to tweak the Dread Lords to be just the right level of nastiness without it being overwhelming.  I spent most of Sunday playing that mission at different difficulty levels to gauge it.

It also gave me time to tweak a bit further the AI weapon/defense adaption code.  That 2 days between "code freeze" and "gold" made a big difference there.  The AI is much better at adapting to the weapons and defenses of its enemies than it was before. 

The AI is a never ending journey

As I get better at the game myself, I think of new things I want to put into new AI personalities.  I would like to add some additional AI personalities in so that when people get their game and bring it home, they can look forward to the first of many free updates that keep adding new stuff. 

One of the things I want to work on further is the planet building up stuff.  But to do that, I'll have to wait until I see how the top players are playing the game.  From the Metaverse, I'll start emailing the top players and see how they play.  What do they build first? When do they purchase (quick build) something and when do they let it build normally? Which resources should be gotten first? Should I trade with minor races more who aren't likely to go to war with me or use trade as part of my diplomatic arsenal?  I have opinions on these things -- strong opinions.  And the AI reflects much of this.  I know from the gamma testers that they certainly find it pretty challenging.

"It's cheating!"

I know I'm going to hear that a lot because I kept saying it when I'd see the AI do something that I didn't think was possible.  One of the changes that has had a far greater impact on the AI's effectiveness is the new economic analysis system.  Previously, (including GalCiv I) the AI looked its economy as a matter of how much to spend. It didn't touch taxation.  But now I've plugged in the overall approval API into its analysis and it raises and lowers taxes based on a bunch of criteria.  The result was unexpected -- the AI focuses somewhat more on getting high approval ratings so it can raise its taxes which in turn gives it more money.

But when I was playing it out of the debugger, all I saw was the AI with a larger economy with a similar population.  That meant loading up the game in the debugger and trying to figure out the "bug" to keep it from "cheating" in the future.  The result was a higher tax rate than anticipated and the AI going after those morale resources.  Let me tell you this -- if you let the AI take and fortify either the morale or influence starbases all the way, you're dead.  If you see the galaxy suddenly turn to their color, that's why.  Controlling those galactic resources matter a lot in the long term because when they get built up, they can literally double your ability in a given area. 

Now, if you set the AI intelligence to "Genius" or higher then it IS cheating. I make no bones about that.  If you beat the AI at "intelligent" then you are beating me.  Congratulations, you're better than I am at the game.  At that point, play some Metaverse games and I'll likely contact you to learn from you.  But in a single player game, the player needs to be challenged and if I can't beat you, then there's the option of just handing the AI more money.  But that is the key -- the AI isn't getting free units or special attacks.  We also don't start you in crummier galaxies or give you poorer planets.  The highest levels are just AI gets more money. The reverse is true at lower levels.  If you play at beginner, we're giving you money.

The Marketing really ramps up

We've had full page ads going in the major PC game publications in the United States for the last few months.  Next month that'll expand to on-line ads, in-store ads, and an expansion on the existing ads with 2-page spreads and such.

Now, to gamers reading this, that's all to be expected.  But the costs are amazing.  A full page ad in a major game publication can cost well over $10k per month.  An in-store ad, a good one, can cost $30k.  Even the major gaming sites can charge pretty big bucks for this.  There aren't very many indie developers out there.  There are even fewer indie developer/publishers.  And we're trying to be certain not to cut any corners.

Meanwhile, in Europe, we teamed up with Paradox to make sure the game is available in Europe at the same time.  Paradox, makers of Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron are kindred spirits.  Initially it'll only be available in English but German, Italian, Russian, Polish, and other languages are in the works.  It should also be available down under (Australia and New Zealand) around the same time but I'm not as up to speed on what's happening on that front.

So far, we've got orders from WalMart, Best Buy, CompUSA, EB, GameStop, Jack of All Games, Circuit City and a few others.  Users who pre-order get the collector's edition which besides having a cool looking box get the tech tree poster, the GalCiv Desktop, and extra game content (additional pieces for the ships, etc.).  Cost is the same as the regular.  Users who have pre-ordered it from us directly can also get the same thing.

The initial availability is going to be 3-times what the first GalCiv was.  We're very excited

The Reviews

The reviews always make me nervous.  Very nervous.  Two years of work and I can tell you the reviews on an indie game can make or break it.  Now that we're not as obscure, we tend to get the better reviewers.  Back in the days of Entrepreneur (our first Windows game) we'd be lucky to get assigned to a reviewer who would play the game.  It was discouraging to have worked so hard on something and have some reviewer not even give it 10 minutes before writing the review.  But like I said, things are much better now.  By GalCiv I the major game magazines knew us enough to make sure that their solid reviewers checked it out. 

Good reviewers don't necessarily mean positive reviews though.  It just means they'll give it a fair shot which is all you can ask for. 

GalCiv I got 4.5 stars from CGW and CGM and an 82% from PC Gamer and an 8.4 from Gamespot. GameSpy gave it an 87.  So that's our baseline to see how we've done.  3 years have passed and the bar has been raised, so there are other factors to consider as well.  This time, it's not "Hey, it's either this or MOO3".  Civilization IV, the best turn-based strategy game I've ever played, came out 4 months ago.  So in many reviewers minds (I know it would be in my mind) the question is "Is this a game that is worth looking at with Civ IV there?"  That's a question I can't answer. I'm too close and too enthralled with Civ IV anyway.   I can say that they're very different. 

There and back again

GalCiv II took a major turn this time around.  We wanted to make a game that could be a definitive 4X space strategy game.  That meant incorporating features from the genre that are popular.  Sometimes, games leave out feature -- good features -- from other games simply because they don't want to acknowledge that other games exist.  I see that in RTSs and it drives me nuts.  After playing Rise of Nations, it's hard to go to another land based RTS that doesn't have a concept of land control (at least for me).  It's such a good idea.  After playing Total Annihilation, it's hard to deal with units that don't fight back (or run away) when attacked. 

Similarly, GalCiv II couldn't just pretend that Master of Orion didn't exist.  Or that Homeworld didn't exist.  Or that Ascendancy didn't exist. Or that Stars didn't exist.  Or Twilight Imperium. Or Space Empires, or Starships Unlimited, or even the unreleased Stars Supernova.  I don't claim to be a real game developer. Or even a real programmer.  I'm a gamer who just happens to know how to make game ideas be turned into actual games. 

So we could either pretend that GalCiv is the only 4X space game that's ever come out and expand on its existing features.  Or we could try to reach out to the fans of all these classic games, many of whom are probably looking for a new game to try and see if we have something to offer them.  That's not to say we just took features X, Y, and Z and crammed them in to have a bullet point.  We didn't do that.  Instead we looked at features we thought might make the game better and then looked to see if other games implemented it, how they implemented it, and how that might make sense in our game.

First GOLD screenshots

Here are the first GOLD screenshots..

This is a fairly late stage planet.  In GalCiv II you can have your planets focus on a particular type of production (a lot of players asked for this). And if you're not building a ship, you're not charged for it which is why the (2) at the top (2 potential production but you're not being charged because you're not building a ship).  That was one of the most common complaints from GalCiv I.

Planets are not just visually unique (we generated the high quality planets each game, so you'll never see this planet again).  We also added things like artifacts, mineral rich areas, fertile land, and other things that give you bonuses (BIG bonuses) if you build the proper thing there.

There are probably three  major technological innovations in GalCiv II that I can think of off the top of my hat.  The first is the unlimited smartscaling technology. Play at any resolution (at or above 1024 x768) and have it all used intelligently -- 16x9, 9x16, you name it, the smart scaling stuff will let the game be relevant years from now.  The second is the vector based texture development so that the textures can keep getting better as technology changes.  So 3 years from now when our video cards have 2 gigs of video ram on them you'll be able to plop in GalCiv and hopefully have say 4096x4096 textures on things.

And the third is the per-race dialog system.  I don't know how big of a deal it is to have each race have its own dialog.  I do know that Paradox's translation team won't be sending me any birthday cards though.  But we really thought of having a lot of this stuff would be fun.  And it's done in such a way that we can keep adding more easily.

Some would probably argue that this is why user-designed ships aren't such a good thing.   This is my "Awacs" ship. I used the ring to throw on tons of sensors. 

 

Speaking of ship design, I wonder how many polygons this ship has. Heh. The game (as far as I know) has no limit to the number of things you can connect to it.

Here it is in action:

BTW, little thing but the display settings in the game let you control ambient light.   So you can make space very dark.  The lights you see on the ships aren't just texture noise. They're literally lights:

 

I turned down the ambient lighting so that just the ships themselves have their own light sources doing their thing.

I think I mentioned this before but we felt this was important:

You can click on a ship and press the details button (or hit I) and see what is actually on the ship and how much it cost.

Don't like the colors of the UI? No problem, change them.

GalCiv I's UI wasn't quite so nice..

Speaking of which, I've heard some people downloading the GalCiv I demo.  I wouldn't bother.  It's nothing like GalCiv II.  It would be like trying to figure out what Windows Vista is going to be like by trying to fire up a copy of Windows 3.1.

One of the other things I think people will like is that you can zoom out with your mouse wheel until the map turns into strategic mode where the units are icons. You can play it like a war game from afar.  It's not nearly as pretty. 

I'm going to try to put together a quickie animation though because you can zoom all the way from this to looking right up close at a planet or ship.

So anyway, tomorrow the crew will start to go on vacation.  I plan to take a day or two off, then catch up on email and then try to catch up in general! Plus spend some time with wife/kids.

In about two weeks, it'll be out.  February 21st at a store near you.

With 16x9 displays becoming increasingly important, Microsoft's new Sidebar, scheduled for release in Windows Vista and also to be back ported to Windows XP may be the right program at the right time.

The sidebar is essentially a container for "gadgets".  Gadgets are similar to widgets except they don't require a special enabler in order to use.  Stardock plans to support Microsoft's Sidebar in a variety of ways depending on the final implementation.

Originally, Microsoft planned to have the Sidebar support gadgets made either via DHTML or as Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) gadgets.  However, the company seems to be focusing more on DHTML gadgets in order to allow those gadgets to be able to run on both the desktop and on web pages seamlessly (something Avalon gadgets would not be able to do since they would require the browser to support Avalon explicitly).

The question that remains to be answer is whether Microsoft's particular implementation of the Sidebar is compelling enough for users to adopt when Google and even Stardock have their own "bars" that can do much the same thing.

We think it'll boil down to two things:

1) The content of course.

and

2) Whether there is a compelling need to have a bar sticking around on the screen.

Taken together, Microsoft and others have to make the case that we need this.  Sure, an RSS feed might be nice. But what else? Weather? Do I need weather info taking up screen space 24/7? Or a big clock? Or MP3 controls?  This isn't a new issue. 

For all the hype widgets/gadgets have received over the past few years (and we've certainly been part of that) no one seems to have answer to that question: Why.  Can Microsoft come up with compelling content.  Look at Microsoft's own screenshot carefully.  It has a clock, an RSS feed, a picture, a couple of shortcuts, and an MP3 control. Is it worth 10% of your screen space for that?

We think that the Sidebar as a concept is good. The problem that remains to be solved is finding compelling content.  Clocks and RSS feeds ain't it.  Even with all the exposure Yahoo has given the Yahoo widget engine and all the press it's received, the typical widget for it gets less than 10,000 downloads (compare that to a "niche" thing like WindowBlinds or even a popular DesktopX theme or an icon package).  The story seems the same -- widgets and gadgets simply don't have enough meat right now to be compelling.  Someone needs to come up with content that goes beyond the mildly useful and into the realm of compelling.

What do you think?

This week Kristin, Derek and Brad bring you news of IE7, we are in awe of Cingular’s bold move, we applaud Apple for yet another good idea, and we describe ways to get around Google’s "Great Firewall of China". Also, some say that spending too much time online means not enough social interaction, but a new study proves otherwise. In your face, Mom!

Tax news: Bill Gates is so rich (how rich is he?) that the IRS must use a special computer just to deal with his taxes. Hardly surprising, considering that Kristin needs a special computer just to contemplate how rich Bill Gates is. A Texas politician has suggested a 100% tax on violent video games (among other proposed taxes). We wrap up our tax news with a look at Take 2’s books.

Game news: Los Angeles sues Rockstar Games for the pornographic content in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Also in the World of Warcraft we find out there is a bit of a "don’t ask don’t tell policy". We also learn that there is some challenging new content for top-level gamers.

We answer a question for a caller this week about Windows Vista, and discuss our varied political spectrum based on an online quiz Brad found. Download now for your listening pleasure!

I had a lengthy interview with Talk Strategy recently on some of the ideas behind GalCiv II and what we were hoping to do with it.  Here is an excerpt:

TS:     It's hard to miss that you have the word 'civilization' in your name as a 4X game. Do you think Civilization IV raised the bar for the whole 4X genre? Has it made you rethink anything?

Definitely. Civilization IV is the best turn-based strategy game I’ve ever played. I love it. And it has been to everyone’s advantage that it came out when it did because it has raised the bar so much.

A lot of people don’t know this about the game industry but game developers don’t look at each other as "competitors" like you have in other industries. We were involved during the Civ IV beta and they’ve been involved in our beta. Soren from Firaxis has been very supportive of our efforts and has given us a lot of very useful suggestions and feedback for Galactic Civilizations II.

The two games are different enough that someone who likes Civilization IV won’t feel like they’re retreading on the same ground when they play Galactic Civilizations. But we’ve tried to make sure that quality and polish level of the two titles are similar.

TS:     There seem to be two schools of though on sides in 4X games. One has a small number of very unique sides while the other has many sides with minor starting differences. Why did you make the decision you did?

For us, it comes down to balance. Stardock developed the Starcraft add-on for Blizzard called Retribution. In Starcraft there were three races who were radically different. Blizzard was constantly having to balance things between the three of them and I remember during the development of the expansion how tricky it was setting up the maps and units such that it was "fair" to all sides.

If the different sides are that radically different, it puts a very hard limit on the number of sides you can have. And in a diplomacy-heavy game like Galactic Civilizations, we wanted to have lots of different factions.

That said, each race has its own ships and there are three ethical philosophies to choose from, which have dramatic repercussions on gameplay (though often subtle). So there are some stark differences between races. But at the end of the day, we wanted to make sure all the players were playing the same game.

TS:     Tell us about the AI and describe a time when it surprised you.

The AI has gone through an immense amount of work this time around. Because we don’t have multiplayer, the AI takes center stage for the game. The AI can’t just be tough – that’s easy. The AI has to play like a human would. It has to be challenging but also be suffering from the same problems that a human player experiences.

In terms of the most surprising thing I’ve seen, I should note that since I write the AI, I rarely get surprised. But one thing I had happen this weekend was a war I had with the Drengin. The Drengin had been focusing on phasors for weapons and shields for defense. In preparation for war with them I amassed a huge fleet of capital ships filled with missiles which go through shields like paper.

But when I finally launched my attack, the Drengin had amassed a fleet of "Mark VI" Battle ships which were equipped with Point Defense technology. That had spotted what I was doing and adapted before my attack. Things didn’t go well for humanity.

TS:     If I understand correctly, there are no tactical battles or multiplayer in GCII. Could you briefly explain why and go over their prospects for the future (either in an expansion or the next version)?

Sure. The problem with tactical combat is that it tends to consume the overall game.

Picture this – you’re in a galaxy-wide war. There are literally thousands of worlds. Thousands of ships. A given game turn might have two dozen battles.

Now imagine if the player had to tactically fight each of those battles? Most of the player’s time would be spent there instead of running a galactic civilization, which is what the game is all about. Now, you say "well, just put an ‘auto fight’ button." But using Master of Orion, the gold standard of 4X games, we know that tactical AI is almost never as good as a decent human player. So good players would feel like they had to fight the tactical battles if they were going to be remotely close in order to maximize their results.

TS:     Normally 4X games start slow, have a great middle and a somewhat tedious end game. How did you address this problem?

The problem you describe is scaling. Most games don’t scale well as the game progresses. What we’ve done in Galactic Civilizations II is make sure that the game interface and game mechanics scale.

At first, players manage individual ships and planets. The fun at the start is exploring the galaxy, designing ships, negotiating with aliens and telling planets what to build.

The fun in the middle is fighting wars where players are managing fleets of ships (the number of units remains the same, but now they’re fleets instead of individual ships). The planets don’t have the micro-management issue because the buildings automatically upgrade themselves based on technology. So the middle part of the game involves only sporadic interaction with planets.

The fun at the end of the game is using the rally points to tell various fleets of ships and planets to automatically send ships to certain strategic points. Giving orders to your governors to switch production from one thing to another or telling ships going to rally point X to go to rally point Y. Players in essence deal with task forces of fleets and groups of planets.

The computer players know when they’re beat and will surrender. They won’t hold out until the end most of the time. So mopping up isn’t as much of an issue. They play as humans would… Well not quite; when I play online in strategy games, human players tend to quit the instant that the tide starts to turn against them, while our computer players will at least give you the satisfaction of knowing you have definitely defeated them.

TS:     How's development going and when should we look for Galciv II? Will there be a simultaneous retail and Stardock Central/Total Gaming.net release?

It should be out at both retail and digital distribution at the end of February!

Read the whole thing.

Okay, I found this on the net. The REAL Back to the Future story.

Game development is a labor of love.  At least for me.  After two years of working on Galactic Civilizations II in varying degrees and in fact having lived with the "franchise" now for 12 years from the original OS/2 version, the code-freeze has been really difficult for me.

Every time I play the game, I see something different that I could tweak, improve in some slight way.  We're way beyond the "it's good enough to ship".  As some of our external and internal gamma testers said, it was probably read to ship a week ago.  But each day I play it, I see something, something little that could be improved.  Made better.  When you're deep into the code, you see all kinds of opportunities to make things even better. 

That's one reason it's hard to simply stop. To say "It's time to stop and send it out there." I found a bug the other AI that kept the AI from researching miniaturization techs.  But it didn't matter to people other than me.  The AI seems really smart.  And indeed, the AI simply adapted to a strategy of more/cheaper ships.  It could have gone out like that and nobody would have noticed.  But *I* would have known and it would have bugged me.   So we made it so that the AI can determine whether miniautrization is a strategy it onces to make use of -- fewer but higher quality ships.  It doesn't HAVE to do it, it can choose to do it based on the state of the galaxy. 

But it's things like that that make it hard to let go.  I could keep tweaking forever.  Luckily, I can keep updating things.  I plan to do a bunch of game examples where I document different games. That'll give me an opportunity to put the AI to the test in a variety of conditions and be able to adjust it and then give users the results as part of a free update.

The AI is something we're pretty proud of though.  In terms of AI quality of games I've worked on I would rate them as follows:

Game	Rating (out of 10)
GalCiv for OS/2	6.0
GalCiv for Windows (2003)	5.0
The Political Machine	5.0
GalCiv II for Windows	8.0

That's where 10 would be the absolute best it could possibly be and probably best left to a research project and not a commercial product.  I'd say that a 8.5 to 9.0 on that scale would be about as good as we could do without it having used up so many resources that it wouldn't be commercially viable from a hardware requirement standpoint or pure development time or that be incredibly unfun because it would be doing incredibly annoying things.

Which user should get the best first experience?

The area that is particularly painful is having to make compromises on who to target for the best experience.  Consider this:

Galactic Civilizations II supports Windows 98, ME, 2000, and Windows XP on hardware ranging from ancient Pentium 3 800MHZ level CPUs all the way up to the latest Dual core processors.  It will run on a Geforce 2 level card all the way up to the latest ATI/Nvidia monsters.  And the difference between these cards isn't just speed but capability.  We had to put in all kinds of things to make it run on Geforce 2 cards for instance. Our own custom lighting system for instance. 

And that brings us to all kinds of choosing defaults.  WHO are the default settings targeted for?  Let me give you an example we agonized with -- anti-aliasing.  Many of you are probably familiar with 2x, 4X, 6X antialiasing right? Makes the graphics look a lot smoother.  So what should the default be?  If we have no anti-aliasing, it'll run fastest of course on low end hardware.  But then people with decent video cards (not even great ones, I mean like ATI 9000 level like my laptop) have their first experience, their first 10 minutes of play so to speak, looking at jaggier graphics.  Sure, they can switch it, but on the other hand, the guy with the Geforce 4x series or Intel integrated graphics card can also turn down the anti aliasing.  After all, their hardware vendor is the one who claimed it could handle 4X anti-aliasing (it's not like we force anti-aliasing, the game does a series of tests to try to find a good setting for the card but if a card says it "Look at me! I can do 4X, no really chief! Send me in! I can do it!" then we set it to that.  But that means some older cards that claim they're just swell with anti-aliasing run slower than we'd like.  Not unusably slow but cut scenes dog a bit and the framerate is lower than we're used to.  But like the other way around, they can simply turn it off too. 

So who wins out? We decided to opt at 4x anti-aliasing and put it in the readme.  Since 4X antialiasing works well on any decent video card that's within the last 2 years at the default resolution, we decided to target them.

Making sure everyone can play

One thing that we wanted to avoid is to have a game that had too high of system requirements.  It's a freaking turn based strategy game after all.  You shouldn't have to have a mega machine.  So while the guy with the Win98 box with a Geforce 5200 card on a Pentium 800mhz machine might have to turn off anti-aliasing for the cut scenes to run smooth, we wanted to make sure the game would run fine for him.  After all, what about the guys who have older laptops?

Laptops were my personal little obession. I'm a laptop junkie. I've got more laptops than I really should have. I have a problem.  And by golly, it was going to run on them!  As long as there's at least 32 megs of video RAM, it was going to run.  So there the game was, on my wife's laptop with one of those Intel on board videos. And it worked. Plays very well.  Not that she'll play it but SHE COULD!

Hey Neighbor! Can I install my beta software on your machine?

Because you want the game experience to be great for everyone, even the people with very low end hardware.  It was very important to us that people not have to have some state of the art computer.  So there we are, running around with CDs to friends and neighbors to make sure that we're not just testing it in the testing lab or relying exclusively on the gamma team installing the thing on some funky hardware. 

Testing on Win98 and 2K were a lot tougher than we had expected.  It's really hard to find people with those OSes now.  It's hard to believe that Windows XP is now going on 5 years old.  And you can't just buy some machine and throw on a copy of Win98 or 2K on them.  You have to find a machine that would realistically have the hardware that someone would have. And it's a pain.  Because Object Desktop supports only Windows XP at this point, it was really a challenge to test on those OSes.   We actually had to make a special Windows 98 version of the game -- the installer literally uses different EXEs/ DLLs if you're running Win98 because the latest DirectX SDK doesn't support Win98 or 2K (oh, it SAYS it does but it doesn't in practice).  This will definitely be the last game we make that isn't XP or higher.  It's just too time consuming to cater to an audience that, according to our web logs, represents less than 1% of the gaming user base.

Testing on Win98/2K brought back all the old memories too. It was during that period that people used to argue, with good reason, that consoles woudl rule and PC's were "d0med" because PC games didn't reliably work from one PC to another.  Oh it comes back.  "Oh, your Win98 box is already stuffed full of spyware and now you're going to try to run a 3D video game?"  Surprisingly, Windows 2000 is actually worse because it's DirectX support is even spottier.  Oh the video driver may say it's for Windows 2000, but its DirectX functionality may not have been touched in a long time. 

But we felt it was important not to lock out Win98/ME/2K users because it's a strategy game and we wanted to make sure it was as accessible to as many people as possible.

Speaking of funky support issues

I'd like to take this moment to say that I hate HATE HATE most "anti-virus" programs.  I think most, not all, but most of the anti-virus makers have lost their way and are more of a problem to the typical user than the virii are.  One of my friends computers was soooo beefed up with overlapping anti-spyware/anti-virus stuff that his system was crawling.  Until I cleaned off some of the redundant antivirus programs, the install from CD was taking forever.  That gives me the chills.  Because you know there will be thousands of people out there who don't buy games very often but who do like strategy games who will buy the thing, take it home and their mega-anti virus programs -- overlapping, will slow things down. 

This is the part where I say "THANK YOU CIV 4!" If the Firaxis team were here, I'd give them a big hug.  Why? Because I suspect many of the people who are into these kinds of games bought Civ 4 last Fall and already had to troubleshoot their systems and get them back into gaming working condition.

Because while friends and relatives who are letting you install the game onto their PCs to help you ask "So is this going to be for one of those Nintendos?", you know deep down that they're not the target audience. Their machines are probably well into the worst case scenario. "Wow, Nancy, I've never actually seen a PC with 5 shopping toolbars before.."

And while they somehow manage to have systems full of debilitating software, they also manage to have installed several different anti-spyware packages.

One anti-virus maker that really has my ire is McAfee.  They detect ANY call to Windows Scripting Host as a virus. Great... Our launcher gadget uses VB Script to detect whether the game is already installed so that when a user puts in the CD it doesn't try to install it but rather says "Play".  Mind you, this only happens if you have every option on it clicked so it's not a common issue. But as the QA guys looked into it, they were astounded -- it labels all calls to WSH as "Malicious scripts".  No sort of parsing that we could detect. Just a simple IF using VB Script THEN "Malicious script". It's harmless but it's annoying that on probably .1% (which on 100,000 machines means  100 people which is a lot of people if you think about it) are going to see this message.

Where does it stop?

When you work on a project for a very long time, it's really hard to let go.  It's hard to say "it's done".  Especially on a game where you play and you play and you can always tweak.  I think that's one reason why I like PC games -- as I play the game and think of something that I or other users might like, I can put it in and make it available to others.  But realistically, before we do that, we will need to hear what people want. 

I put in AI features this past week that I suspect few people will ever notice. A few examples:

• Some of the AI personalities will try to run away from enemy ships that it determines it can't "Take".
• The AI has gotten much better at escoring transports
• If an AI is losing a war, it'll pay more money to any player who offers it ships for money.
• The AI will make snarky remarks if it detects starbase threats
• I also did a bunch of tweaks at lower levels too.  For instance, now new players get economic boosts (20% at simple and 10% at beginner). 
• Paul K wrote me a new API that made it much more efficient to tell how many planetary improvements the AI had built on a planet so that it could better prioritize what it should build.
• I was able to create a new AI personality called AI_CRAZY which I gave to one of the players. It's got some different tactics than the others that mix things up a lot.  It's cool watching different AI modules have to adapt to one another.  We have a mode where we can literally just sit back and watch the AI play against itself.  Watching them wheel and deal and war is cool.

There's a bunch of things like that.  And it could go on forever.  Today was the official code freeze. It's not "gone gold". It still has to pass final QA.  But like I said, it would have been able to do that a week ago. But it was tough still to say "Okay, it's done".  It's just so hard to let it go.

Scary Retail

Now the scary part starts.  I think one of the reasons why it gets to tempting to keep holding on to it is fear of what will happen when it gets out there.  When Civilization 4 came out, they discovered that due to an issue with some ATI cards / ATI drivers that the game wouldn't run.  It required a patch.  It wasn't a big deal in hindsight, users downloaded the patch and all was well.  But as a developer, that's the nightmare thing.  You work so hard on these things for years at a time and to have all that work overshadowed by some glitch like that is maddening.

And when you're manufacturing tens of thousands of these things at a time, there's no going back once it's in their hands.  We've tested it on every machine in our QA department.  We've taken it home. We've put it on our friends and neighbors computers -- many of whom have PCs that are in no shape to be playing games.  And while it went well, I still get paranoid.  You can bet we tested it on a LOT of different video cards.  And X64 and Windows 2003 and Dual core and so forth.  Heck, we even ran it on Windows Vista (note to anyone running the Vista beta -- you will have to run galciv2.exe direct, Microsoft broke layered windows in the current build and our pretty launcher is hosed by that -- Microsoft needs to fix that since there's a LOOOOTTT of programs that require that). But in the meantime, Windows Vista beta gamers (if such a thing exists) will find that yes, indeed, we tested the game on Vista and make sure the game runs there.

No Copy Protection

GalCiv didn't have copy protection and the piracy level on that was reatively low.  I think not having copy protection decreased its availability to a degree in warez areas.  Since there was no CD check to crack, no disk protection to thwart, there was less incentive to put something up to distribute.  After all, what possible justification does one have to put it up other than sheer stealing? There's no rationalizing of it at that point, especially with the demo due out shortly after release.

So the retail box of GalCiv II has no copy protection whatsoever.

Putting together ideas for the "BonusPak"

Like we did with GalCiv I, we plan to have a Bonus Pack.  A set of enhancements, extra content, etc. that users can download.  THAT's our copy protection -- give people who buy the game a thank you for buying it.  Reward customers.  It was very well received in GalCiv I.  There is always the concern that someone is going to say "Ah, you didn't really finish the game..." so we make sure that the review copies are the out of the box game -- no bonuspak. 

So what ideas do we have there?  What sort of goodies can you expect to have waiting for you when you bring the game home? Here's a few ideas we have:

1. More ship components -- particularly "extras" to help modify the look of the ship.
2. Additional technologies.
3. Additional text for the AI to say back and forth to you.
4. Ability to play tutorials full-screen (right now they play as part of the game screen which is visually cool but some people might want to watch them like they would a DVD).
5. Video strategy guide (basically the GalCiv team doing something like a DVD commentary but where users can hear what we do in different parts.

Of course, add to this that I plan to keep updating the AI further.  I haven't had a chance to do a recent Drengin/Human AI contest since the last set of changes.  I do know the AI is substantially better than anything we've ever done in the past.  But I'd like to do some more simulations and have more AI updates in the BonusPak.  Don't worry, it's not about making the AI tougher, it's about making the AI more intelligent.  We'll deprive the AI of even more money on lower levels as it gets better.  I'd also like to add more AI difficulty levels so that it's more graduated.  I want players to be able to tweak the settings until it's just at the point where they sometimes win, sometimes lose.  Right now, for me, that's "Intelligent" (the AI level) and dependent on the map and the players.  But i want to make sure all players have that kind of ability.  I'd like to see that in.

New features beyond the BonusPak

Like GalCiv I, we plan to keep putting in new updates after release.  Here are some things that we hope to make available after release based on player feedback:

• High Resolution Packs.  For people who do have monster hardware (well ATI 9800 or better at least) I'd love to see ships with 1024x1024 textures.  I'd like to see planets the same way.  Just overall more eye candy stuff.  We have to wait until after release so we can cater best to the people who actually buy the game.  Right now, it's all guess work as to what kind of hardware people who buy the game will have and we don't want to discriminate against any groups (we'll discriminate equally against everyone! <g>).
• Several new planetary improvements.
• Some new hulls for ships.
• More modding tools. 
• New Metaverse features based on what people ask for.

Stardock Central

Back in 2003 we rushed Stardock Central out the door and we have paid for it since.  A lot of people back then really hated it because it was flakey.  Atari asked us to push GalCiv I's date back a month to let MOO3 go out first in exchange for a GalCiv flyer in every MOO 3 box.  That was a no brainer.  But that extra month put the launch date within 2 months of Stardock Central's planned release.  So we moved the date up on SDC so we could go out with GalCiv I.

Now, today Stardock Central works well.  Literally millions of users have used it.  It's the backbone of our software distribution.  It's a very good software manager.  But that said, we aren't going to require people to use it to download updates.  If they want, they will be able to download these updates I mentioned as seperate patches to install like other games.  The advantage of Stardock Central though is that you can redownload the ENTIRE game.  Once you have your serial # that comes in the box, you can toss your CDs and just download the latest/greatest version of the game.

Sleep for a week

Between last Saturday and today, I've worked 111 hours. Or put another way, I was either sleeping, driving home, or doing something else 57 hours last week.  The rest of the team was in much the same shape.  We all wanted to get our little tweaks or fixes or adjustments in before the code freeze.  That meant fixing typos or grammar in the hundreds of pages of text.  Or fixing a screen so that if you run it at over 2000 pixels wide that a scrollbar shows up in the proper place.  Or in my case, having the AI improve its tactics further.  In other people's cases putting in different music. Getting in an additional cut scene. Having an additional event.  Making sure you can Alt-Esc out of the game and back in every circumstance we could thik of (because of the user-defined ships, it's tricky doing alt-esc back, long story but we nailed that down).

So barring some problem from QA, the game will go gold next week and be sent off to manufacturing for availability at retail on Feb 21ish.  We got big orders in today from Walmart, Best Buy, EB, Gamestop and a bunch of other places.  It's by far, our largest launch ever -- over 3 times as many units at retail on day one that GalCiv I had and this is the first real Windows product we've published at retail.

Feel free to ask questions here, I'll be around!  Tomorrow I'm going to be playing Battlefield 2.