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.

1	5,987	CES: The show in pictures.. The sights, the sounds, the noise! by Brad Wardell  on  Friday, January 06, 2006   in PersonalComputing
2	3,365	CES: Brad's Day 2 adventures And hangovers by Brad Wardell  on  Friday, January 06, 2006   in PersonalComputing
3	2,891	Bill Gates CES keynote summary The future is gadgety! by Brad Wardell  on  Wednesday, January 04, 2006   in PersonalComputing
4	2,623	CES Day 1 report Consumer Electronics Show! by Brad Wardell  on  Wednesday, January 04, 2006   in PersonalComputing
5	2,300	PowerUser.TV scoop: Microsoft confirms Aero glass for Vista Windows Vista user interface finalized by Draginol  on  Tuesday, January 10, 2006   in PersonalComputing
6	1,949	Inappropriate comments and their removal The way to go about it. by Jafo  on  Sunday, January 15, 2006   in Community
7	1,740	HALO_WB5 Coming soon.... by JJ Ying  on  Monday, January 23, 2006   in Skinning
8	1,713	Anyone want to help me kill my computer? by lifehappens  on  Monday, January 16, 2006   in PersonalComputing
9	1,109	PETITION: To limit the length of upload names. maybe I will name my new skin.. ThisismynewskinthatIamgivingalongnamesoallotherskinsarebumpedfromthenewestuploadlist by Night Train  on  Wednesday, January 11, 2006   in Community
10	958	Insanely cool time waster by BlueDev  on  Saturday, January 21, 2006   in Internet

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Allen "The Dark Lord" Rausch has got his hands on Gamma 1 of Galactic Civilizations II and gives an in-depth look at what he's seen in the game.

Allen Rausch was also the person who reviewed the original Galactic Civilizations for GameSpy 3 years ago (how time flies) so he knows definitively where the game originally came from.

Definitely check it out.

We've talked about this in previous entries but in GalCiv II you play as any of 10 races and depending on which race you pick the AI will choose different dialog to talk to you with.  Moreover, depending on your ethical alignment and their ethical alignment you will get different variations.  There's plenty of "generic" dialog in there as well but there are pages and pages of unique dialog that only show up if you play as the right race.

So tonight I was playing as the Drengin Empire -- the evil scum of the galaxy.  The humans had this to say:

I found this really interesting test on-line.  Share your results. It's interesting to see how different people end up.

You are a Social Moderate (56% permissive) and an... Economic Conservative (76% permissive) You are best described as a: Capitalist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

  Here's my score..

Galactic Civilizations II is nearly ready to go gold. It'll be available at retail both here in the United States & Canada and in some places overseas.  You will also be able to purchase and download the game directly from Stardock's TotalGaming.net. RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 21.

We've put up some new screenshots to show you what the game is going to resemble.  If you've seen beta shots, those didn't have the "final graphics".  So here are some shots of the near-final game.

The game includes a ton of mini-cut scenes to help create make each game an epic story. The underlying premise of the design is that YOU, the player are making each game an epic story of your own through your conquest, diplomacy, influence, efforts in the game. 

The screenshots in this news item are designed to show you some different aspects of the game too that aren't normally talked about but we think matter to many strategy gamers.

One of the many cut-scenes.  If you played Galactic Civilizations I, you know the basic game mechanics but this game is light years beyond it in almost every respect.  GalCiv I had about 10 minutes of music. GalCiv II has (I think) over an hour to keep it from getting too repetitive.

 

When you choose a civilization you can still customize how they look and behave. You can even customize the look of the user interface. So you'll see screenshots with all kinds of different interface tintings.  You also control the colorization of the ships which I can say is non-trivial to make look good. GalCiv II ships support bump mapping, hardware T&L, and all kinds of other lighting and texture effects.  Because we're turned based, we can have units with over a thousand polygons (a typical 3D RTS, for instance, has units of less than 200 polys). 

 

Each opponent has its own dialog that depends on who you play as.  There is a LOT of dialog in this game. We developed special tools just to make it easier to keep track of it all. And within each response are sub-responses so that there's lots of variance in what the computer players will say.

 

Okay, this is an ugly ship.  But it's user-designed (by me).  Now, for people who don't want to mess with the cosmetics, you can literally just pick your weapons, modules, etc. and press "Place" and the game will try to intelligently put it somewhere for you.  But for sci-fi geeks like me, you can really go crazy in design and create virtually any kind of ship you can imagine.  To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever been done (ship design isn't new but the "lego" like behavior of being able to piece together unique ships we think is).  And don't worry, your creations are saved to disk so you can use them again in future games.  We hope to eventually develop a tool that will let you export your creations for use outside the game.  Oh, and if you want to add your own graphics, no problem, they're just .X files in the model directory.

The game is totally moddable -- all images are either .PNG, .DXPACK (DesktopX) or .X.  Go nuts.

 

This screen may look boring but it allows you to see, at a glance, what is built on your planet and what it is contributing.

 

During the beta, the computer players pretty much were always at war.  The diplomatic AI engine is now quite sophisticated with them coordinating attacks, ganging up, and generally trying to keep from dividing their forces.  In this screenshot, the Torians are dead meat.  BTW, the game makes no distinction between computer players and the human player in this sense. So the "difficulty levels" don't involve them ganging up on the hapless human player. They don't care any more or less about the player than another computer player.

Besides each race having its own dialog tree that is per player (that's a LOT of dialog 10x10 nodes) you can literally trade anything for anything. I won't even go into how much time it took to get that down so that you couldn't rip off the AI.  We put our best cheese testers to the test on that one. 

Okay, I don't know about you guys but 4X games are notorious for bogging down late game. I.e. they're boring at the start, fun in the middle and just D-R-A-G at the end.  So we developed a new type of user interface that is an extension of what we did in GalCiv I.  Now you can manage tons of things from a few different screens later on. It vastly cuts down micro management.  For those who like micromanagement, you can still do it.  Just for people like me who find late games to be tedious if I'm having to click on zillions of units and planets/cities/whatever to tell them what to do causes me to go crazy.

The Rally points are really cool. You can tell ships to automatically go somewhere and form fleets or build starbases or whatever.  And there are governors for managing immense numbers of rally points. It really makes it easier to organize your build up and forces.

In GalCiv II, influence victories are not just possible but very attainable.  NOTE: The colored area is NOT YOUR BORDER. It's your sphere of influence.  So fellow fans of Civ IV shouldn't mistake GalCiv II's spheres of influence for diplomatic borders.  You can build up influence starbases to spread your culture and your sphere of influence and take over alien civs.  Of course, they will try to do the same thing back.

 

The lines you see on the screen represent trade routes from different players.  You can hence blockade a player by destroying their freighters on the trade route.

There's a lot of scale in GalCiv II. Here's a military starbase next to a fighter.  If you have full battles on, fighters appear even tinier in the combat viewer so that you get a true sense of scale.  When you watch Star Wars or Star Trek, you get a sense of "Hey, this is a BIG ship".  We try to do that here too.

Conquest cut-scene. There's actually multiple ones we rotate through so that there's variety.

These battle screenshots can't really do the battles justice because it's all in the animation.  You can change the camera so that you can zoom in, out, rotate, pause the battle any way you want. It's just totally cool.  It's also a great way to judge how well your ship designs work out.

In GalCiv II, there are 3 types of weapons and 3 corresponding types of defense.  Non optimal defeneses are only counted at the square root value. So you have to really keep an eye on what kinds of weapons your enemies have.

For the full eye candy effect, you can fold down the UI for this.

Love those nebula too.

This is a battle above a ringed planet.  Rings planed give extra research bonuses while planets with moons give production bonuses.

This is the details screen of a planet. It'll tell you all the "hidden" data you might want to know. There's actually a pretty significant amount of code behind putting together intelligent text for this screen. Read the text on here and you get the idea (and there's a bug in this screenshot).

This is the colony management screen. It doesn't just display info, you can click on the the projects and change them from here. Makes it very convenient to manage a large empire.

A lot of computer AIs cheat.  We put quite a bit of work into having the AI play intelligently without cheating (except at the very highest levels where some uber-player can be challenged).  But we wanted players to be able to see exactly what the AI ship design is -- what is literally on there.  You can also zoom in on a ship and see the stuff on there but this makes it very clear.

I was putting my best ship against their best ship. I "won" this battle but only because I was the one who initiated combat and got first strike.

Another thing that drives me crazy in strategy games is where you have to mop up the entire world/planet/galaxy/whatever.  In a typical 5 hour strategy game session, you KNOW whether you're going to win or not usually by hour 3.  So we put a lot of play testing into when the computer players should throw in the towel.  We wanted to make sure players got the satisfaction of smacking down the computer players but that they didn't have to take every last world.  So the computer players will surrender quite a ways before their last world is taken usually but well after it's obvious they're doomed.

Just thought this was kind of cool. Like I mentioned earlier, you can zoom in and out or switch the camera to cinema mode and have it look like a real battle from different angles and such. It's really pretty neat. The screenshots really don't do it justice.

Little thing about the naming convention we used for AI ships. Remember, players design their ships. So does the AI. And there's no set strategy because the best ship depends on the circumstances.  So it can be a real blast watching your opponents ships evolve over time.  See the "M5"?  That means Mark V. It's its 5th generation of that type of ship. Or more accurately, it's the number of years since the initial game year (2225). So in that screenshot, that was its state of the art ship.  This is important info since you want to make your design decisions based on their state of the art and not old ships.

BTW, before someone asks, you can upgrade your ships too either all at once or individually.

Just a little touch - the night lights on the planet on the dark side are based on the population of the planet. And since most planets are randomly generated (landmasses and all) each new game, it's not some set pattern/texture).

We've got enough graphs to satisfy the biggest stats fiends.

Yay.  Conquest victory.

The game will be available at stores on FEBRUARY 21 as well as for ddownload from us.  Some of the stores it'll be at in North America include EB, Gamestop, Best Buy, Walmart, CompUSA, Circuit City, and several other chains.

Stardock is an independent game developer. Fully funded and self-published so we were able to make the game exactly how we wanted and ship it when we felt it was ready to go.

We also need your help. If you're interested in the game, spread the word. Pre-orders at retail help increase initial stocking levels (i.e. the difference between that game on the bottom shelf with 2 units and the one with tons of shelf space).  Pre-ordering direct is fine too. 

If you know other strategy gamers who might like this, feel free to link to this news item.

We hope you like what we've done here.  We're very excited about release. There's still a few more days left of testing, bug fixing, optimizing, fixing spelling, etc.  Then it's off to manufacturing.

Make sure you check out the link below to see the rest of the screenshots.