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

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.

Steven Den Beste's site seems to be down but I had a copy fo an article he wrote some time ago that talks about the reason why Noah's Arc is a fairy tale.  There are many many reasons why Noah's Arc is fiction but this is one of the better arguments I've seen.

Steven's site is located here.

I just had the distinct displeasure of encountering someone who is a Biblical literalist (and who actually believes that all evidence supports the fairy tale of Noah's Ark). Let's review the story, briefly:

God decides that the human race is sinful and wants to destroy it. But Noah is virtuous and God warns him about the upcoming catastrophe and tells him to build an Ark (a big ship) and to load it with breeding stock of animals, so as to repopulate the earth. Noah does this, and with his wife and three sons and their wives embarks on the ship. God then covers the earth with water for 40 days and 40 nights, drowning all animals. (It's not completely clear how this would harm whales and seals, but let that go.) Then the water begins to recede and Noah's Ark grounds on Mount Ararat. He releases his animals and the world is repopulated.

This is ecological nonsense. If the whole flora of the world was released from a single point, most of it wouldn't survive and they sure wouldn't be found where they are today.

It's also genetic nonsense. There are a lot of ways of showing this, but one is particularly unambiguous: human Y chromosomes. Nearly all the genetic information each of us carries comes from both our parents. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes and one of each comes from our mothers and one from our fathers. One pair controls the sex of the child. One of these is normal sized and the other is extremely small (relatively speaking), and they're called "X" and "Y" respectively. (But the Y chromosome still carries millions of codons.)

In mammals, XX is female and XY is male. (This is not universal. In birds, XX is male and XY is female. In some insect species, females are diploid and males are haploid. And when you look at plants, sex isn't determined by genetics at all.)

Each human parent contributes 23 chromosomes to the baby, in egg and sperm. The egg always has an X chromosome and the sperm may have an X or a Y (unless there's an abnormality, about which more in a moment). If the sperm has an X then the resulting fertilized egg is XX, thus female. If the sperm has a Y then the fertilized egg is XY, male.

So the sperm cell determines the sex of the child (in mammals). But sometimes when the egg or sperm are formed there's a mistake, and they get more or less than 23 chromosomes. This can happen with any of the chromosomes. When it happens with the sex chromosomes you get individuals who may have three or one instead of the normal two.

If the egg forms wrong and has no X, and if the sperm cell has a Y, then you get a fertilized egg with a Y chromosome but no X chromosome. This egg isn't viable. The X chromosome contains genetic information without which a baby can't develop; the result is a miscarriage (so early, in fact, that the mother may not realize she's been pregnant).

The other three abnormal situations all result in children. If there's only one X chromosome ("Turner's syndrome") then the person looks female. XXY ("Kleinfelter's syndrome") is male. XYY (sometimes called the "supermale") is also male.

The development of male features is controlled by the presence of testosterone in the baby in the womb. This in turn is stimulated by the presence of the Y chromosome. There is, however, an extremely rare condition where the genes which describe the testosterone receptors are damaged, and in such an individual testosterone will be ignored even if it is present. The genes describing those receptors are not on the sex chromosomes but it's possible for them to be present in a person who has a Y chromosome, and if this happens the resulting person will look female. However, such a person will also be sterile, because no ovaries form.

The point is this: if a person is fertile and has a Y chromosome, then that person will be male.

I am male. I have a mother and a father. I got my X chromosome from my mother and my Y chromosome from my father.

Each of them also had two parents, so I have two grandfathers. My father's father gave his Y chromosome to my father. My mother's father gave his X chromosome to my mother.

I got my Y chromosome from my father and he got it from his father. I carry my paternal grandfather's Y chromosome. He got it from his father, and from his paternal grandfather, etc.

My mother got one of her two X chromosomes from her father and one from her mother. There's a 50% chance that the X chromosome I carry came from my maternal grandfather, but no chance whatever that I carry his Y chromosome. (He gave his Y chromosome to my mother's brother, but I'm not descended from my uncle.)

I have many male ancestors but my Y chromosome only came from one of them. I have many male ancestors but only one by strict patrilineal descent. They're the same person. That doesn't mean I have no genetic information from any of my other male ancestors; there are 22 other chromosomes to talk about and I may have gotten some of them from other men way back when. But the Y chromosome itself can only have come from one place, and it is from my strict patrilineal ancestor. My lineage from all my other male ancestors includes at least one intervening woman, and at that step their Y chromosomes were not passed on.

If any two men have the same strict patrilineal ancestor, no matter how far back, then those two men will have the same Y chromosome.

Which brings us back to Noah. According to the story, the ark carried 8 people: Noah, his wife, his three sons and their wives. Genetically only five are important, because the three sons carried no genetic information not present in Noah and his wife.

So if the story is true then the entire human race is descended from just five individuals. And four of them were women; Noah is the only man among the five. 10 sex chromosomes, and nine of them are X. Of the ten, only one was a Y. Noah carried it and passed it on to his three sons.

And they passed it on to their sons, and their grandsons, and great grandsons, and ultimately to all living men. So if the Noah story is true then every existing Y chromosome in men should be identical because they'll all be copies of the one carried by Noah.

And they aren't. Human Y chromosomes have been tested many times and they are not all the same. There is enormous variety among them. It is impossible for all human men to have the same strict patrilineal ancestor.

Therefore the Noah story is not true.

 I recently did a pretty lengthy interview with Game Daily. In it, we talked about where we thought things were going to go with digital distribution, retail publishing, etc.

Nowadays, digital distribution of major titles doesn't seem that big of a deal. But when we started selling The Corporate Machine on Drengin.net (later renamed to TotalGaming.net) it was a definite big deal. People suddenly had the option to either buy the game at the store or buy a copy and download it.

In 2003, Galactic Civilizations was the first major retail game released at the same time digitally for download.  Sales at retail and for download both vastly exceeded our expections.

At the end of February, Galactic Civilizations II will have an even wider release at retail than the first one with most of the major retailers already on board to carry it (many taking pre-orders -- all users who pre order the game anywhere will be able to get the Collector's Edition box).  On the same day, the game will be available for download as well.

Even users who buy at the store will also be able to digitally download not just updates but the entire game. So if you blow away your CD or just plain lose it, no problem, you can just download the game -- even years later (as GalCiv I players can attest to).

So check out the GameDaily article, it should give you some background into what we're trying to do.

In Galactic Civilizations II the home planet for the Yor is called Iconia.  Huh? Is that a bug? Even in Galactic Civilizations I the Yor home world was called Iconia. 

In Galactic Civilizations II, you discover why that is.  But this article at IGN gives the details on the relationship between the Yor and the Iconians.

AI tweaking continues to be one of the many many things being worked on.  I am still not satisfied with the AI though (it's wayyyy better than Beta 5 and Beta 5 was roughly on par with GalCiv 1).

Here's some results and you can see where the flaws being worked out on.  I'm frustrated with the AI ship design stuff still. It's getting there but needs another day of tweaking.

Here are TWO games, not as detailed as the other, just whipped through them.

Human / Drengin Wars VIII

Map: Duel.
Setting: Intelligent (AI is playing its best game without cheating)

Note: smoothing effects off for debugger so don't look at these screenshots as representative of a typical game.

1) We need to work on what music plays when more. (for me to fix)

Early game:

Galaxy is split except a randomly generated minor race took Thindor. This will give my military the opportunity to try out some stuff when I take it.

Initial AI heavy fighter:

Initial human heavy fighter:

AI strategy this game: High logistics, wimpier ships. First major test:

5 Drengin ships vs 3 human ships.

Result:

Roughly equal damage but in this case, more, cheaper ships beat out fewer quality ships.

...

For quite awhile, the Drengin have a pretty substantial lead.  I put everything I have to increase my logistics ability and couple it with a final generation of railgun based heavy fighter:

The Warhawk isn't much better than the Star Hawk on paper but it has better range and it has some beam weapon protection.

The Drengin's counter:

Practically the opposite.  Fully protected for mass drivers with missiles instead.  The mark 3 is the Drengin's "latest" design.

Spending Contrasts:

Me: 80/0/20 (miltiary/social/research) Income: $297. Spending: $238

Drengin: 48/7/43 (miltiary/social/research). Income: $238. Spending: $254.

By 2229 I've crushed the Drengin again:

Surprising other than in military it's pretty even:

But I can't conquer them yet.  I need to get advanced troop modules (Which they have).  So I'll have to switch to research for a bit.

If I do win, I think the biggest issue is they let me off too easy when I lost the first war.  I was able to make peace by giving them some minor techs even though they had me on the ropes.

But really it's more an issue so far that the AI went for advanced transports while I went for better weapons. But at this stage, we're at a stalemate. I can't take his worlds without those advanced invasion techs he already has.  I also fixed a bug with how the AI is handling their transports.

Another thing I think the AI could do is build more helpful starbases for itself.

The next war would be a battle of ship designs and manufacturing capacity of our societies.

The War Eagle cost less than the previous generation FireHawk, does 2 more mass driver damage, and has better range.

It would be backed by the Dauntless class Medium Frigate.

What's particularly  nice about the Dauntless is that it's only 60 billion credits more expensive to build than the War Eagle despite having nearly twice the punch.

The Drengin fall before it.

A few other notes:

1) The AI should be more aggressive about taking out unescorted transports.

2) The AI should be more aware of battles it can't win.  Some puny fighters going up against a fleet of dauntless's is futile.

The Drengin is destroyed.

Other Bugs discovered/fixed:

1) ALL AI players were building Influence starbases instead of military ones (copy and paste bug).

2) AI player was too quick to abandoned established military tech. Easy to fool. Now it takes into account how much it's invested.  So if it has Zeon missiles and the player has some defense against that but none against beams, it's not going to just start over with beam. It's going to look at how much better its stuff is than the human players stuff.  This is heavy duty stuff but I think that what hurt the AI was when it switched to missiles rather than sticking with beam.  Sure, my ships had some defense but not enough.

3) But more effort into AI escorting transports

4) Fixed the Diplomacy AI to drive a harder bargain in wartime when it's winning. If the AI hadn't let me off the hook when it had the initial advantage, it could possibly have won.

 ---

Map: Duel
Scenario: Standard Drengin vs. Human. Test 9
Record: Brad (9 wins, 0 losses).
AI Intelligence: "Intelligent" (its best game without getting extra goodies).

Note: smoothing effects off for debugger so don't look at these screenshots as representative of a typical game.

This is the 9th generation improvement to the Drengin AI.  This evaluation will see how effective it is against a skilled player.  A lot of tweaks were made over the last generation. It is getting close to being "final".

First generation Drengin Heavy Fighter is different than any I've seen it build before:

But in reality, it's because the AI now is building military starbases which it wasn't able to do so before due to a bug.  The military starbase adds +2 to the mass drivers.

Take away the military starbase (Which I promptly destroyed) and it's not quite so impressive.

First generation AI units remain unimpressive.

..

The Drengin ramps up their military much earlier. That's why they have those crummy M0 units.  But the head start helps them.  They take one of my planets as a result.

The first really critical battle involved 5 Drengin ships vs. 3 of my F-1's.  First generation on both sides though I waited longer to commit so my ships are substantially better.

It's amazing how small the tiny hull is vs. the small hull when seeing them battling it out.  Small tweak -- fighters should worry less about defense IMO.

Overall though the Drengin was definitely winning this time.  They had conquered two of my planets. I'd retaken one of them but damaged it in the process giving me an overall disadvantage.  Luckily they had stuck with the crappy mark 0 ships for a long while. Probably because it could crank them out (they're cheap).

..

No, it's a bug. There's a bug in the AI ship design.  I've been able to exploit it thus far and get to where I am now which is even with the AI.  So I'm going to fix it and restart.  At the close of 2228, the AI's state of the art ship is a 1 attack, 1 defense ship, a first generation ship. Sad.

..

Fixed and reloaded the saved game.

Map is evenly split between the two of us. My biggest advantage thus far has been speed. The AI doesn't have impulse power clearly.

The balance of military power is in my favor:

The AI had cranked out a bunch of quality poor ships and I was able to wipe them out but it was a close thing.

It doesn't take long for the new changes to take effect: The Mark IV Heavy fighter:

A bit better but possibly too little too late.

My newest ships...

The Alpha, a medium class Frigate.

and the F-2 Star Eagle

    My new units are superior to the Drengin's and wipe them out pretty effectively.

And so...

AI Ship Design remains non-optimal. Will continue on.  T-minus 5 days until code-freeze.  I think we're pretty close.