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.

Before Civilization 4 came out, we were kind of on our own in terms of turn based user interface.  I don't want to say that no turn based strategy games came out since GalCiv I back in 2003 but I hadn't played any extensively.

So when Civilization 4 came out, there were a bunch of very innovative user interface tweaks.  I also really liked the Civpedia.  The Civpedia stores a lot of information that is presented to the user at the time of execution. But there's a lot of good stuff in there that I'm sure users would like to have access to from a single place.

But it always brings up the issue -- if we borrow too much from Civilization 4, would users complain?  What many gamers don't realize (and in fact most non-gamers as well) is that the game industry isn't like other industries.  Game developers don't *generally* see other games as "competitors".  We're all part of the same team -- trying to make good games.

I talked to Soren Johnson about this very issue (designer of Civilization 4).  One of the features we wanted to put in was something to indicate that there were no more units to move.  In Civilization 4, when you finish moving everything that can be moved, the turn button changes color letting you know that you could press turn and not miss a unit getting its move in.  Soren's response was "You shouldn't be afraid to borrow interface elements. If you don't people will just complain!" 

I think something as obviously good and logical as color-coding the turn button would be one of those things.  It was one of the things Soren suggested we changed based on his beta experience with the game.  There were numerous other UI tweaks like this.

In the real time arena, there are certain user interface conventions that have become standard.  When games come out and don't make use of them, many gamers (myself included) become frustrated.  As much as I enjoy Age of Empires 3, there are a number of UI conventions from Rise of Nations I wish they had borrowed. It would have made Age of Empires 3 a better game.

But I suspect many game designers feel trepidation about borrowing ideas and suggestions from other games.  I know I do.  I don't have a lot of shame. I believe in the "Great artists steal" but I do feel some shame.  I love how you can look at a city in Civilization 4 on the map and see what it's building.  We actually tried to do something like that but it didn't work out as well with our UI.  After release, I'd like to come up with something like it still for the bonuspak.

Another thing from Civilization 4 I liked (and Soren brought up) was how you can look at a unit and tell if it has moves left.  A little green dot appears if the unit has all its moves left. Yellow if it has some moves. And red if it's out of moves.  This was another one of those things that I'd like to put in as a bonus pak option.   The issue is how to do it cosmetically.  In Civ4, you have a fixed camera (unless there's an option I'm not aware of).  In GalCiv II, the camera is free form. So we want to make sure what we put in looks okay regardless of the angle and direction. 

I think in time many of the innovations in Civ4 will become "Standard" in Turn-based strategy games.  If you don't have Civ 4, you can get it here: http://www.civilization4.com.

The GalCiv II campaign has been a lot tougher to do than we had thought it would be.  A couple years ago, we whipped up a campaign for the GalCiv expansion pack called Altarian Prophecy and so this time around we thought it would be pretty much the same except we'd make it more dynamic where you could lose missions and go to alternative missions instead.

We were wrong.

It's all in the balancing.  First of all, the main feature of GalCiv II is the stand alone "sand box" games.  That is, the randomly generated games where the player is making up the story.  For me, as a player that's the whole point of the game -- to have a strategy game where I'm making my own mythology as I play along.  To "role play" if you will.  So one of the things we quickly changed was how long the campaign took to play.  Originally it was going to be an ungodly # of missions.  But then that puts most of the game play (and reviewer's time) put into the campaign because reviewers will feel they need to "finish" the campaign in order to review the game adequately.  But we don't want the campaign to be the main part of the game.

At the same time, we do want the campaign to be awesome.  And having done a lot of campaigns over the years, I know which types of missions I like and which ones I don't like.  Escort missions, protect the item, etc.:Yuck.  Blow up and kill things: Good.

Another thing I noticed is that whenever you have an impossible to defeat enemy that you've built up, sci-fi tends to end up with the good guys winning by some trick.  In Star Trek, best of both worlds, the unstoppable Borg were only stopped due to the Enterprise being able to put the Borg to sleep. No way. 

The Dread Lords gotta be tough. But they have to have a very obvious and reasonable weakness to exploit. One that makes sense to the player and can be represented in-game.  We came up with that weakness: They're so technologically advanced that it takes them a very long time to actually build things. 

Let's face it, if the US military conquered an ancient city, it's not like they could quickly convert ancient Rome into cranking out new MFVs overnight.  The Dread Lords suffer the same problem except they're millions of years more advanced.  So when they arrive, they have this issue -- they have a handful of ships which are deadlier than anything else out there.  But these planets -- so primitive.  Look at these humans and Arceans and what not, still use non-organic ships.  Still throwing trivial bits of energy about.  Still using their people to do labor.

I've zoomed out into strategic mode to show the area in question.  The blue ships are my fleet that I'm sending in. The red thing at the upper left is a single Dread Lord Dreadnought.  That single ship will wipe out my fleet but it'll hurt it good and there's no quick replacements for the Dread Lords.

The other issue to have them be super powerful but not unstoppable are raw numbers.  There just aren't very many of them.  So when they do finally invade a planet, there's only a a dozen of them versus 5 million troops. Obviously we had to put together a special invasion effect to convey 10 guys wiping out 5 million troops.  But each of these Dread Lords is as powerful as Sauron.  You can take them out, it's just hard.

So I spent the entire weekend tweaking the Dread Lord AI to make them tough but not unstoppable.  This is harder than one might think.

In the campaign mission, Apocalypse, it's basically everyone versus the Dread Lords.  So here's the design challenge: You want to make a mission in which IF the player doesn't do anything that the Dread Lords will win. BUT if the human plays decently the Dread Lords will lose. 

So you can picture playing this mission over..and..over...and over.. tuning it.  For some hours, the Dread Lords were too nerfed and eventually, just by hitting the turn button, the Dread Lords would be taken out by someone else.   So then I build them up and pretty soon they're conquering the universe and there's no stopping them. The human player, even me, gets wiped out.  So all kinds of tweaks were made until I finally started homing in on the Dread Lord weakness and making sure that was carried to its logical end -- they produce ships slowly and their ships are not as powerful as they might be (early on, that Dreadnought has a 200 attack -- if you get far enough in the tech tree, you can build incredibly powerful ships).    So I have to restrict how much they can put on their ships (that's where a lot of time went -- just how powerful are their ships).

Similarly, you have to decide how powerful their troops are.  You want to make it reasonably possible to invade their worlds if you get through their defenses but you still want their forces to be immensely tough when they do the invading. But not too tough mind you.  10 guys wiping out 5 million troops is fine. 10 guys wiping out 10 million becomes imbalancing.

|
I apologize for the blocky graphics, I have all the effects/smoothing turned-off for debug.

By 2231 in the campaign mission, which starts you out with a lot of techs (one other thing we've done a lot of work on is making is to that players get increasing amounts of tech each mission - no one wants to have to keep researching "space militarization over and over").  The idea is you "keep" some of the techs you get from the previous mission.  But even with a lot of effort, my top of the line ship is 16 missile attack and 2 armor.  Which is another thing I did to the Dread Lords.  They only get to "Adapt" ONE time.  That is, they don't get to change their ship designs like normal players.  Their infrastructure barely supports creating their advanced organic ships to begin with let alone switching from Doom Rays to Mass Drivers later on.  So they will adapt one time and that's it -- though they get to pick when.  Still my pitiful 16 missile attack is not going to stand up to a Dread Lord when they're doing 52 attack with beam. 

They already did their adaption and made useless my entire line of beam-based ships.  My "EarthForce" heavy fighters were all based on beam weapons and the Dread Lords now equip their ships with a standard 20unit shield defense making my plasma beams pointless.  So I had to start my way up the tech tree for missiles and it's been a real race.  One of the recent (i.e. last week) changes is that we made it so that each new tech you get makes the next tech a bit more expensive. Not massively mind you but later on in the game when you've built up a massive technology industry it's not right that a player could just whiz through the missile techs (like I'm trying to).  So instead of it taking 1 week to get Stinger II missile tech it's taking me 3 weeks. Not  a huge deal but it definitely puts some meat into the "You pick your weapons and defenses and you live with it." 

So you can (like I'm doing) switch to another weapon technology but you're not going to whiz through in 5 turns. It's going to take a bit of time.  We did give something in return though -- no research wastage.  When you research a tech, the excess technology production is automatically put into the next tech in the line.  So when I first started up on the really early weapons stuff, I was getting 2 or 3 techs in a single turn which was nice.

The other penalty I put on the Dread Lords is that they have a relatively low logistics ability. They can't coordinate their ships.  That way, the player isn't faced with a fleet of Dreadnoughts. It's usually a single ship or a couple ships at most.    But if you research enough logistics, you can put together a death fleet which is what I've done.

My 6 ships include 3 Battleship-level ships. Enough to kill off any Dread Lord.

Which it was. But in rare incident, the Dread Lords had two ships together and one of those Dread Lords was destroyed but the rest of my fleet was wiped out.  It was quite a battle though.  I have to say, there's something humbling about seeing not just one but three of your state of the art, large hulled, armed to the teeth designs being destroyed.

This brings me to map design. At the end of this, the player will win if they know what they're doing (and each mission has its own difficulty slider).  But part of the key was making sure the player wasn't in the action.  We have, literally "human shields".  Other civilizations who are in the way.  Namely, these guys:

By the time I'm done, they're gone.  I wish I could show you the Dread Lords battle but the PR people want me to wait and as a way of thanking IGN for their really cool coverage we're going to have the first shots be in there when we talk about the Dread Lords.  They have ridiculously cool ships that make the most of 1000 polygon models, bump mapping, and normal mapping and high definition textures plus they have the high end weapons (the weapon effects get better as you go up the tech tree).

The other "timer" is that the Drengin and Yor are on this map. They are at war with the Dread Lords too but the Dread Lords aren't as interested in them as they are you and your allies.  So while you and your friends are dealing with the Dread Lords, the Drengin/Yor alliance is slowly encroaching in.

In my mind, this one is the "toughest" mission in the campaign.  But on the other hand, it should be the toughest. This is the pay off, to match yourself to the Dread Lords.  There's no "trick" to it, it's just good old fashioned strategy gaming.

I'm glad I'm not doing translation. There's a lot of it. For a strategy game, GalCiv has a lot of text.  GalCiv II may have more text in it than most RPGs.  This really stems from the decision to be a single player game.  By focusing on the single player game, we can sit down and put in per-race dialog on a per situation basis.  Most people won't see a fraction of it.  Play as the Torians and you'll get a different set of dialog and reactions than if you played as a human or a Drengin.

The tool we made is really pretty neat.  I can type in a # and type in alternative text.  When the parser sees a # it knows that there's another randomly available bit of dialog to select or in other cases another bit of text based on a slightly different situation.

I don't know how many people even care about that kind of thing.  Strategy games usually have a pretty narrow set of text. Part of that is to ease translation and part of it is the consensus that it adds little or at least not enough to justify the effort.  But for me, I enjoy seeing players that say a lot of different things.  And plus, I type 120wpm so it's not a big deal to type a 10x10 grid.  We also have a "generic" category so that if it can't find what it needs specifically, we can wimp out and just fill in the generic stuff.

Translation was an after-thought in GalCiv I.  It was amazing it even worked as the fonts in GalCiv I were bitmapped. That means every character -- every letter -- was literally an individually encoded picture. 

Translation to a non-indoEuropean dialect would have been out of the question.  But this time, we used the True Type Engine that is part of DirectX 9c (this is actually the feature that breaks compatibility with really old Intel integrated graphics -- not the fancy 3D engine). 

So we literally now have directories such as:

\galciv2\data\english
\galciv2\data\german
\galciv2\data\russian

and so forth.

But there's a lot to it.    There's also the question on updating.  We want to make it so that when you install the game, it will put your country code in the registry. And then when a player updates the game from Stardock Central, it'll download all the different language files (they're text and compressed so we're talking tiny) and then when you run the game you will have it in your own language.

The nice thing about Stardock Central is that it enables us to ship the game with zero copy protection.  No CD in the drive required. No Internet access needed. While some people will still pirate it, we hope those numbers are low -- there's no excuse for it. The retail game is cheaper than any other AAA retail title that's come out recently. And there's no inconvenience factor. Just install it forget. And when you update it, you use the serial # with the game and it will auto-generate an account for you. So even if you get a new computer 3 years from now, lost your CDs, lost your serial #, no problem. Just use Stardock Central and type in your email address that you used (and if you lost/changed that too you can always contact us to retrieve that) and it'll set you up with a link to validate and voila download the latest/greatest version. 

We think in the long-term, there's a good reason to keep the hassle down -- international sales.  As countries that are currently piracy heavy start having more people who buy these games, the convenience of just being able to type in your UserID and password and be able to download the full game will be a big deal especially if you get any language you desire.  It's a lot like iTunes except you can re-download your game as many times as you need.

In the meantime, Paradox is in charge of foreign translation.  I am glad they're in Europe because once they see how much dialog there is to translate I think they'd want to reach over and whack us.  There's hundreds of pages of dialog.  I'll talk about that next.

We're in the final stages of Galactic Civilizations II's development cycle.  If you want to see some of the fine tuning, check out the Developer Journals.

Tonight we log how we fine tune the computer AI in various ways.

If the Stardock crew that hangs out on WinCustomize seems quiet lately, it's because it's been consumed entirely by Galactic Civilizations II.  It's a new strategy game Stardock has been developing for the past two years and it is scheduled to go gold in the next week and a half so everybody is working on those final tweaks.

Big thanks to Jafo who sent us a Kangaroo! (not a real one) it's in my office now.

For those of you interested in what we're doing, here's a link to our game development log where I talk about some of the stuff we've been doing.