Post here your ideas for a super-melee abilities.

Here are some of mine:

• Fast guided rockets. Similar to the Earthling Cruiser, these would be much weaker but also much cheaper.
• Phaser.  Automatically hits nearby ships at short range for some damage.
• Mirror.  Temporarily become the other ship for N seconds but with your health.
• Cloak. Enough said.
• Disruptor.  Greatly depletes enemy energy.
• Betrayal.  Swaps the crew count of the enemy ship with yours.
• Mine.  Lays a mine that sticks around for the rest of the round.
• Mirage.  Creates a duplicate of your ship that doesn't do any damage.  You can have several.

What about you?

Greetings!

Beta 1 is fast approaching and we want to give you a tentative schedule of what to expect.

BETA 1: November 16
This is the Super-Melee beta.
Super-Melee is a ship vs. ship combat game. In it, you assemble a fleet of ships. You have a total of 100 points to use for your fleet with ships costing between 5 and 20 points depending on the ship.
You will be able to battle against the computer with various difficulty level or against other players via the Internet in either ranked or unranked play.
The Ship Crafter will also be enabled in Beta 1 (yay!) which means you'll be able to design your own ships and share them via Steam Workshop and play with and against those ships. If you want to play with custom ships, you will be able to choose custom multiplayer where you will see a list of games where the host can set up the rules for that game.

BETA 1A: November 30
This will largely be a bug fix of Beta 1. Our Founders group have done amazing work in helping us iron out connectivity issues, lag, video card compatibility, sound effects, balance, etc.
This beta will about refining the experience. There will be endless "ship X is OP" posts and "game is broke" posts that this Beta 1A will address.

BETA 1B December 14
This will add some new ships to the mix. This build will have more balance and bug fixes too but it's main focus will be to incorporate some of the initial feedback we get. We believe this build will also support local multiplayer (2 people, 1 keyboard) and have refined game controller in.
The general idea is that over Christmas, we want you and your friends to be able to get together and play the game with your Steam/Xbox/PS controllers.
Speaking of friends. We expect to also have the taunting system in for this build.

As it stands now, it is looking like there will be no actual NDA requirement for this builds.  However, we do intend to make a few "hoop jumps" so that players understand that yea, this is really and truly a beta and not a demo.

Four years ago Stardock acquired Atari's rights to Star Control.  I soon got to meet my hero, Paul Reiche.  He was, more than anyone else, the person who inspired me to become a game developer over 20 years ago.

Over the past 4 years, we have communicated regarding the progress of Star Control: Origins.  He asked us not to try to make a sequel to Star Control 2 and said that he hoped one day to be able to return to the universe he and Fred Ford created.

Recently, Paul told me the good news: Activision was going to let him do a true sequel to their Ur-Quan story.

Today, they posted the news publicly:  https://dogarandkazon.squarespace.com/

It's still very early but they will have all the characters from Star Control 2 plus new ones.  It's going to be called Ghosts of the Precursors. 

For 4 years, people asked me why we weren't going to touch the Star Control 2 story.  Now you know.

As soon as they have an official site for it, we'll let you know.

What features do you think the forums need to make them more compelling for you and for others to use?

Greetings!

So the team is starting work on the next major expansion pack.  But we also want to keep an eye on the base game.

Right now, the recent Steam reviews for GalCiv are pretty awful with most of the people reviewing it doing so because they don't like some of the changes in v2.5.  So if there are changes you would like in 2.7 and beyond, this would be the place to ask.

The Steam review system is something I have and will continue to complain about because frankly, it absolutely destroys games.  When it's less than 70, a game might as well not exist.  So I'll be explicit, if you want us to keep working on GalCiv III, please leave a Steam review.  If not, don't. If you already have, thank you!

As many of you know, I am AI biased. But I know I'm in a minority because there is another space strategy game outselling GalCiv III and, suffice to say, AI is not its focus. 

It is clear that narratives in games matter.  GalCiv has a quest system ala Fallen Enchantress/Sorcerer King.  But we have tried to avoid doing that because we don't want the game to be a series of scripted narratives.  We don't plan to change that position in the base game but we are looking at releasing DLC that will do that if players want it. 

Now, the next major expansion pack focuses on politics and government.  So we'll set all that aside for now.  Otherwise, it's all open. What would you like to see?

Please vote on this:

https://steamcommunity.com/linkfilter/?url=http://www.strawpoll.me/13992658

Thanks!

It's been a year since we posted the last big public update on the new Star Control.

Last year, we began the Founders Program!  Thank you all that joined.  In the next two weeks, we will be ending the Founder's Program as we prepare for a public Beta program.  If you want to join the Founder's Program it's not too late yet.

A new tier

Right now, we have Founders and Lifetime Founders.  Both get access to our internal vault of stuff.  Lifetime Founders get everything we ever make for Star Control: Origins.  Those who are standard Founders get Star Control: Origins and everything we release for a year after.

Development schedule

Our original release date was going to be November 2017.  That's exactly 25 years from the release of Star Control 2 (The Ur-Quan Masters).  Some design changes we made have extended the development time (which I'll be talking more about soon) but we will be releasing the Super Melee beta in time for the anniversary.

Some screenshots

Super Melee in action

In engine, animated, voice synced conversations with aliens and of course the commander of Star Control.

Design your own ships, share them, and fight with them either against the computer or your friends online or on the same PC.

The writing team, led by Cracked.com's Chris Bucholz, has a compelling sci-fi story that is also very much in the style you expect from a Star Control game.

We are working on a host of tools that will make it easy for people to create their own universes to share and play in.

Explore worlds for minerals, Precursor artifacts, hidden bases, and more.

We will have a lot more information in about two weeks!

I'm really liking the direction the version 2.6 opt-in is going.

That said, I feel like I'm really only touching the surface of where we're going with this game.

Do you guys understand that the engine is state of the art and brand new? As a game developer, it's very exciting.

The next big thing on my plate is all the political stuff.  That's what the next major expansion will be about but the main game and Crusade players will benefit as well as balance continues to get more and more interesting.

From the AI side, the next major effort for me personally will be the ship design AI.  I'm going to be tossing out the "modding" stuff that no one uses and instead have the AI procederually design its own ships which I think will be a lot more interesting anyway.

Meanwhile, lots of interesting editors are being made for you guys to actually access the 11,000+ files that make GalCiv III.

I promised you some years ago that for GalCiv III we were in it for the long haul.  Well, I can say for a fact that here at 2017, we're not even warmed up yet.  There's so much more we can do.  

The only real question will be whether people WANT turn-based strategy games.  I have nothing but joyous feelings about Stellaris and Sins of a Solar Empire.  But there does seem to be a preference for real-time games over turn-based.   Real-time makes pacing a lot easier since you just speed up or slow down the game as needed.  But I feel like RT games (and yes, I mean Sins too) lose some of the crisp game mechanics that turn based games can have.

In any event, we have a lot of exciting stuff coming up!

The big GalCiv III v2.5 update went out.  Most people like it.  Not everyone of course (it breaks save games).  If you're liking it, you know the drill "Like and Subscribe" as they say on YouTube or in Steam's case, please leave a review.  Even if you've left a review in the past, you can delete your old one and leave a new one which will have the "Recent reviews" which matters a lot (a lot more than it should imo but hopefully Valve will update their algorithms in light of recent review abuse on Dota2 and other games).

Anyway...

Playing with the look and feel

Continue Reading...

[..]

You may not have noticed this before but in the Ship Designer of Galactic Civilizations III you can take the ships you have designed (or downloaded) and export them as a .OBJ file.  This can be used by 3D printers but also on a cool site called Sketchfab.  It's super easy to set up.

Here are a couple I've already uploaded:

 Have fun!

p.s. Bonus one:

https://skfb.ly/6tIOy