Half the team has the flu which isn't a good thing. We didn't even see each other over the holidays and we still got sick!
But while I'm busy spreading my plague around the office, we're still moving forward.
January 17 is a big internal date for us because I'll be flying to San Fran the following week to show the Alpha to Computer Gaming World, PC Gamer, Gamespot, etc. Hopefully they'll be impressed.
The parts of the game we'll be showing off are:
- The intro video
- The new setup screens (where you can play as any civilization)
- The ship design screen
- The planet design screen
We've really narrowed down on how we want to do the planet design in order to prevent micro management late game. Galactic Civilizations is a STRATEGY game not a TACTICAL game. So we don't want players having to get bogged down into minutae to be effective.
So in a nutshell, here's how planets work:
Planets have a planet class (0 through 26). The planet class determines how many useable tiles there are by default. That is, how many spaces on the planet you can build. Each planet will also have a random number of upgradeable tiles that can be made useable with the right tech (soil enhancement, terra forming, etc.).
The typical planet you'll find is going to be class 10. I.e. Earth is class 10 (not class 15 as it was in GalCiv).
Planet population isn't magic like in GalCiv 1. Instead, it's based on the availability of food (And food can't be shipped across hyperspace in GalCiv 2 but maybe in some future expansion, we just want to play it safe on the MM issues). So you can build farming zones on your tile which produce various amounts of food based on your tech (you can upgrade your zones over time).
So you will have a LOT more control over the morale and population of your planet. But in GalCiv 2, people are a resource - they produce $$$. That's it.
To produce research units, you build labs. Labs produce X amount of research units based on your tech. You build these ona tile (a tile can be zoned as only one thing - research, farming, manufacturing, etc.). Don't think of these as one building per tile but rather a research district representing a large amount of area.
Similarly, manufacturing things means building factories.
What's nice about this is that it's simplistic in design and yet provides tons of strategic depth that the original didn't have. The original was all about the planet class. Planet class 26 planets just magically produced tons of everything.
Now, you build a factory and it produces 2 manufacturing units (i.e. to build ships and such). Period. No +33% to whatever. It produces 2. Want more? Upgrade it to a anti-matter manufacturing center which can produce 5 units intead.
So the power of a high class planet comes over time. No more magic. Higher class planets have more POTENTIAL.
Now before anyone wants to get into complicating this and saying it's not realistic enough, please bear in mind our first run at this was much more "realistic". You had farmers producing food and food could be imported in from other planets and you build residential areas for your people to live in and those people then went to work in the factories and farms and labs and form that you could calculate unemployment, etc..etc.. And you know what? It would have been horrible later in the game when you had 50 of these planets (espeically if you're conquering them) to juggle around. So then people would have said "let's have AI governors" who of course are never as good as human governors so top players would have felt compelled to mess around with each planet which would have made the game mind numbing.
So we're going with this stream lined system that we think you'll really like in practice. Simple elegant designs often seen excessively simple. Try to explain Caesar III or The Sims sometime on paper. 
So that's one of the big things we're working on right now.
We have a second team that is about to start work on a MMORTS called "Society" (persistent world massively multplayer real time strategy game).
