Galactic Civilizations II won't be released until 2006! But users who pre-order the game (or have an active TotalGaming.net subscription) will be able to start playing the beta in a few months to tell us what they think!

It is through pre-orders that Stardock is able to afford to have such a long beta cycle where users get to make sure the final game is what they need. It is also through pre-orders that Stardock maintains its independence from large publishers.

Pre-Order by clicking [HERE].

With the election tomorrow it's time for predictions. Based on using The Political Machine's issue based predictions and looking at polling data and trends, this is what I'm concluding:

Kerry victory with 306 electoral votes to Bush's 232.  This is a much clearer victory for Kerry than any of the polls and pundits are showing here. But then again, they don't have The Political Machine.

So what do I base this on?

1. The Iraq war isn't a positive for Bush but in fact a negative.

2. I think the Democrats are better at mobilizing their base. This has to do with demographics. It's easier to get people to the polls in urban areas than rural/subburban areas. As I explained to a neighbor, there's roughly 200 people in our neighborhood. It would take hours to pick us all up and take us to a precinct to vote. By contrast, there might be 500 voters in a single building in Cleveland.

3. I think fraudulent voting is going to be a real issue. It's a lot tougher to challenge fraudulent voting than it is to try to preserve the sanctity of the system. It's disappointing to think that my vote might be counter-balanced by someone's cat or "Dick Tracy" but our sensational media has clearly decided that it's better to have 1000 fraudulent voters get through than to prevent a single legitimate voter from being turned away. I disagree. I think there should be a balance because a fraudulent voter is effectively taking away the voting rights of someone else by canceling out their vote.

4. The "early voting" mechanism is going to be the big story this year. Early voting favors less committed voters which tends to favor Democrats.

5. That ridiculous "missing explosives" story from last week that looks to have not had any reasonable basis in fact (latest news on that is that a US unit actually removed the explosives at the end of April). But the media ran on that for a full week which may have been enough to tilt the balance in Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa to go for Kerry.

But in the end, if Kerry wins, it will be that first Bush debate that caused Bush to lose. The momentum was in Bush's favor and he so blew that first debate that it shifted momentum that he has not been able to recover from.

So there's my prediction. Not nearly as close as the pundits are predicting.

That said - EVERY informed voter should go out and vote. So even if you're in a blue or red state, go and vote tomorrow. I think the good news out of this election would be that we may have record turn-out which I think would be fantastic regardless of who wins. 

You Republicans who are hoping Bush wins better do what you can to get your friends and neighbors and family out to vote. Because you can be assured that the NEA (teachers) and other unions and other organizations are way ahead of Bush and his allies in organizing get out to vote on election day drives.

This election is going to come down to a handful of votes. Particularly in Florida, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

https://www.galciv2.com/databank.asp

This has a brief overview of the changes in Galactic Civilizations II.

In Galactic Civilizations all ships had an attack and defense value. You could stack ships together but that really meant nothing in terms of combat. And you picked ready made ships.

In Galactic Civilizations II, attack and defense has much more depth. All ships will have 3 types of attacks - beam wapons, mass drivers, and missile weapons. And 3 types of defense: Shields, armor, and point defense.

You also build classes of ships rather than pre-made ships. So you take your technology and design your own unique ships both in how they look and what they do.  The more complex the ship, the more logistical support (logistic points) it uses.

Based on your logistics ability, you will be able to put together ships into fleets which will act together in combat where each ship gets to take a shot during the player's attack role.

So you might create a ship called the DoomGiver class. Attack: 9/3/5 and Defense: 5/3/5 (they'll be displayed in such a way so that they'll line up so you'll be able easily tell how they are in each area. 

So if you battling the Drengin Empire for most of the game and both of you are going after beam weapons (phasors, disruptors, that sort of thing) you might have ships with attacks like: 10/2/1 and Defense: 7/3/3 (beam/mass driver/missiles and shields/armor/point defense).  But then if you battle the Torians they may be big in mass drivers and things can change in a heart beat. So you'll have to put some more thought (and so will the computer players) into who you go to war with.

Fleets won't be that common until later in the game since your logistics ability starts out at 0 and even a trivial ship uses 1 point of logistics. It'll take awhile to get say 5 points of logistics but a battle ship might use 5 points of logistics.

Based on your various choices of weapons, defenses, propulsion, hulls, skins, etc. your ships will look quite different. Far more customization than any game of this kind that I'm aware of. And you'll be able to also look at ships and eventually be able to just tell what kinds of weapons they're strong on visually (i.e. once you are familiar with what things look like on ships).

The goal is to have combat have a lot more depth to it strategically without making the game overly complex. Seems like most strategy games these days get way into tactics -- which is fine. But GalCiv will be a game of strategic decisions, not tactical micro management.  So keeping an eye on what the various races are doing will matter more here but even in fleet battle, it'll just be a straight up ships from fleet 1 fire, ships from fleet 2 fire and so forth).

If you lived in a house that had a rat "nuisance" you might tolerate it. But if one of your children died from a rat bite, you might be tempted to start going around killing all the rats in the house and getting rid of the rat holes.

After 9/11, there were a lot of rat holes in the world. You don't worry so much about which rat bit your kid as getting rid of all the rats. The most obvious infestations were Taliban Afghanistan and Saddam's Iraq.

So goes the thinking in this article. Check it out.

The left-wing media and Kerry supporters made a mountain out of a mole-hill by trying to claim, without evidence, that around 200 to 300 tons of explosives were looted under the noses of the US military thus proving Bush's incompotence (that's their reasoning, not mine, I agree, it's pretty wacked logic).

However, a new report seems to indicate what I had previously suggested - that a US detachment probably hauled off the weaponry at some point. Why? Because 200 to 300 tons would require far too many trucks to just spirit away under the noses of US troops. Even if unguarded, it's unlikely that the insurgency, 18 months later, has enough trucks in one place to move that quantity of munitions and explosives.

But what it does show is that a: John Kerry is reckless and disrespectful. Anyone who would jump to the conclusion that the military (and Bush) was "incompotent" based on a single barely researched New York Times article, especially in the post memogate campaign, is not someone who can be trusted. It's the kind of political opportunism that has many Kerry detractors, such as myself, so much against him.

Will Kerry apologize? Will Kerry supporters apologize? I doubt it.  I don't consider this report or any other we've seen as "conclusive". But that's the whole point - the charges Kerry and his supporters and the left wing media have made were made on the most flimsy of evidence (200+ tons of explosives missing = looters). Making such a charge under normal circumstances would be rash. But making them a week before the election is borderline criminal.

One thing that you can't ignore from Osama's latest message is how deflated his words are.  Long gone are the talks of world domination and accusations of American cowardice.

In the end, Osama is looking essentially for a truce. And he's delivered his truce offer on the eve of the election. Choose Bush and continue the war or choose Kerry and there's an opportunity for peace with Al Qaeda -- assuming you take the word of a murderous terrorist. Stay the course with Bush or become like "Sweden" with Kerry where we have nothing to fear from Al Qaeda -- so says Bin Laden.

The question will be answered on Tuesday.  I for one take great comfort in knowing that the war on terror must be going well for the US.  Bin Laden, once full of confidence and defiance now pleads his case for us to leave him alone.  But we won't leave him alone. Because America isn't like Sweden (which is slowly becoming Islamic itself according to their latest census).  We won't bow down to monsters like Bin Laden and we won't take him at his word. We won't stop until Al Qaeda has been eradicated and Bin Laden taken into justice or removed from existence.

Read this article linked below for a much more thorough and thoughtful analysis of Bin Laden's message.

Well known blogger Andrew Sullivan has argued that a Kerry victory might be a good thing because it would force the Democrats to finally get serious about foreign affairs. That the war on terror would be a wake up call for them and their constituents about the ways of the real world.

I think that's a dangerous assumption. Imagine if the election today was between George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter. Would you vote for Carter over Bush? Even given what we know about his first presidency?

If not, why would you vote for John Kerry, a man who is even more dove-ish than Carter and more liberal on foreign policy than Carter. The main difference between the two men is that Kerry, unlike Carter, is willing to say whatever he needs to say to try to get elected. So dove-ish Kerry is willing to do the tough talk of "killing terrorists" in stark contrast to his entire career which has largely been based on a pacifistic dove-ish policy. Only when he decided he wanted to run for President did he briefly vote a bit more mainstream in the senate.

Far from making the Democrats have to start getting serious about the war on terror, a Kerry presidency could be akin to sending Chamberlain to Munich. We could end up in a situation 4 years from now where the world is vastly more dangerous. One that would require real sacrifice in order to clean up.

Next week, those of you who have ever purchased anything from Stardock (level 3 users) will be able to logon to the new WinCustomize 2K5 beta.

It's getting pretty darn cool and we're only about 1 month away from general launch.