My Microsoft Surface is a constant companion.  It is absolutely central to my workflow.

One of the challenges I’ve had with it is battery life.  There’s a lot of things you can do to help with your battery life but one simple thing I’ve done, for now, is to set the max CPU when on battery to 99%. 

Setting the max CPU to 99% prevents the CPU from going into Turbo mode.  For me, this accomplishes two things:

(1) I get roughly an extra hour of battery out of the system

(2) I don’t get the annoying fan when I watch videos

 

Set your maximum CPU while on battery to 99%

Here’s how it works:

Step 1: Download and run https://draginol.stardock.net/files/SP4_Max_Processor_State.zip 

 

Step 2:  Go to advanced power settings and go to the new option: Processor Power management

Set the on battery to 99%.

 

There is no step 3. 

You should notice the behavior difference fairly quickly on battery.  For one thing, when you have Edge running on an ad intensive site or are watching a video your CPU speed will not go nearly as high (on the other hand, it won’t get power throttled to 0.5Ghz either which is a big benefit).

 

 

Hope this helps.  Feel free to comment if you have questions. 

This week I did a blog over at Gamasutra talking about the importance of interesting choices:

Read the whole thing here: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/BradWardell/20160104/262961/Ashes_of_the_Singularity_PREmortem.php

 

Let’s look at StarCraft II:

In Starcraft, you have to build a Supply Depot before you build a Barracks.

 

Now, look at Ashes 0.71 alpha:

 

See the red lines? Those are poison choices.  Newbie traps. 

 

So we’ve made some changes that you’ll see in the beta:

We’ve renamed the “Cruiser Factory” into the Armory.   You have to first build the factory to build the armory.  You also have to build the Factory before you can build things like Smarties and many other things.

Now, you experts might think “Nobody would build missile defense structures as their first decision.”  Actually, yes, lots of people do.  And it’s always a bad choice.

Again, you can read the whole thing here:  http://gamasutra.com/blogs/BradWardell/20160104/262961/Ashes_of_the_Singularity_PREmortem.php

Greetings!

First of all, Happy New Years!

This is going to be rambling.  So please bear with me.

This Winter I plan to do a series of articles for The Escapist on Ashes of the Singularity.  We have a unique opportunity to talk about some of the things that makes this game unique.  I’m going to touch on a few of those topics here.  I’m no writer so please bear with me through this.

As Gamers, you’re getting ripped off

To a certain degree, gamers have always been getting ripped off.  However, in the old days, the company making the game still owned the game. 

Why does that matter?

Let’s use Supreme Commander as an example.   Supreme Commander 1 was developed by Gas Powered Games. It was published by THQ.  Back in those days, that was the business model.  The publisher would front tens of millions of dollars and the studio would make thee game for a royalty (that was never fully recouped from the advances).   The problem with that system is that sooner or later, it killed the game studio.

Supreme Commander 2 was bought by Square Enix but still developed by Gas Powered Games.   This was one of the first games of the “new” model (the shitty model imo).  That is,  Square Enix would put millions of dollars into GPG to develop it but at the end of the day Square Enix, not the developer, owned the game. 

And that, my friends, is how most games are made these days.

Think about that for a moment.  Think of your favorite big games.  Who “owns” them?

So no new Supreme Commander.  Total Annihilation was bought by Wargaming.net (the World of Tanks guys) from Atari.  They also bought GPG so there’s hope that they might be making a new Total Annihilation some day.  On the other hand, they might just shop it around as a WFH.

Bottom line: As a gamer, you want the people making the game to own the game.  As a greedy bastard business person, I want to own everything I can. In fact, you reading this means I own your eyes which I can then sell to a third world black market organ dealer. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Digital Distribution and the new model

So there’s been some good news lately.   Digital Distribution + Kickstarter + etc. has opened the door for developers to also own the game they’re making. Again: This is what you, as a gamer, want.

Things like Rocket League, Kerbal and Undertale better than any cure for depression that an old guy like me can get.

Why you should care?

Because games owned by the ones funding it mean that the game can evolve forever.  For those of you who are Supreme Commander fans, you know that if GPG still owned it and was still independent that we’d be on SupCom 4 by now.  Just kills my heart just thinking about that.

Bottom line: When the one paying the bills is also the developer you can keep evolving the game for years. 

What do you have to have to do this?

I’ve come up with 3 arbitrary but I think relevant pre-requisites for a game to continue to evolve:

1. Capital. Obviously you have to have money to keep making it.
2. Engine. You have to have a code-base that can still be extended.  That’s why we had to make GalCiv III instead of continuing to expand on GalCiv II.  The engine was ancient. 
3. Community.  Games that evolve have to have a community of people who want the game to evolve.  A built in audience who will want to buy future versions.

Pretty obvious right? And yet, how often do all 3 come together? Very rarely.

So let’s talk about Ashes of the Singularity and why (I hope) you should care a lot about it

Every developer wants people to care about their game. Some developers are arrogant enough to think their game is special…cough.

Anywhoo…

Hopefully I can lay out the case why you should care.  But feel free to tell me how terribly wrong I am in the comments.

I can’t really start this without talking about Galactic Civilizations III and the nature of game engines.  I’m going to be talking about this a lot because if anything scares me about our industry it is that we’ve largely given up on making our own tech which reduces the types of games we can make.

Today, pretty much everything is made with either:

1. Unity
2. Unreal
3. er need third bullet point here.

Rocket League uses Unreal.  Kerbal uses Unity. and Undertale uses GameMaker.

Their insane, and arguably illegal levels of awesomeness (I am quite certain that Undertale’s awesomeness may be affecting our local galaxy cluster’s space-time gravitational constant, if you don’t have that game quit reading my crap and go get it) show that you don’t need to make your own engine to make a great game.

But engines do create the box around new types of games can be made in.  

For example, we couldn’t have made Galactic Civilizations III with Unity or Unreal.  Not that there’s anything wrong with those engines. We use Unity for Offworld Trading Company and use Unreal for other projects. We like them.   And to be fair: We could have made GalCiv III as it shipped with either one.  I am particularly in love with Unity because of their tools and a general love of C# but that’s personal preference.

The GalCiv III engine

This gets back to the importance of combining engine + capital + community.  GalCiv is the oldest continuously updated space 4X series.  It has a big community.  After Stardock sold Impulse® to GameStop back some years ago, it had all the money it would ever need.  As some of you know, Stardock is over 20 years old and has one founder: Me.  I haven’t bothered to take a real salary from Stardock since 2009.  I’m here literally for you guys. My income comes from my stock portfolios. 

The reason I mention this stuff is because it means we can think really really long term.

GalCiv III is a really good game.  But it’s nothing compared to what it’ll eventually be (this is why marketing wishes I didn’t post). 

Consider this: GalCiv III is a native 64-bit, multi-core game engine.  That means, eventually, with mods and expansions and such you’ll be able to finally stream the Star Trek galaxy vs. the Star Wars galaxy live with every unit and detail made by fans.

64-bit matters because you have, effectively unlimited (for the next decade anyway) memory to work with.  That 32-bit game you want to play has to stay with 2GB.   2GB is about what an iPhone has in it now.  It’s nothing. In 5 years, it’ll be tragic. 

The Ashes engine

Nitrous, the engine used for Ashes of the Singularity, Star Control and…other games I can’t yet talk about is, frankly, sick.  For you developers out there, it is a core-neutral (meaning the more cores you add, the faster it gets), GPU neutral (similarly,  can jam 4 video cards in there? Go for it, it just gets faster), 64-bit, REAL-TIME engine.  Nitrous is basically Pixar’s renderman in realtime.

And now… the mechanics of the game

As I’ll be going into detail in upcoming articles, Ashes is 1/3 brand-new 1/3 taken from existing genres and 1/3 expansion on existing concepts. 

 

Something borrowed

 

Baby-daddy #1: Total Annihilation

 

Baby-daddy #2: Company of Heroes

Baby-daddy #3: Sins of a Solar Empire

 

This will be presented during deposition no doubt

Something new

Having thousands of units sounds exciting but it could also be a total mess.  Thus the concept of a META unit (join army in game) was born and is central to the game design of Ashes of the Singularity

 

From way up here, they all look like little tiny ants

You could argue that Kohan introduced the concept of a Meta unit.  Here’s the basic premise (it’s pretty obvious):

You select a bunch of units and form an army with them.  That army becomes a single unit that works together.  This can be tough to get used to because you’re allowing the AI to make some decisions that you might not always agree with (for people who really want to micro 7,305 units they can still do that…) but the the army then tries to accomplish your objective as if each sub-unit is an individual unit or arm or whatever of a single unit. 

Programmatically it’s not even that complicated.  For you coders out there:

You create a vector of units that you spin through and look at what the meta unit has been ordered to do. You then go through the tree and see if the medic should go and help someone being attacked or if the artillery u nit should back off or whether the melee unit should run out in front and defend.

The idea is easy.  So why don’t games do this? 

The answer: Multi-Core.  If you want your precious 60 frames per second it means the draw calls have to respond in…wait for it…1000ms in a second. I want 60 frames in that time.  In other words, the AI has to do everything in less than 20ms which is basically not possible unless you can spread it across multiple cores.  That’s why Ashes requires a minimum of 4 cores.

How good will this be at release? Meh. Decent.  Engine power does not equal strategic skill.   Every time I play I find a new tweak I want to do to improve the meta unit.  CPU power isn’t magic.  Time is magic. Or something.

Only many many games of us playing you online and entering secret hidden cheat codes to beat you will allow us to learn the strategies necessary to incorporate into the game.   Sure, you might think “Hey, that’s bullshit that he somehow spawned a dreadnought in my base when I was about to win.” but I can assure you, on my mother’s non-existing grave, that this was necessary from a research point of view…

This is just another example of why the evolution of these games matter.  For a lot of things, there’s no substitute for time.

Anyway, that’s my example of the something new. There’s tons of other stuff but they’re a little too dry and technical. Let’s go to the things enhanced on…

Something Improved

One of my favorite aspects of Ashes is the concept of Orbitals.    It’s the one thing I wish Total Annihilation had.   In TA, many end games boiled down to endless nuke races (or worse, Big Bertha races).  SupCom has a similar thing where one side is trying to get nukes or shields faster than the other side.

What we wanted was the idea that we could have an endless (well not endless but however much we can cram into our UI) number of buildings that you can build that require you to sacrifice short-term gain for long-term benefit by giving you global abilities.

 

In Ashes of the Singularity, every single shot is a light source. As in, not 3 light sources ala DirectX 9 games but rather one for each shot (as in thousands). Even if you don’t consciously notice this, your brain does.

When I play Starcraft, I often feel like my oldness in being able to get to the ghost or the now horrendously nerfed Raven’s special abilities were just too slow.  Which one is the unit? What hot key is it? Is he in this group?  I don’t like key clicks being what determines victory or not.

Company of Heroes had global abilities.  Ashes has something similar but you can build up an economy just to use them (they’re not tied to what regions you own, they’re the energy equivalent in SupCom).

Example of some of the oribtals/abilities we’re working on

The Future

To have a game like Ashes succeed you need the engine (Which we have) plus the capital (which we have) but we also have to have a good community.  So far, it’s pretty good.  It’s a delicate balance at times. I get pretty annoyed with SupCom super fans who literally want Ashes to be SupCom 3.  But overall, it’s gone well.

Modding will become a big deal over time as we find ways to let people create their own units and maps and UI improvements to the game.  The AI is already very moddable (I’ve made it my business to wreck it many times…for science).

One of the key things about being an independent developer that self-funds is that you can keep people on a given project.  The GalCiv III project continues development as if it were never released.  Ashes will be the same way. 

Right now, as I type this, we have 4 game teams.  One is on GalCiv III, one is on Ashes, one is on Star Control and another is on a brand-new unannounced game (and won’t be for another year).  It’s not like the old days where games were released and the teams went on to the next thing provided that the 3 criteria area met (funds, engine, community). 

So that’s all for now.

Post your thoughts below.

Hey there!

I've gone ahead and started up the Ashes of the Singularity Wiki page.

https://www.ashesofthesingularity.wikia.com/wiki/Ashes_Of_TheSingularity_Wikia

Feel free to contribute.  

I'll make sure regular, serious contributors get access to stuff way early to help.

Greetings!

Can you believe it's already been 6 months since release! I hope you guys are having as much fun with the game as we've been having taking your feedback and adding to the game.

For those of you who don't know me, I'm the CEO of Stardock. I designed and wrote the original GalCiv for OS/2 way way way back in the 90s. I also designed GalCiv I and GalCiv II and consulted on GalCiv III.

One of the reasons why I love making 4X games are the people who tend to play them. Anyone who is on a lot of forums can tell the difference between a 4X game forum and a regular game forum.

Another reason is that 4X games are updated for years. In fact, we just released a huge update to GalCiv II (2) this past week and that game was released a decade ago and much of the updates in it came from the fans themselves. 

With the Steam holiday sale here, we'll be getting a bunch of new players so I want to give some helpful links out here and welcome them to one of the best gaming communities on the net.

## Some Helpful thread to read ##

#1 The Wishlist thread.http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/598198173700392501/

We mine this thread regularly. We don't respond to it nearly often enough but we read it. A lot.

#2 The roadmap thread.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/

If you're new to 4X games, you may be surprised to find that we update these games as often as we can. There are actually more engineers on GalCiv III full-time than we had when we made GalCiv II. The main reason for this has to do with digital distribution but what's really wonderful about it is that when you buy a game, you can expect continued updates for as long as there is sufficient demand.

#3 The helpful links thread:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/226860/discussions/1/620713633843484431/

This just gives you some help in getting started.


## What to expect next ##

You may hear the term "4th generation game engine". This is a technical term for what amounts to the move from 32-bit, DirectX 9c, single core designed games to 64-bit, DirectX 10+, multi-core. GalCiv III, as far as I'm aware, the first gen 4 4X. Which, in itself, means nothing other than that iit means there's really no limit to how far it can be expanded which is what we plan to do.

So let's get specific:

In the past 6 months we've a ton of new features which you can read about here:https://forums.galciv3.com/461047

The roadmap goes over the long-term plan but coming up we have:

#1 1.6 which is going to feature a lot of UI improvements. Now, UI isn't glamorous. It makes for a bad screenshot. But in a game that you may play for many hours, good UI makes a big difference between fun and tedium.

#2 The First expansion. I can't tell you what it is going to be yet but I can tell you that it is something that no GalCiv game has ever had before (or even something similar) but at the same time, it is a feature that probably should have been in every GalCiv game -- I just didn't think about it until now.

If you have any questions or thoughts, you can post here or post on the official Stardock forum where we hang out the most:

https://forums.galciv3.com/forum/1058

Have fun!

 

This past week I was on Explormiate (http://explorminate.net/2015/12/16/strategic-expanse-interview-with-brad-wardell-2/) and the subject of game engines.  Given the emails and feedback I’ve gotten it is pretty clear most people are not that familiar with game engine generations.   So consider this a basic primer on them and why they matter.

Beginnings

It’s important to note that historically, every game had its own custom engine.  Id was a pioneer in licensing its engines to third parties which wasn’t surprising, they were the first ones to create a third generation game engine with Quake.  Each generation of engines gets exponentially more difficult to make and as a result, more and more developers drop out of making their own and start licensing which has the effect of reducing the amount of variety in game design (since, ultimately, you are making a game within the confines of what the engine can do). 

Id doesn’t often get enough credit for what a big deal the Quake engine was. So let me put it like this: Quake was released in 1996.  Stardock didn’t make a 3rd generation game engine until 2010 and it was a disaster (Elemental).  Very few developers are capable of making a third generation engine well.

Engine Generation Primer

You don’t need to be a game developer to understand game engine generations.  Once you know what they are, you can spot them easily. Let’s take a look:

• Generation 1: DOS, 320x200 with 256 colors. 640K limit.
• Generation 2: Windows, sprites (or 3D acting as sprites), typically fixed resolutions
• Generation 3: 32-bit, DirectX 9c (OpenGL 3.2), single core design, assets live in 3D

There are certainly games that you could apply the “+” to.  For instance, GalCiv II was a generation 2+ engine. That is, with work you can retrofit an engine to have next-gen features but it is still, at its core, a particular generation.

At this stage, most studios already license their Gen 3 engines.  My favorite third-party 3rd generation engine is Unity.  Besides Valve, no single company has done more to help the game industry than Unity (I am a pretty big fan of Epic too but Unity has transformed game development).

As a practical matter, if you’re an independent game developer, Unity is what I’d recommend. 

Generation 4

For these generations to have any meaning, anyone with reasonable technical knowledge should be able to onto a Steam game page and instantly recognize the engine level.   As soon as I see 2GB memory req or DirectX 9c/OpenGL 3.2 I know it’s a Gen 3 engine.

So what is required to be a 4th generation game engine? Well first off, there is no standards body so I can only relate general consensus.  A 4th generation engine has to be obviously distinct:

1. 64-bit only (designed assuming essentially unlimited memory)
2. DirectX 10 or later  (designed assuming that multiple threads will be talking to the GPU)
3. Multicore (designed so that it gets faster as you add more cores)

So when you look on the game page you’d see the minimum requirements be:

4 core, 6GB or more in memory, DirectX 10 or later. 

What is the benefit and what is the cost and why should anyone do it?

As I said earlier, if someone were asking me what they should use to make a new game I’d point them over to Unity.  If not Unity, then Unreal (this is nothing against Crytek, I’m just not familiar with it enough to recommend).  So in short, I don’t actually recommend making or using a 4th generation game engine.

So why has Stardock made two 4th generation engines? Because we have determined our games need a technological edge to stand out.

 

My role at Stardock these days

Different companies have different strengths.  Stardock is really good at designing games that are big and endlessly extendable.  We stick with our games for years and years.  Our design process is iterative.  We make something, we get feedback, we improve it. Over and over again. 

With GalCiv II: Twilight of the Arnor, we were able to make what I think some would agree is the ultimate space 4X.  But we couldn’t go any further.  We had extended our Generation 2 engine (Pear) well beyond what it was ever designed for.  We got a lot of mileage out of it

Every time I see a new Paradox game that uses the Clausewitz engine (their third generation engine) I’m so jelly.  They’ve used it for Europa Universalis III, Hearts of Iron III, Victori II, Crusader Kings II, EU 4 and I think Stellaris.  Stardock wouldn’t get its gen 3 engine until 2010 and that was Elemental.  

Once you have your engine, you can make a lot of games with it.  But that first game is always a pain because you have to start over largely from scratch.  This puts you at a short-term competitive disadvantage.  But once you have your engine going, you start to build momentum.  

The Future

The GalCiv III series will continue to use the Galactic engine.  Future games will use Nitrous which is being developed by Oxide Games (Ashes of the Singularity).

Be careful what you wish for.

Next year all the 4X’s are going to come out.  What I write below is not under some NDA. I know it because it’s my job to know it.

Let me walk you through the schedule:

1H2016: Stellaris, Master of Orion

2H2016: Civilization VI, Endless Space 2

I could be wrong on the dates. You could swap some of this around a bit but you get the idea. 

Where is GalCiv III in this?

Stardock will be announcing its first expansion in January.  I won’t go into details here but it is something we’ve never done before.    2016 we’re going to release a steady stream of GalCiv updates but we are going to do our best to stay away from the flood and work on the really big GalCiv III expandalone for much later.

GalCIv III has been a tremendous success for us.  It’s kind of our Civ V.  That is, with Civ V, a lot of long time fans were really upset that it didn’t do X, or Y like Civ IV had but it brought in a lot of new players.  GalCiv III has done a good job welcoming a lot of new players into the GalCiv universe.  2016 is going to add a kick ass expansion (target release date February) and follow that up with a lot of updates to refine and improve the GalCiv III universe.  But it won’t make sense to do another big expansion after February since all the 4Xs are coming out.

What should be in the base game versus some future expandalone?

Let me walk you through the things I think GalCiv III needs and how we want to get these things to you.

First off, Steam now supports upgrading to expandalones. This is a big deal because it means we can make a GalCiv III: X that is major game change but let people upgrade to it very inexpensively.  In the old days, you’d have to “rebuy” the game.  It also lets use do universal DLC which means that all the DLC you would buy for III will work on all versions of GalCiv III.  As a gamer, that’ s a pretty big deal.

What we have decided going forward is that any really major changes will have to go into an expandalone.  We had a pretty serious bit of pushback with the per-planet production wheel and we don’t want to go through that again. The per planet production wheel is a bad game design.  We allow players to still get to it through a racial trait but personally, I’d rather see it die.  But I understand players who feel attached to it.

But now there’s a lot of fear about making game changes that I think are objectively good.  Let me give you an example:

In GalCiv II, I made it so that ship components used X + Y% of hull size space.  Thus, an engine might use 3 units of space but also use 5% of the max hull space. This meant , no matter what you were very limited in how many engines you could have.   GalCiv III doesn’t have the Y% and thus, inevitable, we have people designing ships that can move 73 moves which breaks the game balance.  Do we bring back the Y%? Well, you know what will happen when/if we do. There will be angry people down-voting us on Steam. And to be candid, a game’s review score determines how often Steam will promote it.  When we got rid of the per planet wheel, several people gave GalCiv III a negative review on Steam which hurts us even though we suspect most people were glad it was gone. 

So on the one hand, making engines and sensors consume consume a % of hull space will make the game objectively better.  But on the other hand, if we do it, we’ll upset some people who like having ships that can move 73 moves and some of them will give us negative Steam reviews which will in turn cost us a lot of future sales.

Let’s talk about the future

GalCiv III remains the first and only 4th generate 4X.  All the other games out there are still 3rd generation (32-bit, DirectX 9c, single core design).  Eventually, everyone will have to move to 4th generation.  This was painful for us since we lost a decade of legacy code. But it’s something every franchise has to do sooner or later.  So we’re in a good position for growing it into the future.  It’ll just be a question of whether the fan base will stick with us or whether we’ll all great fractured between MOO, Stellaris, ES2 or whether Civ VI will annihilate them all.

Regardless, what I do know is that there are certain key ingredients on our road-map that I want to share with you guys:

 

1. Espionage
2. Destabilization
3. Enforcing spheres of influence
4. Forms of government
5. Domestic politics
6. Unified resource system
7. In-depth trade
8. Citizienship and species
9. Crime
10. Combat control
11. Navigational infrastructure

These are intentionally vague so read into them what you will.  But the game is called Galactic Civilizations.  So over the next few years there’s just a lot of stuff to keep integrating into it. 

So anyway, just some thoughts.

cheers,

-brad

Hi guys,

 

Just so you know, I play Ashes MP a lot on Fridays.  Look for me as Draginol. Friend me on Steam.

Greetings! 

Owning the company never stops me from complaining about our games.

First: Add me as a friend as I'm playing MP a lot and am looking for people to play with.


## High Level Points ##

1. Incursion and Plasma storm are fun. Players are using them quite effectively.

2. I'm pretty happy with most of the balance.

3. Map resource distribution is too bland.

4. When someone is nearing victory via Turinium the music should change and the Turnium display at the top should start flashing faster and faster or something. Also, the display is very unintuitive and needs work.

5. Need *something* that lets me target units. Sentinels are a great turtle weapon but they are too hard to kill with the current unit mix.

6. Need more economic build up options.

7. Performance is nearly 2.5X better than 0.64 (ymmv)

8. UI needs a lot of work.

## Alpha -> Beta ##

9. This 0.70 is the last major ALPHA update. The Beta will be going out in January and adds the Substrate.

10. New Global Ability: Overload. You can temporarily overload a power generator to get 4X its output for 30 seconds.

11. New Global Ability: Amplify. On a structure you've built an amplifier on, you can increase its output by an additional 10%. Stacks. Permanent.

12. Dreadnought experience added.

13. Orbital Strike added (calls down a nuke).

14. Major AI update

15. Lots of new maps. Let us know what kinds of maps you enjoy the most.


Other stuff:

PHC
	Support Abilities
		Sensor Sweep	Scan a section of the map to uncover the FOW for 30 seconds
		Amplify	Target power amplifier gets a 10% boost. Stacks. Permanent.
		Overload	Target power generator gets provides 4X the resource output of the region its in for 30 seconds.
		Call Engineer	Call down an engineer onto any location onto the map that is clear of FOW
		Intensive Care	Target units in area gain 1000 HP health back over 30 seconds via healing drones
	Military Abilities
		Plasma Storm	Target enemy units in area lose 1000hp health over 30 seconds
		Incursion	Small invasion force consisting of a Zeus, a Nemesis, 2 archer squads and 2 brute squads are brought in
		Orbital Strike	Target area receives 5000 damage over 5 seconds. Has 10 second count down.
		Carving Turret	Places a heavy plasma beam cannon in target location that does 500HP of damage to one target over 3 seconds, 5 second cool down. Loses 20Hp per second (has 600 base HP)
		Disrupt	Units within target area (600 HP) lose all shields -- useless on PHC
Substrate
	Support Abilities
		Overcharge	Target power generator gets a permant 15% boost. Stacks
		Regenerate	Target units have their shields fully restored over a period of 5 seconds
		Transmutate	All metal in storage becomes radioactives at a rate of 5 metal per 1 radioactive
		Sensor Drone	Summons a Sensor drone to target location that floats there until it's destroyed.
	Military Abilities
		Drone Swarm	Place a swarm of drones in the target area (uncovered FOW)
		Cool name	Places a floating energy ball in target area that lasts 30 seconds, does 1000 damage in lighting strikes to a single target every 5 seconds.
		Hijack	Target group of T1s and T2s within a 500m radius change sides
		Recruit	Splinters (Neutrals) join player
		Corrupt	All enemy T1s in target area become Neutrals
		Detonate	Teleports a bomb to target area that when it explosed does 4000 damage in 3 seconds to target area.

Greetings!

In October we released v1.3 of Sorcerer King which added a ton cool things like the build queue, a bunch of UI improvements, bug fixes and more.

1.4 is a somewhat bigger change and as a result has taken longer to get out.  Much of it is under the covers but should be pretty noticeable in play.

Let’s take a look:

 

Three things to take notice here:

1. There’s an Auto-Equip button now to take out some of the tedium on new units.

2. Your trained units can now equip swords and shields.

3. Your starting units have a lot more cool abilities (and so will other units).

 

Besides various minor visual improvements throughout the game, your starting units no longer consume logistics.  So you actually gets to train more units…early on…

 

…Of course, there is going to be a price to pay for all this goodness…

Resources now accumulate.  You control an Iron mine? You get 1 metal per turn.  Same for horses.  Building the units consumes them.

Don’t have those resources? Well, you have to make some tough choices.  You can harvest mountains to get metal, for instance.  Or you can build units that don’t require those resources like regular soldiers but they now cost 2 logistics.

 

 

The AI, meanwhile has gotten a huge boost. You will probably need to lower your difficulty quite a bit with this new build. Both the remnants and the SK have gotten a pretty big boost in terms of intelligence.  Some of this has to do with some new algorithms for determining best destinations.  The original functions were written in 2012 with 2012 hardware in mind.  I don’t think you’ll notice a different in performance since it’s all in the background.  But it makes a big difference in AI quality.

At this stage, I’m pretty much assuming you have at least dual core.

 

More to come!