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:

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!

Greetings!

So far, I hope I've done my best to convince you guys that this will be a horrible game that will give you cancer and that you're all being ripped off so that I buy a gold plated rocket car.

Assuming this is the case, I have a confession. It may end up being less cancerous and less shady than I had intimidated.

This thread is to discuss some of the things we can do for early access buyers while at the same time making the game appeal to more players post release.

Topic #1: THE PRICE

Starcraft II: Legacy of the Void just shipped. It's $39.99 for the "standard" edition and $59.99 for the Deluxe Edition.

Ashes, by contrast, is *currently* priced at $49.99. We always have high early access prices to discourage the curious and the casual from getting involved since OUR early access programs are actual alphas and betas and not some sort of glorified demo with bugs.

Now, one idea we have is to provide a similar pricing structure (except $49.99 for the digital deluxe edition). The base version would be $39.99 and have a Deluxe Bundle which would include a DLC that would be available on day 0 for $14.99. Obviously, YOU guys would get this DLC for free. This way, we could make the base game be $39.99 which would help create a bigger multiplayer + general game community.

The question would be, what would be in that DLC in a way as to not cripple the MP experience? For example, you couldn't have special units be in that version or else it would wreck the game experience.

But on the other hand, what is worth $14.99?

Here are some thoughts on this:

1. The base game is scheduled to include 24 maps.  We could provide an additional 12 maps in this DLC
2. The base game map size ends at large.  We could include an additional 3 maps at an even bigger size.

I'm not super keen that this is enough.  So we're looking for ideas from you guys on what you think would be a cool DLC gift for early access players.

Like many of you, I've been playing RTS games from the start.  Dune 2, C&C, Warcraft, Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, etc.

I loved Starcraft so much that I made one of the expansions to it (Starcraft: Retribution).  Yep. that was me.

I was "this close" to licensing the Total Annihilation engine from GT Interactive (who gained the engine after Cavedog died).  

I bring this up so that people who are hard core strategy gamers feel free to bring up other games into this discussion.

Now, in the Alpha (And sometimes people forget, this game is still not in beta) you win the game by cranking out a bunch of low level units to capture resources and repeat. Which is fine as far as it goes but not exactly deep strategy.

What we need to do is make sure that there are multiple strategies and counter strategies that are valid depending on the circumstances.

The purpose of this thread is to discuss features we, as a community, would like to see added to the game by 1.0 (ideally) or as future DLC.

0.70: More Factory Types and the first Orbital

For 0.70 (which comes out next week) we are doing two particular things:

1. The Factory is being broken into a Frigate factory and a Cruiser factory. This way, players will have to start making some strategic decisions on which direction they want to go.

2. The first Orbital will go in called the Orbital Fabricator. If you build this, you can two global abilities: Call down engineer (25 quanta base) and Incursion (100 quanta base). I say base because each time you use an ability, it costs a bit more to use it again.

The player will start out with 100 quanta that you can use to increase your logistics right off. But another ineresting thing we've discovered in MP is that you can really punish someone who has spammed out engineers to capture lots of regions quickly. 

If you see your opponent spreading really quickly you know they are spread thin. So you can build the orbital fabricator and call down an incursion. An incursion can go anywhere you have vision. It beams in a Nemesis, a Zeus and some Archers and Brutes to the target location. Not enough to destroy their seed by any means but enough to ruin them if they've spread themselves too thin.

The downside of this is that if you do this, you won't be building up a big conventional army early since you;ll have gone through your metal stores and the loss of quanta means you'll need to build up that quanta from relays.

Strategic Directions
The above is one example of adding new strategic options for players. But there are plenty more we need to do and our tools come from structures (mostly the orbitals and the techs).

In Starcraft, for example, at the start I can try harassment, I can try to fast expand, I can rush, I can try to tech up fast, etc.

In SupCom, when you went for a T2 factory or a T2 metal extractor was a key skill.

In our build (I'm not sure if it's in yours) we have the Power Amplifier which doubles a region's output. Super expensive, not an early game tool. 

Where I think we still have our work cut out for us is in the areas of Teching up (there is no research Stim equivalent in ashes) as well as developing viable unit composition differences.

For instance, in Starcraft, you can have fast (bio) or slow mechanical. Do I go with MMM (marine, marauder, medvac) or do I go for siege tanks, liberators, and thors?

What we want to do, especially for 1.0, is flesh out our units further to make them potentially do different things based on what you've invested in back at your base. 

Possible Feature discussion

Since you guys joined early access, welcome to the sausage factory. We've spent years designing and making this game which means we've spent years playing it in various forms. As a result, we've had many ideas that looked good on paper but once in didn't seem as fun as we thought.

Here are a few things that we're currently considering:

Fixed artillery piece. Built by engineers. Expensive. Good for securing an area.

Tech that allows Frigates (T1s) to ignore the engagement speed penalty.

Tech that allows the Fury to hit ground targets

Orbital that lets me overcharge a power generator to quadruple its output for N seconds.

Orbital that lets me order things constructed and have them appear at that orbital (proxy teleporter)

T3 upgrade that lets units it orders to join it be teleported to its current location

Your turn.

The logo

At last, the Founders Program is about to start and the basic website is now live!

First, read this: http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/11/19/fans-can-help-developer-stardock-determine-the-future-of-star-control?abthid=564e0e1df23fa43015000013

Take the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VCQQG7D

We are desperately trying not to spoil anything about the game but at the same time we want Star Control fans to feel reassured that we’re on the right track. It’s a delicate balance.

So let me just put out information that is now publicly available:

#1 The Team

Stardock built a new studio, from scratch, in Towson Maryland specifically for Star Control.  We knew Star Control would require a veteran team to nail and for that reason decided that it was best to build the studio in Towson Maryland.

Why Towson? In one of the quirks of the game industry, Towson Maryland is ground zero of a good chunk of the PC game industry.  Firaxis is here. Bethesda is here. Big Huge Games is here. Zynga was here.  So much PC game history was made in this little town (Microprose and its successors). 

Stardock has a single office complex to house Stardock Towson, Mohawk Games, and Oxide Games.  This has had some really positive results that we didn’t consider at first.  For example, Soren’s team (Soren designed Civilization IV) working on Offworld Trading Company has had readily available early testers while we’ve ramped up while Andrew’s team (Star Control) has had readily available access to art and game design input from Soren’s team.  And of course, Oxide Games, the team making Ashes of the Singularity, is there to help with the engine.

#2 The Engine

So it’s using the Nitrous engine which is being developed for Ashes of the Singularity.  Star Control will be 64-bit and require at least DirectX 11.  This won’t be a big deal when it ships but it’s something to be aware of.

We’ve made some core design choices (Super Meelee will support up to 6 players in MP mode). While we’ve left other decisions (how many ships should be present in a Super Meelee battle) for the Founders to have input on.

The engine, of course, could support thousands of ships in a battle. That’s not the issue.  The issue will be the gameplay and what makes sense.

#3 The Art Style

If you’ve seen Inside Out you have a good idea of what the general art style will be like.  Mind you, we picked our art style before that movie came out, so we’re not basing ours on that movie, it just kind of worked out that way.

Here’s a screenshot of one of the new aliens:

#4 Planet exploration

When you explore the galaxy, the planets won’t look like realistic planets. They’ll look like the above.  That’s because when you land on a planet, there’s no transition. You are literally landing on THAT planet and exploring (obviously super zoomed in).  While it’ll be similar to what was in Star Control 2, it’s heavily expanded upon (first, because it’s 3D and you’re driving around on a sphere-ish thingy, secondly because you’ll find special items in addition to resources).

#5 The Modding

This is the piece we’ve really struggled with in terms of “spoilers”.  Other parts are easy to not mention because we don’t want to give away too much.  But we think this part is important to get out early on.

If you go back and play Star Control 2 the challenge has always been about replayability.  Now, you can always create “sequels” that continue a story but then that means you’re waiting until a sequel which isn’t super satisfying.

How do you solve this?

The answer: A multiverse. 

We toyed with this a bit with Stellar Frontier a long time ago with fantastic results.  The idea being that OUR story will take place in our dimension (Earth-1, 2085).  But the community will be able to create their own stories, aliens, ships, etc. with the tools we’re making.   This sort of thing has helped games like Skyrim and now Fallout 4 a great deal.  But what if a game was designed from the start with this in mind?  Imagine loading up the game and being able to choose to go to “Earth-76” or “Spazik Universe” or whatever dimension someone comes up with?

Obviously, this is a win-win for both us and the players. I’m not going to pretend that making these tools won’t sell a lot of copies of the game.  But it is also a no-brainer to do.  Players aren’t in the situation where they “finish” the main campaign and wait a year or two for our next edition. Instead, they logon and there’s a bunch of things.

Obviously, for the Super Melee enthusiasts, this won’t mean much. They’ll just be playing in their 1 on 1 up to 3 on 3 (or any combination in between) and competing in a quasi-MOBA style game.  Our Super Melee will be action oriented (so we might as well get that out of the way, it’s not going to be a strategy experience).  But we have the advantage of being designed where we can say you need broadband to play it online.

That’s all for now!

Greetings!

We are just about ready to release 0.64 which has a lot of small improvements to it from last week’s build as well as a pretty big new feature: The power amplifier.  Your engineer can build this onto your power generators to double the resource output of a region.

Now, let’s talk about upcoming changes for the beta.

Early Game Decisions

It is important that the game provide players with multiple early game decisions that are viable.  Below are some decision matrices we are working toward:

Game Start

Around 1:30

Hopefully, there will be a lot of viable strategies along with suggestions for more viable strategies.  But what we want to do as designers is make sure there are multiple viable strategies that we can think of and make sure they’re balanced.