Don’t judge me.

So, in the next public build we should start to be able to give players access to prototype components.  These are components that require one of the special resources (Durantium, Elerium, etc.) that give your ships an early head start.  Since you won’t have many of them, they make those early ships very unique.

I enjoy making odd looking ships just to house these special modules.

By beta 5, it should be pretty clear that GalCiv III is an entirely different beast from GalCiv II.  This post won’t go into the game play differences, which are pretty vast. This is about something a little more dear to many of our hearts: modding.

Why GalCiv II was the way it was

The thing about GalCiv II that I would like you guys to understand is that I wrote nearly all the economic, diplomatic, AI and other code personally.  I enjoyed doing it but it also meant that *I* wrote it. It wasn’t data driven in any way.  If I wanted the Drengin to focus more on getting some tech, I modified C++.

GalCiv III, by contrast, has a much bigger team and while I designed (or helped design) the high level way that the economic, diplomatic and AI works, I didn’t program it.  And since the talented folks on the team are aware that we will be making GalCiv III expansions into the next decade, the entire thing is data driven.  This is good news for modders.

Your first mod

If you hit the ~ key you can bring up the game’s console. From there, you can type “soak” (no quotes) and “fow”.  Soak has the AI play itself once you hit the turn button. fow unhides everything.

In GalCiv II, if the AI was doing something stupid, well, too bad. Because you’d have to wait for me to fix it and between my various opium walkabouts and general laziness who knew how long that would take? But in GalCiv III, you can make the AI better the same way I am, through changing the data.

What makes the AI decent?

Right now, in beta 5, I’d say the AI is…adequate for most people. Which is to say, it’s not very good by my standards or the standards of those reading this post.  This isn’t due to the AI being badly written, it’s all about data and strategy.  

So what makes an AI in a strategy game decent?

1. Having a focused tech path
2. Knowing what techs it must get
3. Understanding timing attacks (i.e. by this point you should have X)
4. Being good at macro strategies (building out, expanding).
5. Being good at micro strategies (make this planet do this, make that planet do that)
6. Being good at having good ships and at the right time.
7. Focusing your attack on one player at a time and not attack everyone
8. Organizing the tip of your spear to be as sharp as possible (no death trains)
9. Focus its spending on what its current strategy is effectively.
10. Build a network of friends diplomatically and make good trade.

At this stage, the AI gets an F at 1, and F on 2, and F on 3, a B on 4, an A on 5, a C on 6, a B on 7 and a B on 8 a D on 9 and a C on 10.

This might be a bitter pill for some of you but for release, we only need to get everything up to a C. If we do that, the AI will satisfy nearly everyone.  Post-release, me and you guys will likely work together in ways we can only dream of to bring all these to an A.

Where GalCiv III beta 5 currently falls down:

1. What to spend its money on
2. What techs to pick

These are not “AI” as much as scripted strategy based on playing.  It’s purely data driven.

The Terran Alliance: Techs

First 100 turns the Terran Alliance needs these techs:

1. Xeno Industrialization
2. Planetary Improvement
3. Soil Enhancmeent
4. Environmental Engineering
5. Interstellar Travel
6. Orbital Manufacturing
7. Orbital Speiclaization
8. Zero Gravity Construction
9. Weapon Systems
10. Defense Systems
11. Universal Translators
12. Xeno Commerce

Now, a player can try to b-line over to Invasion tech but unless you’re playing on a really small galaxy, that’s not idea.

Modding the Terrans: Techs

So open up TerranTechDefs.xml.  You can find those techs and find AICategoryWeight.  Make these numbers big across the board because they are strategic. The higher you make them, the harder it is to trade for them so keep that in mind.  I’m going to make mine all worth 25 in every category.

Modding the Terrans: Personality

Now open up FactionDefs.xml and look for the Terran Alliance.  You can see the AI category weights which align up nicely with the ratings on different techs. So you can pretty obviously see what techs matter to the Terrans. 

These are great numbers.  Unfortunately, I’ve learned something about random number generators.  Do you know what the difference between a 12 and a 14 is as far as random is? Nothing.  If we want the players to really play differently (differently as far as the player is concerned) we’ll need to make these numbers a bit more extreme.  How extreme? That’s the fun: Try it for yourself and find out.

Here are my numbers:

So I made the scale from 0 to 25. As long as you’re consistent (your range is basically the dice roll size).  I like to have very distinct differences in the numbers.

Test #1: First 100 turns

So before, after 300 turns, none of the AI had even medium sized ships.

Let’s see how the two sides are doing now.

Terran Flag Ship:

Attack of 20, defense of 18. 63 HP.

For comparison, let’s look at what the Drengin has:

Attack of 12, defense of 18, 39 HP.

So clearly no match, one on one, with a Terran ship.  They’re both using rail guns oddly enough. Not sure if that’s a coincidence or not.

Terran techs after modification

1. Xeno Industrialization
2. Advanced construction
3. Institutional Research
4. Planetary Improvement
5. Environmental Engineering
6. agriculture ADaptation
7. Xeno Biology
8. Interstellar Travel
9. Orbital Manufacturing
10. Zero Gravity Construction
11. Interstellar Logistics
12. Weapon Systems
13. Missile Weapons
14. Beam Wapons
15. Kinetic Weapons
16. Militarization
17. Defense Systems
18. Shield Systems
19. Armor Systems
20. Universal Translator
21. Xeno Commerce

So it got all the techs and then some.

However, not all these choices were good choices.  It should have picked a single weapon system to focus on.

Drengin techs (unmodified)

Let’s look at what the Drengin have (their tech tree is whatever is already in beta 5)

1. Xeno Exploitation
2. Xeno Slavery
3. Persuaive Research
4. Planetary Exploitation
5. Agreiculture
6. Enviromental Engineering
7. Interestellar Travel
8. Orbital Manufacturing
9. Interstellar Logistics
10. Weapon Systems
11. Beam
12. Missile
13. Kinetic
14. Militarization
15. Defense Systems
16. Shield Systems
17. Universal Translator
18. Xeno Commerce

So some easy progress there.

Next up: Spending.

Who are the good guys?

So we (Stardock/Oxide) have been living in the Singularity universe for a couple of years now and there are a lot of arguments over which side is better. In the original PR for the game, the “Haalee faction” (the leader of the Substrate) tried to describe the game as a battle between the noble Substrate, led by Haalee to save the galaxy from Post-Human predation.  This was ultimately changed to something more neutral.

Game Mechanics

Over the coming months we hope to do a number of exclusive reveals of the different units, the game mechanics and ideological differences between the Post-Humans and The Substrate. For today, we will talk a bit about the unit differences.

Disclaimer

I’m not a marketing person. And to be honest, they don’t like it when I talk about our games sometimes because I violate one of the basic rules of marketing: Don’t mention other products.  But as a fan of Total Annihilation, Starcraft, Kohan, Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes not to mention our own Sins of a Solar Empire (plus countless other games), I cannot help but to want to communicate much of this through analogies with other games I enjoy.

Post-Humans: General concepts

This particular unit is nick-named the Apollo.  Post-Human units hover via channeling gravity.  The Apollo is a medium sized unit (about half the size of a football field).  Now, one thing you’ll notice here is that it has multiple weapon systems on it.  This is one of the things that will make Ashes somewhat different from other games you may have played.  Units have multiple weapons that can independently track and target.

In the case of the Apollo, it is loaded with a series of guns for taking out aircraft as well as swarms of drones.  However, its weapons are not strong enough to penetrate through the armor of other units of its class. 

Understanding Armor:

There is no case of a pikeman taking out a tank in Ashes.  The design downside is that things are a little more complex in calculating damage.  A unit has an armor class.  Weapons have an armor piercing class.  If it penetrates the armor then it does that weapon’s damage minus the armor. But if the armor is better than the weapon, then it does nothing.

So why did we do this? Because in a real life, all the small arms fire in the world is not going to destroy a tank.  And in RTSs, there is always the temptation to just crank out endless crappy units. And in a game where your armies might involve thousands of actual independent units, the new player might think they can get far by just building swarms of cheap units. 

Back to the Apollo

So the Apollo has some very nice guns for taking out drones (which have no armor but make that up in terms of numbers and a rather nasty weapons) and air units (which also have no armor but tend to have rather nasty bombs).

But the Apollo would do zero damage against an armored unit. If this concept feels familiar it should, Company of Heroes demonstrated why this is a good game mechanic.

The Substrate

Not surprising, the Substrate have a different view on things.  This unit is nicknamed “Destructor”.  It destroys buildings.  How? In the front of it you will see what appears to be 6 small polaron beams. It focuses these beams together to create a nasty orange beam of death. 

Unlike the Apollo, it isn’t totally defenseless against armored units because it has the two, independently tracking rail guns that, while short range, can hurt things that get near it.

Substrate units have shields instead of good armor which has pros and cons. On the pro side, they take no damage until you get through their shields. On the downside, even the Apollo’s weapons can do damage (albeit not a lot) to the Destructor’s shields making its relatively modest armor vulnerable. But their shields do recharge on their own (unlike Post-Human armor which has to be repaired).

Understanding shields

The Substrate chose shields because it allows them more freedom in the design of their ships.  The Post-Human units are obviously distinctly different looking from the Substrate because armor limits the number of design options.  On the other hand, armor has the advantage of making the unit a bit less fragile.

Trivia

The nicknames of the units are provided by the Post-Humans, even for the Substrate. Haalee does not call her units crude names like “Destructor” but her names aren’t as marketable.

Who is Haalee?

Haalee was the first sentient AI created in the early 21st century.  The Substrate refers to the computing material (see more here). The Post-Humans sometimes refer to it as “Computronium”. The marketing folks would prefer a different word entirely like, Kickassium or something probably.

We’ve been playing Ashes multiplayer for about a year now and I can tell you, balance is a tricky thing, particularly when you lose a game. We will be making it available to those who join the Founder’s group as part of the “Friends and Family” beta this Spring.  Early access will probably be this Summer but we haven’t decided for certain whether we’ll be doing early access outside the Founders or not.

Any questions?

Windows 10 is coming along nicely. A definite nice step from Windows 8.1 (once the bugs are out).

Still, not all is well yet.

The Windows 10 skin

The Windows 10 skin has some issues. The title bar is thicker than some apps expect (such as Microsoft Live Writer). Stardock’s WindowBlinds has had to tackle this issue for years.  I suspect WindowBlinds will be making a comeback with Windows 10 as the title bar and borders in windows 10 are a combination of not pretty and a bit hard to use at times (the border is one pixel making resizing a bit of a pain. Seriously.

The Start menu

vs.

I’ve seen people argue that there is no need for a Start10. I think these two screenshots (the Windows 10 start menu on the left and the beta of Stardock’s Start10 on the right) make it pretty obvious that yes, a lot of people will want Start10.

Let’s walk through some of the issues:

1. Where’s my home folder? Those items at the top left are hard-coded. You can’t remove them. Maybe they’ll fix that but time is starting to run short.
2. It has no context menu whatosever for the menu. So it’s not easy to understand how/if you can change its behavior.
3. If I want to pin my home folder, I have to pin it to the tiles part of it.
4. I don’t even want to go into the spam abuse here. It already includes a bunch of junk I have on interest in, didn’t ask for. I can’t imagine what the OEMs will do. One can almost picture that that is the purpose of the tiles in there in the first place. 
5. You cannot pin short-cuts to the start menu.

If I remove the junk I get this.

This is what you get if you choose “All Apps”.

Please, someone go ahead and make the argument that this is an improvement on the Windows 7 design? Tell me how it’s superior. In fact, if you can name 1 way it’s more usable than the Windows 7 design I’d really like to hear it.  I’ll start with 1 freebie: it’s easier for touch UI.  But if I’m using touch, I’ll be using the Start screen. 

Home Group

Speaking of the home group, these are the icons. I hope these are not what they plan to ship in the final. They’re very distracting.

Then there’s the ribbon.  The giant “Pin to Quick Access” thing is very annoying.  Luckily, I can minimize it but it seems like a step back.  Another thing are all the little pins on the left. I get it, they’re pinned. I hope (assume) they will have an option not to show those. I couldn’t find any options in the folder options panel.

Did I mention how annoying it is that the borders are only 1 pixel?

It’s better than Windows 8

I prefer Windows 8.1 over Windows 7 with some caveats (Object Desktop installed). That’s because Windows 8 is so much better dealing with high DPI and it’s faster.

Windows 10 seems be be an improvement over Windows 8 in those terms as well. But the UX needs a lot of work still.  On the other hand, if they don’t do that work, well, I guess I’ll be able to afford to send my kid to college after all.

Just want you guys to know we've added a bunch of new stuff to the Founder's Vault. Do NOT share it anywhere.

Thanks!

As we saw back in GalCiv II we did a number of test AI runs with the Drengin vs. the humans on a special arena map.

I’m happy to report that we are ready to do that again for GalCiv III.

The editor this time around is very very nice. Not that the old editor wasn’t but it wasn’t an in-game editor.

It begins

The year is 2241, one year before the events of Galactic Civilizations III’s story.

The Terran Alliance has been defeated by the Drengin Empire with Earth alone, surrounded by a Drengin armada.

A break away group, the Terran Coalition, has gone largely unnoticed and settled the planet Athan.

The humans settle the neighboring planet Candra.

Instantly, we see one of the first big differences between GalCiv II and GalCiv III (in terms of game play obviously).  There’s a lot more stuff on planets and there are adjacency bonuses.

The first thing I’m going to do is rush build a colony ship. We know that there’s a great planet in the middle of this sector. How? Well, er, I made the map. What? That’s cheating? Unfair to the AI? Well, I can tell you the AI doesn’t have any lawyers so too bad for them.

I get universal translators first.

Contact

It doesn’t take long to find the Drengin.  What are they up to?

They got the highest quality planet but I have two of them.  We have no use for Drengin so we will be destroying them soon.

Uh, no. We won’t be giving you weapons.

I begin to build the Spider class fighter. Equipped with twin particle cannons.

My future slaves have a sense of humor. That will come in handy.

Next up: For realsies.

Dear Galor,

We love you.  You know that right? We aren't here to criticize you. We wouldn't be here if we didn't care about you. That is why this conversation is so difficult for me. For all of us.

It's not you personally. It's your skill tree. It's...boring.  It's generic. You, Galor are supposed to be a great wizard and yet, there is nothing interesting about you. Your skill tree I mean. Not you.  Your parents were so impressive. Lord Relias was the main character in War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress. I know it's hard to live up to him.

Here, you are in a safe place. This is a place of love. And here we will talk about what new skills we think you should have in order to be a better wizard. A more...interesting wizard.

Dear Galor,

We love you.  You know that right? We aren't here to criticize you. We wouldn't be here if we didn't care about you. That is why this conversation is so difficult for me. For all of us.

It's not you personally. It's your skill tree. It's...boring.  It's generic. You, Galor are supposed to be a great wizard and yet, there is nothing interesting about you. Your skill tree I mean. Not you.  Your parents were so impressive. Lord Relias was the main character in War of Magic and Fallen Enchantress. I know it's hard to live up to him.

Here, you are in a safe place. This is a place of love. And here we will talk about what new skills we think you should have in order to be a better wizard. A more...interesting wizard.

Usual caveats: Pre-alpha here.

But you can see the individual gravity channelers on this unit, the Artemis, which allows it to hover.  The Artemis is the mainline Post-Human missile unit.

This is at the start of the game so its secondary weapon, a long-range missile, isn't enabled (the black disabled piece in the middle). Players can upgrade their units via the tech tree (all this is subject to change based on play testing for fun and pacing).

Now, mind you, this is an extreme extreme close up. The artists are going to kill me for zooming this close as these are supposed to be small units (i.e. a big map might include thousands of these guys).  

How you put your groups together matters though. It's not just about cranking out lots of units.

The other thing I wanted to convey here is how much attention we are giving to being true to the lore. We don't simply have units that float. There is a reason for them and a lot of background on the limitations of gravitational channeling.

Greetings!

First thing, I talked to Paul and Fred and they suggested I talk to Riku Nuottajärvi about doing music for the new game (he worked on Star Control 2's music) but I don't know how to contact him.  So if any of you could do me the favor of letting him know we are looking to talk to him I'd appreciate it.

Second, with Galactic Civilizations III nearly done, the dev team and art team will be moving on to new projects one of which is Star Control. So the staff up continues.  The core team is already in place and development has been ongoing for awhile (though very little art yet).

Third, the basic plot of the new game has been finalized.  We think people will like it.  Chris Bucholz (cracked.com columnist) is leading the writing effort. You'll be hearing a lot from him in the coming months.

Fourth, from talking to Paul about what sorts of things really matter to him about Star Control we've expanded on the community element of the game.  So in essence, the game will ship with all the tools necessary for modders to create their own "galaxies" (which we refer to as cluster groups until we come up with a better name) that has their own ships, aliens, etc. where users can download and add it to their in-game universe from within the game.

Fifth, the player's flagship will be very very customizeable both in terms of weapons, crew, etc. as well visually.  When players explore planets, they'll find lots and lots of cool stuff including ship parts.  These ship parts (think of them like lego pieces of various shapes) will let players make their flag ships look however they want.  So in terms of multiplayer battles as well as visiting other people's galaxies, we have no doubt we'll see people flying around in Serenity or the Millenium falcon as well as endlessly unique player creations.

Sixth, while we will be creating (and supporting) alien ship designs via Maya and 3D studio, the plan is to allow players to also use a GalCiv III-like ship designer so that when they create their own galaxies to share with the community, they can easily give each race their own unique ships along with their own stories, aliens, etc.  

Seventh, more controversially, the current plan is to have the aliens be pre-rendered. We are still debating this.  There are pros and cons.  The Civilization V team that created the leaders (which speak in real-time) now work here believe we can support real-time.  My issue with that is that it's very very expensive to do it well and I'm not personally keen on aliens speaking English (I realize they did this on some versions of SC2).  I personally prefer the aliens speaking their own language with subtitles.  This is an issue we'll be debating internally and with the community I'm sure for a long time.

Eighth, most of the races aren't humanoids. In fact, off the top of my head, only the Earthlings and one other are humanoid right now.

Ninth, there won't be any official announcements in 2015.  We're not sure if we'll have a public beta but we are sure that we will be offering beta access to the Ur-Quan community and related communities.

Tenth, The game will be using the same engine as Ashes of the Singularity (www.ashesgame.com). 

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks!

-brad