**Updated 2/4/15**

Hey folks, this is Island Dog making an update to Brad's original post.

Here is the updated changelog for the upcoming Beta 4:
 

• New Sovereign, Champion, & Sovereign Customization

• Tinkerer sovereign – A master craftsman who wields the power of the Forge of the Overlord with great skill

• Drogon the Dwarf champion – wields two axes, has the Beardsmith ability...what else do you need to know?

• Sovereign customization unlocked – combine any sovereign skill tree, starting ability, champion, and spellbook loadout

• Improved strategic map visuals

• Claimed city tiles now have visible villages

• Terrain has more elevation variation, texture contrast, and scattered props

• Unique forest types for desert, shadow, burning lands, scrapyard, and blue fissure

• Chasm terrain

• Improved lighting and shadow appearance & values

• Improved Fog of War appearance to better match art style

• Polished appearance of Kingdom forests

• New Frozen Realm capitol

• UI improvements & additions

• Auto Resolve Prediction – safely auto-resolve battles you’re guaranteed to win, avoid those you’re likely to lose

• Animated Sorcerer King and minor faction interactions

• Full screen quest UI (final art still WIP)

• General UI polish and consistency improvements

• Gameplay features, balance, and additions

• Enchantment System – enchant crafted items to customize their buffs and abilities

• Tactical Battle Rounds – Some abilities are locked by round now, like enemies that will summon a big bad if you haven’t killed them by round 4

• Can edit owned unit and city names

• Steam Achievements added

• Hero quests now properly scattered throughout the world (and you can’t find duplicate heros)

• Summoned unit spells added

• Additional variation in monster lair battles

• Lots of new sound effects for units, abilities, and spells

• Lots of new visual effects for abilities and spells

• Enchantment Sleep

• Sleep

• Enchantment_regeneration

• Soothing Melody

• Harvest Shadowland

• FlameDart Projectile

• Cloudwalk

• Heroic End

• Warriors Might

• Guardian Wind

• Gift Of Iron

• Tutelage

• Divine Protection

• Withstand

• Haste

• Enchantment Confused

• Celerity

• Enchantment AttackBoost

• Blood Rage

• Blood CUrse

• Blight

• Blessing of Restoration

• Boat particles (not hooked up)

• Aura of Vitality

• Aura of Might

• Aura of Madness

• (and more)

• Lots of new icon art added

• Tons of new quests

• Additional balance to quest rewards

• More quests are escapable and repeatable (e.g. running away does not always end a quest)

• More idle animation variation and custom ability animations

• Changed all references of “combat speed” to “initiative” for consistency

• Camera can now be zoomed out a little farther before cloth map appears

• New Map and Battle music tracks

• Falcon unit art and animations

• Storyteller camera mode advanced option added (free rotate for screenshots, etc.)

• Smoother camera zoom behavior

• New Spells:

• Enhance Land (turns grassland into fertile land)

• Restore Land (turns marginal land into grasslands)

• The Drain Fertility and Harvest spells no longer cost doomsday points. Just mana

• Bewilder (reduces enemy accuracy by 33)

• Call Skeleton ability (special ability for summoning a skeleton)

• Unearthly attack (15% splash damage)

• Lowered Champion immobilization penalty to 3 (from 5)

• Big update to the tactical AI to make units effectively use all these cool unit abilities intelligently

• Tactical AI does positioning and enemy stat analysis to choose what ability and who to use it on (wait till you see this in action, it now plays better than I do manually)

• Music choices greatly increased as the game goes on (very tired of hearing the same 5 songs early on)

• Music playing during tactical battle takes more into account to get a better variety

• Increased SK unit moves to 3

• Rewrote the guardian spawning to support multiple, randomized wandering monsters. Supports XML

• SK Strongholds are not seeded as much

• AI good (arguably too good) at summoning monsters at the worst possible time for the player.

• Added support to XML via AIPriority to nerf AI’s summoning if necessary

• SK has more spells to use on the player.

• If you haven’t met a minor race, it won’t declare war on you anymore. They now have to know you to want to murder you

• Player Threat to SK now impacts how many monsters the SK can have (not by a lot)

• General nerfing of the SK’s armies on lower difficulty levels

• Monsters won’t attack cities unless their army size is at least 3 (very annoying being attacked by a lone bandit)

• However a monster that is sufficiently powerful WILL attack a city, even if it’s alone (I’m looking at you Umberdroths)

• Pikeman becomes trainable by the Barracks, does not require metal

• Tons of tweaks to units to balance them better

• Massive increase in the number of abilities units have

• Warlock enemy unit has been redesigned

• Lots of spells enhanced to make them more worthwhile

• Coalstones cooldown increased from 5 to 7

• Coalstones damage decreased from 2X level to 1X level

• Despair now has a 20 turn cooldown and only removes 1X caster level HP from all units.

• Divine shield mana reduced from 15 to 3

• Inner Fire will summon a Flame Elemental

• Nightmare casting time eliminated, now an instant

• Shrink fixed to target enemy units

• Lots of AI fixes to the targetworthy code

• Lots of new items

• Linguistics, Pragmatism, and Archeology are now sovereign traits (mostly for future modder use in quests)

• Lots of new goodie huts and monster lairs created to provide more variety, especially early game (so sick of same 3 bandits)

• Balancing of the various unit abilities, especially in terms of how valuable they are in determining the units actual combat rating.

• City improvements made slightly less expensive

• Official game year set to 651 AC

• Bug Fixes

• Improved performance on laptops – now defaults to high performance mode on dual-GPU laptops

• Starting weapon recipes for all Champions

• Removed outdated and broken items

• Typo and phrasing fixes throughout

• Fixed a crash where gfx code was being called from a thread

• Fixed a game-within-a-game crash due to shard cleanup between games.

• Fixed a warning about a function not always returning a value, which would cause unexpected behavior

• Fixed a bug that caused the Allow Camera Rotation code and game option to not be synced

• Minor faction quest items can no longer be equipped

• Fixed Varda skill tree typo & bad prereq

• Fixed issue where AI could potentially go on quests, collect goodie huts

• Fixed broken post-process lighting

• Dead SK units no longer visible after they attack a shard

• Shards no longer occasionally invisible when initially attacked/revealed

• Fixed bug where "next page" arrow button was being shown in the spellbook when there was nothing to show on the next page

• Unnecessary “what do you do” lines removed from quests.

• Fixed a crash with the "enemy in ZOC" or "resources in ZOC" notifications

• Fixed bug where world props did not fade under exposed fog of war

• Archer Sniper now plays particle on sureshot properly

• Dwarf warrior crushing blow now plays animation and particle

• Fixed bug where you could casts sov spells in tactical when it was not your turn

• Fixed the really annoying “hourglass showing up when it shouldn’t” bug (lots of little code changes to do this, very annoying)

• Fixed the really annoying tendency of the doomsday counter updating at the same time as a lot of things are going on resulting in choppy animation (still needs more work)

• Fixed the slow, inefficient and often inaccurate tile yields displayed. So founding a city that claims to have 4 grain and 2 materials won’t happen anymore (it’ll display the correct amount). Also, this was called a lot and it was really really inefficient

• Fixed bug that caused monster lairs to sometimes spawn with nothing in them

• Fixed bug that caused the Sorcerer King’s fortress to be turned in weird ways with the gate floating off

• Fixed bug (heh) where monsters could go on quests and thus make them unavailable to the player (forgot I had had that in there, seemed like a good idea at the time)

• Fixed bug that was preventing AI from making use of certain types of combat abilities

• Fixed embarrassing bug of mine where a minor race would still adjust its favor with the SK even after you were allied

• Fixed bug that caused multiple trait quests to come up on the same turn

******************

This is NOT released yet.  Target release for Beta 4 is sometime this month. 

-- Change Log --

(or how Brad spent his Christmas break..)

Code

• Big update to the tactical AI to make units effectively use all these cool unit abilities intelligently
• Tactical AI does positioning and enemy stat analysis to choose what ability and who to use it on (wait till you see this in action, it now plays better than I do manually)
• Music choices greatly increased as the game goes on (very tired of hearing the same 5 songs early on)
• Music playing during tactical battle takes more into account to get a better variety
• Fixed the really annoying hour glass showing up when it shouldn’t bug. (lots of little code changes to do this very annoying)
• Fixed the really annoying tendency of the doomsday counter updating at the same time as a lot of things are going on resulting in choppy animation (still needs more work).
• Fixed the slow, inefficient and often inaccurate tile yields displayed. So founding a city that claims to have 4 grain and 2 materials won’t happen anymore (it’ll display the correct amount). Also, this was called a lot and it was really really inefficient .
• Increased SK unit moves to 3.
• Fixed bug that caused monster lairs to sometimes spawn with nothing in them.
• Rewrote the guardian spawning to support multiple, randomized wandering monsters. Supports XML.
• Fixed bug that caused the Sorcerer King’s fortress to be turned in weird ways with the gate floating off.
• Fixed bug (heh) where monsters could go on quests and thus make them unavailable to the player (forgot I had had that in there, seemed like a good idea at the time)
• SK Strongholds are not seeded as much
• AI good (arguably too good) at summoning monsters at the worst possible time for the player.
• Added support to XML via AIPriority to nerf AI’s summoning if necessary
• Fixed bug that was preventing AI from making use of certain types of combat abilities
• SK has more spells to use on the player.
• Fixed embarrassing bug of mine where a minor race would still adjust its favor with the SK even after you were allied.
• If you haven’t met a minor race, it won’t declare war on you anymore. They now have to know you to want to murder you.
• Player Threat to SK now impacts how many monsters the SK can have (not by a lot).
• General nerfing of the SK’s armies on lower difficulty levels.
• Monsters won’t attack cities unless their army size is at least 3 (very annoying being attacked by a lone bandit).
• However a monster that is sufficiently powerful WILL attack a city, even if it’s alone (I’m looking at you Umberdroths).
• Fixed bug that caused multiple trait quests to come up on the same turn

Campaign (bulk of work was in this, but won’t be released in beta 4)

• Rough draft of SK-Kingdom campaign scenario created
• Various recipes and items for the campaign created
• Various new quests created for the campaign
• Lots of new quest locations created (lots)
• Lots of terrible terrible programmer art

Balance

• Lots of new weapons have gone in. We are playing around with the idea of letting trained units get to equip weapons as long as they have the proper profiency to use it (rational is that while it’s silly that 1 sword can equip 3 soldiers, it’s just as silly that 1 chain shirt can equip them too and let’s face it, equipping units is fun)
• Pikeman becomes trainable by the Barracks, does not require metal.
• Tons of tweaks to units to balance them better
• Massive increase in the number of abilities units have.
• Warlock enemy unit has been redesigned.
• Lots of spells enhanced to make them more worthwile
• Coaltstones cooldown increased from 5 to 7
• Coalstones damage decreased from 2X level to 1X level
• Despair now has a 20 turn cooldown and only removes 1X caster level HP from all units.
• Divine shield mana reduced from 15 to 3
• Inner Fire will summon a Flame Elemental
• Nightmare casting time eliminated, now an instant
• Shrink fixed to target enemy units
• Lots of AI fixes to the targetworthy code
• Lots of new items
• Linguistics, Pragmatism, and Archeology are now sovereign traits (mostly for future modder use in quests)
• Lots of new goodie huts and monster lairs created to provide more variety, especially early game (so sick of same 3 bandits)
• Wizard Sovereign has a skill that gives him a Yetti Hero
• Priest Sovereign has a skill that gives her a Scoundrel hero.
• Balancing of the various unit abilities, especially in terms of how valuable they are in determining the units actual combat rating.
• City improvements made slightly less expensive
• Official game year is set to 651 AC.

New Units

• Sentinel. Requires Armory to be trained
• Xeron the Warrior. New Champion
• Netros the Mage. New Champion
• Rygos the Ranger. New Champion
• Darkling Shaman
• Urxen Commander
• Trog Commander
• Trog Sniper
• Rabid Dire Wolf
• Bandit Sharp Shooter
• Baby Black Widow
• Skeleton Warrior
• Syndicate Enforcer
• Quendar Rebel Archer

Music (thanks to Mason Fisher)

Game/Layered Music/RaceTheme_SK.mp3
Game/Layered Music/RaceTheme_FrozenRealm.mp3
Game/Layered Music/MapTheme_Ambient_LateGame_5.mp3
Game/Layered Music/MapTheme_Ambient_LateGame_4.mp3
Game/Layered Music/MapTheme_Ambient_LateGame_3.mp3
Game/Layered Music/MapTheme_Ambient_LateGame_2.mp3
Game/Layered Music/MapTheme_Ambient_EndGame_1.mp3
Game/Layered Music/MapTheme_Ambient_EarlyGame_6.mp3
Game/Layered Music/GameTheme_SetupGame.mp3
Game/Layered Music/GameTheme_Credits.mp3
Game/Layered Music/BattleTheme_Medium_3.mp3
Game/Layered Music/BattleTheme_Medium_2.mp3
Game/Layered Music/BattleTheme_Medium_1.mp3

New Spells:

• Enhance Land (turns grassland into fertile land)
• Restore land (turns marginal land into grasslands)
• The Drain fertility and harvest spells no longer cost doomsday points. Just mana
• Bewilder (reduces enemy accuracy by 33)
• Call Skeleton ability (special ability for summoning a skeleton)
• Unearthly attack (15% splash damage)

New Quests: (Thanks to the Mod team! )

Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_34.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_33.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_32.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_31.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_30.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_29.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_28.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_27.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_26.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_25.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_24.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_23.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_22.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_21.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_20.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_19.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_18.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_17.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_16.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_15.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_14.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_13.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_12.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_11.xml

Game/data/English/Core Quests/NewChampion_Yetti.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/NewChampion_Scoundrel.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/NewChampion_Cleric.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1_QuestLocs.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1_QuestItems.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1-TheHermit.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1-TheExile.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1-TheBazaar.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1-SouthGate.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1-SectionHQ.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1-RockSlide.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1-MerchantCity.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1-Linquists.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1-Garrison.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Campaign1-FearfulFog.xml

Updated Quests:

Game/data/English/Core Quests/SK_Interaction_Threat0_03.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/SK_Interaction_Threat0_02.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/SK_Interaction_Threat0_01.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/SK_Interaction_CityBuilt_01.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quests-Pariden_01.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_SorcererKing_Gates_01.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_RandomEvent-10.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_NewHeroQuest_Slayer.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_MysteriousCave_06.xml

Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_04.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_02.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Inn_01.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_DM_Fame_07.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_Battlefield_01.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_AncientTomb_09.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_AncientTomb_02.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_AncientTomb_01.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_AbandonedVillage_30.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_AbandonedVillage_08.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_AbandonedVillage_03.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_AbandonedVillage_02.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest_AbandonedVillage_01.xml
Game/data/English/Core Quests/Quest-DM_Honor.xml

Stay tuned..this post will keep being updated…

My wife is a mathematician by training but her wit is second to none. In a different life, I think she’d been a good comedy writer.  So I’ve decided to start tracking some of her quips.

This is all from this morning:

Me: You’re too good a cook. You’re making me fat.

Deb: And if I was a bad cook, you’d be complaining about that instead.

Me: And?

Deb: You’re like the Kobayashi Maru of food.

--

Deb: Every time we travel now we have to find people to take care of the chickens.

Me: Look, we’re chicken people now. And we’ll be chicken people until the day you die.

Deb: Oh, you’re definitely going first.

Me: Oh really?

Deb: How’s that coffee?

Me: Er..Almondy.

--

More to come..

Naturally I’m waiting until the last day of the year to finally write this.

If you’re looking for a drab, properly edited, PR approved article, this is not that article.  So hang on as we do a skim through of the hyperbole of awesomeness that’s been going on this year.

Let me get this part out of the way: If you’re a gaming journalist, we’re going to be at GDC with a suite. In that suite will be Soren Johnson (Civ IV), Bruce Shelley (Civ, Age of Empires), Dan Baker (co-author of the DirectX shader language, engine lead on countless games), Dave Pottinger (Age of Empire series), Dorian Newcomb (art director on countless games), Tim Kipp (system lead on countless games including Civ V and industry expert on touch UI integration). And we’re going to be showing a lot of never before seen things and reacting to some of the upcoming industry announcements that aren’t currently public.  If you’re in the media and want to cover any of this, contact our PR manager, Stephanie Schopp ([email protected]).

Now, let’s talk about this past year:

Here’s a brief recap for those of you in the Stardock community:

The new game studios

Back in 2011 when Stardock sold Impulse to Gamestop we were asked what we were going to do with all that capital.  At the time, I said we would set up an investment fund to help fund startups. 2014 was the year when we unveiled the first of these new companies.  It’s been a real challenge keeping the things we’re working on under wraps.

Oxide Games

www.oxidegames.com was announced early this past year and unveiled a tech demo called Star Swarm.  Someday we’d like to do a full on game of it but the purpose here was to show Mantle (and while we couldn’t say anything at the time, how a future DirectX 12) could dramatically change the way games are made.  Right now, as we speak, any games you’re playing are communicating with the GPU via 1 core.  You have 4 cores? 8 cores? That’s nice. They’re doing little for you in terms of improving your gaming experience.  But Mantle and DirectX 12 will change that.  This will be a very big deal in the coming years.

Oxide is making a new type of 3D engine that will take advantage of this which will allow us to make new types of strategy and role playing games into the future.

The Oxide team is led by what was essentially the Civilization V engineering leads which includes one of the developers of the DirectX shader language. 

Mohawk Games

Meanwhile, acclaimed designer, Soren Johnson and I founded Mohawk Games together.  Soren is best known as the lead designer of Civilization IV. He has assembled an amazing team from around the industry and they’re currently working on a game called Offworld Trading Company.  And the good news is that this game is expected to go into Steam early access around this February. 

OTC has been a mixed blessing. I kid you not that this game is banned from being played outside of lunch hours now.  Even though it won’t ship until 2016, it’s been being played multiplayer for a long time.  Don’t worry single player fans, Soren has you covered. Even now, it’s single player AI is remarkably good (did I mention it’s still a year away from release).  Once released, its addictiveness will no doubt result in arrests and investigations. I’ll be in Belize by then.

Stardock: Towson

We also opened an office in Towson Maryland.  We’ve been lucky enough to recruit some amazing talent including Civilization V art leads (terrain, models, etc.), sound and music leads and some Big Huge Games veterans.  We are very fortunately to be located down the street from Firaxis, the world’s #1 strategy game studio (imo) and we share the building we’re in with Brian Reynold’s Big Huge Games (though they managed to get the lead graphics dev we wanted for Star Control! )

The studio out there is working on Star Control.  Right now, it’s just the underlying game systems (which uses Oxide’s Nitrous engine).  The main game is expected to begin development this year once we’ve recruited a lead designer for the game.  Unfortunately, Paul Reiche, one of the best game designers in our industry’s history and the creator of Star Control 1/2, is pretty busy on Skylanders these days. 

We’ll be talking a lot more about the new Star Control in 2016.  Not too much will happen this year other than saying that while we will continue to support and promote the original Star Control classic series (www.starcontrol.com) the new one will be a reboot and have a different set of lore from the classic series.

Mothership Entertainment

Meanwhile, down in Texas, industry veteran Paul Tozour and us have founded Mothership Entertainment.  They’re working on a game that we expect to announce this year but won’t be released until 2016.  I can’t even hint at it right now.

Stardock: Austin

All the new games, including Galactic Civilizations III and Sorcerer King will be using a new meta game service we internally call Tachyon.  The simplest way to describe it is that it’s Battle.net built on top of Steamworks.  So in case there’s any question on this: As far as Stardock is concerned, Steam is the PC game platform and Steamworks is its API.  I could write entire articles on how impressed we’ve been with Valve.  They run Steam in a way that only a privately held company could run it.  But I digress.

We want our new games to be able to have a meta experience like you see with Battle.net (which we love).  Luckily, we were able to recruit one of the original Battle.net architects, Adrian Luff from Blizzard to run the new studio. 

Other cool stuff coming up

BonusXP

Ensemble Studios created some of the best games of all time including Age of Empires and Age of Mythology.  When Microsoft closed Ensemble, many of its key leads went on to form a new company called BonusXP.

In 2015, their first major PC game will be announced.  The new game, whose developers include Dave Pottinger and Bruce Shelley is expected to be unveiled before GDC in 2015.   One of the reasons we feel very certain this game will become very popular is that after playing it, its game mechanics seem so obvious in hindsight.  In fact, I expect we’ll see a lot of games…borrow from it in the future.  I’m a fan.

Windows 10

We have a lot of things coming up for our non-game software (Object Desktop).  Still, if all goes well we will be in the position that in 2015, more than 50% of our revenue will come from games.  Most of our customers know us from our non-games.  

Unfortunately, since our programs tend to end up part of the OS, we tend to not talk about what we’re coming out with until the new version of Windows is far enough along that something won’t get integrated. Which isn’t to say we mind if Microsoft incorporates our OS ideas into Windows. Anything that makes Windows better is good for us all.   But we have some new things in development that are so obvious that once you see them in action you’ll know they’ll be part of the OS at some point.

Galactic Civilizations III & Sorcerer King

I can’t forget GalCiv III.  The beginning of 2015 will start out with us releasing the types of games we’ve been traditionally known for: 4X strategy games.  Both of these games excite me for very different reasons.

GalCiv III is being built on a brand new, 64-bit platform. It’s a custom engine designed to be built on for the next decade.  This matters because it will allow us to create, what we hope, is a true living breathing galaxy with amazing depth over time.

Sorcerer King, is exciting because the game lends itself to third-part modder expansions in a way nothing we’ve made before does.  It was remarked by one of our modders that you could remake Baldur’s Gate with the Sorcerer King engine.

The people on the other end of your screen

I just wanted to end this with a mention of how much we appreciate you.  There are very few independent tech companies from our generation left.  And I can tell you, it’s a pleasure being able to talk to our customers and our friends in the media as openly and plainly as possible.

I believe this transparency has been crucial to our success over the years.   We are techies. We make no bones about that.  We love what we make and I say this without reservation, we love making this stuff for you. 

He is referring to “GamerGate”.  Now, full disclosure, as a game developer, I don’t even consider it possible to be part of GamerGate.  Historically, the games media was there to protect consumers from evil, greedy bastards like me.  But at some point in the past few years, some of them decided they really didn’t like gamers.  I find it odd. It’s like a sports reporter not liking the fans of the sport he reports on.  Finding this situation odd makes me “part of a hate group”. But I digress.

Being eaten

The experiment of being eaten by a hate group has already been performed.  Let me walk you through the experiment:

Women in gaming

In 2006, Stardock released Galactic Civilizations II, its third game mostly developed by a female game developer at Stardock (GalCiv I, GalCiv II and LightWeight Ninja).  She was the lead on it because she was the best at it. Her gender had nothing to do with it. 

The media didn’t seem very interested in covering the fact that the #1 highest rated space 4X game in history (and btw, STILL the #1 space 4X according to Metacritic) was mostly programmed by a woman at the time.  And I would argue, why should they? In my experience, women code just as well as men.

Go ahead to Metacritic.com and see if there are any games above GalCiv II that were primarily programmed by a woman. Go ahead. I’ll wait. BTW, if you liked Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes the plurality of it was written by a woman too, a different one. How about its amazing random map generation? Also a woman. Yet a different one.

The lack of acknowledgement of this isn’t a bad thing because we shouldn’t give coverage to things based on who made them but rather based on the merits of the game. But then again, apparently me believing this makes me part of a hate group.  

The point is, for 20 years, simply by not discriminating other than on talent and hard work, we’ve been a destination for a number of talented female game developers and artists.

Copy protection

We also were pretty outspoken in our contempt for copy protection on games. I don’t like paying customers being inconvenienced and we got a lot of coverage for this. 

Gamers Bill of Rights

We also came up with http://gamersbillofrights.org/ because many games at the time were being shipped that wouldn’t even work on people’s machines (remember Star Force?). The idea was that people should be able to get their money back if the game doesn’t work for them.

Point being, we were very vocally and unapologetically pro-consumer as a business model.  We believe it’s good business to treat your customers fairly.

Elemental

This was the first time I saw our openness used against us.  We made a game that was buggy on release. We didn’t realize it was buggy on release. In fact, so certain we were of its readiness that we released it early to those in the beta program.  We messed up.  So we gave the subsequent two games in the series to players for free to people who have pre-ordered it and gave refunds to those who bought it after who had technical difficulties with it. 

Again: treating your customers well and rewarding them for their loyalty is a long-term smart business decision.

.

The hate group eats you

So at this point, we had worked hard to establish ourselves as a forward thinking, fair minded, honest, transparent company that didn’t just talk the good talk about creating a good work environment for people of all sexes, races, orientations but we were walking the walk.

It didn’t matter

One day in 2012, a young woman sued us for hostile work environment, battery, sexual harassment.  When we didn’t pay her off, she and her lawyered talked to the press. Anyone who looked at the details honestly knew it was ridiculous. But it didn’t matter. 15 years of good deeds and being painfully honest publicly meant nothing.  Even though I publicly stated, early on, that we did nothing wrong and that the claims were frivolous we didn’t get even the slightest benefit of the doubt from the so called “social justice warriors”.

Instead, I was subjected to two years of hell. And even after we won the case and the plaintiff issued a public apology, we still have people who consider the mere allegation to be enough to undo decades of actual deeds in support of women in game development and providing a good working environment.  None of that mattered.

And you want to talk about death threats? Try getting ones that include a picture taken by someone from the street in front of your house with an explicit promise to sodomize your child.  My crime? Oh that’s right, being falsely accused of sexual harassment. That’s all it took.

And people wonder why I have such a militant attitude. 

So you tell me, who’s the hate group?

Update:

Ever noticed no one brings up the “battery” part when they discuss that lawsuit? That’s because that was so absurd that no one would even mention it because it was so credibility destroying. And they were right. But by not mentioning the “battery” charge they didn’t give the full story. Imagine how people would have viewed the credibility of the suit if were were accused of “battery. I suspect people would have taken the whole thing with a few grains of salt.

Our company is relatively small in size.  In total, we have less than a hundred people. And yet, our software is used by millions of people and we produce many new pieces of software a year.

When we do press tours of the company, it inevitably comes up, how do we do it?  The #1 answer is: Very low turnover.  It’s absolutely essential.  Someone whose been at their job for 10 years is far more productive than someone who is new, even if that person has industry experience.  There’s just no substitute for low turn over when it comes to a successful, productive company.

What are some ways to get low turn over?  Here are a few things we’ve done:

#1 Ideology free hiring

While we do care a lot about how well people will get along with each other, we otherwise strenuously make sure that there is no discrimination in how we hire.  This is one of the reasons why I am very skeptical about people who talk a good talk about “social justice” yet work in offices of all white males. 

As someone who is quite vocally critical of “social justice warriors” a lot of my contempt for them is the hypocrisy.  I am amazed at the glass houses some of these guys throw their stones from.  It’s been mighty tempting to out some of these places where they rail against “misogyny” and yet can’t seem to hire a diverse staff.

Let me give you Stardock’s senior staff:

1. Me (male)
2. COO (female)
3. GM (female)
4. VP: games (male)
5. VP: bizdev (male)
6. Controller (female)
7. Dir: Platforms (male)

That’s a 4 to 3 ratio.  But it doesn’t stop there.  Whether you walk into the game studio or the software studio, you will find a diverse environment of people (men, women, all races, all orientations, etc.). 

And mind you, we don’t try for this.  This is just what happens when you hire without caring about about pigment and parts a human have. 

The reason this is important is because everyone knows they’re there because they’re the best and brightest we could find.  It’s not because they went to the “right school” or because they were “buddies” with the right people or have the “correct” politics.  People knowing that merit is how they got there goes a long way to helping morale.

#2 Make it a healthy environment

We have an on-staff nutritionist and separate fitness trainer.  Now, if you’re in your early 20s, this might not seem like a big deal.  But as you get older, people become keenly aware of how unhealthy our type of work can potentially get.  Plus, it sends a definitive signal to the team that they matter to us. A lot. 

I don’t give much credence to slogans like “Our employees are like family”. I hate that kind of empty rhetoric.  People make judgments based on deeds, not words.

#3 Job Security

We really really don’t like to let people go.  We have laid people off before and we will lay people off in the future. It’s inevitable. Projects fail. The economy changes. 

However, knowing that your company will do everything in their power to avoid it means people are willing to make long term commitments to that company which reduces turn over.

One of the things Stardock did in the past couple years was created what is called a PEO (Professional Employment Organization).  What it is, in effect, is a company within a company.  Multiple Stardock partners now use this PEO (so it’s not just Stardock, it’s Mohawk and Mothership and Oxide and other companies as well).  If a project finishes and the next one won’t be starting right away those resources can be shared with another company. This largely eliminates the issue of hiring up and firing down when projects finish.

Companies that make job security a priority will inevitably retain staff better.

#4 Mutual respect

I offend people online all the time. I always have.  I don’t intend to. But there is an expectation that CEOs will behave “professionally” when interacting online.  This is a foolish expectation because it just means the CEO is lying to you about what they really think. 

The same is true internally.  No one ever doubts my opinion on anything.  That’s not to say I’m rude and blunt in person. When talking to people, we have the luxury of back and forth and the opportunity to have a little tact.  

Transparency vastly reduces miscommunication internally. Now, understand, written communication is a trickier thing. When someone gets offended by something I write online it is often the result of interpreting words that might have been intended differently. Hence, when people talk to each other, in person, the intent is much clearer and thus feathers are rarely ruffled.

The same holds true the other way. People talk to each other, their managers and myself in an open environment.  That doesn’t mean people always get along, of course, but it greatly reduces office politics when people feel comfortable and safe speaking their mind.

I consider it my job to make sure people’s concerns are met.  That might mean making sure someone gets a lamp for their desk or that a new server gets expedited. 

As the CEO, my job is to serve my colleagues.  I don’t do this out of any sense of morality or ethics. I do it because that’s my job.  To put it another way, it’s also my job to serve our customers because they pay my salary.  I can’t do that without the effective support of my team.

Final thoughts

If I could sum this up it would be this: I trust rational self interest to create a good working environment and fair hiring practices far more than I trust self-serving rhetoric.

Hi team! Here are some of the pics.  I think Bruce or someone might have a lot more pics, these are some of the ones I got.

First off, I apologize for not getting more. I’m not a good photographer. If any of you (Stardockians) want to send me photos to put up, go ahead and I’ll update.

GalCiv III team! Well, some of them anyway.

Future developer! (or artist!)

This picture makes me feel 20 years older.  I’ve known the little ones parents since they were in HS.  They’ve been with us since college graduation. So cute! (all of them frankly)

Good shot of the gang getting ready to play Avalon.

Random shot. Though Jenna, our lead UI designer, knows what’s up.

My hero Bara. This is the man who wrote the Quest Editor for Sorcerer King.

Sarah and Skittles (Katie) with Leo. 

Really good shot of Leo. He’s the lead artist on Sorcerer King.

Another random shot.

More GalCiv team with Software team back in the background.

Such a good shot you’d almost forget it’s an iPhone.

I feel very fortunate to be able to work with such amazing people.  Many of these folks I’ve been working with for many years now.  It was really fun having them over.

Greetings! Welcome to the sausage factory!

Beta 3 of Galactic Civilizations III has arrived with lots of new changes and improvements. We still have a long way to go but progress is swift.

A few highlights

Beta 3 brings the Yor into the game.  We’re still playing around with how they “breed”.  The current plan is to have the player actually manufacture more Yor on the planet. 

The Yor are a synthetic, pre-singularity lifeform.  Long ago, the Yor were the servants of a race called the Iconians. Naturally, they eventually rose up and took over the planet.  The Yor home planet is Iconia which never amuses the Iconians and their lawyers. 

The Yor get their own ship parts to ensure that their ships are visually and functionally distinct from the other races.

The govern button on the bottom right is still newish and has a long way to go still before release. Eventually, players will want to automate this via governors to keep their massive empires from spiraling into a micromanagement abyss. Our hope is to have the governors rely less on AI and more on letting players set priorities and have it automate itself.

The shipyards have gotten a lot nicer as players can now more easily control which planets are feeding which shipyards.  We have a lot of balancing and pacing to do. Even today, we’re working our way through the default ships and capital planets to boost the early game pacing significantly.

The cinematics team has begun to deliver some amazing stuff to help bring you into the GalCiv universe. This is the first past of better visuals, music and sound since the original beta release.

Tooltips continue to improve in order to provide better information.  Much still to do but little by little, the UI is coming together.

A big part of what we hope will make GalCiv III much  more appealing to a wider audience is the time we’re spending trying to really visually deliver the new worlds players are colonizing.  Tell us what you think in the comments!

If you want to join the adventure, you can visit our store at: https://www.galciv3.com/store

I was on this month’s Binpress with Alexis Santos.  We talked a great deal about how Stardock got started and where the PC software and game industries are heading.

If you've ever wondered what it's like to start your own business from scratch you'll want to listen to this.    I was 20 years old when I started the company back in college from my dorm room.  This gives the gritty backstory, warts and all.

->Full Podcast

Greetings!  It’s the end of the year and here are some pics from work.

To the team: I suck. I apologize. I had said I’d get a photo album going this year and while it is still technically 2014, it’s the last week before we close down for the year.  On the bright side, this year is not just picture of the Stardock dogs (though Arrow is in a few of these but Bailey and Maggie are not).

Stardock in the evening.  Adam is in the first one. He is the poor guy who has to clean up after whatever PR horror I’ve got us into that week.  Kristin our GM is meeting with Adrian and Bruce and lastly Jenna, our lead UI artist is making icons.

On the left, Sam is back from maternity leave! Hooray! With Emily, our superstar HR manager.  Rob and Bilal talking tech. The dynamic duo of Jillian & Nikki do basically all of our web graphics design (not forgetting Katie but I couldn’t find her to take a pic).  Meanwhile, Stardock Chairman, Arrow is keeping an eye while Steph (like all of us) do whatever he needs.

The gang doing their thing.  The Fitness room was added this year to prevent people from ending up like me.  The Tachyon leads are scheming about..Tachyon while the Cinematics team is cooking up a lot of coolness for next year.

The Azure team (Lou and Sarah) along with a Sarah Prime (our lead gameplay coder on GalCiv III) working on the battle system for GalCiv III.  And Chris is coming up with new Azure stuff to do.

I will try to get more up before the end of the year. I apologize for procrastinating.

For those of you on vacation and weren’t in the pics. Remember what I always say: Friendship, Family, Religion, these are the 3 demons you must slay to be successful in business.  

More to come.

I need more analytics in the game to do this properly but this is a start.

How long should a game last? That depends on the game. 

Sorcerer King, for me, as the designer, is meant to take elements of Master of Magic, Star control and FTL and put them together.  While those games may seem dissimilar, they each have key ingredients that I think can be blended together to create something really spectacular.

And Sorcerer King is turning out spectacularly.

Map Size Ranges:

These are random maps so they’ll have random shapes. As maps get bigger, the shard dots (the white diamonds) will get smaller. You

Tiny maps

Land tiles: 300 to 800

Shards: 8

Time to play: 1 hour 45 minutes

Small Maps

Land tiles: 450 to 1200

Shards: 8-9

Time to play: 2:30 minutes

Medium Maps

Land tiles: 800 to 1600

Shards: 9-10

Large Maps (for the hard core)

Land Tiles: 2200 to 2800

Shards: 11 to 12

Huge Maps (for crazy people)

Land Tiles: 3000 to 5000

Shards: 12

Misc. Screenshots

Just thought this looked cool.