The Milky Way Galaxy of the 23rd century is a brutal place. The malevolent Drengin Empire and their allies, the Yor reign supreme.  Earth and its allies have been defeated and in most cases, occupied by Drengin shock troops.  Earth itself remains free, protected behind an energy shield put in place by DL Bradley, commander of the Terran fleet just before they vanished.  Though protected, it is surrounded by an armada of Drengin ships. The ancient Precursors are gone f...

Fire-Watch pointed out that I’ll need to get a virtual image of Windows XP going in order to program GalCiv.  Otherwise, I’d have to take some people off of Elemental to migrate the GalCiv II project to Visual Studio 2005 or 2008. Right now, I’m on a bit of a sabbatical to get back to focusing on tech. So installing a virtual PC image (or VM Ware) is kind of cool.  I’ll let you guys know how it goes as I’m doing it.

So I’m on a sabbatical which was planned a long while ago.  Basically, it’s an opportunity for me to get back to my roots. One of the things I’m working on during sabbatical is GalCiv II (Twilight of the Arnor).  It’ll be lots of little tweaks and improvements (AI, gameplay, balance, bug fixing).  But this is the kind of thing I enjoy but can only justify on vacation. It seems like for the last couple of years my role has been less CEO and more fire fighter anyway. While...

Galactic Civilizations II still sells amazingly well. Both at retail and digitally. As a token of thanks, I was thinking of working on an update in my spare time after I turn in the book manuscript next month. Are there any small updates you guys would like to see in there? Mind you, it would be just be me. On a couple of cold weekends doing this.

If there is a Galactic Civilizations III someday, it’s going to have to deal with a lot of issues in its game universe. If we look at the story of Galactic Civilizations as a 5 chapter (so far) novel you’d have: Chapter I: Galactic Civilizations: The humans develop Hyperdrive and its technology spread to the other 5 major space-faring civilizations (the Drengin, Arceans, Yor, Altarians, and Torians). Chapter II: The Altarian Prophecy: Shows us that long ago, there were other r...

What? You thought because we released Demigod and are working on Elemental we’d forget our beloved GalCiv players?  GalCiv II is barely 3 years old. So specifically, what’s in the pipeline? In the next week or two (depending on marketing scheduling) we have a new build of GalCiv II coming along (no particular order): Fixed bug where creating a new planetary governor when another was already assigned to a planet would cause the planet to not be able to access it's govern...

Finally upgraded our network here at Stardock. w00t!

Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition is now at retail.  This version combines the original release with the 2 expansion packs into a single integrated game. The code-based is the latest version if Twilight of the Arnor but the content is the entire saga put together.     Ultimate Edition takes the full game and presents it in its 3 acts. Act I: Dread Lords where the galactic civil war puts the humans from Earth and their friends up against...

I was pleased to visit GameStop and see Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition smack dab in the middle of the “What’s hot” shelf. I have to say, ultimate edition came out pretty well with the original and the 2 expansions integrated together as a single entity. Meanwhile, even though Elemental , Demigod , and Sins have gotten a lot of attention lately, there’s a new update of GalCiv II in the works.

Okay, last time to test out the improved AI I did a death match between the major AI personalities and I. I learned that the Terran Alliance AI is too meek at pursuing weapons based tech early on so that will need to be looked at. I still lose, however because the Thalan rush researched to large scale building and I was too slow to keep up. http://frogboy.impulsedriven.com/article/331922/AI_vs_Human_Death_Match_Game_1 This time, I'm going to be a lot more aggressive. ...

So, the AI has gotten a lot of work these past few months. Each race in GalCiv gets its own AI with its own philosophy on how to win. So how effective is it. Let's find out! First we need to design a map. Next, set up the game. And now... We shall find out...I am the leader of the Paridians and the galaxy will be ours..maybe. Who shall be victorious! June 2227: Terran outreach The Terrans have done well in taking the lion's share of the...

EDIT: EU users should now be able to download the update for 2.02.  All of the tweaks were done by Brad over Thanksgiving weekend, since he can't help but start tweaking stuff while he's playing.     So you have an additional reason to be thankful this year! + TWEAK: Ethical alignment becomes increasingly a source of tension as the game goes on in terms of diplomatic relations + TWEAK: Altarian AI more sensitive about falling behind in military hardware tech. + T...

I'm setting up a game today to play on this day after Thanksgiving. Here are screenshots from the game (I'll be updating this over the course of the day): Large galaxy with no tech brokering (a tech I trade to someone else can't be traded by that civilization to someone else). I want to have few stars but those stars should have lots of good planets.   I set up a custom player.   Gave my custom player their own techs, abilitie...

See Brad's post https://forums.galciv2.com/331132/page/1/#1954133  for more details and screenshots. + NEW: Added option to popup governor wnd (if there are governors) on colonization of a planet + NEW: Greater use of expanded sound track for background music + TWEAK: Drengin, Yor and Korath will now colonize more aggressively + TWEAK: Tourism revenue slowly increases over time + TWEAK: Music no longer changes at the end of a game year but rather periodically during the co...

I don't have a specific change log in front of me but I can tell you a few of the things that went into v2.01 over 2.0. First, the AI is better. I made changes to how the AI decides which planets to colonize and improved how they pick their research projects.  The overall "Feel" of 2.01 in terms of pacing and general fun is just much improved really in my opinion. Second, the team fixed some crashes that we had noticed.  I'm not sure what caused them but I know that...