So there's going to be a GalCiv II v2.01 soon. Normally, this time of year, I would be playing a new PC game. But right now, I only buy new games from Impulse . I'm currently looking at The Witcher and Sacred 2 . I'm going to get World of Goo this weekend for me and the kids. But this past weekend, I played Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor which some of you know I helped develop and wrote the AI for. And when I play, I always have the debugger open and so c...

+ NEW: Ship design screen available from the main menu + NEW: Old Campaigns now available in Twilight using new Tech trees + NEW: Campaign mods will now show up in the screen from the mods folder + NEW: Updated Twilight Manual + NEW: Galaxy setup options     + Frequency of Extreme Planets     + Frequency of Random Events     + Option to disable tech brokering     + Option to disable surrenders ...

Playing at very high resolution... Note that the ship designer can now be accessed from the main menu. Nothing really new here, I just think it's cool.   Here's one of those ironies. The feature of being able to randomly pick races and randomize intelligence came out in a post-release update which, I think you guys would agree vastly increases the replayability of the game. This is precisely why games should always have a post-re...

Working on the final play balancing for the upcoming release of GalCiv II v2.0 (November 5!). We've made tourism bring in more money and military ships cost less to upkeep along with significant changes to how much research costs, especially late game. My class 30 planet.  Don't hate the player. Don't hate the game....on second thought, don't hate the game either..   Ah, love those updated textures.

On Tuesday Stardock will be announcing the fantasy strategy game it's been working on.  (November 4).

Cisco doesn't support their VPN's on Windows Vista 64. What does this have to do with Galactic Civilizations? A lot actually. I have been working on the GalCiv II v2.0 (tentative release date is November 5) to update the AI and take care of a long list of little pet peeves of when I'm playing. When I do this from home, I need to use the VPN because I use Vista 64-bit. And Cisco's VPN doesn't support 64-bit Vista which makes it tougher to get updates back into the main source tree. ...

Played a lot of GalCiv II v2.0 today.  Other than the issue that the lighting is not working right on my Thinkpad T400 (there's no shadows on planets) it's working pretty well.  The ThinkPad T400 ATI display driver randomly crashes when I play games which is a bit of a bummer too but that's not game related. One feature that I've concluded we should put in is to let people set the pacing of research any time they want within game.  In a single player game, if I want techs to ...

I got a good game of GalCiv II v2.0 in over the weekend.  Here are 10 things the game still needs.   The trade routes need to increase more over time than they currently do. Tourism should be worth still more than it does currently. AI needs to be better about researching space mining techs. AI needs more variance in what it researches. AI needs to focus more on miniaturization techs. Integrity fields should cost the same as reinforced hull ...

Currently available on Impulse is Beta1 of GCII version 2.0 (we're shooting for only one major Beta, but there may be more).   I'll keep exposition to a minimum, so here's that list of remaining features you'll be receiving...     New Negotiation Options Tech Brokering is a game setup option that restricts the trading of technologies to only those you've personally researched. This keeps tech-trade-spam to a minimum and gives some extra muscle to races more...

Continuing our in-depth look at 2.0 brings us to the new Galaxy Setup options, as well as the Espionage changes people have been looking for. Again, as with all new things in 2.0, we aren't looking to revolutionize, just to bring these features to a natural completion before work on GCIII begins (which is still a way off, but still looming).     New Galaxy Options   As Brad (Frogboy/Draginol) pointed out in his official Preview of 2.0 , we've gone in and added some...

Galactic Civilization 2 Version 2.0 is being designed to blow our other updates away.   A few months back we traversed all the suggestions/requests/demands we've received since GC2:Dreadlords 1.0 and compiled a definitive list of new features to cram into our penultimate update.   I think these next two are going to make alot of people happy...     External Ship Designer   Yes, we've finally done it!  From the title screen, you now have the option...

For the last few months the team has been toiling away on THREE seperate projects...Political Machine 2008, the unannounced fantasy strategy title, and GalCiv 2.0. And for those months we've kept players in the dark about 2.0...mostly because of the frantic, nose-to-the-grindstone pace we've maintained. But now it's time....time to finally start talking about what will hopefully be the ultimate update to our little GC2 series For those that don't know, GalCivII 2.0 is the final major upd...

The good news is that there will be a Galactic Civilizations III.  The bad news is that it won't be out this decade. Galactic Civilizations II v2.0 is currently in development but it's free for all players of the expansion packs.  But that will serve as the code basis for any further GalCiv II updates. Right now, the team is working on the "unnamed fantasy strategy game" sometimes called "not-MOM" (not Master of Magic).  It's a totally new graphics en...

The update to 1.96 should show up on Stardock Central and Impulse shortly.  If it doesn't show up for you, try switching to server US-1 (that's the first one it gets copied to) and refresh your XML data.  If, after updating with Stardock Central, your titlescreen still says 1.95 or earlier, see below the change log for instructions on how to force it to re-update. + NEW: Clicking on Race Logos on the Civ Manager>Timeline>Legend screen will toggle them on/off in the timelin...

Some of you may be aware that I've been a panelist at Dragon*Con the past two years.  I usually forget to post about it until the last minute, but I'm trying to get my act together early this year.    Dragon*Con happens in downtown Atlanta every year during Labor Day weekend.  It's a great convention for geeks of all kinds, and seeing downtown Atlanta swarming with storm troopers, furries, elves, pirates, and anime characters is just awesome. 

I've sent in my application to be a Guest this year, so I'm just waiting to see if I get accepted.  My plan is to go even if I don't get accepted and crash the game developer panels.  (It's a common occurance.) 

So I have two purposes in posting today: first, to invite all of you to come to Dragon*Con, and second to bounce some ideas off of you for panels for if I do get accepted.  I haven't had to submit my panel ideas yet, so if you guys come up with something better, I can still use your ideas.