Galactic Civilzations II: 21 Feb

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2006-03-06 11:12pm

Well, as I was hanging on by a shoestring fighting the Iconians, finally they accepted a peace treaty after the Drath and the Altarians both opened up on them. Given that I did the bulk of annihilating the Iconian's fleets, even going so far as to grab Iconia and New Iconia, I let the Drath and the Altarians finish the job, since the Iconians once again got the Ancarens to my south uppity. Following a quick redeployment of fleets and the closest fight I had since the beginning of the Iconian war, I managed to get the Ancarens to back off.

Amusingly enough, as the Iconians got beaten to hell and back by the Drath Legion, they started looking at me like their best friends. I considered trying for an alliance victory, but then figured to let them rot. Meanwhile, I started building a new heavy fleet to deal with the Drath Legion just in case they decided to come after me next.

Amazingly, they didn't. After the Iconians fell, the galaxy was at peace for about a year. In that time, I teched up diplomacy, trade, and influence, built a trade starbase over one of my trade hubs and slapped up an influence starbase over a cluster of five worlds held by the Altarians and the Drath Legions (spoils of the Iconian War).

As I was setting up an influence victory, the Ancarens pissed off the Drath Legion and the Altarians (who I had bribed into an Alliance, hopefully ensuring that the Drath Legion wouldn't wardec me). In order to avoid total extinction, they surrendered their remaining planets to me (up until now, most of these giftings had been to the Drath or the Iconians). That, combined with several Altarian defector worlds, gave me enough of a control over the galaxy to kick off the influence victory timer. By the end of the game, I controlled roughly 80% of the galaxy, with even Drath worlds realizing the greatness of my empire.

Even on the Medium map, by the time combat was over, the largest ships I had used were medium ships, though I had five full fleets of Large ships waiting to go should the fighting break out again.

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-03-07 12:05am

One thing I don't get- why do people play on anything other than the biggest map possible? Such decisions make no sense to me. Bigger the map, longer the game, longer the game, more fun I get out of it.

I only play smaller maps when I'm learning the ropes.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-07 12:09am

On larger maps I always seem to get owned in the land-grab phase, and since 'planetary invasion' is a middling tech, I'm boned by structure maintenance, bankrupted, zero morale, all that. Anything smaller than medium is too easy, though... I guess I'm just rubbish at it.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2006-03-07 12:19am

Smaller maps mean faster transition from establishment to open hostility. Sure, longer games can lead to some fun games, no question, but smaller maps mean that the game is on from the word go. I'm reminded of games of Rebellion I used to play with my roomie in high school. Sure, the games I played against the AI were more fun in that I was weilding larger fleets and I could utterly crush them, but the games against him were more fun in that the conflict was a bitter fight from the beginning, there wasn't time to hide in a hole and build up a fleet of uberness. You had to scrape for every bit of advantage you could.

Also, this game does not seem well suited towards massive expansion at the beginning. Colonies don't return on their investment until much later, after several facilities are constructed.

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-03-07 12:19am

Heh- well I guess I have to wait till Sunday (what kind of release date is that?) for me to see how good I am or if I have to surrender to smaller maps!

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2006-03-07 12:22am

Don't get me wrong, I'm slowly transitioning to larger and larger maps, though gigantic scares the hell out of me. Memories of huge Space Empires 4 maps come to mind, and while this game has nowhere NEAR the micromanagement SE4 has, it also lacks some of the very nice tools it has to control micro.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-07 01:40am

On the GC2 forums the devs have announced that 1.0X resolves the pressing issues, and in a few weeks they'll look at making more sweeping changes to the UI etc. I'd really like to see what the UI can do: if they allow windowing, it'll be a micro paradise.

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-07 02:06am

Double post madness.

wautd · Post by **wautd** » 2006-03-07 02:24am

One of my first games was on a small map. Before I knew it, the pc rushed me with massive influence and there was too little time to make a difference.

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-03-07 02:46am

Just looking at this Link

Does it give the weapons names like that and which company they're designed buy, or is that just made-up stuff and you have to settle for "Phasor Mk I".

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-07 02:49am

Just regular boring names.. although there are four contractors available with different terms for rush-building.

Post by **Vympel** » 2006-03-07 04:17am

Stark wrote:Just regular boring names.. although there are four contractors available with different terms for rush-building.

How do you mean? As in, if your rush-build with this contractor, you pay a different amount ... ?

Do the contractor names differ based on what civ you're playing?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-07 04:30am

The rush-build contractors vary the amount paid now and the amount paid off over time, ie 500 + 20/week for 50 weeks. There is always a 'pay all now' option, but i'm not sure if the others are on fixed percentages or what. It's a neat way to spread rush costs over many turns, leaving you with more cash to play with in the mid-term.

The contractor names don't seem to change, and appear Terran-centric. This is probably an oversight: since release many instances of Terran-specific language has been replaced by links to your civilisation. I imagine this will be corrected too.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-03-07 09:18am

Gal Civ 2 is going places!

Dev journal 1

We just got our report on the first week of sales of Galactic Civilizations II. Despite some availability problems, we're told that we're presently the best selling software title at Walmart. Let me be clear: Not just #1 PC game, but overall software.

Best Buy, EB, and Gamestop have put in additional orders that actually exceed their initial sell-in orders (which you may recall were 3X what GalCiv I's initial retail presence was).

How is this possible? No one is ever going to accuse us of being a marketing juggernaut. It's not like there was a 6 month build up of "hype" or whatever. Few reviews are up yet.

It's word of mouth. You guys. Individual people from around the world simply getting the game and telling their friends that they liked it.

And here's another thing to consider -- Galactic Civilizations II has no copy protection whatsoever. Not even a CD check. Heck, you can install the game and toss out the CD and use the included serial # (which you don't even have to use to install) to redownload the entire game from us even years in the future.

So what about piracy? Remember? That's the argument why games need all kinds of DRM and CD protection -- piracy. Yet retail sales are very high. Very high despite the fact that any one of the 50,000+ people who have already purchased could zip up the CDs and put them on-line because there's no copy protection.

One might argue that not having copy protection decreases the piracy on the game because there's no copy protection to crack and distribute. And perhpas some people who might have been on the fence decided to buy the game because they didn't have to worry about losing their CD or worrying that some copy protection scheme was going to create headaches.

It will be interesting to see what the overall monthly sales stats will be when they're published next month (i.e. the ones publicly available).

Thanks to the Internet and the ease of communication, it is looking very possible that the balance of power in PC entertainment software has shifted decidedly to the players and away from the traditional avenues.

As soon as the generally available sales stats are out, we'll link to them.

But thats not all, check this out

Today something unprecedented happened -- for us anyway. Several retail chains re-ordered more units in a single go than their initial order. EB Canada, for instance re-ordered a very large number. Yay Canada!

See, typically what happens at retail is that you get your initial "sell-in". Re-orders are only designed to bring stocking levels back to that initial sell-in level. So over time, the game fades away. It's very unusual for a game to actually increase its retail stocking after the release.

So now we're in unknown territory. We no longer have any idea how many units the game will sell. The first one sold roughly 75,000 units in North America and roughly that many overseas / electronic. We've shipped around 50,000 so far and we're starting to run into a back order so availability is going to get tight in the coming days as we're now rush manufacturing another batch to handle.

This all happened before the reviews even started to come out. The reviews should certainly help. But it goes to show how powerful word of mouth is. And if there's other small developers out there, bear in mind, Galactic Civilizations II had only a handful of full time developers and roughly that many artists on it. If you're at home, open up one of your game manuals and look at the credits to see what's the norm.

You can be a small development house and still make a game people like. Word of mouth is absolutely crucial. I also am convinced that having the developers themselves interact in the forums directly is important as well. It lets us hear issues people run into. We've also learned a lot in the process. I also think that putting out timely regular updates is key as well. In fact, we're planning to put up the final version of 1.0X tonight. Lots of new video options, AI tweaks, glitch fixes, that nasty hard drive formatting bug if you're using an ATI or nVidia card (just kidding) should help spice things up.

Once 1.0X is out, we'll start talking about what we want to do with 1.1. We have a lot of ideas ranging from random alien players, being able to create your own custom players, UI support for mods, and of course putting in user requested features, tweaks, etc. But that'll be in a few weeks. 1.0X will likely be the version where we take a bit of a breather. People who visit our IRC channel (#galciv on irc.stardock.com) will be able to access our daily internal build if they're feeling particularly masochistic.

This game is going to some very intresting grounds.

Bounty · Post by **Bounty** » 2006-03-07 09:21am

AI tweaks, glitch fixes, that nasty hard drive formatting bug if you're using an ATI or nVidia card (just kidding)

That one nearly gave me a heart attack.

I'm going to install this tonight, see what all the hype is about

It'll be my first 4x game, too...

wautd · Post by **wautd** » 2006-03-07 09:36am

Bounty wrote:
AI tweaks, glitch fixes, that nasty hard drive formatting bug if you're using an ATI or nVidia card (just kidding)
That one nearly gave me a heart attack.

*shivers*

I once had a game with such bug. If you wanted to uninstall it, it deleted your whole HD. That... sucked. Hard

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-07 10:27am

I remember back in the day, 'format on save' bugs weren't unheard oh. Oh, the times we had ...

I've also discovered the probable cause of my frequent hammerings by the AI. Since noone likes an evil guy (well, evil guys do but they're evil and traitorous) if your ethics go evil pretty much everyone gangs up on you. I usually hover around the neutral end of evil. I haven't found the sweet spot for expanding without crippling your economy yet either.

Post by **The Yosemite Bear** » 2006-03-07 04:02pm

Stark wrote:I remember back in the day, 'format on save' bugs weren't unheard oh. Oh, the times we had ...

I've also discovered the probable cause of my frequent hammerings by the AI. Since noone likes an evil guy (well, evil guys do but they're evil and traitorous) if your ethics go evil pretty much everyone gangs up on you. I usually hover around the neutral end of evil. I haven't found the sweet spot for expanding without crippling your economy yet either.

the microsoft win 3.0 bugs that attacked your HDD if you had the audacity to own DRDOS, a Western Digital HDD, a SCSI drive controler, or used a popular memory management tool not owned by Microsith. Yes they did it on purpose, DRDOS even had the software that not only disabled the Win 3.0 anti-DRDOS subrutine, but ran Win 3.0 better then it ran in MSDOS.....

*end DRDOS 6.0 fanboy rant, fucking win 95*

Duckie · Post by **Duckie** » 2006-03-07 04:33pm

Best parts of 1.0X.1 Patch that came out Yesterday.

HIGHLIGHTS REEL, curtosy of the Duck
================
"Virtual Reality Center" and "Stock Exchange" are now actually better buildings than their downgraded versions (annoying bug).

"Upgrade" button apparantly removes all weapons, defenses, sensors, armor, etc., but not jewelry according to the changelog. Basically gives you the base hull you made to play with again. I haven't tested it, but if it works it's the best change ever.

Fleets with 0 Perpetual Movement bug fixed (annoying as hell).

AI Trading toned down, AI Trade instinct reduced.

Minor Races, Terrans, and Drengin have research/behavior tweaks.

Minor Races are randomized in number (dependant upon size for exact formula) and start much less rich and powerful.

AI at "Bright" or higher will make simulated guesses as to whether Transports are safe to go unescorted or not.
----- [1.0X.0 Changelog starts here] -----
Planetary Bombardment causes a new texture to be made for a planet to reflect the lower quality.

Starbase Modules now correctly work for Research.

Social Production ability no longer useless (Pop. Growth still is...)

Alt-Tabbing is a bit faster.

Heat issues resolved by GPU Throttling.

4 new Ship Defense/Attack modules for Good Players as promised by tech tree but not in the lists.

"Trade Goods and Galactic Achievements now transfer their benefits when ownership of them changes. In the case of Trade Goods, ownership of the Trade Good is transferred and the old owner no longer has use of the Trade Good."
=====================

Woot.

Worst Part:

Ship Designs from 1.0D and Earlier will NOT work.

Workaround: Load up a saved game with the ships in it, mes with the design a bit (remove/replace part, etc.), and resave it.

Post by **The Yosemite Bear** » 2006-03-07 06:04pm

minor rant....

I ordered online, I recieved a serial number when I made my order, another with the disk, yet another when I went to register online, and none of them worked, finally found the serial number on a piece of paper in the box.....

ok, this has to score for the most confusing copy protection scheme ever....

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-07 11:36pm

There isn't copy protection per se, but I've heard the online orders giving many people problems with the autoupdater. I manually download my updates and never gave the game itself a serial number.

Further, it is actually possible to play this game in different ways! I was getting screwed by everyone and falling behind technologically, so I spun up my four fabricator worlds to churn out ships. I then sold those ships to local powers for hard currency, used that to upgrade my industry and buy a few techs, then sold my new improved warships for more money. Using the cash I was able to see off threats from the Drengin by providing ships and money for other powers to fight them, and I've caught up technologically. Security for the forseeable future! It's neat.

Hawkwings · Post by **Hawkwings** » 2006-03-08 09:30pm

how does the serial code/updating thing work?

Duckie · Post by **Duckie** » 2006-03-08 10:37pm

Hawkwings wrote:how does the serial code/updating thing work?

If you download Stardock Central and put in the Serial Number, it will pop up with new patches when you open it up, as far as I can tell.

I don't know about what happens without downloading it, as it's much more convenient than without it. I imagine you go to the website and put in the code or something?

Stark · Post by **Stark** » 2006-03-08 11:34pm

Yeah, I use the download links on the site and enter my code. I hate auto-updaters.

Every time someone surrenders in this game, it makes me step back and remember all the games where people would never surrender. Regardless of the massive fleet you have hovering over their last, defenceless world.

InnocentBystander · Post by **InnocentBystander** » 2006-03-09 12:59am

I had a good laugh when one of the aliens told me that they knew what I was doing with those massive fleets hanging around in his territory. He even admitted that he couldn't do a damn thing about it, but he did know, which is cool. I like an enemy who can appreciate the concept of doomed.