Galactic Civilizations II: v1.4 FINAL change log

1.4X

By Brad Wardell on October 25, 2006 4:48:33 PM from

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Brad Wardell

Join Date 03/2001

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Here is what is new in Galactic Civilizations II 1.4 over 1.31.

1.4 will be known as 1.4X on Stardock Central and in game.

+ Initial Colony buildings have less maintainence.

+ New colonies start out with a population cap of 6 instead of 5.

+ Farms provide less food.

+ Each citizen provides more tax income than previous.

+ Morale buildings have been increased in benefit but techs to get to them cost substantially more (ex: Virtual Reality Center now provides a 40% morale improvement vs. 25% in 1.31).

+ Stock market no longer gives morale bonus (wasn't supposed to in the first place)

+ Updated beam weapon model along with large hull models

+ Updated some of the planetary improvement icons to be prettier

+ Updated Achille's heel, Apocalypse, and Pathfinder missions in the campaign based on player feedback.

+ Tweaks to make money not too hard to get early on but not as easy to get ridiculous levels of money later on (though expert players will still be able to do this).

+ fixed bug where ships on auto-attack would try to attack ships they weren't at war with if the ship was in the way

+ fixed bug with auto attack where it was using the wrong function to check to see if a ship was hidden by the FOW.

+ fixed cheat key to force an AI player to surrender

+ added in code so that when using the CTRL+Z cheat to run the game in AI test mode, it will make the AI take over for the human player

+ fixed bug where ships that were being upgraded but were not selected tried to update the ShipContextWnd, resulting in a crash if the last ship to be selected was deleted

+ fixed a bug where a ship (under certain conditions) could fail to start moving even if it had a path calculated to its destination

+ added additional debug info for missing string in tradewnd, took precautions to avoid a crash

+ Tweaks to the AI code that handles planetary improvement so that they don't do stupid stuff by mistake

+ Fixed integer divide by zero crash (very rare but possible)

+ Fixed bug where if you upgrade a constructor and build a starbase while it is upgrading, the starbase will change into a ship when the upgrade is complete

+ If RAW file fails to load, a height field is generated randomly

+ Fixed crash in Quick Project Window (very rare case)

+ fixed a bug that could occur if you loaded a campaign save game and tried to continue after finishing that mission, instead of using the campaign screen.

+ added option to save ship design to disk. If turned off, the ship design will not be saved to disk and will not show up the next time you start GalCiv2. Ship designs will still remain in memory until the data is reloaded (from a save game, from starting a metaverse game after having played a normal game, etc).

+ Some minor memory leaks fixed.

1.4 will be available on Stardock Central on October 25, 2006 (as 1.4X). The stand alone version will be available on the 26th which is when the official announcement will occur.

Thanks for "yet another update"! (yaup!)

I hope that the 1.3 and 1.4 changes to farms, morale and economy will turn out to be the right ones in the long run.

(It's not about making money or MV points, but somehow 1.3 felt too restrained when compared to 1.2.)

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Slightly off topic, but I though this might be the right place to point out that your home page still proudly advertises:

free update to 1.2

Might want to bring that up to date when you upload v1.4...

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Looks like economy sizes are going to be kick ass compared to how it plays now, not only are we getting lower main. rates early on but as you grow higher per pop income via taxes, means if you dont spend a ton upgrading a planet you'll be brining in a lot of income on those middle class worlds.

Gonna make for a faster expansions early on.

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Many thanks for the update guys (and Elves).

Looking forward to the DA betas now. Only a few more weeks to go

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Dark Avatar economy will feel very very different from GalCiv II's.

Tourism will be 10X more than in GalCiv. But as most people know, tourism is trivial as a % by late game. But early game, it will make a big difference.

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So far, everything seems to be running smooth with 1.4x...
Good job Stardock personel, and good luck with Dark Avatar.
Can't wait...

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I always thought the tourism bonus was way, way too low. Going for a victory by influence rarely seemed like a viable method, mostly because there was so little payback unless you really were going for an influence victory. You do get planets to rebel and join you, but that's only if you're really powerful, and by that point you probably can or already have a great military or research and could win one of those ways.

Has there been any thought given to creating some sort of diplomatic threat, such as races threatening to go to war if you don't withdraw/prevent your ships from entering their area of influence? I imagine it'd be somewhat similar to the way culture works in Civilizations later on. That'd make influence zones even more political/diplomatic. Minor civilizations could also be treated similarly.

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This looks awesome, but it seems like the colony rush is going to be speeded up now, when in previous patches it was slowed down. What's Stardock's view on the colony rush? Does it play the way you want it to?

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Heartfelt thanks for the autoattack fixes. Those were makin' me crazy.

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Not really. But the real solution is in Dark Avatar. There's still a hit to colony rushing but just not as much.

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Just a quick question about mechanics.

If I am in the middle of a game should I update now or wait until the game is done? WIll the update change the current game?

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Downloading now and thank you VERY MUCH. Just in time I just beat extraction point and the next few weeks I got lots of games coming in. Cant wait to play Thanks Stardock.

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Devs which planetary improvement icons were tweaked?

Thanks in advance

Drengin

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Good to know that this game keeps getting better.

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Sounds good...downloading.Cant wait for DA, for all new features in a same game.CA could learn much from Stardocks from that part of view.Also one of my greatest hopes is initiall colony rush "timebreak" and different atmosphere etc...game will variate much more...have high hopes, maybe one of new races will be methane breather

Keep on great work!

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To Cari Elf and other Stardock members, no one has read my report in the bugs section of the forums, other wise the new patch for 1.4x would have updated these problems. So lets try this again. When you are creating a new ship, and when you are selecting the hulls under the type of hull the ship will have, there is no "grey highlighter" on them when you click the cargo hull you want. When you move your mouse up and down on them without clicking on the hull you can see the very faint selector like the other windows in the build mode, but if you click the hull you want the "grey highlighter" does not light up like the other sections of adding weapons, sensors etc... In Layman terms what I am trying to say, is that you can click the hull you want to add, but unlike the other windows( like weapons, sensors etc..)when you click on the object and want to add them, you dont see that you are clicking on them---Go test it yourself and you will see this glitch. I hope this makes sense. Also you said you adjusted the bars in the economy but it still isnt fixed right. You state that there will be a change in the new Avatar game, so I will wait to see what happens in that game and not worry about it for now. Please let me know if this will be fixed...? --Viithtrump

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Vithtrump,

If you click on a hull it automatically appears in the large window to the right. There's no particular need for this to happen and for the hull to be highlighted in the select hull window.

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Just finished my first game on 1.4X - I like it, plays well. The changes made are "gentle" ones, enough to tip the balance of the game in what I believe is the right direction. The game always felt a little like "pushing sand uphill" in the early game mainly due to the way the economy worked. This resulted in the early timeline indicators flat-lining almost for the first 12/18 game months due to game mechanics and it suffered a little because of it.

Now it feels more responsive, more active, and you face less hard "mechanical drudgery" grinding through that early - horrible - economy. Still gotta work hard at it, which is fair enough, but now the early economy no longer verges on the rediculous.

The Stock Exchange change did not make as much difference as I originaly thought it might - game armagedeon did not appear

. Still get a handy influence bonus, and it was no great pain to adjust thought slightly to pitch in a few more morale buildings compared to pre-1.4X.

All in all a nice job - as always.

Regards
Zy

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Not really. But the real solution is in Dark Avatar. There's still a hit to colony rushing but just not as much.

From what i've heard about DA the colony rush will still be there just a little different. ie normal colony rush probabably followed by a tech rush for the new colony techs.

Imo the real problem about the colony rush is the AI's are completely useless at it. They build slow colony ships and are also slow to buid them. They launch them out in a haphazard directions often where they shouldn't and they colnise the first planet they get too rather than try to fill from the outside in. Also colonising the first planet they get to often means they colonise a small planet in a system when theres a huge PQ planet right next to it.

Currently in my games I have to look for a dodgy start on my maps because its just to easy to out colonise the AI's.

This is something I hope DA vastly improves upon. In GC2 so far the ability of the AI to colony rush has not really improved since the out the box version imo.

Lenius.

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Imo the real problem about the colony rush is the AI's are completely useless at it.

Not if u play suicidal, then they r utterly fantastic at it, will always out cononise u.

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Hi!

Imo the real problem about the colony rush is the AI's are completely useless at it.

Ermmmm, do we play the same game? GC-2 ver. 1.3+?
In my games (AIs on genius and harder) they regularly get more collonies as I do. I especially remember one maso game where yor's collonizers were zipping around with speed 6, when mine were crawling at 3! Guess who got more planets?

BR, Iztok

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Overall 1.4 is a hit with me, I would guess you guys would prefer that I just keep quiet.

But then I couldn't pitch GalCiv2 ver 1.4 retail to the masses, if you are checking out the game you should buy now, the bugs are fixed! The game is tweaked, the value is awesome. There are no show-stoppers whatsoever to speak of at this point. The challenge of gameplay is excellent. The AI is AI but for AI it's pretty good. Not great or outstanding, but it is better then above average which is saying a lot. It will challenge you to not make mistakes which is in essence what a human player would do.

There are a few areas that lack some depth still, espionage, and the UP, but this can be a positive if you like your game to keep flowing. I do so it's not too bad of a deal for me. Thank you for continuing to support the program and develope new ideas/tweaks. I look forward for the next patch should there be one, as well as the expansion. Which I am considering purchase of and recommending should it prove as entertaining as the relase currently available.

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Well, I can't really participate in the discussion about balance, because I just yesterday got GC2 v1-0 to work (on my other PC, which has some not-so-nice issues, which is why I waited so long trying it there).
(the first - quite complex - design I made unluckily lost more then half it's jewelry when I saved it. Is this an engine limitation, a bug in v1.0 or what else happened?)

But, I have to say - saving designs to disk for future use is one thing that directly struck me in my first attempts yesterday (I wouldn't want to re-design a complex hull every game). So, a big thanks from here!

Now if I only could get the patch + CE stuff to my other PC...

I already downloaded them manually from here, but SDC doesn't like my login.... (I'm using MY email, and it says "The nickname you have entered is already in use, please use another") , and so I can't use the email activation to get the registration to my other PC...

The best explanation for this I can think of is, my ISP gives me a dynamic IP-adress, and if the SDC-server (or whatever that is) checks if the IP is the same as when I created the account, it of course thinks I'm someone else

(I don't know if the dynamic IP can be deactivated, but if that's the problem this wouldn't really help much, since I'd be pretty hopeless to get the IP I had when I registered) .

Could anybody please help me with this issue?

P.S.: Sorry, I propably should have put the last part into an error-report instead of here - but it was related to the rest of the post, so I didn't want to leave it out...

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Dude don't even bother with 1.0 take it from me because I almost, well I did have a freak out over the initial release, upgrade to 1.4X, and go with that.

If you have issues, contact the tech support, stick on them and eventually they'll get you patched up and good to go. P.S. It may take a day or two, they have a lot of things going on. I hope you've gotten some help by now.

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