For the past few weeks, Stardock and CivFanatics.com have had a contest to come up with some characters to be inserted into the campaign of the upcoming expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II.

We originally intended to only have 3 best entries.  But we've found that there were so many compelling entries that we increased the number of winning entries to 7. There were several others that were outstanding but we just couldn't figure out a way (or a budget) to insert them into the game.

Below are the winners:

Character: Ragash
Race: Koranth
Originator: Tiavals
Role: Leader of the Korath military forces. Assigned by Kindar to destroy The Dark Avatar.

Character: Sothos the Mnemonarch
Race: Iconian
Originator: Sarx
Role: Data archiver lord of the Iconian Refuge. They have been trying to rebuild the shards of the Precursor libraries to help give them an advantage. They have discovered a technology that allows for resources to be harvested from asteroids and literally beamed as a low frequency energy to a selected world. Sothos is willing to trade this technology to the Drengin's Dark Avatar in exchange for the Drengin protecting the Iconians from the Korath.

Character: Slir Rah'shi
Race: Drath
Orginator: M.B.M.
Role: Commander of the Drath war fleet. He has brought together the clans of the Drath civilization together in an all out defense of their home world. Slir Rah'shi has even managed to convince convince the Altarians to help defend the Drath home world despite their past differences. He has his own long-term agenda, however.

Character: Delta-3
Race: Yor
Originator: Enigma
Role: Delta-3 is the ultimate arms merchant. He will step in and offer help to anyone who needs help if they are losing a war. Delta-3's motives are unclear but there are rumors he may be linked with the Dark Yor.

Character: Lord Vire
Race: Drengin
Originator: Shane Maness
Role: Lord Vires is the main non-player character of Dark Avatar.

Character: James Solon LOcke:
Species: Human
Originator: Arilias
Role: Locke is the leader of the remaining Terran Alliance forces.

Character: Lok'tar
Species: Drengin
Originator: NIGHT HAWK
Role: Lok'tar is your master sabateur who has been sent to aid you in subverting the Korath. The goal would be to defeat the Korath without going to war with them in one of the scenarios.

In some cases, I've made some minor tweaks to the characters in order to fit them into the game.  You can read the full backgrounds of these characters and the other entries HERE.

Thank you to everyone to participated. We will begin contacting the winners next week with regards to their pirzes.

The sheer creativity demonstrated in the contest has inspired us to examing making Dark Avatar an expanded expansion pack (i.e. put in even more features. You can read some of our thinking on that in this thread).