Galactic Civilizations: Twilight of the Arnor is our most ambitious expansion pack ever. While gamers expect expansion packs to add a special unit or technology to different factions in their strategy games, Twilight of the Arnor gives each side its very own technology tree complete with many new ship components, planetary improvements, abilities, and more.

In addition, Twilight of the Arnor delivers a complete graphical make-over to the game while at the same time dramatically reducing memory use.  This, in turn, allows us to provide new features like Immense-sized galaxies, Terror Stars, new victory conditions, and more.

This past week, we released BETA 3 of the expansion pack.  Below are some of the highlights:

Return of the Iconians

The Iconian civilization were the very first sentient beings in the known galaxy. They were once the servants of the ancient Precursor civilization. When that civilization split into two factions -- the Arnor and the Dread Lords, the Iconians, who had served the Precursors for eons, became pawns in their struggle. During the course of the Precursor struggle, the Dread Lords, fearing the Iconians would side with the Arnor, modified the robotic servants of the Iconians to achieve sentience -- thus was born the Yor.

The Iconians start out with Precursor legacy technology

The Precursors are largely gone now, other than the Dread Lords who remain a shadow of their former majesty. But the Iconians, more than any other civilization, are the inheritors of Precursor technology. The strength of the Iconians is that they start out with some incredibly powerful technologies. Their weakness, however, is that they do not fully understand it. As a result, they have some obstacles to overcome in order to maintain their early advantage.

Iconians have access to powerful Precursor technologies

It's so pretty

Beta 3 begins to upgrade the planetary graphics. If you're running at high resolution, you will quickly notice that the planetary improvements now look a lot better than previously. They are much higher resolution than before.  Moreover, planets continue to improve in how they look even as they use less memory.

More flags and player pictures have been added.

The Iconian hulls have been re-textured to use less memory and look vastly better.

ANIMATED HULLS AND PARTS!!!

Beta 3 also has a big surprise - animated ship designs. Players can now select any ship component and tell it to be animated. The effect can be pretty stunning on screen.  We didn't mention this feature in the "marketing" material because we wanted to make sure we could do it without slowing the game down first.  Unless you go nuts with the animations, you shouldn't see any slow down at all (and if you have a high end system, you can go nuts with the animations too). The animated ships are extremely cool to see in action in the game.

Beta 3 also has a ton of new weapon effects in them courtesy of i-Mod productions. There's a lot of new weapons in Twilight of the Arnor and you'll get to see some really cool battles with these.

More accessible information

One request we've received by players is the ability to see more readily what goodies a technology gives. This is particularly important in Twilight of the Arnor on the diplomacy screen when players will want to know what a traded tech does for them.

Players can now access information on technologies by right-clicking on a technology on virtually any screen (diplomacy, tech screen , etc.).

In addition, the ship design screen now lets players set various ship pieces as "favorites". In this way, players who design a lot of ships can easily work with just their favorite ship components.

Terror Stars

Terror Stars are the ultimate weapon -- they destroy entire star systems.  To build one, one must first research the proper technology for them. Then, one must construct the actual Terror Star which requires a large number of constructors.

Once the Terror Star has been completed, it takes 10 weeks (turns) to mobilize.

Terror Stars can destroy entire star systems

All that remains are asteroid fields where the planets once were.  The terror star must be closely guarded. It moves very slowly (which means you have to build it close to where you want to use it) and has hardly any hit points. Thus, a powerful fleet should be assigned to guard it.

The Road Map

All of the above was just for a single beta release.  Wait till you see what we have coming up.  There's still 4 or 5 editors to be released, a new invasion screen, several more civilizations, lots of ships and planet improvements, and we haven't even really started the new computer AI enhancements.  Plus, there's a bunch of new tournaments in the pipeline. And of course, the campaign itself. And that's just a highlight of what's coming up. 

If you want to get Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor, you can purchase it here.  You have to have Dark Avatar (or Gold Edition) already to play it.