I want to keep a running public journal on some of the thoughts we have on Galactic Civilizations II which won't be out for over a year but the beta should show up early next year.

# Fleets #
You will have fleets. Not just grouped ships but fleet battles. They won't be fancy though, more akin to Warlords type style. But nubmers will matter. However, the # of ships you can have in a fleet will be dependent on your logistics ability. So no "mega" fleets (unless you put your research in that direction).

# Ship Design #
You will have ship design. You will be focusing on the actual components. You will have X number of "class slots" (we will have this for ease of refitting ships in space on the fly for you). X will probably be something like 8 or 10. The way your ships look will depend on your components. The 3D engine will put the pieces together for you visually.

# Ship Battles #
Ships will have 3 classes of weapons: Beam weapons, mass drivers, and Missiles. There will be tech trees on each pattern of this. The defenses will be shields (for beams), armor (for mass drivers) and point defense (for missiles).

This will be where much of the strategy will come in for the warrior. Which technologies do you try to go up? You'll have to pay attention to what your enemies have. If The Drengin have Mark VI phasors and the Arceans have Mass Driver Mark VI then you're likely only going to have enough technology to fully counter one of them.

# Sectors #
Planets will be natively part of the sector. Not a seperate screen. That means we'll have things like asteroids and nebula which will SLOW you (to simulate having to fly around them in 3D, it's going to be a 2D map in a 3D engine).

# Cultural Influence #
Instead of looking at numbers, you'll look at the map. The 3D engine will have irregularly shaped boundary lines. If your planet is surrounded on all sides by a particular player's "space" then you can watch is zoom in on your planet turn after turn. When it touches your planet, it changes sides. So it'll be up to you to battle that sort of thing with your star bases and such.

# Planets #
Planet quality # wont' be the end all, be all thing. Instead, planet quality will determine the POTENTIAL of the planet. Planet building will be based on slots in a randomly generated surface (i.e. planets will look different from one another in this). A class 20 planet has more grids than a class 10. But someone working really hard on that class 10 is going to have an advantage over the guy who's barely making use out of his class 20.

This will add to the strategy: Guns or butter. Improve your worlds or put your energies into other things?

# Budgeting #
You'll have much more fine tune control of your budget on a per planet basis (now that we have planets in the sector we have a lot more freedom).

# Races #
There will be 12 races to choose from of which 8 can be active at any one time. Our current PRELIMARY plan is that you will be able to play as any of them.

So those are some thoughts for now on what we have planned. The game's release date is scheduled right now for 4Q2005 but we're not promising that as we won't release it until it's finished. And while that phrase has become cliche, in our case, since we do open betas with our customers, it'll be you guys who largely tell us when we're done. I.e. none of that vaporware nonsense.

I hope you like some of the things we're hoping to do with it. BTW, thank you to all who have purchased GalCiv and especially the expansion pack Altarian Prophecy (whose sales are funding GalCiv 2's development ).