Subtract the absurd costs for advertising and every single expense made from the moment GalCiv2 had a budget written up for it and you have a far, far smaller number. I am quite familiar with sales and marketing costs. The fact remains, with $ 16 million a years and such a small staff, they must be doing all right. I take my hat off to them. Hard to pull that off in just a few years.
I doubt it. Moreover, not just anyone can write good text. So it would, in effect, be me writing it and I'm not updating the text because it wouldn't be fun to go and do it. If money was the primary motivator for this sort of thing, I'd have us focus purely on the desktop enhancement market which we totally own (GalCiv might have 100,000 active players but our desktop enhancement software has easily 5 million active users). For $1,500 we could create content
Thanks Iceman. I had read that each influence starbase was like advertising, and therfore would increase your tourism income. But if not, then it seems like tourism is a waste of time and effort then.
Re: Beta testing My original post has hit a nerve it seems! Let me clarify. My proposal was not a new concept nor was it aimed at demeaning anybody's contribution to the existing game deta testing. Software testing can take many forms depending on the project budget and the level of potential puplic liability from it's use. The closed or controlled "Beta" program is a tried and accepted part of the SDLC program. For those not in the know, the SDLC stands for the "Software Dev
Where does the tourism income come from? In the last game I played with the Beta release version, I had 70 bc of tourism income, but I had no starbases yet. Then when I started to deploy influence starbases, I noticed that the maintenance fee of 5bc was being charged, but no tourism income increase was registering. I was under the impression that influence starbases would increase your tourism income!
When trading techs with any civ and the civ you are trading with has no money, the pop up window says that my civ has no money to trade with instead of the civ's name that i'm trading with.
2) The text descriptions are a real weakness. It's one of those things that, in hindsight, I wish we had spent more time on. They are what they are. If someone else wants to put together a better set of descriptions, I'd be happy to insert them into an update, give credit and Stardock schwag to. We just don't have the budget internally to do much with them. Frogboy , I would be surprised if it took more than 10-15 man hours to upgrade th
I have tested Beta 5 on two different computer systems. 1: An AMD 3800 64 dual processor, 1 meg memory with an nvidia 6000 series, shared memory video card. The latest drivers from AMD and Nvidia were loaded. 2: An intel 4, 3.2 Ghz, 1meg memory with a Radion 9250 video card. The latest drivers were loaded. It should be noted that this video card is not directx 9 compatible. Results: The AMD exibited graphics aborations. They seemed to eminate from the fill function
Small independant companies and big companies alike must focus on the rules of success. Packaging, documentation, marketing and support. When a small company is living hand to mouth, the documentation phase is almost always sacrificed with the good intention to get back to it one day. But other priorities usually take over. It'sa trap that eats up many companies.
I did not save the game at that time. The very next turn, the stacked ships zoomed into the mist and I did not see them again, All other ships acted normally. I will save it next time it happens.
In Beta 4, when at war with the Dregin civ, they had some stacked ships that I just could not seem to attack. My ships just went to the middle of the pile of stacked ships and no attack was innitiated. Tried it from multiple ships surrounding the stack.
I must admit that some of the changes are logical. Rolling the dice to decide on the accuracy of a gunner to hit his target makes a certain amount of sense, so a "0" point hit could exist. But I cannot see the logic of rolling the dice to determine the effective strenght of the shields. Defensive systems should not be subject to chance. The player has paid dearly to equip his ships with defensive capabilities, only to have them negated by a role of the dice! Maybe we should all go back to playi
Yes Bagar79, The poor, or lack of description for tech tree improvements was a magor issue for me when I was first learning the game. ( I am sure that they loose much business because of it).In fact, it still is, although to a lesser amount. I have had the patience to learn that it just does not matter since you have to master each improvement of a branch in order to move on to more powerfull weapons or features. Each branch of the tech tree could in fact be represented by a bar graph,
When the game is playing video clips, I seem to get it by peices. It,s like i am getting and image with some sound, anthen the display changes and I get more sound, then the display updates again without sound, and so on and so on... Id thi a game issue? Yet while I am playing the game itself, it all seems alright until an othe video clip is played. Can anyone help?
A starbase that can automatically attack a ship, becomes a mine.
Reality ? Having designed many things for the millitary, I can say with certainty; that If there ever is a space war, you can be certain that it will involve automated space mines. Man is too expensive to put in space. A computer on the other hand is cheap, does not eat or breath or produce waste. Anti-satellite missile systems are already in orbit around our planet. The game could mimic those auto missile systems. They sleep most of the time of course. They are woken
I received the latest game update, thank you. It would be nice if you included a release notes document with each release that would explaine what was changed in the game in this release.
Master ship command/battle screen. The concept of a "Master ship command screen" involves adding a new command screen that could be used to see the complete inventory of ships you own and which planet they are orbiting. This screen could also be used to... 1: Immediatly deploy the ships from that screen, individually or as a group to a rally point. 2: You could set the default "ship launch status" for each planet. This way you could decide if some or all
( Frogboy May 8, 2007 23:56:37Reply #279 ) With the number of constructors presently required, it would be nice to have a controls that would allow you to send only constructors created from all or some ports to a location. I think the issue with contrusctors is not that you have to build so many but that you have to micro manage them too much. I think what might be a good feature would e a new type of rally point that simply says "Send all completed constructors
It would be a help if the ship presently selected was highlighted somehow. Maybe it flashes at fast speed or changes color. It is frustrating whem you think you have selected a ship but end up moving a different one. Selected ships have an animated cursor around them. I'm not sure what you mean by tithis. Reply_________________________________________________________________ The animated cursor cannot always be seen. I tend to play on larger maps, hence
I am surprised that a company in the software business, would have such poor control of their network system. It is after all, the company's heart beat. I am equally, surprised that a software company would even have a Joe User blog area, that provides a venue for peoples political nonesense. After all, even if this is a free sociaty, there is a proper place for everything. (Funny enough, I did not see one on the microsoft web site).
Once trade routes are established, I find it difficult to identify free freighters from those engaged in routes. This seems to depend on the zoom factor used.
I agree with Hirka. The number of constructors that must be created in this game is just to much. Why does a constructor ship dissapear after building something anyway? Is it magic? Why not re-use the same ship as it is done with mining ships? Each new structure built could take "X" amount of time perhaps and vary in cost. You could pre-select "X" number of new modules for a base and the constructor would do the work without the need for further intervention. But the time frame to const
t would be great if we could build Battle stars. These would be able to carry a number of smaller an less expensive ships to battle. Like an airplane carrier. the battle star could travel at hyperwarp speeds but the fighters it carries could be slower but with stronger armements. Fighter could now be made much smaller since large engines are no longer required. The star ship would have long range weapons and super shields to keep the fighters protected until they reach the battle zone. Plus, hav
An other usefull thing to incorporate would be wormholes that could be used by all ships to move between two fixed locations. this would be useful for trade and to travel on huge maps. Random worm holes may be a surprize from time to time as well.
