FarAway Galciv

Ahhh, my kingdom for a magical measuring stick that assesses "scope", "depth", and "variety of gameplay"!! :D The Dominions series is a great game system, once you pull yourself up the rather formidable learning curve. It's so open-ended, you can wander lost in the forests of gameplay for weeks without figuring out what leads to success. But it's a great game series. It doesn't have the polish of most major releases, but the development team is a 2-man group, so it's hard to

Hard to compare, but all 3 are very good games. Master of Magic was the absolute classic for its time. Great game, innovative and absolutely captivating portrayal of a 4x TBS fantasy game. The player-vs-environment aspect of MoM was perhaps the best of any game I've ever played. The varied schools of magic and racial bonuses gave it great replay value. Age of Wonders was a very promising system, but it only really reached its fruition after multiple patches to [I]Age of Wond

I just downloaded the Fall from Heaven mod for free off the website below a few weeks ago, and have been playing it furiously ever since then. Great mod, and the best bit of free content I've seen for any game in a LONG time. In a class w/Dwarf Fortress, but with a better UI!! Seriously, if you enjoyed Civ IV much at all, check out the download (either for BTS or the original, vanilla Civ IV) at: [link="http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=171398"]http://for

I've often thought this would be a great way to add some "flavor" and storyline to the one-off campaigns. The "Good vs. Neutral vs. Evil" choices are interesting, but at the end of the day, the stories end up feeling like window dressing for what amounts to an adjustment in the spreadsheet underlying most of my racial abilities.

Arkanciel, you make a lot of interesting points. On the unit progression front, Warlords IV actually did a pretty good job with that. The production was so rushed and the development so botched that it didn't shine through in the initial release, but Steve Fawkner has worked with a few volunteers to release some patches "on the side" that have fixed a lot of those problems. Two years after shelving Warlords IV, I downloaded the latest patches posted at www.warlorders.com, and

Nice pic of the surroundings. So, like, in Michigan, don't you have to call them "Icelands about half the year? Sorry, went to college in Minnesota, the whole genre of "Lick the Stop Sign" jokes never grow old... Watching cultures evolve on various Internet bulletin boards is an interesting thing. The Internet, as a medium, is conducive to lots of insecure guys acting like total twits

Hmmm... Sounds like you're designing a Starship Designer simulation game? It would be an interesting dimension to add to the game, but I wonder if it wouldn't end up in a micromanagement fest for anybody who wanted to build a new ship type? I'm not sure what I'd love to see in GC3 just yet. The best sequels are those that make tweaks to gameplay that are subtle, yet profound. Some e

I read in a recent Dark Avator interview where Brad (aka "Draginol", "Frogboy", and "the guy who signs my paycheck" to the Stardock employees who show up on the forum) confirmed that they were working on a fantasy 4x game now. I'm VERY stoked about that! The GalCiv experience has been nothing but first class--game design done for the sake of a great gaming experience. I love the design and development philosophy that Stardock emphasizes, and I think it runs counter to a lot of

Game design is first and foremost an art--not a science. Innovation in game design is driven by designers trying to make new games within the confines of the free market. A lot of things about games are changing: graphics and computational power first and foremost. But gameplay --the way a game plays, the way a game feels, the kinds of things it challenges a gamer to do--hasn't seen much innovation in the last 5 years. Mainstream publishers seldom welcome innovation

This whole debate gets really convoluted in a hurry. You can get to the bottom of it, but it takes a fair amount of time and a certain tolerance for ambiguity. I just got done doing a bunch of research on how to replace my 250W Dell PSU, after I wanted to upgrade my PSU, so here's what I learned... If you want to estimate power consumption for a card, I'd just go to a good product site with lots of informed customer reviews (I found www.newegg.com to be the best site) and see what com

Brad, these forums are kinda rambunctious as forums go, and I can imagine it would be a pain to have somebody moderate them more aggressively. I think that's why most game companies don't have their own forums, and/or police them so aggressively that very little discussion happens on those forums. That said, I definitely think that the freewheeling nature of this forum--sanctioned as it is by StarDock--really helps to set the game and the company apart. The fact that you all have a

I enjoy 'em myself. Not in a class with Shakespeare's comedy, but it's an entertaining change of pace. And, frankly, it helps to keep the game light-hearted. I guess it's just a stylistic thing. Who's to say that the media on 26th Century Earth don't have a smart-aleck, tongue-in-cheek style? I mean, really now, if we can suspend disbelief around FTL travel and the proximity of life forms in such a small volume of space... <img src="http://images.stardock.co

We all know that StarDock is a gaming company, and they make games for clients. Most of us here happen to be clientswhic gives us some right to ask for new products/features. That said, I'm kind of astonished at how bitter some of you guys are getting on this multiplayer thing. The Internet is a crappy medium for these kind of discussions, but at this point you guys are arguing w/Frogboy like this were a football message board and we were all 17-year olds. Can't we all ju

I think the different alignment bonuses come into play at different times of the game, and in differing levels of intensity. For the Good alignment, I definitely enjoy the Arnorian Battle Armor!!

Smaller ships might survive longer, but it's unlikely that they'd be able to punch through the Defenses of significantly larger ships often enough to make this work particularly well (especially after 1.2 gives players even more incentive to build Defenses). One possible alternative would be a one-shot or two-shot weapon that could be mounted only on Tiny Ships (think a torpedo bomber). Rather than having an endless number of 1- or 2-strength attacks, allow one or two 6- or 8-strengt

Well thought-out original post, and good responses. If the AI can handle terrain, I'd love to see it! I agree that the UP is perhaps the least successful part of the game. It's more like a random event than an active ingredient in strategy. I'm not sure how to get AI to handle a revised UP, but I never noticed the AI doing dumb stuff in SMAC, and if Sid Meiers' team can pull it off ~7 years ago, I'm sure the StarDock guys & gals can come up with something cool h

There's also a "Set Rally Point" option from the Shipyard, so you can not only automatically launch ships from a specific planet, but have them go to a set location anywhere on the map and then take a specific action (i.e., "Wait", "Assemble into a Fleet", or "Auto Attack"). Very useful for assembling strike fleets without the micromanagement.

I thinkest the biggest problem is getting an AI that could handle tactical combat. Brad is the lead guy on Galciv and for all of Stardock, and it's the AI that is his biggest passion. I simply haven't seen many tactical combats that were fun to play, where the AI was very competent once things got interesting. To make battles interesting, you need to introduce something to the combat resolution besides straight math (e.g., the special abilities for units in Heroes), but it's very

Congrats on the recognition, Cari! Sorry those congrats seem to get sidetracked on explorations of gender and identity in the American workplace... Seriously, it's good to see the recognition and the promoting awareness around women active in the gaming industry. For whatever it's worth, one of the most notable examples that I know of goes back a few years: Frog City based here i

I lean towards the traditional method (I'll almost never pay more than $20 for an expansion pack myself), although it's really up to you and your marketing teams to figure out the economics behind the different options. That does sound exciting. I get especially stoked about expansions that significantly alter gameplay in one or more ways. Doesn't have to be mind-bending, just something that enhances the replay value of the game above and

A simple storyline tweak would fix this as well. Something along the lines of "As the conflict with the Drengin Empire was warming up, humanity found themselves sending out colony ships to remote sectors. Different leaders will find themselves in different circumstances, facing different challenges, as they move through the unfolding campaign against the Drengin--and worse." You could integrate this into more of a persisting thread through

Brad, in terms of that second poll, this is probably old hat to you and/or your marketing folks, but there's a pretty common measure that's all the rage among consultants right now: The guy that coined the original concept calls it a "Net Promoter Score". I'll spare you all the details--lots more articulate stuff in the biz journals out there, but if anybody's interested, they can start at <a href="http://chiefmarketer.com/crm_loop/roi/new-

Errant pedants of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your sense of civility... Sorry, I didn't think anybody had taken a Neo-Marxian spin on this original post! Some people here even end sentences with prepositions. That is something up with which I will not put!

In my playing of just the original (and then the patched version--the approved patch, not the betas), I've only noticed one glitch, and it's scheduled to be fixed as soon as the final version of the next patch comes out (less than 2 months after release, I think that is?). In general, I think a lot of the complaining is by people who downloaded the beta but don't realize it, or just malcontents. The fact that the board admins, lea

Feinan, you can allocate Espionage spend through the "Foreign Relations" window. It's a little slider--I think down in the lower Left hand corner of the screen, if memory serves me correctly. Hope that helps!