Stardock announced today that the award-winning 4X turn-based strategy title Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition has made its way to Steam. Stardock announced that after years of exclusivity to the Impulse digital distribution platform (now owned by GameStop) its titles would be making their way to a broader PC gaming audience. Fans can now purchase Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition (priced at $19.95) for 25 percent off through December 9 at http://store.steampowered.com/app/202200/.  Nominated for several “Strategy Game of the Year” awards in 2007, Galactic Civilizations II is the most epic turn-based space strategy game ever.

In Galactic Civilizations, it is the 23rd century and the known galaxy is at war. The Terran Alliance and their coalition are fighting a desperate interstellar war with the evil Drengin Empire and their ruthless allies. Behind the scenes, the precursor civilization called the Dread Lords pulls the strings on both sides. As leader of a galactic civilization, it is up to you to ensure the triumph of your civilization. Fight wars, design star ships, research new technologies, negotiate treaties and build an empire that will stand the test of time in this epic and timeless strategy game.

The first expansion title, Dark Avatar, greatly expands the gameplay of Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. Dark Avatar introduces asteroid belts that can be mined for resources, unique planets that require special technologies to colonize, spies to conduct sabotage and destabilization (or used to protect your worlds from the same), new types of diplomatic treaties, an enhanced artificial intelligence engine, and much more.

The second expansion, Twilight of the Arnor, takes players into the year 2227 where the fire of war is consuming the galaxy thanks to the manipulations of the evil Dread Lords. But the remaining factions, led by the humans, have a plan to rid the galaxy of the Dread Lords once and for all. It’s up to you to conquer the galaxy and determine the fate of those around you.

The complete bundle is also available digitally through GameStop (www.impulsedriven.com), as well as direct from http://www.galciv2.com/Purchase.aspx.

If you don’t have Galactic Civilizations II then starting today is a great time to pick it up!  GalCiv II – Ultimate Edition is on sale this weekend for 33% off.  You get Gal Civ II: Dread Lords, Dark Avatar, and Twilight of the Arnor for just $28.

GalCiv II – Ultimate Edition

Stardock Entertainment and Ironclad Games have unleashed a massive changelog for the upcoming Sins of a Solar Empire - Trinity version 1.2 and the update is now available. Trinity bundles the original award-winning real-time strategy PC title from Ironclad Games with the two game-changing micro-expansions, Entrenchment and Diplomacy. Sins of a Solar Empire - Trinity is available via the digital download platform, Impulse for $39.95.

The updates consist of a new and improved Pirate system, updated gameplay balance for the TEC, Advent and Vasari (based on player feedback), engine improvements to handle memory better and provides increased performance, AI tweaks to enhance computer player behavior and more. The entire change log is below.

In the year of its release, Sins of a Solar Empire was awarded dozens of Real-Time Strategy Game of the Year accolades as well as the overall PC Game of the Year award from IGN.com. Sins of a Solar Empire provides a seamless transition between epic strategy and tactical combat modes, a galaxy of intriguing aliens, powerful starships, and colossal planets that come to life with stunning 3D graphics, unparalleled sense of scale, and a cinematic musical score. Explore and conquer nearby planets as one of three factions: the Vasari, the TEC or the Advent and play for domination of the galaxy. Players will explore distant solar systems by applying brute force, cunning strategy, elegant diplomacy, economic mastery, and researched technology.

Sins of a Solar Empire - Trinity can play on most recent PCs and requires Impulse for downloads and updates. With Impulse, users purchase their game and can then immediately download and install the game through the Impulse client which seamlessly manages updates, community features and more. Games become part of that user’s account such that when a user purchase a new machine, a user can simply re-download the Impulse client, logon to their account and re-download all their purchases, even years into the future.

Download Impulse at www.impulsedriven.com.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Trinity/Diplomacy v1.2 Change Log

Galactic Civilizations II has made PC Gamer’s Top 100 PC Games of all time!  Coming in at #74, PC Gamer has this to say:

“Managing two hundred billion people is complicated, and GalCiv isn’t as simply presented as its Earthly inspiration, Civilization. But the excitement of setting out to explore a procedurally generated galaxy of mind-boggling size does so much more for us than an ordinary world map. The scarcity of fertile planets out there makes your brushes with alien races much tenser. It’s a game that dwells on the knife edge between peace and war: we’re all friends at first, but take that f---ing planet just because you got a colony ship to it one turn before me and you will be on thin f---ing ice, fish-thing.”

From Gamesradar.com.

Stardock Entertainment continues to bolster its development staff as renowned fantasy and science fiction writer/editor Dave Stern joins Stardock to oversee creative storytelling and lore implementation in all future projects, including the recently launched Elemental: War of Magic. Stern, author of numerous books including the novelizations of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and The Blair Witch Project and former editor of Pocket Books Star Trek and science fiction lines, was responsible for putting together the Hiergamenon lore book for Elemental: War of Magic Limited Edition. Stern will head up all further integration of the Elemental: War of Magic lore into the increasingly popular strategy title as Stardock continues to offer unparalleled post release support for the game.

For the past year we've been pretty focused on getting Elemental: War of Magic released.  With its release, our minds are turning back towards Galactic Civilizations to see what we can do.  Awhile back I made a journal asking users what small updates people would like to see and lots of users came through with great suggestions.  So we're going to be starting to look through those to see what's next on the agenda.

For those wondering about a future Galactic Civilizations III, right now, our plans for now will be to continuesupporting the existing Galactic Civilizations II -- no GalCiv III is in the works right now.  

Each year, like most companies, Stardock puts together an internal business plan that sets up goals, objectives, and challenges that the company must address.

Part of our internal business plan includes analysis of the state of the products/services we make as well as the results of our customer survey.

Last year, we made this report available to the public and based on the positive response we got for doing so, we’re doing the same again this year.

View: Stardock 2009 Customer Report

If you've never been there before, http://galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Galactic_Civilizations_Wiki is an excellent source for all things Galactic Civilizations related. 

 Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor has received an update bringing it to version 2.03. This also applies to the Ultimate Edition and Endless Universe as well. Updates can be downloaded now via Impulse.

Change log:

• Minor adjustments to tech tree costs
• Arceans more aggressive at colonizing
• Terrans build up military sooner
• Fleet window crash bug fix
• Misc other updates and fixes

This week, I-Mod has announced the public release of their Tech Tree Viewer tool. You may recall their past holiday releases of high-quality tech tree posters--now you can make your own for personal viewing!

The Tech Tree Viewer will not only read in your base game tech trees and produce tree maps for them, but it will also scan any mods you have, and produce a high-quality tech tree map for each race in each mod you have installed. No more wondering just how the latest mod's new tech trees are laid out!

You can find screenshots, and the download over on the official release announcement, and as always, stay tuned for news of the latest mods and releases over on I-Mod's Impulse blog.