I'm weary. Weary to the marrow of my bones. It's been a long time since I've been this fatigued.  Part of it is obviously getting this beta out but things have been really busy elsewhere with Windows Vista ready.

This whole year really is absurd. But November to January in particular is just out of control.  Windows Vista ships in January and is already starting to perkle out there.  Nintendo Wii this month. Playstation 3 this month.  There's just SOOO much going on that the noise is deafening.

And as I work on tweaking the AI and trying to get some semblance of balance in the values, I feel the fatigue taking over.

So here's my review of the Dark Avatar beta (I'm biased but my work has been purely on AI lately):

1. I think most people are going to like it a LOT if they remember it's a beta.
2. It's pretty stable. No crashes on me yet tonight.
3. The new graphics are very nice. I notice all the explosions and such look nice.
4. Some of the new weapons effects are really nice (big shout out to Stefan who donated some new effects there too -- thank you!)
5. Agents. Wow. This is going to be tough to balance. Very tough.  How much they cost, how much they affect the game, etc.  I think at a certain point players will need to recognize that they will probably have agents on their planets and that they'll need to live with that unless they are dominating.  At first, I tried to eliminate every agent placed on my planets by the alien players but eventually I realized that I could "live" with a few on my planets as long as they weren't on key structures. Otherwise I'm just spending way too much of my economy battling them and not using it to do harm to my opponents.
6. The AI needs a LOT of work still.  I've got a huge list in front of me. There are more new strategic elements going from II to DA than there was going from Galciv 1 to Galciv II. Spies, asteroid fields, planet environments, lots of new techs, treaties.  It really is a whole new -- better -- game.
7. I don't like the pacing yet.  It needs work.  We've made some changes to things -- factories produce a LOT less to make the asteroid fields matter more and to encourage fusion power plants and the like.  But that also means the AI needs to get a lot better at asteroid mining, starbase building, etc.

Stay tuned...

The first public beta of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is nearly ready to go out. Now we're in the final testing phases for getting something that functions. It's not done but it's definitely playable.

A good portion of the challenge has to do with packaging. There's a LOT of stuff in there and we have to make sure that you can play Dark Avatar or Dread Lords together which means making sure the directory structure is in place.

What I'm about to show you is a brief walkthru of the game from the new screen on. I'm in the debugger while doing this so you're going to see uglier graphics, frame rate counters, and  more.   Here we go...

The new title screen. It has a grimmer look to reflect the darker nature of the backstory.

This is the new choose opponent screen. It's much simpler (I think) and yet more powerful since it supports user-designed players.  I'm going to create a quickie custom opponent now.

So first I set up the basics.

Now, on the customize opponent screen on appearance I can choose a custom ship style. This screen still needs work because it's hard to find the custom button, it's way too small for such an important feature.

On the custom ship style screen, I can actually tell what ships the AI will use visually. This screen still needs some work. It needs icons or thumbnails for one thing. Secondly, the available ship templates are based on the chosen style which I'm not sure is a good thing or not.  In essence, players can design the ships that the different computer players actually use -- even modded ones.

Now, on the customize opponent screen, is something we're still working on and will be worked on more (along with the repercussions of it) for months. The different settings are pretty self explanatory.  But the ones that we think gamers will find interesting are:

1. The Natural Abilities.  The AI in GalCiv gets more difficult baesd both on amount of resources it gets (like most games) but also on which algorithms it gets to use. So we've split the amount of money they get from the "smartness" of it.  We still have more work to do on this because we need to display what "Difficulty" the AI is now at based on these settings which will be a combination of Natural Abilities plus Financial Resources.
2. The CPU Usage is going to require a lot more work.  Basically, for many functions I'm writing a "HCPU_" function equivalent that lets the AI project further into the future. This will be a big deal for players who want to see the AI perform better tactically since a lot of "smartness" of computer players boils down to raw CPU -- how much analysis should the AI do about strategies?  But it does mean re-writing a lot of AI code which I've only started to do.  What's a bummer is that this is really a BIG feature for players but I'm not sure how many people other than the people who actually play the game ongoing will really see the benefit. This feature costs as much as say a full cut scene or two.
3. The Super Ability. Players can choose which kind of super ability your custom race has.

And so we have the civilizations set up.

Now you might say, well big deal that Dark Avatar has two new civilizations. But the real work is in the AI personality -- the coding behind the AI.  The custom created opponents still have to borrow the AI algorithms and they still have to rely on the text written for others. So it's not a trivial matter creating new races (not even counting all the artwork involved).  But still, I think most gamers will find it pretty cool that they can set themselves up with opponents of their own design.

So now I'm in the game. The selected ship is my colony ship. The other ship is a space miner which is used to construct mining outposts on asteroids.

On the finance management screen, there's a new slider -- Espionage spending. You can spend up to 25% of your economy on Espionage.

The constructor has been improved graphically. That's one of the things gamers are going to notice pretty quickly is that we went back through all the graphics and re-did them to look nicer. And they actually use less memory.

Diplomacy has been enhanced and will continue to be enhanced with better dialog and more options.  For instance, there are now Economic and Research treaties. You can only hand this out to one player (and them the same way). But the result is that 10% of your economy or research is shared with them. The key words -- shared. You lose nothing from these treaties, they're basically a way of helping civilizations you like.

Here's a bug in my code. But what you are seeing here that the dialog is trying to find a response for the treaty being too early.  One of the annoyances I have with GalCiv II is that you aren't given very much information as to why they reject a given offering.  So we're going through and trying to improve this.

Here's a bug -- the Snarthi didn't remember what image I assigned them.

Meanwhile, I've gotten my first agent. See the red button over on the left. That's my quick link to place the agent. If I press it, the mouse cursor changes and then I select what world I want to put him on. Let's do bad things to Iconia.

The ugly agent graphic is still in this build. But basically I just assigned an agent to the factory on New Iconia. Now, their production is weakened significantly. I can use agents to really slow down my opponents early on if I want.

Since UI is so key in a TBS game, you can in the espionage tab quickly manage all your agents in the field as well as see if your planets have agents on them.

And so now I can see there's an agent on the planet. As a side note, you can't really see in this shot but ships in orbit now actually orbit the planet, you see them flying around.. it's kind of a cool effect.

I've also found an asteroid field to mine. But I have competition for it.

The Altarians are in Dark Avatar but now they're the Altarian Resistance due to the events in GalCiv II: Dread Lords.

My mining base is now in. But I'm only getting 1 industrial point from it since Earth is so far away. There's a secondary problem, because it is so much in the Snarthi sphere of influence, it is likely to end up rebelling and working for the Snarth.

So that's all for now.  Lots of work still cut out to do. I didn't even touch on custom environments or tons of other features...that's for later! ;)

Here is what is new in Galactic Civilizations II 1.4 over 1.31.

1.4 will be known as 1.4X on Stardock Central and in game.

+ Initial Colony buildings have less maintainence.

+ New colonies start out with a population cap of 6 instead of 5.

+ Farms provide less food.

+ Each citizen provides more tax income than previous.

+ Morale buildings have been increased in benefit but techs to get to them cost substantially more (ex: Virtual Reality Center now provides a 40% morale improvement vs. 25% in 1.31).

+ Stock market no longer gives morale bonus (wasn't supposed to in the first place)

+ Updated beam weapon model along with large hull models

+ Updated some of the planetary improvement icons to be prettier

+ Updated Achille's heel, Apocalypse, and Pathfinder missions in the campaign based on player feedback.

+ Tweaks to make money not too hard to get early on but not as easy to get ridiculous levels of money later on (though expert players will still be able to do this).

+ fixed bug where ships on auto-attack would try to attack ships they weren't at war with if the ship was in the way

+ fixed bug with auto attack where it was using the wrong function to check to see if a ship was hidden by the FOW.

+ fixed cheat key to force an AI player to surrender

+ added in code so that when using the CTRL+Z cheat to run the game in AI test mode, it will make the AI take over for the human player

+ fixed bug where ships that were being upgraded but were not selected tried to update the ShipContextWnd, resulting in a crash if the last ship to be selected was deleted

+ fixed a bug where a ship (under certain conditions) could fail to start moving even if it had a path calculated to its destination

+ added additional debug info for missing string in tradewnd, took precautions to avoid a crash

+ Tweaks to the AI code that handles planetary improvement so that they don't do stupid stuff by mistake

+ Fixed integer divide by zero crash (very rare but possible)

+ Fixed bug where if you upgrade a constructor and build a starbase while it is upgrading, the starbase will change into a ship when the upgrade is complete

+  If RAW file fails to load, a height field is generated randomly

+ Fixed crash in Quick Project Window (very rare case)

+ fixed a bug that could occur if you loaded a campaign save game and tried to continue after finishing that mission, instead of using the campaign screen.
 
+ added option to save ship design to disk.  If turned off, the ship design will not be saved to disk and will not show up the next time you start GalCiv2.  Ship designs will still remain in memory until the data is reloaded (from a save game, from starting a metaverse game after having played a normal game, etc).

+ Some minor memory leaks fixed.

1.4 will be available on Stardock Central on October 25, 2006 (as 1.4X). The stand alone version will be available on the 26th which is when the official announcement will occur.

Because there are asteroid fields that can be mined and provide resources to planets, we have had to relook at the planetary improvements.

Some of the changes have included:

• A new type of improvement: Power Plants. These magnify the production coming in by X%.
• Fertility clinics to increase population growth.
• Much higher population limits so that lots of money can be achieved.
• Morale is more affected by population than previously so reaching those limits will be tougher.
• Lower level farms produce relatively little food so that new users won't run into big morale problems. Instead, we'll add an additional farming tech to gradually increase farming on planets.
• We're adding a Food Distribution Center which will increase the % of total farm production.
• Morale buildings will become significantly more powerful at the higher level so that you can keep people happy AS LONG AS you have researched the techs (entertainment networks won't be enough to get some 20+ population).
• Vacation Capital Super Project will allow a single world to be a real fun place (i.e. high morale).
• A new building called the Planetary Revenue Service PRS (one per planet) will increase the number of citizens that are taxed (right now a planet with 12B population only actually taxes 6B of the citizens, The PRS would increase that to ~9B which is a significant increase in the # of citizens you can get to).
• Low-Level Factories won't produce as much as they currently do (making the asteroid fields more important).
• Lab Networks (buildings that increase by a % your research)

The overall idea is that at the low level, money is easy to come by when you're getting started. Then it will start to try up if you don't build up your planets properly to get more population, more economic activity, etc.

For casual players, the system should be fairly straight forward -- simpler -- than GalCiv II. But for expert players, the gameplay becomes very sophisticated as planets now require a lot more choices than previous in terms of strategy. A LOT MORE.

In Dark Avatar, the relationship between food production, asteroid fields, and star bases will be very crucial. It does make writing the AI much harder (I'm going to basically toss out the planet improvement code in GalCiv II which I didn't write in the first place and that person isn't with Stardock anymore so we've been patching the planet improvement AI choosing code since release, better to scrap it and write it new with the new strategies in mind).

Another area I'm really enjoying is the re-design of ship values. A LOT More thought and experience has gone into the new values for how much hulls cost. 

Basically: The bigger ships will cost a LOOOT more. But they will be a LOOOOT tougher. A capital ship should be a capital ship. It should be a big deal. We want to encourage players to make a choice between fleets of smallish ships OR capital ships and have both be valid paths.  It will be very difficult to research both gigantic ships AND ultimate logistics for instance. You may not be able to get to both in a typical game which means deciding to have large fleets of small ships or smaller fleets of very very tough capital ships. 

Logistics have changed as well. A huge hulled ship now uses 10 logistics points and costs 320 just for the hull. BUT, it now has 150 space (about double) and 84 HP. 

So you could picture a couple of Huge hulled ships (using 20 logistics) with 300 space and 168HP having cost 640 to build...coming up against 16 small ships (48 logistics) with 384 space 128HP and also having cost 640.

The fleet of fighters would pack more punch per round but the hull ships would be able to take a bigger beating. There's so many factors to take into account (the time to research the corresponding techs, the "wastage" on building fighters -- i.e. can't build more than 1 fighter per turn, the "wastage" of a shot from a capital ship on a fighter -- a shot that does 20 damage on a ship with only 8 hitpoints isn't going to make it any deader).

The net result is that it just FEELS a lot better. Those capital ships are a big deal. There shouldn't be tons of them out there. One can imagine the best results being mixed fleets -- a couple of fighters and frigates to picket for the capital ships.

The other value I spent a lot of time on today was spies. We're going to have to put in an espionage branch because we want players to be able to put increasing amounts of money into spying.

By now, one thing you may have noticed is that money is going to be much more under control. At least, that's the intention. That it won't be nearly as hard to have lots of money to do things with but there will be a lot more choices on what to spend money on.  But at the same time, we want there to be a real gulf between new players and expert players. A lot more variance in strategic options than previous.

Where before you might just throw tons of farms on a planet or tons of factories, now there are other things to consider -- asteroids? Do you build a food distribution center? Should you build a Quantum Power Plant? And if so, should you re-direct the asteroid mining to that planet instead of the closer one?

Much of the final balancing will be in the hands of beta testers starting next month.

One of the things that probably won't get much mention in the "marketing" of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar (the upcoming expansion pack to GalCiv II) is that we've gone back and updated the graphics throughout the game to be at a new level. But it's more than just eye candy, it's better performance.  What used to require several textures to be done is now being done with a single texture -- reducing memory while increasing the quality (this ship uses about 1/4th the memory that the constructor in GalCiv II uses despite looking a lot better).

The Star bases are an even better example:

Bear in mind, this is very zoomed in at high resolution with anti-aliasing OFF.

Picture all this rotating gently with the lighting changes as it faces a star (the screenshots really don't do justice to how they look animated).  But you can compare the graphics here to what's in the game today (i.e. load up 1.3 or whatever and compare).

Which makes things all the more interesting when we start looking at the specifications of different ships.

Or when we create templates designs to use for future games.

Another little touch is that clouds move independently of the planet's surface so as you see planets rotate, you can see the weather on the planets cycle around (though a screenshot won't really show much new on that since it's in the animation). 

Now, I'm sure there's a good business reason to go back and re-do the graphics for an expansion pack so feel free to, um, let us know what it is so that we can be sure to tout it! ;)