On Tuesday Stardock will be announcing the fantasy strategy game it's been working on.  (November 4).

Cisco doesn't support their VPN's on Windows Vista 64. What does this have to do with Galactic Civilizations? A lot actually.

I have been working on the GalCiv II v2.0 (tentative release date is November 5) to update the AI and take care of a long list of little pet peeves of when I'm playing.

When I do this from home, I need to use the VPN because I use Vista 64-bit. And Cisco's VPN doesn't support 64-bit Vista which makes it tougher to get updates back into the main source tree.  I can still do it, I just have to use other machines at home to transfer but it's annoying.

Speaking of 64-bit, I will tell you right now that no future Stardock developed games will go out that don't explicitly support 64-bit Windows Vista and beyond. And what I mean by that are native 64-bit versions.  Not 32-bit games running in compatibility but full native 64-bit.  Of course we'll still support 32bit too but there's a lot of performance boosts we could provide to 64-bit players in the future.

Played a lot of GalCiv II v2.0 today.  Other than the issue that the lighting is not working right on my Thinkpad T400 (there's no shadows on planets) it's working pretty well.  The ThinkPad T400 ATI display driver randomly crashes when I play games which is a bit of a bummer too but that's not game related.

One feature that I've concluded we should put in is to let people set the pacing of research any time they want within game.  In a single player game, if I want techs to come faster, I should be able to do that. It's not cheating as it affects all players equally. 

I figure we can set it to be 0.25 to 5 of whatever setting players have set at the start of the game and it resets each game.

Another thing I've concluded is that 2.0 isn't the end of the line. I know whenever I play it I'll have the debugger open making tweaks for each game.

I got a good game of GalCiv II v2.0 in over the weekend.  Here are 10 things the game still needs.

1. The trade routes need to increase more over time than they currently do.
2. Tourism should be worth still more than it does currently.
3. AI needs to be better about researching space mining techs.
4. AI needs more variance in what it researches.
5. AI needs to focus more on miniaturization techs.
6. Integrity fields should cost the same as reinforced hull points (not more)
7. The tech rates should slow down the rate of increase.
8. Defenses should be slightly cheaper to research than they currently are.
9. Need to update the credits to say (c) 2008
10. There should be more incentive to do leases than currently.

So there will be another beta soon...