Warning: Spoilers below.

The Thalan have the most unique technology tree in the game because they come from the future.  Here are some of their unique technologies:

 

Hyperion Domination (Evil Only)

Hyperion Domination incorporates a number of various tweaks to ship design that results in a 10% bonus to ship hit points.  Unfortunately, the work to do this is very dangerous. Luckily, the steady supply of slaves abducted across the galaxy to work on these special ship design improvements ensures our ships will remain in peek condition.

Xeno Brain Washing (Evil Only)

Having studied the way the humanoid species of this time period think, we have devised new ways of making more money from their tourism while at the same time greatly increasing a planet's influence in the galaxy.

Weapon Magnifier (Evil Only)

By making use of an unstable energy source, the weapons on our ships now gain a 10% boost to their damage.  The only downside, if it can be called such, is that the lifespan of those on board will be shortened and it causes increasing pain over time to those who work the weapons. However, we have staffed the most dangerous parts of the ship with lowly abductees from other worlds.

 

(Good and Neutral Techs are also present and are considerably more powerful).

Xeno Colonization

The planets in the galaxy are truly alien to our species. When the colonization fleet entered this space-time, we had overlooked a number of key factors that in hindsight should have been obvious. For one thing, our species has had little experience dealing with the surface of worlds. In our time, in a dying universe, the ability to exist on the surface of planets in an unprotected environment is unthinkable. As a result, none of our equipment is well suited for being used in an untamed environment.

Xeno Colonization begins the process of adapting our equipment and strategies to working on untamed planets. As a result, our population growth will increase by 10%.

 

Alien Soil Studies

Now that we have begun to colonize planets, we are quickly discovering that we are not adapted to the various kinds of bacteria and fungi that exists on different plants. While we are inoculated against most diseases carried by animals and planets, we did not take into account the kinds of bacteria that exist in the soils. Alien Soil Studies will decrease our sensitivity to the bacteria we come across.  This will improve our population growth rating by 10%.

 

Stellar Production

The logistical underpinnings of our civilization were based on a premise that does not exist in this space-time. That premise is cheap, nearly unlimited energy. The Apocalypse that originates in this space-time in their near future does not reach our space-time for a considerable amount of time. As a result, we have developed energy sources that are far beyond anything that is present here.

Unfortunately, the Hyperion Matrix we brought with us, the source of our advanced technology, is all based on what would be called "Expert Gravitronics". This is a technology that simply does not exist in any form and would require decades for us to re-invent.  As a result, we have to make use of portable fusion reactors that we buy on the open market or manufacture ourselves.

Stellar Production is the adaptation of our tools for technological and manufacturing production to use fusion reactors as opposed to Gravitronic Reactors. The side-effect is that while our production will be far beyond what anyone else is capable of, the maintenance of our systems will be an order of magnitude greater as well.

 

Technological Adaptation Level 1

While the other civilizations of this galaxy make use of various means to research new technologies, those means are not consistent with the way we've evolved to research new technologies. That isn't to say we can't use "Research Labs". It is that we simply do not fully grasp how a bunch of individuals can simply come up with new ideas.

Technological Adaptation involves taking our Hyperion Matrix to form a Technology Matrix which makes use of vast amounts of energy to take existing technologies and automatically generate, over time, improvements to them using advanced probability systems to determine the likelihood of acceptable improvement to a given technology.  The down side is that they require immense amounts of energy to operate which requires the relatively inefficient fusion reactors.

As a result, our Technology Matrices will be very productive but very expensive resulting in us probably not being able to make full use of them.

Technological Adaptation Level 2

This is the on-going struggle to improve the efficiency of our Technology Matrices so that we can bring the cost down.

Technological Adaptation Level 3

This is the final level of adaptation to our Technological Matrices that make use of fusion based power systems. They are still very expensive to operate but are superior to most other research systems in the galaxy.

 

Industrial Adaptation Level 1

Like most of our core technologies, our manufacturing capacity is based on the assumption of the availability of massive amounts of cheap power. Our Industrial Matrices operate by channeling immense amounts of power to replicate a pre-designed item.  The amount of power needed to do this is understood even by relatively primitive civilizations (E = MC^2). Our Industrial Matrices can product a great number of things but the energy requirements mean that they are relatively cost ineffective.

Our Adaptation systems rely on us finding more efficient uses of fusion based power while we try to supplement our power with gravitronic-based energy sources.

Industrial Adaptation Level 2

Through efficient use of power, we have managed to drop the maintenance costs of our Industrial Matrices by a considerable amount.

Industrial Adaptation Level 3

We have improved our energy efficiency about as far as we can get. But the results seem reasonably satisfactory until we can make use of Gravitronic power.

 

Basic Gravitronics

Gravitrons are the elementary particle of the universe. The universe exists in 11 dimensions. Some of the civilizations have a basic understanding of what they call "String Theory". In String theory, all matter is produced based on different frequencies of sub-atomic particles called strings.  What they do not yet understand is that these strings all rest on an arbitrary edge of an even more elementary particle called a Gravitron.  While they are correct that vibrating strings create all matter and energy, they do not yet realize that these strings are not arbitrarily positioned. The gravitron is 11-sided -- one for each dimension of the universe and each edge has its own strings.  Beings of a given dimension can only perceive a limited number of these edges (beings in the third dimension can perceive 3 sides but do not realize that all strings they are aware of are directed in one of three predictable angles because they cannot perceive the other 8 angles).

Gravitronics matters because once gravitrons (not to be confused with gravitons) can be harnessed, any conventional power system can be easily enhanced to produce 2^8th more power than it would normally produce.

Basic Gravitronics is about as far as we can get in this space-time because while our scientists on hand know the basics of Gravitronics, our colonization fleet did not bring anyone with an expert level understanding of gravitronics.

All of our key material and energy research rests on our understanding of how the universe actually works. The net benefit is that our ability to research technologies that other civilizations have equivalents of will take less time because they are making use of trial and error in their experiments where-as we are approaching our technological achievements through a more thorough understanding of the universe.

 

4D Phasing

4D Phasing allows us to increase the output of our fusion reactors by a considerable amount by making use of an additional dimension of energy. As a result, our ship building factories will see a significant boost in production.

 

Dimensional Exploitation

We have begun to integration our knowledge of 4D Phasing into our weapon systems which will result in those weapons producing additional damage.

 

Dimensional Weaponry

With the success we've seen with dimensional exploitation, we have focused on producing weapon systems that explicitly take advantage of 4D phasing (as opposed to merely a byproduct of other research). As a result, our weapons have become increasingly powerful.

 

Near Omnipotence

We have embarked on the path to conquer this galaxy through technological victory. For us, this means to recapture our full technological advantage. It will require immense amounts of scientific research to put together the necessary infrastructure to dominate the galaxy with incredible weapons, but we believe this is the best path to take.

 

Expert Gravity Channeling

Every interstellar civilization has some form of artificial gravity. Artificial gravity is merely the basic channeling of gravitational forces. Gravity is, after all, simply the indention of mass into space-time. The unified theory of force that all civilizations at this stage have recognizes that energy can be used to shift the gravity that is exhibited by mass in different ways.

However, what no other civilization grasps yet is just how much can be done with gravity provided that enough power is available. Basic Gravitronics allows us to shift the gravitational outline of a ship in ways that enable our ships to move more quickly through hyperspace. As a result, our ships gain a speed bonus.

 

Hyperion Hull Design

Hyperion Hull Points make use of expert gravity channeling to constantly shift the gravitational center of a ship in such a way that even if the ship takes damage, it remains structurally sound far beyond the damage point where most other ships would be destroyed. While expensive, they will provide our civilization with a significant advantage when so equipped.

 

Hyperion Starbases

Other civilizations we have observed have a myriad of technologies that enable them to learn how to make the most out of starbases.  Luckily, this is a path our civilization took long ago.  With Basic Gravitronics in hand, we can now produce starbases with significant advantages in all conceivable areas in a single stroke.

 

Mechanized Warriors

While other civilizations seem to insist on training their citizens to die en masse in battle, we do not have that luxury. There simply are enough of us to spare as canon fodder.  Mechanized warriors are armies of robotic troops that can be controlled from afar. As a result, our troops are immensely powerful per man.

 

Defense Industries

Like the other civilizations, our weapons are broken up between mass based weapons, missile based weapons, and beam weapons. Unfortunately, all of our weapon designs rely on a manufacturing infrastructure that is simply not present in this space-time. We knew this would be a problem.  The challenge in traveling to this space-time meant that certain sacrifices would have to be made. We are able to skip some of the rudimentary weapon and defense systems that other civilizations apparently must go through, but in the end, we are going to be dealing with the same basic technologies -- except that ours will be of higher quality.

 

Temporal Mechanics

Our universe exists in 11 dimensions. There are also a near-infinite number of universes that are connected to each of those 11 dimensions. Destroying a universe is a non-trivial effort.  And yet, somehow, the primitive species of this space time have managed to do just that. Specifically, the species known as humans, in their near-future, manage to create such utter destruction that the resulting ruin feeds upon itself and permeates all of creation throughout every dimension.

The only bright side to this is that this destruction travels at the speed of light. The downside is that the destruction moves at the speed of light through folded space which means it will engulf the universe in far less than the 13 billion of their years that it would otherwise require.

We have thus brought a single strike force through dimension 4 to this particular universe in the hopes of averting this apocalypse. Thus far, the humans do not seem to be the type to unleash the kind of destruction that they apparently destined to do. But they are not what they seem to be either.  The humans in their government, the Terran Alliance, attempt to provide a diplomatic, peaceful coexistent front-end to their activities. They genuinely seem to be interested in living in peace.

And yet, these same peaceful humans are incredibly ruthless when motivated.  For example, we have learned that only 10 years (human years) ago, the humans wiped out a civilization known as the Xendar. The humans fight what they call "total wars" which is in contrast to the skirmishes that other civilizations seem to fight.  That is, humans seem to resist war to a point but once a threshold has been passed, the humans fight to win for all time.

In the current time, the galaxy is beset by an immense war with multiple factions. The most powerful faction is called the Drengin Empire. They are a ruthless, evil civilization whose motivation is control and conquest.  Their brethren, the Korath, are xenophobic and wish to wipe out all non-Drengin life.  The two are struggling for control.  The Korath are quite obviously being manipulated by the remnants of a the malevolent Arnor civilization called "Dread Lords" who lack the numbers to conquer the galaxy through open arms but are potent enough to use pawns to accomplish their ends.

At the same time, the main human fleet has disappeared to where we do not know. But not before leaving Earth protected by an Arnorian shield that nothing can penetrate leaving the Drengin frustrated in their attempts to final victory over the Terran Alliance.  The Terran Alliance still has a handful of task forces in the galaxy who are quite capable of being every bit as brutal as the Drengin when necessary.

And then there are the other civilizations who have chosen sides.  Our concern is with the humans.  Our goal is to build up enough of a force so that when we identify the cause of the ruin, we can act.

 

The Hyperion Matrix.

Every advanced civilization has played the hypothetical game of what if you could go back in time 1,000 years. What would you bring with you? We have done just that. And what we brought with us is the Hyperion Matrix, the store-house of our knowledge as well as enough equipment to get us on our feet.

We have enough equipment on hand to ensure that our capital world will be virtually unconquerable by anything but the most massive of forces.  The problem, however, is that we completely lack the infrastructure to replicate our equipment as-is.  Our objective is to research technologies that will aid us in making use of our vast technological advantages before external threats overcome us.

Twilight of the Arnor raises the stakes.  I really don't like the concept of nerfing. If someone is too powerful, then I tend to like to correct this by making everyone else subsequently more powerful.

Those of you who have played the beta so far can attest that if the civilizations from Twilight were to go up against the same civs from Dread Lords that the Twilight civs would utterly destroy the Dark Avatar civs.

But what we're working on right now is just going to be so much fun in this next beta as we begin to get into serious balancing.

I am starting to think that we may not make the date we want. I really want to have adequate time to work over the AI.  I've learned a lot of new tricks and strategies over the last few months and it's going to take quite a bit of coding to incorporate these ideas into the game.

I will give you one spoiler: The base speed for ships is now 2 instead of 1. I did this so that some civilizations (notably the Arceans) could have a negative speed ability (so they move at the same speed as below).

I also wanted to move things along a little bit to support the Immense sized galaxies.

Also, when you're playing these betas, you absolutely, positively must let us know if you run into any out of memory issues.  In fact, if you really want to help us, play the game in a window and keep the task manager open (ctrl-shift-esc) and look at the galciv process.  If it grows beyond 1.5 gigs then we have a BIG problem and you should look to sending us your saved game so that we can profile it.  The whole 2 gigabyte limit on process memory is going to be a big deal in PC gaming.  As someone who desperately wants to play games in which there might be 10,000 ships and 10,000 planets, it annoys me to have to deal with these kinds of limitations. 

Anyway though, there's just so much cool stuff in this expansion pack to play with. We're having a really fun time with it.  I'm working on the Thalans tonight (yea, New Year's Eve but I'm partied out ). 

The Thalans are the most interesting civilization in the game. If you get Twilight, you absolutely must spend some quality time with the Thalans (especially since they're going to be a major factor in GalCiv III someday).  They have significant unique tech trees that depend on your choice of good, neutral or evil (i.e. xeno ethics is really important with them).  It also means that a lot of their techs won't show up by default on the tech tree until after you pick a ethical path.

Incidentally, be sure to read a lot of the back story on the Altarians which are slipped into the tech descriptions.  There's preview info on our fantasy strategy game that's in development in there. (I am dying to talk about the fantasy strategy game, it has, and I kid you not, the most advanced 3D engine for strategy games that has ever been developed. Smooth transition from a whole world down to an individual leaf. And while it uses lots of DirectX 10 goodies, we're doing a lot of special coding so that it looks amazing on DirectX 9 and the whole game brings new meaning to the concept of modding -- the modding engine is PART of the game and we are using it to build the game ourselves and we use it to submit content into the master database which the game then uses -- and so will players who want to come up with really cool stuff).  The fantasy strategy game is really the kind of thing that strategy gamers usually don't see because only an insane indie game company would make a turn based strategy game like this -- i.e. the kind of technology and budget usually only seen in high end RPGs or first person shooters but instead used to cater specifically to strategy gamers. You'll see what I mean when the time gets closer.

Anyway, good times ahead. I think Twilight of the Arnor is the work I'm most proud of since getting into game development.  I just hope people enjoy all the next text and subtle tweaks.  12 unique civilizations to play with mean 12 different cultures to explore. :)

The Altarians do not call themselves Altarians. It is the term humans call the residents of the third planet orbiting Ara Centauri. Known as "The Altar", it has become simply known as Altaria since it is the only planet with intelligent life in that part of the galaxy.

The evolutionary history of the Altarians is a story on its own. The Altarians name for their own planet is loosely translated as "Elemental". But how they evolved on this world is something of a mystery.

Long ago, a sentient species evolved from warm blooded lizard-like beings that became known as the Drath.  And yet, multiple humanoid species evolved in a short amount of time despite the lack of any primate species on the planet.

There are many theories on how so many different sentient species could arise on the planet. But the various myths and religions on Altaria insist that it was the result of the presence of the dark Mithrilar Draginol whose influence caused a single humanoid species to evolve alongside the Drath.  This attracted the Precursors whose conflict had not matured.

The Precursors fought a series of proxy wars using the fledgling Altarians as their clients. Different Precursors modified the young Altarians in different way resulting in a series of subspecies and early nations.  The Drath found themselves in the middle of this conflict and eventually was forced to flee the world with the help of sympathetic Precursors.

In the meantime, a series of incredible wars were fought out on Altaria with different factions laying claim to the world. At the end of one particularly brutal war, the planet is nearly destroyed in what becomes known as the cataclysm. Nearly all life on the world is wiped out. 

While the world recovers, the war between the Precursor factions raged across the galaxy in what becomes better known as the Arnor/Dread Lord wars.  The war is concluded just as the world begins to heal itself.

The post-cataclysm Altaria recovers slowly with different factions vying for control. The world itself is littered with artifacts of the Precursor wars which threaten to ultimately destroy the world again.

Much of the history between the rebirth and modern Altaria is lost.  What is known is that the modern Altarians are highly peaceful and benevolent.  They also have the genetic ability to manipulate what is known as "dark energy".  It is a difficult concept to grasp. Just as different species can recognize different light spectrums, the Altarians have the capability to inherently make some use of dark energy.

This inherent ability has only limited use in a technological society. As the rise of the Drengin Empire and Arcean Empires show, technology is the ultimate equalizer.

Physically, Altarians look identical to humans. They are not, however, humans. They are not genetically compatible and do not share the same DNA. But they are similar enough in DNA to ensure that there is some unknown connection between the two.

For the first time ever, my main desktop machine is also a laptop. I never thought that day would come.

For the past 3 years, my desktop PC has been what I thought as a very powerful Pentium 4 based Dell XPS system.  But after getting a new ThinkPad T61 laptop, I did some benchmarks and discovered that the ThinkPad was substantially faster than the Dell (other than in the hard drive area where both are roughly equal).

During the holiday, I plan to work on computer AI in Galactic Civilizations and today I got the laptop set up with all the various development tools to get going on that. It's the first time I've coded on Windows Vista so it should be quite interesting to see how that works out.

So, I'm not the only one who said, "Hey cool, the beta is 3D today!" am I? :)

The Thalans and the Altarians are not enabled for this beta as was previously scheduled because they are going to be wicked cool and with all the excitement of Christmas we were concerned for your heart condition. This update will also include some of the assets for the Ascension Victory, but it is not yet fully implemented.

As a note, please make sure to e-mail your bug reports to [email protected] unless you actually NEED a response from a support tech (eg, you can't get into the game.).  The support techs are actually going to have to work over the holiday, and if you save them the trouble of having to foward the tickets to me, I'm sure that they'll appreciate it.  Oh, and if you have save games, yes we want them but we want them zipped.  I've had trouble unzipping files compressed with Vista's default zip program, so if you have Vista, please download the trial for WinRar or some other program so that I can actually unzip your file.

Happy holidays everyone!

+ FIXED: Bug where class 0 planets were hard coded to 10 textures

+ FIXED: Crash during end of turn due to temporary fleet created without all the information it needs (fleet that would be created by Orbital Fleet Manager)

+ FIXED: Added code to fix save games that cannot be submitted to the metaverse due to error 12.  This will only work if the original serial number that the game was started with is still in your registry.  If it was changed because you had to re-install and you got a different serial number from SDCentral, this still won't fix it for you. 

+ FIXED: Bug where you couldn't add Terror Stars to fleets

+ FIXED: Re-enabled fix for stuck turn button now that it accounts for space miners on auto-improve

+ FIXED: Techs with the tag InfluenceAbility to use the correct tag, CultureAbility

+ FIXED: The typo for the tech requirement for Interstellar Construction

+ FIXED: The display name for Industrial Replicator Level 2

+ TWEAK: Changed the value for the new end game conditions for compatibility with the metaverse