Greetings! The team has been hard at work on Beta 2 of Galactic Civilizations III.  Galactic Civilizations III is a space based strategy game that puts the player into the position of leader of a 23rd century interstellar civilization that is expanding out into the cosmos. As they expand, they will encounter other galactic civilizations that are doing the same.  How players react to dealing with “aliens” is up to them. Trade? Cultural Exchange? Alliances? Warfare? It’s all u...

Greetings! Welcome to the sausage factory! Beta 3 of Galactic Civilizations III has arrived with lots of new changes and improvements. We still have a long way to go but progress is swift.   A few highlights Beta 3 brings the Yor into the game.  We’re still playing around with how they “breed”.  The current plan is to have the player actually manufacture more Yor on the planet.  The Yor are a synthetic, pre-singularity lifeform.  Long...

Well the party is almost over for you humans. I’ve never hidden the fact that I consider human beings playing my AI a necessary evil.  I need your money to fund my AI work. This time around, I’ve got a talented young developer working with me.  He makes me feel old. Very. Very old.  A lot has changed over the past 20 years.  It is still technically C++ but it’s all very different from what it used to be. Example code //GalCiv III:  ...

Greetings! I was thinking the other day on how Galactic Civilizations has evolved over the years.  Let’s take a look: Feature GalCiv OS/2 GalCiv I GalCiv II GalCiv III Core 4X mechanics x x x x United Planets x x x x Moral Dilema Events x x x x ...

Drengin are somewhat bigger.

Little shout-out on 23rd century Earth…

One of the things we were excited to add to GalCiv III was more detailed race customization.  This time around, we’ve made it a lot easier for people to create their own truly unique civilizations. You can set your leader to be different from your species Right now, you’re doing the eating but later, they’ll be eating you. Of course, when making a GalCiv race you get to play AS that race and then later play against it if you so choose. So when designing them, you al...

Don’t judge me. So, in the next public build we should start to be able to give players access to prototype components.  These are components that require one of the special resources (Durantium, Elerium, etc.) that give your ships an early head start.  Since you won’t have many of them, they make those early ships very unique. I enjoy making odd looking ships just to house these special modules.

Gameplay notes Every game of Galactic Civilizations III is different.  You can play as any of 8 pre-made alien civilizations who have their own histories, technologies, etc, or you can literally create your own.  After release, we expect players will share their civilizations with one another.  You can play against up to 128 different opponents but in this case, we are only playing against ~8 civilizations. This example is just one game.  The infinitely replayable...

By beta 5, it should be pretty clear that GalCiv III is an entirely different beast from GalCiv II.  This post won’t go into the game play differences, which are pretty vast. This is about something a little more dear to many of our hearts: modding. Why GalCiv II was the way it was The thing about GalCiv II that I would like you guys to understand is that I wrote nearly all the economic, diplomatic, AI and other code personally.  I enjoyed doing it but it also meant that *I...

As we saw back in GalCiv II we did a number of test AI runs with the Drengin vs. the humans on a special arena map. I’m happy to report that we are ready to do that again for GalCiv III. The editor this time around is very very nice. Not that the old editor wasn’t but it wasn’t an in-game editor.           It begins The year is 2241, one year before the events of Galactic Civilizations III’s story. The Terr...

It. Is. On! Our story so far… As an AI test, I see how well the Drengin do in what would normally be a multiplayer game. I have this map where I play as the Terran Alliance run by those crazy primates from Sol 3 (aka Earth) from the year 2245. My opponent are those brutal, skin eating bastards from Drengi who recently wiped out their own sub-species the Korath because, they’re just that nasty. In the previous tests, it’s been a sad sad story of me just wiping out the stupid...

Introductions: The oldest actively developed space strategy game series Galactic Civilizations is the oldest actively developed space strategy game in the world.  The last version, Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor, was released over 7 years ago and remains to this day the highest rated (by Metacritic average) space strategy game of all time.  The series has sold over 5 million copies since its inception back in 1992. Suffice to say, Galactic Civilizations III h...

For those of you who haven't been following Stardock these last few years, it has helped found a series of new studios out in the Maryland and Austin areas. In Towson Maryland, we have 3 studios located in the same building which is where I am today working on the GalCiv AI. The people who make up the new start-up studios include many of the leads of Civ IV and Civ V.  So as I'm writing the AI, I am literally feet away from Brian Wade (Civ V AI) and Soren Johnson (Civ III and ...

Hey guys! I’m going to be hard core on the GalCiv III AI this weekend. For those of you just checking in, I put together a long laundry list of new functions I need to improve the AI. In the old days (when I was younger) I would have written those functions myself but now I’m old and fat and lazy and my far more talented colleagues can put together something a lot less hackish. So this weekend, I’ll be using these new APIs to vastly improve the AI.  The weather ar...