I grew up in a steel town. A dying steel town.  I wouldn’t have called the area I grew up as “rough” but no one would describe it as “privileged”. In my high school, there was a group of 5 jocks who would go around beating up “nerds”.  One of my friends came in one day with two black eyes and his face incredibly swollen up.  He had been “chosen”. One afternoon, while leaving my advanced math class, I was punched in the back of the head.  I fell to the ground and tur...

Back in 2012, Stardock released Elemental: Fallen Enchantress.  It was the sequel to 2010’s Elemental: War of Magic.  War of Magic was an ambitious game but had a very rough launch due to its brand-new engine just not being able to handle the game.  We released a series of updates to address those problems but ultimately, we felt we needed to reward those who had bought into the early access. With the launch of Fallen Enchantress, I sent out an email to all those who had boug...

I think long before global climate change matters one way or the other that the fate of humanity will be determined by how we make use of strong AI. In the near term (next 5 to 10 years) we’re going to see a huge swath of jobs disappear.  This past week Panera bread added a kiosk to let me order my food.  Wendy’s and McDonalds are already heading that way too.  Transportation is next.  My Tesla Model X with auto-pilot is on the way. I should have it in the next mon...

Got a Kindle Oasis.  I won’t bore you with a full on review because there’s a ton of reviews that basically say it’s wonderful but too expensive. It is a lot more expensive than the other Kindles but the screen is noticeably better thanks to having a more consistent series of lights and it is also noticeably lighter. If you do a lot of reading on the Kindle and you’re not price sensitive, get it.

With the 1.7 series done, we’re well on our way to version 1.8 which has a pretty substantial update in terms of the underlying plumbing of the game as well as new features. A lot of work has been spent on the multiplayer parts of the game.  While few people currently play GalCiv III multiplayer, it is a part of the game that we want to improve the general robustness on as it, in turn, makes the single player game more robust. We are also putting some work into the AI diplomacy...

[Not released yet]   HIGHLIGHTS Deluxe Campaign: All dialog now voiced, 3 new missions, 2 new cut-scenes, dialogs no longer modal New Units! Hall of Fame Lots of UI improvements Substantial AI improvements UI Health bars and more informative tool tips for unit within an Army in the Army unit panel Unit panels can be data driven such that new units can be added by modders and hooked into the UI Skirmish map sorting Select air hot key (F2) Add someone as a friend from...

Ok, so internally we've been playing on huge maps and another type of map size called massive. Huge maps are (I believe) 4X larger than Large.  Massive maps are 16X larger than the large maps.  We won't support Massive in Ashes 1 (you have to have 4GB of video memory to run them and at least 6 CPU cores). However, even on huge, yes, we are going to need a way to zoom out and see a strategic view of the map.   We aren't going to turn every individual unit into ...

* PHC Falcon AA armor increased from 8 to 16 * Substrate Nexus shield regen rate increased from 0.5 to 1 * Substrate Rengeerator shields increased from 760 to 800 * Substrate Regenerator cost reduced from 360 metal to 180 metal * Substrate Drone Hive shields vision decreased from 600m to 500m * Substrate Drone Hive metal cost increased from 210 to 310 * Substrate Mauler metal cost increased from 355 to 380 * Substrate Punisher max shields reduced from 900 to 800 * Substr...

Ashes of the Singularity v1.11 was released today.  The update is a lot bigger than its 0.01 version change might indicate.   Highlights: Lots of campaign balance updates Mini map region icons now scale based on their output Unit and weapon balance updates Lots of small usability improvements   Change Log   m04 (caletheon) unlock amplify, amplifier, power regulator, energy projector, weapons lab, carving turret, intensive care, scan projector OV...

  Impulse to GameStop Back in 2011 Stardock sold its digital distribution platform, Impulse, to GameStop and began migrating its titles to Steam, GOG, Green Man Gaming, Gamersgate, and other sites. Stardock Strategic Investment Fund In 2013, we announced the formation of a strategic investment fund in which we invested in two types of studios: Ones that we directly founded and helped manage (see above) as well as helping fund promising new game studios ( Mot...

Greetings!   This week's micro update is now live.     We like to do these little updates whenever there's an opening in QA for something small that is data only.   Avatar speed reduced from 250 m/s to 200 Nemesis logistics increased from 3 to 4 Zeus logisitcs increased from 3 to 4 Fury logistics incresed from 4 to 8 Hades HP increased from 1200 to 1250 Avenger rad cost increased from 24 to 39 Avenger logistics increased from 3 to 4 Dronehive metal cost ...

  Occam’s Razor: Option 1: Our award-winning real-time strategy game is the worst game released in 2016.   OR…   Option 2 : The person who has me blocked on Twitter and gave our last game a 4 may have some objectivity issues…

    PHC Frigates To enforce the PHC charter, several prominent Post-Humans formed the “PHC Weapons consortium” in which they pooled their collective ideas into producing weaponized constructs. The first results from this cooperative effort came in the form of what the PHC now classifies as “frigates”. These early militarized constructs lack both the lethality and refinement of their more advanced cousins now classified as “Cruisers”. For the first two ye...

Greetings! In a few moments I"ll be previewing v1.01 http://www.twitch.tv/stardock  

Just a head's up: + Your Nexus now provides 2 metal per turn (instead of 0) + Controlled metal deposits provides 0.5 metal per tic instead of 1 + Meta extractors add +1.5 metal per tic instead of 1 + PHC Brute max velocity increased from 118 to 120 + Engineer max velocity reduced from 200 to 180 + Artemis max velocity reduced from 84 to 80 + Zeus max velocity increased from 95 to 96 + Reaper max velocity increased from 97 to 110 + Constructor max velocity reduced f...