Greetings! Today I would like to ask you guys some questions about strategy games. 1. What specific features of diplomacy do you traditionally like the most? I want you to be as specific as you can be. Which parts of diplomacy from any game do you like the most? What parts do you remember long after playing the most? 2. Looking back, how many turns do your favorite games last? This is important to know the specific number of turns the game in Question lasted. 3. Consi...
Forever now, I’ve been naming my PC’s “Frog-<Year purchased>”, Toad for my home machine and Turtle for my laptop and then benchmarking them. My Here’s a brief history of their Passmark scores: Frog-2003 (Dell Pentium IV): 132 Turtle-2006 (ThinkPad T60) 150 Turtle-2007 (ThinkPad T61) 286 Frog-2007 (Dell XPS, Intel Core 2 Extreme) “Total monster” 798 Frog-2008 (Intel Core2 Duo E8200 Alienware Area 51) 2280 Frog-200...
This week the team up of Stardock and Dallas based BonusXP was announced ! We’re all very excited to work together on a new game that we think gamers are going to really like. Little by little the pieces of our long-term strategy get announced. Here’s a recap of what’s been going on: 2011 Stardock sells its Impulse digital distribution platform to Gamestop 2012 Stardock spins off its enterprise software unit into EdgeRunner Stardock bu...
My desktop has 3 monitors with lots and lots of windows. On Windows 8, it gets really fatiguing picking out the active window. That’s because Windows 8, unlike Windows 7, doesn’t have shadows. It’s one of my biggest pet peeves with Windows 8 visually. This wasn’t a problem with Windows 7 because each window had its own drop shadow which changed based on what was the active window. As a result, at a glance, you could pick out the active window. To a...
First Summer with the chickens. They seem to be having a good time. I’m late on harvesting honey though, too much time spent in the debugger.
Ah to be young again. I’m watching Twitter afire with different groups blaming each other for the death threats of different people. They’re all wrong. They’re not sending death threats. It’s the crazy lurkers who do and they are typically not particularly into the cause. Death threats: A starter’s guide Now, first, let’s define a death threat because I see a lot of people confusing “I hope you get cancer” with a death threat.&n...
Have you been getting a bit frustrated in recent weeks about having your well crafted or well-intentioned point mischaracterized as something vile and disgusting? Maybe they just misunderstood right? Nope. You have just run into someone who intentionally chooses to misrepresent your position in order to cheaply gain the moral high ground. Nearly every bit of PR trouble I’ve gotten into over the years has been the result of someone mischaracterizing something I’ve said or posted in...
The game industry has been ablaze for, really, the last couple of years about misogyny within its ranks. This really came to a head in the past couple weeks when an outspoken “indie” game developer was accused of some sordid activities in exchange for media coverage. Online culture has a serious toxicity problem. It gets worse every year. Here are 3 things that are driving it: #1 The tabloidiziation of the gaming media. First, I want to emphasize tha...
Greetings! Well, my friends, there’s so much going on around here these days that I don’t even know where to start. Please forgive me for my rambling in advance. Galactic Civilizations III As a developer, having a 64-bit only game engine is amazing. As I type this, old man Kael is testing to see what a GalCiv game with a hundred or so AI players will play like. Can you guys imagine that? A game where the galaxy is alive with hundreds of empires (not counting min...
I’ve had nearly every Microsoft Surface they’ve made. Surface RT, Surface Pro 2 and now the Surface Pro 3. The original Surface was really just a technology demo. You couldn’t really do real work with it. The Surface Pro 2 was the first version of the Surface that could, in theory, be used for something useful. Realistically, the Surface Pro 2 was only useful as a work machine when hooked up with a real monitor, keyboard and mouse. Its weight to screen size ratio made it la...
Greetings! The team is really excited to get Beta 1 of Galactic Civilizations III out there. The target date is one week away. The Founder's Edition, which is what provided access to the Alpha builds along with a lifetime subscription to everything we make for Galactic Civilizations III (all expansions, DLC) will not be offered anymore once the beta comes out. On the other hand, the beta Early Access edition will be $5 off the list price of $49.95. So what's up?
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The Internet is toxic, but its toxicity is usually equal opportunity One of the more annoying trends in our society has been the substitution of action with rhetoric. This has really taken off in the age of Twitter where people think hashtags are a replacement for actually doing something. Today I read an Opinion Piece on Polygon called “ No Skin thick enough: The daily harassment of women in the game industry” by a woman named Brianna Wu. It's an article I r...
The Scarab brand has been reintroduced this year with the launch of 3 new jet boats. These jet boats are the spiritual (and in many respects, literal) successor to the Seaddoo line of Jetboats that BRP discontinued at the end of 2012. layout), the 195 (a 19 foot model) and the 215 (a 21 foot model with 2 Rotax engines). As a current (and happy) owner of a 2011 Seadoo 150 (and occasional user of the Seadoo Challenger), I can say that the general build quality of the new Scarab line is s...
Okay guys! I'm out at the lake for the next couple weeks. I only plan to be on working when the weather is crummy. I just checked out source code for E2015 and will be working on that during the rainy days. While I'm out. please DO NOT burn down the place. I know it's tempting. I realize now that leaving the ammo dump and the fuel depot together in the same area of the forum were mistakes but resist! Just resist. Thank you!
It looks like, with any luck, LH v1.7 will be going out a week from this Thursday (July 17th). This is possibly the biggest update we’ve done to Legendary Heroes since its release. You can read up on what’s new in it here: https://forums.elementalgame.com/455808/ Besides a ton of tweaks to the game itself, new features, new content and improved AI we were able to diagnose some crash bugs and fix them as well. So not only should it be the funnest update we’ve done but the most st...