Galactic Civilizations Coming Soon

dragonsister writes "Like Master of Orion 3, Galactic Civilizations is a turn-based strategy game involving colonizing and dominating the galaxy - militarily, diplomatically, or economically. Unlike MOO3, GalCiv will (release date March 26th) come without copy-protection; Stardock are addressing the piracy issue by providing a bonus pack and further downloads to users providing a CD key. This 'rewarding the honest' approach is precisely what Slashdotters have asked for ." I've been playing a lot of MOO3, which I love, but this is looking great as well. Ah, the bounty of games.

GalCiv may also be purchased via a subscription to Drengin.net, which also supplies a variety of 'smaller' games which would not sell so well in the normal market.

I have no connection to anyone producing Galactic Civilizations. I'm planning to buy the game because I've been impressed by:

• The developer's interaction with fans, at least on the newsgroup comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic
• The level of beta-testing employed
• The comments from the public beta-testers
• The developer's budget of a year of additional development, including AI improvements (Stardock has a reputation for good game AI anyway!)

Others may not be so pleased to hear that the game is developed for single-player only - no multi-player - but to each their own."

Comments

Great move

[Ice Tiger]

This is a good move, allows you to burn backups of your CD's. For an example, Battlefield 1942 came out in the uk (maybe elsewhere) with CD's that were poorly manufactured and so have been cracking whilst in the drive etc. EA charge 7.50 UKP to replace each disc and as there are two that's an additional 15 UKP for the game on top of retail price. Not a good situation at all. Oh before you ask the copy protection on the CD's is a nightmare to get around.

The game comes with a CD key and this can be used to prevent online play which is what bf1942 is all about, ok so that doesn't prevent the warez kiddies from playing the game in single player which is like a training ground for multi player, so the CD key could have been the main form of protection for this game. Grrr

Critical mass

[little1973]

I am curious to see if they really solved the critical mass problem found in strategic games as well as they claim here.

hopes and expectations

[Stalcair]

I really would like to see this system work for them but am afraid that it could possibly blow up in their face. This would not only be bad as it would punish them for placing trust in consumers but would only serve to give valuable ammunition to those that wish to eliminate fair use. Other companies would surely not ever dare such a thing any more than they would attempt to have a product based business model and then open source. (A service model CAN work with this assuming, like any business that there aren't incompetents running the show). I know this has been done with various levels of success in the past but it just seems that this here is a major focus. Furthermore I know that it is relatively easy to obtain cracks and images to download from various sites yet the issue here is one of business confidence.

On another related issue, I am hoping that the "Internet distribution business model" starts showing a more vibrant show of support soon. The ability to save money by taking out the middleman is just about always wanted. Add to that the possibility of increasing quality and diversity of games by reducing the groupthink draconian measures from the publisher. Every little bit helps I suppose.

Better than MoO3, hopefully...

[Ephemeriis]

I bought MoO3, and played it for 30+ hours, desperately seeking some kind of enjoyment. I never found any. I wound up returning my copy for Freelancer. I've been watching GalCiv for a little while now, and it actually looks halfway decent. I think I may need to pick up a copy. This time around, however, I'll wait and see what some of the players are saying before I pick it up.

yrs,
Ephemeriis

Re:Better than MoO3, hopefully...

[Ramze]

I was bored to tears with Moo3. It's almost nothing like Moo2. I was hoping for a larger queue for each planetary construction list, more technology to play with, and maybe even a technology tree that was almost like what they gave us, but this whole dealing with the Galactic Senate thing is boring (gee... a game for politicians! ugh!) and with only so much able to fit in the queue at a time (3 for planet, 3 for military), you almost have to put everything on Auto. The game plays itself & you end up fighting with the AI for what you want to do. In Moo2, I could go through a few hundred turns w/ out looking at it, just click a button, and it would tell me 30 turns later when my colony ship finally was built. Moo3 requires you to take each and every turn & you reeeeeally feel those 30 turns go by. (I even forget I tried to build one!) and if you want it to go to another system... another 12-30 turns & man... that takes forever, too! I'll stick to Moo2. I don't know WHAT they were thinking when they made Moo3. It's a huge disappointment

Comment on Stardock

[greenreaper]

I've been a Stardock follower for quite a while now. See, I tried out some of their software quite a while back, and I found a rather nasty bug in their window skinning product, WindowBlinds. So I decided to go report it.

Most companies would simply have acknowledged the bug, maybe offering a simple thank-you. Their response was to give me a registered copy of the software and encourage me to submit more bugs.

(disclaimer: this approach may not work for everyone :-)

Stardock are good. They don't mess their customers around - they might not always do what some of them want, but hey, that's true of any company, and at least they explain why ;-). They go the extra mile to help - almost every member of the company is available on IRC, from the CEO downwards. They have a dedicated community on the Stardock newsgroups and over at WinCustomize, who helped them transition from OS/2 to Windows - people bought Object Desktop subscriptions a year before it was officially out, because they trusted Stardock to deliver.

Heck, they even had a positive cashflow throughout the dot-com era, because they didn't rely on stupid business plans and massive investment. Just on listening to their customers, making a good product and shipping it.

GalCiv is one of those products. It's got a solid AI, and more gameplay than you can shake a stick at. And the price is right. So go get it now.

And no, I don't get paid for this. ;-)

Linux version?

[intnsred]

I remember playing GalCiv way back in the OS/2 days. It was a pretty cool game.

But this is 2003 -- are they going to come out with a Linux version?

If not, then why do I care? Should I have to go out and buy Windows XP to play a game? (Sorry, I can't run Windows for legal/ethical reasons.) Should I have to dumb down my Linux box by buying a commercial WINE variant that seems little more than a big kludge?

It's got to be native Linux binaries or nothing...

Re:Not everyone is honest

[Anonymous Coward]

You wanted the game, and you bought it. There is your economical reaon.

A game only needs to be developed once. You are paying for both yourself and the guy who just got a copy, but the alternative would be that neither of you would pay (he just spent all is money on beer after all), and neither of you would get the game.

Would you really want him to pay anyway? Think supply and demand... When demand goes up, so does the prices. Two customers instead of one is double the demand. Expect the price to rise a lot.

Don't believe propaganda about prices being so high because of piracy. The prices are so high as they can be without loosing the rest of the customers. If there were more customers, they could rise the prices even more, and only loose some of their customers. As long as the price increase causes a bigger rise in profit than the drop caused by loosing customers, they win.

An in bonus, they can sue the rest for copyright violation, and get extra money from them.

Re:At last!

[Surak]

Now wait a minute here. Here's a quote from the Google Groups link:

In a nutshell, the game has no copy protection whatsoever. Instead, we've
taken the route of providing long term feature support (i.e. updating the
game with new stuff). But to get to these new features you go through
"Stardock Central" which uses the serial # that comes with the game. The
serial # is authenticated on the server so even if someone cranked out a
serial # generator or passed out serial numbers on the net, the server would
be able to detect serial #'s that aren't in the retail list or serial #'s
getting a lot of differnet IP's downloading the entire game.

This sounds an AWFUL lot like what Microsoft did with Windows XP. Yet, when Microsoft banned certain serial #s from getting SP1, Microsoft was (and still is) severely bashed on /., but when Stardock does the same thing for their "cool game" /.ers are overwhelming saying how cool it is and that this is what they asked for. How come?

Re:Actually, MOO3 can run on Linux-with a little h

[Omnifarious]

But, will Galactic Civilations run under WineX?

Re:Actually, MOO3 can run on Linux-with a little h

[ClassicG]

That's the big question right there, isn't it. I certainly hope so, but of course there's no way to find out until somebody gets their hands on a copy and tries it. Unless of course somebody at Stardock tries it out themselves before the game is released.

Hmmm - that would be nice - to have the actual developers try to get the game running in WineX before it's released. Heck, maybe they could even fix any incompatibilities in the game itself, rather than have TransGaming update WineX to support it! Not going to happen, sure, but damn, it would be cool...

OS/2's killer app, now for Windows!

[The Fun Guy]

Seriously, this game was pretty much the only reason I kept OS/2 Warp on my machine as a dual boot with Win 3.1 back in 1996-97. I loved OS/2... the multiple virtual desktops, the multithreading of all the programs, the clean looks, the stability... but what I really loved was GalCiv and the responsive way that Stardock and Brad Wardell would update the AIs on a regular basis, based on feedback from the players. I can't wait for GalCiv to make its return to my machine. (No, I am not in their employ... I just really, really loved that game, and really, really hated being forced to give it up when I finally gave up on OS/2.)

Shoot, I take over the world...and I got rejected

[skogs]

There has been a lot of posting about Linux on the XBox, but I am much less adventerous and way too cheap to buy a brand spanky new xbox. But Simcountry has an incredibly in depth and hopelessly nerd centric game that I can play with the glories of Opera/IE/Netscape. They simulate an entire world right down to each country's roadmap and social security payments...and they do it on linux. It takes almost 12 full hours of processing to make each world go thru one month of activity. I wonder where they fell on this list of favorite linux games. All servers are dual processor units running everybody's favorite free operating system:linux. You can see how it all works. And see me.

Re:At last!

[Surak]

Doesn't XP require you to activate eventually?

I've been using it for 6 months without activation, it hasn't asked me yet. Come to think of it, I think we're using the corpporate version though.

The return...

[j_w_d]

of the ONLY great game ever turned out for OS/2. StarDock was originally supplied apps for OS/2. One - not a game - provided multiple desktops and otherwise took great advantage of the object oriented nature of the os. GC was multithreaded and had a vicious AI. GC also earned a Game of the Year Award at one point. Great news.