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.

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. ;-)

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?