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

At last!

[SkoZombie]

A game company that understands the key is not to cause inconvience to users but to commit to ensuring theres a better reason for buying the game "because otherwise you're a bad boy". I'll be buying it!!

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:At last!

[OneEyedApe]

First, this is just a game, not an Operating System. Far less critical. Second, this is a far better scheme than a lot of companies have been using lately. Be honest, and you get extra stuff. It sounds like these would primarily be expansion pack type enhancements, and not really critical patches.

Re:business model....

[kfg]

For many companies, including Microsoft item 3 on your list has been filled in with "Sell a shitload of games."

You are perhaps mistaking missing some sales with being unprofitable. Many people make this mistake, and thus fail to profit. Half a fresh pie you can eat is better than a whole pie rotting in a safe.

Apogee actually managed to make a profit *giving* fully functional games away and only selling additional content.

Go figure.

I'm not at all sure that wouldn't make a viable commercial model today. Sell what amounts to a "super demo" for a nominal fee to cover costs, say ten bucks, and get as many copies out there as you could, and then sell extended content for twenty five bucks to those who found the game worth it.

Of course this would only work if you were putting forward a really *good* game.

If you're putting forward a crappy game, yeah, you're right, the only way to profit is copy protect the hell out of it, and make sure you've got the buyer's money well tucked away up front.

Hey, maybe that's why so many games are a pain to play these days. If you can't even get authorized to play a game you've actually paid for you'll never get to find out what a piece of crap it is while you can still return the bugger.

Good games, at a fair price that can simply be copied to a HD and played from there without a key have never failed to be appreciated, and to sell quite well.

KFG

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. ;-)

GalCiv has multithreaded AI

[glMatrixMode]

GalCiv has such a bright AI that at most difficulty levels, not only doesn't it cheat, but it is defavorised against the human player - for example, if I understand well, it gets less money.

This has been made possible by the use of a multithreaded AI. To wit, whereas most turn-based games did 'think' only during a short lapse of time between the human's turns, GalCiv thinks continuously while the human is playing. So that allows for a much longer computation time.

GalCiv has already been used on Tom's Hardware to test the hyperthreading capacity of the new Pentium4 3GHz.

Moreover, there's a stuff called the 'Metaverse'. In short : after you end a game, you can automatically upload some crucial game data (your score, elements of your strategy...) to a central server which then deduces improvements to the game's AI. Then I guess you end up with a game which plays better.

The guys from the GalCiv team say it has already been working with the betatesters's games and has very significantly improved the game's AI.