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Beta 1.1 Eve

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Beta 1.1 Eve

A preview of what is in v1.1 beta

from JoeUser Forums

We plan to release 1.1 this week which means between tomorrow and Sunday. ;)

Note to gamers: BETA means it's going to be buggy. I played a long game tonight and it was quite buggy. Hopefully we'll get them straightened out tomorrow. Most of the bugs revolve around the auto pilot line drawing so we may just take that out for the beta and keep working on it. It wasn't a hugely requested option anyway.

The New options:

People are going to like those. But realistically, I find the game lacking without tech trading. I've spent a week playing with it and without trading tech, you really lose something.  I rewrote how the AI trades tech so that it's pickier with each other but at least people have the option.  Don't get me wrong, it is a nice change of pace.

I actually MUCH more like the blind exploration feature. This is where you can't see the other players in the game with the influence mini-map option until you've explored the territory they're in.

The two new features here totally rock and I think if we added nothing else to 1.1, would be the most significant in terms of expanding the replayability. You now have the option to simply select N players and have it pick them out. The randomize intelligence lets you pick a overall difficulty and the game will randomize up the intelligence to fit that so that some civs are smarter than others.

But THIS BELOW will almost certainly be the most popular new feature:

Way m ore space to design your ships, rotateable parts, able to hide parts, it's just much better overall. You can even go back and rotate/resize after something's been placed.

This is the auto pilot line feature. It's pretty cool and very useful in large maps. It's a bit buggy right now though. I'm sure they'll get it fixed soon.

You can now tell what area of effect a starbase will have before you build it.

See how you only see their influence based on what you've explored. So you can't easily tell how vast someone's empire is. The fun factor of this is much higher than I thought it would be.

There's a ton of other features, we'll have a full log of it before we go up.

43,127 views 28 replies
Reply #26 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
This is absolutely awesome. Stardock is now officially my favorite PC game developer. Period.
Reply #27 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
For those of you who don't like the starting positions, you REALLY need to not use "Tight Clusters". Huge and Gigantic galaxies on Tight clusters rarely start off with good starting positions. Set it to "Loose Clusters", and you'll be much happier, I guarantee. The Tight Clusters option is like playing Archipelago maps in the Civ series.

I wonder whether the clustering algorithm takes into account the size of the galaxy enough. The amount of empty space you can have with Tight clusters in a Huge/Gigantic galaxy is pretty mind boggling.


Actually I always play on "scattered", this way all sectors end up with one or two systems. You're definitely right about the clustered galaxies, however, the fact remains that even in this spread out universe, the majority of the players can start in the same corner, while the other half of the galaxy is empty, or worse, with one player who's prime for taking over the rest of the galaxy. This is one of the situations where I definitely will ctrl-n, especially if I'm the closest one to the empty cluster of stars.

Another situation that I ctrl-n is when two homeworlds are right next to one another. If I wanted to have races die that fast, I might as well have selected 9 races and rush, but I don't really find that to be enjoyable past 2 games. What I would really like to see is an "equal distance" calculation as an option to the current randomized placement. It would also help, as I mentioned before to not put special tiles on homeworlds, at least none of the 300% and 700% bonuses anyways. 100% bonuses I can live with, and the slight effect it has might make games interesting. The large bonuses tend to throw the game out of whack really fast.
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Reply #28 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Ahhh game programmer weeks.... take the latest possible time from when promised and that is when it will get release. Takes me back.

But seriously, Fantastic job - looks like you guys hit your programming stride now that you got that evil box deadline out of the way. No rush, I rather have it later with less bugs than have an unplayable beta. Oh and try to get some sleep. Too many hot-pockets can kill ya.

Oh and if you want to add one more option, how about making the graph bars only show up when you get a certain level of espionoge. This way you will be blind on what the computer is doing until you can afford to send some spys in. Just a tought.