Message from Frogboy on Main Page

from Stardock Forums
Interesting... :D

What do ya think?

"Tuesday, May 06, 2003 - GalCiv Development Schedule Update

The stand alone 1.03 update is currently going through Strategy First's quality assurance testing. Once it completes that, it'll be available for download.

Next week some of us will be at E3 so there won't be any updates next week. A beta of GalCiv 1.04 will likely show up either at the end of this week or early next week.

Version 1.04 will include:
+ More stars in the galaxy
+ Some new United Planets events
+ Some bug fixes
+ Significant AI update. The lower level AI will be more active but make more "mistakes". The higher level AI will play even more intelligently with quasi-fleets, build up for war, one AI player will really focus on star bases, and more.

Meanwhile, at E3 we will be announcing Galactic Civilizations: Expanded Universe. The FREE expansion pack for Galactic Civilizations. Just because it's free doesn't mean it's light on features either. Here's a small taste of what's going to be in the expansion pack:

+ A host of in depth linked events
+ The Technology Tree Navigator
+ Hyperlinks in the game to get to detailed Info
+ A BUNCH of new technologies for both good and evil
+ New Starships for both good and evil players including the Death Knight unit.
+ Updated graphics
+ Rally Points
+ Much more powerful Governors for easing late game micromanagement further.
+ The Arnor minor race
+ A bunch of new random events and United Planets issues
+ A ton of new anomalies that visually look very very cool and do some really crazy things.
+ Lots of AI updates
+ More story based events to give more information on the back story on GalCiv.
+ Lots of new AI behavior in diplomacy.
+ New cut scenes

The Expansion Pack will go into beta in June and be completed sometime this summer. It is free for all owners of Galactic Civilizations / Drengin.net users.

Lots of exciting stuff. Since GalCiv 1.0 we've added many thousands of lines of new code to the game based on player requests, the expansion pack will be even bigger than everything we've done so far.

Have fun! "

498 views 14 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
I am REALLY looking forward to the continued patches AND the expansion pack. I can already tell now, there will be even MORE sleepless nights due to the OMT syndrome...heehee....Man, I love this GAME!!!!

:D :CONGRAT: :d
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
As an afterthought, there are only 4 games I've played in all these years that left me sleepless....Star Flight, MOO, Homeworld, and the entire Diablo series!

"Oh the pain....the pain"!

:)
Star Control: Origins
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
The Tech tree navigator IN-GAME with be great! As will more powerful govenors(hate late game tasks, slow game way down). Better AI diplomacy sounds great. Would like some solution to the arrow up and down in diplomacy screen, be nice to be able to just branch out like a windows folder for ship types. :)
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Everything sounds really great, I'm looking forward to seeing it. But then, I never doubted it, as I own Entrepeneur and the support for that was really incredible as well. It was one of the reasons I preordered GalCiv, breaking my rule of never preordering any game ever again. :)
Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
I am truly grateful for all the building being done on the game, but... As I said in another thread, with folks up high going on holiday, does that mean our little Metaverse problem gets to chill for a week or so as well? Just how in the heck am I supposed to build up any street cred in the meantime? By the way, that expansion pack will rock!
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
Linked events sounds cool if that allows to make scenarios, but I wish there was a map editor.
Overall, this sounds great.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
David Ballantyne:

Believe me, it won't be too big a pack for a 56k6 modem. I downloaded the game and multimedia on a 56k6 link. It took me several days at the end of a link that had approximately 400 - 500 ms lag most times of the day (this resulted in all kinds of fun trying to download).... except from about 5am - 9am local time. So that is when I did my downloading. At those times I was mostly getting about 80% utilisation from the 56k6. Rest of time it often got as low as 12%, according to the program in XPHome that is brought up by Ctrl-Alt-Delete (Windows Task Manager).

And this is also in despite of a program that doesn't have auto-resume after the 3rd failed try to get a file. And I've seen failures at 15MB of 16MB downloaded. With the consequent wipe of the file and restart all over again for that file. Fun... not. :notsure:

So believe me, it can and will be done :)
Damian

~SDC~
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
You are mad ;)

I pay per minute for my internet connection so I hope the expansion pack isn't too big. I can probably stretch to 20 or 30 megs.
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
All the upcoming features sound great. Really looking forward as well! :)

... still hoping for a 'AI tech victory option' though.
Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top
For people who, for whatever reason, can't download the expansion I wouldn't be surprised if you could obtain a disk of it directly from Stardock for a minimal shipping/handling fee. That might work better for those who pay by the minute, but that would be up to the Stardock team to decide on.

It might not even be that big a download, from reading the description of the pack it sounds like the bulk of it would be the cutscenes (as far as size goes). If so they could probably split the download to make it easier on us 56K types.