There’s so much text in Fallen Enchantress that author Dave Stern and I are thinking of having an e-book for players. There’s a lot of material and now that much of it is getting integrated, we hope it’ll start making the factions more distinct.

I can tell you that the AI behavior now follows the writing.

Writing and AI behavior are two key elements. In Galactic Civilizations, all races were the same other than their graphics, text, and AI behavior.  And all that AI behavior work would have been for nothing, imo, if players weren’t made aware that they were actually playing differently.

The world of Galactic Civilizations has some great heroes and villains.  The Drengin think you’re delicious. The Yor are bemused that meat can talk. The humans want to get along…but, don’t ever think the talking apes from Sol 3 won’t grind you into dust if they have to.

Elemental has some really great factions too.  Both before release and after release, we’ll be doing a lot more to make them feel and play differently.

I have my own biases for the different factions.  In my mind, as I code up my interpretation of the various XML tags I’ve come up with some basics on how they behave:

• Pariden is bugged that the riff raff are squabbling over what is rightfully theirs
• Capitar are a bunch of objectivists.
• Altar wants to unite everyone – except the Empires who they despise
• Tarth doesn’t like anyone.
• Gilden are Paladins. Noble and honorable beyond reason.
• Magnar are evil but make no bones about it.
• The Wraiths would rather everyone just die. Nothing personal though.
• The Urxen

I’m still working out some of the others in my mind in terms of programming them.

The way this comes through is in terms of whether they’re paying other players to do things to each other (don’t tick off Pariden as you will find others suddenly attacking you). Another area this comes through in what they say to you when they interact with you.  There’s also what units they build, how well they defend their cities, their biases in research, what they like to build in their cities, etc.)

This is why it’s so important to get good writing and have it communicated – without it, players may not realize just how much the AI is thinking about what say Gilden builds in their cities versus Yithril.

In GalCiv, this was communicated clearly to players via in-game dialog.  In beta 2, we’ll start doing more with this.  And what they say depends on who you are and how you’ve played.

From a player point of view, it lets me incorporate different strategies into the game.  Rather than trying to come up with “the best” overall strategy, I can implement several different ones (some of which may fail).

And a gratuitous tactical battle shot: