Galactic Civilizations II still sells amazingly well. Both at retail and digitally.

As a token of thanks, I was thinking of working on an update in my spare time after I turn in the book manuscript next month. Are there any small updates you guys would like to see in there? Mind you, it would be just be me. On a couple of cold weekends doing this.

If there is a Galactic Civilizations III someday, it’s going to have to deal with a lot of issues in its game universe.

If we look at the story of Galactic Civilizations as a 5 chapter (so far) novel you’d have:

Chapter I: Galactic Civilizations: The humans develop Hyperdrive and its technology spread to the other 5 major space-faring civilizations (the Drengin, Arceans, Yor, Altarians, and Torians).

Chapter II: The Altarian Prophecy: Shows us that long ago, there were other races of powerful beings that battled throughout the universe. One of these beings, known as Draginol, used a powerful object known as the Telenanth to create a precursor civilization that came to be known as the Arnor.  Draginol and his peers eventually disappeared for reasons we do not yet know leaving the Arnor as the guardians of life.   Draginol’s presence, however, for reasons we do not fully understand still, resulted in the Arnor, the Altarians, and humans being visibly similar in appearance.

Chapter III: Dread Lords: This chapter opens up the long-awaited war between the Drengin and their allies (notably the Yor) and the Humans and their allies (notably the Arceans, Torians, and Altarians).  The Drengin accidentally free the Dread Lords from a prison located in a pocket universe where the Arnor had put them and they begin to wreak havoc.

As a result, the humans and their allies are forced to deal with the Dread Lords (which they’re successful) only to be beaten down by the Drengin and Yor.

Chapter IV: Dark Avatar: Life is good for the Drengin.  Arcea is occupied. Toria is occupied. Altaria has been bombed into submission and only continues to fight on through the Altarian Resistance.  The humans, always clever, have managed to keep Earth protected by using an Arnorian shield to produce a forcefield around the planet.

But the Drengin Shock troops, known as the Korath, are insisting on the extermination of the defeated. The Yor support this as well. The Drengin, by contrast, “merely” want to enslave the defeated. 

It turns out that the Dread Lords have been pulling the strings of the Korath and the Drengin manage to fight them to a stalemate.

Chapter V: Twilight of the Arnor: The Korath are slowly beating back the Drengin Empire thanks to their relationship with the evil Dread Lords. Luckily, a human expeditionary force has found the last Arnorian who provides aid to defeat the Dread Lords once and for all and ironically saving the vile Drengin from their genocidal brethren.

At the end of Twilight of the Arnor, the evil Drengin reign supreme. The Earth is still protected behind an impenetrable forcefield but is not a strategic factor.

How’s that for a depressing point to leave off?

…

So where does Galactic Civilizations go?  The story still has 4 more chapters in my mind with the last chapter having many possible endings to it.

One of those endings results in the Yor becoming the dominant force in all the universe (not just the galaxy).  As someone who has a healthy interest in astronomy, the sheer scale of the galaxy, let alone the universe is something I take very seriously.

In the dark future where the Yor take over, there are no living creatures anywhere. The universe itself becomes sentient via a Yor-invented material known as “the substrate”.  Essentially it is material that spreads across the universe converting all matter into this material in which the Yor come to exist within.

The best (and still poor) analogy would be that this material is used to turn all matter into a single massive computer and all consciousness exists within this “Matrix-like” existence --- except there is no biological life. No one is connected to VR but rather all conscious reality exists within it with the collective intelligent of the the Yor being able to spread the substrate to all places at once through the folding of space.

Nothing in this scenario would even exist in the physical, material world anymore. All life would exist in the virtual sense within the Substrate. THAT is the goal of the Yor.

The Yor, of course, are right now merely synthetic organisms that exist still as individual physical entities in the material universe.  They do not yet have the means (technological or otherwise) to realize their dream but that is their goal.

…

Of course since we’re humans, the fate of humanity in the form of the Terran Alliance (those darn earthlings) will be the center point of the concluding chapters.  But they are an even greater threat than the Yor (and if we get to make GalCiv III you’ll see that).  The Thalan, in fact, are actually a race of beings from a parallel universe who have figured out the means to travel to other universes and managed to enter our universe at a point before the humans destroyed the universe (though, “destroy” obviously will have to be explained since one man’s “destroy” is another man’s “transform”.).  The universe, being over 13 billion years old and unimaginably large can’t be “destroyed” in the conventional sense.

…

From a GAME point of view, however, what makes me exited for a future Galactic Civilizations game are the artifacts which will allow players to do a lot of crazy things in game that are fun and interesting. But that’s for another discussion. :)

Piece of Trivia:

The aliens in Galactic Civilizations II were designed and modeled by Paul Warzecha. Today, he is the lead character modeler on Diablo 3.

What? You thought because we released Demigod and are working on Elemental we’d forget our beloved GalCiv players?  GalCiv II is barely 3 years old.

So specifically, what’s in the pipeline?

In the next week or two (depending on marketing scheduling) we have a new build of GalCiv II coming along (no particular order):

• Fixed bug where creating a new planetary governor when another was already assigned to a planet would cause the planet to not be able to access it's governor's info, causing a crash somewhere along the line.
• Fixed a bug where a different governor than selected for deletion in planetary governor manager window was deleted.
• In the lower-left corner of the main screen, clicking where empire income and population are displayed will now take the user to the civ manager screen instead of the research screen.
• Dark Avatar and Twilight of the Arnor intro videos now only play before the first mission of their respective campaigns in the Ultimate Edition.
• Changed how fleet rally points handle putting ships into fleets
• Now, ships that can't find a fleet to join at the rally point will attempt to create a fleet with any ships at the rally point that are also not in a fleet, and any leftover free ships will attempt to join that new fleet, as wel
• If a new ship still can't find a fleet to join, it will just stay a single ship (until another fleet opportunity comes) This prevents fleets of only one ship being formed when there are no fleets to join, and fixes a disappearing turn button bug caused when  fleets were disbanding when they didn't need to.
• If a civ's saved tech tree can't be found, a new tech tree is created from the default tech tree def instead of looking for an actual tech tree named "default."  This prevents a crash while loading a save that lost its races' tech tree names.
• In Ultimate Edition, now checks that a scenario is a campaign scenario before trying to load one of the campaign intro videos.  This fixes a crash that happened whenever a custom, non-campaign scenario was started in the Ultimate Edition.
• The "Set rally point" window that pops up from these screens now shows whichever rally point is currently selected for that ship/planet.
• Game won't try to calculate which techs are race-specific in UIBeginGame() if there is only one major race playing in the game.  Before, in some campaign scenarios where only the Terran and the Dreadlords were playing, every single tech was restricted to the Terrans because they were the only race whose tech tree was being looked at. This caused the Dreadlords to have no techs, so they had negative tech scores. 
• Changed range checks for race number in GetDialogue() and SetDialogue() to make sure the race number isn't greater than OR EQUAL TO the max number of races. This caused a crash if a conversation file mistakenly specified a race number exactly equal to the max number of races, since the index was too big for the dialogue matrix.
• Initialized selected governor in planetary governor manager window to NULL in OnStartNewGame() to prevent crash when starting a new game without quitting the app.
• When filling the build queue, now checks whether an improvement on the queue is a galactic achievement, super project, trade good, or one-per-planet improvement before adding it to the queue.  Prevents an exploit where the user could build many of these improvements by correctly timing when they added them to a planetary governor's build queue.
• AI smarter with regards to friendly players moving through their territory (not seen as threatening as before).

Nothing particularly exciting there.  But development continues. :)

Finally upgraded our network here at Stardock. w00t!

Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition is now at retail.  This version combines the original release with the 2 expansion packs into a single integrated game.

The code-based is the latest version if Twilight of the Arnor but the content is the entire saga put together.

 
Ultimate Edition takes the full game and presents it in its 3 acts.

Act I: Dread Lords where the galactic civil war puts the humans from Earth and their friends up against the powerful Drengin Alliance.

Act II: Dark Avatar puts the player in the role of a commander of the Drengin Empire on what to do with those civilizations they have conquered.

Act III: Twilight of the Arnor brings back Jena Casey from the outer rim who must work with the last of the Arnor to put a final end to the Dread Lords menace.

Twilight of the Arnor completes the story of Galactic Civilizations II.

Ultimate Edition’s graphics are vastly better than the original Galactic Civilizations II even though it uses less memory and runs faster than the original.

Design your own ships.

Choose among 12 civilizations or design your own!

 
In GalCiv, you’re not playing in a distant galaxy. It’s the 23rd century and the humans are on planet earth.

Win through superior fire power, better technology, stronger economics, or the clever use of diplomacy. It’s all up to you.

Galactic Civilizations: Ultimate Edition is at a retailer near you or you can buy it direct from Stardock.

If you already have all the expansion packs and the original then you’re all set already.