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.

I was pleased to visit GameStop and see Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition smack dab in the middle of the “What’s hot” shelf.

I have to say, ultimate edition came out pretty well with the original and the 2 expansions integrated together as a single entity.

Meanwhile, even though Elemental, Demigod, and Sins have gotten a lot of attention lately, there’s a new update of GalCiv II in the works.

Okay, last time to test out the improved AI I did a death match between the major AI personalities and I.

I learned that the Terran Alliance AI is too meek at pursuing weapons based tech early on so that will need to be looked at.

I still lose, however because the Thalan rush researched to large scale building and I was too slow to keep up.

http://frogboy.impulsedriven.com/article/331922/AI_vs_Human_Death_Match_Game_1

This time, I'm going to be a lot more aggressive.

Observation: The Arceans don't expand particularly well.

Observation: Terran AI still isn't aggressively getting military techs.

The Terrans went all the way into the year 2231 without researching any weapons. Mind you they researched large-scale building and other potential military techs but in terms of actual weapons, very slow.

I took advantage of their poor research to attack them and took 2 of their worlds very quickly.  I will say I'm surprised how quickly they responded. The AI did react to my attack on them by quickly cobbling together some weapons tech (still quite pathetic) with large scale ships (not pathetic).

So the question is, when should the Terran Alliance AI start building up its military.  It has recovered well but it lost two key planets immediately.

To break the Terran Alliance's back, I have designed the Punisher:

In battle, they play a game of keep-ahead with the Terran shield techs.

This results in a bit of a stalemate. They have a lot more ships, I have a lot better ships.

They recognize this.

So I'll just do what anyone else would likely do.  Make peace, reload, and sneak attack.

Strangely, the Terrans didn't build the orbital command center which would have made it a bit tougher to take their planets. Another thing to look at for a future update.

And soo...

The answer: The dreadnought.

Ah, just figured out why the Terrans didn't have the orbital command center - I captured their planet that had it.

So combat the Dreadnought, I design a newer, more advanced ship. Still a large ship (not a huge one like the dreadnought) it has armor to combat the dreadnought's mass drivers.

It proves superior in battle by a fair amount to the Dreadnought. Defenses matter.

The problem remains is that the Terran Alliance economy has boomed. I may have waited too long to go after them as their technology is far superior to mine.

The Terrans are wearing me down. I can't believe this.

Maybe I can make peace and rebuild.

Well Yea...but I was hoping you wouldn't realize that.

The tide turns in my favor.

Ah the USS Eagle. My Level 23 mega ship.

The Terrans make a last stand with two dreadnoughts and 2 battleships against 2 "Supper Nanny" and one of the original Nannies.

The Terrans are gone.

Cultural conquest! Whohaha!