This Week's Progress Report
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Stardock Forums
Stardock Forums
We've done a lot of updates here internally that we hope to make available to you guys shortly.
Amongst the fixes/updates:
+ We think we've solved some of the more aggravating bugs reported with regards to managing ships.
+ We implemented purchasing of star ships and improvements. So now you can buy ships/imps from one of 4 companies (Bastards, Really awful bastards, Terrible Horrible Bastards Corp., and Microsoft). There are pros and cons to each one (some ask for a lot of money up front and others ask for little up front but require you to pay a lot down the line).
+ The economic system has been better worked out. Star ships cost money to maintain now which should help alleviate star ship swarms.
+ Debt matters - each year you're in debt increases the amount of anger in your population (which affects morale which affects everything). If you go -500 into debt, production stops and you can't buy anything. We are going to actually work hard to make it so that you can be in debt a lot if you choose to, just that you will eventually wreck yourself if you stay in debt too long. I.e. make being in dept very tempting since it lets you spend beyond your means. We'll be playing with this more later. I would like to increase the debt celing to something ridiculous like -$10,000 and then have an interest on the debt and have your civilization slowly crumble the longer you're in debt but have it be a slow process.
+ The amounts make more sense now. In terms of a planet, at start, will only produce a couple of shields worth of things rather than many.
+ Leasing system and processing fully implemented (pain in the butt to implement that).
What needs to be done before the update:
a) Improvements, Ships, and technologies tweaked.
Need the AI to be more intelligent about what it researches. Eventually the AI will learn from people who play on Stardock.net - i.e. your strategies when you play can be recorded (optionally) and good players can be contrasted with bad players and what they do right and wrong analysed by the AI and used. Little things like what technologies are best to research and in what order. What improvements should be built and in what order. I'm just too lazy to work too hard on that when there are human beings to learn from. 
But in the near term I'll have to put in something since the Metaverse won't exist for awhile.
c) Neeed to make sure mouse focus problems are fixed (they weren't today).
d) Other little balancing issues.
e) Fix that robot screen to show something intelligent.
f) Rough in some of the text for the .tech files. once this is done, you guys are certainly free to modify the .tech files if you want to put in descriptions that you think are better than what we come up with. We'll add anyone who helps in this manner to the credits. The GalCiv techs were not created by me or anyone on the team but rather engineers, scientists, historians, etc. who happened to be on the beta team who contributed.
THEN for next week:
Basic (very basic) diplomacy - being able to selectively be at war and peace with people. It'll be very simplistic at first. We just need to be able to start coding the AI and work with the game mechanics so that this stuff is roughed in.
THEN for the week after that:
Full Diplomacy will begin being implemented (it will expand over the next year but you'll start seeing it grow).
The polish and detail issues that have been mentioned here probably won't be addressed until Spring. Our goal is to rough in the basic pieces and then polish and implement fine tuned features over time.
Thanks so much for the time and effort you guys have already put into this. We really appreciate it. We're pleased to see that the game functions on all the different platforms of Windows already.
Amongst the fixes/updates:
+ We think we've solved some of the more aggravating bugs reported with regards to managing ships.
+ We implemented purchasing of star ships and improvements. So now you can buy ships/imps from one of 4 companies (Bastards, Really awful bastards, Terrible Horrible Bastards Corp., and Microsoft). There are pros and cons to each one (some ask for a lot of money up front and others ask for little up front but require you to pay a lot down the line).
+ The economic system has been better worked out. Star ships cost money to maintain now which should help alleviate star ship swarms.
+ Debt matters - each year you're in debt increases the amount of anger in your population (which affects morale which affects everything). If you go -500 into debt, production stops and you can't buy anything. We are going to actually work hard to make it so that you can be in debt a lot if you choose to, just that you will eventually wreck yourself if you stay in debt too long. I.e. make being in dept very tempting since it lets you spend beyond your means. We'll be playing with this more later. I would like to increase the debt celing to something ridiculous like -$10,000 and then have an interest on the debt and have your civilization slowly crumble the longer you're in debt but have it be a slow process.
+ The amounts make more sense now. In terms of a planet, at start, will only produce a couple of shields worth of things rather than many.
+ Leasing system and processing fully implemented (pain in the butt to implement that).
What needs to be done before the update:
a) Improvements, Ships, and technologies tweaked.
Need the AI to be more intelligent about what it researches. Eventually the AI will learn from people who play on Stardock.net - i.e. your strategies when you play can be recorded (optionally) and good players can be contrasted with bad players and what they do right and wrong analysed by the AI and used. Little things like what technologies are best to research and in what order. What improvements should be built and in what order. I'm just too lazy to work too hard on that when there are human beings to learn from. 
But in the near term I'll have to put in something since the Metaverse won't exist for awhile.c) Neeed to make sure mouse focus problems are fixed (they weren't today).
d) Other little balancing issues.
e) Fix that robot screen to show something intelligent.
f) Rough in some of the text for the .tech files. once this is done, you guys are certainly free to modify the .tech files if you want to put in descriptions that you think are better than what we come up with. We'll add anyone who helps in this manner to the credits. The GalCiv techs were not created by me or anyone on the team but rather engineers, scientists, historians, etc. who happened to be on the beta team who contributed.
THEN for next week:
Basic (very basic) diplomacy - being able to selectively be at war and peace with people. It'll be very simplistic at first. We just need to be able to start coding the AI and work with the game mechanics so that this stuff is roughed in.
THEN for the week after that:
Full Diplomacy will begin being implemented (it will expand over the next year but you'll start seeing it grow).
The polish and detail issues that have been mentioned here probably won't be addressed until Spring. Our goal is to rough in the basic pieces and then polish and implement fine tuned features over time.
Thanks so much for the time and effort you guys have already put into this. We really appreciate it. We're pleased to see that the game functions on all the different platforms of Windows already.
