I even had to move Jesse off of Elemental to Demigod to help get it to work. And as amazing as she is, this was a tall task. So I had to assign my best developer from Elemental to develop the multiplayer for Demigod - at the 11th hour. During the end of its development, it was clear we’d need to take over the multiplayer part of the game. This was a game we published for Gas Powered Games. However, we had two things happen during its development that changed the company.įirst, there was Demigod. We developed an ambition engine for it so that we could fit what amounted to an 8GB game into a 32bit (2GB for Windows) game. This is the game that changed Stardock as a company. This meant that our games were made for ourselves to play.
There’s a good chance that your PC, right now, has some piece of Stardock software on it somewhere in the bowels in some driver or some app. What most people don’t realize is that if a Stardock game, particularly back then, sold 0 copies, it wouldn’t have mattered because Stardock’s main source of revenue was software. But you never know, maybe someday people would have higher resolutions so this was put in “just in case”. GalCiv II (2006) had a resolution independent display engine even though, back then, that meant 1024×768. Invasions in GalCIv II AI players could get pretty snarky Making my “ship” with the Locksteed N-1200 Stinger nuclear missile. We played it ourselves and if no one had bought the game, that was fine because we enjoyed playing the game. The big thing about Galactic Civilizations II is that I played it 7 days a week. it doesn’t “Scale” graphics up, it is just as sharp at 4K as ever). Stardock in 2006’s main business was desktop enhancements - particularly UI enhancements, and we used our internal tech (DesktopX) to do the UI which is a big reason why that game holds up so well because it’s resolution-independent (i.e. You can play it, today, on a 4K monitor and it still runs fine. Galactic Civilizations II came out in 2006.
That’s where Galactic Civilizations starts.įast forward to 2003 and now Stardock is an actual company that’s been around 10 years and I wrote the Windows version of Galactic Civilizations with two interns, Cari and Scott.Ī couple years after that we made Galactic Civilizations II which had Cari, Scott, myself and added Paul for the art lead and Jesse for the graphics engineering lead as GalCiv II wasn’t sprite based. I just wanted a game that told the story of what happens in Civilization after the spaceship leaves Earth. In my case, I was 22 years old in 1993 when I put out the beta of Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. The only difference between Stardock and the people who frequently announce their own space 4X game is time. If you’re not reading eXplorminate and r/4xGaming, you should be, if you’re interested in this style of game. If you’re reading eXplorminate or you’re on r/4xgaming then you already know the state of 4X games. Commonwealths (this was a dumb feature, we admit).Includes races are pretty similar in playing.Here were the weaknesses from the article: Future proof 4X specific game engine (64-bit, core neutral, entity component system, etc.).Titled Galactic Civilizations 3 Final ReeXamination, it took a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly of Stardock’s popular 4X strategy game. There are also a whole variety of weird logical restrictions on attacking enemies and expanding your empire, and everything unfolds at a glacial pace.In early 2021, eXplorminate wrote a retrospective on Galactic Civilizations III.
Since your AI opponents don’t do very much, diplomacy is rather rudimentary. Paradox Interactive fetishises complexity, and has created a game that features perhaps a dozen gameplay mechanics that are mostly unnecessary, and which are overwhelming rather than complementary. Offworld Trading Company, for example, is very much in this vein. There is a difference in design philosophy between Paradox Interactive and Firaxis Games, the developer of the thematically similar Sid Meier's Starships, Civilization, Alpha Centurai and Beyond Earth.įiraxis Games builds complex gameplay systems that are fun to master, and have a pleasing internal logic to them.
You will have to update your designs every time you research a new technology, and combat is automated anyway, meaning you derive little pleasure from your upgraded ships. For instance, it is possible to customise warships with a significant degree of detail, but doing so is not particularly rewarding.