Stardock Forums
So, what can we expect as your next game project? GalCiv3, something different or will you for the time being work on Elemental (patching, updates and addons)?
They mentioned that they wouldn't release anything for the next year and work on Elemental and free/pay content.
I'd expect some Elemental DLC, manybe an expansion, and someting else in the pipeline that is on the horizon and likely to remain secret while Stardock focuses on improving/expanding Elemental.
There has been discussion of some sort of RPG after elemental. But said discussions were from before elemental was in beta and I personally have heard nothing about it since because it appears that everything has been dedicated to elemental.
In the pipeline we also have to consider they likely are involved with further Ironclad development including potential secret Sins of a Solar Empire developments (they promised us a story) and a potential new game about which we've heard nothing beyond ambiguous suggestions of a new game in existence (source: PAX 2009)
from another thread
http://forums.impulsedriven.com/394855/page/4/#replies
that about sums it up
I would like to know what to expect in 2012, still hoping for a Star Control sequel, but I heard Atari had some weird demands, think that was for Star Control, anyone love there stuff, been thinking on Elemental but might give it a couple more weeks. The free Book Two is intriguing anyone know what the cutoff for purchase is?
I think it'll be GC3, but not until Elemental has had a run at least as long as GC2, so ... my guess is GC3 around 2015, maybe even 2016. May be even later, because I know Brad will expect to set things right. I know they were probably planning expansions, but I expect its going to be months before the major bugs get worked out. I expect Stardock's actual game making department to go through some changes. Hopefully Brad, having had to acknowledge the screw up, will really really value a strong and robust QA and testing. I've worked in QA for an aerospace factory and know no one likes QA ... everyone feels pride in their work and thinks "good enough." Its only human. The same thing happens with the projects I'm involved with, like the failed attempts I made at writing novels ... I thought they were great, but tried showing them around to folk to help edit them and many just said the novels were so terrible, they had little to work with. I feel really badly that Brad and Stardock got such a harsh lesson with Elemental, but ... thankfully, as Brad said, their income does not hinge on Elemental sales and it sounds like they have learned a valuable, if hard lesson on quality assurance and testing before a product is ready for market.
Its a real shame. GC2 -- even vanilla -- got 9.0 from Gamespot.
Well, as has already been said, the next year is all Elemental. After that, who knows? There's the un-named RPG that was in pre-production according to the podcast Brad did, but the team for that is gone after what happened to Elemental, so who knows where that's going. There is also still Society that's been put on hold these last couple years. And there's Ironclad's secret "not in space" strategy game that Stardock would probably help out with.
A couple weeks ago I bought a copy of Master of Orion II and that game still holds up and is still worth my coin. This week I bought Elemental and even though it still crashes and needs some significant work, I love playing it. Keep in mind that I'm playing Elemental on a $200 Acer Aspire Revo with a one-lung Atom processor (2G of RAM becuase I'm not stupid).
I expect Stardock to make good on Elemental because their development model and distribution channel allows them to, and they are in business for the long term. Also, the company seems happier with a long term business model than the "kick it out the door and move on" philosophy that most marketing types prefer.
The following is my to-do list for making Elemental good:
1. Fungible resources: Materials to Metals to Gold to Mana to Crystal to anything not critical. While bagels do not transmute into BMW's, there are bakers who by Bimmer's and they had to get the resources somehow.
2. City production: Trade Goods. Stop worrying about balancing and start worrying about over-gating development. Think open-ended. I can see some advantage to decreasing efficiencies as city size increases, because quantity decreases quality on it it's own.
Side note: Thank you a thousand times for not having pollution as a factor. I am bored to death with being beaten on the head with the "people are bad" whine in 4E games.
3. Upgrade paths for units: On my first day of Boot Camp I was not issued a nuclear aircrfaft carrier, and it wouldn't have fit in my seabag anyway. My friends who went army weren't issued Abrams Main Battle Tanks. Elite troops can handle new tools because they are really good.
4. Merging paths for units: See above re: Aircraft Carriers. Average the unit's experience. I do love that larger units are much more impressive and effective than individuals.
5. Simple announcements as an option. I don't need a lavishly calligraphed note to tell me the kettle's on the boil, especially if the note crashes the system. Let me pick to make simple notices use less memory.
I do love the game and look forward to playing far too much for years to come.
And I forgot:
6. Food: Can I please build farms? What is the point of making everything verdant and wonderful if you can't grow stuff on them. Or is there an ethereal requirement for vast expanses of putting greens?
I request permission to revise and extend my remarks regarding humanity and civilization:
There is a belief amongst some people that civilization is a bad thing. While it is true that the wealth made possible by civilization allows for extravagant degeneracies, that kind of illness is usually self-correcting. There is also the problem of people unable to distinguish between wealth and treasure. In the film "Raging Bull" there is a brilliant sequence of boxer Jake LaMotta breaking up his championship belt to to get at the precious stones, only to be told by a pawnbroker that the stones were cheap baubles, but the intact belt was immensely valuable. If you are reading this, you are part of an extremely wealthy civilization surrounded by and infested with barbarians who would smash everything to pieces to get at the resulting scrap. Many of these barbarians are populare celebrities, honored politicians, bestselling authors, and tenured academics.
One of the barbarian's leading causes in the last forty years has been the environment. One of there early efforts in this cause was the "Earth March" with the "Earth Marchers" moving through cultivated California to hold a giant rally. For four days several hundred people camped around my family's home at the invitation of my father, who was vigorously active in a variety of more and less noble movements during the 60's. Allow me to assure you that the overwhelming bulk of the ecology movement back in the day were a bunch of barbarians, regardless of how they presented themselves as saviors of the planet. They overflowed our septic tank, caused massive biologic infestation of our pool, and trashed the field around our house in the name of saving the planet. There are still a lot short-sighted, opportunistic twits looking for a party forty years later (does the word Copenhagen ring a bell). Just as I did not enjoy the fecal remnants of those jerks as a child, I do not like pollution nattering in a 4E game as an adult. (Let alone Global Warming effects in the Civ series.)
Of all the features you do not have to add to this game, pollution whining is one of the best.
@pslblog I like the idea of being able to 'construct' farms... I would like to see engineer units that need to be researched and then trained in special buildings that only lvl5 cities can build.
This way it will keep the popcap in check. A little.
Also, Elemental needs port traiding with the harbor. Sea trade ... 8-)
Other ideas are upgrading existing units equipment.. Canit do it right now. Exp a peaseant to lvl30 and he is still a peaseant with a club and mass hit poits. ... ick!!!
Alos, Tool tips on how morale affects combat... I still don't know... 8-(
Unit mergers interest me and I have an idea where the price of merging units is to reduce the average level of the troops at least one step per level of aggregation. This means that if you took 8 level 4 Peasants, you could merge them into 2 level 3 squads or 1 level 2.
The formula should work something like: Average level of troops-level of aggregation = combined troop level
If that functionality is in place, then the equipment upgrade can be functioned as a level of aggregation, even though the size of the unit won't change.
[EDIT] Upon reflection, tying the experience change hit to a more generic "complexity" is probably a better model for the mod community. Putting an open ended complexity cost factor into the mix allows for a lot of changes to take place.
Enchanting troops should probably have a complexity cost of 0, but the ever popular practice of warping troops into twisted creatures should really carry a stiff penalty. It's one thing to have talented troops skilled in maintaining armor and maneuvering with pike; it's a bit much to expect them to suddenly adapt those skills to trimming claws and managing corrosive excretion flow. Also, warped mutations rarely come with well documented preventative maintenance instructions.
In all, one of the cost increases for new gear should be that it readily trains up as a replacement. Is it worth spending crystal on to make units new gear more user friendly? Depends on the complexity hit the new gear is going to impose.
This would also make more sense if equipment could be found in pre-fall caches or captured from opponents and stored until applied to a unit. The capacity seems like it is there, with unit inventories.
There was a discussion at one time that Brad wanted to do a remake of Moo2. It'll probaby come out as GalCiv3 but would absolutly would love to see another Moo2 (I'm intentionally forgetting Moo3)
Maybe a kind of Hybrid-style, open-world MMORTS would be a cool Idea. I actually came up with an idea for such a game, maybe I could submit my idea to stardock.
Looks like the next game planned is GalCiv III using the engine in Elemental.
The good news is that there will be a Galactic Civilizations III. The bad news is that it won't be out this decade.
Right now, the GalCiv team is working on the "unnamed fantasy strategy game" sometimes called "not-MOM" (not Master of Magic). It's a totally new graphics engine that makes use of multi-core CPUs and GPUs but will still run fine on lower end hardware thanks to built-in detection that will determine "how much stuff" to display in real-time.
That game will go into public beta early next year and its release date will be largely based on player feedback. As many of you know, we are in the position of being able to keep working on our games until everyone's happy with them. Our non-game part of the company does so well that there's no pressure. We want to make it the best turn-based strategy game of all time.
THAT engine will be what serves as the basis of a future Galactic Civilizations III. That means GalCiv III will have features like tactical battles (as an option), multiplayer, more sophisticated planetary development, and much more.
Dont you all think they should release a fully working, un bugged version of there 50 dollar game before talking about new releases?
And any game based on the elemental engine is doomed to fail at this moment. The game is not the main problem, memory leaks, sum checks
etc all come from the engine driving it. They basically put a 2 cylinder lawnmower engine into a cadillac body.
Which is why, as I previously said, they have committed for the next year to be only Elemental. They won't be working on anything else (gamewise) besides Elemental.
And to repeat myself again, there was an RPG already in pre-production before Elemental was released. Elemental's... lackluster release forced the team working on that to be transfered to Elemental and/or laid off. Because of this, I would expect this to be the next project once Elemental is the game it was intended to be.
There also was Society, which is/was an MMORTS (sorry Taharos, too late to submit that idea
). It was started a while ago, but it was basically put on hold indefinetly back in 2006. I would still expect to see this at some point. (See here for more info: http://societygame.com/).
I'm fairly certain it's been confirmed somewhere that the RPG will come before GalCivIII. How Society will fit in there remains to be seen.
I've never been very punctual, so posting months later makes perfect sense to me...
~Gimme GalCivIII or gimme deatH~
One last suggestion I would like to make is 2 points in regards to a very old space genre game.
Emperor of the Fading Suns
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVbEj_fpPdY
1st: It would be wild to be able to buy a new digital copy from StarDock of the very old computer game Emperor of the Fading Suns; based on the roleplaying game of the same name by Holistic. One that works nearly bug free on Vista & Win7, 64 bit systems. My old copy is giving me nightmares trying to get it to run without some nasty crashes. And I dont really trust other online vendors claiming to sell this product.
2nd: Many game elements in EFS were truly epic in scale. Many of these game play elements are sorely lacking in most contempory games. You at StarDock came close to matching the size and scope of this old classic with your GalCiv series. I hope you take the time to look at some of the game elements in EFS for your next space genre style game. It's safe to say that the majority of your players would prefer to see more excellent content.
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