Modding community,

Hi! I've been taking a break from GalCiv because it was causing me too much anxiety (I have several major anxiety disorders), and I've been applying for disability and dealing with crises of one form or another. Life... you know, that thing you do between games?

Lo and behold, when I get ready to come back, StarDock has announced v3.0, which will have MANY of the things I wanted to mod already in it. Which is good, because I hadn't gotten past the planning stage on the ones they are aiming for, and they can do it better than I can. And if they can't, well then, I have a job now, don't I?

My new races mod (130+ races) will definitely wait until the new options come out, and my new planet-types mod may be scrapped or re-done, depending on how good StarDock's upgrade is. Given recent experience, I'm thinking it'll be scrap. Depending on how the new politics rules go, there may be a return of General Pants' Political Parties, one of my favorites of my mods from GCII... my favorite was "The Legitimate Businessman's Guild," which gave you extra trade money and their symbol was a sliced orange (get it, Coppola fans?).

So, I'm on a Shogun break for a while while I wait, and argue with the Texas government, and do some real science. When everything new comes out, I'll use my new, fancy(er) computer to get back to the racial proliferation mod, and try to fix my stars mod. Hopefully they will have sorted out the map issues by then, and I can get to making more realistic planetary systems, which was my real baby (I spent a year of research on it). The new gas giants, uninhabitable planets, and moons are still coming too!

Anyone who is wondering what else I've been up to is encouraged to keep an eye on the fast-paced world of vertebrate paleontology (that was a joke, nothing moves fast when everything has been dead for 70 million years). Over the summer I started about six new projects, and they will be slowly trickling out as the years go on. Nothing that will make the papers, but I think it is cool.

In the mean-time, I highly encourage you to sign up for Gauntlet' Patreon account and keep money flowing his way for the excellent material he has been adding to our favorite game. I will continue to make my mods as compatible as possible with his, and my Civ mod will require you to have his civs.

Here's to 2018 being another banner year for our favorite game. Please keep encouraging StarDock to invest time and resources into the game! And thank you once again to StarDock for being such a responsive, responsible, and remarkable game design studio!

General Pants