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| Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar Interview Part Two by Jonathan Trevisani,Computer Games Online  Jonathan Trevisani presents the second part of an interview with Brad Wardell, President/CEO of Stardock, about the upcoming expansion to the popular turn-based space strategy game Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar. The forces of evil have taken over the galaxy and things are getting bleak with a new force entering the fray. In this part of the interview, Mr. Wardell talks about the new features of the new expansion pack.Jonathan Trevisani: Some of the new features of the expansion include espionage agents and new diplomatic treaties. How will espionage change from the previous "info" espionage? What will the new diplomatic options include? Brad Wardell: Espionage was the weakest part of GalCiv II in my view. In Dark Avatar, espionage starts to get its due with agents that are actual units that you can send to planets to do very bad things (or to counter an enemy's agents). In terms of diplomacy, we wanted to give players more carrots and sticks to work with. While GalCiv has always had a lot of warfare in it, we want the diplomatic route to have more meat. Treaties will include economic treaties and technology treaties where money and research are shared between two civilizations. If you can make civilizations dependent on you, they may think twice about attacking you even if you have a weak military. Jonathan Trevisani: Will asteroid fields change the resource management of the game? How will special worlds influence the initial "colony grab" portion of the game? Brad Wardell: Asteroid fields will provide users with some terrain to get resources out of. Special worlds should really change the beginning portion of the game. The land grab part of GalCiv is pretty well known. But with special worlds, now players won't be able to colonize a good portion of the planets initially. They'll have to research environmental technologies first, which means they're not researching, say, weapons or industry or other types of technology. Jonathan Trevisani: Customization plays a large part in Galactic Civilizations II. How many new ship parts are in the expansion? What are some of the benefits from the customized opponents feature? Brad Wardell: The new ship parts are kind of crazy in terms of quality/quantity. When we made GalCiv II, the art team was still relatively new to the engine. But now they've really mastered how to create some really wonderful-looking stuff. The result will be that users can build not just nicer ships, but the graphics will be a generation better. Jonathan Trevisani: Most GalCiv2 players seem to be looking forward to the special world environments in the expansion. What feature are you most proud of? Brad Wardell: I'm a computer AI guy so my favourite parts are in that area. Not only can players design their own computer players, complete with their own ship designs, graphics, etc. that the player can create (so I can finally have that Stars Wars vs. Star Trek battle I've always wanted) but they can change the behaviour as well. For example, players can set up how aggressive they are. They can set up how "Smart" the player plays versus what resource bonuses they get. So you could, for example, have a really stupid-playing race that gets all kinds of resource advantages. Or you could have it play as smart as it can but get no resource advantages at all. Jonathan Trevisani: The patches for GalCiv2 have been very heavy with added content. Aside from bug fixes, how do you decide what content to be included? Will 1.4 be the last patch for GalCiv2? Brad Wardell: We pretty much just hang out on the forums and users tell us the kinds of things they want in. More modding support or some user-interface change or how the computer players could play better. After we release 1.4, we may still update the base, but most of our development effort will be on updating Dark Avatar (free updates for Dark Avatar users). Jonathan Trevisani: Is there another GalCiv2 expansion in the works? How long before GalCiv3 enters our galaxy? Brad Wardell: There will probably be a second expansion pack but not any time soon. I have no idea what would be in that; that's pretty far off into the future. As for a Galactic Civilizations III, I'd be surprised if it came out this decade. There's a lot of expandability with the GalCiv II engine. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Game News :: home page |