Topic: Galactic Civ II: Dark Avatar Thread -- UPDATE: Patch 1.8 released

[MysterD]

Galactic Civ II: Dark Avatar expansion has been delayed from Fall '06 to Feb 2007.

They are doing this to add MORE, MORE, MORE content for the expansion. I dunno' if I ever heard that kind of reasoning for a delay on an expansion before, but that sounds good to me!!

Plus, at the same time they are shipping the expansion out, they will be offering for retail stores a Gold Edition, which'll include both the Galac Civ 2 game and the Dark Avatar expansion. Very nice.

Link:
http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=postmessage&boardid=1&id=0&threadid=71720

GalCiv 2 Expansion Expands, Delayed [October 09, 2006, 1:57 pm ET] - Post a Comment
Stardock announces that the Dark Avatar expansion for Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords is delayed from its planned Fall 2006 release date, and the turn-based strategy add-on is now due in February 2007. The news is accompanied by word that this extra time will be used to expand the Dark Avatar feature set, and word that users who preorder will be allowed into the closed beta test in November:

    October 9, 2006 -- Stardock Entertainment today announced plans to extend the feature set of the highly anticipated expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. The expansion, entitled Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar, has been given a new release date of February 2007 along with a significantly expanded feature set.

    "As our players submitted suggestions for new features, we realized that we didn't want to have to wait until some future sequel to implement these awesome ideas," said Brad Wardell, Product Manager of Galactic Civilizations II. "So you could say that this expansion— while not quite a sequel — goes far beyond what a usual expansion pack would provide.

    Galactic Civilizations II is a space-based strategy game set in the 23rd century. Players must build an interstellar civilization through military power, economic strength, technological might and political savvy. Since its release earlier this year, the game has received many Editor's Choice Awards and sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide.

    The expansion pack, Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar, was originally designed to add new units, new maps, a new story-based campaign, user-created opponents, an epic generator, espionage agents, asteroid fields, new diplomatic treaties, unique planet environments and much more. However, Stardock decided to expand on the already impressive feature set based on fan feedback and suggestions.

    In addition to the original concept, new features now include a streamlined technology tree, Mega Events, super abilities that are unique to each civilization, a visual makeover, more advanced opponent-design features and more.

    For players who are interested in getting their hands on the expansion pack before Christmas, Stardock has announced that it will be opening a beta program for users who pre-order the expansion pack, which will start in mid-November.

    Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar will be available exclusively from GalCiv2.com (powered by TotalGaming.net). However, Stardock will also be releasing Galactic Civilizations II: Gold Edition simultaneously at retail, which will include the original game (Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords) and the expansion pack in February 2007.

    More information can be found at http://www.galciv2.com/darkavatar.

[Quemaqua]

I highly recommend this to anybody.  It was a wonderful game that was a lot of fun.  The expansion should only add great stuff.  Stardock is a company that truly deserves your support due to its own support of the community and its good-faith business practices.  Those guys rock.

[MysterD]

I have heard games delayed to add more content to it, but I have never heard of a company decide to push their expansion pack back just so they can add a lot more content to it.

EA should take notes from these guys on that one when it comes to giving a lot of content to an expansion pack.

[MysterD]

9.0 from IGN for Galactic Civ II: Dark Avatar expansion pack

[Quemaqua]

Awesome.  I'll probably grab this despite the fact that I haven't given the core game nearly enough time.

[MysterD]

An early heads up for you guys...

...Looks like the week of 2/25/07-3/3/07, Galac Civ II: Gold Edition will be $27.99 @ CC.
This Gold Edition box comes w/ both Galac Civ 2 pieces: Dread Lords (campaign) and Dark Avatar (expansion)

[MysterD]

Galac Civ II: Dark Avatar (expansion content) got updated to 1.5X with a new patch. This update is only for those who have Dark Avatar expansion installed. 

Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar 1.5X released
The first update has arrived!
By Frogboy
Posted March 1, 2007 16:24:14

Stardock is pleased to announce that the first of many free updates to the award-winning expansion pack to Galactic Civilizations II has arrived.

Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar gets its AI updated, new play balancing tweaks, memory reduction and more.

In terms of the AI, we read through strategies posted on the forums and took notes as to how the top players were playing the game and then updated the AI to take advantage or thwart some of those strategies to various degrees.  Players should find the game significantly more challenging at higher levels (tough on up).

We reduced the memory use of the game by implementing a "garbage collection" feature in which obsolete ship designs the AI creates are removed from memory. This can reduce memory usage significantly in long games which in turn improves performance.

We also made changes to defense in that they're cheaper and use less space to encourage more usage of defense modules on ships.

Many other minor tweaks were made based on player feedback.

If you don't already have Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar, you can get it here at GalCiv2.com or at retail in the form of Galactic Civilizations II: Gold Edition which includes (until April) a $10 rebate for people who have Galactic Civilizations II already inside the box.

To update, use Stardock Central which you can get in the downloads area here. This will update both Dark Avatar expansion pack users and users who have purchased the Gold Edition.

We hope you enjoy the updates and look forward to reading your feedback on the forums. Thanks for posting your ideas, suggestions, and requests, we hope we've been able to translate some of your AI and gameplay requests into action in this first update.

The full change log can be read here.

Below is that change log.

Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar 1.5X notes
Changes, fixes, tweaks
By Draginol on Opinionated Techie
Posted February 28, 2007 13:47:42

We're very pleased with the response Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar / Gold Edition have received.  Well over 95 out of 100 people appear to be glad they got it based on the poll.

We've also gotten some very good feedback from players that we have turned into the first of many free updates to the game.  There's a lot here to digest but some of the big changes are to how the AI plays (strategies updated are based on expert player feedback) as well as a new "garbage collection" function that goes through and removes unused AI ship designs (while crash reports have been few and far between, the one thing we've run into is the case where people have the new CPU options turned on and the AI will design new types of ships much more often which uses memory which, over time, can cause users with a relatively small amount of virtual memory to crash -- for reference, you should have at least 4X your RAM reserved as virtual memory on Windows XP or Windows Vista).

We also tweaked some of the startup settings as well as ship defense costs (which are now much cheaper).

...

Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar
-1.5x Change Log-

+TWEAK: Nerfed both the Mega Pirate event and the regular Pirate event so that it picks a random AI player instead of the most powerful, and made sure that their fleet ability is not greater than 10 (which we did for the Mega event but not the normal random event).
 
+ FIX: Crash in diplomacy screen if the other race (like the Jagged Knife) did not have a homeworld.
 
+ FIX: Bug in combat code where the code that forces a winner in case of a tie was not considering if the defending ship was upgrading or not.
 
+ FIX:  Bug in improvement code that was interfering with projects that were not upgrades completing properly (including terraforming imps). This is something that a lot of people have been complaining about.
 
+ TWEAK: Changed it so that the option to save ship designs to disk does not affect templates; templates will always be saved to disk.
 
+ COSMETIC: updated xml data files that need to be translated with a node that says which fields to translate
 
+ FIX: Bug where AI ships would attack mining bases and not declare war.  Now AI ships will go around mining bases unless already at war with civ.
 
+ FIX: Bug where research from shared research treaties was not added to receiving civ’s tech research.
 
+ FIX: several alt-tab related crashes.
 
+ TWEAK: Activated code to display messages in debug.err if any ship templates or ship designs are missing.
 
+ TWEAK: fixed event text that had a period in the middle of a sentence.
 
+ TWEAK: fixed problem with a comment in PlanetImprovements.xml where having '--' in a comment was causing read errors for Galactopedia.
 
+ FIX: Old AI designed ships are removed from the ship design list and deleted when they are no longer in use by any civ (Should significantly neft high memory usage in late games).

+ TWEAK: Changed Superior Hulls description.

+ TWEAK: United Planets: now a higher chance of the 'Neutral Ground' issue being picked if it's not being enforced.

+ Decreased spacing between stars so that more stars can be fit on a given map (which means more planets as well)

+ Abundant setting produces more of whatever it is being specified for

+ Ship defenses use slightly less space and cost a lot less

+ Manufacturing capital now produces 33% bonus instead of 25%

+ Fusion, Anti-Matter and Quantum Power Plants are far less powerful (but still pretty powerful)

+ AI priorities on various technologies tweaked

+ AI more savvy at trading technologies

+ Ships are not quite as valuable in terms of tech trading at previous

+ Fixed AI bug where special treaties were valued extremely high if traded early on

+ AI evaluates value of special environment technologies based on whether they are useful to them or not

+ All AI players will tend to build more factories on planets

+ Some AI players are less likely to build orbital fleet managers depending on their defensive strategy

+ Last remaining AI personality will no longer build planetary improvements on special research/manufacturing tiles that don't match (previously it would sometimes override it if it felt it was for a good reason, all other AIs already avoided this)

+ Drengin aren't as aggressive at colonizing after the first couple game years unless it has a particular planet in mind

+ Drengin and Korath AI personalities now look at what their colonies are doing when deciding whether to research manufacturing or research technologies

+ Drengin and Korath AI personalities value propulsion techs far more than other players

+ Drengin and Korath AI personalities won't upgrade ships outside their sphere of influence

+ If AI determines it wants to go to war with someone, it will declare war even if relations are neutral

+ Improvements to the Altarian and Arcean AI personalities in making them research better

+ AI now keeps a better eye on planets defecting and why

+ AI will factor planet defections into its relations with a given player

+ AI will heavily factor influence starbases into relations with a given player if defections have occurred (tough or higher difficulty)

+ Torians now focus a lot more on manufacturing on planets than research

+ Torians no longer will build oribital fleet managers no matter what. They're living on the edge now.

+ Torians won't build farms on planets that have more than 12 food production

+ Torian researching significantly improved based on player suggestions/strategies

+ Improvements to Terran Alliance / Drath research based on player feedback

+ AI evaluates technologies for trading more individually regardless of player's diplomacy ability

+ AI slightly better at managing its economy

+ Fixed crash bug in which multiple new minors being created in a given game could cause a crash due to no available player slots being available

[Quemaqua]

For anyone who didn't grab the original game, you should try it!  It's some really great stuff.

[MysterD]

Dark Avatar gets patched to Version 1.8

Dark Avatar 1.8 Change Log
By CariElf on Girl Geek
Posted October 18, 2007 14:16:28

** Major Changes **

+ High Score List: Lets you keep track of scores on local games

+ New Governor 'Reroute Ships': Send All ships of a given type to a specific rally point. Colonies building the ship type will also change their rallypoint destination to the specified rallypoint.

+ New Governor 'Colony Reassignment': Switch military production on colonies going to a given rally point

+ Event Log: List that keeps track of the major events that occur throughout each game

+ Memory Optimizations: Tweaked several areas to cut down on memory usage, and stomped out some glaring memory leaks, allowing lower-end machines to run gigantic galaxies more efficiently (and improve performance across the board)

+ Lease and Maintenance Tab: Helps players to manage your weekly expenditures

+ Screenshot Hotkey: CTRL + 'PrintScreen' will now take a snapshot and store it in your 'My Documents/My Games/GC2DarkAvatar/Screenshots' folder

+ Anomalies Reappear: Survey ships are now of greater importance with the addition of re-spawning anomalies to the galaxy

+ Ability to Rename Stars: Button added for the renaming of...well...stars

+ AI Tweaks: Computer opponents should now put up a better fight

+ Improvements Tweaked: A value here, a new bonus there...several improvements are now 'more better' based on player feedback

+ Debug Output: Made debug.err always go in user defined data directory. This is to deal with problems encountered by people with limited user accounts and for consistency with Vista.


** Minor Tweaks **

+ Added standby mode for auto improve asteroids and auto survey ships.

+ Terran Alliance is now more inclined to focus on building larger starships.

+ Optimized AI sorting routines for better performance.

+ Spore module are more expensive.

+ Spore Weapons technology is more expensive.

+ Morale buildings are more powerful.

+ Capped the number of stars in a galaxy to reduce the amount of memory usage.

+ Whenever a planet changes ownership, any trade routes involving the planet are cancelled.

+ Made it so that the saved scoring information also saves mod name and description if mods are enabled.

+ If you update several planets, it will update all of them in the colony list.

+ Auto survey and auto improve standby modes are cancelled when you set an autopilot destination for the ship.

+ Changed the way that save games are saved so that you won't lose your previous auto save if you fail to save (due to out of memory, etc).

+ Fixed the sorting code in the governor's screen so that Nothing is always at the top.

+ Changed it so that all textures not generated by the game (like thumbnails) and not in dxpacks should be loaded (and flushed) by the resouce
manager, which should help keep memory usage down.

+ Made the AI mark its old designs as obsolete so that we can tell which ones it's not using more quickly.

+ Changed the code that cleans up the obsolete AI designs because it was letting the designs hang around in memory even after no ships were using it.

+ Auto attack is now canceled if UPIssue is preventing ship from attacking because of non-aggression UP issue.

+ Tweaked distribution of planet tile bonuses so that the starting home worlds are more likely to get bonuses distributed on them, but no more than 3 per planet.

+ Changed AI ship class naming convention so that if the AI designs new ships every week, it doesn't re-use the same class name, which can cause problems; the AI now tracks how many times it has designed a shiptype and uses that for the version number.

+ Blocked tiles map is now updated once per turn so that the code that uses it will be more accurate, reducing the chance of landing ships on anomalies, planets, etc.

+ Changed it so that the stacked ships and fleet windows recycle their entries so that they aren't constantly allocating and deallocating. The Stacked Ship context window will attempt to shrink the number of saved entries if it hasn't used the last max number in awhile.

+ Ships marked as destroyed are removed from the main list the first turn they are marked destroyed instead of waiting until they are deleted; this should fix crashes and prevent the AI from picking dead targets.

+ Added code to delete multiple ships at once from the maintenance tab.

+ The prompt to upgrade a starbase now lists what type of modules are available to build.


** Bugs Fixed **

+ Crash on some machines when star density is 0

+ Bug which caused animation in combat viewer to fire wrong weapon and/or fire at the wrong ship

+ Ship list entries were not being deleted when the ship was destroyed

+ Not all planet/ship list entries were being displayed

+ Mining base lines would not disappear if the base was destroyed because planet was traded or conquered.

+ The treasury display on the main ui was being constantly updated during the end of turn, thus causing slowdown

+ Rounding errors with bonus research production

+ Reduced some of the slowdown when moving a selected ship caused by updating the ship context area

+ Bug in Xeno Ethics that reset debt to 0 and converted the negative treasury balance to a lease

+ Took out some debug messages that were making debug.err files huge

+ Possible crash in ship components when removing old ship designs

+ Crash due to not checking the colonies for what ships they're building when checking if a ship class is still in use

+ Bug in the AI ship design code that was causing multiple ship designs to be created with the same exact name, which could cause memory leaks and graphical glitches

+ Bug that could cause AI ships to be created with the wrong ship class

+ Fleet context window was not updating after ship moved

+ Trade Window was not popping dialogs up over it

+ Cari squashed a spider last Wedensday

+ On the TradeWnd, the dialog warning that the other civ had no money was using the player's empire name

+ Bug in GraphWnd scaling code

+ Crash caused by AI ships holding on to ship destinations that were destroyed

+ Fixed bug where clicking on a ship would attempt to clear the selection flag for all ships in the galaxy, regardless of whether they were selected or not, causing lag

+ Bug where the turn button was always green even if there were ships with moves left

+ 'Weird minimap lines' bug

+ Starbases were being added to the moveable ship list, which caused the end of turn button to never come back

+ Bug where ignored races still could be chosen in the Opponentwnd

+ Planet thumbnails were not being reused even if the planet surfaces were identical

+ Removed unnecessary information to be saved in save games

+ In the Dread Lords campaign, when playing from Dark Avatar, it was not possible to continue due to it not finding the location of the next
mission's files

+ Bug in the Dread Lords campaign when playing from Dark Avatar where scenarios with the Dread Lords would never end because they had the incorrect race ID

+ Bug with activation code on Win98.

+ Changed code that writes out debug messages to be more threadsafe

+ Made it so that the dxpacks are kicked out of memory after the screen has been created if there are not multiple instances of the screen, like custom list box entries, thus reducing the amount of stuff kept in memory.

+ Changed screen code to make sure that the textures created for the screens do not create mip map chains, which are unnecessary in screens and just take up more memory

+ Crash caused by not being able to find strings in the flavor text files (text that appears when the AI talks to you)

+ XML data saved at the end of a game was not saving campaign data if it wasn't a metaverse game

+ Crash in the rendering code related to alpha-blended graphics