Rough Draft User Manual

"Now with extra fiber!"

BETA 3

Written by Brad Wardell

Designer and winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics

(well, okay, only one of those things is actually true)

Introduction

In a perfect world the user manual for Galactic Civilizations II would already be done.  But then again, in a perfect world, I would have been one of the cool kids in high-school. Or heck, I’d be cool now.  Because a cool guy wouldn’t have to start out a beta user manual explaining about all the features that aren’t in the game yet.

Typically, Stardock games absolutely suck until the last month (or week) before they ship.  The problem with having a sucky game for so far into the development process is that it tends to preclude preview coverage.  And we need preview coverage or we’re doomed.  So this time around, the game still sucks but visually it only half-sucks.  So at least screenshots made of the game won’t be completely embarrassing.

A little bit about Galactic Civilizations I

Before we start telling you about this game, we should start with the first game.  Galactic Civilizations (Windows version) came out in 2003.  Its graphics were fantastic – at least compared to shareware games from 1993. 

It was a 2D, sprite based strategy game in which players played as the humans and had to build an interstellar civilization.  Players researched technologies which in turn gave them access to various starships.  A player would literally research "Battleship Technology" and a battleship unit would appear in their list of ships that they could build.  Because we had been told..repeatedly.. that single player, 2D, turn-based strategy games were a dead end, we only budgeted for 30,000 units to be sold worldwide.

When the game came out, however, it didn’t sell 30,000 copies.  It sold 150,000 copies (85,000 in North America alone).  It also got really good reviews which were a key element of those sales no-doubt (which reminds me, I’m still scheduled to go mow editor lawns still but that’s another story).

What we do at Stardock is we make games we want to play.  We wanted to play Galactic Civilizations and so we kept tweaking and tweaking the game until what actually shipped was a pretty mature title in terms of game play being reasonably well thought-out. 

But like all Stardock games, it sucked until weeks before it went gold.  This also meant it received no preview coverage what-so-ever.  We couldn’t even get one of those "coming soon" listings in most magazines even though our date was set for February 2003 (eventually it shipped in March so that we didn’t collide with Master of Orion 3).

What’s missing in this beta

Oh where do we start.  Oh about not having a user manual. That’s my fault, I had promised friends, family, reviewers, and the Amish that I would not write the manual for Galactic Civilizations II. And we have someone terrific doing it.  But we wanted to wait until the game was..you know..functional before subjecting them to it.  With the litigious world we live in, the last thing we wanted was a lawsuit for causing blindness, madness, or Turrets syndrome.

• Graphically the game is about half-way there.  We don’t have bump mapping in.  We tried to get it in for this beta but there’s just so much to do.  But there’s also a ton of other missing graphics, images, etc.
• While you can play as any race, we suggest you play as the humans because they’re the only ones where we’ve started putting in the non-sucky textures and models in for. Play as the humans for now.
• The diplomacy is really rudimentary.  Because you can play as any race, we have to put in a lot more work to make sure that the dialog back and forth is interesting and real.
• Fleet combat isn’t in yet. This is one of the major new features of Galactic Civilizations II. Naturally, it’s not in.  (See "We suck" for more details). And by we I mean me since I am the one who scheduled its implementation for October. 
• The AI… The AI is the one part of the game I’m programming myself. Which means, naturally, it’s awful right now.  But at the same time, it’s a good self-esteem builder since it should be easy to defeat.
• Playability. This beta isn’t fun to play.  Not just because the AI isn’t in but because there’s very little playability done to it yet.  Things take too long to build (or too short), things are excessively hard to manage, we’re missing a lot of screens that make the game more intuitive, etc.
• No Campaign. The game will have a dynamic single player campaign.  It’s not in and won’t be in until November.
• No Metaverse. The final game will let people compete against other players on-line via the Metaverse.  It’s not multiplayer, but people had a blast the first time around.  We plan to do a lot more with it this time. But we won’t be getting to that until November/December.
• Performance. The game is kind of a pig right now speed-wise. It doesn’t use a lot of memory, we just haven’t really set out yet to optimize screen painting, load times and that kind of thing yet.
• Load/Save Games.  These work…kind of.  The final game will allow you to save at special "save points". Just kidding, you can save and load your game any time anywhere.
• Polish.  There’s all kinds of tweaks and pacing issues that we are very fully aware of.  Right now we’re just focusing on getting the features in, so there hasn’t been much effort put into "fun" yet.  Even things like missing status screens and such can make a big difference to making the game feel organic vs. feeling sterile.

Requirements for this beta

The beta should run on pretty much any machine with a decent (64MB) video card running Windows 98, ME, 2000, or XP.  But we’ve really only put it through its paces on Windows XP.

We are targeting people with very low end systems (Pentium II level systems) to be able to play the final game as long as they upgrade their video card to something that can do DirectX 9 (i.e. modern $25 video card).

Starting a game

Your best option here to choose "New Game". 

Galaxy Setup

On this screen you (wait for it) set up your galaxy.  In the beta, that means you pick the size of the galaxy.  In the final game,  you will also have option to choose custom galaxies (ones we or other players have made).

The scenario will eventually let you choose different custom sets of rules to enhance replayability and to ensure we, the developers, can do different spins on the game without mucking with the main game mechanics. J

You can also set up how many good planets there are, how many planets there are total (which we may remove this because it’s kind of silly to make people pick habitable planets and dead planets both).

We will also be removing the Asteroid field option in the next beta since we’re not going to have asteroid fields in the final game (game balancing would take too long).

Pick your race

This screen had nothing similar in GalCiv I.  In the first game you had to play as humans.  This was because it helped the plot and made it cheaper for us to make the game art-work wise.

Now, thanks to network based child labor in third world countries, you can now play as the leader of 10 civilizations or design your own civilization (hold on, gotta whip the slaves, okay back).

Different races have different advantages and disadvantages.  They also have their own unique ship-styles (see "slaves").  The unique advantages are not in yet though so there’s nothing special here.

Note the nice big edit button. The team wants to make sure you press that button! Lots of work under that.

If you choose edit on the custom race you can do all kinds of cool stuff.

Figure 1: My r ace is sneaky and productive! W00t!

Choose your opponents

On this screen you can decide who you want to play against. You can either set their intelligence individually or crank up the difficulty globally.

Playing the game

Once you are in the game you start with a colony ship and a flagship.  The flagship is a special survey ship that can explore anomalies.  The colony ship can be sent to create colonies on habitable worlds.

Some basic controls

Thanks to the (ahem) power of 3D, you can zoom in and out on the map:

Figure 2: Very close.  No textures on the ships yet in this screenshot.

Figure 3: Mouse-wheel zoom out and you can see your ship is small.

Figure 4: And if you zoom out enough, the map turns into a symbolic mode so that you can play the game like a board game. Differnent units have different symbols and their size indicates how "powerful" they are.

You can also use the function keys to change your point of view:

• F1: Normal view
• F2: Alternative view, little bit closer to the horizon.
• F3: Nearly level to the horizon.
• F4: Galactic Civilizations I view – top down.
• F5: Strategic view (zoomed out)

The Button Bar

The bottom button bar displays the following:

1)      Planet/Ship list

2)      Research Screen

3)      Domestic Policy screen

4)      Foreign Policy Screen

5)      Statistics

6)      Shipyard (ship design)

Bad Playability Example:  We don’t give you any ships with more than 1 move which makes the early part of the game less fun.  So we’ll be changing this.  Both your ships start out with only 1 movement point presently.

Mouse controls:

• You can use button 1 on your mouse to pan around the map.  Just hold it down and drag around.

• Select ships by left-clicking on them.  Right-click on the map (or mini-map) to send them to a destination.

• You can use your middle-mouse button to rotate the map in various ways (hold it down).  If you lose your orientation, hit the F1 key to re-orient yourself.

What matters on the map

If you put your mouse over a planet, it will state what planet "class" it is.  The higher the class, the more potentially useful the planet is.  A planet must be above class 0 to use.

Colony ships are what colonize planets.

You will also see color-coded borders.  If you’re race is blue, you can see on the mini map and the main map your borders.  In the final game, your units will get a 10% bonus to their stats when they fight in their territory.  If you have planets that are not in your borders, they are likely to revolt at some point.

The mini-map has a whole array of different visual options to choose from.  The main screen also will display your population, treasury, research status, and the galactic balance of power meter. 

Figure 5: These buttons will be to manage way-points for ships. Very handy.

Planets

When you send a colony ship to a planet, you will often encounter various events that help determine what kind of civilization you are (good or evil). 

The planet view is totally new from Galactic Civilizations I.  The planet class now determines how many of the 72 tiles on a planet can be used. 

On a class 14 planet there are 14 useable tiles.  Some tiles have special items on it (artifacts, culture bonuses, mineral rich). 

The main variables on a planet are:

• Its population in millions which determines how much tax revenue you will receive. Population is capped by either morale (if it gets too low) or by food (you must build farms to produce food). If you can produce 10 megatons of food per week then you can support a population of up to 10 million.
• Unemployment is going to go away so ignore that.
• Your approval rating determines how happy your people are.  Happy people are more productive.  Literally. 50% approval will halve your production.

Things to build on a planet

There are several types of things people would want to build on a planet:

• Farms.  Farms produce food which allow ones population to grow. More population means more $ produced.
• Factories/Mines.  These produce resources which are spent on building ships, building more planetary improvements.
• Research Labs.  These produce research units which go into your overall technology research pool.
• Cultural Centers.  Embassies and other special buildings increase the amount of influence the planet has which in turn increases its effect on your borders.
• Morale boosters.  These are special buildings that increase the morale of your people.  People gotta have stuff to do for fun or they get miserable.
• Starports.  You can’t just start building interstellar ships on some miserable world.  You now have to use up one of your precious tiles and build a star port.

Build vs. Buy

You can dedicate your planet’s resources towards building a ship or you can hire a private contractor to crank out the ship in a single turn – for a price.

Research Screen

The research screen allows you to research new technologies.  Technologies provide new abilities.

This screen is broken up between the list of techs and their info and a visual display of the tech tree.

This screen still needs work.

When a technology is researched, the event window will come up informing you.  This screen needs a lot of love ..

Domestic Policy

On this screen players set up what their tax rate is.  The higher the taxes the more money you collect but the unhappier your people get.

When elections come, the AVERAGE morale (not the snapshot anymore) will be what determines the election.  So keep those people happy all the time.

You can also spend your money between military, social, and research.  These ratios determine how much your factories and labs are funded to do their thing.

Foreign Policy

The foreign policy screen allows you to interact with the other civilizations.  It is not really well tested yet in this build.

Shipyard

New in Galactic Civilizations II is the ability to design your own ships.  And since we have a 3D engine, we decided to just go nuts with it.  Bear in mind, again, that we don’t have all the textures and models in so it’ll be even cooler when it’s done.

When you first arrive at the shipyard, you will see a list of your current designs.  You can upgrade your ships any time you want.  All your ships, regardless of where they’re located, will be upgraded.  BUT…

Depending on how dramatic of a change your "upgrade" is, ships will go into "refit" mode on screen in which they refit themselves to the new changes.  While they are in refit mode, they are totally defenseless and cannot be moved.  A refit might only take 1 game turn or it might take 50.  Moreover, ships that are outside your territory suffer a 2X time penalty to refit.  Refitting time is also based on the production of the planet it was produced on.

Designing a ship

Choosing a Hull

When you design a ship, first you have to select what type of hull it has.  The larger the hull the more hitpoints it will have and the more components it can fit.  But it also largely determines the cost of the ship.

There are many different types of hulls to choose from.  The difference between one hull of the same size and another is purely cosmetic.

Extras = Eye candy

Players have total control (okay, ridiculously intense control) of how the ship will look.  You can make a ship as complicated as you (and your computer hardware) can handle.  We wash our hands of your craziness!

You can pick a variety (and in this beta we only have a handful of non sucky eye candy in, lots more coming).

You can connect your pieces by selecting one and then clicking on the red "hard point" you want to put it on. 

Or if you’re wimpy, like me, you can just double-click on a component (or press the place button) and it’ll stick it on the ship for you based on a fairly cool system of knowing where a good place to put it is.

This way, crazy people who want to design their own mega ship as well as grumps who just want to quickly build a ship can both live together in harmony.  Though, not likely under the same roof…

At first, you won’t have any weapons or defenses for your ship.  That’s what technology researching can cure.  But you can start making crazy stuff early on.

Once you are done, you save your ship and you can start building it.

Figure 6: The Nerdling Avenger goes forward...without any weaons..

Warfare

In Galactic Civilizations II there are 3 types of weapons and 3 types of defenses. 

Weapons:

• Beam weapons
• Mass Drivers
• Missiles

Defenses:

• Shields (defend against beam)
• Armor (defend against mass drivers)
• Point defense (defend against missiles)

When a weapon comes against its corresponding defense, the weapon rolls between 0 and its maximum attack value and the defense rolls between 0 and its maximum defense value.  Non-optimal defenses can help too but they roll between 0 and the SQUARE ROOT of their maximum-defense.

Example:

The USS Enterprise attacks the USS Reliant.  The Enterprise has phasers rated at 10.  The Reliant has Shields rated at 4 and armor rated at 16!

When the enterprise attacks, it rolls between 0 and 10.  The Reliant rolls its defense which is going to be between 0 and 8 (0 to 4 + 0 to square root of 16 which equals 4 therefore 8 total).

We don’t want players who picked the "wrong" defense to be totally out of luck.  But we don’t want to reward players who focus strictly on one defense type.

Options

The game will have a ton of various options to choose from to let players totally control how they want the game to paly out.

The video options are important.  Make sure that you have anti-aliasing on as high as your system can go because it makes a huge difference to how the game looks.  Most of these settings require you to reload the game (sorry!).

The Story Continues…

And so your civilization must go out, colonize planets, research technologies, design ships, form alliances, negotiate treaties, fight wars, etc.

Eventually you will be able to conquer your opponents (or be conquered by them) through a variety of means (military conquest, cultural domination, technological superiority, or political victory).

Support & Help

The home page of Galactic Civilizations II is https://www.galciv2.com

Stardock Entertainment

15090 Beck Rd.

Plymouth Michigan 48170

734-927-0677

Credits

Designer & Product Manager

Brad Wardell

Project Leader

Scott Tykoski

User Interface Designer

Paul Boyer

Development Lead

Cari Begle

Engine Developer

Joe Engalen

AI Developer

Brad Wardell

Developers

Cari Begle

Joe Engalen

Jesse <get spelling>

Scott Tykoski

Brad Wardell

Paul Kerchen

Scott Brodie

Art & Animation

Alex Gounaropolous

Scott Tykoski

Paul Boyer

Jake Callery

Scott Brodie

Akil Dawkins

Paul <Ensemble Studios’ Paul>

<Alex’s Intern – get name>

Story & Elements

Brad Wardell

Kristin Hatcher

Alexander Antoniades

Quality Assurance

Biz

Angela Marshall

Larry Kuperman

Kim Kolaz

Metaverse

Pat Ford

Andrew Powell

Cari Begle

Laurence Parry

Music

Mason Fischer

 Eric Heberling

Final Documentation

 Someone other than Brad