For the last few months the team has been toiling away on THREE seperate projects...Political Machine 2008, the unannounced fantasy strategy title, and GalCiv 2.0. And for those months we've kept players in the dark about 2.0...mostly because of the frantic, nose-to-the-grindstone pace we've maintained.

But now it's time....time to finally start talking about what will hopefully be the ultimate update to our little GC2 series

For those that don't know, GalCivII 2.0 is the final major update that we'll be producing. More updates are sure to trickle out, but in terms of huge new features being added, this will be our last huzzah Sad, but inevitable.

For this reason, we really wanted to pack it FULL with all the little features that were straightforward enough to keep the game balanced, but interesting/exciting enough to make 2.0 special.

The first of the new added features (and what's turned out to the the most suprisingly time-consuming) is the addition of Planetary Governors.

The necessity of this feature really came late in the testing of Immense galaxies in the Twilight gamma. There were just too many planets to deal with, and even queuing up planet improvements on initial colonization got cumbersome. Looking back, it's a feature that players have requested for a long time, so putting it in was a no-brainer. Also, for everyones future reference, the best way to get a feature added is to get the programmers annoyed by it's obmission

All you do is create a governor type (give it a name and short description) and fill that governors queue. As techs for better improvements are unlocked, the queue will automaticially update. Special tiles are searched for and properly utilized, and terriformed spots are filled as they become available.

The system is slick, and works well as a 'macromanagement' feature opposed to a 'let the AI handle my planet building'.

We hope to have all the new features in the beta (Thursday, September 25th), with a final release on Wedensday, October 8th.

Up Next Monday (Now Tuesday): Another Manager, and a Feature Requested Since Dreadlords 1.0...stay tuned!