Stardock's Brad Wardell talked with Strategy Informer about Galactic Civilizations III taking advantage of 64-bit, Steamworks, multiplayer, and more.
Strategy Informer: You’ve said that your game is going to only work on 64-bit computers – that’s quite a statement. "Brad Wardell: The vast majority of our users have 64-bit Operating Systems already, so it’s really not that big of a thing. For us… 64-bit is just about memory, we wanted to have a much richer galaxy. Even GalCiv II, back in 2006, we were bumping up against that 2 GB limit. We had people who were like ‘oh, I really wish we could have even larger galaxies with more detail’ and we’d say ‘yeah, we’d love to that too, but we can’t do any more. We’re out of memory’. In a strategy game… I mean I’m playing Battlefield 4 at the moment, which I love, when it’s not crashing… but in that game you have 64 people, but you only see a small part of the map. In a strategy game like GalCiv, we have to keep the whole Galaxy in memory. There’s no way around that."
Read the full interview here.
Battlefield 4 can scale down a fair bit, but the recommend specs are pretty beefy too. It seems to be a lot better optimized than Ghosts is.
There isn't a whole lot of complaining about 64 bit going on anywhere other than Ghosts, really (and people are complaining about Ghosts on every platform, even it's Xbox 360 rating is well below normal for a Call of Duty game). Star Citizen is 64 bit only and it's raising absurd quantities of money. By this time next year with XP dead and 64 bit consoles entrenched, there's just going to be no particular reason for a major game to be 32 bit. So for Galciv, which desperately needs access to all that RAM people have, it's natural to go that way now. By time the game is ready for release, 64 bit games will be the norm.
And it's about time. Hopefully it can actually use a quad core processor to full effect as well. There's nothing more annoying than when Sins lags and task manager shows three idle processors.
The Sar Wars reference... uf. Sith are evil (according to [some] western ethics). If you go SWTOR with light sided Sith possibility, in which you are nicer Sith and less bloodthirsty. But still evil as you are still working for Sith. But of course Sith don't considerer themselves evil. Every group considers itself "good" and anyone who opposes them is "evil".
Maybe people would prefer to stop talking of "good and evil" and talk about "right and wrong". In the end, it's just that.
Ugh. Welp, that's all I needed to know.
Brads mentioned Ideologies and poaching from Civ games, which would seem to suggest that ideologies are akin to Freedom/Autocracy/Order. But he also seemed to indicate that ideologies replaces the Good<---->Evil axis. Right now it sounds to me like ideologies will be social engineering options with diplomatic effects (as in Civ 5), but a different set. I am however, hoping that the ends in view will be a lot more varied.
The highest good, the ideological endpoint, might be personal, such as honor, religion, duty and/or transcendance; it might be a goal, such as acheiving the technological singularity, purifying the galaxy of [evil | organic life |other intelligent species], uniting the galaxy diplomatically, converting the galaxy to Bokonon, cornering the galactic market on left-handed windchangers, &c. Or, hell, it might be discordian: keep everyone else too distracted and disunited to resist your insidious manipulations, so that whoever seems to win is still just another puppet of yours.
Since all these will be, IIRC, in XML files, we will presumably be able to add new Ideologies such as tridecaphilia (a fascination with the number 13), which gives, for example, a big morale boost every 13 turns? This of course would require the ability to set triggers, etc.
One disadvantage of GvE is that it means the other side automatically hates you. With ideologies, some goals can coexist. Since races need not be equal, neither do ideologies. The ideology "Organic Life Must Be Erased" might be a weak ideology relative to "Death Before Dishonor" because of a strong penalty (no trade routes) coupled with a weak economic benefit (more revenue from piracy). I myself would be tempted to select a weaker ideology if doing so removed some micromanagement (no longer need to protect my own trade routes, since I have none). Fun trumps balance. And balance is difficult when races are truly different.
TL;DR - Unique races good. Balance? pfui!
I never understood why I could pay to instantly turn a good civilization into an evil one or an evil civilization into a good one upon researching Xeno Ethics in GalCiv II. This might be possible through a gradual and expensive process of education and government intervention, but it didn't make sense to me that I could change my civilization's ethical alignment simply by paying XXX BC on the lump sum or installment plan. I agree with Brad that the "ideologies" concept sounds more interesting, both from a theoretical and practical standpoint. Significantly, this change should break the good vs. neutral vs. evil trichotomy, where the good decision was the costly one, evil the beneficial one (with some minor negative effects and potentially disastrous diplomatic consequences), and neutral decisions produced results between these two extremes.
Nice, lengthy article! I definitely appreciated Brad's honesty. I am really intrigued by the "ideology" system. Wonder if it will be like the one from Civ V?
Nice to hear about the hardcore ship designer! Any chance of being able to import from Blender too?
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