Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion made PC Gamer's list of the best strategy games! Check out the complete list here: http://www.pcgamer.com/the-best-strategy-games/

They underestimated me. They always underestimate me.

I didn’t have one of the most successful real estate businesses in the state of California for nothing, you know. Coming to Mars was an easy choice - the colonies here would absolutely need someone with an eye for development, an eye for the long term goal - and that’s me.

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Today, Stardock released a huge update and a free Co-op map pack DLC for its massive-scale RTS game, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. A Steam weekend sale will accompanies today’s release and has the game and its other DLC on sale for up to 50% off. Read more here.

Learn how to use the advanced functions of the Civilization Builder to create a polished custom faction to play as or against. This video covers custom art assets, citizens, dialogue, and more. 

Check out Part 1 here.

From the desk of Frank Dawson
Foreman - Reclamation, INC.

Sometimes, I wonder why I ever came to this bleedin’ rock.

Then I remember I didn’t really have a choice. I made the most of it, though, and it beats rotting away in that prison. Come to Mars and make a new life for yourself is what all the slogans said. I didn’t really believe any of ‘em, but I guess I have to admit I was wrong. 

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Learn how to use the in-game Civilization Builder to create a custom faction to play as or against. This video covers names, descriptions, traits, abilities, AI personality, and more. Stay tuned for Part 2.

G'day! 

For the past month, we've been flat out working on the 2.4 update, which is being released later this month and is now available for opt-in. There's not too much to talk about here, since we already went over both 2.4 and and the 2017 roadmap in detail in our July Dev Diary, but we do have one big announcement to make for the 2.5 update.

##New Juggernauts##

We're excited to reveal the two new Juggernauts we're working on that are currently scheduled for 2.5 later this year. Here's a sneak peak!

PHC Agamemnon

Full size concept:

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Summer continues.  Unless you're in Australia or New Zealand. But they're not people. Not really.  I mean, they can't feel heat and cold.  So what's been up? The boring job of architecture update.  We've been spending the past month fixing architectural issues that have slowly built up. This shines through in the form of bug fixes.  It's slow, time consuming but important work. 

We are also working on merging the GalCiv III base game and Crusade core together.  The net effect is that late this Summer, there will be a massive update to GalCiv III (v2.5) that will bring some of the elements of Crusade over to it.  This will mostly be seen as a major improvement in balance, stability, AI, diplomacy, memory use and performance. 

The next DLC: The Dread Lords

This Fall we hope to release the Dread Lords DLC.  This will be accompanied by a number of new features into the game itself (which doesn't require anyone to buy the DLC to benefit from). 

The Dread Lords will bring the backstory of the GalCiv universe up to where GalCiv III started.  This will bring back the Korath.  Because Dread Lords will be combining the events from GalCiv II + Dark Avatar + Twilight there will be some consolidation to keep the gameplay cohesive.

Technical work

I'm happy to report that the latest GalCiv III does work on the Surface Pro 4.  We are working hard to try to reduce the hardware requirements further and increase performance.  That's why you haven't seen a lot of gameplay updates recently.  Making the game run faster and more stable and improve the multiplayer experience (we are close to custom races in multiplayer) is very important.

Multiplayer

Speaking of multiplayer.  While very few people play multiplayer, supporting it has a benefit to single player users.  It forces the engine development to be much more disciplined.  So players end up with a much better experience.  In the long-run, we want to make GalCiv III have not just good multiplayer but so compelling of a multiplayer experience that people will want to play it that way.  This will mean adding some new modes to the game (that will work in single player as well) to allow for much shorter games. 

The next expansion

It's far too early to start talking about the next expansion.  What I can say it that it will focus heavily on politics and government. 

Modding

One area that Stardock is actively hiring for are C# developers.  Doesn't even have to be full-time.  It's more like we will pay for various tools that we can share with the community.  We are going to be releasing a Flavor Text Editor shortly as well as a Mega Event editor.

It may come as a shock but GalCiv III has supported full-blown quests (as in, extremely sophisticated quests and stories and linked events) since 1.0.  However, there is no tool to create them. You current have to edit XML files in a text editor which is very tedious and time consuming. 

Thus, we are looking for:

• A campaign editor
• A tech tree editor
• An event editor
• A C# map (separate from the game) map editor

and that's just off the top of my head.  These kinds of editors are basically glorified XML editors since the output is just XML.  But imagine what effect it would have if people could create and share their own campaigns and events.

Now, before anyone starts emailing me or PMing me, bare in mind, one of the reasons we haven't done this is because we don't really have time to walk people through the various XML files and their corresponding .XSD files.  So the short answer is, you make the thing, we will be happy to pay for it if we can use it (and you can even make a prototype that just needs polish and we'll pay and pay more for the polish).

Just look at the XML files and the XSD files and you'll see just how powerful the system is.

Next up

So next month, get ready for GalCiv III v2.5!

Today, Stardock announced a major v2.4 update for its massive-scale RTS, Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. The update releases on August 24, 2017 alongside a FREE Co-Op Map Pack DLC. 

From the desk of Maisie Song

Seneca Development

Mars is beautiful.

When I say beautiful, I don’t mean the landscape -- although there is kind of an eerie serenity to it. No, what I really mean are the opportunities. My family wasn’t thrilled when I decided to take the job off world, but I wasn’t about to let the chance to become more than just an intern pass me by.

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