"MOO3 is going to OWNZ you!"
It was Spring 2003 and Galactic Civilizations had been released just a couple months before. The game was slowly making its way into retail. In February 2003, the game was considered an also-ran by many. Master of Orion III would soon be out and that obscure indie game would be quickly forgotten. And who could blame people for thinking that? That's what we thought.

Through the worst of timings, Galactic Civilizations and Master of Orion had a collision course on dates. But it had happened before. Almost ten years ago to the day. Back then, Galactic Civilizations was an OS/2 game and Master of Orion was a DOS game. But to hard core fans of the 4X [] genre, the lines were drawn. Of course, true strategy fans got both -- if they had OS/2 anyway. Which of course was the rub, you could run MoO if you had DOS. GalCiv required OS/2. And whatever merits there might have been to Galactic Civilizations, it didn't matter. Master of Orion was far more accessible and went on to be king of the 4X space genre.

When it became clear that Master of Orion III was going to be released at around the same time as Galactic Civilizations for Windows in 2003, we began cutting features. Our budget was miniscule, less than half million total for everything. Master of Orion III had a budget of several jillion dollars. In a post on the MoOIII site, one of the art directors made clear they didn't have unlimited resources either as they only had 5 people on their art team which was bigger than the entire GalCiv I team (art or not).

So features like ship design, fleet combat, and advanced planetary management were taken out because we knew -- KNEW -- that Master of Orion III would have these features and they would be done far far more extravagantly than we could. Master of Orion III would have a 3D engine and users would be making all kinds of fancy ships. Their fleet combat would look like something out of a Star Wars movie. Like many Master of Orion fans, we had imagined what the game would be like. We saw Master of Orion II combined with a state of the art 3D engine, a big budget, and great ideas. When Master of Orion III shipped we realized we had been wrong.

They [developer Quicksilver Software] had taken it in a very different direction that was not like what we had in mind at all. The two games were not very similar after all. There were comparisons still since both were in space and both were strategy games, but that was about as far as it went. They both took very different paths to gameplay. Moreover, sales of Galactic Civilizations didn't stop at the 30,000 units we projected or the 40,000 units we hoped. They didn't stop until around 75,000 in the US/Canada and nearly an equal number overseas plus tens of thousands sold for digital download from GalCiv.com. Starting from scratch
We knew we would be doing a sequel and this time, no compromises. If we could assume at least 60,000 full priced retail sales in North America and in that ballpark overseas along with similar numbers elsewhere, we could significantly bump up our budget.

So where to start?

I hate GalCiv, let's make another!
Galactic Civilizations had virtually no present back story. In my opinion, it was a dry, soulless, generic strategy game in many respects. It had dated graphics. Its interface was awful. I was totally unhappy with the computer Artifical Intelligence, or AI (which I had written). It lacked strategic depth in some key areas -- particularly in running your planets. It lacked cohesion. The aliens were generic. You had to play as humans because we couldn't afford to create the content to let you play as other races. The ships were generic and unbalanced (just get Avatars and wipe everyone out). The combat was simplistic.

I shouldn't say I hated Galactic Civilizations. I don't think it was a bad game. I'm biased but I do think it succeeded at being a pretty good strategy game overall. You could sit down and with a little patience play a game with a considerable amount of replayablity. I just think it needed a lot more work. I benefited from gamers not having a lot of other options at the time. So to do a sequel, we needed to go back and make that addressed these issues and addressed the issues of strategy gamers in general.

Bringing in the backstory
Galactic Civilizations, all the way back to the OS/2 version existed in a world that exists on paper. A lot of paper. Hundreds of pages of it. I'd made a series of poorly written manuscripts in college that pieced together this 23rd century Earth and a vast mythology that flowed around a series of characters. In all, there are 9 of them (plus 3 semi-related ones that deal almost exclusively with the Arnor/Dreadlord wars). I wanted to bring this into the game so that the overall game would feel like there was a story. But we also wanted to be careful because one of the tenets of the game has been to let players create their own worlds with the game. As they play, they're making their own epic tale. But we decided we'd introduce players to our mythos this time around so that if they wanted, they could use our universe as a backdrop for their epics.

The first step was to bring in the missing aliens and expand on the existing ones.

Aliens and Art
Before top modeler/artist extraordinaire Paul Warzecha went to Ensemble Studios, he finished up a bunch of cool alien models for us. Paul is one of the best modelers I've ever seen. Like everyone else at Stardock Systems, he was grossly underpaid. By contrast, Ensemble's offices have those neat key card things to get in. Stardock's new building has them too (the hope is that chicks dig the key card things though technically they're called "fobs" or something like that, but I digress).

We also wanted to bring in the Precursors. They're alluded to in random events in GalCiv I but we wanted to have them be in your face this time in the form of a campaign. We managed to bring in one of the guys who was fresh off of Lord of the Rings having been one of the modelers of Gollum over in New Zealand. He was tasked to bring the organic ships of the Arnor and Dread Lords to life.

Alex, who had been Stardock's first full-time artist (did the artwork for Entrepreneur, The Corporate Machine, GalCiv I, and so forth) worked with Kristoff (New Zealand guy) to put together the setting for the new game.

New Game Mechanics
One of the first things we wanted to deal with was the crummy planet colony system. In GalCiv I, planets were differentiated by an arbitrary numbering system. Higher number means better. It was a strategic dead end because ultimately, the guy who got the best planets early on would pretty much always in. There was no strategic depth to it because you could build as many things on a planet as you wanted and all the bonuses were essentially multiplied by the planet quality number.

So I asked Alex to come up with a user interface design that was tile based. That is, each planet would be different and the planet class would determine how many things you could build on it. But it had to look cool.

This mockup is an early concept of it. At this point, the planets were still going to be housed within stars. This was all back in 2003 mind you and the ideas were just starting to come out. We thought of making 30 or so different planets with nice looking surfaces and the game would just use them. Later on, we would add the requirement that each planet be unique which would greatly add to the complexity of how to make the continents look nice but still be randomly generated.

Meanwhile, the main map was still bogged down in the GalCiv I concept of planets being stuck in stars.

By this time though we had decided that the new combat system would be expanded. The old system was essentially a modification of the old Civilization I system of units having an attack and defense. We added a hitpoint concept to prevent the old "Tirene kills battleship" issue. But it was pretty simplistic by 2003 standards and would be completely outdated by 2006 when we hoped to ship the sequel. So we came up with a new system: 3 types of attacks and corresponding defenses. Players would hence not be able to get a single end all, be all ship.

It would depend on who the enemy was. If you had focused on phasors and your enemy was strong in shield technologies, you would be in trouble. Better to pick on someone who was focusing on armor instead.

Ship Design
Ship Design came in almost immediately. But it was going to be pretty standard stuff. That is, the typical "Pick your hull and then you get a grid of things to stuff it with".

So you'd get a set of ships to choose from but had no control over how they looked, just how they functioned.

The Political Machine
A lot of things changed when we hired a new game developer named Joe Engalan. He had a pretty solid understanding of 3D engines and during our work on The Political Machine we ended up with a pretty solid 3D engine that could be expanded to let Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords do a lot more exciting things. Ironically, it was The Political Machine that changed everything. During that project, our programming team really clicked. Moreover, our Art Director, Paul (Mormegil) had come up with a way to use DesktopX, one of our desktop enhancement programs, to design user interfaces. The result was that we would be able to create resolution independent game interfaces, something to my knowledge had never been done before (i.e. User Interfaces (UI) that didn't have to scale proportionately but rather individual objects and elements could scale at different rates based on the designer's wishes without coding).

So a new user interface was designed. The ships were still not going to be user designed visually at this stage. But now the planets were part of the map and the UI looked a lot better.

Ahead full steam
So now we had put together the team, had a list of grievances that we wanted to address and a bunch of technology. The next step was to make the game itself...

Brad Wardell
Founder, Chief Executive Officer
STARDOCK SYSTEMS

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