Developer's Announcement: Galactic Civilization for OS/2 2.1

June 24, 1993

Brief:

An OS/2 multithreaded PM game that uses MMPM/2 to generate digitized sounds. Began development early in June. Beta testing begins early this Fall. Game only available on the OS/2 platform.

Features:
 * Completely 32 bit
 * Multithreaded
 * SDS/AI (SDS Artificial Intelligence specification .9)
 * Up to 7 computer players vs. You.
 * Over 1000 different star systems
 * Over 8000 different planets to conquer
 * SVGA/XGA graphics support, 256 color high resolution.
 * Object Oriented interface. If you can see it, you can click on it.

In Early June SDS inquired on the Internet Usenet conference of comp.sys.os2.apps about the interest in an OS/2 specific game. SDS had come to the conclusion that OS/2, lacking native entertainment software, might be a viable market now that it had reached critical mass. We expected to receive between 5 and 10 responses that week and would base our decision on that mail. Instead, SDS received over 1000 mail messages in the first 2 weeks and discovered that the message had made its way all over the globe to virtually every major OS/2 BBS in existence. This response prompted SDS to not only pursue this project but to accerlate its development.

This announcement will cover in a fair amount of detail what the game is about, how to make suggestions to changes, how to become a beta tester, pricing information, and availability information.

This message will be cross posted to several well known OS/2 areas by us. If it is not on a conference that you, the reader, think it should be, please feel free to re-post it there. To Fido-Net moderators, please do not consider this off topic, in order to produce this game to the OS/2 population's liking, we are including (on various FTP and BBS sites) bitmap snap shots of the program. This way, users can send us feedback about the interface as well as the rules and other design mechanics of the game. Before cross posting this message, please be sure that it has not already appeared on that conference since this message is rather long and will take up considerable bandwidth.

THE GAME
The game is loosely based on MicroProse's game, Civilization. The game departs from Civilization in most ways but maintains its general theme: Build up technology, ally with other players or destroy them, keep your people happy. In this game, you begin with your people just beginning to explore space. To make the game more fun, we have taken several factual liberties, namely, you don't know where stars are. The stars appear as you get close to them. You will begin with one little explorer star ship that can't even colonize new worlds.

Your screen is dominated by the map view, which lets you see one "quadrent" at a time. In order to leave a quadrent you must develop "warp" technology. A typical quadrent might hold 5 or so star systems, the game features an 16x16 grid of quadrents, so it is a pretty big galaxy. When you finally build ships capable of transporting a colony, you can enter a star system and colonize the various worlds. The worlds you can colonize will be pretty easy to tell by looking at them. You can colonize any world you want but the less earth like it looks, the less you will get out of it in terms of food, resources, and trade.

The key ingredient to success in this game is developing new technologies. For instance, you begin the game with space travel and a few other technologies and are asked what you want to develop next. Unlike Civilization, which only allows you to be developing one new technology at once, GalCiv allows you to be working on 4 new technologies at once, dividing up your research resources among them however you want. You can, for example, put 50% of your resources into developing Nano-Electronics, 20% into Phaser tech, 10% into Anti-matter tech, and 10% into photon tech. Some technologies will take longer to develop than others. Developing technologies to make a "death star" will take a lot longer than to design a cloaking device.

While you are busy building colonies and exploring space, up to 7 other computer players will be doing the same thing. These computer players will be controlled by SDS's AI specification and molded after real life strategy experts. Since a lot of the strategy to win is similar to the game Civilization, we have chosen to model the AI after people who have literally creamed Civilization. Unfortunately for you, no matter how easy you set the difficulty, the computer players will always be smart, they will just have the number of resources available to them limited.

The game is won by either A: Destroying all enemies, or B: Uniting all players into one alliance. There is no time limit to complete the game, the game could literally go on forever if you aren't able to destroy other players or unite them. Because of this, the player has the option to set the size of the universe. The largest it can get is the aforementioned 18x18 area. In a smaller universe, the game will likely end sooner.

If you are not familiar with Civilization, then this next part may be difficult to understand. Feel free to skip it to the next section...

FEATURE SET:

Since this game takes place in the distant future, we assume that all resources are handled optimally. You will be too busy to have to deal with making sure your colonies are (for example) using the newly made Energy System you've built (in Civ, you could build a coal mine and the game would use a desert area until you manually changed it to the coal mine, this won't happen in this game).

The economic system is based more on reality than Civilization. In this game you set your tax rate. The higher the tax rate, the more irritated your people get. With those taxes you can spend it on research, military or social programs. Mineral resources can be put towards your military or colony improvements. This is an added modifier towards the amount of taxes. If you happen to have a lot of very productive planets, you can lower your taxes spent on the military and social and more towards research.

In summary on this feature: Your taxes go towards: - Research of new technologies - Building your military might - Building colony improvements (Social)


 * By the way, our game isn't based on socialist politics, social programs simply mean that we invest in privately owned companies that would build the colony improvements!

Your star systems also produce resources which can be converted into liquid funds or applied directly towards colony improvements (for the colony that the mineral resources came from) and military units (again, for that particular colony).

There is no "corruption" in this game or "revolutions" but the higher you raise taxes, the less productive your people get and the more taxes that are lost due to having to fight crime on your colonies.

Star Ship Units
The following is a preliminary list of star ships. Each empire will have their own unique looking star ships. they aren't color coated, they simply look different.

Planet Explorer		- Explores your quadrent, no warp drive Star Fighters		- Can attack others, no warp drive Colony Wagon		- Can colonize star systems, no warp drive Interstellar Colony Wag	- "                       ", has warp drive Star Cruiser		- Explores everywhere, has warp drive, limited arms Battle Cruiser		- "					" better arms Battle Ship		-       """" also has hyperspace, very tough Military Transport	- Transports troops. Can invade other colonies Sensor Array		- Just hangs around in a quadrent, required if you want to be able to look in that quadrent (when			 you don't have a star ship in it).

Death Moon		- Can destroy ships easily, no warp drive Death Star		- " and star systems, has warp drive very tough. Diplomatic Cruiser	- Can make treaties with other star nations. Tradeships		- Allow interstellar trade (major part of game)

Ground Troops		- Just protect the ground
 * Ground Based Units *


 * Colony Improvements *

You can improve your colonies' defense, money making potential, happiness, or productivity by adding improvements.

Planetary library	- Increases research, a modifier of the taxes you put towards new technlogies

Planetary bank		- Increases wealth and makes republicans happy!

Fusion based manf. plant- Increases productivity

Planetary Defense	- Improves your defenses

Military Accademy	- "

Food Replicators	- Lets your population increase faster

Research Institute	- Really improves your research modifier

Stadium			- Makes people happy

Multimedia stations	- Makes people happy

(we want to add more here, please feel free to suggest more to us)

WONDERS OF THE UNIVERSE
TerraForming device:

This is a device that only one empire can have, that empire basically doubles the trade resources of all its worlds. Very powerful and very expensive to build. Because you can make your worlds a garden of eden, you will receive a lot more trade income.

Hydroponics Lab:

One empire will be able to build a lab that will make everyone on that colony always have enough food keep them happy.

The Cloaking Device:

Whoever develops this first will receive increased offensive points.

Dinosaurus Park:

Doubles trade to that colony. Bring back the dinosours.

"Chicago":

Build a mythical operating system that allows you to automatically get the next closest technology free because while everyone else was wasting time waiting for this to get done, you were busy getting real research done.

Deep Thought:

Build the ultimate super computer. Doubles research in colony.

The Death Star Project:

Must complete this before you can build death stars (PLURAL).

Creation of Life:

Makes everyone a bit happier.

(We need more...please send suggestions if you have any for more wonders of the universe).

Government Types
Government types are very important to the game. You start out as a simple colonizer and work your way to having a federation.

Colonizer:

You can only collect taxes from your home planet, but then again, you don't have to worry about how unhappy your colonies are. You can still build things with your colonies (except star ships) but collect no money, unless you trade your resources into money (which means you can potentially get a moderate income from colonies).

Star Empire:

You can collect taxes from your colonies but you still can't build star ships on your colonies.

Star Democracy:

You recognize your colonies to be states and collect taxes and can build ships.

Star Federation:

Same as above but your trade resources are doubled. Downfall is, people get unhappy a lot easier.

List of Discoveries
Nano-Electronics Phasers:			Allows star fighters and star cruisers Anti-matter Photons Deflectors TurboLasers			Allows battle cruiser instant communications tractor beams universal translotor Super-Metals Warp drive			Allows you to leave the quadrent Transporters Anti-matter weapons robot fighters long range sensors planetary defense Cloaking Atmosphere Traversal Super Lasers			Allows battle ships Intergalactic Diplomacy		Allows you to make alliances Largescale building Civilian Interplanetary transport Hyperspace Mass food Molecular Reconstruction Molecular Medicine Star Democracy Star Federation Artificial Satellite (moon) Death Moon Death Star

(if you can think of more, please tell us).

Special Features:

Unlike Civilization, ships and death stars take damage. You can keep attacking a battle ship and if that battle ship is far away from a home port it will eventually be destroyed. Also unlike civilization, if a attacker is far less powerful than the defender, the attacker will ALWAYS lose. A star fighter will NEVER single handedly destroy a death star. It may damage it some but NEVER will it just destroy it.

You can form alliances with other powers. Alliances mean that if someone attacks you, the other members of the alliance will attack them.

The economics of the game is very important. You can trade with other races and get a lot of income. But if you are at war, you will receive NO money from star systems that belong to the enemy. Even if you have a small military, if you are a large economic power, people will think twice before going to war with you.

You receive money in 3 ways: The aformentioned trade. Taxation Tourism. For every quadrent you control, you will get some tourism money from it.

To control a quadrent, the sum of your star system's power must be greater than the enemy players' star systems' power.

THE BORG The NTers The Altarians The Cylonians The Empire The Drengi The Orcors
 * Enemy Players************************

Availability:

The game is still early in development, but we are a couple weeks ahead of schedule. The September beta may have sound support in it but it will not have the enemy players in it. You will be able to play it in completeness but there won't be anyone to play against (so it won't be very fun). Next winter a feature complete version should be almost done and ready to be tested by a limited beta audience. Next Spring the finished product should be ready.

Beta users will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement with SDS.

The cost of the game will be between $28 to $35.

Requirements:

OS/2 2.1 8 megabytes of memory VGA or better, SVGA or better highly recommended (16 colors will look terrible) 4 to 8 megs of disk space. A mouse

Features not in v1.0 but in 2.0 (if the game is successful, a sequel will probably be made).

THESE FEATURES WILL NOT BE IN THE FIRST VERSION: - No modem play - No network awareness - No editors

About the Bitmap snap shots:

The screens show some of the early featurs (not polished yet) and show what a battle ship will look like. One screen shows how the game will begin with no discovered stars. The final product will look somewhat different. For example, the starfleet icon will not be there since it is trademarked.

If you have questions, please send email to:

Internet: x90wardell@wmich.edu

On OS2BBS: Brad Wardell

On the Atlanta IBMBBS: Brad Wardell

Note. No support will be at locations requiring a fee (i.e. compuserve).

Conclusions:

We believe that this is probably the first commercial OS/2 game, and hope that it sells well. It is more than just a game, it is advocacy for future software development for OS/2. How well it does will depend on how well we market it and how responsive the OS/2 community is to it. If you have any suggestions, please feel free to make them to us.