Greetings!

When I rejoined the GalCiv team back in November I warned you that I was out to destroy your lives.

Part 1 of the reign of terror was version 1.9 which made a lot of major AI updates to the game, balance changes, and pacing updates.

But 1.9 was really just a sampling. 2.0 is where things really get into high gear.

You can read my journal on this here: http://forums.galciv3.com/481386/

By far, the biggest change will probably be the arrival of Administrators. The purpose is to let people play vertically (small, powerful empires). The one planet victory challenge has been going well. I got very close to doing it on a large galaxy until I disobeyed the rules and didn't give away planets that were given to me by the Altarians which sparked the Drengin to come calling.

We also did work on various UI changes and diplomacy changes. The big diplomacy change is something that some of my fellow old people reading this will understand: Redlining.

From a coding perspective, when you are negotiating with the AI (or any AI is talking to another AI) the trade deal gets passed around and evaluated.

Seeing that, I decided to add a "redlining" vector to the trade deal where the different AI appraisal functions could comment on the deal and add some of their own vetoes to the deal. This is like in contracts where you send it over to someone and they make changes or comment on it (redlining).

Thus, the AI will start to explain why they not only won't agree to go to war with someone (a previously easy to exploit system) but why.

The feature is implemented but only a bit of text was added (translation has to be done).

By far, my favorite change was also to the diplomacy system. The biggest problem I ran into when I played was that once I reached a certain point, it was all a mop up. If I was the most powerful, nobody would touch me.

Well, now, the AI greatly takes friendships with others into account. This not only helps the AI players resist a powerful player conquering everyone but it is actually quite awesome for those of you who try to play nice only to get the someone declaring war on you. Now, others will go to war with them even if they are less powerful.

This sort of thing will get further tuning but overall, the changes are pretty obvious in a short amount of time.

This update should be publicly available on Thursday.