Dev Journal #120: They're Not Squatters

Wishlist Federations & Empires

When a civilization chooses the Oligarchy government type, they get a “hero ship” and we originally called them squatters. The ship gets a special ability to go around to class 0 planets and claim them as collateral, which they use to purchase investments that get added to their portfolio.

When investments mature, they provide a new executive order for the player. For example, Dumping Rights lets you flood a target foreign planet with your goods and get 10 turns of their income. It makes them mad but you have the money without going to war. Another one is Resource Embargo where you can have all the supplies of a given foreign core world go to your closest core world instead. It deprives them of resources for two years (24 turns) from their core worlds. But I’m drifting off topic here.

The point being, the ship isn’t squatting. It is merely… acquiring planets that no one else has claimed. People complained about all those class 0 “dead” worlds. The Oligarchy civs agree. They are on your side. Not squatters. They are quite literally, single handedly, making this cash grab 4X game’s obvious design flaw worth something. What else were you going to do with Mercury anyway?

So you like space games eh? Play them all day and night!

I know a lot of you are my age. I turn 55 this month. When I was a kid, back in college, writing Galactic Civilizations for OS/2, I never would have guessed that 35 years later I’d still be playing it. Addiction doesn’t really cut it here. Even now, every time I play the game, I think, “Oh this would be so much better if we just did X, Y, and Z.”

Now we were supposed to have this new expansion out on June 11. The expansion is “done” in the sense that it’s all there. The problem was that when playing the game over and over again, there were things in the game that just annoyed me so much and I kept adding them to the list of requirements for v4.0 and the expansion pack requires v4.0.

I probably won’t be able to get everything I want into 4.0. I have rewritten the tech navigator screen twice and thrown it out twice. Tech screens are tough.

But other things have come along better. Minimap is less critical on a single sector map but man is nice to have on multi-sectors. The updated ship context window is nice being able to see the special abilities in their own section.

One of the bigger holdups is art. Icons. Funny fact: the icons in GalCiv are done by the same person today (not me) as they were 25 years ago. And right now I need a good icon for collateral.

The governments do NOT get unlocked by techs. But rather by cultural progress.

So it’ll be pretty obvious which ones give you a government type.

Vacation

Next week is the Steam Next Fest and the week after that is the Steam Summer Sale. That’s my cue to go take a vacation. I’m going to go find someone’s unoccupied house and hole up in there for a couple weeks. Oh wait, that is squatting. Well in any event, don’t burn the place down while I’m out!