News: SF has picked up Space Empires V.

Cool!

Space Empires.... never cared too much for it's user interface means - or the game too much, but... it has great potential - if any company can make Space Empires a better game, certainly Strategy First can accomlish the task.

Um, SF has no say in the development of the game and it is important to note that SE IV was made by ONE guy working alone with no income. Additionally SE IV was a better game than M003 which had millions in development capitol and a huge staff working on it for years. So what if the interfaced for SE IV looked a little dated, what do you expect when its a one man show. The fact that the game has endured so well over the last five years proves that it was a solid title. SE V will have a new UI and much needed graphics updates so hopefully those who care about such things will be made happy.

Have to disagree. Endured? By what standard and research data? What "facts?" National sales data? Sorry, but in my experience, SE rarely comes up in conversations, whereas MOOI and MOOII still do. But, true, that's not a legit scientific survey analysis - just opinion; but having travelled the Union since the days of the TRS-80, and loved 4X and similar, I think it's fairly informed. Too bad they can't work on more developement (if "no" as you say).

One guy? Fine, "Well Done" for one guy, but that is irrelavent in determining if something is good or not on the market, either as shareware, as national distribution at retail stores, or whatever the case. MOOII did well precisely because of the level of time and money put into it - and great common sense management at the developement level... it naturally follows that such would be the case.

Interface? True, an opinion, but as a person of the "old school" way of thinking, a user friendly interface, one which is logical and efficient, is what ultimately is going to make or break divided opinions on how good a program is; and such likely will have a dramatic impact on overall approval of the game if the rest of it is on target. There can still be no doubt that MOOII had one of the best, if not the best, user friendly and highly efficient game element control interfaces ever designed for a 4X Space game. In my opinion, GC/AP is given a huge push in a positive direction simply due to having a fairly efficient common sense interface, though still not as good as that of MOOII -- which truely set the standard to emulate, in my opinion.

As a side bar, I'm please when I read stuff like the below regarding the coming GCII - and the candid honesty of Brad Wardell.

Not sure this link will be taken properly by this poor forum design:

http://articles.filefront.com/Galactic_Civilizations_II_The_Dread_Lords_QA/;502;;;/article.html

"XXXX://articles.filefront.com/Galactic_Civilizations_II_The_Dread_Lords_QA/;502;;;/article.html" where XXXX is http


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Given that Strategy First didn't pay royalties they owed us for most of the retail sales of Galactic Civilizations worldwide, I hope they have better luck with Strategy First than we've had.
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I'm thinking in error about certain relationships... I had thought Strategy First was a division of StarDock or vice-verse... so you're with StarDock? How does Total Gaming fit in? Sub of whom? Too bad SF hasn't paid up... that's not good for those hoping to see more come from you guys and gals I read StarDock's mission statement, and that certainly is something I can say: "It's about time a company came along with such goals as yours." I hope you all succeed and do well! Hopefully online sales will help you all out as well.
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Strategy First is a retail publisher. It has nothing to do with TotalGaming.net. 

It basically took our game, put it in a box, sent it to retailers and then didn't pay most of the royalties they owed us.

Stardock:

• Developed GalCiv totally on its own
• Designed, built, hosted this website
• Hosts and pays for all the bandwidth for updates
• Provides the techncial support for the game
• Did nearly all the marketing for the game

So as you can imagine, it's a sore subject. It's not just that Strategy First didn't pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties to us, but that they essentially were a middle man in the whole process who intercepted revenue the game earned and kept it for themselves.  They're currently in bankruptcy.

The "Galactic Civilizations Deluxe" and retail "Altarian propechy" that's at the stores? I doubt we'll see any money from sales of that. But we're stuck with supporting it including dealing with their putting the wrong serial #s on some of the units which you've seen people flaming us about even though we weren't involved.

I'm really shocked that any developers would sign on with them. I don't think Strategy First is a dishonest company mind you.  Just incredibly ineptly run from a financial point of view.

When Stardock pays royalties to third parties on projects, it seperates royalties it owes to developers from the general accounting here so that we're never spending it.  IMO, from a practical point of view, money owed to Stardock was a good chunk of the money that Strategy First used to stay in business these past couple of years.

It's not the money aspect that's so frustrating.  It's just the huge amount of work our guys put into Galactic Civilizations. Providing the free updates, listening to users.  Strategy First had nothing to do with any of that. But I regularly see people who credit Strategy First for the game's success when they really didn't have anything IMO to do with how well it did. In fact, given how little marketing they did, they were more of a detraction from how well it did.

They essentially sat between us and the game's distributor (Encore) and the retailers.  Their value-add was very little but they kept nearly all the income that the game earned from retail.

If it weren't for direct sales of the game, which went through Stardock, there'd not only be no Galactic Civilizations II but there'd be no Stardock games division.

So, here's to hoping that they make enough money off of Space Empires V to pay off Stardock!

And then enough money from their next game to pay the developers of Space Empires V...

(I don't know about anybody else, but I never would have heard of GalCiv if I hadn't seen it sitting on the shelf at Best Buy. I bought AP directly, and I'm going to buy GCII directly. So there is some oblique benifit to getting your game on the store shelf somehow.)

Incedently, what are the plans for the retail publication of GalCiv2?

Frogboy a quick question, for us the players the best solution would be to subscribe to Totalgaming.net? Does the revenue from these subscription go entirely to Stardock? I think that we as players should support your company by subscribing to Totalgaming.net, if this is the best way your company will receive the money you deserve. (By the way I have already my Totalgaming.net, I love the renewal option that lowers the cost of the subscription)

This really, really, saddens me to hear this. Years ago I was in partners as a tropical fish supplier - and our retail pet stores (Value Pet, Inc) got into deep debt with us - hoping against hope that they'd eventually pay up - they were, saddly (in retrospect), our main customer (13 stores) - then they went bankrupt, total liquidation. That was the beginning of the end for Viginia Aquatics Tropical Fish Supply (c1990). Gads, I hope you can manage to survive this sort of thing!

Sad thing is, like PJ, I came across GC in a bargin bin at a mall store, Electronics Boutique here in Virgina. But I'll have you know, I bought AP online from StarDock and I am constantly trying to get some of my long time Settlers IV online friends in Germany interested. But it's takes a certain personality type to love 4X and turn based games ("Turn Based;" i.e., the norm for most my years playing board games before the PC arrived; aka "War Games"). There is much which is great to be said for turned based games, and many aren't aware of that in the younger generations (saddly - due to no substantial reference point).

I apologize deeply for any sense of credit I gave to SF for GC/AP; and, I certainly hope you guys and gals can recover! And I hope there are legal avenues you can take if need be (regarding SF - if they do reorganizational bankruptcy, Chp 11, or whatnot). In any event, I will buy they next edition! I like what am seeing and reading about it as well!

BTW, I hope you can get the time to take a look at the old C64 game Lords Of Conquest (by EA, if I recall correctly) - it would be a great PC remake, as nothing at all similar has ever be done since the C64 era. It's a wonderful strategy game, turn based.


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Thanks for your kind words guys.

I want to emphasize that Stardock considers all GalCiv buyers equal regardless of where you bought it.  You should buy your games in whatever way is best for you.

Under normal circumstances, where you buy the game is all equally good for the developer.  Buying your game at retail helps ensure the game remains at retail where more people will find out about it.

So you should definitely not feel bad about buying the game at retail in the bargain bin or whatever.  We love you all equally.

Stardock wasn't the only ones affected by Strategy First's financial difficulties. Paradox, makers of Hearts of Iron and Europa Universalis and many other developers suffered similarly.  The bankrupcty filing of Strategy First indicates they owed millions of dollars to people.

One of the things we came away with is that we will publish our games at retail.  We are about to sign up with a major retail distributor so that Galactic Civilizations II will be at far FAR more stores than the first one was and have much more marketing.

We are also starting to look at publishing other games that are of high enough quality so that other game developers don't have to go through what we went through.

Chippoka,
I has endured for on line sales. Shrapnel Games has stated that it has been one of their strongest selling titles for over four years. The thing that hurt SE IV is that it is a nitch game. By going retail the word will get out about the game, and hopefuly some of those MOO folks will learn of it.
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Frogboy, Thanks for the heads up. We have been discussing this at the Shrapnel forum. I have sent an email to a friend who will hopefuly tell Aaron to read this thread.

If they are cash strapped, then it is likely that they will rip Malfador off as they have done to you. This sucks because your game is the only other game that I play on a regular bases apart from Tribes and SE IV.

I'm sure Moo II players will all eventually hear of other titles Heh, given Moo III was such a disappointment for so many of them (as it seems, anyway). "Niche" market? Aren't all these Space 4X games that way? Erm, save, perhaps a few titles (Moo II broke the yoke due to multiplayer on-line ability and full market release)...

How does SE IV rate to Stars, Pax Imperia, Imperium Galactic II, Spaceward Ho, Moo III, and similar, in sales? Have and links to stats on that? Or is it really pretty much subjective opinion?

But GC --- a better game at this point in my mind; hopefully the follow-on will be even better It's wait and see sort'a thing.... I need to check SE IV again, however

GC/AP has a lot going for it that is very good and original in concept - if it ever becomes multi-player, I think it will see dramaticly increased popularity (provided it is hard-coded to a set of rules for online play to ensure no cheating and data file tampering).

Why on earth hardcode it, let it use a it's-the-hosts-data-files-that-count aproach, this way mods can allso be multiplayer.

I would suggest not hard coding so any mod can be used by all.

For the other side I would put in a notifier to all player in that game telling them in a private msg that the "fjjljljfl file has been changed by fjljfl;jflj".

~SDC~

I play both Gal Civ and SE IV and feel that both games are differant enought to be enjoyable. SE IV beats the crap out of Pax, and GI II, and rates exceptionally well when compared to Stars. (From posts on the shrapnel forum that compare the games for which players of all have made their opinions known.)

The thing that is most appealing about SE IV is the fact that you can mod the hell out of it. Take for instance the Star Trek, Adamant, Porportions, Space Food, TDM, and my more mods. You can make your own ship sets and include them as new races. The game is not limited or has set races you can play. (There is a game limit of 20 races per game though.) PBW is a wonderful way to play head to head with other players and there have been no issues with cheating that I know of.

Both Gal Civ and SEIV are great games. Comparing the two does an injustice to both. They are both great games with a lot of growth room.

Exactly, but given that so many online players take their gaming efforts so seriously, many will expect set "standards" in order to permit fair comparisons; so, perhaps, a rule standard set could be developed for such things, but with a menu option to turn those off for those wishing to use mods (as in Unreal, etc).




Ok, we can tell you like it the game Hence a small bias , but without hard facts as sales data comparisons, user surveys with a large sample sizes, etc, I still say it's a fairly subjective call regarding "popularity" or what is "better" (which was why I objected in the first place).



Or you're being careful due to the site you're posting at ...being polite or honorable. However, comparing products isn't wrong either if gets at the truth so that they can be improved. Ok, so great, if they are both fairly equal - but I doubt that is absolutely true.

You're both biased! We all are in one way or another, we all would lean to one game or the other. To be honest, I'm with Atrocities on this one, SEIV and GalCiv are different and yet the same.

And yet, comparing the ratio of times I've spent playing GalCiv to SEIV...well there's no comparison. 1000's (literally!) of hours playing SEIV, compared to maybe a couple hundred playing GalCiv.

And now back to the discussion of Strategy First and their foulness

Biases? Yep. That's what I'm saying: It's subjective unless there is solid proof as fact expressed as sales data, surveys, etc, to show where the line is drawn for popularity (whatever) over the past decade... well, then....

But SE IV and AP for me? It's the opposite; and so likewise of many of those I've met over the past 20 years in my travels. Most of never heard of SE; certainly have heard of Pax or the Moo series, even Stars (and others)... hence the basis of my opinion. Hey, but I have been convinced to give SE another try

An a-side... How many of you are familiar with Reach For The Stars? It's really the game that bagan Space 4X category, is it not? It was a great "Hot Seat" game... spent many hours playing it as multiplayer and likewise with another early 4X game: Spaceward Ho (another "Hot Seat" game - SH4 is even still on my PC).

Yep. SF... A sad story there...


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Chippoka, I am another galciv player that comes from SE4. I'll add to what Atrocity wrote that SE4 shines on the multiplayer aspect, and it's "Play by Web" server. I own SE4 since 2 years (a bit more probably...) but I haven't played a SP game with SE4 since my learning phase. However, galciv is still on my hard drive and I bought a total gaming subscription to get quickly altarian prophecy. And now I am waiting for galciv2.

To my opinion, these games do not compete for the same space.

I hope SF will not screw Malfador as hard as stardock, but I fear it is a bad move to go from direct distribution to channels when you are a niche product.

I've played a demo of Reach for the Stars - it was pretty cool till I found Galciv, then SE IV. Since I've been playing SEIV, I pretty much have neglected GC right now. I still plan on playing though.

You can also mod Galciv to a level that the only limit is your imagination, check the libraryat the top and you will see how many mods you can create, infinite.... The only thing I find SEIV superior to galciv is the ability to play as any race you want and how you can improve the ablities of the different races, Galciv 2 is making the ship design available, something that galciv lacks.

Ah, SE shines on MP, huh? Ok, that could part of why I'm missing something here, as I mostly play the single player component of most games - mostly due to connection issues (modem). Plus, for online play, I'm more drawn to Tournament Unreal (or similar) due to my limited time available for gaming in general. One day that may change, but I can't justify the cost for DSL or cable (I hate our local cable monopoly here in Virgina anyway).

You played some Reach For The Stars? That's showing your age a bit I played it constantly "Hot Seat" and single player back in the 80's on my old Commodore 64.

As far as modability - isn't GC/AP sufficient in that regard too? I didn't realize SE was modable (I didn't stay with it very long).

I for one find the fact that most people who have responded have either played or own both Galciv and SEIV heartening. Shows there's support for both games. Of course people like one or the other better, that's to be expected. And with both SE5 and GalCiv2 coming out this year, it's a good year for 4X space strategy games.