On Galactic Civilizations 2

Well, now you know what has occupied my free time lately.
This game is one that I had heard a lot about, mostly through two playthroughs that are still roaming around on the internet. I highly recommend them both, so long as you have a high tolerance for language and an interest in strategic videogames. (Here and here)

Galactic Civilizations II has it's closest cousin in the Civilization series, which I was already a major fan of. They are both part of a class of games called 4x, which basically refers to the fact that they are turn based, require advancement along technological, economic and territorial branches, and are incredibly addicting. What some have called the "one more turn" factor is very, very strong with games like these, and Gal Civ 2 is absolutely no exception. In fact, I would say that this game completely outdoes Civilization, for a variety of reasons.

The background of the game is that there were a bunch of alien civilizations restricted to hyperspace travel via slow, hard-to-build stargates. Then one of them discovered the humans, who manage to invent a portable, faster version of the technology to make more effective FTL systems. They willingly share that information with everyone--thus creating absolute chaos in the process as all those civilizations start declaring wars, claiming territory, and generally making a mess of the previous, stable universe. Of course, that is all on the periphery, since I've pretty much ignored the story campaign in favor of the sandbox mode, but I guess it is important to set things in context.

The depth of the game is absolutely breathtaking. You have a number of options available to you throughout the experience that can actually kind of overwhelm you at times. From the outset, you can choose what kinds of inherent skills your race has, what type of galaxy you will play in, and what enemies you'll face. Once you get into the game, you can not only name your own colonized planets and such, you can also design and build your own spacecraft (!!!!), balance your own economy, engage in trade negotiations and diplomacy that actually matters (one area that always seemed to fall flat in the Civilization games) and pursue one of five different paths to an ultimate victory. Those range from outright conquering everyone, to creating a grand alliance of nations, to researching the meaning of life. If nothing else, the game has more or less infinite replay value, simply due to the sheer number of possibilities you will constantly face.

It isn't an easy game by any means either. The many different possibilities mean you have just as many chances to utterly fail at what you want to do. My first game went well--I managed to win an alliance victory after brutally sabotaging the game's major superpower, convincing half the galaxy to band together against them and then leveraging those connections for a victory. Then I played a second game where I spent myself into a bankruptcy my little star nation couldn't recover from before the others started to roll through my territory. My third and fourth games went well, and I marched through my normal difficulty opponents with ease. Feeling confident, I started a game where the AI was ticked up by one notch.

I promptly got my head handed to me, where I soon realized that not one but three or four brutal civilizations were ready to completely wreck my plans and destroy me within a short amount of time. I dropped back down to normal level, just to salve my poor self-esteem, and I now look on the higher level AIs with justifiable fear. I haven't even thought about the upper level difficulties yet; my overconfidence was my weakness last time.

All in all, the entire game has been a good experience. I hesitate to label it a worthwhile investment of time, but it definitely was worth the money I paid for it, and I believe has given me some time to relax after the overtime I've put myself through for the start of the year. Now that I've finally managed to get this review up, maybe I can get back to business on the other stuff.
 

On Moving

Sooooo, we just moved apartments. Unfortunately, that leaves me without much to say in the blogging department. Unless you would all like to hear all about my dreadfully treated back muscles and the fact that half our stuff is in boxes, which I doubt.

In any case, work will continue on the current drafts for the rest of this week. Life is always full of surprises...

On Background: Dark Energy

In honor of me finishing the rough draft of Eagle (cause I totally did!) I decided to take a stab at writing a bit about the background of the Jacob Hull universe. Mostly I'm a bit burnt out and unwilling to start on Airships before next week, so here goes.

One of the cool things about science is that the more we've discovered, the more we realize how little clue we have about how our universe works. Dark energy, along with dark matter, is one of those things that currently proves that maxim to its fullest.

There are a variety of explanations about dark energy, but what it boils down to (to my, non-expert understanding) is a collective "Huh?" on the part of modern astronomers. You see, the Big Bang theory (not that one) has managed to explain quite a lot about how the universe was formed. We've discovered background radiation from that first initial explosion, and all the galaxies in the universe are speeding away from each other, just as that theory would predict. There's just one problem.

They are all speeding up.

Why is that a problem, you ask? Well, according to a little thing we call gravity, we know that all matter is drawn toward other matter at a certain rate. That rate is lessened by distance and depends on the mass of the objects involved, but the gist of it is that the mass in the universe should be attracting the rest of the mass in the universe--especially those big globs of stars and planets we call galaxies. The initial assumption was that--due to gravitational pull--all those galaxies would eventually slow down and reverse course, finally merging together in a big condensed clump for another Big Bang of some sort. That is not what is happening at all.

They figured that out by looking at the light coming in from those galaxies, and measuring what kind of light it was. Light coming from an object headed toward you has blue shift, thanks to the Doppler effect. Light coming from an object headed away has redshift, thanks to that same effect. People have measured the light from the various galaxies and have found that they have redshifts--and that the shift is increasing. Basically, they did to galaxies what traffic cops do to your car and found that not only were they speeding, they were freaking flooring it.

Now, the concept they are using to explain the phenomena is called dark energy. Basically, from what I can understand of the subject (which I admit is limited) is that they think it is either the energy cost that is paid by the universe's expansion to have more empty space, or that there must be a kind of energy called a quintessence field that provides the gravitic acceleration. There is apparently a high-level debate on what those theories imply, and we aren't anywhere close to figuring out which one is correct, but they have concluded that dark energy makes up about seventy-three percent of the energy and mass in the universe. That's right, we have no idea about the nature of about three quarters of existence.

So how does this relate to Jacob Hull? When I was writing Wolfhound, I was reading about dark energy and came across a description of it as a sort of 'negative pressure' in the universe. With the weird way that my mind works, I connected negative pressure with the air pressure systems on Earth which create winds. From there I jumped to the idea of a similar sort of wind system occuring between concentrations of high and low 'negative pressure' in space, which people could sail along using sails meant to catch the energy provided by those dark energy currents. From there I went to the Capistans capturing that energy like specialized windmills, and missiles and torpedoes using those same currents to accelerate as well.

Now I'm sure there are at least a couple of physicists who are crying out in horror at what I've just done to the whole concept of dark energy. I'm sure there are already plenty of theorems and explanations to describe why the direction I went with here is absurd and illogical. I'm fine with that; Wolfhound was never meant to be a science textbook after all, and I readily admit that it was not meant to be hard sci fi either. Still, there was the thought process behind the background, for those who are interested. Hope to be a bit more regular in posting here in the future. See you around!