Um, yeah.  You don't really speak for all of us.  Or even very many of us.  No offense, but if you want to play GalCiv 2, play GalCiv 2.  And if the devs think there is enough demand to port the game to other platforms (news flash: there is) then they will.  And no, it won't somehow make the game worse.  This isn't 2006 anymore.

Thanks for your opinion, though.

I agree...keep it GalCiv!  SD can learn a lot from Civ V.  They made major changes, and it wasn't very good until after a couple of expansions.  There's no reason to fix what isn't broken.

Galciv is not close to a perfect 4X strategy game when the military side of the game is more about building space toys than interesting varied weapons systems.Things have to improve and keep moving forward.

Civ5 is easily the most played and best Civ game today and the mechanics are very different from Civ2.

What IS GalCiv?

That's a more loaded question than you can think

I didn't like Civ5.  Civ4 was my favorite Civ game.  I was so looking forward to Civ5, and when I played it it was the biggest letdown.  They just dumbed down the game so much.  The games I played came down to catapult/artillery spam.  I didn't like how the cities worked nor the buildings.  The tech tree wasn't nearly as interesting.  It was basically a PC version of the XBox 360 Civ Revolutions with cartoony graphics and all.

I am loving this thread.

First off, as the designer, this is perhaps my biggest challenge. Keeping the soul of Galactic Civilizations II, but making it better sexier, and feel new.

I can't really roll out a big list of what has changed, and what has stayed the same… Yet. But I will let you know that keeping GalCiv, GalCiv, so to speak is my number one priority. This is not to say we won't have lots of new things, we have lots of new things, but they all have to pass a very simple test. “Does it feel like GalCiv”. If and new feature, or enhancement fails this test it goes back to the drawing board.

Can’t wait to tell you guys more.

No worries there, my friend.

Galactic Civilizations has been around for a very long time. It's as old (if not older) than Master of Orion (the first beta of GalCiv for OS/2 was released before Master of Orion 1 was released).

GalCiv II isn't perfect. I can think of a lot of areas we can improve on.  There's a lot of really cool things we're doing with GalCiv III that make it even better than GalCiv II.  That said, when the first screenshots come out, people are going to look and say "It seems very similar to GalCiv II except prettier".  But that's because the core game play is still the same.

There are some exciting areas we can expand on thanks to improvements in PC hardware and also, admittedly, just having more years of being able to think about how different game mechanics lend themselves to new and interesting things.

When some of these new game mechanics show up in the betas, I think most people (as in 99%) will think "Oh yea, I see. This should have been part of GalCiv II actually."   That's been my reaction when we start implementing some of these things. It's not just that they are great for GalCiv III but I kind of wish we had thought of them for GalCiv I and GalCiv II because they seem so obvious now.

I'm the mean guy who won't let mormegil tell you everything, it's totally my fault

Putting together a journal post that I hope you guys will like though, so that's something! Hopefully that should go up tomorrow.

And

This is why I feel that my trust in Stardock is well founded.  Sure, I can wait until the rollout of the alpha to see what gems the new GalCiv has.  I don't want to, but yeah, I'm sure it'll be a top notch game.  

I know, it kills me that Cari isn't on GalCiv III.  If she were on it, we would, literally, have 100% of the GalCiv II team on GalCiv III (except expanded with more people).

But no...she and her baby.  She'll probably pop in from time to time here though.  

I can mail you bacon...

Give her consulting credits?

I remember when my son was born. I actually cut work for a week without realizing it. Wife commented that she was happy I was able to get the last three days off.

Thank god I know the owner and she has a sense o' humor.

"So make sure she doesn't forget 'bout Stardock!", I guess is the selfish message I'm tryin' to put across.

Hahaha. Well, not everybody would want to know everything, just the parts that interest/worry them more. But bit by bit, you would get the whole picture.

The combat threads... a prelude to other system threads?