GameSpy: Let’s get back to the gameplay. I know this time you’re doing something different this time with planets and with bases.
Wardell: That’s by far the biggest, most welcome change. In the original game there was no strategy involved on the planets. Everyone went in and just built everything on the planet. The only strategic problem was what order to build the first 75 things. After that they just queued up everything and whoever had the highest level planet was going to win. That doesn’t seem very strategic to me.
This time around what class a planet is indicates how many useable tiles there are on the planet. If you land on a class seven planet that has 10 tiles that you can build something on. That means you now have to pick and choose carefully what you want to build. You need to ask yourself, ‘Is this going to be my agricultural planet?’, ‘Will it have a high population for taxes, or is it going to be my industrial planet to crank out ships.’ These decisions will also be affected by various bonuses on the planet – it might have alien artifacts or be mineral rich.
Nice.
The one thing I do not like is that we have to wait until 2006.
The real credit goes to Allen Rausch. It was a phone interview and he managed to take out the “it’s like, you know, totally cool” and turn it into something intelligible.
Real Brad: “GalCiv is a really cool game, you know. We liked decided, you know, to rip off, is that the right word? Ya, rip off like every strategy game this time around and squish it all together into one cool, you know, game thing.”
Allen’s translation of Brad: “We are very excited about Galactic Civilizations II. For instance, we decided to try to incorporate and expand on concepts we’ve seen in classic games to create our own unique take on this classic genre.”
I’m sure you’ve been asked this before – hell, if I took the time to read the interview, you were probably asked it there: Will we finally be able to build our own planets in the end game? Not just improve existing planets to Gaia status or wield our own Death Stars about the place: But seriously take a bunch of rock and push it together and plant a pretty flower on it.
Wow, that I would never have guessed. Its just so rare to see anything like that in video game journalism. I’ll have to keep an eye out for the Rausch byline. :)
I think you give me way too much credit, Brad. Everything you said on the phone is in the interview, I just pulled out a lot of the "Um"s and “Uhhh”’ and “I think”'s. You also have a tendency to make the same point three times, so I just pulled out repetetive sentences. That’s not a bad thing, though, you do it because you’re really excited about what you’re doing, and I gotta tell you, it’s a genuine pleasure to talk to someone with such passion about their product. Gives me hope for our industry.
Though really, I do say “like” a lot when speaking I’ve noticed.
Nothing will make a person more aware of their verbal ticks faster than reading through a court transcript of their testimony (I gave a deposition last year and was (like) cringing when I (like) read it).
