So why expand the expansion?

When the November beta of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar hits it'll be pretty apparent that it would have not been a problem to maintain the original November release date of the expansion pack had we kept the original feature set.

So the question is, why add more features?

The simplest answer is that Stardock is privately owned. There really isn't a good business justification. Believe me, we've tried to come up with a plausible marketing or publishing reason to add more features to the expansion pack but it always comes back to the same answer -- because we wanted to.

There were just a couple of things that we just didn't want to have to wait for some future sequel for.  The number of new little touches that aren't even being mentioned in the bullet points will become pretty apprarent (like re-texturing starbases and components and such to look nicer). And we just wanted to have these things in there so that when we are working on other games (there will be two more Stardock developed games before we even contemplate a GalCiv sequel) we weren't feeling regretful for not getting to them sooner.

The Mega events and the unique features I think are two key ones that are pretty time consuming to get right (and balance and write AI for).  I hang out on a lot of forums. I don't usually post but I read them.  While most people like GalCiv II, there were a couple of complaints that came up time and time again:

1. After awhile, the game felt repetitive.
2. The alien races were generic to play as. Why play as the Drengin vs. the Arceans?
3. The technology tree was unwieldly and uninspired.

My view is, if some people felt that way after 8 months, imagine what it would be like after 3 years. I want to have a game that people would still be enjoying years from now.  BTW -- another argument for no CD copy protection -- you can keep the game on the hard drive for years without keeping track of some CD/DVD and occasionally fire it up years later.

A word on what we mean by a stream-lined technology tree...What we don't lke about our technology tree is this:

Laser I..Laser II...Laser III...Laser IV...Yawn.

It's just totally uninspired.  So what we're going to do is reimagine how the technology tree is displayed. There will be MORE technologies total. We're not nerfing the tech tree.  We are just looking for better and more innovative ways to present it. 

The idea we're playing with (that won't be in the beta) is the concept of Milestones.

So when researching weapons you would see Lasers. And instead of there being Laser I, Laser II, etc. It would just be Lasers and you would hit multiple milestones. Each milestone would give you the same kind sof benefits as you got from say Laser III (new components).  But on the research screen, what you would see is the Laser tech slowly filling up. 

Incidentally, we are also going to release a Galactic Civilizations II v1.4 shortly. Main changes will be an AI crash bug fix and some changes to morale and economics (we're going to make the morale buildings more powerful but the techs to get them MUCH more expensive).

Anyway, the goal of Dark Avatar is really to put together an expansion pack that we think addresses the key game elements that we think can realistically be added in an expansion pack (I'd put in OPTIONAL tactical battle features but that would be immensely expensive to do). 

When people start getting the beta in a few weeks, I think what they'll be most surprised with is just how much better and cleaner the game looks. Lots of little touches that aren't even mentioned.  If you've seen one of our game update change logs, you can probably imagine what something we charge money for has in it.