GalCiv II took a major turn this time around. We wanted to make a game that could be a definitive 4X space strategy game. That meant incorporating features from the genre that are popular. Sometimes, games leave out feature -- good features -- from other games simply because they don't want to acknowledge that other games exist. I see that in RTSs and it drives me nuts. After playing Rise of Nations, it's hard to go to another land based RTS that doesn't have a concept of land control (at least for me). It's such a good idea. After playing Total Annihilation, it's hard to deal with units that don't fight back (or run away) when attacked.

Similarly, GalCiv II couldn't just pretend that Master of Orion didn't exist. Or that Homeworld didn't exist. Or that Ascendancy didn't exist. Or that Stars didn't exist. Or Twilight Imperium. Or Space Empires, or Starships Unlimited, or even the unreleased Stars Supernova. I don't claim to be a real game developer. Or even a real programmer. I'm a gamer who just happens to know how to make game ideas be turned into actual games.

So we could either pretend that GalCiv is the only 4X space game that's ever come out and expand on its existing features. Or we could try to reach out to the fans of all these classic games, many of whom are probably looking for a new game to try and see if we have something to offer them. That's not to say we just took features X, Y, and Z and crammed them in to have a bullet point. We didn't do that. Instead we looked at features we thought might make the game better and then looked to see if other games implemented it, how they implemented it, and how that might make sense in our game.