The premise of Galactic Civilizations is that you have united your homeworld and are now ready to send your first colony ship off into space.  What kind of alien worlds do you think we can settle?

The reality is, many worlds are not going to be safe for us.  We'll have to live in environmentally sealed enclosures at first.  Not because they are too cold or lack the right atmospheric conditions (though that is an issue), but rather because many worlds will have microbes that just aren't compatible with our biology.

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Greetings Offworld CEOs! Work continues on Offworld, but we don’t have anything to show off just yet. However, with the recent launch of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, this seemed a good time to touch on an idea that’s core to Offworld Trading Company: the privatization of space back here on Earth.

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"You need to establish trust with gamers."

Some of our community managers and devs discuss what makes a stream good, and then what streamers do to make a stream truly great. Check out Episode 5 of our "Strategy Visions" series here!

G'day! Today I'll be talking about the upcoming 2.75 update for Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and some cool things that have been happening in the community. 2.75 will contain a large number of gameplay changes, but I'll only mention the most significant ones. You can view the full changelog here.

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People don't like to be taxed.  They really don't like to be taxed if they don't have a say in it. The principle cause of the American revolution was not taxation in itself, it was that the colonists didn't have a say in who and what was taxed.

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Brad is still at war with the Centauri Republic with no end in sight! Part 8 of "Humans vs. The Multiverse" is available now. Check it out here:

Art design is one of the many components of video games that's subconsciously appreciated but rarely expressed and understood. If a game's art direction works, it just works, and the player isn’t required to dwell on it. I had little regard for unit design until I started as a designer on Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation, where I am now required to be cognizant of the many subtleties of game design which gamers take for granted.

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13 minutes, 48 seconds.  That’s how long it took the Curiosity rover’s signal to reach Earth from Mars - and Mars is in our own solar system.

Intrigue is the name of the upcoming expansion pack to our best-selling space strategy game, Galactic Civilizations III.  It’s not called “Government” or “Politics”. It’s Intrigue.  13 minutes, 48 seconds between responses for radio signals in our own solar system leaves a lot of time for uncertainty, for doubt, for fear…for intrigue.

Let’s walk through how colonization might actually work.  Let’s presume humans get to Mars in the 2030s.  Let’s also presume that at some point in the not so distant future, we actually plant a colony on Mars.  Are those colonists citizens of Mars? Or are they citizens of their respective, Earthbound, nation states?  How long would that work? How many generations would that work for? Would it survive the first crisis?  Would humans, born and raised on Mars, care about the political maneuverings in Washington DC? Berlin? Beijing? London? I suspect that there would be point where the government would need to change in order to deal with large populations of people living off world.

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Good afternoon.  Below is the captain's log from the recent Jupiter test of the prototype Emdrive MK I.  As a reminder, all information concerning the Emdrive remains classified.  Please return your Aug glasses to the front counter when you have finished this briefing.

Captain's Log: March 2, 2086…

There are 69 known moons of Jupiter. 

Jupiter is the first planet we’re sending Star Control’s prototype ship to visit. Powered by the Darius Robotics Emdrive MK I, the prototype can get from Star Control command to Jupiter in a matter of days, rather than months.  It is ironic that the prototype is powered by a drive made by Darius Robotics, given that Darius Erdmann is now gone, lost to the Lexites.

The prototype closes in on Jupiter, March 2086.

Some people have speculated that Jupiter was meant to be Sol’s twin in a binary star system.  In reality, Jupiter is not even close to having enough mass to be a star.  You would need at least 80 Jupiters to have a chance. Jupiter was chosen as our first test because of the various types of moons that will allow for a good measure of the lander’s capabilities.

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Brad recalls the days of Elemental's rough launch, what we learned from it, and how we did our best to make it right for all of our future games.

Check out Episode 3 in Ars Technica's "War Stories" series here.