Highlighted new features
Here are the key new features for Twilight of the Arnor:
* Each major civilization now gets its own
unique technology tree. We don't mean that each civilization gets a few unique technologies. We mean that each civilization gets their own, technology tree. Even on technologies that are common, the description text changes from civilization to civilization giving different insights into the back story of the civilization.
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Terror Stars. Players can now build mobile bases of death that can destroy entire star systems!
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Vastly more planetary improvements. There are probably more new planetary improvements in Twilight than there were total improvements in GalCiv II. These improvements greatly enhance gameplay and add new strategies to the game.
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New types of ships. Ships can enhance other ships in a fleet, behave differently when battles are fought in friendly territory, add more hit points to ships, and much more. It significantly alters the strategies available to players.
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New Victory Condition: Ascension. Scattered across the galaxy are shards of the Precursors. Build (and defend) star bases on these special galactic resources and work towards ascension. Of course, other players may want to put a stop to your march to victory. This greatly changes the game dynamics since players can make a desperate gambit for victory but also can no longer turtle into a corner of the map and go for a technology victory so easily. Like other victory conditions, it can be enabled or disabled.
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Map Editor. Now players can design their own maps. They can also be uploaded to GalCiv2.com and shared with others.
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Scenario Editor. As configurable as a GalCiv game is, the scenario editor lets people tweak their start up options to incredible levels. They can even save them and share them with others.
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Tech Tree Editor. Players can add their own technologies to the game and the computer players will even automatically use them intelligently.
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Planetary Improvement Editor. Now players can create their own planetary improvements and like techs, the computer players will automatically use them intelligently.
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Star Ship Component editor. New components for ships can now be created by players and like the others, automatically used by the computer players.
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Updated Planetary Invasion Screen. The old ugly planetary invasion screen has been replaced with ad ynamic one that has state of the art graphics.
* Metaverse On-Line Tournaments. Players can play a specific map with a specific scenario and compare their scores to others on-line to see how they match up.
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New Galaxy Size: Immense. For players who want their epic games to last months
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Massive graphics overhaul. Nearly all the graphics in the game have been re-designed. Moreover, they now use a fraction of the memory of the old ones. That's right, they look better and use in many cases 1/10th as much memory. Read this section to learn more on this as it's really cool.
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Tons of new content. More race portraits, new ship parts, new civilization logos, extra planetary improvement images for use by players, and more.
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Updated Sound Track. New background music and scoring helps keep the game fresh and new.
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Updated Computer AI. Taking the feedback from players over the past year, the computer players will play more intelligently. That means at lower levels they'll play like "newbie" human players and at higher levels they will play more like expert human players (the goal isn't to make the game "harder" but rather more fun).
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The New Campaign: Twilight of the Arnor. Discover the fate of the Dread Lords and the galaxy itself.
This doesn't count the hundreds of minor new features in the game based on implementing player feedback. The overall result is like having a whole new game.
Many reviews of Dark Avatar thought it could have practically been a sequel. This is probably even more true of Twilight of the Arnor.