Can we ask some follow-ups based on those questions?
Like, how confident are you about the planned time-table of things you mentioned back then? Stuff like:
There's going to be 3 DLC released in 2015 with the first one next month which will add a map editor and a series of "balanced" maps.
Re AI quality.
If I were to rate AIs on a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is the "best possible AI humans can reasonably make" and 1 is "brain dead" I'd rate them as:
GC1: 7
GC2 base: 5
GC2: dark avatar: 7
GC2: twilight: 6
GC3 base: 6
I'm pretty sure by 1.2 GC3 base will be up to 7.
I can well imagine that with the actual release there have been way more bugs discovered and hurdles with the AI programming coming up, that things turn out harder than you'd anticipated. Though I expect with all the games you guys have under your belts you're pretty good at estimating that kind of stuff by now.
Oh, and about this:
Re rejected concepts. We definitely want to get more leader portraits in. Everyone is fighting over those art resources. The same team working on the GalCiv aliens is also working on the Star Control aliens.
There's a lot of modders creating factions and leaders right now - and soon enough those will become easy to transfer. But, there's still a problem with animated portraits, which you guys made in Bink. As Bink is proprietary, modders can't afford to do that. Is there any word on alternative video formats people could use to contribute?
Perhaps Stardock might be willing to commision modders to create these kind of assets?