Welcome to the Galactic Civilizations 2 Developer's Kit.

This is our first attempt with GalCiv2 to allow third parties
to create their very own add-ons to the popular sci-fi strategy
game.

The files we include are:

battle.dll
----------
This is called whenever two ships go into battle.  The loser is
returned.

We designed it (back in 1993) to be extendable.  It is passed
a window handle which means users could make interactive battles
ala Ascendancy or Masters of Orion (hey, we thought of it first,
we just didn't use it! <g>).  As it is now, it merely does some
simple calculations and returns the loser.

Beware though, if you do extend it, you need to be aware that it
is called everytime a battle occurs.  GalCiv was designed not to
allow the AI to cheat which means the game does not distinguish
between humans and computer players. In GalCiv 1, the human player
was hardcoded at Player[1].  This exists somewhatin GalCiv2 but
is largely taken out in order to fasciliate network play later on.

For now though, if you only want it to be aware of human battles,
just have it look out for owner 1 (1 being you).

Extra.DLL and Network.DLL
-------------------------
These are called every turn at the VERY beginning.  Be aware that they
are called in the main thread so the queue will be hogged up while you
are doing your calculations (you can always start your own thread).


Starship.DLL
------------

All the ships in GalCiv2 are in there and then some.  The icons for
Shipyards are there as well.  I spent several months drawing those
pixel by pixel in several different screen modes. We'd appreciate it
if you don't distribute the icons, just the starship.dll you end up
creating with it.

Save game info
--------------

We hope someone makes some editors for Galciv2.  But in order to do
this, you'll need to know how a saved game is made.  Now you'll know.

Other notes
-----------

GalCiv was written with Cset ++ though these components can be made
with Borland C++ v1.x or later.

The developer's kit is not supported by Stardock officially.  You can
post about it in public forums such as comp.os.os2.games or comp.os.os2.dev
or on Compuserve.

We'll try to help when we can but we have 10 OS/2 projects in development
so we're pretty busy.

You are free to create whatever freeware, shareware, or whatever else you
want.  If you do create something you think it is pretty neat and think
you can sell it, contact me at bwardell@stardock.com and we can look at
distributing it for you and arrange a royalty plan for you.

Good luck and have fun!
