Ever since GalCiv1 came out, people have commented on how personally we the developers take comments/criticism on our games. Well, yes, we do take it personally, and that's really not a bad thing. It's because we love the game. We love what we do. The GalCiv2 team is composed of workaholics, no one more so than Brad. Between our love of the game and our workaholism, we've put a lot of effort into making the game something that you want to keep playing, even years after the release. So when people start posting things like "you've ruined the game", it really is a slap in the face to us. And after having worked more hours than is really healthy for us, and then spend additional time working on second level support and reading the forums, our tempers can get a bit short. In a perfect world, people posting criticism on our forums would do so in a constructive manner rather than just posting, "OMG you've ruined the game!" To that end, I would like to thank the people who crunched numbers, sent in save games, etc..
After some discussion here at the office, we decided to put up another update to 1.8 which increases the number of habitable planets back to 1.7 levels. The code for setting the initial planet class isn't exactly the same because I decided to leave some of the tweaks Brad made to the code that picks the actual class value. This is how the code works to select the initial class of a planet:
1) It takes the value from the Number of Habitable planets spinner and uses that to calculate the Habitable Planet Factor.
2) The Habitable Planet Factor is used in a random roll to determine if the planet will be class zero.
3) If the planet is not a class zero, it does a few more random rolls to determine the non-zero class.
The part of the code that is now the same as it was in 1.7 is the code that calculates the Habitable Planet Factor, which directly impacts the number of class 0 planets. The code that is different is the code for step 3, which doesn't affect the number of non-zero planets, but the actual class values. Note that none of this code has anything to do with the planet type (toxic, heavy gravity, etc). At this time, we're not going to touch that code. I didn't even have a chance to check for other bug reports, and I won't until I get some work on Twilight of the Arnor done.
Anyway, we put this update today because we really love this game too. Just try to remember that the next time you're about to hit the submit button on that flame, ok? The less time we spend reading your flames and getting mad about them, the more time we can spend on coding.