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Galactic Civilizations II Review March 03, 2006 |
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Summary: Ready for another epic struggle against the evil Drengin Empire? Or maybe you want to play as the Drengins this time around? All is possible in Galactic Civilizations II. It's like Zombo.com, you can do anything at zombo.com. The only limit is yourself.
 Overview | Page:: ( 1 / 5 ) |
GC2 takes place in a universe where humans have invented the hyperdrive and, for some reason, chose to share this technology with every race in existence – good and evil. A mad scramble for colonies ensues both in the official story and at the start of every map, during which events unfold. Regular games play almost exactly like original Galactic Civilizations – you lead your race to victory or defeat by power, diplomacy, technology, or culture. The campaign consists of a series of maps with set starting conditions and specific victory requirements. The story is told primarily through cutscenes between missions, with some minor dialogue during the maps.
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The campaign missions are an interesting and worthy addition to the 4X strategy genre. Much like RTS games, the challenges that are set up tend to contain a bit of a puzzle element – requiring the player to figure out a proper order of events with which to reach a win scenario. There is some flexibility, but less than in the regular maps. The campaign is attractive primarily for its uniqueness; you will not encounter the title Dread Lords in regular play (thank God).
Another major change is the addition of ship building and customization, which adds a great deal of charm to the game. Not only are custom-designed ships usually more suited to the player’s needs, but they can be impressive creative outlets too. There are five different styles of hulls – Human, Altarian, Torian, Yor and Drengin. Each style will have several types of basic hulls for the various ship sizes – tiny, small, medium, large, and huge. All in all, there must be over fifty basic hulls to worth with – and then these can be customized with weapons and defenses, but also cosmetic additions. The cosmetic changes don’t affect ship performance at all, but do offer a really cool creative outlet for players.
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The final addition is a change to the way planets were handled. Previously, a planet had a number associated with its quality rating – 4 would be like Mars, 10 like Earth, 15 is paradise. All the planet’s capabilities were tied directly to that number – population and income, production and research. In GalCiv 2, the number merely designates the number of build slots on the planet. Want money? Then you need population, which requires farms. However, high population leads to overcrowding which means dissatisfaction, unless you build entertainment facilities. Combined with unique structures like Technological/Industrial/Economic capitals, planets can be customized very easily now. Most players will presumably build a few economy worlds, one or two industrial planets, a couple of tech planets, and so on.
| Starbases | Page:: ( 2 / 5 ) |
The other three types of starbases have a limited radius, but their effects tend to be more powerful in that area than the global effect resource starbases. An influence starbase can, with enough upgrades and the proper technology, expand the borders of the player’s empire. This can help win a cultural victory, or – if alien planets with low morale fall within your borders – you might win over a planet without a shot. Economic starbases boost planetary production and trade route revenue within their sphere of influence, while military starbases can improve the firepower and defenses of friendly ships.
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The game offers some interesting challenges to players then, they need to decide whether to spend their money on research or production (by building the appropriate improvements), and then what kind of research and production. Technological victories require long games to get all the techs necessary, so that puts pressure on the player to defend himself or make “strategic acquisitions” with a handy fleet. Similarly, the AI, facing pressure from influence starbases will declare war rather than simply watch as the player gobbles up quadrant after quadrant unopposed.
Similarities appear in the tactical game as well. Does the player build a ship with missiles, beam weapons or mass drivers as the primary armament? That depends on what kind of defenses the enemies have – ECM, shields or armor. The defenses all offer some protection against all weaponry, but only give their full benefits against the weapon they were intended to counter. This kind of pressure and counter-pressure balancing can be seen throughout the game.
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The best part of Galactic Civilizations II is the AI. The AI plays in believable ways, even on the dumber settings, and doesn’t get production or economy cheats until the highest difficulty levels. It will recognize player build-ups near planets or along the border, or sneakily build up by itself. Even if you’re friendly, a treacherous AI may take the opportunity to steal a few undefended or lightly-defended planets from you, should you be careless. The AI takes into account its alignment, militaristic tendencies, military, economy, technology, past relations and whether or not one of you is in a state of war before deciding on a course of action. AIs will be careful about not provoking more wars if they’re already engaged, for example. What makes the AI really rich is the dialogue written for it. Stardock, the developers, have quite a sense of humor and share it with the player. If you’re banging around on an easier difficulty level and build up an invasion force near a planet, the AI is likely to say to you something like “Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing. Just because the difficulty is low and my generals are idiots and can’t do something to stop you, doesn’t mean I’m stupid and don’t see it.” This is both amusing and serves as training for higher difficulties.
| All together | Page:: ( 3 / 5 ) |
There is some linearity, however. Games all start with a rush for colonies – you’ll learn quick to buy rather than build your first colony ships. They then settle into the resource collection phase, rushing to get your constructors to galactic resources and occupy them first. Buying the first factory on every planet is quite helpful too, as is deciding early which will be the money, industrial, and tech capitals.
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After that initial rush though, things open up. A warlike strategy would focus not just on military techs, but rush towards planetary invasion specifically – otherwise there’s no way to conquer planets. Aggressive play out of the gate is risky but has payoffs, and is almost certainly a necessity if the random map generator didn’t put any decent planets near you. Military starbases can, ironically enough, make a passive strategy more effective. Since they upgrade your ships’ capabilities, you can afford to slack off on military research and focus on the tech-win technologies, or influence technologies for a cultural victory.
There’s definitely more randomness in GC2 than the original. Starting positions vary a lot, and there’s always the risk of sending your scout or colony ships to the wrong stars, or betting that a large cluster will need many colony ships when that turns out not to be the case. Being entirely singleplayer, Galactic Civilizations II can afford to do things like that, there’s less worry about balance. While some might complain about the lack of a multiplayer option, we’re inclined to believe that Stardock decided against it to make a better singleplayer title.
Where we wish more development time had been spent is on the interface, performance, and bug fixes. The interface generally works well but does some strangely counter-intuitive things. Want to place a rally point? Don’t bother right-clicking. You’ll need to look around the toolbar to find the tiny rally point icon, which would be unidentifiable if not for the pop-up text. Scrolling is pitifully slow, though fortunately the player can click-drag the screen or click in the mini-map to get around. Also, there are notifications dropping down on the right-hand side about completed ships or planetary projects; but it doesn’t matter whether your left- or right-click, you MUST go see it if you click on it. The only way for them to expire without being seen is to wait 3-4 turns. As I said earlier, the interface isn’t bad by any means – in fact it handles a complex game very well – but it has a few niggling issues that stick out.
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We’ve encountered a surprising number of bugs with the title. There’s one in the ship creator, if you go into it via the dropping notifications, will crash the game. There are some more crash bugs and perhaps a memory leak, because the game runs much worse as the turns add up. This may simply be the number of units and structures to worry about, or it could be a code issue.
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 4 / 5 ) |
Pros
Gameplay
Clean, simple, and yet full of depth and complexity and most of all – charm.
Writing
What’s the last strategy game that had you laughing?
Cheap
$10 cheaper than most games.
No copy protection
There may be no copy protection, but there are incentives to buy legit – like upgrades, patches and other downloads.
Cons
Bugs
A few crash bugs, and some other minor annoyances that shouldn’t be there.
Interface quirks
Let’s be clear: the interface is generally excellent at what it does, it just doesn’t always do things intuitively – or do them at all in some circumstances.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 5 / 5 ) |
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Galactic Civilizations II isn’t perfect, by any means – we could stand some more granularity in difficulty levels, tactical battles would be nice – but it offers much more than GalCiv did in a more refined package. Fleets, logistical limits to keep fleet stacks reasonably sized, the ability to custom-design ships and of course the campaign all add spice that wasn’t there before. The move to 3D makes the game much more attractive and eases issues for LCD users with native resolutions.
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