Who has heard of GalCiv II?

[Matthew]

I decided to get the Galactic Civilizations II: Gold edition that includes the Dark Avatar expansion.

First impressions:

The graphics and sound are descent. There are some good game play concepts and the AI can play a good game at the higher difficulty levels, especially if you turn on the CPU intensive algorithms. It is still not quite as challenging as playing against a good MoO2 player online. The AI is predictable enough that you can counter its strategy well in advance.

There is one really cool feature. GalCiv II seems to borrow from the original Master of Orion for planetary invasions. You first research planetary invasions which unlocks troop pods and transports. You then load up some of your citizens on the transports then send them off to invade rival worlds. There is a bit of a twist. You get to choose from traditional warfare, gas warfare or information warfare when invading. There is also a bit of randomness to it too. For traditional warfare, the invading force multiplier is determined by random numbers that are decided with a mouse click.

There are nagging problems that I have with some of the design decisions and some of it's implementations. I dislike how they used an isometric map for the stars, planets and all the other strategic elements of the game. I much prefer MoO2's star map implementation and having the solar systems appear in a pop-up. They could have designed it to use a MoO2 style star map and used the isometric map for tactical combat. The lack of tactical combat is also a big negative for me.

I think the concept of Good vs. Evil is a good idea but in GalCiv2 it's badly implemented. Essentially, being evil unlocks lots of cool stuff and your planets are better for it but it can hurt diplomatically. Being neutral has little or no benefit. Being good is good for diplomacy but you end up with lower quality planets and the evil doers go after you first. I prefer MOO2's ruthlessness as opposed to being branded as evil. Being evil implies malice and cruelty but being ruthless just means you don't let anything stand in the way of achieving your goals.

The ship designer is another good concept but again the implementation needs work. The ship designs are pretty basic. It doesn't really matter where you place things because the game just uses them in simplistic combat calculations. You can point your weapons at your engines and it won't matter at all for the combat calculations.

The technology tree is bloated beyond belief and there are too many generic sounding techs. They could trim it down to less than 50 if they wanted to make it more streamlined and fun.