Galactic Civilizations II

[Astromarine]

It's about ready to go gold, and should be in stores in a couple weeks. I've preordered the online version.

http://www.galciv2.com/

Main new feature:

Okay, this is an ugly ship. But it's user-designed (by me). Now, for people who don't want to mess with the cosmetics, you can literally just pick your weapons, modules, etc. and press "Place" and the game will try to intelligently put it somewhere for you. But for sci-fi geeks like me, you can really go crazy in design and create virtually any kind of ship you can imagine. To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever been done (ship design isn't new but the "lego" like behavior of being able to piece together unique ships we think is). And don't worry, your creations are saved to disk so you can use them again in future games. We hope to eventually develop a tool that will let you export your creations for use outside the game. Oh, and if you want to add your own graphics, no problem, they're just .X files in the model directory.

 

[Kraken]

Looks like tactical combat this time around, sounds pretty sweet. I also hope you can change your priorities on a planet-level as opposed to empire-level like it was in GalCiv 1.

 

[obediah]

I'm pretty excited. I wanted to love GalCiv 1, but it wasn't quite there for me. Ship design is a big win for me, and I like some of the other things I've heard as well.

One thing I didn't like about the first that I haven't heard anything about, was that there was a correct way to get your empire started. I played 4-5 games with different strategies and struggled. Then read one forum post that said put your sliders like this until this happens, then move them here until this, blah... I did that with everything else the same and by the middle of the game I was tens of times more powerful than any other game. It just felt arbitrary and forced. Maybe it was fixed in patches, updates etc. Does this ring a bell to any that played it more?

 

[Astromarine]

I honestly don't know, since I didn't go to forums much. I know I eventually managed to progress on my own, but I'm unsure if "my" strat was the same as yours. The feel I got from the game was that there were some things that were, well, obvious and should be done, but your general strategy could vary quite a bit.

The AI in this game is MUCH improved from the first, this much I know. Since it's not based on scripts, but on data analysis, it should go quite a way towards clearing that problem, if it in fact existed in the first one

 

[Schmoozer]

GalCiv was easily the best game I played last year... and almost a complete surprise. I hadn't researched the title much but always like to try different styles of turn-based games. I saw it at Fry's for about $20.00 (with expansion) and gave it a whirl. I'll admit, the learning curve was STEEP. But compared to so many games today, I found that refreshing. The biggest challenge was that there really was no backstory. The map unfolds with just a ship and a planet and you can decide how you want to "conquer" the galaxy. At first I was luke-warm about the gameplay but then as things began to click I realized I had spent literally hours every night on one map. Unlike most games, you certainly WILL lose if you don't expand your planets properly. I'm really looking forward to GalCiv II. I'm a fool for micro so the more options to tinker with, the better.

 

[obediah]

Cool I'm certainly looking forward to it. And will pre-order it. I guess I should dig out the first one and see how it has changed over the past few years. I look forward to playing both of them while enjoying a wonderfully delicous box of snickers.

 

[Schmoozer]

FYI... If you are going to try GalCiv again, the key to winning is capturing as many free planets as possible at the beginning of the game. To do this, you need to increase Military Spending ahead of all other types of spending (I usually go 60, 20, 20) until there are no more planets within range. Then, crank over your spending to research and social to keep the people on all those new planets happy. Also, you can colonize a planet with very few people. Keep your core planets heaviliy populated (increases taxes and decreases research time) and scout with colony ships of very few people (20 to 25 mil). These tips should get your going correctly.