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Excellent Game w/ a Few Minor Flaws

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 27 / 30
Date: May 15, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game this weekend mainly based on the other reviews listed here and was not discouraged. Where games like Star Wars Rebellion and Star Trek - Birth of a Federation quickly dissolved into mind numbing micromanagement, this game spices things up a bit with real time planetary and space battles. The graphics are excellent and the plot of the story continually evolves and adds subtle changes or side plots for you to address. The only thing I saw that could be construed as negative was the fact that it takes and inordinate amount of time to contact other races and really get into the meat of the game. The easy level is also ridiculously easy. My advice is to skip that all together. Overall I enjoyed this game immensely and feel it will be one that I will play at will for some time

Master of Micromanagement

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 32 / 43
Date: April 25, 2000
Author: Amazon User

While this is a terrific game concept with some nice features, it is far more work than play. The core of the game is a standard 4X space empire builder, with colony management, a complex tech tree, tactical space and ground combat, espionage, and diplomacy. But there is no centralized display of colony status. A building must be supplied with both power and workers in order to operate, and if it doesn't have enough of either, it will simply shut down and the game gives you no warning or announcements. You are forced to pause the game every few months and personally inspect every single colony to discover these problems. But the tech system is even worse, and has not been improved from IG1. There are three types of tech, and so you have to have three types of labs. But you can only research one invention at a time, so while you're developing a new hyperdrive in your ship labs, your ground unit and colony facility labs are sitting idle, sucking up your colony's power and workers. If you can't afford that waste, and most of the time you can't, you have to once again personally remember where you placed each one of up to 30 labs, go to the colony display for each planet on which you have a lab, and turn the idle ones off, one at a time. If you decide to develop a new building next, you have to go around and turn off all the ship labs and turn all the building labs on again. And I don't have room here to go into the game's futile diplomacy system, or the sluggish screen redraw, or the constant nagging interruptions by messages regarding random events and spies demanding orders. No offense to the other reviewers here, but only a hardcore strategy addict with a fetish for micromanagement could enjoy this game. I returned it four days after I bought it.

Good effort that shold have been great.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 13 / 14
Date: May 04, 2000
Author: Amazon User

As a wartime strategy buff who enjoys tactical strategy based games, this one more than satisfies the appetite until the next blockbuster is released. A very good effort with above average graphics, IG2 delivers to satisfy the lure of empire building, both civilian and military style all while engulfing you in a decent campaign that keeps you going. The only thing keeping me from the big 5 star rating the continuous interuptions in the gameplay from your staff. Also the graphics get a bit choppy in the campaign mode. Dark graphics during battle scenes are also a bit annoying. But for the casual gamer and the strategic buff alike, I highly reccomend this as a good game to wet your appetite until great games like Shogun:total war, or the like come out.

A good, but broken game.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 8 / 8
Date: May 26, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I play a great many strategy games and I consider myself to be a fairly decent player, though not great by any means. On the one hand, I truly enjoy playing IG2. The mechanisms of planet building and support, the ship design, the research tree, and the general interface are all excellent and make the game a pleasure to play. Or would if the difficulties (easy, normal, hard) were actually indicative of anything. When I play a game on easy, I expect to learn how to play and very likely win on my first try. In IG2, the easy was so easy, I won before I really felt I had a handle on the game. Normal level should be a challenge. I should need to play well, and in the end, I should still only win about half the time. I've lost count of how many times on "normal" (as the Solarians) I have not even come close to winning. I get wiped out every time by a Kra'Hen fleet so large I can't even conceive of what I would need to do to make one half its size. Sometimes I die even sooner. Goodness forbid that I even try to play on "hard" difficulty. For any normal game, I have come to expect that the "hard" difficulty to really be "nearly impossible". In IG2, normal mode does this, and I feel the game is hardly worth the trouble as a result. I have tried as the Shinarians as well, with similar results. In conclusion, while I truly liked the game architecture, I cannot recommend this to anyone. I found this to be one of the most frustrating games I have played in quite some time.

Alliances are hard to come by...

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: September 06, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Imperium Galactica II, Alliances, is definitely a very good strategy game, yet it has several silly flaws for no apparent reason, thus taking away from what it could overall offer.

There is a good, though not great, variety of civilizations to choose from; from the peace loving Cheblon to the mighty warlike Kra'hen, and many others in between. Humans of course could not be absent as they exist in the form of the Solarians.
The feeling of building up your empire and expanding into the far reaches of the galaxy is very real and you do get a strong sense of accomplishment for all your effort. The battles, the inventions, the upgrades, and the plot are very good.
A lot of work seems to have been put into the game.

On the negative side, there are several points, which could have been dealt with before the game was released (and many of them have already been covered/pointed out by other reviewers):
There is an easy, normal, and difficult level of play, but normal is next to impossible and that is a pretty big problem.
Moreover, when you do decide to play single as opposed to multiplayer, you only get a choice of three races.
In addition, the actual alliances are very difficult to come by when you actually need them, while at the same time extremely easy whenever you're winning.
Furthermore, the videos and the graphics are average; not poor, but not great either.
Finally, there are such things as the "futuristic" electronic music for example, that is constantly playing in the background, which is rather terrible and highly annoying to say the least. A more Star Wars-like sounding music would have been much appropriate and inspirational.

Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of hours of gaming enjoyment ahead when playing Imperium Galactica II, Alliances! Despite its flaws, and though it may not be a masterpiece, it will provide for a decent amount of amusement as well as excitement.

A must have for any armchair emperor!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: April 21, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This game totally rocks! for any gamer that is familiar with empire builders such as masters of orion 1 and 2 or the civilization/settlers/aplha centuari series this is a must have. i recommend this game to any fan of those series and any person who likes there games with a little more brains than the usual stuff thats push out!digital reality combines deep involveing gameplay with beautiful graphics and great cinematics that makes for a stunning gameplay experience! it's a joy to actually see all of your colonies in 3d splendor as you zoom in on your colonies surfaces. finally somebody did this type of game justice. my only gripe is that i wish there were more races. this game is a must have for any and all armchair emperors!

Nice, but hard to learn

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: July 05, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Imperium Glactica II is a great game, but the fact that it has different areas in it, make it difficult to learn (i.e. Starmapping, Colonization, Ground Assaults, Space Assaults, Space and Ground Production, Design, Research, Spying, and most importantly, Diplomacy). The game has so much stuff, it actually takes a 5 part training session to learn it all. The problem with the AI is that they are all out to conquer the galaxy by themselves. If you offer them to ally when you're weak and they're strong, they will turn it down, but when the tables are turned, they will be glad to ally with you. I hate the difficulty levels too, I'll translate for you Easy = Effortless, Normal = Nightmare, and Hard = I don't think there's even a word for how impossible the hard level really is.

Last problems depict the multiplayer area. I have troubles connecting to the IG II IRC, and no one can play over LAN. All in all, it's a nice game, really great cinematics, cool single player, but lacks in multiplayer.

This game is the middle ground of many other games

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: November 17, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game 3 days ago and already I found it a rather grave disappointment. Allow me to tell you why:

-Switching between different screens (ex. research screen to starmap screen) takes 3-5 seconds. Unlike the previous reviewers, I happen to know for a fact that my hardware is more than capable of handling anything that is thrown at it. It's merely bad coding ettiquite. This is unacceptable especially in a multiplayer situation.

-The research system is SLOW. It costs too much or takes too long (usually both unfortunately). On top of that, the research system only allows you to research ONE item at a time. This is extremely tedious, and makes it impossible to research most of the good items. By the time you research something you REALLY want to use, all of the planets are either in your possession or you're dead.

-Star systems only have one planet per star. This is just a minor gripe, but it takes out the essence of simulating star system colonization. This also removes any possibility of one star system being more productive than another since you can terraform.

-You can only play 3 races. Multiplayer allows you to have up to 8, but if you choose single player you only can pick 3. This is extremely disappointing considering each of the 8 races has unique attributes, but 63% of those attribues are gone if you decide to make it solo.

-All 3 branches of research require too much attention. I feel like I'm playing Sim City trying to manage where my population is supposed to work I'd rather be handling conquering the galaxy.

-Combat resembles Warcraft/C&C/Starcraft, but lacking many of the options you find in other games. Even more annoying is that you have no control over your fighters, and many advances you make in the ship research department have little or no noticable affect during battle.

That's not to say the game is all that bad. The Spy feature is nice, and the plots for single player are actually entertaining. Graphics are top-notch for this genre of game (strategy), but again, at the cost of waiting 3-5 seconds between different screens. If you're into multiplayer, all of the races are very balanced and this allows you to apply many different types of strategy.

But I suppose I am overly disappointed because this game lacks personality. You get hints of Starcraft, hints of Master of Orion, and occasionally a little Dark Reign here an there. Unfortunately I have yet to find anything in the game that tells me I'm playing Imerium Galactica II.

Nice, but seriously flawed

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 12 / 17
Date: July 06, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I bought IG2 based on reviews, and overall the game is quite nice. It has some serious flaws, however, which should have been corrected by the developers. The most serious flaw is the research system - you have to build 3 different types of research centers for the different techs, but it rapidly becomes incredibly tedious to cycle through all of your planets toggling the various research centers on and off when you want to research different classes of technology. A single research building for all the different classes would significantly decrease the meaningless micromanagement and let you focus more on the game.

Another flaw for me is performance. My system is a PII 330MHz w/64MB RAM and an 8MB 3D video card. I have to play the game at the lowest resolution (VGA), and still find it incredibly slow. Especially annoying are the pauses whenever you switch screens - I get at least a 5 second pause, making the previously mentioned research center toggling triply annoying. Other 3D RTS games like Starcraft and Age of Empires II scream on my machine at their highest resolutions (SVGA), but this game makes me feel like I'm playing on a 386.

Also annoying is the CD security. The game has 4 CDs - a base CD and one for each of 3 races. The annoying part is that you have to have the base CD in the drive to start the game, then swap out for another CD *every* time you play. Why not let the game start up from any of the 4 CDs?

Anyway, if you can get past all these flaws, the game isn't bad. I prefer Master of Orion, though. Swapping CDs and plodding through the various screens just makes this game too painful for me to really get into.

Why didn't i buy this GAME the exact moment it was released!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 22
Date: May 15, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I'm going to focus upon the bad things of the game and thoughthis game has way way more good things than most games it also hasmore bad things than many !good! games e.g. "Theif 2" OK let's get started.......I think that this is one of the best games made....at least for a long time..... when u start the game u see really cool scenes and u think and it is cool but when you have played the game for a few hours you see that you have accomplished nothing you have a few planets and 10-20 ships but nothing is happening, so my advice is to expand ....expand your territory .colonize every planet you can posibly find hire every spy......but the thing is that it takes time to research new things that u need to research other things....so what i'm trying to say is it begins to look like a circle .....but though that's a bad thing that's also a good thing cause that gives u the feeling that u are not about to finish the game..... the 3D space graphics.(when you are fighting other ships) are THE BEST i've seen in any space game, strategy or other i well i started saying that i was going to focus on the bad things but i can't cause when i think about it it's just a great game with flaws that i can't find................i recommend it to all people that like COOL cutscenes and good games because this one is what i call a REALLY REALLY GOOD GAME! END

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