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I Preferred MOO:3

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: April 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Don't get me wrong; this is a fine game, worth the price. However, I'm the kind of weirdo that LIKED the mystifying complexity of Master of Orion 3; GCIV2 is a bit to simple and straightforward for me, a little like a "spreadsheet game". In MOO3, the player gets to control friendly forces in tactical battles on ground and in space; in GCIV2, one simply watches them happen. Never mind the fact that this is more realistic: given the distances involved, battlefield commanders would enjoy great freedom of action in this context. But I play Turn-Based Strategy games to indulge my inner control freak (strange, considering that my persona is pretty laid-back and messy). Still, a good game, and if you were overwhelmed by MOO:3's byzantine sophistication (or appearance thereof), this is the answer to your wishes.

Cheesy intro, classic game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: March 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

In terms of game play, this game can trace it's roots back all the way to the original "Trek" for VT terminals by way of Master of Orion, The Corporate Machine (another Stardock title) and the original GalCiv. You explore space, colonize planets, build fleets, trade and do everything you can to beat the alien civilizations you play against. The sophisticated AI and sparse resources means you can't just go blundering around with a fleet of ships and expect to win.

It's hard to describe the game if you've never played this kind of thing, but imagine Civilization in space - research, technology trees, planet improvements and so forth. The difference is that there are a limited number of planets and resources and everyone wants them. Therefore there is a lot more diplomacy and forward thinking than the gradual landgrab of a Civ game.

I played the original GalCiv and it was a great game, somewhat let down by a dense interface and 2D graphics. But the AI could be devilish and Stardock uniquely kept supporting the game way beyond its shelf life. The sequel carries all the good bits from the original and adds a complete makeover for the front end. Everything is 3D now and looks very pretty indeed. The UI is also a bit clearer although reading the manual is recommended especially if you haven't played this kind of game before.

One bonus for gamers is the CD is not required to play. You can install the game and forget about the CD. This deserves an extra star by itself. If you install the Stardock Central app, it will keep your game up to date. SD Central is similar to Steam but has been around a lot longer.

The only fault if we're going to pick faults is that the intro is a cheesy ripoff of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. You know the prologue at the front LoTR that relates the story of the War of the Ring? Transplant that into space complete with Kate Blanchett wannabe voiceover and you have the intro to this game. Ugh.

Once over, the rest of the game is exemplary. Highly recommended.

Fun, Bug-free, Turn-based Strategy Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 8 / 10
Date: May 31, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I have found only one tiny bug in this game and it has never crashed in 50 hours of playing, but I downloaded the 1.11 patch, I think it was, before playing. I easily downloaded the patch without installing stardock first but then downloaded stardock anyway.

The game is much more fun than Civilization 4 and vastly better than Imperium Galactica 2 (a very simple, old, low-budget game that I played a lot).

The best thing about the game is that you constanly have critical choices to make, especially early on in a game. It's very interesting and makes you think.

This is a low-budget game though and the graphics are unimpressive. The land battles are pitiful.

However, the gameplay is great!

The developers obviously paid a lot of attention to game balance and gameplay so that players have lots of interesting and difficult choices to make.

Luckily, the game is turn based, so you can think a while about whether you want to build a scout ship to check out the kinds of weapons and defenses a potential enemy is fielding, whether to go to war, or whether to put off military research for one more turn, hoping you won't be attacked soon. It's just a lot of fun to make tough choices and watch how they pan out.

There are loads of statistics in this game (like the manual says, "My God, it's full of numbers.") and you can see almost all of them, (at least if you do some espionage spending).

This is the best turn-based strategy game I have ever played, though it's a low-budget game.

Enjoy!

Ignore the Negative Reviews

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 32 / 75
Date: July 29, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a great game, ignore all the negative reviews. If you read them you'll notice two common themes:

1. The user is really impatient and emotional. Most of the negative reviewers are practically foaming at the mouth. Furthermore they face problems that merely require a little time and effort to fix, but since I suspect they are immature kids, they believe everything should be 100% perfect, done their way. And once these impatient types do play the game they gripe about how long it takes to learn it. "Oh my, you mean I have to read a 150 pg. manual? oh the horror." "You mean I have to read small type and type out a number? That's too hard, wahhhh" People like that can't even fix their own car.

Probably Democrats.

2. Paranoia. So you have to fill out some forms to register. So they put a little program on your comp. Big deal right? Except nothing happens to the people who do install it and fill out the forms. Jeez the CD dosent even require a key and has no copy protection.

Why this game rocks.

1. Gameplay
2. AI- All the reviewers have said enough- it rocks. It really is great though. The highlight of the game.
3. Endlessly Customizable- Ships, Races, Game Size, etc. One guy said there's no difference between the races. Yes and no. You can customize their attributes, but the overall style & personality is the same.

Could Use Fixing
1. More Atmosphere. Emotionally uncompelling aliens and story.
SciFi requires a universe you want to be in and "feel".
2. Less repetetive music. Should just link to some space-trance
net radio station. DroneZone's a good one.

Overall great technical game, very solid in "game" but users looking for great atmosphere and story will be a little dissapointed.

Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 9
Date: November 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This game is somewhat difficult to get into because a lot of information as to how to manage your civilization is somewhat intimidating. But once the initial shock wears off it is a real good game. There are 3 or so interface sliders that work together managing the economy, and once these are mastered its smooth sailing. The game provides a good challenge as the AI plays well, and the game has a "just take one more turn" feeling that can get you up late at night playing. I recommend this game.

Company fo thieves

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 17 / 35
Date: December 17, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I had great expectations about this game, especially after reading the 5-star reviews here and the 9/10 mark from gaming sites. I bought the game and played it, only to be disappointed. Essentially, this game is MOO2 with good and bad modifications, but overall worse than MOO2 and with uneven performance in terms of features.

PROS

1) More flexibility in ship design and look. This is almost a minigame in itself and can be quite fun.
2) Starbases can now be designed almost like ships through upgrades and can be placed almost anywhere.
3) There are now resource locations to be mined.
4) Trade routes are now actual ships you can design, build, manage, and attack.
5) What a ship can do in a turn is based on its speed. Faster transports can shuttle more population per turn, especially between close locations.

CONS

Even more annoying economic system. To make things "easier", now you have central control of percentage spending, which might be great for running huge galaxies with hundreds of worlds, but is really annoying and inefficient for players like me who prefer a small, cosy, well-managed galaxy with only a dozen worlds to worry about. At the least, there should have been an option to turn off the centralized socialism and allow individual planets to be managed very differently. Right now, the system is unwieldly and gives a big advantage to the computer.

The interface is cluttered, opposite to what other reviewers said (then again almost anything is an improvement over MOO3). A lot of the space on the screen is wasted on flavor text and borders, as opposed to giving you the info you need fast and easily.

Tiling in the world screen is not that meaningful, except for occasional bonuses. It seems like a waste of space. All I need to know is how many slots I still have in that planet and what I can build there. At least MOO2 did that for you automatically and you did not have to spend time on it and it was drawn far more beautifully than just Dune-type slabs that look 10 years old.

Combat system is primitive compared to MOO2, and even to MOO1 (which is over 10 years old now). It is also idiotic. So, if I have 100 lasers on a ship, each having 2 beam attack, my minimal damage is still 1? You must be joking! Also, one of the great features of the MOO series was that you could fight cleverly with inferior ships and still win. Guess what, you cannot here, because combat is automated. You get to watch the video and cannot do anything. Good job, guys, you really nailed it. Grrr.

The tech tree is unnecessarily cross-linked. Why would an advance in a remote field have to be a pre-requisite for an advance that you want? What if my playing style essentially ignores certain applications? Why do I have to research all this worthless junk before I am allowed to research what I want? MOO1 did a fantastic job in decoupling the research directions. As a result, MOO1 has some amazing games where you would have to really change stategy to compensate for tech tree randomization, e.g. having your superdreadnoughts still crawl at warp 1 because nobody in the galaxy was offered advanced engines. That was a big addition to replayability because individual games could differ enormously. Here, you do not get that and tech advances would be the same all the time.

Furthermore, tech tree does not tell you simple things like:"What do I have to research to get medium hulls?" If you have a system of research prerequisites, you also have to put in a system that allows the player to answer questions like that quickly and easily. Instead, there is a big tech tree screen that cannot be scrolled quickly and cannot be zoomed out, and where tech is shown as a single-word box with no description. You have to do a lot of clicking back and forth before you can eek out the info you need, if you are patient enough. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, developers. How about a decoupled system like MOO1? In addition, your huge empire can research only one thing at a time. Why? Why? WHY? Different does not mean better.

What is the point of borders, if at any time anyone can cross them without going to war? MOO1 and MOO2 did a far better job in that.

Morale is poorly implemented and makes little sense. If you are fighting for your very survival, I find it hard to believe your population will be that concerned with entertainment networks. To my knowledge, there is no 4X game that has tried and succeeded in implementing morale properly. So, the better games are the ones that leave it out of the equation, e.g. MOO1.

Why are growth rates set at 0.2b/week regardless of population size and type of planet? How does this make any sense whatsoever? A lot of strategic element is lost as a result.

Why implement a system of logistics points? Why limit the size of a fleet by them? Do the developers seriously believe that N scattered ships are easier to supply than the same ships grouped in a single fleet? That system may be true for a Napoleonic foraging army but makes no sense for space-age races. It is an unnecessary senseless irritant.

Under the economic system, you actually pay for your production. Yes, that's right, the beautiful factories you constructed and pay to maintain also charge you "conversion" fees in credits for producing. Same is true for research. Somebody explain to me why. I thought that was the point of maintenance. Also, under imperial dictatorships, why would you pay for something you own already? Pay whom?

After awhile, all the Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, cowboy, etc. references grow annoying. Playing a sci-fi 4X game is about atmosphere to some extent at least. Don't break it with sophomoric humor and obvious reminders that the developers are all human and have seen the same movies as the player. After all, this is supposed to be a different universe that does not contain Capt Kirk and Picard.

The political system is silly and so is the constant moralizing about good and evil. Guess what, this is a 4X sci-fi game, not sunday school. Ethics is a silly addition to this game, especially since the "good guys" are far more dangerous and insidious that the "bad guys".

United Nations resolutions are a good joke for a short while, but get really annoying real fast. Somebody explain to me why "evil" empires would vote FOR limiting the capacity of their military installations. We have all these different space races and cultures; why would they even consider holding such meetings and discussing socialist crap, like giving money to "war victims"? The developers basically want to poke fun at our own UN. Fine, but not in 4X sci-fi. Basically, keep your own politics out of designing a game that is meant to be fun for everyone.

The game mechanics makes small empires very inefficient while large empires take forever to manage. Contrary to what the developers say in their tutorial, it takes more than one afternoon to finish a smallest galaxy. This is a general problem with later games in the genre, because developers refuse to acknowledge that MOO1's mechanics was nearly perfect and that people these days cannot afford to spend 12 hours on a finishing a single game. So, they continue making mechanics unwieldly and turning everybody off. That is why MOO3 and GalCiv2:DL are worse than MOO2, which is worse than MOO1 in this respect. Giving players the option to control 100 worlds is not as rewarding or important or even practical as giving them the opportunity to control a dozen worlds really well. So, the real issue is one of design philosophy, rather than technology or particular mechanics. So long as developers do not understand that, they will produce flops like MOO3 and GalCiv2:DL.

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, this game has a great potential and could have been even better than MOO1 and MOO2, but the above shortcomings made it fail. I shelled out 40 dollars for it and wish I could get my money back. I give it 3 stars only because of the improvements mentioned above and because it might be fun for a very select group of gamers with a lot of time on their hands and a big sense of humor.

IMPORTANT UPDATE!!!!

I tried to return the game to the games shop where I bought it and they refused to take it back! They said that because of the online activation feature, they cannot resell it to other customers, while the publisher refuses to accept back an open box! So, I am stuck with it and cannot get my 40 bucks back or even get store credit for it!

This is the last game I buy from UbiSoft, and am also considering boycotting EA as well due to their 25% share in this piece-of-garbage company of thieves.

Amazon should be ashamed that neither of their "spotlight" reviews mention this "feature" at all. With all these negative reviews, both spotlights are 5/5. Even half a brain can figure out why.

Best 4X In A Long Time

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: March 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Stardock has outdone themselves with GalCiv2. First of all, the Stardock downloader system is excellent, and is how I bought the game (i.e., downloaded it). I could rant about the typical features, but we've all played games like this before. Instead I want to focus on the highlights and things Stardock has done to give it flavour. First of all, the tech tree is excellent. The different races have personalities, and the AI can be wicked. There are TONS of random events and factors in the game: anomalies your flagship can pick up for bonuses, galaxy-wide events like economic booms, mineral deposits on planets, minor races, &tc. The game includes a ship editor so that you can build and customise your own ships, or just use the ones that come when you unlock technology. Finally, there are 4 different ways to win: technology, influence, diplomacy, and good old butt-stomping.

Great game, but don't buy it.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 10 / 18
Date: April 08, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This is a good, solid game. I recommend buying it to anyone who enjoys turn-based strategy games.

That said, if you played Gal Civ I, DON'T buy this game. There is really almost no expanded content. The various moral choices are exactly the same; I have yet to stumble across a single new one. There are a few updated graphics, but even the in-game movies are identical. The campaign is simplistic and leaves off in mid-storyline. All-in-all it is certainly not worth the price of a new game. I feel more than a bit cheated.

Good but not exceptional

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: November 20, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Overall this is a good space based 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) game, but I did not find it to be a ground breaking one. Players like me who have played similar games like good ole Ascendancy (from Logic Factory) and Master of Orion II (Microprose), and the more recent ones such as Reach for the Stars (from SSI) etc., may not find this to be exceptional (except possibly for it's supposedly superior AI which apparently does not resort to cheating).

I was expecting GalCiv II to be well ahead of the older 4X games so as to set a new standard for space based 4X strategy gaming but did not find it to be refreshingly different or startlingly innovative.

GalCiv II seems to have an uncanny resemblance to that excellent mid 1990 era game - Ascendancy from the Logic Factory. e.g. Planet tiles, Ability to custom design/build ships, ground combat cinematics etc. The ability to customize your race attributes, voting in a galactic council etc., is reminiscent of Master of Orion II (MOO II).

(BTW, for old DOS game, Ascendancy had superb graphics and 3D Tech Tree to boot. As most readers of this review probably won't be familiar with Ascendancy here is a link for more details: [...]

In my humble opinion GalCiv II could have benefited immensely by having some of those subtle little aspects that helps one bond with the game. A good example is the Leaders in MOO II, who brought in specific strengths/skills. This feature made the game less mechanistic and more fun because you had a set of leaders to appoint as planetary governors and ship captains. You can could watch them progress over time increasing their strengths/skill levels. (BTW, the disappointing aspect of MOO II leaders feature was that there were only limited slots for leaders - If I can remember right I think 4 planetary governors and 4 ship captains was the Max and sadly did not increase as you added more planets and ships to your empire). The Total War series has a very good characterization of Governors/Generals (Family members of a faction), Spies, Diplomats, Assassins etc. Features like this helps a player relate to the characters in the game and get a sense of bonding with the game. I was hoping that GalCiv II had some similar mechanism - for example a choice of planetary governors and a pool of ship captains whose numbers will expand with the growth in the number of planets and ships in your empire so that you can appoint a planetary governor for each of your planets and ship captains for each of your ships (the most senior ship captain becoming the admiral when you create a fleet of multiple ships). Their attributes will improve or go down based on how their planets/ships/fleets perform.

Straight out of the box I found this to be the most unstable game I have ever played. I tried this on 3 machines starting with the minimal requirements and going to a relatively high end machine (Intel P4 2.6Ghz Dual Core with 512 MB RAM) with no change in stability (especially when auto saving). I think game developers should never release buggy games and expect players to wait for and download the enumerable number of patches. Remember the fist impression of a game makes a lasting impression - a buggy game has a high probability of gathering dust in ones shelf. Can't say I am a fan of half baked initial releases followed by the invariable add-on scams. I would gladly give GalCiv II four stars if not for the stability issues that really frustrated me and put me off.

I am an ardent strategy games fan (an addict as per my wife), with literally hundreds of days of game time on games like the Total War, Age of Empires, Civilization series etc. I am sure most people like me given the opportunity would be glad to test out a Beta and come up with an extensive list of bugs and playability issues - for a small non-monetary reward such as a complimentary copy of the game when it is released. I think game developers should use game enthusiast like us to volunteer to augment their Quality Assurance (QA) teams. After all to test a game thoroughly one has to have a passion for playing the game fully. I guess when game testing becomes just a chore to the QA folks the job does not get well done.

Do hope game developers take note of customer reviews at Amazon as a valuable source of feedback to continuously improve themselves and their products.

Runs Bad and the AI kinda stinks

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 11 / 22
Date: June 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I like the overall setup of this game, but it has two big problems which make me hate it.

1) The AI is annoying. The biggest problem I have is: Anytime your troop transports get anywhere near a computer opponent's planets, they declare war on you. It doesn't matter if the planet is adjacent to an enemy planet you're at war with, or if the planet is right next to one of yours, and sometimes it does it when your transports are kinda far away. If the makers of the game wanted you to be careful about moving your transports next to computer AI players, they should have an option on the diplomatic screen where you can negotiate passage of your transports or something....because otherwise you have friendly races declaring war on you for no reason.

2)like everyone else says, the game runs like [...]. It's ok on my computer for about an hour, but any longer than that, my system gets bogged down. And I meet the system recommendations.

If they fix those two things, I'd give it a 4 or a 5, but as it is now, I get little enjoyment playing it.

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