Customer Reviews

Galactic Civilizations II Ultimate Edition

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Galactic Civilizations II Ultimate Edition is the latest and best installment of the Galactic Civilizations series, packing in both currently-available expansion packs in addition to the base game. It is a turn-based strategy/conquest game, allowing play to stretch out over days or even weeks. There is a lot to this game, but once you get the hang of how to play this game it is very much worth the time and effort.

To be very clear, this is a turn-based game, not a real-time strategy game or a first-person shooter. If turn-based games do not appeal to you, look elsewhere. If you have not played a turn-based game in the past, it is a different experience from most other games on the market in that the planning and strategizing require thinking in a different way, and this style of play is not something everyone enjoys.

One of the very first things that a player will notice about this game is that the graphics are absolutely stunning. Stardock put an incredible amount of effort and care into the interface, from the menus to the cut scenes. Everything is smooth, seamless and, well, beautiful.

Although the graphics are well-done, the interface is exceptionally complex and busy. The player manages almost every conceivable aspect of the game - economy and tax rate, research direction and funding, relationships with other civilizations, planetary production, fleet composition, trade and more. It is very easy to get lost in the sheer volume of options available.

Gameplay starts with several choices, most importantly race but certainly not the only option. Victory conditions (more on that shortly), universe size, star cluster density, frequency of viable worlds, number of other civilizations, and a few other options are all specified at the start. After making all of these selections, the player gets a single planet, a colony ship, a survey ship and an asteroid miner.

Every turn consists of a number of important choices. The player decides how to allocate all of the resources available and takes steps to better their position, with the ultimate goal of meeting the victory conditions specified at the start. This may include exploration of space junk (there is frequently much benefit to doing so), colonization of a new planet, or perhaps cranking up the tax rate. Once all of the desired options have been selected, the player ends the turn and a new turn begins after all selections have been executed.

One of the most interesting aspects of the game is in designing new ships for the fleet. The player gets to pick hull type, armament, sensors and everything else a ship needs to be a successful contributor. Once a design is complete and named, any starport orbiting the player's planets can build those ships. It is important to keep in mind that some designs may not work well through the entire game but that sometimes a design should be retired in favor of new, more advanced designs.

Gameplay continues until victory conditions are met. There are several conditions that can be specified - military conquest, diplomatic victory (peace treaties with all other major civilizations), technological victory (done through research) or even a cultural invasion.

Every choice a player makes affects something else within the game. For example, higher taxes can cause a planet to mutiny and join a different civilization. More important, though, is how choices affect relations with the other civilizations. Most civilizations pay attention to ethical alignment and military might, and depending on how strong or weak a player's civilization can even incite a war. Finding a good balance is the key, and finding that balance is inherently tough.

As this version comes with both expansion packs, there are three campaigns that are available for play. I have not tried any of these so I cannot really comment on them.

This is a very engrossing game with slick graphics and many, many choices for the gamer who wants absolute control over every aspect of the game. If this style of play is appealing to you, seriously consider picking up a copy for yourself and say goodbye to your free time.

This game is without doubt the best turn based 4X game I have ever played. Allowing me to design and create my own ships with different weapons and defenses made a dream come true.

I began playing video games on a SNES, heck I learned to read by playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I've been an avid gamer ever since, and there's no doubt about it Galactic Civilizations 2 is a gem.

If you enjoy strategy games (turn based or RTS) and are not afraid of using your head, try this game out, there's a great demo out there that can give you a taste.

I started with the purchase of the core game, I then bought the expansion Dark Avatar, and then Twilight of the Arnor. I've followed this game for years, and the fact is, I still play it. I've played the same game for years, simply because it has that much to offer.

I'd love to give you an in depth breakdown of how things work, but the game is just that deep. I can't stress enough to try the demo, this game single handedly saved a summer (which always seems to be dry in the quality games category). You can take the galaxy over planet by planet, the next game you may be in a defensive struggle for your life so you can buy your scientists time to achieve a scientific victory. Each game is different, how different is of course up to you.

I liked this game so much that I started pre-ordering other Stardock games such as Sins of a Solar Empire, and all their expansions. Stardock has made a fan out of me simply because of their continuing devotion to their games, and their policy on DRM. They're looking out for me the consumer, and I doubt I can say that about many other software companies if any.

Try the demo, see for yourself. I went for it, and have nothing but good things to say.

The GALACTIC CIVILIZATIONS series in effect has kept the classic Turn-based Strategy genre alive. When the CIVILIZATION series was going to the dogs (all flashy animations and dummied-down options instead of evolving) and the MASTER OF ORION series was committing seppuku (unable to live with the shame of its 3rd installment), GC reminded us how much fun space colonization can be!

Starting off with a planet in a customizable Universe (size, resource abundance, scarcity of habitable planets etc), one begins his journey of exploration, colonization and conquest. With the exception of roving pirates who can be destructive if encountered early on (but whose annoyance can be deselected), the factions are well balanced and interesting.
The graphics are clear (with full zoom capability), whereas the interface is easy to master and friendly to use.

However, what makes GC so much more fun than any other space colonization game is its ship design options. From freighters and colonist-ships to planet defenders and frigates, there are no limits in what one can build in your dockyard. Want something that looks like STAR TREK's Enterprise, STAR WARS' Millennium Falcon or BATTLESTAR GALACTICA's Colonial Vipers? Easily done - the sky is the limit.
Research will not only keep you solvent and your people happy but it will also make it possible to better equip your ships. Stronger engines, more effective armor, more destructive weapons.

And, on top of all that, this being a STARDOCK release, it comes FREE of any intrusive DRM scheme. These days, that alone deserves gamers' support. How much more so that GALACTIC CIVILIZATIONS II is a great game. Its new patching method is neither convenient nor reliable and I hope the STARDOCK people will see to that promptly. Besides this shortcoming,

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!!

As a huge fan of MOO2, I see the following as game-ruining problems:

1. You can not bombard or destroy colonies. The only way you can take out colonies is by invading them with troops, which are basically your own colonists. So, to take out enemy colonies you must sacrifice significant number of your own colonists. Considering how many colonies the opponents may have and how much population on each, if you try to take out their colonies you will quickly run out of your own people. This is also a huge hassle when you want to eliminate an opponent's colony that you're not interested in (on some poor quality world). Furthermore, once you capture a colony you must then worry about defending it (and this colony is likely closer to the enemy than to your other worlds). In MOO2 you had the ability to bombard and destroy colonies and it makes no sense that in GC2 you can't do that.

2. Combat is nonsensical and boring. The battles are resolved automatically and according to a very simplistic and illogical formula. Say you have a large ship with 20 Disruptors mk3 (damage 8) going up against 5 small vessels, each with 10 HP. During your turn, you will do between 0 and 160 damage. Let's say you did 9 (to 1 ship). After their turn you go again and this time you do 160 damage. This 160 damage will all be applied to the damaged ship with 1 HP remaining. All excess damage is wasted. In MOO2 you could fire one (or a few) weapon on the damaged ship, finishing it off, and fire all remaining weapons on other targets. Dont' even get me started on defense. You may have shields capable of deflecting 50 damage and an attacking ship with (only) beam strength 1 can still damage you. No control, simplistic, and ultimately stupid.

3. Players have very little control over specialization (building/military/research) on individual planets. You may want one planet to do only research and another only production (social) and other military, but guess what. You can't. Your spending is controlled with sliders for the whole civilization. Even worse, no mattr how much money you have, on a given planet you can't run factories and research labs to maximum. It's either one or the other.

4. Very poor in-game documentation and worthless printed documentation. This game requires that players understand its mechanics in order to succeed. Why then does it make them so complicated and secret?

Also dislike:

5. Update system is ridiculous.
6. Game often crashes on saving, causing the save to vanish.
7. Boring research.
8. If you're upgrading a building and try to purchase the upgrade you will have to pay the cost of the whole building.

At heart, this is a clever Civ-in-space ("4X") game with a number of interesting design choices and options (e.g. the economic system, ship research and design, and racial abilities). Graphically, it has a nice, clean presentation. I had no technical problems getting the game up and running. Unfortunately, that's about where the good stuff ends.

I never thought I'd say this, but this title proves there can be software designed with too many developers and too few managers. The game is obviously the product of developers with a lot of love for the product who really wanted to throw in lots of cool features. That's great, but someone needed to step in and make sure that everything actually worked and had a reasonably coherent interface and presentation, and that lingering issues were properly addressed. I have, at least, the following serious issues with this game...

1) Gameplay is extremely buggy, unforgivable for an "ultimate" edition released years after the initial title. To take one example out of several big ones, the game will auto-design ships for you, but due to a calculation glitch those ships will be far more weight-efficient than anything you can design yourself. That is, you can't design anything close to that same ship from scratch without exceeding the weight limit. This makes the entire ship design aspect of the game almost completely useless for serious play, as the efficiency bonus for the game-designed ships is far greater than the utility you can get back out of intelligent specialization. Of course, it's possible that this is a feature and not a bug, which brings us to the next point...

2) The publisher's web site and general support structure is atrocious. The official forums are horribly organized and bizarrely replicated across numerous URL's (one of which scores points as the only example of white-text-on-light-grey-background I've ever found). They lack basic features like thread subscription and forum-specific search functions. Answering elementary questions like "Do I have the latest version?" and "What was fixed in the latest version?" are non-trivial tasks. The ship design bug mentioned above was rumored to have been fixed in the version I was playing, but nobody really seemed to know for sure, nor particularly care. The game's developers seem to have left any involvement with the game to their community manager (who at least tries to help, to his credit), and no longer respond to any issues directly or indirectly. This might not be so terrible were the game not so extremely buggy at the same time. And none of that is even mentioning the problematic custom updating service (Impulse) and the lack of simple, downloadable patches. I've seen tiny indie games developed by two guys on their off-hours with more professional, efficient support systems than this.

3) Numerous game design choices are extremely unintuitive, but poorly documented. Again, at heart there's some clever stuff, but it's obvious no one ever stopped to think about how to clearly communicate the system to a non-developer. For example, just the fundamental concept of per-turn planetary research/production numbers and how they relate to cash flow and economic settings is totally mystifying without extensive reading of widely scattered forum posts. Now, I don't really expect to completely understand this sort of thing from the printed manual, the size of which is subject to cost restraints. But there's nothing online for this game comparable to the Civ articles [...], where you can find articles detailing the workings of nearly every mechanic in the game. The best you can do is just Google every mechanic and try to figure out which of the many resulting forum post hits are correct, complete, and still current (many subsystems were completely overhauled with each expansion). Admittedly, these kind of resources are usually community-driven and not a publisher's effort, but I think the absence of them reflects a very basic fact - this game just isn't good enough to attract the kind of players that make those community efforts happen. In any event, trying to understand the game system well enough to play more than casually is extraordinarily labor-intensive. This all could have been mitigated somewhat, had it not been for the fact that...

4) The game interfaces are atrociously bad. Outrageously bad. Violating-years-of-interface-expectations bad. Discarding an unsaved current game without confirmation? Sure. Details that show up on the main map but aren't visible when you click in to the detailed view? Sure. Mouseover text that appears for one element of an interface but not on a different, parallel element of the same interface? Yup. Totally elementary stuff that you'd see instantly with blind play-testers? All the time. In the end, all of these can be worked around or simply ignored with enough experience, but they just add to the general feeling of sloppiness surrounding this game. And more importantly, they compound the documentation problems mentioned above.

This game really had the potential to be fantastic. Once again, the game system itself is quite interesting and solid. But everything about its execution is just so incredibly sloppy that it's not at all worth taking seriously. If all you want to do is fire up the easy levels, blow up some spaceships, and conquer the galaxy, then it may be fine. The gameplay is fundamentally pretty fun. But if you're the type of player that wants to study the underlying system and carefully develop detailed strategies over hundreds of hours of gameplay, you'd be better off investing your time elsewhere.

Update: I so desperately wanted to like this game that I kept playing it for another week or two after writing the above. And you know what? It's actually even worse than I thought. The AI is absolutely braindead and fails to properly handle even the most elementary strategic decisions. Such as... "Hey, you're attacking me! Should I learn Space Weapons, build a military, and fight back, or should I continue to research builder techs and produce more defenseless freighters for your warships to destroy?" CivII had a better AI 15 years ago. The praise this game receives for the quality of its AI is utterly mystifying to me. I don't think I've ever played a game where I disagree so strongly with the majority of reviews out there. This game is garbage, quite possibly the single worst PC title I've ever purchased.

One more thing... note that the publisher effectively prohibits reselling by only providing updates through their custom service, which will not allow you to reregister or unregister the original serial number. So forget about eBay'ing this monstrosity when you get tired of it.

My favorite game. Unfortunately, now that I have upgraded to Windows 7 (32 bit) it will not work.

More than any other 4X game this one comes closest to being Civilization in space.

As others have noted the interface is very busy, and the game does sometimes bog you down with details such as custom designing a ship, or deciding what upgrade to build next as your colony worlds.

It's a good game, and fun if you enjoy 4x turn-based strategy.

I can't give the game 5 stars though. The AI is not well programmed and the computer races will regularly take actions that display the limitations of the programming. Worse, there are times that no computer race will sign a treaty with you, even though you have been perfectly honorable up to that point. I have played several games where at some point I'm ready to pull my hair out because of the illogic the computer uses. It even extends to surrendering. You could have the last 1-2 worlds of one computer race surrounded and he'll suddenly surrender to a third race rather than allow you to defeat him. This is extremely frustrating, especially if you are trying to get a conquest win as you then have to start a new war with an enemy who might have been a friend up to that point.

Still, its fun, has an amazing amount of detail and technologies to research, and does not have a vertical learning curve. If you like 4X games, its worth looking into, but those who don't have the patience for the slow pace of most turn-based games should avoid this.

I love turn based strategy, and most of these types of games have gone the way of the dinosaur in favor of flashy (but often lacking in any real strategy) RTS games. This game is classic in it's general design, and really is a throwback (which I like). The level of detail at which you can manage your empire is quite impressive and daunting at first. This is not a game you will immediately master, or even be proficient at.

Pros:

* Many different strategy approaches to winning, and many different races (or custom) to experiment with
* Awesome ship designer, perhaps the coolest thing in the game
* Great flexibility of victory conditions, and customization of the galaxy
* Deep, immersive, strategy. You must manage politics, morale, economy, research, and your civilization can evolve politically. Also, what political party and custom racial attributes you choose effect abilities, i.e., production, economy, research, weapons ability etc.
* AI is pretty ruthless (and sometimes I think it just cheats)
* hours and hours of game play
* this pack gives you three campaigns to do and is a bargain

Cons:

* So why have a turn based game and then not be able to control your units in battle (you simply watch a cinematic)? I harken back to Moo2 which is the standard in my book, and what I loved about that game is that order of fire and tactics mattered (i.e., initiative)--also what units you wanted to target first. Galactic Civs weaker units get killed off first and so on, all units target one unit on the other side, and quite simply all "strategy" is lost, it's a simple matter of who has greater firepower to defense ratio--period.
* Economy needs to be easier to run, or at least more transparent. In other games of this type, you had a type of intra-empire commerce and shortfalls by one colony could be made up for by other colonies (i.e. food) also you could direct some colonies to focus on either production or research. Also there is the bizarre feature that over-crowding effects happiness, yet you have research trees devoted to increasing your population maximum (which would increase your tax base and production potential)? I would like to see mining become more strategic, i.e., mining for particular elements to build and do research, and also add a galactic market place where you could sell surplus.
* Ground combat is a bit boring, even the animation is boring

All that said, I am picking at what is a very engaging game. I look forward to whatever the next version will be like. Happy gaming.

I was not sure if I wanted to play this game because of some of the negative reviews, but I gave it a try. I love it. Some parts are a bit clunky -- combat and the damage system, and other things could be more automated, but a pretty good game. What I would like to see is more automation (in starbase design for example). I would like to set up a template for what I want the base to look like and then assign colonies to suppling the parts. A couple of clicks and you are done.

Space games can be fun, especially if you can change the history of the game to include custom additions and environs. Galactic Civilizations II has the potential be be fun. Looking at all of the factory installed features of most 4x platforms, you will get slightly more than what you paid; in GalCiv2 you will be tempted to want even more. From working in the shipyard to balancing your operating expenses, your game play is in its infancy. From a novice 4x player perspective, GalCiv2 is an excellent means of being introduced to the turn-based/3D environment. From a young and aspiring developer's perspective, GalCiv2 provides a platform of virtually endless combinations to build upon before exhausting your available hard drive space.

Most gamers seek a challenge that they may or may not be able to overcome. Probability says that no one is actually suppose to win (honestly) at this game. The technology trees span across libraries of research that even nuclear physicists may have difficulties completing. Yet, diligence and modding provides a sneak peak into the many different worlds and planets that lay deeply hidden within the progressive scenarios.

Politician may also have severe trouble keeping up the pace with GalCiv2's United Planet agendas. The taxes may be nominal at first, but can easily sneak up and decommission an entire spacecraft. If you are good at balancing budgets and keeping track of your spending, you will be on your way to your first colonial launch and greeted by the neighboring space civilization(s). They may be friendly or foe, so be aware.

Respectfully; the only way to actually appreciate GalCiv2 is if you are a diehard 4x fan seeking to hone in on a strong mod platform. There are rumors of additions to the GalCiv series, but the most popular rumor is that GalCiv2 Ultimate Edition is the last of the breed.

(Note: This game requires a tremendous amount of memory and hard drive space. Crashes and interface freezes have been known to occur on smaller hard drives. Read the install requirements throughly before purchase.)