Galactic Civilizations

Rating:

This game is a knock-off of the classic Master of Orion (MoO) series. It's not a bad game; it's just that this has been done before and better.

Gameplay: This is a turn-based, strategy game with a somewhat sharp learning curve. The object of the game is to conquer the planets of enemy civilizations with either your military might, cultural influence, or political wherewithal. There is a barrage of information that you need to absorb during gameplay, from statistics to what's going on with your planets' economies. Lots of things can be researched and upgraded, but it's sometimes hard to tell what difference they make in the scheme of things. You have very little control regarding customizing ships. Conflict with other civilizations in this game is inevitable, but not very exciting. There are many lulls in the game, and you'll sometimes get downright bored having to click on the NEXT TURN button until something happens.

Visuals: Ship-to-ship combat is very basic, and surprisingly not as well depicted as in the classic Master of Orion, which came out in 1994! Graphics generally are adequate for such a game, but no real improvement over MoO2.

Sound: The game does have nice music. However, there are no voices beyond the narrator at the opening. I don't recall what sound ships make, but nothing very memorable.

Technical/Replayability: The game was perfectly stable on my computer. The instruction manual is adequate. The developer has released a number of patches and updates that supposedly add some new content to the game. After playing the game once, I had no desire to play it again. Those who like the game should get some value out of it, since it can be replayed with somewhat different results. However, you can only play the human side.

Overall, if you have played Master of Orion 1 or 2, you may find this one to be disappointing. Given that it had the MoO model to work from, there is really no excuse for this game to be as limited and unoriginal as it is.

Rating:

Galactic Civilizations is the junk food of 4x games.
It's filling and comfortably familar, but after awhile you realize it's making you sick.

It's basically what you would expect if you took every successful 4x game and merged them together, but with no regards for balance or gameplay. The feature list looks impressive, until you realize half the features are broken or unbalanced. Here's a sample game I played once I realized how broken things were:

Normal difficulty/Small Map

Right away I colonized 2 systems.
I did nothing except change research, occasionally build a building, and hit next turn. I did not build any attack/defense ships.

This went on until near the end of the research tree(!), when finally the AI attacked. I built ships to defend, but I was overwhelmed as you would expect. Then they ground invaded. Carrier of 5 million lost for them, killed 3 million of mine, repeat. Sounds bad since I only had 2 planets, right? Well unfortunately the pop of my planet they were invading was 100 billion. They couldn't conceiveably wipe me out since they couldn't make transports fast enough. Why are transports "used up" when you attack anyway?

So after a few hundred attempts they seemed to give up
then space sharks were randomly spawned. Since I had no ships they didn't attack me, and instead wiped out both the remaining ai player's fleets. I couldn't invade for the same reasons they couldn't invade me though, so I just waited to see what would happen.

Eventually I was given one of the AI's systems. Turns out I had set some money in "destabilize" a few dozen turns ago.
I pumped up the amount of money i was spending on it, to about 10% of my economy. Soon both civilizations gave me all their systems, including their capitals!!!!

So basically all you need to do to win is do nothing for a few thousand turns then put some money in destabilizing your opponent's systems and you win. That's it.

Utter junk.

Rating:

I tend to get hooked on one game at a time, and will play that game 50 to 100 times in a row, over a course of 6 months to a year, before looking for another game to move on to do the same... this game fit the bill for me over the last year, and I'm just now starting to look for a new replacement "favorite game".

Galactic Civilizations has an excellent AI, and decent 2D graphics and musical score, and an easy to understand user interface. It has a complicated tech tree - even in the longest of games, I was never able to get thru all the possible technologies.

One major negative to GC II is the inability to play against others online. While playing against the excellent AI is enjoyable, I certainly would have liked to play against others at some point.

I've been looking at the Galactic Civilizations II Beta (up to 0.21, as of this writing); it will be quite different from GC, being based on 3D graphics - but, right now, it is hard to judge GC II, as it is still in an early Beta state. Having said that, I think they are putting too much emphasis on ship design in GC II, and not enough on graphics related to planetary improvements (both of which are new features in GC II). I also see where the first release of GC II will not provide the ability to play against other humans - this is unfortunate, as this was probably the biggest deficiency in GC I.

Rating:

Being a Moo fan and seeing this game, I had hopes. boy was I wrong. on the ooutside it loks like an increadible Moo ripoff, which I would not have minded. ounce you start playing however, you come to realize that there is no real hope for this game.

No ship customization, no organized way of of doing combat other than "go here and kill", and for Willy's sake, you can't even play as anyone other than the stupid F***ing humans! Diplomacy you have to discover through tech reserch, even then it's so mundane it hurts. unimaginative planet design, and tedious turns.

Don't get me wronge, there are a handfull of things that are decent. I dig the major and minor races, and how the minor ones just pop up out of nowhere. If you start doing evil your entire screen changes to dictate how ruthless you are. and the random anomalies that you can explore are a nice touch.

All in all, it's an unimpressive game that it more bark than bite.

Rating:

Fun game, great community, helpful staff at stardock and regular updates and now an expansion pack. It's a game with a simple premise and a challenging AI. The graphics are good enough and its clearly a game for the thinker gamer rather than a "blaster".