Galactic Civilizations 2: Dread Lords

Rating:

It's a bit shameful that I would be giving this game a one-star review, since the bottom line is this: I played it several hours a day for almost two months and got a ton of enjoyment out of it. And it only cost me about twenty dollars! How's that for value? There were times I felt the game had been programmed by a twin version of myself who knew exactly the kind of game I would like. The point is, this is great game and I really enjoyed almost all of it. I knew I would write this review and for a long time wavered between giving it one star or five stars. Unfortunately, I'm in a rotten mood just now, so one star it is!

The chief thing that eventually wound up getting my goat was the many interface issues. True, the interface in many respects is much smoother than in similar games, but there was some room for improvement. I compare this game not to similar titles such as "Imperium Galactica II" and "Master of Orion" but to itself: what it could have been. Seems like there's one major patch still to be issued, only there won't be: the company is on to other things. Admittedly, there was nothing that really rankled you the first week of playing, but if you play this game for weeks and weeks, there are some things that are really gonna get on your nerves:

1. The research completed screen keeps popping up and there's no way to get it not to. The writing here is so good that the first couple of times you're not going to have a problem, but if you're playing the game through dozens of times, that really grates. Same thing goes for various announcements about mysterious force-fields, political developments on other planets, gossip from the other races, etc. There should have been a way to not be bothered about this, the way you can choose not to be bothered by "found anomaly" pop-ups. All this seriously detracts from the replayability of the game.

2. There was no need for this game to be 3D (especially given #5 below). It's essentially a 2D game -- yet incredibly consumptive of your computer's resources. There should have been an option to just play in 2D, with those symbols for the ships and planets. In fact, 3D just makes this game more confusing: when you zoom in to a planet, for example, you can't readily apprehend its class.

3. The money in this game is all messed up. They don't give you enough at the beginning. There's a million things you need to do at the beginning and since the computer never wastes a move, it's never enough. Minimally, they should have given you more money on the easier levels.

4. Some of the research was b.s. Do you really need to be able to research alliances? Good and evil?

5. In battles you're reduced to nothing more than a spectator, be it land battles or space battles. Major drawback to this game. Checkout "Imperium Galactica II" for an example of how they might have factored in your generalship in land battles.

6. Your ability to built fleets is pathetic. You can only get about 8 serious ships together. Why is this! It's not like we're going to run out of room. This is outer space! You should have been able to mount fleets of hundreds.

7. Pirates and minor races don't obey your guidance about difficulty levels.

8. The screen keeps recentering on planets and ships without your being able to do anything about it. When you're playing with a "huge"- or "gigantic"-sized galaxy, this can get really disorienting.

9. You cannot pause the tutorials to write something down or look at something carefully: you have to replay the whole thing.

10. Although the game has many difficulty levels, there are not smooth gradations between them. I did like how in "Cakewalk" your opponents are reduced to drooling idiots, useful if you're just learning what is inarguably a complicated game. But as I got better, I noticed that in moving from "Beginner" to "Normal" there was a jarring jump. Fortunately, in my experience, the computer opponents never break alliances with you treacherously, allowing you to plan out your overall grand strategy. One thing I wish the game had done was have it so that you could slide the difficulty during the game: I like to start out Easy so that I can at least get a footing and have the assurance that I'm not going to be wiped off the map in one fell swoop; then, once I've got my civilization up and running, go in for higher difficulty. You can't do this. If you choose "Easy," the game is easy all the way to the bitter end.

11. The campaign is a crock, I think. I've never seen a walkthrough on the Internet, and it's difficult to get through, even if you choose "Cakewalk." Two things I'm thinking of here: First, most of the campaign settings can be got through by simply laying low and letting your allies do all the hard work. This was a let-down, since to get through the level, you're reduced to playing an ancillary role, though you've got a right to expect to be front and center for any battles. (The way to get through the grand battle, Apocalypse, for example, is to simply colonize the four planets closest to you, then tech trade like made so that your allies have as much technology as possible. Then, they'll go in a take out the Dread Lords for you. If you get it into your head to enter the fray yourself, the overwhelming military superiority of the Dread Lords is just crushing when you meet them.) Thus the campaign is doable, but incredibly unsatisfying. In many of the missions, you're actually marshaling all your resources just to hold your own against your allies (Altarians, I'm thinking of you!) who have the gall to build influence bases right next to your core planets! Whose side are they on?

12. Although the "Doc" Smith-style story is a perfectly serviceable setup for the game, what actually happens at the end is a majorly unsatisfying downer.

13. Many "planetary improvements," if you actually sat down to do the math, turn out to be a crock (especially some of the banking ones). I don't think any game should do this: an improvement should be an improvement.

14. Population growth is also a crock: your planet can't have more than 20 million people, or you'll have approval problems. This is something I had to learn from a message board: the manual sure won't tell you.

15. I don't know about you guys, but my TURN button is always stuck on SKIP and I have no idea what it's doing. There should have been a way to turn that off.

16. The game should have distinguished the races better. When you played with a different race, it didn't really feel like it was a completely different game, like it did in Starcraft. In fact, creating your own Custom Race was a bit of a dud since you can jigger any race's specs to be exactly what you want anyhow.

17. It was way too easy to win with an influence victory.

18. Autoexplore and autoinvestigate are buggy. They say there's nothing to explore but there clearly is. Plus if you build several ships and instruct them to do this, they don't go off in different directions: they merely follow each other in a line!

Of course, I am open to reason! Here's a brief list about what I thought was great about the game:

1. There are a lot of cheat codes available if the game is too hard for you or if you are just learning.

2. You can build and deploy your own custom ships.

3. The writing (e.g., the notification of completed research, the diplomatic dispatches) is the most funny I've ever seen in video game. Very well done.

4. You truly can win using vastly different strategies. This is something many similar games boast of but don't really deliver on. This game does.

UPDATE: I admit I liked this game so much that I plopped down money for Galactic Civilizations II Ultimate Edition and was pleased to discover that many -- if not most -- of these interface issues have been fixed therein. If you're going to buy this game, I definitely suggest you buy that one, which also includes both expansion packs.

Rating:

Gal civ 2 is one of the greatest strategy games ever, sadly there is NO MULTIPLAYER WHATSOEVER! This means that sooner or later you get bored not fighting acutal people, but creating ships and ruling an empire is great fun!

Rating:

Everything is superb. The cutscences, the intro, and of course the gameplay. It is strategy at its best. It provides many different ways to approach a problem at hand. The new research trees are pretty neat too. I especially like the ethics choices and the different paths you can take.

Plus, its system requirements are very low by today's games' standards, so chances are it will run very well on your system (a.k.a you don't need a gaming rig to enjoy this).

Rating:

I've played the Civilization series and enjoyed it a lot, and because GC2DL is so similar in concept and execution it was familiar and appealing to me from the outset. It's also pretty simple to master for anyone experienced in 4x games. It's well-made for the most part, from the space art and ship design to the music and inspired sense of humor (Monty Python In Space!). But there are numerous issues with movement, stacking and fleet operations that make even the most basic mechanics of the game an exercise in frustration even when using the latest version and a fast system.

My main problem with GC2DL is with the simple process of clicking and moving units. It only works well after you've learned some awkward processes. I lost track of the number of times I left-clicked on a single unit, right clicked on its destination, and watched helplessly as my unit stayed in place while the rest of my other units moved instead. You'll be playing in a zoomed-out mode most of the time, and when you think you're clicking on a unit you're often not, at least as far as the software is concerned. And when that happens, when your click doesn't "register" the way you expect it to, the next unit on the list of automated movements will move instead. And then the next, and the next, etc. etc. In fact that next unit will often move to the target your initial unit was supposed to move to, because when you clicked on that initial unit the software didn't "get it" and instead it assumed that because you ignored the first unit you actually meant to move the second one to that spot.

The simple solution is to zoom in every time you want to click on a unit but that's so terribly time-consuming that it's just not feasable. Either that, or you have to click on several different locations in that same unit until you find the specific tiny spot that actually registers. This doesn't always lead to disaster, of course, but it's easy to see that it could. When you need to move your heavy defensive unit into the orbit of your Class 18 planet just before the bad guys arrive, it's pretty frustrating to watch your ship "accidentally" move off in another direction. And you've just lost your planet.

Other times, when you click on a unit in order to check out its information, immediately the rest of your ships start moving. The screen jerks and spins so quickly, moving from each automated unit to the next, that it's impossible to follow the action. What is the practical reason that single-clicking on one unit, and giving it no instructions whatsoever, would cause the rest of your ships to move? Makes it tough to keep up with your operations.

Sometimes when it's your opponents' turn you'll hear the sounds of an attack. That's you being attacked, or depending on your settings it may be one of the other races within sight of your units, but you have no idea who, what or where the attack is taking place because the screen doesn't move to that location. You have to actually zoom in and search for it, and you'd better be quick because it won't last long.

There seems to be no way to predict exactly how far your units are able to move. Every ship has a "speed" rating of a certain number of parsecs, and we're told how many parsecs there are per sector, and you can view the gridlines to get a basic idea of what to expect, but there seems no logical reason that when you want to move that afore-mentioned heavy defensive unit toward your planet, you can't determine whether or not it can actually reach it. Are you 6 parsecs away, or 7? And if you're transporting troops you surely don't want to leave your troop ship stranded by itself right next to the planet. You can right click on the planet and you'll be told how many turns it will take you to get there, but as soon as you right click you'll start to move whether you want to or not. The only "fix" for this seems to be to hold a ruler up to the screen- no doubt it would work fairly well, but a few centuries from now I suspect that the measurement process will have progressed to the point where space ships will not have to carry giant rulers with them.

When you want to move in a straight line toward your destination and pass through the unexplored area in between, you can only do that if you're moving strictly vertically or horizontally. In other words, if you're moving on a diagonal the program won't let you go "straight". It ideally should make a series of one-square (or hex, etc.) moves, turning right then left then right then left, etc. in order to maintain as straight a heading as possible, but it doesn't do that. It seems to be ruled by the imperative to make as few "turns" as possible, meaning that your units will always travel a seemingly-arbitrary L-shaped course. So in that situation your ships never travel the course that you ordered. And often this kind of inaccurate movement will bring you into your enemy's line of sight, which is not at all what you wanted.

Creating and disbanding fleets is often an exercise in frustration. What should take one or two clicks often takes 4 or 5, and in many cases the player is required to move ships out of a planet's orbit, then combine them (or disband them) and then move them back again. That seems unnecessary and wasteful. And if you're short on remaining movement you could really be in trouble.

When you create a fleet and then right click to move it, nothing happens. You'd expect that fleet to remain highlighted in anticipation of movement or attack, but no. For some reason the fleet loses its highlight, so you have to go back and click on it once again. It's a small matter, but after having to do this a few hundred times it gets pretty frustrating.

At other times, when one of your units is highlighted in the bottom information window the stats that display will be for a different unit altogether. This is another one of those funky processess that has to be learned- you have to not just click things, but click things in a particular order. In this case you actually have to click on the unit to de-highlight it, then click it again to highlight it- then the stats that display will be for the correct unit. This is the kind of stuff that makes you want to throw your computer out the window. Or write a review.

When your unit is part of a fleet and you want to find out how much movement it has left, it's almost impossible to get your information without having to spend 5 minutes exploring the Wonderful World of Click Options. Perhaps after another 100+ hours I'll have this figured out, but should such basic information be so difficult to obtain? You should be able to click on a unit- any unit, anywhere, at any time- and be able to see all of its basic information on one screen.

Another misadventure can be had when using the planet invasion screen. It may tell you that you hold an edge in troops, soldiering, technology and "advantage", and it will show you the specific numbers that apply to invader and defender in each of those categories, but right below that there is a graphic that looks like an odometer on methamphetamines. Numbers for both sides, all spinning like mad, and for God knows what reason. The player is supposed to click to stop the spinning numbers on a "random" ratio ostensibly representing the actual combat odds, but surely the software knows what the odds are already. What is the purpose of this pointless exercise? And what makes it even stranger is that once you've "chosen" the actual odds of the battle you're shown another graphic directly below, where your advantage, e.g. 24 to 6, is expressed as colored bars that often read... backward! Whoever has the bigger edge gets the shorter colored bar. So as a heavy favorite you watch worriedly as your very short bar gets very slowly shorter, while your heavy underdog opponent's longer bar drops like George Bush's approval ratings. Maybe I took too much Excedrin in the '60's, but this whole system seems rather bizarre.

The editor's review was right on when it suggested that future techs were not adequately discussed. It's certainly understandable that they're by definition "works in progress" and therefore the little information we may actually have about these techs would seem rather obscure to the average player anyway. How could anyone tell if researching Restaurant of Eternity is the best option at any given time? There's just no way to wrap your brain around it, as there is in other games where your choice may be between building another farm or cutting more trees. Besides the fact that it might take you 100 turns to Eternalize your restaurant, this, like all of these other "future tech" options, may as well be written in a foreign language. I imagine that for most players, this limitation makes the process of technological development less satisfying. And less workable as a strategic option.

In any case, in a game set in such a large arena it's not practical to micro-manage as much as one might like. It would be simply too difficult for the player to be involved in the minutae of every single R & D process. For some of us the tradeoff is not a net positive. I spent hundreds of hours happily playing AE2 and AE2CE but I bailed on AE3 (and Europa Universalis) because it was difficult to associate as closely with the workings of the game and as a result I felt less involved in the process. I appreciate that this is a matter of preference. One can't have both gigantic scale and fine detail. At least not for $29.99 :-)

I do find it distracting that when a representative of the minor races appears, for example "Mr. Frogface", he might represent a different race in each successive game. Apparently these minor races have serious loyalty issues, with the heads of government regularly jumping ship. Were the options really so limited that there couldn't have been a few more faces?

GC2DL also shares some of the weaknesses of the Civilization series, among them the use of so-called "advisors" to negotiate. There's no negotiation here. There's no negotiation there, either. All that you do is pick something you want, offer something in return, and then depending on whether you get the green ("Yes") colored dialogue or the red ("No") dialogue you'll know how to proceed. At that point you can either add things to your list of Wants, or you can add extra things from your inventory to sweeten your own "offer". Whichever way you make your adjustment, you can finesse it down to 1 single monetary unit. And you'll have your answer before you even present your so-called offer to your opponent. All you're doing is constructing lists that even out- one for you, and one for him. At no time will you get a "Maybe". In fact there's no reason for there to be any "opponent" on the screen at all, since you're dealing only with the software's concept of what a fair trade would be in this particular instance. When you know the answer before you ever present your offer, it's not negotiating. And that being the case, the use of so-called advisors for this process is pointless and silly.

Also in common with the Civilization series is the negative effect on the game caused by excessive "relative speed". When you begin constructing ships that travel at a speed of 30+ parsecs per turn, suddenly you'll be leaping huge distances across the galaxy. This may be realistic to the extent that we're able to predict future space travel, but it completely changes the nature of the game. Gone is the importance of some kind of normal defensive perimeter, not to mention mobile defenses. You can still maintain those things in principle but they look very much different now. Your fastest ships are now LeBron James, and once your opponents catch up in technology every player on every team will be LeBron James. You may still be able to utilize basic strategic concepts but the relative size of the playing field has changed, along with the abilities of the "players", and because everyone is now dunking every shot there's little reason to continue the strategy that had been working for you the entire game. And for many of us that takes away a good deal of the enjoyment of the experience.

I accept that my experience seems to have not necessarily been shared by other reviewers here, who in general seem to think more of this game than I do. And even from my perspective, despite all of the issues that I mentioned once you learn the somewhat disfunctional languages of movement and fleet operations it's a rewarding game. There's some good stuff here, in particular the beautiful artwork (zoom in on the suns!) and the very cool combat screens with variable camera perspectives. Although the many problems itemized above will keep me from continuing to play the game I imagine that for many players the rewards will be worth the extra frustration.

Rating:

Like a lot of you, I really liked master of orion 2. Not only did a lot of cool elements come together, it had a kind of goofy charm with characters, artwork and whatnot.

Then came gal civ and gal civ 2. Better graphics, some small tweaks, but basically the same song and dance.

Remember the glut of RTS games that came out in the 90's? Gather resources, build, create army, fight. Some were better than others, but weren't they all just variations on a theme? How about first person shooters?

Gal civ 2 is a good species of a game archetype, but not particularly exciting or different compared to moo2. I also find the atmosphere a bit sterile. There's no "oomph" to it, for lack of a better word. Very sedate.

Again, not a bad game at all, just a tad ho hum.