Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords review

Many strategy games offer you the chance to lay claim to provinces on a map, controlling a city or some patch of land with the help of a few panzer divisions. Galactic Civilizations II is a much more ambitions proposition, allowing you to take command of many star systems. Budding Darth Vaders will be right at home here.

Controlling so much space, developing your civilization in competition with other alien races is far from easy, but GalCivII really helps thanks to an appealing interface that puts all the major functions just a click away. Most options allow you to customise and after a few games you’ll really start to get to grips with this powerful interface.

New Visuals

If you’ve played the first game in the series the most immediate change you’ll notice is the way the star systems are displayed. No longer will you have to click a star system to see the planets. These planets now appear on the main map and without the artificial borders of the previous game this leaves you feeling rather naked in the path of some of the more expansionist and aggressive alien races.

Map items such as ships are now displayed as 3D objects. It isn’t the best use of 3D you’ll see in a strategy game, but it allows much more control of the view that you’ll be used to in the first game. VCR style controls are most welcome when it comes to watching large fleets do battle, making for entertaining viewing albeit rather scary entertainment if it’s your fleet being atomised. This isn’t just a case of enjoying eye candy, carefully examining the way your fleet performs will tell you a lot about which areas you’re weakest in and where to concentrate ship research.

Building Empires

When it comes to running your empire some traditional strategies have to be rethought. If you’ve played Masters of Orion you may be tempted to create some very strong planets in your empire surrounded by weaker outpost planets. GalCivII makes this a difficult strategy to succeed with. I will take some experience with the game before you really get to grips with successful planetary economies.

Each planet has a rating that shows how many constructions can be created on it. While the number does go past double the rating of 20, most planets you’ll find will be below this number. In practice this means you can’t just make planets specialists, say having a factory-based planet. Balance is the key to success and even if you’re terraforming to create more building locations, successful planets need farming and cultural resources as well as factories. Fans of Ascendancy will feel right at home with this approach.

Ship Construction

The game sports a revamped combat engine.

When it comes to creating, designing and building new technology the simple yet detailed descriptions in the game really do help. The concepts behind GalCivII may be complex, but trying to decide on researching on two different ship weapons systems is aided by clear and concise summaries of the technology involved.

Designing and building ships is worth the admission price alone and is one of the most fun aspects of the game. Sure you can build ships based on existing templates, but once you’ve got more technologies researched you will want to create your own awesome looking battleships. Like most aspects of GalCivII customisation options abound, so if I wanted to name a new cruiser Harry’s Starsmacker, I could.

Alien8

The most pleasing aspects of Galactic Civilizations II tend to revolve around the superb AI and diplomacy. Few single-player games can match GalCivII for convincing you that you’re playing against other sentient beings. Sometimes the other alien races’ motivations and plans do seem entirely that, alien, but rarely do they seem like some cheating omnipotent AI.

Sure, play it on the harder levels and they are aggressive and ruthless and liable to destroy you pretty quickly unless you’re really on the ball, but playing against these AI enemies is a lot of fun. There’s plenty of humour here too, with alien races often commenting on your behaviour such as asking if you are drunk when making some odd trading choices.

Final Words

Here you can see the new fluid galactic influence borders at work.

The learning curve for GalCivII is rather steep and it will certainly take you a few games before you feel comfortable getting more involved in some of the detailed options. This patience pays off though as through repeated play the game draws you in, to the point where whole evenings will pass you by.

As turn-based strategy games go it’s hard not to recommend Galactic Civilizations II. Stardock has created a deep, intelligent, yet not too serious strategy game that’s going to be the best of its class for quite a while. The developer also has a history of strong relations with its players, so you can expect to see the game develop further based on issues raised in the community. My only real gripe with the game is that I wish I had more time to play it.