Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords Demo

[RainOfTerror]

Galactic Civilizations II takes place in the distant future, when mankind has become a space-faring civilization and must contend with other extraterrestrial powers for domination of the galaxy.

Stardock has released a singleplayer demo allowing you to play as the human race, all weapons unlocked, 3 year (~140 turn) limit on gameplay, no campaign, no metaverse, no tutorials. Only the ship styles for the Humans, the Altarians and the Drengin are available (Arceans use the same style as the Humans).

Grab the Galactic Civilizations II demo (http://www.worthplaying.com/article.php?sid=33062) (170mb) over at WorthPlaying.

[Gamefreaks]

Awesome game. Everybody should play this.

[agentgray]

Do NOT GET THIS DEMO!

Your family and even your livelihood is at stake!

:D

[Steve_Erhardt]

if anybody is on the fence about this game, the demo should clinch it. GREAT stuff. It's like the proper sequel to MoO2 that we never got out of MoO3. Go Stardock!

[Nichols]

If I find out that anyone here hasn't played the game, I will hunt you down and force you to play nonstop Clockwork-Orange style. And you will enjoy it. It's that good.

[Zurik]

I played the first one, and thought it was okay, but not great. MoO2 had one thing that kept me coming back, multiplayer.

[The Letter 3]

Downloading now... looking forward to playing this. I've always had a soft spot for space strategy games. My last big game was Space Empires 4. Not a bad game, if a bit too simple and straight forward.

[Varsity]

It seemed entirely average to me. Nice, smooth interface but nothing in the game I haven't seen many times before.

And was it just me, or did building even the smallest ship take six or seven turns?

[Ajguy]

Pretty nice stuff. If I were to buy the game, I could totally see myself doing nothing but play with the ship editor. That thing is pretty awesome! I've never really played GalCiv I or any of the MoO games, so this could be a good entry point.

[Intruder]

Downloaded and purchased it from Stardock last night. Best space 4x game since MOO2!

The ship editor is utterly insane! Go to the forums at galciv2 and look at some of the fan ships.

[Rifter]

I also purchased and downloaded the game last night from Stardock. GREAT game. It is quite a bit of fun. I am looking forward to some more quality time with the game tonight. :-)

[Steve_Erhardt]

I played the first one, and thought it was okay, but not great. MoO2 had one thing that kept me coming back, multiplayer.
I think multiplayer in GalCiv 2 would have been a really good bonus, but the lack of it doesn't really hurt the game, IMO. It's just that good; and as I recall, I hardly touched the Multi in MoO2 anyway. *shrug*

[Intruder]

If the demand is there, Stardock said they might put multiplayer in. I too wish it were in.

[MachDelta]

*Sigh* GC2 is great, but IMO it's an over-hyped game right now.
Yes, its good. Yes, it has the potential to be great. But it's not OMGWTFBBQ amazing out of the box.

The game's got stability issues for one, though thankfully most of them seem to be "don't click that exact combination of buttons because it crashes the game" and not many "WTF it just died on me?!", though I have had both.

The UI, while it looks pretty and has good intentions, is easilly the worst part of the game. Multiple units in a single square (er, parsec) is a nightmare. You can literally be moving one unit while viewing the selection data on another. And if two automated units are in the same square, forget trying to clear one of its orders. You've got to fight with the UI at times, which is a real shame.

The ship designer, while cool, has some big shortfalls. For one its the source of most of my crashes :P. For two, its kind of limited in power... you can really only scale things and then hope to lego them together somehow into something space-shippy-looking (though 1.1 should help remedy this with rotations etc).

One big issue for me is how the designer and the game actually handle all your ships. For instance, you can't 'obsolete' something without mothballing any current versions of the ship floating around. For someone like me who obsessively tweaks out their ships with almost every tech iteration, this turns your build menus into a freaking mess. I'll easilly have 3-6 versions of a single platform, and only ever consider building 1 or 2 of the latest ones. So duh, the answer is to upgrade right? While most game mechanics are pretty bang on, upgrading is an exception... it is mind bogglingly expensive. I've seen quotes for retrofitting fleets of ships hit 6 digits (and, like MOO, thats in "billions of credits"). Its usually waaay cheaper to build new stuff and then sell your old boats for scrap cash (that you can then turn around to use to partially rush-buy your ships). Takes about the same amount of time too, its just a gigantic pain in the ass.

Another sticking point for me is how it saves ship designs. You build a ship in one game and can use it in another - pretty cool, huh? Well except you have to have the EXACT techs you built the first ship with, and since every game is different you can quite easilly have tons of behind-the-curve designs magically appearing in your build menus.
Which wouldn't be too bad, I suppose, if upgrading them was easy... and it isn't. When you click the upgrade button, it completely strips a ship of any functional parts. All of the jewlery (lights, wings, extensions, whatever) stays, but you've got to reassemble everything else (engines, weapons, scanners, support, defenses, etc) from scratch... even if all you wanted to do was switch a missile launcher out for a pair of plasma cannons, and tack a "-B" onto the ship name. Gah!

Now all that said, it IS a fun game. It WILL keep you up until 5 am if you let it. But perfection it is most definitly not. You'll bump into weird bugs (like how conquoring a planet will sometimes temporarily give it a ten digit population), gnash teeth over the sometimes clumsy UI (like why you can't click "back to planet" on a spaceport build menu and have your new build orders stick), scratch your head at the usually exceptional AI (figuring out why they love/hate you, despite the +/- notes, can be quite the mind bender), and be more than willing to sell your soul for an in game Civilopedia (it would eliminate so much trial and error, ugh).


It's not a hall of famer. Its not a MOO3-dun-rite. But it could be.

Give it a couple more patches and then maybe i'll consider cranking up the drool. Until then, GalCiv 2 is IMO just a good crack at the 4X genre.


Anywho, just my opinion. *Slips into an asbestos suit*

[Nojiko]

I attempted to download the demo, but when it finished and executed it, I get this error. "An external application must be launched to handle file: links"...etc. And when I tried to launch it straight from my file explorer instead of my download window in FireFox, Windows tries to tell me it is not a valid Win32 application. :/

I've downloaded it twice now to see if that would fix it and no dice, any suggestions? I'd like to try out this game and see what all the fuss is about. :P

[Bad_Syntax]

Actually, I played it and thought it sucked... the detail wasn't there, it was highly unrealistic, had a crappy interface, stupid power-ups, etc, etc....

The game was made for very young kids I think, as an adult a game like SE4 or MOO2 is far better in every way (except graphics, but a decade in game age does that).

Add starforce to the game and it looks like it would cost somebody more then they would gain from it....

But, its just my opinion as a hard core 4x gamer with 20 yrs game play experience :)

Bad Syntax