f13.net

This is what I need, another fantastic update to a wonderful game.

Calciv bored me to tears, which is odd as I generally like strategy games, but I just did not like it at all.

Same here, and I can't really put my finger on why I didn't enjoy it.  I love the Civ games, loved Master of Orion, and even liked GalCiv I quite a bit more than it's sequel.  I can't figure out why, because objectively, GalCiv II only improved on the original.  I'm still not on board, though.

Ditto. I just couldn't figure it. I could see that the game was built really really well, that there was a lot of love in the design, that it was the kind of game I should like, and somehow, it just left me cold. I kept trying to play it, to understand what it was that was pushing me away from a game that I should by all rights love, and I just couldn't. The only things I could put my finger on were:

1) Lack of map-based choke points that organized or controlled the strategic action of a given game. This seems to me to be an important thing in turn-based strategy: that the random topography of a given map will give an emergent shape to the experience of a given game session, that you'll end up focusing on some long-term objective that's defined by how the map has taken shape. This is why the decisions in the first X of a classic 4X both matter so much and yet also have unpredictable consequences. When I head off in a given direction in Civ IV, or place my first city, I've just done something that will shape the whole game from beginning to end, but I usually can't tell exactly what's going to happen. In GCII (and I), it seemed to me that the first X was mostly more amorphous.

2) The narrative hooks seemed soft and generic: nothing really drew me in, no faction grabbed my imagination, there didn't feel like there was much personality to anything.

3) I didn't always have a good feeling for the relationship between cause and effect in any given subsystem of the game--it was hard to tell why some things worked when they did, what the key things I should be doing at any one moment were, what my immediate and longer-term priorities ought to be. I could figure all of this out if I concentrated and looked beneath the hood, but somehow the visible game lacked the strong visceral feedback of many other 4X designs.

Gal Civ 2 left me pretty much cold as well and I'm someone who owns Civilization and all of its expansions and still plays them a few hours per month. With Gal Civ 2 I couldn't bring myself to even buy the expansions because the devs decided to price them as if they weren't nichey little indy games.

This. The games are decent but seem lacking. Not something I'll risk my AA title budget for, but definitely something I would look at under $20. GalCiv2 is now under $20, but to get it with the expansions it's $60!? Err..no. The game is two years old and priced like a new console title. Good thing they have a core fanbase, I guess.

I found that the heterogeneous-map problem was solved, for me, by choosing the Gigantic map (or whatever the biggest was called) and specifying tight clusters.  It has the effect of simulating continents and oceans.  I did the land rush to grab all the good planets near me but once I had all that wrapped up, I had to send an expeditionary force across a large space-gulf to beachhead in someone else's territory.

I think a large part of the issue is that the mechanics are opaque in many places, particularly with colony management.  I still think it's a great game and I also love Brad Wardell to pieces.