Galactic Civilization 2: Dread Lords

[Sairon]

Alright, I'm seeing no mention anywhere about this title. I've given it a shot and it turns out it certainly lives up to the reviews it has been getting. I'm enjoying it way more than Civilizations 4. It's like a mix between Deadlock and Civilizations.

Planetary development is done by constructing buildings on a grid. Every tile can have special properties, like 700% (if you're very lucky) Research output if research building placed on it. If you on one of these tiles place a starport the planet gains the possibility to construct space ships. Now this is the really really cool part, these space ships can be custom made! First pick a hull type which determines the number of spaces available. Then put on some engines, the more the faster it gets. Put on some life support if you want to increase the range ( how far from your domain it can travel ). Putting on sensors increases the visual exploration range. Equipping it with a colonization module enables it to colonize planets etc. You can also specialize the planet by focusing on planetary development, research or military production ( space ships ).

Being in the universe view it controls very much like civilization. You travel the universe exploring solar systems, and every once in a while you stumble upon an habitable planet. A number ranging from 1 and upwards called class designates how yummy the planet is and what potential it will have once you land on it. Once you use your colonizer to take it over you get to see how good it really is. Some planets are already inhabited by species of some kind. You then get presented with 3 options on how to deal with these. 1 being morally correct, usually coupled with a penalty of some kind. The second one is neutral, which is usually coupled with neither a bonus nor a penalty. The last is the evil choice which usually grants you something. I'm not 100% certain but these choices affects the support from your people. There's also resources floating about in space which you can control by sending constructors to. Using a fairly special space ship which you get in the start you can also hunt down anomalities in space which holds a lot of diffrent stuff.

Researching is done in pretty much the same fashion as Civ. Technologies has pre-reqs and requires a certain amount of research to achieve.

Every once in a while all the races gathers to decide on things, it can pretty much be anything. Depending on how much influence you have gathered you can affect the outcome of these meetings.

Politics is pretty much a copy of the civ games, it has all the things which civ has I believe in this area.

There's espionage options, I haven't used these yet though. This naturally reveals information about the other races such as their defenses and stuff.

War, which I've only seen in the splendid tutorial so far, is done by first conquering the space above a planet. Then using a transport you move in with your troops and bring them to the ground. You then get to see a battle looking pretty much like the mass battles in suikoden. There's a bunch of diffrent modifiers affecting the outcome, luck being on of them. It didn't seem very interactive.

Alright that's all for now, will update later if I get the time and feel like it  .

[schild]

Ongoing thread. Though this title probably deserves its own.

[Yegolev]

GalCiv II does deserve its own thread.  I have not gotten far enough into one game to give good commentary, but I would like to complain about the interface.  Scrolling by putting the pointer at the edge of the screen doesn't work when certain elements are on the screen edge (example, Ship/Planet panel on left side prevents scrolling that way).  Using the PDF-style grab-and-drag seems to be the best bet here although I am used to the more-standard method.  Redesigning a ship class is buggy, notably the Remove button; it can be easier to just make a new design from scratch.

See the other thread for other complaints centered on the confusing industrial/research funding system.  Personally I find the interface issues to be a real concern rather than the weird economic system.

[Sairon]

Yea I noticed this too. I usualy use the arrows to scroll around, and that doesn't work either. There's a bug, atleast I think it's a bug, with the minimap. If you scroll it down to get a good look at the planets during exploration it doesn't auto focus correctly. Lets say I have this vessel way out in space and have the minimap corrected to this vessel, when I have completed the move with the vessel and it automaticly moves on to the next I still get to see the last vessels location on the minimap.

Btw, anybody have any tips on how to speed up planetary production on "research planets"? I usualy kick start them with paying straight up for the first factories, but it's still fairly slow. I seem to need atleast 4 factories to build up the research labs at a reasonable pace.

Also, do you guys populate all planets? Even the ones with a fairly low class? I found a planet with 1 +700%, 2 +300% and 2 +100% manufacturing tiles on a class 11 planet.

[Yegolev]

I have not gotten too far, but the only reason I would not colonize a planet would be because I had better things to do with my shipyards, or if it was terribly pitiful.  Judgement call I suppose, but it seems a waste to build a colony ship for a Class 3.  Not sure what the maint-to-revenue equation would say about minimum tiles, but at some point your colony maint cost would be too much to justify a couple tiles of production.

My idea for building up a research planet is to do it somewhere there are enough tiles to run the handful of factories, and when eveything was built up, decomm the factories and erect research buildings.  Not much of an idea, I know.

[Trippy]

GalCiv II does deserve its own thread.  I have not gotten far enough into one game to give good commentary, but I would like to complain about the interface.

Yes the interface has issues. Tooltips, for example, don't work the way all other tooltips work. If you move over a tooltip'able item and stop your cursor "instantly" the tooltip will not appear. You have to move your cursor ever so slightly to make it popup and then they don't disappear when you move away. The research screen is maddingly opaque where sometimes it'll tell you if a tech will, for example, let you construct a particular ship, but other times it won't. At least with the patch now it'll show you dependencies where before it didn't leading to even more guess work. The "zoomed out" mode in the research screen is almost totally useless since you can't see any details of the tech you have selected. There's no "galaxypeida" you can browse to understand objects in the game. The rally point feature doesn't work the way you would expect it to. The fog of war graphics are confusing especially if you don't have the grid turned on. Taxation is confusing (I'm taxing a percentage of what? It's not the direct population number that's for sure). The statistics for all your colonies are spread across multiple separate screens. And so on. Not to mention all the fundamental bugs in the game like global social production bonuses not working at all and global research bonuses not giving the full bonus.

[Jobu]

I played the first Gal Civ for awhile. I ended up losing interest because of a few things, but mostly for the following:

1) No strategic positioning or placement. Like in Civ where you build a city on a one-tile land bridge to block off access to the rest of your territory. Or in MOO where you colonize a shitty planet that is a major warp junction. GalCiv was missing that element, and a certain point into each game it just became a mess of ships and colonies scattered everywhere.

2) The tech tree wasn't previewable, so I felt very unsure as to which route worked out best, and which technologies I should bee-line for while skipping other lesser ones.

3) No colony customization. Each colony was just found colony, build improvements in the following order, lather, rinse, repeat.

So it sounds like they completely fixed #3. #2 was a minor gripe that I could get used to if you play the game enough, I guess. Did they improve #1 at all? Basically, what have they done to make the game better than it's predecessor?

I might just buy it to support the company. I thought they did a fantastic job of support, and patching their game. And I love the way you can buy and download everything online. These guys were one of the earliest publishers to "get it" and offer their games online like that.

[Tebonas]

They improved on 3  and the tech tree is previewable now. But there still isn't much strategic positioning. The only hurdle to go directly at the heart of the enemies civilization is if your ships don't have enough range. You theoretically could have ships all over your border, but the enemy can still slip past you and attack your colonies without your interference if their ships are faster than yours.

[Yegolev]

With the ship customization, I don't think I'll have a problem running down interlopers and at least harassing them with small fighters unless I forget to research propulsion at all.  Anyway, I always thought choke-points in space warfare was dumb.

There are so many tiny things wrong with the UI that I just can't bring myself to catalog them all.

[Pococurante]

I played the first Gal Civ for awhile. I ended up losing interest because of a few things, but mostly for the following:

Oh you mean the first version Wardell sub-contracted out for release on 1992's OS/2 Warp? ;-)  That was the version I played/beta tested - I was a young snot working for IBM at the time and tried my best to promote an OS/2 consumer games division.  I never saw the GalCiv1 that came out three years ago but my impression is it was a cashcow, a straight port to pay the bills from the OS/2 original ("now featuring *multi-threading* - truly competitive AI, so strong we had to Dial It Back! Accept no substitutes!")

I just downloaded GC2 this weekend.  Bought it more for nostalgia and solidarity.  Still puttering around in it.  Yeah the interface is as clunky as I remember it.  Better sub-features.  I read the open letter on why no MP and I sort of agree and understand.  But gimme MP beyotch - *my* sandbox, *my* rules.  There're mods coming out for it but I have yet to educate myself on them.  Based on what I see the elements are definitely there to challenge Civ4 but I don't think it has the user friendliness to threaten it.  I spent almost an hour trying to figure why my shipyard doesn't actually build & launch ships, and where to go to make that happen - and another twenty minutes trying to figure out how to scout/recon.  Intuitive it is not.  Nice mini-game designing your own ships.  Hope to actually *play* the damn thing over this week and learn it.  I'm taking a break from MMOGs and playing SP games - Oblivion as well as the aforementioned two.  (tangent: I have a smoking machine and yet still my mouse drags when in conversations or battle w/Oblivion? wtf)

Not drawing conclusions just yet - it took Sevo's Fusion Mod for me to really enjoy Civ4.  I just cancelled my WoW account after almost two years but without the player-made UI mods I would have quit the first few months.