Galactic Civilizations II Review

It's not often you find a game that has the ability to suck you in and keep you glued to your chair for hours on end. With plenty of customizable features, numerous victory conditions, and a complete entertaining experience Galactic Civilizations II The Dread Lords is one of those rare games. In addition, strategy game fans will be delighted with the high level of replayability, no two games of Gal Civ 2 are ever the same.

Galactic Civilizations II is an epic turn-based strategy game set in the 23rd century with the overall objective to be the most dominant civilization in the galaxy. Victory conditions do not depend on the typical method seen in many games of wiping out the existence of rival civilizations. Rather, it is obtained by using your civilization and it's growth to obtain a political, technological, cultural or military victory. The path you choose for your civilization is entirely up to you and can easily change throughout the course of the game.

The game offers both a campaign and a free form stand alone game mode. In the campaign mode you take on the role of the Terrian Alliance (a.k.a. Humans) and play against the evil Drengin Empire in a quest to control the galaxy for good or evil. The Drengin however, have awoken the Dread Lords, an ancient and powerful civilization that don’t necessarily play nice with others.

In the stand alone game you command one of 10 civilizations and guide them towards the ultimate goal of controlling the galaxy. There is a bit of a learning curve and many of the options and features are worth learning through the tutorials before you spend your first couple hours clicking around aimlessly.

You may be tempted to quickly click through the galaxy and civilization setup screens, but these screens are quite important and should not be overlooked. From here you'll decide the overall make up of your galaxy and civilizations that call it home. Settings such as size, habitable planets, stars, starting technology and more are all decided here and are very customizable.

In addition, if for some reason you don't like any of the standard civilizations, GalCiv2 gives you the ability to create your own civilization with different abilities, alignment(good, neutral or evil), political affiliation and more. These are also very important as other civilizations will react differently to you depending on your actions and overall tendency during game play. If you're civilization is inherently militaristic and you’re trying to make peaceful impressions, building up ships around a civ’s planet will not instill in them the warm fuzzy feelings you’re hoping for.

Once you're past the initial setup you'll begin the game with one planet and the task of growing your civilization by building up the planet's facilities and colonizing other worlds. Planet rating in Gal Civ 2 has been simplified when compared to the original Galactic Civilizations, and simplified for the better. Each planet has a rating of 0 thru 10 which signifies how habitable it is for life. This number actually determines how many facilities can be built on the planet's surface. A key strategy from the start is determining how you're going to expand your civilization.

Determining what facilities are built on a planet is done through the Colony Management screen which shows a basic layout of the planet with available building zones. Earth for example has a planet rating of 10, with this rating there are 10 zones that can support buildings such as farms, factories, research labs, spaceports, markets and more.

From this screen you will also get a snapshot of how your planet is doing, it's income, expenses, production levels, food level and more. It's also the place where you'll see your approval rating and tax/military/research rate which can play a big impact on how your citizens view your leadership.

The game play and interface for Galactic Civilizations II is superb, all areas of management; the galaxy map, colony management, ship building and more perform flawlessly. There's not one bit of necessary information missing and if for some reason it's not on your the current screen, it's no more than one or two clicks away from being front and center.

Resarch, Production & Combat

Research and production are a huge part of any strategy game and Gal Civ 2 is no exception. Deciding how much of your planet should be used for factories or research labs determines how fast ships are built and new technology is discovered.

Although the technology tree for Gal Civ 2 is less complicated than the original, it can still be overwhelming at times with more than a dozen paths of research to choose from. You can focus your civilization on weapons and defense, diplomacy, propulsion or engineering or research across all technologies. You will discover that the path you choose plays a role in how other civilizations react to you. Focusing entirely on military and weapons may sway other civs to focus their attention on developing alliances and building defenses.