Gal Civ II: Gamespot Preview

[Crapshoot]

Slowly but surely, Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords is coming together at last. We first saw the sequel to 2003's popular turn-based strategy game at the beginning of this year, but progress has been slow in coming. That has changed recently. We've gotten our hands on a third preview version of Dread Lords, and unlike the previous two versions of the game that we've played around with, this latest version actually feels more like a game and less like a technological placeholder of things to come.

Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lordsscreenshot
Go conquer the galaxy, if you can....

In many ways, Galactic Civilizations is very similar to the classic space strategy game Master of Orion--and that's high praise, indeed. Your goal is to guide your species to galactic domination, which you do by colonizing star systems, researching technologies, building fearsome interstellar navies, and crushing anyone who gets in your way (at least, that's one path to victory). And Dread Lords is far more like Master of Orion than its predecessor. In the original Galactic Civilizations, you could only play as the human race. In Dread Lords, you can now play as any of the alien species in the game. And, in Master of Orion tradition, you can even create your own custom species, with your own unique racial abilities and technologies.

The first thing that you do when you start a game is to determine the type of galaxy you'll fight in. Galaxies come in varying sizes, ranging from tiny to gigantic, and this will determine the number of star systems (and correspondingly, planets that you can colonize). This will help determine the speed of the game; a small galaxy will lead to confrontation right away, while a larger galaxy will offer a slower pace because there's more time to explore and colonize before you have to fight. Other settings determine the number of habitable planets, the density (or distance) between stars, the number of asteroid fields and anomalies, and more. You can also tweak the victory conditions, and that determines the paths to, well, victory. The default victory conditions mean that you can win by researching the ultimate technology, creating a mighty alliance with other races, or overwhelming these races with your cultural supremacy.

After selecting your opponents, as well as their difficulty level, you'll drop in to the actual game; it's here where Galactic Civilizations II really differentiates from its predecessor. Yes, everything is now rendered in 3D (unlike the 2D graphics of the first game), but there have been a lot of other changes. For example, solar systems can now have multiple planets, meaning that different civilizations can colonize the same system. The galactic map dominates the screen, and you can zoom the view all the way in to focus on a solar system and then pull it all the way out until you see the entire galactic map. The galaxy itself is still a 2D plane, and anomalies still litter the space between the stars.

The entire planet system has been overhauled since the first game, adding a lot more complexity to the game as well as the potential for micromanagement. Essentially, planets are rated by "class," and the higher a planet's class, the more workable tiles are on its surface. The maximum "size" of a planet is 47, though most planets are rated far lower than that, and you'll need to research some advanced technologies that will let you terraform and unlock more tiles. At the beginning of the game, you'll have a handful of tiles available to you, and your first bit of business will be to put down research labs, factories, farms, spaceports, and more. Obviously, each facility you construct has a corresponding effect on a certain part of your empire. Invest early in research labs, and you'll advance more quickly up the technology tree. Dump your resources into factories, and you can build ships faster, among other things. Some tiles are better suited for certain industries than others, which is represented by a symbol on the tile. This also means that it's possible to create specialized planets, such as a "breadbasket" planet that supplies food, or a research planet that handles all your technological advances. And because space is at a premium, there's a very real sense of urgency early on to scout your neighboring star systems and colonize the best available planets.

Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lordsscreenshot
Planets have a limited number of workable tiles, so plan carefully.

Ship design is finally up and running in this version of the game, as well. Basically, you create your own vessels in the game, using the technology that you've researched to arm and equip them. Each race has a distinct visual style, and all you have to do is go into the spaceport, select a hull type, and attach engines, weapons, and more to various hard points on the hull. There's a weight limit that you need to stay aware of--you can't build an ubership immediately. Besides, the more expensive a ship, the longer it will take for your factories to crank it out--and at the beginning of a game, when your industrial capacity is very low, you just can't afford to churn out complex ships.

Before too long, we had built up a small interstellar empire by colonizing distant planets. However, the artificial intelligence has never been a slouch in Galactic Civilizations, and it appears that it's as sharp as ever in Dread Lords. On the default difficulty setting, we quickly found ourselves surrounded by the enemy, and eventually the neighbors came knocking with hostile fleets. In the next game, we dialed down the AI a level and still found the computer civilizations keeping pace with us. Still, we came away from Dread Lords feeling like it was a blend of the original Galactic Civilizations and Master of Orion II, and those are arguably two of the finest space strategy games ever made. That's good news for galactic emperor wannabes everywhere. Stardock aims to wrap up work on the game early next year, and it should be out during the first quarter of 2006.




Lookin good...

[A-Husker-4-Life]

YES, this is what I've been looking for since MOO2... Can't wait....

[jbmagic]

Also if you guys never play Gal civ 1, i would recommend to check the game out.

its a great game if you like Civilization and Space Ranger games.

http://www.galciv.com/

[tategter]

...drool...

[Bee]

Also if you guys never play Gal civ 1, i would recommend to check the game out.

its a great game if you like Civilization and Space Ranger games.

http://www.galciv.com/

Just a note...

Space Rangers is a much different game than GalCiv. Other than both being set in space, they really aren't the same kind of game.

[WSUCougar]

Gal Civ II is very close now. I wasn't a fan of the first one at all, but this one looks more intriguing.

http://www.wargamer.com/news/news.asp?nid=3024

[sachmo71]

I'll hold out, but it's possible.

[Eaglesfan27]

Wow. Yet another interesting game that will be in stores the week of Feb 15 to the 22nd. So many potentially good games coming out that week.

[WSUCougar]

Wow. Yet another interesting game that will be in stores the week of Feb 15 to the 22nd. So many potentially good games coming out that week.
I just posted in the PC Game Impressions section that Crusader Kings version 1.05 is very close to release as well. That is very good news. :cool:

[Eaglesfan27]

I just posted in the PC Game Impressions section that Crusader Kings version 1.05 is very close to release as well. That is very good news. :cool:
I haven't played that for a long time, but I think I'll need to start up a new game once 1.05 is out :)

[aran]

No one's heard of Space Empires 4? It's pretty much the definitive 4X Space Strategy game in my eyes. It's also fairly modern.

EDIT: Wow. After reading that review, i see the game is exactly like Space Empires 4 now. It probably just has prettier graphics and a slightly better interface. Sheesh, talk about a dissapointment. I was hoping they'd actually do something new and interesting with the game, not just rehash what is essentially standard.

[Eaglesfan27]

No one's heard of Space Empires 4? It's pretty much the definitive 4X Space Strategy game in my eyes. It's also fairly modern.

EDIT: Wow. After reading that review, i see the game is exactly like Space Empires 4 now. It probably just has prettier graphics and a slightly better interface. Sheesh, talk about a dissapointment. I was hoping they'd actually do something new and interesting with the game, not just rehash what is essentially standard.
Where did you get the idea that we haven't heard of SE IV? There was a huge thread about it. Many people on here like it. However, I think to say that this game is just a rehash of that is a bit premature. It may have many similarities, as they are in the same genre but to me that is a good thing.

[Eaglesfan27]

Dola -

I'm looking forward to seeing what SE V does new whenever that comes out.

[WSUCougar]

No one's heard of Space Empires 4? It's pretty much the definitive 4X Space Strategy game in my eyes. It's also fairly modern.

EDIT: Wow. After reading that review, i see the game is exactly like Space Empires 4 now. It probably just has prettier graphics and a slightly better interface. Sheesh, talk about a dissapointment. I was hoping they'd actually do something new and interesting with the game, not just rehash what is essentially standard.
:rolleyes:

[twothree]

I just posted in the PC Game Impressions section that Crusader Kings version 1.05 is very close to release as well. That is very good news. :cool:

Continuing this minor thread jack, EU2 also received an update to 1.09 back in December, in case anyone missed that update. It's good to see that Paradox continues to tweak (patch) games that have been out for a while.

[Warhammer]

Continuing this minor thread jack, EU2 also received an update to 1.09 back in December, in case anyone missed that update. It's good to see that Paradox continues to tweak (patch) games that have been out for a while.

What's new in 1.09?

[jbmagic]

If you enjoy playing civilization 4, would i like Galactic Civilizations II?

[WSUCougar]

If you enjoy playing civilization 4, would i like Galactic Civilizations II?
Completely different animal, so it's really hard to say.

[Crapshoot]

Gal Civ II is looking amazing - been reading up more on it. the AI was top notch in the first one - it looks like it is pretty damn good this time around as well - Wardell is fairly reliable.

[WVUFAN]

I loved Master of Orion 2, how similar to it is this game?

[Barkeep49]

I've played the crap out of the beta and I find the AI very challenging indeed. I've had to turn down the AI a notch from the level I played at in the first one in order to avoid getting KILLED, but that also might be that a lot of things still aren't fully documented.

It is definitely the spiritual successor to MOO WVU.

[astrosfan64]

I haven't played that for a long time, but I think I'll need to start up a new game once 1.05 is out :)

Crusader Kings ---- Have you ever played that game multiplayer? I've been dying to try it out online.

[Eaglesfan27]

Crusader Kings ---- Have you ever played that game multiplayer? I've been dying to try it out online.
Nope. I've never tried the MP in that game.

Honestly, I forgot there was MP in the game.

[WVUFAN]

Nope. I've never tried the MP in that game.

Honestly, I forgot there was MP in the game.
Speaking of multiplayer, there's no mention of MP in the official website for Galactic Civ 2, but in the EBGames description, it states:


Friends can join together to form on-line empires via the Galactic Civilizations “Metaverse”. Anyone have any info on that?

[astrosfan64]

Speaking of multiplayer, there's no mention of MP in the official website for Galactic Civ 2, but in the EBGames description, it states:

Anyone have any info on that?

Gal Civ 2 was supposed to have multiplayer, but I believe they pulled it out for released. The metaverse thing if like the first game is ok. Basicly you form a clan on the site and everyone in your clan loads their scores to the web. It will keep track of everyones high scores and rank your clan.

Not as cool as true multiplayer like MOO2 had. I hope they put multiplayer in with a patch.

[Bonegavel]

I liked GalCiv but I tired of it rather quickly. The game quickly devolved to:


grab as many planets as fast as you can (AI can do it more effeciently, of course)
research everything (don't have to be very careful what order-though a few things did matter depending on your style)
do every planetary upgrade you can
build starbases and upgrade them with everything possible
build only the best ships
zzzzzzzz... the game could have easily played for you. If there was a way to tell it to do the above (in your name) you would be golden.

I like how galcivII appears to force strategic choices and not just upgrade/upgrade/upgrade.

[JPhillips]

Where's the Victoria update? That and a working version of CORE2 and I'm very happy.

[twothree]

What's new in 1.09?

This is what's been done to EU2 1.09: http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showthread.php?t=222052

And back on topic, there is no multiplayer in Gal Civ II as explained in this thread: http://tgnforums.stardock.com/index.aspx?forumid=162&aid=98074 (By the way, you might not be able to access this thread. It seems stardock's servers are a little unresponsive today.)

Edit: Looks like the forum's server is back up.

[aran]

Where did you get the idea that we haven't heard of SE IV? There was a huge thread about it. Many people on here like it.

The fact that no one in the thread so far has pointed out that the features that the preview harps on have all been in the Space Empires series for a while led me to believe that the game isn't a big thing here. Unfortunately, i barely spend any time here. I've never seen a thread about SEIV here.


However, I think to say that this game is just a rehash of that is a bit premature. It may have many similarities, as they are in the same genre but to me that is a good thing.

What i see from the screenshots and what i've read: the game is essentially space empires IV with a slightly different feel, better graphics, nation boundaries, planetary facilities are placed on some weird and unneccessary grid, and a terribly out-of-scale tiled map.

If i want to play SE4, i'll play SE4. I'm not going to spend $50 on a game that i essentially already own.

[sabotai]

I have Space Empires IV and Gal Civ. They are hardly the same game and I highly doubt that the makers of Gal Civ are going to completely change the way the sequal plays to be more like Space Empires IV than the original Gal Civ.

[Eaglesfan27]

The manual has been released early, and I'm liking what I'm reading. I'm trying to resist the urge to pre-order now (the downloadable version.)

Here is a link for those that are interested in reading it:

http://www.galciv2.com/databank/docs/gcmanual-draft3.pdf

[Brillig]

For those tracking, the game has gone gold and will be in stores Feb. 21. This news item from the official site cracked me up though:



Schedule of Pain

According to the universal code of PC game launches game developers must ensure:

All games, products, and or services that are distributed or rely on a digital/on-line component (e.g. the "Internet") must have a disastrous first few days of availability to ensure that the entire release is tainted.

The level of disaster and general failure of said service must be inversely proportional to the amount of time, effort, and testing that went in to trying to avoid the mandatory fate.

However, the rules do not specify WHEN this disaster must occur. So there's some wiggle room. So rather than having the "disaster" and "nightmare" be on Galactic Civilizations II's release date we would like to move it back to be a week BEFORE the release.

So here is what we have in mind:

Tomorrow, February 14th we will open the doors to allow all the existing beta users to begin pre-loading the game. You won't be able to play it as it's just grabbing all the big data files. But it will make sure that on release date your download is only a couple of megs.

For your convenience we will go ahead and create the appropriate posts which will be entitled:


"Download woes"
"Stardock sucks"
"Yet ANOTHER problem! HELLO?!"
On Wednesday, February 15th, ALL users who pre-ordered will then have their orders processed and be able to begin preloading the game as well. New forum threads will be created:


"Where's my email?!"
"Stardock drops the ball...AGAIN!"
"Class-action lawsuit may be needed"
Yep, it's a cluster you-know-what!
Didn't they test this?!?!!?111
Game is d0med!!!!1
The major issues on Tuesday will be making sure that the updated Stardock Central works, that it handles existing customers well, and that our new server farm is doing what we expect it to (i.e. not timing out on downloads, extracting the files properly, etc.).

The major issues on Wednesday will vary between people who don't get the email with the serial #s and links, can't get their serial #s to work, and of course the people who didn't read any of this, download the thing and are mad because when they click on the icon it thanks them for preloading the game and that the actual final EXE will be available on February 21.

As far as we can tell, everything should go smoothly. We've gone over it over and over again. But with thousands of users suddenly jumping on at the same time and with all the different levels of network connection and of course all the people who have 3 different email addresses (i.e. we have two accounts - the Stardock.net account which lets you get on the forums and your order account, we keep them seperate because your order account has order info and that is not allowed by our internal policy to be used outside our store -- we keep that info under lock and key). So just bear that in mind, if you ordered using one email address and have a different email address here, you may need to do a lookup (Which we'll have available here for you to do).

But the guidelines are clear: No electronic launch can be smooth. So we figure it best to get it out of the way so that the actual release day is nice.

Strictly voluntary of course. On Thursday, the floggings begin but there will be a sign-up sheet for that. My skin is very tender... http://images.stardock.com/smiles/frog.gif

[Eaglesfan27]

Yep, I laughed for a few minutes reading that one the other day. I'll be pre-downloading this week.

[Bee]

That's a great post. I didn't have any real interest in this game, but I might just buy it based on their humor. :D

[Eaglesfan27]

Besides having a great sense of humor, I love that they don't put any copy protection on the game. No starforce. No disk required in the drive. They say that they wouldn't want to be treated like thieves and they don't want to treat their honest customers that way. They also realize that pirates can break just about any copy protection anyway.

[Eaglesfan27]

Another funny (and informative post) from the developers of Gal Civ 2:

To recap: To try to ensure that the release day's digital downloading extravaganza is kept to a painthreshold of merely excrutiating nightmare, we implemented a policy of pre-loading most of the game.

On February 14th, members of the beta group were allowed to pre-order and we took notes on their experiences and made some tweaks and adjustments to the servers based ont hat.

On Wednesday late afternoon EST, users who pre-ordered the game (But we not part of the beta) will have their orders processed and sent an email that should include a serial # and a link to download Stardock Central.

IF you ordered just the retail box from us, fear not. You will receive a temporary serial # to use while you wait for your box to arrive in case you want download it digitally.

The preload won't allow you to play the game until February 21st still. But it will ensure that 99.5% of the game is already installed so that on February 21st you don't have much to download.

There will be several Stardock provided flame threads created for your convenience in case you want to participate in this voluntary form of masochism. Reports from today indicated that things went far better than anticipated and even with a couple thousand people downloading at once our bandwidth only peaked at 22% of capacity. Some users reported download speeds of 600k on the multimedia and other bigger files (the base game however is currently slower due to the additional security on that which we're working to streamline but 200k per second should be a reasonable expectation for tomorrow).

Note: If your email address that you used to create your account here is different than your email address that you used to pre-order, make sure you put in that information into Stardock Central in the tools->register products.

[gstelmack]

Speaking of multiplayer, there's no mention of MP in the official website for Galactic Civ 2, but in the EBGames description, it states:

Anyone have any info on that?The Metaverse in version GalCiv 1 was kind of a global leaderboard. Basically you had the option to upload your scores from single player games you beat, and you could essentially form "clans" that would combine your scores together. Clan scores were used to determine how much of the "metaverse" each clan owned, and the Stardock servers would update the metaverse on a regular basis so players can view it.

Basically a clan leaderboard presented as a galactic map.

[twothree]

Gal Civ II is now available to download and play via Stardock Central...version 1.0D.

Hopefully, you already have most of it pre-downloaded if you plan on getting it from them today, because it may download at a rather slow pace. :D Though, I had most of it pre-downloaded. So, it only took a few minutes to download the remaining update.

Time to play for an hour before work. Later.

[sachmo71]

I'll be anticipating reviews...

[gi]

Crusader Kings ---- Have you ever played that game multiplayer? I've been dying to try it out online.
Girlfriend and I played multiplayer. It was fun if you are near each other. Otherwise it seems you will have little to do with each other. Looking forward to the new patch.

[Brillig]

Ok, some first impressions... graphically very snazzy, but that full 3D perspective is a little hard to get used to from GalCiv I. The interface has been redone, and it's taking a while to get used to. Ship design is probably the "cool new feature", somewhat sabotaged by the fact that it takes a fair amount of research until you can actually build a military ship (much worse if you tend to research builder techs first, like I do). It seems very odd to spend the first 40 or 50-odd turns with unarmed ships wandering the galaxy (especially considering that on a smaller map, most ships can wander across the entire map in that time).

The decision to break planets out of the star systems is interesting, but completely stupid in terms of scale (planets of one star might be closer to planets of another star than those of their own). The new planetary level screen puts a new twist on improving colony, making more strategic choices necessary.

A number of crash issues has been reported - hard to say definitively, but if you're at all on the fence about it, I'd consider waiting until the first patch. The overall feel is that this release is a bit unstable.

More later...


...well, it's later. And for some reason GCII keeps crashing on me, so I think I'm stuck until the first patch. So much for beta.

[Eaglesfan27]

I'll be anticipating reviews...
I was going to play quite a bit Friday night, but hearing about crashes has dimmed my enthusiasm a bit. I'll still probably give it a go this weekend and give some impressions.

[Brillig]

More details...

After some self-debugging and forum crawling, the game is pretty stable. There's supposed to be a patch today, but even without it, I've gotten through a pair of games without crashes - the key things to keep in mind are:

1. Don't put too much "flair" on your ship designs. I now restrict myself to a half-dozen or a few more, and have no problems.

2. Don't ever reload a game from within the game proper. Only load a saved game once, when starting the app. If you want to reload, quit the app and re-start.

3. Don't play the campaign. Aside from having a tweaked tech tree that will probably confuse the hell out of both GalCiv veterans and novices, numerous bugs have been reported with some of the campaign missions.

With those pointers in mind, you should be able to enjoy the game...

Speaking of which...

There are some major changes from GalCiv I, mostly for the better - in no particular order:

Planets - in GC1, the planet quality(PQ) was the be-all and end-all of expansion - you just wanted to grab the most/best planets you could get your hands on. In GC2, we have a new system where each planet has it's own mini-map. Each "unit" of planet quality corresponds to a tile on which an improvement can be built. This makes it necessary to make strategic decisions as to what to put on each planet (as opposed to GC1 where you could pretty much build whatever you wanted).

It doesn't stop there, though. Each tile has the chance of having a "special", a boost to certain types of production/research/etc when something is built on it. After a little getting used too, this is a very cool feature - it reminds one of the old "Mineral Rich" specials of MOO. It also means that even a low PQ world can be very valuable if it has the right specials.

More changes - in GC1, everything was based on population - taxes, production, research. This was another reason why PQ was so critical - more PQ = more people. In GC2, things are broken out a little differently - population is only linked to taxes/income. Production is only based on factories, research on research labs (plus the necessary investment of money to run the installations). This makes specialized worlds much more viable.

One warning - keeping people happy is a lot harder at high populations than it was in GC1. Don't put up too many farms until you know you can keep em happy as well as fed. Remember that you don't need more pop to run factories etc... There's also a typo regarding food production and the number of people being fed. 1mt of food feeds 1 billion pop, not 1 million.

[Scale snicker - this means that each GC2 person eats 1kg of food a week, instead of 1000kg. And let's not even talk about the reproduction rate.]

This change also magnifies the effect of racial abilities and planet specials. In GC1, a -40% to social production, say, was pretty meaningless after every planet had a couple of improvements added +300% to planet production, since you'd end up with a net +260%. In GC2, that modifier will stick through the entire game. So even if you build three factories (8 industry points each), that 24 industry will get chopped down to 14. Big difference. So choose those racial abilities and planet morality choices carefully!

[b]Technology[/b] - is still a little weird. In addition to the social/diplomatic techs from GC1 (which have survived with minor modifications), the new weapons technologies are, hmm, huge? There are three "schools" of weapons, beams, mass drivers and missiles. Each also has it's corresponding "school" of defense, shields, armor and ECM. With six different lines of equipment to research, you'd expect the techs to be relatively cheap... well, no. The idea seems to be to force each empire to focus their research on a few lines of weapons/defense rather than generalizing. This actually leads to some interesting choices in terms of what to build. The AI seems to have a pronounced affection for mass drivers - although given time, it does seem to adapt to your strategy and produce ships designed to take advantage of your weaknesses.

Many of the old Galactic Wonders and Trade Goods have been carried over as well, but are scattered fairly deep in the tech tree. Note that these also take tiles on planets to produce, so plan ahead...

One annoying thing about the tech tree - weapons techs are sufficiently buried that it's almost impossible to get to any armed ship during the initial planet-grab. This can lead to some very annoying circumstances with enemies colonizing within your "borders". Which leads one to talking about

[b]Ships[/b] - The new ship designer is fun to play with, which is fortunate, since almost every default design can be improved on. If there's a problem with it, though, it's that components seem a little large for the various hull sizes. In fact, until you get to Medium hulls (about 3-4 techs deep along that research line), you'll have trouble fitting both a weapon and a defensive system on a hull. Considering that I usually like to put an engine on too (ships start with a default 1 square/turn engine, which is too damn slow for my tastes), and you'll understand why I don't build warships until I get medium hulls. Thank God for no multiplayer :D .

The ship designer is also a great invitation to specialize designs though. One obvious example - I never bother with adding sensors to my warships - instead I create an "AWACS" design with just engines and sensors. A few of those are more than sufficient to provide coordination to my war fleets.

One pet peeve - it seems like offense is a little too easy to come by with when compared to defense. Most ships seem to end up with several times higher offense rating compared to defense. Combine this with the fact that there are multiple offense types to defend against, and it seems inordinately hard to defend your ships. Instead, the best defense seems to be blowing up the enemy first. (Well, yeah, that makes sense but...) Combined with a tactical resolution engine in which the attacker always shoots first, and, well, sometimes it seems silly even putting defenses on ships. That said, if your ships outclass the enemy's, a little defense can be the difference between taking moderate damage and none at all. This can make a big difference in sustaining a long offensive against a numerically superior opponent.

[b]Fleets[/b] - Fleets rule all.

Okay, maybe you'd like to hear a little more than that. There's a new attribute for your empire called "Logistics Ability". What this does is limit how many ships you can put into a fleet. It starts at 5, then goes up to 8, 12, 16, 20 etc... Each hull size takes a certain number of Logistics points in a fleet (Tiny = 2, Small = 3, Medium = 4, etc...).

Fleets are critical to space warfare - all ships in a fleet attack and defend together. So if your ships are wandering about solo, you're ripe for defeat in detail. Indeed, with the "attacker first" combat resolution, a fleet of ships will often wipe out a single defender without the defender even getting a shot off.

By the by, ships in orbit around a planet don't get grouped into fleets unless the planet has a specific defensive improvement built - so while a planetary defense ship is necessary to keep enemy troop transports from invading, you're going to have to defeat enemy ships in open space to keep your ships from being picked off one by one in orbit.

Fleets are, unfortunately, the buggiest part of the interface. For example, selecting a ship within a fleet can only be done when the fleet isn't stacked. If you remove a ship from the fleet and move it, the "selected ships" focus will snap back to the original fleet. Pretty serious annoyances that hopefully the patch(es) will address.

[b]Influence[/b] - Influence existed in GC1, and it's pretty similar in GC2. Not quite the borders of Civ4, influence is, well, [i]influence[/i]. If an enemy colony is within your influence, then there's a chance the colony will rebel and come over to your side. Influence poses no barrier to ships though, so rival empires, will freely traverse your influence zones to plant colonies, build starbases, invade others etc... Notably lacking is a diplomatic option to complain about excessive enemy military presence in your zone of influence.

Influence gains additional importance in GC2, though, in that it generates revenue for your empire through "Tourism". The more influence you have, the more tourism revenue. This is more than a bonus, it provides a significant amount of your imperial income. It also is part of one of the victory conditions (you win an influence victory by having 75% of the galaxy under your influence).

Side note - by toggling the "Influence" indicator on the mini-map, you can see every empire's influence on the galaxy - even at the start of the game. This is by intent... no more blundering around wondering where your rivals are, you get a general idea from turn one.

[b]Starbases[/b] - Starbases and galactic resources were important in GC1, and that importance has only increased in GC2. As noted above, percentage modifiers have a much greater effect than they used to in GC1, so grabbing resources quickly is a must. Mass constructor-spam is still with us, I'm afraid, as using multiple constructors to upgrade a starbase is still crucial.

Early on, starbases are fairly easy to upgrade into fairly beefy platforms. (For example, a fairly early tech allows you to add a +7 beam module to a starbase - for comparison, a similar-tech beam weapon added to a ship only adds +1 attack, and takes about a third of a small hull, or half a tiny hull). Fairly quickly, though, weapons advances and increases in fleet size will make any starbase a relatively easy kill (starbases will always fire last, since they can't move... no more Dreadstars, sorry). Starbases can be defended with fleets though.

The multi-purpose do-everything starbases are gone with GC1, though. Now, each starbase has to be specialized in one of four categories: Military (boosts ship attack/defense values), Influence (increases/extends influence), Economy (boosts planetary production and trade routes), and Mining (for galactic resources). All four types have access to the same upgrades for starbase attack and defense though. All starbases also increase your fleet range as well.

There's a "module limit" for starbases, but it's so high I don't see much realistic chance of reaching it. There also seems to be a limit on the number of starbases you can have (your logistics rating?), but then again, that could be a bug. I can see that being a significant problem in larger galaxies.

[b]AI[/b] - As mentioned above, the AI does handle ship building pretty well. It does appear to adapt to your design choices. On the other hand, conquest of AI controlled planets shows that the AI doesn't seem to improve planets optimally. I usually find conquered planets full of influence improvements and little else. This is, however, at the base (normal) level of AI and one level up. I'm about ready to start cranking it higher, so I'll see if things get better.

Like Civ4, military might plays a significant role in whether the AI declares war - but it's not nearly as critical as it is in Civ4. Another positive change from GC1 is that each empire's report screen shows the factors influencing their relationship with your own empire.

The AI is also a little tweaky about negotiating peace when it's getting clobbered. One game the Altairians went from a huge military to... zero. After having all that wiped out, they still wouldn't give up a planet to get peace. So... I conquered em all. Heh.

[b]Easter Eggs[/b] - Well, sort of. I've only encountered one - I was moving my ships into position to attack one of the AI empires, when I got a diplomatic message from him, to the effect of "Do you think I'm stupid? I suppose you're planning to move your fleets and transports next to my worlds and then capture them in a lightning offensive. What a strategic genius. If my generals were set to 'Challenging' I'd crush your ships, but since they're only 'Normal', invade away!" I guess I'm supposed to increase the difficulty now :D

[b]Overview[/b] - So far, this seems to be a fine entry in the 4X genre. The balance, pacing and general "fun-factor" are not quite up to the Civ4 standard, but it's not too far behind. If you're looking for the spiritual successor to MOO2, this is probably it.

What will probably garner the most negatives in reviews are minor problems with the interface... it's abundantly clear that there wasn't a dedicated interface designer at work on the project from multiple small issues. (If there was, well, that person needs to be fired... sorry). These annoyances do detract from the overall game - if you don't agree with me, you will after the umpteenth time when you move a fleet in the wrong direction because it wasn't clear you had it selected.

The pacing is a design decision, of course, but it seems like it would be a better game with basic weapons and defenses available to everyone at the start. And ship design would be more fun if you could actually [i]do[/i] more than one or two things before getting medium hulls.

All told, I give this one (CGW system) 3.5 out of 5 stars.

[Schmidty]

I am probably going to buy this, but is the learning curve huge? I love Civ4 because, although it's very complex, it doesn't feel that way for various reasons.

[Brillig]

The learning curve isn't too bad, but then again, I'm speaking as someone who also played GC1. If you haven't, then it might be a little worse than Civ4. This effect will also be magnified in that things aren't quite as intuitive as they were with Civ4 (the things that happen when your dev team is one-tenth the size...)

That said, if you do buy and have questions, just post em and I'll give what answers I can.

[Schmidty]

The learning curve isn't too bad, but then again, I'm speaking as someone who also played GC1. If you haven't, then it might be a little worse than Civ4. This effect will also be magnified in that things aren't quite as intuitive as they were with Civ4 (the things that happen when your dev team is one-tenth the size...)

That said, if you do buy and have questions, just post em and I'll give what answers I can.

Cool. Thanks man.

[Brillig]

Addenda:

Forgot two things. Another major cause of CTD problems is Alt-Tabbing. If you're going to switch apps, run it in windowed mode. Also, apparently there's reportedly serious shortage of retail boxes in some stores, so call ahead if you're looking to buy the box.

[Schmidty]

Addenda:

Forgot two things. Another major cause of CTD problems is Alt-Tabbing. If you're going to switch apps, run it in windowed mode. Also, apparently there's reportedly serious shortage of retail boxes in some stores, so call ahead if you're looking to buy the box.

Does that mean the game is downloadable?

[Warhammer]

How is combat handled. Is it just that the ships line up and fight, or do you take control of it?

[Crapshoot]

Does that mean the game is downloadable?

Yup- from the website. and its better, because they get the revenue directly.

[Brillig]

Yep, you can get the game by download (www.galciv2.com (http://www.galciv2.com)).

Combat is handled by the CPU. You do get to watch it as a cinematic though ;) For the most part, the computer decides which enemy ship is the most threatening, and focuses fire on that one (in a fleet battle - with individual ships, only one ship is involved.) If ships or fleets are stacked, it's still a one-ship or one-fleet vs one situation (like Civ4, the CPU will pick the 'best defender').

Example 1.

I have a stack with 1) a fleet of 3 medium ships and 2) a fleet of 2 tiny ships. I move it into a CPU stack of 1) a fleet of 5 small ships and 2) a starbase constructor.

My 'best attacker' (fleet of 3 meds) will attack the 'best defender' (fleet of 5 smalls).

Combat will be resolved as follows:

1. My 3 mediums will each fire at the 'most dangerous' small ship.

2. The 5 smalls will return fire at the 'most dangerous' of my 3 mediums.

3. Repeat 1 and 2 until one fleet is destroyed.

'Most dangerous' is a combination calculated from (Fewest hitpoints)+(High attack value)+(Low defense value) in some formular. Basically, the CPU will logically target heavily armed ships over lightly armed ones, less defended ships over more defended ones, and damaged/smaller ships over larger ones.

[Eaglesfan27]

Nice review Brillig. I'm waiting to see how the first patch works before I dig into it, but I have little doubt that this game is going to be worth my money.

[path12]

Overview - So far, this seems to be a fine entry in the 4X genre. The balance, pacing and general "fun-factor" are not quite up to the Civ4 standard, but it's not too far behind. If you're looking for the spiritual successor to MOO2, this is probably it.


I totally loved MOO1 and 2, and was really looking forward to GC1, but it always seemed a bit sterile to me and never really hooked me. In your opinion, does the changes with the ship and race customization really improve the immersive factor over the first one?

[Brillig]

I totally loved MOO1 and 2, and was really looking forward to GC1, but it always seemed a bit sterile to me and never really hooked me. In your opinion, does the changes with the ship and race customization really improve the immersive factor over the first one?
I completely understand where you're coming from - GC1 was kinida bland for me too. So far, the changes to the ship design and the combat system with fleets really make a huge difference in the interest level. The other big difference is the planets - having the number of improvements limited by PQ, and the "specials" make each world much more distinct than a simple PQ number.

Race customization... is pretty much the same as GC1, at least as far as the available options. However, as noted, the percentages mean much more than they did in GC1, so different races play more distinctly than they used to. Improved Planet Quality is no longer a must have, for one. Although I'm still picking it (habit!), I'm beginning to think that those 3 points would be a lot more useful somewhere else.

Since it's single player only, I think the long term 'legs' of the game will be dependant on the strength of the AI. But now that I think back on it, MOO1 and MOO2 didn't exactly have Deep Blue AI either - they just cheated a lot.

If you're on the fence, you might want to wait for the demo, one should be available reasonably soon. But if you're jonesing for a 4X fix, this is a good game for it :)

[Warhammer]

If you're on the fence, you might want to wait for the demo, one should be available reasonably soon. But if you're jonesing for a 4X fix, this is a good game for it :)

This is my dilemma, should I put down the money for this or Civ4? I enjoy Civ, but I never picked up Civ 3 much after the first few times I played it. However, Civ 4 is supposed to be better than Civ3 and I loved Civ2. That said, I also loved MOO and MOO2, so this could be a good way to scratch the itch.

[jbmagic]

This is my dilemma, should I put down the money for this or Civ4? I enjoy Civ, but I never picked up Civ 3 much after the first few times I played it. However, Civ 4 is supposed to be better than Civ3 and I loved Civ2. That said, I also loved MOO and MOO2, so this could be a good way to scratch the itch.


try the demo of GC1 first to see if you would like it.


Civ 4 is more easier to learn and understand how to play.

[Brillig]

The games are slightly different in terms of focus - Civ4 is really about empire building. While combat exists, it's not the real focus of the game. On the other hand, combat is the main focus of GC2. In that sense, it's more akin to the Total War series than Civilzation.

That said, Civ4 is a great product from a highly polished developer. GC2 is definitely more of an "indie" product, and it shows in terms of rough edges. If you disliked Civ3, you weren't alone. Civ4 is a much better game, and much closer to the original Civ roots - it's a solid pick.

I wouldn't bother with the GC1 demo, though. GC2 is a very different game. It has about the same level of similarity to GC1 as Call To Power had to Civ.

Edit: The bottom line is, unless you liked MOO significantly more than Civ, I'd go with Civ4. Civ4 is raking in the awards from far and wide, and although I like GC2 personally, I don't think it's quite at the same caliber.

[path12]

This is my dilemma, should I put down the money for this or Civ4? I enjoy Civ, but I never picked up Civ 3 much after the first few times I played it. However, Civ 4 is supposed to be better than Civ3 and I loved Civ2. That said, I also loved MOO and MOO2, so this could be a good way to scratch the itch.

Really, I think Civ 4 might be the best of the entire series. And that's from a Civ 2 fanboy. FWIW.

[path12]

I completely understand where you're coming from - GC1 was kinida bland for me too. So far, the changes to the ship design and the combat system with fleets really make a huge difference in the interest level. The other big difference is the planets - having the number of improvements limited by PQ, and the "specials" make each world much more distinct than a simple PQ number.

Race customization... is pretty much the same as GC1, at least as far as the available options. However, as noted, the percentages mean much more than they did in GC1, so different races play more distinctly than they used to. Improved Planet Quality is no longer a must have, for one. Although I'm still picking it (habit!), I'm beginning to think that those 3 points would be a lot more useful somewhere else.

Since it's single player only, I think the long term 'legs' of the game will be dependant on the strength of the AI. But now that I think back on it, MOO1 and MOO2 didn't exactly have Deep Blue AI either - they just cheated a lot.

If you're on the fence, you might want to wait for the demo, one should be available reasonably soon. But if you're jonesing for a 4X fix, this is a good game for it :)

Thanks for the feedback, the added variation in characteristics and planetary improvements sound very intriguing (every planet/building and tech seemed so flat in the first one). I will likely wait for the demo since I've got plenty on my plate between FM and Civ4. But a space 4X with real personality would be teh r0xx0r -- I still remember actually yelling at the screen at those friggin Psilons in MOO. :D

[Eaglesfan27]

I enjoyed Galciv1, and I'm fairly certain I will like Galciv2 once it is patched some. However, if you had to choose between just Civ4 or Galciv2, I would pick Civ4 because it is an AMAZING game. Civ4 is the best non text sim sports game to come out in the last year at least.

[Warhammer]

I loved the Psilons, freaking Pacifists until they had the Black Hole Ray or whatever it was called. Your 32727 ship stack would just vanish!

[path12]

I loved the Psilons, freaking Pacifists until they had the Black Hole Ray or whatever it was called. Your 32727 ship stack would just vanish!

Yeah, I'd think I was cruising along nicely and then they'd come up with some tech that would just decimate me. Bastards. They and the Darloks with all the spying and espionage always were a pain in the ass.

Funnily enough, I never had nearly the problem with the more militaristic races like the Bulrathi and whatever those bird guys were called.....even though I was more of a empire developer rather than military player.

[Warhammer]

No, the Bulrathi would pound me into the ground quite a bit. Mainly because of their insane ground combat modifiers. Now the Alkari were always my pawns. Alkari attack the Darloks! Alkari, sure you suffered losses, but go get the Krylons!

[sachmo71]

No, the Bulrathi would pound me into the ground quite a bit. Mainly because of their insane ground combat modifiers. Now the Alkari were always my pawns. Alkari attack the Darloks! Alkari, sure you suffered losses, but go get the Krylons!


Yes, the poor Bulrathi would usually end up getting cleansed from above. Sort of helps illustrate the delima of invading the home islands of Japan during WWII. I go for the atomic option every time. :(

Thanks for the review of Gal Civ II, Brillig. It sounds to me like this game is another victim of it's own design. Some of the details, such as the mini-map of planets, sound like they are designs that made it from the beginning of the design phase, but the imbalance issues of ship sizes and making weapons inaccessable until the early mid-phase of the game seem more like twinks to me than good design decisions. And the handling of fleets vs. individual ships is just a forced weapons cap, I believe.

These are the sort of indicators that usually make me shy away from a game, unfortuantely. I'm not saying I won't buy it, but I'm definately shying away from it for now.

[Brillig]

And the handling of fleets vs. individual ships is just a forced weapons cap, I believe.
Going to have to disagree on this part - I see the whole fleet thing as a balancing factor. In GC1, getting to the "next bigger size" of ship was a epochal event - once you had bigger ships, you proceeded to mop the floor with all your opponents until they caught up.

With fleets, since a larger ship uses more logistics points, a fleet of larger ships isn't as big an improvement since it will have fewer ships in the fleet. Similarly, choosing to invest research in logistics rather than larger hulls could be an effective strategy (the death of a thousand cuts).

---

Patch notes are out... on the one hand, it's good that they're squashing lots of bugs, but on the other hand, well, there's a fair mort'o'bugs...


Bold items are new features, italic are "bug fixes". And normal print is, well misc.

Version 1.01 will have:

+ Fix for bug where save games with a version <= 24 didn’t properly set the cached commonly-used tech IDs. This bug manifests itself by making the "Speak To" button do nothing or not acknowledging a technology victory.

+ Research Wnd: When listing ships that a tech will unlock, the other techs required will be listed as well.
+ Support for a mods directory where people can dump things in (we'll document this as soon as we get a breather)

+ Fix for when a starbase is destroyed and being unable to build another star base on it

+ More debug messages for saved games to provide more user info on what's being saved

+ Custom maps with support for fewer players won't allow too many players to be on them.

+ Fixed "No Image" png that would show up then prompting to harvest a resource

+ Easier to get higher approval on planets with low tax rates

+ Fixed bug in surrender code that caused the Defection victory popup message to pop up.

+ Fixed bug where improvements that were supposed to change the player’s miniaturization ability were actually changing their logistics ability. This affects exactly one improvement type: the Hyperion Shrinker.

+ When a starport is destroyed, classColony::OnDestroyImprovement() now sets its planet’s bNeedToUpdateOverlayIcons member to TRUE so that the planet will have its starport overlay removed in the main game screen.

+ If you are running in 16bit color, the game will warn you.

+ CTD on exiting game fixed. (only came up in very specific circumstances)

+ If you're running too low a resolution, the game will warn you.

+ Fixed invasion escape exploit (you know who you are)

+ Morale ability nerfed a bit it now is to the .80 power to balance.

+ Sensor range capped at 15 tiles. Significant performance issues if it gets much bigger than that (> 1 sector)

+ Tweaked farm improvements. Farm improvements provide 4,6,8,10,12 units of food as you go up the tech tree. This prevents players from accidentally ending up with ridiculously large populations that are impossible to keep happy.

+ Sensors are a bit more expensive in terms of space

+ Fix for the elusive "social project never completing" bug. The key to finally finding this bug was learning that it only happens from the quick build window: improvements built from the quick build window were being built upon whatever planet was last viewed in the colony management screen, not the planet selected in the quick build window.


+ Starport Details: List now shows number of installed modules / available modules so players know what starbases to send ships to.

+ Trade Wnd: Alliances made in trade window more fool-proof...old code open to allowning one race to consider another race an ally, but not the other way around (fixes Ashberrys Treaties Window Bug).

+ Memory optimization on ship graphics, game should use less memory, especially in larger galaxies

+ Alt-Tabbing should be faster to come back from. Note: The game does not crash when you alt-tab back in, it just takes time to regenerate the textures from the seed nodes.

+ Performance (frame rate) improved on larger maps.

+ Fixed an ALT tab problem reported in forum where fleet units would leave ghost fleets after attacking after an alt-tab

+ Hitting Cancel when placing a new rally point will now destroy the rally point

+ Fixed bug where battles would skip if the planet had orbital fleet manager

+ Destination in context area no longer tells you the anomaly type. Now it will display the anomaly name. i.e. "Anomaly 20 15"

+ Tightened the spacing of ships in fleet battles

+ Fixed bug where some fleets would fail to fire because their lead ship’s graphic did not have the right weapon

+ Cosmetic: Fixed bug where some fleets would fail to fire after an alt-tab


+ Ship Context Window: "Set destination" button is removed for starbases and disabled for AI ships

+ Fixed size limit for .shipcfg files. This will fix the disappearing jewelry problem

+ Fixed the GNN/Shipyard popup problems. Basically the popups are forced to the front.

+ Added debug information to ship intelligence report and ship details screen when running in DEBUG mode


+ Saved games should load faster

+ Added ‘.’ to the set of legal characters for metaverse character names.


+ Fixed crash when selecting a component if no hull is selected

+ Made scanner modules work for any starbase type, not just military starbases

+ Fix for crash in EntryField that can occur when the backspace key is pressed in an empty entry field.


+ Fixed classCivilization::TransferAllTech() so that it works for all techs. It was calling IsTechKnown() with the tech’s display name, but IsTechKnown() expects the type name. Therefore, some techs wouldn’t get transferred because their display name was not the same as the type name. Also, this wouldn’t work at all with non-English data (i.e., TransferAllTech() would transfer no techs in non-English games).

[sachmo71]

Going to have to disagree on this part - I see the whole fleet thing as a balancing factor. In GC1, getting to the "next bigger size" of ship was a epochal event - once you had bigger ships, you proceeded to mop the floor with all your opponents until they caught up.

With fleets, since a larger ship uses more logistics points, a fleet of larger ships isn't as big an improvement since it will have fewer ships in the fleet. Similarly, choosing to invest research in logistics rather than larger hulls could be an effective strategy (the death of a thousand cuts).

---




So instead of toning down the ship size factor in design, they just add fleets and give them the bonus of firing simultaneously? If I misunderstanding what you said, I apologize, but it seems like a poor trade-off to me.

[Brillig]

Back from the pile of dead threads, here's what's coming in GC2 1.1 (beta this weekend)


<DL><DT>V1.1 BETA Change-Log (March 24, 2006) <DD> <DT>+ New Option: No tech Trading. Players can prevent any tech trading by anyone.</DT></DL>+ New Option: Blind Exploration. Players can now start out not knowing where the other civilizations are located.
+ New Option: Disable Minor races. No minor races.
+ New Option: Randomize player intelligence. This will scramble opponent intelligence by around +/- 10 points to have more variance.
+ New Option: Randomly pick opponents. Players can simply choose to play against N opponents and it will pick them out.
+ Ship Design Screen re-designed to allow far more visible space for designing.
+ Ship Design Screen supports panning with left-mouse button held down.
+ Ship Design Screen displays installed components in a grid list. Right click to remove a component.
+ Ship Design Screen supports rotation of components. See options screen to control how much you can rotate them.
+ Ship Design Screen supports copy/pasting behavior with ship size/rotation. If you select an existing component and then select a new component, the new component will automatically take on the size and rotation of the installed component you had just selected.
+ Ship Design Screen supports symmetry in rotation. Select an existing component, then select a new component to add on and then RIGHT-CLICK on the appropriate rotation dial and it will mirror the rotation automatically.
<DL><DT>+ Ship level doesn't add as much to max HP.</DT></DL>+ Option now to display an animated dotted line showing where your selected ship is going.
+ How many turns it will take to reach a destination can be displayed at the destination target for selected ship. Note that you can hold down the Shift key and drag select multiple units.
+ If low-level espionage achieved, you can see the destination of selected enemy ships.
+ AI values range technologies more

+ Sensor techs increase sensor ability

+ Lots of little AI tweaks not worth mentioning but together will make a substantial difference to making the AI more enjoyable at low levels and more challenging at higher levels.

+ AI's more aggressive about expanding range with starbases. (some of them anyway)

+ Uncommon habitable planets tweaked to make them slightly more likely to have habitable planets.
<DL><DT>+ Fixed AI bug where it would sometimes put its rally points on planets when it didn't mean to.

+ AI takes distance more into account than it used to for determining relations.

+ AI more sensitive to cultural and military build up using new APIs that do fewer false positives.

+ AI gives more effort towards researching propulsion technologies.

+ AI puts more effort into logistics techs.

+ AI puts more effort into miniaturization techs. In all 3 cases it does an evaluation of the galaxy state to determine whether it should be doing this.

+ Some AI personalities focus on significantly different techs.

+ AI will design faster or longer range ships depending on its needs

+ AI tech trading rewritten so that it doesn't do sweetheart deals. Tech trading somewhat rarer now as a practical matter. May need to be balanced so that human player doesn't get too much of an advantage.

+ AI can upgrade ships if it has enough money and thinks it's worth it.

+ AI manages colony improvements more effectively.

+ AI adapts economic strategy based on whether the new "disable tech trading" option is on.

+ AI generally better at picking techs based on new algorithm for evaluating galactic state.

+ Some AIs smarter about building constructors/freighters/defense.

+ Terran Alliance AI will not allow it to fall behind militarily beyond all hope.

+ Most AIs now will try to upgrade existing starbases more so than building new ones.

+ Most AIs will tend not to upgrade starbases that exist just to extend range.

+ Terran Alliance AI builds helper starbases closer to home.

+ Terran Alliance experimental strategy: Very focuses research - will ignore other weapons techs other than its main strategy. If you're not playing against the humans, you're missing out.

+ Terran Alliance has a whole new ship design sub-module for having its very own types of ships.

+ Terran Alliance will build defenders with no weapons (not needed to keep invaders out).

+ Drengin AI planetary management substantially different from others.

+ AIs take into account wasted social production (which is no longer wasted) into account when deciding what to build.

+ Drengin more likely to escort transports.

+ Drengin will focus more on trying to have the strongest military at all times.

+ Terran Alliance focuses on diplomacy techs, gifting, etc. to keep relations up so that it can pursue technology.

+ Drengin and Terran AIs now very much focused on controlling all nearby galactic resources.

+ Drengin focus more on extending their range of their ships and getting more morale building techs than previously.

+ Drengin tend to focus more on their primary weapon and defense techs. We'll see how it works.

+ Drengin AI a LOT smarter about what they research.

+ Yor AI now derivative of new Drengin AI.

+ AI, in general, values research more than it did previously.

+ First attempt, but probably not last, for AI to try to take out resource starbases of enemies where it can find them (as a reminder to players, the AI doesn't necessarily know the existence of a resource starbase, it has to "see" them. So if you have some resource in the corner of the galaxy, don't wonder why it's not getting attacked any more than why you don't see their resource starbases tucked into some corner).

+ Trade revenue increased on larger galaxies, decreased on smaller galaxies.

+ Starbase factories improve the production of factories and labs on planets by X%. Half of that increased bonus is "free" and the other half is charged for.

+ The -2000 ceiling on debt has been eliminated for players playing at higher difficulty levels.

+ Last vestiges of aborted feature "Propaganda" eliminated. Expansion pack will have "agents" that players and AI can assign to do mischief and counter-mischief instead.

+ ECONONOMIC ENGINE CLEANED UP! Production and research now works as follows: Labs and Factories produce N production of their kind. How much of their capacity is used is based on the domestic policy sliders (spend rate X what % on each of the 3 sliders is used).

That amount is then multiplied by 3 types of bonuses:

(1) Your Civ Ability (which you set at start and can enhance by mining special resources).

(2) Economic starbases with factories on them.

(3) Planetary bonuses that comes from random events, UP issues, etc.

50% of this bonus you get for free -- not charged for it. The other half you pay for out of your treasury.

Example: If I have factories producing 100 units and my spend rate is 50% from domestic policy and my military spending is set to 100% then that factory's base production is 50 (50% of 100).

If my Civilization ability on military production is 10% and I have an economic starbase doing 5% bonus and I had an event that increase planet production by 5% then I would have 50 + 20% bonus = 60 production. I would only be charged 55 however -- 10 bonus production, 5 free, 5 paid for.

+ Tax rate angers citizens less (a bit).

+ Your Morale ability is taken to the .90 power and then added to morale (was .80 power).

+ Population growth fixed dramatically. This is going to have a significant game play result that we're still having to fix in the AI. Before, on a class 10 planet with a morale of 70 your population would increase at 20% per turn. Now is would change at 3%.

The "population growth ability bug" wasn't a bug but rather a problem with having populations in billions rather than millions. The population growth was previously capped at 200 million per turn. 20% of say 1 billion (or
higher) reached that cap. So all those bonuses meant nothing.

Now, at 3%, if you have a population of 1 billion then you're looking at an increase of 30 million per turn X your population bonus. If your morale is 100%, that gets doubled again.

Here's the thing: If you drain a population down to only a few billion, it'll take you a very long time to recover. Say goodbye to mass colony rush. You'll need to be very careful or else you could end up with a vast empire of tiny populations producing no money while smaller empires grow beyond you and conquer your weak but large empire.

Population Growth = CurrentMorale X Government Level X PlanetQuality Factory X GrowthFactor.

+ If your morale is > 75% you now get a 25% extra bonus to population growth. If it's at 100% you get a 100% extra bonus.

+ Population growth ability taken into account at the very end of this process for maximium effect.

+ Research Ability used wholesale (previously it was chopped in half).

+ Base taxes collected now is the square root of the population of a planet. This may be tweaked based on play testing.

+ New clean APIs: CalcTotalMilitaryProduction() and social and research equivs that just give you how much a planet is producing (for AI use later).

+ Social Production that is not being used anymore is transferred to military. So you're no longer being charged for social production. However, only the BASE social production is transferred and that amount is not subject to bonuses and so forth (lest there be a lot of cheese tactics and gaming of the social production bonus). So you still need to manage your economy decently but you're no longer being charged for production you're not using.

+ AI at lower levels gets less money to account for improvements in overall AI.

+ AI now "adds noise" to its decisions based on difficulty level. <DT>
Essentially, on things that are prioritized, AI that is playing as a "dumb"
level will have injected into its calculations a noise factor that will result in it coming to wrong conclusions about what it should do and hence do stupid things. It's random

+ Planets on the verge of defecting are more likely to defect.

+ AI updated to use its points differently based on new ability costs.

+ AI Ship design looks at the galaxy size and then decides based on that whether it needs to focus on range or speed more. Before it was one size fits all.

+ Cost to upgrade ships now cheaper.

+ Lockup fix: AI could get confused on where to put a starbase and get into an endless loop.

+ Player and AI on same starbase rules: 4 friendly starbases per sector.

+ AI more likely to target starbases.

+ New function: FindClosestEnemyStarbase()

+ AI will send its ships to guard nearby planets rather than cluster them in hordes.

+ AI will target military support starbases more so.

+ Bonus production now displayed in various displays).

+ Updates to the various screens to display the correct economic data based on the new economic engine (involved 9 different .cpp files).

+ Planet Abilities decreased in player start-up. Before someone yells (or if someone can answer them on various forums): Before the abilities would then get nerfed in game. For instance, a research ability of 20 was treated as a 10 when calculated. Now, the research ability is half as much in the player setup window but multiplied directly. There's no net change, it's just a display change.

+ Message changed to tell players they can only build 4 friendly starbases in a given sector.

+ Most defense modules are now slightly smaller

+ Logistics change: Large ships now use 6 logistics (was 5). Huge ships use 8 (was 6).

+ HP change: Large ships get 30HP base (was 28).

+ HP change: Huge ships get 50HP base (was 48).

+ Nano Rippper damage changed from 8 to 6.

+ Capitals no longer provide a morale bonus.

+ Maintenance on labs and factories increased slightly (1 to 2) to compensate for higher tax income and easier morale.

+ Factories and labs produce slightly less base production (because the new bonus system provides more bonus production).

+ Cost of some high level buildings substantially decreased.

+ Slight tweaks to racial abilities.

+ Eliminated Galactic Mall and Concert Hall starbase modules. Since influence victory strategies have been strengthened, we require players to have to go for the cultural domination tech path.

+ Put cost to upgrade an influence starbase at the beginning, subsequent modules are free.

+ Mining modules have been significantly nerfed since abilities are now directly multiplied rather than modified.

+ If you have the cultural domination techs, you can build directly to those upper cultural influence modules bypassing the wimpier lower level ones.

+ Influence modules are less powerful (since you can now go directly to them) but still very powerful.

+ Fixed some tech tree bugs where the category was wrong. The AI relies on category to determine what type of tech it is since the AI isn't scripted.

+ Lots of tweaks to technology costs based on play testing and user feedback.

+ AI values tweaked. Miniaturization was valued very low. So the AI tended to have lots of cheap and ineffective ships compared to expert players.

+ AI less aggressive at lower levels.

+ Fixed typo in UP issue.

+ Prevent Cheese: Do not allow player to open fleet manager for a ship that is fighting. They could disband or change the ships in the fleet. <DD> <DT>+ If a component on the ship is selected, size and rotation will remain the same as the selected component when a new component is chosen</DT></DL>+ You can click a slot at the top of the window to select a component on the ship. Clicking the slot again, de-selects the component.

+ Clicking a component on the ship, high-lights its slot in the component list

+ Fixed bug where if you choose a filter, and then add a component that should be filtered out, it would still show in the list

+ Size and rotation settings are no longer reset when selecting a new component type

+ Fixed bug where Clear button did not restore modules ( like colony, trade, etc) in the list of available components if they had been added to the ship before clearing it.

+ Fixed an exploit where players could add several modules of different types on the same ship by using auto-place.

+ Fixed not being able to select slots Slots now tint to the correct color
+ Took out the old component "slots" code and replaced it with new code using a grid list control.

+ Implemented the filter controls for choosing function or structural parts, or all parts. Known bug: if you choose a filter then add a component of diff type it will show in the list.

+ Added support for mouse wheel to the rotation dials. They will use whatever increment you have set in the options screen for rotations.

+ Made the constructor highlight slightly less transparent to make it more visible
+ Random ?'s turn on and off on the Opponent screen Polished
+ Functionality on the Opponent Screen added funciton to
+ "OverrideTextDisplay" of Spinners
+ added code to make civ save extra research points when it has more needs for the current tech
+ changed code to save ship designs as .xml files blind exploration now works
+ Changed "Enable Minor Races" option to "Disable Minor Races"
+ Changing any of the Game Options in Galaxy setup will now trigger the galaxy thread to be recreated if it is already running
+ Random Number of Races option working
+ Random Selection of Races option working (PaulB will be cheking in a screen to fix the clipping)
+ Random Intel option working (PaulB will be cheking in a screen to fix the clipping)
+ Added Stat in "Foreign Stats">"Misc" that gives the intelligence of the race.
+ NEW FEATURE: Auto-Pilot Lines checked in NEW FEATURE: "Show Auto Pilot
+ Lines" option added to Options screen NEW FEATURE: Resource icons on
+ tactical map are now color-coded NEW FEATURE: Number of weeks to move
+ to destination appears on the destination cursor
+ Tweak: Made dial needles thinner in ship designer
+ Fix: Bug where adding a ship with moves to a fleet with 0 moves restores the fleet's moves
+ Fix: Potential crash in overlay code
+ Fix: Made constructor highlights slightly more visible
+ Fix: Fleet Manager updates context area if fleet is disbanded
+ Fix: Removed code in CalcAStarRoute (used by trade routes and auto-pilot lines) that prevented the route from reaching across a gigantic galaxy
+ added code to FindPath to allow AI ships to get a new destination when they don't have one
+ added code to CanRaceBuildShip to check for an existing model file if it's a user defined ship
+ added code to classShipTypes to save out an XML file for its def. If a ship is user defined and this function can't find a .shipcfg file for it, it will now return FALSE. This fixes the bug that Brad found where he was playing as a custom race and he changed what style of ship he was using.
+Fixed length of the Zombie Army event to make it fit nicer in the box
+Added ability to pan and rotate main map with the Keyboard:
-CTRL and Arrow keys to rotate (with snapback working if activated)
-SHIFT and Arrowkeys to pan main map
+ Old "hardpoint modifiers" that rotated and flipped hardpoints have been marked as "hidden." This removes them from the components the players can choose, and also allows them to keep using the designs they have previously made that use them.

+ Improvement Summary window now shows tile improvements and their effects on the improvement and planet

+ Fixed bug where obsoleting a ship that had been purchased prevents the star port that purchased it from ever building anything else again

+ Improvement Summary Window: Fixed spacing of units
+ removed some references to humanity in the Tech Tree (but only where it made sense to remove, most places it worked well)
+ Fleet Manager: Now displays number representing ship's logistic value in ship thumbnail

+ Fleet Manager: Implemented the command buttons

+ Ship Designer: Implemented "Reset Component" button

+ Ship Designer: Added tool-tips to the new design UI controls

+ Ship Designer: Fix: Scaling selected part now scales ONLY that part
+ Fleet Manager window is implemented
+ Dbl-click a fleet or click on Details in the fleet context window to open it. Use it to add ships to your fleet. Use it to move ships from one fleet to another. It still needs a few graphical tweaks: Some things don't tint Will be adding a number next to the ship icons to show their logistics (like the stacked ships window does)

+ You can no longer multi-select dead ships or ships hidden by FOW (This fixes bug where multi-select highlights empty spaces)

+ You can not cycle through fleets in the ship details window anymore (This is to make way for the new Fleet Manager screen)

+ Action buttons in ship details screen are now disabled if the ship cannot perform that action
+ Fixed bug where text in trade screen would display green when using the money slider even if the AI would refuse to trade a military tech because the civ was too powerful.
+ Fixed bug that Brad e-mailed about (Planet logos missing when zoomed out)
+ Fixed bug in Tutorials window where pressing ESC key would hang the game
+ Fixed UP Starbase Tax law-related problems.
+ Fixed bug where a player could not attack Dread Lord planet with an orbital fleet manager on it
+ Fixed non-working scroll bar in rally point window Added GetTurnsAway function to classStarShip that returns a float indicating number of turns it will take to get to specified tile CTRL+I now displays the number of turns it will take a ship to get to its destination.
+ MiraclePlanets Event: Now updates the overlay icons for the planets. (They used to have "uninhabitable" icons even though they were upgraded by the event)
+ Fixed exploit where you could get around UP starbase module limit using a fleet of constructors
+ Fixed sizing to 0 error message in debug.err in ShipCombatShipsEntryWnd.
+ AIUpgradeShip will not allow you to use it on a fleet (it will abort gracefully) “Fleets” themselves cannot be upgraded, but the ships in them can + Fixed UP Law bug where starfaring tax was applied even if the civ in question was dead
+ Fixed UP Law bug where war tax was applied even if the civ you were at war with was dead
+ Fixed UP Law bug where Starbase tax was applied even on starbases that were destroyed

+ Changed starship::GetFleet function to return a pointer to itself if the ship is a fleet.
+ Found and fixed source of “Influence Flooding” bug. If the invader used the “Use unhappy citizens” tactic, these citizens could be counted as casualties and the casualties would exceed the number of troops on the transports, thus giving a negative population.
+ Fixed crash when memory allocation fails on ship type creation in ship designer. Adds message to debug.err when this happens and takes appropriate action to avoid crash
+ Fixed crash in Polyline. It now checks number of points in the line to avoid out of bounds crash.
+ Fixed CTD on Governor Screen. pColony was not set in governor mini map. Pointer is checked now.
+ Fixed bug where removing components does not remove their tech requirement.
+ Fixed crash when entering victory status screen. Planet was not set in colony::CalcMorale.
+ Fixed incorrect stat shown in ship statistics text (Trade screen)
+ Fixed bug where data on main screen (treasury, tech, etc) would not update immediately after loading a saved game
+ Fixed crash in OverlayGraphic::QueryInterface function. Pointer was not being checked.
+ Trade Screen, if you right-click a ship, you will now get the “ship intelligence report” on that specific ship, instead of a generalized ship type information popup.
+ Trade Screen, if you right-click a starbase, it will now show the correct data based on what modules your starbase has.
+ Fixed a typo in conversations
+ Fixed a “false positive” message in debug.err. It would display “Could not find texture” when PictureFrame images were being set to NULL (to clear the image). This is ok.
+ If population after an invasion is less than 1, it will be set to 1 + Fixed incorrect data being displayed in Ship Upgrade window
+ Fixed colors in a few end game summary screens to use race color instead of interface color


They've been busy. From the dev journals, looks like the AI will be much improved - good thing, I need the challenge ;)

[Eaglesfan27]

Sounds like a nice patch. I can't wait to finish up my current game and start a new game once the patch is out. This and Oblivion will be eating up plenty of free time this weekend.

[jbmagic]

I saw this game at Best Buy Store today.

But Oblivion is the one i ended up getting for now.

[Senator]

Got this game to goof with. Since I never played the previous or really any Civ game, which is odd, I had a little learning curve to figure out, especially as I am the type to jump in without the first clue what I am doing, and learn by error. It is pretty fun, I am glad I got it.

[Pumpy Tudors]

I bought a totalgaming.net description, jeez, maybe a couple of years ago. I completely forgot about it. I just loaded up my Stardock Central application and discovered that I had 10 TotalGaming "tokens" to use for game purchases. GalCiv II only costs 5 tokens. I'm installing it now, and I didn't have to pay a cent for it. :D I'll be playing this game soon!

[Eaglesfan27]

I thought I would play mostly Oblivion today, but this game drew me in and I ended up playing for a few hours (then got off and played an hour or two of Oblivion.) This really is a very fun game, and in some ways I enjoy it even more than Civ4. I love designing ships.

[jbmagic]

How is the learning curve for a newbie to understand this game?

[Senator]

How is the learning curve for a newbie to understand this game?

It took me some time. Probably helps to read the manual or at least the beginner doc they have on the website. I just sat down, made all the other guys fools and thought it might be the best way to learn. Once I figured how to attack with the right click I was golden. There is some stuff I didn't do, since I went on attack mode instead of trade or diplomacy. Now, that I have a decent understanding I will read the fine print.

To answer the question, I thought it was a little tough at times, but I never play games like this and have never played any Civ game, so take that for what it is worth.

[SirFozzie]

It's fairly easy, I never played any of the games in the series before, and within a week, I had my first victory (diplomatic, helped that my diplomatic partner was culture crushing everyone)

[Pumpy Tudors]

Worldwide Soccer Manager sucked me back in last night, so I didn't play any GalCiv II, but I do have it installed. I think I'm just going to look at a tutorial and then just wing it. It's been a long time since I played the original GalCiv or any turn-based game, really, but I'll give it a shot. :D

[Bonegavel]

Looks like the demo for this is out:

hxxp://www.gamespot.com/promos/2006/galacticcivilizations2-demo/index.html

[hukarez]

Went browsing through GameStop and EBgames, and I notice that this particular title's going for $39.99 now. However, through Stardock, it still seems to be $44.95 + s/h.

Hmm. Which to do...

[Flasch186]

this or space rangers? Space rangers 2 is over at Wal-Devil for 29.99

[hukarez]

this or space rangers? Space rangers 2 is over at Wal-Devil for 29.99

Hey, that's not a bad pickup for $29.99 over at Wal-Mart. I've already got Space Rangers 2, hence my curiousity about picking up this title. (Already have part 1, never got the expansion pack for it though)

[ausonny]

FYI for those who don't know the 1.1 patch is up to the fourth beta and should be released fairly soon.

Also, has anyone started an empire in the Metaverse?

[ausonny]

Here's the list of changes for betas 2 through 4:



V1.1 BETA 4 (April 12, 2006).

Note: This build is designed to wrap up bugs introduced in the 1.1 betas so that we can prepare for general release as an official non-beta update.


+ Saved games now load MUCH MUCH faster on new saves

+ Fixed bug in Ship Designer where auto-place would not create a slot icon for modules such as colony, trade, troop, etc

+ Fixed bug in Ship Designer where auto-placed modules could not be removed from the ship

+ Fixed crash when trying to buy AI ships from trade screen (ahem)

+ Fixed bug where Diplomacy history would have no data

+ Fixed bug where large galaxies might save planet data before it the data had been initialized, making the saved game crash in unexpected places

+ Changed saved game version because saved games no longer save influence data - speeds up saved game load time

+ Added support for loading older saved games that still have influence data

+ Fixed bug where you could not select a ship that had been upgraded in the Quick Build list

+ Fixed crash in ship move calculation because the ship had no ship type

+ Fixed crash related to ship/improvement built icons

+ Fixed crash related to failure to load and create fonts

+ Implemented Cari's change to prevent AutoSave crashing

+ Improved stability in various places by checking process pointers before appending them to other processes

+ Added debug messages when memory allocation fails

+ Influence updates immediately after loading a game (No need to wait a turn for the influence to correct itself)

+ Fixed a bug where saved games from older versions that had orbital fleet managers in them did not allow the player to attack ships in a planet

+ Ship Design Screen deletes an old design if the new design has the same name

+ Fixed bug where if you pressed ESC in election window, you would never get any more elections from then on




V1.1 BETA 3A (April 10, 2006). What's new over 1.1 BETA 3
+ Updated AI rally point code to adjust to it being blocked by opponents.

+ AI rally points are now closer to friendly planets so that they're nearer to reinforce

+ New Ship Design and Adaption system implemented based on experiences from (ahem) "after hours play testing".

+ Alien ship names are better. I.e. Drengin Fighter instead of just "fighter".

+ Tightened AI tech trading so that weapons are rarely traded.

+ Torians much better at managing planets.

+ AI treats home planet differently than other planets when it comes to deciding how to build improvements.

+ Lots of tweaks to how the AI determines which technology to research.

+ Updates several of the AI modules to support an improved starbase handling algorithm (didn't update all because "better" is subjective).

+ AI better at upgrading their ships

+ Lots of tweaks to the tactical battle AI

+ AI will tend not to send combat ships out of orbit if doing so would leave the planet vulnerable to an invasion.

+ Normal and Bright AI intelligence levels made a bit easier

+ Trade route value increased based on population of source/destination planets.

+ Fixed bug where display name was used to find ships (can't assume English names!)

+ Updated AI ability picking based on new values.

+ Optimized AI usage of space on a ship.

+ AI will now create sub-fleets that will go after enemy starbases.

+ Technologies 20% cheaper by default (use technology rate to adjust this).

+ AI wont' "help" you by giving you starbases to fight wars.

+ AI is much less likely to trade away mining starbases.

+ Nano Ripper costs more, does 5 damage instead of 6 (it's still a very potent weapon).

+ Drengin loyalty removed from abilities.

+ Fixed bug where ship components that are in the .xml but not in the .shipcfg would not be displayed in the slots in the ship designer

+ Fixed bug where AI ships would build mining starbases without resources. It was allowing them to do this as long as the starbase limit had not been met. Now, if they try it, it will abort before building the starbase and leave a message in debug.err

+ Fixed bug where camera would scroll to AI ships that were targeting the player's dead ships

+ Fixed bug where trade route graphics were not clearing the vertex shader

+ Fixed a crash related to the starbox render function

+ Planet Context window will now update the planet stats as you change the sliders in the Domestic Policy Economy window

+ Fixed upgrade overlay for AI fleets to not display time to upgrade (Release Mode only)

+ Fixed "Auto-obsolete" bug when upgrading a ship design


V1.1 BETA 3 (April 6, 2006). What's new over 1.1 Beta 2

+ More balancing on what techs AIs should research

+ Tighter controls over tech trading

+ AI won't lower relations with a player for military reasons unless it has a distinct military advantage

+ Good civilizations now get an outright + to their relations from neutral civs.

+ Torians better at making use of constructors

+ AIs will tend to have much different sets of technologies based on race.

+ AIs will make a priority out of terraforming their tiles

+ Terran Alliance AI ship designs more flexible with galaxy size (other civs already using this)

+ Terran Alliance will use economic bases to extend their range

+ AIs will accelerate military production if they fall behind enough on military spending.

+ New API FindClosestLocalUnfriendShip(). AIs will use this to put ships near potentially hostile ships that are somewhat near its worlds.

+ New APIs: CalcFullAttack(), CalcFullDefense(). These APIs allow the AI to quickly (CPU wise) determine if a potential target is getting benefits from military starbases and make decisions based on this information.

+ Military Might makes use of the new CalcFullAttack and CalcFullDefense APIs

+ Precursor Rangers don’t show up until after game year 5 (was 3).

+ Some Civs put more emphasis on increasing food production

+ Tech research slightly faster at default tech rate

+ Cleaned up planet economy display so that ()’s only show up if you’re not spending.

+ Tool tip for military spending now shows up if you mouse over the actual number. It will explain where that number comes from.

+ AI better at valuing the worth of planets.

+ AI more wary about attacking fortified starbases (this is harder to balance than it might seem, you want the AI to sacrifice units if necessary to wear down a starbase but you don’t want it mindlessly throwing ships at them, it’s a fine line).

+ Start-up abilities made cheaper but less powerful too. More opportunity to spread ones Civ out.

+ Political Parties re-balanced based on new values.

+ Updated graphics for some planetary improvements.

+ Some planetary improvements made less expensive

+ Spin Control Center now requires Majesty

+ Neutrality Learning Center added

+ Attack Assist Modules now cost typically $300 per module. The reason for this is that these modules essentially give the same benefit as building several small ships when used correctly. $300 may even be too cheap. Late in the game, these costs won’t be significant but it prevents a player from b-lining to these techs and eliminating opponents before the game has really started.

+ Attack and Defense assist modules will require that the starbase have battle stations on them at the very least.

+ Starbase militarization techs cost more to research.

+ Terran Alliance AI focuses more on self-defense of planets Drengin

+ AI now uses experimental weapons focus technology system Scoring system tweaks. See http://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=345&AID=111746 for details

+ Music playing tweaks

+ Update the influence borders when an influence module is added

+ Drengin racial morale increased to 25%, Soldiering racial bonus decreased to 20%.

+ fixed bugs reading in height map mods

+ added ability to read in .str files from the mods\data folder

+ added support for modded star types

+ added support for replacing the custom planets and race config files with copies in the mods folder (but not adding new or partial mods)

+ added support for replacing the abilities xml file with a copy in the mods folder

+ tweaked code that sets the star type so that we get more variety, and made it so that yellow stars only appear for systems with habitable planets and purple stars for systems with class 20+ planets

+ made it so that if you want to mod the AbilityBonuses.xml file it will use additional entries which were previously excluded like Logistics.

+ Implemented “Disable Point Sprites” option. This option will force the game to not use point sprites whether or not the hardware supports them or not. It can be used to speed up performance for cards that do not support point sprites, because point sprites will not need to be emulated with software. The option has the following effects:

a) Stars will not be rendered ( no appropriate substitute without point sprites )

b) Engine exhaust will not be rendered ( no appropriate substitute without point sprites )

c) Ship damage will show as electricity whenever it would normally appear as a fire, smoke, sparks, or any effect that uses point sprites


+ Fixed dials precision in ship designer. When using certain rotation amounts, cardinal directions like 180 deg could not be accurately obtained.

+ Fixed display bug when number of weeks before an election was calculated as negative

+ Stacked Ships window: If you select a fleet, the Details button will change to “Manage”

+ Fixed bug in invasion where number of colonists in colony ships was included in amount of troops after an invasion

+ Fixed autosave loading crash when mods are used

+ Fixed bug where all class 0 planets have the same texture after reloading a saved game

+ Fixed bug/exploit where if you use a fleet with both transports and attack ships to attack a defended planet that belongs to a civ you are not at war with, and you vote to declare war, you skip fighting the ships in orbit and go straight to a land invasion

+ Fixed wrong number of troops displayed when choosing invasion tactic if the fleet has both colony and transport ships in it.

+ Fixed various crashes caused by texture painter not getting initialized

+ Fixed glitch where some components on core ships could not be removed because they said there was something attached to them

+ Planet Context window now takes into account bonuses for ships in orbit

+ Fleets have their own version of CalcFullAttack and CalcFullDefense to add up the full attack and defense of each ship in the fleet

+ added code to make nosprites option read in from prefs.ini file

+ fixed bug where setup appearance screen didn't have the correct style selected in the lisbox

+ added function to galaxy to return the correct directory for the shipcfg file based on the shiptype

+ adding code to be able to upgrade but not overwrite core designs and mods

+ added code to track if a data type is a mod or not

+ now if the anti-aliasing is set to an invalid value, it's just disabled

+ added code so that it will always try to create at least 11 stars (1 for each major race) to keep the code that picks the starting locations for civs from breaking down

+ added code to delete ship cfg files when galciv2 is loaded if there is no definition for it

+ updated shipcfg files for the pre-canned ships so that they save the component name as well as the model name

+ FOW tweaks to remove cases where FOW is permanently unhidden



V1.1 BETA 2 (March 30, 2006) What's new over 1.1 Beta 1

+ Hardpoints on ships tweaked to be more symetrical

+ Torian population growth changed to 20 from 30

+ Torian Morale ability increased to 25

+ Torian luck increased to 10

+ Diplomacy ability slightly more potent in determining diplomatic relations

+ Being a good civilization gives you more bonuses with neutral and good civilizations in terms of relations

+ AI will generally not trade weapons technologies back and forth to other players unless they're very good friends.

+ AI more aggressive about upgrading ships

+ AI escort ships less likely to be converted into attack ships

+ Rewrote CalcMilitaryMight() to be more intelligent. If someone has a higher military might than you now, you better take it seriously.

+ Population Growth tweaked so that abilities are taken into account BEFORE morale bonuses. Net effect is that population growth ability not quite as powerful.

+ Fixed cosmetic glitch where military might factors always displayed "--" in the report screen instead of "-".

+ AI is less rigid about trading weapons and techs with human player, it will trade low level techs even if the player is very powerful but not high level ones unless they are allied.

+ AI much smarter about taking bribes. If you're weak or they really hate you, it takes a much MUCH bigger bribe to move relations back up. Moreover, how often you can bribe and get an effect has been increased (previously you could bribe them every few turns and maintain high relations in perpetuity). Now if you're bribing more than a couple times a year it will ignore subsequent bribes. In short, you can still use gifts and such to increase your relations with other players but you can no longer rely on gifts as the sole means of staying out of war unless you're willing to spend a LOT of money/tech on it.

+ If AI is at war and is losing that war, it will value gifts and help farmore than normal and be much more appreciative.

+ Double-Clicking entries on the Stacked Ship Window will bring up the Ship Details or Fleet Management window for that ship/fleet

+ PaulB's Random Icons showing up on the Galaxy Setup Screen

+ Fixed bug in Options screen where some options that required restart would pop up the message that the game needed restarting, but not list which options required it.

+ Fixed bug where ships built in an off-screen port that had a rally point assign would be invisible next to the planet until they were selected or moved.

+ Implemented graphical <<<< on planet screen to indicate when social production is being added to military production

+ rally point context window enhanced

+ can now move rally points using the MOVE btn on the context area

+ Formatted Text boxes will now allow you to use the mouse wheel to scroll when hovering over the text ( used to have to hover over the scroll bar )

+ End Game Summary Graphs screen now shows up to 10 civs (instead of 8)

+ When a new game is started, the Global Resource Manager now unloads all textures and surfaces that are no longer being used

+ Implemented new MOVE button in Ship Designer:
+ Select a component
+ Click move button (or press M)
+ Click where you want to move the component
+ NOTE: You cannot move a component if something is attached to it

+ Implemented Hot Keys in Ship Designer:
New hotkeys:
Delete - deletes selected component
M - Moves the selected component
1,2,3,4 - Default, Front, Side, Top views
Pre-existing hotkeys:
H to toggle hardpoints on/off
+ and - to zoom in and out

+ Fixed bug where "Cannot Remove Component" popup would get stuck behind the ship design window

+ More balancing of Arcean and Altarian AIs in terms of researching technologies.

+ More emphasis on creating escorts

+ More work on the simulated intuition engine to make better guesses as to whether an area is unprotected. (avoided temptation to simply put in code to have it look to see if there's attack ships in the FOW and escort transports - it's easy to create a perfectly effective AI, it's harder to make an AI that plays like people)

+ Terran Alliance AI more focus on defensive technologies

+ Torian AI better at building up planets.

+ AI better at building up planets at the very start (bias towards factories early on)

+ AI more concerned about the health of its troops in evading trouble with transports.

+ New API: AITakeEvasiveAction(X,Y). Give coordinates of threats and it will attempt to stay away from them. Using this only a bit right now to see effect. Combined with faster ships, it should be harder to take out enemy ships at higher levels. This API only works at Bright or higher.

+ Defensive technologies cost less.

+ Fixed crash when trade ship arrives at a planet and the trade routeaborts because it is too long

+ Added "Remove Functional Components When Upgrading a Ship Design" option to the option screen. This is ON by default. Turning it off will leave the functional parts on a ship when you upgrade it. You will have to remove parts manually.

+ Fixed FogBugz 8471: Upgrading a ship design sets all ports building nothing to build the upgraded design

+ Updated map scrolling in message popup window. If coordinates are passed to message box, the map will now scroll to those coordinates when the message pops up

+ "Do you want to upgrade starbase" popup will now display the name of the starbase and scroll to the location of the starbase

+ Fixed FogBugz 8014: Bottom-most sector displays at top of game screen as 2863311-2863311

+ Updated the tool tips in the camera controls for the ship designer to say "Rotate" instead of pan, since that is what they do now

+ Implemented Details/Manage button in stacked ships list. Players can now easily access the new Fleet Manager interface. Joy!

+ Ship Details window can now display data on a ship type as well as a specific instance of the ship

+ Ship Details will no longer allow you to decommission a ship that is currently involved in a battle

+ Implemented info buttons in the Civ Manager Governor screen. You can now use the info button to get information on ship types or change/disband rally points

+ Fixed bug where "Component will not fit dialog" would get stuck behind the Ship Designer window

+ Fixed bug in Ship Designer dial controls where if set to rotate "freely" the mouse wheel would only allow scrolling in one direction.

+ Fixed problem in games prior to v1.1 that are loaded into v1.1 where the starport would get stuck at 0 turns if they had obsoleted a purchased ship before saving the game.

+ techs now appear in the foreign report window as espionage is done on alien races (fixing problem of not knowing enemy techs when tech trading is turned off)

+ Fixed graphical bug where some components attached to a ship would scale to a HUGE size when trying to resize them

+ Fixed graphical bug where some components attached to a ship would rotate 180 degrees whenever you rotated or scaled them

+ Random opponents and num of races will now randomize on Ctrl+N. (let us know if this is what you want)

+ Humans will now be randomly picked when playing another race.

+ Civ Manager Governor now only lists rally points that are being used for "Ships Going To" list

+ Prevent Cheese: Cannot disband a fleet in fleet manager while the fleet is involved in a battle

+ Race Legend Window will now only show civs the player has met if Blind Exploration is enabled

+ Fixed rare glitch where hardpoints reappear on the ship if you have them turned off, and select a component on the ship or from the list

+ Destroying a fleet will destroy the ships in the fleet. Disband works as it used to. These are now two different things.

[EagleFan]

How is this game? I've heard enough mixed reviews to keep me away from it so far.

[SirFozzie]

Awesome. I'm surprised you've seen mixed reviews, everything I've seen has been completely and totally positive

[EagleFan]

Sorry, not mixed as in a lot of bad. It ranges from good to great but there is always an adendum to the review that states that people that aren't fans of that type of game probably won't like it (that's what makes it a mixed review in my book as I'm not a big RTS person). To me, a true "great game" is one that fans outside the genre will like but this may fall within the "great (fill in the genre) game".

This isn't meant as a slam on the game at all, I basically should have asked if gamers who are not fans of the genre would fall for it. I like turn based; with Alpha Centauri being my favorite of those. I wasn't able to get into Starcraft.

[ausonny]

Well, it isn't an RTS, it's turn based, if that helps.

[ausonny]

I guess I didn't really answer your first question. I'm having more fun with this than I've had with any game outside of the FM series in a couple years. Anyway, that's my 2 cents.

[Warhammer]

Sorry, not mixed as in a lot of bad. It ranges from good to great but there is always an adendum to the review that states that people that aren't fans of that type of game probably won't like it (that's what makes it a mixed review in my book as I'm not a big RTS person). To me, a true "great game" is one that fans outside the genre will like but this may fall within the "great (fill in the genre) game".

This isn't meant as a slam on the game at all, I basically should have asked if gamers who are not fans of the genre would fall for it. I like turn based; with Alpha Centauri being my favorite of those. I wasn't able to get into Starcraft.

Wow, every game review I have seen has been glowing. Except for those where the guys type the review in l33t speak and think if it doesn't require a joystick or a gamepad its not a real game...

Whoever said it was an RTS either didn't play the game, or is smoking something. This is most definitely a turn based game, the only thing that happens in "real time" is resolution of space battles if you could really call a playback of the battle "real time".

[EagleFan]

Thank you, that helped clear up a lot. It sounded promising then I saw RTS tagged to it somewhere and get a little hesitant. So it's a little like Lords of the Realm 2 where the battles are the only RTS part of the action and the rest is basically turn based?

I'll have to check it out.

Thanks.

[ausonny]

The battles are not RTS, you basically get a little movie or playback of fleet battles.

[Eaglesfan27]

Yeah, this is completely turn based, and I've had a great deal of fun with it (I'm on the last battle of the campaign.)

[Flasch186]

i just got the game, and will be playing tonight.

[Greyroofoo]

I love the game, thought I'm waiting for the next patch to come out.

Not necessarily because anything is broken, just that with all the changes I don't want to get used to playing the game a certain way and having it all change on me.

[Flasch186]

LOL myfirst use of the game was to kill a wasp on my back porch with the box as Im downloading the sevomod 3 for civ4. Well already got good use out of it :)

[WSUCougar]

I think karma would dictate that you are some kind of insectoid aliens in your first actual game. ;)

[Flasch186]

is it just me or does the game start off kinda slow?

What are some of the settings you guys use to start? number of civs, etc? to get the best game.

[gi]

is it just me or does the game start off kinda slow?

What are some of the settings you guys use to start? number of civs, etc? to get the best game.

I don't think this game starts off any slower than other 4X games. I choose the default settings for my first couple games until I understood the game better.

[Bonegavel]

After playing and falling in love with Civ 4, the demo for Gal Civ II just doesn't cut it for me. I love Brad's stance on making games easy to play (aka, no starforce or other type of protection), but if I want to play a Civ game, it's going to be Civ 4.

[gi]

After playing and falling in love with Civ 4, the demo for Gal Civ II just doesn't cut it for me. I love Brad's stance on making games easy to play (aka, no starforce or other type of protection), but if I want to play a Civ game, it's going to be Civ 4.

The one thing I feel Gal II does better than Civ IV is AI. The AI is noticably better in Gal II. From that point I feel it comes down to the setting. Do you like earth or space better. I'm playing both and enjoying them both for what they are. The learning curve is a lot higher on Gal II in my opinoin too. You also get multiplayer with Civ IV. Both great games.

[Bonegavel]

The one thing I feel Gal II does better than Civ IV is AI. The AI is noticably better in Gal II. From that point I feel it comes down to the setting. Do you like earth or space better. I'm playing both and enjoying them both for what they are. The learning curve is a lot higher on Gal II in my opinoin too. You also get multiplayer with Civ IV. Both great games.

I agree with that to a certain extent. The verisimalatude of Civ4 probably doesn't hurt, but something about GalCivII seems "wrong" for lack of a better word and I'm not good enough yet at either game to recognize differences in the AI (though everything I read about galciv's AI is that it is exactly as you say).

With Civ4 I can easily understand the tech tree and I just don't get that from GalCiv. And maybe it does come down to the tech tree (which is a HUGE part of both games).

[gi]

With Civ4 I can easily understand the tech tree and I just don't get that from GalCiv. And maybe it does come down to the tech tree (which is a HUGE part of both games).

One of the reasons that CIV 4 is a huge success is because the tech tree is intuitive. Not so with other games. Space Empires IV comes to mind. It takes time to learn it, where in CIV 4 you already know it. More time to have fun in CIV 4.

Good point Bonegavel.

[Flasch186]

one thing it has done is got me back into Civ4 with the Sevo3mod...pretty nice pace to it now.

[Brillig]

Hmm.

While the tech tree is a big part of the enjoyability of 4X games, I don't think you can take the position that Civ4's is more intuitive. Let's have a look...

GC2's tech tree has 230-ish techs in it, and is painfully linear. There are 24 different tech lines, and they are, for the most part, fairly obvious. You've got your 3 weapons lines, 3 defense lines, sensors, engines, logistics, 6 different flavors of planetary improvements, etc... All in all, not too complex.

On the other hand, Civ4's tech tree has a mere 87 techs. A look at the tech tree shows that it's anything but linear. Intuitive? Not on your life. For example, why would Banking be a pre-req for Replaceable Parts? How can you have Writing before Alphabet?

That said, I do think Civ4's tech tree is better than GC2's, for a number of reasons. One, it's more interesting, the techs have real names and we can all understand what they are - not so with GC2, where it's unclear whether Enhanced Logistics is better or worse than Advanced Logistics. Two, while the spaghetti dependencies of Civ4 make for a messy diagram, it's a more interesting decision to face when a tech has multiple prerequisites instead of having each tech following a single predecessor like a line of dominos. (In theory, custom designed ships would help this out in a way, as each ship would have dependencies on multiple technologies. However, this doesn't work in practice, as one never tries to tailor research to reach specific ship designs, and instead simply designs ships to fit the technology available.) Three, the GC2 tree just has too many techs, and for the most part, they only do one thing (i.e., give one part, or one new building, or one bonus) - the Civ4 techs, on the other hand, almost always give multiple benefits, to different parts of the game, which makes them, on the whole, more interesting than the GC2 techs.

So, although the GC2 tree is much larger, it's also much simpler, and more intuitive - you always know what you're getting, and it's easy to figure out where you need to go to get something. The Civ4 tree is just more fun, though.

[gi]

While the tech tree is a big part of the enjoyability of 4X games, I don't think you can take the position that Civ4's is more intuitive. Let's have a look...

I believe I didn't give enough information to make my point. Everyone knows what banking is right off the bat. Not everyone knows what a discovery sphere is off the bat. CIV's is more intutive because you already have a real good understanding on what a tech will most likely do. GC II you have to spend time learning what the concept is then learn how the game handles it. So in my opinoin, CIV IV's is very much more intuitive.

[Critch]

There's a new patch out for GalCiv 2, seems mainly to be improvements to the AI and generally cleaning up.

I guess anybody who has GalCiv 2 probably knew this after getting an email from stardock, but I'm using it as an excuse to bump this and say that GalCiv 2 is the best space 4x game ever.

That is all.

edit - I should have put the links in:

download - hxxp://www.galciv2.com/Downloads.aspx

details - hxxp://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=164&AID=116586

[Brillig]

Update - the expansion to GalCiv 2, Dark Avatar has been released (a week early, was scheduled for Feb 14.) You can find a release-day dev-chat here:

hxxp://galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Dark_Avatar_chat_log

[sachmo71]

is this a good game, even before the expansion?

[Galaril]

The races are very vanilla. This game has some good gameplay but not much personality it gets old fast. AT least SEV, even with it's bugs has more personality and fun. I hate that GC combat is pointless and boring.YMMV

[Brillig]

Well, that's one opinion. The general consensus is, though, that this is the best 4x space strategy game in years. I'm not sure it's better than Civ IV, but many reviewers seem to think so. There's a demo for the first game available in various places.

[gi]

AI is better in GAL Civ II than CIV IV. Overall, this is an outstanding game with an outstanding value. I own both and if you have the money, get both. If you can only buy one, I'd consider what interests you the most, space or earth. Also figure if you wish to play multiplayer or not. CIV IV has multiplayer, GAL Civ II doesn't.