I downloaded Dark Avatar yesterday, booted it up -- and got sucked right in. First off, I was tickled to find it had the only real feature request I had for CG2: the ability to save a character once you've defined it. Seriously -- that's all I've really wanted.
Besides some of the new game features (e.g., asteroid mining), I noticed what must be some changes made for balance. Playing at 'challenging', I found that anomalies yielded much less cash than they used to, which undercuts one of my standard opening strategies, namely making a quick research climb to 'Sensors' and then fast-spending out two or three extra survey craft; I almost always get my money back quickly and then a lot more after that. I also noticed that planets I settled seemed less likely to have bonus tiles, while the computer opponents had many more bonus tiles on their worlds, but that may have been just luck of the draw in those first few trial games.
After an hour or two of playing around, I decided to try the 'Dark Avatar' campaign. I'll note for the record that neither the Altarian Prophesy campaign nor the Dread Lords campaign held my interest sufficiently to get me past the first few scenarios. Dark Avatar, on the other hand, sucked me right in. I was up playing until 5 am, then picked up again late this afternoon and finished it just a little while ago. Kudos to whoever put the campaign together; it's well designed, tough but fair (I played at 'Normal' difficulty), and forces you to use lots of different game design aspects. (I also found that I carefully crafted my character's attributes and politics to match the anticipated demands of each scenario.) The final scenario was the toughest and longest; it was just teetering on the brink of being tedious when I caught up enough in tech and money to take the fight to the Dread Lords. Once they were gone, it was pretty easy to finish off the Korath, though they were clever enough to have changed their ship weapons/defenses to counter my current fleet, forcing me to quickly do a redesign myself and then upgrade a few of my ships for the final assualt.
I did have two freeze-ups in the course of about 12-15 hours of playing, and I'm pretty sure they were both triggered by clicking on the Civilization Manager icon at the bottom of the screen while the game itself was still catching up with me. I have MS Visual Studio installed on my laptop; both times the game tried to bring up the Visual Studio Just-In-Time panel and my whole system locked up. Other than that, the game ran quick and solid. I'm especially grateful that the game for the most part no longer interrupts you while you're in the middle of doing something to accomplish what it thinks should happen next.
All in all, a great upgrade and well worth the price. It brings some freshness and interesting twists to a game that I've probably already spent far more time with than I should have. Well done; congratulations to all and sundry. ..bruce..
A HINT FOR THE LAST SCENARIO IN THE DARK AVATAR CAMPAIGN (POSSIBLE SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO LIKE TO FIGURE THESE THINGS OUT ON THEIR OWN): The Dread Lords will keep showing up with their nasty ships to blow away any starbases you attempt to build. So just build one simple starbase early on, away from your systems, and leave a ship nearby so that you can see what the Dread Lords are using for weapons and defense. Then don't attempt to build another starbase until you have built up enough mean ships of your own to take them on -- and then build a starbase as bait, with your ships in position to trap the DLs. Note that I went through a fair amount of time, money, starbases, and ships before I figured out this is what I would have to do.
