Agree way too early for a good review. I'm not going to be up to snuff to take a look at the AI at all which I am most excited about. The tech tree has me boggled....just because I know how I want to play but I don't know exactly how to progress diplomaticly /defensively without leaving basic improvements behind. Once I get a feel for the pacing for planetary advancement, exploration, and military progression I'll be able to make a pref strategy.

So far love it love it but here are my...
Issues:
Much much prefer arrowkeys to control map scroll rather than ship movement...or at least an option.

Ship designing
-couple of the hardpoints are facing the wrong way....didn't check everything but noticed only so far on the tiny hulls.
-Do CAD work myself and am familiar with certain control patterns.
-removing a part by clicking the part then hitting delete.
-an undo option
-a click copy function (eyedropper)
-more windows shortcut like functions (del, ctrl-c,ctrl-y)
-'ghost' parts after deleting parts that extend beyond the "total-parts-list"
-more prominant highlighting of selected parts
-Able to adjust lighting
-A right click function (no ideas as ot what)
-minor - maybe more categories for the extra parts

other - clicking the slide bars...leaving the bar when holding the left mouse button causes the slider to stop.
Sound stutter...may be performance issue
tech tree help - I'm lost picking techs....don't understand what the improvements are numberwise. miniturization for example...trial and error for now is ok.

After my first full game of GalCiv 2, I am exceedingly impressed. While I have yet to delve into the campaign mode, I feel that the standard skirmish-type scenario is a good basis for review.

Before I go into detail about my particular game, allow me to comment on the graphics. They are simply amazing. From the beautifully rendered ships to the subtle parallax in the tech tree, this game screams quality. My only graphical complaint stems from the occaisional lack of contrast between the smaller ships and the starry background. While I am fairly certain this can be rectified by altering the background in the options menu, I believe this to be a nonideal solution.

The tech tree as a whole is well designed, if occaisionally unbalanced. For instance, Miniaturization (a technology which allows you to cram more parts onto your ships) is essential if you intend on creating any custom-designed ships. Conversely, the population growth paths (Xeno Farming, etc) were left unresearched, as unchecked population reduces morale far more than it benefits production. A minor complaint is the desire for the ability to remove certain techs from being displayed in the main bar on the upper left. I focused mainly on beam weaponry and shielding, but the top section of my research screen was clogged with low-level techs from the other weapon branches.

I began, naturally, by going through the tutorials. These were all very helpful, and they contain all the information a beginner would need to jump headfirst into GalCiv 2. They are also divided in such a way as to enable the long-term GalCiv 1 player easy access to information new in the sequel. The voicework on each tutorial is much better than one would expect, though it sounds at times like a quality microphone would have been a sound investment.

The feature which has garnered the most attention, naturally, is the shipyard. It is here that the player gets free reign over the design of their ships. While the functional components are limited by your current research progress, the aesthetic additions (ranging from the science-fiction staple Stanford Torus to tiny blinking lights) are limitless. Through these components, the number of possible ship layouts is limited only by your creativity.

However, a system this complex is not without its caveats. Often times I would find myself uncertain why my ship design was refusing to be saved even though I was within my space limit on the hull. The unfortunate fact is that in these cases where your ship seems somehow invalid, you get no indication of this other than the fact that the save window doesn't appear. That's not to say the save window doesn't exist, it just exists BEHIND the shipyard window.

The AI in this game is very flexible, and ranges from mentally handicapped to much smarter than you. Considering the fact that I am stereotypically bad at Civilization style games, I begin on Easy. As such, none of my opponents seemed overly interested in defending their ships, and any planet I gained control of was underdeveloped. Needless to say, were I playing on a harder difficulty, that would not have happened. Then again, if I was playing on a harder difficulty, I personally wouldn't have been able to gain control of a planet in the first place.

In short, for those of you who love Galactic Civilization 1, or any turn-based civilization development game, buying GalCiv 2 is a no-brainer. My complaints are minimal and superficial. GalCiv2 takes everything that was good about its predecessor and improves upon it tenfold, while further advancing the genre as a whole. This game is truly what a sequel should be.

93/100

Neato. I think I shall wait a week or two to buy the game. My mom doesnt have the money for it right now, and with all the reported problems Im seeing, I think it would be wiser to wait untill they release updates that adress these issues

I love It!
I was winning in my first game, playing as Korx vs 3 other races in a small galaxy. I was winning until the damn terran president was assasinated. That had to be my fault. The AI smoked me. (But I loved it)

Graphics: 11/10
Gameplay: 11/10
Sound: 11/10
Pros: Many
Cons: ??? I'll have to get back to you on that. J/K! Seriously, NONE.

Stardock Delivers! & the crowd goes wild! Wow, what an amazing game. It will blow you away. High quality graphics, sound, music. Graphics are very beautiful. Movies are impressive. A++ for the tutorials. Game is newbie friendly and Gal Civs veterans can jump right into the fray easy enough. Gameplay is great. No MP is not a con, seriously. A high quality single player experience. Bonus pack was icing on the cake!

Summary: Must Buy Now! Do not pass go! Go directly to Stardock.com and order now! (for those that haven't )

I give it a 9.5 on a 10 scale.

The game play is excellent and the AI is great. On a planet I acquired from the Drengi they had built all the right improvements and used the bonus squares correctly. Playing at normal, the only obvious mistake the AI made was building too many scouts for a tiny map.

There are a few hiccups that will probably be patched soon but they don't disrupt the game play and the only one I even recall is that the first impulse engine seems to be a mass driver instead of an engine.

The only thing that ticked me off was, I forgot to log on to metaverse so I missed out on logging a nice score (for me). Based on the 5 digit scores on crippling, that are already posted, I probably won't be logging that many scores anyway.

It was worth the long wait.

I have played about 3/4 of the way threw a gigantic, beginner galaxy, and so far overall the game has been excellent,
graphics are great, sound is good, I haven't really gotten into ship design yet, just made a couple quick, I haven't had any of the problems that anyone else has had as far as system crashes or anything, but my comp isn't the greatest, so I have had alot of slowdown in the last couple of hours of gameplay, not a game problem, just to much info for my comp.

Little things I didn't like:

Ship battles, watching them wiggle around is really wierd to me, but I'll just turn that off in the future, no big deal.

I would like to be able to see the whole tech tree and not have to click next techs to see where the tree is going, I really like civ 4's version of the tech tree, but once I get the tech map that won't be big deal either.

That is about it at least of what I have seen so far and I know I'll want to play it more (BTW that quiting screen is evil, "Are you sure you don't want to take just a couple more turns" - cracked me up).

Overall I'm sure the little social life I had just got a little smaller, so 4.5 out of 5.

I have not yet finished my first game, but i do have a few first impressions:

First of all, let me say I am definitely impressed by what I have seen so far.

The whole tech tree is a bit daunting. I am the sort of player that is used to routinely completing the tech tree and I find the massive range of techs avaialble a bit daunting, especially when i can't see the whole tech tree at once. Once my boxed version of the game arrives this will not be a problem.

I would like an option to dictate the number of minor races in a map - a possible option in a future update?

Keep up the good work!

I still don't know where I stand on this game. It's very pretty, and the ship customisation is a cool feature, but I have to say I find it fairly bewildering. I really enjoyed playing Galciv I, so I don't know what the difference is. In my first three games, all at cakewalk, I had massive troubles with economy and morale, which left me foundering in bankruptcy. In the words of The Streets, it was supposed to be so easy...

I then had a go at the campaign, making the inaccurate guess that it would have some sort of walkthrough element. I quickly found out how aggressive my Altarian allies could be - they surrounded my worlds with influence starbases so thoroughly I didn't have enough room to build any helpful bases of my own. I gave up in disgust on that front.

Also I couldn't figure out how to set rally points. I clicked everywhere on the interface, but no flags or indicators came up on the screen - is there a hotkey or something? I couldn't find it. I had a quick look in the manual but nothing obvious presented itself, although admittedly I didn't look everywhere.

So I'm going to give up on it at the moment. It's too complex for my tastes as it stands so I'm going to wait until there's some decent articles on how to play it and how to ward off stagflation and unruly peasants. I'll wait til then before I rate it, because otherwise it wouldn't get much in the gameplay department and from the sounds of it everyone's been loving that aspect. But if I was to pass judgement at this stage, it would get a 5/10 or so - I really do like that customisation feature, and the little touches in the dialogue are fantastic. I just can't figure out how to play it.

Cactoblasta, have you watched the totorials?

Also Brad has posted several game play examples on the site. check out the jurnals section.

Very good, congrats to stardock on an excelent game

I played about 1 and 2/3rds metaverse games last night. My initial reaction was a 10 out of 10 score. The game feels very well polished. I like the sense of humor. The ship design has lots of great potential. Everything runs smoothly at full settings. It's all good stuff.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to drop my rating down to 8 out of 10. Once some patching takes place I'll bump that back up. The game seems to be riddled with minor bugs (not so minor?). Here's a list of some issues I ran into:

* After updating video drivers I always CTD trying to start a campaign game. Sandbox games play just fine.
* Once an AI has owned a resource I can never build a starbase there. All of my ships just move on top of the resource as if it isn't there. AI constructors can still come along an build mining bases on it, just not me.
* I split a fleet and couldn't get it to go back together. Instead I got blank selectable ships that hung around until I sold them off for 0 each (except one that wouldn't sell). This only happened once. Other times I had no problems with fleets.
* I never got upgrading to work right. Once I upgraded a design that had no ships built yet. That prompted me to switch ships from the old design to the new. Another time I got the prompt to convert old ships and I said no, so it deleted the old design from my list of available designs (despite the fact I still had a dozen ships of that design). All the ships seemed fine after that. All other times I could never get the upgrade dialog to open so I could never upgrade my ships. I could never find any other way to upgrade a ship.
* You can't launch an empty colony ship and you can't scrap ships that are in orbit. (Not really a bug, just a design flaw).
* Designing ships (while cool in theory) became a bit of a pain because it was too painful to sort through the bling pieces to find what I want or need. Perhaps this problem goes away with familiarity... Also you can only scale pieces before you place them (not sure why).
* I turned on the option to always watch the full battles, but the full battle would only randomly show up perhaps 60% of the time for battles in open space and 0% of the time for battles around planets.
* I wanted to use the cinematic camera during the battles, but it just doesn't do a good job at tracking the action. The top down view will have to do.
* Where are the buttons to take me to my next ship that doesn't have moves? I was lucky enough to discover that space bar skips a ship/fleet for this turn, but if you haven't moved all your ships and you stop to manage a planet or something, then you have no good way of getting back to finding the other ships you still need to move. And how about a way to center the view on your currently selected ship? Gah! Two little buttons on the interface...

I'm sure there were a couple other issues I've forgotten. Unfortunately I'm only operating on 4 hours of sleep right now... ...so obviously the game isn't bad. It just seems plagued by all sorts of small little problems. I'm sure they'll all get fixed fairly quickly.

I would like to be able to see the whole tech tree and not have to click next techs to see where the tree is going, I really like civ 4's version of the tech tree, but once I get the tech map that won't be big deal either.

Have you tried some options on the research screen that allow you to diplay all techs? And you can move around the tech tree with the mouse

It's slick. The interface is nice, there are many little touches (like the awesome research text), and the game's framrate runs unwaveringly right on my monitor's refresh rate of 60Hz.

One thing I found odd had to do with ship upgrading. It works perfectly for the most part, but seems impossible to do individually (not by class) with ships in fleets unless you take them out of the fleet first. This is just a minor thing right right now.

The only other complaint I have is that the campaign isn't quite my cup of tea. I'm on the first mission right now, on normal and beating the Drengin up, but it's just not as fun as the normal game. It's probably just too restricted feeling, whereas I know there's a full game available with a press of a different menu button.

Weak review, I might right something more detailed after I've played a bit more.

* Where are the buttons to take me to my next ship that doesn't have moves? I was lucky enough to discover that space bar skips a ship/fleet for this turn, but if you haven't moved all your ships and you stop to manage a planet or something, then you have no good way of getting back to finding the other ships you still need to move. And how about a way to center the view on your currently selected ship? Gah! Two little buttons on the interface...

End of quote

It's still the Find button...

Score: 4.5 out of 5. Tagline quote: "It's Civ4 in space, but with a better end game!"

Pro:
-------------
- Very accessible 4X game in the style of MoO2.
- New Ship Designer feature adds ability to customize ships with both gameplay components and pure eye candy; it's time to "pimp your ride"!
- Galactic map when zoomed in has nice looking ships, planets and stars with really top notch graphics appeal, while a simple spin of the scroll wheel zooms out to a more traditional abstract view of the battlefield with easy to understand icons and symbology.
- Easy to understand charts and graphs enable understanding of your economy without turning GC2 into a spreadsheet exercise.
- Cinemagraphic battle view allows those gee-whiz "Star Wars" movies space batle sequences, but can be skipped if desired.
- Real attention payed to making mundane details of politics, economy, combat and construction easy to understand without over-simplifying.
- A return to a fun space combat strategy game that appeals to the brain and to the eye.

Cons:
--------
- Some rare crash to desktop bugs reported in Ship Designer
- Disappearing "Turn" button bug, rare but annoying
- Some users report corrupted save games.
- Einsteinian space-time physics still can't put more than 24 hours in a day, so when am I going to get time to play more

Too early to comment on AI other than so far it hasn't done anything stupid, or at least more stupid than I would do

Recommendation: If you don't mind some rare but annoying bugs, buy this today. If you are a bit concerned, wait for the first update. Either way, this is the 4X game you have been waiting for. Seriously.

Game is great , I was strong supporter of tactical combat but with fleet buttles like this it's not really needeed (*at least in this game* )

The game has one main thing - it's fun to play.

However the "code" does seems a bit unfinished , small bugs and glitches (especially in different statistics/info screens) make a bad impression but hope it will be fixed soon.

* Where are the buttons to take me to my next ship that doesn't have moves? I was lucky enough to discover that space bar skips a ship/fleet for this turn, but if you haven't moved all your ships and you stop to manage a planet or something, then you have no good way of getting back to finding the other ships you still need to move. And how about a way to center the view on your currently selected ship? Gah! Two little buttons on the interface... It's still the Find button...

Err... whoops! I assumed that was a search by name button. Guess I need to go back and reread the manual. Thanks!

I was a big fan of GalCiv 1, but my attempts at playing the late betas and the release have left me a bit cold. I tend to play 4X games as a builder, and there's not a lot of satisfaction so far for that playstyle. Yesterday, I started a Beginner/Large game to try to get a feel for the released product, and my observations below are based on that.

I'm finding the main map/mini map are exceedingly hard to work with. Why do stars show up on the mini but not main at the start of the game? Why does the mini map not scroll to match the main map view? It's useful to zoom in on the mini map, but why is there no indication when zoomed of how it corresponds to the main view? Why is there no way to scroll the mini map when zoomed in? And why is the fog of war so dense that you can barely see what you've explored? All in all, basic exploration seems like a lot of work and not very much fun.

And then there's the planetary development. In my sample game, I wound up with 5 planets after the land grab, for a total of 31 planet quality. After building starports and the command base everywhere, that leaves 21 free tiles. The manual lists a total of 35 superprojects/achievments/trade goods. Bummer, guess I don't get to build very many of them, no matter how well I develop my top planets. Moreover, developing the planet (more factories & such) actually reduces my ability to subsequently build wonders on that planet, because it uses up the free tiles. Planet specialization seems like it would be fun, but in practice the "large" galaxy is way too cramped to support much of it.

And like others have said, it's very hard to get a handle on the research tree as it's presented in game. Only a very short time in the game, and I have dozens of available research projects. I have no idea what they do. The names are mostly meaningless. I can randomly pick "Planetary Improvements" or "Beam Weapons", but I can't really get a handle on what technologies I should be heading towards or how to formulate my overall research strategy.

Hey, the graphics are awesome. The music is great. The ship design seems like it might be fun. But the gameplay....

So far, 5/10 for me. Perhaps I was spoiled by Civ IV.

*I* for one LOVE your game guys...I'm a new comer to the Series (saw an add for Dread Lords in a Mag). I mean sure it has it's quirks, (Not seeing what tech is needed for new core ships is the biggest one i can think of), but i love it...My first game i played was set on easy against i think 4 other races on a Small System...And it was a blast..I was the Terran. About half way thru i was kicking everyones ass, (in a diplomatic sense) and started to get my ass kicked bad (then i discovered how to design my own ships)....So right now i'm d/l the tutorial to see if i can sharpen my teeth a little better.

So on a scale of 1-10....i give it a 7 and i'm sure my opinion will get better after the first patch. Keep up the good Work guys.

Well as many have said before, it's too early to give a real review, so I'll just throw in some first impressions :

1 Buying & Downloading : well done ! my visa payment was processed instantaneously, I donwloaded the stardock thingie without hitches, and the game itself downloaded at a steady 600kbps.
Minor Nitpicks : in the Firefox browser ( latest build ) I can't select my birthyear during registration, so I had to do that part in IE. it's also impossible to select the whole download ( game + movies + music etc ), instead I have to select each extra after the first one has downloaded, forcing me to babysit my download.

2 Initial Impressions : it certainly shows this game has gotten a lot of love from Stardock. the interface is pleasingly simple yet spit-polished, and the graphics are also of the same vein : no deep detail, just a very nice clean look. because of the lower polycount and simple but elegant textures the game runs extremely well on my Asus laptop ( pentium mobile 740 - 1.73gh, 1gb 533 ddr ram, geforce go mobile 6200 with 256 extra video ram ) on full detail at 1280x800.
Minor Nitpicks : I found the technical quality of the FMV to be very low. I think Stardock would have done better to not do any CGI FMV at all, and just go for the classic drawn frames + voiceover à la Homeworld, using the extra money for something else. this is probably just me, but I'm of the principle that FMV should either look mindblowing or you shouldn't bother with it !

It's a bit early to give a comprehensive review, but...

Graphics are great except for some minor flickering of cursor and cutscenes

Shipyard is a bit tough for us aethesticly impaired folks to use for "good looking" ships - but since the game only worries about what's on the ship, basic building works fine (besides, as the Admiral or even the Emperor I only worry about spec sheets - fitting this stuff on the ship is what minions are for  )  It might be nice to have the capability to design using all techs/hulls to set up various ship progressions without taking time from an ongoing game.

Having the designs show up on the tech tree as "New Ship Designs Available" is a really nice touch.

Finding the local minor race building a mining starbase on the nearest resource was quite unexpected.  If this is a new minor race characteristic, I wonder what other OBTW things there are.

First impressions: Favorable and quite playable

The game is great!

Nevertheless I second the notion of some glitches that should be adressed, e.g. when moving a ship out of a bunch of ships (not a real fleet), then the bunch of ship stays selected instead of the ship you just moved - or resources not being usable (until reload) when the starbase on them is destroyed. But these are minor issues which will hopefully be eliminated.

Cactoblasta, have you watched the totorials? Also Brad has posted several game play examples on the site. check out the jurnals section.

The tutorials will have to wait - I've got bandwidth issues at the moment cos I don't live in the US and the best my 2mb connection will give me is between <1k/s and 30k/s. So if they're really good I don't know. I'll check out the gameplay examples though. I thought they were just on the AI at Intelligent - I didn't realise they included the early game! cheers.

From an avid Galactic Civilizations player:

After barely scratching the surface on this game last night I can say that it is leaps and bounds better than the first game, and I loved the first game. It was great being able to download, install, and start playing this game with nearly no time spent trying to learn how to play the game. If you liked GalCiv you'll love GalCiv II. It has everything that was good about the first game (improved) plus tons of great new features.

The custom ship class design is OFF THE CHAIN! I've dreamt about this kind of unit customization in a 4X game since I've played 4X games.

I wish I could say more but I simply need to get more hours of play time in but so far it is everything Stardock promised and more.

Well, overall I think the game has HUGE potential. There is an incredible amount of depth to the gameplay. I love the graphics. The interface makes it fairly easy to access information about your ships and empire. The game succeeds in making you want to play "just one more turn", and when you cannot actually be playing, you will find yourself thinking about the game and wishing you WERE playing.

However, I am sad to say that there are a few critical flaws and ommissions in the game that significantly bring down my review score. The DEVs have already said they will address SOME of these concerns, but playing the initial release of the game without these features made my initial experience with the game a lot less enjoyable than it could have been.

Things that REALLY need to be in the game (IMO) but were lacking at release:

A comprehensive hyper linked civilopedia to explain in detail what any technology in the game does, and exactly what benefit they provide (numbers, stats, etc.). If a player wants to know how to research a large hull, he should be able to click "large hull" somewhere and see exactly what it does and what technology will provide it, and the research path needed to get there. The game just has WAY too much stuff not to have this, and not having it leaves you with a vague feeling of confusion and uncertainty about what you should be doing instead of just having fun. Certain game concepts need to be explained better as well, such as how influence is calculated and applied to the map, and how starbases affect this.

You need to be able to copy ship designs, and just modify the parts you want to change. It might be fun to spend an hour building a cool looking state of the art warship, but if you want to quickly upgrade your old colony ship to move 3 squares instead of 2, you should not have to spend 30-60 min designing a new ship from scratch and struggling to make it look halfway decent unless you want to. You should be able to copy the old design and just replace the engines if that's all you want to do.

I realize learning to develop your own strategies is part of the fun, but another few tutorials should be added giving people some general basic strategies to begin with and explaining WHY it is important to do certain things. Let them figure out their own master strategies, but offer enough basic ones that anybody new to the game has a basic sense of direction and understanding of the basic game mechanics. (Ex: I still don't understand exactly how starbases affect influence, so how do I know exactly where to build one?)

Basic general improvements that would give this game a perfect review score:

When you mouse over anything in the game, there should be pop-up help on what it does and how to use it. (Ex: make it easy to see the difference between sentry and guard, etc.)

A basic key to activate the next ship with movement remaining in case you want to move a differnt one first or you don't know which ship still needs to move and it's not active, that button would find it for you or cycle through them.

The ability to set your OWN viewing presets and replace the default ones.

Ships left in orbit should remind you each turn that they are there and still need orders unless you set them to sentry or guard, etc.

You should be able to set patrol points for ships so they automatically patrol the set of points you give them.

You should be able to look at a starbase and know what modules are available to build there if you were to send a constructor. Things that you have not researched yet should show up faded out, and you should be able to click on them and see what they would do, what you need to research for them to become available, etc. It sucks to have to send a constructor there only to find out after it gets there that there is nothing you can build there that is very helpful and you wish you had known so you could have sent it somewhere else, or not have built the constructor to begin with.

The planetary summary screen should show you which planets are specializing in what types of production at a glance.

Unused social spending should not be wasted...it should just not be spent. Why should a planet be penalized for being fully developed?

When a ship with a starbase constructor module is active, it should project a ghost on the map showing exactly what it's spere of influence would be if it build a starship there, or there should be a command to do this. Wasting time trying to guess if it will cover a certain area with its benefits is silly.

Overall, I can only give the game in it's current state a 75% score. I feel several (not all) of the missing features above should have been OBVIOUS (especially the civilopedia) to anybody playing the game for 2 hours. I know there are other potentially helpful features I thought of while playing that I can't recall offhand now. Just adding the civilopdeia, ship design copy feature, and pop up help would raise my review to a 95%, but without them the game feels almost broken and certainly incomplete to me.