Well, I finished my first real game (2nd game overall - 1st one didn't last long as I got used to stuff). I was playing a medium sized map on beginner level as a custom race.

Things went from being very good, to a bit scary, to good again. The game took me a loooong time to play - somewhere between 8 and 12 hours (not sure exactly).

I had a nice start and was able to gobble up some extra systems. I started off peacefully developing non military techs and didn't even build any warships for a long, long time - which seems like something you can get away with since early ships are weak and it takes a while to get the tech to do invasions.

I had a pretty good sized empire, as did the terrans who bordered me. It was about this time that I noticed the terran influence was going nuts and overlapping some of my planets. I was thinking this isn't a good thing. So I started to focus on military research expecting to have to whup some terran butt, and I also built some influence starbases to push em back some.

Also about this time I noticed the terrans were fighting lots of other people including the minors...and they were gobbling up worlds at an alarming rate. Before too long, two of the other majors had surrendered to them and they'd grabbed some NICE worlds in the process.

Fortunately, I guess, they managed to do this with weak ships, and I'd researched superior military tech, and started pumping out my "Antiterran" line of medium hulled ships. The bulk of the terran power was their overwhelming and enveloping influence.

Thus began a series of wars between the terrans and I. Well, everyone was at war most of the time - so much for terran diplomacy - they were fighting 1-3 at a time nonstop.

The terrans had more ships than me, but mine were technologically superior - so I won many battles. Even so, and even with me taking terran planets and them getting nowhere inside my borders, they still thought they had the upper hand and wouldn't easily settle for peace (something I found odd since I was throttling them and taking planets with ease).

Eventually I expanded enough and cut the terrans down enough that I felt comfortable again, achieve peace, and built up for the next round of "expansion". Meanwhile the terrans were still fighting nonstop with others, and after a few years of peace they declared war on me - with no ships anywhere near my borders to attack me with. Another space oddity.

So I whupped em some more, and whupped em some more, and eventually wiped them out, then the other remaining races, who were easy by that time because I had large ships and vastly superior tech.

----

Overall, the game is fun as heck - I'm really digging it. I've had a few small glitches and a few things I'd like to see enhanced, but nothing game breaking at all.

The AI did some boneheaded things but I was playing on "beginner" and it should make mistakes, things like sending unescorted transports near my guarded planets, or this one time I wasn't paying much attention and put half my home fleet in upgrade mode...THEN I noted TWO terran fleets within striking distance. They surely could've done some damage especially since I didn't have the fleet/planet/defense thingie. But, they were fixated on an undefended planet quite some distance away and didn't change their plans. I wiped em as soon as m upgrades were done.

I destroyed the AIs for research, pretty much and considering I'm a noob that doesn' t seem that great. Hopefully it was just due to beginner level. With the literally nonstop warring going on it's no wonder they didn't research as much though. My game was violent from the moment AIs could invade planets. After that, there was never one instance where there was all out peace - someone was always fighting.

I've still only played this one real game, so it's hard to make full or intelligent comments, but here's some things I really liked:

- Fleets rule. Fleet battles are much more fun. Wailing on helpless enemies with fleets is spiffy.

- Ship design rules - and for me it's not even for the cosmetic/artistic elements, even though they're cool. The thing I like is that you can totally customize your ships for whatever purpose you want. The whole system is also very well balanced - it's hard to make a "killer ship" of any given tech level due to limitations on just how much you can pack in a hull. But near the end of my game, when I had more flexibility, I'd made some fun designs. I had short range fighters to defend world less likely to be attacked, I had offensive powerhouse large ships with good range and speed, I had constructors and troop transports with ridiculous speed so they could get from my back line productive worlds to the front in a hurry, I made a large hulled ship with 1 engine and as many sensors as it could hold, parked it in the center of the map, and it could "see" the whole map for me so I knew every enemy movement (kinda cheesey but hey, I had to research the tech and build it - before that I had a bunch of tiny hulled sensor drone ships doing the same thing).

I like the flexibility in having complete control over range, speed, attack, defense, etc - it lets you create ships for any occasion.

- I didn't even come close to running out the tech tree and I played til I conquered the last remaining planet. I like this. I would've had to play a long, long, long much longer time to run ou tthe tree. I had tons of techs to research and most were at 10+ weeks each, and there were techs lined up after those too.

- For me one of the biggest leaps in the game is having limited tiles to develop on planets and the more in depth planet development. It makes you put a lot more thought into planet development. It's fun to specialize planets and build wonders and such to turn them into superpowers. One of my earliest worlds was of decent size with a nice +% to production tile - I made it my manufacturing capital and it built the majority of my ships for the whole game. It was my favorite planet.

- Influence is rugged. You really have to be on top of it. In my game two major AIs flipped to the terrans in a matter of a handful of weeks. They just folded. It was scary. One week I was the same size as the terrans and building up to whup em - a few weeks later they had doubled in size thru assimilating the two other majors. I thought I was doomed. But I played it out and persevered.

- The graphics are awesome. I know, it's a strat game and graphics don't *really* matter - but it's damn nice to be able to zoom from a tile like level all the way in til a single ship fills your screen and it's loaded with details. You can zoom in on individual freighters on trade routes and see the designs you made.

- The interfaces are tight. There's a ton of information available. I didn't even use most of it - but that's the great thing - it's there if you want it to maximize but you can also play without worrying about the nitty gritty details too. I was somewhere in the middle, I think, and I'm sure I'll dive deeper as I play, but it's nice to be able to complete without flipping between 6 screens of numbers to see what's going on.

- Governments are beyond annoying (in the game that is...well, IRL too at times). In my game the terrans were clearly a threat, every race on the map was coming to me for help agains tthem, and I'd spent YEARs building up to fight them, then I got federation or whatever, and then moved into position to attack, and then the senate refused to let me attack. Everyone in the universe wanted me to attack - except my government. I had mulitple huge fleets and transports all over human planets and couldn't do a dang thing. So keep your morale up so you don't get voted down when you want to attack! - My game took a long while to play - which is good - but it never felt slow and I didn't feel artificially held back. One thing that slows me down in this and galciv is transports - you have to have troops to take worlds. The nice thing in galciv2 is that you can build FAST transports (I had transports holding 3k trrops moving 21 pc/wk - which was insanely fast in my game since my warships were doing 9pc/wk). It still hurts to take those 3k "troops" off of a planet - that's what slows me down. But with well designed fleets yo're not necessarily waiting 20 turns for your troops to get to the action, which is NICE. ---- Well, errm, obviously I can write way too much, and could write more, but I gotta go start another game.