I've pretty much fallen away from the genre during the past five years or so. I got started back on my Commodore 64 with a GEOS game called Cluster Wars. It was pretty simple: planets had a set economy, you build ships, and send them to destroy your opponent. There wasn't much depth and the AI had a nasty habit of tossing his entire fleet at you without worrying about his own defense. Still, it got me stuck into the genre and in the next ten years I enjoyed variety of other titles.

I never played Master of Orion when it was originally released. It was only in the past half year that I tried to get myself back into the genre by playing it. The experience was wonderful. It was pretty much everything that it was hyped by its fans as. I took a peek at the GalCiv1 demo, but found the lack of an ingame tutorial rather discouraging. Because of that, I never got into the game. With GalCiv2 I heard that there would be tutorial videos and there were, so I got myself hyped on the various press releases and journals and today I bought the game.

It's great. The interface is smooth, the graphics are wonderful, and the gameplay sets a great balance between complexity and depth, with little micro-management. I think I'll enjoy this game for quite some time to come.

Regarding several issues that I hear alot about. . .

Multiplayer: yeah, there's a big thread about this and I agree with StarDock's stance. Personally, the only turn based games I like to play in multi-player are those that last a couple dozen turns at most. In such games, each turn tends to be the same length, or sometime the turns get shorter. This type of game is the exact opposite. Turns get longer as there's more to do and I would be really annoyed to find people rushing me or for others to be taking far longer than they should. Truth to be told, I like the idea of playing this type of game against other people, but in practice I don't think it'd be enjoyable in most cases.

Installation and runtime issues: None! I got it working on the first try! My drivers are up-to-date, my system relatively clean, and my hardware is decent. The only annoying issue was that it seemed to have taken a while for my account to be registered with the game. It took quite a while before I was able to register the game and get Stardock Central to update things. Still, registration didn't seem to be a requirement for playing the game, so I had a short game to get aquainted and registered after. No real problems to speak of.

Anyways, gotta play more. I'm still a noob and have really got to refine my gameplay. . .