From the article:
Stardock has added some other features to GalCiv2, some that make your life easier, some that make you plan harder. One of the features in the "making your life easier" category is the introduction of Governors. Governors can be assigned to a solar system (there can be more than one habitable planet in a solar system) when you don't want to spend every turn micromanaging planetary resources. Depending on which Governor you choose, he will allocate all of the planetary resources in a solar system towards one area: entertainment, military, social, or research. For example, if you choose Conan the Librarian as your Governor in the Aurigae system, every inhabited planet in that system will allocate its resources towards social spending. If you choose Bill the Researcher, he allocates all the resources towards scientific research, Donald the Sword towards the military, and Ringo the Happy towards entertainment.
Each governor has his drawback: Conan the Librarian helps the system grow rapidly in production and population, and even helps military spending and research grow to a lesser degree, but he also seems to increase a planets pollution, which can make the people very unhappy. Bill the Researcher increases the effectiveness of your researching efforts (allowing you to discover more technology) but not much else: it will take a long time for you to build anything on that planet, and although the game does allow you to buy projects for your planets, they are expensive. Although all Governors have their weaknesses, they can be very useful when you don't want planetary management to clutter up your game.
On a more challenging note, Stardock has made it more difficult for you to meander across the galaxy at will. Now, each kind of spaceship has a limitation called "range" which is the maximum distance a ship can be from "friendly territory"--that is, yours. This forces you to plan where you go, and how you expand. For example, I've had to colonize some fairly unattractive planets to get to the great ones just across the way, simply because my colony ships can't go out far enough. It makes it a lot more difficult to explore the galaxy, and forces you to plan ahead much further. It also changes your expansion and military buildup tactics--for example, I've found that planets near a lot of sectors with no stars or planets at all are great locations for scientific research, because it's harder for the "bad guys" to get to them, so you don't need to worry so much about protecting them. On the other hand, you suffer from the same limitations--so it's very difficult to get out there and take over the entire galaxy in a few hours. |
And the reviewers rig:
Cyrix 5x86/100
24mb ram
AcerView 76i 17" monitor at 1200x1020, 256 colors
Creative Labs 4x CDRom
Creative Labs 16 bit Soundblaster
Maxtor 540 mb drive
Maxtor 1040 mb drive
Maxtor 240 mb drive
Miro 2mb PCI card |
I was doing a search for teh command line swithes for GalCiv2 and found this link: http://www.os2ezine.com/v1n4/galciv2.html
