Reading your replies has been very … educative. I want to thank you all.
I started a new thread because I cannot read them all, nor reply, immediately (due to the time zone, my starting post went back to half an hour past midnight, so, whilst you were posting the replies I was sleeping) and I fear no one of you would have read my answer after more than 12 hours.
Besides, there are reasons inducing me to believe that discussions of this sort can evolve no more. I will try to explain them. But first a couple of general consideration.
1) Originality is a value only for occidental cultures (though they too, now and again, have deviated from it: let’s think upon the Mannerism or the works of Andy Wharol).
2) GC2 is in no way an original game: it is a reprocessing of concepts and mechanics already seen in other games, even if several of them have been greatly refined (graphic, AI, ship building).
3) A good sequel is better than a bad new game (take this as a general assertion: I’d be culturally dishonest if I called GC2 a bad game).
4) Many a Milton is buried in country churchyards: nowadays, more than ever, a great market success doesn’t imply that the product is a good one (unless you consider "good" what pleases the multitude – I do not). This was admitted even by Draginol (see the post "The science of game publishing - March 29, 2006" in the journals section).
5) It is not entirely true that "People love the game", Xant: if you had the time to browse all the posts, you’d find many a complaint on this or that. About the quality of GC2 there is disagreement, but I concede that the fans seem to be more than the critics (or simply post more often – ok, it’s a joke).
And now, let’s come to the point.
Pnakotus wrote that GC2 "It's not a MoO2-esque wargame". The fact that someone can consider MOO2 a wargame left me bewildered, at first. I’ve ever thought it is a strategic game with some RPG aspects, where one can win even restricting to the minimum his military activity. Then I understood something very important that I’ve neglected: in every game you have an antagonist, and beating it is the goal of every game; but not always the antagonist is an entity (another character or race) distinct from you. Strategic games in which you have to build your society (empire, civilization or whatever) and make it prosper, often leave to you the choice of your antagonist, and this may be yourself.
In fact (remember the first Settler?), you may find fun simply in overcoming the many obstacles maintainig passably stable your growing society lays before you, whilst beating the other characters/races ends in the background.
So it seems that me and Pnakotus (and many other like us) have simply chosen different antagonists playing GC2, with me preferring to challenge myself in social management and him preferring to beat his adversaries through either weapons, culture domination or diplomatic efforts (or a mix of them). In the end, this is, to me, the reason why I love this game less than him and care very little about the "intelligence" of the AI and its improvements.
So, you can see: we are at a dead end: I’ve expressed my opinion, others the ones of theirs. I have little hope things will change so that everyone will be pleased (it’s simply impossible) and that implies there is no purpose for other posts such as this.
A last word for Frookie. Even if I’ve just stated that further discussions about what I’d like to see implemented in GC2 are futile, I sense I owe him a brief answer: I don’t like to pass as one able only to criticize, proposing nothing. I’d like to have the governors improved, so that they would be able to manage other things besides generical buildings and soil improvement; I’d like to be forced to heed the physical characteristics of planets before colonizing them; I’d like to find guardians protecting the more coveted resources, the anomalies hiding the greater bonuses, the planets of class 20 and over; I’d like the tech tree could really grows and reveal new technologies when you stumble across certain anomalies; I’d like espionage gave me more options (a wide array of covert operations). I’ll stop here, but I’m far from done.
And yes, all of this things are "the good points from heaps of different games". And yes, I humbly "demand to know why one game doesn't have them all' thing" [sic]. What shame is there in such a desire?
P.S.: I hope Shakespeare fans would forgive me for the quotation.
