I don't have vast experience of 4X games. Colonisation and Space Empires III, those are about the only ones I played. Colonisation I beat as the English and never went back to it. Good fun though.

Space Empires III though, that game got its hooks into me deep. It's the only reason I look at 4X games. The demo was addictive and the full game amazing. I wasn't one for multiplayer, so it was purely AI fights for me. On hard, in a large galaxy with maximum civs it provided a real challenge for me... oh how I loved SEIII, from the various treaties, to the way you could customise civs, to random AI civs, simple to design ship graphics (I even released a ship style set... number 34 in the official pack I think it was, the Quitchonian Empire), random events... loved it. For some reason I never bought SEIV though, I guess I just liked SEIII too much and couldn't be bothered to learn the changes I'm looking forward to SE5 to see if it recreates the magic, though the new 3D look scares me.

Anyway, I was always intrigued by Galactic Civilisations because of the praise for its AI. I made AIs for the RTS Total Annihilation (not that there was much you could change), and have always been a fan of a strong AI. The multiplayer crowd tends to vastly overrate itself, and I got tired of reading replies to "Improving the AI" topics things like "Play a human". Well, some people just can't be bothered with that, aren't interested, want a more relaxing game etc. So, when Galactic Civilisations II came along, I decided to pick up a copy (I'd been buying up things from my back catalogue, so since I was in a spending mood...)

Anyway, the game has proven addictive. It took a little while to get into, for two reasons:

1. The economic model is rather different to what I'm used to, and there's quite the curve of learning what interacts with what etc.

2. The campaign is rather dull. I have since stopped bothering with it. What Westwood and Blizzard recognised, something Stardock haven't quite grasped, is that without an engaging backstory, without exciting events between missions to draw you into the story, and without characters to care about, there's no reason to play in a crippled version of the game when sandbox/skirmish mode is available. Since the GalCiv2 campaign offers nothing over sandbox, to play it is simply to bore yourself.

Anyway, I dumped the campaign and have been having fun on the Metaverse, after I finally penetrated the truly painful sign-up systems, which, as I recall, required at least two seperate sign ons.

And this is the problem with Galactic Civilisations II, it's a great game let down by countless niggly problems. The metaverse is one such issue, you can create a password with symbols in it, but that won't work in game because it doesn't accept symbols, but you've no way to knowing that.

I find the diplomacy aspect of the game severely lacking. Speaking to another race is useful only to see what tech, planets and ships they have (which in turn means there's little for the intelligence aspect of the game to do), and to trade for tech. Stardock say they want the AI to act like a human, yet the AI can threaten you, or tell you when it's coming to your assistance, yet you can't do the same to it. Space in GC2 feels very lonely because there's not much reason to talk to the other races, and so I personally feel the random Empires of SE3 had more personality because you'd threaten each other, make demands, and work your way up various levels of treaty which would in turn effect trade. There's really no reason to ally in GC2 since it merely helps them go for an alliance victory, and there's zero cost for them failing to honour an alliance in a time of war (or you for that matter), barring the difficulty in regaining that alliance later.

But the element of the game that really irks me is the UI. In the post-mortem, Brad said he'd learned you need to bring in fresh beta testers for each stage of development. He's right, and the fact that they didn't shows, simply because the UI falls apart in so many areas and smells of people getting used to "working around" problems. One glaringly obvious area is the fact you cannot order an upgrade for a stacked ship, or ship in a fleet, but you can upgrade that ship by choosing a mass upgrade from another ship. Also, Brad has talked about a game freed from the CD, but the game fails to provide a lot of valuable information, meaning you are tied to the manual!! There is no way to find out what a starbase module does without researching it and trying to upgrade a starbase (assuming it's the right type), so you need to refer to the manual. There's no way to find out your current logistics value without going to the research screen and adding up numbers from the logistics path. There's no way to find the logistics value of a ship unless you stack it with another ship... it's in the manual, but they've since changed the values!! Don't even get me started on auto-centring on a selected ship, or automatically moving to the next ship. The fact that some commands have tool tips while others mysteriously don't. That hotkeys exist for almost, but not all the main controls. The way it's impossible to see a planets focus without visiting the planet. That the starbase list is hidden as a tab in the ship view. That sometimes the game uses dropdown boxes while other times it uses lists you click through one at a time. That many items aren't sorted in alphabetical order. That you can reverse a sort order by clicking the name, but this isn't documented. That some races racial abilities are hidden while others aren't. That you can overwrite racial abilities, but not restore them. That the custom race's built-in racial abilities aren't customisable in-game (making the whole custom race thing bloody pointless).

The list goes on and on. I created a topic over on the SD forums detailing no less than fourty seperate UI problems. Since then I've discovered at good twenty more, but I just can't be bothered to keep interrupting my game to note them down anymore, especially as 1.1, while a good patch especially in the AI areas, just failed to correct almost every UI problem documented (and the inability to upgrade ships in most circumstances is not exactly a low profile issue).

The game is really fun to play, don't get me wrong, though there are some things I think the Space Empires series did better (and some differences in GC I enjoy) I love it, but the whole thing is just lacking that final spit and polish that makes a professional product. Every time I encounter a problem I'm just left wondering, WTF didn't a beta tester spot this? Why wasn't this fixed?