Or players can choose to play as the Drengin Empire, the antithesis of all that is good and holy in the universe. Some would say they are ugly, but they look like fuzzy orcs to me—I want to tickle them. -Taken from Review

Finally, someone saying what we're all thinking!

Nice! Always good to see GalCiv 2 get the kudos it so richly deserves.

Some would say they are ugly, but they look like fuzzy orcs to me—I want to tickle them.

I want to tickle them with a few doom rays.

I have a hard time giving props to a game reviewer which allows mistakes as bold as an entire repeated paragraph to slip through. In this case:
“Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords is a turn-based 4x strategy game, much like the Master of Orion series or its prequel, Galactic Civilizations....”
is repeated twice.
Talk about an amateur mistake that could be solved by a simple proof read. If I saw this in a print magazine I'd cancel my subscription.

... confusing technology tree ... ?

How confusing can a tree with perfectly linear, non-forking branches be?

Initially I thought the game was awesome. Great graphics, great concept, design your own ships and race. Then reality sets in.

The game is annoyingly riddled with bugs. In order to thoroughly clean them out, you not only need to upload all the updates from stardock (which requires you to load up something else entirely), you also at times need to copy the debug file from you game on the online forum. Even then the game is twitchy. I personally had to uninstall the game and then reinstall over the upgrade to get it working fairly well. And then there is the wonderful five minute plus wait whenever you try to load a game that is long in the playing. It's takes away the spontaneous joy of playing. It's like watching grass grow. And who has run into the occasional but reliable crashs after playing for awhile?

It's like this. In the early to mid nineties, when games were just starting to really get complex, exploring all the nuances of the joyous 386 - 486 - 586 progressions (sarcasm intended), games were twitchy. Soundblaster not compatible, video card hang up, need patch, blah blah blah. Only in the last five to eight years have games become fairly reliable. If you have a good system, almost all games now thankfully play smoothly. Except this one. Thanks to Galactic Civ 2 (how bad was the first one???) I got to relive all the annoying horrors of the late nineties all over again. What were you guys thinking??? Get a new tech crew or something. I can't even get a straight answer on your online tech help, because all I get is a computer automated response which gives knee jerk responses to key words in my email. It's like talking to a talkative lawn gnome.

I ended up unistalling the entire thing and sending it to my friend, box and all, in the mail. But he can't even use it with the original CD because, silly me, I REGISTERED the dang thing!!! I think he ended up burning it. Too bad, he loved the demo.

In short, IF GAL CIV 3 is done WELL, without the all the tedious crap riddled within this one, I may like playing it. As it is now, it is WAY too much "oops, we can fix that, and that and that and that and that, just install star dock and upload and blah blah blah". I'll stick with ol' faithful Warcraft.

MOO2 is still a better game despite it's age.

Why woud he be unable to play the game just because you registered it?

Because the Serial Id is linked with his e-mail and Stradock has publically stated that they won't support second-hand copy. And you need the serial id to get the lastest version. But if he is able to have his serial Id associated with his friend e-mail, the problem should be solved