I have to say that I think that was the best review I have ever seen. He did an awesome job of pointing out the pro's and con's, and then also gave some ideas on how to fix up the con's. That was an excellent read, and in my opinion, spot on.

The link posted just returns back to this post. Looks like an typo. I went to Apolyton's site and found it:

http://galciv2.net/4/254/439/

I'm not sure how old the review is, as it doesn't post a date.

I originally posted it on Apolyton on the 18th of February - IIRC, that's around a week after Dark Avatar was released.

Thanks Brad for putting it up, I haven't checked out 1.6 yet, but two months later I remain firm in my opinion that Dark Avatar is absolutely one of the best expansion packs in the industry.

You know that if you drag the slider for gold, the message screen will turn red & green, right? If the AI will take the deal, the message will be green; if you drag the slider way up to where the AI won't take it, it'll turn red.

Crappy double post.

@ACS_Solver:
Just out of curiosity, would you still rate DA as a 9.2 today?

It's not like I was expecting you to say anything different really

Anyways, looking at DA and comparing it to DL, I'm not so sure it really is worth not only being rated so high, but also being an expansion at all. What was really done?

- Graphics: they were announced as being better and lighter on your machine. They're better, but lighter? Where are those memory problems coming from?

- Super Abilities: they are highly unbalanced among themselves, they are not equally useful in power and duration, some are game breaking (especially when used in custom civs).

- New races: except for the Super Abilities, which are unbalanced as mentioned above and can be turned off, they don't really add anything new to the game. The Korath are merely buffed up Drengin, the Krynn "stole" the espionage ability from the Drath.

- Race stats: some races got so nerfed that if balance was already an issue, now it's blatant when playing without Super Abilities. The fact that you can turn them off, and that races will be extremely unbalanced without them is a puzzling dillema.

- Mega Events: some are mega, some are not, and in the end they cripple the AI much more than the player, so it's a rather intriguing feature.

- Space combat: a much needed change turned into a nasty bug that the devs couldn't fix in over 2 months. Not really fun having to pack your ships with defenses, and a few weapons...

- Ships: some very welcome tweaks to ship stats, logistics and fleets, the engine nerfing. Of course, they had to spoil it with their (TM) cheese and make modules small enough to be assembled in the smaller hulls.

- Ship Intelligence Report: eye candy, when what the game really needed was bug fixes and improvements. A waste of time, the graphics aren't that good, the fluff stats are bad, there's even QA issues with some of the stats.

- Extreme colonization: Where exactly is the "new" part of "new features" here? Apart from a few more techs in the techtree, those new planets work exactly the same way as regular planets. They're yet another source of cheese, and they screwed up the tiles in the Colony screen. They're but a justification for the necessary different Super Abilities for every race. An extremely shallow implementation too.

- Low PQ planets: PQ1~3 planets and terraforming, what nonsense. Tosses the PQ concept into the garbage bin.

- Customize opponents: a good thing, though the built-in races are potentially stronger - a good decision, after all it's about them. Not so good is the combination of some abilities with a particular Super Ability potentially becoming too strong.

- Campaign: in a single player game that refuses to implement multiplayer, and I have no problem with that, campaigns should be a crucial aspect. Not in this game. The mere fact that there's no persistent techs makes campaigns boring. And the maps don't seem to be very good either.

- Espionage: the cheese factor again, as well as a shallow and rushed implementation. The farm exploit isn't all that serious because farms aren't all that much of a factor. If they were though...

- Treaties: Strange deal, these treaties. Apparently, an attempt at expanding diplomacy, but the AI doesn't seem ready to deal with it.

- Trade: not sure how to even describe this one. Exploits, bad evaluations.

- Economy: nerfed big time. Projects, governments bonuses, tax income, trade routes. Higher maintenances. The fact is now you need to have a huge part of your empire dedicated to making money. Not much diversity, not much fun.

- Population: morale buildings took a pretty big hit. Farms, they weren't that special, they didn't improve either.

- Power plants: not really new, it's not really clear why power plants increase production or why there can be only one per planet. They're really just a way to place sort of a manufacturing capital in each planet. Fusion isn't really all that useful.

- Asteroids: the concept was lacking in the game. The extra production, plus the power plants, forced the nerfing of factories and the manufacturing capital. No problem for planets close to asteroid belts, but not so good for those that are not. Industrial Sector was made not effective, if not useless.

- Techtree: cosmetic changes, easier to read. Some new techs, needed for the new features, but that's it.

- AI: it was made better, thanks to a lot of good player input.


In the end, not that much really. I understand that by being different, it's readily perceived as being better. It's a change after all. But a cold analysis isn't all that clearly favorable IMO. In addition to all this, old bugs were not fixed, most aspects of the game are still very shallow or unsatisfying (alignments, UP, diplomacy, stabases).

Iceman,

From where I'm standing, even your post shows that DL is a great expansion. For most expansions, you don't get to list nearly as many things that they change. My favorite TBS game is Civ4. The first expansion, Warlords, is pretty average IMO. Without going into relatively small details such as changes in unit statistics, the list of additions would be a much shorter one. DA's scope is great.

I do agree with some of your points, such as the treaties. In 1.5 at least, they didn't exactly work as supposed, plus the AI had roughly zero clue with regards to those treaties. Which I also mentioned in my review, by the way. Ditto for Mega Events - a fun and good flavour feature, although it does have the problem that some are smaller in their impact than the "regular" events, and others cripple the AI within 20 turns.

Also note that I am judging DA as an expansion here, not as a separate game, because it's not one. My initial impression of GalCiv2 was unfavorable - I liked the concept but thought the game was poorly executed and very shallow strategically. I posted quite extensively about 1.0 and 1.2, and I am amazed at how far it came with the updates. I found the original game somewhat fun but ultimately not good enough, but the updates were, to me, good enough to make me buy (and love) the expansion.

I don't have thousands of hours of GalCiv2 gameplay, so I can't pretend to provide very insightful and deep views into the balance of certain buildings, for example, although I do have an eye for those things. I wouldn't call myself a casual player, because when I do play, I micromanage many aspects heavily and notice the little things, but I'm not a hardcore GalCiv2 player either, simply because I lack the playtime (compare to Civ4 where my playtime is certainly 4-digit).

Two more points I want to make. First, extreme colonization - I maintain that it might just be the best thing about Dark Avatar. I hated all the planets getting snatched early. That placed a huuuuuge value on the initial colony rush, and made warfare too attractive for the game to have enough depth on the war-peace choice scale. You fight, you get planets, the enemy loses them and can't replace them. Extreme colonization gives some civs a second chance. Losing the early rush doesn't mean you're doomed to always remain the smallest. And these extreme planets really become a long-term investment, even moreso than low PQ planets with terraforming.

My second point would be about the AI. I'm a self-confessed AI whore. A good AI will make me like a game with many other shortcomings (example from a different genre: I enjoyed FEAR as a FPS game because of its AI, though the level design and storytelling is among the weakest I've seen in recent big-budget FPS games). On the contrary, a poor AI is enough to spoil many good things for me. That was also my problem with GalCiv2 1.0 - the AI was dumb. It did act very intelligently in some areas, but it would fall for the same tactics over and over, it was too exploitable, too gullible - after getting the hang of the very basics, Tough was beatable, that's after playing 2 games to figure the system out.

Dark Avatar improves the AI considerably, which is, to me, worth a lot. Fortunately, Brad is a designer who considers the AI to be an extremely important element, the key to the fun. I still think the biggest problem of GalCiv2's AI now is that it's uneven - it can be really smart in some areas, but when it's poor, it's so poor that my hair almost stands up - I've mentioned examples of these things in my review.

Dark Avatar isn't a sequel. If this were GalCiv3, spending 4 years in development, it would've been disappointing. As an expansion, though, it adds much more than I've come to expect from any expansion. In the end, though, seems like we have a difference of opinions here.

Nice review, Solver! Civ and Alpha Centauri focus on a single planet, while the Galciv series focuses on a single galaxy, with many planets. Civ has been around since the old MSDOS days, and is a mature platform as a result.

I am also a casual player, and it is nice seeing an objective review.

I don't agree. Espionage or super-abilities aren't "triggered by other additions", as far as I understand. Superficial? Yes, some of the additions are somewhat superficial. The espionage additions aren't terribly in-depth, the diplomatic treaties are definitely a superficial addition. But nonetheless, for me, all those things work well together. In my experience with DA, the smaller and the bigger additions added up to change the game experience considerably enough.



I appreciate the fact that you present a clear and civil argument . I just want to agree tat I didn't cover everything about Dread Lords. Two reasons. First, of course, I didn't notice everything. I think that I notice more than most other players given the same amount of playtime, but I'm far from perfect. Second, if you read the review, you saw how big it is. Publishing a review twice its size would probably be pushing it too far, even if I was tempted



I disagree again. It doesn't delay the rush per se. It instead creates a second rush / wave of colonization. More importantly, it makes sure that some colonization happens *after* the initial zones of influence have been established. Granted, the impact varies greatly depending on the extreme/normal planet ratio on a given map, but I feel that's how it works. I like that implementation myself. The tech trading issue, though, is a big one.

I'd say that Stardock's problem with these games appears to be not enough testing. I honestly don't know how the testers could fail to point out some of the really bad flaws I've seen in various versions of GalCiv2. Still, I won't blame the testing process - as a game tester myself, I know how sometimes things may appear untested where they really were tested. I'd also say that the Stardock test group needs to include some people who really have an eye for AI issues, good skills of analyzing how the AI acts and why it does, but I don't know who the testers are, so I'm probably not qualified to make that comment, either.



As I said, I feel that Dark Avatar has enough - more than enough - for an expansion. In this day and age, gamers are used to getting an expansion for successful games. It brings nice closure and all that. I'm glad to have DA myself, and I assume that it also boosted Stardock's financial profits.

A sequel will need to have more in it, of course, more radical changes, bigger additions, etc. But the expansion has an advantage of a relatively quick development cycle. That's good. GalCiv3 will, in all likelihood, be crap if it doesn't get a long enough dev cycle. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be a problem with Stardock, not given that they publish their own games. So, while I hope that Brad does undertake work on GC3, I also hope we don't see it before mid-2010 at the earliest. In the meanwhile, I'll enjoy GC2 + DA .

As I stated in my post - I have not noticed the defense bug. Not to say it is not there - just that it has not affected my play or my enjoyment of the game.

I have been enjoying DA immensely since I started playing it. So it is not at all 'unplayable' for me, or I suspect, the large majority of players.

I am playing 1.6 beta - and SD has stated there is a fix for it in that beta, though some have reported that it is still broken in some way. I'm sure that by the time I get to the point (if ever) where it may be noticeble for me that Stardock will have finally remedied it.

@ToS Iceman

I doubt if I'll have time to go point by point through your list in the near future - my apologies.

As I stated, I happen to disagree with your opinions in almost all of your bullet points. All of the points you bring up have been debated from all sides at length in the forums, by players with much more skill and experience than me. Those threads provide the same arguments I'd make in most cases - and since it is opinion we are talking about, until I do have the opportunity to put down my PoV - again, My apologies, I'll have to cop out and point you to those threads for dissenting arguments.

C'mon, the list isn't THAT big... you just have to point them out. You already have them nailed, so you just need to type it.
I was expecting disagreement, of course, but substantiated. Saying you disagree just because is kinda weak.



In case you haven't noticed, I pointed out that most of the issues I mentioned came not only from my experience, but also from posts in these forums... I'm assuming we're reading the same forums. If you read those posts, I'm sure you'll find some if not all of these issues being mentioned, and not exactly the opposite of what I posted here.