Galactic Civilizations II

[mudtiger]

Anyone picking this one up? I did the electronic download pre-order and should have it tomorrow. If anyone wants any impressions, I'll post 'em sometime this week.

If you were a fan of Master of Orion 2, you should give gal civ2 a look.

[Skerik]

Re: Galactic Civilizations II

Please post impressions when you have them. I've been looking for a good space-oriented game for a while and this may fit the bill. The preview that Gamespy posted back in January sounded very intriguing and the screenshots look really, really nice.

What I'd really love is a modern day Wing Commander game. Or even an updated version of those Tie Fighter games that Lucasarts used to make back the day. But since Freelancer, the market for space combat sims has been really dry and I don't feel like playing a 7-year-old game like Freespace 2.

[mudtiger]

Re: Galactic Civilizations II

Skerik, if you want some more info on the game, check out http://www.galciv2.com/Journals.aspx?AID=101434

It's a sample short game with screen shots.

I'll post impressions probably tomorrow night.

[mudtiger]

Re: Galactic Civilizations II

I got in a 30 minute session or so. I haven't read the manual or watched the tutorials so I only had a vague clue what was going on. I started the campaign and liked what I saw.

Things that jumped out at me....

You can design your own ships and I spent a good chunk of time just looking through all the different parts you can use

rally points are great (ships will automatically proceed to a selected rally point and it looked like you can make as many as you want)

my AI ally offered several tech exchanges so it didn't seem like I was out there by myself

controls are very intuitive but I had no idea what the purpose of things were - manual reading time

graphics are very well done and so is the brief amount of music I heard

turns only moved the game forward by one week so even with very very long games, very little time will pass. An epic galctic conquest should not be over in 5 years. Gamewise, this isn't a problem, just kind of throws me out of the feel of the game. I'm hoping this might not really be an issue though because there are some rather large galaxies to choose from when palying a sandbox game.

it may have just been the campaign story mode, but I was researching tech awfully quickly. Granted they were initial techs, but I was going rapid fire through them.

The campaign sort of throws right into the story, I guess I need to read the manual for an overview of the story.

So far so good, I liked what I saw and I'm hoping as I get past the initial learning curve the game will really open up. I've read nothing but good things about the AI.