Why I buy this one ?
- Direct your people's military as you battle to control the galaxy
- Deep strategic elements as you establish your place - Ccolonize planets, establish trade routes, fight wars, research new technologies, sign treaties, build up a planet's industry&economy
- Research and design new ships -- full customization lets players create completely unique ships
- Create entire fleets and develop them strategically
- Multiple planets to explore and colonize - pick and choose what your planets will be used for

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What our customer's say!

"Galactic Civilizations ", I bought the first galactic civ when it came out. The second was even better. You can make custom ships and reaserch new technologies and there are even more races to choose from. I like these game for replay value. Not the same boring thing. In the first I go into the xml and add new stuff such as technology and new stats and so on. It is too easy. Both galactic civ one and 2 are a safe bet for a fun stratagy game.

"The Bottom Line", This game is without doubt the best turn based 4X game I have ever played. Allowing me to design and create my own ships with different weapons and defenses made a dream come true. The people behind this game, Stardock, are developing an odd reputation, because for some reason they actually care about their customers, many of these reviews were written nearly a year ago, and since that time the game has been pacthed and changed.

If you enjoy strategy games (turn based or RTS) and are not afraid of using your head, try this game out, there's a great demo out that can give you a taste.

I started with the purchase of this game, I then bought the expansion Dark Avatar, and because of the amount of support the company has shown me and their products I pre-ordered the second expansion Twilight of the Arnor and Sins of a Solar Empire. Now that Sins of a Solar Empire is out I can say that I will continue to pre-order Stardock Entertainment products as whatever team they have creating video games over there are clearly gamers themselves and put plenty of common sense into their games, which is a lot more than most companies can say.

Try the demo, see for yourself. I went for it, and have nothing but good things to say.

"Above average game", This game is ok. Lotta tech to research. Lotta differant ship designs and payload. But i like Star Trek Birth of the Federation better. The starports on this game dont protect the plants and that can get kinda annoying.

"Brain Cells beware, this game will kill allot of you.", Nothing like a good strategy game that will wipe out brain cells when you're depressed and/or lonely.

This game is exceptionally fun and Very inspiring, keep the name Stardock in mind.

Stardock the makers started off a very small company with good ideas and exceptional programmers, the company is the game, unlike Ubisoft, Atari and other mega-giants who don't even know there product or care to support it, Stardock takes a personal interest.

The fanatics generated by the open-ended nature of this game have thrilled me with Babylon V and Star trek revisions of the game which easily could be sold as stand-alone expansions.

The selective complexity of the game remains just good enough to be entertaining and fun while remaining simple enough to play in short or long periods, the AI for strategy gets an A+.

The real fun in the game comes in MAKING your own starships, interfacing with a common language like XML to create scenarios', designs and storylines (limited),

The premise is the same as all good strategy games; grow your civilization, arm yourself just enough to achieve your goals and win a victory based on your choice. Be a war monger and blast all your enemies to pieces, be a diplomat and form a galactic alliance of coerce your enemy to surrender to your superior way of living etc...

The 3D battles are like 1980 television show CGI effects, but truly a treat, again remaining simple means you are not on the helm of a ship targeting enemies but rather arranging to win the battle by combining arms and fleets to get the upper edge what strategy is all about, and then if your really good not one shot has to be fired, but then you miss the cool effects.

It's a game priced well, from an exceptional company (a 3d0 replacement possibly).

Pros:

Very compatible with most machines and graphic cards,
Fast and multi-tasking so you can commiserate life's pointlessness while you destroy the universe.
Excellent support and community structure, FREE add-ons.
A true desire to work with there users rather then leech them out of some more small change.
No CD in drive 24/7 needed to run

Cons:
New release does not work on my older p3, even though it is loaded. (Intel Graphics)
I can't tell what version, what upgrade, what release I should get or have or should have, there sales teams needs a little bit refinement
(Which is sort of backwards since everyone else sells you the Brooklyn bridge and there tech teams is the clod)


All in ALL it's worth the money you won't be disappointed
Duftopia

"Decent. But old ideas don't make a new game good.", I had been hoping for good things with Dread Lords. The older GalCiv, while not on the level of MOO2, was good enough and looked promising.

Sadly, my hopes were not answered. Don't get me wrong, Dread Lords is not a bad game. However, it is nothing special either. 10 years after MOO2 something more is demanded of 4x space strategy than what we got here. There's plenty of new options, but after playing it perhaps 40 hours and finishing the main campaign and a few random galaxies I sat with the impression that I could safely go back to Rome Total War without losing much sleep. A month later I discovered Sword of the Stars and Dread Lords made its way to the dustbin, where it has stayed until today and probably will remain.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"A great game for Master of Orion II fans", Basically MOOII was one of my favorite all time games and I was dying for MOOIII to come out. I was even posting on the forums at the time it was being developed, the developers would come on and say all these great things about MOOIII and basically they were completely full of it. Never saw a worse, more disappointing game than MOOIII. But the good news is that its like literally the good part of the development team got away at some point and made Galactic Civ 2. Basically same strategy components but better graphics and more fun. So have at it old school Master of Orion playas!

"Who likes this game?", I too bought this game for its rave reviews...but its god awfull! Despite the 3D engine(is that really a big deal these days?)this game is cruder than any PC game I ever played even in the 1990's. In Civilization or any other turn based or real time strategy game you scroll through your units or groups of units each turn to see what's happening in the world or galaxy around them..."Hey there's an enemy armada heading my way in sector Q24!-I better prepare!" In this game you can't scroll thru your ships(unless they are out of moves), not with tab, not with any shortcut or icon, but have to pick them one by one off a menu (which is mind-numbingly tedious) and then maybe you'll see that enemy armada, or maybe you won't before it attacks your home world. This is just one of dozens of complaints I have about this sham called Galactic Civilizations 2.

I agree whole heartedly with the reviewer who said this game is no "Master of Orion 2". It is also no "Pax Imperium" which was a another great space strategy game, even though it was inexplicably not well reviewed when it came out 8 years ago or so.

"Company fo thieves", I had great expectations about this game, especially after reading the 5-star reviews here and the 9/10 mark from gaming sites. I bought the game and played it, only to be disappointed. Essentially, this game is MOO2 with good and bad modifications, but overall worse than MOO2 and with uneven performance in terms of features.

PROS

1) More flexibility in ship design and look. This is almost a minigame in itself and can be quite fun.
2) Starbases can now be designed almost like ships through upgrades and can be placed almost anywhere.
3) There are now resource locations to be mined.
4) Trade routes are now actual ships you can design, build, manage, and attack.
5) What a ship can do in a turn is based on its speed. Faster transports can shuttle more population per turn, especially between close locations.


CONS

Even more annoying economic system. To make things "easier", now you have central control of percentage spending, which might be great for running huge galaxies with hundreds of worlds, but is really annoying and inefficient for players like me who prefer a small, cosy, well-managed galaxy with only a dozen worlds to worry about. At the least, there should have been an option to turn off the centralized socialism and allow individual planets to be managed very differently. Right now, the system is unwieldly and gives a big advantage to the computer.

The interface is cluttered, opposite to what other reviewers said (then again almost anything is an improvement over MOO3). A lot of the space on the screen is wasted on flavor text and borders, as opposed to giving you the info you need fast and easily.

Tiling in the world screen is not that meaningful, except for occasional bonuses. It seems like a waste of space. All I need to know is how many slots I still have in that planet and what I can build there. At least MOO2 did that for you automatically and you did not have to spend time on it and it was drawn far more beautifully than just Dune-type slabs that look 10 years old.

Combat system is primitive compared to MOO2, and even to MOO1 (which is over 10 years old now). It is also idiotic. So, if I have 100 lasers on a ship, each having 2 beam attack, my minimal damage is still 1? You must be joking! Also, one of the great features of the MOO series was that you could fight cleverly with inferior ships and still win. Guess what, you cannot here, because combat is automated. You get to watch the video and cannot do anything. Good job, guys, you really nailed it. Grrr.

The tech tree is unnecessarily cross-linked. Why would an advance in a remote field have to be a pre-requisite for an advance that you want? What if my playing style essentially ignores certain applications? Why do I have to research all this worthless junk before I am allowed to research what I want? MOO1 did a fantastic job in decoupling the research directions. As a result, MOO1 has some amazing games where you would have to really change stategy to compensate for tech tree randomization, e.g. having your superdreadnoughts still crawl at warp 1 because nobody in the galaxy was offered advanced engines. That was a big addition to replayability because individual games could differ enormously. Here, you do not get that and tech advances would be the same all the time.

Furthermore, tech tree does not tell you simple things like:"What do I have to research to get medium hulls?" If you have a system of research prerequisites, you also have to put in a system that allows the player to answer questions like that quickly and easily. Instead, there is a big tech tree screen that cannot be scrolled quickly and cannot be zoomed out, and where tech is shown as a single-word box with no description. You have to do a lot of clicking back and forth before you can eek out the info you need, if you are patient enough. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, developers. How about a decoupled system like MOO1? In addition, your huge empire can research only one thing at a time. Why? Why? WHY? Different does not mean better.

What is the point of borders, if at any time anyone can cross them without going to war? MOO1 and MOO2 did a far better job in that.

Morale is poorly implemented and makes little sense. If you are fighting for your very survival, I find it hard to believe your population will be that concerned with entertainment networks. To my knowledge, there is no 4X game that has tried and succeeded in implementing morale properly. So, the better games are the ones that leave it out of the equation, e.g. MOO1.

Why are growth rates set at 0.2b/week regardless of population size and type of planet? How does this make any sense whatsoever? A lot of strategic element is lost as a result.

Why implement a system of logistics points? Why limit the size of a fleet by them? Do the developers seriously believe that N scattered ships are easier to supply than the same ships grouped in a single fleet? That system may be true for a Napoleonic foraging army but makes no sense for space-age races. It is an unnecessary senseless irritant.

Under the economic system, you actually pay for your production. Yes, that's right, the beautiful factories you constructed and pay to maintain also charge you "conversion" fees in credits for producing. Same is true for research. Somebody explain to me why. I thought that was the point of maintenance. Also, under imperial dictatorships, why would you pay for something you own already? Pay whom?

After awhile, all the Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, cowboy, etc. references grow annoying. Playing a sci-fi 4X game is about atmosphere to some extent at least. Don't break it with sophomoric humor and obvious reminders that the developers are all human and have seen the same movies as the player. After all, this is supposed to be a different universe that does not contain Capt Kirk and Picard.

The political system is silly and so is the constant moralizing about good and evil. Guess what, this is a 4X sci-fi game, not sunday school. Ethics is a silly addition to this game, especially since the "good guys" are far more dangerous and insidious that the "bad guys".

United Nations resolutions are a good joke for a short while, but get really annoying real fast. Somebody explain to me why "evil" empires would vote FOR limiting the capacity of their military installations. We have all these different space races and cultures; why would they even consider holding such meetings and discussing socialist crap, like giving money to "war victims"? The developers basically want to poke fun at our own UN. Fine, but not in 4X sci-fi. Basically, keep your own politics out of designing a game that is meant to be fun for everyone.

The game mechanics makes small empires very inefficient while large empires take forever to manage. Contrary to what the developers say in their tutorial, it takes more than one afternoon to finish a smallest galaxy. This is a general problem with later games in the genre, because developers refuse to acknowledge that MOO1's mechanics was nearly perfect and that people these days cannot afford to spend 12 hours on a finishing a single game. So, they continue making mechanics unwieldly and turning everybody off. That is why MOO3 and GalCiv2:DL are worse than MOO2, which is worse than MOO1 in this respect. Giving players the option to control 100 worlds is not as rewarding or important or even practical as giving them the opportunity to control a dozen worlds really well. So, the real issue is one of design philosophy, rather than technology or particular mechanics. So long as developers do not understand that, they will produce flops like MOO3 and GalCiv2:DL.


CONCLUSIONS

Overall, this game has a great potential and could have been even better than MOO1 and MOO2, but the above shortcomings made it fail. I shelled out 40 dollars for it and wish I could get my money back. I give it 3 stars only because of the improvements mentioned above and because it might be fun for a very select group of gamers with a lot of time on their hands and a big sense of humor.


IMPORTANT UPDATE!!!!

I tried to return the game to the games shop where I bought it and they refused to take it back! They said that because of the online activation feature, they cannot resell it to other customers, while the publisher refuses to accept back an open box! So, I am stuck with it and cannot get my 40 bucks back or even get store credit for it!

This is the last game I buy from UbiSoft, and am also considering boycotting EA as well due to their 25% share in this piece-of-garbage company of thieves.

Amazon should be ashamed that neither of their "spotlight" reviews mention this "feature" at all. With all these negative reviews, both spotlights are 5/5. Even half a brain can figure out why.

"Good but not exceptional", Overall this is a good space based 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) game, but I did not find it to be a ground breaking one. Players like me who have played similar games like good ole Ascendancy (from Logic Factory) and Master of Orion II (Microprose), and the more recent ones such as Reach for the Stars (from SSI) etc., may not find this to be exceptional (except possibly for it's supposedly superior AI which apparently does not resort to cheating).

I was expecting GalCiv II to be well ahead of the older 4X games so as to set a new standard for space based 4X strategy gaming but did not find it to be refreshingly different or startlingly innovative.

GalCiv II seems to have an uncanny resemblance to that excellent mid 1990 era game - Ascendancy from the Logic Factory. e.g. Planet tiles, Ability to custom design/build ships, ground combat cinematics etc. The ability to customize your race attributes, voting in a galactic council etc., is reminiscent of Master of Orion II (MOO II).

(BTW, for old DOS game, Ascendancy had superb graphics and 3D Tech Tree to boot. As most readers of this review probably won't be familiar with Ascendancy here is a link for more details: [...]

In my humble opinion GalCiv II could have benefited immensely by having some of those subtle little aspects that helps one bond with the game. A good example is the Leaders in MOO II, who brought in specific strengths/skills. This feature made the game less mechanistic and more fun because you had a set of leaders to appoint as planetary governors and ship captains. You can could watch them progress over time increasing their strengths/skill levels. (BTW, the disappointing aspect of MOO II leaders feature was that there were only limited slots for leaders - If I can remember right I think 4 planetary governors and 4 ship captains was the Max and sadly did not increase as you added more planets and ships to your empire). The Total War series has a very good characterization of Governors/Generals (Family members of a faction), Spies, Diplomats, Assassins etc. Features like this helps a player relate to the characters in the game and get a sense of bonding with the game. I was hoping that GalCiv II had some similar mechanism - for example a choice of planetary governors and a pool of ship captains whose numbers will expand with the growth in the number of planets and ships in your empire so that you can appoint a planetary governor for each of your planets and ship captains for each of your ships (the most senior ship captain becoming the admiral when you create a fleet of multiple ships). Their attributes will improve or go down based on how their planets/ships/fleets perform.

Straight out of the box I found this to be the most unstable game I have ever played. I tried this on 3 machines starting with the minimal requirements and going to a relatively high end machine (Intel P4 2.6Ghz Dual Core with 512 MB RAM) with no change in stability (especially when auto saving). I think game developers should never release buggy games and expect players to wait for and download the enumerable number of patches. Remember the fist impression of a game makes a lasting impression - a buggy game has a high probability of gathering dust in ones shelf. Can't say I am a fan of half baked initial releases followed by the invariable add-on scams. I would gladly give GalCiv II four stars if not for the stability issues that really frustrated me and put me off.

I am an ardent strategy games fan (an addict as per my wife), with literally hundreds of days of game time on games like the Total War, Age of Empires, Civilization series etc. I am sure most people like me given the opportunity would be glad to test out a Beta and come up with an extensive list of bugs and playability issues - for a small non-monetary reward such as a complimentary copy of the game when it is released. I think game developers should use game enthusiast like us to volunteer to augment their Quality Assurance (QA) teams. After all to test a game thoroughly one has to have a passion for playing the game fully. I guess when game testing becomes just a chore to the QA folks the job does not get well done.

Do hope game developers take note of customer reviews at Amazon as a valuable source of feedback to continuously improve themselves and their products.



"I want my money back!", DON'T BUY THIS GAME. Whoever said that this was a worthy successor to Masters of Orion II should be killed. This game is awful! You don't get to DO anything. Neither the fleet combats nor the ground combats are interactive--all you get to do is watch. The micromanagement gets old if you have more than a few planets and the technology-tree is difficult to use. Considering how little you get to do, you might as well go watch T.V. instead. This game is garbage. I wish I could get my money back.