Players: 1
Playing Time: 3-12 hours
Difficulty: 8 (of 10)
The Components
Although also available as a packaged game, my version of Galactic Civilizations came from their download site, Stardock. A demo is also available here if you want to give it a shot.
Because it's a download, there's really nothing to discuss regarding the components.
Stardock does have a simple, serial-number driven upgrade process which was pretty easy to use. This is nice because they're still expanding (and presumably bugfixing) the game.
The Galactic Civilizations website has a somewhat useful, though not entirely organized, encyclopedia for various player-help files, one of which is an adequate player's manual--though it's a bit hard to read because it's a long page of HTML scroll.
Overall, the components were about what you'd expect for a download, with a bit higher quantity of online documentation than I would have guessed.
Graphics & UI
Here you get to the true heart of the Style of a computer game: what's it look like.
Graphics: There are a few static cut-scenes in Galactic Civilizations, which largely insert events into the game. However, the main graphical interface is clearly the galaxy view screen (what the GC manual calls simply "the main screen").
This screen depicts, on a large pane, a view of nearby space, complete with planets, star bases, and spaceships. It's all 2D, but attractive in its simplicity. Planets are clearly differentiated by the color of their stars and, for a very nice effect, each starfaring race has ships that look distinctly different. It's not exciting, but entirely utilitarian.
User Interface: The UI is overall driven by the mouse. Left-clicking on a planet, ship, base, etc. will select it, double-clicking will pop up a screen of more information, often containing relevant commands, and right-clicking will select something as a destination if you've already got a ship left-clicked.
A variety of buttons near the bottom of the screen acccess various informational screens, such as stats on your overall society, on your interactions with other races, and your current technology. A few buttons also toggle the right-hand window pane between a map of the galaxy, info on the current planet, and a listing of your spaceships. Initially the icons aren't terribly intuitive, but you catch on to them as you play.
Overall, once you get the hang of the interface, it's easy to bop around from section to section. Every once in a while the way you activate an interface is difficult to figure out (e.g., in the diplomacy screens it's not immediately obvious how to drag the slider to offer varying amounts of cash, and on the ship screen it takes a bit of work to figure out the right way to select ships), but 90-95% of the interface is pretty clean.
Charts: Various charts are scattered throughout the interface to show you how your society is doing. On the main/galactic-map sidebar you can keep track of how your doing versus the technology, population, economics, etc. of other societies, while within your societal screens you can look up some additional stars on your progress. These are vaguelly useful from an overview perspective, but with no actual numbes shown on the charts, precisely what they mean is sometimes vague.
As I comment way down in the Game Design section, below, there are also a few annoyances with the UI, which make it slightly harder to use, at well as at least one timing-related bug.
Overall, the UI & Graphics of Galactic Civilizations are useful with some notable flaws, and beyond that fairly utilitarian. They rate an average Style of "3" out of "5".
The Game Play
If you're familiar with Sid Meier's Civilization series (particularly the most recent, Civ3), you already know how 90% of that game works. if you're not, you may wish to check out my Sid Meier's Civilization III review.
However, here's an overview of the gameplay:
Starting the Game: Before the game proper begins, you'll get to choose the size of your galaxy (affecting game length), choose some particular strengths for your society, and also select the characteristics of your foes. There are a bunch of alien races, some major and some minor (though the reasoning behind the distinction is unclear), but you'll always play a Terran. The amount of variability in the setup is very nice, and should expand the replayability of the game.
Production: The whole game of Galactic Civilizations centers around planets, and what those planets can produce. Each planet will produce income, based on taxes, and also three different resources: military, social, and research.
Income is used to pay for your resource production and also to pay the upkeep for various military and social projects (e.g., buildings & ships). You get to set a tax rate to increase (or decrease) income, but how that actually converts to money on a planet-by-planet basis is pretty opaque. Outlay of income is a little clearer because you have a clear cost for your resource production and also clear maintenance requirements for ships and buildings ... but there are so many of them that even with the handy "economic" page, it's hard to see exactly what's going on.
The main production of each planet is centered on that aforementioned military, social, and research military production. By default a third of your resource production goes to each category, though you can push any category down as low as 20% or up as high as 60%.
Each category of production produces a number of resource points, usually in the range of 3-4 for a new colony, or up to the hundreds for a very mature, valuable colony. Then, each production item costs a certain number of production items to create--e.g. 60 for a colony ship or 100 for a freighter or 100 for a bank or whatever (numbers probably not correct).
Military productions are spaceships. For the most part these are armies and attack vessels, from star fighters to battleships on up. There are also a couple of exploration vessels, a colonization vessel, and a trade vessel.
Galactic Civilizations gives a very convenient ability to switch what military items you're working on (e.g., everyone building "Frigates" switch to "Battleships"). This is a great boon given the constant march of technology.
Social productions are buildings you create on a colony which benefit various planet-wide or society-wide characteristics. A bank might increase income production on a planet while a special Galactic "Wonder" such as the Galactic Stock Exchange could increase your culture's influence throughout the galaxy. Almost all of these bonuses are seen as percentages and thus again they're real opaque. It's unclear what a +20% income bonus or +10% research bonus really means, in hard crunchy bits--let alone a +20% cultural bonus for your entire society.
Thankfully Galactic Civilizations also has some nice ways to automate selecting what social buildings you're working on, to keep it from getting totally out of hand mid-game+. You can set a "governor's" list of things to automatically build for up to 4 different governors. Thus, you could have a "front line" development list, an "economic world" development list, etc. I tended to just run one list, prioritizing every extant social production item, but more intricate planning is possible for the obsessive.
However, if you don't choose to use the automated governor lists, and try and manage each planet on a case-by-case basis, you'll quickly get lost. Upon completion of a previous task, the game will jump you to that planet's production page, and you'll discover that there's no intuitive way to figure out where that planet might be located. Thus, you're forced to make blind choices without understanding that a particular planet might be on the border, and thus a better choice for offensive or defensive projects, rather than economic ones. (Technically, the same problem exists for production of military/ships, but I found it less troublesome there, for some reason.)
Research production stores "research points" toward technological gains. These tech gains are global inventions that can give your culture yet more societal-wide bonuses, can give you access to even more technologies, and can give you the ability to create new social buildings, new military units, new starbase modules (more on that in a second), etc. Compared to the Sid Meier's games, it felt like GC had a humongous list of technologies. Unfortunately, the manual doesn't give any master tree of techs. Even when I discovered one while googling on the web, it was so complex that I could never quite figure out, e.g., what series of technologies I should build to get a new military ship to help turn a war around. Not to sound like a broken record, but this was another problem with the game being opaque. There were just too many levels of indirection between the player and the underlying mechanics for anyone but a very serious player to figure out how they interrelated. A way to to choose a desired future technology (e.g., that next war ship), and then have the game line up all the technologies required to get there, would have been much more helpful. Likewise, categorizing potential technologies by gains would have been useful.
Exploration: The exploration component in GC is minor but there. Primarily, you locate stars that have good planets around them--type 15+ in the game. Sometimes you can find multiple good planets around a star, which is cool, but usually there's just one. Additionally, you look for resources to build star bases around (again, see below). Finally, certain ships can investigate anomalies, which gives you civilization (or the ship) bonuses. However, this last option is primarily a fire-and-forget operation.
Star Bases: The coolest item that GC adds to the traditional Civ3 formula is the "starbase". Using a special space ship called the Constructor you can create a Star base. This can be built on a space resource, which it can mine to benefit your civilization (although again, due to opacity, this benefit was never really obvious), or just freely in space. Then, additional Constructors can be sent to your Star base to add "modules", whose availability is determined by your tech level. Based on its modules a star base could help or hinder nearby ships, improve planetary production, support trade routes, or else imbue the galaxy with your culture. As with most things in the game, you had to just trust these effects were actually occurring.
Warfare: One of the very possible outcomes in GC is outright warfare between two races. This is made even more likely by the fact that the game has a curious and interesting "alignment" system. (Every once in a while you're faced with a moral dilemma, and your answers to those dilemmas add up to your being "good" or "evil"--and also partially influences what technologies are available to you, or at least so says the manual.) In any case, if you're particularly good or evil, it's more likely an opposite minded race will take offense with you.
Warfare is conducted by all those potential starships you're creating with your military spending. Each ship has attack, defense, and hit point ratings. (And, one more time, I'm going to bitch a bit about the opacity of the game. Your ships' attack, defense, and hit points can all be increased by specific buildings on the planet they were produced, such as an Advance QA Facility, and also by your civilization-wide values for the attack/defense/hit-point ratings. In one of the games I played I got absolutely pounded, because my opponent had ships that were at least 50% better than mine for the same ship type, and I could never figure out what to do to try and get my ship ratings up.)
For the most part, you're probably using automated maneuvers on your ships, like "Auto Attack", "Auto Retreat", "Guard", and "Sentry", and then clicking through as they attack your opponent. Warfare is very slow and tedious, especially in a large galaxy, where a skirmish with another civilization can take hours. If you try and hand control your ships, for better tactics, time issues get dramatically worse.
As with Civ3, I found that never getting into a war was not a protection just for your civilization, but also for your sanity.
There's one other annoyance in the warfare aspect of GC: it's hard to grab ahold of ships when they're running around engaging in various "automatic" pursuits. If you see a ship going on "auto attack" get badly hurt, you can either get lucky in clicking on it quick enough, or else must later scour your galaxy to find it and place it on "auto retreat". Usually, I decided it just wasn't worth the trouble.
Commerce, Diplomacy & Culture: The game has a number of other subsystems which aren't quite as core to the game as the aforementioned ones.
Commerce allows you to create trade routes with nearby civilizations. Trade routes are initially limited, giving you something else to strive for in technology. Each trade route will give you (and your trade partner) money. Again, the exact amount of return is unclear, because it's buried in the game system.
Diplomacy lets you negotiate with other races, pretty much like in Sid Meier's game. You can: trade technologies, money, planets, or ships; form alliances; or declare war or peace.
Culture is a measure of how influential your civilization is. It's built up by certain buildings and by certain star base modules.
Ending the Game: Eventually you'll want to win, and bring your 2/8/24/100-hour game to an end. You can do this in a couple of ways.
Military Victory means you generally kicked the galaxy's butt and took it over.
Cultural Victory means your culture is by far the most influential.
Diplomatic Victory means you've formed alliances with everyone you're not fighting with.
When it's all done you'll see an animated cut screen, and then get some very detailed stats about how well you did versus the other races. I found the latter particularly interesting because it gives you info on how much others had researched, what their best ship was, etc. A real boon in trying to measure your performance against the computer.
Game completion also gives you an opportunity to upload your gameplay results to an Internet high-score list, which is a cool way to measure yourself against other players, even though the core game play isn't Massively Multiplayer.
For more information on how to play GC, read the online manual here.
The Game Design
I've covered many of the game design boons & banes already. Likewise, a few of them are directly inherited from Civilization, for which again, see my Civ3 review. In brief, however, the good:
Great AI: The governor functions are terrific & make the game much more enjoyable to play, particularly in end game. Likewise, the opponent AI seems decent and speedy. (The docs claim it does all its figuring during user idle time.)
Addictive: Because of the constant reward structure, the game is addictive to play. There's always something good around the corner, whether it's a new technology, a Galactic wonder, or the oncoming defeat of an enemy, and thus you want to keep playing.
Multiple Starts & Ends: With the multiple starting conditions, the huge tech tree, and the three ways to win, you genuinelly can play this game in many different ways--much moreso than in Civ3 which similarly had multiple paths but had sufficiently narrow tech development that it all ended up being the same in the end.
And here's the bad:
Boring End Game: By the time the game gets toward end game, things start to get boring. You're no longer making fresh strategic choices, but rather watching the slow build-up of your existing strategy. That means lots of button clicking. The docs for GC claim that enemies give up when they're defeated, rather than fighting to the bitter end, and I suppose this is true to an extent, but you still might have an hour or two of play after it's obvious that you're going to meet your victory condition.
Bad Opacity: As mentioned ad nauseum in this review, too much of the game is opaque, so it's not obvious what precise results are garnered from specific actions.
Some Serious UI Issues: Though the AI is great, when you try and take control of things yourself--making your own production decisions and/or controlling your own ships--the User Interface starts to fail, as noted earlier.
Combat Unwieldy: Just as with Civ3, any combat with a large number of troops is an absolute nightmare. During one game I sat clicking through ship builds and deployments for hours, and then when it was obvious I was going to be defeated, I discovered that there was no way to surrender to the enemy, and at least see a defeat cut screen.
Buggy Code: In various places the code felt just a bit too raw for release. For example, I could count on about one crash per extended gaming session, though regular auto-save functions meant I'd only lose 5 or 10 minutes of play. One time, however, my game began crashing so regularly that I had to abandon it. I'd also regularly run into other bugs. For example if I clicked to pop-up a window, while the computer was doing things, I could end up with somewhat intermingled windows. I also had issues with ships on "Auto Flight" sometimes stopping for several turns with no reason. Nothing was critical, but combined they were sufficient to be annoying.
Overall, I think it's most helpful to compare GC to Civ3. GC offers a totally new setting, which is great, and also includes new game systems, such as trade and star bases, which do add to the game. However, this is offbalanced by real problems with abstraction of results and an immaturity in the code base which is reflected both in bugs and a few bad UI decisions.
I'd generally give Galactic Civilizations a Substance rating of "3" out of "5". As an original game, it might have eked out a "4", but as an ultimately derivative work, it needs to be measured by its predecessor.
Conclusion
If you're a fan of Sid Meier's Civilization series, and you're looking for something new and different--yet familiar--Galactic Civilizations is probably an excellent choice for alternative fare.
However, if you're just looking for a turn-based 4X game (explore, exploit, expand, exterminate), and haven't yet tried Civilization, I'd suggest purchase of Sid Meier's Civilization III first, unless you have a strong hankering for the science-fiction genre.
