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ucscdude's Galactic Civilizations II (PC)
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| [February 9, 2007 04:54:15 AM]
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Well I went back for another round of gameplay. I was going to just do another skirmish mode when I noticed there was a Campaign Mode.
I gave the campaign a try and this opened up a new level of gameplay.
This introduced a story to the game and the univerise it takes place in.
It seems there is an evil empire battling with the good one and you as a human are somewhere in the middle.
The campaign mode is basically alot like the normal game except now you have some kind of story driven goal. For the first mission I needed to conqure an enemy planet by force to gain some item that has imporance in the story. The interesting aspect of the campaign mode is that it limits the players options for research. This forces the player to play with less advanced weapons and tactics.
This brings up something that often happens in games. Often times there are many weapons to choose from but one weapon is generally always more effective then another. This is a sign of bad game balancing. Well this does occur to a degree in Galactic Civilizations. This game is basically very good at balance as there is only a select number of attacks and they each have an equal defense. For example shields block lasers, armor blocks guns, flares block missles.
The aspect that is more difficult to balance is the democracy and cultural research options. These give the player to take control of the galaxy with out any weapons at all.
In this game to prevent these options from cause a imbalance in the campaign mode they simply made them unavaliable. This is extremely common in most rts games.
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| [February 9, 2007 03:49:21 AM]
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I am quite excited to write this first log on my experience of playing the Game Galactic Civilizations II. This is a truely a game of stratagy.
The game spawns from a rather rare and under appreciated class of games. It is basically a turn based civilization type of game based in a space setting. The game is very open ended but there are some methods of winning. The game employes resource managment and tons of complex stratagy and multible levels. Be forwarned the learning curve for this game is intense. I have logged nearly 40 hours in games such as this and I am still only a beginner.
Well, my first experience of the game which in real world took about 2 hours was set up in a map size of tiny and with 5 other races of space civilizations with their AI set to simple. I knew that I was new at this game and I do not really want to lose to hard.
I started out the game with a colony race to capture all the avaliable planets. This is reminacent to Civ III games in which in the beginning everyone would race to build settlers.
After I did that then I decided I would take a nice gentle democracy approach to the game as this is what my race the Humans were best at. Well after a while I discovered that Democracy is boring and I want blood. So, what I did was convince using my high democracy skills and exploited the computers low AI setting by convincing them to all give me money.
After I did this I boosted my weapon research to the max. After a few turns my weapons were much better then ever other race.
It was now time to engage in warfare. As a leader I love to exploit the enemy and so after some friendly trading I decided to move all my troops and ships up to another races planet and launch a full scale assault. This was proved to be way too effective. In no time I managed to conqure half of the universe.
By this time I got bored with the game as it seemed to easy and I quit the game.
For my next log I will attempt to play the computer with the difficult set much higher.
The Good:
Great features such as custom ship design, planet control, interactive discussions with AI. Nice graphics.
The Bad:
Very steep Learning curve.
Game play can get boring.
Game borrows much from the Civ series.
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ucscdude's Galactic Civilizations II (PC)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Friday 9 February, 2007
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