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First of all, a short introduction just so you know what you're reading. You can call this a review if you like, but generally, these are just my thoughts on the 1.1 update for GalCiv2. I have posted quite extensively on GalCiv2 in Yin's wonderful “Open Review” thread which is right here, and while I really loved many of the concepts behind GalCiv2, I was quite critical of the game. I was dissatisfied with many interface decisions, as well as some gameplay issues – mostly related to a lack or limitation of strategic choices – in other words, game situations when there's, basically, only one right choice. I concluded my initial impressions with an intention to try the 1.1 update and give the game another look, and so I did.
To anyone who doesn't have GalCiv2 1.1 installed, I'd like to say that 1.1 is not a patch. It simply wouldn't be appropriate to call it that. 1.1 is an update, and quite some – I would go as far as to say that 1.1 improves the game more than some expansion packs do. I really appreciate Stardock's system of releasing free extra content for the game, because indeed, this goes beyond just patching. Okay, now to continue on to the game itself.
The first noticeable improvement was the addition of some options to the game setup screen. Probably the most important one to me was the addition of a random rivals option, which randomizes the civilizations that are going to inhabit the galaxy with you. The option for a random galaxy size is interesting, but “randomize intelligence” is probably the most unusual of these new options. You choose a general difficulty level, and the intelligence of your rivals is random within some limits to overall match the difficulty you chose. As a result, some of the civs will be stronger and some will be weaker. It's an interesting option to pick once in a while, though I am probably going to stick with setting everyone to the same intelligence level.
As the game starts, it immediately requires a change in strategic thinking compared to previous versions. One of the biggest flaws of GalCiv2 was, in my opinion, the “Colony Rush”. Simply put, you'd want to get as many colony ships as you could, do it fast, and send them out to colonize as many planets as you could. If you did it right, you'd end up with noticeably more planets than the other civs, and thus immediately assure yourself a much better position. More planets equals more population (and less planets for your rivals), more population equals more tax revenue and more troops for invasions, which basically equals better economy and a better military. Fortunately, the underlying system has been significantly tweaked in 1.1.
You can still do a colony rush. Push your slider to max out military production, use most of your starting money to rushbuy colony ships and send them everywhere you can... that's still an option. Instead of just limiting the player's choices, GalCiv2 did the better thing, and added tradeoffs and other choices. The most significant change is in population growth. Much as you could realistically expect, if the population on a planet is low, it takes a considerable time to increase back to what it was. So if you build colony ships on your home planet like crazy until the population decreases to less than a billion, you will be stuck there at a low population for quite some time. Also, the new planets you settle won't population-boom at once. Of course, huge population growth on new planets and quick population re-growth on colony-building planets made mass-colonizing the one right thing to do. Now, even if you grab a planet less, you may just end up having more population on your home planets, and it matters.
Also, building colony ships at a maximum speed requires you to increase your industrial spending, which led to a decrease in your approval rates. In the original GalCiv2, it hardly mattered, and you would be right to have your approval relatively low, because the benefits of doing so far outweighed the negative consequences. The new population growth formulas, however, are better tied in to your approval, which means that keeping it higher can give you an advantage, which, in turn, means again that mass-rushing colonies might not be the best thing, and that you should really consider colonizing a couple of planets less, but developing them better.
My first game with 1.1 I played as the Drath, in a medium-sized galaxy with most parameters random. Here I'd like to comment again on the difficulty/intelligence levels. The names on those are quite misleading, and indeed, when I first started with GalCiv2, these misleading names gave me a far worse impression of the GalCiv2 AI than it deserved. Simply put, I expected the “Normal” difficulty level to be, well, normal. Sort of me being on even ground with the AIs. However, it turned out that the “Normal” difficulty sets the AI intelligence levels to pretty low ones, which results in a game that is a complete pushover. Also, the “Normal” intelligence level isn't really normal, because many AI algorithms are dormant there, and the AI does stupid things on purpose. The least I'd expect of “Normal” intelligence is maybe having some more advanced tactics unused, but I'd certainly expect the AIs not to pursue losing strategies. Anyway, I want to emphasize that for anyone familiar with GalCiv or Civ4, or Civ-like games, playing against opponents on anything less than “Intelligent” is probably going to be easy to the point of frustration.
The AI is, to me, an extremely important aspect of any strategy game. I also criticized the GalCiv2 AI extensively, and am now glad to say that it has improved significantly, though there are still some notable areas to improve further. Diplomatically, the AI has certainly improved. It seems that it's become stricter in its refusals to sell weapons technologies to military superpowers, and it has definitely become more “aware” of what's going on around. You can now really see civs working together among themselves (or with you, as the case may be) to defeat a common enemy, and there's now some real feeling of blocs forming. Particularly, there seem to be the Good & Evil blocs that end up quite hating each other.
Likewise, the AI trading ability has improved. It won't quite accept deals that aren't fair to it easily anymore. A drawback I've noticed, though, is that it's nearly impossible to get anyone to sell you trade goods. I found it easier to even buy ships from other civs that the trade goods. I'm not sure if I was unlucky, but if it's a design choice, then it's definitely somewhat too strict.
On the downside, it seems that the AI still declares war first and then tries to figure out what to do now that it's at war. It declares war, and then it'll start making more ships and going for you. Instead, of course, it should have an attack fleet ready, move it to your vicinity, and then declare war. I again experienced this with the Drengin. The Drengin AI is very aggressive – you're going to end up being at war with them, essentially, and certainly so if you're a good-aligned civ. So I again had the Drengin declare on me, but at that point they had hardly any military capable of an attack. Of course, I immediately sent the bulk of my fleet to Drengin systems, and conquered them while they were thinking about how to wage the war they started.
Warfare in GalCiv2, of course, remains very powerful. Once you take a planet, your enemy has one less, you have one more, and the enemy has no way to rebuild it or anything, since there are only so many planets, this being one of the most important differences between GalCiv2 and Civ4. It gives the attacker quite a considerable advantage. Another interesting fact is that the advantage grows exponentially if you have more troops than the enemy does. Star systems have planets that are within one turn, two maximum, of each another. Therefore, once you have your fleet at a planet, you essentially are threatening all the planets in the system – and if you have enough ships to do so, you can take over an entire star system in one turn. Just need to have enough Transports. Admittedly, I haven't yet seen enough warfare waged by the AI civs, but so far I haven't seen them executing such attacks on an entire star system at once.
While I would, ideally, like to see warfare a little less advantageous, it's helluva fun. Then again, the advantages of warfare have decreased somewhat in 1.1. Transports are the key ship in any war, as you can't take planets over without them, and transports use your population just like colony ships do – which means that building enough transports to take over good planets loses you quite a bit of population that, again, takes time to grow back under the improved formulas. And warfare is fun. There's just something awesome about designing your own starships for war, at least for a sci-fi fan such as myself. And thankfully, the shipyard in 1.1 is now better. It's just gotten easier to use, decorating your ships is now really simple, including the rotation of parts, etc. Of course, the sheer mechanics of combat are also very fun.
Strategically, wow, forward starbases are awesome. Building a military starbase to cover the area where you're attacking is just a huge benefit. Particularly when you're using lots of small/medium class ships. Build a starbase forwards, add one attack assist module to it, and boom, your fleet of 7 small ships has now got 7 more attack. I've seen some cleverly placed AI Influence starbases, but I haven't so far encountered military starbases placed strategically to aid in attack.
Again, though, to fully enjoy war, you absolutely must have the AI rivals at at least “Intelligent”. Any less and they will send unescorted or barely escorted at best Transports, and form no real fleets, just maybe small ones. Also, they won't be very effective at adapting to your ship designs. This is, fortunately, actually a strength of the AI at higher difficulties – if you attack with laser-based ships only, the AI will quickly switch to building ships with good deflector ships, and you'll be screwed if you don't have sufficiently advanced bullet or missile technology.
One moment of true happiness for me was when I got a message from a minor civ that they've noticed me building up troops around their planet. I've complained in the past that the AI was often slow at detecting troop buildups, but the problem has been remedied now. On the other hand, you never need to actually do a troop buildup there. You build up a fleet at home, send it towards the enemy, and you'll be able to attack a star system while giving very little advance notice to the enemy, just because your ships won't be seen until a turn or two before the attack.
I am surprised that the AI doesn't seem to care for diplomacy (yellow) techs much. I've seen the Torians do very good research, but they and the other AIs I've seen just don't really research diplomacy techs. This gives the human a large, maybe too large, advantage when negotiating, and it also seems that the AI is actually willing to pay quite a good price for those yellow techs when you do decide to sell them. Finally, this means that the human gets to Alliances first, which basically lets the human player gain a big advantage by signing an alliance with a civ or two – first, of course, preparing for that, and getting the relations with your chosen allies good enough beforehand.
It's disappointing, however, that you still have to haggle with the AI civs. I'm selling them a tech for money. Move the slider around. Aha, they'll buy it for around 400. Then, start moving it in increments of 10. Will buy for 410, not for 420. Then in increments of 1... will buy for 419, will buy for 418, and for 417, and for 416, for 415 they won't. Click back to 416. Sold. It's needed to maximize the profits, but it's boring, and tedious.
On the upside, wasted social production going to military is a huge plus, and kudos for that. It makes adjusting sliders every turn much less necessary, and that was quite a micromanagement nightmare before 1.1. There's still quite a bit of micromanagement involved for optimal play, but now it's on an acceptable level. Oh, I also remembered now that the AI civs won't surrender quite as easily, which is also a very good thing. No more “I'll just take these two planets” to find the AI afraid and completley surrendering.
I appreciate the humour in GalCiv2. The new dialogue is even better and more humorous, but it's never over the top. It's one of those things that remains in memory even once you're no longer playing and for that, again, I give a thumbs-up.
I am now looking forward to playing more 1.1, and as my hands aren't too tired, I plan to update this thread with some more impressions and thoughts. Might not be immediately, though, as I'm quite busy on the Civ4 expansion, and can pay attention to GalCiv2 in breaks.
My bottom line for now is, 1.1 is an update that adds a lot. Oh, it shows you how long until destination for a ship on the main interface too, yeay! If you've played GalCiv2 but put it down temporarily, it's definitely worth another try. 1.1 hasn't fixed completely everything, but it's fixed a lot, and the AI improvements are really significant. As always, I'll be adding not only more good impressions as they come, but also thoughts on what's bad and what remains to be done, ideally. Thanks for reading, and thanks to Stardock for a very solid update!
To anyone who doesn't have GalCiv2 1.1 installed, I'd like to say that 1.1 is not a patch. It simply wouldn't be appropriate to call it that. 1.1 is an update, and quite some – I would go as far as to say that 1.1 improves the game more than some expansion packs do. I really appreciate Stardock's system of releasing free extra content for the game, because indeed, this goes beyond just patching. Okay, now to continue on to the game itself.
The first noticeable improvement was the addition of some options to the game setup screen. Probably the most important one to me was the addition of a random rivals option, which randomizes the civilizations that are going to inhabit the galaxy with you. The option for a random galaxy size is interesting, but “randomize intelligence” is probably the most unusual of these new options. You choose a general difficulty level, and the intelligence of your rivals is random within some limits to overall match the difficulty you chose. As a result, some of the civs will be stronger and some will be weaker. It's an interesting option to pick once in a while, though I am probably going to stick with setting everyone to the same intelligence level.
As the game starts, it immediately requires a change in strategic thinking compared to previous versions. One of the biggest flaws of GalCiv2 was, in my opinion, the “Colony Rush”. Simply put, you'd want to get as many colony ships as you could, do it fast, and send them out to colonize as many planets as you could. If you did it right, you'd end up with noticeably more planets than the other civs, and thus immediately assure yourself a much better position. More planets equals more population (and less planets for your rivals), more population equals more tax revenue and more troops for invasions, which basically equals better economy and a better military. Fortunately, the underlying system has been significantly tweaked in 1.1.
You can still do a colony rush. Push your slider to max out military production, use most of your starting money to rushbuy colony ships and send them everywhere you can... that's still an option. Instead of just limiting the player's choices, GalCiv2 did the better thing, and added tradeoffs and other choices. The most significant change is in population growth. Much as you could realistically expect, if the population on a planet is low, it takes a considerable time to increase back to what it was. So if you build colony ships on your home planet like crazy until the population decreases to less than a billion, you will be stuck there at a low population for quite some time. Also, the new planets you settle won't population-boom at once. Of course, huge population growth on new planets and quick population re-growth on colony-building planets made mass-colonizing the one right thing to do. Now, even if you grab a planet less, you may just end up having more population on your home planets, and it matters.
Also, building colony ships at a maximum speed requires you to increase your industrial spending, which led to a decrease in your approval rates. In the original GalCiv2, it hardly mattered, and you would be right to have your approval relatively low, because the benefits of doing so far outweighed the negative consequences. The new population growth formulas, however, are better tied in to your approval, which means that keeping it higher can give you an advantage, which, in turn, means again that mass-rushing colonies might not be the best thing, and that you should really consider colonizing a couple of planets less, but developing them better.
My first game with 1.1 I played as the Drath, in a medium-sized galaxy with most parameters random. Here I'd like to comment again on the difficulty/intelligence levels. The names on those are quite misleading, and indeed, when I first started with GalCiv2, these misleading names gave me a far worse impression of the GalCiv2 AI than it deserved. Simply put, I expected the “Normal” difficulty level to be, well, normal. Sort of me being on even ground with the AIs. However, it turned out that the “Normal” difficulty sets the AI intelligence levels to pretty low ones, which results in a game that is a complete pushover. Also, the “Normal” intelligence level isn't really normal, because many AI algorithms are dormant there, and the AI does stupid things on purpose. The least I'd expect of “Normal” intelligence is maybe having some more advanced tactics unused, but I'd certainly expect the AIs not to pursue losing strategies. Anyway, I want to emphasize that for anyone familiar with GalCiv or Civ4, or Civ-like games, playing against opponents on anything less than “Intelligent” is probably going to be easy to the point of frustration.
The AI is, to me, an extremely important aspect of any strategy game. I also criticized the GalCiv2 AI extensively, and am now glad to say that it has improved significantly, though there are still some notable areas to improve further. Diplomatically, the AI has certainly improved. It seems that it's become stricter in its refusals to sell weapons technologies to military superpowers, and it has definitely become more “aware” of what's going on around. You can now really see civs working together among themselves (or with you, as the case may be) to defeat a common enemy, and there's now some real feeling of blocs forming. Particularly, there seem to be the Good & Evil blocs that end up quite hating each other.
Likewise, the AI trading ability has improved. It won't quite accept deals that aren't fair to it easily anymore. A drawback I've noticed, though, is that it's nearly impossible to get anyone to sell you trade goods. I found it easier to even buy ships from other civs that the trade goods. I'm not sure if I was unlucky, but if it's a design choice, then it's definitely somewhat too strict.
On the downside, it seems that the AI still declares war first and then tries to figure out what to do now that it's at war. It declares war, and then it'll start making more ships and going for you. Instead, of course, it should have an attack fleet ready, move it to your vicinity, and then declare war. I again experienced this with the Drengin. The Drengin AI is very aggressive – you're going to end up being at war with them, essentially, and certainly so if you're a good-aligned civ. So I again had the Drengin declare on me, but at that point they had hardly any military capable of an attack. Of course, I immediately sent the bulk of my fleet to Drengin systems, and conquered them while they were thinking about how to wage the war they started.
Warfare in GalCiv2, of course, remains very powerful. Once you take a planet, your enemy has one less, you have one more, and the enemy has no way to rebuild it or anything, since there are only so many planets, this being one of the most important differences between GalCiv2 and Civ4. It gives the attacker quite a considerable advantage. Another interesting fact is that the advantage grows exponentially if you have more troops than the enemy does. Star systems have planets that are within one turn, two maximum, of each another. Therefore, once you have your fleet at a planet, you essentially are threatening all the planets in the system – and if you have enough ships to do so, you can take over an entire star system in one turn. Just need to have enough Transports. Admittedly, I haven't yet seen enough warfare waged by the AI civs, but so far I haven't seen them executing such attacks on an entire star system at once.
While I would, ideally, like to see warfare a little less advantageous, it's helluva fun. Then again, the advantages of warfare have decreased somewhat in 1.1. Transports are the key ship in any war, as you can't take planets over without them, and transports use your population just like colony ships do – which means that building enough transports to take over good planets loses you quite a bit of population that, again, takes time to grow back under the improved formulas. And warfare is fun. There's just something awesome about designing your own starships for war, at least for a sci-fi fan such as myself. And thankfully, the shipyard in 1.1 is now better. It's just gotten easier to use, decorating your ships is now really simple, including the rotation of parts, etc. Of course, the sheer mechanics of combat are also very fun.
Strategically, wow, forward starbases are awesome. Building a military starbase to cover the area where you're attacking is just a huge benefit. Particularly when you're using lots of small/medium class ships. Build a starbase forwards, add one attack assist module to it, and boom, your fleet of 7 small ships has now got 7 more attack. I've seen some cleverly placed AI Influence starbases, but I haven't so far encountered military starbases placed strategically to aid in attack.
Again, though, to fully enjoy war, you absolutely must have the AI rivals at at least “Intelligent”. Any less and they will send unescorted or barely escorted at best Transports, and form no real fleets, just maybe small ones. Also, they won't be very effective at adapting to your ship designs. This is, fortunately, actually a strength of the AI at higher difficulties – if you attack with laser-based ships only, the AI will quickly switch to building ships with good deflector ships, and you'll be screwed if you don't have sufficiently advanced bullet or missile technology.
One moment of true happiness for me was when I got a message from a minor civ that they've noticed me building up troops around their planet. I've complained in the past that the AI was often slow at detecting troop buildups, but the problem has been remedied now. On the other hand, you never need to actually do a troop buildup there. You build up a fleet at home, send it towards the enemy, and you'll be able to attack a star system while giving very little advance notice to the enemy, just because your ships won't be seen until a turn or two before the attack.
I am surprised that the AI doesn't seem to care for diplomacy (yellow) techs much. I've seen the Torians do very good research, but they and the other AIs I've seen just don't really research diplomacy techs. This gives the human a large, maybe too large, advantage when negotiating, and it also seems that the AI is actually willing to pay quite a good price for those yellow techs when you do decide to sell them. Finally, this means that the human gets to Alliances first, which basically lets the human player gain a big advantage by signing an alliance with a civ or two – first, of course, preparing for that, and getting the relations with your chosen allies good enough beforehand.
It's disappointing, however, that you still have to haggle with the AI civs. I'm selling them a tech for money. Move the slider around. Aha, they'll buy it for around 400. Then, start moving it in increments of 10. Will buy for 410, not for 420. Then in increments of 1... will buy for 419, will buy for 418, and for 417, and for 416, for 415 they won't. Click back to 416. Sold. It's needed to maximize the profits, but it's boring, and tedious.
On the upside, wasted social production going to military is a huge plus, and kudos for that. It makes adjusting sliders every turn much less necessary, and that was quite a micromanagement nightmare before 1.1. There's still quite a bit of micromanagement involved for optimal play, but now it's on an acceptable level. Oh, I also remembered now that the AI civs won't surrender quite as easily, which is also a very good thing. No more “I'll just take these two planets” to find the AI afraid and completley surrendering.
I appreciate the humour in GalCiv2. The new dialogue is even better and more humorous, but it's never over the top. It's one of those things that remains in memory even once you're no longer playing and for that, again, I give a thumbs-up.
I am now looking forward to playing more 1.1, and as my hands aren't too tired, I plan to update this thread with some more impressions and thoughts. Might not be immediately, though, as I'm quite busy on the Civ4 expansion, and can pay attention to GalCiv2 in breaks.
My bottom line for now is, 1.1 is an update that adds a lot. Oh, it shows you how long until destination for a ship on the main interface too, yeay! If you've played GalCiv2 but put it down temporarily, it's definitely worth another try. 1.1 hasn't fixed completely everything, but it's fixed a lot, and the AI improvements are really significant. As always, I'll be adding not only more good impressions as they come, but also thoughts on what's bad and what remains to be done, ideally. Thanks for reading, and thanks to Stardock for a very solid update!
ACK!
. I was actually hoping you would drop by when writing this, err, tirade 
.
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