Wardell interview on Strategy Informer

[Asmodean]

Link is here

Most info is known, but this bit tells you exactly why I love GalCiv:

Let me give you an example -- you colonize a very high quality new world only to discover that it is already populated by a pre-industrial society. What do you do? Leave the planet? Only make use of parts of it? Put the natives into reservations? Enslave them? It's up to you. And your choices will change not just how other civilizations react to you but the technology tree changes and how the game itself looks and feels will begin to change. An evil civilization actually has a different looking game graphically along with different sound tracks and such (same for a "good" civilization -- you start out neutral).
We also have a lot of very complex in-game plot points that can alter the course of the game depending on how you deal with them. As I mentioned, there are 5 major alien civilizations. But there are up to 30 more minor civilizations that may be running around with their own agendas. Depending on your actions and that of other civilizations, different events can come up. And we're not talking simple "Plague shows up, kills 10 million people" type stuff. We're talking series of events that are inter-related and build up. And in virtually all cases, they are things you can control beforehand, they're not just "random bad things".

Asmodean

[Jamski]

I am dribbleing already...

-Jam

[Lemmy]

Brad Wardell: The game takes on a macro vantage point. So combat is handled in a fairly straight-forward way -- fleets and ships meet on the screen and battle *very briefly* with the result being final -- one side dies.

Not sure how this works out, but it would be nice for certain fleets to have the ability to withdraw, so you don't lose you big warfleet in just one battle, but are sort of pushed back.