So I downloaded the final components of the game almost the minute they were available. I took over half an hour drinking in the game setup process, the new graphics and music. The game sounds and looks very good, in my opinion. Most of the old options are back but some new ones exist.
My first game, I started with AIs on top of me, no room to expand. OCC or Zergling Rush, take my pick?
I quit that and restarted.
My second game, there's one juicy planet in range, about equidistant between myself and the Altarian, and his colony ship beelined straight there, beating mine out by half a turn. That's it, no colony for me. ... Maybe if I'm lucky, my colony ship can wander around in the dark and find a home, eventually -- no, wait. There seem to be range limits on the ships! ... What am I supposed to do with these maps? Where do I dial up the MinDistance variables in the XML to correct this. 
... They made the maps smaller, and they were already pretty small last time out. (A lot of players played only on the biggest size maps -- I was one of the few max difficulty players who played the full variety.)
I'm certainly biased about my own map creations and balancing efforts, but... Expansion is the most compelling part of the genre. How can shortchanging that on your default settings possibly be a good thing?
I started a third game on a Large galaxy and seemed to get some breathing space. There were six star systems in my neck of the woods. In these, there would turn out to be one good planet and I rolled lucky and chose to send my initial colony ship in the correct direction to find it right away. Trying to deal with the rest of my local stars did not go so well. Long story short, I built another colony ship and a scout and sent them around through the back lines looking at the other four stars, which all turned out to have nothing useful. Before I could get my colony ship back home to settle Mars (a poor but habitable planet in Earth's home system) an Alien beelined his colony ship there and grabbed it right out from under my nose!
Managing my economy, there are areas of waste, where spending just goes up in smoke. Trying to prevent, or more likely limit, the waste, is an exercise in micromanagement, and to make matters worse, the interface was not lending itself well to lots of micro of this type. (At least I remember it being easier to do the same kind of micro in GC1). The new planet system makes it harder to get a handle on the economic formula. In one sense that might be good, but short term it means a lot more up-front complexity. (The old system was Civ-like, in that you could build one of each type of building. Now that you can instead build X buildings on this planet and Y buildings on that one, well... there's more freedom, but also a lot more calculation involved in winnowing your way to a successful outcome.)
My initial review is a mixed bag. I know it is unfair to GC2, but Civ4 has raised the bar in so many ways (and I was in there pushing it up). I find it frustrating and even painful for there to be so much economic waste in the system. There's at least the same amount as was in GC1 if not more thanks to the new planetary buildings system. We can almost stop right there, because for me personally, this is already a halting problem. A lot of the gameplay in GC1 was about minimizing waste. Civ3 was the same way. I find that I can't really go back there any more. Getting in there and messing with the sliders and settings on every turn has my eyes bugging out after just a couple of hours. Since mastering that process is integral to mastering the game on the whole (at least up to a player's maximum potential for success) I won't be going there. ... More on this in a bit.
The starting conditions haven't changed either. You start with one military ship and one colony ship. It's the Civ equivalent of starting with a second settler and a warrior, except that instead of being able to move in almost any direction on the land and be able to settle there when you arrive, there is at most one or two right answers out there in the fog, and several wrong answers, and it's a Big Huge Dice Roll™ for you to guess. ... GC1 was like this too and I worked around it with spoiler infomation, exploring a map and then restarting, because it was just too dumb for my whole game to turn on whether I guessed correctly on where to send my first colony ship or how many more colony ships to build. ... I suppose I can go back to the same type of spoiler info again to work around this gambling element, but I am less than enthused about it. (Civ4's expansion phase is a lot less harried. You get to scout around to a greater or lesser extent and there are more options for how, where and when to expand. In GC, expansion is like in Civ3: the faster the better, the more the better, except the options are much more narrow.)
There are some frustrations about the ship-designing section, too. I wanted to look at the specs on the existing ship designs and couldn't seem to get those. Some stats, yes, but not the "this is how this is put together" display.
There is some good stuff in here, behind the mechanical items that are getting in my way. Honestly, my first urge is just to go start a new game of Civ4 instead. That's not the urge I want to be having. I got over fifty games out of GalCiv1, almost as many as I got out of Civ3 counting both expansions; however, I ran the course with the GalCiv1 gameplay and its attendant imbalances, annoyances and flaws, and most of those issues are still with the game! I feel very much like I did about Civ2 when I first saw it, which is, "Hey, why didn't you guys fix the GAMEPLAY problems?" My Civ1 burnout was legendary beyond measure and the franchise had to move a long way before it could attract me back. I skipped Colonization, Civ2, and SMAC, waiting literally a decade for Civ3 to improve on enough of the things that finally ended my intense love affair with Civ1 for me to enjoy the game again. ... GalCiv2 has dramatically improved graphics, sound, polish, and most likely the space warfare. That's a lot! But the economics are essentially unchanged, at first blush. That may be more than I can overcome.
I'm willing, at this point, to go with lower difficulty and some kind of process that accepts a certain degree of economic waste and inefficiency in exchange for not having to micromanage to such a painful extent, but... There is still the problem of having to THINK THROUGH this economy to macromanage it. I'm not sure I can accept the waste. (I could not accept it from the Civ3 governors. It just drove me crazy!
I could not take my attention off it, and that was fatal for my efforts to pull the same trick on Civ3, back when I tried it.)
I am not giving up on it after just a couple of hours. I've got two years of Civ4 under my belt though (and worse, the ability to nag Soren to fix these kinds of issues when I found them -- and man did we fix a bunch of them!) Those of you fresh off of Civ3 and the land of endless micro, or those of you who never played GC1, may find the economics do not bother you.
I hope to have a more favorable report to offer after adjusting for some of these issues and giving the game a chance to make a second impression beyond them.
- Sirian
My first game, I started with AIs on top of me, no room to expand. OCC or Zergling Rush, take my pick?
I quit that and restarted.My second game, there's one juicy planet in range, about equidistant between myself and the Altarian, and his colony ship beelined straight there, beating mine out by half a turn. That's it, no colony for me.
... Maybe if I'm lucky, my colony ship can wander around in the dark and find a home, eventually -- no, wait. There seem to be range limits on the ships! ... What am I supposed to do with these maps? Where do I dial up the MinDistance variables in the XML to correct this. ... They made the maps smaller, and they were already pretty small last time out. (A lot of players played only on the biggest size maps -- I was one of the few max difficulty players who played the full variety.)I'm certainly biased about my own map creations and balancing efforts, but...
Expansion is the most compelling part of the genre. How can shortchanging that on your default settings possibly be a good thing?I started a third game on a Large galaxy and seemed to get some breathing space. There were six star systems in my neck of the woods. In these, there would turn out to be one good planet and I rolled lucky and chose to send my initial colony ship in the correct direction to find it right away. Trying to deal with the rest of my local stars did not go so well. Long story short, I built another colony ship and a scout and sent them around through the back lines looking at the other four stars, which all turned out to have nothing useful. Before I could get my colony ship back home to settle Mars (a poor but habitable planet in Earth's home system) an Alien beelined his colony ship there and grabbed it right out from under my nose!
Managing my economy, there are areas of waste, where spending just goes up in smoke. Trying to prevent, or more likely limit, the waste, is an exercise in micromanagement, and to make matters worse, the interface was not lending itself well to lots of micro of this type. (At least I remember it being easier to do the same kind of micro in GC1). The new planet system makes it harder to get a handle on the economic formula. In one sense that might be good, but short term it means a lot more up-front complexity. (The old system was Civ-like, in that you could build one of each type of building. Now that you can instead build X buildings on this planet and Y buildings on that one, well... there's more freedom, but also a lot more calculation involved in winnowing your way to a successful outcome.)
My initial review is a mixed bag. I know it is unfair to GC2, but Civ4 has raised the bar in so many ways (and I was in there pushing it up). I find it frustrating and even painful for there to be so much economic waste in the system. There's at least the same amount as was in GC1 if not more thanks to the new planetary buildings system. We can almost stop right there, because for me personally, this is already a halting problem. A lot of the gameplay in GC1 was about minimizing waste. Civ3 was the same way. I find that I can't really go back there any more. Getting in there and messing with the sliders and settings on every turn has my eyes bugging out after just a couple of hours. Since mastering that process is integral to mastering the game on the whole (at least up to a player's maximum potential for success) I won't be going there. ... More on this in a bit.
The starting conditions haven't changed either. You start with one military ship and one colony ship. It's the Civ equivalent of starting with a second settler and a warrior, except that instead of being able to move in almost any direction on the land and be able to settle there when you arrive, there is at most one or two right answers out there in the fog, and several wrong answers, and it's a Big Huge Dice Roll™ for you to guess. ... GC1 was like this too and I worked around it with spoiler infomation, exploring a map and then restarting, because it was just too dumb for my whole game to turn on whether I guessed correctly on where to send my first colony ship or how many more colony ships to build. ... I suppose I can go back to the same type of spoiler info again to work around this gambling element, but I am less than enthused about it. (Civ4's expansion phase is a lot less harried. You get to scout around to a greater or lesser extent and there are more options for how, where and when to expand. In GC, expansion is like in Civ3: the faster the better, the more the better, except the options are much more narrow.)
There are some frustrations about the ship-designing section, too. I wanted to look at the specs on the existing ship designs and couldn't seem to get those. Some stats, yes, but not the "this is how this is put together" display.
There is some good stuff in here, behind the mechanical items that are getting in my way. Honestly, my first urge is just to go start a new game of Civ4 instead. That's not the urge I want to be having. I got over fifty games out of GalCiv1, almost as many as I got out of Civ3 counting both expansions; however, I ran the course with the GalCiv1 gameplay and its attendant imbalances, annoyances and flaws, and most of those issues are still with the game! I feel very much like I did about Civ2 when I first saw it, which is, "Hey, why didn't you guys fix the GAMEPLAY problems?" My Civ1 burnout was legendary beyond measure and the franchise had to move a long way before it could attract me back. I skipped Colonization, Civ2, and SMAC, waiting literally a decade for Civ3 to improve on enough of the things that finally ended my intense love affair with Civ1 for me to enjoy the game again. ... GalCiv2 has dramatically improved graphics, sound, polish, and most likely the space warfare. That's a lot! But the economics are essentially unchanged, at first blush. That may be more than I can overcome.
I'm willing, at this point, to go with lower difficulty and some kind of process that accepts a certain degree of economic waste and inefficiency in exchange for not having to micromanage to such a painful extent, but... There is still the problem of having to THINK THROUGH this economy to macromanage it. I'm not sure I can accept the waste. (I could not accept it from the Civ3 governors. It just drove me crazy!
I could not take my attention off it, and that was fatal for my efforts to pull the same trick on Civ3, back when I tried it.)I am not giving up on it after just a couple of hours. I've got two years of Civ4 under my belt though (and worse, the ability to nag Soren to fix these kinds of issues when I found them -- and man did we fix a bunch of them!) Those of you fresh off of Civ3 and the land of endless micro, or those of you who never played GC1, may find the economics do not bother you.
I hope to have a more favorable report to offer after adjusting for some of these issues and giving the game a chance to make a second impression beyond them.
- Sirian
Fortune favors the bold.
