Galactic Civilizations II Dread Lords

Space, the final frontier, these are the voyages of the Drath Legion … no, wait, the Iconian Refuge … maybe the Arcean Empire, or Terran Alliance, or … you get the idea.

Stardock is back with Galactic Civilizations II Dread Lords, a real-time strategy space title that allows gamers to build civilizations; it is a tale of discovery, of technologies bridging the gaps between the stars and of younger races reaching out to explore and conquer. But, as the narrator so ominously intones …

“As they will soon learn, there are far worse things in the universe than each other.”

In the single-player mode it is readily apparent just how well designed the game is. You begin in the Galaxy Setup, picking the six of the galaxy for the game from five pre-built sizes and a custom size (custom is a common feature, which allows players to tailor the experience very nicely). Move over to Scenario for six designs and set the victory conditions. Under Galaxy Settings you can pick the proliferation of habitable planets, star density, the number of planets, number of anomalies (nice resource point, or potential battle areas), the number of stars and the rate at which technology is developed. After that, you can pick from nine races or customize a race. Each race has its own strengths and you can allocate points to abilities (there are 24 categories), set your political bent, give the race it’s own color scheme in the appearance set up, and allocate points to tech areas.

Game settings enable you to choose the difficulty and number of opponents in the scenario. There are 12 difficulty settings from cakewalk to obscene and suicidal. Nice touch and good definitions.

Once you work through the selection process, you hop into the game and work through turns to move ships, colonize, start technologies to develop dialogues with your rivals and basically work toward the goals outlined in the scenario. The AI is really pretty good here, depending on the difficulty setting, and the game moves at a nice pace. The interface is solid and players should only have a small learning curve to work through the settings.

Starting on the lower difficulty ratings to enable you to click through the interface without too much worry is advisable.

Each turn allows you to select technologies to work on, build structures on your planets, move ships into space and begin colonization of other planets. A map overview shows you quads on the planet surface you can build on, and the building is done on a turn-by-turn basis as well. As a governor, you can set the game to micro-manage or allow it to upgrade and build as the turns become available.

Also, should the mood take you there, you can design your own craft, putting together hulls, add structural designs, engines, weapons, defense systems and modules (like construction, support, sensors or colony transport).

The combat is strategic and if you use your head, you will survive these fights. The controls proved intuitive (the tutorial in the preview build was disabled, but regardless, this game was not hard to work through and the manual was rarely consulted).

The graphics are solid and though they take on a somewhat flat two-dimensional appearance, they are bright and colorful. The theme music is wonderful.

There is a whole lot to like about this title, and this was only a preview build. While there is a tab for multiplayer in main menu, this is disabled (both in the preview and it will be in retail)  to keep the price point down. However, should there be a demand later on for multiplayer, there is a tab set into the game that may allow Stardock to patch in that feature.

Galactic Civilizations II is a strong title, featuring some of the best attributes of the turn-based strategy genre, and this is a game that should appeal to fans of the genre as well as those looking for a strong entry point into the class.