All together

Playing Galactic Civilizations II offers more freedom than Civilization IV. Civ 4 had a fairly linear tech tree and way to win. In Galactic Civilizations II, there is great temptation to downplay parts of the tech tree to focus on something more conducive to your victory. The customization of the experience goes deep; from buying off potentially dangerous civilizations by making all your trade routes with them (and this being a potentially huge source of income), to aggressively placing military starbases in the vicinity of enemy planets to prepare for invasion – GC2 offers a lot of freedom.

There is some linearity, however. Games all start with a rush for colonies – you’ll learn quick to buy rather than build your first colony ships. They then settle into the resource collection phase, rushing to get your constructors to galactic resources and occupy them first. Buying the first factory on every planet is quite helpful too, as is deciding early which will be the money, industrial, and tech capitals.

After that initial rush though, things open up. A warlike strategy would focus not just on military techs, but rush towards planetary invasion specifically – otherwise there’s no way to conquer planets. Aggressive play out of the gate is risky but has payoffs, and is almost certainly a necessity if the random map generator didn’t put any decent planets near you. Military starbases can, ironically enough, make a passive strategy more effective. Since they upgrade your ships’ capabilities, you can afford to slack off on military research and focus on the tech-win technologies, or influence technologies for a cultural victory.

There’s definitely more randomness in GC2 than the original. Starting positions vary a lot, and there’s always the risk of sending your scout or colony ships to the wrong stars, or betting that a large cluster will need many colony ships when that turns out not to be the case. Being entirely singleplayer, Galactic Civilizations II can afford to do things like that, there’s less worry about balance. While some might complain about the lack of a multiplayer option, we’re inclined to believe that Stardock decided against it to make a better singleplayer title.

Where we wish more development time had been spent is on the interface, performance, and bug fixes. The interface generally works well but does some strangely counter-intuitive things. Want to place a rally point? Don’t bother right-clicking. You’ll need to look around the toolbar to find the tiny rally point icon, which would be unidentifiable if not for the pop-up text. Scrolling is pitifully slow, though fortunately the player can click-drag the screen or click in the mini-map to get around. Also, there are notifications dropping down on the right-hand side about completed ships or planetary projects; but it doesn’t matter whether your left- or right-click, you MUST go see it if you click on it. The only way for them to expire without being seen is to wait 3-4 turns. As I said earlier, the interface isn’t bad by any means – in fact it handles a complex game very well – but it has a few niggling issues that stick out.


We’ve encountered a surprising number of bugs with the title. There’s one in the ship creator, if you go into it via the dropping notifications, will crash the game. There are some more crash bugs and perhaps a memory leak, because the game runs much worse as the turns add up. This may simply be the number of units and structures to worry about, or it could be a code issue.