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Look who’s daddy now

It must have really sucked to be designer/programmer/head marketing flak/swamp master Brad Wardell a few months ago, when MOO3’s ship date was finalized and coincided with Galactic Civilizations’. The effect was not unlike trying to release an independent movie at the same time as the new Star Wars. No matter how good your game sounded, everyone expected Master of Orion 3 to crush it.

Early reviews seemed to confirm this fate for GalCiv, but a second sober look showed the massive holes present in this latest Master of Orion release. Buried under needless layers of complexity, conflicting AI governors and poor features was… a terrible game. Nothing quite as disappointing had hit the PC market since the release of Outpost a decade earlier. The stage was set for GalCiv to dance its way into the hearts of gamers like Cinderella. But has it delivered?

Galaxy setup

The challengers

My poor start

What GalCiv is

In many ways, Galactic Civilizations is the anti-MOO3. Whereas Master of Orion 3 built on the complexity of Master of Orion 2 and added AI elements to help the player cope, GalCiv took a cleaner approach to the manner. Resembling Civilization and Warlords more than Master of Orion, Galactic Civilizations is a deceptively simple game with deep gameplay that belies humble graphics.

MOO3 has a wild collection of factors displayed to a player that he considers before colonizing a planet. GalCiv just rates planets by number – the higher the better. A planet rating of 15 is the minimum one should colonize, and a world in the 30s is exponentially greater, a virtual Eden. MOO3 has AI governors who routinely ignore the demands of the ruler, while GalCiv’s governors are nothing more than a production queue. Yet despite being the simpler method, GalCiv is far more effective. True, there are no specialized industrial colonies, research colonies or farm colonies, but systems and worlds retain a variety of strategic significance by their quality rating.

This kind of initial simplicity makes GalCiv easy to dismiss as yet another Civilization clone that adds nothing to the genre, except a space setting. Yet nothing could be farther from the truth, as Stardock has come up with some new tricks for the old dog, and delivered on age-old promises that other titles in the genre have never quite achieved.

Buy your colony ships to colonize quickly

w00t

Pick the planet to colonize