Galactic Civilizations II impressions

[Saber Cherry]

I really don't have time to play around, but I bought it anyway. Oh well. I'll make this short and concise. But bear in mind that in so doing, I am glossing over the positives - which are understood - in favor of the negatives, which are unexpected.


1) It seems like a good game. And though irrelevant to gameplay, the ship builder is just AWESOME. I spent more time in there than in the actual game last night. Unfortunately, 99% of it is cosmetic rather than functional, but I expect to be able to change that in a mod. Don't equate "cosmetic" with "irrelevant" - it's truly awesome.

2) If you like strategy games other than SEIV, I preliminarily recommend buying it. But see the proviso in #3...

3) I do NOT recommend playing it right now, even if you buy it (ergo, there's no point in buying now). The release was decent, and much cleaner than Civ IV a month AFTER release. However, it is not finished. There are some aspects that are just broken, as well as scores of small bugs. But these problems are almost universally easy to fix (5 to 200 minutes each) rather than fundamental; they are typically issues of "specific implementation" (easily mutable) rather than "missing functionality" (requiring massive work). Perhaps 20% of them were fixed in the first patch, a record 4 days after release; I anticipate another 25% in the next patch, due Thursday. At that rate, 90%+ should be resolved in two to four weeks - and bear in mind that most games do not reach the 90% mark, ever. Actually, most published games never reach the 40% mark, but here I'm using the word "game" to refer to something to which a reader may have been exposed.

3a) GalCiv2 is playable and fun now, but I'm a perfectionist. The issues that annoy me will annoy other perfectionists. Why settle for less when you can demand and receive more? If you like turn-based (aka "real") strategy games and don't care about minor details, go buy GCII and play it now - but in that case, you wouldn't be active in the SEIV forums anyway, so you'll never see this.

3b) On the other hand, cautious perfectionists and non-perfectionists alike should neither buy nor play GC2 before visiting the official website (www.GalCiv2.com) and reading the Official Bug List and Other Official Bug List and Unofficial Bug List.

4) There are numerous issues that I have with design decisions, such as population growth rate (currently ~10% per week), technological development, ship parameters, weapon balance, overly coarse granularity in some areas (like ship HP), and so forth. These will not be fixed as they are not 'broken'. However, mod support will be included in Thursday's patch. From examining the XML files (I can post them here if anyone is interested), most (but specifically NOT all) of the numbers I'd need to change are already XML'd rather than hard-coded, so (assuming that a relatively small number of additional things migrate over to XML) I expect to be able to change the game to the way *I* want it by Thursday.

5) Bear in mind that unlike SEIV and Dominions II, GC2 is strictly single-player; thus AI deficiencies are ?X (read: some number of times) more meaningful, and no imbalance can be remedied by "mutual agreement".


I will let you know when I feel that the game is ready for prime time. God knows why people release things before they're ready, as they only hurt themselves. GC2 has been getting 90-95% reviews according to GameRankings.com, but who ever knows what filthy crack reviewers are smoking? They're the same people that gave Final Fantasy 7 100% and Xenogears 80%, and the same people that convinced me to buy Star Control III with 85%+ reviews... when it was a pile of stinking feces. Not to mention that they unanimously gave Civ IV 90%+ reviews *at release*, when it 1) was unplayable on non-Nvidia cards, 2) regularly crashed after at most 2 hours, 3) gradually slowed to below 1FPS after playing for "too long", and 4) allowed you to get any city from any AI at any time through an easy diplomacy exploit (I found that bug *after* their 1-month patch). I no longer trust any published reviews. And even though I use the keyword "they" to denote "the enemy of all that is good", I'm obligated to note that I have received financial compensation for writing the game reviews of a periodical with circulation over 500,000.


In the meantime, I know there are others here who have bought and played GC2. So come out of the closet; it's nothing of which to be ashamed! Post your impressions too.

[Atrocities]

Thank you for the review, it was very enlightening and helpful.

[Saber Cherry]

You're welcome. I consider it more of a "late-beta preview" though.

[BlizzardGR]

I got it on release and it's fabulous! The game deserves those high scores because it's awesome! As for the minor bugs here and there, you said it yourself, that they are easily fixed and most of them will be gone in a few weeks. I'm a bit of a perfectionist too but they don't bother me that much because i know that they be fixed soon enough and they don't affect gameplay. For now there is no doubt who is the 4X king! I'm sure SEV5 will challege it for the title but baring in mind how different they are, i think there won't be much competing.

Now it's time for SEV5 to live up to our expectations cause GalCiv II already has.

[Fyron]

Saber Cherry said:
God knows why people release things before they're ready, as they only hurt themselves.

You mean the debacle of Civ 3 didn't have you convinced?

[Saber Cherry]

Imperator Fyron said:

You mean the debacle of Civ 3 didn't have you convinced?

Let me rephrase that: They hurt me too. I always swear "This time, I'll wait until (my friend buys it, a patch comes out, a demo comes out, it drops to $19, whatever) before buying it." And I always break down, and later regret it. I didn't buy MOO 3, though - I started to suspect something was wrong in the final weeks.

BlizzardGR:

Opinions on the game vary, though on the GC2 forums they seem largely positive. Regardless, there are undeniably a lot of bugs that you would not see in (for example) a Microsoft-sponsored PC game at release, let alone in a console game. To me, it's like going to a job interview without showering or combing your hair. You're the same person underneath, by why saboutage yourself? The game's quality is monotonically increasing at a very rapid rate, so there's little point in diving in now, when it will be much better in a few weeks.

[Graeme Dice]

and the same people that convinced me to buy Star Control III with 85%+ reviews... when it was a pile of stinking feces.

SC3 was hardly that bad. It was nowhere near as good as SC2, but that doesn't mean

Not to mention that they unanimously gave Civ IV 90%+ reviews *at release*, when it 1) was unplayable on non-Nvidia cards,

It was only a subset of ATI cards where the game wouldn't start, and in many cases it was a matter of Microsoft's DirectX 9.0c install routine not properly updating the drivers.

2) regularly crashed after at most 2 hours,

I never experienced any crashes that I would consider regular. Even so, one crash every two hours is extremely low for any kind of game.

3) gradually slowed to below 1FPS after playing for "too long",

Do you have the recommended 512 MB of RAM? You'd probably want at least 1 GB to prevent slowdowns.

and 4) allowed you to get any city from any AI at any time through an easy diplomacy exploit (I found that bug *after* their 1-month patch).

It's a single-player game, so just don't use that exploit.

[Fyron]

It was only a subset of ATI cards where the game wouldn't start, and in many cases it was a matter of Microsoft's DirectX 9.0c install routine not properly updating the drivers.

Irrelevant. There is no reason why the game shouldn't have been able to run _at all_ with 1 version out of date drivers.

I never experienced any crashes that I would consider regular. Even so, one crash every two hours is extremely low for any kind of game.

*cringes* More like, extremely high. There is no excuse for a $50 game from a huge company to crash in anything but the most obscure of situations. The game would crash _every turn_ after playing for a while in many cases... It was absurd.

Do you have the recommended 512 MB of RAM? You'd probably want at least 1 GB to prevent slowdowns.

High amounts of RAM didn't help anyone I know. Game was still unstable and crashed a lot with a gig or more. It has been fixed now, but the beta release 1.0 was really bad...

[Saber Cherry]

I thought Starcon 3 was horrible. I derived no pleasure from it *except* for melee mode, which took no game designing, as it's been present since SC1.

I should not have said "Unplayable". In fact it was playable on most ATI cards, but there were major graphical flaws. In my case - I have 512 MB ram and a Radeon 9800 Pro, which had the latest drivers (and the latest DX) - I got no wonder videos, a black diplomacy screen 80% of the time, the screen went all *weird* when I zoomed out (orange blocks rather than cloud cover). But it was playable. However, that was after the patch that was supposed to fix problems with ATI cards.

I also had no music at all except for the intro (maybe that's the only music, I don't know), and after my fourth city, the game would slow down as time progressed so that I had to restart the game every 20 minutes or so, rather than experience 0.5 FPS. That was a memory leak combined with a graphics caching problem, I understand.

And then there were the crashes, but there were only a few of them. However, I only played for about 7 hours. Civ IV is the only game I can think of that's crashed in WinXP SP2 (though I have a bad memory). WOW crashed, but that turned out to be a motherboard problem, due to crappy Taiwanese industrial espionage (they messed up when stealing the Japanese electrolyte formulas, but used them anyway). If they didn't have a virtual monopoly, I'd never buy another Taiwanese motherboard again... and I see no reason to cut Firaxis slack for shipping a technically broken product, either. Developers know at release whether their game works or not, just like mobo makers know whether they are using black-market child-labor capacitors based on crayon drawings smuggled on the underwear label of a dyslexic Japanese janitor. The Taiwanese execs may not have known the capacitors would explode and leak, but they sure knew that they didn't care. And Firaxis didn't really care whether ATI users could play their game within two months of buying it, or whether anyone could play more than 2 hours without a crash or more than 10 turns (mid game) without restarting. I know there were reports of people not having problems, but you can't launch a new jetliner based on scattered reports of them not crashing on takeoff... and you shouldn't do that with software, either.

As for not using exploits... it wasn't like I tried to. The typical AI diplomacy routines, like those in Civ 3, demanded strictly unequal trades. But if you used the new feature, the "What will make this deal work?" button, the AI would accept any deal you had put on the table, even if they had rejected it before. And they would never accept my peace settlements otherwise, no matter how badly they were losing in a war, or how little I asked for.


As I said earlier, GC2 is in much better shape. No major graphical flaws, working music, no crashes, no slowdown after 10 straight hours DESPITE defragging my other harddrive for the first 4 hours of it. They simply care more... though not *quite* enough for me.

[Fyron]

I'm just glad I borrowed a friend's copy of Civ 4 to try it before wasting any money on a beta...