Review: Galactic
Civilization GOLD
http://www.32bitsonline.com
By Christopher
Robato Yao
Galactic Civilizations Gold - The Mother of all Civilization
Games
I truly mean what I just said. This is the
mother of all civ games. Nothing else could be so much bigger,
so much more encompassing. In fact, nothing else has ever come
close to the size enabled by the Gigantic settings of the
earlier versions of GalCiv 2, the previous holder of the throne.
The new Enormous setting of the Gold version looks to vastly
increase the size of this already humongous universe. This new
setting is the crown jewel among the many improvements GalCiv
Gold (officially version 2.95) has over the Expansion Pack
(version 2.90). Taking a cue from a recent movie, SIZE DOES
MATTER. After all, megalomania in cyberspace requires no less.
While GalCiv needs no introduction for OS/2
hobbyists, it does for Linux and Windows users, especially
because a version of GalCiv is planned for their futures.
Essentially, GalCiv is a turn-based strategy and simulation game
in the great Civilization tradition. Its main characteristics
include its galactic scale, such that the playing universe is
the biggest by far you will ever see in such a game; a strong
object-oriented approach; and an artificial intelligence (AI)
engine so good, it does not need to cheat to whip your @$$. Brad
Wardell of Stardock created the original GalCiv in response to a
challenge in comp.os.os2.advocacy – a challenge that OS/2 has
the potential to be a great games platform. But what he created
turned out to be a product that deserves better recognition on
all platforms and not just OS/2. This is an excellence that
transcends operating system borders. It's nice to know that
finally, we can see this. Stardock has other cross-platform
games like Entrepreneur, but GalCiv is its greatest creation,
and it has been optimized very specifically for OS/2. The
powerful AI that is one of the strong points of this game makes
heavy use of multithreading, an OS/2 strong point. This could
grind down a lesser OS, imposing a risk on platforms like
Windows 95.
If you are looking for the latest fancy
graphics, you will be disappointed. GalCiv is not about fancy
graphics, it is about content. In a way, it's refreshing. Too
many games nowadays are carried away by built-in movie clips, 3D
effects and other visuals, to the detriment of solid game play,
especially with games on a higher intellectual level, such as
strategy and civilization games. This does not mean that GalCiv
is ugly – far from it! It is laced with tasteful graphics. For
example, the planets are the best I have ever seen in a galactic
strategy game. They look as if they are being viewed from a
telescope, complete with a sense of atmospheric fuzziness. Other
games tend to have tacky planet graphics that look like they
were lifted out of children's books. The planets are best viewed
in 16- or 24-bit color; I usually play mine at 1024x768
resolution with 16-bit color depth. The type of planet graphics
can easily tell you what kind of planet it is; habitable M class
planets are depicted in blue or purple. I do wish, though, that
there were some more color in depicting gas giants, which look
more like the bluish green orbs of Uranus and Neptune rather
than the more colorful spheres of Jupiter and Saturn. No
plantary rings nor any no moons. Planets are found when you
click on a star, and hundreds of stars permeate this galaxy.
They are all rendered pretty nicely, though in 24 bit color,
also with a telescopic view with a touch of lens flare. A star's
type can give you a clue as to what sort of planet you will find
in orbit around the star. Nice big yellow stars are the best,
and when you click on them, yes, it's nice to find nice big
juicy blue M class planets to colonize. However, this does not
mean other kinds of stars (even small red ones) won't have nice
blue orbs, so it's best to click on every one of them to
maximize your discoveries.
It's easy to miss tiny blue and white
stars, so pay attention as sometimes they also have planets.
As expected, the bigger the planet you
colonize, the more important that prize will be. Big planets
mean big populations with lots of resources. Once developed,
they produce more troops, offer more research facilities to your
empire, and build more powerful ships more quickly. The
colonization of large planets is strategically important to your
empire, and these planets should be regarded as nothing less
than the cornerstones of your empire. At the other end of the
spectrum, you should not ignore big planets with poor habitats.
These large, usually pink orbs pack resources that will still
contribute to your empire.
Unexplored sectors are hidden by a painting
that looks like nebula clouds. Only when one of your ships
enters the sector will the contents of the sector be revealed.
Sometimes you get stars, sometimes you get nothing. When you
discover a beautiful, habitable planet, I suggest you get a
colony ship out on a journey to colonize it quickly.
Colonization is a race in this game, as with other games of this
nature. The more you colonize, the larger your star empire will
be, and the stronger you you will be later in the game. It must
be noted that GalCiv allows you to initially set the density and
availability of habitable planets in the game. I like
high-density, enormous galaxies. Despite the micromanagement I
have to do, there is only one way I like my star empire to be
and that is big, bigger and biggest.
When a star gets colonized, the entire star
system is yours, and nobody can colonize even the empty
habitable planets in that system. The star system is marked with
the emblem of the human race, which looks sort of like the seal
of the United Nations. Unfortunately, you also lose the pretty
bitmap for the star system. I wish they just kept the bitmap and
put some flag underneath or on top to indicate ownership.
For GalCiv Gold, a new kind of colony ship
is introduced: the Deep Space Colony ship. However, I didn't
find it as useful, since it takes a lot of technology to
research its discovery and I was too impatient to wait that
long. Even after you do research this new ship, it's also quite
expensive to build, and during your empire's formative stages,
you're not exactly flush with cash.
The starships are mostly pretty icons –
some really nice, others Star Trek-inspired, and others
strangely alien-looking or incomprehensible. GalCiv Gold
introduces some new ship icon designs, and I particularly like
the Advanced Fighter and the Battle Hawk. Some new ships are
actually new names with new specs, but are represented by old
icons. Others, like the old Transport, are given new designs.
The old Transport reminds me of the Eagle VTOLs from the old TV
series, Space 1999. The old Rebel Destroyer is gone as well,
replaced by the new icon of the Ominorian Destroyer, a design
that you will learn to loathe as it preys on your Colony ships.
All in all, the ship icon graphics are
quite decent. Moving across the black background of space, they
have a kind of unique phosphorescent quality. There is something
about them that reminds me of luminescent plankton swimming in
sample water in a microscope. Even with range calculation
enabled, GalCiv ships don't travel in fixed hyperspace routes
that web across the galaxy. Rather, the two-dimensional space is
free space; ships are able to roam freely about from any one
point to any other point. With ranges disabled, the ships can
just about go anywhere. The price of this freedom is that it is
difficult to track the current whereabouts of all ships,
especially when you have a really big galaxy with lotsa lotsa
ships. You can access a ship menu which lists all the ships in
your fleet. Click on the ship you want to see, and the menu
brings you to the sector where the ship is. When you have ships
by the hundreds, it's going to be one long list. There is no way
to track down alien ships, however. You have to search sector
after sector manually to find the alien ships, although your
scanners (activated when you click on the alien ship) will tell
you where that ship is going or targeting.
The free form space travel featured in
GalCiv makes the galaxy attractive for pirates, and once pirates
go after your colony ships or freighters, there is not much you
can do to stop them, unless you happen to have some sort of
fighter ship within striking or interception range. In the early
versions of GalCiv, you had to deal with random pirate or rebel
bases, which so often spawned a Destroyer-class ship. Beginning
with the Expansion Pack, the Rebels took on a mean
transformation into the Ominorians, based on the Inhuman
character created by David H. McCoy.
Ominorians are a game option; you can make
them available at the start of the game. In my experience, they
will actively hunt down your ships once they sense you, and
there tend to be more of them scattered throughout the galaxy to
give you more trouble. I find their presence enough to stunt not
only my empire's growth, but also that of the other five AI
civilizations. I do find it odd that the alien civilizations
don't do anything about the Ominorian problem, even though they
will fight each other, leaving it up to you to take down the
Ominorians. The way to do this is to launch punitive expeditions
against their planets. Load up transports with troops and escort
them with fighters, or various destroyer- or cruiser-class
ships. These attacks can provide you with practice in taking out
hostile planets. If an enemy ship is orbiting the planet, attack
with a transport results in the transport's destruction, so you
must take out the orbiting ship by attacking the planet with one
of your other ships. Suffice it to say, the Ominorians, like the
Rebels before them, are easy fodder against your expeditions.
Once you defeat their planets, they're all yours, and Ominorians
tend to have nice, fat, blue orbs for a prize, planets whose
size and resources should be regarded as major strategic value.
This brings us to the battles. GalCiv lacks
the special battle modes seen with other space sim ulation games
like Master of Antares. There are no ships shooting at each
other like in Ascendancy. It's more like a contact sport; ships
simply move into the enemy ship's space, and offensive points
are counted against the defensive points. Depending on the
outcome, one ship or the other must die. Clearly, not much
thought has been applied to the battle module, but simplicity is
a virtue. This game already has enough levels of management that
you will be glad not to have to bother with one more, and with
the capacity to breed massive armadas (if you can, even ships by
the hundreds), this sort of combat would be extremely tedious. A
simple point-of-contact elimination speeds up the pace of the
game, especially in large scale galaxies, where your outposts
can build several ships in one turn.
This is not to say that GalCiv battles
cannot be exciting. They can be extremely tense. While fighting
minor powers and pestilinece like the Ominorians with small
numbers of ships can be a bore, it's much different when you get
involved in a total galactic war of domination and
extermination. When a large enemy sends armadas against you, be
prepared for a titanically long, drawn-out battle for the very
survival of your species. One particular battle I fought had me
going for weeks, with ship casualties by the hundreds. The
outcome depends very much on the situation of the galaxy. If a
hostile power is allowed to develop super power status,
destroying at least two or three rival civilizations and taking
over a third to a half of a large galaxy, it can be in a
position to send massive armadas against you. In my case, the
opponent was even more advanced technologically than my
civilization. Random flukes mean that you may or may not
encounter such a situation, but if you do, consider yourself
lucky as it does not happen all the time, and when it does, this
is certainly the most exciting and challenging part of the game.
Best of all, all of the AI opponents are certainly up to it.
In my most memorable GalCiv battle (fought
in an earlier version of GalCiv), the random design, placement
and clustering of stars created an ocean or chasm right across
the galaxy. This enabled an opposing power, the Torians, to
develop unhindered, destroying enemy civilizations on their side
of the chasm, while I was able to dominate my side through a
series of conquistidor wars against minor threats. I gained some
initiative by launching a preemptive attack on several Torian
planets at the same time. But soon enough, my border planets
were being threatened by a massive fleet of battleship-class
starships emanating from the interior of the enemy empire.
The unique battle conditions of this
particular game created interesting tactical opportunities. I
had every planet producing large numbers of small escort- and
frigate-class ships, which is not difficult even on poor quality
planets or M-class planets of small size and resources. These
ships I deployed in orbits in a last-ditch defence around
threatened planets, and gross numbers were sacrificed to brutal
assaults against my planets. Small ships alone don't pack much
of a defence, but when orbiting around planetary defences, their
defence strengths are multiplied. Against ferocious defences
such as these, enemy battleships are often destroyed or left
vulnerable to counterattack by my own cruisers and battleships.
I often had good numbers of my own escorts and frigates
available to strike back at the enemy. I especially made it a
point to target enemy transports, because without transports,
the enemy cannot exploit defenceless planets. 'Civilian' ships
like scouts, freighters, and especially colony ships, are also
good for use in defence-in-depth schemes. They may not have
offensive power, but they have some structural strength and
defensive power to spare, especially colony ships. Transports
too, can be used for that purpose. Cheap buoys can be made
cheaply by poor planets and then can be sent out as decoys and
pawns for the enemy, to draw and waste their attention and
energy. When you realize that an enemy transport cannot attack
your planet even with a mere sensor buoy orbiting around it, you
can exploit this technicality with any ship you can create.
Faced with an enemy armed with a good sized
battlefleet, you can employ or create (with the GalCiv Shipyards
expansion pack) a cheap, fast cruiser type maximizing on speed,
range, and offensive firepower in exchange for protection. I
find large numbers of this sort of ship to be effective in
hunting down and decimating enemy fleets which are supposedly
superior, with powerful battleships and higher-class ships. But
in this game, there is really a god of balance. When I attacked
a supposedly inferior alien civilization, it spawned a large
number of Stealth Cruisers that quickly ambushed my attacking
fleet of battleships and Battle Rangers, teaching me a bloody
lesson that two can play the game. The next time I struck at
enemy territory, my own fleets were covered by numerically
superior frigate-class ships, which were very cheap and quick to
make, but whose limited firepower was still enough to take out
poorly armored fast attack cruisers.
The earlier versions of GalCiv certainly
didn't lack in ship variety, but nothing beats rolling your own
designs, a decisive advantage in itself in some cases. That big
and most memorable GalCiv battle I mentioned above had me
teetering on the edge of disaster. With superior resources and
technology, the Torians mounted wave after wave of battleships
against my numerically superior but technologically inferior
small ship and cruiser forces. My planets were holding on, but I
could not keep replacing the torrent of losses in my fleet. I
didn't play the game every night; I saved it and resumed the
scenario a few days later. By coincidence, the Shipyards
expansion pack came out as a separate addition for GalCiv. I
ordered a copy, and was able to move the scenario to my
Shipyard-upgraded copy of GalCiv. What a difference it made! I
was able to go beyond the Disrupter (a fast cruiser) design into
new cruiser types that had even more speed, range and firepower.
Earlier in the game, my large numbers of Disrupters, in pitched
kamikaze attacks against the enemy waves had cost the enemy
plenty, but this was not enough to stem their advance. I needed
a ship design that could decisively slaughter the enemy. My new
designs exaggerated the Disrupter specification profile for even
more devastating, lopsided firepower. At the same time, I wanted
another nasty surprise for the alien battle fleets. I designed,
from a moderately cheap, medium speed frigate, a ship with very
little offensive firepower, but packed with as much defence and
strength it could hold on its little body. Again, this was an
exaggeration of Frigate and Corvette spec profiles with much
more defensive power. I had this ship design orbiting around
threatened planets, reinforced by planetary defences.
In defence, I found technicalities I could
exploit. Ships on the attack have to throw their offensive
points against every ship orbiting in that system. A planet can
have as many as eight ships in orbit, and a system can hold
maybe three, even four planets. This is where a colony ship can
be handy. Many systems have poor, relatively inhospitable
planets, but they can be colonized as outposts, and you can use
the additional eight orbital slots to hold more ships, adding to
the defence of the entire star system.
Against heavily fortified systems, the
enemy suffered devastating losses to the cream of their
battlefleet. I threw my fast cruisers and remaining battleships
into a desperate counterattack against the Torian survivors,
turning the attack into a rout. With Shipyards and my new ship
classes, I found the key to turn the tide of the war. It was not
over yet; the enemy still had enough industrial capability to
rebuild a new battlefleet, and I had to retake planet after
planet under fierce opposition.
Move to the present day: with the advent of
the Gold edition, Shipyards has been integrated into the game.
In addition, lessons of past GalCiv battles have been
acknowledged and learned. GalCiv Gold formally introduces new
ship classes that exploit the game's technicalities, maximizing
on range, speed and first-kill firepower instead of more
balanced designs. This time around, beware the newly revised
alien AI players, who will be aware of such battle and
ship-building strategies.
Indeed, for the veteran GalCiv player,
things are not going to be any easier this time around. I felt
that money doesn't grow on planets like it did before. Ships are
more expensive than ever. Aliens are meaner than ever.
Technologies take longer to research, although there are a whole
lot more of them now. Sure, you can have a larger galaxy now,
but it will be a more hostile one. For veterans, that means, ah,
a better challenge. If the Ominorians didn't trouble you enough,
get ready for a new race called the Outsiders. From some dark
nether regions outside the galaxy, they come out fairly late,
and randomly in an advanced game, and seek to obliterate all
those within. They sort of remind me of the Shadows in the
Babylon 5 TV series.
Going back to the ships...yes, there is a
large list of additions and improvements in GalCiv Gold over
previous versions. Not listed are "subtractions", if
you can even call them that. The entire ship acquisition program
has been revised. Many cheap ships, like the original Fighter,
Frigate, Escort, and Corvette, are no longer in the game. In
their place, you get the Advanced Fighter, this game's idea of a
second generation design, and a nicer icon to go along with it.
The Advanced Fighter is more expensive than any of the four
missing ships, but it has enough offensive firepower to take out
an Ominorian Destroyer. That's something you are going to need.
With more expensive ships, longer research
time for technologies, and a more hostile galaxy with Ominorians,
small, developing civilizations are more vulnerable in this game
than in previous versions of GalCiv. What you used to get away
with before may not work now. Ambitious beginners may find
themselves getting slaughtered unless game settings are toned
down. This is a game intended to test battle-hardened GalCiv
players, not to pamper beginners.
For those who played Master of Antares, you
might be disappointed to find that you cannot play any race
other than Human. Although portraits of the aliens are weird
enough, the game does not exploit alien biology features to
create distinctive advantages for any one race over another.
Rather, alien differences in GalCiv are much more subtle and
seem to center more on the personality of the alien AIs. Each
alien AI seems to have its own political strategy, its own
technology research strategy, its own economic development
strategy, its own ship building strategy, and its own battle
strategy. Each personality seems to have both a good and evil
side, each present in amounts that are determined at the start
of the game. The way each race acts when playing as evil or as
good is determined by these personalities. In the evolution of
GalCiv, these AI's have been revised to fix bugs and to improve
strategy development, and yes, they're more aggressive this time
around. The five alien civilizations are the Torians, the
Dominion of Yor, the Altarian Council, the Drengin Empire, and
the civilization formerly simply called 'Empire', which is now
formally called the Achean Empire.
Indeed, it is the AI that is the heart of
this game. The alien personalities are the best of any
civilization-style game I have encountered so far. They
certainly surpassed my "Genie in a PeeCee" perception.
Each AI can be set up separately, from moron to genius, at the
beginning of any game. You can also configure each race's moral
personality. Adding color to the alien personalities is their
arrogant style of speech, and you might get the impression that
in addition to treating you as the justifiably primitive
inferior that you are, you are also either potential slave
culture or dinner. Enough of this, and you will just want to get
back at them. But be forewarned! Although this game does not
cheat, on higher level settings, the AI's can hold their own.
One thing about these AI's is that they also compete with and
fight against one another. This is one reason why this game does
not need to stack the deck against you. All the AI's compete on
a level field, against you and against each other. It is not you
vs. the Universe.
The moral characters of the AI's can be
individually set, and the issue of morality is one thing that
separates this game from most others of its type. You are also
the master of your moral destiny. Being good – sacrificing
profit and production for the value of life and respect to other
species – can determine your technological development and how
other alien races treat you. I don't want to spoil anything, but
having a good report card may make it easier to get an alliance
with other aliens. Being evil, on the other hand, well, you get
to enjoy maximum productivity by trampling on others, and this
philosophy is not without its benefits, both technological and
economic. You get access to totalitarian technologies, for
example, such as the Thought Police. If you wish to know, I
often get rated as Super Evil as a leader, one who actively goes
out to murder people along the way. I didn't really like the
Talking Dolphins (one of the native aliens you meet in water
planets) anyway. Every time I retire from the game, yeah, the
game lambastes me in the closing message for the evil doer I am.
Give me a break – I'm Super Evil! Your morality, however, has
no bearing on point count, which is measured solely on the
success of your civilization. You also can change your political
state from Imperial to Democracy and then to Star Federation.
Once in a while, in a democratic state, the people rush up and
make a vote. So far, despite my evil policies, I get much more
votes from my electorate, suggesting great approval to my
alien-slave hostile policies. That's all I need. If people and
planets are unhappy, they may rebel and join the Inhumans (also
known as Ominorians) against you. But I keep my systems in line.
This game truly has what it takes
(especially with its colorful language) to appease the cyber
megalomaniac. You can always play this game based on your moral
principles and beliefs. I just don't believe in dealing with
other evil civilizations by being an intergalactic boy scout
myself. One thing of note is that in the older versions of
GalCiv, you could suddenly change from evil to good, but the
Gold version eliminates this "Darth Vader complex". If
you're bad, you stay bad.
Along with the battle modes, the game lacks
SimCity-like modes that let you develop a community piece by
piece, something characteristic of civilization games patterned
after Master of Antares. Instead, development is controlled in a
very businesslike manner, with charts, percentage allocations,
taxes, budgets, and governors executing economic plans of your
design. With a game this large, you certainly don't need the
SimCity-like micromanagement, and every assistance is needed to
help you concentrate on the grand scale. The game seems to have
a Republican/Milton Friedman approach to economics, though –
lower taxes tend to stimulate growth. Heavier taxation tends to
stifle it, so players with liberal-minded economic views should
watch out.
The star systems in a new galaxy are
distributed randomly, and the stars tend to cluster in groups or
in arms. The way clusters are grouped together will have a
profound effect on your destiny in the game. Because of the
various random factors, each GalCiv game will always be unique,
each a very different epic story. This is a game that does not
lose its appeal when you finally finish a game. Due in part to
the random nature of the galaxy layouts, the game has almost
infinite play value.
On the technical side, the game runs
flawelessly on my copy of Warp 4 with Fixpack 6. It seems free
of bugs and other sorts of instability. At enormous galaxy
settings, a powerful CPU is recommended, like a Pentium
Pro-class CPU or better. My Cyrix 686MX PR266 handled it
gracefully with power to spare. I felt annoyed at times, though,
at the way this game dominates the interface queue. I don't like
the way the game eagerly snatches away the message queue when
you need to respond to a menu or dialog. One detail about the
game is that the menu that lets you assign governors is not on
the menu for assigning projects, which would be the logical
place for this menu to be. During movement phase, the menu for
assigning governors is not presented at the time of colonization
of a new star system, although the menu for assigning projects
is. You have to wait until the end of the entire movement phase
to return to the newly colonized system and assign the system's
governor. Also, during movement phase, after you respond to a
dialog that results in colonization, the screens don't update as
accurately as they should, as the program is too busy with
background multithreading (and thus is not displaying results
properly.) But when you respond to a trade dialog, the screen
updating returns to normal. The problems above are not exactly
new; they are also present in older versions of GalCiv. GalCiv
Gold has not corrected this behavior.
GalCiv Gold offers something called World
Civilizations as a bonus. It's not really the new city-building
mode that I thought it was; it is actually a new scenario that
is land-based. The grid size, the technologies and the aliens
are limited, and though the scenario doesn't really strike any
interest with me, other players may find it a refreshing change
of pace. World Civilizations is a demo of GalCiv's
extensibility, showing that it can be altered in its look and
style.
In hindsight, it's not every day that you
see a game with a version number of 2.95. Games these days
simply come out as 1.00, have one or two patches that put it at
1.01 or 1.1, and then sit out the rest of the normal product
life until a successor title comes out, with its own 1.00
versioning system. Not GalCiv and Stardock. GalCiv is built like
many OS/2 business applications, in that it has a highly
extensible modular architecture that in time can grow more
features. GalCiv Gold is the fruit of such an approach to
software design. GalCiv veterans can easily refer to the PDF
docs for the numerous enhancements in the game.
Now issued on a new, yellow-colored CD-ROM,
Galactic Civilizations Gold may be the definitive version of
GalCiv. It is in many ways still the same old GalCiv, and that
is a comforting thought. No need to relearn the game. On the
other hand, the numerous additions make it a delightful new
surprise. Bigger, better and meaner sums it up pretty well.
Contact
information:
Stardock
Systems, Inc.
15090 Beck Rd., Suite #300
Plymouth MI 48170
Phone: (734) 927-0677
Fax: (734) 927-0678
Email: info@stardock.com