GALACTIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: ENTER TITLE HERE

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