June 14, 2006 - The original Galactic Civilizations computer game is one of Stardock’s most successful to date, and was later followed up with an expansion called Altarian Prophecies. Galactic Civilizations 2 takes the original game and completely revamps the graphics engine, and adds a few additional tweaks into the gameplay which turns this newest series addition into a hard-core strategy game that gamers should consider looking into.

The campaign mode picks up at a point in the near future from where the original game left off. In the original you played as the humans who had just developed the technology to travel between worlds. This campaign starts off by having the player chase after a device that was left behind by the Precursors, an ancient alien race, whilst in the middle of a civil war suddenly fell off of the face of the universe. Unfortunately, the evil Drengin Empire has the jump on you, and throughout most of the early missions you are chasing after them and taking over worlds that hold clues to the final location of the device. In these early missions and throughout the campaign, your Altarian allies as well as other good-willed civilizations, will aid you in your struggle against the Drengin Empire.

The campaign is not one of the most appealing aspects of the game, because once you finish a stage, you’ll most likely never want to play it again. The replay factor is non-existent because it is played in the same fashion as the custom made games. Each level starts the player off with a single planet as well as a colony ship and survey ship; the goals are typically to eliminate the opposition, or to complete a more specific objective. In the end, it tends to turn into a race to control more planets than your enemies, and to be the leader on the research tree. So while playing the campaign is fun, it is very difficult to have the same enjoyment factor when playing multiple stages in a row. I found that I was getting more satisfaction from playing a single custom game where I could set settings to my personal tastes

Galactic Civilizations 2 is a space strategy that lets the player choose a civilization from a list of races and then, through the colonizing of planets, start to grow your economy, social and military production, and eventually attempt to win by achieving one of four victory scenarios. The gamer can choose one of twelve playable races, and is also given the option to create their own customizable race. Each race comes with its own special abilities that can affect areas such as the strength of your weapons or your civilization loyalty rating. An additional feature is the ability to change not only the customizable race’s features, but also that of any other species. The player can change anything from the name of their home planet, to the color of their ships engines. The only catch is that only the starting technologies for the customizable civilization can be changed. Compared to the original game where only the humans were a playable race, this newest release allows the user to choose any of the available races. The campaign is played from the human perspective, but all custom games are completely open-ended.

Each custom game allows the user to edit their race, as well as the map settings, the winning conditions, and the intelligence and number of alien races. The map settings that can be changed include the number of stars, planets, and “habitable” planets. The numbering system is not governed by actual numbers, but by the probability of encountering them on the map. This probability has a range of Rare to Abundant settings, and is primarily governed by the size of the map. The winning conditions are set on the same interface for the map settings. The three winning conditions that can be turned on and off are as follows; a political victory involves the player having created alliances with every major alien race in the galaxy, the cultural victory is achieved by having influence in over 75% of the galaxy and the research victory is achieved by researching the final tech in the research tree. There is also a fourth victory condition that is one that almost does not need to be mentioned and is definitely not an option to turn on and off; eliminate all of the major alien races and you’ll take control of the galaxy and win a domination victory.