so quiet here ............... guess everyone's too busy playing...

*sigh* still stuck at work... grrrrrrrrrr another 2 hours to go....

This game is a work of art.. It is what Moo3 Should've been and several times more I am very impressed with it beyond anything I couldve imagined!

Well, GalCiv was what MoO III should have been.

So I expect GalCiV II to be kinda what a MoO IV would have been in the correct tree!

Can't wait...want to play...not in store...consider becoming a terrorist to activate games store...hmmm...

I'll try to come up with a more organized/thorough list once I've played a few games, but based on the one very quick game that I played this afternoon, a few comments:

Things that are Good:
- Music. Really like it. That's very subjective, of course, but I enjoy the style you chose.
- Graphics. It's definitely pretty. The 3D, especially with ship design, is very nice.
- Interface. Very slick and easy to work with (other than the ship design window, as below).
- The text. As expected, the dialogue and writing is quite hilarious. The Douglas Adams-esque writeup on the Space Weapons tech (I think - the one about it being rude of space to kill you) was priceless.

Things to Improve:
- Influence shouldn't be visible on the map/minimap for any Civ until you have actually "met" that Civ. Right now, the Influence minimap gives away the starting locations of every Civ from the first turn.
- the Ship Design screen needs work. Especially with the cosmetic parts, the list of parts is so long and the thumbnails so small that it is very hard to identify what will look like what without trying to place each and every part.

Things That Might Need Improvement (or maybe I just don't get it):
- is there a keyboard shortcut for rotating/tilting the camera? Related to that, is it possible to remap the entire control scheme?

Overall score: I won't give it one yet. My gameplay experience so far has been too short (and on difficulty levels too low) to evaluate minor things like the AI or ship combat.

I'm sure I had more stuff, but it escapes my mind right now. I'll post more later when it comes back to me.

- Ash

PLAYER REVIEW: Mike Mike is a pretty good player. When compared to all the other available players right now, he isnt exaclty state of the art, but he certainly holds his own. Unpatched he tends to drink a bit too much beer, and has been known to play poker causing some significant compatability issues with Jeanne. Fortunatly the HD Bigscreen patch seems to have reduced the frequency and severety of these issues. Mike has been known to compain and moan severly when presented with crappy copy protection like Starforce, but you can easily avoid these problems simply by avoiding UBI altogether and checking individual titles before letting him think he wants to buy them. I have found Mike to an overall good player and would recomend him to most strategy games and well as all non UBI Flight simulations. ****½ stars

lol now that is good

I agree with the thing about the influence being shown at the start. I like not knowing where the other races are and that gives it away.

I agree with the thing about the influence being shown at the start. I like not knowing where the other races are and that gives it away.

I disagree, Its a helpful indicator on where you stand and in how much trouble you soon will be in.

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Part I - Downloading the 5MB Preload package

This part was rather frustrating, It kept freezing during the download but at the end it got done and thats all that matters, Besides..Your servers are busy as hell.

Part II - First game

It went well, Music and graphics were great. Got my ass kicked by the Yor and the Torians ganging up on me.

Part III - First MV Game

Went pretty much the same as there. Except that this time I got killed by the Arcans.

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Its a great game, My only complaint is that civs start TOO GODDAMN CLOSE TOGETHER

Could the spawning be tweaked so you get placed evenly?

I haven't played a full game yet (only just a few turns) but I've gone through the wonderful tutorials and manual; I'm about to start a game now but had to grab a drink and figured I'd check in here. So far my initial impressions are very favourable. My lowly corporate laptop is running the game fine so far and since I'm away on a business trip, that makes me happy.

From what I have seen of the game so far, it is truly a labour of love. You can really tell that these guys have poured their heart and soul into this game. Being a new customer (though a TBS and RTS nut), I don't have any prejudgements on what this game should be; all I know is that so far I'm extremely pleased with the game. The game appears to offer everything I've been looking for in a galactic strategy game. What impresses me more is that I keep reading that Stardock tends to offer free new content and that they are very supportive. There isn't even any annoying copy protection. This is money well spent!

Can't wait to get back home and try this on my desktop and new laptop (which my company tells me arrived AFTER I left for my trip. Argh.)

Excellent work Stardock!

The first thing that strikes me about the game is the obvious graphics, I hate to make a comparison because everyone else will do that too, but the main menu has a very Civ IV feel to it, with the rotating asteroids and crisp vocalized music.

As all good gamers do the first thing I did was press options.
One thing that did strike me as odd here was that there were very few graphical options, with a game as pretty as this I would have expected all manner of sliders and quality settings. Not that I needed them, the game seems to run very smoothly.
I then go into creating a new game, and set about the enjoyable process of creating a custom race, all manner of options and customizations to select from are presented, and the whole process is very user friendly with it's tabs and next buttons.

Launching into a game I have a quick fiddle, research is presented nice and promptly and I briefly spent some time browsing through the massive tech tree. Then the new planetery tile system is shown, all nice and easy to take in, instinctivly I que up a few factories to boost production and then que a few useful facilities. The option to buy the facilty straight off was easily presented and I chose it.

30 minutes in I couldn't resist any longer and cheked out the shipyard.
Ship customization was a little daunting, purely by the amount of aesthetic options presented, I spent a good 30 minutes having a play around in there, then disaster, I went to save the design and the game crashed to desktop. Checking the forum I realize this is a known issue and is being looked into, I wanted to start again anyway so I started it back up this time remembering to quick save before customizing for now.

This time I start up a nice big one, using my prebuilt custom race that was sitting there remembered for me.
I chicken out and go for an easy setting though wanting to get to grip with new features.

6 hours later I've won a cultural victory!

Gameplay was very smooth and fluid, I knew what I wanted to do, and how to do it was easily discovered and in logical places. I enjoyed every minute of it, I will definatly be sinking some considerable time into this game. Unlike other games in the 4X genre there wasn't any middle game boredom, there was always something going on. Those pesky Terrans were attempting to setup their own cultural infastructure, which I had to covertly ensure was destroyed!
Resources and starbases seem to play a HUGE part of the game, almost as much as the lovely value 20 planet I had next door to my starting system.

If I had to give a rating I'd do it in a percentage, and it'd be 86%
There are some annoyances, but they're little things like the quality of land invasion sound effects, ships playing bumpercars during combat playbacks and left clicking ship construction messages while right clicking planet construction ones in order to not do anything about them.

Now back to the fray!

THe game runs amazingly fast. I was concerned about this when I played the beta, but they must have done some serious optimization.

The sound track is so cool I want a CD of it.

The gameplay is brilliant.

The graphics are incredible.

In short, the game is a complete success if you ask me. I love it and will play it lots more when I'm not in stupid class. Rating: 5 stars. To everyone who is giving it less than 5, wait a while. It does take some time to fully get into. It's incredibly deep, but it does have a learning curve, like all decent strategy games.

Oh, and you get used to ship design. I had issues with it early in the beta, but it's grown on me and it's tons of fun. I'm not the best ship artist, but yet I can still make an awesome lookign ship in 2 minutes. If I spend longer, I can make them even more cool.

What I really want is the ability to export pictures of my ships...then I could use them in RPGs as props. Hahahahaha.

Fast paced and fun so far.

My nitpicks (mentioned elsewhere and by other people):
1. Sliders are a bit on the tempermental side. It's difficult to get them to do what you want sometimes.
2. It's difficult to see where your ships are headed when you're zoomed out to the strategic level. Lines and/or more noticable destination markers would be a very nice addition, IMO.
3. Ability to zoom in and out on the tech tree? Probably not worth the (considerable) effort, but I thought I'd throw it out there. Being able to zoom out, click on the area you want focus on, and zoom back in would be neat-o. Not very useful for experienced players, though.
4. The ability to see the influence of all civs without having met them does seem to undermine part of the strategy of the game--fog of war, etc.

One more:
5. Removing projects from the build queue by double clicking on the queue item would nicely complement being able to add projects onto the queue by double clicking on the project.

Bah...my post got obliterated and I'm not retyping it.

It sucks when reviewers spew without actually playing a game and it's early still even for initial thoughts...so I'll review the game later.

So far, so good. I'm having fun and the game looks vastly better in person than in screenies.

The game is not very alt+tab friendly AT ALL. I have an AMD3000 with 1g RAM and an ATI9800 128, WinXP, etc - and I've successfully alt+tabbed once so far - all other times the game crashed brutally.