Agree way too early for a good review. I'm not going to be up to snuff to take a look at the AI at all which I am most excited about. The tech tree has me boggled....just because I know how I want to play but I don't know exactly how to progress diplomaticly /defensively without leaving basic improvements behind. Once I get a feel for the pacing for planetary advancement, exploration, and military progression I'll be able to make a pref strategy.

So far love it love it but here are my...
Issues:
Much much prefer arrowkeys to control map scroll rather than ship movement...or at least an option.

Ship designing
-couple of the hardpoints are facing the wrong way....didn't check everything but noticed only so far on the tiny hulls.
-Do CAD work myself and am familiar with certain control patterns.
-removing a part by clicking the part then hitting delete.
-an undo option
-a click copy function (eyedropper)
-more windows shortcut like functions (del, ctrl-c,ctrl-y)
-'ghost' parts after deleting parts that extend beyond the "total-parts-list"
-more prominant highlighting of selected parts
-Able to adjust lighting
-A right click function (no ideas as ot what)
-minor - maybe more categories for the extra parts

other - clicking the slide bars...leaving the bar when holding the left mouse button causes the slider to stop.
Sound stutter...may be performance issue
tech tree help - I'm lost picking techs....don't understand what the improvements are numberwise. miniturization for example...trial and error for now is ok.

Neato. I think I shall wait a week or two to buy the game. My mom doesnt have the money for it right now, and with all the reported problems Im seeing, I think it would be wiser to wait untill they release updates that adress these issues

Graphics: 11/10
Gameplay: 11/10
Sound: 11/10
Pros: Many
Cons: ??? I'll have to get back to you on that. J/K! Seriously, NONE.

Stardock Delivers! & the crowd goes wild! Wow, what an amazing game. It will blow you away. High quality graphics, sound, music. Graphics are very beautiful. Movies are impressive. A++ for the tutorials. Game is newbie friendly and Gal Civs veterans can jump right into the fray easy enough. Gameplay is great. No MP is not a con, seriously. A high quality single player experience. Bonus pack was icing on the cake!

Summary: Must Buy Now! Do not pass go! Go directly to Stardock.com and order now! (for those that haven't )

I have played about 3/4 of the way threw a gigantic, beginner galaxy, and so far overall the game has been excellent,
graphics are great, sound is good, I haven't really gotten into ship design yet, just made a couple quick, I haven't had any of the problems that anyone else has had as far as system crashes or anything, but my comp isn't the greatest, so I have had alot of slowdown in the last couple of hours of gameplay, not a game problem, just to much info for my comp.

Little things I didn't like:

Ship battles, watching them wiggle around is really wierd to me, but I'll just turn that off in the future, no big deal.

I would like to be able to see the whole tech tree and not have to click next techs to see where the tree is going, I really like civ 4's version of the tech tree, but once I get the tech map that won't be big deal either.

That is about it at least of what I have seen so far and I know I'll want to play it more (BTW that quiting screen is evil, "Are you sure you don't want to take just a couple more turns" - cracked me up).

Overall I'm sure the little social life I had just got a little smaller, so 4.5 out of 5.

I still don't know where I stand on this game. It's very pretty, and the ship customisation is a cool feature, but I have to say I find it fairly bewildering. I really enjoyed playing Galciv I, so I don't know what the difference is. In my first three games, all at cakewalk, I had massive troubles with economy and morale, which left me foundering in bankruptcy. In the words of The Streets, it was supposed to be so easy...

I then had a go at the campaign, making the inaccurate guess that it would have some sort of walkthrough element. I quickly found out how aggressive my Altarian allies could be - they surrounded my worlds with influence starbases so thoroughly I didn't have enough room to build any helpful bases of my own. I gave up in disgust on that front.

Also I couldn't figure out how to set rally points. I clicked everywhere on the interface, but no flags or indicators came up on the screen - is there a hotkey or something? I couldn't find it. I had a quick look in the manual but nothing obvious presented itself, although admittedly I didn't look everywhere.

So I'm going to give up on it at the moment. It's too complex for my tastes as it stands so I'm going to wait until there's some decent articles on how to play it and how to ward off stagflation and unruly peasants. I'll wait til then before I rate it, because otherwise it wouldn't get much in the gameplay department and from the sounds of it everyone's been loving that aspect. But if I was to pass judgement at this stage, it would get a 5/10 or so - I really do like that customisation feature, and the little touches in the dialogue are fantastic. I just can't figure out how to play it.

Very good, congrats to stardock on an excelent game

I would like to be able to see the whole tech tree and not have to click next techs to see where the tree is going, I really like civ 4's version of the tech tree, but once I get the tech map that won't be big deal either.

Have you tried some options on the research screen that allow you to diplay all techs? And you can move around the tech tree with the mouse

Score: 4.5 out of 5. Tagline quote: "It's Civ4 in space, but with a better end game!"

Pro:
-------------
- Very accessible 4X game in the style of MoO2.
- New Ship Designer feature adds ability to customize ships with both gameplay components and pure eye candy; it's time to "pimp your ride"!
- Galactic map when zoomed in has nice looking ships, planets and stars with really top notch graphics appeal, while a simple spin of the scroll wheel zooms out to a more traditional abstract view of the battlefield with easy to understand icons and symbology.
- Easy to understand charts and graphs enable understanding of your economy without turning GC2 into a spreadsheet exercise.
- Cinemagraphic battle view allows those gee-whiz "Star Wars" movies space batle sequences, but can be skipped if desired.
- Real attention payed to making mundane details of politics, economy, combat and construction easy to understand without over-simplifying.
- A return to a fun space combat strategy game that appeals to the brain and to the eye.

Cons:
--------
- Some rare crash to desktop bugs reported in Ship Designer
- Disappearing "Turn" button bug, rare but annoying
- Some users report corrupted save games.
- Einsteinian space-time physics still can't put more than 24 hours in a day, so when am I going to get time to play more

Too early to comment on AI other than so far it hasn't done anything stupid, or at least more stupid than I would do

Recommendation: If you don't mind some rare but annoying bugs, buy this today. If you are a bit concerned, wait for the first update. Either way, this is the 4X game you have been waiting for. Seriously.

* Where are the buttons to take me to my next ship that doesn't have moves? I was lucky enough to discover that space bar skips a ship/fleet for this turn, but if you haven't moved all your ships and you stop to manage a planet or something, then you have no good way of getting back to finding the other ships you still need to move. And how about a way to center the view on your currently selected ship? Gah! Two little buttons on the interface... It's still the Find button...

Err... whoops! I assumed that was a search by name button. Guess I need to go back and reread the manual. Thanks!

*I* for one LOVE your game guys...I'm a new comer to the Series (saw an add for Dread Lords in a Mag). I mean sure it has it's quirks, (Not seeing what tech is needed for new core ships is the biggest one i can think of), but i love it...My first game i played was set on easy against i think 4 other races on a Small System...And it was a blast..I was the Terran. About half way thru i was kicking everyones ass, (in a diplomatic sense) and started to get my ass kicked bad (then i discovered how to design my own ships)....So right now i'm d/l the tutorial to see if i can sharpen my teeth a little better.

So on a scale of 1-10....i give it a 7 and i'm sure my opinion will get better after the first patch. Keep up the good Work guys.

It's a bit early to give a comprehensive review, but...

Graphics are great except for some minor flickering of cursor and cutscenes

Shipyard is a bit tough for us aethesticly impaired folks to use for "good looking" ships - but since the game only worries about what's on the ship, basic building works fine (besides, as the Admiral or even the Emperor I only worry about spec sheets - fitting this stuff on the ship is what minions are for  )  It might be nice to have the capability to design using all techs/hulls to set up various ship progressions without taking time from an ongoing game.

Having the designs show up on the tech tree as "New Ship Designs Available" is a really nice touch.

Finding the local minor race building a mining starbase on the nearest resource was quite unexpected.  If this is a new minor race characteristic, I wonder what other OBTW things there are.

First impressions: Favorable and quite playable

Cactoblasta, have you watched the totorials? Also Brad has posted several game play examples on the site. check out the jurnals section.

The tutorials will have to wait - I've got bandwidth issues at the moment cos I don't live in the US and the best my 2mb connection will give me is between <1k/s and 30k/s. So if they're really good I don't know. I'll check out the gameplay examples though. I thought they were just on the AI at Intelligent - I didn't realise they included the early game! cheers.

Well, overall I think the game has HUGE potential. There is an incredible amount of depth to the gameplay. I love the graphics. The interface makes it fairly easy to access information about your ships and empire. The game succeeds in making you want to play "just one more turn", and when you cannot actually be playing, you will find yourself thinking about the game and wishing you WERE playing.

However, I am sad to say that there are a few critical flaws and ommissions in the game that significantly bring down my review score. The DEVs have already said they will address SOME of these concerns, but playing the initial release of the game without these features made my initial experience with the game a lot less enjoyable than it could have been.

Things that REALLY need to be in the game (IMO) but were lacking at release:

A comprehensive hyper linked civilopedia to explain in detail what any technology in the game does, and exactly what benefit they provide (numbers, stats, etc.). If a player wants to know how to research a large hull, he should be able to click "large hull" somewhere and see exactly what it does and what technology will provide it, and the research path needed to get there. The game just has WAY too much stuff not to have this, and not having it leaves you with a vague feeling of confusion and uncertainty about what you should be doing instead of just having fun. Certain game concepts need to be explained better as well, such as how influence is calculated and applied to the map, and how starbases affect this.

You need to be able to copy ship designs, and just modify the parts you want to change. It might be fun to spend an hour building a cool looking state of the art warship, but if you want to quickly upgrade your old colony ship to move 3 squares instead of 2, you should not have to spend 30-60 min designing a new ship from scratch and struggling to make it look halfway decent unless you want to. You should be able to copy the old design and just replace the engines if that's all you want to do.

I realize learning to develop your own strategies is part of the fun, but another few tutorials should be added giving people some general basic strategies to begin with and explaining WHY it is important to do certain things. Let them figure out their own master strategies, but offer enough basic ones that anybody new to the game has a basic sense of direction and understanding of the basic game mechanics. (Ex: I still don't understand exactly how starbases affect influence, so how do I know exactly where to build one?)

Basic general improvements that would give this game a perfect review score:

When you mouse over anything in the game, there should be pop-up help on what it does and how to use it. (Ex: make it easy to see the difference between sentry and guard, etc.)

A basic key to activate the next ship with movement remaining in case you want to move a differnt one first or you don't know which ship still needs to move and it's not active, that button would find it for you or cycle through them.

The ability to set your OWN viewing presets and replace the default ones.

Ships left in orbit should remind you each turn that they are there and still need orders unless you set them to sentry or guard, etc.

You should be able to set patrol points for ships so they automatically patrol the set of points you give them.

You should be able to look at a starbase and know what modules are available to build there if you were to send a constructor. Things that you have not researched yet should show up faded out, and you should be able to click on them and see what they would do, what you need to research for them to become available, etc. It sucks to have to send a constructor there only to find out after it gets there that there is nothing you can build there that is very helpful and you wish you had known so you could have sent it somewhere else, or not have built the constructor to begin with.

The planetary summary screen should show you which planets are specializing in what types of production at a glance.

Unused social spending should not be wasted...it should just not be spent. Why should a planet be penalized for being fully developed?

When a ship with a starbase constructor module is active, it should project a ghost on the map showing exactly what it's spere of influence would be if it build a starship there, or there should be a command to do this. Wasting time trying to guess if it will cover a certain area with its benefits is silly.

Overall, I can only give the game in it's current state a 75% score. I feel several (not all) of the missing features above should have been OBVIOUS (especially the civilopedia) to anybody playing the game for 2 hours. I know there are other potentially helpful features I thought of while playing that I can't recall offhand now. Just adding the civilopdeia, ship design copy feature, and pop up help would raise my review to a 95%, but without them the game feels almost broken and certainly incomplete to me.