This game is really really great.

I've just finished playing through a 7 hr game (my first).

I'll try to give a quick unbiased review here with just some highlights:

Yes, there are currently a few rough spots. However, I encountered no bugs that couldn't be worked around easily or solved with a simple save / reload. I have no doubt that Brad and team will fix these as efficiently and trasparently as they do everything else. Given the fact that the last patch for GalCiv1 is from mid 2005, and the game was released in 2003, you can tell the team will continue to support the product. They care.

Looking past these temporary niggles, the game is really beautfully strategically done. As a reference, Civ4 is one of my favorite games of all time. This game is not as polished as Civ4 (the budget was probably what 1/5th?, 1/10th?). However, conceptually, and strategically there are no compromises made. This game works strategically on so many levels it's not even funny. The game is actually reasonably simple to pick up and play. Need more production? Build a factory. Need to research better weaponry? There's the branch of the tech tree, straightforward and linear, grab the next one and go. (great job smoothing out the tech tree by the way, it's so much easier to navigate and see where you're headed than GalCiv1)

However, this ease of use on the surface belies the depth of gameplay. There are just enough variables thrown in that you can never really get comfortable with how events are playing out around you. You're always a little on your toes, because there are a handful of equally acceptable ways to dominate your opponents, and the AI makes use of all of them, responding to how you're playing to throw something at you it doesn't think you can handle. No while the game is easy to pick up and run with, you're going to agonize over your decisions. Yes it's easy to see where you're heading in the tech tree, and it's simple to set your colonies up to gear towards research, but are you focusing on the right branch? That's the kicker.

There is one area that I have to admit GalCiv2 trumps Civ4 in. Late game micromanagement. I'm not sure I'm completely representative of Civ4 players in that I don't like using governors to set my build queue. I need control over what's going on, because as good as the governors are, they don't know my strategy. They're likely to start throwing banks onto my city that has no trade income or miss the fact that I wanted to stack the heroic epic with west point. So I end up controlling them all manually. Towards the late game, the game just draggggsss ooouuuttt. Usually, I've already won more or less, but it takes hours to mop up. It becomes a task, working towards seeing the end of the game, rather than a strategic challenge.

GalCivs colony management is so streamlined, without sacrificing depth, its a breeze to use, even in the late game. There aren't really 40-50 types of buildings you can build, with 10 of them affecting your trade income etc. a la Civ4. There's really 7 or 8 main types of buildings that then have the equivalent of mk2, mk3 versions as you unlock higher tech. This system works so much better it's not even funny. You still get to make the agonizing decision of how to set up a colony, and all of the strategic implications of your choices are still there undiminished. But then, as you continue to play the game, when you unlock a new tech allowing for better buildings, your colonies automatically queue up to replace the older buildings that gave a 5% bonus for example with the newer ones that give 10%. You just don't have to spend the micromanagement time on them. The only time you really have to dig into a colony is if you want to shift the focus from say research to production, (or influence, or economics, or ...) The system of replacing older buildings with newer, more powerful versions is really well conceived and well implemented. You lose a little bit of the charm that you have in Civ4 of saying, oh cool, I've built a temple and now I can build a cathedral, and then I can add a market to get my happiness up, but you don't have to spend the time, which in the late game just kills the fun. The GalCiv2 equivalent of that progrssion by the way is: put happiness building on tile, as new tech unlocks happiness building mk2 replace automatically with no user input needed, as new tech unlocks mk3 ... etc. It sounds so simple, but boy does that help to streamline things in the late game. It's a great great concept, and does nothing to diminish the fact that you are still choosing that you need to improve your happiness, it's just very streamlined.

On a minor note (for me minor):
For a strategy game the gfx are incredible. No matter how tight you zoom, nothing ever looks like it's losing resolution. Must be something to do with the 'advanced ray gfx' or whatever that scale to your hardware. Great job.

I could probably say more, but it's 1 in the morning, I really need to go to sleep. I have to wake up at 5 for work.

As to all the reported bugs in the forum, yes I encountered a few small ones. At the risk of sounding like a fanboy, none of them really bothered me. I expect that they're going to be fixed, but I can still play the game with no problems. (I just got done with a 7 hour session that required one save / reload to fix something)

- there are a few issues with the ship creation screen. First off, it's not horribly easy to use at first. The first few times you try to design a ship you're likely going to fail miserably and maybe even get a little frustrated. I think this screen more than any other deserves a little more TLC on the development side. It's kind of a tricky problem because the darn thing is so powerful, it's hard to concieve of an easy way to streamline the interface and present the information. With that out of the way, one bug constantly reported in the forum is that the screen breaks if you load too many goodies on. I didn't encounter that, but apparently there's already a fix, so no biggie. The other bug I encountered was that if you try to remove a component by selecting it in the horizontal list thingie and then clicking remove, sometimes it doesn't go away. Or it gets removed from your size limitations, but you still see the gfx or other weird things. I can verify that that did happen to me. I quickly figured out though, that if you click on the actual gfx of the component on the ship itself, and then click remove, it always works. So workaround number 1, if a component isn't getting removed properly, select it on the ship itself. That always worked for me.

- There was another issue with how other civs mining starbases get removed when the civilization goes bye bye. What I observed to happen was that moving a constructor over the now empty resource did nothing. It was almost as if the resource wasn't there any more (although you could see it on the screen). Workaround: Move your constructor off of the resource. Save the game and reload it. Move your constructor back on the resource and it will work fine. Not a terrible workaround, you won't be doing this often anyway, only when you wipe out a civ.

- I'm insanely anal, like anal to the point where it's not even funny, it's kind of sad. I pull out a calculator and check the math of all of the functions that drive the underlying economy of the colonies. There were a few things I didn't understand. They might not be wired up correctly, or I might just not understand them. There are some tooltips a la Civ4 that when you hover over a value, it tells you all the numbers that go into the value. There aren't tooltips for every value though. (I'm assuming some values are sufficiently complex that it might confuse people more to look through the data) At any rate, more tooltips and transparency would be nice. In a few circumstances I could've sworn that some of the bonus I'd worked hard to get for my civilization simply weren't being applied. So I have a slight mistrust of some of the values. However, if you pull the anal cap off, it all works intuitively. At the most basic level, building more research labs does increase your research. I might get a bit miffed because i swear it should go from 46 to 53, and it actually goes from 46 to 51, but that might be me, I dunno. At any rate, in the meantime, if there are underlying quirks in the equations that aren't fully hammered out the AI is living with them too, so it's still a level playing field. (although sooner or later, I'm going to have to figure out where I'm mistaken in my calcs or I'm going to point the team in the direction of a few things I don't think are wired up correctly)

So that's my experience, I tried to spend equal time on good / bad, but overall my impression is immensely favorable. This game is extremely easy to pick up and play and is far more streamlined than Civ4. The really impressive thing is that it manages to streamline in such clever ways that no amount of strategic depth is sacrificed. There are currently some rough patches, but nothing that won't be smoothed out, and certainly nothing that will stop you from enjoying the game.

Hope this was a good read for a few people.
Cheers.