Should I buy GalCiv2?

Had issues with GalCiv1

I'm not here to flame, I just want to ask a few questions before I buy.

Now this is comming from someone who thinks that Sid Meier's Alhpa Centauri was one of the best 4x games ever, so with that in mind....

I played GalCiv 1 and my feelings were mixed.

I liked the ship building and tech trees. Little iffy on the economy management and culture influence models, which I've heard GalCiv 2 does better.

I *hated* the following:

-GROUND COMBAT. You basically transport hundreds of thousands of soldiers and committ genocide, taking the planet once you've killed it's entire population.

Very unrealistic and oversimplified. I understand a lot gets abstracted away in games of this sort of massive scale, but having a few thousand power-suiters fight it out then having to deal with a hostile population works better.

Like Rome:Total War or Alpha Centauri. You take enemy cities and deal with the hostile population

-THE "UN" AND DIPLOMACY IN GENERAL. I still think Alpha Centauri still has the best diplomacy model ever. It wasn't a good/evil model, it was a cultural model, where people got along with you better if your society was more like theirs.

Also, you could call a "UN" meeting anytime you wanted to and could negotiate with the other factions before taking a final vote. You could also bring a topic up for discussion as well.

GalCiv's "UN", honestly, sucked by comparison. No negotiation, no topic selection, just a randomized topic and a straight good guy/evil guy vote alignment.

-AI. The most cheatingist AI I've ever seen; these guys always made bee-lines to the best planets every friggin time. Most of the games I won were basically decided by luck, that is, I got good planets close to my homeworld in the randomized galaxy.

Also, with uber-planets, you or the enemy gets one of those lvl 15+ worlds, it's a ridiculously unbalencing advantage.

Now I *want* to play a good 4x space strategy game, so my intent isn't to flame. My questions is does GalCiv 2 address the above issues and will it make me forget my love of Alpha Centauri?

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

Invasions and the UP are largely the same as they were in GC1. As to invasions though you also still have the option to simply 'flip' the planet with influence.

The AI in GC2 no longer 'knows' exactly where good planets are. It must scout any location before sending colony ships--if you watch carefully you may even see it colonize a low-class world on one side of a system, and miss a higher one on the other side that it didn't see on its first scouting pass.

All races except the Terrans start with Stellar Cartography, which lets them know where there are planets, but they still have to scout to see if they're any good. The AI on the higher levels has a chance to guess whether a system might have decent planets and send a colony ship out without scouting, but otherwise it still generally scouts first. If the Terrans are a computer player, it does actually take into account its lack of stallar cartography tech when scouting.

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