I could not possibly disagree more with a statement regarding game design. "Visuals" are not "gameplay"... and hence are not a key part. The two top selling games of all time are Starcraft and Tetris, go ahead and load them up, graphics are not the main feature. Those games have a deceptively large amount of depth to them, though.

A focus on graphics is exactly what leads to shallow gameplay as developers waste resources better spent on balancing, mechanics, story and control. It is a focus on graphics that leads to the decline in sales of the whole PC market. It also drives away people who can't afford or don't care to own a top end machine.

I also own EaW and the expansion. First, auto resolve is a poor substitute, because you take unrealistic casualties. Second, I did enjoy the fact that you could pause the action and give orders during the RTS portions, especially the space battles which were pulled off much better. However, I ended up pausing the game so often to micromanage my units that the game might as well have been turn based. Third, because of the more shallow gameplay in EaW it is way way WAY too easy. The hardest difficulty level is a joke that can be beaten in your sleep. And all of three difficulty levels... wow, that's depth. The AI uses no strategy in the RTS sections other than some form of mindless bum rush, and in the strategy sections obviously follows a scripted pattern because the overall options are so limited.

You are comparing a game with very little variety that tried to fancy up what they put in the game, with one that focuses on depth and thought. There are what, a total of 3 ways through the EaW tech tree? Plus, you are actually forced to balance production and research in GalCiv2. In EaW research is just about automatic - and instead you just focus on producing a few units. But there are several that are much more efficient in a cost/benefit analysis... so you can just stick to kicking out the same 2 or three ground units and the same two or three ships and conquer everything. Assuming that you don't just get really lazy and beat up everything with your hero units.

That isn't depth. People with a more intellectually mature outlook will look past the visuals and see there isn't much there. I mostly bought the games because I enjoy the starwars universe.

You may have spent "several weeks" with GalCiv2, but if you don't think it offers more than EaW you haven't given it enough of a try. From designing the look and equipment on every ship, to balancing tax rates/production/research, to the billions of combinations of ways through the tech tree, to the incredible flexibility allowed in designing your own opponents, to the plucky AI that tries its best and will sometimes surprise you with a really nasty innovation... I could go on and on. All of these things are missing in EaW.

- Wyndstar

Can't agree more with wyndstar.

If i can contribute, i think that the auto-resolve feature is only a good marketing idea to sell RTS to a bizarre minority of TB fans, which i'm obviously a part of. A classical example is Rome: Total War. Maybe this is a good RTS, but if you play it only as a turn based game (with the auto-resolve feature), you'll be very disapponteid by the basic gameplay and naive strategy model.

I started to understand i was part of a bizarre minority when everyone began to name with the acronym RTS, not actual strategical games but mere tactical games. Being myself a chess player and a wargamer, i had to learn the difference between strategy and tactic very soon. Now, can anyone say EaW is a strategical game? Maybe, but in a so poor way that i personally dont have any interest to play it. If you are interested in deep, complex, strategical games, you don't need any complex visual and animation. On the contrary, you maybe want a symbolic or iconic graphic, simply because when you play strategical you need powerful metaphors and analogies of reality, not an imitation of it. Now, when i play chess, i obviously prefer beautifully carved pieces and board than a small plastic magnetic set, but this doesn't mean i would like to play with real horses jumping here and there or a real king with crown and sceptre. I need, so to say, a schematismus, i need that the fictional world i'm moving in is simple, so i can concentrate on strategy and i'm not distracted by all the details of reality (included time passing by!). When i play i want to be Napoleon, not Chauvin.

I know that nowadays graphic rules and most of the games are simulation or tactical graphic-based games. I'm sorry for it, but all in all i think, when you see the everlasting succes of CIV and GC (and Europa Universalis, perhaps the only real RTS), that if i'm part of a minority, maybe bizarre, at least this is a large one.

Richard

No. You start with an in-depth gameplay and then add visuals to aid the player in making decisions.

I wanted to write more, but most everything has already been said. There are far too few TBS games being released these days, I for one wouldn't buy a RTS, ever. The saddest part is in fact the Warhammer series, Dawn of War and Mark of Chaos. They turned a perfectly well developed TURN BASED tabletop into a realtime clickfest... I've been tabletop gaming since the early 90s, but ever since Gamesworkshop gave the license for Dawn of War, I stopped. It's a shame, really, they had several good TBS titles with the license in the earlier days.