Welcome to the addiction and wonder that is GalCiv2!

The (GAA) The Galactic addiction Anonymous Has room for new Members We need all the help we can get!!

The addiction is very strong

Welcome to Galactic Civilization !!


Nasty

Yep, it's addictive. We have family visiting for the holidays, and the gamer-geek daughter noticed I was playing the TA beta. She got interested, took over my computer when I went to bed, and stayed up the entire night playing the TA Korx on a large map, Normal difficulty. She won the game with an alliance victory. No sleep at all, but she crashed early the following night.

She customized the Korx... renamed them, and made their UI and all their ships PINK!! She used the ship designer to make their freighter look like a giant pink rabbit. She also shifted the race to pure Good. I'm going to have to remember how to reset the defaults, but I'm keeping that rabbit design.

I am sure if Stardock implemented an interactive tutorial (similar to Dawn of War's Tutorial), more people would become die hard addicts.

I play GalCiv2 a lot and even still, I occaisionally have trouble and get frustrated. I have serious ADD issues and often have trouble keeping everything straight turn to turn.

Quite often I will read online written tutorials. When reading them - it's all so clear. Yet once I am entrenched in the game, whatever I head read easily becomes a jumble in my head. I am slowly learning (and loving it)... But it does take immense patience and faith in the game to see it through to a proficient level of playing (at least for me – and I am still not there yet).

My roommate hates the game (he attempted playing for a bit then just said he didn't like it - saying it was boring). I feel this is probably the case with a lot of people who do not have the patience to stick it out and learn the mechanics of the game (often by trial and error). Much of the game's excitement comes later in the game when your empire is faced with wars and other events. Some of it can be downright riveting. Many people do not get this far in the game - or do get this far, but do not enjoy the game because they have no idea what the hell they are doing.

A game this complicated really needs an interactive tutorial (not movies) where a narrator can explain things to you hands on. I am 1000% certain this would 'hook' a lot more players into the game. At the VERY least release a PRIMA strategy guide.

One helpful scenario I set up to make learning the game easier is to play on an immense map with everything set to rare - and then enable maximum races (minor and major). This way there are not many habitable planets and vast spaces between stars. In doing this, I have fewer planets to maintain – giving me more time to focus on each of them. My competition also has a limited number of planets and cannot really rush to colonize a large quantity of worlds… This kind of keeps them in check so they are on an even playing field with me (the part I like is it IS even and I do not have an unfair advantage over them). I have been able to learn the most from this kind of setup. I can even play on higher difficulty settings. It just gives me more time to focus on details and learn the game faster.

Re-create the vanilla Korx as a custom race. That's what I did when I replaced the Terans with the Earth Federation. (The Federation is better, though;that pop growth bonus does wonders during the early stages of the colony rush.)