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| Galactic Civilizations Revisited | - by Christopher B. Wright |
OS/2 had been lacking in one branch of software that is absolutely crucial to the success or failure of any operating system in the home: games. Stardock responded to this vacancy with Galactic Civilizations, which has been quite successful (see the review in OS/2 e-Zine! issue #2). In fact, for a game that exists only on an operating system that's not considered "mainstream", it seems to get talked about far more often than it ought to. I have heard it described as one of the most addictive strategy games out there. I've also heard myself cursing at 7:00 in the morning when I realize I've been up all night playing, it's time to go to work, and I'm out of coffee.
The first thing you do when you start playing is choose what aliens you want to have in the game. There are a list of five you can choose from, and you can determine the level of their intelligence (how well they play the game), their alignment (good, bad, neutral, and a "random" setting that can surprise you), and if you don't like the default names of the races, their names. You then determine the size of the galaxy, from small to huge. Stardock recommends you have a Pentium if you wish to play in the largest-sized galaxy (it's really big). It runs fine on my machine, and I almost have a pentium (see the computer spec at the end of this review). Once you've determined all this, you choose your own name and the name of your political party (this becomes important later in the game).
Not only does GalCiv2 put you in charge of expanding your little empire, it puts you in charge of maintaining that empire. You have to decide how high your taxes are going to be, how much your government is going to spend on projects, and how the money spent is going to be split amongst military building, social building, and scientific research. If your taxes aren't just right, your citizens become unhappy and stop reproducing, your population drops, and you lose money. If your taxes are OK but the government is spending too much money (yes, deficit spending is allowed in this game) then you will watch your funds disappear until you suddenly find your civilization bankrupt.
Deciding how much money you allocate to what kind of government spending requires making a lot of tough decisions. There are three areas of government spending (at the "Federal" level) in this game: military, science, and social. Increasing the amount of spending for one decreases the amount of spending for the other two (so that each is a portion of 100%).
All during this time, your civilizations' scientists are discovering new technologies that can give you an advantage over the other civilizations you meet. Some technologies give you the ability to move faster and farther into space, others give you the ability to clean up polluted planets, and still others give you the ability to move your society into more economically rewarding governments. At the same time, your alien neighbors are trying to do the same thing--and if they're not neighborly, they'll use what they have against you . . . unless you get to them first.
Not only do you have to control your civilization from a "federal" level (that is, make decisions that affect the entire civilization), you also have to manage from the planetary level. Each planet has its own specific characteristics: how rich in resources it is, how big the population is, and depending on what decisions you make when you build up the planet, what industries it has. As before, you can choose to allocate planetary resources towards military, research, or social, along with a fourth group, entertainment.
It's not all show, however . . . the package contains some good stuff. First of all, the CD-ROM holds not only the game, but also a movie introducing the story that can be played from the video player in your Multimedia folder if you have it installed--I recommend it. What's more, the game also comes with a manual--something the original did not--and it's a useful one, giving you tips on installation and playing the game.
GalCiv2 runs entirely on CD-ROM. It installs no files on your machine except for an INI file and a rather large swap file when the game is running, so I suggest at least a quad speed CD-ROM drive for smooth playability (even then there are some bumps as it goes from one mode of play to the next). If you have a large enough hard drive with a few hundred megs of free space (I'd say make sure you have at least 300, but I don't know for sure) you could simply copy the entire GalCiv2 directory from the CD-ROM drive to your hard drive and play that way. I tried it to see what would happen, and it seems to work, but these days HD space can be at a premium, so you'll probably want to stick with the CD-ROM.
I was pleased to discover that you can play the game at any resolution as long as you can display at least 256 colors. GalCiv2 has two settings, a 256 color default setting and a 16 million setting you can manually switch to if your video card can take it.
I'm one of those lunatics who insists on using the highest display possible (I'm currently at 1200x1020 with the smallfont applet giving me small icons and text). So far, I've noticed only one flaw in hi-res displays: there is video corruption of text when GalCiv2 explains whatever new technology your society has discovered. This is not a problem I would consider too constraining, however; the problem goes away if you highlight the displayed text, so you can still read what it says.
Actually, one of the best things about the game is its interface. Everything in the game is mouse-driven: you don't have to use the keyboard at all to play (though you can if you want, and Stardock states in the manual the game can be played without a mouse if that's what you prefer). At the same time, you can control your society to an incredible level of detail and with a large amount of flexibility without feeling the need for keyboard controls. GalCiv2 has a plethora of buttons, sliders, and graphs that help you understand as well as affect what's going on, without having to hit a key. My only wish is that it came with "help flags" (like the tabbed launchpad in Object Desktop) so I could remember what every button does.
Each governor has his drawback: Conan the Librarian helps the system grow rapidly in production and population, and even helps military spending and research grow to a lesser degree, but he also seems to increase a planets pollution, which can make the people very unhappy. Bill the Researcher increases the effectiveness of your researching efforts (allowing you to discover more technology) but not much else: it will take a long time for you to build anything on that planet, and although the game does allow you to buy projects for your planets, they are expensive. Although all Governors have their weaknesses, they can be very useful when you don't want planetary management to clutter up your game.
On a more challenging note, Stardock has made it more difficult for you to meander across the galaxy at will. Now, each kind of spaceship has a limitation called "range" which is the maximum distance a ship can be from "friendly territory"--that is, yours. This forces you to plan where you go, and how you expand. For example, I've had to colonize some fairly unattractive planets to get to the great ones just across the way, simply because my colony ships can't go out far enough. It makes it a lot more difficult to explore the galaxy, and forces you to plan ahead much further. It also changes your expansion and military buildup tactics--for example, I've found that planets near a lot of sectors with no stars or planets at all are great locations for scientific research, because it's harder for the "bad guys" to get to them, so you don't need to worry so much about protecting them. On the other hand, you suffer from the same limitations--so it's very difficult to get out there and take over the entire galaxy in a few hours.
Stardock can be proud of this game. The level of detail could have easily been too much to take, and could have detracted from the playability; instead, I can't imagine playing this kind of game any other way. The graphics are stunning, the sound is good, and the playability is excellent. If you have a few months to kill, buy this game. If you don't have a few months to kill, buy it anyway--just don't tell your boss.
Galactic Civilizations v2note: I got a surprising amount of mail from a lot of you about last month's article (on the whole, favorable, I'm glad to say). I want to apologize to all of you for not returning most of it. I'd planned on it, but a week into January, my computer contracted a virus, and a week later I was reformatting my hard drives and (guess what) reinstalling OS/2. I didn't want any of you to think ill of me, however, for not responding to your mailings. Unfortunately, I'm rather cavalier about backing up my hard drives, and PMMail and all it's files were swept away . . . again, I'm sorry.
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