Info Guide
Title: Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords
Developer: Stardock Entertainment
Publisher: Stardock Entertainment
List Price: $39.95
SW Req: Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP
HW Req: Pentium III 800MHz or better with 512MB of system memory
3D video card with at least 32MB of video memory
DirectX 9C.
Homepage: www.galciv2.com
Availability: Most retail outlets in North America.
Widespread European availability in March 2006.
Digital download at TotalGaming.net
Genre: Turn-based strategy
This guide is designed to take you through the basics of the game and highlight the parts of the game that we feel gamers of this genre will be interested in.
It is designed for potential players, recent buyers, and of course reviewers.
Galactic Civilizations is a turn-based strategy game that is set in the 23rd century. In it, the player takes on the role of leader of a space faring civilization and must guide their race into the galaxy.
Through economic power, military might, cultural influence, diplomatic ability, or industrial strength, the player must become the dominant civilization in the galaxy.
Galactic Civilizations I for Windows was released in 2003. It had a very limited budget (less than $400,000) and a very small team. It was only expected to sell around 30,000 copies worldwide.
The game came out one month after the release of Master of Orion 3. The reviews were very positive with most reviews between 4 and 4.5 stars. It also ended up selling roughly 150,000 copies worldwide.
The primary criticisms of the game (from gamers and reviewers) included:
The overall consensus was that it was a very good strategy game, particularly for an “indie”. But it had plenty of room to improve too.
Galactic Civilizations exists in the real universe. In the 23rd century, humanity has expanded into the galaxy and encountered several different alien civilizations.
The galaxy is populated by various alien civilizations, some could be classified as “good” others as “evil” and others in-between. In Galactic Civilizations II, we learn there was a powerful Precursor civilization that existed millions of years ago that disappeared. The campaign part of the game explains what happened to them and the consequences to all of the civilizations.
As leader of an interstellar civilization you have to decide which civilizations to trade with and to engage with diplomatically and which ones you will have to be dealt with military force. It’s a classic “clash of civilizations” type of situation. Each civilization can take radically different paths on the technology tree (our tech tree isn’t designed to be fully researched, you have to make some interesting choices). Those choices along with your emphasis on your economy, industry, military, research, etc. will determine the fate of your civilization.
The game is won either:
1) Military conquest
2) Technological supremacy (research a technology path that takes your civilization beyond mortality)
3) Cultural Influence (get 3/4ths of the galaxy under your sphere of influence and you win).
4) Political victory (build an alliance with all the existing major powers).
Armed with a much bigger budget and a lot more experience, Stardock set out to make Galactic Civilizations II a much more polished, fulfilling strategy game. Stardock had grown a lot in the past 3 years and was able to bring in some great talent to help take the game to the next level.
In short, we were able to go nuts and make the game we always wanted. No compromises.
Now you not only can play as the humans but any of 9 other civilizations. Or you can create your own.
Custom races. Finally, a game that lets you take a squirrel civilization into space.
The nicest thing that could be said of the original GalCiv graphics were that they were “dated”. Dated as in “Best new Shareware of 1987!” dated.
The 3D engine wasn’t the result of wanting to have pretty graphics ironically. Our feature requirements needed it. But the result was a much better looking game that we think makes the entire thing more accessible.
3D engine. We needed it for all kinds of our new features but it also makes the game look a lot nicer.
The interface of a strategy game is key. You don’t want it to look like a spread sheet but you don’t want a bunch of gratuitous prettiness getting in the way either.
Stardock felt that any serious strategy game in 2006 would allow players to seamlessly zoom in and out of the map. That is, the user would determine their own zoom comfort level, not the developers. We also wanted to make sure everything was clean and easy to understand.
Flexible UI. You can zoom out as far as you want and eventually the galaxy will present itself into iconic mode. It's not just to look at; hard core war gamers can play the game this way as well. The game can be played in a number of different ways. This is where the 3D engine came into play.
We also were able to use a new technology in our UI design called DesktopX (www.desktopx.net). Next time you look at another game (PC or console) check out the interface graphics. Buttons, scrollbars, etc. Most games (including Galactic Civilizations I) tend to have pretty barebones user interfaces.
The reason is that it’s a huge pain to make UI graphics. DesktopX allows the actual artists to make the graphics. In the GalCiv2\screens directory are a bunch of .dxpack files. Any user can load these up with DesktopX and change the game without any coding. This allowed our artists to indulge themselves and make very friendly looking interfaces without the coders having to deal with it at all. And they’re resolution independent with each object (button, window, list box, etc.) being able to resize independently so the art director can control how things look at different screen sizes.
Anyway, this may be more info than you wanted to know on the user interface elements. But the reason for all this is in terms of replayability. We want people to be able to play this game 3 years from now and have it still look like a new game. This technology will enable the game to still look new years from now.
In the first game, planets were rated on a scale from 1 to 26. A class 16 planet or better was good. Is that intuitive? What was I thinking? I’m not sure. But it gets worse. You could build things on your planet such as factories and research centers. Each of these applied a % bonus to your base production – WHICH WAS BASED ON THIS PLANET QUALITY NUMBER.
So in other words, a huge part of winning the game came down to who managed to grab the best planets in the first 10 minutes of the game. No strategy at all.
This time, we kept to planet classes for consistently but the planet class determines how many useable tiles there are on the planet. A good planet is class 10. A class 10 planet has 10 tiles you can use to build things like factories and research centers. These buildings provide a set number of production – NOT % bonuses.
So a factory would provide 8 industrial units. Therefore, a class 10 planet could potentially have 10 factories on it for 80 industrial units.
But the strategy comes into how you use your planets. Now you have to make some tough decisions. Is this going to be your farm world that generates tons of money from having a huge population? Or is this your industrial world? Or maybe your culture world? Or maybe your research world? How you run your planet matters.
Unique planets. Each planet is unique. In fact, most are generated each new game. You will never see this planet in the game because it won't ever exist again.
To make things even more interesting, some planets have special tiles. Mineral rich tiles. Or ones with artifacts that give huge bonuses if you build a certain type of building on there.
Galactic Civilizations is a strategy game – not a tactical game. It’s the ultimate clash of civilizations – literally different alien races trying to wipe you out. You’re job is to build up that civilization, not be a division commander.
That said, the combat system has been enhanced considerably. Typically, there is a linear progression up a technology tree to “better” weapons.
But in Galactic Civilizations II, “better” depends on who you are battling against.
There are 3 types of weapons:
Beam weapons (ex: phasors)
Mass driver weapons (ex: railguns)
Missile weapons: (ex: nukes)
To counter them, there are 3 types of defenses:
Shields counter beam weapons
Armor counters mass drivers
Point defense counters missiles
So players have to think a lot about who they are attacking, look at their weapons and defense technology and prepare for that. The computer players do the same back.
New combat system lets you view your ships in battle to see how your technology is working out against your opponent's.
This may be the single most obvious new feature in the game and the one that beta testers and previews seem to like the most.
You can design ships in Galactic Civilizations II. But it goes far beyond what has been done previously. This isn’t a matter of “Wow, those Stardock guys are smart.” That’s definitely not it, when I finish this, I have to go call the fire department to get 2 of our guys tongues off of frozen poles over “double dog dares”.
No, the reason is that 3D hardware has gotten to the point where you can let users make truly free form ship designs. The recently release game, “The Movies” lets people export their movies. We hope in time to provide tools that let people export their ships so that others can see them outside the game (make models, put them on websites, etc.).
The ship design isn’t purely functional, users control the cosmetics too. In fact, 90% of the time is usually spent on the cosmetics. Users not interested in what the ship looks like can still just click on a hull, pick their stuff and be done (or just use the pre-canned ships we include).
A high degree of control over how the ship looks and how it works in the shipyard.
Super moddable. All the pieces are standard .x files.
See your ships on the map and in battle.
16x9 aspect ratio, very high resolution.
Play on a high resolution 16x9 monitor
Or even on a portrait monitor. Notice that it doesn't just scale. Different parts resize based on the UI designers decisions.
Massed units have always been a difficult thing in strategy games. On the one hand, it’s nice to build an army or fleet or whatever. But on the other hand, you don’t want the game to devolve into each side having one mega army/fleet chasing the other.
So we came up with the logistics concept. The size of your fleet is dependent on your logistics ability which can be researched to be improved. The bigger the ship, the more logistics it uses.
Put your ships in the same tile, select the ones you want in your fleet, and it’ll add up the logistics and create a fleet.
Fleets
This was an issue we gave a lot of time and energy to. Some gamers love to micro manage things. Others hate it. So what could we do?
For us, we tended to view that most strategy games start out slow, get fun, and then get bogged down in micro management. But other people love that stuff and others are bugged by it even more.
So we put together a whole new series of screens called the Civilization Manager. In it, you can literally run your empire globally once it gets really big. Give orders at a macro scale so that you’re not clicking all over the place.
When used in conjunction with the rally point system (where you can tell ships and planets to send units to a particular place) it can make a gigantic galaxy feel pretty manageable. And yet, it’s all optional and it’s not driven by any AI. We’ve attempted to solve the age old micromanagement issue with better user interface design rather than AI (even though AI is what we’re best known for ironically).
One of the screens of the civ manager.
Manage your colonies at once
I like graphs.
Am I winning?
On many games, diplomacy is a bullet point. Here we arguably went overboard. We lost control.
There are 10 alien civilizations in the game plus one that you can create yourself. The computer AI and diplomacy system is designed to react differently and speak differently depending on who you play AND whether they or you are good, neutral and evil.
So that’s 10 different civs X 10 different responses = 100 different combinations for every greeting. Now there is some redundancy (i.e. copy/paste). But there’s a LOT of unique dialog in the game. Probably more so than the typical RPG.
Each race has its own set of dialog that changes depending on who you play as.
The Yor frequently complain that we're all a bunch of humanoid flesh creatures. "Why not a silicon based life form" they have been heard to say.
The Torians were enslaved by the Drengin. A fact they regularly...often..bring..up
Each race, talks differently, depending on who you play as. And it’s not even set there either. They have a number of randomly selected things they may say too in order to keep it from getting repetitive.
Like I said, we lost control. We lost our way. One day we’re coding some sort of space strategy thing and the next day we’re coming up with some new funny thing for the Iconians to say to the Yor if you’re playing at the Yor. Therapy will take care of…most of this maybe..someday.
One of the things that made Galactic Civilizations I not look so good is that the planets were put inside of the star rather than as part of the map. You can picture the on-screen effect, the game map had various blobs (yellow, red, etc.) that were stars. You then had to click on the star, then click on the planet to do anything. Very tedious.
Now the planets are part of the map itself which makes it a lot more approachable and more appealing to more gamers.
Planets are part of the game map now.
In the campaign, you play as commander of the Terran Alliances forces. The vile Drengin Empire has begun trying to conquer the galaxy and you have built up a coalition of allies to work against the Drengin.
However, the Drengin accidentally unleash into the galaxy the Dread Lords, immensely powerful beings from the past.
They are few in number in the missions they’re in but each of their ships is very powerful and if you linger long enough, they’ll build up and wipe a player out.
They have narly ships.
The Dread Lords have some nasty weapons.
Remember Sauron at the beginning of Lord of the Rings? He's a "Maiar ". Each Dread Lord is essentially that level of lethality.
The Dread Lords are not impressed with my ship design
With Civilization IV so recently out and it being an outstanding game, there is bound to be comparisons. This is particularly true since GalCiv essentially begins where Civilization leaves off. But the two are designed to be very different games.
In Galactic Civilizations, your legal borders are your planets. The influence borders are your sphere of influence. Some users have suggested that it’s not right to see aliens traveling through your “territory”. But your sphere of influence isn’t your territory. It’s vacuum.
Civilization IV’s excellence did have an impact on us as well. One of the things we really liked is that you could see where numbers came from. No voodoo. We tried to make sure the same was true in GalCiv II as well. You can mouse-over your approval on your planet or your influence rating and it will explain where it came from. The “Summary” button on the planet window will detail where your production is originating from.
Civilization IV also came with multiplayer that will set the standard (we think) on how multiplayer should be implemented in a turn-based game. This naturally will make one wonder why Stardock chose not to make Galactic Civilizations have head to head multiplayer (it has indirect multiplayer via the Metaverse).
Galactic Civilizations is the only Windows game I’ve worked on that isn’t multiplayer. The reason boils down to 2 reasons:
1) We wanted to focus on the single player experience. Multiplayer requires streamlining the gaming experience. But the fun in Galactic Civilizations II comes from some of the fluff. That the aliens do say different things. That you can take 10 minutes to design new ships. That you can do detailed analysis of your enemy’s ships. It’s not that GalCiv is more complicated, it is that it is designed to let the user indulge in the world they’ve created. We wanted to have intricate events. Not the usual “Bad plague, 10 million die” type random events. But things like a revolution occurring in civilization X causing it to split off into two new civilizations (complete with new alien portraits and dialogs). In multiplayer, that would be annoying because it wouldn’t be “fair”. There are all kinds of things like that. And while they could be turned off, the game is lessened when that happens.
2) We didn’t want players to subsidize multiplayer in a TBS game. To reviewers who get their games for free, GalCiv II and Civilization IV are apples and apples. To game buyers, one is $39.95 and the other is $49.95. Stardock would simply not have been able to get into as many retail chains if the game was $49.95. To gamers, $10 matters. Multiplayer would have pushed the price to $49.95 and to game buyers, that $10 matters – a lot. When we wrote the Metaverse in the game, the internal plumbing was done for multiplayer. So IF there’s a significant demand for multiplayer, we can do it as expansion pack (the game won’t ever be a very good multiplayer game in my opinion because of the things mentioned in item 1 but if people demand it, we’ll provide it). This way, people who don’t’ want multiplayer aren’t having to spend $10 to subsidize the small percentage of gamers who do want a multiplayer turn based strategy game. Note: if GalCiv were a REAL TIME strategy game it would definitely have multiplayer no matter what but it would have been a very different game too with a very different set of features and different focus.
These strategy games can be quite a bit to get into. Turn based ones especially. To that end, we created a series of tutorials that can be accessed from the main menu. At any time you can go back to the main menu, look at a tutorial and then continue your game.
Stardock’s games are best known for their computer AI. Galactic Civilizations II is the best computer AI we’ve ever written. But there’s a few things you should know about it since it’s not written the same as other games:
1) It’s multithreaded. That means while you are taking your turn, the game is multitasking within itself to generate a strategy. That’s why the turn button comes back so quickly. By the time the player has moved, it’s already figured out what it’s going to do and then it’s just moving ships.
2) Different intelligence levels mean it. If the AI is set on fool, it’ll do stupid things. If it’s set on intelligent, it’ll play much more intelligently. Typically, computer players simply are robbed of resources when they are set to easier levels. We do that too here but we also try to make them play poorly at lower levels. Since it’s a single player game, we have sought to simulate human players at different levels. So at low levels it’ll just throw ships stupidly at entrenched defenses or barely defend its planets or not notice that you’re building up for an attack. At higher levels, it will (and we’ve made it occasionally make fun of players doing this) detect players massing for attack and take action.
3) At the easiest levels, players are given extra economic bonuses.
4) You haven’t won until you’ve won. The AI is designed to simulate a human player. So an AI player may declare war on you but that doesn’t mean wave after wave of death ships are going to come after you. It may mean it’s going to isolate you over time. It may do analysis to see if the player has tended to spread themselves too thin and then launch a massive attack. It depends on the difficulty level.
5) It is NOT cheating (unless you put the difficulty above “Tough” at which point yea, it’s cheating, we’re giving it money). You can quick build units with money and you can raise your taxes. The AI will do these things at the higher levels. So you may find yourself being outspent by the AI even though it has a lower population. It’s not getting free money (I debugged this myself because I thought it was cheating). It raised its taxes and didn’t get penalties because it had gotten a morale resource and had fortified it getting a huge morale boost which let it have higher taxes. The AI even has to explore planets the same way humans do –build scouts and send them out there (in GalCiv I, the AI knew where the good planets were).
6) Sometimes the AI might do something that seems stupid (like send an escort unescorted) because it doesn’t necessarily see your ships. It makes simulated “guesses” on where it thinks your ships are but it can be wrong. In general, the AI will try to escort its ships. But if it has a fast enough transport, and it doesn’t think you have ships in a given area, it will try to pull a fast one. The simulated guessing system was one of the new features in the game so that the AI could have a quasi-form of intuition.
The retail version of Galactic Civilizations II at this point is called 1.0X. The initial release, 1.0 went sold-thru its manufacturing run almost immediately. We took the opportunity to add in new features, early adopter suggestions, bug fixes, and more content. We will also be releasing regular updates that add features. Like with Galactic Civilizations I, our form of “copy protection” is to keep updating the game after release to encourage people to buy the game.
The retail box version of the game has no copy protection whatsoever. So its through these updates that we help decrease piracy. It worked very well with GalCiv I.
The boxed copy of Galactic Civilizations II is just the beginning. The reviews should assume players will never download any of these updates, however. We just think this system works better as a copy protection system than others. Rewards customers for supporting the game with their hard earned money.
If you have any suggestions on things you’d like to see (and we understand that what we add in the future can’t affect your review) let us know. As gamers, we definitely want to hear your thoughts. Visit our forums to talk to us, we're there!
Thanks for taking the time to read through this massive thing. We hope it helped!
-Brad Wardell
Designer of Galactic Civilizations II