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While MoO3 is geared more towards the multiplayer fan base, Galactic Civilization (GalCiv) tries to corner the market on the single player experience.

I’ve been watching GalCiv mature for the past few months. It’s made a great deal of progress and has turned out to be a well-designed game. Every time I sit down to play, I discover something brand new that I had never even imagined possible in previous sessions. GalCiv is a Sci-Fi, turn based “4X” game (explore, expand, exploit and exterminate). The player will represent the Human race in a quest to colonize the galaxy and become the most powerful and/or influential force in the cosmos. With the help of breakthrough technology such as the Human invented Hyper-Drive, six major races throughout the galaxy are on a collision course to stake their claims in a galactic land-grab. You’ll encounter such races as the cold and calculating robotic Yor and the human-like Altarians. New “races”, or civilizations will often evolve from the main races. These civilizations are born from such events as revolutions or civil wars, as an example.

You can configure the starting galaxy how you see fit. Size, habitable planet frequency and how smart the other races AI will be. GalCiv actually takes advantage of multi-threading and therefore will utilize Hyper Threading technology on newer P4 CPU’s. During galaxy creation, you will also need to configure your own race (the Humans). Specific traits are available (political parties) that confer a variety of bonuses to areas such as military, technology, diplomacy and so on. There’s also information provided that will let you know how hard or how ‘comfortable’ the game difficulty will be, based on the settings that you’ve chosen.

After you setup the galaxy, it’s time to go exploring. The Human race is relatively new to space exploration. Your first survey and colony ships wait in Earth’s orbit. You must explore and claim as many planets as possible to become the galaxies most powerful or influential race. Along the way you will need to develop technology to help you achieve this ultimate goal. The tech trees are enormous and you won’t be able to research everything in just one game. The idea here is to pick an area to concentrate in, such as military, industrial or trade and rely on that as your bread and butter. If you branch out too much you’ll probably have a much more difficult time and won’t be rewarded with some of the more advanced tech the game has to offer. There are several different ways to “Win”, providing a non-linear game-play experience and adding to the replay value of this game. You can win via several methods. These include military might, political, technological or cultural means. Whichever path you choose provides you with the ability to totally refocus the gameplay from one game to the next. Politics in the United Planets Council play an important role in the influence of the galaxy. The higher your population, the more influence (votes) you control. On the same note, establishing lucrative trade routes can also sway the influence of the galaxy via trade embargoes or as I call them: “sanctions”. There are many possibilities to explore in Galactic Civilization, I’ve given you only a few here.

Along with exploration and colonization, you will need to manage your own systems government. You control spending budgets, taxes, research, industrial production and all other sorts of economic and domestic policies. You can form alliances with other races, stay neutral or declare war and try to become the galaxies most feared race of ruthless invaders. As you progress through the game, many different scenarios will arise that give you the opportunity to adjust your alignment from good to neutral or evil. The dark-side is very tempting, but beware… it’s not going to be the easiest route to take, at least in my experience. You may find several of the other races allied against you in an all out War of the Worlds. If you haplessly slaughter your opponents, they may come crawling to you begging for peace. It’s times like this where you can take advantage of them and demand planetary systems, technology or money in order to insure their well being from your galactic might. Then again, if you choose the more Pacifist route, you could use your diplomacy and political influence to resolve hostilities between races. You have all sorts of social options too. Two you may be familiar with are “Achievements” and “Wonders”. Achievements such as “Capitals” may be built once per civilization. Wonders are rare and only one can be discovered one time per game for all the races combined. These achievements can do great things for your population’s morale and your galactic influence, whether it be political or in some other way. GalCiv is definitely a game that will reward you for exploring the many different options the game presents to you through the course of play.

There is a wide range of ships available based on your technology levels. Everything from scout ships to constructor ships. You can even build star bases that can be further expanded in greater strategic assets such as Battlestations. There’s plenty of technology to play with. Weapons systems, defense systems, propulsion, you name it. There’s a nice variety of ships that can be built based on your current tech level. You have ships for exploration, combat, construction and science. Battles can occur from ship to ship, ship to planet or total planetary invasion using ground forces. Each ship has stats such as Attack, Defense and Hit Points. Battles can be won using common sense. Comparing ships stats or the number of soldiers you have ready for an invasion versus the target planets population.

One thing that has really impressed me with this game, is the effort put forth by the developers. They regularly communicate in Newsgroups with the fans and keep everybody up to date on stuff. They suck up all sorts of suggestions and comments from the fans and testers while occasionally bantering back and forth about the game with others. Speaking of testers, GalCiv has had an extensive beta test and has pushed out new betas on a pretty regular basis. The development of this game really seems more of a community effort rather than just a single group of developers with a static design plan. Stardock has already budgeted support for expansions and additions to the game well after it’s initial release. One of the more touted additions will be the online "Metaverse". This will keep track of player scores and even allow you to form teams and combine scores to compete against other teams. While it's strictly a single player game in function, you will be able to compete with other human opponents through this Metaverse. You can expect the game to evolve even more even after it hits shelves near the end of March, 2003.

The AI is highly configurable. You can set the intelligence/aggressiveness of every race individually. My first run through the game proved to be challenging, even on the lower settings. By the time I got used to the game, I was able to hold my own at the mid-upper settings. If I pump all the races up to high settings, I still get beat down severely! My first approach to the game was to conquer by force. That strategy turned out to be a dud as I found most of the other races in an alliance against me! I’ve discovered (at least for me), that a diplomatic and political approach seems to work better. I have gone back and tried to play the ‘War Monger’ again and had a bit more success with it recently. This was mainly because I threw in some politics with it, instead of just roaming the galaxy and murdering everyone. I formed my OWN alliances and had much more success! You could always play neutral and stick with a Trader or Merchant approach as well. As I’ve said, there are lots of ways to play this game. There are some great features in this game. I especially like the implementation of ‘Build queues’ for your planets. This makes management of building much, much easier to deal with.

I know I’m coming off a little happy-go-lucky about this game and I hope you don’t necessarily run out and buy it based on only a preview (unless you are a total fan of the genre or of Strategy First games). I’m trying real hard not to over-hype the game, but such is the nature of a “Preview” in most cases. While the game may sound spectacular, in depth and state of the art, it’s not without it’s shortcomings. I’m positive that fans of turn based, Sci-Fi strategy games will dig GalCiv, but in my opinion there’s still ONE real indelible flaw with the game. It happens to be something that’s usually overlooked in games like this, so it may not be major to some people, but it still raises a red flag with me.

I’ve gotten tons of Email about it already, so I’m just coming out with it: You’ve got this well designed game with great cut scenes, pretty pictures, thoughtful game mechanics, a pretty decent interface… but it has this really old looking, ‘Shareware’ like feel to it because of the 2 dimensional top down galaxy view (where you’ll spend the majority of your time while playing). GalCiv was designed with playability in mind, not pretty graphics, but I can’t help but sometimes feel like I’m playing a Shareware game due to this perspective. I know many of you probably could care less about it, but I thought I’d throw it out there on the table, in case some of you do care. We’ll still have to wait and see the final release before we make any real, official judgments. This is one game strategy fans should definitely keep an eye on.