Galactic Civilizations II: Ultimate Edition
Originally released on 2006-2-21, Galactic Civilizations II (GalCiv II) is a 4X Grand strategy game set in the 23rd century, when multiple alien civilizations scramble to conquer the galaxy, planet by planet, by force, diplomacy, influence (culture), or technology. GalCiv II focuses on the single player experience that consists of a Campaign mode and a "Sandbox" mode, and omits multi-player. The game is notable for its artificial intelligence, which is challenging without being given resources and abilities not available to the player, as is common in the majority of strategy games. Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is the first expansion pack to the turn-based strategy game Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. It added new features such as: Two new civilizations: a genocidal Drengin offshoot called the Korath and a civilization called the Krynn, A new campaign in which the player leads the Drengin Empire, The ability to create custom opponents, An "environment" statistic to planets, which will determine which civilization can innately colonize or what technologies will be necessary for other civilizations to colonize different planets, An enhanced role for espionage, special "Agents" being hired that can conduct various missions, such as sabotage or destabilization, on rival worlds, or act as counter-agents against rival agents attempting to conduct missions on the player's worlds, Asteroid fields to the space map, for players to mine for resources. Resources from asteroid fields are directed to planets where they increase manufacturing capacity, A great deal of new ship hulls and jewellery and The extermination of two civilizations during the campaign - the two exterminated civilizations will still be available in "sandbox" mode, but will not appear in the future releases of the game. Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor is the second expansion pack to the turn-based strategy video game Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. It added new features such as: The ability to destroy solar systems with massive ships called "Terror Stars", Unique technology trees, planetary improvements, and weapons for each civilization, A map pointer and custom scenario editor, New graphics that reduce graphic memory requirements by over 90% and a new map size that allows for games that may take millennia to complete The officially supported Community Update, included in all recent releases of Ultimate Edition, fixes severe bugs in the AI that were present in Twilight of the Arnor.
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I love this game.
The original GalCiv II Dread Lords was my first PC Game, (ignoring MNOLG and some dimly recalled edutainment). The first time I went for a genocide playthrough, after getting bored of easily winning via "diplomacy" wherein you puppeteer everyone else to fight each other and then congratulate your allies about how you've brought peace to the galaxy by eradicating everyone else not in the alliance in the name of "freedom and democracy", the Terrans almost immediately called me out after testing my new Virus Armada against an unsuspecting minor-race that insulted my custom Barbarian Starhorde upon our first contact. The Terrans promptly lost their shit and formed an alliance of Allies and we engaged in an epic struggle that lasted until the end of that campaign. I love how every once in a while the game spits out a Space Opera with actual drama and pacing. The AI in GalCiv II is definitely above average, and doesn't even start cheating until you select one of the very high AI difficulty options.
It's not perfect mind you, there's a goofy "moral" system that often offers a bunch of uninteresting choices for either good-boy-points or chaotic-stupid-points. Meanwhile the only correct choice is Neutral to achieve Technological Supremacy via the Temple of Neutrality.
I'd say the game is unintentionally comical, but a lot of the events are tongue-in-cheek and occasionally eye-rollingly so, or just downright kinda dumb. More pressingly I feel that too many of the Evil options simply don't provide enough of a strategic benefit to be valuable. There's a clear intent for them to provide short-term gains but I've always looked at them as insignificant.
I think there's also a handful of bugs, as I once encountered a minor-race with a soldiering bonus of over 4 billion percent. Not sure how that happened. I've never encountered anything run destroying though. On max size maps there's also a chance of random crashes, as the game is only 32-bit.
The game is easily moddable, and has plenty of customization options for bringing new races and factions into the game. I like to roll with a pool of Master of Orion and Twilight Imperium custom races available to the CPUs.
You can lose weeks of your life to this game, stay away.
(Fuck the Drath. Scheming lizard bastards. If people are declaring war on you for no reason, it's always because you're playing against Drath. Every. single. time.) It's okay when I make the same kind of backroom deals tho