King of All Cosmos

There was a time when settling new planets, battling spaceships, and conquering the galaxy were major themes in PC gaming. Nowadays, if it weren’t for first-person shooters and Star Wars games, it’s doubtful there would be any sci-fi computer games at all. In the strategy genre, Frodo and Rommel have replaced Captain Kirk at the center of the gaming legend. It’s all elves and wizards or pikemen and panzers.
So the context of the pastime itself makes Galactic Civilizations II: The Dread Lords a welcome guest. The fact that the campaign plot of powerful ancients is derivative of so many earlier games is immediately forgiven. The obvious echoes of Star Trek and Babylon 5 are comforting, not jarring. Galactic Civilizations II is like a skilled karaoke singer. The tune is not original, but Stardock has a way of making it its own.
It’s hard to think of a recent strategy game as colorful as this one, in both meanings of the word. The palette is rich and varied and completely customizable. If you think that your race has ugly ships, you can choose a default design you like better and alter its trim to be more eye-catching. Few 4X strategy games have as much text, and a lot of it here is quite funny. (For those who have forgotten, the Xs represent “explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate.”) Most of the text captures the attitudes of the other races you encounter in your expansion across the universe, with each race having its own dialogue for each of the other civilizations. It’s not enough to make more than a few of the alien cultures stand out as unique societies, but it’s a cut above a lot of the diplomatic dialogue out there.
It’s now standard for games like this to have automated governors, but it’s hard to see any need to use the ones in Galactic Civilizations II unless you are playing on the largest maps. If you do choose to use these virtual viceroys, it’s easy to set their priorities, and they will faithfully follow them. But planetary management is a snap, so manual control will always trump the automated route.
The inclusion of the planetary governors is more likely just a symptom of Stardock’s generosity. Do you need to custom-design ships? No, but they’ll let you. Tired of games with three difficulty levels? Here’s seven! There aren’t just different forms of government—there are different political parties that add bonuses to the player. It’s a tribute to good game design that none of these gifts get in the way of efficiency and that you are never overwhelmed by all the information you can find.
Take the details of each planet you rule. Ripping a page from Civilization IV’s book, Galactic Civilizations II gives you a nice breakdown of why your people love or hate you. You will find that you almost never need these numbers, since a global (galactic?) approval rating gives you a general idea of how you are doing. Sad faces and threats of secession give you lots of time to prevent a disaster, but the exact numbers are available for the micromanager.
On the combat side, victory depends on massing fleets with the right weapons against enemies with the wrong shields. The total transparency of the world means that you can tell whether Bond V is defended by frigates or snipers, so you can prepare your armada for the enemy you expect. Custom ship design is a nice distraction, but it’s hardly essential to victory. Your enemies are usually satisfied with their default ships, and building the ultimate DeathShip is only satisfying the first few times you do it. Some of the structure pieces of new vessels are a little finicky, too, so your dream ship may look more like a mutant hedgehog on your first few tries. An excellent design could turn the tide of a war, but not as quickly as grabbing a great planet will. This is a game about taking out societies, not battleships.
You will find yourself at war very quickly, too. This is not a game for virtual Gandhis. Though there are diplomatic and “influence” victory options, triumph depends on making sure that your planets are well protected. On lower difficulty levels, the AI will send unescorted transports into your zone of control, but on normal and higher levels, it appropriately softens up the invasion area before wasting valuable men.
When you do get into a firefight, you may be treated to the useless but compelling ship-to-ship combat view. You can’t control the ships at all, but you are offered a beautiful rendering of the battle as it plays out, with a switch of camera angles as you watch every die roll. When your hordes of tiny fighters swarm an enemy frigate, the whole thing looks like Star Wars on the cheap. If they’d put only half as much thought into the dull land combat screen, where you just watch a bunch of numbers count down, Galactic Civilizations II could have been a good movie as well as a good game.
There are some missteps. The mostly excellent manual doesn’t tell you which techs you need to build certain classes of ships, forcing you to write stuff down that should be somewhere easy to find, like a Galcivilopedia or something. The ethics system is written in such a way that only suckers play nice. The good choices all penalize you for no major benefit that you can’t equalize with an alignment that picks up some cash along the way.
Ultimately, these faults are forgotten with every zap-zap of a laser gun or groveling plea of the Yor Collective. Galactic Civilizations II may not lead to a resurgence of space conquest games, but as long as it’s available, the renaissance can wait.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #186