Computers and space strategy games have always existed side by side. There’s just something intrinsically appealing to computer gamers about commanding space battleships and exploring the vast reaches of the galaxy. Every generation of computer has had its flagship space game – from Netrek on the old line terminals, to Empire on the Apple ][. Most people will recall that the space game of the 80’s was Master of Orion. It was a huge hit for its day, and set many of the standards for what would be called 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) space games.
But there was another 4X space game in the market at the time: Galactic Civilizations. Players that tried it generally found it a better game than MoO, but getting people who could play it was the trick: it was written for the doomed OS/2 operating system.
Therefore, when the news came out recently that both MoO and GalCiv were releasing new versions, MoO naturally started with a great deal more name recognition and public reputation. The team at Stardock knew that for the bulk of the gaming public, Galactic Civilizations was an unknown. It took quite a bit of courage to step into the ring against a direct descendant of the “heavyweight champ”, but they remained undaunted.
As it turns out, they had good reason to be confident. Despite a plethora of games in the same well-trodden field (everything from Space Empires IV to Stars and VGA Planets) GalCiv is not only fun, but maintains its unique character.
Whether you are a jaded old-school computer gamer or a newbie just starting out with strategy games, GalCiv feels very comfortable. For the new player, the ‘path’ of the game is broad and evident: build some ships, explore and colonize some planets, and generally just try to survive. While you manage the standard guns vs. butter economics, opportunities will arise to make choices about tech research and investment that will begin to reflect your approach to winning the game. Since the galaxies can get to be extremely large, micromanagement might be a problem. GalCiv offers some limited options to assign various ‘governors’ to planets, each being essentially a saved build queue. Unfortunately, there isn’t an auto-route function (directing produced ships to specific destinations) so even the governors can’t get you out of having to give every ship flight orders once they’re produced. By the latter game stages with lots of ships, this can be a little tedious.
Fortunately, gameplay doesn’t end there. For the expert player (or the novice with a few games under their belt) the finely crafted balance and subtleties of the game start to become more readily apparent. Diplomacy is not simply the ability to beg your way out of a war or induce someone else to join one. Craft a truly dominant and strong alliance, and the other powers will concede that you are undefeatable. Technology is no longer just about building bigger & better guns (although this can be handy), so a direct and dedicated investment in tech can allow you to achieve such stunning levels of development that humanity wins by ascending to the next level of existence.
Either or both of these can be paths to victory in their own right. Granted, it’s much more straightforward to simply build a big fleet and knock your enemies into submission. But at harder difficulty levels and larger galaxies you will have trouble winning using brute-force tactics alone. Even simple natural success – the cultivation of a healthy economy and happy people – can bring its own rewards as your cultural influence spreads and induces neutral or troubled worlds to try to improve their own condition by joining their cause to yours.
The character of your own choices is in play, as well. As the game progresses, a number of random events will present themselves (frequently but not always associated with your colonization of a new planet) offering you a list of alternatives and consequences. An example might be that your colonists discover some potentially dangerous but rare sea creatures – do you respect the rights of indigenous inhabitants and restrict your colonists to safe areas? Do you try to share the planet, driving them back (killing a few, if need be) to allow your colonists more room? Or do you just kill them all and have done with it?
The choices are more than just academic of course; they have a direct impact on that planet’s development, morale, production, etc.
Moreover, your choices move you along a morality scale of good and evil which (once you pass a certain point) not only changes your user interface but importantly changes the way others treat you and what techs you may develop – “good” realms may not have the opportunity to develop some weapons techs, for example. Some of these random events are funny, some are thoughtful, but in all cases they add a welcome texture and context to the game. The list of events is extremely long and more are constantly available from Stardock (it’s a favorite subject among modders), so every game has differing choices.
The game interface is well designed and non-intrusive. It plays very smoothly, but doesn’t offer the volumes of charts and analyses that some “spreadsheets in space” games do. Possibly as a result of its OS/2 parentage, GalCiv oddly doesn’t make use of the “right-click for information” as well other UI standards that have evolved in Windows. These make some information needlessly hard to retrieve/find, and force the player to click through menus and popups.
Of course, it’s not just you in the game. One characteristic of the early GalCiv was multithreaded AI (a technology possible even in early versions of OS/2), and the newest incarnation makes good use of it as well. While most strategic games have to do a terrific amount of number crunching to run the AI after you press “next turn”, GalCiv is uniquely different: the AI is running all the time in separate ‘threads’ in the background. In fact, GalCiv has been hailed as the first computer game to use Intel’s new hyperthreading to good effect. (Note: you don’t need a hyperthreaded processor to run the game, but if it’s available the multithreaded AI will take advantage of it to run even faster.) When you hit “next turn” – even in the later game stages on huge galaxies where hundreds of ships and planets are all doing their thing – it processes quickly, even with the meager minimum / recommended system requirements.
The most important reason to have the mid- to late-game playing smoothly is the most striking feature of Galactic Civilizations: you’ll still be playing it! I can’t count the number of strategy games that (although fun) I’ve quit halfway through because the conclusion is foreordained; either the enemy has no chance to defeat me, or (more frequently) I’ve dug a hole so deep I’ll never climb out of it. With a certain preponderance of power, it’s usually all over but the carnage, but not in GalCiv. I’ll spare you my own AAR, but there are some good ones posted at http://www.galciv.com/play.html illustrating the subtlety and depth of the game from the beginning to the very end.
This is a direct reflection of a quality AI, and that most holy grail of computer wargames: an AI that doesn’t cheat! Having so much processing time available for the AI opponents allows them to mull over a variety of options and react appropriately. Good civs will commonly band together to protect each other, while evil AI’s will cooperate as long as it’s needed but not a moment more; foolish enemies will telegraph their moves and ignore yours, while Genius-level opponents will act with a (shudder) human level of subtlety and foresight.
That’s only the beginning. When players connect to Stardock.com and register, their winning GalCiv games will be uploaded – not just the scores, but gamefiles that illustrate how you played the game. Stardock’s heuristics system will analyze this, and use it to upgrade the AI in subsequent patches. This means that the replayability will only increase over time, and is not a bad idea for strategy-game programmers to steal for their own projects.
Of course, not everything is roses and buttercups. In an effort to streamline their design, Stardock made a few choices that leave gameplay a little constricted. You may only play the humans. Your color is blue and your logo is fixed. I know that these are petty complaints, but how hard would it have been to allow the player to choose a set of ship graphics, colors, and avatars? Some other “chrome” details common to the genre are notably missing, such as ethnic types of planetary inhabitants, or more than a rudimentary interstellar trading system. None of these are a big deal in the way the overall game plays, and they are ultimately consistent with Stardock’s goal of streamlined gameplay, but some players used to “all that and the kitchen sink” games may find their lack a little surprising.
On the other hand, their decision to forego multiplay in a game released 2003 is…daring. There is no LAN play, PBEM or other direct player versus player action. They do offer their “multiverse” at Stardock.com that, aside from the AI-improvement function mentioned above, is essentially a public player-ranking board. They feel very strongly that this has resulted in a better solo player game, which is what most people play anyway. That may be true, but I have to say with such a smoothly-playing game, it’s impossible not to consider that GalCiv multiplayer would be a blast.
One last note, Stardock has chosen a commendable and courageous approach to piracy. Knowing that any new game is inevitably on the warez board within hours of its release (if not before), they’ve chosen the carrot rather than the stick in copy protection. If you register the game and have a valid, unique registration code you get more ships, more tech, more capabilities in-game (kind of like early VGA Planets shareware). For everyone who has been infuriated with on-disk copy protection, manual checks or worse, this is a development that we as a community need to encourage. If we make it a success for them by shunning warez GalCiv, maybe more companies will follow their lead.
Galactic Civilizations is the whole package – not just a combat game, not just a management game, but also something more besides. As designer Brad Wardell put it: “Galactic Civilizations is really a civilization simulator with strategic goals in it.” That’s it in a nutshell, but that also misses a big point. Games like this frequently get bogged down in minutiae; just at the point where the map is full and the nuances of a zero-sum situation begin to appear, other games have so many details that they require the player to run a separate spreadsheet to keep track of it all. GalCiv has very deliberately attacked that paradigm. I’ve seen some comments and reviews on GalCiv that criticize it for being 4X-lite. In some ways it is. But I think you will find that GalCiv is carefully balanced, quick to learn and play, fun yet challenging to master. To me, that’s a pretty good combination.
