Be Excellent To Each Other

That's odd, we had no thread about this even though I remember telling you all about it. It can't have been on WoS because I did nothing but piss and whinge there, hence my ban. I guess I must have dreamt it. ANYWAY, this game is great, and I have topical news about it. Tom Francis, a PC Gamer writer, previously wrote a very entertaining game diary of his efforts to win a game on the largest map size. He has started another one detailing his efforts to win a game on the new, even larger map size without firing a shot... he has to use cultural victories only. It's most amusing and is probably about to make me reinstall the game.

Cultural victories are easier than non-cultural, to be honest. GalCiv II would be one of my favourite ever games if it wasn't for the unbelievably gamebreaking spore bomb, or whatever it's called.

I've never done a cultural victory. I am looking at the DVD case on my shelf right now, though.

Is GalCiv2 the one with the incredibly entertaining add-on discs?

Hmmm. Not sure what you mean. It does have a few add-ons, but not sure what would qualify them as "incredibly entertaining", they're just expansions really.

Oh. I remember reading that Dark Avatar (?) really really changed the game for the better.

Yes! I actually got the expansions a couple of days ago and they are seriously putting a strain on my learning. If there is one thing I want it would be a little box you could tick so that when you end a turn, if you ticked it you would have the ability to write a story of the turn in a window or something. Then upon conclusion of the game it would write all your entries out to a text file. This would surely be easy to implement and would leave the writing style up to the player. You wouldn't have to do this every turn obviously but I find war diaries fascinating and this would really help the game.

Anyway GalCiv is amazing.

Ooh - I knew there was something else that annoyed me. The fact that there is a 'campaign' which involves starting from scratch at every stage.

And one of the campaigns involves fighting the Dread Lords.... lots. ARgh.

The campaign is rubbish. GalCiv is ace. In an ideal world I'd like fighters to still have some use after you've researched medium hulls, the planetary attack screen is rubbish and I'm not fond of either espionage system (from the original game or Dark Avatar). But other that that it's absolutely brilliant. Much like the Creature Creator in Spore, the ship creation screen is almost worth the price of admission on its own.

Heh. I like it, but I must - not - partake. It will take too long, and the unplayed games shelf will grow weighty.

His latest headline is amazing. He triggered a mega-event which infested every planet through the galaxy with spies, who slow down production from his population. The headline? "Spy sappin' my gentry!"

The full story was given away as a book with PC Gamer this month.

It's a good read.

I won't spoil it for you.

Yeah, but I ain't spending money on something I can eventually get for free.

How does GalCiv II compare with the Civilization/Alpha Centauri series of games? I used to play Master Of Orion 2 a lot and utterly loved it, so this has seemed right up my alley for a while. Some Bezzie recommendations first would make it even more appealing, however.

It's a bit different in style. For a start, there's no "terrain improvement" in space, so strats based around that don't work. However you can build on planets. And of course planets don't make up every tile of the map, so whereas in Civ you get choke points and things, in GalCiv you have blobs of stuff... it's a bit different, but I'm sure you'll be used to that type of play if you've ever played any other space strat game.

Economics wise it is much more intuitive, but even easier to "game" and exploit that Civ's is. It's a different style of play all round....

...just get the demo.

(ps: I really like it. I haven't played it in ages because technically my friend bought it then I transfered it to his new account blahblahbalh. But it is good fun. Just don't click on the "Campaign" button. That's an accident the developers left in. It's a bug. It's clearly not ment to be there.)

Zio: I cannot recommend that you buy this game, unless you particularly like playing a game for a bit, then thinking "well time for me to call it a night", then looking at the clock and realising you have to go to work.

Heh heh, Civ has done that for me on many occasions!

One of the "are you sure you want to quit" type messages the game throws up is "oh, go on, a few more goes couldn't hurt!"