GalCiv Demo Available

Galactic Civilizations is a better MOO than MOO3, that’s my first impression having played the game for about a week now. I haven’t played MOO3 and based on the overall bad reviews
of it I will stay away. StarDock’s game definitely has that “just
one more turn” appeal that hypothecially may keep you up until 3
AM. Here are some of the things they’ve gotten right:

  • No ship design: at first I thought I’d miss this feature but I
    don’t – as you research new weapons and improvements for your ships
    they’re auto applied.
  • Starbases: you can build star bases in sectors and customize them
    with different modules that give different bonuses to ships or colonies
    in a sector.
  • Governors: no AI governors but you can customize each governor’s
    build list in essence giving you “global queues” that each planet will
    build to.
  • Internal Politics: besides managing diplomacy with other races,
    you have to keep your own party in control of the Senate by keeping
    your populace happy.
  • Race customization: even though you can only play as Humans, you
    can customize pretty thoroughly the bonuses for your species. So you
    can play as super-researcher humans or bad-ass warrior race humans or
    whatever.
  • Did I mention the huge tech tree to research?

Initial Concerns:

  • Ship to ship combat doesn’t seem to have much of an element of luck to it.
  • Sucks you in for long periods of time