t is the 22nd century, and humanity has made contact with five alien races. A meager trade in information passes among these races for several years, until the humans discover the lost art of interstellar travel. After exchanging this technology with the other sentients, humanity races to the stars, establishing new colonies, fighting trade and martial wars with its new neighbors and researching fantastic new technologies.
Galactic Civilizations is a turn-based, single-player strategy game like the Civilization and Master of Orion series, in which players must develop a civilization and lead it to victory. Players can play only one race—humanity—but at the opening of the game they can choose to customize it however they see fit. They may choose a political party, such as Federalists, who receive an economy bonus, or Pacifists, who help with social production and influence. After picking a party, players can use a point pool to further customize their civilization, giving it bonuses in areas such as trade, research and diplomacy.
As the game opens, players are assigned to a home star system containing one or more habitable planets. As with other "4X" games, players are also given a colony unit, which they can use to establish a base at another star and a scout ship to explore the galaxy.
The galaxy is laid out on a two-dimensional grid and is composed of stars ranging from white dwarves to red giants, with the mid-range Sol-like yellow stars usually having the most Earth-like planets. Floating between the stars are special resources representing the space-borne relics of a bygone age. Players can exploit these resources by building space stations next to them, thus securing bonuses for their civilizations. Various special objects, such as starship hulks, gaseous anomalies and wormholes, are also floating through space, and each gives a different advantage when discovered.
The game offers four types of victory: conquest, culture, technology and alliance, each of which involves widely different strategies and priorities. The game's technology tree—as well as the players' abilities to achieve their victory conditions—are controlled in part by a series of moral choices that pop up randomly throughout the game. Choosing to let a thriving alien species survive on a newly colonized world puts players on the path to goodness, while exterminating that species leads to evil. Players who commit enough dark acts will find their alignment shifts to evil, causing the good-aligned races despise them while at the same time allowing destructive new technologies to be researched.
A growing galaxy of opportunities
Galactic Civilizations is a solid, enjoyable game that succeeds where Master of Orion III failed. Unlike MOO3, which created an extremely complex game that was reduced to "press the 'next turn' button" simplicity by the artificial intelligence, Galactic Civilizations keeps the player firmly in control of the action.
This starts with the game's interface, which lets players easily manage every aspect of the civilization, from empire-level decisions like funding and research priorities to individual planetary building priorities. A particularly nice touch is the planetary governors, which act as a sort of build queue for planetary improvements. The advantage over the traditional queue is that these governors can be assigned to multiple planets, easily allowing players to assign priorities empire-wide. The governors don't handle starship construction, which is unfortunate but hardly crippling.
Galactic Civilizations' morality system adds a welcome dimension to the game, as well as some occasionally gruesome humor. In one scenario, a plague breaks out. Good-intentioned players can immediately spend a small fortune to cure the virus, while those with an evil bent can instead choose to drain the sores of the infected and sell the pus to alien civilizations who consider it a delicacy. Coupled with morality-inspired changes to the technology tree, this system adds greatly to the game's replayability.
The game's AI is surprisingly capable. Instead of being content to sit back, colonize a few worlds and let players run roughshod throughout the galaxy, the AI aggressively seeks out resources, builds expansive empires, and will happily declare war on both its human and computer opponents. The AI is even capable of launching late-game strikes against enemies, devastating players' home worlds just when they thought they had the game wrapped up.
The game's multiple paths to victory are all robust, and there are myriad strategies that players can use to achieve them. For example, a war-minded player could choose to build space stations to boost starship production, could sell technology to raise money to increase military spending, or could simply buy the ships outright from other civilizations. The rudimentary, two-dimensional game board may seem like a 1990s throwback, but in fact it serves to keep the focus planted firmly on gameplay. With so many games these days choosing flash over substance, it's good to see one that goes against the tide.
That said, the game isn't without its occasional problems. It forces players to start off as human in each game, which may disappoint some folks. More troubling is the fact that there are only five major alien races—it would have been nice to see twice that number. Similarly, the lack of a multiplayer mode may turn off some, but given how bad most turn-based multiplayer modes are, this shouldn't be too much of a disappointment.
The in-game visuals are adequate, but they would have been better if the size of the ship graphics corresponded to their physical size. As is, starfighters appear bigger than the much larger frigate-class ships. The planet types were also disappointing—while there are a fair number of habitable "Earth-type" worlds in the game (and players can choose to have more) there's no way of turning substandard worlds in to habitable ones.
These are relatively minor distractions, though. Galactic Civilizations is a good game that, with a few tweaks and enhancements, could be a great one.
GalCiv's the game I wanted Master of Orion III to be. Granted, players can't build their own starships (one of the best parts of MOO2) but the robust AI more than makes up for its shortcomings.
— Ken
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