by Andrew Vawter - March 12, 2006

Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords from Stardock is the latest 4x game to roll down the line. Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords is a turn-based game with four main points (the reason it’s called a 4x game) they are: explore expand exploit exterminate. Basically you are put at the helm of one of twelve different stellar empires and your objective is to win by satisfying the victory conditions in one of four ways: a technology victory, an influence victory, an alliance victory, or a military conquest victory.

By Any Means Necessary

At the beginning of Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords you are given a race setup screen where you will choose what kind of galaxy you want to play in. Various galaxy sizes range from small to gigantic with the number of planets, stars, anomalies, and even the speed of research being determined by settings you set here. After this screen you’ll be given the race selection screen where upon you can choose from one of the twelve empires in the game or you can even create your own. Finally, you’ll be asked to select your government type with various governments giving a differing bonus. The War Party will add +25 to your ships’ hit points while the Technologists will add a +20 to research and a +1 to sensor range. All in all there are many different government types each having a dramatic impact on how you’ll play the game. The last step of setup is to select the number of enemies you’ll be facing in the galaxy. Up to eleven enemies can be selected on any map.

Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords is played primarily on the galaxy map. On the galaxy map you have the ability to zoom in close enough to see individual weapons mountings on a ship or all the way out to see a good portion of the galaxy. The nice thing is all the views are easily played and the zoomed in view looks a lot like any standard 4x game. However, when you zoom all the way out the game looks a bit like a tactical map used to display naval deployments around the globe.

Since you’re building a galactic empire you’ll have to manage what kind of buildings you want on each planet. So if you want to set up a planet that does a bunch of research but that pays for the research it does (instead of pulling out from your treasury) then you’d need to build laboratories and marketing centers. Other buildings in Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords allow you to increase the rate at which ships/buildings are produced (factories), increase how many people can live on the planet (farming), increase the overall morale of the colony (entertainment networks), and to increase the overall influence of the planet (embassies). Also available for building are various unique items such as Diplomatic Translators that greatly increase your ability in diplomacy (only one per galaxy). Also there are buildings that can only be built one time per race in the game like the Hyperion Shipyard, which greatly increases the speed at which the planet it’s built on produces ships.

Ships in Motion

In Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords for the most part what you see is what you get. If you build a ship with 4 engines on it and one gun that’s exactly what you’ll see when you zoom in on it in the game. Also with planets what you see on the galaxy map rotating around in space is what you’ll see when you call up the planet’s screen to assign new buildings to be built there. Attention to detail like this is shown in spades in Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords with everything having a very refined, very polished look. Nothing in this game will ever let down the players.

The problem with taking screenshots of Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lordsis the fact that it makes the game look merely good instead of how it really looks which is great. Almost everything in Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords is animated from ships in space to the fully animated fleet battles. Fleet battles happen whenever two fleets of ships meet up and attack each other. They aren’t interactive however; they play a lot like on a VCR with pause, rewind, and fast-forward options. They do however allow you to clearly see where your ships are failing and where they are dominating the battles. Also you can view your ground assaults in a similar VCR viewer.

Sound Sound Sound…

This maybe the only department in which Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords falls short from its extremely polished design. The music in Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords is nice and adapts well to the situation. If you’ve just started a war with someone whose around equal strength you get this war track that can only be described as "cautious excitement". By the same token, if you are forced into a war with someone who is much more powerful then you you’ll here music tracks that make it sound as if you have no chance to survive at all (and you probably don’t - the AI’s extremely good). Music in this game is top notch and there is a great deal of it even the diplomacy menu has each race with a different theme song.

Where Galactic Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords goes wrong however is in the sound effects department. All ships when they explode sound exactly alike even star bases sound similar. Furthermore weapons noises from fleet battles or ground assaults all sound similar. Well I mean laser’s all sound the same and all the mass drivers sound pretty much the same (but lasers don’t sound like mass drivers). Either way you can’t really blame the developer for this. After all, how many different effects could anyone come up with particularly when dealing with "Lasers" and "Phasors" or "Miniguns" and "Mass Drivers" anyway?

Foolish AI or the Omega AI?

Take your pick from the AI’s at that start of the game and prepare to hash it out. At the very start of the game you can choose between several difficulty settings for each AI race from fool to incredible. Each increased level removes more handicaps from the AI. On fool the AI will happily trade anything away including ships around its home world when you’ve got troop transports right beside their planet. On normal they won’t do this anymore they also won’t trade weapon techs to a vastly superior force but they’ll trade with a force that’s comparable to them. On the hardest settings the AI is ruthless. I, however, haven’t been able to even attempt the hardest setting without getting completely dominated by the AI in a few turns. The AI in Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords is extremely well made and is constantly receiving small tweaks in how it operates.

Build Your Own Death Star

Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords offers the ability to build ships from various base hull designs. Using the "extras" area of the design area allows you to add parts to your ships everything from a gigantic arch to small atmospheric wings that make it look like your ship would handle well in both space and in a planets atmosphere. Some of the more creative designs like this one are truly amazing. All of these ship designs are possible within Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords ship designer.

One thing truly worth noting about the way Stardock handles games is the fact that you buy it now and you get a full years worth of add-ons for free. Add-ons, not a patch, not bug fixes, but full-blown add-ons. This can be anything from new parts to play with to new government types and technologies. By the time Stardock stops giving out free add-ons for this game this review will be out of date and only reflect what was available at the launch of the game.

All Good Things

Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords is the epitome of a modern 4x game. It’s everything you wanted Masters of Orion 3 to be, it’s everything you wanted from the first Galactic Civilizations on the windows platform, and it's the game you were waiting for that you never knew existed. All I can really say is if you like turn based strategy games go out and buy this game right now from Stardock’s online store or your local game retailer. If turn based strategy games aren’t your thing but strategy is, you should defiantly go ahead and give this game a whirl. It really is that engrossing. Should you however absolutely hate strategy games of all forms and only want to play first person shooters I guess this game might not be for you, but I’d still recommend it to you. I can only think of one last question to ask, "Is it better then Civilization 4?" In my opinion it’s a dead heat based on you’re preference to dominate space or to dominate the planet.