My Review Of My First Massive-Sized Galaxy

Well let me start by saying that I am very new to GalCiv2 and the first massive-sized galaxy game I played game lasted for soooo long, therefore this is going to be a long review. I'm guessing it went for more than 10 hours, but I had a lot of fun playing it. All 9 civ's where enabled on this one huge map with star systems set to abundant. My race was the Iconian's, placing a huge effort (compared to most other civ's) on technology and throughout most of the game I held the strongest economy.

I choose to be evil throughout the game, with about equal good/evil civilizations. I gained strong ties with the Evil Dominion Of Korx early on throughout the game and kept good relations with another Evil civ, The Thalan Empire. Other empires I "thought" I had good relations with where the Terran's, the Altarian's and to a lesser extent the Drath Legion even though they where Good civilizations. Pretty much all of the rest of the other civilizations failed early on, and didn't play much part in the game other than being slaves to bigger civilizations.

Everything was going good until I reached the far other side of the galaxy...where the overwhelming sleeping giant of the Arceans lay. The Arceans where a Good civilization, and on meeting them they declared war on me. Hey, I can handle one civilization right? Wrong. Straight after I received a message "The Terran leader Allan Bradley has been assassinated! A new leader has taken his place and declared war on us!." Things where not looking good at all as I received yet another message, this time from the Drath Legion "You are hurting our economy by warring with my allies, therefore you must die!"

So I was facing a war on three fronts and against some of the most powerful civilizations in the game. Thank God that I set their intelligence levels to very low otherwise they would have wiped me out. For 2 hours on end, I advanced and retreated time after time again on all three fronts trying to fend of persistent invasions. The Dominion Of Korx declared war on the Terran's but because of the massive distance between the two civilizations very little was done. I was losing the grip of my civilizations as I was forced to face the fact that very slowly my planets where starting to fall.

But by chance I accidentally researched "Governments" and by doing so, I realized that I could than research "Alliances." Being very new to this game, I had no idea that you could form alliances. I new that researching Alliances would be my one and last desperate hope to get back in to the fight. Three turns later and I had formed Alliances with The Korx, Thalans and Drengins. Soon after they decleared war on my enemies sending the galaxy in to one massive galactic world war.

Bad Guys: Me (Iconians) The Korx, Drengin Empire and the Thalans.

Good Guys: Arceans, Terrans, Drath Legion

Everyone else was weak and neutral.

With the help of my allies, I spent the next hour or so retaking the many planets I had previously lost and spent a massive amount of time rebuilding my empire. As I reached the last of the planets I had lost, I started putting a massive effort on taking out the Arceans while the Korx and Thalan's kept the Terrans busy while the Drengin held the Drath at bay. I took about 10 of the Arceans 40 or so planets when they asked for peace. I accepted for the sole reason that the Drengin where about to be wiped out by the Drath allowing for the Drath to once again focus on destroying me. Sure enough, even though I supplied the Drengin war effort they fell and the war between me and the Drath empire began. Soon after, the Arceans once again declared war so that I was facing war on two fronts.

I set up massive defensive lines against the Arceans while I focused on taking out the Drath since they where a smaller Civ. The first problem came straight away as I realised my ships just couldn't reach far enough into the galaxy to attack the Drath. Keep in mind that the whole time this was happening, the pesky Terrans kept invading random planets of mine which took a huge and annoying amount of time to fix. This was solved by building a starbase deep into enemy territory. Repeated attempts where made to destroy it but I managed to fend them off with my superior ships. I was now able to reach Drath planets. Everything was great and I was sure I could destroy the Drath. That view soon changed as I sent whole fleets to destroy the Draths defense on their planets...which completly failed. The Drath had built up extremly strong defenses on their planets that destroyed any ship trying to attack.

This was solved by creating my "Imperial Cruiser" which took a good half hour to complete. Because of my great economy, I managed to pump out about 12 of these babys in 2-3 turns.

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The Drath empire soon fell.

The tides had turned and we where winning. Victory however was a long, long way off. The Terrans had the strongest military in the game, nearly twice the size of mine. The Terran's had taken a substantial amount of Thalan planets. Since I owned the Drath territory, my border was now shared with the Terrans. They launched a massive offensive at me which I managed to defend with the last of my Imperial Cruisers. only the Korx could stand up to them.

I focused on destroying the Arceans, while the Korx/Thalans held the Terrans. It was only after the fall of the Arceans (Which took me hours to conquer so many planets) where we able to start effectively taking out the Terran. They put up a good fight but in the end we won.

In conclusion, I must say that the AI are very good. It was a mind straining struggle of hours and hours and hours trying to win the game. No matter what I did, the AI always seemed to counter me by pulling of annoying stunts. They tried so many strategies to bring me down. However, I know I set everyone's intelligence to low but I think it would be a good idea if Stardock fixed the "easy, medium, hard" settings. It would be good to have the game set to easy which would increase the intelligence of my Allies and decrease the intelligence of my enemy. Normal should be having the intelligence of everyone kept the same. hard should be having the intelligence of my enemies higher than the intelligence of my allies. Overall it was really good fun, great job on a great game. I'm already pumped for my next game.

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