I've been playing Galactic Civilizations since the OS/2 version in 1994. It's one of a very few games, including Civilization and MOO2, that I've gone back to time and again. Played the heck out of the original GalCiv2. Eventually got the DreadLords expansion and played that an awful lot too. But I got bogged down halfway through the DreadLords campaign and never finished it. Although I've come back to GalCiv2/DreadLords many times, and have probably played 50 games to the end, I finally got kind of tired of it. There are certain settings and strategies that I favor, and I always win. And then along came Dark Avatar! I know I'm about a year late to the party, and a full expansion behind, but I just got DA a week ago, and I'm having a blast! I love the espionage feature. I love the space mining feature. And I REALLY love the campaign. In the fifth scenario, you encounter the DreadLords for the first time. Wow! When they first showed up, my best ship had an attack rating of 6. Up shows a tiny fighter with an attack rating of 188! Plus shields, so I couldn't even hit it at all. Then one of my planets with 6000 troops got invaded by TEN DreadLords. The advantage ratio was like 924:3! My tech was listed at something like 8,000. They were at 260,000! Amazing. In more than 20 years of playing computer games, that is one of my most memorable experiences. Eventually I figured it out. Guerrilla war. Post sentries. Pick off transports with fast fighters. Don't even think about grabbing galactic resources. Build up. . . . Oh...and stick 7 spies on their main planet. It took a long time, but it was VERY satisfying to put the last DreadLords to the sword. Now I'm playing the 7th (and last?) scenario. Huge map. Protect Drengi from the REALLY evil ones. Last night, after a couple of hours, I lost when Drengi was conquered by an army of just FOUR DreadLords against my remaining 5000. They overran me quicker than I thought possible. I'm thinking of skipping work today so I can have my revenge. Belated kudos to Stardock for a REALLY good game. I'll get Twilight of the Arnor, but I expect DA will keep me busy for a while first.