Campaign Mode vs. Sandbox?

Well, they give you the backstory on all these civs.

Personally, I just do sandbox, because I suck at the campaign.

I've never done any of the campaigns. I spend all of my time in GalCivII designing ships and playing in sandbox mode; personally, I consider sandbox mode to be the game's "primary" mode.

I assume that the campaign offers backstory and a narrative series of events, with gameplay parameters limited to what fits the story at hand. If that sounds appealing to you, you should probably try.

I did enjoy the campaigns my self, they are well written and usually fun (there are some that can get a little hard). The second one campaign is neat because you come from the point of view of the Dengri, but overall they do offer an interesting backstory about how some of the races did come about.

I would agree, in terms of storyline and explaining a bit why each race has such and such characteristic, they are interesting.

But purely in terms of gameplay I prefer sandbox games as you have much more freedom as well as access to the full tech tree. I always feel a bit constrained by the limitations of the campaigns.

Thanks a lot for all the input.  I didn't realize the campaign mode explained the back stories of all the races.  That definitely intrigues me.

Well, if you just want the backstory quick 'n' dirty, you can go to GalCivII -> Data -> English -> Campaign and use an XML application to read it.

You can also use an XML editor to correct most errors in the game text, if you're a grammar Nazi like myself and care about such things.

I just use Notepad, but an XML editor does all the nice color coding for you and can render/error check.  I never got into the campaigns much, but I've picked up a lot of the backstory through reading text here and there.  To be honest, it doesn't interest me all that much.  I've always gotten plenty of enjoyment out of sandbox mode.  And yea, there's *a lot* of spelling and grammer errors.  It's kind of understandable though.  There's a whole book worth of text in this game and I doubt Stardock has any professional technical writers, well they probably do, but none of them ever looked at this game.

I'm hoping you did this on purpose.

Oops, hehe, guess I should use a spell checker when complaining about spelling and grammar errors.

I tried the campaigns, but totally sucked at them.

You are not alone. Same for me