It's a Terror Star! It's a Satellite Waterpark! It's both, in one fabulous installation!

I can hardly believe that this strategy game - one of the higher rated games of 2003 - has gone entirely unreviewed here. How could our vigilant game reviewers commit such an oversight? Ah, well, we'll fix that now.

It's a good thing the galaxies in these space games are never as large as real galaxies. Real galaxies have like billions of stars, whereas even the "gigantic"-sized galaxies in Galactic Civilizations have maybe a couple hundred - and even that comparatively tiny galaxy can take days or weeks of free time to conquer.

Anyway, if you've ever played a space empire or "4X" game (like the Star Control or Master of Orion series), you know the drill here. Compete against various alien races in turn-based strategy, colonizing as many planets as possible while advancing your technology. Each planet can construct ships for your military effort, or buildings to improve the world's living conditions, production, population morale, research, profits, and other factors. Luckily, military conquest isn't always the only possible victory - you can also ally or trade with your alien neighbors, if you're not up to revisiting the Holocaust on a galactic scale.

This is among computer gaming's oldest formulas, so it's not surprising that Galactic Civilizations does not offer a lot of brilliant innovations. Nonetheless, it's well done, with a few twists that make it worth playing.


Story

The story in space empire games is rarely important, which is good in this case, because Galactic Civilizations begins after humanity invents hyper-drive technology (at last allowing the colonization of other systems), and...transmits the design to all the other major races, believing that "any civilization capable of interstellar travel will have long ago overcome its militaristic tendencies". What the hell? When has it ever been human nature to just hand over such a civilization-altering discovery? Especially to beings we know nothing about? Needless to say, all five other races immediately begin striving for galactic domination. Nice one, Earth Leader. Luckily, once you begin the game, the prologue fades into the background and can be safely ignored.

There's not much resembling an Alpha Centauri-esque in-game story...only the process of winning the game via military conquest, political alliances, cultural conquest, or evolving to the next state of existence.

The cultural victory is pretty neat, actually - colonies generate influence as well as money/population, and if your influence gets high enough, neighboring alien worlds will defect to your empire without bloodshed. We first saw something like this in Civilization 3, but Civilization 3 sucked, so this is better.

In many ways, culture is actually the most depressing and loathsome victory - instead of something noble like risking your brave soldiers' lives by violently subjugating the entire galaxy (oh, wait, that isn't so noble), or getting smart enough to become a post-human being of pure thought or whatever, you win simply because you've put a Future McDonald's and Future Hot Topic on every corner of every planet, and all the alien kids are shut-in social retards who just watch Future Anime and Earth Idol all day and wish so badly that they were human. A race with any dignity at all would much rather be wiped out in a huge genocide than that.

There are a small handful of events that almost resemble a story, like Dark Lords returning or terrorist factions rising or something, but these do not happen every game, or even in most games. Nor are the alien races really anything you haven't seen before (though some of them are quite amusing, especially when you're losing or they hate you: "Did you get the present we sent? It was a bouncing red ball. We believe your species will be quite amused by it...").

So you'll be playing this one for the gameplay, not because it has a fascinating, mysterious plot.


Graphics

Like with most strategy games, Galactic Civilizations is not graphically intense. It was definitely not among the most visually impressive games of 2003. In fact, it is not all that much of an improvement over Master of Orion 2 (my other favorite space empire game), which was released 7 years prior.

You can tell what everything is, and it doesn't look bad, but much more effort could have been spent here. The major races have different style ships (for example, no race's colony ship looks like any other race's colony ship), which is good, but do not expect landscapes for the different planets beyond a tiny picture, or special movies for completing a galactic wonder, or other such graphical innovations from previous empire games.


Sound/Music

The effects were standard - lasers firing, mild explosions, and other such things for ship combat. If there were more sound effects to the game, they were too pedestrian for me to possibly remember. Some soundbites like the ones you heard in Alpha Centauri ("Please don't go. The drones need you. They look up to you.") would have been cool. (Okay, so I've been bringing up Alpha Centauri a lot in this review, but it raised the bar on a lot of things, so sue me.)

The music is minimal - not many different themes are used, but they're okay. Luckily, one option allows you to use your own mp3s for game music. One really cool moment was just as I finished the first star-system destroying Terror Star I ever created, and SMP's "Chemicals" got to the "and the universe went dark" line. More and more games in recent years are leaning towards letting players use mp3s, and I hope this trend continues.


Smoothness

This game is not very smooth. Like most PC games in this age of lazy, slipshod programming, Galactic Civilizations has been patched repeatedly (in fairness, though, these patches also added new features as well as fix bugs), and even now, it will not begin from the autorun menu when I insert the CD - I have to use the Start Menu or Desktop icon. It also usually crashes the operating system (forcing a reboot) when I try to alt-tab to another program. There are also minor gameplay things that don't make sense, like being able to steal evil technologies if you're a good civilization - so I'm too high-minded to research Advanced Slavery on my own, but if my spies steal it from an evil civilization, then it's okay?

Speaking of good and evil, it's also interesting how events are the only things that alter your race's Morality. In other words, you can load up some transports, invade a world owned by a peaceful race, kill off its population in a mass extermination literally 5,000 times worse than the Holocaust, and still have a "saintly" alignment. Let's hear it for moral subjectivity!

Worse yet, the in-game text has quite a few typos and bad editing. Worst of all is the instruction book, which was obviously written before the game was even finished - the political parties listed show incorrect modifiers, for example, and one of them isn't even in the final version of the game!

There is really no excuse for any of these problems. Even in its initial release, however, Galactic Civilizations had way fewer problems than the (also-recent) Master of Orion 3, and that alone makes it the better choice.

Also, despite the game's far-future setting, only one billion people live on Earth when you begin. Was there a huge series of genocides the book forgot to tell us about?


Gameplay

At first, Galactic Civilizations plays like most any other turn-based space empire game you've played - colonize worlds with colony ships, set your population to produce improvements/spaceships/research on those worlds, discover new technologies, make deals with other races or war against them using your warships, wash-rinse-repeat. It's fairly well balanced, and high-difficulty alien empires use better tactics rather than blatant cheating. It's as addictive as the best games in this genre have ever been.

Sadly, there is no multiplayer, but there is the Metaverse, where you can sign in and register your score after each game. Get enough total points, and you get various imaginary rankings and awards. I'm not sure, I never really got into the Metaverse.

Those looking for Master of Orion 2 tactical combat need not apply - spaceship combat is handled almost like the Civilization games, with one unit pitted against another on the galaxy map, and the two damage each other according to attack and defense ratings until one runs out of hit points and explodes. The defender gets a slight bonus if it's part of a fleet or stationed at a planet with defense improvements, but for the most part, the only thing you can do is have bigger ships and better technology.

Planet invasions (where you send troop ships to exterminate a world's inhabitants and claim it for your empire) are a little more tactical - again, it's mostly a matter of numbers (and technology), but you have the option of using various tactics beforehand to soften the defenders up, like Core Detonation or Gas Warfare. You won't use these tactics often, if ever, because they're not only hideously expensive, most of them damage planet quality, and that's a very bad thing.

All this non-tactical combat isn't automatically worse than tactical combat, but it's something to be aware of when deciding to buy games like these.

Anyway, as you play, you'll notice slight improvements on the formula that add up to a compelling experience.

Unfortunately, you can only play as the human race...but you can set your own racial bonuses or penalties to spaceship range, research, production, morale, diplomacy, population growth, sensor range, and many other stats, which is largely what picking a race in these games amounts to anyway. It lacks some of the cooler quirks that Master of Orion 2 had, though - in that game, your race could be Subterranean or Tolerant, which helped you colonize otherwise worthless worlds, or Telepathic, allowing you to dominate undefended worlds without conquering their populations. Such abilities are greatly missed in Galactic Civilizations, where worthless planets are a dime a dozen.

In a new touch, you can select a political party, each granting further bonuses. If you choose Populist, for example, you gain +20 to both Morale and Diplomacy, while being Federalist grants +20 to your all-important Economy.

The other parties are irrelevant in the beginning, but once you evolve beyond your initial Imperialist government, your party can lose elections if you aren't keeping morale high, taking its precious bonuses with it. Worse yet, entire planets can rebel from your empire altogether if they aren't happy. All of this feels more realistic than most empire games, where even if your race's government is described as democratic, it still acts like a homogenous entity that never changes.

Again, however, another game has done it more creatively - Alpha Centauri's advanced governments were much more speculative, and few had overwhelming advantages over the others, which was more enjoyable and imaginative. The choice between, say, Thought Control and Eudaimonia was not to be taken lightly. In Galactic Civilizations, there's only Imperialism, Republic, Star Democracy, and Star Federation, and there's no reason not to choose the next one when it gets researched. Borrrring. The political parties are still cool, though.

So what else? Economy. Most empire games make you allocate your population to production, research, and whatever else, with income being an incidental product no matter who's doing what.

Galactic Civilizations takes the opposite approach - each planet has a population, but you don't assign them individually to tasks. They automatically pay taxes, and you set what percentage of your empire's income goes towards military production (ships, basically), social production (planet-improving buildings), and research. If a planet has facilities that improve production or research, its economy will stretch farther in that area. For example, if a planet normally produces 10 Research points but has a +50% to Research, it might produce 15 Research (while only taking 10 out of its economy).

Espionage works the same way - instead of building spies, you just throw funding against each race you want to spy on (or disrupt). The amount is applied toward your selected races each turn, and more information is revealed as the total reaches certain levels.

This economy-centered thing is an interesting setup. The problem is that you can only set the production for your empire as a whole, not for individual planets. In other words, if you set your military/social/research at 20/40/40 percent, respectively, that goes for every planet. This leads to many annoying situations where your production giants have built every worthwhile social improvement, but there's no way to reallocate their social production without also reducing it on all your planets that still need social improvements. Thus, you end up with assloads of production going to waste on your dime. Being able to set each planet's production individually would have been a big improvement.

At least planets can build both a ship and a planet improvement at the same time, though. Most space empire games only let you do one. Thus, Galactic Civilizations avoids questions like "So it's taking the resources of every employable person on my planet to make a scout ship?" (Now, it's just "So it's taking the entire planet to make a scout ship and a banking center?")

As with most of these games, you can also buy a ship or improvement in one turn for prohibitive costs, but Galactic Civilizations also offers the useful option of payment plans - if you can't afford the huge lump sum, you could pay smaller amounts, plus a fee for the next X months. Much appreciated.

The expected Galactic Wonders are also present - these are the equivalent of Wonders in Civilization: expensive and powerful projects that can only be built once in the whole game (so get yours done before another race beats you to it and all that production you spent on them goes to waste!). Also thrown into the mix are the lesser Galactic Achievements, which can be built once by each race, but you can still get duplicate Achievements by taking alien planets that have them - the multiple bonuses will still count, and your stupid masses won't notice at all that you have two Political Capitals.

Best of all are Trade Goods, which are unique to the race that builds them and can be traded to other races. The race that builds a Trade Good has a monopoly on that good (and its precious bonuses), and is the only one allowed to trade it to others. At first, you might wonder why the hell you would let someone else share your unique bonus - unless you go for a pansy Alliance Victory, only once race can win the game, and the aliens know that - but Trade Goods are easily the best bargaining chip in the game, next to whole planets. If your Diplomacy stat is anywhere near good, you can easily convince races to butcher other races or hand over several vital technologies in exchange for these things. Fun!

All these huge projects needed, really, were special little movies when you finished them. Hey, Civilization 2 and a few other games had them.

Another thing I can give unreserved praise to is the tech tree. Like Alpha Centauri, the final technology is evolution to the next phase of existence (and an automatic win). Like Master of Orion 2, the tech tree is non-linear - you can get to the Final Frontier without researching everything. In fact, there are many extraneous paths that are dead ends, but grant your race further bonuses. This is a good approach, allowing specialization or simply help where your civilization may need it.

Galactic Civilizations also borrows from Alpha Centauri in its UP Issues. After the major races make contact, the United Planets comes into being, and every few years, the races are called upon to vote on some random issue that alters the game in some way, like making Constructors faster, banning Terror Stars, or taxing races who go to war. Your voting power depends on your race's population and influence stat, and this would be a good way for influence-leaning players to disrupt the game if the issues came up more often. (The instructions say there's one issue that can make issues come up more often, but this is not true.)

Better than the issues - a highlight of the game, even - are the random events. Most space empire games have random events that can happen, but Galactic Civilizations takes it to the next level by giving you a choice in most events - a good choice, a neutral/weasel choice, and an evil choice.

For example, you might colonize a planet and find ancient machines there that can boost the planet's Quality if people are sacrificed to them. The good choice is to not sacrifice anyone, which gives you no bonus. The neutral choice is to sacrifice a few volunteers and gain a minor Planet Quality bonus. The evil choice sacrifices hundreds of people (willing or not), gaining a massive bonus. Another event might be finding pre-industrial natives on a planet - do you live in peace with them (compromising your colony's growth), gently move them to reservations (neither bonus nor penalty), or enslave them all (production bonus)?

The choices you make affect your empire's Morality rating, which in turn affects how the alien races react to you. If you're good, most races like you more, making it easier to trade or make peace with them. If you're evil, they like you less, but you'll also gain many bonuses from taking the quick and easy (and conscience-less) path. Even better, some technologies can only be researched by good or evil civilizations. The events don't happen as often as I'd like, but this is totally sweet.

With one exception, the remaining differences are minor. Colony ships are much easier to build than in most games. This really speeds up the game, at least in the opening phases, when the race is on to snatch up all the good planets.

Sadly, those planets are not as descriptive as most games. Master of Orion 2 would assign planets size classes, plus environment types like Radiated, Toxic, Ocean, Terran, Gaea, and so forth. Pretty vivid. Galactic Civilizations, by comparison, reduces planets to simple Planet Quality ratings - anything 15+ is inhabitable, and 25+ is a paradise. The colony screens do have individual descriptions, but there are only about five different descriptions. You do get the option of naming worlds, but you won't think of them as anything but numbers and production facilities. Not good.

Anomalies. Galactic Civilizations takes a more diverse approach to investigating the unknown than most. The anomalies are little things scattered all over the galaxy, and can only be investigated by Survey Ships. Normally, they give you free ships or mild bonuses ("Yay. A new form of energy that boosts my Economy by +1 percent!"), but occasionally they turn out to be this giant space monster that's a pain in the ass to kill. Still, it's fun seeking them out. Who leaves all this junk out in the void?

Then there are Starbases, which your constructors can build anywhere in the galaxy, preferably where galactic resources are floating. The resources are very valuable, as they provide civilization-wide bonuses to one stat or another, and each constructor can add modules to increase the bonus. Other modules can boost production, trade, or influence for any planets you have in that sector, or provide bonuses to nearby ships. After you research Terror Stars, starbases can be upgraded to star-destroying weapons...that move one frigging space a turn (no matter what your race's speed bonus is) and are thus almost useless. But all the other modules you put in it will still work, so it's not a total loss.

It's even funny. Tell me, did either of Emperor Palpatine's Death Stars have Trading Centers, Shopping Districts, Franchise Headquarters, and Satellite Waterparks? It may be your massive weapon for spreading genocide across the galaxy, but it's also a hot vacation spot for families!

Lastly - and awesomely - there is the customization factor. Not only can you use your mp3s, but the Galciv Writer program is easily googled for, and allows you to create your own ships, social improvements, technologies, anomalies, starbase modules, political parties, diplomatic dialogue, and events! Especially events.

Seriously, people. No game can be all bad when it lets you make events like "The Second Coming of Christ", with choices like:

Good: "Ouch. And here I was worshipping Noshabkeming this whole time. Looks like I better buy Bibles for my whole race." (-200 bc)

Neutral: "Hooray! Now humans can get presents on Second Coming Day each year! You're the best, Jesus!" (+10 Morale)

Evil: "It's about goddamned time. I am, of course, the Antichrist. In accordance with prophecy, you will find my armies ready for the battle of Armageddon. Your move, punk." (+15 Military Production)

Stuff like that can drastically lengthen a game's hard drive life, wouldn't you agree?


Conclusion

Though I still prefer Master of Orion 2, Galactic Civilizations is very enjoyable (if somewhat flawed). If you're into space empire games, especially highly customizable ones, give it a try - it deserves your time. If they ever make a Galactic Civilizations 2 and refine what has been done here, it would kick tons of ass.