After this pompous review I expected too much. But this game feels unfinished even after few days of playing.
GC II had great aspirations. Honestly, this game is not bad. It offers nice and handy graphics interface, comfortable sounds, honourable depth and complexity and the ambition of becoming a space epos. But the great idea fails on lots of bugs, the feeling beeing unfinished and - the most important - the lack of originality.
1. Bugs everywhere. The game loves to crush down periodicaly. So I had to save it every move not because of my possible strategy mistakes but because of the game instability. I don't know, if this is a bug or not, but I could barely see the ships I was designing and nearly nothing at the tactical map. The same problem with the planets which I noticed as boring schematic transparent circles.
2. After a while you don't know where which of your planets lies, because the names are visible only in nearer zoom levels. After few hours you feel quite desoriented because of the bad whole transparency and visibility of the ships.
3. Ships and combat: It took few hours until I was able to build a clumsy little (smal-type...) fighter-design just with some armor, 10 hitpoints and one miserable laser-cannon. The battle was a matter of tasteless exhibition without the possibility of interfering - like in MOO 3. Boring and weird.
4. The research is really the major fllaw of the game. It goes forward very slowly (you may discover only one tech at once) and you are confronted with some really idiotic types of technologies and a unlogical tech tree. Why I have to discover something abstract like planetary improvements, when I want to enhace my factories? Or "trade", "alliances", "diplomatic relations" - are we in the stone age of Sid's Civilization-series or in a space game???
Ergo: The programmers wanted to make a huge tech-tree in spaming it with useless and illogical technologies. The player is inventing something and deos not know what exactly, because the desctription is neither none or some really misplaced kind of humor (a drunken robot comments with "old McDonald had a farm"...).
5. The planet management may turn quite annoying, especially if you notice, you haven't chosen the number of each buildings correctly and now the output of the planet doesn't match your needs (especially by very expensive future uprgades). You only can scrap one building and buid another one instead of it, but not simple transfer the production capacities, like MOO II did in very elegant way.
6. Spying is a joke. You invest lots of money in messages of sort "your spying level is medium or high", but you don't have any benefits of it. No stealing technologies (maybe far later in game?), no sabotages, no subversions, no inner security...
7. Gameplay. Personally and unfortunately I didn't experienced the famous "once more turn"-fever. In fact, during my whole gameplay I was expecting that "something will or must happen" this or in the next turn. But nothing happend. The ships were moving frustratingly slowly also after I invented the 4th version of some XXYY type of drive, I still had to mess with income and approval (a very annoying addition), anonymous planets and spapeless ships or fleets, opponents without exceptionality (where are the really scary Antarans, the intelligent Mentars, the collective of Klackons or the stealthy Darlocks?) and with the dailiness of each turn.
In fact and summarized - QC II offers lot of management, it offers lot of clicking, lot of space building&exploring schematics, but compared to MOO 2 it lacks the atmosphere, vitality, originality and the space 4x spirit totally. Everytime I switched it off, there was no impression left, only plenty of dead hours I could have used for something more meaningful...
"The feeling of the emptiness remained in spite of so much planets..."