Man, those turn based strategy games can ruin your marriage !
What I can surely say that this game is a real addiction threat - anyone who played Civilization knows what I'm talking about. True, in some aspects its much more simplistic than Civilization, but when you find yourself playing until 2am in a work night, when your wife and children are long asleep - it says a lot about this game (or about my irresponsible self ?)
Well, what we've got here is a formula of the 4 X games - much like the Space Empires and the Master of Orion series. You create your race, and of course, try to rule the world.
There are 2 things I liked the most , well 3, about this game - the vast tech tree takes 10's of hours to explore, the rather advanced for its time diplomacy mechanism, and the economics part of the game.
Your diplomatic abilities are influenced from your actions (once in a while you are shown a moral dilemma, and have to decide what path to take. Most of the time, choosing "good" is costly, while choosing the easy, evil option is rewarding financially or otherwise. Who said being good isn't hard ?), tech advance, and the structures you build on each planet.
The alignment thing is important, because no matter how kind you are to a faction of an opposing alignment, they will not be your allies.
The game is a bit difficult in the "Normal" settings. I mean, it's easy to win by a tech victory or by an alliance victory, but most of the time it is impossible to get a conquest victory. The difference between this game and the Altarian Prophecy add on - while most of the game parameters are pre-determined here, in the Altarian Prophecy (from now on AP) you can change your civilizations basic abilities.
AP, is a quite small addition - it adds only the changes mentioned here before, a single player campaign ( the usual, original setting is sandbox mode), couple of races (very good addition when playing the bigger maps, adds a lot to the challenge and the diplomacy), a few more new tech's and structures, and I also felt it raised the game's difficulty somewhat. For instance, whilst in Galactic you can build and improve as many star bases as you want, here additions are pretty costly, so every decision has to not be considered lightly. If i need to grade the AP, I'd give it only 5, because it adds to the game play, but too little.
The game graphics are, hmm, lame. Nothing short of older games graphics, but the games power is in the economic and military planning, and not in the graphics. the sound department is Ok, there are no spoken words, but the music is fine, nothing spectacular or so interesting that will make you avoid turning it down and instead listen to your heavy metal albums... (Heavy metal goes well with war, isn't that true ?)
Game play wise the game is very simple, when the only thing that i can attest to be a little disappointing is the battles. There is absolutely nothing interesting there.
I love games that make you think.This one is not the most beautiful kid in class, but certainly it gets all the A+s.