Empire-building games are difficult to design and difficult to attract game consumers to, what with their sophistication often being seen as uncomfortably complicated. Nevertheless, it did not stop some game-makers from making such games, just to capture the comparatively small segment of the market that favor playing such games if only for their deep gameplay – but only if they are well designed.
Fortunately, for Stardock, Galactic Civilizations was a well-designed game (but with some rough edges). It did surprisingly well enough for Stardock to use it as a stepping stone, in addition to its other ventures, to gain enough commercial capability to go for incorporation as a publisher-cum-developer of software.
The first thing that the player will notice about Galactic Civilizations is its lousy graphics. This is hardly a harsh statement, as Galactic Civilizations rely on sprite-based and image-based graphics, and even these look old and simple. Animations are even more unimpressive, as they mostly involve displacement and rotation of sprites.
Galactic Civilizations is not a game for those looking for graphical pizazz.
Yet, they are satisfactorily functional: the amounts of sprites and images in the game are enough to represent the massive amounts of content in the game. Every ship type has its own sprite, every planet of different quality bands (more on this later) has its own sprite and every anomaly has its own sprite too.
Audio-wise, the game isn't impressive either. A lot of cheesy and silly sound effects accompany the occurrences in the game, with the most uncomfortable ones being those associated with combat. The soundtracks would be more pleasing to the ears as they instill a sense of wonderment, but they are so limited such that repetition would creep in eventually.
If the player can get past the rather previous-generation graphics and audio, he/she will find that the game has plenty, plenty more to offer.
The game is played on a 2D plane, representing a galaxy that the player generates before the start of the game. The galaxy itself is represented using grids of squares, with each sprite in the game occupying one square. These squares are in turn called parsecs, and a similarly square cluster of parsecs forms a sector. They are used to house the sprites that represent objects of importance in the game, such as star-systems and ships.
The galaxy is generated in a procedural manner, making sure that the galaxy itself has seemingly random content yet having enough opportunities for each player to branch out and found a fledgling empire with.
In addition to the size of the galaxy and the number of civilizations, or players, that would be in the galaxy, the player can set the amount of resources and spatial anomalies (more on these later) in it. The player can also set the number of star systems that are available and out of these, the number of viable planets that can be colonized and inhabited.
However, the rather random galaxy generation procedures can result in some players having rather advantageous starting locations, with good planets and galactic resources lying a couple dozen parsecs away, while some others have little choice but to engage in slow research to unlock longer-ranged hyper-drives before reaching further than their initially isolated starting position, with the risk that rivals would have reached the places that he/she/it wants to get to.
The premise of the game is about humanity, canonically called "Terrans" in this game, having just contributed to galactic history by inventing the hyperdrive and distributed this technology (deliberately or not, this is not clear) for every other civilization. The hyperdrive rendered colonization of far flung systems that would have taken centuries to reach possible, and thus began the scramble to colonize potentially productive planets and stake their claim on the galaxy.
In-game, the premise doesn't have much worth or value. There is not any story mode at all, other than the odd game design that the player always start as the Terran civilization – not that it would matter much, gameplay-wise.
Every other player may appear to be of one of the canonical selection of races/civilizations in the backstory of Galactic Civilizations, but there is no actual gameplay difference between one race to another. Every player always start with the most rudimentary of technologies.
However, there are different AI scripts for different civilizations, such as the Drengin Empire AI being particularly war-like and the Torian Confederation being particularly diplomatic (but ultimately selfish); the choices that they will make on how to expand their power will reflect these personalities. Thus, there may be some replay value to having different permutations of contenders for galactic supremacy for the next game iteration.
A player starts with a homeworld, which is always named as the canonical homeworld of the civilization that the player plays, so the (literally) human player will always start with good old Earth as the starting planet, as well as the Sol System as the starting star system.
The player will also start with a colony ship and a surveyor, the former being needed to colonize the nearest habitable planet. It is rare for a player to encounter threats that endanger either ship early in the game, so a player doesn't have to worry much about losing these two very pivotal units.
The player will have to worry about choosing the right planet to colonize though. This is easier said than done, due to the randomized galaxy generation that may either cause a dearth of planets that are good enough to inhabit or a glut of them but only one can be chosen early. For the latter case, this is an important decision too as it will determine the zone of supply that player-owned ships can only travel in while remaining in the control of the player.
A game design that does not help this particular early game decision is that only the sprites for the sun(s) of star systems are shown on the galactic map. To see the planets themselves, the player will have to select the sprites of the star systems and look at the list of planets in them on a sidebar of the user interface.
Of course, being a turn-based game, Galactic Civilizations does afford the player quite a lot of time to deliberate over his/her options, but this game design of obscuring planets until their associated suns are selected causes the player to waste quite a bit of time going through layers of user interfaces.
The individual qualities of the planets that the player inhabits are likely the most important of the long-term factors of success.
A higher-quality planet generally has larger capacity for greater populations of colonists, as well as having a better bonus effect on the happiness of the colony that has been established on it. A bigger and happier populace in turn provides generally better income as well as greater productivity.
On the other hand, a low-quality planet does the complete opposite, and would only be a drain on a player's resources and assets. Of course, there may be some strategic gain to be obtained from colonizing lousy planets, such as extending the player's zone of supply, but starbases are a better alternative as they do the same thing and more (more on starbases later).
The game does teach the player that planets with ten points of quality are the better ones to colonize, while anything below would be quite worthless; there is little that a player can do with such planets. However, this game design results in a lot of planets being red-herrings and thus useless data that goes into the memory that had been allocated for the running of the game, as well as into saved-game files.
The quality of a planet is not set in stone though. The player can conduct R&D to unlock planetary improvements that can be built to improve the planet's quality. This makes inhabiting some planets of lower-than-average quality viable.
On the other hand, when these planet-enhancing upgrades are used on already high-quality planets, it can result in the creation of extremely productive planets, due to the percentage-dependent bonus that these improvements can provide. Astonishingly high-quality planets can support massive populations, be money-churning cash-cows and industrial powerhouses all-in-one. This can result in major gameplay imbalance in favor of the owning player, as these planets provide tremendous amounts of both short-term and long-term benefits.
Worst of all, there is an exploit that can be performed using planetary improvements and the option to destroy a colony at will.
Destroying a colony removes all planetary improvements and other projects on that planet as well as its population, so this is a drastic measure that is often only useful in scorched-earth strategies. However, planet quality is not affected, even though the planetary improvements have been removed. This means that a particularly patient player can use this exploit to build up a high-quality planet, though this exploit takes a long time to pull-off and the star system that contains the planet is ultimately still vulnerable to invasions.
(There will be more on invasions later.)
As mentioned earlier, planets can have planetary improvements built onto them for various benefits. The most basic of improvements are those that support the growth of the population of the colony on a planet, such as farming projects and facilities that boost happiness (either through entertainment industries or morally dubious methods). The planet can also take on improvements that increase its tax income, manufacturing capacities, cultural influence, research output and capability to build, service and repair ships. (All these mechanics will be elaborated on later.)
This design decision may not be unfamiliar to those that have played other empire-building games. However, this proven design typically results in a planet being able to take on all functions; this consequence is especially acute in Galactic Civilizations, due to the design consequence of the planet quality mechanic as mentioned earlier.
In addition to regular improvements, the player may also build Galactic Wonders and Super Projects on planets.
The former confers benefits that are so good, only one of them can be built in a galaxy; they may confer either civilization-wide bonuses or a bonus that is only specific to the planet that it is built on but is still plenty potent.
Super Projects are similar to Galactic Wonders, but any civilization can build them, i.e. there is no limitation on the building of these, other than one can only be built for each civilization.
Considering their designs, a veteran of empire-building games would recognize Galactic Wonders and Super Projects as having been inspired by those in better-known empire-building games, such as Sid Meier's Civilizations. Racing to build these Wonders can be fun, though the game's mechanics of invasions and star-system-based colonies can make them a bit too easy to hold onto compared to those in other empire-building games; said mechanics will be elaborated on later.
More importantly, these powerful projects further contribute to the consequences of the game designs that allow planets to become very powerful in every aspect.
Anyway, a player will need to have planets to be able to advance in power and stake claims to territories in the galaxy. These planets are not only important for building and maintaining the fleets that the player will have (and which will be elaborated on later in this review when convenient), they also radiate zones of influence and other zones, such as the zone of supply mentioned earlier.
Zones of influence are a representation of the extent of the culture of the player's civilization. It can extend surprisingly far from the player's owned star systems, such that it may collide with rival zones of influence. When this occurs, there is a tug-of-war for a larger zone of influence; the winning side eventually bites into the other's zone, replacing its colour. Eventually, the more cultured player's zone may even cover rival colonized star systems. In this case, the player will begin to subvert the control of these systems, reducing their loyalty to their owning player and eventually causing them to defect altogether.
Cultural war is the only war that can be waged throughout a game session, regardless of any treaties that the players have agreed to (more on treaties later) or the game settings that the player has used. This makes the culture mechanic one of the strongest in the game, which is a rarity in empire-building games and which makes Galactic Civilizations that more special.
A player's culture rating also plays a part in the United Planets mechanic, which will be elaborated on later.
Zones of supply are more dependent on ships than planets; in fact, when a ship is selected, the player sees zones of supply that are only relevant to that particular ship. The ship's Range attribute is the one that determines how far a ship can stray from a friendly planet or starbase, though either of the latter may have upgrades that improve the range attribute of ships in their zones of supply.
While a ship is within the zones of supply, the player has full control over the direction of the ship and the ship is able to slowly repair itself if it is damaged without having to enter a star system (though doing so gives the ship a higher repair rate).
If a ship is caught out of a player's zones of supply for whatever reason (the most common being a Survey Ship getting into a Wormhole that bring it far away from home), the player loses much of the control over it and may only give it a direction back home. The ship also cannot repair any damage that it has sustained, and also has reduced scouting range. This is a good design, as it prevents players from attempting to eliminate rivals early in the game without having establish supply zones first.
Speaking of ships, the player can have planets (with shipyards) produce ships, of which there are mainly four types: civilian vessels, explorers/scouts, warships and invasion transports.
Civilian vessels include colony ships, one of which the player starts with. These can carry a surprisingly large amount of colonists, more so than any invasion transports, allowing the player to decide how many colonists that new colonies would have. Colonizing new planets are as simple as sending these colony ships into uninhabited (or player-owned) star systems, and selecting the planets for them to settle on.
It should be noted here that for the purpose of deciding ownership, occupying one planet of a pristine star system grants the player complete ownership of the system. This game design can be exploited to deny an entire clutch of planets to opponents, which some players would not appreciate.
Colony ships can also be exploited to handle over-population; as the population of a planet grows, the squalor from over-crowding will cause a dent in the happiness of the colony on that planet. The player can easily solve this by having a colony ship go to that planet, stuffing excess population into the ship and sending it away to less-populated colonies, or simply conveniently decommission it on-the-spot after it has exited the star system, removing the hapless colonists as well without any consequences.
Scout ships do exactly as what their name suggest: they scout, revealing star systems and spatial anomalies that the player can make plans for, as long as rival players do not get to them first.
Explorer vessels are similar to scout ships, but they are far superior in stats and scouting range. More importantly, they are able to explore spatial anomalies.
The first explorer vessel that the player gets is the Survey Ship, which curiously resembles the Enterprise-class vessel in Star Trek. It has astonishingly long range and better combat stats than a regular scout vessel, but its most important function is that it can explore spatial anomalies and unlock the random rewards (or something else) that they have.
The spatial anomalies have sprites that represent a lot of known real anomalies, such as gas clouds, asteroids and nebulae, as well as more sci-fi ones like wreckage of ancient alien vessels and quantum anomalies that do not have much corroborating evidence yet.
However, their looks generally do not determine the rewards that they give when they are examined by an explorer vessel. The player may get very tiny increments to one or two capabilities of his/her/its civilization (more on civilization capabilities later), or nothing at all from some of the more common anomalies. Other common ones may grant the explorer vessel an improvement in stats, making the explorer vessel useful for defeating early-game attacks on the player (or destroying other explorer vessels).
Some other anomalies do have known rewards though. For example, nebulae may grant a rare bonus to the player's research progress, or nothing at all, depending on the player's luck.
Perhaps the most significant, and also most useless, game design of spatial anomalies is that their rewards increase over time. During early-game, the anomalies give very small rewards (or have small but nasty consequences), but later, remaining anomalies give large rewards.
Unfortunately, while the literally human player can realize this, the AI ones do not. Their explorer vessels will continuously prospect any anomalies within reach, leaving nothing for the future. Considering that anomalies do not respawn and that even the little rewards that anomalies that had been collected early-game give are still important anyway as they give both a headstart and long-term benefits, there is little opportunity for the player to see this minor mechanic in action.
This means that the player won't be frequently uncovering fantastic rewards like a free technology that can be obtained without any research, or nasty surprises like unwittingly unleashing a space monster on the galaxy.
The lack of incentives to keep anomalies around and the absence of the respawning of anomalies are also the cause of another complaint: the more advanced of the two explorer vessels in the game, the Ranger, would come a little too late to the scene. When the Ranger enters the game session, it is more than likely the galaxy in play would already be quite devoid of spatial anomalies by then.
Then, there are trade freighters. These are needed to establish trade routes between a player-owned star system and that of another player. Establishing a route is as simple as having a freighter spend one turn in a player-owned system (apparently to collect trade materials), or build a freighter right in this system, and then launching it towards the targeted alien system.
The freighter is consumed upon reaching its destination, but smaller freighters that are not within the control of the player will be plying the trade route, which will grant trade income every turn.
If these mini-freighters are waylaid frequently by enemy ships, the trade routes will eventually collapse. This game design allows a player to blockade other players who are dependent on trade income, which can be even more lucrative than tax income.
The revenue from the trade route is dependent on the respective prosperity of the trade-conjoined pair of planets and the length of the trade route. The former game design of the trade mechanic is particularly notable, as it allows the trading partners to increase the lucrativeness of the trade route over time by developing their respective planets instead of being stuck with a trade route of fixed income. (This isn't the only way to improve trade revenue; more on this soon.)
Considering the huge amounts of revenue that can be generated via trade, there is a limit on the trade routes that a player can set up unilaterally (trade routes set up by other players do not count towards this limit, fortunately). This limit can be increased through research in the diplomatic branch of the player's technology tree.
Of course, this means that players are likely to set up and dissolve trade routes when convenient to go for more lucrative routes, but doing so will anger the AI player that the player has snubbed, contributing to an acrimony statistic that it has with the player.
If there are problems with the trade mechanic, they would include the lack of transparency of the calculation of the revenue from a trade route and that the player may not set up trade routes between his/her/its own planets, though this is explained away in-game as the player's own planets already having established trade communication and travel with each other.
Players will very likely engage in war to decide who has supremacy. Their warships will be the ones doing most of the combat in this game.
Initiating ship battles is as simple as moving the sprites of the player's ships onto the sprites of enemy ships or starbases. Some simple and unimpressive animations of them firing silly-sounding projectiles at each other will commence, while damage calculations run in the background. Generally, ships with stronger attack ratings than the opponents' defense ratings has will have the advantage, while ships with higher defense ratings fare better in defending against an attack; the ratings can be improved by conducting military-oriented research.
However, there are probabilities being rolled during these combat encounters, such that the outcome may turn out differently from expected - for better or worse.
(The implementation of probability rolls in Galactic Civilizations will be mentioned later in a segment of its own.)
Stacks of ships can be moved as one, at least until the slowest of the ships has run out of moves. This is one of the few advantages of moving in stacks; the other being that enemies may not occupy the parsec that a stack is occupying until all ships in that stack has been eliminated. Yet, the stack cannot be engaged all at once: combat between ships has to be initiated one-on-one.
This means that a player can delay the invasion of a star system or the destruction of a starbase by inserting ships into its parsec, forcing the enemy to go through all of them and be subjected to fickle probability rolls.
Ships gain experience as they survive battles, gaining extra hitpoints as well as improvements to attack and defense ratings as they breach experience thresholds to advance in levels. This means that some ships can become rather terrifically powerful, especially the player's starting survey ship, which can become very strong by picking up upgrades from anomalies. Of course, the probability-dependent combat may result in these veteran ships going down due to a stroke of bad luck anyway.
To defeat opponents through militaristic means, the player will have to invade and conquer the star systems that they own, one-by-one until they either surrender or be completely annihilated.
As a side note, for the former case, they may not necessarily surrender to the player that is beating them; they may actually surrender to other players instead, just to spite their vanquisher by having remaining territories fall into the hands of a much stronger rival.
Anyway, to invade enemy star systems, the player has to load up citizens into war transports that are within a player-owned star system, effectively drafting them outright. There are no additional consequences to drafting huge numbers of soldiers at once other than the colonies that they are being drafted from losing their citizenry, i.e. there are no poor reactions from the people when they are forced into war. This is an expedient and simplistic design that contrasts greatly with the rest of the game.
There is an issue with the loading of troops onto war transports; this issue also effects the loading of colonists into colony ships. When citizenry of a star system is loaded into either kind of vessels, they are always drawn from each of the colonies in said system in amounts proportional to their initial populations. The player has few, if any, options to draw recruits from specific colonies.
Invasion transports can be sent into an enemy star system in an attempt to subjugate every colony in it. Unlike ship battles, invasion transports can be stacked together and moved into a star system en masse to engage in battle all at once.
The problem is that all colonies in a star system has to be defeated in an invasion for a successful conquest. This can make invasions of heavily populated star systems very daunting; it also shows that Stardock had not learned much from other strategy games, namely their implementation of the doctrine of divide and conquer.
Invasion transports are also astonishingly weak; they are more than guaranteed to lose in ship battles against any combat-capable ship. This means that lightly-armed ships with a lot of moves are especially overpowered in taking down transports.
The act of invasion itself appears to be very simple. All of the colonists of the defending system will take up arms against the invaders, which can be a rather eyebrow-raising design (though the documentation does attempt to explain this away with some excuses). The two sides will grind away at each other until either side has been eliminated, seemingly entirely.
Both sides have advantage ratings that are dependent on factors such as either civilization's general level of technology, planet morale/happiness and others. The invaders generally have the advantage though, as the invading player can choose the method of invasion, which includes the default option that grants no bonuses, and nastier options that grant a better advantage but at the cost of damaging the colonies that are being invaded (if the invasion is successful) and some fees for using these.
However, luck also plays a role in these; rapidly changing random number generators are shown on screen, and their ranges depend on the factors mentioned above. The player can have these stop to determine the final advantage ratings that either side has, not unlike playing a virtual one-armed bandit.
Other than simply losing transports and millions of soldiers, there are no additional consequences from failing invasions of enemy systems, or secondary ramifications to having lost a lot of colonists to failed hostile invasions. Also, neither side gains any experience from the outcome of the invasion.
This means that as long as the invader has enough transports and soldiers and can garner a significant advantage rating can eventually grind the defenders in a battle of attrition, which can be a bit dreary if the player could not consider other more subtle options.
Managing a civilization can be daunting, so it is fortunate that Galactic Civilizations has user interfaces that are quite adequate in helping the player make decisions in a civilization-wide scale or decisions specific to individual colonies.
For example, the player can set tax rates across all colonies, which is handy as tax income will be the most important source of revenue, though the idea behind such a feature is of course already quite prevalent in empire-building games at the time. If a player wants to be more meticulous, tax rates for individual planets can also be set to manage their happiness ratings, which are of course inversely proportional to taxation rates.
The user interfaces also include a list of capabilities that the player's civilization has. These capabilities range from agriculture and manufacturing to soldiery and research. They are essentially bonuses that are imparted on the associated tasks that the player's colonies can perform, such as manufacturing giving a bonus reduction to lead time for the construction of ships or projects. These capabilities can be upgraded through uncovering bonuses from spatial anomalies and research, among several other sources.
These lists give a pretty good gauge of the long-term chances of success for a civilization. However, the player can only see the list for his/her own civilization. For those of other players, the player will need to conduct espionage to get this information.
It may be odd to some though, that such information of long-term importance would be locked away and short-term measures like espionage has to be used to reveal them.
Espionage is itself another capability of a civilization. By spending money on espionage directed at another specific civilization, the player can gain a lot of information on his/her/rivals, and may even be able to steal technologies, among other things, if the player's espionage level is high enough.
However, investing into espionage tends to be a high-cost, low-reward affair. The effectiveness of espionage is not only dependent on that other civilization's own rating, but also how vast and how relatively advanced (or backwards) the other civilization is; it can be many, many turns before the player even gets anything substantial on the other civilization, if anything at all.
Furthermore, if espionage spending is withdrawn, the information that the player has gathered starts to decay and lose its accuracy. This makes espionage an especially difficult mechanic to utilize in Galactic Civilizations.
A more well-done mechanic is research and development. All civilizations start out with rather fundamental technologies, not even any that creates viable warships. However, every player has access to a tech tree whose branches are completely visible to him/her/it; research decisions are a matter of planning which branches to prioritize first, thus allowing for a great number of research builds (that is, strategic plans involving the paths of research that would suit the player's play-styles).
Not unlike many other empire-building games that has the mechanic of research and technology levels, the player may only conduct research on only one technology project at a time. Also, not unlike other empire-building games, technological advancement is a one-way track; a player is never be able to regress, though utilizing the benefits that technologies unlock is a different matter, as the mechanic of Galactic Wonders would show.
It has to be mentioned here that regardless of how much manufacturing or research capacities that the player has, he/she/it will have to spend money to make use of these capacities, i.e. converting these capacities into actual production or research output takes money.
Every manufacturing project has a cost, and the number of turns that are needed for the colony undertaking that project to deliver it will depend on its manufacturing capacity and how much of that is being invested in. The player can set the proportion of the manufacturing capacity in all colonies that is fed with credits, much like how taxes can be controlled in a civilization-wide scale.
The same game designs also extend to research efforts, though with a slight difference: for a manufacturing project, the player can instantly finish it by paying out the private sectors of the player's civilization to accelerate the completion of the project. The payment methods themselves are varied too, from a large and immediate advance-payment to installments, though all of them are generally price-gougers. Still, this gives the player more options in getting these projects done.
The player's research and manufacturing ratings will give bonuses in the form of reduction in the costs needed to complete projects the conventional turn-by-turn way.
Generally, a technologically advanced civilization is very likely to win any game session, provided that the other players do not band together to prevent this player from winning. The AI players will generally do this - if the winning player had not sought to win their favor and stay in their good graces.
This is where the game's mechanics of diplomacy comes in. It will be difficult indeed for a player to win a game without resorting to discussions and talks with other civilizations, which is a difficulty that players who like sophisticated gameplay would appreciate.
A user interface specifically designed for diplomatic matters helps make handling these matters easy. The player has access to a screen that shows the icons representing the civilizations that the player has come across. Assuming that his/her civilization is still in good terms with the others, he/she can initiate discussion with the representatives of the civilizations at any time.
Said representatives are displayed on-screen as an animated picture of one member of the dominant species of that civilization, which will also have facial expressions that match the attitude of his civilization towards the player's. While these animations do a good job of showing how the other races look like, this is a superficial aesthetic design at best, as the attitudes of the other civilizations and the reasons for these would have been described in detail in the main diplomacy screen and the accompanying tooltips.
After a discussion has been initiated, both sides can exchange treaties, technologies and actions towards other civilizations, among other things. The relationship between the two civilizations is the main factor of whether there will be an agreement on the matters on the table or not, though there are other plenty other factors, including any recent,similar deals that had been made. Galactic Civilizations' AIs are surprisingly good at bargaining, but generally only so when they are at peace with the player.
During wartime, the AI is exceptionally stubborn, even at the point of defeat, which is a disappointment.
One minor mechanic that is related to diplomacy and bears worthy mention here is exclusive Trade Goods. These are similar to Galactic Wonders, in that they impart bonuses exclusive to those who have them, but unlike Wonders, they can be gifted to allies to impart on them the same bonuses too.
There are research options that enhance a player's diplomatic rating, which allows the player to influence AI-controlled civilizations more easily. As handy as these research options are against the AI, they also happen to highlight the fact that the game has no multiplayer feature, which can be a bit of a disappointment if the player wants to find out if there are any kindred spirit out there who likes playing sophisticated empire-building games like this.
Another important mechanic of diplomacy is the United Planets. Similar in nature to the mechanic of the United Nations in the Civilization franchise, it allows every civilization to come together to a common forum to decide on matters that affect every member civilization in the galaxy.
The matters tabled, if agreed upon, will be binding on every member civilization, for better or worse. The matters tabled are surprisingly varied, such as agreements that would result in trade bonuses for everyone in the United Planets. The player's influence rating determines the amount of votes that the player's civilization can rally, and this in turn is dependent on the player's level of culture, as well as the relationships that the player has cultivated with the others.
If a player feels that certain United Planets resolutions are working against his/her civilization, he/she can choose to leave the United Planets, thus rejecting all resolutions that the United Planets has legislated. However, the player also loses any ability to trade as a consequence, which can be a severe setback, and leaving the United Planets is a permanent decision; there is no turning back. It just so happens that AI players hardly, if not never, choose to leave the United Planets.
Another misgiving about the United Planets is that none of the players appear to have control over the matters that are being tabled during United Planets sittings. It can be completely random, a design of which that the player can exploit, though this is a minor complaint as the matters that are tabled can have so much variety that it will take a lot of reloads for the United Planets to table a matter that is of interest to the player – if he/she can get past the probability-seeding mechanic anyway (more on this later).
Before the start of the game, the player has to choose a political party that has its own unique ideology compared to the others (though the Universalist party is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades). Each party grants a bonus to the player's civilization that is according to its ideological themes, such as the Economists granting an economic bonus (which is an ever useful long-term benefit).
Initially, the player's party is completely in power, filling up all the seats in the congress of the civilization-wide government. However, research into the techniques of effecting governance on a galactic-scale nation will unlock other types of government, which confer tremendous benefits if they are adopted but do not guarantee that the player's party will hold onto power. There are elections that have to be undertaken every several years, and which the player's party has to win in order to retain the party's bonuses.
On the other hand, losing an election is not an immediate game-over; the player still can continue managing his/her/its civilization. However, the player's civilization does suffer penalties, and the details of these are dependent on the rival party that won the elections.
The citizenry of the player's civilization do remember the player's achievements and failures, which is a neat design, but ultimately, the easiest way to win elections is to drastically reduce taxes a short while before the election and raising them after an electoral victory; the citizenry is none the wiser. This is a very cheesy exploit, as well as a disappointing design oversight on the part of Stardock.
The player's territory is not limited to just star systems. He/She/It can also erect Starbases, which can be upgraded to strengthen the player's hold on his/her/its territory or as a forward expansion.
Starbases are practically space stations that can be built on parsecs that are not occupied by a star system or other celestial bodies. They start out as rather useless structures floating in space that has little more benefits other than projecting supply zones for ships, but they do not cause their owning players to incur any costs, i.e. they are wholly self-sustaining.
By default, all starbases will radiate zones of supply that will affect any ships and star systems that are within them, including even those of other players. However, who the targets of their influence are and how they are affected are dependent on the upgrades that the starbases have.
Speaking of upgrades, the player must send unarmed civilian ships known as constructors over to them and have them build modules on these starbases. This is the only extent of the owning player's investment on them, unless there happens to be United Planets regulations that affect them.
At first, these upgrades generally impart new abilities to the starbases, such as giving them the ability to improve the manufacturing abilities of nearby player-owned planets or increase the revenue of a trade route, among other benefits. The later upgrades usually improve these, if the necessary technologies to unlock them have been researched.
In addition to being upgrades, the modules that can be built into starbases also happen to change the sprites of the starbases to make them look bigger and imposing (though there is still a limited range of sprites for starbases).
Perhaps the most important function of starbases is to secure galactic resources. Galactic resources are represented by icons of highly geometric shapes and high-contrast colours on the galactic map. If a player can build a starbase onto them, he/she/it secures a significant bonus to his/her/its civilization. The starbase also gains access to special modules that increase the amount of benefits that the player gains from the secured galactic resource.
Needless to say, starbases can be very valuable strategic assets, but being static, they are vulnerable to raids. Therefore, they also have military-centric upgrades, which can increase their defense ratings or even have them generating an interdiction zone that slows down trespassing enemy ships in the vicinity. Furthermore, starbases that survive raids (by effectively destroying attacking ships) also accrue experience, making them tougher.
Unfortunately, the mechanic of starbases also happens to be quite easy to exploit for unbalanced gain. The player can build as many starbases as he/she likes, as long as he/she can have colonies churning out constructors and sending them towards starbases. There appear to be some attempts to curb the benefits of multiple starbases, such as their inability to stack the benefits of similar upgrades if their zones of influence overlaps, but there is nothing to stop the player from building an unlimited number of starbases as long as there are space in the galactic map.
All starbases can be upgraded with the same modules, with the exception of those that secure and mine galactic resources. This means that every starbase has the potential to become an all-purpose facility and gain power in a similar manner to colonies, as mentioned earlier. The upgrades that would draw the most concern are the Terror Star modules, which not only give the starbase the ability to destroy whole star systems, but more importantly give it the ability to move, albeit one parsec per turn. This can be used to move galactic resources away, which can be an imbalanced strategy.
The last, but not least significant mechanic of the game is random events, and how they are tied into the minor mechanic of moral alignment.
These tend to occur when a player obtains a new colony on an uninhabited planet, usually by colonizing it. These random events typically concern matters like natives and strange natural resources; how the player resolves them will determine whether the colony gains benefits or penalties.
Their resolution is not as simple as picking the choice that will grant the most benefits. Typically, these choices are cruelly expedient decisions, or morally dubious at best. These will contribute to a shift towards the evil half of the alignment spectrum. The decisions that confer penalties are typically beneficent decisions, which contribute to a shift towards goodness instead.
The player's alignment becomes a factor in diplomatic relations with the other AI-controlled civilizations. As an illustrative example, good-aligned civilizations treat players with good alignments well, and vice versa for the ones that had been taking the more expedient of decisions.
As the player's alignment shifts, the look of the animated picture of a robot that presents the player's research trees will change; this is not just for aesthetics, as it is a visual indicator of the alignment-specific technologies that the player can pursue once he/she/it has gotten deeper into either side of the spectrum.
Generally, being a goody two-shoes grants technologies that impart very good long-term benefits, whereas being morally heinous grants technologies that suit the player's preference for expedient solutions, which are fitting designs.
Unfortunately, there does not appear to be special technologies for neutral alignments, which would be a bummer to players who prefer to have a balanced moral scale. Furthermore, the player does not lose any alignment-specific technologies that have been researched even if the player has chosen to dive from one end of the spectrum to the other. Thus, this allows unscrupulous exploits of the alignment mechanic.
So far, what has been described shows that Galactic Civilizations is a very sophisticated title that would cater to players who like rewarding empire-building games. There are some hiccups with many of the game's mechanics, but these are quite minor.
Yet, as good as Galactic Civilizations seems to be, there are still some serious complaints that can be had with the game.
One of the most prevalent designs in empire-building games is the factoring in of probabilities in game mechanics; some players may not appreciate such designs, as they reward good luck where good planning and wise decisions should have been the only deciding factors of success.
For better or worse, Galactic Civilizations is no different.
Galactic Civilizations also makes use of probability-seeding, which had been established in the Civilization games. This game design has the probability rolls that a player would get during a turn decided before the start of the turn itself, usually several turns in advance. In other words, no matter how many times the player reload the game, the rolls that he/she will get will always be the same, unless he/she reloads a saved game that had been made several turns earlier.
While this game design prevents the player from exploiting the system of probability rolls to get good rolls, it also means that there is little that the player can do if the game deals a lousy hand to the player for a turn or the next ones. If the player's plans had included decisions whose outcomes will be affected by factors of luck, the player's plans are pretty much screwed if the game gives terrible rolls.
Considering that some of the most pivotal mechanics of the game, especially combat between ships, are dependent on probability rolls, players with terrible luck will face severe bouts of frustration.
Some game mechanics also appear to be busted or not fully developed. An example of these is the feature to spend money on propaganda to supposedly increase the loyalty rating of specific colonies.
The benefits of spending on propaganda are not clear, because no actual money is spent and the meter on spending keeps resetting every time the colonies are selected. That there are easier and cheesier ways to keep a populace happy, such as the aforementioned exploit on shipping off people on colony ships or invasion transports, makes this feature quite useless.
The worst of Galactic Civilizations' problems are bugs and instability. The game was originally on the Macintosh platforms, but the transition over to Windows had not been kind to the game. Crashes can occur whenever the game processes decisions that would alter the states and statistics that govern the galaxy in play, when the calling of some sprites go awry and even when saving a game (which causes the saved game to become corrupted). Patches have addressed most of these technical issues, but some still linger despite the last patch that had been delivered.
In conclusion, despite its dated aesthetics, Galactic Civilizations is one of the most sophisticated space-themed empire-building games made, with plenty of mechanics that come together to provide a very fulfilling experience to players who love games of this genre. However, some gameplay imbalance and technical issues detract from that.