OMGZOR CHRIS TAYLORZ

[Zpock]

Except for the combat. What the fuck do you waste your time on designing ships you can't even control yourself. Just like BotF.

There hasn't really been any interesting combat in 4x since MOO2, and MOO1, where there was loads of fascinating different stuff you could put on ships and use. Nowadays they just seem to have totally regressed into making crappy systems with ATK/DEFENS value and thats it, WTF.

[rattle]

Yeah exactly. Space Empires 4 is the closest thing I can think of and it's still pretty much off (and quite boring).

The only other 4X games where I enjoyed the combat system were Ascendancy, Pax2, Starships Unlimited: Divided Galaxies and surprisingly Sword of the Stars, even if the ship design is rather limited. This is a pretty bad rate considering how many 4X games there are.

[Zpock]

Even those games combat altough decent sucks hard compared to moo1/2 :-/

[smokingwreckage]

Moo2. Now THERE was a game!

[imbaczek]

galciv2 is a little bit better than MOO2. Lost several nights on both.

[rattle]

If they hadn't borked the combat system in GalCiv2 I'd still play it.

[Argh]

If they hadn't borked the combat system in GalCiv2 I'd still play it.

Pretty much how I felt about that one, too. It was almost a good game. However, being forced to occasionally watch "replays" of combat, and watch the AI make horribly-stupid decisions about what to attack and how... bleah... I know that game designers making these things have used the excuse that it's more "fair" to the AIs if people can't fight, or they've introduced so much noise into the system that it's a pain to play at all (see: Space Empires IV, etc.). However, I think that's the dumb way to go, frankly- if players want harder combat, then meh, just cheat, and make the AI ships tougher... not really hard. But nooooo... they give us "fairness" and automated battles, where we get to watch two idiots fight...

[Zoombie]

I actually like combat in Gal Civ 2, but I was also a weird mutant who liked the tactical combat turned off in MOOII.

Also, the new expansion pack adds some more neat things, like a continually improved A.I.

I've actually had most of my empire conqured by an A.I on the "bright" setting. They took advantage of the fact I was fighting two other enemies at the time and invaded through my backdoor.

It made me a saaaad panda.

[SwiftSpear]

Galciv2 sucked IMO. I was promised infinate ship customization, I wasn't told that it would mean that all ship customization was entirely cosmetic. At the end of the game you realize how massively simplistic and shallow the gameplay dynamics really are. FFS, every weapon system works exactly the same way. You make the # as high as possible and hope the enemy doesn't choose to make their ship with a shield system that magically cancels your chosen weapon system.

The game all around was more feature complete than most of the MOO games, but it didn't offer anywhere near the same gameplay depth of comparible TBS games like Alpha Centauri or MOO2. It didn't hold a candle the hero's of the TBS genre, HOMM, MAX, or Civ.

I'm not even going to go into the pacing of the game. It's just criminally bad, nearly as much so as MOO was.