[raynor]

I just read several articles posted by beta testers of Gal Civ. It sounds like Gal Civ will use the same graphics for all ships. You won't be able to design your own ships. You won't be able to do tactical ship combat. Instead, space combat will be stack based like in Civ.

But... Galactic Civilizations will feature a mult-threaded AI. In a single threaded game, the computer only has a short amount of time to make all its decisions. It has only the time between when you click 'End Turn' and the time that most players will reasonably wait for a response. On the other hand, Galactic Civilizations has just as much time as the player takes and can thus consider a much wider number of factors.

In my opinion, Gal Civ will succeed or fail based on the strength of its AI. I think I read a forum article where they said that it has four or five levels of AI difficulty before the computer starts cheating. If that is the case, then I really can't wait to play the game.