[Roanon]

I have started a few games, played a few turns GalCiv and was very disappointed. Am about to resell it via ebay. Maybe I have done something wrong, maybe by using a different setup (galaxy size, percentage of good planets) the game improves dramatically. Please advise or prove me wrong, I would like to have another good stragegy game - up to now, I don't think GalCiv is one.

My impressions: While SEIV has a low complexity in rules, it has a high complexity in strategy/gameplay. GalCiv has a much simpler strategy/gameplay, but the rules and mechanics are much more complex, mainly due to the fact that they are artificially complicated by hiding even the most basic informations about the game mechanics.

What sense does a complex tech tree make if there is no visual picture of the tech tree available? If, when researching, you can't even click on the buildings/improvements/ships/follow-up techs you can choose for research and get any info about them? A technical/research encyclopedia has been standard since the earliest ages of Civilisation, there is absolutely no excuse for not integrating one into this game. I am sick and tired of games which have to be played 5 times just for learning the rules instead of reading the rules and learning the strategy by playing.

This lack of information continues for the economy. While in SEIV, you can calculate exactly how much a planet with XXX population, Y happiness and your chosen shipyard rate can produce, in GalCiv everything appears to be totally random at first. Later, you see some relations, but still you are unable to plan or calculate anything. There are global sliders for production/tech/social, you get an overview about the number of produced points, but WHERE will they be available? Why has this planet 10 production points, and the other, very similar one 20? Will a certain non-ideal planet, when colonized, have enough points to offset the added costs for non-terran planets? What are the costs for bad planets, anyway? These seem to be rather erratic, too - don't even try to calculate even a single turn in advance when colonizing them.

So you start playing, colonize a few worlds, find out that colonizing worlds of quality 15 or higher is not only "recommended" as stated in the rules, but a planet with 14 is an economical disaster (can there something be done to improve it? There are facilities which improve something ("soil") on the planet by 10%, but what do they REALLY?).

Then you find out that due to the low number of planets, all the colonizeble worlds are gone after a few turns. As the distribution is very random, and also very unequal, you can usually give up after the first turns, when you find out that you cannot reach more than 2 planets from your edge of the galaxy, while the largest empire in the middle has about 10. Rinse, repeat - play a few turns, check the number of planets you are able to colonize, trash the game if again started on a galactic island with hostile planets only.

The rules are really, really bad. No numbers, facts, rules, informations about basic economy, nothing. 90% of the "rules" are informations that can be found out by reading the tooltips for the buttons on the screen. I finally gave up playing when after a fight I had a damaged ship and could not even find out how to repair it.

A pity. It looks nice, it may have potential, but it seems to be more a quick game of luck for the very casual player who does not care to know beforehand what happens when he clicks a certain button or sends a certain fleet against another. The start, where you send an exploration ship across the galaxy collecting things like shipwrecks, asteroids, and warp anomalies, giving you a number of random improvements (just don't try to find out what these actually do !), which are available in huge numbers, reinforces the impression: a nice game of chance, some kind of intergalactic bingo, but not a real strategy game.