[Strategia_In_Ultima]

GalCiv 2 Demo lasted for under 5 minutes on my HD... SEIV has been there for two or three years. SEIV is easily comprehensible, you figure out the basics in a couple of minutes, and when you've got the basics figured out the rest will come with time... it's an easy-to-use GUI, too. GalCiv 2 was not very comprehensible, had a weird tech/ship system, colonization was odd, etc. In short, it was a totally crappy game - the only plus side was, that the aliens were incomprehensible until you discover Universal Translator... but that is offset by two minuses:
1. You can only play as the Humans (who have apparently invented the hyperdirve and gave it to all other aliens then for some reason lost contact or something), and
2. You get universal translators really, really fast. About two or three turns after my first alien message I got it - and that was the total research time.
In SEIV, you get to play as any race of your choice, all fully customizable from their culture and if they're friendly or genocidal all the way to exactly how much stronger they are when compared to other species. No weird "systems" GalCiv style here (i.e. no suns simply lying in a patch of space in which you could freely roam, with the drawback that a ship seemed to be the same size as a solar system. I don't know when you start fighting, I never got to that point.) because SEIV has a set number of systems (you cannot create more systems ingame, only in the mapeditor) which are connected by wormholes called "warp points" (and yes, you can create and destroy those too.). This means that you will have to watch your back more, since an enemy could easily sneak into your home system through an unexplored WP (Warp Point) or they could open one themselves (and yes, you can shield from that, too - though the shield generator for that is very expensive.) to let their assault fleet in.

SEIV rocks. GalCiv is barely sand.