Galactic Civilizations II impressions

[Graeme Dice]

and the same people that convinced me to buy Star Control III with 85%+ reviews... when it was a pile of stinking feces.

SC3 was hardly that bad. It was nowhere near as good as SC2, but that doesn't mean

Not to mention that they unanimously gave Civ IV 90%+ reviews *at release*, when it 1) was unplayable on non-Nvidia cards,

It was only a subset of ATI cards where the game wouldn't start, and in many cases it was a matter of Microsoft's DirectX 9.0c install routine not properly updating the drivers.

2) regularly crashed after at most 2 hours,

I never experienced any crashes that I would consider regular. Even so, one crash every two hours is extremely low for any kind of game.

3) gradually slowed to below 1FPS after playing for "too long",

Do you have the recommended 512 MB of RAM? You'd probably want at least 1 GB to prevent slowdowns.

and 4) allowed you to get any city from any AI at any time through an easy diplomacy exploit (I found that bug *after* their 1-month patch).

It's a single-player game, so just don't use that exploit.