Imagine with me, if you will. You are leader of a small but prosperous empire, controlling roughly two dozen small star systems. You and your allies have been at war with the most powerful civilization for years, and you've managed to gain the upper hand. A long and costly war has cost you several star systems and most of your fleet. Finally, they agree to peace. You sign the papers, and begin to focus on internal affairs.

As you check your intelligence briefings, you notice that another empire has been building up their military. Significantly. As it stands, the Yor have four to five times as much firepower as the rest of the nations put together, as well as a much larger population. They begin to greedily prey upon the weaker nations, demanding tribute or conquering them.

You halt all social and military production, and begin pouring all of your resources into your R&D projects, developing weapons and shields specialized to counter the growing threat. One by one, your allied nations fall to swarms of powerful Yor ships.

After the research had advanced sufficiently, you empty your coffers and upgrade your small fleet, and purchase some additional cruisers. You position your fleet on the Terran-Yor border and wait.

Its time. Your destroyers flash across the border, seeking out the numerically superior Yor fleets and engaging them. Terran ships begin to explode, but the Yor are technologically inferior, and they explode faster. War erupts across the galaxy as civilizations pick their sides. A galactic conflagration begins.

Behind your destroyers, fleets of heavily-escorted troop carriers descend onto Yor worlds, crammed with billions of troops. Tens, then hundreds, of billions die as your begin to inch your way towards the Yor homeworlds. Your war machine keeps turning, producing dozens of sophisticated warships.

Eventually, Icos itself falls. You survey your vast empire, won with the blood of countless billions. Your huge fleet dwarfs all others. Your allies are afraid of you. You've positioned fleets on all of your borders, backed up with troop ships.

Then you realize: you've become what you set out to destroy.

This is Galactic Civilizations.

Ah, GalCiv2... Memories...
I sank so, so many hours into this game. I owned it on CD before losing them and having to buy it again on Steam. And then sank in some more hours, for good measure.

So, what makes this game awesome? It's often compared to Civilization, but in space. Yeah, that sounds about right... but it's not totally true either. See, GalCiv has many things Civilization does not. Unique tech trees for every race: check. Unique gameplay for every race: check. Being able to customize every single ship: check. That's right, no Warrior vs Warrior here. You can build your ships however you like with the ship builder and put whatever weapons, armour, modules and engines you damn well like.

The political system is also well tought-out and doesn't feel out of place. Want a bigger economic bonus? Go Star Democracy! But what's that? Oh yeah, we're a democracy now, I can't just declare war on a whim... Alright then, let's ask what the parliament thinks. They approve? Oh yeah, let's kick some alien butt, baby! (If your approval is too low, good luck getting your people to follow you into war. They have other priorities you know.)

Okay, enough talk. You're a strategy fan? Need another 4x game to sink time into? Get this game and thank me later!

Ok listen if you're a strategy game fan you need to own this game no questions asked. This is about as good as you're going to get when it comes to the 4x genre and is pretty much Civilization 5 in space but better and with its own ship designer. There is an extremely large amount of techs, buildings, weapons and so on so yeah a lot of variety. Even the ship builder is well developed as you can build a ship anyway you like and equip it anyway you like based on the technology you have availible. With Galactic Cvilizations 3 announced recently and the low price this game is at there is no reason why you should not pick this one up and give it a go if you like strategy at all I promise you won't regret it.

If you like Civ IV/Civ V, epic, long games, and space, then GCII is definitely for you. It strikes an incredible balance between providing large-scale epicness and surprisingly robust micromanager's playgrounds.

**While micromanager's playgrounds are not uncommon in modern games, it's exceedingly uncommon for a game to include them sporadically enough that they don't become tedious obligations and yet give them enough weight to make them worthwhile and rewarding. You can go an entire game without ever creating your own ship if that's not your cup of tea--but boy is it ever satisfying to wreck other civilizations with ships you designed.**

GCII is such a vast, epic game it'd be a bargain at twice the price. It's got a bit of a learning curve, but dive right in with a custom scenario and learn by doing until you master the incredible depth and number of facets to it--it's way easier than doing the tutorials. Then, like Civ games, sit in stunned silence when you look up and realize that you've been playing for 13 straight hours. It's that good.

Apparently I'm not saying anything new about this, since it's so highly rated and regarded already, it seems, but nonethless:

A game that I have played, stopped playing, and come back to playing again many times over the years. I've enjoyed it a lot, and for some reason a big title or two will come out and I'll eventually forget about galactic civ. for a while, and then eventually I'll stumble upon it... always surprised by how much I enjoy playing it, time and again.

It lacks some of the graphical 'bells and whistles' of a Civ-type of turn-based strategy game, but as any player of ck2 knows, what a game lacks in polish can be very much made up for in actual game content and replayability. The depth of galactic civ (and ck2, for that matter) makes civilization look like simplistic child's play (unplayable to me, as a by-product) in comparison.

Distinctive differences/cool elements of the game:

- Skill trees are actually unique to every race.
- fully customizable ships (designing ships became one of my favorite elements of the game early, to my surprise).
- plot/narrative elements that differ game-to-game, making it very replayable.
- Races themselves are fully customizable, adding another layer of replayability and depth to the game's customization.

On the downside, it has many layers of things to control and 'develop,' so to someone coming to this from civ or simpler games of that nature, galactic civ could be daunting, by all means, even overly so. This is a game for a real turn-based strategy-lover, who wants to have a depth of 'control' that might be beyond the average gamer, whoever or whatever that even means...?

I'd say for a strategy-lover (someone who likes games like ck2, europa universalis, etc.) it's a must have regardless of price (I don't think it's more than $20, this far from publication). If you're a civilization/spore lover and you're worried this might go a little too deep and not have the 'sheen' you look for in a game, wait for it to go on sale, as it does every so often, and get it for $5, and give it a shot; Who knows? The developers clearly labored over it with love, and put in a lot of good work in making a very fine game (as I see it).

A great game, of which I am angry I cannot play anymore because of the stupid "Stardock Account" that is now required to run this game . I have registered for this dumb account proccess and the game errors after launch every time. why this is now part of this game I do not care but i feel it is now becoming a "process" for running some steam games. If i go through steam for games and multiplayer content why is there another middle man for playing the game?? it makes no sense.

This thumbs down is for the Steam version of GCII: UE (although I haven't played the GoG version so I could likely give it a thumbs down as well). The game-play/mechanics are actually very fun and well-designed but, there's a major problem that prevents me from truly enjoying it--the 2GB Virtual Memory limitation of 32 bit applications.

I love 4X games. Specifically, I love playing 4X games on the largest possible map with the maximum number of opponents and the highest density of resources (in this case planets, stars, asteroids and other celestial bodies). I play 4X games this way so I can shape the game-world to my liking. Unfortunately, that is impossible in this game.

Because this game was developed as a 32 bit application, its VM maxes out at 2GB. This is a huge problem. After a 100+ turns (sometimes fewer) the game will crash because it runs out of VM. I tried a 4GB patcher on the application with no luck. I did manage to get a game past 500 turns by playing on the very lowest graphics settings but, after a point I still encountered the VM crash.

I suppose my biggest mistake was buying this game on Steam. From what I've read, it appears that using a 4GB patcher will work on the GoG version but, not on the Steam version. If you enjoy playing massive 4X games that last for 100s of hours/turns--don't buy this game unless you are willing to pick it up on GoG and patch it to use 4GB of VM.

Galactic Civilzation takes a different spin with "civ" games.

This game offers so much content in terms of making decisions, upgrading your ships and such. upgrading technology which impacts how the game is played. You can even create your own Civilization, however the downside is that you have to use template portraits of galactic leaders both big and small.

The AI is very well done, you can really see the differences between the lowest diffculty setting to the highest. However, the downside is that it will either handicap them or the player. depending upon what setting you want to go with. The combat system is pretty straight forward "The more capable you are, the better results".

Also this game offers an indirect warning to players "don't expand too early or quickly" sure it will help your civilization get resources and such. But however you have to constantly manage the planets you colonize and later on, as the game progresses it will become incresingly diffcult to do anything.

Events in the game are usually recycled or "important" events but they either happen once or not at all. The story mode is pretty good for a space game, but by the end of it all, you just want to play the game itself and not any story

Lastly, there are no mods for this game, no matter what anyone tells you.

I would recommend this game for players who love civilzation games and love space games

Best Space Empire Civ IMHO.
All that being said, here's the bottom line. If you like strategy, you will mostly likely love this game. If you especially like 4x space strategy games then you might as well take a week off from work and dig in. Either that or skip that morning meeting. This game is the best one-more-turn game I have played since MOO.
Good thing I can survive on 4 hours sleep a night. I can recover on the weekend, right? Or just after playing late into the night: Sleep at your desk.

I absolutely love this game, but I can't play it because I bought a new computer and the DRM IS GARBAGE!! Please remove DRM!!! The game is crazy cheap and no one is pirating it.... I kind of want to now though. I probably will have to just to play A GAME THAT I PAID FOR!! This DRM trash needs to stop. It isn't clever and it doesn't stop piracy. It only harrasses people who buy games on steam. Most pirated games have their own way to launch idiots. None of them launch through steam.....