Stardock’s Galactic Civilizations II was released with a universe of races that were pretty much indistinguishable from each other. This in no way compromised the quality of the game; GalCiv II had magic enough without making every civilization a unique and special flower. Still, judging by the expansion packs, this criticism seems to have stuck in designer Brad Wardell’s mind. The first expansion, Dark Avatar, moved towards giving each civilization unique AI and traits that made every universe different depending on who your allies were. The new expansion, Twilight of the Arnor, goes even further, giving each race unique buildings and unique technology trees to make playing the Terrans a very different experience from playing the Thalans.
At first blush, this could cause some confusion for experienced players. Where are my farms? Why can I only build three different structures on my first turn? And it’s a little annoying to conquer a rich and well-developed planet only to find that a number of the buildings are verboten for your race, so they get destroyed and you end up with a desolated planet. I guess that’s what happens when you invade strange new worlds.
The new tech trees promise to give fewer headaches, largely because of interface changes that make it even clearer as to what technology does what. The Terran tech tree is the same as the old one, but now you have a dozen other tech trees to study. Each is similar – they still have weapon differentiation and economic upgrades – and many of the techs are, at this point, the same from civ to civ. But there are tiny changes here and there. There are unique weapons or defense systems, different bonus techs for production or research and so on. Near the end of all the tech trees is something called a Terror Star, a solar system destroying death machine that can be outlawed by the universal UN. They moved at a snail’s pace, but will undoubtedly become very popular with players.
Stardock promises “completely unique technology trees”, so by the time of release these “every other branch” tech trees would have to be upgraded in order to fulfill that promise. At this stage, there is not a lot of difference between playing one nation and another beyond figuring out what has changed and then seeing if it matters.
There are some visual improvements. The ships have been polished to a shine, throwing aside the utilitarian designs of the original in favor of prettier and more colorful ones. The planetary invasion screen has been changed, too, but it adds little more than flashing flags to what is still a countdown of soldiers who haven’t been killed yet.
And who are the Arnor? They are a precursor race that has left artifacts all over the place. In a sandbox game, some planets will have Arnor relics that offer huge bonuses when the appropriate structure is built over them. Factories, for example, can get production efficiency many times the default. These relics are few and far between, and you are advised whenever a rival is making use of one of these tiles.
The Arnor campaign is still tightly under wraps and unavailable in the preview version. The basic outline is a sequel to the Dark Avatar campaign. From the last of the Arnor, the Terrans learn how to destroy the Dread Lords – the evil race that is seeking to dominate the galaxy through both manipulation and brute force. The Gal Civ story based campaigns have always been a sideshow to the standard 4x goodness, but Stardock’s commitment to seeing this trilogy through to the end demonstrates that they think it’s something many gamers want.
