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I?ve got a lot of ground to cover. Galactic Civilizations II, strangely enough, is the follow up to Stardock?s 2003 Galactic Civilizations, a welcome relief to the abortion that was Master of Orion 3. While the first Galactic Civilizations met with critical success, Galactic Civilizations II improves on the original in many ways. The game falls into the ?4X? genre, 4X standing for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. GalCiv II also has the added benefit of being turn based like many of its predecessors and comparable games like Civilization IV. People who are looking for a tactical, real time game would be advised to look elsewhere.

While GalCiv II includes a storied campaign much of the play experience will come from sandbox play. There are four ways to win the game ? diplomatic, cultural or ?influence?, completing the tech tree or the old standby, and my personal favorite, conquest.

The greatest strength of GalCiv II is the almost limitless options it offers players. You have a base selection of 10 races to choose from, including Humans and ?Altarians?, a race identical to humans. Players also have the option of creating their own race from a series of possible characteristics, including the ability to choose a custom portrait. A number of these portraits have found their way to the GalCiv II website including a Battletech pack for wannabe MechWarriors.

Once the player?s race has been chosen the next step is to choose the ruling party, or style of government, that gives various and sundry bonuses. You also have the option of altering your color scheme and the color schemes of your ships. There are also a number of banners to choose as your civilization?s banner, including one that looks suspiciously like Strongbad.

Moving around the map was problematic at first since there does not appear to be a diagonal scroll. Moving the cursor to any of the cardinal directions moves the map around, and you are able to click and drag your way around the galaxy, but the corners do nothing. The other screens immediately available to you are your shipyard, where you can design custom ships (more on that later), the domestic politics screen where you adjust expenditures and deal with approval ratings and the planet screen. The planet screen allows you to build various planetary improvements of various kinds, from military to social improvements. Every planet has a certain number of slots that represent the buildable land on that planet. Some planets will have slots that are inaccessible until certain planetary improvement technologies are available.

The research screen looks a good bit more complicated than it is. GalCiv II has the entire tech tree visible and accessible at any time during the game. Instead of simply telling you what technologies you can research at this point in time you are instantly able to look at what a given technology will make available to you and what other technologies open up. This approach to research management is one of the best thought in any strategy game.

The technologies themselves are lacking sometimes. Most of the time the improvements you research amount to making your existing technology smaller. A level V laser does the same amount of damage as a level I laser, but the level V takes up a good bit more space. Clone this for all possible ship upgrades ? armor, shields, missile defense, and all of the three types of weapons and you can how things can get a bit repetitive at times. The designers of the game recognize this and the bumper video from the ?Galactic News Network? that follows every new tech discovery ranges from ostensibly informative (Level I) to ?Smaller is better, or so I?m told? or ?Oh wow, they made it even smaller? (Level V).

A major part of the game is building your own ships. Once you have researched hulls of a certain size you are provided with a series of pre-made chasses to build your ships on. Building your ships is as simple or as elaborate as you want it to be. The shipyard feature is like a box of Legos. If you want to simply plug functional components like weapons, armor, shields, engines and the like onto a stock chassis and be done with it you are perfectly welcome to do so. If wildly building ships of whimsical, menacing or downright nonsensical design lines is more your thing then GalCiv II has got you covered. There are certain stock classes of ships already built but these are oftentimes underpowered and do no represent the cutting edge of your technology. Building a successful fleet in this game means that you will have to spend at least some time building your own ships. This also means you will want to constantly be upgrading your designs as you progress in technology and are able to cram in one more plasma cannon, or maybe some more shielding.

Galactic Civilizations II is not about detailed combat. Ship-to-ship battles are resolved passively. You have the option of watching your lovingly customized ships duke it out with an enemy fleet from a variety of camera angles or skipping the cinematic entirely and dealing with casualties. Planetary invasion is very much like we saw in the Master of Orion series ? simply two armies charging and shooting at one another until one side?s soldiers all fall over. Just prior to the battle you have the option of several different invasion tactics, many if not most of which will damage your prize but give you massive bonuses to your combat modifiers, which will fluctuate wildly just prior to your attack as a way of adding some randomness to the battle calculations.

The graphics in this game are head and shoulders above most turn-based games. The space battles are a beauty to watch if you get the numbers high enough. The sound is well done even if most of it is the generic sci-fi ?futuristic engine noise #58? and ?laser blast # 64? type effects. The music is muted, it never overwhelms but always seems to complement what phase of the game you are in. There are a number of brief movies that are displayed when technologies are discovered or when major events happen and they are always welcome.

The manual is written in a very clear, concise manner. While the game is hampered by an interface possessed of a slight learning curve and a lack of an interactive tutorial a few minutes with the manual while the game is installing will have you prepared to grind the galaxy under your boot. The lack of an interactive tutorial is far and above the biggest complaint I have about this game ? and that is something I?m willing to overlook. Stardock has also gone to the trouble of making the game available online for a price comparable to the boxed edition.

While the interface does lack the polish of the other big turn-based strategy game, Civilization IV, Stardock has put together a great game. You have a well thought out strategy game with a great deal of variability and replayability wrapped up in a sharp looking graphics and audio package. With the shiny wearing off of Civilization IV Galactic Civilizations II provides a welcome refreshment for strategy buffs seeking the ?I?ve got to be at work in a half hour? epiphany.