All too often, game developers get caught up in the marketing wisdom that in order for a game to be successful it has to be "accessible." In marketing-speak, that usually means, "Make it like that hit game that's out now, only dumber." This is usually worse with sequels where every empty head in a suit feels like they should have input on how the franchise develops. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why I'm pulling hard for Stardock as they put the finishing touches on Galactic Civilizations II. This, after all, is the sequel to a complicated, deep, turn-based strategy game in a genre that conventional wisdom says is dead. Having just spent the last few days digging my way through a beta version of the sequel, it looks like Stardock is going to defy convention again.

Galactic Civilizations II wears its hardcore strategy credentials with pride. After playing an earlier version of the game that was more of a feature demo than an actual game, I said that all Stardock had to do was dump in the code from the original game around the new planetary management and ship-to-ship combat and they'd have a classic. Fortunately, they didn't listen to me, because it seems everything in the game has been amped up to levels I didn't think that could be reached.


Take diplomacy, for example. The diplomatic engine was one of the highlights of the first GalCiv. This time around, the basic diplomacy engine from Stardock's own The Political Machine is being used to generate personalities and dialogue for the enemy A.I.s. The result is pretty extraordinary. The A.I.-driven conversations during negotiations do a great job of getting across the personalities of the alien leaders you're dealing with, and as I played, I could actually see them act consistently from transaction to transaction. Playing the game in my preferred style (a mercantile empire going for a cultural victory), I gradually began to be able to predict what the enemies would do, not because their actions were hard coded, but because the way their responses tracked allowed me to build up an image of their character.

I knew, for example, when dealing with the Drengin, that trading technologies with them was usually useless, since they're a race of warmongers and not all that bright. When they suddenly started making huge technological leaps and offering me some tempting trades, I realized that they were being used as catspaws by another opponent who I was enemies with, but was being pressed by yet another race and needed help. I was able to then use this information to deduce that the Drengin had some kind of military weakness I might not be able to see, but could probably exploit if I attacked right then. That's the only reason they ever seem to negotiate, and if someone was feeding them technology, I needed to take them out before they got too strong.