As soon as you start your first game, you will see just how customizable Galactic Civilizations really is. After selecting new game you will come to the ‘main race’ setup screen. For the first time ever, you are given the option of setting the alignment (good / neutral / evil) of the main races that will be managed by the computer. This is a new and exciting way for the game to give the player some say into the A.I. handling. If you wanted to play diplomacy first, and try winning by bringing the galaxy together you would select each race good and than have little to worry about in the battle aspect. Yet if you were a battle first war mongrel, you would do the exact opposite. I was impressed with this new concept Strategy First put behind their game. Not only did it give itself some creditably in strategy, it gave new life to an old genre. Lately we have been seeing a lot of the same stuff, people building on what sold before. In more ways than not, this isn’t your ‘average game.’ After selecting a race, a galaxy size, a name for your planet, and a name for your ruler, you will find yourself thrown into a galaxy and ready to start. This is where a lot of things began to unravel and the game felt like just another space title. When you begin to explore the galaxy one thing sticks out right away and that’s movement, more specifically the lack of it. The only way you can order your fleet around is with the four arrow keys. (Up, Down, Left, Right) Try getting the goofy cone icons (They represent a lost technology, destroyed ship debris, etc.) that float in space when they are diagonal from your ship. Hah, you can’t! If this is a bug it was never addressed in the update. Could it get any more ugly? The answer may surprise you.

Simple controls aren’t always a precursor to bad game mechanics, but it usually clues you into how poor the overall game play will be, there is a big mixture of good and bad with this title. The actual battle process is this simple: click your arrow keys untill you hit another ship or planet. The starship with the highest attack triumphs over the starship that has the least defense and hit points. It was pointed out to me that this is how Civilizations battle process was conducted. I say, ‘that’s nice, you mimicked it quite well too, but I want to see something new’. It should have been more like Master of Orion, where the game zooms into the fleets for combat. (At the very least I would have liked to zoom in and out of the map) As it stands you can’t place much strategy behind the actual attack process, because you just smash ‘piece a into piece b.’ But there is good deal of depth behind the deployment phase. Like creating a star base to watch neighboring aliens, setting your scout ships on a sector sweep to keep an eye on things in your area, and other details like that which keep you playing a game of chess with the computer.

Far from anything new, the random events, and micromanagement process will keep space fanatics pleased. When I say micromanagement I really mean it, microscopic is the only word I can think of to define the amount of options you have to edit. For the most part its, ‘click this’ and ‘check this’. Once again it’s very simple, but to a lot of fans this seems to be what they like. You can build a starship or one of the few planet advancements. One of the things I was most displeased with is how little you interact with the creation of ships. Once you learn a new technology for starships it’s added to the ship you create. You have no control over naming a starship, or refitting it. After you see the limited building options the only thing left for you to do is research technology, create starships, and play diplomat with the alien races.