Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords Review - PC

It ain’t easy being bad, but somehow you’ll manage in Stardock’s jumbo expansion to last year’s turn-based space strategy bonanza, Galactic Civilization II: Dread Lords. In fact you’re not even the worst bad guy here, but rather a force for relative “good” known as the “Dark Avatar.” Your charge? Save the lesser races of the galaxy from the Korath—a homicidal offshoot of your race, the Drengin. Why? So they can be enslaved and oppressed (by you) instead!

Expansion or Sequel?

But the new and lengthy campaign’s just for starters. Too many expansions taste like after dinner mints next to their originals. A new race, a few new units, and occasionally some “bold” new feature (hey, you can select 20 instead of 10 units now!). Well the guys at Stardock clearly missed the corporate memo about milking your franchise, because they’ve more or less produced a sequel’s worth of new material here, and for peanuts to boot. Instead of charging a justifiable forty or fifty bucks, they’re calling it an “expansion” and asking either an almost-budget $30 to download it from their online service (Stardock) or a flat-out bargain $40 for a boxed retail “gold” version which includes the original Dread Lords material plus a much improved (it’s longer and more inclusive) manual. What’s more, Dark Avatar also constitutes a total code overhaul, to the extent that it’s almost a completely different experience.

That’s largely due to A.I. wizard Brad Wardell’s hard work retooling the game’s “brain.” If you have a powerful enough CPU (multi-core recommended), the A.I. will think much further out in Dark Avatar (as if it wasn’t bearish enough already). Flip the optional switch and the game becomes eerily unpredictable, targeting resources thoughtfully (as opposed to “grab ‘em all”), pursuing tech advances more organically and with a smarter eye on terminal prizes, and building attack fleets that operate much less repetitively (e.g. “Oh look, another wave of right-on-schedule blah”). It’s still not “Poker-smart” and it can’t really bluff the way an all-in human player might, but then again as 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate) games go, this isn’t a genre that really complements bluffing anyway.

All The Pretty Features

Did Dread Lords really need a visual bump? With Dark Avatar you get one anyway, and the result is certainly worth mentioning, with space stations and custom ships receiving higher resolution textures and a substantial polygon boost. You also get the option to design your own opponents, which lets you play with racial skills, beginning technologies, ideological bonuses to economics, military, or research—even the option to blindside it in one area and make it a genius in another which adds immensely to a civilization’s individuality. Every strategy game needs one of these.

Espionage too. With Dark Avatar you can dump cash into covert agents who can be placed on your opponents’ worlds. Echoing Civilization, spies rake in top-secret info and nullify whatever planetary improvements they’re positioned on, and getting rid of them requires quid pro quo agent sacrifices.

And that’s barely nicking the surface. Dark Avatar adds dozens of extras, including: mutually beneficial diplomatic treaties, asteroid belts that can be harvested for resources and used tactically in terms of navigation and defense clusters, “super abilities” that let you personalize a civilization, and an improved ship design tool that’ll let you replicate just about any sci-fi ship franchise you can think of. The tech tree’s been overhauled to make it less muddled (tech groups like “Laser” now fold in arbitrary categories like “Laser I,” “Laser II,” “Laser III,” and so on), you can pull down detailed “starship intelligence” reports which complement the more granular ship design tool, and a “mega event” generator can be employed to check the game’s status and generates semi-random events like galaxy-wise plagues, civilizations that splinter into new factions, and one where a race of super robots invades the galaxy and proceeds to pound any ships that venture beyond their civilization’s sphere of influence.

But one of the best new features is hands-down the game’s implementation of “custom environments,” really a fix that solves an issue with Dread Lords where players would rush early on to colonize as many habitable planets as possible. The problem was that it often reduced winning to whosoever had the most habitable nearby planets. The new environment mechanic corrects this by requiring special tech to colonize roughly half of each map’s planets. Research too aggressively and you’ll fall behind in other crucial areas—too passively and you’ll risk winding up with too few planets to sustain an exploding economy.

“Masterfuller” Than Orion

Mangled adjectives aside, if Dread Lords left anyone doubting Galactic Civilizations’ claims to Master of Orion’s throne, Dark Avatar should quash them. It makes a great game that much greater, and unquestionably deserves a long-term, dedicated spot on any fan of this genre’s hard drive.

Article by: Matt Peckham
Video produced by: Michael Leffler