Galactic Civilizations I: Ultimate Edition

I played it when I was a child. Galactic Civilizations carried me away to new, alien horizons, where nightsky was so bright, full of stars and hope. A marvellous atmosphere has this game. At the begining an epic intro. The next thing we percept is beatiful soundtrack, that I listen to even today, I cannot imagine better one for such games. It makes me feel really excited. Whoa! Then you start a game. You see black space pointed with white dots and covered somewhere with blue nebulas. Highly elegant minimalistic design. And a handful of techs kept on classic space fiction, with usually good descriptions. Four different races, good looking and climatic. Many moral dilemmas, occasionaly appearing on the screen, where you decide about morality of your race by making choices. And o course space warfare, exploration, upgrading planets. Gameplay is good, but the most important is climate, which is very inspiring here. I have a sentiment to this game.

I approached Galactic Civilizations looking for something new after having recently played a lot of Master of Orion 2. Having played GC for a few days it seems to me that it has much in common with MoO2 but that it is much more cumbersome and has a much less intuitive interface. I could look past that if GC offered greater strategic depth than MoO2 but I don't think that's the case. I may be mistaken about both the interface and the depth since I have only played the game for a few days. Maybe the true strength of GC only reveals itself after some time. But I don't think I have the patience to find out. Also the lack of multiplayer support is a big minus. In conclusion GC seems like a good game but just not good enough to compete with the many alternatives in the genre.

The stability of this game is terrible. Every time you get attacked the game freezes up. I would not recommend getting the game.

Bought this on OGO and gave it a go. It has a Civilization feel and play system to it. It was enjoyable. Will buy 3 and 4 some time soon.

Playing this game feels a bit hurried and jerky - events overtake my capacity to manually manage the universe and influence direction. In favor of this game: the complexity is astounding, lot's of options, and I suspect that spending much more time with it will enhance the amount of fun I didn't have in my first playthrough ;)