This is the saga of the largest, longest possible game of the largest-scale, longest-lasting space strategy in years, and after six weeks and around twenty-five hours of play, it's finally over. The story so far follows immediately below, or you can jump straight to the final entry.
"I just finished the game you saw me start at 4.30," I messaged Tim, at half past midnight. "It was a 'Medium' sized one." I'd gone home (with my savegame) and eaten in the meantime, but other than that I'd been utterly lost in Galactic Civilizations II, specifically the Dark Avatar expansion, and I could no longer imagine what other people do with their evenings. Or jobs.
GalCiv invites careful thought about each turn - economies crash easily, people become restless and revolt, other races storm ahead of you in at least one respect, and rash choices quickly lead to at least one race declaring war on you. I crushed everyone in that Medium galaxy, not because I was playing a warlike race - I wasn't - but through a hilarious series of diplomatic SNAFUs, misunderstandings, accidental invasions, and an unexpected headstart on advanced hull research.
At one point I declared war on the most powerful race in the game in the same turn that my only military craft was destroyed. A few dozen turns later, they were requesting negotiations for peace. I charged them 8,962 billion credits and every technology they had for the privelege, then declared war on them again. That time, pretty much everyone rallied to their defense - but what did I care? I had the largest military in the galaxy and nearly ten trillion credits to expand it with.
So we got talking, or I got talking, about what lay beyond the seven-hour game I'd just finished in reviewing an expansion pack for a game very few people bought. The galaxy sizes go up to Gigantic, I had a third of the maximum number of 'opponents', and the AI on the third of twelve degrees of difficulty. Cranking that up too high would be counter-productive: in Avatar the AI is like Deep Blue's worst nightmare, and my demise would be swift. But the other options, dialled up to eleven, would set me up for an epic game that would take me weeks, at least, to complete.
My family did the whole Easter thing a week early this year, for reasons that you'd have to be a Francis to ever truly understand, so I had no religious festivals this bank holiday weekend. So I felt I owed it to the risen corpse of Jesus Christ himself to spend the lion's share of it conquering a vast galaxy in my boxer shorts. Thus, Das Ubergame was begun, and underpants were worn. Here's how it went.
Ulp. Gigantic appears to be somewhere close to the actual size of a galaxy. My race - the suspiciously bunny-like Spectres of Agony - found itself in a cluster of around twenty solar systems which, upon further exploration, turned out to have only one other race in it. We were isolated by a vast stretch of void on all sides, large enough that our ship's range would barely cover it, and which divided us from a chain of central clusters where presumably most of the other races lived. A few other islands like ours were dotted around, one as remote as us, but we were on the outskirts of an incomprehensibly vast nowhere.
I got off to what seemed like a good start. Conserving cash as much as possible, I put what little I could afford solely into grabbing the juciest planets and astroid fields, including an absolutely utopian class-18 right on my rival's doorstep. I even stole one in the same system as his homeworld - only a class 6, but it's the malicious, gloating thought that counts. Nicely settled in, I locked my war-chest, cut spending, and dropped all taxation to zero. This made my people very, very happy. This made my people very, very horny. This made my population growth very, very fast. This is the Super Breeder ability, and at one point two-billion Spectres of Agony were being born a week. We were breeding like Spectres; Spectres, definitely not space bunnies.
We were mighty.
Day 2: I did not have diplomatic relations with that species
It didn't last long. I hadn't bothered to build up a military, because I was neighbour only to an incompetent pacifist, an opponent so feeble he wasn't even worth the warmongering reputation crushing him would garner. And it wasn't like one of the warlike races - the huge Drengin empire, for example - was about to cross the void to conquer what must have been the two militarily weakest races in the galaxy, sitting on a cluster of superbly fertile planets.
In fairness, that isn't what happened. What happened was that I crossed the void with a single defenceless mining ship that didn't have anything better to do, and wandered around their territory for a bit. They opened negotiations and suggested I donate 132 billion credits and the Universal Translators technology in exchange for my 'continued existence'. I ammended the terms of the deal to them giving me four and a half trillion credits, their entire military fleet and their homeworld, in exchange for shutting the hell up. They impolitely declined. We parted ways, snarling. I knew that our next meeting would be even less productive.
The trouble is, with no military extant - even with one of the highest populations in the quadrant - everyone fancies their chances. I was the defenceless fat kid everyone bullies for his lunch money. Before long even the normally upstanding Altarians were demanding tribute for my continued existence, and eventually the unthinkable happened. The Torians, my incompetent pacifist neighbours, were bullying me for pocket change. The Torians! The joke was on them, of course - my early-game economic balancing act involves making exactly no money for the first few years, and the only technology I had that anyone seemed to want was Universal Translators - the very devices both of us were using to negotiate in the first place.
Nevertheless I had to sit back and breathe deeply for a while before I could trust myself to touch the diplomatic relations window without demanding every penny in their coffers for the privelege of being incinerated by the glorious ionised fire of the majestic Spectres of Agony military - which I would be building any day now. Instead, to vent my anger, I made a counter offer of their entire civilisation - their treasury, every planet they owned, their fleet, all of their technology - for 1bc. They ceased talks in a huff.
I had a bigger problem. People were unhappy. I'd never quite been able to work it out, these plummeting approval rates as my civilisation expands - perhaps because by the time it kicks in, I'm usually in a position to obliterate any colonies my wretched inhabitants might want to emigrate to. But I'd still like to know why it happens. My dim red approval percentages offer only "-50% from population" as an explanation. I didn't understand. Every planet had masses more food than it needed, and yet they all cited as the cause of their malaise simply the number of people.
Whistling, I colonised a nice juicy planet right on the Drengin's doorstep.
I was being stupid, of course. What it really meant was over-population, because however much food they might have to spare, eighteen billion people just don't fit on a planet. My fallacy had been to assume that high-quality planets - since they have more buildable land - were larger. In fact they're the same size or frequently smaller than their less habitable counterparts, and the game takes that into account. My homeworld, richest, most populous and most productive colony was also my least happy planet, partially because its citizenry had swelled to fill the generous eating-room I'd given them by building so many goddamn farms. My generosity had been my downfall. My most loyal people were about to defect unless I stopped charging taxes entirely, which thanks to my knife-edge budgeting would bankrupt me in weeks.
The solution was as clear as it was terrible. Six billion people on my homeworld of Blood had to go. I'd never be able to deport them with spacecraft - I didn't have any, and it would take years to research the tech for colony modules large enough to transport that number of people, and I wasn't even sure if I could 'colonise' planets on which I already had colonies. Quite aside from which, these too would be cramped by then. No, there was a simple, cheap and very, very quick solution to this problem, and I took it immediately. I razed my farms. In one week, six billion people starved to death, and my approval rate among the survivors - who could now breathe - went from 49 percent, to 99. I could see why dictators did it.
I don't - and I say this now because it's bound to become portentous - defend my planets. At all. I rarely build more than two or three starports, and even those don't have a standing compliment of ships to shoot down invaders. You could take down my whole civ with a Blitzkrieg of weaponless troop transports. I feel comfortable saying this here because GalCiv has no multiplayer rmode, and while the AI is extremely good, I don't credit it with the gumption to track down and read the PC Gamer blog mid-game.
This screenshot might not look like much, but it's telling me that 100% of my 85 billion people love me, despite having to give me half of their income.
This is a terrible, crippling flaw in my strategy, but over my years of RTS, TBS and even FPS playing, I've discovered it usually pays to have a terrible, crippling flaw in your strategy. It lets you focus your resources on other areas to a degree that no-one seems to anticipate; they assume on some level that a portion of your funds will be reserved for such sanities as defending yourself in any way at all.
I often neglect my military, usually in favour of a robust economy. In Rise of Legends, for example, I focussed on building Merchant districts so singularly and zealously that before anyone got round to challenging my pathetic standing army, I was rich enough to simply buy them. Not buy them off, you understand, literally buy them, all of them.
Now, though, I was channeling the money my terrible, crippling flaw was saving me into cultivating a huge and ecstatically happy populace. By rush-researching Extreme Entertainment, I was able to keep everyone at their randily euphoric 100% approval rating by pre-emptively building Zero-G Stadiums on the colonies that were closest to experiencing even a modicum of ennui, and all with taxes at their full-on rates. The glut of money and manpower allowed me to quickly research Aquatic and Radioactive World colonisation, which gave me three ripe new worlds to screw on - one of them on the outskirts of that enormous main cluster of stars at the centre of this galaxy. I had joined the big boys.
Before long, my genocide had led to the second-largest and by far the happiest population. And I found myself struck by the same thought every great leader must have had when faced with the peace, joy and adoration he has earned:
The Drengin Empire declared war on me. The Yor Collective - who have also inexplicably overtaken me in the population stakes - declared war on me. The Drengin declared war on the Yor. The Terrans declared war on the Drengin. The Yor declared war on the Torians. The Drengin declared war on the Korx. The Altarians declared war on the Drengin. The Altarians declared war on the Yor. The Altarians - in an extraordinarily audacious and unwarranted move for which I will crush their bones to dust and mix it with the vitreous humor from their freshly squeezed eyes to make a sort of sandwich spread - declared war on me. The galaxy is in chaos.
See how every ship has a double-chin? That's because there's a billion of them on the same spot.
No time to write. It's possible, I grant, that this cascading diplomatic catastrophe of conflicting alliances, pre-emptive strikes and outright treachery was in fact triggered by my slightly glib behaviour in first contact with the most powerful race in the universe, but I'm not going to dwell on that. Back when I've thought of a way to win a war against over three hundred ships without a military.
A few minutes ago, the Drengin offered a peace treaty. Given that they are basically Klingons, this is rather gratifying. You might describe the noise I made as a 'cackle'. I have others at war with me, but they're mostly bandwagon-jumpers or Drengin lackeys - none of them would dare keep the aggression up if the Drengin back off.
I was utterly cornered by these thugs before I even started to design my first ship. My military policy is to skip the first few generations of space combat entirely. Every other race builds up huge numbers of these 'Heavy Fighters', but they don't have the Logistics skill to have them fly together in a large fleet, and a significantly larger and tougher ship can repair and even level up between dispatching small groups of them.
Does it have guns? Yes, yes it does.
So that's what I built. I was the last race to have a military, but the first to have a Large military craft - bristling with four times the weaponry and twice the horsepower of anything else in space. I named it You Are All So Boned. I wanted to call it something else, but it was one letter too long.
It prowled the galaxy, singular in number and in nature, undefeated. It cleared the way for some audacious invasions of the lushest and best-defended planets of my new enemies, and after a few demonstrations of its power, the Drengin offered a peace treaty. I didn't have to think about it.
So, there were invasions. With only a handful of craft (I was eventually able to afford a second and third), you can't keep a large galaxy defended against even the lightest ship, so the Yor, Drengin and Altarians all had a go. Most of them failed, because my lascivious population growth meant all my planets had a full twelve-billion living happily on them, making them tough to conquer this early in the game.
But after the fifth successive invasion of the planet Death in a single turn, there simply weren't enough people left alive to defend it. It was lost, and just as my few ships were closing in on the Drengin's most fertile planets for a surgical strike on the core of their empire. I was doing that thing you're not supposed to do: fighting a war on two fronts. And that was when I first saw the blob.
It lurched through my ships' sensor ranges, past the aforementioned planet cluster, and was gone before the turn ended and I could examine it. It was like glimpsing a strange and terrible new kind of sea creature in the murky depths, something whose shape was nebulous but whose sheer size bespoke a chilling power.
It was, of course, simply a great many icons stacked on top of one another, such that their forms merged and their outline dilated. This made it no less terrifying. When it finally lingered near my squadron of second-generation Boned-class vessels long enough that their sensors could linger on it between turns, I saw that it was-
Well, let me say first that I had often wondered exactly where the Drengin military was. Everytime they opened trade negotiations to bully me for money, it listed literally hundreds of vessels, but I only ever saw a few at once. Now I had my answer: seventy eight of them occupied a single parsec, and moved together as one epic and unstoppable beast. It lurched my way.
The YAASBo's fought well, but the waves kept coming.
Some of my craft fought The Blob bravely - I was right about a large, powerful, tough ship being able to take on many lesser ones in succession. But the Drengin had learned Logistics since we last met, and their ships attacked in squadrons of six or seven at a time. The You Are All So Boneds, themselves in smaller but stronger formations, were still able to dispatch them easily, but took irrepairable damage in each clash. Soon one of their number was lost, and the reduced firepower meant the largely unscathed armada shredded the rest without breaking a sweat. The Blob moved on.
Who would have thought repeatedly angering and insulting the most powerful race in the galaxy while completely defenceless could have consequences? Who could have known that refusing to end a war with a military over a hundred times the size of your own might lead to tactically tricky situations? Did any among us guess that attacking the heart of their empire with my only craft while the most populous planets in the galaxy lay unguarded might ultimately lead to my downfall?
I'm on War Bastards now, the next generation on from You Are All So Boned, with comparable firepower but super-thick armour designed specifically to take spadefuls of punishment from mass-driver class weapons, the type the Drengin invariably use. They look like enormous chrome space-scoprions, and two of them can take on a 10-strong fleet of Drengin Heavy Fighters without losing a craft. Which is just as well, because the galaxy is now swarming with 10-strong fleets of Drengin Heavy Fighters. I swoop in and intercept them whenever I can, but I have to exercise caution when a cluster of other fleets are nearby - successive attacks can easily polish off the most damaged War Bastard, even in a fleet of three or four.
But I've noticed two surprising things: for one, without really realising it, I've got my Logistics skill up to the point at which I can have five War Bastards in a fleet. It might not sound like much, but the increased firepower per turn should boost the number of Drengin they can smash through almost exponentially. The other thing is that according to the figures in the Civilization Manager screen, two of my Research-focused planets would actually make phenomenally good war factories - in fact, they're already among my most productive worlds, even though I've set them to focus exclusively on books-an'-learnin'.
Since I wasn't close to getting anything researched anyway, I set them both to Military mode and found that I would now have five shiny new War Bastards in less than two months - seven turns. Combined as a fleet, and deployed as a one-two punch with my current five, I allowed myself to think this might actually be enough to slay the beast.
I'd been holding desperately on to that beautiful class-21 world, Petroni I, smack bang in the centre of the universe, the heart of Drengin territory - and prowling grounds of the Blob. The Blob itself had already smashed the heavy forces I'd posted to defend the planet, but they didn't have any troop transports in the area, so thus far the planet had remained mine. I couldn't really do much with it - any ships I built there would be smashed by The Blob before I could build up their numbers, and any planetary improvements I built would only strengthen my enemies position when he inevitably conquered it - but I liked having it.
So I did what I always do when I can't do anything good: I did something stupid. I built a single War Bastard, and launched it immediately at the nearest Drengin colony - a fairly fertile world with just a few ships in orbit. After smashing its defenders, I would quickly build a troop transport and colonise the planet immediately, achieving no lasting advantage but irritating the Drengin enormously.
I attacked. The planet turned into a ship. The ship destroyed my ship. The ship turned back into a planet. I gaped.
I was not, it turns out, the first race in the galaxy to build a Large craft. And I had been pipped to the post at pioneering the Massive hull type too. The type you use to build Battleships. I gaped.
I checked its stats - it had no armour, but a lot of hitpoints and- wait a minute... TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE GUNS? I gaped.
...and it's back to a planet again.
My star player, the War Bastard - previously thought to be the most powerful craft in the galaxy - has eight. Five of them, combined, my secret super-weapon to slay the Blob, makes forty. This has TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE. I gaped.
The Blob, I was starting to realise, wasn't really the issue. I stopped gaping, and cancelled construction of the troop transport.
Guurk. Where to begin? Okay, everything that's happened up until now has probably taken place in the space of about eight years - 400 turns or so. It's now three years later. Things are a little different.
First, the reason so much time has passed: I was screwed. It turned out my five-strong fleets of War Bastards were nothing like a match for The Blob, and one squadron of them was even destroyed by lesser fleets of Drengin and Yor.
There were no sensible moves left, and I didn't have the money to do anything stupid, so I did nothing at all. I curled up into a ball and hoped no-one noticed me.
The Bongolian Ultraprawn bravely kills itself on a Yor fleet.
I kept producing a single tiny, defenceless, one-gun ship on Petroni I so that lone troop transports couldn't invade it, but other than that all military production ceased, and I turned my people's thoughts to academia. I called that little ship The Bongolian Ultra-Prawn, since the single wavy tendril I gave it made it look vaguely crustacean, and it was exploded and rebuilt every two turns.
The Drengin love to destroy a planet's defences, but I've never actually seen them use troop transports, despite my taking this huge and juicy world right in the middle of their territory. The Yor, on the other hand, invade me constantly, but they lack the soldiering skill of the Drengin, so I can almost always fight them off. And if I've lost a lot of citizens, I just drop taxes to 30%, my approval hits the roof and my people screw the pain away in a couple of turns.
So for three years, I survive. I even hold Petroni I - the Yor don't dare take it so deep in Drengin territory, and the Drengin just don't seem able or willing to use troops. Instead, they do what they've always done: build up their military.
Now The Blob is the standard Drengin fleet. Dozens of them swarm the galaxy. Battleships like the one I encountered on Petroni II jet around in pairs. The universe is a sea of red, but I survive.
And that's about when the human race declared war on me.
I'd been trading technologies with the Altarians - despite their earlier transgressions - so that I could keep up with propulsion advances without diverting research time from developing ridiculously powerful guns. Trading tech in GalCiv doesn't lose you that technology, so you don't have to worry about the cost to you, only how much you're benefitting a potential enemy. I was doing it on the assumption that the Altarians would never be a threat to me - or at least that the other three threats to me would kill me first - so I was being fairly generous. Alliances, Fertility Acceleration, Advanced Trade, I even gave them some of the lesser weapon technologies along the tech-tree branch I was climbing.
You're probably familiar with the literary technique of foreshadowing, so you may well be expecting to hear next of my demise at the hands of a now-mighty Altarian Empire. It didn't quite happen like that. In fact, shortly after our trading was complete, they surrendered under the might of a vast Drengin assault. They were out of the game.
But surrendered under, not surrendered to. Generally when a race surrenders, a report pops up informing you that they've given some of their ships to race X, some to race Y, and often quite a few to the race that conquered them. I am never race X or Y. I'd often wondered if it was even possible for the player to be the recipient of these legacies, so consistently did I fail to inherit. This time, though, I got something! Two ships.
Oh. My. God.
Slightly chuffed, I went back to tending my colonies, and clicked away a warning that the citizens of my colony on Amber II were becoming restless and thinking of joining the Drengin. Feh, was my reaction - let them. I don't even remember which planet that is. Hang on, I actually don't remember which planet that is. I've never heard of it. Apart from Petroni and Banfield, mine are all named things like Blood, Death and Carnage (we overcompensate for our lovable physical appearence somewhat). I zoomed out. I'd inherited two ships, and the entire Altarian empire.
It was hemorrhaging money, full of 150 billion profoundly unhappy people and about to be invaded by a Drengin force the likes of which I'd never seen, but it was mine. I'd been clicking through three years' worth of turns because I was so screwed that there was nothing really to do. But now, with fifty new planets' worth of problems and an empire around eight times its previous size, I had something to think about. I saved, quit, and thought about it.
Okay Altarian empire, let's see what you can do. Apart from sap my money and complain, I mean. And get invaded and lose. I mean the other stuff. Military - can you make ships? Let's see... no, no you can't. One or two planets have enough factories to pump out the odd War Bastard, but I'm researching ships on a whole other order of magnitude, and these factories are simply too low-tech to cope. Planetary structures - got any? Make any? Not really and not really. Plenty there, but again all stone-age compared to my stuff. Really, guys, was your civ built to do anything other than surrender?
The heart of my lovely (yet rubbish) new empire.
Yes, it turns out. Despite the profound lack of it evidenced in their own achievements, their colonies combined boost Research enormously. Wow, enormously in fact. The thing about Research is that every planet doing it is collaborating on the same thing - building ships or structures is done individually on each planet, so the ones that aren't competitive don't contribute. But here, with my entire civ set to full-scale research mode, every colony with so much as a library is getting me a little closer to HD Spike Drivers; a gun bigger than any I've researched before. In fact, we'd have learnt it in, let's see... one week. A single turn.
In fact, scrolling down the list of research possibilities, the next rung up any given tech ladder would be done in one or two weeks. Research was about the only area where we Spectres were already competitive: we were a small race devoting all our resources to it, while everyone else was a huge race using only a small fraction of their potential. Now I was huge, and using it all.
There are two ways to catch up with someone: run faster than them, or keep running after they finish. I'd planned to hole up and research until I joined the Drengin at the top of the tech-tree, some time after they reached it themselves. Once we both had Black Hole Generators, I reasoned, their huge military advantage would be undermined. But now I was actually learning faster than them too - there was a decent chance I'd beat them there. All I needed was a little time.
Long story short, I got it. My enormous new hivemind of supergeeks plowed through the whole tech tree in under a year, and for an encore we researched the the hardest possible hulls and Ultimate Logistics, which would let me use the superships I created in fleets.
In the time it had taken to research these components, I'd been invaded a lot. The only three remaining races in the galaxy were all at war with me, and while the Drengin still inexplicably refused to land on my planets, the Yor and the Terrans rained troops down on me. Us Spectres have 12 billion people on every planet, and our nymphomania means we recouperate losses quickly, but the scale of the onslaught was such that we still lost one or two planets. So when it came to the fun part - designing my capital-class super battleship to use all the best technology in the universe, I was angry.
The Bongolian Deathcrab, a crab-class craft.
This is how, by the end of the half-hour design process, I ended up with a ship that is too wide to fit on the screen. It is around twelve times the size of the Drengin battleships. It doesn't just have a Black Hole Generator - the most devastating transdimensional weapon conceivable - it has ten. They're spread along its one and a half thousand meter wingspan to make it even more impressive when firing, and two huge blades at either wingtip indicate very clearly that it's not something you want to crash into on a dark space-night.
I took almost as long settling on a name - most of the ones that seemed appropriate would be too obscene to mention on this blog - and finally decided it would be related to the Bongolian Ultraprawn, the smallest and cheapest ship in my armada. The Bongolians do things in extremes. One day I'll actually get round to naming one of my planets Bongolia, and this will all make sense. Right now it's just an obtuse Stereolab reference.
None of my colonies had anything like the production capabilities needed to produce a Bongolian Deathcrab before the heat death of the universe, so I'd have to buy one outright. It cost 15 trillion credits. I gulped, and clicked Accept.
It was enormous, and beautiful. It crushed a few local Yor fleets, then ran into a Drengin battleship and exploded, instantly. They already had Black Hole Generators.
Yes, those are seven Drengin battleships heading to my new empire. I'm screwed.
Military, size of. The red line is the Drengin, the white line is me. I'm completely screwed.
The red lines mean 'at war with', the blue ones mean 'allied with'. I'm so very screwed.
I am - and not for the first time, long-term readers might have noticed - utterly screwed. That was my ace, my Babylon 5, my last, best hope for victory. If I saved up for a few years I might be able to afford two of them, but some Drengin fleets have three capital ships and a gaggle of corvettes (that's the correct collective noun, by the way). I was there with them at the top of the tech tree, and sheer numbers and resources left me just as screwed as I had been before.
This was the fifth time I'd discovered my best effort was utterly insignficant in the face of my enemies, and it was starting to take its toll on the wreckless enthusiasm with which I offend, insult and lash out at the other races. What was the point?
The truth is that apart from that recent glimmer of hope, I've known I was screwed for some time now. At first I assumed my underdog status was just a precursor to one of the spectacular comebacks I'm accustomed to stumbling into, but it just never came. And as I became more and more screwed in more and more ways, and more and more of my last ditch secret weapons failed, it was sinking in that my defeat would not only be pathetic, but also extremely public. Short of posting "Day 17: Then I won," there isn't going to be any way to get out of detailing my painful defeat on a public blog, when everyone had probably been expecting I was leading up to a dramatic recovery.
Then I saw it. I looked again, and thought about it carefully, but I couldn't see anything wrong with the idea. I sneakily checked the other races, and none of them were trying it. There were a few unknowns involved, sure, but however I crunched the numbers in my head, it came out doable. It would take a while and mean a lot of spilt blood, but it'd render everyone else's military might irrelevant. Experienced GalCiv players have probably spotted it by now - I don't know why it took me so long to - but I won't spoil it for those who haven't.
It's called a Technology Victory, and it's a fairly obvious path. It means researching the nature of existence itself, until somewhere down the line you discover a way to transcend this mortal coil and become a being on another level entirely. I had, of course, considered it as soon as I noticed how quickly my new empire could learn things, and in fact a commenter even suggested it before yesterday's post.
But by itself it wouldn't work: the Drengin had finally invaded the first of my planets, and the Yor and Terrans had been picking at me for a while, even managing to claim one or two respectively. I wouldn't last long enough unless I could hold them off, so I'd gone back to researching the components for a Bongolian Deathcrab.
The actual solution was both fairly close to that and almost the exact opposite: Bongolian Ultraprawns. Remember I introduced these diminuitive fellows to defend Petroni I, an incredibly fertile world I stole deep in Drengin territory? They got destroyed within a week or two of being built every time, but they worked. Petroni I is still mine to this day, and making me masses of money. Right now it's paying for most of the Altarian empire.
The Terrans and the Yor will always have a go, there's no stopping that, but the Drengin always crush first and invade later - they won't try to land on a planet if it has any form of combat craft in orbit at all. And there's a word for that, I'm sure. Oh yeah: COWARDS.
Well, they can make as much Prawn-toast as they like, but every time they launch their troop transports in the murky depths of their territory my sensors can't penetrate, they'll find another tiny space-crustacean waiting for them. And then, I'm almost sure, they'll turn tail and head home. I set every single one of my colonies to produce Ultraprawns continuously and indefinitely. All had an ETA of 'Never' since I wasn't devoting a penny to Military production, but I only had to siphon of a few percentage points from Research to get a lot of three- or four-week times. Not everything would be defended all of the time, but the only time the Drengin invaded anything at all - in my extensive experience with pissing them off - was when there had been no military craft anywhere near it for months. This ought to do it.
And it did. The next few months the universe was aflame with explosions - everyone and their space-grandma was swooping in on freshly produced Bongolian Ultraprawns and blowing them to dust. But no-one invaded anything. It was a warzone, not the safely smouldering ruin you want to bring a troop transport into.
Before long, I even caught a break. The United Planets council assembled to vote on a pressing issue, and the motion was "Should all current wars be called off?" And I tried to vote yes.
I couldn't do it. The Spectres bow to no-one, plea for no quarter. Engraved on the seal at the base of a mile-high statue of their leader, Paul Davies Mutilator of Worldsblood, are the words "Bring it the fuck on." In Latin.
It wouldn't have mattered anyway - my population wasn't enough to swing a U.P. vote either way, particularly against three allied races. But something completely bizarre happened: the motion was passed. I voted no, the Terrans voted no, the Yor voted no, which meant that- good God, the Drengin voted yes? They're only at war with me! Are they scared of the Ultraprawns? Are they running out of ammunition to slaughter them with? Is the boredom tearing them apart?
Regardless, this was space-Christmas for me. Not only did their decision prevent the Terrans and Yor from invading me for a while, but it was the ultimate slap in the face for them to learn that I'd voted against it. They'd probably imagined they were being benevolent, granting a dying race its last request, but they'd ended up looking like they were begging me for mercy.
Quite literally the path to enlightenment.
There's a misconception that the Technology Victory route is boring. I'd thought it would be too, which is why I didn't try it from the outset (that, and arrogance). But it's actually the GalCiv equivalent of those RTS missions where you have "hold the base for five minutes". Only it's "hold half the galaxy for three years."
For a while, though, it was quiet. That massive swarm of battleships closing in on Altaria prime sheepishly veered round and headed home, bound to oblige the bizarre decision of their masters to abort the war. The Terrans and the Yor drifted aimlessly, geared up for invasion and unsure what to do with peace. And me, I learned furiously.
Another reason heading for a tech victory isn't boring: I don't know if it'll be three years. At each step along the path - Galactic Understanding, Near Omniscience, Beyond Mortality - you only know how close you are to a breakthrough with your current task. The next ones have no ETA at all - they could be the same again, or ten years. I'd reckoned on the time required for each rung on this ladder of learning to be about twice as much as the previous one, when trying to judge whether I would make it, but each time I mastered another step on the ladder out of this miserable mortal coil, the ETA of the next one made me cringe.
More and more bored of war with the Yor.
War broke out again, of course - the joint resolution reset all race relations to 'Cool', but it's not quite the same sense of the word as "I'm cool with the French." Soon they were demanding cash for my continued survival, and I was only able to avoid spitting on my monitor by repeating my counter-offer of their entire civilisation in exchange for some space-cumin.
So the Drengin declared war, the Yor declared war, and finally the Terrans declared war. Another, more intense spate of invasions rocked my colonies, and another planet was lost. At last I mastered Beyond Mortality, the second-to-last milestone on the path to enlightenment, and discovered exactly how long the home stretch would be. Sixty weeks.
The Gal Civ races are loosely based on common sci-fi archetypes, the most famous instance of which is usually from Star Trek. The Drengin are the Klingons, the Terrans are the Federation, and the Yor are the Borg. That should give you some idea of how bizarre and hopeless it is to fight an alliance of all three. And sixty weeks was just the wrong length of time, and I knew I wouldn't make it curled up in the corner reading books and mumbling about going to a better place. That didn't work in primary school and it wouldn't work here.
The problem wasn't surviving sixty weeks - I was sure I'd make it that long if my Ultraprawn tactic held. The problem was that if any of my significant research centers fell in that time, it would take a hell of a lot longer. I'd hoped to counter-act this by using the money I was making to buy new Research centres, enhancing my least productive planets so that no one or two were vital. But money was going to be a problem. I lost Petroni I.
I was just about to rename it to Bongolia, too.
It had been invaded before, by the ever-rhyming Yor, but shrugged the enemy troops off by the sheer weight of numbers. Tougher to do with the Drengin - for it was they - when their invasion fleets land with 6,000 legions of men. Their Soldiering skill got them a 3-1 advantage, so they crushed the 12,000 defending legions easily. They might bide their time, but when the Drengin do invade, there's not a lot you can do.
In other words, my Ultraprawn tactic was not holding. I lost four more planets to the Drengin and Terrans, and had to divert most of what little I was spending on military to get my research ETA back in line with previous estimates. My income sunk below zero. It was starting to look like time for Plan Omega, my top-secret financial coup that- oh, wait, I wasn't supposed to tell you about yet. Even if it works, though, it seems far from likely that I'm actually going to win, now. The Drengin weren't as predictable as I'd hoped, and were even mightier than I'd thought possible.
The only good thing that happened in this whole wretched chapter of my existence was tactically insignificant, even if it was absolutely hilarious. A Terran Heavy Fighter swooped in on a Spectres planet very close to our homeworld, and exploded. A Bongolian Ultraprawn had finally succeeded in its duty.
Let me say first that I am an extremely stupid man. I don't think things through. I don't research things (ironically). I don't read the manual. I've played incarnations of GalCiv for a while, but the intricacies of certain subsystems within it sometimes escape my memory. So GalCiv players, please wince with me as I detail my Plan Omega, my secret weapon, the coup that was going to win me the game in spite of everything. And everyone else, imagine for a moment the glee I must have felt at coming up with such a seemingly flawless idea.
Phase one: tax the cocks off these chumps. Crank it up to an obscene level, to the point at which the entire civilization will rebel or have me killed if I keep it that high for long. This will make money. Phase two: get into debt. Spend all of this money on research centers, but don't buy them outright - get them on finance, paying the bare minimum now and committing to weekly payments for the next forty years. This will result in many research centers, and a plummeting economy, but we'll be dead or Gods in thirty weeks, so what are the loan sharks going to do? Pray threateningly? Phase three: just before hitting five-hundred billion in debt, buy a Neutrality Learning Center, the most expensive and productive research facility possible, outright. For five and a half trillion credits. Phase four: drop taxes to zero, causing the plummeting economy to nosedive so hard that it almost goes backwards in time, but making everyone extremely happy before they have a chance to rebel.
There are only really six or seven things wrong with it. But the chief among them I discovered just after Phase three.
I'd built eight or nine shiny new research facilities, and decided to buy the Learning Center before going into debt, just in case being in debt stops you from buying things (it does). I waited until I had everything before checking the effect on that all-important ETA, but early signs were very good. I'd bought centers on my most populous planets - the hardest to conquer, and the ones that'll benefit most - and the numbers rocketed.
The real treat came when I discovered I had access to something called an Omega Research Center (Omega! So perfect!), a Galactic Achievement (Wonder) that boosts a given planet's Research by 50%. That put my home planet over 400 research points per week. Space-Christmas had come twice in one year.
So when I finally left the Colony Manangement screen to twizzle the sliders and see how much all this had reduced my ETA, I was puzzled to find that it now read 'NEVER'. 'Puzzled' is a new word for 'petrified'. My heart was actually pounding. And it was then that I remembered how debt works.
Half a trillion debt isn't the cut-off point for buying new things, it's the cut-off point for production. All production. Including Research. THANKS, MEMORY. Could have done with that info TEN MINUTES AGO, but thanks anyway.
My entire civilisation would not learn a single damn thing until I was out of debt, and I couldn't put the tax rate one percentage point higher without losing half my empire to a rebellion.
You know that word 'screwed' I used to use on this blog? I was using it all wrong. Back then I meant 'in trouble', or 'a tight spot'. This, this was the true meaning of screwed.
The only thing that mitigated the damage of Plan Omega was that I'd planned it so badly in other ways too: I hadn't saved enough money to buy that many research centers, so my week-on-week losses weren't as bad as I'd intended them to be. And because it had completely nullified all my research centers, rendering even the new ones useless, the main drain on my finances was gone, and I was eventually able to crawl all the way back up to the lofty heights of negative five hundred billion credits. Nice plan, Paul Davies, Mutilator of Worldsblood. Real masterstroke.
It had blown my ETA out of the water, my entire civilisation loathed me, and all three enemy races had stepped up their invasions in the meantime. I lost at least one world every turn, including two major research centers. The only thing that saved me from total annihilation for the time being was a minor plan I executed in the first thirty weeks of the onslaught: building extra farms on my most valuable planets. We couldn't make war, but dammit we could make love, and the booming population on those worlds saved several from the repeated invasions of the Terrans. One even survived the Drengin ultra-transports for a time.
The Terran military was suddenly enormous and everywhere.
As the worlds fell, the billions died, the last of the Ultraprawns exploded, and the ETA ticked down with an agonising slowness, it almost looked like it might be close. But now that I was out of debt and researching away, my academic expenses stacked on top of my debt repayments and I had to scale back my research efforts to save money. This was more or less the opposite of the idea behind Plan Omega, so you can imagine the bitterness with which I dragged that slider down and watched the ETA climb week-by-week until my colonies would just about be making a profit.
I was at a standstill. It was agonising. Plan Omega had cost me almost exactly as much as it had gained me, and the unrest, instability and steady haemorraging of major planets was increasing my ETA as fast as the passage of time itself was reducing it. In the ebb and flow of those two factors grinding against each other, my destruction was constantly getting closer, even as my ascendance to godhood was slipping away.
Before I explain what ultimately tipped the balance, I would like to pen an open letter to the Drengin Empire, just to demonstrate that with Godhood comes understanding, and with understanding comes forgiveness. And because you never know about that AI reading-the-blog thing.
Dear Drengin Empire,
HA! IN YOUR FAT STUPID FACES! BITE MY GLOWING CELESTIAL ASS, YOU INCOMPETENT GERBIL-JERKS! HOW D'YOU LIKE THEM DEIFIED SPACE-APPLES? HOW DO THEY TASTE, ASSHOLES? DIVINE? THAT WOULD BE BECAUSE I'M A GOD.
Sincerely,
Paul Davies Mutilator of Worldsblood Chief-King God Spectres of Agony Hyperbrothel 37 Orgasm Avenue Heaven
It was a mega-event that gave me my final break, although I've almost convinced myself that I would have won without it. The key was in the fact that I'd already lost a lot of my best research planets. I'd assumed that because I was losing planets at a steady or increasing rate, my research ability would go down at a steady or increasing rate. But after losing a few good planets, that rate-of-being-screwed was artificially high. It actually leveled out after that: my ETA ticked down week-by-week for the last fifteen turns. But the mega-event did save at least one of my last remaining major knowledge-factories, and that is because it was this: sex.
Some kind of miasma spread across the galaxy and made everyone ultra-fertile. A Fecundity Zero, for Jeff Noon fans. We Spectres were already the most reproductive society in the galaxy by a factor of two, so we benefited from this twice as much as anyone else at exactly the time we needed it. The Terrans, who rely on successive small invasions to wear a planet down, never conquered another world. We just screwed the losses away before they could get another ship to us, even at warp 9. Once the ETA got to single digits, it was clear no-one could stop me. I don't even know if they realised I was going for a tech victory - the furious onslaught they inflicted on me may have actually been them biding their time. Certainly they showed no signs of realising how close I was. If anything, the Drengin actually let up - but more on that later.
The other myth about tech victories is that they're anti-climactic. This was excruciatingly tense, and GalCiv is great at letting you enjoy the moment of victory. It gives you one turn after you've technically won in which to put your affairs in order. After panicking slightly that I wasn't seeing the Victory screen, I dropped my tax-rate to zero, making everyone 100% happy, and ceased all production and research. But it still didn't seem like enough. So I opened up a dialog with the Drengin, and gave them everything I had. All my influence, trade goods, technology and all planets except my homeworld. In return I asked for 1bc, and I very nearly clicked Offer. But then I looked at their sneering Gerbil-jerk faces and decided that to forgive was not in fact divine. It was distupid. So I switched my comm through the other races and found the Vegans, and gave it all to them.
The Vegans can deal with the invasions now, we don't need planets where we're going.
Four different minor races were discovered in the course of that game, and mysteriously all of them were called The Vegans. The Drengin destroyed two of them, I destroyed one (they only had one planet, and it was in my territory). I didn't know about this fourth one until they came up in my comm menu, and had no idea what they were like - one race of Vegans had been utterly evil, the other two had been lovely (I think I even extorted money out of them once). But I gave them everything anyway, and took my 1bc coin return gratefully.
I finally renamed my last remaining world to Bongolia, clicked the Turn button for the last time, sat back and watched a really rather wonderful cut-scene showing our people transcending into pure energy, lifting off our world in a soft white inverted rain.
Rather appropriately, I finally understood the Drengin's bizarre behaviour just as I was about to acquire total understanding of the universe itself. They did three mysterious things in the course of this six-week game, but their reasons all stemmed from the same strange fact. Bare with me, this is going to take some explaining, but the answer is remarkable.
1. Why did they destroy my ships, but almost never invade? It sure as hell wasn't the Bongolian Ultraprawns - towards the end they smashed right through them and rained troops down on me. But again, still not as fiercely as you might expect. And shortly before I would have been wiped out, they stopped entirely.
2. Why did they declare war, then vote for peace? They threatened, extorted, attacked and bullied me the whole game, then voted to end all wars - all of which were against me. Then they were the first to declare war on me in the new peace. What the hell were they playing at?
3. Why did they stay in an alliance with the Terrans for so long? The Yor seem fairly logical partners for the Drengin, but the Terran are simpering diplomats. Why did the Drengin stay pals with them?
It was mystery number 2 that turned out to be the key. They wanted galactic peace, but they were more than happy to be at war with me. So it wasn't peace per se that they wanted, it was what came with it: they wanted the Terrans and the Yor to stop attacking me. They couldn't persuade them to do that because the Terrans had all the diplomatic clout, but they utterly dominated the United Planets vote because of their vast population.
The red lines mean 'at war with', the blue ones mean 'allied with'. I'm so very screwed.
But why did they want to call the dogs off? It evidently wasn't to take my planets for themselves, because they still refused to invade me. The answer was actually in this screenshot, which I put up with my report on Day 16: How screwed I am in pictures, and I should have spotted it then. GalCiv players probably have already. Everyone but me is in an alliance - an alliance formed by the Terrans. If I'm destroyed, the Terrans immediately win an alliance victory for having united all the remaining races. Sure, the Drengin would be part of the resulting alliance, but do they really strike you as the "Yay team!" type? No, that wasn't a win for the Drengin - not in GalCiv's book, and certainly not in the Drengin's. They had to win, and they had to win by crushing everyone and drinking their blood. And that meant keeping me alive for the time being.
This was delicious. All those times I spat in their faces, threatened them with nothing to back it up, stole their best planets and refused their offers of peace, they must have been dying to crush me. I'd flattered myself to think that my bravado had spooked them into assuming I had some secret weapon, but in fact it's a testament to just how much I was irritating them that they attacked me at all. Their survival utterly depended on mine, and they still couldn't resist slaughtering a few billion of my people. The whole game their aggressive nature and their better judgement had been in a heated conflict, and time and time again I'd tempted them to lose their patience.
So that was mystery number 1: they weren't about to let me build up a military, but invading my planets would bring me scarily close to extinction, and they couldn't let that happen. Not yet.
The more I understood about what had been going on while I dicked around with ridiculous ship names and insulted everyone, the more I realised this had been the Drengin and Terran show all along. They were just using me as a pawn. The Terran's superb diplomatic ability had allowed them to inherit the empires of several races that surrendered early, and form an alliance with all the remaining ones except me. I became a crucial piece in their galactic chess game by being such an insufferable prick that even the gladhanding Terran leader wasn't prepared to offer me an alliance. (I would have spat in his face and punched his wife, by the way).
The Drengin probably signed on early, when their unison would allow them to be even more audacious in attacking the other superpowers, but soon found themselves in a sticky situation. Which was mystery number 3. As huge as they were, the one thing that could defeat the Drengin outright was an alliance of the Terrans and the Yor. The Federation and the Borg. And if they left the alliance, that's exactly what they'd be up against. They had the lion's share of the galaxy's planets, so they could build up their army faster than their allies combined, so they were just biding their time until they were strong enough to take both of them on. Or I came close to extinction and they had to break their alliance to be safe. We must have been mere weeks away from that happening.
The Terran military was suddenly enormous and everywhere.
The trouble was, the Terrans were smarter. They built up more slowly but more intelligently. They researched missile weapons - against which the Drengin had no defenses - and accumulated a vast treasury. By the time they had all the techs they needed for top of the line capital ships, they had the money to buy an army of them outright. And every one was geared up to be nigh-impervious to Drengin mass-drivers, and deal vast amounts of the worst kind of damage to Drengin craft. The tech-tree for missile weapons goes one notch higher than the one for mass drivers, they had one up on Black Hole Generators straight away. The Terrans knew the Drengin would betray them before I was wiped out, and once they were ready for that, they hammered me. The Drengin followed suit, knowing I was done for and wanting to claim some of my planets for themselves - not to mention take out some long-pent-up frustrating with me.
Unfortunately for them, that was just as I was on the cusp of a technology that would render all this irrelevant. But you can't blame them for underestimating me - even I didn't think I was a threat to them for most of the game. I'm extremely glad the Drengin were secretly on my side - if they'd actually considered me a threat, I would have been decimated in seconds - I didn't have anything like the smarts it took the Terrans to outwit them. I did win, but both AIs were thinking on a tactical, political and strategic level so advanced that I didn't even understand what was happening until the end of a twenty-four hour game.
I'm in awe at the level of forethought, planning and cunning they displayed - in fact, I'm a little scared. But what I love about it is how their intelligence fits or clashes with their personalities. I think the Terrans would have won in the end, simply because their strategy fit their nature perfectly, whereas the Drengin's went against everything they believed in. It was backfiring towards the end, and I almost wish I'd hung in there just to see what happened when the touchpaper was finally lit. But I guess the touchpaper would be my own destruction, so that's a bit impractical.
Footnotes
Thanks for reading, everyone. If you fancy buying GalCiv 2, you can get it with the expansion I was playing cheaply from the developer's site. GalCiv 2 scored 84% in our glossy publication PC Gamer UK, and more recently the Dark Avatar expansion got a whopping 89%, and we deemed it a Must Buy.
We'll do more of this sort of thing if you enjoyed it.
That sounds a lot like a game of Stars! I had in 1996, right down to the super breeding space bunnies (nice Easter theme by the way). I am sorely tempted to buy GalCiv 2 when the inevitable double pack is released, as it sounds a lot of fun and I've not played a decent 4x space based game since.. 1996.
The AI can lead you a merry dance allright, I can't count the times I've been suckered into a trap; it's always the quiet ones you've got to watch out for, or sometimes not.
Heheh, sounds like there's some interesting times ahead. Planetery defences and sacrificial fighters look like the way ahead, let the fools bang their heads against you superior numbers, then try and get the fighting one another
PMSL, I've never tried that technique. It probably would have saved me a lot of hassle in past games. Instead I just 'store' people in population ships and troop carriers. I suppose that's just as cruel though, as they're bound to be woken up purely to soak up an enemy attack
So, are jokes about WW2 ok? What about jokes about cancer? Or aids? Or the plague? Or jack the Ripper?
Is everything to do with death not allowed to be funny? What about the guy who tested the strength of the glass of a skyscraper by jumping against it and smashing through, to his death? Are we to treat the horrific with morbidity and depression? Is it wrong to make light of horrible things? Does that some how mean we don't agree they are horrible, that we are almost as bad as them?
People joke about horrible things, it may not be tasteful by everyones definitions, but it's not a crime and it's rarely intended as disrespectful.
Bah, go ahead and spoil a good thread with immature sensitivities. Anyway, glad to see war has broken out on all fronts, it's time to do what all good rich countries do, pay everyone to fight each other and not you
First of all, this is the best blog... thing by far. We need more like this. Excellent to read.
And actually, like you Tom, I always horribly neglect one thing (usually my military) in games like this including Gal Civ 2 itself. Just the other day I decided to focus on being the nice guys of the galaxy and didn't research a single weapon. My entire civilization was wiped out in just a few turns not long into the game
As opposed to spoiling it with immature rants about corruption and how bad the Battlefield series is bugged yet still playable by thousands of people largely without issue?
This blog has made me decide to buy Gal Civ 2 sooner rather than later.
Yay, I just won a game on challenging difficulty, I was trying to win a diplomacy victory, but in the end, I won it on influnence, I just got the dumb drengin to attack the altarians, then sat back and watched them kill each other, once the drengins one, I had so many influence starbases that I won on influence. My faith in my gal civ 2 ability is restored...
Great. The big evil empire has colonised a planet right next door to my planets "Eden" and "Shamballa".
Prediction: The population of their planet will tire of being under a dictatorship and because of my great influence will convert to my peace loving and totally defenceless civilization sparking a war in which mass genocide will be performed. On me.
I want more of this sort of thing in the mag. Games like Europa Universalis 3, Medieval 2 Total War (Or Rome, as Jim did on the forum), Civ 4...
Excellent little personalised views of a battle twixt man and AI. Bravo, I want to see more of this sort of thing please.
Edit: Lightbulb, it's a bloody game. Where the hell the relevance of the killing fields of Cambodia comes into it, I have no idea. If you don't like the idea of being a megalomaniacal dictator in a fictional game, and don't see the funny side of this article, well... don't read it then, and go back to whatever games you do play.
I want more of this sort of thing in the mag. Games like Europa Universalis 3, Medieval 2 Total War (Or Rome, as Jim did on the forum), Civ 4...
Excellent little personalised views of a battle twixt man and AI. Bravo, I want to see more of this sort of thing please.
Edit: Lightbulb, it's a bloody game. Where the hell the relevance of the killing fields of Cambodia comes into it, I have no idea. If you don't like the idea of being a megalomaniacal dictator in a fictional game, and don't see the funny side of this article, well... don't read it then, and go back to whatever games you do play.
I second all of this although wish to emphasise to Lightbulb that it's nothing personal as I enjoy his posts.
Anyway, in my game I got f**ked over by the evil guys whose name I can't spell. Still, gives me an excuse to start a new game.
My comment was really: Don't you think that was going a little far?
I too am enjoying the series and i hope it continues and indeed that it becomes a more regular feature.
Only problem is i find myself craving MORE, more detail more depth. I want a proper AAR.
As for the 'argument' i think its been blown way ouyt of proportion.
As for being called immature for expressing an opinion... well i'll take the high ground and let thta slide...
Can we have no mroe talk of it please it IS starting to take over the thread abit...
Anyways how many mroe days are there to go now? Looks like the end is near unless some kind of diplomatic resolution is reached.
Unless you can decapitate the AI by taking out his Capitol and thus leaving the fleet leaderless? I guess it doesn't work quite like that, in the game or reality.
Top class blog, love it. I'd love to see an in depth hints and tips article on this game, especially for designing new races as the bonuses that you pick at the start can have a real impact on how you play.
Me, I tend to go for heartless brainiacs. If I wasn't currently in a GW phase (which is preventing me from playing C&C3 as much as I'd like) and with the upcoming ET:QW beta a possibility, there's just not enough hours in the day.
I'm just going to have to buy a laptop that will run Gal Civ II so I can play in bed.
Im hoping Amazon's minions will be delivering this tomorrow. I would have liked to solely buy the expansion pack boxed instead of downloading it but thats laziness really.
I found the devs' website for info and downloads Home: http://www.galciv2.com/Index.aspx Straight to purchase and download: http://www.galciv2.com/Purchase.aspx
According to comments left on Amazon and some forums, this game was very badly bugged and needs heavy patching. All the bad reports Ive read are from people playing unpatched. I think I read somewhere that it patches automatically in the background but I could have imagined it.
I downloaded and it seems alright to me, apart from a crash just as a finished a campaign game which I hadn't saved in ages.
And it's a wee bit annoying that the vanilla campaign is using the dark avatar tech tree, as some stuff is useless there, like the asteroid mining. And possibly other stuff, I don't know. Fleets of PewPew's (Mk I-VI) conquering the galaxy ftw though!
Victory is assured? That is of course until they catch up with your tech i guess. If you have stopped research will you be able to produce enough ships to crush them or is the idea to build one or two more fleets and then go back to research?
Stardock is about the best place to get it (no suprises). I go for the digital download so I can play right away, then for the cost of shipping they'll send you the boxed version. To me, that's the ideal way to sell online as I have a nice shiny box/manual/chart and unopened CDROM for future use if needed.
As for naming ships, I always use WWII aircraft, don't know why, but there's something about a fleet of Spitfire's and Lancasters that sounds cool. Oh, I know why now, it's because my made up race is called The Brittish Empire and they're real Imperialistic Bastards. There's fun to be had though with the irony of India rebelling
Still, great blog/thread. Always good to see some of the readers getting interested in the game. Maybe we should have more of these for some of the less mainstream games as this blog gives so much more for the feel of the game than any review ever can.
Great Stuff - It's given me a taste for playing it again as soon as my exams are over (just like I did last year). The great thing is that because of the expansion pack and the relentless additions and support that the game is given post release, it will be almost like playing the sequel compared to last year! More columns like this would be great.
As for naming ships, I always use WWII aircraft, don't know why, but there's something about a fleet of Spitfire's and Lancasters that sounds cool.
I think i will call my ships in the manner of Iain M Banks in his Culture novels:
GCU - General contact unit
Classes of GCU are usually named after geographical features, some of the known classes are:
* Mountain Class * Ridge Class * Escarpment Class * River Class
General Offensive Unit
General Offensive Units (GOUs) are the main warships of the culture, the epitome of their (unwilling but highly efficient) capability to make war. The only type of vehicle comparable in firepower to a GOU would be a war-modified GSV (see for example GSV Lasting Damage).
Rapid Offensive Unit
Rapid Offensive Units' (ROUs) consist of little more than engines, weapons and the ship's Mind. While some ROUs are crewed, the crew complement on such vessels is much smaller than those of the more general purpose ships of the Culture, such as General Contact Units and General Systems Vehicles.
ROUs frequently store a copy of their Mind state with another ship before going into action, and these are frequently emplaced in new ships if the ROU does not survive. This is in part a reward for the self sacrifice of the ships, and a motivation for bravery in combat.
Some known classes are:
* Torturer Class * Psychopath Class * Gangster Class * Thug Class
All from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_types_%28The_Culture%29
-------------
I don't think GalCiv has REALLY REALLY big ships with manufacturing on board does it? Basically i am talking small planets with engines kinda size here. Population 3 billion kinda thing?
Also can you individually name your craft or just give them a class name? I fancy using some of his names too. SOmething cool about having your ship called:
The GSV Just Read The Instructions or the GSV So Much For Subtlety. Or the ROU's Lapsed Pacifist, A Momentary Lapse Of Sanity, Now Look What You Made Me Do and Reformed Nice Guy.
Plus there are GCU's:
I Blame The Parents I Blame The Parents II I Blame Your Parents
Yeah, making up your own race is one of the great things about Gal Civ II. Like my British Empire which was based around creating high influence and ground attack. Civilisations usually get invaded or consumed. I build lots of influence space stations right next to tasty alien planets, they're usually more than happy to join the Empire (whilst a big invasion fleet orbits the planet)
I tried once to be a heartless machine race (called the 'Von Neumanns' maths & physics fans) but just didn't have enough of a mean streak to do them justice - once an alien race capitulated, I didn't have the cold heartedness needed to finish them off in true Von Neumann style. I might try again though after reading this thread.
BTW - the GCII blog has been the best thing to appear since PCG joined the website. If it hadn't appeared here I would have happily read it in the magazine. 10 out of 10 and a big thumbs up. Lets have some more, it might get me interested in games that I normally wouldn't consider; that would be a good thing.
So Tom you basically encountered the Gal Civ 2 equivalent of the Deathstar Nice one.
I usually try to be fairly serious about the civilizations I create. Usually I create the Atlantean Empire (focussed on influence and diplomacy) and name all planets after lost continents, mythical places etc. Atlantis, Lemuria, Shamballa, Mu, Hyperboria, Agharti etc. But tonight "The Iron Duke" takes to the Galaxy
I don't know what the PC Gamer teams schedule is like but maybe they could take turns to write a blog like this based on whatever game they choose. That would be great.
Sure, they can do that when I finish this. IN NINE YEARS.
I honestly have no idea how long it's going to last. I go from being fairly sure I can win it in another week or so, to being unable to see how it will ever end, to knowing I'm so totally screwed that it'll be over in days.
If people get sick of it I'll still play to the end, and just cover my slow death in one or two final posts.
You should just take it at a leisurely pace I reckon. I can't see anyone getting bored of it. This is exactly the kind of thing we want to read. It's inspiring.
I did start my own Medieval 2 blog in Extra Life a week or two ago but I wrote it in such detail that I realised it would end up being a tome. The release of official patch 1.2 also gave me an excuse to leave it.
Maybe I should write one from the perspective of "the Iron Duke" as he conquers the galaxy. Trouble is, I don't like war in these 4x games and peace and diplomacy don't make for the most exciting reads.
Oh well, good luck! Look forward to future installments.
Heh, I guess the depth of the blog is reliant on the depth of the game - a blog on DOOM3 just wouldn't be interesting.
Football Manager might be another good one, especially with a lower division club. I can't think of too many games that allow such control over the direction of the game. Any games based on fixed missions of a plot wouldn't be able to create the same level of interest as the experience would be very similar to everyone elses.
Lots of the PCG staff must be playing things like this in their spare time....
Anyone got any ideas apart from 4x games or Football Manager.
Ah man, I love reading this. It's the feeling of doom. I mean, sure it's fun reading a blog where someone effortlessly conquers the universe but this feels a bit more personal, y'know?
If you leave the Altaran planets undefended and raze everything on them just before they fall your oppoents will waste resources taking worthless rocks from you.
Meanwhile you can keep climbing the tech tree...
The other possibility to to remove all food production and drop the total population to a more manageable level.
Or of course you could sue for peace and offer a fairly significant amount of planets to sweeten the deal...
Take any materials you can transport from anything remotely near the Drenigens, destroy the rest and set the population soaring. Not only will they be useless, they will be a lot of angry mouths for them to feed. As he gets bogged down you can build a battle fleet and a raiding fleet in your homelands. Pick a spot to defend, then send a small group of fast raiders to tie up slow moving battle fleets behind his lines. I still havent been delivered my game but this usually works in Rome.
I add my voice to those praising this blog. excellent work. I advise others who want to write such a game blog that you have to write it WELL, like Tom does... That's what differentiates between a gripping read and a dry "galactic history" textbook.
Now that I've played the GC2 demo, I really want to buy it, it's just seems so deep I might drown...
Re-created my Von Neumann race in Dark Avatar, but this time as an opponent.
They totally wiped the floor
For a race that are supposed to be nothing more than a bunch of self replicating machines (read up on Von Neumann machines for more info) they acted exactly like they should. They didn't have the most powerful military (and in fact, rarely used it), they just consumed other races, planet by planet, minebase by minebase just exactly like they should.
Although I didn't do to well in the game, it was still a great joy to play as the AI for the Von Neumanns really made them come to life and differentiate their 'personality' from the other races.
It's a tribute to the AI of the game that it played my made up race as intended, but wasn't predictable at the same time.
Hey Tom, just a thought but if you can go so far ahead in research then you could try for the Technological Victory. Although be warned, when you come close to achieving this the AI unleashes its full fury upon you.
I know there was only one... but it sounded funnier with the plural.
*shrug* i still want to know what inspired that fantastically enigmatic "f**k". Mainly because its always the last thing i say before turning GalCiv 2 off at night.... i just suck at turn based strat.
I can't even find and buy this game on the high street!
It'll be hard to find. Play.com has Galactic Civilizations 2: Dread Lords but if you want Dark Avatar as well I think the only option is to order diretly from their website.
I can't even find and buy this game on the high street!
It'll be hard to find. Play.com has Galactic Civilizations 2: Dread Lords but if you want Dark Avatar as well I think the only option is to order diretly from their website.
http://www.galciv2.com/
Yeah, download it then get them to ship you the box as well; best of both worlds, play as soon as it's downloaded then have a nice shiny box with manual, cd etc...
As for the person who sucks at 4x tbs, I do to, even though I love 'em.
I had to go all the way into the depths of the (ridiculously dis-organised) games/software dept of my local PC World for a copy, no-one else seemed to:
1. Sell it. Or: 2. Had even heard of it.
Go figure. Barring downloading it (i dont download games, ever. I need the shiny box and book.) you might have a bit of difficulty.
I suck at most strat games, never really understood why since i love them so much... you would think after nearly a decade id be a bit better at them.
I had to go all the way into the depths of the (ridiculously dis-organised) games/software dept of my local PC World for a copy, no-one else seemed to:
1. Sell it. Or: 2. Had even heard of it.
Go figure. Barring downloading it (i dont download games, ever. I need the shiny box and book.) you might have a bit of difficulty.
I suck at most strat games, never really understood why since i love them so much... you would think after nearly a decade id be a bit better at them.
Oh well, i still own at CS and BF.
Go to the developers website. Select Download and Post me the box. Play the game. Get the box a few dasy later. Remind me of the problem?
After my Von Neumann catastrophe, I started another game a few night ago.
This time, the problem comes from another user made race based on Morninglightmountain from Peter F Hamilton's Pandora's Star duo of books.
This time I pre-empted the bastards. They'd declared war on a minor race in my territory (I've seen this dastardly trick before). Whilst their small invasion fleet was on the way to the Dark Yor Planet, I shut down their 2 major industrial planets with Agents on each factory. I'd put 25% of my cash into espionage right from day one. I had an army of agents in cold storage, they obviously had only a few as I can still produce them quicker than they can get rid of them
With their 2 most productive planets producing nothing, their ship production has slowed to a crawl
I started a game of GalCiv II when it first came out. I haven't finished the game yet (almost a year - ? - later). To be fair, I haven't played in a while, but I wasn't even using the largest galaxy.
I'm pretty dominant now, and have used a similar approach. Lots of research and economy, trading techs with the smaller and distant civs, and using influence to expand my borders tremendously. I don't have to invade planets, I just broadcast MTV and sell them Coke until they want to join me.
I bought it online, its the best way to go. You don't need a CD, just use their updater and it will install on any of your machines. Too bad it won't server-store my saved games so i can play them on any machine too.
Hint, buy tokens for their site, and then the game, with the tokens, you get a 20% discount or so.
Too bad there's no built in blog generator, or newspaper?
Morninglightmountain always reminded me of the Zerg from Starcraft. Which is basically what it was, with technology.
Alas, I'll never see how well Morninglightmountain got on. I've just been on the back foot against the Drath Legion. Stuck in an isolated corner, I chose to surrender to the Altarians.
I knew it was going to be tough when I first saw the map. I guess the Drath were correct, the Galaxy wasn't big enough for the both of us
Well last night I bought Galactic Civilizations 2: Gold Edition from the website. Of course stupid me forgot to select that I also wanted a boxed copy sent out but a quick e-mail sorted that out. Yay for helpful cutomer service!
So I gave Dark Avatar a quick blast at around 4am. What a difference it makes to the game. Ive seen sequels with less changes, additions and improvements. Well worth it if you've only played Dread Lords thus far.
I can't even find and buy this game on the high street!
It'll be hard to find. Play.com has Galactic Civilizations 2: Dread Lords but if you want Dark Avatar as well I think the only option is to order diretly from their website.
http://www.galciv2.com/
Yeah, download it then get them to ship you the box as well; best of both worlds, play as soon as it's downloaded then have a nice shiny box with manual, cd etc...
As for the person who sucks at 4x tbs, I do to, even though I love 'em.
It's a pretty big Download! I have a 40gig capped net.
Why the hell would a warlike race on the brink of victory declare peace? Why should single weak ships be able to defend planets indefinitely? Looking at the strategy of the author, there is no way that he should be alive at this point. You can't take a persistently warlike stance without the military to match it. Realistically, the player's only option at this point would be to somehow break apart the alliance, and use them as cover.
The devs really should issue a patch so that this account cannot happen. If you win this, I applaud you, but I don't think you should be allowed to win.
As you'll note in the beginning, while playing an enormous game, he's not playing against the AI at its optimum level. High level GalCiv AI is genuinely brutal.
Just incase anyone hasn't noticed, you can read Tom's review of Galactic Civilizations 2: Dark Avatar http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=164303
Also, the original Gal Civ 2 is supported on X-Fire but Dark Avatar is not. There is a topic of people bemoaning its absence. If you use X-Fire, please, please post your support for Dark Avatar to be supported on X-Fire http://www.xfire.com/xf/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=109941&start=45
The AI may often do unexpected things. However, there's usually a reason for it (especially if you've got mega events (or whatever they're called) switched on).
Being stuck in a large galaxy with only the Yor, Korx and the ones with the funny wide heads, the Terran Empire decided to lean towards evil to be on the safe side. After a historic friendship with the Yor & Korx, things were looking good, especially as the Yor had allied with me (after becoming suitably evil).
Trouble is, at some diplomatic dinner, one of the Terran guys somehow offended some female Yor(?), by spitting soup or something and War was declared instantly....
The same thing can happen when you're on the back foot. The AI will quite happily shake things up every now and then.
Well after reading what has been posted so far and playing the demo on this months disc i have signed my own exam failure form by buying the Gold Edition from the Devs Site!
Trouble is my 'net is bugging up at average of under 10k/sec...taking a while to download
At least i can revise
Damn i want it now!
I may generally suck at these kinda games, i abandon the military and usaually go for a try and avoid getting killed plan
Why the hell would a warlike race on the brink of victory declare peace?
There's a very, very good reason for this, and I've only just worked out what it is myself. It's a reason that's shown very clearly in one of the screenshots in this article. Basically you're thinking too player-centric, assuming that wiping me out is the Drengin's main aim. GalCiv's AI doesn't even know which of its enemies is the player, and the Drengin are using me as a pawn in a much grander scheme.
Why should single weak ships be able to defend planets indefinitely?
I wondered about that too. Turns out they're not. More on Day 20.
As you'll note in the beginning, while playing an enormous game, he's not playing against the AI at its optimum level.
True, I set them all to 'Random'. So we don't know how smart or dumb any of them are, except by how they behave. And knowing what I know now about what the Drengin are up to, I suspect they're set to very smart indeed. Not as smart as the Terrans, but a lot smarter than me.
You know i find myself wanting to see if we could have done anything about the situation.
Don't suppose you have the old save games do you?
Sounds like a PGF challenge to win from say half way through the game...
lol, just go evil and ally yourselves with the bad guys. You know they're gonna try and screw you over at some point, but until then, you can let them fight and get ready for the inevitable invasion.
The AI can be sneaky basts though, and as someone said, the individual races AI isn't geared towards differentiating between human and AI players.
Personally, I'm a terrible warmonger in this game and can't help but concentrate on research and economy first. This is a big weakness as I lose a lot to early invasions It's my own fault though.
I'm not familliar with this game, but are you sure you can't just raze/sell everything you don't need and cancell all production to get back to the debt cut-off point? You only need a couple more turns of full on research right?
You can't sell the buildings on your planets, and no-one's willing to trade with me anyway because they're all at war with me, and razing doesn't save any money because everything's already shut down because of the debt.
Hey, You can get GalCiv 2 at bestbuy.com for only $40. Thats $5 cheaper than the dev's website. Here's the link: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8240307&st=galatic+civilation&type=product&id=1168043813113
'cause if not, you really should have. I know that -I- bought it after reading this.
This is an amazing read, and reading it after I started my own campaigns(and losing, badly a couple times) gave me some insights into the way the game works that just reading manual's didn't seem to give.
Not to mention I love your responses to being threatened for cash.
Hey, You can get GalCiv 2 at bestbuy.com for only $40. Thats $5 cheaper than the dev's website. Here's the link: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8240307&st=galatic+civilation&type=product&id=1168043813113
personally, I'd rather give the extra $5 tip to the devs, so I'll be buying it from them.
I wish I had 18 million people to pack on a planet. I mean... *cough* ahem. Credits! Thats what it's all about. All about the credits. I can't see why the Dagon or whatever leader refused your diplomatic offer. I would have taken it any day. Some people are just stupid like that I guess.
As for tech victories being anti-climactic, i would akin it to the last second redemption from almost certain destruction... kinda like in Armageddon. Or something... I mean, anyone can flatten the galaxy with twenty million laser packed deathships... it takes style to orchestrate a total victory without firing a shot.
I already owned GalCiv II, but had strayed in favor of faster paced entertainments. This reminded me of why I liked it in the first place & I plan to get me a little of that expansion action. Plus the writer was funny as balls (thats a technical term btw).
I'd love to see more blogs like this on games. Thinking about it now, the best thing I like about the PCG reviews have been the indulgent parts. Like the Oblivion review, for example.
If only this game had a 'spectate' option after you'd 'won' to see what happened after you transcended.
Having never read anything on these sites before, I wholeheartedly vote for more of this sort of thing. Although you have to be clear why this worked -- it wasn't the underlying game (as much as I love GalCiv2) as much as it was Tom's funny and interesting writing about it.
So you're telling me a wave of fertility swept across the universe? Strange. You should have saved right before the end, then after you won gone back and see what would have happened. The Drengen surely would have done something spectacular even if they lost. And what happened to those planet-ships?
Sounds like an awesome game I must say, and reported in an extraordinarily well put way. The AI seems quite intelligent and the complexity of the game is very appealing... It's just that... Well, I've NEVER heard of it before!
I would like to see this as a permanent article. I was directed here from a link that a web comic posted and I was so intrigued that I bought the game right after I finished reading it. Stardock should really be paying you, you have probably sold several hundred copies with this blog.
That was brilliant. Please do another one, that actually became one of the sites I visit daily just to read what happened next. That was so much fun to read, please do another!
This was absolutely awesome. So awesome in fact i've actually registered here to comment on how awesome it was. Y'all really need to do more things like this.
I'm one more for "you single handedly convinced me to buy this game and the expansion," and another "more blogs plz," too.
Of course, beware that it wasn't just the game, or even just the writing of the article (although that was a major part of it), but the humor of the game itself that made this the most awesome thing I've read in years. If you'd played the game straight, then no matter how well or humorously written, the article wouldn't be this good.
Hmm, how is espionage and infiltration implemented in this game? As far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be any? It would have been interesting to see how the game would change if the Drengin could find out how close you are to tech victory, or if conversely you can infiltrate them and find out why they are behaving the way they are. (And maybe then manipulate the situation into a proper military victory!)
Hmm, how is espionage and infiltration implemented in this game? As far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be any? It would have been interesting to see how the game would change if the Drengin could find out how close you are to tech victory, or if conversely you can infiltrate them and find out why they are behaving the way they are. (And maybe then manipulate the situation into a proper military victory!)
In the Foreign Stats menus there is a slider that lets you choose how much money to invest in espionage against a specific race. I never really bother with espionage in games and have done it only once in Gal Civ 2.
Hmm, how is espionage and infiltration implemented in this game? As far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be any? It would have been interesting to see how the game would change if the Drengin could find out how close you are to tech victory, or if conversely you can infiltrate them and find out why they are behaving the way they are. (And maybe then manipulate the situation into a proper military victory!)
In the Foreign Stats menus there is a slider that lets you choose how much money to invest in espionage against a specific race. I never really bother with espionage in games and have done it only once in Gal Civ 2.
There were changes made in the expansion pack which improved Espionage.
Top stuff, and loved the analysis at the end. I totally agree on the AI thing,
The other races aren't out to beat you, they're out to win for themselves. At all costs.
Perhaps just as important though, the blog can give you a feel for the game so much more than a review can. I'm already a fan of GalCiv I & II so there's no need to sell it to me. However, I wonder how many games are out there that I've never considered, but a blog like this one would spark my interest.
Now all we need is some tips in the magazine
Many thanks and I hoped you enjoyed playing the game and writing the blog as much as we enjoyed reading it; definately what gaming is all about.
Not sure if you already knew Tom, but this article has made front page news on GalCiv2's home page! Nice work. I noticed it whilst looking for info on how the hell to start downloading GalCiv 2, now I've bought the damn thing and installed Stardock...
With Stardock, you should be able to just go to Tools > Register Product and enter your GalCiv key.
People using Stardock: what do you think of it? I'm a fan. I like that the interface is Windows-conformant as opposed to Steam's rebelliously graphics-heavy skin. It's less ambitious but also less intrusive than Steam - once you've installed the game you never need to use Stardock again, the game itself runs independently. Even if you start it up, it'll check with you before auto-patching your games to the latest version, in case you're about to play one and just want to get to it.
It's not very newb-friendly, I find. Yook me a bit to work out how to use it. And I find the layout cluttered and confusing. The idea behind it is good though.
I prefer the simplicity of Steam though, at the moment.
Wow, for the second time. They must like me. People using Stardock: what do you think of it? I'm a fan. I like that the interface is Windows-conformant as opposed to Steam's rebelliously graphics-heavy skin. It's less ambitious but also less intrusive than Steam - once you've installed the game you never need to use Stardock again, the game itself runs independently. Even if you start it up, it'll check with you before auto-patching your games to the latest version, in case you're about to play one and just want to get to it.
I like it although like Gabanski said it isn't as simple as it perhaps could be. Took me a while to figure out how Im meant to download the game after I had bought it. Easy once you know how. Aside from that I love the idea of the system and the philosophy behind it. The updates that you do receive are so much more substantial than the average patch as well. This is one of the many reasons I believe that Stardock are a company that actually do deserve my money. Frankly, I don't feel the same about a lot of companies.
With Stardock, you should be able to just go to Tools > Register Product and enter your GalCiv key.
People using Stardock: what do you think of it? I'm a fan. I like that the interface is Windows-conformant as opposed to Steam's rebelliously graphics-heavy skin. It's less ambitious but also less intrusive than Steam - once you've installed the game you never need to use Stardock again, the game itself runs independently. Even if you start it up, it'll check with you before auto-patching your games to the latest version, in case you're about to play one and just want to get to it.
Much prefer it to Steam. It may not be as slick presentation & navigation wise. However it's far less obtrusive, doesn't download games that you already own but have uninstalled and crash. Plus, big bonus - you get the hardware through the post. Friendly bunch too.
Mr Tom, for Stardock question - It is useful but is a bit annoying. When I bought and downloaded DA, it kept saying that my original GalCiv 2 invalid :/ - I kept hitting 'register' until it was valid.
I'd love to buy AD in UK but they won't release it over here! Stupid thing! Europe is world's 2nd largest market.
This is the funniest thing I've read in a while! Somehow it also manages to be quite informative about the game itself, although I'm sure that's entirely by accident By all means, more of the same, please!
The mega events are a great idea to shake things up a bit. I've been playing on the biggest universe and was quite happily tootling away in my corner, steadily overpowering my only neighbour with my cultural wiles while out of range of all the other empires for a long time when one of my researchers uncovered an artifact that gave all the ships in the galaxy infinite range. It was utter chaos, with everyone declaring wars on the empires that hadn't needed a military. Like mine.
And now a disgruntled worker on one of my planets has killed the visiting leader of the Korath Clan, who immediately declared war. Ooh er. Bloody careless of the Korath clan tbh.
Also, piling all of your racial stats into economy bonuses gives you an insane amount of money - 100% spending at the moment and I'm still making hundreds of billions of credits every week.
A funny event happened in my latest game. The evil and warlike Drengin suddenly became a peace loving culture Unfortunately they had already commenced war with me so that one in a million event couldn't save me by that time
I used Stardock to get the game and all the stuff, and I like the way it is set up, but since I haven't used it for anything more as of yet, I don't have much experience. It seemed good to me, so far. More than the program itself though, I love the way the system works. Download it on any computer, no CD key, just get the serial number, which you barely even have to worry about losing forever. They're just so nice about it!
I've bought the game (through Stardock and the token thingie) yesterday. While it took me a while to get to grips with it (opening an account, giving my details again, getting two emails, and so on..), once the thing was installed, it's pretty nice. Only after starting the game up and discovering it didn't include DA did I notice that I had to download it separately, along with the tutorials and movies.
BTW, does anyone know how I can get a hard copy as well, or does using tokens prevent it? (note: you can get Uplink for a single token! joy!)
I've bought the game (through Stardock and the token thingie) yesterday. While it took me a while to get to grips with it (opening an account, giving my details again, getting two emails, and so on..), once the thing was installed, it's pretty nice. Only after starting the game up and discovering it didn't include DA did I notice that I had to download it separately, along with the tutorials and movies.
BTW, does anyone know how I can get a hard copy as well, or does using tokens prevent it? (note: you can get Uplink for a single token! joy!)
Buying with tokens shouldn't matter, you should be able to pay the shipping and handling costs and they will send it too you. Don't know how exactly though. Sorry.
That was a really enjoyable read I throughly enjoyed reading all about it and the ending perfectly wraps up the entire "saga". I am glad you enjoyed playing it and to answer the last statement, Yes do more of that sort of thing Cheers
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