Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar
by Marcus Mulkins
previewed on PC
"I Have Seen The Future And It Doesn't Look Good." (cont.)
As in all of the other versions, the stand alone, go your own way game is where all the meat really is: More elaborate shipbuilding. Flashier combat displays. Not only can you design your own race, but now you can design all of your opponents, right down to designing their ships! Espionage has been seriously upgraded: In the past you poured hundreds of billions of credits into espionage and what you got was news reports of what was happening in an opponent's empire. Now espionage will be pro-active, with the ability to perform sabotage or steal technology -- or thwart an opponent's spy from doing that to you. There is however, a really big HOWEVER: a single spy will cost you billions of credits to create -- and each successive agent will cost even more. And if you use that agent to go abroad to do his thing, he won't be available to perform counter espionage at any given domestic location. Or vice versa. (Somehow I just can't see creating Agent 001 costing a significant amount of GNP. And Agent 002 costing twice as much. And Agent 003 costing twice as much again. At that rate, the UK could never have afforded hiring and training James Bond. And then where would the movie industry be?)
Another brand new feature involves exploiting asteroid fields. You will now be able to extract additional resources from a given solar system, but with several twists: First, once you develop an asteroid field, it is not restricted to providing its resources to the nearest planet. Instead, just pop the cargo ship into sub-space and send it off to the planet of your choice. Secondly, once built, the asteroid mining operation decides who gets the goodies. You may have footed the bill for construction, but if it's a remote location, the mine manager may decide to ship off to a more influential neighbor. So be careful where you put those things!
My particular favorite new feature is the "Epic Generator": As the game progresses, the game will actually be writing "The History Of Our Galaxy" (in HTML!) that will describe the events and details of that particular game. Not only will you be making history; you'll be able to read about it! Add in the MegaEvents (truly major events such as entire empires sinking into total anarchy) that occur randomly in each game and you are guaranteed a completely unique "history" for every game.
"We Don't See Problems; We See Opportunities!"
On the 9th of October Stardock owner Brad Wardell announced that the release of Dark Avatar was being pushed back to February 2007. (Originally it was meant to release before Christmas.) He is quoted as saying "As you guys gave us suggestions and new ideas we realized that we didn't want to have to wait until some future sequel to add in those features. So we're going to push the release date of the expansion pack to around the 1-year anniversary of the release of Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords". So, essentially, "We're cramming so much good stuff into it, it's going to take us longer than we thought. But it will be well worth waiting for!" Yeah, but how many more bugs will there be if there are so many changes? Well, they've got that covered too, sort of: If you pre-ordered the game from Stardock for $24.95 (instead of $29.95) YOU TOO CAN BE A BETA TESTER! Just think: for only $24.95 you can have the opportunity to help find and weed out all those bugs that would otherwise be the total responsibility of the Stardock R&D Department. And think just how much more efficient the debugging process will be when they have input from hundreds of playtesters instead of just their in-house staff of a half-dozen or so paid playtesters. Pure genius!
Another case of Stardock pure genius is how they plan to market the game: As with most other expansions, buyers must already own Galactic Civilizations II in order to play Dark Avatar. And Stardock knows almost exactly the absolute maximum number of copies of Dark Avatar that they can hope to sell. Remember the online registration? They know how to contact nearly all of those potential customers. Who needs retailers? (Or to pay the substantial discount off the retail price that a manufacturer must give to those retailers.) So don't start bugging your local game store to find out when the game will be in stock; the answer will be "Never." You have to go to the source if you ever want to play this game.
And the last bit of Stardock genius is that you will only be able to purchase a digital download! Think how much Stardock will save not having to print off a gazillion manuals and print packages plastered with a ton of graphics (with the inherent cost of paying the artists that decorate the boxes). I had visions of an hours-long download, all the while praying fervently that my dial-up modem wouldn't break its connection during the process. Fortunately, if you can bear the additional wait, a CD of the game can be sent instead of the download for people that anticipate needing to reinstall at some time in the future. (I'm not sure if Stardock will charge extra for sending you the CD, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did.) And if you happen to be outside the U.S., using something other than U.S. dollars will require you to use a currency conversion service such as PayPal.
"Dark Avatar": All in all, taking everything into consideration, it seems a very appropriate title, in more ways than one.