GalCiv II is on sale- Ultimate Edition for 5 bucks. Any reviews on that one, B12? What other 4X games is it best comparable to?
All Stardock titles are 50-75% off this week.
GalCiv II lets you build ships! Oh and there was some 4x thing too I guess. Hard to recall.
**DISCLAIMER: I'm not a huge 4x fan, soooo take this with a shaker of salt**
The combat is rock/paper/scissors, the planetary production is really weird (you have sliders to allocated all planetary production between different factors, along with the associated facilities. This means a lot of micro on developing worlds), and some things are a bit too micro-intensive for me to hold interest long. Most of my matches ended up with whatever AI got the best random starting colony location to blob and consume everyone else. Those are the bad things.
The good things are: There are plenty of viable strategies that aren't directly combat-centric, like arms brokering and cultural pressure. The races felt pretty varied to me, and the custom race option was fun to mess around with. The AI is apparently pretty smart, and will scheme and plot against itself; it doesn't treat the player any differently than any other AI. It can and will enact long-term political and economic scheming.
I paid about that much for the game just for the ship builder, but that seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it, with more love than hate here, that I've noticed.
EDIT: Oh and planetary invasions are garbage. worst system ever.