The default victory conditions mean that you can win by researching the ultimate technology, creating a mighty alliance with other races, or overwhelming these races with your cultural supremacy.Īfter selecting your opponents, as well as their difficulty level, you'll drop in to the actual game it's here where Galactic Civilizations II really differentiates from its predecessor. You can also tweak the victory conditions, and that determines the paths to, well, victory. Other settings determine the number of habitable planets, the density (or distance) between stars, the number of asteroid fields and anomalies, and more. This will help determine the speed of the game a small galaxy will lead to confrontation right away, while a larger galaxy will offer a slower pace because there's more time to explore and colonize before you have to fight. Galaxies come in varying sizes, ranging from tiny to gigantic, and this will determine the number of star systems (and correspondingly, planets that you can colonize). The first thing that you do when you start a game is to determine the type of galaxy you'll fight in. And, in Master of Orion tradition, you can even create your own custom species, with your own unique racial abilities and technologies. In Dread Lords, you can now play as any of the alien species in the game. In the original Galactic Civilizations, you could only play as the human race. And Dread Lords is far more like Master of Orion than its predecessor. Your goal is to guide your species to galactic domination, which you do by colonizing star systems, researching technologies, building fearsome interstellar navies, and crushing anyone who gets in your way (at least, that's one path to victory). In many ways, Galactic Civilizations is very similar to the classic space strategy game Master of Orion-and that's high praise, indeed.

Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lordsscreenshot We've gotten our hands on a third preview version of Dread Lords, and unlike the previous two versions of the game that we've played around with, this latest version actually feels more like a game and less like a technological placeholder of things to come.

We first saw the sequel to 2003's popular turn-based strategy game at the beginning of this year, but progress has been slow in coming. Slowly but surely, Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords is coming together at last.

Civilization ii replacing textures