Galactic Civilizations Deluxe Description:

Galactic Civilizations Deluxe review:
5 stars (Strategy Game Star Trek) - Here is a simple galactic conquest stategy game that allows you to play in spurts if you can tear yourself away from it. It's just complex enough to allow you to become immursed in it. The AI is intelligent enough to provide a challenge.
1 stars (Terrible AI won't even bother to attack you) - Galactic Civilizations is the junk food of 4x games.

It's filling and comfortably familar, but after awhile you realize it's making you sick.



It's basically what you would expect if you took every successful 4x game and merged them together, but with no regards for balance or gameplay. The feature list looks impressive, until you realize half the features are broken or unbalanced. Here's a sample game I played once I realized how broken things were:



Normal difficulty/Small Map



Right away I colonized 2 systems.

I did nothing except change research, occasionally build a building, and hit next turn. I did not build any attack/defense ships.



This went on until near the end of the research tree(!), when finally the AI attacked. I built ships to defend, but I was overwhelmed as you would expect. Then they ground invaded. Carrier of 5 million lost for them, killed 3 million of mine, repeat. Sounds bad since I only had 2 planets, right? Well unfortunately the pop of my planet they were invading was 100 billion. They couldn't conceiveably wipe me out since they couldn't make transports fast enough. Why are transports "used up" when you attack anyway?



So after a few hundred attempts they seemed to give up

then space sharks were randomly spawned. Since I had no ships they didn't attack me, and instead wiped out both the remaining ai player's fleets. I couldn't invade for the same reasons they couldn't invade me though, so I just waited to see what would happen.



Eventually I was given one of the AI's systems. Turns out I had set some money in "destabilize" a few dozen turns ago.

I pumped up the amount of money i was spending on it, to about 10% of my economy. Soon both civilizations gave me all their systems, including their capitals!!!!



So basically all you need to do to win is do nothing for a few thousand turns then put some money in destabilizing your opponent's systems and you win. That's it.



Utter junk.