Simple, but functional old school 4x game which was overshadowed and improved upon by its competitors. GC II was an amazing, innovative and well written game. Its sequel however stagnated and introduced massive amounts of questionable quality paid content. Series seemingly only had progressed in terms of graphics throughout the decades which is just too little as most 4x games have amazing aesthetic. The final nail to the coffin is the fact that this game simply does not work. Its fundamental mechanics are broken which makes it an obsolete product.
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Calicifer’s Reviews
A Dinosaur
This is what I felt while playing this game. It might be a lesson to me, that I should play my childhood favourites when they come out and not when their development is long over. Everything this game does seem so similar to GC II game. This might be fine for an old or remastered game, but is far from fine for a new game. It feels that everything what this game does, someone else have done it better. Game is stuck in the past with next to little actual development of its mechanics. Play Stellaris for better immersion. Play Endless Space for more casual and straightforward 4x experience. Play Distant Worlds or Aurora for complex simulation. This game is in a weird place where every competitor have done everything it tries to do, but better.Is it worth starting the galactic crusade?
This question solely depends on how experienced you are in 4x games. Do you have nostalgia for GC II? Experienced players have nothing to see here, however it is still a charming little experience. Morality events have their own charm, research tree is sometimes funny or tries to be creative. Developers once put effort into this game and it is now in remade form, all the things which made previous game great is still here and they might be worth experiencing for returning players or ones who do not have extensive library to compare games to.It takes talent to fail so much
Despite this game being developed for decades now, it is still a broken mess. From its combat system, economy, surrender mechanics or diplomacy. It is hard to find an aspect of this game which would just work. You sure can play this game, but do not expect it actually working. Soon you will notice just how poorly thought out and refined all of its internal mechanics are at which point, all the gameplay becomes about meaningless min/maxing and computer exploitation. AI
- Artificial intelligence in this game is really terrible to borderline broken. It simply fails to be a credible threat. It has no function which would tell it to create a massive deathball and try to invade you. All it does are interceptor building which really are good at anything besides protecting your planets from ground invasions. It cannot keep up with a player, after an early game where AI seemingly cheats, it falls behind rapidly due to its ineffective build strategies on its own planets. The difference is so immense that after a while, you start a war against them only to discover that they had failed to properly max out their planets and construct any worthwhile fleet against you. This game was in development for so long and developers still had failed to make a simple boolean-based AI which would actually work.
Diplomacy - Diplomacy option received quite a bit of adjustment over the years, however AI still remains very bad at it. It will never trade planets or their own far out stations for anything reasonable. You might give your whole empire away for one of their colony planets. They consistently ask you to invade others for insultingly meagre rewards. They randomly ask for tribute with no relationship to the threat (or lack of) they pose to you. They sometimes give everything away in their own deal. They sometimes randomly decides to hate you when their ally declares war on you. They sometimes randomly declare war against you when you camp on of your fleets next to their borders even if they are ridiculously outmatched. They do not show any initiative to ally with you and only get pissed at you for trying to research high end tech. In this game diplomacy is very rudimentary and is little more than a button to min/max your own gain.
Surrender - After all this time, this game still has major bugs. After enemy empire surrenders, it can decide to give all of its planets to their own ally. They can surrender even when you sign peace treaty with them and leave them with quite a few planets. They will just decide to end themselves and will give all of their planets to their allies. This however causes all of their controlled planets to disappear. In my play through, whole south of the galaxy was unpopulated, because enemy AI decided to surrender and all of its planet vanished, leaving only their token influence on the map. It is a major bug which developers never had bothered to fix which I think is quite telling of their commitment to these series as a whole.
Combat - Combat system is equally broken as rest of a game. Ship building is all about stacking specifics weapons. It does not have any counter system. Shields, armor and point defences are effective to a certain level before late game tech adds modules which essentially nullifies all defensive capabilities of enemy ships. With something insane as 100% armor piercing, it becomes pointless to add any armor to your ships. In fact, the only effective protection is maneuverability in sub-light speed drives. You can add easily stackable 20% evasion bonuses from a single such drive upon any ship. Interceptors which casually dodge shots is one thing. However, you can even make super-maneuverable capital ships which will dodge most of the shots coming their way. In this game, there are no counters, just abusing broken stacking mechanics which make combat one hit – one kill affair.
There are also issues of ship roles. Even if you make light aircraft carrier on cruiser hull, it will still rush to the combat regardless of its combat role. Support ships with no defences will still close in instead of trying to stay behind. In this game, setting ship role does not matter. Entire system seems to be completely broken and there is no organic inter-play between various ship types. Capital ships just outright annihilate everyone and there is no point of trying to counter their spam with light interceptor-bomber ships which could hit them without being hit themselves by their massive cannons. It is such basic inter-play, but it is missing in this game.
Economy - Economy in this game is solely reliant on stacking bonuses. Eventually every civilization becomes incredibly good at something. They receive such immense bonuses that it makes you wonder why even try doing anything. It is a game about specific builds and strategies as your entire galaxy spanning empire can be less productive than few worlds in the corner. It is such 4x gamey mechanic.
Send it to Lagrange point…
…and kill its momentum. Send it in places where nobody will ever see it again. Where gravitational forces cancel each other out and its lack of momentum will ensure that it will be stuck in cold, dark and irrelevant place forevermore. This game is as average as it gets. I cannot even recommend on a basis of refinement and maturity, because there is none. It is just an old game with new graphics and features which were never properly implemented. This game does not enrich your soul, it does not provide you with new experiences, it does not challenge you. It is good as a time sink, but it doesn’t do anything better than other games.