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Imperium Galactica II
by James Cobb

Designers often make a mistake when making a follow-up to an almost-successful game. They tend to think that piling on more state-of-the-art features will rectify the flaws in their first effort. Digital Reality and GT Interactive fell into this trap.

Imperium Galactica was a nice game, following in the footsteps of Reach for the Stars and Master of Orion. It was a turn-based “Xploration, Xploitation and Xtermination” game whose fatal flaw was an incredibly inept computer opponent. Instead of tweaking this flaw, the designers threw all of the latest 3D and real-time features into Imperium Galactica II. In doing so, they scored another near-miss that only the most fanatic space game fanatic will play.

Play comes in three variations on a theme. The variation are full campaigns where every race starts from scratch to conquer all following a storyline, skirmishes where players begin better developed and mission that give players unique tools and goals.

Players choose one of three races (eight in multi-player mode) with each race thriving in different planetary environments and having different strengths and weakness. Play starts with one or two home planets that are built up as the galaxy is explored.

Regardless of play, the first thing to do is to send a ship or fleet out to explore the inky blackness. The usual click/right click procedure moves ships on the starmap. Unexplored planets show up as colored points.

A fleet begins exploration on the starmap

Click on them brings up possible action icons. The spy satellite is the best move. For 3000 credits, a satellite will tell the planets population and production manual. It will also introduce the player to the game’s love of information; it drowns you in it and gives you several ways to go under three times.

In this case, clicking on planets puts it in the starmap information window, left clicking on it gives you more detail while right click takes you to the surface where another left click on the window yields further data. Buy a spare mouse for this game.

While the fleet finds new planets, the old ones need to be developed. Populations need to be housed, fed and entertained while beings worked and taxed. Twelve domestic buildings ranging from houses to bars and stadia keep the masses growing. Five different power plants supply energy.

 

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