Well, Stardock's never done a DEMO verison of its software before. We've always believed that the good reviews, advertising, and other exposures our software gets is enough to convince customers on the merits of our software.
But games...well, games are different. When 3D Realms released Duke Nukem recently, this was a game none of us at Stardock would have bought regardless of the reviews because we thought it was "yet another doom clone". But one of our support people downloaded the shareware version and within a few days the productivity level at Stardock's Michigan office went down the tubes from networking it. By the end of the day, 3D Realms had received 4 orders from Stardock employees. 4 orders they would not have received had it not been for their shareware version.
Because of examples such as this, we are convinced that releasing a DEMO version of Galactic Civilizations 2 will help bring new players to the GalCiv universe. We ll be the first to admit that GalCiv 2 was not written to have a "demo version". As a result, we re not entirely sure how stable the demo will be on your system but we re pretty sure it should be very playable and give you a taste of what the real thing offers.
We took out quite a few features (primarily for disk space reasons) from the game and made it only playable for the first 500 turns (which gives you a few hours of fun still).
Missing features:
- Most of the graphics are missing
- All the music is missing
- You can only play at a pre-made galaxy size (small) (the real GalCiv allows
you to play in gigantic galaxies with hundreds of quadrants).
- Most of the technologies are missing and many descriptions of the ones included
are missing
- You can only play against 2 opponents.
- Lots of other little things (like loading and saving games)
Now, with all this missing you might think that GalCiv 2 DEMO is crippleware or something. I think you ll be very pleased to find that GalCiv 2 DEMO is quite playable even with all the missing features. And if you think GalCiv 2 demo is fun, the full version is much better and allows you to take advantage of it s unique object architecture in which Stardock or third parties can make add ons for it.
We hope you enjoy the GalCiv 2 DEMO. There is no technical support available for this DEMO.
The official site of this demo is on our CompuServe forum (GO STARDOCK). If you are on CompuServe, we highly recommend visiting as it has become a great hub for discussing industry news, OS debates, politics, and of course Stardock software offerings. Updates to this demo will be made available first on our CompuServe forum.
You can purchase the real thing from many places such as CompUSA, Micro Center, Indelible Blue, APS, Kiyo Design, and basically anyplace that carries any OS/2 software. A listing of resellers is available on our home page (www.stardock.com) and included in the demo (os2store.txt). If you have
Stardock's sales line is only available Monday through Friday from 9am to 5pm EST. Some resellers are open 24 hours a day if you want to get it during an off hour (like 3am, you just started conquering the Drengin and you decide right then and there to get it).
Stardock's 800 number is: 1-800-672-2338. When you order, if you mention you are buying it because of this DEMO we ll try to come up with some extra freebie to give you (afterall, we want to know how effective demos are).
Playing the Game
Stardock doesn't have an on-line manual for Galactic Civilizations 2. The full version comes complete with about a 60 page hard copy manual. Obviously for the demo we'll need online documentation and this will be available through Stardock's WWW page (www.stardock.com) and on Compuserve (GO STARDOCK).
Game Basics
You start out with a single colony ship on the main map. You can move the ship around by using your mouse to tell it where to go or (as most people play) by using the cursor keys to direct it to where you want to go.
Virtually everything in the GalCiv universe is an object. You can right click on almost anything to get information about it (star systems, ships, planets, etc.). A single left click will select an object and a double left click will activate any special action (on ships it will make them leave orbit or turn on auto pilot).
The object of Galactic Civilizations is to create an intersellar civilization that can stand the test of time. You will manage your economic, political, military, and scientific policies.
Planets can build two types of things: Military and Social projects. Military projects produce ships. Most ships are in the defense or offense class. However, there are several special types of ships:
Colony Ships
Can colonize new worlds. Find worlds that have high planet classes.
Transports
Invade undefended star systems (star systems that don't have shields by them). Right click on them while in orbit to add troops to them.
Freighters
Conduct interstellar trade. Build them, send them to an alien world and negotiate a trade route with them. The profit you make from that trade route comes back every year.
Stealth Ships
Your enemies have a hard time seeing them.
Aspects of strategy
As many people have said, Galactic Civilizations AI doesn't cheat. It plays by the same rules and uses the same internal structures as you do. From the game's standpoint, it doesn t recognize the difference between a human player and a computer player. What this means is that the AI can't see your ships, for example any better than you can see theirs. When your ships come within sensor range of an alien ship it will appear on your map and you will appear on their map.
Each ship has an attack, defense, and strength value. Strength = Hitpoints. When your hitpoints reach 0 your ship is destroyed.
Technology
You research new technology in order to gain access to new social projects, military projects, and to give yourself an advantage in planet defense (when you attack ships in orbit, it looks to see what their planetary defenses are which are based partially on how technologically advanced they are).
Social Projects
Social projects are dividied into three types: Projects, Super Projects, and Achievements.
Projects:
Any planet can build it at any time. Will improve that planet's production values in research, morale, manufacturing, trade, (or one of the many other values).
Super Projects:
Each civilization can build once, has greater effects than projects.
Achievements:
Can only be built once in the game by one empire. Usually affects the galactic balance of power.
Winning the game
You win the game by doing one of the following ways:
1) Uniting everyone in an alliance
2) Moving beyond mortality (not available in the DEMO)
3) Conquering everyone else
In the DEMO, the ending screens are not available so you will get a fairly anti-climatic ending.
Good places to talk about Galactic Civilizations 2 DEMO:
On the Internet:
NEWSGROUP:
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic
comp.os.os2.games
On CompuServe:
GO GAMING
GO GAMERS
GO STARDOCK
IBM CFORUMS:
STARDOCK
OS2GAMES
On Fidonet:
OS2
OS2GAMES
You can email orders to us by emailing sdsang@ibm.net (soon to be sales@stardock.com).
We hope you enjoy this glimpse at Galactic Civilizations 2. Thank you for supporting native OS/2 software.
