The worst games

[Quirinus]

Oh my, yes, I agree with you on that. The space combat system was limp and for the most part not as good as expected. But I was disagreeing with you in this:

The space 4X genre has always been about epic space battles. Marketing and reviews both claimed that GC2 had interesting ship design and combat. As a fan of the space 4X genre I believed this, bought the game and got burned with a Civ in space instead.

Personally, the most gratifying GalCiv games I had were games where I didn't have to fight a major war or, in a couple of them, not even fire a single bullet to win the game, that is, by using diplomacy, trade and/or influence. The meat of the game for me was always the robust AI and the nation-building bit-- in effect, "Civ in space".

Also, (this is another personal reason) I played the first GalCiv too, which had literally spreadsheet ship combat, where all ships had a number for attack, one for defense, and one for hitpoints, and that was the sum total of their combat engine. So when I played GalCiv II, I was disappointed that it had no tactical ship control, but thrilled at the ship builder, and, if not completely impressed, then happy with the rock-scissors-paper mechanics.