The worst games

[Crandaeolon]

Ah, I see now. Yes, I agree that combat doesn't really need to be a significant part of a 4X space game - interstellar politics and intrigue are easily worth their own treatment. However, prior to GalCiv games the genre used to pay a lot of attention to armed conflict, and that created certain assumptions.

I intentionally skipped the first GalCiv because conflict in it was so downplayed, it just wasn't what I expected from the genre. The second GalCiv burned me because by most accounts (marketing & reviews) the combat aspect was much improved. Perhaps it was, but it just didn't meet the expectations created by MoO2 and its ilk. I was also hoping for a game to atone for the abomination that was MoO3 but it didn't. And, I didn't really want a Civ-type game at that time, the Civilization series filled that space well enough. For these reasons GC2 was a personal disappointment to me, which is what this thread seems to be about.

EDIT: There were also a lot of other oddities in the release version of CalCiv2 that degraded the overall experience. Here is an old thread in the Arena with some arguments about the issues beginning on page 3.

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...ivilizations+2