I'm actually more of a fan of the first game, the thing that broke my enthusiasm for the game (despite the very nice ship design feature) was how the planets were depicted-- it became virtually a Civ-in-space. There were actually other quibbles for me too, such as how you have to officially research an ethical alignment, which doesn't sound right to me. A cool thing about the game's combat, though, is that unlike most games where higher-tech/tier automatically means better, in GalCiv II spamming hordes of low-tier, low-cost cannon fodder is actually a legitimate strategy.