Introduction

Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar was not created by your average game development company. Stardock, while not having the sales numbers of Firaxis, Valve or Ubisoft, is definitely a developer to respect. Stardock’s vision on game development differs in several ways from that of many major companies, and Dark Avatar is a prime example of why that is a good thing.

The first thing that has to be said about Dark Avatar is that it is definitely not similar to most game expansions in scope. Instead of adding a new race or two, one major feature and many bugfixes, Dark Avatar changes the game in a pretty substantial way and has several important new features.

The technical side

GalCiv2 has an uncommon combination of low system requirements with the ability to actually utilize some of the best features of modern computers. Dark Avatar, likewise, will run on low-end PCs that have CPUs as slow as 800 MHz, but it includes the CPU usage option scale that was introduced into GalCiv2 vanilla in one of the updates. A number of advanced AI algorithms will only run if you allow the game to use more CPU power, resulting in a more powerful AI.

Better still, Dark Avatar makes excellent use of dual-core CPUs if you have one of those. I played the game on a dual-core system, and noticed a surprisingly pleasant consequence – there is no wait time between turns. After ending my turn, the next one will begin immediately, unless you’re treated to the sight of some AI ships moving.

The game is programmed so that it allows the AI to think about its moved during your turn, utilizing one of the CPU cores to do that. Hence almost never having to wait between turns. If you have a fast CPU (dual-core or not), it’s a good idea to allow AIs to use maximum CPU power. That will reward you with better AI performance without any performance issues.

I should also mention here that Dark Avatar, while boasting improved graphics, does not seem to consume noticeably more memory than the original GalCiv2 did, under the same circumstances.