More game options and leader diversity

It should definitely be mentioned that GalCiv2’s new game screen, which already had decent customization ability, is now very customizable. There’s a new impressive ability to design your own opponents. You can choose their ethical alignment and aggression levels, among other things. That opens up a bunch of interesting possibilities, such as making the Drengin very cowardly and good (just to spite them), or set the Thalans to extremely aggressive, which should certainly provide a curious result.

An added fun factor is the ability to create custom ship styles that can be assigned to AI civs. If you want the AI to use some fancy ships you designed or downloaded online, you can now do so! This is one of those features in GalCiv2 that, while being purely aesthetic and providing nothing to the actual gameplay, still serves to increase the fun considerably. Sci-fi geeks all over the world can make the AI build ships that look like those of a villain from some sci-fi series, and that’s an appealing feature indeed.

The civilizations in the game have also changed. There are two new ones – the Krynn and the Korath – with the latter being remarkable as great warmongers and someone you may come to hate even more than the Drengin, which is not easy to achieve. Still, as I have already mentioned, Dark Avatar goes well beyond your average x-pack, so every civilization now has a Super Ability. As the name implies, these abilities are very powerful, and, of course, fairly unique.

Super Abilities are mostly fun, although the balance still needs some work. I know that they’re supposed to be super and somewhat out-of-balance, but I believe tweaking them is still in order. Or, at least, tweaking the AI use and understanding of these abilities. I’d like to mention the Korath ability, Supper Annihilator, specifically. The ability allows you to build ships with Spore weapons, which are capable of wiping out all the population on a planet and turning the planet into a toxic one. That’s as powerful as it sounds, with the current problem being that the AI does not put super-priority on these super-ships. It won’t really go out of its way to intercept an incoming spore ship, which is a problem – you can get them fairly early as the Korath, and wreak some real havoc on the AI, which will not consider these weapons of mass destruction as huge a threat as they are.

Of other special abilities, the Drath Super Manipulator one is worth noting. The Drath can convince civilizations to go to war with others easily. I’ve discovered that the Drath are now an absolute pain to have in the galaxy – they will, more likely than not, persuade some of the other civilizations to declare war on you, and generally never let you let your guard down. Most super abilities are interesting, but I’m sure no one wants to read my detailed thoughts about each.

These ships are different

Dark Avatar makes several substantial changes to starships, including the way they engage in combat. Given the nature of these changes, they serve to shift the game around quite a bit.

The first change you’ll probably notice is that engines are now bigger. That means you can put less of them on a ship, which, of course, means that your ships are likely to be slower overall. Very fast Freighters or Constructors are still quite feasible, but producing battleships with a huge speed would lead to them not having enough weaponry. This is very much a change that will come down to personal preference, but after my initial period of getting used to it, I like it better this way – it’s more difficult to launch attacks against AI star systems while being well outside their reach just a turn ago.

An extremely important change in Dark Avatar is the move from ship-based combat to weapon-based combat. Previously, in one round of combat, a ship would fire all its weapons at one target. Now, a ship fires each weapon separately, which means that it can, theoretically, engage as many targets in one round as it has weapons. The original GalCiv2 revamped combat significantly in one of the updates, by removing the attacker’s first strike ability, and this change is just as important.

In practice, this means that capital ships, which have numerous weapons, can take on several small fighters literally at once. Some powerful late-game weapons can do 10 damage per shot. That’s theoretically enough to destroy Tiny hull and sometimes also Small hull ships. So, a capital ship with five of these weapons can, theoretically again, destroy 5 fighters in a round of combat. In reality, you’ll not get such extreme situations often because of dice rolls and fighter veterancy upgrades, but you’ll definitely see powerful ships destroy two targets per round, or damage multiple targets.

Clearly, this makes fighters notably weaker. Previously, if you put together a fleet of five fighters and attacked a lone capital ship, your fleet was guaranteed to last at least five rounds of combat – in which time the fighters could do enough damage to kill or severely damage the capital ship. With fighter survivability having dropped significantly in Dark Avatar, one’s first impression might be that they are now useless. It’s far from true, however, because the cost of Medium and larger hulls has increased. And by increased I mean really, really increased. Frigates will now be truly expensive, and you can forget about building Battlecruisers on a specialized research planet.

Personally, I’ve come to appreciate fighters in Dark Avatar. Outfitted with powerful weapons, they can do good damage, while being really cheap to build. Seems like a combination of capital ships from your industrially powerful planets and fighters from your weaker-production planets is the way to go now.

Another notable, if less obvious, change to combat is to the way defenses are now handled. When a ship’s defenses absorb some damage in a round of combat, their effectiveness is reduced for the rest of the round and only resets the next round. Since, obviously, there’s no next round for a ship that gets destroyed, this has the net effect of weakening defenses overall.

I’m not very fond of this change – in my experience, it reduces the feasibility of having a ship that has low weapons and very powerful defenses, thus being able to withstand a good number of attacks. Having some defenses on a ship is still a good idea (and having 1 defense point in any category still gives you 1 defense in all categories), but I have to confess I miss my powerfully armored dreadnoughts. I tried using some of those, noticed that they die way easier than in GalCiv2, and then found the fact that defenses have, indeed, been changed.

As it should be expected, all these changes also affect the AI. They now seem less eager to switch to frigates after getting Medium Size Building, instead employing a real mix of fighters and frigates. Also, the AIs, again, prefer to crank out ships with powerful weapons and few defenses.

Another AI shipbuilding quirk is that the AI seems to have slower ships now. With the increased size of engines, it generally prefers putting more weapons on a ship instead of engines. This is, of course, a mixed bag. I almost always design my ships to have some engine, at least a slow one, so in Dark Avatar my ships are generally weaker in combat than AI ships, but faster. The AI does have some problems adapting to situations when you constantly outrun their ships, but this isn’t a huge issue overall. Although it does get fairly interesting when you see that an AI fleet is targeting one of your fleets and then you can keep running with that fleet of yours to lure the AI fleet wherever.