(Sorry if the site is slow, one of our ISPs is switching their network and so some parts of the site are very slow - hopefully will be solved in a couple of hours).

Gamespot has a very cool look at the gamma of GalCiv II.

So what makes Galactic Civilizations II such a promising game? It takes all the great ideas found in Master of Orion II and expands on them to deliver a deeper and richer experience. In this turn-based strategy game, you'll play as one of the galaxy's primary races, or you can create your own custom race, and you'll attempt to expand from a single star system to conquer the galaxy peacefully or militarily. It won't be easy, though, because there's a whole lot that can happen between the start and the finish of a game.

Over in this journal entry I talked about how when it came time to design GalCiv II that we had to decide whether we were going to try to just expand on GalCiv itself or try to bring elements in from other games.

You see that a lot in games where some features in a given genre become widely accepted but franchise developers are wary of adding them because they almost seem like they don't want to acknowledge the existence of those other games.

When we made GalCiv II, we thought carefully about what kinds of features we wanted and then gave some thought to how other games tried to implement those features.  Sometimes the game had a great implementation, other times there were side effects that could never have been foreseen that we wanted to avoid. 

At the end of the day, we wanted to create a game that would appeal to more of the 4X fan base.  More story.  More control.  More strategic options.  A cleaner interface.  Better grapihcs.  Resolution indepedence. Longevity and replayability.

Whether we succeeded in this remains to be seen.  That's not our call.  Only you can make that determination.  We hope you like the end result. 

That said, we don't look at GalCiv II to be the heir to anything other than Galactic Civilizations I.  Master of Orion along with the other classics are special on their own merits.