Galactic Civilizations II is nearly ready to go gold. It'll be available at retail both here in the United States & Canada and in some places overseas.  You will also be able to purchase and download the game directly from Stardock's TotalGaming.net. RELEASE DATE: FEBRUARY 21.

We've put up some new screenshots to show you what the game is going to resemble.  If you've seen beta shots, those didn't have the "final graphics".  So here are some shots of the near-final game.

The game includes a ton of mini-cut scenes to help create make each game an epic story. The underlying premise of the design is that YOU, the player are making each game an epic story of your own through your conquest, diplomacy, influence, efforts in the game. 

The screenshots in this news item are designed to show you some different aspects of the game too that aren't normally talked about but we think matter to many strategy gamers.

One of the many cut-scenes.  If you played Galactic Civilizations I, you know the basic game mechanics but this game is light years beyond it in almost every respect.  GalCiv I had about 10 minutes of music. GalCiv II has (I think) over an hour to keep it from getting too repetitive.

When you choose a civilization you can still customize how they look and behave. You can even customize the look of the user interface. So you'll see screenshots with all kinds of different interface tintings.  You also control the colorization of the ships which I can say is non-trivial to make look good. GalCiv II ships support bump mapping, hardware T&L, and all kinds of other lighting and texture effects.  Because we're turned based, we can have units with over a thousand polygons (a typical 3D RTS, for instance, has units of less than 200 polys). 

Each opponent has its own dialog that depends on who you play as.  There is a LOT of dialog in this game. We developed special tools just to make it easier to keep track of it all. And within each response are sub-responses so that there's lots of variance in what the computer players will say.

Okay, this is an ugly ship.  But it's user-designed (by me).  Now, for people who don't want to mess with the cosmetics, you can literally just pick your weapons, modules, etc. and press "Place" and the game will try to intelligently put it somewhere for you.  But for sci-fi geeks like me, you can really go crazy in design and create virtually any kind of ship you can imagine.  To my knowledge, nothing like this has ever been done (ship design isn't new but the "lego" like behavior of being able to piece together unique ships we think is).  And don't worry, your creations are saved to disk so you can use them again in future games.  We hope to eventually develop a tool that will let you export your creations for use outside the game.  Oh, and if you want to add your own graphics, no problem, they're just .X files in the model directory.

The game is totally moddable -- all images are either .PNG, .DXPACK (DesktopX) or .X.  Go nuts.

This screen may look boring but it allows you to see, at a glance, what is built on your planet and what it is contributing.

During the beta, the computer players pretty much were always at war.  The diplomatic AI engine is now quite sophisticated with them coordinating attacks, ganging up, and generally trying to keep from dividing their forces.  In this screenshot, the Torians are dead meat.  BTW, the game makes no distinction between computer players and the human player in this sense. So the "difficulty levels" don't involve them ganging up on the hapless human player. They don't care any more or less about the player than another computer player.

Besides each race having its own dialog tree that is per player (that's a LOT of dialog 10x10 nodes) you can literally trade anything for anything. I won't even go into how much time it took to get that down so that you couldn't rip off the AI.  We put our best cheese testers to the test on that one. 

Okay, I don't know about you guys but 4X games are notorious for bogging down late game. I.e. they're boring at the start, fun in the middle and just D-R-A-G at the end.  So we developed a new type of user interface that is an extension of what we did in GalCiv I.  Now you can manage tons of things from a few different screens later on. It vastly cuts down micro management.  For those who like micromanagement, you can still do it.  Just for people like me who find late games to be tedious if I'm having to click on zillions of units and planets/cities/whatever to tell them what to do causes me to go crazy.

The Rally points are really cool. You can tell ships to automatically go somewhere and form fleets or build starbases or whatever.  And there are governors for managing immense numbers of rally points. It really makes it easier to organize your build up and forces.

In GalCiv II, influence victories are not just possible but very attainable.  NOTE: The colored area is NOT YOUR BORDER. It's your sphere of influence.  So fellow fans of Civ IV shouldn't mistake GalCiv II's spheres of influence for diplomatic borders.  You can build up influence starbases to spread your culture and your sphere of influence and take over alien civs.  Of course, they will try to do the same thing back.

The lines you see on the screen represent trade routes from different players.  You can hence blockade a player by destroying their freighters on the trade route.

There's a lot of scale in GalCiv II. Here's a military starbase next to a fighter.  If you have full battles on, fighters appear even tinier in the combat viewer so that you get a true sense of scale.  When you watch Star Wars or Star Trek, you get a sense of "Hey, this is a BIG ship".  We try to do that here too.

Conquest cut-scene. There's actually multiple ones we rotate through so that there's variety.

These battle screenshots can't really do the battles justice because it's all in the animation.  You can change the camera so that you can zoom in, out, rotate, pause the battle any way you want. It's just totally cool.  It's also a great way to judge how well your ship designs work out.

In GalCiv II, there are 3 types of weapons and 3 corresponding types of defense.  Non optimal defeneses are only counted at the square root value. So you have to really keep an eye on what kinds of weapons your enemies have.

For the full eye candy effect, you can fold down the UI for this.

Love those nebula too.

This is a battle above a ringed planet.  Rings planed give extra research bonuses while planets with moons give production bonuses.

This is the details screen of a planet. It'll tell you all the "hidden" data you might want to know. There's actually a pretty significant amount of code behind putting together intelligent text for this screen. Read the text on here and you get the idea (and there's a bug in this screenshot).

This is the colony management screen. It doesn't just display info, you can click on the the projects and change them from here. Makes it very convenient to manage a large empire.

A lot of computer AIs cheat.  We put quite a bit of work into having the AI play intelligently without cheating (except at the very highest levels where some uber-player can be challenged).  But we wanted players to be able to see exactly what the AI ship design is -- what is literally on there.  You can also zoom in on a ship and see the stuff on there but this makes it very clear.

I was putting my best ship against their best ship. I "won" this battle but only because I was the one who initiated combat and got first strike.

Another thing that drives me crazy in strategy games is where you have to mop up the entire world/planet/galaxy/whatever.  In a typical 5 hour strategy game session, you KNOW whether you're going to win or not usually by hour 3.  So we put a lot of play testing into when the computer players should throw in the towel.  We wanted to make sure players got the satisfaction of smacking down the computer players but that they didn't have to take every last world.  So the computer players will surrender quite a ways before their last world is taken usually but well after it's obvious they're doomed.

Just thought this was kind of cool. Like I mentioned earlier, you can zoom in and out or switch the camera to cinema mode and have it look like a real battle from different angles and such. It's really pretty neat. The screenshots really don't do it justice.

Little thing about the naming convention we used for AI ships. Remember, players design their ships. So does the AI. And there's no set strategy because the best ship depends on the circumstances.  So it can be a real blast watching your opponents ships evolve over time.  See the "M5"?  That means Mark V. It's its 5th generation of that type of ship. Or more accurately, it's the number of years since the initial game year (2225). So in that screenshot, that was its state of the art ship.  This is important info since you want to make your design decisions based on their state of the art and not old ships.

BTW, before someone asks, you can upgrade your ships too either all at once or individually.

Just a little touch - the night lights on the planet on the dark side are based on the population of the planet. And since most planets are randomly generated (landmasses and all) each new game, it's not some set pattern/texture).

We've got enough graphs to satisfy the biggest stats fiends.

Yay.  Conquest victory.

The game will be available at stores on FEBRUARY 21 as well as for ddownload from us.  Some of the stores it'll be at in North America include EB, Gamestop, Best Buy, Walmart, CompUSA, Circuit City, and several other chains.

Stardock is an independent game developer. Fully funded and self-published so we were able to make the game exactly how we wanted and ship it when we felt it was ready to go.

We also need your help. If you're interested in the game, spread the word. Pre-orders at retail help increase initial stocking levels (i.e. the difference between that game on the bottom shelf with 2 units and the one with tons of shelf space).  Pre-ordering direct is fine too. 

If you know other strategy gamers who might like this, feel free to link to this news item.

We hope you like what we've done here.  We're very excited about release. There's still a few more days left of testing, bug fixing, optimizing, fixing spelling, etc.  Then it's off to manufacturing.

Make sure you check out the link below to see the rest of the screenshots.