This game is a lot of fun, and that's really all that needs to be said. But to get a bit more detailed, I will write up a few salient points for people who are familiar with previous and similar games: The frantic rush that you usually see at the beginning of 4× games like Civ1–3 and Galciv 1 is greatly mellowed out. There is more fine tuning in setting up your empire, not every planet can build every facility since planet quality this time around determines how many parcels of land are available for building. Population pays taxes and produces research and labour. The initial colony facility can provide food for 5 billion people, after that you have to build extra farms. You can specialize planets for production or research, with appropriate ‘wonders’. There are more major and minor races to meet than in GalCiv1 which makes for a bit more variety, as well as trading opportunities. You can also make up your own custom race to play with, much as you could in Master of Orion 2. And you can design your own ships, but there are no tactical battles. You design them, and then you watch how they perform against the enemy. You can also combine ships into fleets. Spacestations have been segregated into culture/influence, economy, military and mining (special resources found in space). Forget about the 3D – while the graphics are much improved and prettyfied, the main objective of going 3d was to take a load off the cpu of your computer so the video card could do most of the work. This idea has worked, Galciv2 runs smoother and much faster than GalCiv1; load and save times are faster.
At this time (March 1st) the game still has some small bugs – all of which have workarounds.