Introduction:

Space......the final frontier. You have been tasked to lead humanity, or the race of your choosing, to the stars and to subject all others to your will. Who hasn't dreamed of being given the opportunity to oversee the migration to space? For the strategy gamer, this is one of the bread and butter scenerios that game developers have based multiple games around. But is Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords the next generation of space strategy games, or another great idea squashed by mediocrity? With our comms signaling 'we come in peace' and the phasors set to 'deep fat fry', we boldly stride ahead.

Installation and Setup:

Minimum Requirements:

Recommended Specifications:

The game came on 2 CD's. There was some swapping of cd's at the end of the install, but the install was smooth despite the swapping.

Note: Requires that video drivers be updated to drivers released in 2006 to run properly. This means Catalyst v6.x for Ati, ForceWare v84.xx for NVidia. When in doubt, go ahead and update drivers.

Note about copy protection: There isn't any, and there is a reasoning behind it. From the Stardock website:

"Our primary concern is our customers – the people who pay my salary. They’re my overlord and I don’t want to inconvenience them. Moreover, piracy is really about how many sales are actually lost. What we do is put out free updates after release. We got Editor’s Choice Awards from most of the major game magazines for the original Galactic Civilizations, and that was on the 1.0 version in the box. However, we put out tons of updates after release that greatly enhanced that experience.

So let’s say someone got a “warez” copy. If they like the game, they’re going to want the updates, and to do that, they have to have a valid serial number that is verified on the server side (i.e., no cracks). So at that point, we’re going to get that sale or we would have never gotten the sale."