But even the stock cast is fun to tinker with, as each comes to life with its own bonuses, personality, and quirks which reveal themselves in everything from the text prompts for trade and treaty negotiations to hidden humor in the tooltips. This wealth of customization extends right down to the races themselves, to the point that you can create your own Stormcloak faction and upload a high-res photo of the Dovahkiin as your faction leader should you so desire (don't judge). That's to say nothing of the options to set the frequency of black holes, stars, and galactic events that affect the lives (and passive bonuses) of all the races in the galaxy. That's the kind of map that could keep me busy for a year, although I worry that the ridiculous approval penalty for having a large empire would cause my empire to collapse from within long before I won. Over 155 increasingly tedious turns in, all I ever saw were the annoying pirates I'd signed for during map creation, and the five other civilizations I specified at the start (out of a potential 100) might as well have been extinct. The latter is big, even to the point where it occasionally caused my GTX 780 to stutter and complain when I zoomed in on some of the busier stuff, and I never did see it at its full potential. Then there’s the bevy of map options, which can start you out with a "tiny" parcel of space that you could maybe conquer in 200 turns or less, or with a sprawling "insane" map that spans lights years in any direction. For starters, there’s the inclusion of six victory conditions, including everything from basic conquest to yes, the ascension to a higher plane of existence. However, Galactic Civilizations enjoys such a wealth of victory conditions and customization options that the experience feels new with every playthrough. You start out with only a single planet and a couple of ships, and you're expected to exert your influence over everyone around you across dozens or hundreds of turns until you control the whole shebang. But let me be frank-there's not a lot here that's truly different from 2006's beloved Galactic Civilizations II instead, we have polished forms of the genre's conventional trappings.
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