After failing to start those games (see above), I decided to give
Galactic Civilizations 1 a fair try. (In my OP I had
mistakenly referred to "Starport's Galactic Empires" when I was really thinking of Stardock's "Galactic Civilizations 1".)
It installed fine. Though, I had to read through the docs to discover the v1.05 patch that comes with the install disk - which had to be installed
manually.
I started some new games, looking for an ideal world and starting location, and read through the manual and strategy guides. And I gave it an honest go. I did not really give it a real chance before. That said, it's still bad.
It obviously takes some inspiration from other 4x and space games. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The meeting of the Federation of Planets (or whatever) every few years to vote on topics is obviously from the Master of Orion series. And I believe some inspiration - such as some of the random events - may have come from something like "Strange Adventures in Infinite Space".
I didn't care for their random events. Nothing good
ever happens unless you choose an "evil" option that has serious consequences later. It's nothing more than a morality litmus test - short term vs long term rewards/penalties. In some cases, bad things will happen
unless you choose the evil option.
What's unfortunate is how the only adjustments for AI opponents is picking their alignment (good, neutral, or evil) and a difficulty rating from Beginner to Genius. You can't even change how the races look. Also, it's limited to 5 opponents, though one can turn them off so you only have 1 through 4 opponents.
What's bad is the clunky interface. This makes everything three times more tedious than it ought to be - making a chore out of something that should be fun. I even made and printed out a keyboard shortcut diagram and I memorized the few shortcuts, but that doesn't help much. It's just that the layout is terrible.
What's worse is how the AI players
cheat and are impossibly difficult to defeat, even on "Normal". To be fair, if I replayed the game over several times, learning more each time, I'm sure I could beat them - even on Normal. But that's not the issue: All AI opponents are
aware (as stated
in-game) of the
entire galaxy! And, so, they make a beeline to colonize all habitable planets in their range. The only way to compete with this is to pump out Colony Ships yourself at a 200% spending rate (spending twice as much in Military as your monthly income, rapidly depleting your reserves) and try to beat them to these planets - which is only practical by cheating and knowing where those few habitable planets are.
It just turns every new game into a literal "space race" which becomes a tedious micromanagement to beat your opponents to the most valuable resources (planets, mostly). One can't even spare the resources to do research until later in the game, when all the habitable planets in range have been claimed, by you or your opponents. This makes the first 50 turns or so with all players stuck with
beginner technology! Combat isn't usually an issue until late game. This makes the first half of every new game
boring. (At this point, I wish I'd given MOO3 another chance instead. And that's saying something.)
What's
awful is how the Military / Social / Research sliders are an all-or-nothing affair that apply
equally to all your planets! It's impossible to devote one planet to research and another to building a social project, while a third to building a ship. Well, you
could, except you'd have to balance the sliders to spend equally - meaning, those billions of credits your spending on each planet is mostly going to waste! The best solution I can see is to make sure all your planets are doing the same thing: Either building ships, building social projects, or doing neither so as to devote to research. That way your money isn't being wasted. Problem is: Most of the time the majority of your planets won't have a good reason to build a ship or social project, meaning they'd be better off doing research. You can't set local tax rates on a per-planet basis, either.
And it's glitchy: The sliders to adjust the Spending Rate and Income Distribution (Military, Social, and Research) are buggy. I'll have them set and switch to a different menu... then click [Next Turn] and wonder why my Colony Ship was not produced - even though the last time I looked it said "0 turns" to completion.
Also, I found a rather annoying bug. If I load a saved game and try to repeat what I was just working on (say, loading up colonists), it will crash-to-desktop - almost every time. It doesn't help much, either, that you can't turn off the intro movies (though, you can click to skip) and the main game menu takes several seconds to load because of the fancy animation.
Then I realized that, in all likelihood, Stardock has a more recent patch.
So I went to Stardock.com and GalCiv1.com and found there was a v1.2 patch now. And beyond game balances and bug fixes, it even comes with expanded content and a new cheat mode. It's like a whole new game.
Unfortunately, I purchased the European CD version. Neither the Stardock Central update software nor their websites will recognize my CD Key as a valid serial number. I'm SOL as they will only allow the download if you can register your software! Obviously, I'm not impressed with Stardock.
UPDATE: After several email messages (including requested photos of my game disk and CD Key to prove I owned an
original), I finally got an updated version. There was some issue with registering my CD Key in particular. Just my luck.
They gave me a
Steam code to play the Altarian Prophecy version of GalCiv1. (A nice gesture. But that was another 800+ MB of downloads on my slow connection.)
And... Yes, some issues have been fixed or improved. I started the Campaign Mode and it is nice to have a story to go with it. Also, I do appreciate the new cheat codes as it allows me to see the map and play on somewhat equal footing with the AI empires. (Which is the only code I use.) However, the sliders for Spending Rate and Income Distribution still act glitchy. And the game difficulty is still pretty high.
What really made my blood boil, though, was when I discovered that the space anomalies, space junk and such - which add up to be very useful - will randomly and slowly evaporate! They will all disappear by mid to late game regardless of whether or not anyone grabs them up! (I checked: Many disappeared while the AI was in no position to grab them.) As my race bonus I had a really high ship movement, yet I could not get all of them in time - they just disappeared on me.
Also, none of the manuals or strategies guides made it clear that having a relatively high tax rate will
cripple your population growth - to the extent that your empire will rapidly fall behind the others. Even if none of your planets are revolting or have an approval rating below 50%, it still does this.