Every empire needs an army, in Galactic civilizations you have the opportunity to build your own ships and have to research space weaponry to be able to have ships that bite, but they are most definitely essential in protecting your planets and attacking other civilizations to gain resources and a larger empire. To build a ship you have a choice of using the templates provided and adding pieces that you need for a specific ship you may need to build or you can completely start from scratch making your armada of battle ships completely your own design. Personally I found building ships one of the most complicated parts of the game. Although the pieces where at the side of the screen there were no descriptions of what the parts actually did and how they would benefit the ship for whatever purpose you wanted to use it for. Once you had finally mastered making your ships you could put them into fleets and put them on sentry or guard duty on planets and starbases which is very important to protect your livelihood. Having a high manufacturing planet being taken over and being in trade with another race may ruin your empires income and over all can slow things up.

On initial perusal of Galactic Civilizations II, I found the main interface very complex and confusing. It’s only when you go into the tutorials that you start to understand what each part of the interface means and does. But even with the tutorial you still find yourself aimlessly clicking on things hoping that they will do something positive to improve things. This game is most definitely specified for the older generation as it didn’t really keep me engrossed for very long before. I felt as though I really had to focus myself to get involved with the game and the music was dark and annoyingly repetitive after a while, if you like your civilization games like Risk and other earth-based versions this is definitely the game for you. It certainly didn’t engage with my game-playing brain cells.