Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor [PC]

That initial meeting essentially set our strategy for the rest of that game. Yes, the Krynn want to aggressively convert everyone in the universe to their faith, but by pursuing the diplomacy/proselytizing track, the Krynn become "bombard the heathens with pamphlets" rather than the "slaughter the unbelievers" sorts of missionaries. We pursued a program of building influence starbases, spreading the truth of the Word across the universe and pushing back the influence spheres of both the Yor and the Iconians. Our superior spies on the home worlds of our opponents let us know when they were building attack craft and our continuing diplomatic efforts managed to set the Yor and the Iconians at war with each while world after world voluntarily transitioned to our control.

The Yor and the Iconians didn't take this lying down, naturally. The difficulty of pursuing such a strategy was it almost guaranteed that the Krynn would not be as well-armed as their opponents and left a number of weakly defended influence-generating space stations just waiting to be popped by a hostile fleet. This got even worse when we discovered "Ascension Crystals" spread liberally around the map. These are part of a new victory condition being introduced in Twilight of the Arnor. A player who builds a space station around one of these crystals starts accumulating points toward an "Ascension Victory." Doing so seemed to fit naturally into our policy of building missionary stations everywhere we could. As it turns out, the only thing more annoying than super-aggressive religious zealots stealing your planets is when those same zealots might actually have a shot to transcend this plane of existence. The result was probably predictable -- both sides eventually declared war on us.

Our response to this was to use weapons technology stolen by our spies and minimal weapons research of our own to create fleets of defensive vessels that could act as pickets in sensitive areas. These lightly armed fleets were defensive in every sense of the word. Their major function was to use their "Righteous Fleet" modules to just put up a good fight and move around harassing the enemy while we continued to pump out a continuous stream of constructor fleets to build more influence stations. Since we were technologically inferior to our opponents, we lost a lot of ships and a lot of space stations. They, on the other hand, lost several of their major production planets to cultural conquest and a big chunk of their income as their trade routes with us dried up. Gold and God is a pretty powerful combination in any era.

Subsequent games using the Krynn played out very differently once we decided to start converting heathens by the sword. The Krynn weapons tree is laid out to require a lot of investment to reach truly advanced weapons and hull design is a completely separate line. Despite this, Krynn are able to get Terror Stars (star system-destroying space stations) relatively early in the game because they branch off of early weapon research, not hull design. Placing hull design on its own line means that the most efficient Krynn fleet design is a whole lot of tiny vessels that are able to overcome enemies using swarm tactics. The result is a technology tree designed to create starship versions of suicide bombers and a "scorched Earth" military doctrine. Pursuing this track, of course, meant that we couldn't focus on the Krynn's diplomatic gifts, but it's remarkable what having about a zillion fanatics ready to embrace oblivion can do for a negotiation.

According to Stardock, the beta 6 version of Twilight of the Arnor is "feature complete" with the remaining time dedicated to tweaking and balancing. There are certainly a few things to work on including an occasional graphic bug that made the entire screen dim, an AI for evil races that doesn't seem aggressive enough and actually turning on the Ascension victory condition. Based on Stardock's past history, though, there seems no reason to doubt that any minor issues will be cleared up by the April 23rd release. The good news is that the version we played is already so good, we already can't imagine Galactic Civilizations II without it. How could we live in a world where the truth of the Krynn isn't made manifest?

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