As Regards Spoilification
This isn't the first time I'd observed some tiny scene in a movie and felt like I could extrapolate the film, somehow. King Kong was a movie about a monkey making his crazy way in the big city. I'd never heard of any Skull Island. Hair was also this way. I was with it. They were dancing in the park, it was the Age of Aquariuuuuuuus, I knew about that, and then bam - on the plane to Vietnam. I also thought I had a pretty good fix on the Sound of Music, indeed, the hills were alive with it, but they go right from singing about whiskers on kittens to a bunch of Goddamn Nazis kicking down the door. These are pronounced shocks to a young man such as myself, frail of constitution, given to bouts of tremors and glossalalia even on a pristine summer afternoon. The idea that even The Sound of Goddamn Music played host to a writhing core of evil was simply too much for a mind already taut with those horrors which, if named, would spring as if from the very sounds of their naming unto a sleeping world.
Where was I? Ah yes.
So, if Weird Worlds is like a vacation but in outer space, and Sword of the Stars is like playing Space Captains after school on the Jungle Gym, then I think that I can step forward in this trajectory by saying that Galactic Civilizations 2 is probably something like going to work.
As you may recall, I loved the first GalCiv - so I was only too happy to pre-order the second one and gain access to the beta. That is, until I remembered that I don't really like playing betas anymore. I used to live for them, several installed simultaneously, here we go, but some internal shift ocurred at some point and now I prefer to play finished games. Weird, I know. Oh, and also, the beta for Anarchy Online destroyed my Windows partition, which did sting a bit.
GalCiv2 is, I think it accurate to say, en route to being the definitive star empire simulator. They're rarely made anymore, which I suppose improves the odds. More than that, however, is that Stardock is focused on making a full-fat, no excuses, honking angular Imperial Throne for you to recline in and manage your worlds. I think it's understood that if you want to succeed with this sort of thing, concessions need to be made to the market gods re: mechanical complexity. They are pretty much telling the market gods to go fuck themselves.
(CW)TB
no stumbling pilgrim in the dark


