There's a lot left to do in Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar. But most of the core new features are implemented, they're just buggy. VERY buggy. And there's little AI yet to take advantage of it and there's a lot of polish missing and UI crumminess and tons of other things.
Today I worked on some of the mega events. Coding a mega-event = Easy. Testing a mega event = Hard. They're a pain to make them balanced and feel right.
Take for example the Dread Lords event. In Dark Avatar, the Dread Lords might show up as a major civilization. Nice. But how tough should they be? How tough should they REALLY be? Well you don't want them just wiping everyone out and be game ruiners. But you want them to be challenging. Which means that you'll have 20% of people on the forums screaming that the Dread Lords are "broken" because they wipe everyone out, 20% of people saying the Dread Lords are a joke, and the rest thinking they work fine. That's how it always is. You also have the inevitable crash bugs. There's quite a few of them right now and we're cleaning them up. Big pain.
See our bugs:
What are those blue dots around my ship? I dunno.
Why aren't my agents nullifying their production? Dunno.
Missing symetry in that hard point.
Why is my civilization one of the listed opponents?
We also have a lot of graphics to get in. I have to implement the rest of the Mega events. There are quite a few and some of them will require more graphics than are currently present. The new soundtrack is really nice and the new intro video is probably going to be a lot better than the original.
I can say this, even at this rough stage, Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is a much funner game for me. Three things that make an immediate difference - the spies, the asteroids and the special planets. Not being able to colonize half the worlds until you get advanced technology - VERY big change to how the game is played. Having agents to wack your opponents with keeps players from getting too powerful without having to actually go to war with them. And asteroid fields give players a LOT more control over their economy based on THEIR strategy as opposed to randomly placed good/bad planets because players can direct where the resources from asteroids go to (with diminishing returns as they get further away).
People I think are really going to like the streamlining of the economy. The numbers for everything will be much smaller. Much easier to deal with and more intuitive to work with.
So while the internal alpha is pretty buggy, it's already pretty fun (the mega events are pretty fun too -- mega events are different from the random events in that they are more intelligent in who they effect and why). For example, a plague event that starts killing off the population requires players to research a tech to stop it. It's an expensive tech. Do you research it yourself or trade someone for it when they get it? If you research it yourself, you can trade it to others and get a ton of stuff. And that's just one of many mega events that we have in. Almost all of them change the gameplay in some way but not by imbalancing it but by adding a new gameplay element.