This week we're starting to work on the Civilization Manager.  Galactic Civilizations I didn't have a Civilization manager and some people thought that was definitely something we should have.  And we agree.  BTW, the screenshot doesn't have anything to do with it, just wanted to have something pretty to go along with this blog entry.

So what does the Civilization Manager have on it?  Four things:

Civilization Summary

This is a screen that displays in brief information about your civilization. What your form of government is, what your ethical alignment is, what your political party is along with what advantages/disadvantages those things give you. It should also provide you with some basic information on how well your civilization is doing in various categories (basically duplicating what's on the stats screen on domestic policy).

Planet Summary

The second tab displays the planets in your civilization. While there is a button that lists ships and planets, the point of this is to provide much more details summary information in a full screen way. You can change what you're building on these planets and see your approval and production all in a nice big table.

Time Line

The third tab displays a full screen view of all the available line graphs on all the civilizations. This is similar to what is available in the mini-context area at the bottom if you click on empty space except this is a full screen window with some configuration options.

Victory

This fourth tab displays what your victory status is. That is, how close you are to achieving victory in the various available paths.  This gets to the heart of this discussion -- the real heart of GalCiv IMO is that it truly has multiple paths to victory. More play testing is put into balancing this than any other part of the game.  Strategy games typically include multiple ways to win but as a practical matter, there is an "easiest" way that everyone always ends up either choosing to use or feeling forced to use as the difficulty increases.  In Galactic Civilizations there are 4 paths to victory:

• Military Conquest. This is the tried and true wipe them all out strategy.  Conquer everyone else and you win.
• Technology Domination. In GalCiv II, there is a technology path that takes you down to a technology victory.  You can take this path though it is incredibly expensive to do and requires that you sacrifice many other areas of research. But if you can hold off your enemies long enough, it's achievable.
• Influence Victory. This is where your civilization's influence has spread over nearly the entire galaxy.  Influence can best be described as your culture.  You can extend your influence in a multitude of ways but the most obvious is through cultural starbases.
• Diplomatic Victory. This is where you build an alliance with all the remaining players.

The technology tree in Galactic Civilizations is designed to allow people to pursue very distinct strategies. Each path is supposed to be equally challenging to achieve.  Depending on the player, some paths will seem easier than others. But the goal is for all the paths to be objectively equally challenging to achieve.