On the positive side, reviews I trust say GalCiv2 is great – and it seems to have potential. And it's run fine on my system from the beginning. On the down side I’ve had "AI problems" from the beginning as well.

I’m running the most recent update – the released 1.1. I signed onto the Metaverse and played a small game against two opponents – just normal difficulty – to try things out. One opponent – the Drengin seemed to do fine. They colonized several worlds and discovered a variety of technologies. (Though I’m not sure they ever built an armed ship, though they had the technology – another concern of mine.)

The other opponent – the Yor – did manage to colonize one other world, but all game long their research pace was a flat line at the bottom of the screen. At the end of the game the report said that they had researched ONE technology all game long.

There was no war all game – no one held back the progress of the Yor. There were even other worlds left to colonize at the end of the game due to the "abundant" habitable planets setting. With two worlds even just the basic colony with no research labs would give them enough research points to discover several techs by the end of the game. But they did no research – and didn’t seem to build much else, either.

I dominated the game with over a dozen colonies and won in January of 2227 with an influence victory, but the Drengin managed to research various technologies. What was wrong with the Yor? I have saves available if someone wants to check one.