Thomas Lawrence: Absolutely nothing to do with the above: have you gotten around to Twilight of the Arnor yet, Tom?

Thomas Lawrence: Ah, so you are lined up to review it for PCG? Good good. Will it be in the July ish?

I've played a couple of games of it now, my first experience with GalCiv II having bought the megapack on a whim (another sale secured almost entirely by your AAR blog with the Spectres of Agony, no doubt).

In any case, I like it. The fancy new race specific tech trees are mostly well done (although there are a few annoying flaws at the moment connected to some races missing starbase upgrades). It strikes an interesting middle ground with them - they aren't utterly distinct (a good 60-70% tree is still more or less identical for each race), but it isn't just a few token techs for each race either, and in some cases it does require an interestingly different approach. Particularly with the Thalan, although their tree is one of the ones most hampered by lacking starbase upgrades they ought to have.