If you like Galciv, but are turned off by the battles, try Sword of the Stars (should you ever tire from AI wars).
It's basically TBS with real-time battles, where you can use tactics to defeat a superior force (which is impossible in GalCiv). After three expansions and numerous patches, it has a reasonable AI and a good game balance. It also has a deep research tree (like GalCiv), but in every game, there are random holes in this tree: you cannot always research everything. And you only find out that "Super-cool-weapon-on-which-your-strategy-relies" does not exist when all preconditions are met, yet it does not show up.
The best part of the game is that each of the six races uses a totally different concept of movement between systems:
- humans use fast movement through wormholes (like AI Wars), but cannot move from A to B unless there is a wormhole.
- bugs don't use wormholes but use excruciatingly slow movement. However, once they are at a planet they can teleport instaneously to any other planet they control
- crows move fast in big groups but slow in large groups
etc. etc. and yet the game is fairly balanced.
SOTS could be considered a prequel of AI Wars: in SOTS there are certain AI-related techs that provide large benefits to your ships and planets, but there is a % that the AI will become sentient, form a new race and turn on you.
Even worse: sometimes one of the other races has this mishap, and this will also promulgate to you. Of course, all the AIs will band together and declare war on all other races. And since they are hyper-efficient, this regularly results in the AI destroying all races and taking over the galaxy.
The entire galaxy?
No, in a small corner, a tiny band of humanity survived ....... But that is another story.
