deservedly so.

only thing that bugs me is that performance really isn't all that better than in DA. at least not on my system.. so i'm stuck with icon view

I'd give it a 7. Based on my experience with GalCiv1 (years ago) the Trade system appears buggered.

Great job, Stardock! Let's hope the perfect scores keep rolling in.

Wow, superb take by James Allen on the whole concepts introduced by TA.
I'd say that if someone doesn't know anything about this SD's core gaming product, they should carefully read that stuff.

But to me it's more like 7.66666../8... since, i believe some corrections (better Espionage, MicMan of Constructors, etc) and enhancements (mostly to the editors features & options such as DA backward compatibility!) must be done before this title goes straight to 7.99!
Cuz, in my world - perfection doesn't exist. Even though, version 1.92 (DA&TA) is comin'.

Yes, everyone should regularly visit that particular person's site who has exactly the same nickname as I do...ahem...yes, he is great.

Next stop, 9 out of 8.

First of all, I'd like to say that Out of Eight is one of my favourite review websites and that Galciv2 is a game that I consider among the best of its genre, so take what follows the right way, since this may be just a critic for the world of game reviews in its entirety.

Although I'm generally fond of James reviews, the Twilight of the Arnor one seemed a bit too focused on the good points, but maybe because he honestly didn't notice all the bugs, or didn't notice that the game shipped with no manual whatsoever, or that some tech trees are bugged to the point of being unplayable, or the Vista compatibility issues...

My opinions is this: in its current form ToA is definitely not a perfect game, sure we can hope that everything will be fixed, and with Stardock good fame on updates, we can positively hope that that will be the case, but at least some of the most glaring problems with ToA should've been cited in the review, and a more proper 7/8 should've been awarded this time. On a side note, James says he enjoys ToA more than Sins, another game he awarded with 8/8.

As I said though, I'm sure James was totally honest in his review but I wonder if after all these serious bugs have been discovered he doesn't think it would've been better to rate it a 7/8. The fact that the game doesn't have a manual is honestly enough to label it as an incomplete product.

Actually, I write game reviews too from time to time, but when I realized that to really give the community a reliable service you needed to invest a huge amount of time on each reviewed game to be sure you were not missing out on bugs, or on very good features the game might show some hours into it, I decided to review only games I knew like the palm of my hands. Now, I'm not saying James didn't do that, but it's a safe assumption saying that if you spend 10 days on the forums of the game before sending in the review, it's more likely that you may come to know something you hadn't noticed earlier and revise your review/vote accordingly.

One of the reasons I pointed this out, it's because in another review (Armageddon Empires 5/8) James seemed very critical on "bugs/UI complaints/no multiplayer stuff/stuff that may be patched but we don't know if it will be" and decided to dismiss AE with a 5/8, whereas with similar aspects of ToA he was much kinder.

Again, this is not to say that ToA isn't a better game than AE (I bought ToA but I'll probably buy AE too since I liked the later demo which streamlined some parts of the interface), but the difference in treatment the two games got was at least deserving of mention IMO.

I'd like to add that I'm not involved in any way with Armageddon Empires/Cryptic Comet and that I used AE only as an example, and I really broght this up only because I really care both about Stardock's games and about Out of Eight reviews.

I didn't notice any of the bugs (I use XP) you mentioned in ToA...bugs can be hit or miss and I missed them I guess. Getting the quantity of games I do doesn't let me devote the complete amount of time to each and every game that I would like, but I do feel I definitely play each title enough to give a thorough review. Averaging 2 games a week means I have to play about 2 games a week, so there you go. I'd like to think that Out of Eight covers a wide range of PC games that the "big" sites ignore in addition to more mainstream titles.

As for AE, I just didn't like it as much as seemingly everyone else does. I did get the first version of it so a lot of my complaints are most likely corrected now.

Oh, and thanks for reading my site!