I personally like both GalCiv2 and Sword of the Stars. They play very, very differently though. If you would like to control (or at least choose to control) your fleets in combat, Sword of the Stars is it. It's entirely possible to win a battle through better tactical control even with fewer or less technologically advanced ships, which i find a compelling reason to play.

GalCiv2 has a much more rewarding diplomacy model, and more options than "kill everything to win." It's possible to get an alliance win in SotS, but really a military victory is the most likely win scenario.

I guess I can't really recommend one over the other so much as point out their differences. One thing I would suggest though, play the demos.

Sword of the Stars can get extremely boring at times. Late in the game every single enemy planet will have a full complement of defensive platforms. Meaning that your fleet will just get HAMMERED by wave after wave of super long range undodgeable missiles.

Your fleet will always start far away from the planet and the only ships that can survive the barrage are point defence ships and shield ships, both of which sacrifice so much offensive power that they can barely take out the turrets once they get there.

Both are pretty good games. If I had to pick the better of the two (I have both of them as well as all x-packs) I would say GC2. The last x-pack just put it over-the-top by a big margin feature and function wise.

I can't say I've had the problems you're describing with late-game planets. Put lasers in your small mounts and you've got a good amount of anti-missile defense, especially from the planets where the missiles come from a known vector. I sometimes ignore point defense (and rarely get shield technology in my tech tree) completely, since planetary defenses aren't that much of a problem unless you've got no fleet to speak of.

Or research biowarfare and take the planet population out that way Had one game where cloaked biowarfare ships were my main offensive weapon.

You have to defend against missle weapons with point defense lasers or phasers.  In late game rocket weapons are near useless for defending against a dedicated assault.  You can build many different types of ships on many different types of technology.  Since the research tree is random you cant depend on one type of technology strategy.  Some times, for example, you wont get point defense or phasers.  In this case you will want to invest in sheilds, light lasers or lots of armor.

Random events can be very unforgiving in Sword of the Stars.  I have seen all surviving races team together to take out a threat that spawned in. You can turn these events off, but the horror factor of not knowing what might be floating out in the dark can be a lot of fun.  Some things you fight, some things you run from.

You can also send ships against an enemy system and raid commerce there.  Piracy gets a lot more personal.

That doesn't account for how many missiles there are. There were points where I tried sending in ships armed with nothing but point defence. All of the platforms targetted one ship and it was quickly destroyed. There were so many missiles flying in that they got through because the point defence was busy recharging.

I got bored of it pretty quickly though so I never took the time to integrate any advanced tactics.

Maybe it's a difference between vanilla Sword of the Stars and the later Born of Blood (and A Murder of Crows) expansions? All I can say is defense satellites, when I run into them, are only a nuisance.

I had a fleet that was 3 normal (not shield, not point defense only) cruisers interdicting a developed world. One cruiser didn't have a drive anymore (which is one of the reasons they I didn't have them leave). Instead of abandoning it, I sent a repair ship that direction which was going to take about 9 turns. They just hung out at the edge of the system and destroyed missiles until the repair ship showed up.

Generally I take along a few destroyers armed with lasers/phasers/PD/whatever-I-have to act as missile defense when attacking a colony while my cruisers take along larger weaponry because if you don't take anything to combat missiles, yes they can be a problem. Usually then I destroy all or most of the defense sats (manually targetting them). Still, I rarely run into a world with more than 5 small and 5 medium sats. I could see coming up on a planet with a full complement including the largest taking awhile to pound through.

If I didn't like to play out the battles, though, there's no question in my mind that GC2 is the game to pick. On the other hand, if you want weapon placement/ship design to matter beyond rock/paper/scissors then SotS is great For me, they fulfill different gaming itches so I like 'em both.

in sword of the stars u can play as a dolpin species wich i personaly found very cool

I have to agree with 44RS. The Liir are awesome,and i personally wish i had the time/knowledge to port the Liir over to Sins.

  Maybe thats what the Vasari are running from.... extremely angry space dolphins.

I find that Sword of the Stars is far more satisfying combat wise. Zooming in and watching your ships duke it out and actually being able to command them tactics-wise is far more entertaining than the Galactic Civilizations system. That being said, the Diplomacy/Research/Colony Development (Pretty much everything besides combat) is far more interesting in Galactic Civilizations.

I did enjoy the differentiation among the SOTS races. There were only four, but there were far more differences between them than there were for (12?) races found in GC2. SOTS required a lot more strategy.

If I'm in the mood for simple downright fun, I play SOTS. If I'm in the mood for challenging diplomacy/development, I play GC2.

To tip the balance for a must have, I can only agree with the above: teleporting space dolphins kick serious ass.

thank you all for your input, i have gotten the game Sots and have been playing it for a while. one question i do have is are you able to refit your ships or do you need to build a new model every time you research an upgrade?

There's no auto-upgrade, if you get new weapons you need to design a new ship. You can, for a fee, upgrade existing ships I believe. I don't think I ever have, just using them for cannon fodder if they've become too outdated (or scrapping them to recover some of the material).

There are a few upgrades that apply without rebuilds/redesigns, missile improvements and accuracy for mass drivers I think, but they are rare.

I dont believe you can refit old ships.  You can scrap them or position them to the back lines where they can still perform defensive roles for a while.  If you watch  AI fleets, sometimes they are held back by ships with primitive drives and at times you can see every type of weapon they have represented. 

Additionaly Born of Blood adds radom encounter types, diplomacy options, technologies, ship types, and a new race.

A Murder of Crows adds another new race and a bunch of other new stuff, too.

Sadly, Stardock doesn't have AMoC available via Impulse (SotS and SotS:BoB both are). I really wish they did, because I'd like to pick up A Murder of Crows but am not sure how the expansion would interact with the games installed via Impulse.

You can install AMoC over the Impulse version of Born of Blood. Unfortunately, the Impulse installer doesn't set up the registry correctly when SotS/Born of Blood is installed, so you need to edit both the install path and version number in the Sword of the Stars registry entry before installing AMoC from Gamersgate.  A Murder of Crows is definitely worth the upgrade.