Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar is the expansion pack for Stardock’s award-winning hit strategy game, Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords. This expansion pack not only adds the usual content that expansion packs tend to do such as new opponents, new units and a new campaign. It also greatly expands the game play of Galactic Civilizations II. New features include asteroid belts on the map that can be mined for resources, unique planets that require special technologies to colonize, spies to conduct sabotage and destabilization (or used to protect your worlds from the same), the Epic Generator, new types of diplomatic treaties, an enhanced artificial intelligence engine, and much more!

• Custom Civilization Opponents. Players can now design their own opponents within the game and then play against them. This includes both what the opponent looks like but also how it plays.
• Espionage Agents. Many of the reviews of Galactic Civilizations II have made mention of how the game allows players to win through many different strategic paths. Espionage agents give players the ability to win through covert operations. Spend money on espionage to hire agents who can sabotage production, research, morale, farming, etc. on enemy worlds. Or use them to snuff out enemy agents on your worlds.
• Special Worlds. In Galactic Civilizations II, all worlds could be colonized by all players. That will change. In Dark Avatar, each world will be of a certain environment and only civilizations that know how to build colonies on the proper environment can colonize until they research the proper technology.
• The Epic Generator. One of the most popular community building features of Galactic Civilizations II was Stardock’s release of epic stories of various games the developers played. Dark Avatar will include its own epic generator that will actually build (in HTML) the story of each game the player plays to read later or share with others that gives the story of each game.
• Asteroid Fields. Near worlds are asteroid fields which can be exploited by nearby worlds by players. Players will have a variety of asteroid bases they can construct. No longer are planets and galactic resources the only types of "space terrain".
• Diplomatic Treaties. Players will be able to establish research and economic treaties with alien civilizations. In this way, they have other sources of money and research and have more tools to influence diplomatic relations.
• New Computer AI options. The advanced artificial intelligence in Galactic Civilizations II has been one of the most appreciated features of the game. For the expansion pack, players will be given new options on just how the computer player will play (what algorithms it will make use of, whether it will "cheat" or not, how much CPU to give it) in order for players to get the best experience possible.
• Two new races. Two new civilizations will be joining the mix.
• New Ship parts. The popular ship design feature will get a lot of new content to design all kinds of new ships.
• The new campaign. A new mini-campaign will also be included to continue the story where things left off at the end of Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords.