Stardock's epic turn-based sci-fi strategy game just got a big fat update. It's now officially Galactic Civilizations II v2.0, which I'm pretty sure works out mathematically to be the same things as Galactic Civilizations III.

My favorite new feature is that you can play around in the spaceship builder from the main menu. Galactic Civilizations II has a flexible shipyard that lets you build and design your own ships, stuffing them with useful components and then adorning them with various doo-dads. In fact, I'd say it's even better than the spaceship designer in Spore, because it has more options to do practical things that have an effect on gameplay. Spore is awfully cool, to be sure, but it's all for looks.

The new Galactic Civilizations II patch also includes additional options for how to set up games, a new governor systems presumably makes late-game sprawl more manageable, espionage has been revamped, and the graphics have been improved drawing partly from work done by modders. You can read some unfiltered comments from designer and Stardock founder Brad "Frogboy" Wardell here. Wardell certainly has a knack for breezily demonstrating his games, showing you just the kind of stuff you want to see instead of iterating a bunch of bullet points.