what happens when you cut an enemy civ in half?

No it's the same empire they don't divide into different empires. the more planets you take from him the weaker he can become. However you better make sure he doesn't have a lot of trade routes with someone bigger than you because the other race might attack you for their own economic survival. The major thing to watch out for is does he have any allies, if so they will come to his aid by attacking you

have fun playing the game

rich

thanks for the super quick response. i am a looking forward to the game. from what i saw/heard (designer listening to feedback, catering to gamer's wishes, personally responding to questions, ai quality)

i will be getting it as soon as i hear even a few good reviews. when buying games i do the penguin strategy: let the first ones go into the water, and if they aren't eaten jump in after them.

although i still think splitting an enemy empire in 2 should be a bigger deal- that's a major event in most wars.

btw, impressive ranking!

It's not as big of a problem in GalCiv for three reasons: patrolling empty space is alot more difficult than patrolling a land border (read: near impossible), supply chains are meaningless when you consider that you're dealing with things on a scale of groups of individually self-sufficent planets, and because communications are difficult if not impossible, to cut off when you have a means of communication that propigates at superluminous speeds (sevral techs early in the tech tree create and/or suppose such).

Slicing his empire in half might impact trade routes, though, right?

Hi FFAristocrat!

If you capture the star system where the trade route ended/started from then those trade routes he'll lose.

but more importanly

if you destroy enought of the commercial trading vessels (they're the small ships moving along the trade routes) the commercial sponsors (it's a commercial not a military route) will cancel the route as being to unprofitable.
there is a random U.P.Issue that comes up that can protest trading vessels if voted on. In that case when you try to fire on a trade vessel you'll get a message from the u.p. forbidding you to do so (as long as you don'tleave the U.P.)

rich

'Slicing his empire in half might impact trade routes, though, right? '

Trade routes, at least initially, have to be to alien planets, so they're not really impacted that much more than the war already had impacted them just by being declared anyway.