Gamasutra has posted an excellent
postmortem on the development of
Galactic Civilization II. The feature is especially interesting as Star Dock isn't a large developer and they took a bit of risk in developing the sequel without the backing of a major publisher (they used 2K Games for part of the distribution and AEG for PR but they did everything else on their own). If you wanted some more behind the scenes on one of the best games of the year so far it's worth your time.