Starting this week, tens of thousands of people will be jumping on to download gigabytes of game at around the same time.  This means, naturally, that some percentage of people are going to have problems.  This post is here to answer some questions and provide a place where Stardock support people can also help.

Don't worry! We will take care of you.

Stardock Central:

The most common problems we've seen people have revolve around two things:

(1) Someone who bought the game with one email address but has used a different email address to be on the forums.  That's fine, in fact, probably a good thing to do.  But it may confuse Stardock Central.  If you run into that, just email support@stardock.com with the subject:GalCiv Stardock Central problem.  They will fix you up.

(2) Some of our long time users have multiple accounts on our sites.  Same issue as above.

(3) The base game will download slower than the other modules.  In Stardock Central there is a menu called tools. Go to Settings, pick Internet and you can try a different server to see if that helps your download speed.  The base game should download at speeds from 30k/sec to 300k/sec depending on where you live, time of day, etc.  The bulk of the game, however, should download at whatever the maximum your connection is as we have set up mirrors world wide.  The base game is being set up so that we can update it very often. The  other stuff won't need updating (i.e. movies and such) so we can mirror that more.

(4) Activation. If you are downloading the entire game, there is an activation system built in.  Don't worry, you will be able to keep installing the game, even years from now, on your new systems without having to talk to us.   However, because the activation server is likely to get hammered, there may be some issues that will crop up.  Don't worry, just email support with the above. IF you don't get an answer within 1 hour, feel free to post in this thread.

(5) IF you had the beta, you can install on top of it and it should work fine.  But if you do run into problems, reinstalling is a possible solution (yea, that's a lame answer).

(6) IF you switch servers, there may be some modules that look like they need updating. Trust your own judgment. If you just downloaded the latest/greatest version and you switch servers and there's an update that you didn't hear about, it's probably due to minute differences in the time stamps.  This probably won't happen but given the sheer # of mirrors involved, it's possible.

(7) IF you purchased the retail version, you can skip Stardock Central entirely if you want and just download the "patch" from Downloads area. 

(8) IF you are downloading on one of the first days, bear in mind how many other people are also downloading. Download resume should be working fine so if for some reason there's a server time out, don't panic, you can resume where you left off. 

(9) MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE LATEST STARDOCK CENTRAL. 2.29A.374 (or later).

Thanks to the preloading we did last week, we don't expect any huge issues.  But due to me saying that, just now, that naturally means something will go wrong. For you.

We'll be camping out here, not just me but the support team, the development team, my mom, and of course the tech support guy who has "It's working fine here." set as a hot key.

Stay tuned and good luck!