We hope you're as excited to play GalCiv II as we are for you to get your hands on it.

So what can you do to make sure you have the best possible experience? Here are some suggestions:

1) If you have an integrated video card and you have a free AGP/PCIE slot, do yourself a favor and get a good video card.  For less than $100 you can get a decent ATI or nVidia video card that will make all your games run much better.  You MUST have at least 32 megs of memory on your video card. If it's a really old (i.e. >3 years) Intel Graphics extreme you may not be able to run the game because it won't support DirectX 9C.

2) If Option #1 isn't available, make sure you have the latest video card DRIVERS.  We're serious about this.  The game uses some fairly new graphic features that only recently are well supported by video drivers. We found during the beta over and over people having some problem and it turning out their video drivers were 2 years old.

3) Make sure your desktop display is running at 32bit color.  To do that, go to control panel, display properties, and choose 32bit.  We found that on some systems running in 16bit color won't run the game (or most other games, we have no idea why).

4) We did a lot of memory optimization to make sure the game runs on pretty low end hardware.  Still, if you're running around with a PC with less than 512MB, see if you can upgrade. The game will still run but it'll be slower.

5) The game will default, if it can, to 4X anti-aliasing so that things look nicer.  But if you have an older video card (a Geforce 5600 is an older video card incidentally) you may want to turn that off, especially if you're watching the video cut scenes or video tutorials (The 3D engine itself works fine). The game runs fine on Geforce 5x, but 4x anti-aliasing may be too much for some of the high resolution cut-scenes YMMV. Most of our testing boxes were this series (or ATI equivs) so don't take what I'm saying here as the game not running well on it.  It's just that 4X anti-aliasing is probably overkill on such a setup.

6) If you have Mcafee anti-virus, be aware that if you have VB script detection on it will give a warning when you run the game the first time. It's not on by default but it's useless anyway (it detects ALL VB Script as "a malicious script").  Our game launcher uses VB Script.

7) The game does not have copy protection but it does come with a serial #.  When the installer asks for it, it's optional but we recommend putting it in because it'll make it easier to get upgrades. Since it's optional, the installer doesn't check for the accuracy so be careful when entering it in (don't worry, there's an easy way to update your serial # if you do make a mistake).  The serial # is only needed to download updates.  That said, PLEASE DO NOT give your CD to others.  We are really trying to avoid putting copy protection on our games and every sale counts.

8) The game takes two CDs to install so you will want to make sure you have enough disk space (two CDs worth).

9) If you pre-ordered from us and plan to download the game, we expect to start letting people preinstall most of the game prior to release (next week) to decrease bandwith needs. We recommend taking advantage of this.

10) If you do run into a problem of some kind, there is a file called debug.err in your GalCiv directory that should tell us a lot of info about what happened.

11) The game will run at any resolution >= 1024x768.  So 1440x1050 or 1600x1200 or 3072x2200, it doesn't matter.  But the game will start at 1024x768.  Go to options and select the resolution you want to play and then reload.