thanks for the update chojinXYZ

and thanks to Tandis for taking the time to answer

I don't think the full extend is realized yet, though.

Exploit of the samegame bug:

This bug can actually be an amazing exploit under the right circumstances. Like if I find Rangers...and then keep reloading and reloading while the enemy gets destroyed. No one produces, but their entire fleet gets destroyed.

This needs to be fixed, stat. How can this not be a priority, yet some eye candy is!?

1.11.029: same ol' - same ol'

Saving has speed up a lot though.. that's nice.

Huh? It's supposed to be *intentional*? That's GARBAGE. You can see the times I have to go to work, because the entire galaxy grinds to a halt for a turn, dropping all the bars to zero. You can still move... but not build, not make money... it's absurd.

Hi!

the entire galaxy grinds to a halt for a turn, dropping all the bars to zero.

I remember a MoO2 random event: A time warp anomaly has occured in the system XY. No ships could move, and no production happens (in about that form ) It was annoying, if it was your big production/research center.

Just think of the "load" bug in GalCiv2 as a similar event on galactic scale, and everything will be OK. If anyone wants to abuse it, he can go ahead. He's cheating only himself, not us.

IIRC even after reload I was able to BUY buildings. IIRC that was the only thing I could do to beat an Ai at grabbing an important galactic "wonder" once in a game.

BR, Iztok

No news... Someone called echelon said here, that it would be addressed in v1.2...

Just think of the "load" bug in GalCiv2 as a similar event on galactic scale, and everything will be OK. If anyone wants to abuse it, he can go ahead. He's cheating only himself, not us.

The problem is, if you play on huge galaxies and only have a small amount of time, it completely screws the whole game up, independantly of what you really wanted.

And in case this was a "feature", intended to prevent exploits in the Metaverse, the fact it's allowing for other exploits (that might be even worse) makes it inefficient at its own purpose.

So, please, kill it, and that's not so unimportant. Maybe it's a very hard bug to solve, and then I'd understand, but if it's not, please do it. That's far more important to the gameplay than having a better 3D jewels interface.

Hi!

The problem is, if you play on huge galaxies and only have a small amount of time, it completely screws the whole game up,

I don't see why the game is screwed. You can't produce anything, AI can't either, and about the only thing that works is moving ships.

If you don't have the time for gigantic galaxy, use something smaller, or put the game in background and do what you need with the comp. If you need to turn the comp off , do it by hibernating it. You will continue from where you left the game. Takes some minutes for the game to revive, after you start your comp again.

BR, Iztok

I've returned the game to the store, luckily I could get my money back, they could understand that there was no way I was going to pay for a game where you can't even load and save whenever you wanted.

I'll buy the game again once this is fixed, cause the rest of the game is really nice.

If you don't have the time for gigantic galaxy, use something smaller

Don't tell someone to play on a small map, some people have preffered styles of playing, I get ABSOLUTELY NO satisfaction on playing on a small map! I like my games to last as long as possible against the most difficult opponents. Small maps are for players with small brains (I don't mean to offend, but it's true). Playing on small maps is for players who want action, instead of strategy. Too bad there aren't many real strategy players around anymore, everything has to be fast and with great graphics and stuff, where are the good old days where players really took their time for a game, like playing one game that takes you half a year to complete. I gues that playstyle is bad for business...

Well, ignoring us oldstyle strategy players is bad for business as well! I think most of us don't speak up, since I'm usually not the type to speak up either.

or put the game in background and do what you need with the comp. If you need to turn the comp off , do it by hibernating it. You will continue from where you left the game. Takes some minutes for the game to revive, after you start your comp again.

With all the bugs this almost never works for me, whenever I try to come back the first time there's about a 50% chance the game crashes, whenever I try to come back a second time there's about a 90% chance of a crash. I've also tried it on another pc (a faster and better one), but there the game sometimes crashes in the middle of a game for no apparant reason, very annoying when you've just spent hours getting a game started (in the early stages of the game the load/save bug is much more dramatic, since it has much more impact on the overall balance of the game).

I don't mind crashes and bugs, as long as you can save and load without any dramatic side-effects there's no problem, just a little annoying. Too bad the developers are more interested in fixing other bugs and adding stuff while that won't solve any problems for me. Leave the crashes! Leave the bugs! Leave the add-ons! Just fix load and save...

I don't see why the game is screwed. You can't produce anything, AI can't either, and about the only thing that works is moving ships.

When half the turns of a game are non-production ones, then the experience with the said game is screwed. It doesn't mean the two sides are not on equal foot, it only means the gameplay gets destroyed.

If you don't have the time for gigantic galaxy, use something smaller,

I figured that solution out all by myself, but that's by obligation, not by choice. And it does reduce the variety of playable games (not forgetting that map size does affect gameplay).

or put the game in background and do what you need with the comp. If you need to turn the comp off , do it by hibernating it. You will continue from where you left the game. Takes some minutes for the game to revive, after you start your comp again.

Very easy to do for me, as Galciv2 crashes when I alt-tab (probably due more to my comp than to GC2).

No news... Someone called echelon said here, that it would be addressed in v1.2...

well I don't know about final 1.2
but it's still not fixed in 1.2b1 ...


I'm seriously thinking about doing a sort of Poll or Petition with for example www.petitiononline.com
to raise this particular bug on their priority list but I don't know if I can do a poll here
and I think anything external would not be limited to galciv2 players ....
which would seriously limit its credibility
what do you think ?

This might be related, and I'm sure you've noticed if you play gigantic maps and reload saved games a lot like me because you have to break to go to work: the influence borders are shrunk when the game first loads, and they don't expand all the way out to where they should be until 2 whole turns later. Also perhaps related to this is if you Alt-Tab out of the game and then back in, the influence also appears to get messed up so that the in danger of defection icons disappear around most of the planets that had them before the Alt-Tab, and don't reappear until 2 turns later.

Hi!

I like my games to last as long as possible against the most difficult opponents... Too bad there aren't many real strategy players around anymore, everything has to be fast and with great graphics and stuff, where are the good old days where players really took their time for a game, like playing one game that takes you half a year to complete.

This sounds like you're describing a typical Stars! PBEM game. If you don't know what I'm talking about visit us on starsutohost.org http://starsautohost.org/stars.htm , and try a game or two.

BR, Iztok

Hi!

> put the game in background ... Very easy to do for me, as Galciv2 crashes when I alt-tab (probably due more to my comp than to GC2).

Try to run game in window mode. It hasn't EVER crashed on my comp because of alt-tab.
To run it in window more, open properies for the shortcut that runs your GalCiv2, and add after the galciv.exe a space and word "window" without quotes.

Br, Iztok

Hey whismerhill, thanks for checking I updated the main post.

I haven't found the motivation yet to play another round of Galactic Civilizations 2... I can't believe Stardock is thinking of expansion packs already. At least you can finally upgrade from within the fleet manager window, if I understood the ChangeLog correctly. I'm starting to lose motivation to try and get this save game bug fixed..

This bug also existed in the original Galactic Civilizations.

It seems like it should be an easy fix; setting a flag or resequencing the order in which the game performs its between-turns calculations. But without knowing how the code is constructed, it may be that the issue is very complicated.

The bug may be buried so deep in the 3-year-old code ported from the original that it's not something that can be easily fixed without breaking other elements of the game.

well perhaps I'm mistaken but if they can't find the bug in the code they might apply a patch over it: (I know it's not a pretty way of doing this but it's better than nothing !)
here's a sample of what I'm thinking about :
-Event : On click // Object : TurnButton
before doing anything save the in game date
after everything is complete check the in game date
if both in game dates are the same
then set all ships to 0 movement & auto-restart this event

ok perhaps I'm completely mistaken, I'm just a very very small programmer, that was just an idea thrown around

if stardock people comes here, please remember that in no way am I judging any of your work
just consider this as a suggestion

If the savegame bug was intentional to prevent metaverse score manipulation, why not at least add a checkbox to the options disabling the bug which also disables metaverse submission. It would have to be greyed out of course during a game and also flagged to the game when first saved to prevent cheating and only enabled to be changed at the main menu with no games loaded. It really is a game stopper to us perfectionists.

P.S: Why does every forum I go to automatically delete one of the spaces after a full stop (sentence). There's supposed to be two spaces after a full stop, argh.

Posted on this same issue a few days ago. I've come to believe it is deliberate and i agree that it is a show stopper.

I was in the "this isn't really important" camp on this until yesterday. Then I lost power during a storm...

...with my last save having been in the middle of a war, one week before my factories would have completed a wave of fighters to repel transports...

Foot, meet mouth.

I have seen this bug in every version of the game I have played, specifically the demo, V1.0 and V1.11. It occurs in all games, Metaverse or not. Personally, I consider it a really major bug, and even if it is deliberate, it could still be considered a bug, since we the players all hate it. Also, the principle behind saving a game is to return to it as you left off. In this game, aside from halting production, the influence borders are just wrong for a few turns afterward, and then they don't return to their previous positions, the planet quality is reset, and any added but unused tiles are removed (a bug Stardock is trying to fix). It sounds to me like they have a general problem with their save/load programming. If some of it is deliberate ... well, then they deserve the other problems they now have to fix.

People are still suggesting lameass workarounds for this 'feature'? Can't SD just either fix it or say 'too bad, you lose, it's staying'?

It was deliberate Please reference a source in which someone from Stardock said so. Thanks.

Well, this behavior was in the game and spotted since the november 2005 beta (yes, before the release), sincei t it so obvious. So you can be sure that they are aware of this behavior, especially since they have spend sometimes on gigantic map to search for UI improvements.
But basically is the problem is:
- prevent the savel/reload cheese
- allow some legit use of reloading without penalizing it
- don't introduce more exploit

Now, if you look carefully, there are some adavantages about the fake turn on reload: take a carefull look at the influence borders Saving all influence data would be too costly, especially on gigantic maps will all races. If you have ever played GC1, you will know the problem on 2 turn to get a correct influence map after reload.

And the problem is only linked with the free movements for ships: as you may have spotted, you can't use the extra turn to rushbuy 2 improvements on a same planet.

I've returned the game to the store, luckily I could get my money back, they could understand that there was no way I was going to pay for a game where you can't even load and save whenever you wanted.

I hope you haven't registred you serial Id: second hand version aren't supported by Stardock.

BTW, not all games have the feature to save and reload whenever you want

not all games have the feature to save and reload whenever you want

a game like galciv2 without save feature ????
well it would be a buy stopper for me