Played half a game so for, and it looks like Dark Avatar is going to be a winner!

First of all, hats off to excellent stability for a beta - played halfway through a game, no crashes in the game itself until I decided to invade a planet.

Exiting the game, however, is a tad different: I don't always manage to get back to Windows when quitting.

Overall, it's an excellent game, though! The updated graphics are cool, and all of the new features fit very nicely with the rest of the game. Starting the game was a lot easier - even though I still have to plan the planet race at the beginning carefully, my economy didn't go into the red like it does in GC2. I didn't manage to capture very much territory, though, but I blame myself for that. I was still able to keep pace with my allies/opponents, though .

I retired once just to see what the epic generator does. It's nice, but I can see why the devs are having second thoughts about it: It looks pretty hard to implement. Writing prose has never been an easy task for computers.

Instead of writing prose, perhaps more detailed information at the end of the game can be given to the player, or perhaps recording the game so it can be played back? Although the epic generator would be nice to have, I don't see it as a must have - the game would still be great without it.

You should still keep the code around, though - even if it doesn't get released with the launch of DA, perhaps it could be added later.