Okay, I dunno much about "threads" and commenting in this format in general, but I gotta make my case... I'm a MOO fanatic who tried MOO3 and lost my mind trying to figger out what the hell those bastages did to my favorite franchise. Then a pal told me about GCII, showed it to me, sung its praises, etc. Well, I think GCII (I bought the DL+DA Gold box right off the shelf, and therefore had NONE of his registration problems ) is the SH*T, no holds barred. I love it even for the fact that my laptop (Celery 1.46, crap RAM, poop HD) runs it like Rain Man on a rack. But there's a HUGE problem (for me) and a few minor troubles worth noting. This thing where "civ of siilar ethical alignment" gets warrish or warred upon -- and then I have the "option" to go to war to support them or not... but both "yea" and "nay" equal "yea". That's a real bummer for me, since I'm a diplomatic playa. So it really pisses me off to have settled everything down a bit and then have to deal with a sudden conflagration I CAN'T say no to. So then I check out the updates here... let's just say -- based on what I've read -- I wouldn't update my game on a dare. I'll just have to play like my aforementioned buddy does (give no quarter, love no one) and get militarized to the max until a STABLE patch hits the wind. Poop. While we're at it, why do half (or better) of the hardpoints lack positional and rotational symmetry? I'm anal about my ship designs (best feature, BTW). As for this discussion board, whycome my ENTER key doesn't make for new paragraph? Maybe it's just me. Other minor issue: if writing dialogue for a game is so hard, you developers can feel free to call on my talents -- no charge, really! Want a good joke? Howabout adding "Towel Survival Tech" to the tree? Looking thru the manual, I see the developer takes great pride in the AI. I call this "pulling a Molyneux"... I mean, it's good AI indeed -- but we'll never really know HOW good, will we? Finally, I agree with other comments about the ship combat engine, as regards the optimal/non-optimal defense calcs. I'm no slouch at number-crunching, and I detect a few operational defects here and there. But I want to say again that this is the best turn-based strategic space sim out there by far (at least, until Stardock hires me as a designer!), and not even the diplomacy, trade, dialogue, and occasional CTD can take that away.
