Craig, long time no see. Actually my case is probably unique because although I purchased DA close to a year ago, I've never installed it mainly because of not caring for SDC. In any case that's not really the point, there still are folks that have never bought DA and even folks that have DA that still play DL. I have no real idea of the mix of folks playing which rev but my off the cuff guess is that it may be as high as 1/3rd still play DL.

Hope to see you around more.

Hey Mumblefratz,

Good to see a familiar handle.

I totally understand about SDC. I have the same feelings about not wanting to install any more software than absolutely necessary. My main concern is software that installs startup items or user level drivers that can slow down my system or worse, interfere with important software. I also don't like the way some software installations replace shared .dll files without the user's knowledge.

That said, I did have to break down and install SDC in order to load all the latest GC2 stuff. So far, it seems to be an innocuous program and I haven't found that it installs anything undesireable. One thing nice is that it handles all the key authorizations transparently and keeps track of version data.

The complete GC2 w/DA download takes quite a while, about 1.5GB of data, so you want to avoid that process for secondary installations. Unfortunately, SDC doesn't handle the installation packages in a very user friendly way. To "archive" and "install from archive", you have to use a misleading selection from a right click menu. First a selection to download and second, a selection to install. When using the obvious "install" button, SDC copies installation packages to a cache directory then deletes them after installation. It always downloads and never looks for installation packages in the archive directory. What SDC should do is archive always and install from the archive always. Then it should prompt the user on whether to remove the installation files or not. That way, you only need to hit the install button after copying the files to another computer. If you try it out, you'll see what I'm talking about. I was thinking about commenting on this in the Stardock support forum.

Okay, later.

Yes. Don't worry, I'll get there sooner or later. I will play DA just as I will play TA. The question is not if, it's just a matter of when.

When I joined the Diplomats a little over a year ago one of the main points that was driven home to me by some of the long term members was to not burn yourself out over the game. I think I've done that rather well. A big part of my continuing to play DL is that I still find it fun and exciting and still find things to improve about my game. It is inevitable that I will eventually tire of DL and when that happens I will still have DA and TA to look forward to.

Mystikmind, I can understand the frustration but as long as your objection is more of a practical nature as opposed to philosophical then I suspect that your problem is not insurmountable. I'm sure that the folks at either sales@stardock.com or support@stardock.com can help get you get straigtened out. There have been a couple of recent threads about this subject and I don't see any great need to replicate them here as they do sometimes tend to get a little bit strident.

In the meantime, I'm sure you remember Craig as well as I do and will join me in welcoming him back to the game and the forum.

Welcome Back Craig it has been a while.   

I'm a proud owner of DA and preorderer of TA, but I'm also still mostly playing DL for a lot of the same reasons Mumble mentioned. I'm just not through with it yet   .

I'm still playing DL, since I haven't a credit card like Visa.

DA, even with updates is much harder on my computer than a similar setup in DL. I can run a gigantic all abundant in DL and not have to start turning down graphics options till I get up to a few thousand ships. DA, I have very little chance of seeing a gigantic all abundant to fruition playing a minimalist.

Although I have bought DA last month, I still play DL and have not installed DA yet. It is just that I like DL very much and want to get better at it before I move on to DA.

You aren't the only one but there is apparently some kind of issue that at the least involves more work for Stardock. I have to assume that there's a good reason that they no longer provide the standalone installer. This has been discussed a bit as you can imagine, sometimes rather stridently. The latest I've heard is that there still may be occasional releases in this manner but the next version where this will be expected is v2.0 and currently there's no scheduled date for that release.

Currently, I play nothing! I'll be getting the Gold Edition box on the 3rd and I can only open it after the 18th due to exams. Once that all is done, I plan on playing DA sandbox first and then DL sandbox, followed by the DL campaign, and then DA sandboxes again until December when I'll get TA. After that, I won't be able to decide.

At first, I liked DL better because of:

- Better engines.
- Better espionage system( in my opinion ).
- Better campaign( once again, IMO ).

But then, I began liking DA more because of:

- Super Abilities.
- Mega Events.
- Better defense systems.
- More logistics.
- Mining system.
- Better graphics in general.
- Much better ship hull designs.

Like Konk, my gaming computer is not on the net and this computer I'm posting on has a broken CD drive. So I won't be able to update until I get it connected( by mid-October or early November ).