Question from a Galciv noob

Sorry but I don't know, I only play sandbox.

Hopefully the bump your post will get from this non-helpful response will let somone who does know see it.

Would this be merely the design itself? (the bling)
Or would it also include weaponry?
To be honest I wouldn't know either, the bling would be transferable by designing a ship without the weapons, support modules etc. Then saving it as a template.
I suggest you try this out yourself, isn't that hard to test, just take a small hull and add some bling, template it, load DA and see if it's there under templates.
With weapons, I sincerely doubt, weapons have had an overhaul in the shift, probably not compatible.

But as I said, I do not know. (Don't play DL)

another (maybe dumb) question:

I can't find where or how to build an alliance with other races.

there is no "offer Alliance" in the diplo screen.
I researched alliances and gave the tech to all other races...

also can't find anything in the manual...

can someone tell me how to offer an alliance to another race?

thnx in adv...

KG

You need two things. Firstly, the the race must show relations as "Close" in the diplomacy screen. Secondly, both you and the other race must have perfected the yellow "Alliances" tech.

You can bribe races to friendly relations, but you cannot bribe them to close. Once friendly, close relations occur on a seemingly random basis. It's important to increase your diplomacy rating by researching the yellow diplomacy techs. Build the Diplomatic Translators and Galactic Showcase special projects made available as you perfect them. Establishing trade routes with a praticular race can help bring relations to close. Trading economic or research treaties may also help. Being of like alignment helps so it's better to try and form alliances with similarly aligned races. Having a higher military rating that the other race will help quite a bit, the higher the better.

If you have close relations and the alliance option still does not appear, check the race has the alliances tech. You can give it to them if they don't have it and the alliance option will show up.

BTW, Dread Lords (DL) and Dark Avatar (DA) store ship config files in different places with different formats so they're not transferrable. DL ships are DL ships and DA ships are DA ships.

ah.... that is what was missing.
thnx a lot for your explanations.

Yes. I have done this once with a jewelry only design of about 100-200 parts. I designed a survey vessel in DL that I really wanted to bring over to DA. All of the jewelry parts that exist in DL exist in DA (with better/different textures) so you can bring a ship from one to the other but not the reverse. I do not know if the ship will technically be metaverse safe however, since I never mess around with the metaverse and haven't tested my ship. What you must do is copy the .xml & .shipcfg file from Galciv2\ships to GC2DarkAvatar\ships folder in the .xml file you must change this line:



to this line:



That should allow you to find the ship in your shipyard, provided you have researched the appropriate hull technology.

Warning: There are some differences in the sizing and rotation algorithms for some parts between the two games, so it is likely that some pieces will be rotated wrong or sized wrong you will have to fix them manually but it is a heck of a lot easier than trying to figure out how to rebuild a ship from scratch.

It shouldn't be any big problem, but if you do have some, I am usually on the ship design thread.

Sorry for the double post, the coding you need to change got blocked...

Yes. I have done this once with a 75 (went and counted: my previous estimate seemed a little high) piece jewelry only design. I designed a survey vessel in DL that I really wanted to bring over to DA. All of the jewelry parts that exist in DL exist in DA (with better/different textures) so you can bring a ship from one to the other but not the reverse. I do not know if the ship will technically be metaverse safe however, since I never mess around with the metaverse and haven't tested my ship. What you must do is copy the .xml & .shipcfg file from My Documents\My Games\Galciv2\ships\ to My Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar\ships\ folder. In the .xml file you must change this line:

xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"

to this line:

xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" standalone="yes"

NOTE: Obviously, "UTF-8" is used by Dread Lords and "ISO-8859-1" is for Dark Avatar.

Of course you should leave the "<" "?" and "?"">" at the beginning & end of the line.

NOTE: Notepad can open the .xml file and the .shipcfg file (you will need to associate it with those extensions) and if you close Notepad it will offer to save your changes. Select yes. If you try and use the "Save" or "Save as" options in the File Menu you will find that Notepad cannot save files as .xml or .shipcfg...but if you just hit the close button in the upper right corner it will...go figure. You may want to send a copy of your original files to the desktop beforehand in case you mess up this process some how.

Saves you the trouble of downloading an xml viewer.

That should allow you to find the ship in your shipyard, once you have researched the appropriate hull technology (if necessary).

NOTE: You will now need to start a new game in DA to see your ship as your ship will not appear in the shipyard of a previously saved game.

WARNING: There are some differences in the sizing and rotation algorithms for some parts between the two games, so it is likely that some pieces will be rotated wrong or sized wrong you will have to fix them manually but it is a heck of a lot easier than trying to figure out how to rebuild a ship from scratch. More importantly however is that NOT ALL HARDPOINTS ARE THE SAME BETWEEN THE GAMES...anything that is attached SHOULD stay attached where it is, however if you remove it you may find that there is no longer a hardpoint underneath the piece to put it (or something else) back on. It is because of this that I am not sure an imported ship would necessarily be metaverse compliant.

It shouldn't be any big problem. The number of parts may play a factor in the transition, I don't know, but I had no problems...if you are talking about ships with a massive # of non functional components I guess you'll just have to try it out and hope for the best...