Q. Can you do nothing but post like this?

Looking at your profile all you have done is moan, moan, moan. Fair enough some of your point have had a valid background but everything you have written here has been covered before in all of your complaining posts! I really dont see the need for this one after you have already posted the same over the last 5 of your posts. I can only ascertain you must either like the sound of your own voice or you are a compulsive moaner.
To sum this up, please spare us any more of this type of post.

Most people here will always try and assist where we can but "horribly programmed pile of crap?" is that really conducive to getting any help at all? With 99% of us having no issues with the game i would suggest you first look at your system and maybe tweak the game settings a bit. Checking you have the latest drivers is also a good idea and failing that, if you still have problems, then contact support@stardock.com who are a great bunch of people who will do their utmost to assist you through your issue.

You're new to Stardock products, aren't you? There'll be quite a bit more than one patch.

Perhaps you can post your difficulties and your debug.err file so we can try to help. Maybe your graphics drivers are old and that's why you get slowdowns. I've noticed the research screen popping up as well when you click that area, but come on, it's harldy game breaking. Actually it's the whole taskbar except the buttons that behaves like that. Just point more carefully and perhaps it will be fixed next time.

All I can say is that you seem to be the only dissatisfied customer I've run across. I can understand if what you're running with is true, but honestly, the bug is more likely on your end- as no one else has been able to reproduce it.

Besides, you're not supposed to run other programs while you defrag anyways.

Playing DVDs and running defrag will probably explain away your slowdown issues, mate. As for the bug, it's hardly game-breaking, is it? Just a cosmetic glitch, that only apparently occurs in the minority of cases where you're placing a heavy demand on resources (and possibly because of the defrag, you shouldn't generally do anything else while that's running). Stop complaining, produce a debug.err file for it and let Stardock know politely, then maybe you won't get such a frosty reception here.

Also: you can press Return or Enter (on the numpad) to take a turn instead of clicking the GUI. This will stop your problems with bringing up the research screen, and save you moving your mouse back and forth all the time.

Although I don't have any but anecdotal proof either, I do seem to experience the memory leaks thing, but I'm pretty sure Stardock are already aware of it.

I hate this game as well. I barely get any sleep nowadays. Must... kill... Drengin....

You are an idiot.

I was cooking a cheeseburger on my heat sink, spraying my computer with a garden hose, watching 3 movies at once on my DVD player (horrible grinding noise) and then loaded up Twilight and IT DIDN'T WORK AT ALL! How dare Stardock release such a flawed game!

Lol. Get a life.

Yes, but you are not supposed to do this. Official line would probably be, like for all games, close all other applications that may be using resources.

If you also want a bug to be fixed you should produce the debug.err file, found in My Documents/My Games/GCTwilight folder after the error occurs so the devs can have a look at it, see your systerm specs and see if the problem is on your side or the game's fault. If you are playing on a system that's ancient, plus doing everything else you are saying, well, that's a recipe for disaster, for all games, not only GalCiv.

I do notice a memory leak. My game will crash when it overloads my 2 GB RAM and 6 GB of virtual memory. When I restart the game it ends up using significantly less than what it crashed at (definately a memory leak). I also noticed that if my game gets overloaded once, it will continuously overload. However, I have had some games with alot more units floating around that do not overload my RAM (so I do not know what the source is).

*sigh* Some people have no idea how to get things done. I don't typically flame folks, but boy have you earned it. I'll see if I can restrain myself.

First of all, as already mentioned, you will get much better results in any task if you go about it in a productive manner. Would you help a person who came to you and said "I hate what you devoted the last 2 years of your life to! It is total crap! Now make it do what I expect!"? I know I wouldn't feel like it. I'm sure they still will, but how much better could they help if they really wanted to?

Second, you have no clue how the game is programed and obviously have no idea how programming (or computers for that matter) even work as evidenced by your ridiculous posts above. By the way, if you have a dual core processor and don't have the proper drivers loaded, the processor (not he game) will cause lots of weird behavior since it could report two different times to the game. You can also limit what processors any program can use in task manager, again only if you have a dual core.

Third, you would know if you had asked (or likely if you had even searched around for some answers) that Stardock has about the best reputation for updating their softare and games. They even ask us to give suggestions and ideas and put in what we ask for. Brad (the owner of the company and programmer of the AI) has even created a post asking us to please slam his game.

Fourth, where are your explanations of the actual problems? Where are the explanations of how to reproduce them? Did you even read the stickies on how to post a bug report or known bugs and how to get help?

Fifth, you are an idiot. Oh, I know you are frustrated and upset. I can understand that you want to express your emotions. I get that things aren't going as expected. But your arguments lack any kind of understanding of the situation.

That having been said. Please post a debug.err (you can find out how in the linked threads) and explain your problems properly and thoroughly so we can find a way to fix them. Brad, Cari, Kryo, and others often post answers directly to you. Email tech support typically gets back to you within 4 hours, including the responses you send. Why not give it a try before judging things?

Babamilo, are you retarded or just stupid? Personal computers, meaning "home" computers are only designed to do one major task at a time. This is how your CPU or Processor works. It can only "process" so many commands at a time. When it is trying to do too much at once it will hang and crash. While you may be able to play simple games like mine sweeper while watching a DVD, even high end PCs will not be stable if you are trying to play a DVD, run a defrag, and play a quality game. Also, in my experience (and you could know more than I do, I'm only A+ and Network+ certified as well as a Linux user) you can't do anything other than defrag while defragmenting your computer because it will hang often and eventually you will be told that it can't finish because something is writing to the drive.

Do the world a favor, stop using computers and don't reproduce.

You have to distinguish between processes(i.e. tasks) and threads. GalCiv2 is a single process with about 10-15 threads running during gameplay.
Threads execute at the same time and are vying for the processors attention to get their stuff processed. Its a basic principle and allows the computer to do more than one thing at once.
For example enable you to already adjust the tax rate in the economic screen while you are waiting for the computer's moves to finish.

I am using this sort of "blunt" language, because since Dark Avatar has come out, nothing has been done to fix these things. Now the final expansion pack came out and the game is still in shambles. Imo, they mostly focused on including eye candy and new features. Which is ok of course. But I would have liked to see more effort put into stabilizing the game.
It reminds me of EA. EA releases a game, then errors/bugs become apparent. Since funding has dried up and the game is unlikely to generate any additional revenue with or without a patch nothing is done about those bugs and you are stuck with a nice but half-working, annoying game you would just *love* to play if it wouldn't cause you to pull your hair out while playing.

So Babamilo, how's your "strategy" working for you? Not too good, huh? Well, if your goal is to annoy and complain, then I guess it's working just fine. But if your goal is get your game working, then I respectfully recommend you change your methods.

Stardock is not perfect. No developer is. But if you've been using their products as long as you say you have, then you should've come to the conclusion that they do actually care, and will try hard to solve problems as they come up.

Since the game has been in development for quite some time, the logical assumptions are a) the bugs you're finding are rare, and/or the bugs you're finding are specific to your system.

Either way, if you want it fixed, please be proactive. Stop running so many darn processes at the same time, install SmartException, play the game until it crashes, then send the results, plus what you were doing at the time of the crash to Stardock's support.

It all comes down to picking to deciding what YOU want to happen, then choosing the appropriate behavior so that goal is accomplished. Good luck to you.

-HM