I have created another post that goes into this in more detail: Link

8. Be able to change your etical alignment whenever you want (not saying it should be easy: it should be a very expensive process that may take up to a year, just saying it should be possible)

10. Instead of always having to pick the crappy choices in rendom events to be a good civ, have approvaimately 50% of events reward good choices and punish evil ones. Neutral would stay as a semi-positive, semi-crappy choice. Actually, could be done as a mod, provided that the modder had far more creativity and skill with graphics than I do.

REPLYING TO WILLYTHEMAILBOY:

Good point. I like the idea of not getting the benifits until the money is paid, as well as the more expensive costs. As to the problem of players flipping , I was thinking of having the bonuses for choices that do not match your alignment be sharply reduced, i.e. if a Good player chooses an evil choice, that bonus is not nearly as good as if an evil player made the same choice. That would prevent the player from flipping to get the best choice, while still dealing with the imbalance I was originally trying to correct. Or, just leave everything alone and give good better bonuses after researching Xeno Ethics. The main reasonI'm writing all this is that I think the post-XE benifits for good are too well balenced, and, since you have to choose the crappy options in events to avoid being charged ( I usually operate pretty close to bankruptcy(sp?)), that balance is actually an inbalence. I don't really care how that imbalence is corrected, just as long as it is.

12. In the race selection screen, have the computer assign all of the ability points not assigned to abilities for AIs be randomly assigned. This would close the tried-and-true AI-nurfing strategy of giving your player all of the abilities you can while you give the AIs none, as well as making it possible to include something like the Pants Penalties mod as a default part of the game w/o screwing up the strategy.

Yeah, looks like this wish list has gotten a bit out of control. Guess that's what happens when you mix a perfectionistic streak with extreme verbosity.

11. As of DA 1.7-1.8 (somewhere in there) anomalies do regenerate.  You can still "run out", even in a gigantic galaxy, if you have enough survey ships.

12. My understanding was that at Tough and beyond the AI chose their own customization points, regardless of what you had set for them.  I can look into this, though.

1. This is in the latest TA beta, and will be in 2.0.  I believe it is for randoms only, not specifically for megas, but I haven't yet tested this.

3. A tech can still have multiple prerequisite technologies, but it doesn't display properly in the tree and tech 1 won't tell you that you need tech 2 to unlock tech 3; tech 1 and tech 2 will both tell you that you need that specific tech to unlock tech 3, though.  So you sort of have to remember what you need.  It's certainly worth noting that in the normal tech tree there are no such instances, but it's certainly moddable and does not in my experience contribute to game instability.

4. You might try the Ascension victory condition in TA, then.

With regards to TA: When you can afford it, anyway.

@Rhunteen

Thanks for bumping this thread.

As far as Linux goes, I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that GCII worked via Wine.  I recall a discussion about Impulse not working on numerous Linux distros, as it needs .net and IE7, but SDC (which was actually praised as working under Wine some time ago) is still somewhat available (albeit hidden) and at least has the most current versions of DL and DA.  Edit: Here's the link.

Since this [thread] is in the GCII forum and is about GCII, if you don't mind my asking, what other games are you talking about?

Rewriting the game from Direct3D to OpenGL would mean, well, a total rewrite of the graphics engine. That's really not a possibility, especially given that GC2 is rapidly approaching EoL.

I ran it on a desktop from 1998 or thereabouts without too much trouble...the main obstacle being the RAM.  Well, okay, the other problem was I was running it on integrated video, but that's beside the point.  CPU usage wasn't that high.

What are your specs/start a new thread?

You might also consider just toggling the option off to have the AI use max CPU.

That's your problem. 

Or, rather, that's both of your problems.

99% of the time, 224MB of RAM is 256MB of RAM minus what the integrated video is consuming.  And integrated video, on a laptop, from 2003...ouch.

Still, if you can find the right memory (if you have the model number it's a Google away), swapping out the 256MB that's in there now for 2x512MB would definitely help.  It does require that you actually open it up, but installing RAM is extremely simple, several years ago it was changed to be allowable without voiding the warranty, and in any case it's a 2003 system so there's probably no warranty left to void.

My guess would be perhaps $40-$50 for a gig of RAM for it (maybe less), but this is a stab in the dark-a model number would be helpful.

My other suggestion would be to increase the paging file size (and set it to a set size rather than letting it expand), but the only way this would help is if Windows were paging out other processes-if it starts paging out what GC2 is doing, then you're worse off than you were before when it needs that information again.

Update: I was able to coerce... uh... I mean CONVINCE my parents to get me a nice, fast new laptop for Christmas, and am now running TA perfectly.