I'm unsure which patch version is in the box of Ultimate, but registering your game via Impulse will be how you can tell that you are up to date.  BTW, Impulse will be the only way to patch the game, so IMHO you mine as well get that part over with.

Unless your internet connection is slow or are too young to own a credit card for purchases, I'd just recommend a direct download of the game via Impulse....less clutter around your house.

If one of them starts off with "GC2", don't use that one per the thread here

When in doubt, contact support at support@stardock.com

Yeah...sounds like an email to their support would be warrented.

The serial number for my retail copy of Ultimate is on the back of the manual. It's a set of six hyphen-separated 5-character sets.

Way too long for me, but I know some people are in to that sort of thing. By way of comparison, I find medium-galaxy, medium-tech GC games are longer than comparable, standard continents Civ4 games. But perhaps it just feels that way, as I haven't noticed a game clock option anywhere yet.

Isn't figuring that out on your own part of the fun?

The fundamental production and economy systems in GC are very different than Civ. Unfortunately, they're also rather poorly documented both in-game and online. Coming from a serious Civ player's perspective, I suspect you'll find this to be true of nearly every aspect of GC - there's no single source of GC information even remotely comparable to CFC's War Academy.

Anyway, the short gloss on the economy... the only thing that is actually *created* in a turn is money. Money comes primarily from taxes, trade, and tourism. Production and research are not created - they're merely bought from your total capacity as determind by your labs/factories. So building lots of labs/factories can easily put you in the hole - not only are you paying more maintenance, but now you're producing/researching more and thus paying more to do so. You can adjust the percentage of your capacity you utilize on the economy screen if you find that you've overbuilt, but of course you're best off finding some more income in order to use that capacity. Note that percentage-based economic buildings have limited value at the beginning of the game, since they boost your taxes and are thus based on planetary population. Your production/research sliders are applied after the overall capacity slider. So, for example, if you're running 90% capacity and 30% military/30% social/40% research, your labs will generate 90% x 40% = 36% of their listed research points.

There are lots of other modifiers thrown in there for things like starbases, resources, racial abilities, and focus, but that's the gist of it.

There are as many differents ways to play this game as there are players and that's what's so hard about giving someone specific advice. The best way is to just dive in and play and then ask as specific questions as possible.

Everything is a balancing act between colonizing new planets and developing ones you already own. As I said there are many different strategies and they all work.

One quick piece of advice is that often the best thing to build is *nothing*. Letting your planets sit a bit just letting the population grow is very often the best thing to do. Don't be so quick to build buildings that just increase your maintenance costs unless you have a specific need for the building. In line with this if you feel that you have to be building something then build an economic building. Given that your population is low they won't have that much of an effect but they usually don't have a maintenance cost associated with them and building them gives you something productive to do while your waiting for your pop to grow.

Also the size of your galaxy and the number and difficulty of your opponents willl make a big difference in what you want to do. In large galaxies you typically want to try and colonize as quickly as you can and not overspending early can allow you to colonize at a much higher rate for longer periods of time. In smaller galaxies it's more important to get to those free planets as quick as possible and spending some of your initial cash rush building colony ships and spaceports on new colonies can be very worthwhile.

Like I said it's very tough to give specific advice to general strategy questions. Your best bet is to start down a particular path and ask as detailed questions as possible when you run into problems.

As far as difficulty levels, tough is indeed tough. There is no shame in turning down the difficulty level to get a handle on the game. However I do recommend that as soon as you feel comfortable at a level that you turn it up a notch. It's very easy to let yourself develop bad habits that will work against the lower difficulty levels but are death against decent competition. As I said tough is indeed tough and the AI plays a very credible game at that level, but I don't think that much below that is something that should be used for any extended length of time.