How to update Gal Civ II Gold?

SDC has been discontinued for some time and replaced by Impulse.

It won't show as installed because very old installations didn't use the same registry entries. However, you can get Impulse to recognize it by clicking the blue menu button at the top left and using the Detect Application option. Just pick games, GalCiv2, and point it at the folder. Repeat for Dark Avatar, then you should be all set to update.

Okay thank you very much. I have tried your instruction, and Impulse detects and imports Dark Avatar no problem, but it won't import Galactic Civilizations II, even though it automatically provides the correct path of folder the game is installed in. It automatically detects the folder location, but then it says there is no Gal Civ II in that folder, when I click on the Import button...

Since the update to GalCiv2 replaces nearly everything, it might be easier to simply uninstall it and download the entire thing from Impulse.

I never install from the CD anymore. I simply install Impulse and log in, then install GC2 - which installs the latest version.

I'm not going to download the game and waste my time and monthly bandwidth when I can just install from a CD, just to get a friggin patch. I'll just reinstall it from CD again and see if Impulse can detect. If that doesn't work, then it just an example of why there is so much piracy these days. I don't see why a loyal and paying customer like myself has to go thru this BS. But whatever.

This makes two!  I can't get Impulse to recognize my Galciv II install, either.  I pointed it to Dark Avatar, and that was accepted OK.  However, Impulse won't accept my original Galciv II install.  I have Galciv II "Gold" (the original + Dark Avatar in one pack)

I'm not gonna get tempered over this, but I have to agree with Zebulahn in so far that it is natural to install from CDs I own, and receiving a patch shouldn't be such a chore. I've been playing PC games for over a decade, and that has been the order of things. 

Sure, I can uninstall and reinstall via Impulse download...  but why download 1.3GB when all I am looking for is a patch?  Perhaps a 1.3GB download isn't a big deal for some, but not everyone has $50/month unlimited broadband.

Seems to me there is a bug in the Impulse software, especially since you gotta have the original Galciv II installed before any expansions.

I don't think it is possible to install Dark Avatar by itself with Gal Civ II Gold, so we'd have to download both, which is like 1.6 or 1.7GB? Seriously that is a lot just for a patch.

But I am tempted to download as I have been playing unpatched I have noticed several bugs. I hope I don't have to and there is a solution, because forcing people to download over 1.6GB just to patch their game is kind of unfair, no?

If detect app isn't working and you can't redownload, contact [email protected] and they should be able to provide you with a .reg file to get Impulse to pick it up.

I uninstalled and then downloaded from Impulse A-OK. I am good to go, technically.

However, my point is that not everyone with broadband has transfer speeds rated in Mb/sec, and some people even have metered access when they download over a certain limit, their ISP will slap extra fees on their account.  While I am not among them, there others who do have limited internet access, even over broadband.

To expect someone who has physical discs to just rollback, uninstall, and download the game is not a good customer solution.  Not for everybody.  As Impulse clearly has a problem detecting Galciv II install, that bug should be addressed and fixed as a priority.  It looks very unprofessional that Stardock's own game management software fails to detect one of Stardock's flagship games.  Just my $0.02.

So I've downloaded the full games from Impulse. It took a while since for some reason Impulse servers don't advantage of my full internet capability. It was downloading at 450 KB/s speed only, even though my full download speed is around 1MB/s.

Anyways, game seems I don't notice the bugs anymore. Planets now have tiles with resource bonuses, survey modules now have a cost, etc. I also notice that that the launcher program (DAlaunch.exe) is now able to load. Unfortunately when I click Play the Game, it doesn't detect that game has been installed, it even tells me to install using Stardock Central, lol. So, yeah, that's kind of weird...

Hey guys it has been quite a while. After a long break from the game and with my exams completed today I gave in to the urge to haul out GalCiv 2 again. After blowing off an impressive layer of dust I experienced similar problems to those above.

I had an extra hiccup that I wanted to share incase anybody else encountered this problem.

I installed off the discs I had first (Gold Edition). After I ran into the registry problem outlined above I tried reinstalling from my discs again. Then a quick google search found this thread. After some grumbling to myself I opted to download the game and the Dark Avatar expansion.

Then I tried to run Dark Avatar from the Impulse menu. The splash screen came up. Play game. I got an error message saying that I needed to run setup or reinstall from Stardock Central.

More grumbling and poking around in the game files. Then I figured it out.

When you install the game from the original discs it places the game in the Stardock directory. When you install the updated version of the base game from Impulse it creates a new folder called Stardock Games.

I'm guessing either of the following two things happened:

1) When I reinstalled Dark Avatar it updated the version of Dark Avatar I had installed in the Stardock Directory

2) When I reinstalled Dark Avatar it searched my computer for a copy of GalCiv2 and stopped looking when it found the Stardock folder install path instead of proceeding on to find the copy installed in Stardock Games.

The simple fix was grabbing the Dark Avatar folder from the Stardock folder and merging it with the Stardock Games install.

All of this was on a Vista machine.

Now I can put off my desire to play no longer. Good day!

Edit: A side effect of my manual manipulation is that it will no longer launch off Impulse (Presumably because the file paths no longer match - Will this have any effect on future updates?

I have the same problem and just tried what was recommended here and though Impulse detected Dark Avatar it does not detect GalCiv II. This is really a problem because it was asking me to install Dread Lords to play DA (even though it IS installed) and I could not launch either game. Had to un-install and reinstall from the CDs again.

I'm downloading the games via Impulse it while I play the outdated CD version. Once that is done, I'll have to uninstall the CD versions and re-install the Impulse versions just so I can get the darn updates.

This should not be happening, Stardock needs to get on the ball and fix this.

This is a solution for the Galactic Civlizations 2 GOLD edition to be recognized/imported into Impulse.

I don't recommend anyone going into their registry to make changes (Backup up your registry before making any changes if you do decide to edit it)

The following is what I needed to do on a Windows 7 PC:

From the START menu select RUN

type REGEDIT and press OK

Navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Stardock\Drengin.net\GalCiv2"

The variable "EXE" The name of the file it is looking for

The variable "Path" is where the the above "EXE" file should be located


Now in my case the EXE file was "dalaunch.exe" and my path was "C:\Program Files (x86)\Stardock\TotalGaming\GalCiv2"

So in this case I was able to copy the "dalaunch.exe" from "C:\Program Files (x86)\Stardock\TotalGaming\GalCiv2\DarkAvatar" into the above GalCiv2 directory and Impulse then detected it.