To help beta test? I'm a fan of stardock, but not that fanatical

Feel your pain, with the Civ 4 comment. My GeForce 5200 does feel marginal now after that. Take Age of Empires 3, a RTS that came out at the same time. No problems whatsoever, with Civ4 it's like I need to get a whole new machine...
for a turned based game. That's what burns me up over it.

Thank you Stardock for even considering lower end graphics card.

Is there a way I can have it on 2 machines to test? [/endquote]

Download Stardock central on new computer, goto options put in your name serial codes/ emails and passwords.
Haven't tried it, since I can't even access the internet at work hope it works

Download Stardock central on new computer, goto options put in your name serial codes/ emails and passwords.

Yeah, but is that legit? Most software has a "you can only use it on one computer" type policy in the licensing agreement. I'd rather have Stardock's blessing and an official way to do it.

I'm just offering in response to Frogboy: I have access to a 32MB video card at work, and I can test on it after hours, but I'm not sure how to or if I can install another copy of the beta onto it.

Don't consider this statement authoritative, but at one time I seem to remember stardock saying that it was "you can only use it on one computer at a time." Install it as many times as you want, just don't have different people playing it at the same time.

This is changing for GC2, they've put in activation to limit you to installing it on a certain number of computers, but that number is still greater than 1. I've got it installed on three machines at this time (my gaming machine, my lower end machine my GF uses, and one friends machine I spent Thanksgiving day at so that I could continue testing while everyone else dealt with the food ).

Popup Target has it:  You can install it on multiple PCs that you own, but you shouldn't have more than one copy running simultanously.

We don't care very much how many machines it's installed on as long as only one copy of it is being run at once.

Cool, thanks, gave it a whirl and posted my amazing discoveries.

Edit: Well, I did post them, but the post is nowhere to be found.

Tried posting again, still can't find the post. It should be in Beta Reports.

Here's what it said, I'll remove this if the mystery of the missing post is solved:

Started the game, noticed the text was sitting low on the buttons on the title screen.

Clicked to start new game, noticed there was no spinning galaxy graphic.

Also noticed the Back/Next buttons were only showing the top half of the graphic.

Clicked next all the way through, the loading screen appeared. The robot chick graphic appeared squished vertically and didn't take up the whole box.

Then the game crashed.

I attempted to post this, and somehow failed. No crash log appeared in smart exception. I right clicked the desktop, settings, advanced, adapter, properties, driver, update driver... and it installed a new driver and I rebooted.

I restarted galciv2, stardock and smart exception. Then I noticed there suddenly was a crash log for galciv2.

In the game, I repeated the steps above, and everything was the same as last time. The crash log from smart exception is still there, but clicking "submit exception report" doesn't seem to do anything. So here it is:

......................................

Stardock SmartException Logging Information
-------------------------------------------

OS Version : Windows XP
Video Card : 32MB ATI Rage 128 Ultra
Application Exception code: C0000005 ACCESS_VIOLATION
Crash Addr: 10008F46 01:00007F46 C:\Program Files\Stardock\TotalGaming\GalCiv2\Lib3D.dll

Processor Registers (x86):
EAX:00000000
EBX:00000000
ECX:046F7DF0
EDX:00000009
ESI:046F7DF0
EDI:046F7DF0
CS:EIP:001B:10008F46
SS:ESP:0023:0012FA7C EBP:02D179F8
DS:0023 ES:0023 FS:003B GS:0000
Flags:00010202


Current Application Call Stack:

Addr Frame Logical addr Module Name
---------------------------------------------
10008F46 02D179F8 0001:00007F46 C:\Program Files\Stardock\TotalGaming\GalCiv2\Lib3D.dll


Debug information for each stardock app follows ....

......................................

and that's all there is in the file.

Hey everyone,

I'm not sure if it's my place to speak here since I'm not a beta tester. However, map size and the "epic" feeling are, I believe, incredibly crucial factors in 4x strategy games. I feel the GalCiv team would be making a mistake if it were to sacrifice a feeling of open space for those with lower-end graphics cards. Granted, you can't bet on everyone having the latest piece of hardware in their PCs, but 32 MB is very out-of-date.

Because GalCiv II is a space game, that's part of what its purchasing demographic will be looking for - an epic struggle between space empires. Some of the draw of space is its immense size. If you have everyone on top of each other it loses its appeal. And I'm not sure if dumbing down the graphics is a good idea, either. I've read many-a-preview that praise the GalCiv II team's dynamic new 3-D background and impressive graphics. And correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't watering the graphics down a lot easier for a user as opposed to beefing them up?

I understand the desire to make this game mainstream. However, isn't a 4x strategy game set in space inherently aimed at a niche market? I believe it's safe to assume that the demographic for such a target segment will not have archaic parts that make up its computers.

Just my two cents.