col80

PC - Alpha Centauri still rules the roost all these years on - best writing, ideas, and characterisation in a game ever. Birth of the Federation - if you're into space 4x games and Star Trek this one just oozes authenticity. Okay there are memory leaks and some balance issues but it's still the only space TBS to properly model contact and assimilation of minor races. Mount and Blade - independent and still in development but oh so playable. Medieval action/strategy/RP

[quote]The only thing that I found irritating was the complaint for no multiplayer.[/quote] While that was annoyingly predictable, the most irritating part of the video was that woman's voice - is she some kind of robot? Why are all video reviews done by people who sound (and look) like they live in their parents basement?

Great game but always room for improvement so . . . 1) Rejigging of diplomacy. At the moment you get a free list of ships and technologies with whoever you're talking to, it would be nice if the AI would 'withold' certain information - just like there are some techs it won't trade there should be some techs/ships it doesn't want you to see (espionage could negate this of course). Trading ships could also do with some work - firstly by giving some indication of just where the ship you wa

I think my problem is not so much that GalCiv is a self consciously 'funny' game (as has been pointed out humour and sci-fi go together like bacon and maple syrup) but that it is a funny game in an environment oversaturated with funny games. Sometimes knowing winks to the player are cute, but sometimes you want a genuinely immersive experience with the confidence to take itself seriously. Civ 4 suffers from the same problem albeit to a lesser extent. In this context, while Galciv on its own isn'

New patch is the business - thanks guys. To be honest I've not really been able to play Dark Avatar since it came out, the whole ships graphics thing just made it too slow to be an enjoyable experience. The change in performance in this latest patch has been huge on my machine, everything is very smooth. Well done!

How about: A galactic supervillain issues an ultimatum to all leaders - either pay x amount of credits or an atomic bomb will be set off on your capital planet. The galaxy has become polarised into two great superpowers, in game terms all civilizations are divided into one of two camps, allied with others in that camp but at war with the other side. A Q type deity appears, judging all races and dishing out rewards/punishment according to how they have conducted themsel

They do. Just becuase two games have the same basic requirments to run doesn't mean that they have the same requirements to run optimally. Since DA has better graphics and AI, as well as more potential items on screen, people might experiance more slow down. It's a bummer, but the price of innovation. I think the problem is that none of this was mentioned in any previews of the game or by the devs. In my experience it is not usual for an expansion to re

I've tried to read through everything on this post, but there are only so many hours in the day. My changes would be: 1) A way to view the position of ships when trading for them. This was in Galciv1. At the moment its a tedious process to note down the names of all the ships you might want to trade, and impossible to tell the location of any potential ships you might want to acquire. 2) Some way of telling how much of your trade revenue is due to economic starbases. Unless I'm

As the original poster said, a change would be beneficial if only to stop the cheesy tactic of picking off the AI ships one at a time. It would also give the defending player a bit more of a chance, at the moment the odds are stacked way too much in the attackers favour. The fleet manager just seems a needless level of fiddly complexity.

Just something as simple as getting them to build a proper defence fleet (they usually have the productive capacity) rather than pointless starbases would make them a bit more interesting. I would also like to see a peaceful option to incorporate them into your empire - maybe when you had excellent relations with them, instead of an alliance they could be offered membership of your empire. A similar system was used, very effectively I might add, in Birth of the Federation.

I'm not sure what "the same problems" are that other people are reporting is. I would imagine the poster is referring to the performance issues a lot of people have posted about, whereby DA is a lot slower/choppier than DL was. I'm not sure whether this is one issue, lots of little issues, or simply a hit to performance as a result of graphics upgrades, but I certainly have my fingers crossed that a patch will help out as its unfortunately making the gam

I'll second the plea for a debate free from bitching and name-calling. As someone who thinks DA is a good expansion pack (not brilliant but well above average) here are my two cents: Firstly, just because gamespot etc. give a good review does not of itself stand as an indicator of quality. The large online review sites represent a certain approach to gaming and to scoring - for instance all gave Grand Theft Auto 9/10 or 10/10, I would have given it 5/10 if I was feeling generou

Generally I think the AI plays well. The only exception to this is when I am invading his worlds. Without fail there will be a ton of ships stacked at his planet that, were they combined into a fleet and launched, would repel my invading ships. Yet every time the ships stay in orbit for me to pick off one by one. Not the brightest strategy really.

I'm pretty sure it's to do with ships. My latest game is a medium galaxy with a handful of other players. At the start of the game I'm at a steady 50 framerate; a couple of hundred turns in I'm still between 35-50 generally except where my ships are gathered where the framerate is around 6-7 - not unplayable but a bit of a chore. For comparison I set up a similar game on DL and with a similar number of ships at around the same time I was getting a framerate of about 25. I should note th

At least post everything ABOVE where it says "Debug Message: ***** Initializing Game *****". Okay kryo. As I said there is a lot more but it might annoy other forum users to have to wade through it all in the thread. The problem is not so much that gameplay is jerky (with the graphics card I've got I'm used to that!) but that it was smooth as silk with DL so the change is really noticeable. Anyway, thanks for your help: Debug Message: Version

I've got a similar problem (I posted elsewhere about it), but are you sure I should post the whole debug err file here? It's 504kb and from opening up in notepad, about 50% of this is Debug Message: Popup Manager Update: Updating window with ID=32 repeated over and over again. Do you just need to see the first bit before all the debug messages appear?

I kinda like the idea of having the ability to choose urban or rural, gorilla or formation Cry havoc! And let slip the gorillas of war!

1. The tech tree. I just don't like how it's amazingly rigid. I can understand it being as such so it's easier on the AI given their different goals. Drengin can just go down the military line... Gotta say this is one of my favourite aspects of GC2s approach to technology. While the civ approach may make more sense it does mean that until you are familiar with all the techs you have to spend a hell of a lot of time plotting out research courses through a

While I agree that DA is a good expansion pack, the original poster might well point to the fact that this is as much to do with the rather wretched quality of most expansion packs as the qualities which the expansion undoubtedly has. As such, while 7.8 (why not 78?) might be a touch on the low side I don't think it can be rejected just because other expansion packs suck more. As to the general points raised, I agree with a lot of what the OP says yet despite this I think the good outwe

All other race info can be gleaned from the diplomacy screen, and you can use the "spy" function on planets when you have a single agent in stock, to see whats built on the planet. Weve always been able to see troop numbers (population), and enemy ships present(with their precise statistics!) This for me gets to the nub of the problem with espioange as currently implemented. In catual fact from turn 1 the player already has in essence a fully fledged spy

I'm playing on an Athalon 3000+ 2Ghz processor with 1GB of Ram. I would have thought this should be enough to handle the medium sized galaxies with 4 opponents I tend towards. My Radeon 9250 graphics card may be the issue as its pretty old, but as I said, this wasn't a problem with DL so I'm puzzled why its caused such huge difficulties with DA.

On the original posters points: Super abilities aren't quite as super as I thought they would be, which is probably a good thing. In my current game: the Korx have a poor economy in spite of being a super trader. The Korath haven't used any spore ships that I am aware of. The Altarions only had one player to call on when the Korath attacked them (me), and that won't win them the game. Heh. It's interesting that you mention the Altarians and the

A hearty second to the suggestion for technology pop-ups to give you more information on what that tech provides. I find especially when tech trading that I have to exit and go to the tech screen to remind myself whether deflectors are better than shields etc. On the subject of tech trades, I do wish the AI would stop offering me patently ridiculous trades of one of their really low level techs for one of my high ones. Another interface issue I just thought of, when ship trading there s

Okay, downloaded last night after finally figuring out where to input my authorisation code (Am I the only one that struggled with this?). I think it is far too early to make any meaningful judgements on the expansion pack, but I have run in to a couple of issues which hopefully someone can help me with. 1) I am taking a significant performance hit over regular GalCiv2 so that as soon as there are more than a couple of ships on screen my framerate degenerates into a chuggy mess -

This has really whet my appetite- it's already looking awesome! On a slightly less serious note, the feature allowing me to 'literally' cerate my own universe has got me especially excited. What sort of graphics card will I need to run this feature?