Ray Radlein

My favorite utterly negligible bug involves Constructor ship movement and starbases: If you have a constructor which exhausts its movement points right next to a starbase (i.e., the starbase it was heading towards was seven spaces away, and it only had six movement points), and then another constructor moves through that space en route to the starbase, both constructors will be used to build new modules. It's like the first constructor just sort of gets pulled that last little dist

1) If a planet has more than 1 row of ships in orbit, mouseover on the second row doesn't popup the ship info window. I was noticing that just last night.

What's even worse is that it's possible, if you're going through your new turn's planetary events from the GNN screen, to overshoot slightly while aiming for the "Back to Planet" button on the shipbuilding screen, hit the "Turn" button by mistake, and have it begin processing the end-of-turn actions in the background without telling you , while you're still on the planetary improvements screen. You're sitting there staring at your planet, deciding whether to build another

I finally left the UP in one of my games (in part, I'll admit, just to see what would happen) after the UP voted to make everyone use Republic or Democracy after I had already switched my entire economy and everything over to Federation. The sudden collapse in my economy and production was immensely larger than my (actually reasonably significant) trade income, so I told 'em all to sod off and switched back to being a Federation.

The survey module is a great advantage if you're playing on gigantic maps with a fair number of anamolies. It's a quick pickup on the sensor tree, and if you can stick survey modules on all of your early-game scout ships, you can really clean up on anamoly exploration. Lots and lots of +1% bonuses and +25% research tech bonuses definitely add up; and many is the time I've kept my entire early-game economy afloat and running on full throtle by finding a +2500 bc anamoly every few turns. Things li

I've seen things like this happen to me, too, from time to time, but not, alas, in any clearly repeatable way.

I've had things like that happen in each game I've played since upgrading to 1.2. I don't remember them ever happening before 1.2, for what it's worth.

I got the "Colonies for Entire Tech Tree" event the last game I played, but was unable to actually do anything in response. It popped up at the start of the New Turn processing, got dismissed by the GNN and other event screens, and by the time I was able to contact the minor race in question, they just looked at me like I was crazy when I tried to trade with them.

[QUOTE]Well as for bug #1 as a metaverse anti-cheating feature... I don't see how that is a valid reason to have Bug #1. I mean, people constantly restart their games to get a good starting position, and 95% of people only submit games they win. Very few of the Metaverse scores actually reflect the skill of the player.[/QUOTE] Besides, as I (and others) have pointed out, this bug can just as easily be used as a player exploit: If you have an invasion fleet en route to an alien

That second bug must explain why I will sometimes acquire a planet from the AI which appears to have a negative food production -- it will have an Advanced Farm which is only producing a Basic Farm amount of food, or some such, and if I decommission the tile to start over, all of a sudden, I have a planet with -3 units of food production. That is annoying. On the other hand, the "Save Game" bug is perhaps the single most annoying bug I have ever come across in an

The problem with the "they just don't want you taking advantage of saved turns" theory is that, as people have pointed out, the bug itself can be used as a player exploit . Want to make a planetary invasion go down a little easier? Just keep saving and reloading while your invasion fleet is on the way, so that the AI won't be able to complete that Orbital Fleet Manager it's building on the target planet. Want to get the drop on the AI in exploration? Rush-build a bunch of scouts early in t

Aw, crud. Still, thanks for answering me so quickly -- I definitely wanted to know the answer before I started my next game! Time to go restore the original .XML file in my Metaverse folder now!

What sort of modifying data counts as modifying data for purposes of the Cheating Flag? For instance, if you add new hull types to GC2Types.xml, does that trip the Cheating Flag? Even if the types in question have the same stats (hit points, costs, base speed, etc.) as the other hulls?

Far be it from me to complain, given that I love the mod and am currently playing it, but how does one reconcile the approved B5 mod with the "No CopyVio" policy?

I freely admit that I have yet to ascend to the parts of the "Difficulty" ranking where the game starts to run out of good adjectives ("Painful," "Masochistic," "Suppurating," "Abatoir," "Chuck Norris," etc.), preferring so far to stick to "Challenging" for the most part, but I've just won something like nine games in a row without firing a shot . For that matter, in four of them, I never even launched an armed space craft, and in two of those , I never even built a

Heh. I have wanted to do this for just over thirty years now, ever since the first 4X game I ever played, a board game called "Stellar Conquest" from an Austin, Texas based company called Metagaming Concepts (I think that they may have eventually merged with Steve Jackson Games). Stellar Conquests was basically the pure 4X portion of GalCiv, obviously without AI diplomacy, etc., but also without interstellar commerce. Explore star systems, find new planets,

Woot!

Any deal you offer the AI for a starbase is either a bad deal for it, or not a serious deal from you. Either way, there's no reason for the AI to accept it. Not necessarily; you could, for instance, offer to trade starbases. Say you have three Morale resources and no Money, and the AI race has three Money resources and no Mora

Since the "mods" folder heirarchy has its own "movies" directory, is there any way to get these movies to live there, rather than in the game's "movies" directory? That way we wouldn't have to worry about backing up the game's original movie files, and we wouldn't have to worry about seeing B5 movies played when we weren't playing a mod. Or am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here?

In my case, to get our cable modem to work, the cable company had to take my computer room's cable line off of the signal amplifier, resulting in random blocks of stations which simply don't show up on my television -- including, needless to say, ESPN and ESPN2. So my case is even worse: I have to choose between World Cup football or using my computer at all, whether for GalCiv or for, well, posting messages to the GalCiv forums. (On the other hand, I finally got my Radeon

I'll say this much: I certainly wouldn't mind it if there were an option of "attempt to disengage" so that battles do not have to be conducted to the death (so long as you still have movement points left). This would have been terrifically unbalancing as long as attacks were not conducted simultaneously; but it should be possible now without throwing the whole game out of whack.

Aside from the overeager "Turn" button and other UI issues, my pet peeve is the lack of automatic (or even semi-automatic) notification of various events which are of substantial interest. For instance, if I have complete Espionage access to a foreign power, there should be an easy way to discover that they are working on a given Galacic Wonder without spending ages double-clicking on every one of their planets to see what is being built. Similarly, there should be a

I turned off the skip autopilot moves remaining option, because having those moves executed is a lifesaver for all of the many times you might accidentally hit that damned "Turn" button by mistake. Once those end of turn autopilot moves get going, your only hope is that one of your autopilot courses will expire with moves remaining (or that the game will prompt you with a "Do you wish to upgrade this starbase" or some such), to allow you to regain focus and continue your turn.

To me, the absolute most crucial UI problem is the placement of the "Turn" button, and the fact that it is active even if you are on the planet screen. Overshoot just a little while mousing down to click "Done," and your turn starts going in the background . The fact that it is easy to hit by mistake when using the mini-map is bad, but the fact that it can be hit while in the Planet Manager is unforgiveable from a UI design standpoint. The UI also does very badly at allow

I agree about the Guidebook, but I find Orbital Terraformer to be incredibly useful, especially if I have enough cash to buy it outright. Doing so means I don't have to waste any turns of production terraforming tiles here and there on all my planets (it also means, as has been pointed out, that all conquered planets get an instant upgrade). If you don't have enough cash on hand, and have to spend twenty turns building it, it's obviously a lot less useful.