ArkhanTheBlack

I didn't play GalCiv2 for years and so I decided to give it a try with both expansions. I installed the gold edition via CD and then downloaded the Twilight expansion via Impulse. Unfortunately Impulse didn't detect the GC2 and dark avatar installations and I found a hint that the registry data might be messed up. That was indeed the case (BTW, why wasn't it patched when it was a know problem?!?) and I made some fixes to get Impulse to find the GalCiv2 and Dark Avatar installations. I was the

I tried the full installer, but it didn't make a difference, it still crashes at the start. I guess I will have to wait for a new version to be able to get the 2.x patch. (Sigh!)

Why isn't it possible to get the 2.0 / 2.01 patch via the stardock central like usual? I can't run impulse since it crashes at the start on my Vista system. Why do I have to use a buggy program suddenly instead of the much more stable Stardock Central?!

I'd like to have more choices for the mega events: 1.) Most important, a few difficulty levels! Instead of just game breaking, I'd like to have a few more levels like entertaining, challenging, unbalancing and game breaking. 2.) It would be nice to have the possibility to choose which mega events are used in the game. For example, activating dread lords and deactivating all others...

The manual is very dissapointing! There are several scenarios like "Dread Lords dominion" in the basic game setup, but I've not even the slightest clue of how they work, because I can't find any information about them. Neither in the game help nor in the manual. Is it a secret?

Sounds very dissapointing. I really expected a kind of "Death Star" badass unit. Well, 2 : 1 score for Orion 2 for better implementation. [quote]Terrorstars are not death stars. They blow up *stars*, not planets.[/quote] You know that stars are much, MUCH bigger than planets and therefore destroying a planet should be 'piece of cake' when you can destroy a star!?

It's funny that Chris Taylor is so proud about the XBox 360 interface for supreme commander. The PC game clearly showed that the company has not even the slightest understanding of good interfaces. Well, I wish the XBox 360 players the best of luck at handling this thing. Topping the PC interface shouldn't be too difficult. Demigod also sounds quite 'uninteresting'. I don't think the game will be a success on the PC. They should release if just for the XBox 360.

Main reasons: 1.) It gets more and more common that you can take 1 - 2 days off just to install and patch a game. (Greatings to Relic!) 2.) Loading times can get longer than used in Amiga times. (Greatings to Relic!) 3.) "Release time = Start of beta phase" seems to apply for most game developers (except maybe Blizzard) 4.) Graphics overshadow gameplay too much (Greatings to Bethesda and Gas powered Games!) 5.) Too many bugs that occur on all machines

Jesus! Why can people just think in black and white!? Several of those events are defined by plain percentage numbers (Take over X % of planets...). Add a slider to adjust how 'unbalanced' they are and the whole player base gets some extra fun and not just 0,00001% of it, which are represented by the pro gamers. There are difficulty levels between 'Easy' and 'Brutal'. Ever wondered why such difficulty levels like medium and average were introduced?! Some players just l

It would be good if it would be possible to customize those mega events: 1.) Entertaining 2.) Important 3.) Threatening 4.) Game breaking This would solve a lot of problems. I like to have interesting events and challenges, but the game should still be decided by strategy and not by a dice roll.

I'm definitely for more expanions. Especially deep TBS games usually need a long time to grow and balance out to really shine. New games are usually risky if it comes to bugs and gameplay. I'd also like to see space monsters and if possible a real combat mode.

I liked the ship design in Orion 2, but not in GC2, because it's extremly clumsy implemented in GC2. In Orion 2 the ship design had some common sense because the ship designer always took the most modern computer systems and armour and I only had to care about the important parts and select additional armour, weapons and special systems from a list. In GC2 I have to place internal computer systems and hull armour types on certain positions on the hull which is total nonesense. It wou

Master of Magic is still the most fleshed out fantasy TBS. The gameplay mechanics were great, the interface well designed and the quick fight mode a good combination of 'quick' and 'deep'. The greates weakness was probably the AI. The super hero strategy worked too well. AOW1 & AOW2 had beautifull graphics and sound, and could have been great successors to MOM. But the gameplay was too dumbed down to be enjoyable. Too much randomness destroyed the strategy. In the end the games turned out to

[quote] If you aren't sure where you need to go do a quick zoom out and zoom back down on the system in question. [/quote] Altough the empire tree sounds like a powerfull control and building tool, the necessity of zooming shows pretty clear that the interface is flawed. You don't have to zoom with a minimap. But one minus point is usually not enough to justify the qualitity of the whole game. Sins got a good review at gamespy and almighty, and therefore the game is pro

[quote]The UI took a couple games for me to figure it out[/quote] Well, that's a bad sign. A good RTS interface shouldn't take a few games to figure it out. At least not for a veteran of RTS and TBS games. [quote]One example: Had 2 huge battles going on in border planets. While I was keeping an eye on that I used the empire tree to queue up production on all my planets and set more ships to get built at my shipyard planet and as they get built they automatically would warp on i

I'm very suspicious about this game after watching the trailer. An RTS without a minimap?!? Zooming as compensation?!? So far I've never seen any RTS where this worked. Unlike GC2, SOSE is playing in a genre with extremely high competition. Games like Companies of Heroes, Dawn of War, C&C3, etc. offer excellent graphics combined with excellent overview at the same time through the mini map. Honestly, if the game can't be played without zooming then you didn't even reach the bas

I don't have a problem with the stardock central, but I agree that a patch archive would be very helpfull. The current patch version is 1.80e and it's still bugged after the versions 1.80a, 1.80b, 1.80c and 1.80d all were bugged. Maybe it's just me, but I think that developers should test their products before they release them. While I'm very tolerant about bugs at the release of game, I think 1 - 2 years after the release you can expect a bug free version. Sure, it's nice if they release new c

While the problem with bad games getting good reviews is very old and also often depends on the players taste there's definitely a new and bad trend in the game industry: Rushed and bugged games! The problem with those is that there's often a good and solid gameplay core which gets ruined by serious bugs and interface and balancing flaws. Although those problems are not exactly new, the intensity of the problems is new. It's probably a direct result of the complexity of the games today,

Anything planned to get some more action in the early game like space hydras and such?

If you make a successor or a similar game like Master of Magic, please make sure that you don't make the same mistakes Age of Wonders 1 & 2 did. Although the graphics and music were pretty good they ruined the game play by dumbing down the game in several aspects: 1.) MOM had units which consisted of up to 9 members. This way weak troopers could be still pretty good, simply because you had 9 members of them in one unit. This had serious consequences for the gameplay. You could heal or r

Dark Avatar does have mega events that do offer things to fight, Pirates, the Jagged Knife, and most importantly the Dread Lords. I didn't get those yet. Do I have to play the campaign for those events? Also you do know that AI at normal is passive, if you ramp up to challenging it will start making threats, and somewhat bolder moves earlier. Makes sense. It's a bit tricky to find the right difficulty level t

Where can I find my current logistics value if I don't have several ships in one field? I've looked everywhere and the only possibilty to find it seems to have several ships in one field and trying to combine them. BTW, why is the Titanium Armor a device I can assemble on the ship? Shouldn't the whole hull consist of it? The opponent will hardly do me the favour of targeting the tiny bit of titanium armour on the ship!

I'd be interested if the second expansion will offer some more action oriented content like space pirates, rich planets protected by weird space hydras, invading super space monsters and the good old Antarian attacks (or something like that). The starting phase of the game is very long and there's almost nothing happening in that time. I played the game one year ago, and although it looked quite good at the beginning I got bored because after 3 days of playing I had not a single combat.

If it would be so easy to forbid a resell of a computergame or another software then every software distributor would do it. I highly doubt that this would have even the slightest chance on any court of justice to get through. GC2 is not the only game with an online activation. For example Earth2160 had it as well. And if this registration means that you can't resell the game, then it's far worse than any copy protection.

I'm pretty new at the game and I don't understand the concept of military production, social production and research. If I build a factory I get some kind of production capacity. If I don't use it, then it's wasted. Wasted military production doesn't waste BC, but social production does. But if I change the production assignement, then I can 'save' BC by moving social production to military production. With a production focus I can reduce the problem a bit more, but it then also reduces res