CraigHB

Well, I hope they felt the pain. In fact, I hope it hurt so bad they go out of business, freaking software facists. On my desktop system, I'm still running Win2K instead of WinXP becuase of the somewhat draconian activation system MS adopted with WinXP. Like I stated previously, I wouldn't mind if it was just an online activation system, but the MS method uses a checksum based on your hardware config. Major changes to your system's hardware void your activation (which I make quite a

Yea, that's a pretty nice card, worthy of getting excited about. Although, the 7950 GX2 is really something and is even faster. It runs a dual GPU so with SLI, you could run a Quad GPU graphics system. That's psycho! That would be so fast, even the most graphicaly intense games would barely load it. Right now, I'm running a 7900 GT Signature card from eVGA. It's clocked like crazy with a 600 MHz GPU stock, not quite as fast as a GTX (650 MHz), but does pretty good, 5000 points in 3Dmark 06

Normally, the game won't let you start a Metaverse game if "enable mods" is checked in the setup so that shouldn't be an issue. I believe the "cheater flag" checks if any of the stock game files have been modified. There's a file called gc2.xml in the xml directory that contains checksums and time stamps. If you've modified one or more of the game's stock files, you'll probably have to uninstall the game, remove any files left behind, and reinstall the game to stop getting f

I ended up buying just the parts at Computer Builder's Warehouse and MicroCenter and saved at least $1000, not including shipping and handling. So you're not necessarily going to save money with Dell. Interesting, I guess when it comes to higher end systems, you're not really going to save money with a builder like Dell or Alienware. If

I bought a laptop a short time ago that runs GC2 beautifully. It has an Intel Centrino Duo with an ATI X1600 video system. It has 1 GB of RAM and runs Windows Home edition. I don't think you have to worry too much about having a really high performace system to run GC2. This is more often not the case. When talking about graphicly intensive games like Battlefield 2, Doom 3, Quake 4, etc, performance is a big issue. Even so, my desktop system is fast, but it's not extreme. It run

I would like to delete a character as well. I submitted a request to [email protected], but they never got back to me. Webmaster, please add an option to delete characters. Thanks. BTW, Master U, Isn't one of your characters in the top 10? You should set your default character so those awesome medals show.

Stardock is not "advertising" no copy protection. What people are saying about GC2 is that is has a "liberal" copyright protection scheme that allows you to a) run the game on more than one system b) run the game without connecting to the internet every time and c) run the game without putting a CD in the drive. This is a huge step forward in my book. After getting screwed by draconian copyright protection systems (i.e. StarForce, Steam), it's nice to see a game publisher use something reason

I run a ATI X1600 in my Intel based laptop computer. I run an nVidia GeForce 7900 GT in my Athlon 64 based desktop computer. Both systems run the game nicely, but you don't necessarily need a high-end video card for this game. It doesn't really load the graphics system as much as other 3D games. A mid-range card like the the GeForce 6600GT will do the job, but that's last year's architecture. You should get the 7600 GT. Both are mid-range, but the 7 series is the latest architectur

I've seen several posts like this. It baffles me why anyone would get fired-up over bugs and crashes in a pre-release version of the game. If someone is having problems with the official release, that's a different story, but if pre-release bugs make you that angry, don't play the beta...duh! BTW, I mentioned a problem with 1.2 earlier in this thread where the game occasionally hangs when quicksaving toward the very end. Turns out I'm getting an "out of memory" error. I just couldn'

It's enabled by default when you update to 1.2, otherwise, there's a little exe file you need to use to enable it. Best thing is just to update to the latest version of the game.

I couldn't find a specific document that explains the medals myself. However, you should be able to mouse over them and get tool tips that explain what they are. You obtain them by playing Metaverse games. To get your medals, just click on Metaverse from the first screen within the game and go from there. As soon as you create a Metaverse character, you should start seeing your medals in the forum.

Yea, hehe, I'm hooked.

You'd have to zip up the savegame with the .xml custom ship definition files. Otherwise, the components end up in screwy locations.

There was a problem with the Metaverse scoring system where people playing on the beta version received big drops in their scores due to a recalc. That issue has been resolved and hopefully it won't crop up again. There were also some complaints that the calculations had rounding or truncation erros. I have not encountered any calculation errors myself and I believe there's no problem there. The calcualtions are correct and you will not receive a big drop in overall score simply by submittin

Thanks, I was wondering about that seeing as GC2 is my first *** 4x *** game.

IMO, Steam is horrible and rates right up there with StarForce. First, Steam requires an ugly client installation that defualts to running on startup. Then it requires you to *connect* to a Steam server *every time* you want to play the game even in single user mode. That means if you want to play a Steam protected game while waiting for a plane at the airport for instance, you can't unless the airport offers a wireless hotspot or you can modem-in using your cell phone. It's a ridiculous dra

I like the gigantic map. It seems a good size for me. I might try a bigger map, but don't know if I would like it better. The CPU load seems to come from the number of planets you own. My machine is pretty fast and it does slow down noticably once I've obtained 150 planets or so. You could have a map bigger than gigantic and it would probably be fine as long as the number of habitable planets was limited to some number.

I have not experienced any stability problems with 1.2 My desktop system is a Athlon 64 with an nVidia 7900 GT and it does have a glitch every now and then where it locks during a quicksave. Only happens at the very end of a game when I have most of the game's planets (around 200 in the game). Otherwise, no stability problems. I also play on my laptop which is an Intel Centrino Duo with an ATI X1600. The game is perfectly stable on that system. Haven't had a single problem there.

Hehe, I got a serious laugh out of that baby 3.0 line. Congrats and hope the best for you and your family. Thanks for all your hard work in continually improving the game. Would like to second the comment about the replay value of GC2. I think I dare say it's my favorite computer game of all time. I'm waiting for the official release before updating to 1.3 and I'm looking forward to it. Sounds like a good one. Thanks again, - Craig

Run in windowed mode. Even if the game resolution is the same as the desktop and the game appears to run full screen, it will alt-tab a lot better.

I play on my laptop and on my desktop. My laptop came with a bunch of ways to connect to the internet, IEEE1394, bluetooth, modem, wireless, and ethernet are the ones I can think of. At home I use a wireless access point on my LAN for the laptop. Right now, I'm out-of-town using a wireless hotspot to browse this forum. The things are eveywhere now and getting a connection on the go is usually not a problem. Unless you have a pretty old laptop (in which case it probably would not run the gam

Here's my boring desktop, WinXP in totally classic mode,

Haven't had a problem with that myself. I do check that all races are showing what I expect in the little inteligence dialog box. I haven't had any problem where a race indicates an intelligence, but fails to behave at that level. Anyway, if there is a problem, it will probably be fixed in 1.3 since they revamped the difficulty/intelligence system.

Ship designs are stored in a game's save file and in separate files in the game directory. The game loads all the custom ship files when it's created. So old games will always remember whatever custom ships were there. However, you can purge all the ship files then new games will start with no ship designs (except the core ships of course). There are two places for ship design files, mygames\galciv2\ships and mygames\galciv2\metaverse\ships.

I'm playing gigantic with 6 races. I have Number of Planets set to Abundant, Habitable Planets set to Abundant, and Number or Starts set to Uncommon. That gets me around 150-200 habitable planets in the universe. I'm playing on Masochistic difficulty with Randomize Intelligence unchecked so all races are set to Incredible intelligence. I generally have a hard time beating the AI and it stays that way until the end of the game where I can either take the other races out or fail in my