njareg

Well guys it's been a slice, I'm going to stop visiting this post as I feel I've said everything that needs to be said. I really think everyone is not getting full service, not just me. You may agree with me or not agree, of course that's your decision. I think stardock has created a very good game and yes I agree that impulse is not as evil as steam BUT it's still a bad thing. I don't appreciate being treated like a criminal when I've bought the game and too many

[quote who="ansury" reply="45" id="2567989"] But it's not just a matter of Stardock "working a little harder". More work means employing and paying someone to do the work, which means a higher price for the end product, a longer wait for patches, or a longer development time, and so on. Extra work is always something that should be avoided, as long as there's other more important things to get done. (And there always will be, in the case of any duplicate pat

[quote who="foxfire1234" reply="42" id="2565990"]Just fyi, In your Cabin with no internet example... You install your standalone patch and then you can not play until you install inpulse and verify it... But... you have no internet... NOOO! [/quote] Exactly, So you see the problem then and yet here you are defending them? [quote who="foxfire1234" reply="42" id="2565990"] Sadly most DRM is getting very very evil. Like the many games that are out and com

[quote who="WIllythemailboy" reply="40" id="2565362"]We may have another candidate for getting a refund here. As I've pointed out, the CEO/majority owner of the company has said this isn't going to happen. Deal with it; if your method of dealing with it involves boycotting Stardock, they and the community here are better off without you anyway. [/quote] It just shows the arrogance of the ceo and company, they can't argue their point and they in fact they are in the

quote who="WIllythemailboy" reply="38" id="2564985"] Had I known that they were going to do this I would never have given them my money. They've lost my confidence until this is resolved and I know I'm not the only one that thinks this way. This discussion has happened several times before, most notably when Sins stopped getting stand-alone patches during the Impulse roll out. I'm paraphrasing a bit, but Brad's overall answer to this was that Stardock was better off losin

[quote who="Whiskey144" reply="36" id="2563502"]njareg, one thing you really aren't getting is the fact that, Impulse makes Stardock's putting out of patches 1) faster, 2) cheaper, and 3) seamless. [/quote] Whiskley I do understand these things but what your not hearing my friend is that everything you've mentioned is really in stardocks hands. The bottom line is when impulse goes down and if you don't have a backup then you're only method of updating your game is totally gone

[quote who="Whiskey144" reply="33" id="2563463"]@njareg- Rosco IS an employee for Stardock. Just check below the avatar. In fact, Rosco is with the support component of SD. [/quote] Well I'm not surprised, I suspect that was the case. He's arguing for this radical new approach idea which in reality is nothing of the sort. The idea is we buy the game but get a lower level of support, wow what a ground breaking idea that is. let's see how many customers this works on.

[quote who="Netriak" reply="31" id="2563009"]So your question is, why does Stardock use internet activation as copyright protection? [/quote] No that's not my question, my question is why is stardock refusing to give us something every other game company gives you. [quote who="Netriak" reply="31" id="2563009"] Stardock is primarily a non-game software company. Most commercial software, such as Microsoft windows or Photoshop, uses online activation as DRM, an

[quote who="Rosco_P" reply="30" id="2562956"] Impuse is not 3rd party. It was created in-house, by Stardock. Basically, take Stardock Central, modify the GUI a bit, upgrade the behind-the-scenes, and add useful features, and you've got Impulse. And what is intrusive? It's designed to be as unintrusive as possible. It's only required to download, install, and update our software. When you're done, feel free to uninstall it. It's not re

[quote who="DauntlessAnsible" reply="26" id="2562705"]good points to all in the discussion. ultimately it comes down to a difference in opinion. impulse to me is a tool to manage my games and software. i have all my registeration in one place. i can print those out, download full offline copies of the games, and use the tool to install between my home systems as needed. if i rebuild a machine, i reinstall from the web and dont have to deal with scratched cds my k

[quote who="Netriak" reply="25" id="2561561"] First of all, after patching, the game requires online activation. Impulse handles that silently and invisibly. A standalone patch would not help you if Stardock's servers are down or gone, since they are required for activation regardless of how you acquired the patch. [/quote] test Secondly, Impulse patching works by checking the check-sum of every installed file against the one on the server, and downloading any that

[quote who="Netriak" reply="25" id="2561561"] First of all, after patching, the game requires online activation. Impulse handles that silently and invisibly. A standalone patch would not help you if Stardock's servers are down or gone, since they are required for activation regardless of how you acquired the patch. [/quote] Yes but that again is stardocks doing, all the games I own I can download the patch and install the patch _without_ an internet connection. That's

[quote who="joeld1212" reply="23" id="2561435"]njareg: You're beating your head against a wall. For better or worse Stardock has made up their mind on this. I argued this point a year or more ago and it got me nowhere. While many of the Stardock moderators are polite in their defense of their policy they are also quite firm when saying " it's our way or go away". On the other hand, some of the forum posters can be quite rude in alluding to your lack of computer skil

[quote who="DauntlessAnsible" reply="21" id="2561077"]i suppose i personally dont understand why you wouldnt want impulse to handle the update process. i would much rather impulse handle my updates than have to plug in some serial number every time. impulse doesnt blast you with ads. on startup it checks for updates for you so you are always current. if you dont want impulse it can be uninstalled. i suppose if you didnt buy w/e game you are trying to update and a

[/quote]Even if it's not a huge amount for each patch, it adds up over time.[/quote] But isn't that what impulse is doing as well? It must have to do all the exact same functions a stand alone patch installer have to do. How exactly is impulse saving time? I would think once an installer was coded its engine could be used for any future stand alone patch that was made. It seemed you folks were doing that up until 1.4 so what changed after that? See where I'm goi

[quote who="kryo" reply="15" id="2560433"]Using Impulse to deploy incremental updates rather than having to create new standalone patches for each update allows us to provide more updates more frequently at a lower cost. It also allows users with limited bandwidth or download speed to get updates faster, since they don't need to get a cumulative update from 1.0 each time there's a new patch.[/quote] Hello Kyro, thanks for responding How can it cos

ok thank you for the reply, appreciated.

Hi, I just got Twilight of the Arnor today, I have custom races/ships from my previous Dark Avatar game. I installed ToA and it doesn't see any of my previous ship designs or custom races. So I then tried copying the ships and races from the " My Documents\My Games\GC2TwilightArnor\Dark Avatar " folder into the same locations in " My Documents\My Games\GC2TwilightArnor\Twilight of the Arnor " but the game still will not see any of the custo

[quote who="Hawawaa" reply="1" id="2557941"]If you have Gal Civ2 and Dark Avatar then you just want the lone expansion Twilight of Arnor! Cause your just rebuying Galciv2 and Dark Avatar with the Ultimate Edition(it also includes Arnor.) The Ultimate edition has no extras... [/quote] Great, thank you for your answer.

[quote who="Moosetek13" reply="11" id="2558547"] Why not just give us the patch now in stand alone?....like everyone else does. Not everyone does. It actually seems a little shady of them not release the patch in stand alone form, this anti pirating reason is really not believable since anyone can very easily bypass it. Then why don't you simply bypass it , instead of crying about it?[/quote] Why is it whenever

[quote who="Mtrixis" reply="7" id="2558226"]If something major happened to Stardock, why would you think they'd do anything other than release the patches as standalone? In a world where Ubisoft's idea of copy protection is shackling you to online play, installing Impulse to patch your Stardock games is pretty benign (and actually less intrusive than Steam, my Impulse games don't even require me to launch Impulse to play them). [/quote] Who knows they ma

Who knows they may release them....or they may not. Why not just give us the patch now in stand alone?....like everyone else does. Also I am saying that installing Impulse is intrusive, I'm saying I don't like having to be at the mercy of stardock simply to get a patch. It actually seems a little shady of them not release the patch in stand alone form, this anti pirating reason is really not believable since anyone can very easily bypass it.

Hey everyone, had a question, I currently have galciv2 gold edition which gives me dread lords and dark avatar, so I'm wondering should I pay more to get Ultimate edition or just get Arnor expansion pack? Basically I'm wondering ultimate is basically just giving you galciv2 and all the expansions or does it give you more then that? Thanks in advance <

Yes but that isn't the point, It's a great feature to be able to download the game and I'm not knocking that, it's innovative and a really great option but the point is if stardocks folds or if you don't have access to the internet your sunk. Most other game companies out there give out stand alone patches, they offer these for free and open to everyone. locking down the patches doesn't prevent pirating, that's totally ludicrous and it's defies all good sense for stardock to go down this road

hello and thank you for your reply and yes that's what it seems like I agree, but it's not practical and it's punishing the customers who bought the game. Lets face it, there is no 100% fool proof copy protection. This system will not prevent the pirates, they will simply get a working email and one registered game code and use it to take the patch, or worst get the patch and rig it so it can be distributed out with a hack full of viruses. This system only makes it frustraiting for the honest