apoc527

You know, I have to say, Brad, that despite having Fallout 3 at my house, Gears of War 2 a few Amazon clicks away, and countless other "new" games to play, that I've found myself, quite "by accident" simply playing GalCivII 2.0 for hours and hours and hours. It's finally replaced MOO2 for me, which is no small achievement. So, way to go, if you would make a GalCiv3 and take SOME of the ideas from the MOO series, I think you'd have the Game To End All Games.

If you run your own company and can't do what you want, what's the point? I think this is the greatest post ever by Brad, and there have been many awesome ones.

Huh, uofadave--I'm playing a fresh install of TA and I'm playing Terran Empire with the level above Tough as my difficulty. No, I'm not winning (I've never been one of the amazing players), but I have had no trouble getting my economy up and running. And while I'm still using Xeno Labs, I can research most simple techs in 1-5 turns. I honestly don't know if you are seeing a weird bug caused by a messed up install or if you just really, really, really don't get it...

One more fan of Stardock (*the* best game company in the world by a long shot) saying "Take as long as you want." We trust that you will deliver, and like others have said, it's already out, you're just adding more stuff. Besides, I need a better computer if I'm going to play Immense galaxies. My 3.5 year old Dell Latitude with 64 MB video card isn't cutting it these days...

Yea, something seems wrong here. I thought the whole point of having 3 types of weapons and 3 types of defenses was that off-type defenses was really bad. It seems that based on CodeCritter's example, pretty much ANY defense is as good as any other. Doesn't that decrease the strategic choices in the game? It also doesn't make any sense from a fluff perspective; how is a point defense gun supposed to degrade phasor fire?

Weird, I've never had a double post before. I didn't even click twice.

That was the best AAR ever...time to get back to my own GalCiv2 games.

Yea, I love all the new added features. Not sure what's so complex. The new planet types add a *necessary* complexity and spies are fairly simple to understand. Aside from that...maybe it's the asteroid fields? You can turn those off, but really they just provide bonus production points.

Maybe there should be production bonuses for high morale then?

And this is why Stardock has taken its place as my favorite game company. For he's a jolly good fellow...

Don't feel bad dude! You can most definitely learn how to play games like this! All of us had to some point. I'm only "okay" at this game compared to the guys who can beat it on Suicidal. It requires a different approach than your RPGs, however. An RPG is generally a story-driven game. In GalCiv2, you make your own story. If it helps, think of yourself as playing the Emperor in an RPG. It is your job to guide your people to victory. This will require different skills and different menta

Yea, ok, I thought it was just me being really confused, but I'm glad to see this is a bug. And you guys say PQ affects population growth and max size? That also makes sense because I have been having issues in my current game with a bunch of low PQ planets that I've terraformed being stuck at 500 million colonists. REALLY hurts my tax base.

Yea, honestly, because of the way combat and experience works, I think the Super Dominator ability is awful. In fact, it's more of a liability than an asset. As it stands, you get a bunch of free, but totally useless ships. They can't even hurt my current generation of warships, and I'm only about 1/3 of the way through the military tech trees. Considering that every fleet I kill gives my ships a few more HP from experience, I think it's a bad deal for the Drengin. I would like to see the S

I agree very much with your idea. I often play "to see what happens" myself.

Woo hoo. And to head off one comment -- to all the people who scoff at the reviewer's statement about how he had to turn the difficulty down: to echo someone else on these forums, you are from a different dimension. You must have a level of skill so far beyond the typical casual player that it's not even funny, but honestly, I never play above Painful...too hard.

Yea, I have to chime in and agree with John Hamp. You fail to mention several important features, but more importantly, what in God's name are you comparing this to? A new game? Some kind of mythical super-expansion? I echo Mr. Hamp's challenge -- find me a better expansion pack, and maybe I'll consider eating my words.

Except that in many space-based settings, it is the bigger ships that have faster FTL. If this was sublight maneuvering, I would agree with you, but it's not.

Won't this prevent the collection of intelligence? I thought in DA that in order to increase your espionage rating against an enemy civ that you had to put agents on their worlds...

I'm really excited for this guide...I'm curious to see what kind of tweaks you have made.

Very nice, Marcathonas. You clearly understand how to resort to pointless ad hominem attacks to disguise your poorly reasoned and illogical arguments. You clearly have your own (misguided) opinion about Microsoft, which you are quite entitled to. What I find most objectionable is the complaining that SD actually mentioned Vista on the main GC2 site.

Exactly. You just assume that everyone thinks Vista is horrible and that MS is the Antichrist. Newsflash: not everyone agrees with you! Not even all the computer game players of the world! So it's quite possible Brad is just saying, "Look, here's an OS that is kind of neat. It's not perfect yet, but it's good for gaming." It's not a conspiracy and it's nothing to be "afraid of" (a very, very odd reaction to Brad's post, if you ask me). Also, SD has chosen a market strategy. MS has chosen

And I find the sudden backlash against Brad for daring to discuss the positive aspects of Vista to be simply disgusting and disgraceful. Seriously, get a life.

The one thing that annoys me about some of the MS-haters here is the whining about their so-called "rights." Let me put this simply: you do not have any "rights" to a PC. You do not have a "right" to a freely distributed OS that does everything you want and is user friendly and has no DRM. Intellectual Property is America's biggest industry at this point and will continue to be so in the future. Microsoft is trying to protect itself against people who want to ignore the law. There

Is it worth it? Definitely. It's currently my favorite game.

Well deserved, well deserved!