Voqar

One could always order the CDs directly from Stardock, which also lets you download the game immediately. This is how I pre-ordered and it was flawless...

EDIT: Apparently I was typing as curttasker was replying with the same info, but I'll leave it rather than obliterate it... 1. Only help ships in the radius and usually the ships must have something that can be assisted. For ex, if your starbase gives +1 beam assist a ship needs at least 1 beam attack to benefit - starbases do not magically empower weaponless ships. I'm not entirely sure about ships in orbit but I would think they get the effects too (I rarely build military starb

Right now it's insanely easy to create max ranged sensor "drone" very early and give yourself a huge "vision" for detecting the ship movements of everyone else (not as ridiculous as it was pre-last-patch where I could "watch" an entire medium map with ONE ship, but it's still pretty crazy). So. the idea of being able to add cloaking modules to reduce opposing sensor ranges sounds interesting. So if your enemy can "sense" at 15pc maybe you reduce the range at which your ship can be de

I build starports on all planets too. Ships are the "currency" of expansion, development (constructors), and war and I can never have enough of them. I generally only build constructors on smaller worlds and they take forever but every extra constructor helps - and you can always switch out, switch out and do a buyout and a mostly build ship, and/or build smaller warships too. On larger maps and/or once you have a large number of highly productiveworlds, I could see getting rid of s

Never would be fine with me. There are plenty of multiplayer games - the gaming world needs more games focused on quality single player gaming like this one. For me, even if I was into multiplayer, I think it would be pure torture to play a TBS in MP mode. It can take hours to finish a single player game, it would take a ridiculous amount of time to finish MP.

Something I'd add... In my present tough game, same one that I'd made some observations about yesterday, the Drengin and Yor are constantly declaring war on me...which isn't a big deal...that's what they do even if it's often pointless and hopeless. At one point a military resource a decent ways off my border became available and I managed to nab it before anyone else (this is a ways into the game, someone else had it and lost it). It happened to be in a rare moment of pea

So far in every game I've played the precursor ranger event has happened multiple times (the one where you or an AI get a ridiculously overpowered ship). I usually get one first, then at least one AI gets one - and this is still early in the game (since I've yet to come close to running out the tech tree in any game). It's ridiculous when you're researching techs to get an attack 3 weapon, taking 10 weeks, and your best ships are 12ish/4ish, and you and AIs are getting these 66/24 ra

I'm playing on "tough" now and it does seem like the AIs (majors and minors) trade tech to the point of it being sharing. I still manage to have some techs they don't have and I avoid trading them to prevent their widespread distribution. I actually think tech trading in Civ IV is pretty good - way better than in Civ III. Blocks of allies often form and often won't trade outside the block at all, or at least not favorably. The Civ IV AIs also refuse to trade many techs initially ti

I'm a developer...just not for Stardock. 1. Lots of bug reports are duplicates. 2. Lotsof bug reports aren't really bugs - they're suspicions, user error, or game working as designed but user thinks it should be different. 3. Most people aren't noticing bugs, or aren't posting, and/or are just playing. The people who do post usually have problems or bugs to discuss (or they're supposed to be working and are at the forum instead...DOH...that's me). Check out th

Some tips and ideas. Your mileage might vary and people's opinions definitely vary. Try different things you read and see what works for you! ---- What's working for me is to buy outright a factory on each of my first few worlds, start a second factory (unless it's a small world), start a shipyard (unless it's your homeworld), then a lab or two, then a market structure. Eventually I build 1entertainment structure, 1 farm, and 1 embassy. If I build multiples of structure

In my current game (tough/medium/custom race) I settled the 2nd planet of a system containing a minor race. This minor race was going nuts building ships and starbases...and they built numerous influence bases in the same sector as the system, and they built them up (no defenses, so must've been adding lots of influence modules). I hadn't gone out of my way to pump influence and the minor's influence starbases seemingly had no effect on my influence. It doesn't seem like m

So I found out how to use CTRL+N (couldn't find the correct keystroke right off) and discovered that if you use it a few times you end up getting passed thru the tech select, GNN, and lots of other dialogs repeatedly - seemingly for every "restart" you do. You even see dialogs for races you might've been near for any given "restart." You end up having to click "done" a whole lot of times then once everything clears up it's a good idea to check your research, planet, etc to make sur

I love Stardock and I love Brad (in a gamer who loves the best development team that's ever existed kind of way). I've seen some bugs, had self inflicted hardware issues, and posted some quirks about the game (and I have more to come) but I knew Stardock would take care of things, and this update just proves it. The game hasn't even been out a week and they've all been busy as heck and they STILL put together a significant update already. Not to mention that there are a bu

I've checked knowledge base and asked around in #galciv. Sent an email to support too but I'd really like to play NOW (of course). Anybody with this type of card got the game running? I just installed the new card tonight. WoW ran fine. GC2 hangs immediately and I have to kill it in task manager. I installed the 82.12 forceware drivers that came with the (EVGA) card, which I believe are beta drivers, but they support this new type of card. HELP!<br/

For reasons that I haven't seen explained you can't have fleets in orbit (or on a planet, whatever you want to call it). You have to research and build the Orbital Fleet Manager for your ships on a planet to behave as if in a fleet. Even if you have OFM your fleets do not persist - they still disband when they hit a planet. The OFM just groups your ships into fleets based on your logistics rating if you're attacked. It's a big deal because when you're attacking with a fle

I've kinda noticed the same thing but I kind of think the generic military rating is just that - a generic rating. I would suspect (and hope) that the AIs use more in-depth analysis to determine on-the-fly power ratings for decision making. There are other factors to consider beyond tech. For ex, in your situtation you had the ideal attack and defense types to slaughter your opponent - something that doesn't reflect in the military power ranking at all (and it'd be hard to

I think it's normal. It takes a while to research weapon techs and planetary invasion so there's bound to be a few years of peace, colonizing, and constructor action before you see any war.

Well, I figured out how to use the rally points and mix it with the governors for changing production and rally points and WOW, very, very nice. It totally changed how I deploy ships for the better. Very, very cool system. Very well done.

I just had another CTD and I think it was during an autosave. I agree with almost everything in the original post - LOTS of good ideas and/or accurate statements about game issues. I happen to be a big fan of standard windows controls and how they operate, and standard windows text editing conventions (as a programmer I seriously can't live without them). It's brutal when an app (like galciv2) deviates so much from the norm. I can deal, but life in the game would b

Well, I finished my first real game (2nd game overall - 1st one didn't last long as I got used to stuff). I was playing a medium sized map on beginner level as a custom race. Things went from being very good, to a bit scary, to good again. The game took me a loooong time to play - somewhere between 8 and 12 hours (not sure exactly). I had a nice start and was able to gobble up some extra systems. I started off peacefully developing non military techs and didn't even

Bah...my post got obliterated and I'm not retyping it. It sucks when reviewers spew without actually playing a game and it's early still even for initial thoughts...so I'll review the game later. So far, so good. I'm having fun and the game looks vastly better in person than in screenies. The game is not very alt+tab friendly AT ALL. I have an AMD3000 with 1g RAM and an ATI9800 128, WinXP, etc - and I've successfully alt+tabbed once so far - all other times the

The logistics cost of guarding a trade route would likely make the route cost a lot more than it produced. You're probably better off having some freighters on hand as backups, and/or establishing less potentially risky routes, and/or spreading out your routes so an enemy can't completely disrupt all of your trade easily. In GalCiv1, if an AI was harassing your freighters, it would usually be with a small number of ships, so you could counter with a slightly bigger ship or

Check your junkmail/spam folders - it could've ended up there. And of course, make sure you're checking the correct email account. In my case...check the delete folder since my wife decided to clean up our emails and neither Stardock or Galactic Civilations II mean anything to her (so they looked like garbage). Edit...probably depends how you pre-ordered too. I orded CDs from Stardock themselves. I'm also an existing customer from GalCiv1 so I already have SDC

What's the exact cutoff time today? Silly me, I thought the open beta with preorder thing ended ages go.

I agree with you. I haven't come close to finishing HL2 - it's just too boring. I never finished Doom3 either - that was far too boring and utterly repetitive. HL1 is so good you can actually play it several times even though you know what to do and what's gonna happen. To me there is way more to a good game than spectacular graphics. You failed to mention that the whole Steam thing is pure evil and a pain in the butt too.