David Meacham

One of the things that I was most excited about for ToA 2.0 was the Arnor ship style and ship parts. I really reeeeallly wanted sweet crystal ships floating around with my flag. But when it came out, there were no Arnor ships to be had! This makes me very sad. I know you Stardock folks wouldn't've cut the ships from release without a good reason, and that it probably takes a long time to make the ships and parts from scratch, but I wanted to let you know that there's a

In one of the corners of the map of the latest game I played, there is a little Drengin ship. It doesn't move or do anything, and as far as I can tell it's not a real ship; it can't be selected and has no icon when zoomed out. However, when zoomed out far enough for the other ships to turn into icons, that one ship still appears normal. Tiny, but normal. Not a big deal, but still a bug, so I'm submittin' it.

The biggest problem with starbases is the HUGE pain in the ass it becomes to upgrade them. +5 shields, +10 shields, +20 shields, +5 armor, +10 armor... Master of Orion 2 had the right idea by having bases automatically equip themselves with the highest-level weapons and defenses available to the race. How would that play out in GC? You put one module on the starbase for each attack/defense type you want it to have. So six modules total for covering all of your bases. Once a module

I played through a quick game the other night, and in the process I received the aquatic colonization tech from another race in a trade. I noticed after that that the aquatic planet I wanted still had a red icon on it. "Hmm," I thought, "maybe it's just a display bug." I moved a colonizer over to it, and nope, couldn't colonize. A while later, I researched the advanced aquatic tech, and the planet went yellow. I colonized it and played out the rest of the game with a 50% penalty on th

As of a week or so ago, my copy of Stardock stopped connecting to the Internet. It would pop up a script error message when started, then complain that it couldn't reach the server. I uninstalled and reinstalled it, only for it to give me the same error 1001 during the install process at the point where it prompted for my stardock account information. I uninstalled it again, deleted the directory it was in, reset my winsock stack, installed it again into a different directory name, and it sti

I've found that no matter how large a galaxy I play with, the anomalies are all gone after the first year or two. Long before I've reached a point where I can upgrade my survey ship, making the experience upgrades completely useless, and long, LONG before the 'Galactic Guide Book' achievement can be built. Is there any sort of option to have anomalies spawn randomly as the game progresses to give my survey ship something to do after the second year?

Long story short, I had the Orbital Terraforming galactic achievement, had an alien race surrender to me, and none of their worlds improved in environment. And the race was pretty far behind me in technology, I doubt that they'd managed to get terraforming, much less gotten around to fully upgrading any of their planets. Whereas when I had the neutral morality bonus of all worlds being fully-upgraded, it was a fairly regular occurrence to capture a world and have it immediately upgrade a few r

If you want a new video card, wait for April. Nvidia and ATI are both unleashing their new DX10-class lineup around then, so you should be able to buy a sub-$100 card that performs as well as the $150ish cards do today.

Good lord, I think it's become a little too trendy for people to hate Microsoft these past few years. There's nothing wrong with Vista, I've been using it for months on a work computer. I'm going to wait a couple more months before putting it on my home computer to give folks time to make the patches and fixes and drivers necessary for my games to work on it, but it's a perfectly good OS. Vista is not the second coming when compared to XP SP2, but remember that XP was very shaky and f

You keep doing precisely what you're doing and don't let a bunch of Russian jerks tell you otherwise! I bought GalCiv, I bought a Stardock subscription for GalCiv2, and I buy every single game that I enjoy, except for those that use asinine, computer-crippling copy potection. Which is a shame, I want to get X3, but they use Starforce, so they aren't getting my business.