To recap:  To try to ensure that the release day's digital downloading extravaganza is kept to a painthreshold of merely excrutiating nightmare, we implemented a policy of pre-loading most of the game.

On February 14th, members of the beta group were allowed to pre-order and we took notes on their experiences and made some tweaks and adjustments to the servers based ont hat.

On Wednesday late afternoon EST, users who pre-ordered the game (But we not part of the beta) will have their orders processed and sent an email that should include a serial # and a link to download Stardock Central.

IF you ordered just the retail box from us, fear not. You will receive a temporary serial # to use while you wait for your box to arrive in case you want download it digitally.

The preload won't allow you to play the game until February 21st still.  But it will ensure that 99.5% of the game is already installed so that on February 21st you don't have much to download.

There will be several Stardock provided flame threads created for your convenience in case you want to participate in this voluntary form of masochism.  Reports from today indicated that things went far better than anticipated and even with a couple thousand people downloading at once our bandwidth only peaked at 22% of capacity. Some users reported download speeds of 600k on the multimedia and other bigger files (the base game however is currently slower due to the additional security on that which we're working to streamline but 200k per second should be a reasonable expectation for tomorrow).

Note: If your email address that you used to create your account here is different than your email address that you used to pre-order, make sure you put in that information into Stardock Central in the tools->register products.