Welcome to another (or first) edition of "Did you know..."

Standing in for a dialog with a "show me more tips" checkbox is your host, me with a series of fairly random but hopefully useful suggestions that might make your gameplay more fun!

#1 You can "grab" the map with the left mouse button and move it around by holding it down.  You may never want to edge scroll again.

#2 You can RIGHT-CLICK on the ship built block notifications that flow down on the right and your ship will automatically be launched.

#3 On the planet screen, you can put your mouse over the approval and influence and it will explain where that number is derived from.

#4 In the Diplomacy screen, you can RIGHT-CLICK on tiems to bring up a dialog that gives info on that item.

#5 You can play a quasi-Hot seat game with someone by loading up the game as GalCiv2 cheat (use the cheat parameter).  Then when you set up the game, you let the AI play out a few turns and then have your friend pick one of the races they want to control. Have them select that unit and hit  CTRL-SHIFT-Z.

#6 CTRL-S is the quick save.

#7 You can double click on planets and various other items to take the place of having to place, or install or build or go to their screen.

Some retailers who took pre-orders didn't order the Collector's Edition SKU.

No problem, we'll make sure you're taken care of.  Thanks to the serial #s that come with the game, we know which serial #s were part of the first manufacturing run.

Therefore, anyone who pre-ordered the game or gets a box from the first run (the pre-orders pretty much eat all the first manf run) will be able to download the special Collector's Edition content.

That includes:

• The Galactic Civilizations II Desktop
• Additional goodies to help design your ships and more!

So don't worry, we'll make sure everything works out okay.  We'll be updating the Downloads page in the next 24 hours to handle this.

UPDATE: Please don't read more into these words than are there.  SOME retailers who took pre-orders didn't order the collector's edition.  As far as we know, MOST did.  We just want to intercept those who find out their retailer didn't order the right unit to know that we will make sure they're taken care of.

We were assured that PC games were "d0med". We were told nobody plays turn based strategy games despite the fact that Civilization 4 is a huge hit.  But here we are, seeing activity at 10X the level of GalCiv I which in itself did far better than anticipated.

Things went a lot smoother than we had expected and ironically, a lot smoother than they would have if it weren't for just plain luck (we reserved a ridiculous amount of bandwidth which turned out to be just barely enough).

You can read some of the experiences we've had from the trenches these past two days at the link below.

That is the bandwidth graph from yesterday of JUST the multimedia/movies module.  It's measured in megabits. So we peeked at over 300 megabits per second yesterday on just that.  To put things in perspective, Galactic Civilizations I required a total of 30 megabits of bandwidth for the entire game. 

You can see where at around 4pm Cogent, our ISP for our database server, hic-upped causing the default server to not transmit.  At 4:15pm, you had numerous people posting on the forum about how bad their download experience was and when it came back at 4:30pm, everything was fine again.

Observations

I would make a terrible tech support person. I just don't have the patience for it.  I'm an engineer so I tend to get riled at hyperbole in descriptions.  So here are some things I've noticed:

#1. Not only will people not read the manual. They won't read the readme. They also won't read the sticky posts with titles such as "STICKY: Don't have sound? Make sure you download the multimedia!".  I took a screenshot last night where the forum list literally had two "NO SOUND!!11" type posts in a row that were directly underneath the sticky.

#2 Similar to #1, people won't update their video drivers no matter how many times you tell them.  One user, who posted several different places how "buggy" the game was because it kept crashing on them finally, after much loud complaining, gave us a debug.err.  He had an ATI card with drivers from 2003.  His debug.err file actually contained the notice that it had brought up a warning dialog about his drivers.  In email, I went back and forth with him that boiled down to this:

Me: Didn't you read the Readme where it says "We're serious, you MUST update your video drivers if they're older than a year."?

User: No. I don't have time for that.

Me: You didn't read the sticky post entitled: "Having an in-game problem? Read here for tips!" which said "You absolutely must update your video driver, if you make posts saying how the game crashes intermittently on you and it turns out you have some video driver from 2004 we'll find you! "?  And your video driver is even older than that.

User: No.

Me: You didn't heed the warning dialog that came up when you launched the game that said "Your video drivers are old.  You will experience problems if you don't update them. Your drivers are dated 9/1/2003"

User: I didn't think that applied to me. My other games don't have a problem.

This kept up over and over. And the problem is that people who don't read the Readmes or Stickies end up crowding out posts from people with legitimate issues.  Moreover, it makes it tough (at least for me) not to get jaded when someone posts yet another vague issue.  Is it yet another person who decided to rush to the forums and make another all caps post proclaiming "problems" without having even looked at the readme.   And just to be safe, we made stickies and knowledge based articles.

#3 Three people can completely change the perception of an entire forum.  I read on Penny-Arcade about companies hiring moles to go around and make their products look more well liked on forums? It would probably be more efficient to hire moles to go onto other people's forums and say negative things about someone else (That's not happening here btw, it's just a joke).  Because 3 people having problems (Real or imagined) can make enough posts and responses to make something trivial look like it's wide-spread.

Since we know the stats (how many people actually have the game) and the number of different people having a problem, we know some things I've seen are not widespread.  But you get a couple guys responding in every post or making 5 or 6 posts with the same general subject "GAME BUGS IN RELeASE!!!11" and soon you get people asking "Wow, it's buggy!"

That's not saying that the game is free of bugs. Certainly not.  But at a certain point, on a PC game, we're at the mercy of the hardware vendors and their drivers.  We can't come over to people's houses at gun point (yet) and force them to update their drivers.  We can't force handful of people running 16-bit color to change their color depth from 65,000 colors to 32bit color.  If there was an easy programmatic solution to force the color depth change (Direct3D certainly seems to have one and we're using it but on newer video drivers they seem to assume no one even runs at 16bit color anymore) we would do it.

The main thing is that I now really understand why game publishers get tempted to censor or control their forums because it's really frustrating to see a handful of people changing the whole flow. 

I also see why many publishers get accused of trying to "cover up" bugs. Because what happens is that the vocal people who don't read the readmes or the docs or even the sticky forum posts will start accusing the developer of trying to not acknowledge "a very real problem" because they don't want to admit that they just didn't bother to read the docs.

Like I said, there are definitely glitches in the game. But virtually everything I've seen (and I've been living on those forums) fall into the the trivial or the obscure.  They are things we'll fix as quickly as we can, but if you read the posts, you would think "OH man, maybe it's buggy?"

#4 Stardock Central's UI caused a lot of grief.  The biggest problem of the release in my opinion was that in Stardock Central, when you click on the game to download, it doesn't automatically expand to display the other modules. As a result, people download the game and don't download the sound, multimedia, movies, or tutorials.  I don't blame them. That's bad UI on our part and we're fixing that and putting it out as we speak.

#5 The most serious real bugs (i.e. not individual specific) I've seen are:

• If you add enough jewelry to your ship (i.e. the cosmetic addons) the game will eventually crash.  In all my game play examples and all our testing and all the testing during the beta, this never came up.  But now that real players are getting into it, some are making some super-sophisticated ships.  This is something that will be addressed in Friday's update.

• In the Metaverse, some people are reporting weird ability values.  This has been fixed (initialization issue that's only present in the release compile).

• On nVidia Geforce 6x series cards, the mouse cursor for some people disappears.  We don't have any idea on this as we can rarely get people to answer our questions on their systems (another gripe, some people seem to enjoy complaining more than solving their problem).  No idea what the cause it.  Our theory is either they're using the Omega drivers or something that doesn't support what we're doing OR they're using colored mouse cursors outside the game. 

• The GNN has a "Goto" button that can mess up the UI if the player goes deep enough in it (it was intended for people who just wanted to jump to a planet, make an adjustment and leave but people who go to the planet and then go to a bunch of other places from the planet all from within the pop up manager can overload it).  We've fixed this already.

#6 Lessons learned?

1. You can never be too prepared. Thank goodness we did the preload last week.  We never imagined the game using half a gibabit of bandwidth to bring down. Not a million years. We felt we had gone overkill on bandwidth and it was just barely enough.

2. It is impossible to find every glitch.  We had gamma testers giving us the thumbs up weeks before we sent it to manufacturing. One suggested that we were having "separation" anxiety (i.e. being afraid to let it go out there).  Sometimes bugs exist simply because someone does something you never thought of. 

3. Transparency is key.  Be open and honest with people and MOST people will respect that.  Tell people what problems you think you have and what problems you think you don't have and let people decide for themselves. Don't try to "control" the flow of information.  Stay ahead of the curve and make sure you are the one telling people what's going right and wrong.

We've gotten word from Take 2 (our distributor) today that they are putting Galactic Civilizations II into the channel as fast as possible.

Simply put, indie games don't tend to have this kind of demand so they're struggling to meet the demand.  It should be pretty thoroughly stocked by Friday (2 days from now) though some places sporadically do have it in stock.

If there was a graph of "interest level" in the game, it spiked massively as February rolled around from being a smaller title to being a very high demand title.  So everyone's playing catch-up.

If you've pre-ordered it from retail or are planning to get it at retail, please don't cancel your order.  We'll make it worth your while.  We will try to release an update this Friday afternoon to coincide with the wider availability so that you have something to look forward to when you bring the game home beyond what's already available.

We'll put together a Journal entry on what will be in that update, we're still deciding. Probably some additional maps, scenarios, and some bug fixes, tweaks, etc. 

So if it's not at your local store yet, it should be by Friday.  Purchasing at retail helps ensure that the game stays on store shelves longer.

In an effort to ensure that nobody is sympathetic to it, the RIAA's filing to the US copyright office indicates that it does not support people beig able to take their legally purchased CDs and copy that music onto their legally purchased iPod even if they are the only one using it.

Ripping music from CDs and transferring it to an iPod does not constitute fair use, according to a document filed by the major record companies.

In a filing to the US Copyright Office, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) attempts to undo a statement it made in court during the recent successful prosecution of the Grokster p2p company.

In court RIAA lawyer Don Verrilli said: 'The record companies have said, for some time now, and it's been on their website for some time now, that it's perfectly lawful to take a CD that you've purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod.'

However in the Copyright Office filing the RIAA takes a contrary view.

'Nor does the fact that permission to make a copy in particular circumstances is often or even routinely granted, necessarily establish that the copying is a fair use when the copyright owner withholds that authorization,' it argues. 'In this regard, the statement attributed to counsel for copyright owners in the MGM v. Grokster case is simply a statement about authorisation, not about fair use.'

In other words, explained Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the EFF, a leading digital rights campaign organisation, if you want to copy a CD to your iPod, get permission first.

As one of the people who actually does not pirate music but buys it legally, this really gets on my nerves.  At some point, EVERYONE becomes a criminal in the RIAA's book.  The idea that I can't take my legally purchased Star Wars CDs and put them onto my computer to listen to in iTunes is absurd.

February 21, 2006 -- Software developer Stardock Entertainment released the sequel to its award-winning PC strategy game, Galactic Civilizations today.  Galactic Civilizations is a space-based strategy game set in the 23rd century in which players take on the role of leader of a space-faring civilization.  Through military might, diplomatic skill, technological superiority, or cultural supremacy players attempt to dominate the galaxy against up to 10 opponents.

The sequel, Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords, is a complete overhaul of the game that includes possibly the most sophisticated visual ship design feature seen yet in a PC game. It also includes fleet battles, sophisticated planetary management, the civilization manager, advanced diplomacy, and much more all encapsulated in a state of the art 3D engine.

The game should be available at most retail outlets in North America this week and across Europe and Australia over the next couple of weeks. It is also available for immediate purchase and download at www.galciv2.com. 

It will run on Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, and Windows Vista.  The game engine is resolution independent and is scaleable to ensure that it has very high end graphics on the latest hardware but will still run well on low end desktops and older laptops.

Stardock has also released the Bonus Pack for the game today which added several new custom maps, scenarios, starship components, full-screen video tutorial support, AI tweaks, and much more.

Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords lists for $39.95 at retail.  Stardock's home page is https://www.stardock.com.  More information at the game's home page https://www.galciv2.com.

Other Resources:

• Game play Example: https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=164&AID=101434
• Video of gameplay: https://forums.galciv2.com/?ForumID=161&AID=101018

Screenshots:

Good, bad, ugly? Let us know what you think of the game.

If you were a reviewer for Magazine X, what sort of rating would it be on a 1 to 5 star scale?

What did you like? What surprised you? What would you like to see improved?

At around 4:30pm EST one of our ISPs (Cogent) had a hic-up. Naturally it was the default one (anyone who switched to a different server would have been fine incidentally).  But Cogent has restored things.

In the meantime, we spread the bandwidth across more servers in that outtage so people should be getting pretty good download rates now.

Please let us know your experiences.

Hopefully things will go smoothly for you to get the game.  But if not, here's a guide to help you..

First Steps..
When you purchase the game you will receive a link to Stardock Central. Download that.

Make sure you are running 2.29 or later (if you've been running Stardock Central for awhile, double check in the about box that you're not using an old version like 2.24).

Downloading
If you're downloading the game and it's slow, you can try a different server.  From Stardock Central go to tools->Settings and the server is in the "Internet" area.  We have several different servers.

Account Problems
If you used a different email address to purchase the game direct than what you used to create an account here, Stardock Central may get confused. If that happens, email [email protected] with the subject "GalCiv Account Issue" and they'll take care of you.  If you receive no response within 1 hour, post here and someone from Stardock will likely see it and take care of you here.

Download Speeds
The core game download speed will be slower than the multimedia/movies/tutorials because those are mirrored.  The core game is regularly updated so we aren't able to mirror it as much.  You should still get pretty decent speeds (and a reminder: try a different server if you find downloading too slow or if you get a time out -- bear in mind, there's a LOT of people downloading the game).

If you have problems related to actually obtaining/installing the game, post them HERE in this thread.

NOTE: Some anti-virus software will cause the installer not to work (i.e. it'll block Stardock Central from extracting/installing the game). If you run into an installation problem, try disabling some of your anti-virus setup temporarily to see if that resolves it.