Galactic Civilizations II will be digitally released late afternoon EST to users who have pre-ordered it.

It should also start showing up in retail today (though actual availability will depend on a store by store basis, by end of week it should be in most retail outlets hopefully).

If you're looking to pass the time, check out the forum stickies as we talk about what to expect and look for when you download this.

Most of Stardock's people will be hanging out here all day to help people since initial orders aren't the 2.5X of GalCiv I we had expected but more like 10X GalCiv I (thankfully, most of the game is mirrored across the world, we've had reports of download speeds on the multimedia of >1 Mebabyte per second).

You can also create your Metaverse characters if you'd like with the serial #s.  If you run into any issues or just have a question, feel free to stop by #galciv on irc.stardock.com. We'll be there.

Stay tuned!

Share with others favorite moments from your games.  Take a screenshot (print screen) and show them here.  You can use http://www.imageshack.us to host your images.

Here's one I got from tonight (playing on an easier level):

I know some people out there don't like Stardock Central.  Features = Complexity and we totally understand that.

Here are a few benefits of Stardock Central you may want to take advantage of:

You can Archive the game.  Just right click on the game and each module you want to back up and select "Archive".

This will ZIP it up to the archives directory in Stardock Central.

You can take this ZIP and burn it to CD, put it on other machines in your home.  Our license allows you to have it on as many machines YOU OWN as long as no more than 1 copy is being played at a time per license.

You can take the ZIP file and put it on a machine that does not have an Internet Connection.  You will need to install Stardock Central, however.  Once SDC is installed, choose File->Restore Applicationa and browse to your ZIP file.  SDC should take care of your various registry things as well as activation (if you don't have a net connection, it should bring up a dialog when you try to run the game that will require that you get email support to get a special code).

If you bought the retail version, none of this applies as you already have a CD and you can make backups of that as you will, same license restrictions.

Your Stardock.net account is used here by the forums, in Stardock Central, on other Stardock sites, and also to manage your Metaverse characters.  "One account to rule them all."

Your account can have up to THREE characters tied to it.  Most people will have only 1 but this way, if you have multiple people in your family playing the game (my son plays for instance) they can use a character. 

If you've already pre-loaded, you should be able to go to the Metaverse and Manager Characters.  You will need your serial # to create another character.

If you have any problems, let us know.

So which is better? Buying the game directly from the developers or getting it at the store?

The simple answer is: Whatever way is best for you is best for us.

Now for the more complicated answer (which still amounts to the same):

If you buy a game for $39.95 from us directly, we see all $39.95 minus a couple dollars in electronic processing.  If you buy the game from a retailer, then we'll see approximately half of what you paid for it.

But we need people to buy it at retail for the game to succeed. The reason for that is that most people don't want to download games.  They want the box. Or they want the manual. Or they don't want to download a gigabyte of stuff.  Or they just aren't comfortable buying on-line.  There's a lot of reasons for that. 

Moreover, there's an astonishing number of people who simply buy games while casually browsing the store. They literally buy a game based on its box or vaguely from word of mouth.  All the ads, all the websites, all the PR, ultimately don't really come into play as simple word of mouth, having a nice box, and being on a store shelf.  We don't have a precise percentage of how many games are bought in this way but I would be willing to bet it's well over 50% of sales are from this. 

To be at retail you have to be able to sell typically 4 units PER store, PER week.  At the end of the month, the store looks at the same, sees its sales, and decides whether to continue stocking it.  Some retailers based future stocking based on those sales.  So even though buying direct means that we get twice as much money per unit, it takes away a retail purchase that might make the difference between staying on the shelf another month or being taken off the shelf. 

What about mail order places? They're fine.  They often have good prices and good service.  You won't see us promoting them here, however  . Whatever is the best way for you to get your game is good for us.

The best thing that people can do with a game they like is word of mouth. It makes a huge impact on smaller publishers/developers (we're both).  If you like the game, recommend it to someone.  That will ultimately do the most good.  The rest will take care of itself.

Using our vast psychic powers, we are going to attempt to preempt the most common questions we think people will have and put answers here so that the main forum can stick to flaming us for not having some feature or because the installer formatted their hard drive (a problem that we've found only happens on 1 out of 3 systems and only if you have an nVidia or ATI card -just kidding-).

#1 What's the difference between the Bonus Pack and the Collector's Edition?

The Bonus Pack everyone gets. It's a series of minor updates, tweaks, and new content that we came up with while we waited for the stores to get their copies.  If you download 1.0D then you have the Bonus Pack.  There will be a seperate thread that explains what's in the Bonus Pack.

The Collector's Edition is a special version of the game that has additional content and is only available to users who either pre-ordered the game, bought the Collector's Edition specifically (Walmart or Stardock directly) or got the game as part of the first manufacturing run.

The Collector's Edition retail box is silver and contains a poster with the entire tech tree on it.

The electronic content that will be a seperate download in the Downloads section contains the Galactic Civilizations II Desktop and additional Ship components.

#2 I'm in Europe and..

Our publisher partner, Paradox, makers of great games like Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron is handling things over there.  It should be available at retail soon.  They are also working on native language versions throughout Europe but that's going to take some time.

If you're in Australia or New Zealand, Auran is taking care of things there and they will have it out shortly too.

#3 I'm a member of TotalGaming.net, can I get the CD version?

Yes.  If bought TotalGaming.net and used tokens to get the game, it's $5 plus shipping.  IF you got a free upgrade to the new TotalGaming.net (And if you don't know what that means then it probably doesn't apply to you) then getting the boxed version is $20 plus shipping.

#4 I want to download the game now! Do I still get a box?

If you select to get the retail unit when you purchased then yes. You get a temporary serial # and the box will be sent to you.

If you selected the download only option, you can later have a box sent to you for the cost of shipping.

Please copy and paste these items to [email protected] if you want to do any of these things so that they know precisely what you want to do.

#5 I want to go to the store and buy the game but does it have copy protection?

None whatsoever.  No CD check. No "Star Force". Nothing.  You don't even have to enter in the serial # when you install (because, let's face it, 5 years from now people are going to lose that thing anyway). 

That said, we recommend putting in the serial # because it'll make it easier to get updates. Updates require the serial #.  Once you have updated using the serial #, our system will have your info for you so that 5 years when you've lost that serial # you can get it back automatically.

(1) The official release of the digital version is 1.0D (for Digital).

(2) 1.0D allows users to RIGHT-CLICK on ship built notifications and it will automatically launch the ship.

(3) Because some video cards had video stuttering with the tutorials, the digital release adds a "Full screen" option. Ironically, the videos run fine on even obscenely low end hardware if run full-screen.

(4) We will have a full list of what's new in the digital release.

(1) IF you plan to switch between the game and something else a lot, run it in a window. You can do this via an option in the game's video settings. 

(2) The game will run in any high resolution your system will support.

(3) User created data files and preferences are in the %mydocuments\my games\galciv2 folder

(4) IF you run into some problem please let us know the following things:

• What OS you running?
• Is it English or a particular language (Swedish, German, Japanese, etc.)
• What video card do you have?
• What kind of CPU do you have?
• How much memory you have

(5) If you run into a serious problem (i.e. game won't start, crashes, etc.) there is a debug.err file in your GalCiv II directory. Post the contents of it here.

(6) UPDATE YOUR VIDEO DRIVERS.  We're serious about this. If someone responds to this post with a "Game occasionally CTDs, here's my debug.err" and there's a video driver from 2004 in it, we'll find you

(7) The game should run on pretty much any system that supports DirectX 9C.  YOU MUST HAVE DIRECTX 9C or later installed.

(8) There are some first generation Intel Extreme adapters that don't work with the game.  We're talking very old ones (i.e. <2003).  They don't work because they don't support True Type fonts in games. Nothing we can do. There's no work around other than to get another card.  Based on the beta, this shouldn't be an issue as nobody ran into it.

(9) DO NOT use this thread to ask whether the game will work on your system. If you have doubts, wait for the demo. If you can play any other recently released game, then you can run this.  (last time we put a thread like this up we had people with monster machines asking if they could run the game on it).

(10) IF THE GAME CRASHES ON YOU we want to know why. In Stardock Central in the "free stuff" area there's a program called Smart Exception.  Install that, run it, and if the game crashes, it will create a log that will tell us literally what line of code it crashed on.  Email [email protected] or [email protected] the file and we will take a look.  Don't forget to tell us what you were doing when it crashed to help us figure it out.

Good luck!  We'll be checking this thread regularly.

PLEASE only post if you're having a problem of some kind.  Thanks!

ALSO:

Galactic Civilizations II Knowledgebase: Click Here
General Stardock Knowledgebase: Click Here
Submit A Trouble Ticket: Click Here

Starting this week, tens of thousands of people will be jumping on to download gigabytes of game at around the same time.  This means, naturally, that some percentage of people are going to have problems.  This post is here to answer some questions and provide a place where Stardock support people can also help.

Don't worry! We will take care of you.

Stardock Central:

The most common problems we've seen people have revolve around two things:

(1) Someone who bought the game with one email address but has used a different email address to be on the forums.  That's fine, in fact, probably a good thing to do.  But it may confuse Stardock Central.  If you run into that, just email [email protected] with the subject:GalCiv Stardock Central problem.  They will fix you up.

(2) Some of our long time users have multiple accounts on our sites.  Same issue as above.

(3) The base game will download slower than the other modules.  In Stardock Central there is a menu called tools. Go to Settings, pick Internet and you can try a different server to see if that helps your download speed.  The base game should download at speeds from 30k/sec to 300k/sec depending on where you live, time of day, etc.  The bulk of the game, however, should download at whatever the maximum your connection is as we have set up mirrors world wide.  The base game is being set up so that we can update it very often. The  other stuff won't need updating (i.e. movies and such) so we can mirror that more.

(4) Activation. If you are downloading the entire game, there is an activation system built in.  Don't worry, you will be able to keep installing the game, even years from now, on your new systems without having to talk to us.   However, because the activation server is likely to get hammered, there may be some issues that will crop up.  Don't worry, just email support with the above. IF you don't get an answer within 1 hour, feel free to post in this thread.

(5) IF you had the beta, you can install on top of it and it should work fine.  But if you do run into problems, reinstalling is a possible solution (yea, that's a lame answer).

(6) IF you switch servers, there may be some modules that look like they need updating. Trust your own judgment. If you just downloaded the latest/greatest version and you switch servers and there's an update that you didn't hear about, it's probably due to minute differences in the time stamps.  This probably won't happen but given the sheer # of mirrors involved, it's possible.

(7) IF you purchased the retail version, you can skip Stardock Central entirely if you want and just download the "patch" from Downloads area. 

(8) IF you are downloading on one of the first days, bear in mind how many other people are also downloading. Download resume should be working fine so if for some reason there's a server time out, don't panic, you can resume where you left off. 

(9) MAKE SURE YOU HAVE THE LATEST STARDOCK CENTRAL. 2.29A.374 (or later).

Thanks to the preloading we did last week, we don't expect any huge issues.  But due to me saying that, just now, that naturally means something will go wrong. For you.

We'll be camping out here, not just me but the support team, the development team, my mom, and of course the tech support guy who has "It's working fine here." set as a hot key.

Stay tuned and good luck!

Having some fun with the Bonus Pack which goes out tomorrow (it'll be part of the download/1.01 update).

We made logos for a bunch of countries so people can play for the EU or Australia or Germany or whatever.   You can make your own too of course.