system requirements

You can wait and buy it in the box when it comes out.. Check Ebworld.com they have it listed for Feb 25..

If you buy the Beta, you also get the full game... So you are getting the beta and the full game... This is what I decided to do since I wanted to play it now...

I also had trouble finding the Req.. I think a P300 or 400 is all you need... I even read somewhere that they played it on a P200...

There was a recent post by someone from Stardock saying they were increasing the requirement to a 600Mhz processor. This may have been because they increased the size of the galaxies, resulting in more processing activity, but I think if someone with a slower machine was careful in selecting smaller galaxies that wouldn't overtax their machine they could still enjoy the game.

Would more RAM help? I have p4 1.8 w/512ram. If enough ram is present, can the game be set to use it all and avoid HD?

I have a 1Ghz PC with 128 Meg ram, and I see page in/out activity only during game save operations, so I doubt that adding more ram to 512 Meg would change anything.

I generally don't have problems except when loading one-time animations and saving the game on my P-200 MMX with 80MB RAM.

Well, I am going to test a theory. I have a Proliant 5000, quad pent pro 200 server that i am going to try to upgrade the video on and see if it will run the game under server 2K.

Just being a techie in an id10t world.

but the beta should still be made available for free, it's a beta it's supost to be free, it's supost to be for people to test it and give ideas..not to pay and get the full game...
I've been a beta tester for doom and downloaded a 2GB file of doom beta....it's incredible but it's free and it's a beta....you know this because, ex: frame rate drops to 1f/s when you face a enemy...
Beta are for coders what lab mice are for cientitst "guinea pigs"

Eladamri-

There is no rule that says betas must be open to everyone. Companies can do betas in any way they see fit. Some do open betas and some closed. An open "free" beta might be a good idea to test out something like an online games that stresse network and server performance. There is no need for that with a game like GalCiv. If GalCiv did have an open beta, I think some potential customers would have become disinterested or frustrated with the game during some of the earlier betas. (Not true now however!)

What Stardock has done by only allowing people who have purchased the game to beta test is to ensure that they have testers who are serious about the game and have a vested interest in the outcome.

By the way, the beta is free. I paid nothing for the beta. The only thing I paid for was the completed version of GalCiv.

Some people think Stardock is charging people to beta test. The only thing Stardock has done is accepted pre-orders for GalCiv. If you pre-order however, you have the "option" of beta testing.

I for one would pay for a beta if it's a game I know I will buy. Example is with Starwars Galaxies I have tried everything to get into the beta but to no avail. I wish I could have just bought the game, it would have saved me major time trying over and over again to get in. I think one of the reasons we did it this way was so we made sure that the true fans where controlling the fate of Gal Civ. After all we are making this product for them. Not some one who wants to play the beta for a week, says it sucks because it crashed and then never even buys it. If people really want to try the game before they buy it they can always wait for the demo.

Back to the original topic, which was system requirements but basically implies performance, I am playing on a gigantic galaxy (24*24) and am VERY near end game. While I still do not see much in the way of paging activity, I am beginning to see long periods for the autopilot and next turn phases. The autopilot and next turn phases are now taking upwards of 3 minutes each on my 1Ghz 128M system. I have a HUGE number of constructors flying around and a HUGE number of planets completing military and social projects each turn, and the time it takes for these tasks hae been increasing exponentially.

I have a saved game if you think it would give you some insights to why this is happening, but I suspect it is more to do with the vast numbers of tables the code has to go through.

I played half of the beta with 256 megs of ram and the other half with 512 megs of ram. Actually I had 256 megs of ram go bad at the beginning so I went from 512 to 256 to 512. My turns were taking 3 minutes or so until I went back to 512 and then it started to shorten up considerably. note that I only have a 800mhz processor.

I think that more ram helps in terms of getting the tables and what-not prepared to be processed, but ultimately there is only so much processer real-estate to go around. I suppose eliminating anything that takes up extra processing time might help in addition to more ram.

Tytan,

I have the system monitor up on my PC and I am watching the page-in and page-out rates. If what you say is true my paging rates should be horrendous on my 128MB system, but they stay down to 0 except for saving games.