The OP makes some valid points. I've never tried the campaign. I can't stand playing a gimped version of the game just to see the story, this game or otherwise. I agree completely on the diplomacy comments, and the UI could always be improved. Strategist, however, is a troll. Here he gives us a classic example of flame-baiting.
It's a known bug. It will be fixed in an update, soon.
I thought I saw something about this making it into 1.2, but don't quote me. I know it's something that's been mentioned.
It's not a bug.
Your sound drivers are from 2003. I think there are newer video drivers than that, but I could be wrong there. I don't have an ATI.
If you're having a problem, why don't you post some usefull information. A copy of your debug.err is a good start. If you can, install Smart Exception, too, and let us know what it says when you crash. FYI, not everyone is having issues.
They say "No CD copy protection", which is true, and you don't need an internet connection to play the game. You don't need a connection to update the game. You only have to activate once. Sounds like a lot of crying over nothing, to me. I read the manual online before I bought the game.
I like fast tech rate with no tech trading, personally, and the Drengin are cleaning house in my current game. It's a shame, because their my big trade partner, and I think I'm going to have to slap them down, or get the Yor to do it for me. Hey, ManOfWar, you need to get your military going faster. Build lots of 1 or 2 damage fighters, until you have one on every planet plus a couple fleets of three or four. If you do that in the first few years, you'll find the other civs kissing yo
Yeah, I think luck has a lot to do with how often you see them. My custom race has a point in it, and I get precursor ships, the birth rate increase, the two cultural ones, and the economic booms/recessions all the time. Every now and then someone will flip ethically. I still haven't seen any pirates, but I did have the "prison break" event the other day. I even had the extremists one, or whatever the fanatics are called. All of the poor Drengin's planets converted to them.
I think their copy protection scheme is genius. Everyone wins from what I can tell. For the very small inconvenience of activating once, and I have only had to do it once since I bought the game, you get free content updates. What's not to like?
See if there are newer sound card drivers for you Sound Blaster. The ones you have are from last year. You video drivers seem pretty new. You might check your motherboard chipset drivers, sometimes memory problems are related to your chipset.
Jeez, the ignorance runs rampant. It can be disabled through SDC itself, msconfig, or third party software. I disabled it, as I do all services and startup items that aren't required to boot the PC. SDC still works, as does GalCiv2. Big whoop.
Build entertainment centers and research up that branch of the tech tree. Build galactic wonders related to happiness, like the harmony crystals, virtual reality modules, etc. That should keep them pretty happy.
Yeah, there's a much newer driver for that sound chip, and the old drivers cause problems in a wide variety of games. I've got that "sound card emulator", too.
Was it a vanilla 6600? I had a 6600GT before I got my 7800GS, and it worked fine on it. Nice sentiment, regardless.
Yeah, on getting your economy going, keep the people as happy as your budget can tolerate, get your pop. up, and research up the econ branch. All my decent quality planets get one happiness buiilding and one econ building and one farm.
I focus more on getting my economy going now than before.
If it's not a hardware problem, it would have to be a driver or directX problem to affect multiple games. Did you update your directX when you installed?
That's a hilarious link. That does actually happen. Activision recently had to pull their Quake 4 beta patch because it was damaging LCD displays.
Video cards die all the time. Installing a game wouldn't have anything to do with it. Sometimes they just fail.
You just change your resolution to a widescreen resolution. The two most common are 1440x900 and 1280x720, but there are quite a few others, too.
They had probably already scouted the star systems before sending the colony ships.
You guys ROFL my waffles.
Saves from the Beta patches work fine for me. I don't know about saved games from 1.0 or 1.0X.
Upgrade your entertainment centers. You have to research the tech.
GalCiv2 Forums