James Sterrett

Reply to STICKY: EASY TWEAKS to make the game better for you in Galactic Civilizations II Stardock Forums

Two comments: 1) The default galaxy map music is nowhere near as nice as the music for GC1... I'd rather have the option to switch back! 2) I'd ike to have a button to optimize the amounts of cash and/or influence being offered or requested. Open the cash screen, click the "optimize" button, and get the best offer the aliens will accept given the current other things on the offer/request list. #2 would solve my biggest gripe: the painful micromanagement in trad

Reply to Beta 5: diplo sliders in Bug Reports Stardock Forums

Also - Hello, Citizen Brian Rock. Glad to see that Oz is keeping an eye on things.

Reply to Beta 5: diplo sliders in Bug Reports Stardock Forums

I very much agree that the sliders are a pain. A detailed suggestion on the interface: http://tgnforums.stardock.com/?ForumID=139&AID=94948 Bottom line, to me: The interesting decision is deciding what to trade, and deciding whether or not to complete a trade at a given price, not the iterative process of ensuring I get the best price as a basis for the second decision.

Reply to I. Hate. Micro. Management. in GalCiv Journals Stardock Forums

I'm thrilled to hear that Stardock will be adding the following functionality to the Diplomacy screen's Trade function.... - When I open the mini-window for Cash, it will have a button to lock either slider in place. Personally, I'd tend to lock it at 20 months. GalCiv will remember what I last used for this setting with a given race. - The mini-window wi

Reply to Replayability: YES...Continued Playability: MAYBE in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

For most things Looking Glass, try Through The Looking Glass http://www.ttlg.com/ -- you can probably find help for your XP troubles on the System Shock forums there. [Message Edited]

Reply to Can't Get Scores to Post on Metaverse! in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Interesting - I have to click the "Submit" button twice as well. Pwehaps that's indicative of the problem?

Reply to Can't Get Scores to Post on Metaverse! in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Well, I can't disagree with you there. :p

Reply to Can't Get Scores to Post on Metaverse! in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I do keep trying, though not with much hope. I've played rather more than the three scores that actually made it through.... :notsure: On the other hand, it isn't as if the Metaverse submission is more than an extra cherry on top of the sundae. :)

Reply to Can't Get Scores to Post on Metaverse! in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Barry - yes. I'm on a cable connection, and on the turn the game is going to end (before the ending movie), I alt-tab out, use Internet Explorer to surf a little bit (to wake up the computer to the fact is has a net connection), put my machine in the router's DMZ to get around firewall/NAT issues, and then hit the "End Turn" button. It has worked only rarely. I just blitzed through a quick game, did all the above (and I re-registered today), and it has not shown up, though I d

Reply to Can't Get Scores to Post on Metaverse! in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

EBZero - I'll try re-registering. The rest of what you list, I've done - "waking up" the net connection, setting the router to put my machine in the DMZ - and none of these produce reliable results.

Reply to Can't Get Scores to Post on Metaverse! in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Charles, you may be one of the poor schmoes like me who, for no apparent reason, can submit scores successfully only imtermittently. Tells you it went through in the game, but the score never (or very rarely) appears. Someday Stardock will fix it. :)

Reply to OT: Anyone here know of any X-COM like games? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

The XCom designers have had Laser Squad Nemesis out for about a year now; it's squad-level tactical warfare, played over email vs humans. See: http://www.lasersquadnemesis.com/

Reply to Bug Report Thread in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Lucky Jack / mcyang : I missed yang's comment earlier, went looking from LJ's refernce, and can confirm: My savegames and CTRL-N work correctly after removing the Labor Unrest event.

Reply to Bug Report Thread in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I think Robert Frost might have written, "Something there is that doesn't love a reload." Loading saved games causes GalCiv to CTD, nearly all of the time; since this problem cropped up (for no apparent reason), I've managed to load a game exactly once. I've completely reinstalled the game attempting to get around this. No go. In addition, CTRL-N to restart a galaxy caused an immediate CTD. I sent a savefile and galciv.exe.cra file to [email protected].

Reply to Bug Report Thread in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Altered suggestion on the trade slider.... I've figured out how it works, and why it confuses me. The movement of the slider is linear. That means that it's hard to zero in on the necessary number if that number is, say, 9, while the empire I'm trading with has 2398 credits, because 9 is wayyy over on the left and the last jump goes from 23 to 0. Suggestion: Make the slider progression a bell curve, such that the "acceptable" solution is near the middle of th

Reply to Brad's Starbase Thread... in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I'm not entirely convinced of the need to solve the problem, but I'm not a brilliant GalCiv player either - so in my games, I'm happy to pump up my production as far as I possibly can with starbases. A point made above, that constructors are currently the useful means of soaking up otherwise wasted ship production, should also be kept in mind. In effect, at this time, the only "wasted" production is social, since there aren't inifnite-soak social production projects. Having sa

Reply to New review: FiringSquad gives GalCiv 88% in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I believe System Shock predates Duke Nukem; it came out at just about the same time as Doom (give or take a few months). According to http://www.the-underdogs.org/ System Shock is still for sale - they've got a link. For more to make you drool over System Shock 1, 2, and other Looking Glass classics, head over to http://www.ttlg.com/ You won't regret it, except possibly in having to sigh "So many games, so little time!" :)

Reply to Bug Report Thread in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

CTD: The Drengin popped up and wanted to trade Impulse Drive to me in exchange for a blank technology. The little symbol was there, a selection box appeared around the tech when I moused over it, but it was neither named nor shown. Clicked "Accept"; immediate CTD.

Reply to Bug Report Thread in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Stardock Central download trouble (and a sort of solution): I had niggling troubles getting rid of things like the "String not found" to disappear and graphics glitches on the slider bar in trades on the diplomacy screen; I'd been downloading updates via Stardock Central. I downloaded the 1.02 zipfile and installed it: ta-da, problems solved, even though I'd installed the same update with SDC. Conclusion: there's something odd with SDC's installation. :notsure: Interface

Reply to metaverse submission problem in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

It's worse than 50-50 - none of mine have submitted sucessfully after the first.

Reply to FAQ: Demo version in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

LS Boreas: I also ordered from Amazon, as a preorder about a month before release. A week after release, Amazon had not shipped; I said "screw it", cancelled the order, and ordered direct from Stardock. By the miracle of broadband, I was playing GalCiv two hours later. Obviously, not an option if you don't want to download the game...! But Amazon seems to be screwed up on shipping GalCiv, somehow. Normally they're excellent; I've often had pre-ordered software arrive

Reply to Is Simplicity better than complexity in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Simplicity vs complexity isn't really the issue; there's pointless complexity and oversimplification as negatives on both sides of the coin. What's needed is elegance: relatively simple rules systems that generate relatively complex results, keeping the ratio of Gameplay:Rules very high. GalCiv appears to do this pretty well.

Reply to For anyone who has the game already, can I play as anyone else besides Earth in GalCiv? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

You have to start on Earth, you have to be called Human. After that, you can name your leader and empire anything you please, and you can customize the Humans as much as you can customize the alien & human races in the other major space 4x games, if not more so. Does the moniker matter? From the spreadsheet point of view, no: a Klackon by any other name would work as hard. On the other hand, there is a lot in a name; other games have often used the alien race names and pictur

Reply to Crash bug - avoidance details inside! in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I could email you the savefile.... :) I don't know of a secure way for you to tell me where to send it, though. :notsure:

Reply to Crash bug - avoidance details inside! in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Yep, that's true - agreed.... I think that what's happening is this: the game dissolves the trade route, but doesn't entirely dissolve the map-marker for the freighter. When the player then clicks on the half-deleted freighter's map marker, the "link" send the program to a non-existent data location (the deleted route data) -- boom. The bug isn't the loss of the freighter route, it's the CTD when a curious newbie clicks on the color blop that is the partially-deleted freighte