Hate this game ...

Q. Can you do nothing but post like this?

Looking at your profile all you have done is moan, moan, moan. Fair enough some of your point have had a valid background but everything you have written here has been covered before in all of your complaining posts! I really dont see the need for this one after you have already posted the same over the last 5 of your posts. I can only ascertain you must either like the sound of your own voice or you are a compulsive moaner.
To sum this up, please spare us any more of this type of post.

Most people here will always try and assist where we can but "horribly programmed pile of crap?" is that really conducive to getting any help at all? With 99% of us having no issues with the game i would suggest you first look at your system and maybe tweak the game settings a bit. Checking you have the latest drivers is also a good idea and failing that, if you still have problems, then contact [email protected] who are a great bunch of people who will do their utmost to assist you through your issue.

I can answer your question, but first keep the following bug in mind that I listed above:
-> clicking in the lower right corner of screen (next to the turn button) will open up the research screen. While this might maybe only happen at high resolutions and in widescreen - who knows, its annoying. One game consists of hundreds of turns, I open up the research screen countless of times per game.
Secondly, how can you miss something as obvious as this when shipping a game? To me, that shows that Stardock seems to be totally overwhelmed trying to develop a game like this.

I am kinda mad, because the announcement says that there will (most likely) only be one more patch. I doubt that patch will fix any of the many architectural and UI issues.
This makes me realize that I spent 60 bucks on a fun game thats very cumbersome to play. I bought this game based on the rave reviews, and feel "cheated" now.

I been looking for a "good" civ game for years. Civilization plays extremely well. I am sure that you will find that the Civ4 interface is far superior especially in terms of customizability compared to Galciv. In Civ4 you can - for example - disable most if not all popups that interupt gameplay.
However, Civ4 has performance issues imo. When playing against a high number of opponents you'll get to wait quite a bit on their turns to complete during the later stages of the game. In this regard, Galciv works much better. Even on big maps, the computer players complete their turns almost instantly.

You're new to Stardock products, aren't you? There'll be quite a bit more than one patch.

And, frankly, you found one. I stopped playing the Civ franchise after experiencing way more bugs than this game had in Beta...but experiences differ.



Yeah, when they say "patch" they mean major content updates/upgrade package. In the meantime, they will have almost weekly bug fixes to take care of you. (not a sure thing, but that's generally just how they roll.)



But, the bottom line is: Don't be an ass.

I know you're frustrated, but when you act like a grown up, these guys and gals at SD will freakin bend over backwards to make you happy. Give them a chance. Given that most people aren't having the problems you're experiencing, and the fact that this game has been play-tested to death, it's probably a hardware issue.


Or, you can act like a child, and everyone from Brad on down will ignore you. If you're abusive and a lost customer, what's the use coming to you on their hands and knees?

Perhaps you can post your difficulties and your debug.err file so we can try to help. Maybe your graphics drivers are old and that's why you get slowdowns. I've noticed the research screen popping up as well when you click that area, but come on, it's harldy game breaking. Actually it's the whole taskbar except the buttons that behaves like that. Just point more carefully and perhaps it will be fixed next time.

Hmm, you guys aren't really grasping the problem here. The problems I see with the game (lack of interface customization, sluggish interface, bad UI design, not enough shortcuts, too many popups, memory leaks all over the place) will most likely never be fixed.
Why do I believe that? Because going back and retooling technical core aspects of the game is too much work = too much time = too high costs.

Especially the greatest flaw, that comes from the multi-threaded way the game runs is something that we will just have to live with.
If you want to experience this bug, go play a DVD, run defrag, and copy a big file on your harddisk around. While all this is going on, start up Twilight. Now start a game, play for a few rounds and as you are coming up on a very event-intensive turn (i.e. research project complete), hit Ctrl+N to quickly start a new game.
Since your computer is so taxed with all that other stuff, you might experience the odd thing where you can actually get all the way through starting your new game. Maybe even move your scout there. Then eventually the "research complete" - screen FROM THE PREVIOUS GAME WILL POP UP!

I doubt you guys can not see this as a serious flaw in how the game is built. Stuff like that is found all over the game and is the root of my loss of faith in Stardock.

All I can say is that you seem to be the only dissatisfied customer I've run across. I can understand if what you're running with is true, but honestly, the bug is more likely on your end- as no one else has been able to reproduce it.

Besides, you're not supposed to run other programs while you defrag anyways.

Wait, you play a DVD defrag and copy files at the same time and play the game? Well, what do you expect? You are not running a mainframe but a home computer. Try doing one thing at a time and then you might get things done. And which other game has a customisable UI? It's just the way the game is. If it happens that you don't like the game, fine, you are entitled to your opinion. But so many others like it... And why aren't there enought shortcuts? You can pretty much do whatever you want with a couple of clicks each time. Do you mean keyboard shortcuts?

Also, I'm pretty sure that there aren't so many memory leaks as you are claiming... Can you produce evidence for them? If I recall correctly there was a memory leak in the beta but it was fixed. Perhaps others will confirm.

Playing DVDs and running defrag will probably explain away your slowdown issues, mate. As for the bug, it's hardly game-breaking, is it? Just a cosmetic glitch, that only apparently occurs in the minority of cases where you're placing a heavy demand on resources (and possibly because of the defrag, you shouldn't generally do anything else while that's running). Stop complaining, produce a debug.err file for it and let Stardock know politely, then maybe you won't get such a frosty reception here.

Also: you can press Return or Enter (on the numpad) to take a turn instead of clicking the GUI. This will stop your problems with bringing up the research screen, and save you moving your mouse back and forth all the time.

Although I don't have any but anecdotal proof either, I do seem to experience the memory leaks thing, but I'm pretty sure Stardock are already aware of it.

What does this mean exactly? Is this the thing where your game runs slower and slower until the omega molecule appears? If so... can you explain why you get it and I don't?



Yes I worked out pretty early in the piece that it was probably not a good idea to burn cd's, encode an mp3 and edit hex files whilst waiting for my turn in gc2. So rather than declare war on stardock I decided to empower myself... I close everything first, make a nice cup of tea, boot up gc2 and immerse myself in the first game that is generated. When I am finished gaming, I then take care of all those other things I need my pc for, it's a worthy tactic... perhaps you could try it.

I hope you get it sorted dude. Twilight is wonderful... and Stardock are extremely helpful to... deep breaths and try to be respectful.

I hate this game as well. I barely get any sleep nowadays. Must... kill... Drengin....

What are your system specs?

I played for 6 hours straight on an immense galaxy with 9 opponents plus minor races and haven't had a twitch, stutter or crash.

I have had the research screen pop up twice in that 2 hours - not a big deal overall.

This game gets so much more "right" than "wrong" .... your post makes it sound like you bought Dungeon Lords or some such piece of shareware released as a retail game...

You seem immature to me given the nature of your posts - especially when everyone helps you anyways.

J

You are an idiot.

I was cooking a cheeseburger on my heat sink, spraying my computer with a garden hose, watching 3 movies at once on my DVD player (horrible grinding noise) and then loaded up Twilight and IT DIDN'T WORK AT ALL! How dare Stardock release such a flawed game!

Lol. Get a life.

Putting your system under immense load will more reliably produce the kind of odd behavior within the game that I was talking about ("aftershock" events from previous games). Which you would want so you could inspect, test and maybe eventually fix it.

Yes, but you are not supposed to do this. Official line would probably be, like for all games, close all other applications that may be using resources.

If you also want a bug to be fixed you should produce the debug.err file, found in My Documents/My Games/GCTwilight folder after the error occurs so the devs can have a look at it, see your systerm specs and see if the problem is on your side or the game's fault. If you are playing on a system that's ancient, plus doing everything else you are saying, well, that's a recipe for disaster, for all games, not only GalCiv.

While true, the "aftershock" events bug still happens when solely running GalCiv. Of course, if your processor is just busy running GalCiv, its much less likely that processing an event (like completing a research project) will for some reason not complete until after a player has already started up a new game.
The fact is however, that it still does happen. And its sloppy programming that it does. It means that the game kinda muddles along with different parts of the program not knowing what the other parts are doing.

My computer is 2 years old, so not 100% up to par but it runs GalCiv2 quite well. I also do play other, much more demanding games that run perfectly. My drivers are also up-to-date.
I do believe however that for some reason, I am more exposed to the games threads getting delayed. This might cause many of my issues. Maybe loading a saved game while the game is still finishing up the last turn in the background is causing those wierd results and crashes I have been seeing?

I wouldn't know. I just want it fixed and I am distraught because I believe that - since Stardock is moving on to other games - those lingering issues will remain forever.

I do notice a memory leak. My game will crash when it overloads my 2 GB RAM and 6 GB of virtual memory. When I restart the game it ends up using significantly less than what it crashed at (definately a memory leak). I also noticed that if my game gets overloaded once, it will continuously overload. However, I have had some games with alot more units floating around that do not overload my RAM (so I do not know what the source is).

I've yet to experience the prob you've described. Been playing Twilight since it came out with immense galaxies and no framerate issues, despite having a dated system.

Here's the latest from Brad (Frogboy):


Who knows, maybe if you keep on them and point to the errors you find they'll do something about it. Still, starting bug threads with titles like "Hate this game...", asking them how they sleep at night, and calling the game a "pile of crap" is hardly constructive criticism, and more like asinine whining from someone in their pre-teens. You sound like you may be a smart guy. Unless you're much older and it's too late, you'll likely learn that developing good interpersonal skills, in person or via online forums, can actually work for you instead of against you.

*sigh* Some people have no idea how to get things done. I don't typically flame folks, but boy have you earned it. I'll see if I can restrain myself.

First of all, as already mentioned, you will get much better results in any task if you go about it in a productive manner. Would you help a person who came to you and said "I hate what you devoted the last 2 years of your life to! It is total crap! Now make it do what I expect!"? I know I wouldn't feel like it. I'm sure they still will, but how much better could they help if they really wanted to?

Second, you have no clue how the game is programed and obviously have no idea how programming (or computers for that matter) even work as evidenced by your ridiculous posts above. By the way, if you have a dual core processor and don't have the proper drivers loaded, the processor (not he game) will cause lots of weird behavior since it could report two different times to the game. You can also limit what processors any program can use in task manager, again only if you have a dual core.

Third, you would know if you had asked (or likely if you had even searched around for some answers) that Stardock has about the best reputation for updating their softare and games. They even ask us to give suggestions and ideas and put in what we ask for. Brad (the owner of the company and programmer of the AI) has even created a post asking us to please slam his game.

Fourth, where are your explanations of the actual problems? Where are the explanations of how to reproduce them? Did you even read the stickies on how to post a bug report or known bugs and how to get help?

Fifth, you are an idiot. Oh, I know you are frustrated and upset. I can understand that you want to express your emotions. I get that things aren't going as expected. But your arguments lack any kind of understanding of the situation.

That having been said. Please post a debug.err (you can find out how in the linked threads) and explain your problems properly and thoroughly so we can find a way to fix them. Brad, Cari, Kryo, and others often post answers directly to you. Email tech support typically gets back to you within 4 hours, including the responses you send. Why not give it a try before judging things?

We invite you to direct your complaints of our products. We have a channel made for it in fact.

Please send your email reply to [email protected]. This is an actual complain and concern line.

Babamilo, are you retarded or just stupid? Personal computers, meaning "home" computers are only designed to do one major task at a time. This is how your CPU or Processor works. It can only "process" so many commands at a time. When it is trying to do too much at once it will hang and crash. While you may be able to play simple games like mine sweeper while watching a DVD, even high end PCs will not be stable if you are trying to play a DVD, run a defrag, and play a quality game. Also, in my experience (and you could know more than I do, I'm only A+ and Network+ certified as well as a Linux user) you can't do anything other than defrag while defragmenting your computer because it will hang often and eventually you will be told that it can't finish because something is writing to the drive.

Do the world a favor, stop using computers and don't reproduce.

GalCiv2 spawns as a process which is handled by the kernel (like every other application), it sounds like you have a system problem.

You have to distinguish between processes(i.e. tasks) and threads. GalCiv2 is a single process with about 10-15 threads running during gameplay.
Threads execute at the same time and are vying for the processors attention to get their stuff processed. Its a basic principle and allows the computer to do more than one thing at once.
For example enable you to already adjust the tax rate in the economic screen while you are waiting for the computer's moves to finish.

I am using this sort of "blunt" language, because since Dark Avatar has come out, nothing has been done to fix these things. Now the final expansion pack came out and the game is still in shambles. Imo, they mostly focused on including eye candy and new features. Which is ok of course. But I would have liked to see more effort put into stabilizing the game.
It reminds me of EA. EA releases a game, then errors/bugs become apparent. Since funding has dried up and the game is unlikely to generate any additional revenue with or without a patch nothing is done about those bugs and you are stuck with a nice but half-working, annoying game you would just *love* to play if it wouldn't cause you to pull your hair out while playing.

Hmm another bug. I am in Mission 3 of the Arnor campaign and far into it. Now, almost everytime I want to place or nullify a spy, the game crashes.

How can you guys say this game is not buggy and keep a straight face while typing that?

So Babamilo, how's your "strategy" working for you? Not too good, huh? Well, if your goal is to annoy and complain, then I guess it's working just fine. But if your goal is get your game working, then I respectfully recommend you change your methods.

Stardock is not perfect. No developer is. But if you've been using their products as long as you say you have, then you should've come to the conclusion that they do actually care, and will try hard to solve problems as they come up.

Since the game has been in development for quite some time, the logical assumptions are a) the bugs you're finding are rare, and/or b) the bugs you're finding are specific to your system.

Either way, if you want it fixed, please be proactive. Stop running so many darn processes at the same time, install SmartException, play the game until it crashes, then send the results, plus what you were doing at the time of the crash to Stardock's support.

It all comes down to picking to deciding what YOU want to happen, then choosing the appropriate behavior so that goal is accomplished. Good luck to you.

-HM