Lots of Quasi Newbie Questions

You'll probably want to upgrade to GCII 2.0, it includes a considerable revamp of the Spy system so you can have passive intelligence gathering without needing to sabotage buildings. 

As for the search feature, that's been broken for a while.  Luckily, you can use Google to bypass it entirely.  Just enter "Espionage site:forums.galciv2.com" in the bar and you'll get some good results.  The "site:" limiter is a great asset that's generally unknown.

Off-type defenses do contribute to your defense, but only at the truncated square root of their normal value.  A missile defense of 9-15 becomes 3 if you're attacked with beams, while one in the range of 4-8 becomes 2.  Using perfect squares tends to yeild the best overall defense for your buck.

Econ and research treaties give a quantity of revenue/research equal to 10% of the giver's revenue/research to the recipient.  This value is not deducted from your output- it's a pure bonus to the receiver.  You'll want to garner as many of those as you can, and use your own wisely because they are extremely valuble to other races.

And the best part of that is the fact that passive spies can't be nullified.

I reread (4 times) the espionage in DA/TA thread further down the page & figured out the passive spying comes with 2.0 lol.

Only problem is I got it from New Zealand's version of Ebay (Unless a game goes Platinium here it stays at NZ$110, even 2 year old ones.....)

Virtually every game Single player game can be patched fine, only online games don't allow 2nd hand games.

Anyway I installed Impulse, & I'm not allowed to patch, I looked around the net & found DA patch 1.80g.

Anyone know where I can download patch 2 or higher?

& thanks for the help InfernalRS

Invalid serial, or invalid game?  To my knowledge, UE is the only thing not up on Impulse yet.

If it's the former, you might try sending an email to (guys help me out here) either [email protected] or [email protected] (I think it's the first address) describing your situation and see if you can get it straightened out.  No guarantees, of course, but outside of this issue I've been having with Impulse since the dawn of time which physicists can't seem to figure out, support has been very helpful for me personally.

The Good-Neutral-Evil choices on planets, Are they planet wide or Empire Wide? (Killing Squid's for Morale, Trading with Pirates for XX% increase in starships etc

Most choices are planetary, but some are empire-wide.  Killing squids for morale is planetary as is trading with pirates for starship bonus.  Soldiering bonuses and interest rates, for example, are empire-wide.

Cheers, So The Pirates Starship bonus affects all ships produced from the planet?

Wouldn't make sense to be the Colony ship that found em :p

Yes.  All ships built on that planet are granted an attack bonus.

One helpful tip in regards to those plantary bonuses is to rename the planet so you can identify it easily.  All bonuses and penalties will be listed on the Details screen of the planet, but trying to find just one planet when you can have hundreds gets really tedious.

As for the serial issue, that's a common problem with all secondhand games with online components.  They usually get tied to an account, meaning the secondhand sale doesn't actually transfer everything to you- that paticular serial is already associated with another account somewhere around here.  The Stardock fellows are really nice in that they seem to actually consider doing such account transfers once a blue moon, whereas most companies just flat-out say no.  It's something to keep in mind when buying a pre-owned games in the future.

I have broadband, which apart from Fiber optics in the CBD of a coupla cities or Satalite, Broadband is the fastest New Zealand has.

I get 20Kb's, once I hit my limit of 3gb, I go down to 4-6 Kb/s.

The only game I play online is Anarchy Online, & even that I've given up on.

I only play the single player components of games.

Battlefield 2142 is awesum, but it's almost unplayable online, I brought it (New) after trying it for the single player element.

It's akin to a Drunk trying to snipe a marble lol

I keep it in mind about Second hand games.

I'd still like to be able to pour some BC down a counterintel hole, even if the result might be null with some really bad numbers from the RNG.

It would be nice.  Say, just to slow the intel gain rate, even.