I'm sorry? Are you telling me the massive GalCiv2 2.0 update was a fart in the breeze? The entire reason Impulse is required for updating is because Stardock wants to provide these perks as an incentive for people who bought the games - if you pirate it, or just don't use Impulse, the game will run just fine, as it was intended, on its own - no zero-day patching or critical bugs. If you did buy the game, you get the perks of their generally rather generous patches. So you deal with steam because ONE GAME comes out with some free content every few months (well two - I guess you can count Left4Dead) - no other game on Steam is given that treatment besides those, but you're going to accept it and then badmouth Impulse over it?

1) You don't need Impulse running to play the game. In fact, you really don't need it at all. Furthermore, Impulse doesn't run in the background whatsoever. If you disable the 'quick start' it won't even keep a memory process running. Impulse doesn't run in the background - period.

This thread is so full of fail. Everyone bitching about Impulse states in one way or another that they're just a hypocritical whiner. Seriously, if you're going to complain about a feature, don't undermine your own position by stating in the same goddamn post that you honestly don't really CARE about it. Complaining that you need Impulse to get a patch while saying that you approve of needing STEAM to get a damn patch is just retarded.

It's like bitching about how overpriced Dell computers are, while you're using an Alienware.

Uranium man.  I want to respond to your points, but I feel like I'd just be fueling a fire.  Chill out.  I want to point out that the main reason I made this post was just to vocalize that I ( a single person ), am avoiding the Entrenchment expansion because of Impulse.  This isn't the first game I've avoided because of things like this.  I don't like Impulse and how it operates.  That is my opinion.  There might not be many people that don't like Impulse; conversly there might be loads.  I think it's a good thing to give customer feedback to Stardock.

I would quite hapily buy Entrenchment if it was standalone on a CD like Sins, or if it was an installer that you download through your browser after you have paid.  There are plenty of games out there which are distrobuted like those two ways I just mentioned and I only have a finite amount of money.  I will spend my money on games, which are fun and fairly distrobuted.

I noticed a few people said that programs like Impulse and Steam make accessing and patching games really straight forward.  I agree; that can be the case.  There's no reason I can think of though why developers can't supply standalone patches independent of Impulse/Steam.  That way they cater for people who don't want to use Impulse/Steam and people who do.

Actually; I can think of some reasons why publishers/devs might want to only support Impulse-like services and not provide standalone patches:

• It can stop you re-selling your game
• It can stop you lending your games to friends
• It can stop people playing the game who haven't paid for it (at the expense of the paying customers who have to deal with the associated protections / DRM).

They sell these digital distrobution programs to us on the basis of convenience.

I personally liked it when I used to be able to shove a disk in the drive, install, enter the key & play.  I could backup the disk incase it broke, and play the game as much as I wanted on as many new PC's as I bought.  I also never had a problem with going to fileplanet to download the latest patch.  Normally if a multiplayer game needed patching I'd try to connect to a server - it would fail and say it was out of date - I'd then go grab the latest patch.

Please don't flip out!  This is purely my taste in game distrobution.  I can't see why I (and other peeps who like games the way I do) can't be accomodated for ALONGSIDE Impulse-like services.  Just release your games standalone and make patches standalone as well, and all your customers are happy.

-Kom

Basically you can get Sins 1.05 on a CD.  It doesn't need an internet connection to authenticate and there is nothing stopping you backing up the disk so if it breaks you still have the game you payed for.

If they didn't want to sell Entrenchment on CD's, Stardock management could have just made it available as a downloadable installer.  You can buy the popular indy game world of goo ( http://worldofgoo.com/ ), from their home page.  When you've payed through paypal they give you a link to an installer.  You download it, install it and play.  You can make a backup of the installer if you want, and once you've downloaded it you don't need an internet connection to authenticate.

With Entrenchment it's pretty annoying that they didn't use a plain old works-everywhere web download as an option to aquire Entrenchment (just like world of goo).  So you HAVE to use Impulse.  Even if you don't mind Impulse, there is no installer you can backup if you want to make sure you always have access to your paid for copy of entrenchment.  You have to have an internet connection to authenticate via impulse to Install.  If you're behind restrictive firewalls, don't have a net connection or Impulse is down, or being buggy, then you can't install your game.

Only 3 days ago I was going to play Sins at a LAN but Impulse wasn't working on my friends PC (it kept get stuck while trying to download the lastest updates).  The games need to be the same version to play; because I already had the updates installed and he couldn't download them we were stuck.  If they used a patch file system this wouldn't have happened.  I keep my patches for games so I can get around these kind of issues without having to rely on the Internet being available / up.

The easiest way of having an offline Entrenchment install is to backup the whole installation of sins and entrenchment into a zip file.  I'm not 100% sure that works though.  The game might complain if it relies on registry keys that you didn't backup as well.  Even if it works, you wont get automatic desktop shortcuts and you wont be able to uninstall the game from the Windows XP "Add or Remove Programs" window (as there wont be an entry for sins).

So to answer your question.  That is how Entrenchment is different.  Having an offline-installable version of the game is pain.  Or to put it in other words: "You have to authenticate with the Impulse servers to do a clean install".  This is not the case with the original Sins of a solar empire.  I've been told by another poster though that Stardock plan to release a whole bunch of expansions on a CD at some point, so I'm happy.  It just means I don't get starbases for a while.

-Kom

Impulse On-line activation is a half-step less annoying than Steam and a full step better than run-time devices, I can no longer tolerate Steam running for games I happen to purchase from Valve, on-line or off-line. It might be ok for you, gentle reader, but not for me.

Once Impulse becomes intrusive that will go too, sadly..sigh..but as it stands right now on-line activation for install or patches is tolerable...like Steam once was. Games start quicker with no run-time DRM and I can choose when to run Impulse to check for updates, news and patches. I gladly picked up Puzzle Quest from Steam, but the constant "go on-line" demands caused me to jump space-ships to Stardock for Puzzle Quest Galactrix.

What's much more troubling for gamers and developers is the fundamental head-butt that DRM puts up against the First Sale Doctrine. The Supreme Court decided in the favor of the cnsumer 100 years ago, but who knows what the mood of the courts is today? It's a fascinating topic about one of the very fundamental subjects of transactional business: what can I do what what I bought and who has the authority to restrict what I can do?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_first_sale

i noticed some said you need Impulse running in the background to play games thats incorrect (steam you do tho) Impulse is like EA download manager and installs direct to your HDD and doesnt require the downloading program on in the background due to it install into the game folder and create and EXE also check your all program section its there and if you have vista just click the games option in your start section and it will show there impulse allows for updates you do not need it to play the game

I am extremely dissatistifed with Impulse. On my windows partition, I have Sins installed... but since Windows has mysteriously become inconsistent and screwed up, and is rendered inservicable, the impractical and time-consuming restarting of my computer from Ubuntu to Windows has become impossible.

Because of impulse, I can't run the latest version of the game with WINE. The Latest version of Sins has a Platinum (the absolute best! strived for in every game! It's the dream of a WINE user! And Sins is such a good game, so it's fantastic that it's rated as Platinum!) rating. All updates, however, must be done through Impulse, which requires Internet Explorer 7 or greater, which requires its own set of nonsense.

Thus, I can't play my game, and I am a very dissatisfied customer. The pompousness of suggesting that Impulse isn't DRM and that it's specifically coded so it doesn't run on linux is hillarious; call it DRM or call it "Electronic Priviledges Contol" or "Authenticated, Proprietary, and Restrictive Digital Media Updater/Manager," but Impulse restricts my usage.

Regardless of any of your valid views, I CANNOT PLAY SINS OF A SOLAR EMPIRE ON MY COMPUTER, ALTHOUGH I HAVE PAID FOR IT.

im so tired of people blaming everyone else for their problems.  its M$ fault for IE7, its SD fault for Impulse, its IC fault for minidumps.  this is completely stupid.  quit trying to be soooo cheap that you have to run Linux instead of a legal version of Windows. if you can't take incompatibility.  dont browse porn all night and wonder why you are going blind and have system bugs that cause minidumps.  if youre too broke to buy it, then do without until you land a job at a burger joint.  i think they are still hiring.

aaahhhh!!!!!!!!!!

. . . and I can't use my digital camera if I were to accidently buy AAA instead of AA batteries for it. I could possibly use a couple of pieces of metal to "hack" it to make the smaller battery work in the larger compartment, but there's no way the camera maker would honor the warranty and replace it if such a thing damaged the camera in the process.

So I could easily say "regardless of any of your valid views," "I CANNOT TAKE ANY PICTURES, ALTHOUGH I HAVE PAID FOR IT."

. . . but somehow, I doubt that would convince the camera manufacturer to replace my camera.

You did that yourself by buying a product that, even though it could run on an emulator, was not designed for the OS you're trying to run it on.

Sorry, no sympathy. Just a good laugh .

true enough but impulse will get worse as time moves on