[tinkthank]

Lots of excellent posts here. (And some subexcellent ones as well.)

I think Saber Cherry did a nice breakdown on what may constitute a bug (major, minor, gameplay, balance, functionality), and with that in mind, my subjective bug-rating would give GC2 at its current manifestation (1.0X.1) a bug-less rating of A- or B+. I haven't seen a lot to bug me, and have so far luckily been unplagued by lucky rangers.

This is not to say that this game would not be substantially different if I were King of Stardock; those differences would include a substantial change to combat, starting with some radical changes to the way initiative functions (attacker = vast advantage), increased transparancy, more interwoven tech tree, and methods of treating usable space on planets. However, I am a pure end-user, I know nothing about computers or programming. To me, this is a fine product; to my untrained eye, this is a piece of software that runs flawlessly on my poor little laptop since the day I downloaded it, it has a lovely windowed mode which I cherish, it launches in a jiffy and alt-tabs like a charm. For what it is worth, I would recommend purchasing this game over CivIV -- but then again, almost anything is better than a kick in the shins, even if the kick in the shins is *theoretically* very entertaining.