Galactic Civilizations II impressions

[Atrocities]

When microsoft starts to charge for "updates" the rest of the industry will follow suite. Where the big MS leads, all others fall.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Hey...There's always linux.

[Saber Cherry]

Linux? Huh? I'm keeping my copy of Win98 around, just in case. Linux is great in theory (the theory that trying hard == winning) but terrible in practice. Windows does not come with a compiler, and Linux does. So Linux is better? ...no. It just means that you have to compile everything before you can use it in Linux. I tried to install the latest NVidia drivers for Linux in January, on an absolutely mainstream Dell system... and had to hack the driver files to get them to work. Or rather, my research advisor did, and I had no idea what he was doing. And this was Red Hat Enterprise 8.1, not some random distro.

I'm glad that Linux is around for the same reason I'm glad Canada is around. Maybe someday it will be useful, but until then, it's a great place to hide during a global thermonuclear war.

(just kidding, R13, I always go to Canada to buy blank optical media at a steep discount

[Fyron]

Maybe you should try a better distribution like Debian or Ubuntu. Redhat is pretty shoddy in general. Not good to judge all of Linux on Redhat. Ubuntu will almost certainly have good drivers raring to go for you, without any compilation or hacking.

[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.

[Renegade 13]

Saber Cherry said:
(just kidding, R13, I always go to Canada to buy blank optical media at a steep discount

No wonder, you're money is worth more here! Though that may change in the near future.