Was the game designed to run under a non-Administrator account?

from GalCiv2 Forums
It always puts a smile on my face when I can run software as a limited user. The release version of Galactic Civilizations II seemed to work perfectly in such an environment. However, the 1.0X.009 patch seems to have broken that on my machine. The game won't even start unless I do a "run as - Administrator" in my user account. I've done nothing but update through Stardock Central to the latest version. It seemed so well designed as far as making use of limited user file system resources that I thought for sure it was designed with that in mind.

So I guess my question is: was I just lucky before or is GalCiv II designed to work in a limited user account? Has anyone else had the same experience? If so, I'd like to report a bug!
3,162 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

It should run fine under a limited account.  A lot of time was put into that if I recall.

The only thing I can think of is that 1.0X has all those video options that may be restricted to admins.

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
Thanks Frogboy... great game, by the way. Very impressive. I noticed that the game is writing to a file called debug.err under the "Program Files" folder which is a protected on my (and most, I think) system when running a limited user account. That file doesn't appear on my laptop which I still have running the previous version of the game. Could that have something to do with it?
Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

Couldn't because previous versions had debug.err as well.

What happens when you make that directory available to be written to?

Reply #4 from GalCiv2 Forums Top
I gave the User group full access just to see if that would help but it did not. Oddly, I had installed SmartException after having this problem to see if it might help me figure out what was wrong but it wouldn't let me run that either. So programs under the Stardock directory weren't able to be started from a limited user account after I did the 1.0X update for some strange reason. My other programs seemed to still work fine. I ended up restoring a recent backup of my system and installing the game fresh and now it seems to work under a limited user account. Not sure what got messed up but it's good now.

Thank you for your help.
Reply #5 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

That is really odd.

BTW, good news on the whole limited user thing, Windows Vista is going to be much better at handling this stuff.