How on earth does one even begin to start this game????

Several questions-bad experience thus far

from GalCiv2 Forums

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I cannot say anything good about this game so far. How on earth does one even start to play (key words: “start to play” not load the game) this game. This game starts with some stupid ship doing a circle around a planet, yet not a single button, pressed by me, affects said ship.

 

Is this game unnecessarily user unfriendly? I hate when a game is unnecessarily difficult. In example, Novalogic did an absolutely fantastic job with the controls for its BHD game. They did an outstanding job of laying out the keyboard controls in a manner that is intuitive and easy to learn. However, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow 6, a similar game, in comparison to BHD, is unnecessarily complicated, requiring a player to look away from the screen down at the keyboard during critical moments of game play. Obviously, this results in needless player deaths. Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow 6,” also cost half of what BHD cost…hmm.

 

I have noticed a direct correlation between a game’s cost and the difficulty in learning to use it. Is that true here? If this is a case where the keyboard controls for GalCivII, a $20 game, will always lack the intuitive layout of a comparable game costing twice as much, please tell me now, so that I can get rid of it posthaste.

 

Could someone please tell me how to even start to play this game? I am not concerned with cheats or actual strategy as strategy for this game is apparently related to earth history. Thus, I was looking forward to learning strategy on my own.

 

Side note:

This is one of the most difficult to use forums, in my experience. This forum is definitely more difficult to use than Linux forums or a variety of other forums. Is this forum compatible with Firefox? Out of desperation, I just started clicking stuff, and finally, finally, a posting box opened. I no longer know in what category I am posting.

 

Any help would be appreciated. Please keep spoon feeding related responses to oneself as the manual provided no help.

 

Grazi

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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

lol let's say I'm amazed at how hard you find some things, accorded this forum seems to have a buggy "edit" button when in FF3, that's the only bug I noticed though. (EDIT: seems fixed now :rofl: )

First what do you have ? galciv 2 ??? or galciv 2 + dark avatar expansion ??? or galciv 2 + dark avatar + twilight of the arnor expansions ??? Also did you already update the game??? because if not then that's the first step to take since a LOT of changes were made overtime.

Second before diving in keyboard controls, everything can be done through mouse, so I'll start with mouse controls if I were you. In any case here's a page to start diving into keyboard controls https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Keyboard_shortcuts . Whatever you use, I find galactic civilization 2 quite easy to handle, plus it's not real time so you got all the time in the world to press a key ^_^ . 

Third, I guess the ship circling the world is stationed in orbit (defending the planet), if you select the planet you should see in the bottom panel some text : "Ships in orbit" followed by icons for ships that are in orbit . You may also notice that depending on your game version there's a settings in the options for autolaunching ships out of orbit.

Lastly did you play the tutorial videos from the main menu? they are a great help you know, most of them would probably answer all your questions. Have fun :D

 

sidenote: ho and it would be nice not to jump on conclusions that quickly even if you're frustrated :\

btw while I'm at it, there's a program out there that allows to define keyboard macros which allows (for example) to change keys even for games that don't handle changing keys : it's called "autohotkey", the only games it doesn't work with are Massively Online games which are protected against keyboard emulation to prevent cheating.I suggest this mostly for your rainbow 6 example...

Reply #2 from GalCiv2 Forums Top

First off, Dread Lords has a tutorial... You should probably check it out...

"This game starts with some stupid ship doing a circle around a planet, yet not a single button, pressed by me, affects said ship."

Umm... That shouldn't happen... When you first start a game, what you should have two or three ships (flagship, colony ship and space miner if you have Dark Avatar or Twilight of the Arnor) nearby to your starting planet, but none actually orbiting it...

You can select a ship that is NOT orbiting a planet by left clicking on it then right clicking on another square on the grid (including any planet you own) to move it there... If you order a ship to enter a square with a planet owned by you in it, it will go into orbit. When a ship is in orbit, you need to select the planet (left click on the planet). Then, at the bottom of the screen, in the task bar in a box just off to the right labeled "ships in orbit" you should see a small icon representing the ship in orbit. Select the icon then click on the 'launch ship' button underneath... The ship will then appear in one of the grid squares next to the planet. There is a small icon just above and to the left of this box which you can click on to select which of the nine grid squares around the planet the ship will launch into... Here's a screenshot to help you understand...

As you can see, I have moved (by left clicking on the ship and then right clicking on the destination) my space miner (the ship on the left) towards a neaby asteriod field to begin mining operations, I have moved my colony ship (the vessel in the bottom right towards mars and I have placed my flagship in orbit by moving the flagship to Earth... You'll notice the word 'autopilot' under both the miner and the colony ship. This means that, at the end of the next turn, they will automatically continue moving towards their destinations (the asteriod field and Mars, respectively). As for the ship in orbit, I have now selected Earth (and you can see its infomation in the taskabr at the bottom of the screen) and have highlighted for you how to launch a ship...

And that's really all there is to it... I'm not going to explain all the in-game concepts to you as you should play the Dread Lords tutorial and RTFM...

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