Roughly 1.1GB before compression, which helps some with the downloads.

You can play the game with about 140MB of downloads, though it'll be lacking the movies, tutorials, and multimedia bits.

Total download is 1.08 GB on my system. NTFS drive.

for some reason my download is 189 megs.
dunno. It didn't seem right at first, seems even less right at the moment

It's not

Uhh, they seperated out the game data files from the optional multimedia bits for those people on dialup still... or for those that just dont care to have them. I see absolutely nothing wrong with that...?

Well, you forgot one case: allowing people to play the game sooner while downloading multimedia, tutorials and movies

There's nothing wrong with that. As far as I can understand, his problem is that it isn't clear enough that there's more than one package you can download. Personally, I didn't have any trouble with spotting the + button, but to each his own. Perhaps SDC could ask the user if he wants to download the application files only, or all packs in the tree?

I too was a little surprised when I first downloaded a game from SDC (the game worked, but strangely there was no sound what so ever ). To me it seems natural that when I select "Galactic Civilizations" and press install, I get the whole package. I think that when I press the "+" I should be able to select individual parts, and that the gamecode also should be there, so that when I want to install the whole game i just select it and press install, but if I only want parts of it I have to press the "+" and select those parts. That's what would seem natural to me at least.

the whole stardock central thing is a bit of a mess.

Trying to DL GalCiv 1 all those years ago took me hours, with truly atrocious connections speeds. I'll settle for the fact that they've fixed whatever caused *that* headache (although, I am on a completely different connection now than I was back then, which also might have something to do with it ).

That said, the interface was intuitive enough for me, and it's obviously intended to faciliate DLs over slower connections or longer periods of time. Given how easy it is to "fix" if you don't hit all the right buttons, I can't see it becoming too big of a deal.

- Ash