Newbie to Galactic Civ One.

Running on Win XP Home edition, Nvidia GeForce FX 5500 128MB, Pentium 4 1.5 GHz.

I'm finding that spacecraft are frequently getting "frozen" on the screen.
I get a message box saying something like "The Current Position of the Ship is
Out of Range...blah blah blah" and I've got to set autopilot to a place that IS
suppported. Yet the spacecraft is LOCKED on the board, it won't go anywhere no matter what I do.

This has happened three times. I think that there has also been a dialog box saying something about putting everyone in hypersleep in order to get out of the situation.
Well, where do I do that on any of the option boards?

Not a very intuitive interface, designers. I have to stop and think, or even worse, stop and SEARCH every single time I want to do something. Not intuitive. Bad design.
Bad designer. NO biscuit for you.

I also keep getting a dialog box about elections, and I keep losing, over and over again. Yet there does not appear to be ANY function within the game to influence elections. And where is the logic in research spending going down when government changes????

I've also gotten message boxes about the current leader becoming wildly unpopular. Although it is possible to highlight the names of other leaders, there does not appear to be ANY way to actually change leaders.

I thought that one of the designers of this game had also been involved with the Alpha Centauri / Civilization games? Those games had tutorials that literally walked you through everything. I've got this set on tutorial mode, but it still leaves the player totally lost.

The movement of the ships makes no sense whatsoever. I click on a ship, click a tiny distance, or a medium distance...fine, the ship moves there. If I click a HUGE distance, the ship very frequently just stays in place. NO dialog box about that being out of range, it just refuses to recognize the command! However, If I baby the ship within one turn, outlining tiny legs of the journey (click ship, click two inches away on the screen, repeat, repeat, repeat) it IS possible to go that exact same huge distance I wanted to go in the first place.

Also, suppose I have the ship move, say four inches on the screen. I then hit the button to cycle to the next available ship, and give it orders. If I then manually go to the first ship, it STILL has some movement allowance left for this turn! WHY can't I expend the full movement allowance of a ship for a turn in ONE step?????

And....that's IT? Just little ship icons on the screen? I never get to send dropships to fight on-planet?? Disappointing.

Frustrating game, a real mess. Bad designer. NO biscuit.