After owning GalCiv II for more than a year, I tried to install it for the first time on a machine that's running Vista. I probably made a ton of mistakes and would appreciate your advice on how to make this work right.
I have an original copy, purchased from NWS Online. It has the vanilla serial number, without the dashes. I installed it on the Vista machine andthen tried to patch it up to the current version manually. I realize that this is something that Stardock ordinarily does automatically, but I've always preferred to manually install my patches. It's possible, however, that in trying to download the latest patch (galciv2_140x.zip?), I got shifted over to the "special" version of Gal Civ II, because I also ended up downloading something called "Enable GalCiv2-Collectors-Edition.exe.
At any rate, I installed the program, patched it, and tried to run it. It told me I had to put the original disk in my drive. I had thought that one of the features of GCII was that you didn't need the original disk in the drive. In fact, I was loading the game before we went on a week-long trip specifically so that I WOULDN't have to take the original disk with me and risk damaging or losing it.
I forged ahead and was told that I could play, but that the game wouldn't let me update anything or download any improvements. Keep in mind, now, that I had entered my original serial number (I assume correctly. Some other post said something about these serial numbers conatining no 0, only the capital letter O. My serial number has one digit that clearly is a zero -- ie, an 0 with a diagonal line through it.)
Instead of launching right into the game, I chose to exit the setup and then start the game myself. On exiting the setup, I got several windows indicating that certain files had not installed properly, which suggested to me that the game would not run.
I threw up my hands and didn't fool with it again until we returned home. At that time, my son started to play the game (without the original disk in the drive) and everything seemed to be working OK, although he didn't go very far into the game, so missing or uninstalled files may come into play later.
Are any of these issues symptoms of trying to run the game under Vista? I suppose the intelligent thing to do would be to bow to the inevitable and let Stardock do all the updating for me automatically -- so I must also ask if the automatic updating works properly under Vista?
Thanks in advance for any advice or help you can offer. I realize this post has been very vague (eg, about the verbatim wording of the error messages). If none of these symptoms sound familiar I will uninstall/reinstall and post another message giving the exact text of the error messages. If you think you may be able to advise me, please tell me what information you need to diagnose the problem.
Thanks again,
Mark Roth