Hi,

I considered buying GalCiv a long time ago, but finally only did it last week. Bought the Ultimate Edition as a hard copy and updated to 2.03 via Impulse. I'm in my first campaign now, as Terrans.

Just got some questions...

1. For the first campaign I selected one difficulty level below normal - seems quite easy. Is this just luck or should I just move the diffculty a bit up and restart? What would you recomment for an inexperienced GC player to learn and still have a challenge?

2. My copy has only a pdf manual. That's no prob per se, I'm just wondering if I'm missing something. For example, are there no keyboard shortuts at all?

3. I made some ships in the ship designer which is accessible from the game's main menu, however, they are not showing up in my campaign. I'm quite sure though that I have researched all the needed components or hull sizes. I also tested saving them normally or as templates, but this doesn't seem to help. How do I get those designs to show up in the game? Ships and templates I make within the current campaign show up normally there.

4. I'm not sure about troop modules - does it actually help to add more of them to a transporter or does he only need one of them for the "invade" function?

5. Whenever I design some ship with a construction module I get a message saying something like "standard designs cannot be changed" - is there no way around this. For example can I make some constructor ship that moves a lot faster using an advanced drive?

6. Dou you have some general tips about ship design? I read the AI will adapt to your designs and build ships that counter your equipment. So for now my method was to build small and middle sized ships with mostly specialized weapons, then combine several classes in a fleet so that I have ships covering all fields of weaponry/defences in there. For big and large hulls however I use a combination of several types of weapons and defences.