At around 5pm EST on August 30 beta 3 will be made available.  PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE MAKING BUG REPORTS..

Release Notes:

• Ship textures are OFF for this beta.  So the ships will not look as cool as they do in the screenshots. We want to maximize compatibility and move up from there. Plus, it gives beta testers something to look forward to. Beta 4 will have them.
• Diplomacy is not in yet. It's a pure space war game presently.  Diplomacy will not appear until Beta 4 (late October).
• Fleet battles are not in yet.  That will probably appear in Beta 3B (September).
• Beta 3B will not be available to all beta testers.  We will be selecting a group from the forums based on their participation and help to receive beta 3B so that we can more effectively prepare for beta 4.
• There's still a ton of missing features and tweaking.  If you see a "bug" or problem that you think is pretty obvious, assume for now that we are well aware of it.
• Minimum requirements: Pentium II 600 Mhz with a Geforce 3 level card (or ATI 7500) or better that has at least 64MB of video memory.

Feedback we are looking for:

• We are looking for bugs in this build primarily. That is, if the game crashes, we want to know. Extra work has been done to make saved games more reliable. If you have a crash and it's reproducible in a saved game, we will be setting up an FTP site: ftp://ftp.galciv2.com to upload your saved games (please ZIP them first).
• We also want to know how performance is.  A lot of work has gone into performance tuning. We are aware that on the second turn of the game there's a pause as the game generates AI ships. We will be working to reduce this.
• We want to make sure that the game is compatible.  IF you run into any graphical glitches, screenshots help (use print-screen) to copy and then paste it into something like MS Paint. We need to know your processor speed, video card, and what version of DirectX you are using.
• MAKE SURE YOU HAVE READ THIS POST.  It has information on how to obtain various debugging tools and other bug submission guidelines.
• GalCiv II uses a lot of texture memory. If your card doesn't have 64MB of video RAM, it probably won't run.  But if you do have 64MB of RAM and run the game in gigantic sized galaxies and run into problems, let us know.
• Are the basic game mechanics "fun"?  What can make it more fun? Not in terms of new features but pacing.  Do technologies come up too fast? Are there too many types of components or too few? One of the things that is a major factor in game fun is the pacing of it.