Galactic Civilizations: Rough Draft User Manual Available

Umm, that link goes to the front page.

Look under "Encyclopedia" and click on "GalCiv User Manual". Tada-aa, there it is!

I gave it a quick read through and it looks pretty good - probably should have read it before playing and it would have cleared up some of my dumb questions

I'll read it again later and give it some more thought.

Grifman

Did some of the political parties get dropped? I see the Industrialists named in the manual, but they're not in the game - pity, I liked their bonuses

Grifman

Let me retype that:

www.galciv.com/docs

http://www.galciv.com/docs

We're going to add more political parties before the final.

This is kinda minor, but I'd like to know what all the little icons mean--e.g. the one in front of the the ship stats on the ship list, the ones on the planets, etc.

Yes a description af the small Icons (I have a Pirat Flag on 2 of my systems and on other symbol on one of thís systems) would be realy good.

In the "Our story so far...." section, the century part seems incorrect. I believe that the year 2178 is in the 22nd century.

I certainly wouldn't mind the 22 year head start towards colonization before giving hyperdrive to the aliens.

There are planets higher than class 20 are they going to be available in the Final ?

What would the be called ?

Well, I don't know what they are exactly a measure of, but the red grimace and deathshead on planets seem to be warnings that planets are on their way towards defection.

A crown (I guess) is a civ's homeworld, though through defection you can have two or more worlds with those. All the capitals have their own icons (except political which I imagine they are still working on)--moneybag for economic capital, the hammer for manufacturing capital, the research thing for the technological capital.

I've also noticed in the ship list that a ship without an icon is just sitting in space, a ship with a shield is in orbit and a shield with blue arrows is a ship on autopilot.

Speaking of the ship list (and blatantly off-topic), I want to reiterate a suggestion I made in the Beta 4 annoucement regarding both the ship and planet lists, I'd really like to see the option to see the minimap at the same time and have the currently selected ship or planet highlighted on it.

-Robert

Thanks for the icon description.

and I support you minimap suggestion....

Yeah, Robert, I'd love to see the implementation of your suggestion regarding being able to see the mini-map while the ship or planet lists are up, and having the selected item in the list highlighted on the mini-map. While there are a number of new gameplay features I'd like, when it comes down to it, what I most want for version 1.0 is elimination of the bugs and a few features like this one to assist in management of your civilization.

guys, please add my support.

seeing a mini map of sorts when thinking about what to build (for example constructors) all depends upon where your planet is. At the moment you can't locate a planet from the planetary build screen. You have to note its name, exit to the main map, locate it, and then return and build.

Should the User Guide have hardware requirement, and install instructions ?

The minimap thing is a teriffic idea.........

The rough draft manual looks fine so far.......it covers the basic issues...........

Maybe the manual could have some "stories", just like the "Our story so far..." spread out in the manual, this would make it more fun to read.. If you understand what I mean.

Nice start. You could just put the movement and how to in what I would call a quick start guide, That would give you a very concise I just want to know how to play set of instructions. Then in the full manual put a lot more details.

manual is easy to read and sorted logically. The starbase section doesn't seem to mention resources (building on them) and the resources section doesnt yet mention starbases that i can see

s

seen the manual lately? wow, you have been busy Brad it looks fantastic.

Is it to late to mention starbases in relation to building them on resources and specifically that you can get the benefits of resources for your Civ even if built on outside of a sector containing your planets, but obviously in this situation you do not benefit from the 'local benefits'

Brad,

There are three descriptions of the galaxy sizes we get with the startup screen choices, the one in the user's guide, the one in the file "english.str", and the sizes we get from the game. Two of these need to be changed to conform with the third.