This is part of the campaign. In the begining at least it doesn't let you research certain tech branches. If you play a custom game you should see that all the missing techonlogy is available for research.
Linthar
I usually use top down 1 or 2, as I like to be able to be able to see every ship in the combat.
To find your saved games go to my documents. In there you should see a folder called my games. In that folder should be a folder called galciv2. Your saved games are in there.
I'll add that I've run into this bug. I was able to succesfully upgrade, on two occasions the first when I was correcting a typo in the name, and the second when I relized I had made a mistake and needed to change an engine. However on a seperate attempt, when I needed to remove two components the component I removed kept on reappering when I tried to remove the second component.
I started the first map, but I'm probally going to end up restarting. I left it on normal difficulty since I've read the first few missions are supposed to very easy, but I didn't build colony ships fast enougth, and my ally took both of the worlds in the center. Although there's probally a good chance the drengin can be defeated, I feel like restarting so that I colonize the middle worlds.
In both of the games I've played so far, the first thing I've used my money for was to buy some form of factory. So far it seems that buying a factory is the best way to jump start a colony, as everything will take obscene amounts of time to build otherwise. Luckily Factories don't cost to much to buy.
The devolopers have commeted previously thats there's nothing missing. I'm not certain of the reasons for the strange numbering but there is no tutorials 15-19.
My Intial impressions are very positve. Its very hard to stop playing and so far its been a lot of fun. I'm still going through my first game, which is rather easy, but thats to be expected since I picked cakewalk difficulty since I've had no prior experince with the game and mainly want to learn the mechanics. The only bad side is that the game seems somewhat unstable. I've gotten a fair amount of crashes, but I'm not sure if its
Its currently downloading. The server timed out once, but I was able to resume the download easily. The download speed is flucating wildly though I've seen it range from 7kb per second to 170 kb per second. Also the download speed and precentage done sometimes disapear from the main window, and while the download manager shows the speed, the precentage is at time nowhere to be found. This seems to happen any time the download speed slows down a lot. Ho