How exactly does one submit an original post? I have not been able to find anywhere on the screen that allows me to do that. Hence my using this reply page to submit a post.
Nits: Missile Weapons description has a typo: "that" should be "than." In the Ideology Pyramid, in the High Efficiency Cloning description, the comma before "and" should be removed. In the Diplomatic Nature description, "along" should be "a long." In the Interplanetary Sports description, "create" should be "creating."
More important stuff. I started a new game as the Iridiums. After the final setup screen, the screen that came up didn't display correctly. It had a blackish interior elongated horizontal oval with the rest of the screen in gray. Some individual buttons were barely visible through the gray. Did some messing around and discovered that turning Enable Gel OFF cleared the fuzzy grayness, but still left the screen black. However, now I could see all the buttons clearly, as well as the planet section on the right side. Mousing around in the black area brought up various descriptors such as Colony Ship, Asteroids, Iridia, etc.
I proceeded to get building and research going.
Without a galactic map visible, I set all three ships to automated commands. Scout was set to explore, colony ship was set to explore, and survey ship was set to survey. Once I did that, the lower right hand side indicator button changed to "Turn." Evidently, Turn is not an option unless you've got everything else busy. This could be a problem unless there is a way to override this feature. For example, in GalCiv II, once you're reaching an influence victory, it becomes tedious to keep everything working at max, and pressing Turn for 10 times brings about your final victory much quicker than if you had to always optimize things. The survey vessel did explore, and the description of what it found showed up on the screen.
In the Govern-Economy screen, the Wealth Summary showed Income consisting of Savings for 6 and a Total of 6, while the Expenses consisted of Ship Maintenance of 4 with a Total of 5. The Treasury showed a Net Weekly Income of 0. Obviously some round-off display errors. In the top right icons, the Total Credits popup said 0 bc income per turn, but pressing Turn increased the total credits by 1.
In the planetary display screen, with Iridia being the only planet displayed, there are three numbers: 5.6, 7.1, and 5.2. Mousing over the numbers reveals nothing for 7.1 and 5.2, but mousing over 5.6 says Net Income 5.6 bc. There is no icon by the 7.1, while the 5.6 has a stack of gold icon and the 5.2 has a population icon.
At the top right of the entire screen you can mouse over the icons, which reveals the population growth per turn, which is nice info to have. But there is also a population icon up there for which the number doesn't match the population of Iridia. I could see these numbers not matching if there were more than one planet, but only one planet, one would think that the total population would equal the population of the planet. The total pop number was approx 10.2, while the Iridian population was 5.2. A Colony Ship would not account for the difference, so I'm not sure what's going on.
My computer is a SONY J-series running at 2.27 GHz with 4 Gigs of RAM. Windows 7 Home Premium. Monitor is a digital flat panel (1920 x 1080 60 Hz) and the display adapter is Intel(R) HD graphics.
