The new underground window is the great addition to the user interface. Good job!

My 1.1 experience:

first my impulse was out of date. i went to the hp downloaded new version, installed it, but every time i got a some kind of serious error and impulse try to restarted and failed every time. deinstalled impulse. reinstalled. searching cd key. add registration. finally. first problem solved

after 5 fails it finally started to download with a lot of breaks. it took me 2 hours to retrieve the patch

surprisingly installation worked without problems

started the game at about 8 o´clock CET.... WOW 48 people online. amazing

opened a 2v2 and after some quality time of waiting i got a game

everything worked fine, until the fight started and we realized that the whole game ran out of sync at one point and everyone is playing his own game.

conclusio:

i am deeply surprised how you managed to do such a horrible job on a patch you worked so long on. and your patch distribution is a insolence

i buy several computer games every year, but this is the worst support i have ever seen. i mean, yeah you are nice people and stay in touch with the community, thats not what i mean with worst.

worst = very poor technical skills and bad management

conte

I am thinking maybe this is just a few people who are having problems and we are only really hearing from the people who are dissapointed. Impulse worked perfectly for me and I expect many others as well. Although it is not nice to have difficulty getting the patch lets not blow this out of proprortion and start accusing stardock of being a bad company as there are always going to be technical problems with PC games.

On one computer it was OK in my case, however my second computer had problems with Galactic civilisation II. I had to clear temporary file directory and Impulse worked fine again. There may be a problem after bad download being stored in the computer. I guess Impulse use the bad one from temp instead of the new attempt to download.

who`s blowing something out of proportion?

at least 6 month of working on a patch for a game which multiplayer mode didnt barely work is okay for you?

loosing so many player because you are incapable to fix your own game is okay with you?

working on an expansion while the main game doesnt work is okay with you?

i can just talk about my experience, and i have never seen something like this and its not okay with me

conte

I'm not sure about the problem you are having.  A group of friends and I all downloaded the 1.1 patch and played the game fine last night without any issues.

The problem he is talking about is the desync bug and it seems to be occuring more often in v1.1 than in v1.05.  In v1.05, it would minidump if there was a desync.  V1.1 let's you play for hours without knowing you were desynced 10 minutes into the game.

My experience was a little odd. I was catching hell from Impulse, as it wanted to update. After a reboot (something wanted to do something apparently) that went smooth, but then I kept getting an 'invalid key' error. Half an hour later, went to the registration page and somehow my key got cluster-<censored>ed. First half was right, second half I don't even know... changed it to what's in my case and it proceeded to download and install smoothly. Tried a quick solo game and everything seemed fine (after I reset my graphics preferences). I can tell some things look a little better, but I'm not entirely convinced the graphics are running smoother on my 3 and a half year old system. Still, extremely playable. Still fun.

The new UI stuff is great too. Haven't figgured out the auto-group ruleset that's supposed to be there, but takes time. So far, I say great job.

As it is required for this patch, I'm throwing my thoughts on Impulse in here... so feel free to skip the rest if you arn't interested in that.

As far as Impulse goes, I can't say I'm happy about it either. It's not a bad system, and certianly better than Ste@m (in my opinion... that thing crawls for me). Still, on principal I'm not pleased with having a whole extra program just to patch one thing. Expecially a program riddled with ads and demos and a bunch of social crap I'll never use. It's nice for some, but not so much for me. In a game with a launcher owned by basically the same company, I don't see why you couldn't input the relevant code of Impulse into the SINS launcher and have a nice, lightweight updater.

Also, while it's not a concern for most people, it's also one more thing I'd have to worry about playing nice with Wine if I decide I want to try and reboot back to Windows less.

If the stand-alone patchers are really all that bad... maybe a timed release might be a consideration. First on impulse, then the standalone redistributable later (kinda like MS does with the service packs and such). Hell, you can torrent those... who cares?

My 2 cents.

Is it just me or does Impulse really suck?

Largely just you - most people have no issues

99,9% works?   where'd u get that number,  as far as im aware alot of people are having troubles with this,  even people that do not post on these forums

i'd be surprised if more then 75% actually got it to work

dam dualpost-. -   srry

If you'd read a few posts down, I gave how I guestimated that number.  Personally, I was in the public beta for it and didn't have a single problem from then to now, except for some trouble that had nothing to do with Impulse -- for example, my school's internet connection suxxors (in places)!

So sorry to disillusion you, but i don't know, how many players bought a non english version, like me. And i used this wonderful and intelligent impulse, to decide which files have to be downloaded and my SoasE was scrap after this, because the files aren't localized.

So do me the pleasure and prove your calculation...

And yes i am a old school player, means i am interested if 5 years here all will work again, if i do a new installation, because i bought the right of playing this game for thousand or more years.

I still have my Amiga. So i have time to test this out. And if it won't work, it is a kind of thievery

Actually, that I will agree with being a problem -- something that should have been dealt with before hand.

That said, it's been 5 years since the original GC came out, and if I wanted to I could install it via Impulse little/no problem.