I bought GalCiv2 almost the day it came out, and at this point I'm beginning to regret it. To keep it brief, I stopped playing while waiting for some issues to be fixed in a patch. I'm not in any particular hurry. Then after reading the forums I find out that half of the things that are bugging me about the game are there by design and aren't likely to be changed. And it just so happens most of the people I've talked to are annoyed by the same things that I am.
And it's not like there's any dearth of ideas for how to fix these things. Pretty much every suggestion I've seen here for fixing the social production black hole would be preferable to the way the game is now. But again, we're told it's done this way by design.
And we keep hearing about all these new features that are being planned for 1.1. Wow, mirror universes. You know what I'd like even more than a mirror universe option? A UI that isn't terrible (how many games require 3 mouse buttons to play?). A manual that has correct information on how to play the game. Transparency in game mechanics. The game not discarding my resources every turn by design.
90% of this game is great and the last 10% is terrible. You know what? As cool as the ship designer is, I'd give it up entirely in exchange for an intuitive UI and the game giving me correct math to base decisions on.
I may not be a game designer, but I can tell when I'm having fun and when I'm not. Right now I'm not having fun with the game in the state it's in. The aggravation with that last 10% outweighs the fun from the good 90%.
Word of mouth can work for you or against you. When I first bought the game, like a lot of people, I was telling everyone it was great. At this point I'm telling people to wait for a demo, and to play the demo for a straight week before making a decision on whether or not to buy it.
