GeckoOne

Join Date 02/2006

OnDisk Game Manual

Reading between the lines...

Since I have little to do before release but go over every little thing available to me, I have started reading the manual that downloaded this afternoon.

This is not a flame post! This is an attempt to identify for correction errors in the manual.

FILE	LOCATION	SIZE	MODIFICATION DATE
GalCiv2manual.pdf	Base GalCiv2 Directory	947KB	1/30/2006 10:07pm

Program used to read file: Adobe Acrobat 7.0 (note, not Reader).

Following are glitches/bugs/typos I have found as of 2/15/06 @ 7:30pm Central Time.

All graphics in the manual are pixellated and do not scale well with the document. This is usually due to some optimization done on included graphics during document creation/saving. Not a good idea for a game manual that may base instructions on what is displayed in the graphics (for instance page 16).
There are several (too many to list) places where sentences have too many spaces leading/trailing when compared to other sentences in the same paragraph. For instance, this sentence has three leading spaces instead of one.
Page 6, 3^rd Paragraph reads "Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, or Windows Vista" and should read "Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, or Vista".
Page 55, project listing, bottom of page. Reference to first ‘level’ of projects as "standard projects". Page 56, table listing for first ‘level’ of projects refers to them as "improvements". Other listings in the project listing match the corresponding headers in their tables on page 56 and page 57.
Page 57. Trade good table is unreadable due to graphics issue (see #1).

Feel free to add to this thread.

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Sentences have 2 spaces after them, not one. FYI.

Otherwise, this thread is probably a great idea!

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In typography, normally there is only one space after a period; when you write a manuscript, it has 2 spaces usually. So if you are writing a paper for a class, or writing the manuscript to be typeset by other, it should have 2 spaces; the actually published material will have one however.

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Nakor

Join Date 03/2001

+41

I single space after .'s when I write or edit. So if you find any doubles, someone edited them other than me.

I did not do final manual edits though.

As for the Vista bit... we'll get that fixed up when the OS ships...

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2419

I did the layout of the manual and it was a huge pain. As for the low-res graphics, it was a decision to keep the PDF version small as the screenshots are not particularly germane in most instances versus the size of doing high resolution ones.

I must confess, there's probably little likelyhood of much updates to the manual until we have someone (other than me) willing to touch it up. It was done with InDesign and the experience nearly drove me to stop drinking.

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Im not really sure bout this but on page 16, where the control descriptions of the main display are, on the picture, number 18 is supposed to be: currently building social project , and it says its the orbiting moon, while i can clearly see the moon on bottom left of the planet.

Monc34

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Please also at least run the .pdf manual through a spellchecker. In just the table on pages 56 and 57 alone, I can see about a dozen fairly glaring errors(typos, misspellings, grammatical inconsistencies) that make an otherwise very polished product look a bit unprofessional.

Edit: Err, I suppose I could be more helpful and provide the errors I found.. sorry.

On the improvement/project table on pages 56 and 57:

-Tense inconsistencies: "improve" and "improves" are being used inter-changeably. Same goes with "provide" and "provides".
-Description for Market Centers, Banks says that it improves your tax income from the planet by N%... it would probably sound better to just drop the "by N%" part (that one's a nit-pick, I know).
-"hitpoints" and "HP" are both used in descriptions, would be better to stick to one or the other.
-In desc. for Hyperion Fleet Manager, "orbital" is spelled wrong.
-"Logistics" is spelled wrong in both the name and desc. of Hyperion Logistics Center.
-"Orbital" is spelled wrong in name of Orbital Terraformer.
-The desc. of Orbital Terraformer is missing a word between "tiles" and "your".. probably "on"?
-Re-education center: "center" should be capitalized for consistency.
-Typo in Galactic Shocase: should be "Showcase".
-Omitted description for Omega Planetary Fleet.
-Inconsistency in use of periods at end of descriptions... some descs have them, some don't.
-Restaurant of Eternity: restaurant is misspelled.
-Desc. of Spin Control Center: "by" should be "be".

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on p. 31: references to Millions of people should be Billions of people (or is the Colony Mgr. Scr. wrong when it shows x.xx b people??)

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Hi, p. 9 : Galaxy size says...

Galaxy size / Sectors / Total sectors
Tiny / 3*3 / 9
Small / 4*4 / 16
Medium / 6*6 / 36
Large / 9*9 / 81
Huge / 12*12 / 144
Gigantic / 16*16 / 256

After launching all those map sizes some are different...

Galaxy size / Sectors / Total sectors
Tiny / 3*3 / 9
Small / 4*4 / 16
Medium / 5*5 / 25
Large / 8*8 / 64
Huge / 12*12 / 144
Gigantic / 18*18 / 324

p. 31 "Bread and circuses"...

Quote : "Population growth occurs at a fixed rate of 200,000 per turn, or
.20 M on the population display. If your approval rating reaches
100%, your population growth is doubled".

After trying a couple of times, It does not, 100% approval on a planet does not make the pop. growth double, always .20 / 200.000 (in my games at least

).

-sorry if all this was already sayd elsewhere or if I misunderstood the explication

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Hi, I made some tests of population growth / approval, here are the results:

Planet population over 1 billion:

1% -> 20% approval = planet loses 10% of its population per turn.
21% -> 40% approval = no population growth.
41% -> 100 % approval = always +200 million people per turn.

Strangely population growth in planets with less than a billion people (wich behave the same as +1 b planets between 1% and 40% approval) seem to have a proportional pop growth depending on the % approval ( from 41% to 100%, the better the approval the greater is pop growth with a maximum of +200 m, and not always +200 m people).

So population stops growing at 40% approval and not 30% as the manual says, and some other posts report it , it does not double at 100 %.

Do you approve?

(the aproval rate i speak of is planetary aproval and not civilisation general aproval)

i'll test it some more later, until then... lets play

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I feel for you. The last manual I did was done in Word. When you use tons of pictures and you bloat the word document it starts to have "issues". Anyway for screen caps with better quality and good compression look into getting Snagit.
I won't ever do another manual without it.

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Hmm, I tried a reply earlier but I dont see it.
Anyway, the differances of AI in difficulty settings is outdated in the manual. It refers to things such as SUB NORMAL difficulty that I dont think are in the game anymore

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