Couple Questions From a Noob

Stardock,
I said in the player review thread, but I'll say it again, great job! I am really enjoying GalCiv2. I have a couple questions:

1. Is there a forum search button? I can't seem to find it.
2. I find myself reading the forums while at work all day. I noticed in a thread that someone had posted a link to the manual .pdf file. I can't find that post again, and, it would be nice to read it while at work. Could you please point it out to me again, or, could someone stick it in the Wiki?
3. Do planetary improvements only improve the planet they are on? For example, if I build a "research colony" or a "factory colony", do those improvements only help that colony, or, are the benefits enjoyed by all your planets? Is it better to have a diversified colony infastructure, or specialized?
4. I'm becoming a GalCiv2 fan and find myself wanting to install the Desktop Theme pack. Are there any screenshots of what this looks like to help me decide if I want to install it or not? How stable are the Stardock windows customizations? I've never installed any programs that change the windows interface before, so, I'm a bit nervous...windows seems to have enough problems just running on it's own!

Thanks for a very enjoyable gaming experience.

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I'll take a crack at some of the questions

1. The search is just to the left, under the Recent Posts area.
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3. It depends. The super projects benefit the entire empire. Research from all planets go into a "research pot", and is applied towards current research. Whereas factories benefit building on that planet only. It's definitely possible and desirable in some cases to specialize planets. For instance, you would want to build the Technological Capital on a planet with lots of research labs. Specialized factory worlds are good for pumping out warships. To me, it all depends on the planet quality, and bonus tiles. If I have a planet with multiple research bonus tiles, it's going to be a research planet!
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1. The search is just to the left, under the Recent Posts area.

Duh! Thanks!

3. It depends. The super projects benefit the entire empire. Research from all planets go into a "research pot", and is applied towards current research. Whereas factories benefit building on that planet only. It's definitely possible and desirable in some cases to specialize planets. For instance, you would want to build the Technological Capital on a planet with lots of research labs. Specialized factory worlds are good for pumping out warships. To me, it all depends on the planet quality, and bonus tiles. If I have a planet with multiple research bonus tiles, it's going to be a research planet!
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Excellent, thanks! *goes to add more factories to his ship building worlds*

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2. https://www.stardock.com/files/galciv2manual.pdf

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Thanks for the replies.

Now if someone can answer #4....

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In response to #4, I am not aware of any official screenshots of the desktop, but I am currently running it myself. I really like it, definitely way better than the default Windows one, which I was running before. It t's perfectly stable, it really doesn't affect any core systems, it's merely just a skin over the interface. Here is a screenshot that I took:

http://img124.imageshack.us/img124/297/gc2desktop3wf.jpg

The wallpaper is basically a pic of the army in the intro movie. It's not too bad, install it, you might like it.

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Thanks, I downloaded and installed it too. It's nice, but, a bit too "dark" and "kiddy" for me (It scared my wife! heehee). Maybe they can release a "human faction" version, that would feature the human faction color scheme, the pretty blue and white Stardock logo for the background, or something more "Federation-ish"?

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