Okay thank you very much. I have tried your instruction, and Impulse detects and imports Dark Avatar no problem, but it won't import Galactic Civilizations II, even though it automatically provides the correct path of folder the game is installed in. It automatically detects the folder location, but then it says there is no Gal Civ II in that folder, when I click on the Import button...

I'm not going to download the game and waste my time and monthly bandwidth when I can just install from a CD, just to get a friggin patch. I'll just reinstall it from CD again and see if Impulse can detect. If that doesn't work, then it just an example of why there is so much piracy these days. I don't see why a loyal and paying customer like myself has to go thru this BS. But whatever.

I don't think it is possible to install Dark Avatar by itself with Gal Civ II Gold, so we'd have to download both, which is like 1.6 or 1.7GB? Seriously that is a lot just for a patch.

But I am tempted to download as I have been playing unpatched I have noticed several bugs. I hope I don't have to and there is a solution, because forcing people to download over 1.6GB just to patch their game is kind of unfair, no?

I uninstalled and then downloaded from Impulse A-OK. I am good to go, technically.

However, my point is that not everyone with broadband has transfer speeds rated in Mb/sec, and some people even have metered access when they download over a certain limit, their ISP will slap extra fees on their account.  While I am not among them, there others who do have limited internet access, even over broadband.

To expect someone who has physical discs to just rollback, uninstall, and download the game is not a good customer solution.  Not for everybody.  As Impulse clearly has a problem detecting Galciv II install, that bug should be addressed and fixed as a priority.  It looks very unprofessional that Stardock's own game management software fails to detect one of Stardock's flagship games.  Just my $0.02.

Hey guys it has been quite a while. After a long break from the game and with my exams completed today I gave in to the urge to haul out GalCiv 2 again. After blowing off an impressive layer of dust I experienced similar problems to those above.

I had an extra hiccup that I wanted to share incase anybody else encountered this problem.

I installed off the discs I had first (Gold Edition). After I ran into the registry problem outlined above I tried reinstalling from my discs again. Then a quick google search found this thread. After some grumbling to myself I opted to download the game and the Dark Avatar expansion.

Then I tried to run Dark Avatar from the Impulse menu. The splash screen came up. Play game. I got an error message saying that I needed to run setup or reinstall from Stardock Central.

More grumbling and poking around in the game files. Then I figured it out.

When you install the game from the original discs it places the game in the Stardock directory. When you install the updated version of the base game from Impulse it creates a new folder called Stardock Games.

I'm guessing either of the following two things happened:

1) When I reinstalled Dark Avatar it updated the version of Dark Avatar I had installed in the Stardock Directory

2) When I reinstalled Dark Avatar it searched my computer for a copy of GalCiv2 and stopped looking when it found the Stardock folder install path instead of proceeding on to find the copy installed in Stardock Games.

The simple fix was grabbing the Dark Avatar folder from the Stardock folder and merging it with the Stardock Games install.

All of this was on a Vista machine.

Now I can put off my desire to play no longer. Good day!

Edit: A side effect of my manual manipulation is that it will no longer launch off Impulse (Presumably because the file paths no longer match - Will this have any effect on future updates?

This is a solution for the Galactic Civlizations 2 GOLD edition to be recognized/imported into Impulse.

I don't recommend anyone going into their registry to make changes (Backup up your registry before making any changes if you do decide to edit it)

The following is what I needed to do on a Windows 7 PC:

From the START menu select RUN

type REGEDIT and press OK

Navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Stardock\Drengin.net\GalCiv2"

The variable "EXE" The name of the file it is looking for

The variable "Path" is where the the above "EXE" file should be located


Now in my case the EXE file was "dalaunch.exe" and my path was "C:\Program Files (x86)\Stardock\TotalGaming\GalCiv2"

So in this case I was able to copy the "dalaunch.exe" from "C:\Program Files (x86)\Stardock\TotalGaming\GalCiv2\DarkAvatar" into the above GalCiv2 directory and Impulse then detected it.