Right, here we go, Gratuitous Space Battles: Galactic conquest is now on sale for pre-orders / beta. You know the drill by now. The game is in beta, so it might be a bit flaky here and there (hopefully not), but you can buy it and download/play it now anyway, and I will be releasing a patch or two for it before it’s considered final.
I’ll be waiting 24 hours before I send out a proper press release, and tell people on my newsletter. I’ve never done a game with as much server-side integration as this before, so I’m slightly wary of having a sudden mad dash to promote it in case the server blows up. I’m pretty sure it will be fine.
One final warning: This expansion REQUIRES an internet connection, because of how the game works. It downloads enemy fleets from the central server, as they are player designed. it also uploads your fleets (rarely) to serve as cannon fodder to other players. This game just will not work if you can’t connect it online, so don’t buy it if that upsets you / is inconvenient / reminds you of fascism. Make SURE you can browse challenges in the normal game before buying this expansion.
Also, the game really needs you to be on the latest version (1.48). Auto-updating should be happening today/tomorrow for everyone. If you don’t have the latest version, and the patcher won’t run for some reason, you can re-download the whole game (it’s ready-patched). Email me if the link is dead (cliff@positech.co.uk).
For anyone wanting to know every detail about gameplay before buying it, here is the manual:
Will this work if we have GSB installed via steam?
If it will, expect a purches as soon as i know.
If NOT, how long until we can expect to see it on STEAM for mac’s?
mac version will take a while I’m afraid.
This should work fine for steam copies, just ensure you tell the installer where the game is installed. (it can’t guess)
Got it the minute I 1st saw it. Not a good start for me! Launhced 2 invasion fleets an was owned in both.I see I start off as the proverbial 98 lb weakling in this one. Patience my friend …
Hi! So happy to see this is available, so I bought it right away. Can’t wait to spend some time with it.
In the meantime, is there a way to start the tutorial again? I went into it when I didn’t have time to complete it, quit, and now it won’t play again. I tried deleting the old campaign, etc.
Has anyone been able to use the campaign with the Steam version?
I just bought Nomads and Galactic Conquest directly from the site (Steam hasn’t even bothered to make Nomads available yet, so I wouldn’t get my hopes up of seeing the campaign this side of Spring 2011 :)).
Nomads seems to be working properly after installing it into the steam GSB folder, and installing the campaign gives me a new menu background and a “campaign” button, but when hit it I just get a: “Login failed. Either your PC is not online, your firewall is blocking the game or your serial number is not valid.”
My PC is definitely online and my firewall isn’t throwing up any notices of unauthorized programs trying to connect to the Internet, and I can use the GSB challenge browser without problems (although strangely it doesn’t list any challenges more recent than from May this year, and I get a “removed from server” when I try to download any of them - until now I’ve only been playing the singleplayer scenarios).
I have also validated the original game with the “CD key” from Steam.
hi, are you certain that a firewall or other internet software isn’t interrupting the games attempts to connect to the server? It certainly sounds like that is the case. There are about 100 new challenges a day, so you should regularly download new ones if you go to refresh the list and the game is connecting ok. Have you possibly got a proxy set up that might be getting between the game and the net:?
I have my Vista x64 PC connected through a switch into the cable modem (50 Mbit Internet connection with no known blocked ports or other obvious ISP limitations that I have ever discovered), so no hardware firewall in eg. a router.
I run Comodo Firewall on my PC but even after first manually adding GSB.exe to the list of trusted applications and when that didn’t work, shutting down Comodo entirely and restarting GSB, I keep getting the “login failed” error when I try to run the campaign. Additionally no matter how many times I refresh the challenges list I always end up with what looks like the same list ranging from Feb 4 to May 17 this year.
You have to pre-order to test, so you’re basically paying the full price early to get beta access. You won’t need to pay again once the game goes live as you’ll already have it; you’ll just get a patch to download.
I’m not quite sure what you mean here? On my system the game is installed in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\gratuitous space battles - with DLC packs, including the campaign, in sub folders.
Just in case the game should somehow magically be able to find the campaign if I installed it in …\common\gsb instead, I first uninstalled it and then reinstalled into the folder you suggested, but as expected that simply causes the game to start up without the campaign present (old menu background, no campaign button).
Edit: I just tried uninstalling the entire game from Steam and the reinstalling game plus campaign. The two problems persist - login failed for the campaign, and a challenge list that will only show challenges between the dates Feb 4 and May 17 2010.
Miths: Had the same probelm with my steam challenges list, so what I did was go to my challanges folder* and deleted all the existing files, ‘challengelist.txt’ and ‘challengehistory.txt’ then I launched the game from steam, noticed when trying to post a challange that it said "invalid registration code, so I went to ‘online’ and submited it again, and everything was fine.
tl:dr:
delete challengelist.txt and challengehistory.txt
make shure the regestration code steam gave you is correct
submit the regestration code again.
And yes, it’s new and cool!