Crandaeolon, if I burned you to ash I'd only have to clean the floors again.

Finished compared to the ideal, no. Finished compared to the PC games I've been playing and looking at for the last year or more, yes. Huh, but then the cynical frog in me would like to point out that most of those games has bigger budgets and were a worse mess in my experience, and took months to be patched. I'm also a survivor of three Paradox games, including the CK release. GalCiv2 has been perfectly stable for me, and I've not seen anything like that influence bug. Just the odd minor irritation. If I thought GalCiv2 sounded anything like the kind of release I've experienced with Paradox I wouldn't take any notice of it at all for a year or so. Believe me, I've had enough of waiting for my game to become playable. I've also had a stomach full of the 'delights' of issues like RTW's save/load, Stronghold 2's slowdown, Vampire: Bloodline's unfinished state, etc.

I wouldn't have classed this as an Indie game myself. Those, I was always under the belief, are tiny companies with rather simple games which are either released for free or for a couple of quid per download. For example Taleworlds and Mount and Blade. Stardock, Paradox, and the like are small companies. This is what makes the difference with the copy protection, along with the fact the game has a normal retail release in many countries. I can think of ... 2 other games I own which were released without a CD check, and one which had it added in a patch. This is out of a hundred or so from the last 5ish years. Of those 3, only 1 appeared in my local shop, and then it did so in very grudging and limited numbers. It was also a fairly ... erm, let's say cheap feeling release, and priced normally. Whereas here I've got a fancy metal box, glossy manual and tech tree, for £5 less than usual, and it was in a prominent place in the shop. None of those 3 games advertised the lack of a CD check; in fact it is a discouraged subject on their official forums.

I don't play FPS, and Raven make them, so ergo I don't take any notice of their products.

I also like to know the minute detail, the hows and the whys of my strategy games. The strange thing is, I feel I have a better idea of where things are coming from and what is happening in GalCiv 2 than I did in Civ 4. Civ 4 drove me crazy! Too much, and yet also not enough. :cough: But this is the fallout of being a dyslexic frog who has dodged much of the literacy related problems only to be blasted full in the face by the numeracy ones. I don't - can't - play by numbers, so I play by ... playing.