I concur with the above, at least mostly on general priciples. As a native German myself, I also hate localized versions but more for another reason. The localized versions do very often require a separate patch and  mods (mostly for the original version) may only work if you are lucky. As I asume that localization is a) a lot of work, even if it is done not that well done, may cost a lot of money and time and c) are not often much appreciated by the inteded recipient you have some reasons why there is often not much effort invested by a publisher to follow up and make it better.

Furthermore, I have noticed  that it is increasingly common to be only allowed to install the localized version, even if the original version is completly included. (This may be corrected with enough technical knowledge, but it is a pain in the ***) You are out of luck if they only include the localized version.

As a direct inquiry to stardock just to satisfy my curiosity (if it does not violate any business agreements or such), is there some reason for the foreign publisher NOT to include the original version (if possible) and NOT to allow a choice which version to install, localized or original ? It would, at least for the people with enough language skill, save some trouble and time. Especially with SF-Themes we are travelling back in time where it was not uncommon to wait 10+ years for the publishing of books or TV-series. (BSG Season 3 on DVD anyone....) 

Oooopps.... just got carried away.

Apologies for the long rant. <kowtows itself to the unfortunate public wading through all of this rant>

It's good to hear an update is on the way. The positive feedback given to the Stardock team was one of the reasons I got the EU version (Europeans only?). The demo was very promising.

If you change your language of the game (via registry) to english, you have virtually the original since the original files are included. (As stated above it also fixes the minor race crashes.) If you don't have enough technical knowledge, find someone here on the forums who does. Maybe make two .reg files so you just have to double-click on them to change language. Updating after this switch should still be possible without breaking anything, At least it was for me with the GC2:DL updates. So normally, there should be no problem whatsoever.

...apart from that I don't really find the german translation bad... it's just that english strings pop up ever so often and in quite a few places the text doesn't fit in the allocated space (e.g. buttons).

Do Stardock even KNOW about the Ultimate Edition that is being sold throughout Europe?

I sent a support e-mail to Stardock about a week ago, asking about the update and all i got was a two line reply...

Something to the tune of, "Kalypso distributes our products in Europe, support queries and downloads must go through them."

So what does this mean?? It means whoever answered my query either didnt know Ultimate Edition exists, as he referred to Endless Universe in his response, or he was just waaaay too lazy to spend anymore than two minutes replying to my query.

So, what do i believe? Are we getting an update through Impulse? or do I have to go elsewhere?

Yes. UL is basically just a repack of EU with the base game added in its entirety (since Kalypso bought the rights to it from Paradox). Both will be updateable via Impulse.

Thanks for the clarification Kryo.

Sorry if I came off a bit snotty, I can imagine making/updating a game is hard work. I'm just eager as hell to see the changes.

Thanks. I asked earlier in this post and already did the registry thing which solved all problems quite nice.

This forum is really helpful as I now know for years. And also a lot of others! These kind of games really seem to attract nice and intelligent people.(No surprise as these games need a base level of smarts higher than some other genres)

The GalCiv2 games, like also for example SE5, are very user/mod friendly and can be treated easy without much trouble. A lot of other games are NOT that userfriendly !

However, there is an increasing number of games  which are very restrictive that you are only allowed to install the

localized version. (For some time you were asked by most games in the installation process which language you wanted to install, including the original ). Maybe I was only lucky in the selection of my games.

But I am curious if there is some kind of general policy in the gaming industry, licence fees, copy protection issues or else behind it, why am only allowed to install a localized version, even if it would be possible to install the original version.

Now I get what you are on about. Yes, I agree and I also like to know why we get so many one-language-only (or localized-only) versions. Some (e.g. The Witcher or Neverwinter Nights 2) allow for a multitude of languages to be installed. I really thank Stardock for doing the same, but it's still a mystery why most others do not.

... then again I asked myself the same thing about digital sat TV and english (or original if the original was not english) audio tracks of any movie or series, since it would make TV attractive again and one more audio track doesn't really take much - since the stations bought the licence to air the original anyway and I am still at a loss for any answer...

... then again this is really off-topic...

... then again it's getting late over here, so good night. 

There is no standard approach concerning multi-language support in the gaming industry. The decision for or against multi-language support is influenced by two conflicting factors: costs (for translations, sometimes voice actors) and revenue expectations (acceptance on foreign language markets). Both issues are highly non-trivial, and the amount of money involved can be quite high.

I won't go into the differences between languages (for example, that German texts are typically a lot longer than their English equivalents, and what this means) or cultures (which are quite a challenge for creating good localized versions). Nor will I discuss internet-based distribution channels.

Compare it with the (retail) book market: Typically, a book is published in the respective local language(s) only. You may be able to get (imported) other language versions in special book stores, normally at a higher price.

In the beginning, computer games were mono-lingual (mainly in English). When games were translated to other languages, the vendors followed the approach of the book market - influenced by marketing strategy and /or technical feasibility. Now that DVD's are common, technical limitations (mainly size restrictions) don't apply anymore, ie it has become feasible to pack multi-language versions together. This leaves the marketing strategy, associated with cost considerations.

The Witcher is a positive example (free choice of language), Oblivion a negative one (local language only). Space Empires 5 sits somewhere in the middle. Initially, there was only a US version released. Later the vendor agreed on an international release with Empire Interactive, which lets the customer choose between several languages indeed, but they are all incompatible with the original US version, including the (British) English version - which means patches and mods are incompatible with the international version of SE5. Luckily, this issue has been resolved somewhat by a patch offered by Empire Interactive ("somewhat" because you can use the patched British English version for playing mods now, but not the other language versions).

There are also several games (like GC2) where you can switch between languages by manipulating configuration files. For customers who know about it and know how to do this this is quite convenient. But I find it difficult to understand that vendors don't offer it as a visible and generally available function to all customers - it's added value after all.

In my mind, there are still too many game vendors who don't design multi-language support into their products. It doesn't add a lot to the costs of development to make all language-dependant components of the software swappable, to take into consideration that (as an example) the size of text boxes and the length of spoken text elements (where it applies) must be variable. Based on such a design, vendors could make business-driven decisions which languages they want to support (and where!), not hindered and influenced by technical limitations.

I myself prefer the originals, if this means German or English (as I'm fluent in these languages) - they tend to be a lot better than the translations.

Well spoken, but I guess that just verifies my initial hunch: there is no real reason for localized-only versions, only for english-only versions (extra effort for translation, maybe re-scaling of interface elements or font size to allow for longer texts to be used). Tradition or following an example makes a poor motivation in my opinion, although I can see that this might be one of the main factors in this matter. Maybe the future will bring more possibilities. Perhaps the slow introduction of storage media with more capacity (blu-ray springs to mind here) will make it easier to "cram in" additional language support on game discs.

On a side note: it's actually quite refreshing to have a sophisticated conversation in a game forum without so many catch phrases or abbreviations and at the same time I learned something new... That kind of made my day.

Ummmm...I'm not sure if we're handling the Ultimate Edition updates separately or not, but I think that we may be, so I don't know if you'll be able to get the update when we get it up for 2.01.  

We had to fix some additional errors with the German version today, which is why the update is STILL not up for EU users.

Patch is online

It both recognized my game and serial number... Still - 2 GB patch!?!?

2 GB ??? No ~ 76 MB !

Nicely done guys and gals. Thanks for the patch! Your efforts are appreciated here