Pentadact: Are you playing the campaign? I'm not a big fan of that. The sense of progression is kind of undermined when you have to keep restarting, and it's the complexity and depth of that sense that makes GalCiv great in the first place.

I'd much rather play one twenty-hour match from random parameters than a tighly-plotted, mission-based story made up of smaller matches. Apart from anything else, a random game ends up having a better story.

In fact, GalCiv works so well for the former, that I wonder if we'll soon get to the point where people are happy for that to be the 'campaign', so to speak. Quick tutorial, then here: win this one, vast, enormously complex galaxy.

Pentadact: The idea is to give new players somewhere to start - a custom game screen is super-intimidating if you've never played before. People want a button they can click to play the game in a way that'll lead them in gradually, not requiring advanced knowledge from the get go. That's what 'campaign' says to most people.

But a mission-by-mission progression doesn't suit this type of game at all, and that's one of few things I hold against Dark Avatar. Expansions ought to be tackling this instead of just repeating the mistake with slightly more care and attention.

I think my solution would be to combine a preset small-galaxy match with a tutorial, so that the tutorial explains the basics then lets you play an easy little game, offering help and commentary throughout. Then the 'New Game' option would launch you into a somewhat randomised Huge or Immense sized game as a race of your choice or design, with every other race present, default settings, and a simple choice of AI difficulty.

You'd still have a Custom Game option below that for anyone who wants to play differently, but you basically come down and say: this is how our game is meant to be played, this is how we think you'll get the most fun out of it. So that players without a preference will actually try the type of match that best shows off the game's traits, and get a huge amount of playtime out of it.

Right now, timid or modest players probably never try getting stuck into a really huge game, they likely stick to the campaign, which really doesn't show off the game well.

ImperialCreed - did your mail or e-mail address mention your handle? A Gmail search for it turns up nothing.

Pentadact: Nope - all I've got is a Kane and Lynch review you sent to the Uncensored address a while back. Resend?