Are you kidding? Preordering a game from Stardock? After the Elemental debacle? I am not brave enough for that.

I should add that I am not expecting them to repeat that disaster, but still I wouldn't preorder anything from them.

More the same game upgraded twice isn't it? :)

Granted, it's a decent to good game now, despite still having bugs that go back till Elemental.

Maybe it's been said before but I didn't notice it...but was the definitive edition of Galactic Civ 2 with all it's expansions DRM-free? I'm talking more the retail copy.

I would really like more massive space strategies on GOG :(

No, it uses a one-time online-activation as DRM.

Me too.

GalCiv 2 is DRM-free on steam though. I know coz I tested it out myself.

That said I would prefer to see it on GOG.

Are you absolutely sure? It would really surprise me, if Stardock removed the online-activation.

Edit: Primarily because it goes against what Frogboy said here:

"GOG has a number of issues for developers. It doesn't provide retail-time reports. Instead, every quarter we get a report on how many units they say they sold. We just take their word on it that they sold that many since there's no activation or any other way to tell how many copies they sold.

And companies make.."mistakes" on accounting all the time. Atari claimed to have sold only around 1,500 copies of Demigod in Europe back in the day. But because we had activations, we knew we had actually sold around 40,000 copies during that period and made them correct their "error".

Hence, even if we made a non-Steamworks version, there's no universe where we'd put a new game on a service that didn't have some sort of activation if for no other reason that we want to make sure that there weren't any accidental accounting issues."

cant wait..

According to this list it is indeed DRM-free:
http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games

Hmm.. I wonder why I was forced to activate it six months ago. Did this go DRM free recently, or is activation not considered DRM by the wiki contributor?

The list states, that the base game (Dread Lords) and the first expansion (Dark Avatar) are DRM-free, which is correct. The online-activation is only required if you want to play the second expansion (Twilight of the Arnor).

I'm a Galciv noob but I got the Galciv 2 ultimate edition on steam, think a year back on a discount:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/202200/
Not sure if it activated on download or the first run but I have ripped the game files from my desktop out to a thumbdrive and it works on my offline laptop and my work laptop which has a group policy that refuses steam to install and run.

So no chance to see GalCiv 3 on GOG I suppose. Hope to see it in few years time at least and GalCiv 2 in the catalogue soon. Elemental was DRM-free at least, WAS.

The activation takes place after the installation is finished. Once that is done you can do whatever you want with the game, because there is no further DRM-layer (like with SecuROM) and it doesn't require Steam to be working.

Even if it weren't for the activation we still wouldn't see GalCiv 3 on GOG, because Frogboy also said this:

"I'm not sure how many games really are released with a Steamworks version and a non-Steamworks version. I'll take your word that it's "a lot". But there isn't going to a be a non-Steamworks version of GalCiv III because it would require too much time and effort on our part to do that. For starters, it would have to be a non-Multiplayer version of the game, requiring its own installer, requiring the removal of achievements, AI data mining, in-game mod support, etc. In short, it would be crippled."

I hope so too, but I have my doubts. :(

I've never installed the game from my Collector's Edition DVD, because, by the time I got around to it, this version was already outdated. However, even if you could play the game without activating it, you would still need to do it in order to get patches. Just like with the retail-edition of GalCiv 2: DL. The digital version of E:WoM, on the other hand, always required activation.

Kinda regretted preordering Galciv 3. Hope it's DRM-free on steam at least after the one time activation. You I would've learnt my lesson after pre-ordering Elemental CE edition boxed set few years back. Well at least they gave the subsequent games DRM-free. But I can't stand his hypocrisy regarding steam back then when he was still running Impulse and his gamer's bill of rights as compared to now.

Okay, I can officially say that you didn't learn your lesson. :)

Well, I loved GalCiv 2 and I although it is a bit of a shame that they cannot make the effort to free a game from Steam after it is out (I don't think it is too much effort.) I'll buy it eventually when it becomes cheap.