I just purchased this game this morning. It installed and launches fine, except that I cannot play the game without a serial. A window pops up on launch with space to enter the serial and it doesn't appear that I can bypass it.

I saw this thread http://www.gog.com/en/forum/earth_series/qanda_serial_request_at_launch but the solution there is to copy the registry entry for the key and copy it to each user, but there is only one user on this machine. There is nowhere else to copy it to.

I've requested a multiplayer key several hours ago but have yet to get a response. I have read elsewhere that others have waited weeks to get their serial number emailed to them. I hope I won't need to wait that long; although I suppose I could hunt down a crack or something...

What are other people's experience in requesting keys here? How long does it usually take?

Does anyone know of another way around playing this game without a key?

Thanks.

Well still no reply, so no serial number and I still cannot play the game. At least legitimately. I found a torrent for it which included a serial number in the site's forums that worked, but I should not have had to do that.

So it looks like I've solved the problem myself, but this is not solved. I would very much like a legit serial.

I woke up this morning and found my CD-Key waiting in my inbox. I feel a little silly for making a huge deal about this, so I do apologize for my tone above.

However, I can't help but think that it would make much more sense to have the key emailed along with the automated confirmation email I received at the time of purchase. After all, it's not like I was only waiting for the multiplayer key as I was led to believe before I bought it. I literally could not play the game without it. I would have like to have spent a good portion of the day with the game. My solution above worked but even then I was unable to play for long as I did need to retire for the night.

Anyway that's going to be my suggestion--send any needed CD-Keys for purchased gamed along with the automated confirmation emails that are sent out at the point of sale.

Odd that you get a message on launching the game. My copy doesn't force you to enter a key to play single player. It launches to the menu screen and there is the option to enter a multiplayer key there should you want to go online with it, but it isn't needed for single player. I wonder what your system setup is and where you've installed the game to.

As for obtaining the key, there are many, MANY, forum posts about them and GOG have said that they are looking into an alternative method, but we don't know how long this will take for them to decide what they will do with them or when it will be implemented. My own experience of requesting keys from them hasn't been too bad at all as I've always got them within three days, but I do know from the forums that sometimes (such as after big game releases that may need keys) they end up with a backlog of keys to send out so it can take a little while longer.

I also bought this game and had the same problem! It has something to do with the Vista and Windows 7 security stuff. I fixed it by starting earth 2160 as admin (right click).
( oh, noticed it was already said in your linked thread, :P )

Ah, that'd be the old "you've installed into default Program Files location" thing then, so running as admin gets around it. I don't install games into Program Files which is probably why I've not had the issue myself.

Well truth be told I'm running it under Wine in Linux. I've set the wineprefix I installed the game in to XP compatible so I didn't think it would be an administrator issue as that all seemed to come from Vista and Win7, or so I'd read elsewhere here. Anyway, it doesn't matter now. It works fine with the Key that was sent to me.

If GOG is looking for an alternative method, then that's great. I have to say that you've got way more patience than I (3 days!). I'm just used to things happening fairly instantaneously with digital distribution systems, you know? that being said, I am quite happy overall with GOG (this is not the first purchase I've made here, only the first that I needed a key for). I love being able to directly download an executable rather than dealing with a cumbersome client which can sometimes be a real pain getting both the game and the client running smoothly under Wine. But I think that even if I were running Windows I'd still prefer getting the executable.

Anyway, cheers to all who responded!

can we still play online multilayer, because when I select Earthnet it ask for activation