I bought Galactic Civilizations III and could not get it to start. I got a loading screen and then nothing. I tried to run the game as administrator, tried to run the executable wiping the preference file, all to no avail. My PC largely meets the system requirements.

I was about to ask for a refund (I bought 30+ games from GOG and never needed to ask for a refund) when I noticed a file called debug.err in Documents/My Games/GalCiv3. At the end of this log file there was some error about the Galaxy client. So I downloaded and installed the GOG Galaxy client and now the game works.

I like the philosophy at GOG and I appreciate what they do, making DRM-free games available to gamers who still want to enjoy their freedom in this era plagued by digital content issues, when you no longer own what you pay for. GOG is the only big player out there that unmasks these disgusting practices, giving its clients back their ownership over the titles they buy. I can only imagine that the ones who started GOG must have hated being forced to play a game they thought they bought via their Steam or Origin client or whatever.

So why is it then that this GOG *optional* Galaxy client is now forced upon GOG users that want to play Galactic Civilizations III? If it's happening with this game, it can happen to any other game. Will Galaxy be a requirement? Requiring users to log in as well? Maybe it's a mistake and it was accidentally linked as a dependency?

I would just like to know what is going on. I don't want to point fingers, I don't want to accuse, I don't want to start a flame war. Moreover I don't want this to be the beginning of the end for what GOG stands for.

Did you had Galaxy running when playing gall civ 3, or was it just installed?

Sounds like a bug to me, the game needs galaxy for the mulpiplayer and social features, but should work fine for the single player without.
I think something like this happened recently, and was later fixed, but cant remember wich game.

Hi, thanks for your reply. No, I didn't launch Galaxy, I just installed it. Yep, I definitely hope it's just a bug. Should I post this in another subforum?

Sounds like a bug to me as well. My friend also picked up GalCiv3 and did not have the Galaxy client installed, and was able to start the game just fine and play singleplayer (Win7 x64).

I can also verify that even for multiplayer / achievements, you do not need to have Galaxy *running*, just installed.

Hello,
GalCiv3 does not require Galaxy to start up. Can you submit a ticket (http://esupport.stardock.com/index.php?/Tickets/Submit) with the debug.err attached so we can take a look? Thank you.

Patrick
Producer, Stardock

I downloaded the installer with galaxy but installed & started it without. Had no problem.

You do sometimes get errors like that if you have an unclean uninstall of an old GOG galaxy client on your computer. I just installed on a new laptop and it worked fine without Galaxy for Single Player.

Thank you all for your replies. I was wondering how come nobody else experienced this problem, and Kalanyr's post might provide an answer.

At some point, I have downloaded and installed an older version of the GOG Galaxy client (version 1.0.5.14). I checked it out and decided to uninstall it. This uninstall was probably not clean and took place some time before installing Galactic Civilizations III. I think this is what has likely prevented Galactic Civilizations III from launching.

I attempted to reproduce the bug by uninstalling GalCiv3, uninstalling Galaxy, then reinstalling GalCiv3. I cannot however reproduce this issue.

Following Patrick's suggestion, I checked out my debug.err log, but it had been rewritten when I first managed to launch the game successfully. The only reference to Galaxy that I found in the new log was something very close to the message I had when I encountered the problem, but this time it was definitely not a show stopper: So thank you all for replying, I'm glad this was an issue on my side and may GOG and Stardock continue to rock :)

I got the same thing, I recall Stardock has been anti-DRM since before GOG has been around (their CEO is vocal about it and also willing to publicly admit when he's screwed up), so I would've been surprised for them to switch gears and require some kind of phoning home. I'm 100% unwilling to install Galaxy client and won't buy games that reviews state force the install, so I wasn't willing to try installing Galaxy as a fix. However, I think I found the solution (will e-mail what I found to support tomorrow).

I got the same generic e-mail from support you did and tried the run as admin and that failed. However, the thing I tried before any of the rest was I unplugged my network cable and set my firewall to full permissive. The game worked. I tried turning off an autouploading of scores and going back to firewalled with network plugged in and it failed. I set firewall (ZoneAlarm) to prompt me, and I got a crash reporter trying to access the Internet (fair with all the crashes I got, but I rejected just to test), then GalCiv3 trying to act as a server (denied), then GalCiv attempting to access the trusted zone (local network & DNS generally) and I let that one through. I then denied the next attempts to act as a server and access the Internet. The game worked.

I set that as saved and set ZoneAlarm back to Game Mode with auto deny and the game works.

My guess is that the code GOG put in to check for the Galaxy client to enable multiplayer takes issue with ZoneAlarm blocking things (likely makes assumption that NIC is live and the rejection probably looks different from a timeout, so they probably just didn't test for it). Regardless, I'll reply to support for them to file it as a bug, either with their Galaxy integration or with a startup DNS lookup or localhost socket in GalCiv 3.

Hopefully that can help others out there, and I'd be surprised if GOG didn't fix the bug for future releases (probably not a big enough problem to issue a patch immediately for all the games with that code in it, but worth it to include in future updates and have as a common answer for support, after all seemingly forcing phone home behavior on a site that advertises about being DRM free will lose a lot of customers).

Patrick - It doesn't require it, I think it's an integration issue. See my comment above. The lines that suggest Galaxy integration are the last line or two below (I'm including a few above it so you can see where it's happening without attaching the whole file):

Debug Message: DirectX Feature Level: DirectX 11.0
Debug Message: Device SUPPORTS raw and structured buffers
Debug Message: Initializing 2d screen space effect
Debug Message: Device is now ready
Debug Message: Registering text renderer icons
Debug Message: FXManager, FXElement size: 712 bytes
Debug Message: Shell initialization complete
Debug Message: Shell Initialized
Debug Message: CGalCiv3Shell::RequestInitializationState from: Invalid to: Uninitialized
Debug Message: GOGWrapper::Initialize failed, error name=GalaxyRuntimeError, message=Could not start GalaxyService

Well at least I get to see the loading screen for 3 seconds for € 30.

I can see the Galactic Civilization III exe terminating in the task manager and a galaxy communication service coming up, which terminates also after 30 seconds. Way to go DRM free GOG.

See if my fix above works. For me it appeared to be firewall blocking a localhost socket or DNS query or something of that nature. I didn't have to install Galaxy.

Thank you very much for posting this. I was going to wait to see if a patch fixed the game, but now it appears as if having GOG galaxy running (I did not use it to download the game) is necessary for the game to start. It was just jumping back to the desktop about 2 seconds after loading up the intro splash screen

MaGo72 and nvidiac, you probabily have an issue similar to what I have exeperienced because of an unclean unsintall of the GOG Galaxy client. Therefore try installing the latest version of Galaxy, make sure Galactic Civilizations III goes past the splash screen (you shouldn't need to have Galaxy running), then uninstall Galaxy making sure the uninstall is clean this time (no left-over files in the installation directory) and then attempt to run the game again.

That error message means that GC3 thinks that either galaxy is not installed or not installed correctly.

Glad to hear that changing the Firewall setting fixed your problem though!