I don't think i can do this.

Yeah, the trend towards digital releases is more than slightly problematic if you don't have a decent internet connection. Not a huge amount you can do about it, unfortunately.

- Physical boxes are expensive to manufacture, and most users these days simply don't care about them (see popularity of Steam).

- Manufacturing and retail significantly constrain development timelines. Dates have to be set contractually and are prohibitively expensive to change (if possible at all). This means it is not possible for smaller companies to take a 'when it's done' stance and still make retail.

As to the speed, that is entirely dependent on Steam's CDN and your own bandwidth. We can't really draw any conclusion from your statement, though. 4GB/s consumer internet does not exist, so you are probably misstating that, and 32 hours for a 2GB download places it at less than an order of magnitude more than dial-up speeds, which few would consider broadband.

If you run a speed test and post your results we might be able to comment more. But given that even GC2 fully loaded is nearly 2GB, I certainly wouldn't expect GC3 to weigh in any less.

We stopped doing physical versions a while ago for several reasons, but digital distribution is what most people buy and want these days.  Physical releases have been addresses by several members of the team including Frogboy over the years.

First of all, I have never heard of an internet speed given in bytes. It has always been in bits/sec. Second of all, even if your speed was 4 Gbps, that is tremendously fast. I have never heard of any speed above 40Mbps, but the speed has been growing faster than I can keep up with.

Third, it sounds like the actual performance you got was about 140Kbps, which is higher than any dialup speed I have ever heard about (28Kbps), and less than the slowest DSL speed I have ever heard of (256Kbps). Perhaps there is something else going wrong. Even if your net speed was 40Mbps, your 1.9G bytes should have downloaded in a bit over (lets see, 1.9G * 8 / 40Kbps = 380 seconds / 60 = ..) about 7 minutes, rounded up a bit to account for the transmission overhead always encountered with downloads. (Now that seems a bit fast. Are my calculations correct?) On a 6Kbps line, like I have, this would be a bit over 43 minutes.

Another thing to remember, with Steam in the picture, any download can be interrupted in the middle and then resumed. When GC1 first came out, they provided the same capability with their download, and it worked quite well.

It's the future (the present actually) because on my 80Mbps connection I can download a gsme faster than I can drive to the store to buy it. They always have it in stock. Stardock makes vastly more per copy sold than at retail. Sales are common. 

Entire genres of indie games wouldn't exist right now if not for digital distribution. Retail only works for very big releases. 

Here in Germany, some ISPs provide speeds of up to 100Mbps, but it's not available everywhere. Some areas are still stuck at 2Mbps or less.

https://forums.galciv3.com/449009/page/8/#replies

This post from frogboy more or less encompasses why they're not bothering with retail

This is in addition to the fact that Sins of a Solar Empire Rebellino sold 100k without any retail release pretty much shows that the necessity and cost for going to retail is more or less moot. Especially for waht would bea  'niche' game in the typical retail space.

Darca,

Many people already are used to this, but your query suggests it is worth mentioning that the terminology used for transmission  speed is expressed as Bytes per second (Bps, KBps, or MBps -- used for non-internet stuff, like hard disk delivery rates) and bits per second (bps, Kbps, or Mbps -- used for internet, LAN, WiFi, and a few other things). The key is the use of an uppercase B for Bps (bytes) and a lowercase b for bps (bits). My apologies if you already knew this.

T-mobile 4gig speed is what I have what that actually means I don't know, do you guys have any idea how long it will take. I really want this game. I use my phone as a WI-FI for my laptop. And I only yes my phone here on the forums.

(I've read all the stiff you guys posted on the galciv2 site and I'm star struck at you guys and how much karma you all have. )

I REALLY WANT THIS!

Now that you mention it, I have seen adds for T-mobile, Verison, and other mobiles that talk about 4G. I am not sure what the 4G means, but I have difficulty believing it is bit speed.

In addition, it is possible your mobile link is the fastest link in the chain. I don't know of any IEEE approved standard that provides WiFi speeds faster than 100Mbps. Other things can get in the way as well, such as the delivery speed of the server you are downloading from, server load, internet load, slowest connection link, etc.

Edit, corrected the figure I gave for WiFi.

Actually I think I do... I have full speed data at x% and it slows down to two giga Byte speed when the limit is reached, so we're clear.

4G means fourth generation, not 4GBps. Typically that means LTE or WiMax (neither of which are technically 4G) in the US, which have spec maximums of 100Mbps and 128Mbps respectively. In the real world, you'll be lucky to get a tenth of that in most cases, which would be similar to low-end cable.

If you tried downloading Mass Effect through a phone tether, I suspect that your actual speeds are far less than the 'lucky' case. That case was quite low even for 3G, and pretty close to 2G.

Edit: Yes, if you hit your limit early on and were throttled to 2G, taking 32 hours to download 2GB makes perfect sense. 2G is only a couple of times faster than dial-up on the high end.

The moral of the story here is that if you are going to use a phone tether as your primary internet, you need to be very aware of your data caps and what will happen if you go over (i.e., pay through the nose or get throttled to at best 10% of your normal speed, depending on provider).

4G is a term for a type of wireless networking, not a speed. 4G can mean a lot of different speeds, depending on what you get. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4G

if your signal is strong it's reasonably fast, so that's fine. Data limits might be an issue depending on how big your cap is. 

And the speed capabilities given for the mobile specifications in that Wikipedia page is all listed in bits/sec, not bytes (100Mbps, 1Gbps, and so on).

When I did the thing with mass effect I downloaded a mega byte every 15 seconds

That is about 10x dial-up speed (for perspective, average 4G speeds are another 20x that amount). If that is what it started at, you were throttled early and hard, because to take 32 hours you would have had to have averaged only a quarter of that.

Note that especially in America tehre is almost no 'unlimited' 4G data plans. "Unlimited" is code for "we are going to lie through our teeth to get you into a contract".

For example T-Mobile is 'unlimited'. But after 5GB you get throttled into dial-up speeds as part of their 'Protective Measures'.

http://www.t-mobile.com/Templates/Popup.aspx?PAsset=Ftr_Ftr_TermsAndConditions&print=true&cm_sp=TERMS%20AND%20CONDITIONS-_-TERMS%20AND%20CONDITIONS-_-TERMS%20AND%20CONDITIONS

ATT just cuts you off when it detect 'high bandwidth' applications

http://www.att.com/shop/en/legalterms.html?toskey=wirelessCustomerAgreement#whatAreTheGenTermsApplyDataMsgPlans

In Europe, most cell phone services like Three/Orange/etc just outright block Steam from workiing at all

http://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/1/864959336515274680/

relying on mobile connections for high bandwidth applications like Steam is a bad idea. At best you should use it to 'boostrrap' offline mode.

I hate capitalism!!! They lied to me...(why would corporations do that? Lol) I'm going to upgrade from this prepaid crap, thank all of you.(and kryo you are awesome but I have a cooler avatar! lol)

Oh forgot. what should I get for internet, and how should I dl the game?

If you're in America functionally your broadband choices are extremely limited. Whatever your town decided was 'ok' is pretty much what's available. And encumbent providers make damn sure no one else moves in on 'their territory' limiting your choices between A or A or A. Do some basic research as your opitons at best will be between likely 2 providers.

As for downloading the game, just install steam and when the alpha is available, you'll get a code. Register the code with Steam and you can tehn begin downloading the game.

Note though that during the alpha./btea process likely many patches will come out. These patches might be large depending. You may wish to weigh if you want to be a Founder given that you'll be a alpha/beta tester and subject to patches that may break, not work, explode, etc. Justa n FYI, being an alpha/beta tester is not for everyone. It requires a lot of patience. Waiting for 'full release' is a totally viable and reasonable choice for many people. Choose wisely.

If a friend has it, get their copy from the stream folder and do a verify. That will take far less time on a slow connection. 

That's not an easy question to answer.  What is your location, what are your options?

Baltimore Maryland, and the citys very old and crapy like most of the country. *EDIT* forgot the lol. *EDIT*

Do you have a land line? That is where I would go first. DSL gives better speeds than what you seem to be getting and it is specifically for the internet.

How about cable TV? That would be my second choice. Some cable companies have internet only options, and some (maybe all) of them offer TV/phone/internet mix or match packages.

Dish and DirectTV might also be options, but you have to be careful about any games or apps that may have dependencies on "latency". Satellite adds seconds to the time from your computer to the first internet hub in your link. This causes problems with games like WOW, where the game gets in trouble if the latency gets greater than some fraction of a second. And VOIP also does not work on a Satellite link. Since I don't know if Steam has any dependencies on latency nor do I know if GalCiv3 MP will have any latency dependencies, I can't make any suggestions either way.

Comcast sucks as a company, but their cable internet is reliable and will get you good speeds for game downloads.  I moved out of Baltimore mid-2010, so there may be new smaller players in the area as well.  

Downloading over wireless phone is going to be prohibitive, either because of cost (if you're capped, but not throttled) or time (if you're "unlimited" but throttled).