Pre-ordering question

This is a total, wild guess, but I would expect the download to be at least 1G (and quite likely more). GalCiv II (the base game) is 1.4GB as reported by Impulse, and I expect that Elemental will have higher amounts of detailed art assets.

As for the other part of your question, you might want to just email [email protected] - they should definitely be able to tell you and I've never had a problem dealing with them. Of course, they won't respond 'til Tuesday or Wednesday I'm sure (Monday is a US holiday most places).

I think that they allow to upgrade preorders sometimes but don't remember when and/or the conditions for it. As DrGuppie said, better mail the nice people at [email protected]

Its difficult to say exactly without feedback from the devs. Considering that this game will be in a state of development, whatever size it starts out with will likely grow.

Fortunately Impulse doesn't tend to download the whole game again when updating. It'll will only update the components that have changed since last time. So long as you keep up to date with the downloads, any updates will likely be small. Odd are, only the first download will be the big one.

That said, you might want to be ready for a large download. If I recall correctly, Demigod started around 1 Gb, but later grow to nearly 3 Gb by release.

download limit eh?   I have a problem with ISPs that have some sort of total download limit.  Like, bandwidth is not an expendable resource.  When somebody is done using it, it comes back for somebody else to use.   How can you put a price on total amount of data downloaded?  It makes sense to pay for a certain part of the total bandwidth (its like renting your own lane on the internet super-highway) but saying that you can only move information across it x-number of times doesn't make any sense.

/rant

I suspect the downloads will be pretty big.   Only other SD beta I participated in from the start (Sins I didn't join until after 1st relese) was demigod's and for the first few versions you had to basically redownload the entire game.  Of course they eventually got a system that let you download only the files that need patching rather than the whole thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if the 1st few releases were pretty large.  (Then again, I guess the 1st few releases won't have any 3D in them, so it might be pretty small without all those meshes and textures) 

For user content, obviously it depends on how many people have no lives.   I've seen some pretty crazy big fan content before.

This actually sounds like an Impulse question to me, because that's the app we'll be required to use to download and install the betas and released game.

But I'm one of those Stardock geezers who still has a few fingers on his cold, dead hands wrapped tightly around Stardock Central, which means I have no idea at all if or how Impulse would handle interruptions during a basic download-install  process (I'm working on this 'attitude problem,' but progress is slow).

My hope (alright, my expectation, but I'm an awfully demanding user...) is that Impulse would be able to resume an interrupted download on demand, whether or not download limits were the reason for the interruption.

It does.