Ahzi Dahaka

Reply to Space Monsters (Would you like to see them back?) in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

You are on to something there, Infoceptor--the game could definitely use an equivalent to the barbarians of the Civilization series. Space pirates would probably be the best bet for that, though. As for the space monsters: they're one of the bajillion game features that were left out in the end, but still have remnants hidden in the XML. You know, along with Terror Stars, Employment, Antimatter Power Plants, the Starship Foundry, Pain Amplifiers, the Historical Preserve, Life Force Po

Reply to Five gameplay balance tweaks I'd like to see added in expansion... in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

The top thing I'd like to see is a queue for each planet's ship construction screen. I can't think of any half-decent excuse for it not already being in the game.

Reply to Please add the Early Loan Repayment option in Economics GalCiv2 Forums

No, but you... you... you're thinking of this place all wrong. As if I had the money back in a safe. The money's not here. Your money's in Joe's house... right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin's house, and a hundred others. Why, you're lending them the money to build, and then, they're going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?

Reply to Reducing Luck in Ship Combat in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

It's not a matter of what the defence roll represents, but how it represents it. Basically, if you were to graph the results of a significant number of rolls, you'd find the values would ultimately form a straight line across the graph. What's being said here is that the graphed plots should produce a normal distribution, aka bell curve. If you want a scary wall of jargon with fancy graphs, I'd suggest looking up the Wikipedia

Reply to Reducing Luck in Ship Combat in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

While I don't see it as a major issue, it would be nice if combat actually used some statistically sound mathematics. You know, bell curves and stuff.

Reply to Prerequisite for a Hull in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

I imagine your best bet is to just make the Colossal hull prohibitively expensive to the point that you can only afford a few.

Reply to Starbase Influence Area in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

This is definitely nice to know, as it's all too often that I find myself unsure of exactly where I should place a starbase in order to cover all the planets I'd like to. Muchas gracias, man.

Reply to Bring back the Terror Stars! in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

Isn't Stardock planning on getting terror stars into the expansion? The main problem is getting the AI to work with them.

Reply to "Challenge Everything" in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Or better yet, you could just install Windows Defender and never have to worry about it again.

Reply to Auto Explore? Auto Survey? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Auto-explore is a viable option if you only have a few scout vessels and a lot of galaxy to cover. I find that it becomes more of a hindrance than anything else if you build more than two or three scouts though; the game has a nasty habit of having multiple auto-exploring ships head to the same location, so that you end up with multiple ships making the progress of a single vessel. Even so, it's a good idea to have a ship auto-exploring an unmapped region of empty space, since there ar

Reply to MINITURIZATION HAS BEEN FIXED! in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

And then the Lord looked down upon this newest patch for Galactic Civilizations II, and He said, "It is good."

Reply to Getting Best Trade Deal = Micro-Management Pain in Trade GalCiv2 Forums

In a way, I can't help but wonder if an "auto-optimize" button in the diplomacy screen is really that good an idea, considering you already have the luxury of being able to know whether a deal will be accepted or not in the first place; it's like already having it served to you, and then asking to have it on a silver platter. Perhaps if there were multiple levels of acceptability, then it would be viable--the "optimize" button would put you in the "green" for a guaranteed deal

Reply to Wish List: Item 579b, Map in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Right-clicking on the Galactic News item will zip you over to the planet, and selects it, without actually going into the planet screen. If you'd rather not make a two-step process out of it, though, you could name your planets according to what cluster of stars they're in (one star could have Alpha Alpha and Alpha Beta, and the neighboring star would have Alpha Gamma, for example); that way, you can set it up so you only have to remember a handful of "states" instead of dozens of "cities".<br/

Reply to Trade goods in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

Okay, this is weird... I was in one thread, I make a reply, and it ends up in an entirely different one...

Reply to 1.3 and still the AI can't focus in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Indeed I rarely if ever build a warship until far into the game since even if someone declares war on me they rarely are able to invade, even when I see the transports comeing, and there's nothing I can do to intercept them, they don't actually invade the planets, they just kind of wait for me to build a cheap interceptor (one gun lots of engines) to destroy 10s of transpo

Reply to Why don't medals show up for some people in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Internet Explorer 6 does not properly display alpha transparency in 24-bit PNG images. Many sites, however, use a CSS/Javascript "hack" as a workaround. The problem with that fix is that some IE users, for currently unknown reasons (possibly some kind of security setting), are only able to see any 24-bit PNG images while they are loading; once they've loaded, they seem to disappear. What really happens is the image is replaced with single-pixel transparent .gif image usually named "blank.gif"

Reply to Multiplayer! in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

Firaxis developed Civ IV around multiplayer first, and then focused on single player; the reason why is because they learned an important lesson with Civ III: You don't take a complex single-player game, and make it into a decent multiplayer one. It just doesn't happen. If a multiplayer expansion for GalCiv II was made, it'd be no suprise if it sucked. Everyone is much better off if Stardock just builds GalCiv III around multiplayer instead.

Reply to Econ Starbases and Trade Routes in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

The thing I sometimes wonder about is whether it affects the revenue you gain from trade routes formed by someone sending a freighter to you...

Reply to Starbase Module XML in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

I personally use Programmer's Notepad ; I've found it's syntax highlighting and folding to be great for working with editing GalCiv II's XML, as well as for merging Python-scripted mods for Civ IV. Heck, I've even modified my registry so that IE7's "view source" uses it instead of Notepad. At any rate, syntax highlighting helps tremendously; once you get to using it, you won't know what you'd do without it.

Reply to Dark Matter and Matter in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

How about mirror matter ? It's literally the Bizarro World ! We'd better watch out for Bizarro Superman !

Reply to Who united the Earth ? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I like to think that, instead of one country having dominated everyone else, an international council would govern interstellar colonization. Kinda like the UN, except it actually accomplishes things. Then, you get that stuff like Interstellar Republic and Star Democracy, and the colonies start becoming self-sufficient enough to govern themselves. Of course, I think we can all agree that the best-case scenario would be that Bill and Ted really did ascend

Reply to Possible bugs that are known by most people and for the developers to know about? in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

Looks like I was only partially right about the devs already knowing. Sicne such is the case, I suppose it wouldn't be a bad idea to have a thread full of this stuff. That, and I'm not going to trust the "Insert Web Link" button again. At any rate, something I haven't seen mentioned is that the Eyes of the Universe is not working properly. It's supposed to give +10 parsecs sensor range, along with +20% to each ship's base sensor range, but it always increases

Reply to [REL] Miniaturization Fix in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

Personally, I think sizemod is fine as a percentage of the hull capacity; it's just that it needs to be set up so that it's the base hull capacity that the final component size value is calculated from. Provided that happens sometime, it also wouldn't hurt to remove the cap on the miniaturization bonus, which is currently 125%.

Reply to Who united the Earth ? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

The story is that the humans "gave" hyperdrive away, but the truth is that it got leaked onto the Internet.

Reply to Possible bugs that are known by most people and for the developers to know about? in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

I am absolutely certain that the development team is already aware of all of these, as none of them are "new" issues. In fact, the "save bug" has been stated as being intentional, as an anti-cheating measure for metaverse games (and I get the feeling that it may be dealt with, as it is indeed quite unpopular, and apparently even exploitable). As for point-and-click modding... If anything, the reason why this and other moddable games use XML is because you don't need to have a