Archonsod

Reply to Channeler Customization: Continued in Elemental Dev Journals Elemental Forums

Rather than points, why not make it a tradeoff between raw and focused ability? ie by default (no traits selected) you have X, X and X stats/magic power, where X is the maximum. Each trait reduces a relevant attribute by a given amount - if you spent your youth apprenticed to a stone mason he probably didn't teach you much about military tactics. In return, a trait will give you bonuses, access to special spells, units and technologies (maybe even tech/spell tree branches?). So the m

Reply to Minor race steals tech and wants star systems in exchange? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

All the event does is give the minor race access to the tech, you still need to trade it off them somehow. All minor races like to be offered systems though. Unless like me the minor race your spies choose to work with happens to be the one you've been at war with for the past few years.

Reply to Time For Chris To Give Up in Demigod Demigod Forums

Stories : Keeping the unimaginative entertained since Kindergarten!

Reply to Not Sure of a Solar Empire in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

[quote quoting="post"] I suppose SoaSE could never be as involved as a turn-based 4X game; it offers precious little in return for this cost in depth though. [/quote] On the contrary, I'd say it simply shifts it. Rather than looking at the economy or industrial complexity you're looking at ship fire arcs and turning speeds. The races are quite different, but it's subtle rather than being obvious (for the most part anyway). Special abilities available to capital shi

Reply to The death of PC games at retail in PC Gaming Sins Forums

GG and GOG are client free, so assuming they haven't snuck any .net into the account page somewhere you shouldn't have that problem any longer; the GG games I've downloaded since they dropped the client last month were both zip archives. I'd assume more distributors will probably follow suit too.

Reply to 3 PC Game industry myths in PC Gaming Sins Forums

[quote who="mickeko" reply="9" id="2110705"] That's just a tiny fraction of the amount of pirated copies. It's really negligible. Even though every single sale is important, I doubt any developer would prefer the small amount of sales through piracy over a world without piracy. Also, I would think that most of those who bought after trying a pirated copy probably would have bought the game if they couldn't get a pirated copy of any games at all.[/quote] The p

Reply to Starbase range? in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

You can generally cover one path into the system with a Starbase. They're not really supposed to single handedly defend systems though. The key is forcing the opponent to tackle the Starbase. Strike craft help, or you can always focus on the hangar upgrades rather than the weapons. Try minefields to channel them towards the base too.

Reply to Will Expansions 2 and 3 require Entrenchment or will we have 4 separate Sins games dividing the online community? in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

Automatic switching is a silly idea. If I'm launching Entrenchment, it's because I want to play Entrenchment, not vanilla. If I wanted to play vanilla I'd be launching vanilla. I don't need the game to downgrade me, if I was willing to accept a game of vanilla instead I'm more than capable of dropping out and re-launching it myself. Showing the version being played in the server browser would be convenient in letting me see if it's worth dropping back to another version in the f

Reply to Are "battleship" capital ships stronger in cap vs cap ship fights? in Strategy Sins Forums

It depends on whether we're talking a pure capital duel or not. The Marza certainly has the edge early game thanks to higher damage output and the benefit of incendiary shells / radiation bomb. The limitation being that all that damage is pointed straight ahead. The Kol can't quite match in pure damage output, but it does have a much wider coverage of fire, making it pretty good at taking out swarms of cruisers or frigates. Late game they both round off nicely; the Kol getting Finest Hour and

Reply to What To Expect From Entrenchment? in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

And thanks to those frontlines, chokepoint planets become a lot more valuable as areas to prevent incursion into your Empire. The addition of mines, plus the boosts to defensive structures, means it takes a lot more planning to grab a system than previously.

Reply to PC Game Piracy Examined in PC Gaming GalCiv2 Forums

[quote who="psychoak" reply="10" id="1984543"] I have never seen a proven correlation between so called casual piracy and lost sales. [/quote] That's great, or at least it would be if you were a game developer. You're missing the point somewhat though; it doesn't matter if the publishers erroneously believe allowing people to purchase coloured cheddar results in lost sales of their games. Fact is that perception is causing them to move away from the PC as a platfor

Reply to Stardock what in the heck is this? What happend to your Bill of Rights? in Stardock Games Stardock Forums

Hmm. I'd be more interested to hear precisely how Sony managed to secure visibility of Microsoft's kernel myself.

Reply to SOSE badly needs a Scenario/Story line in single player mode!!! in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

[quote who="patkhoo" reply="3" id="1977427"] It would also be nice if the game designers gives me a (strategic?) target to achieve. [/quote] What, galactic domination not enough for you? :P There's plenty of targets already furnished, check out the achievement screen. Or of course you can elect to win by influence, military or even (to an extent anyway) economically. I don't think developer furnished targets work so well in these situations; it's impossible

Reply to Weekend Impulse Sale! in GalCiv II News GalCiv2 Forums

[quote who="Mascrinthus" reply="3" id="1973453"]Why would anyone play GalCiv I today when we have GalCiv II TA, except out of curiousity to see how far the game has come along since that release.[/quote] GalCiv 1 is a completely different game in many respects. I still play it from time to time. But Space Rangers 2 for $4? Guess Santa came early this year!

Reply to Best Epic Fantasy? in Everything Else Stardock Forums

Ursula Le Guinn's Earthsea Quintet. Though I guess my favourite would have to be Discworld :P

Reply to If you could re-make Sins, how would you? in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

I'd steer away from the rock-paper-scissors balance and go for more unique factions. A TEC player shouldn't be able to win the game with the Advent by using similar (or in cases, the exact same) strategies. You know you get it right when players who do well with one race find the other races horribly confusing. Makes for much better balance arguments too ;)

Reply to Why Starcraft II will not live up to the greatest RTS of the past decade. in Everything Else Sins Forums

[quote]We are talking blizzard here.... They will do an impressive game[/quote] That would be a first :P The problem I've always had with Blizzard's RTS's is that they're too much like going back to the early nineties and playing Dune 2 again. The basic gameplay has been pretty much unaltered since then. I was disappointed with Warcraft III because playing games like Kohan and Warrior Kings had led me to expect a little more complexity from an RTS title. Starcraft II will be u

Reply to Choppiness Fps Late Game (Dark Avatar) in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

Make sure you've disabled indexing (properties tab of the drive in Computer. Something like "for fast searching, allow the drive contents to be indexed..."). Also go into the disk tools, defragmenter and turn it off (or schedule it for once a week or something). You don't need your disk constantly defragging in the background. Between them they should cut down on pointless disk and memory activity which should help boost the game. You might also want to try downloading SP1 if you have a

Reply to Twilight Beta 6 in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

Worked fine for me once I switched to US-1. Are you hitting ok after switching? I noticed if you flick the server and then do anything else, it'll default back to US-2.

Reply to PC game piracy hurts us all in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

[quote] I hate to say it, DRM is going to win. [/quote] I doubt it. I remember two years ago DRM was the future of the music industry, and it failed. I suspect the same will occur in the game market for much the same reason. I think a big factor in DRM is that it's now intruding to the level that consumers are actively boycotting or avoiding titles because of the DRM used. The real problem with the method is plain here - if there was no other option but to use the DRM enabled software, t

Reply to Why don't I go to the GDC? in GalCiv Journals GalCiv2 Forums

Release a couple of decent selling games and suddenly you can turn all elitist :P Nah, not much point in turning up. Assuming you have no intention of selling up and looking to be employed elsewhere there's little benefit to the networking. The talks, panels and similar waffle might be interesting, but the way I see it anyone who knew anything about succeeding in the industry would be busy sunning themselves on their personal tropical island rather than turning up to these things. That

Reply to Video Games Are Anti-Social and Addictive in Gaming GalCiv2 Forums

To be honest, there's few activities you can do which would give the brain such a thorough workout as a modern videogame. You're dealing with 3D space, abstractions, pattern recognition and a host of other things generally unavailable without casting yourself into a deep ocean or space.

Reply to Vasari - DA/RA controversy in Strategy Sins Forums

Always get this problem in multiplayer games :lol: I think a lot of the problem stems because players focus on their 'pet' race to the exclusion of all others. One thing that can help is to add a house rule either preventing a player from picking the same race twice in a row, or else forcing random empire selection. Once they've 'played the field' a couple of times these kind of arguments tend to disappear, or at least have a more sound reasoning behind them.

Reply to Advent - Flipping homeworlds like pancakes in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]Depriving them of resources (credits) slowly but surely will guarantee your dominance in the area. Combine this with hit and run attacks on resource extractors and they'll be lucky if they can build a couple scout frigates [/quote] Not the only benefit to cultural spread. All races get little boosts for fighting in their culture, plus of course you can make a buffer zone of uncolonisable planets for your enemies. Since the Advent can start upping culture right off the bat, you c

Reply to Balance Issue: Pirates in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

It would be a neat idea to have the pirates send multiple fleets proportionate to the bounty on each player (or just one fleet which is then divided up according to bounty). Getting them often has never been a problem for me though. In fact, without pirate attacks I doubt I'd ever be able to field a level 10 capital ship, let alone fleets of them.