Mettra

Reply to Capital Ships - the way they should be!? in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

There's a logistical problem with making cap ships too strong. If they are significantly more powerful than an equal supply of other ships, every game would just be a tech race to 16 capital ships with game results becoming more random and less based on strategy (since teching up to more and more cap ships means crippling your economy as a side-effect - the line between when this would be a good idea and when it wouldn't would be too fine to make a good strategic judgment). As it is ri

Reply to RT4X - understanding what it means in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

[quote]I really like Europea Universalis. But to say it has more depth than Sins of a Solar Empire is not something I can remotely agree with. (1) The fact that you admit that you don't see what culture does in Sins I think makes the case that you haven't fully explored Sins or more to the point, have decided that Sins doesn't have the kind of depth you choose to have. (2) There are plenty of people out there that say Galactic Civilizations isn't a "real 4X" simply because it

Reply to What's with the elitists? in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

I see a lot of mention of 'exploiting' and 'cheap' and 'abusive' tactics and such. A competitive player, by definition, is playing to win. If you are not playing to win at the moment, you are not currently a competitive player. If a competitive player decides to play a game for fun, he takes off his competitive hat and puts on his 'casual' hat. If it can be done in the game, it's a valid tactic. Period. The game does not acknowledge whether you won by doing something 'cheap

Reply to honestly, would you really build your research stations in outer space? in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

As a physicist, I would say there's a lot of good reasons to have labs in space - especially when you're researching technology that would be used in... wait for it... space ;).

Reply to Multiplayer Cheating With TeamSpeak in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

[quote]Patch 1.04 notes:MULTIPLAYER:A giant red-hot piece of metal has been included with the Sins game package. Plug it into any USB port. When a game is lost, the metal will slam into your eyeballs preventing you from seeing the other player's units. You can change it to slam into your jaw preventing you from speaking as well in Game Options. Pre 1.04 buyers or digital download customers can get the add-on free of charge.[/quote] Made me lol, but the OP has a good point. They could s

Reply to 1.03 Balance and the Rationality of Casual/Elite Polarization in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

[quote]A number of people were talking about why anyone should look at balance because that was how elite players manipulated the game into their favor at the expense of the casual gamer. Onto Balance....Well, for one thing, bad balance makes everyone unhappy. (1) Now look at how 1.02 went. In that patch, the balance changes were actually good. There was some minor grumbling about how LRMS> everything else, but nothing major. Nothing on the current scale. Siege frigates were weakened, e

Reply to 1.03 "Intercept" flight pathing isn't an actual "intercept" in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

The way it is now requires less micromanagement than the way you suggest. As it is now, you can simply select your fleet and right click or a-click on a certain point. If the AI were really capable of intercepting, you would just have players 'dancing' their retreating fleets around to make your fleet delve deeper towards the planet. This kind of behavior is present in a lot of games, and Ironclad probably specifically knew of it. Even if the intercept behavior was present without an

Reply to Long Live STARDOCK/FROGBOY and IC/the FRASER BROS. !! in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

Signed. Let's see if we can make this the longest thread in the forum ;).

Reply to My responses to Frogboy's comments on balance and intentions. in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

[quote]Well ... if there is such a crowd, I'm not part of it. (1) I don't « hate » high-level, competitive players. On the contrary, I admire them, reading all their posts to study their concepts & models, in the abstract, realising that I will never have the time & willpower to try to apply their ideas in online, competitive multiplay. My crucial point has only been this : since that competitive elite possibly represents less than 0.1% of Stardock customers who purchased the game, I do

Reply to Bombers & Fighters: Balance Discussion in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

I don't think anyone so far has suggested using strikecraft in multiplayer. I would advise to do this only in late-mid to late game if you were to even go for them in the first place. Strikecraft are really decimated by flaks, which are low tech, fairly cheap, and tough to kill. Even without upgrades, flaks just tear through bombers making them (in my opinion) not really worth it until later in a long game where you have abilities that increase their usefulness and support ships to disable fl

Reply to My responses to Frogboy's comments on balance and intentions. in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

He's responding in this thread because the original thread (from which he is quoting) is locked. Splitting up the post isn't necessarily taking things out of context. I do it all the time to reduce post/page size and to only address the specific points brought up. (Admittedly, the OP should have mentioned all this in the first post. ;))

Reply to Sins of a Laggy Empire in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

Instead of insulting him, try responding to his complaints. If you have a 3DMark score of 20k, this game should run flawlessly without even so much as a hiccup. As you say, though, it's not graphical lag. What is the speed of your processor? First off I'll say that quad-cores are pretty terrible for video games because video games are rarely (almost NEVER) written in any serious kind of parallel. So take your CPU speed and divide it by 4 and see if you meet the minimum requir

Reply to My responses to Frogboy's comments on balance and intentions. in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

[quote]The problem here (and in the other billion threads on this subject) is that Sins, thank Heavens, doesn't fit neatly into a "box". It's not really an RTS, and it's not really a 4X game, and that makes a number of people very uncomfortable. Some people seem to like boxes. Now that the community has Sins in their hands, the hardcore RTS fans are trying to push it more into being an "in the box" RTS, and the 4X fans are pushing the other way. (1) The people (such as the devs) who und

Reply to 1.03: Sim City In Space. in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

[quote]I was insulted and mocked before I said a single inflamatory word. I showed evidence of a clear game imbalance between the races. If you want to blame the fact that this clear imbalance is being ignored, I don't know what to say. Stardock has access to all the records, they could go ahead and see the steep rise in TEC players, who already dominated most games.and as far as telling me to "Do something constructive" his post was pretty much brought on by my own.[/quote] Is there a

Reply to Shortlist simple easy 1.035 suggestions (or 1.04 ;/) in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

[quote]Skirmishers cost 7! supply...[/quote] Major off-topic, but I read that as 'seven factorial' supply and was like 'DAMN!' Back to my corner.

Reply to My responses to Frogboy's comments on balance and intentions. in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

I was just trying to clear up what I thought was a misunderstanding on your part. I didn't mean to insult you or make you look stupid or something; I was just trying to get everybody on the same page. I don't make a habit of reading the post times since 90% of the time, posts are made in the order that they appear. That is the only part of my post where I was referring to you. The other 90% of it was aimed at others. Sorry for the misunderstanding. By the way, your point ab

Reply to Bombers & Fighters: Balance Discussion in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

You're using 10 bombers but what kind of fleet are you up against? That is a VERY small number of bombers. If you get closer to 30 or 40, you will see the power of bombers - that being that they can 1-shot (or nearly so) any ship. Get 80 or so and they can even 1-shot capital ships (although that's going overboard a bit). Their refire rate is very slow but their damage is very high. You must gain a critical mass of them and use them to spike targets out. This is much more advantage

Reply to 1.03: Sim City In Space. in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

[quote]What I am saying though is that the belief that the "competetive" MP crowd is doing the rest of the community a favor is a fallacy that has been statistically proven incorrect over countless of studies. (1) Because competitive players play differently than the rest of the community, they will discover issues that the rest of the community does not see(2), are not affected by(3), and in many cases don't even understand(4). Competitive MP players are the smallest denomina

Reply to STOP WHINING!!! 1.03 is great in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

@Sorceress: You seem to not be reading my posts. As some are lengthy, I can understand that. So I will keep this one short. I agree with your quote there 100%. I'm sure most competitive players do too. We're not on 'different sides' of some kind of war. Improving the game balance improves the game. No one is saying that improving the single player experience is bad. We all want the game to be better. /end of story :)

Reply to My responses to Frogboy's comments on balance and intentions. in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

Pnakotus, Frogboy isn't saying that he doesn't care about game balance. He never said that. You just somehow assumed that since he disagreed with you on another point. I mean the guy was a pro Total Annihilation gamer. "Does that mean I think 1.03 is perfectly balanced? No. I don't think any game is. But I do know it's unfortunate that a relatively small group is making post after post after post in order to try to get their particular issue addressed." He's upset at the po

Reply to Lackluster early impressions of game ... does it get better? in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

About finding your buildings... I never ever click on the buildings themselves. If you click on a planet, all of the build/upgrade options available in that planet's gravity well are on the UI. So if you click on the planet, you can click the orange Frigate, Cruiser, or Capital build buttons to build those three types of ships. This should save you a lot of time.

Reply to STOP WHINING!!! 1.03 is great in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

[quote]That very recent statement by the CEO of Stardock goes to the heart of my (previously posted) perspective... (1) Those numerous customers, who have recently purchased well over 100 000 SINS game units, are not « idiots » : most of them simply do not have the time, energy, and competitive power-drive to spend whole evenings on ICO to practice MP and efficiently compete. (2) I can't prove it with statistics, but I suppose that most of those « numerous » casual gamers do no

Reply to Shortlist simple easy 1.035 suggestions (or 1.04 ;/) in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

Excellent post. Good catch on the Guardian vs. Javs. As for the black market prices, I agree they should be higher. Also, it seems like the price should overall rise as time goes on (with mid-late game prices being very high - approaching 1000). I like the boom/crash mechanic but the prices are far too low. I think messing around with the siege frigate is not proving very useful. It seems they are never used in multiplayer except for mid-late game kamikaze attempts. Perhap

Reply to DEVS ship vs ship counters need to be stronger in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

I think perhaps it might be useful to look at this from another perspective. Most ships in the game are good against some things, medium against others, and not so good against yet others. However, flaks seem to me to be the ONLY 'hard' counter in the game, absolutely devastating Fighters and doing a swell job vs. Bombers too - yet really sucking against pretty much anything else by comparison. Perhaps if flaks were to be 'rounded out' a bit more (with a little less %dmg done vs. stri

Reply to Where is the vastly improved AI? in Sins of a Solar Empire Stardock Forums

I don't think anyone could make a reasonable argument that the AI was NOT improved. I'm pretty certain it was improved. However, the use of the ambiguous term 'vastly' and the straw-man argument resulting from claiming anyone said that are overboard. 1.03 was a very tiny patch in comparison to what 1.04 will be (and that IS what Ironclad have said). No major updates were made, just some smaller hacks to fix a few immediate problems (and a rather odd black market change, but that's an