It's also necessary. If the effects of the tactic were applied to the planet regardless of the outcome, you could simply zip around with transports loaded with 1M troops and tidal the enemies core planets... or even mass-drive them if you're feeling really nasty. Who cares if you capture them... they're wrecked now :) ~SDC~
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And that, folks, is why I play Mr. Goody-Goody... the fundies can see my alignment an my morale, but they can't see me handing off Overlords to the Yor so they can tear chunks out of the Altarians while I build my constructor fleet :) ~SDC~
On the other hand, it could seriously nobble any scores that were milked a bit too much. Also, what I'd like to see is a system where only the top, say 80% of your scores are used, for players who had a rough start, had some decent scores decimated by the recalc or simply had a bad day :) ~SDC~
On one hand, fair enough, on the other I really think there should be separate table for each map size. A lot of people out there have things like friends and a need for sleep that really limit the number of gigantic games they can play :) ~SDC~
Dang... Brad's threatened retro-calc could really shake up the table :) ~SDC~
Just out of idle curiousity, what stardate did you finish your 30k game on? I suspect that playing with abundant worlds and getting a good start, as you did, would accelerate victory immensely. Perhaps the problem is that there's *too much* weighting given to quick finishes? ~SDC~
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I suspect a reload is defined as loading the game (presumably the same game) when there's already one active, not firing one when the game's just been started. Obviously the idea is to cut down on battle/invasion cheese. I'm not sure how fair penalising the player for taking 'too long' will work out to be. How do you distinguish a player that took ages because they eventually won a long, drawn-out battle of attrition (or cultural conquest), vs. one who belted the 'end turn' button until
Personally, I'd prefer sector-sweep to be replaced by sector-guard. The ship stays static until an enemy ship enters the sector. If the ship can intercept it, it does so, then goes back to its post. Also, it'd be nice if there was an option for 'guarding' ship to wake up if a garrison ship appears on a previously empty enemy colony. ~SDC~
Actually, I had great fun abusing that :) I was stuck in a battle against 4 mutually allied AIs, but was squashing their collective alien navy into the dirt. Each turn I'd pick a race that still had money and make peace with them (for a suitably extortionate amount of money). The next turn, their alliance would drag them back into the fray. After about 4 or 5 cycles each, they wised up, but by then the payments were ruining two of them, and the other two were 50-60% dependant on trade... not for
Yes indeed :) "There are no Terran avatars outside our homeworld. Well, maybe one or two, but they took one look at our defenses and spontaneously exploded" ~SDC~
Well, if you conquered the entire galaxy and left one empire one poxy little planet in a corner somewhere, then colonised every planet with a class of 13 or better and rush-built the two cheap terraforming techs, then punched the turn button for, oh, a day, you could probably get about 25 trillion people. It'd be quite doable, particularly if you fed the new colonies with transports from breeder colonies... just incredibly tedious. ~SDC~
Perhaps, but those objections could be applied to most of the party-orientated boosts. I think for many of them, it's simply a matter of siezing the advantage while you still have it. Choosing War Party *plus* the 50%HP pick and rush-building Tri-Strontium steel is a great way to kickoff your empire if you find yourself next to some recalcitrant neighbours... but it's next to useless if you don't get into any fights until the mid-late game. However (as I found in my last game), the fact that the
Personally, I've never even got close to achieving a tech victory without already dominating the galaxy, at which point I could pick and a choose which victory to go for, and it's easiest just to gun for a tech victory rather than shuffling troops or constructors around. IMHO, AI tech victories are completely untenable. If you lose the game when they TV, that's basically a death sentence for any player who's lagging behind technologically (and/or militarily) but is working their way to
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Using a more efficient fuel in an engine with a speed of 0 would have just the effect I'm asking for... none. I'm not asking for an artificial distinction between offensive and defensive ships, but it seems to me the ship designs, to some extent anyway, seem to come from a system where speed and range upgrades were a percentage (this is quite clear, IMHO, from the tech descriptions). A percentage system doesn't work very well for low-end ships, which is probably why they changed it. Nev
I tend to run things like Vorlin... for those who don't know, piling the 'surplus-sucking' projects at the end of the queue and switching 'governor overrides project' to ON will make sure your governor spends surplus production on surplus-suckers but will switch to higher-priority projects as they arrive in the queue. Should multi-module constructors become available, they would IMHO nicely fill the surplus-sucking role for the military queue. The only time wasted expenditure r
Firstly, the AI won't just sit there and suck destabilisation-induced morale drops up... it'll counter it by reducing tax rates, building appropriate projects and using propaganda. Unfortunately, although perfectly fine, it *does* make it a bit hard to see exactly what effect you're having. ~SDC~
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With their unmodified stats, Battlehammers are useful only as defensive ships... however, after researching a few range and speed upgrades (and getting gravity accelerators) they become the mainstay of m navy until dreadnoughts show up. I have never built frigates, battle cruisers or battleships. I wonder if the AI assesses a ship's usefulness/role based on its unmodified stats, which is why it underbuilds battlehammers so badly. IMHO, if a ship's speed or range is 0, it should
Now: 1. An option to turn off ship movement animation 2. Some graphical indication of whether or not more (defense, mining, production, culture) modules are buildable at a starbase. 81. When buying a project, it should fill up to (complete_cost - 1_turns_production), not just (complete_cost) Later: 79. Techs (untradable?) that are made available only by choosing particular political parties (just 3 or 4 per party, mind you). 43. Some kind of refund for nearly complet
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The Mauve Ring is much like the One Ring, only instead of ultimate power it gives you impeccable taste in interior decorating. Obviously, this causes a marked increase in the morale of your starship crews, and a consequential increase in ship speed. ~SDC~
Although the original sentiment may be true to some degree, I don't really see that it's relevant. To some degree, all games lack variation because their rules are basically fixed... eventually, you'll discover pretty much everything that the game has to offer, and after that it's up to the player to enjoy it or not. I still play Cleopatra and RRT2, even though the novelty has completely worn off. However, there is certainly scope in both the code and the game mechanics for mixing the g
Although most of your points are certainly valid, the rest of the game is so damn good that I find myself very well dispositioned towards simply getting used to them :) It seems to me that several of them are things that new players might have difficulty with, but experienced players (i.e. the entire batch of beta-testers :) ) barely even notice, and a good number of them are probably (it seems to me) things that the dev team could do in a couple of hours of their Copious Spare Time :).
The Drengin seem to be hard-coded warmongers. Unless they've started in a really nasty location, they always seem to get corvettes before anyone else and are prolific shipbuilders. ~SDC~
There appear to be certain events which are triggered by low/non-existant espionage, as well. ~SDC~
Couldn't this be fairly easily solved simply be having ships de-orbit into the nearest empty square, not just the first blank adjacent one? ~SDC~
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I bent my wookie. ~SDC~