Okay, people are mentioning building shipyards and such, have those actually been fixed such that they affect HP? Last time i tried building all the projects for boosting ships i didn't see any difference between ships built there and ships built at places with no improvements. Since then i've been saving a fair bit of money by just not bothering with those improvements :)
Midnightsun: I didn't need to use those cheese tactics to win, I'd already clearly won. I was just trying to preserve all the good races until i could win the game through other means than conquest. In one case i even helped the Yor out by building them some starbases. And my only complaint is that the person i was trying to protect was getting pissed off at me in one case :) If i was going to try to come up with a solution, well, it would be complicated. If there were
I had a similar issue where i stacked a Terror Star with an Overlord and an Excalibur. The Terror Star always started out the round with a move listed as "9/1" And after moving the stack one space the Overlord (i think) would have a move of 9/17 or such. I haven't done extensive experiments with it yet.
miguv, SMAC has far better presentation that GalCiv. SMAC also has far better presentation that Civ3, Moo3, and every other 4x game out there. I think it's going to be a long time until we see a game that surpases SMAC in that aspect. That asside, GalCiv is a really interesting merging of a lot of the elements of Civ/SMAC and Moo. From a purely gameplay aspect i've found it to be just as addicting as SMAC. It also seems to flow a lot faster than SMAC most of the time.
A technique that i've found wonderful for when two races that are friendly towards you are at war with each other and the stronger one refuses to back down is to blockade the weaker AIs planets. The first time i tried this the Drengin were exterminating the Altarians. For some reason the Drengin though i was just wonderful (probably due to my huge fleet =) but i couldn't get them to declare peace with the Altarians. I tried giving ships to the Altarians, but that didn't work too well be
Second Idea: Encourage fewer starbases A short and simple encouragement first: Starbases should start off with less hitpoints, and get extra hit points for each module added on. (50, and +5 for each module?) It might also be desireable to have starbases not affected by the +Hit Points stat. After developing a fair amount of tech and developing a few military resources, starbases were starting out with 300+ hit points, which meant that even a totally undeveloped starbase often took a cap
First Idea: Restrictions on starbases Put some kind of penalty or restriction on building multiple starbases or on the effect of those starbases. The simplest way would be to attach a maintance cost to each starbase built. Some people have proposed an initial cost plus a cost for each module added thereafter. Although that might have some advantages from a game balance perspective, in order to decrease ISS the cost for extra modules should be small or non-existant. The maintanc
There are two main problems with starbases that I see. One, the AI doesn't know how to deal with them, either building them themselves or dealing with human starbases when they go to war. This problem is mostly in the hands of the gracious and hardworking developers :) Two, Interstellar Starbase Sprawl. Human starbases tend to pop up everywhere. There's no penalty for popping up a dozen starbases in a system to boost production through the stratosphere. Some people seem to think that th
That's evil! :) Of course if you're being really evil, you'll make sure it's in a sector you're culturally dominant in. They'll never be able to build up a quality 10 planet in time to resist, and then you can trade it to them again :)
Stardock Forums
I've noticed the same thing. There are big differences in the values listed for the individual trade routes depending on where the ships are, but the total trade income doesn't seem to reflect it. I do however think that the trade modules affect the value. As i was building them the total trade income kept going up, even when there weren't any trade ships in the sectors i was upgrading =P Maybe i'm just not being observant enough, but it sure seems to me like everything is aver
I haven't made a space themed playlist. One of the playlists i usually listen to is all industrial stuff, Rob Zombie, VNV Nation, Razed in Black, Systen Syn, Battery, etc. The other playlist is all Heather Alexander (a folk/filk artist for those who don't know her) Unfortunatly i need to do that by using winamp in the backround. When i tried to load the playlists in the game, it just cycled through all the song titles in the window very quickly without actually playing anything.
Well, if you're trying to be good and don't particularly care about _exact_ role-playing, it can be really usefull. In one game i landed on a class 15 or 16 planet, and got the choice with the alien tree things that are using up all the soil. The evil choice was +30% or so the planet quality! Well, it seems the explorers just kind of accidently killed all the tree things, my alignment dropped about 20 points, and i got the best planet in my entire empire. However each succcessive group
As much as i love this game, it does still have CTDs (i call them features, because they make me look at the clock and realize that it's time to go to bed :) )and that doesn't mix well with Ironman. I'll often reset when too many of my Anti-matter missiles start dinking. Some randomness is good, but i think this combat system has a little _too_ much randomness to it.
I have a rather odd habit for selling my techs, i either offer an initial price of 20bc per turn for 20 turns, or 100bc per turn for 100 turns, depending on how valuable the technology is. I then adjust it up or down, and usualyl keep the two fairly close together, raise/lower the per turn by 10, and then if that doesn't work raise/lower the number of turns by 10, etc. Although i try not to do any trades for less than 20 turns, and i've found that once you get up to a certain point, you
Stardock Forums
That doesn't really do much to help those who have the fear of their own CD key getting nixed :)
Padlock: Are you claiming that the information listed in the game is wrong? I just loaded up one of my save games, and disbanded a starbase that had a +65% bonus, which seemed to make no differene, so i disbanded a second one, still no change. Then i figured out that the planet info doesn't update right away! =P However after going a few turns, Earth's production dropped from +880% to +750%, or 130%, the same as the two starbases i disbanded _added_ together. I then built a +5 and a +1
This is mostly reiterating what other people have said, but: Start by bumping up your tax rate. You probably want to keep bumping it up until your morale hits about 55% or so. I say probably because the income from taxes is discontinuous. Sometimes you'll increase taxes by 1% and suddenly you income _drops_ 100 bc or so because a whole bunch of people got upset and decided to leave your empire. However these dropoffs usually happen at much higher tax rates, so I don't think you'll need
Stardock Forums
One small improvement that would help a lot in some circumstances would be the ability to put constructors into guard mode. As far as i can tell it's not possible at the moment, because there's no guard button, and hitting 'g' causes it to ask you if you want to build a starbase here instead of putting it in guard mode. I've had stacks of 20 constructors waiting in sentry mode till i was ready to build a Terror Star, then some random alien ship wanders by and all 20 pop out of sentry mo
Okay, i know about infinite cities, but what's the crawler thing for SMAC?
padluck: Why do you say bonuses are multiplied? Looking at my systems with seven or eight starbases the bonuses seem to be pretty clearly getting added. If it was multiplication, two starbases at 100% would give you 10,000%, not 400%. Seven or eight starbases would be giving me at least 5 _trillion_ percent more, not the 900% or so they're giving me.
I'd still like answers to these questions if anyone has got them. It seems like the problem with the TerraFormer is a bug, but it would still be nice to know a way to see a list of built wonders for the other reasons lsited :)
It does, but depending on the tech and current relations some trades may not make enough difference to be noticeable on the slider. As far as I can tell the slider has very discrete itervals that it can move.
Just a warning for those people talking upgrading in the middle of a game, 1.02 busted my save files from 1.01. In another thread I'm asking how to get the 1.01a upgrade out of Stardock again (still haven't figured out how) after I had to reinstall and redo the downloadable 1.01 patch. Unfortunatly the presence of 1.02 seems to make 1.01a unavailable :(
Actually it's not usually the case. The last game i worked on we got through three or four patches without having to touch the save file data format, and when we finally had to make a change we made sure to warn everyone that old saves would be invalidated. The real problem however is that 1.01a now seems to be unavailable for download because 1.02 is sitting "on top" of it. I'd really like to know if there's a way to still get 1.01a on my home computer so i can finish my current game w
Not sure if this is a bug, but Constructors don't seem to get speed bonuses from Starbase module upgrades. Was this intentional? If so, how am I supposed to know that? And are there any other ships that are (or rather, aren't) affected in this manner?