AFAIK it goes off to the printers today The printers? Yikes, but that changes my impression of how much might change during this semi-public beta. Here's hoping y'all have the obssessive need to update DA post-relase as you did the core GCII! <T
Some of us think of high pops as taxman fodder, not cannon fodder I would not miss the 300% farm tiles in general, but maybe they could be weighted to appear only on very high PQ worlds with room for all the entertainment you'll need. Seems narratively plausible that the Precursors would only build something like that on truly huge worlds.
I've seen the minors being stupid with ships in my 1A games too. I had actually decided to be a good patron for the Paulos, who were right beside my homeworld. When I saw an Arcean fleet coming for them, I gave them an aging fleet stationed right beside them. The Arceans picked the ships apart one by one, but they should have been able to win if they were a fleet. The Paulos didn't even launch all those non-combat ships and move their free warships into orbit.
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It is the difference between sending in the troops to kill all who oppose, and waiting for the planet to join you of their own free will. It is exactly b/c they *appear* (in flavor text terms) as polar opposites that the thing seems off to some of us. For some stories, Moosetek13's take will be perfectly appropriate, e.g. a Borg invasion in Trekl
Several folks owe some Hail Caris said while reading the Flaming Wastes Time thread. I'll do mine promptly after spewing some bile at the hardware snobs who allow their spending decisions to be driven by the bloodsucking stock market-driven swine who's only real love of PC technology is its rhetorical power on the NASDAQ. The assumption that bleeding-edge hardware is where any serious gamer needs to be is a corollary to extreme capitalist devotion to growth for its own sake. Another nam
Oi, Kryo, the observant folks *know* y'all are working too hard. But couldn't the four aptly snarky words have been about the EG's status?
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Planets conquered through influence retain their populations. To me, this fact is part of why it seems so weird to have invasions totally eliminate original pops. The diff between military and cultural conquest is too extreme. But I concur that the point is probably moot until GCIII becomes a glimmer in Brad's eye. p.s. to "realism" folk
The AI doesn't do very well on gigantic and the map should probably be eliminated Aieee, no! But must admit I'm thinking of switching to Huge maps for the rest of the beta...
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I've asked about this in another thread somewhere, related to the new DA environment stuff I think. I certainly agree that it is one of the larger "realism" bumps in core GCII, but I can talk myself into thinking that the DA environments make it a bit more plausible b/c you need the appropriate enviro tech to take over a world. That said, I wouldn't hold your breath for a major change here b/c it would require a whole new approach to population mgmt that would track individual
I love options too, but I'm more interested in hearing that the AI will be smartening up about surrenders. Some of my best late games have come from having a straggler suddenly become the leading power. But in DA, I've seen some completely wacko stuff similar to that described above.
2nd the amusement at Mumble using IE Seriously, though, trying a different browser would be an interesting test. I use Opera for personal stuff. The latest version has evolved some "slugabed" thing where it takes several minutes after loading to be actually usable, but otherwise it has a pretty modest footprint and is not very popular with hackers.
It has been fixed for the next beta update. Any info on when the next update will show up in SDC? It's been more than a week since Brad said something like "next release is next week." I'm a long-game player and my last maturing 1A game hit some kind of crash wall (I sent the SmartException zip to GC2bugs). I'm hesistant to put much time
The human plans wars out far in advance and only declares war when he is ready to start blowing ships out of the sky I basically agree with Purge's take, but I want to speak up for those of us who have pacificst tendencies despite our love of wargames. I *almost* never start wars. My preparation to blow ships out of the sky is defensive until it
I always thought that the stargates in MOO where one of the cooler items and I could see them having a place in GC. MOO built them as part of the ship queue, which I think would make a lot of GC sense. I've been plugging for teleportation gates that are managed as starbases. Making them a planetary structure does make some GC sense to me, but IMO
They were kind of space-catapults I had forgotten this detail--easy to lose b/c the GCII "stargates" are sort of misnamed in the larger SF context, where the term typically means teleportation. So, I guess what I was asking about in a related thread was really whether we could get neo-stargates (*expensive* new tech + new starbase type)
Maybe Wheel's (?) campaign for empowered pirates will bear fruit eventually. All they need to be *really* fun is the right AI...wait, was that asking for more blood from a stone?
I'm a fast-ship user, but I can't see how either of Ps!borg's suggestions would help with the AI problem re excessive possibilities to consider. Ps!borg offers a very nice summary of the AI problem, at least as far as I can understand what I've read around here. But his suggestions seem rather detached from that concise statement about computation burdens. Wouldn't new "terrain" elements with speeds up to 80ish *add* to the burdens on the AIs?
Why would the races get rid of stargates just because humans gave everybody hyperdrive? If I recall the GCII story rightly, the gates were disassembled for economic reasons. They had more value as raw material for new warp ships than they did as a fixed, energy-intensive transit system. More of that annoying story stuff that I like so much <img
admission that the AI can't really hack an open movement system I read Brad to be making more of a declaration than an admission. He's never seemed to make a "game" of hiding what his AI code can handle, even though it appears to have taken a long time for him to put these specifics into the "speed cheese" discussion. That said, I was ju
I'm always curious about the dramatic spikes in AI timelines, not least b/c I tend to keep even curves and wonder what that might mean about my strategic weaknesses. I've seen some research and manufacturing spikes that appeared to be a "cooincidence" of an improvement on a %700 tile with overlapping econ starbases in the sector. If you don't see some corresponding dramatic drop like no social spending, you might be seeing good AI use of bonus tiles. Before DA, deciding when to
battleships with speeds of 20 I believe Frogboy would call speed 20 "cheese." I think he said somewhere that 6-8 is what he thought of as reasonable top speed. I'm not holding my breath, but I think Mumblefratz has a seriously good point about map scale and speed. Perhaps the actual speed is not so important as is the number of turns req
I do not think that left to their own devices they would be able to achieve major race status. I imagine Quixen's right here from a current-code POV. I have no idea how different the AI for minors might be. If they get a copy of a standard AI with limits like low expansion, then Quixen's "would" is more about how story lines might play
Has Brad said somewhere else that we'll see these milestones in the beta after all? That old post said The idea we're playing with (that won't be in the beta) is the concept of Milestones.
Yes, the econ and research treaties work with minors. I scored most of them in my last 1A game. I suppose if you have a huge economy, you could boost a minor by giving them your econ treaty. It also looks like, at least on Tough, a minor with a colony can survive past the demise of a couple of majors. The Paulos have two worlds and several resource mines. They were more of a power than the Drath at the point my game stopped working. Seems like a prime time to consider inviting them into
Demoralization, corruption, misinformation, infiltration, Depending on your POV, the first three here are just styles of sabotage and the last is either the commonly-discussed "passive espionage" or a preliminary condition such as needing Battle Stations before you can add Invulnerability Bloom. That said, I appreciate many of Cuddlelump