Khumak

Khumak

Joined Member # 717261
0 Posts 1 Replies 232 Reputation

The big change I noticed is that in the early game the key to your economy is... Survey ships. Most of the games I play I never have to reduce my spending level below 100% even when I have my espionage bar maxed out. Early on the only way this is possible is by building a large fleet of fast survey ships to go out and gobble up all that free money. Survey ships can easily make the difference between being able to advance far enough down the economy research trees to stabilize your eco

55 Replies 119,162 Views

I tend to think the most important aspect of a starting position is the quality of the bonus tiles on your capital. My best start had a 7x industrial tile and 13x worth of research bonus tiles (a 7x plus 2 3x tiles). Needless to say I jumped out to such a big tech lead that it was easy to stay there. In the long run the boost from the resource starbases will be higher but it takes a lot longer to get the full benefit than it does from your initial planetary bonuses. On turn 3 I effec

25 Replies 25,689 Views

I tend to go for a hybrid design where I focus on a single weapon type but all defense types. That makes me strong defensively against everything and strong offensively against all but 1 type. I usually ignore the weapon tree until I've seen what my opponent is focusing on. It's common for me to also get quite a few weapon techs via espionage before I start researching weapons. I also tend to be the type to expand as fast as my economy allows and then turtle up and max out my economy

10 Replies 38,522 Views

Another benefit of being Evil is that you can always pick the most beneficial option in all of those random "Ethical dilemnas" that pop up from time to time. The most extreme example that I can think of are the sometimes crazy boosts you can get to planet quality. Personally, I wish they wouldn't have made the decisions so obviously skewed in favor of evil. There should be drawbacks to evil...

30 Replies 25,013 Views

quote by phbbt107 Good luck getting Ubisoft to stop using Starforce. Seems like all their PC games use Starforce. Why oh why doesn't anyone follow the Stardock model? It's a win-win situation. We get lots of updates and ease of use, and Stardock gets a lot of people buying the game because of all the updates (and the game's

40 Replies 123,692 Views

I never saw the point in making all of the stock ships unupgradeable. Why not just reset them all for any new games but allow them to be upgraded like any other ship once the game is under way? Otherwise what's the point in having them? The only stock ships I would ever even consider building are colony ships, constructors, and transports since they're essentially one use ships and never need to be upgraded. Even then, I still wind up designing my own versions as soon as I can slap enough en

6 Replies 4,880 Views

A quick and dirty solution would be to just make each additional colony require more and more maintenance so if you just expanded like crazy in the beginning, your maintenance costs would be so high that you'd bankrupt yourself which would cripple research, social production, and military production. Civ 4 took a similar stance and it seems to work fairly well. You expand as fast as you can up to the point that your economy can afford and then you stop and build up. Then you expand again eith

72 Replies 64,067 Views

Are there known issues that are causing blue screen of death crashes? I'm using an Athlon with an NVIDIA 6800 GT and I periodically get the blue screen of death and have to power cycle to recover from it. I don't have this problem with any of my other games.

1 Replies 4,996 Views

I build starbases on anything 6+, mainly because even the worlds I don't plan on building any warships with will still be pumping out constructors. Constructors are my default ship that all planets build unless they have a reason to do something else from the beginning of the game to the end.

15 Replies 20,486 Views

I ran into a bug tonight where at some point in my game EVERYTHING in my shipyard screen is gone. All ship types are deleted, and there are zero hull types, zero engine modules, zero weapons, defenses, etc. All modules of all types are gone. Oddly enough I can still build any of the ships that I initially designed when I started the game even though they are no longer present in the shipyard but I can't create any new ship types. This also appears

0 Replies 5,334 Views

So then what is the difference between DELETE and OBSOLETE!? Right now there basically isn't a difference except that it won't let you delete core ships. The end result is the same though. They disappear from your current game but as soon as you start a new game they're all back. Not a

5 Replies 9,593 Views

I prefer large ships for offense and small ships + military starbase for defense. Obviously miniturization is a big help for both so I generally get miniturization first for my planet defenders and larger hulls later for my offensive fleets.

10 Replies 15,005 Views

I don't find the neutral terraforming benefit to be much use. Terraforming is cheap enough that each step generally only takes 1 or 2 turns. I may have to give good a try since it sounds like it might match up well to a turtle strategy which is fairly typical for me. The starbase benefit for evil would be huge for me as well though so I guess it comes down to a choice between good and evil for me.

11 Replies 15,702 Views

I'm addicted to creating custom ships but I'm beginning to get annoyed about the fact that once I create one, it's there forever in all of my games. Deleting them removes them from the current game but as soon as I start a new game they're all back again. Deleting should permanently remove a ship design from all games, not just your current one. Obsolete should just remove it from the current game.

5 Replies 9,593 Views

I'm wondering how the game is balanced between the 3 alignment types. It seems like ALL of the beneficial random events are evil choices but the description you get for each alignment type when you get to the point where you choose an alignment doesn't make it sound like either Good or Neutral have any advantage over Evil. Is Evil just flat out superior in this game or am I missing something?

11 Replies 15,702 Views

This mission is nasty. I've tried it several times so far without luck. I've been playing on tough and up until now winning easily. When I got to this mission I colonized all of the unihabited worlds so I had 11 worlds if I remember correctly. I was way ahead in tech and was trading it all away to my 2 little buddies west of me for money and the occasional minor tech. I built a defending ship on every planet and a maxed out (for my tech level) mil

40 Replies 28,460 Views

Easy solution. Do a poll of how many people would buy an expansion which did nothing but add Multiplayer and any associated tweaks needed to make it run smoothly. By contrast, do another poll for how many would buy an expansion that did NOT include multiplayer but did include a new campaign, more options for customizing your race, expanded diplomacy options, etc (standard single player game expansion material). Multiply the price of the expansion by

616 Replies 3,193,494 Views

Against normal AI races I can win at tough difficulty pretty easily but not against the Dread Lords. I was playing the campaign and winning on tough until I got to the first scenario with the Dread Lords in it. I'm not sure what to do in that scenario because they start sending out battleships with 30+ attack before I have medium hulls or anything remotely close to that sort of attack power. I'm way ahead of everyone in research and have m

26 Replies 30,195 Views

jujumbura wrote: That is absoutely true. What is entertaining for the first 20 hours of gameplay will quickly lose its novelty. This is why most RTS, which have really pretty simple mechanics and rule systems when you boil down to it, DEPEND on multiplayer to have any reasonable amount of lifetime. If you look at

616 Replies 3,193,494 Views

I think I read somewhere that starbase bonuses stack but I'm wondering if that's just the resource mining bonuses or if multiple economy, influence, or military starbases with overlapping coverage will stack? On a related note, since you can't build starbases closer than 3 spaces apart is there any way to tell your allies to quit saturating your territory with THEIR starbases? I can see exempting the resource starbases but my allies build s

1 Replies 6,127 Views