Why is your approval so high?

You only need it ~60% for election weeks, and the rest of the year it can sit down at 21% if you so please.  Well, planetary, anyway, so civ-wide will be closer to ~25-30%.

I mean, you're well beyond the point where pop growth matters, right?

Nice!  The little trick of switching homeworlds can be quite beneficial.

Hehe... But you forget that one integral feline quality is seeking pleasure, whether it be laying in the sun, hunting prey, or finding gullible humans to serve their every whim.

Always try to stay under the limit. Rush-buy improvements or ships to make sure that you are able to.  If you build a military starbase array you can always use more ships.  I generally have my tax rate at 69 or 79% starting in Year 1 and until the end of the game.  At the end, when my planets are all at 20 billion, my approval is usually around 50%.  My racial bonuses are weighted very heavily towards both econ and morale, all for the purpose of upping the econ score.  I'm not sure why you want to keep your approval at 80% indefinitely.  Like Sole Soul said, unless you are looking for fast pop growth, you dont need it that high.  I also find that I consistently win elections with approval at 50%.  If you do happen to lose, you can just reload and do the turn again. 

Sentient species taste better...

I thought that it would improve the score. If that is not the case, then I'm cranking the tax rates! I can always buy 5 or 6 monster warships per turn.

Low taxes will lower your econ score significantly, and your overall score as well. You'll be setting some new personal bests soon I imagine.

Sentient species taste better...

yeah....i could use a couple of them

Same here, I could use a snack right now. Anyways there are two new empires afoot. Welcome to the Galactic Domination Alliance and the Adepta Sororitas. May your soldiers fall to the mighty claw of the Geckodon Alliance.

how many VRC ?   i'm  reluctant to build VRC vs stk mkt.  how may morale resources?  the upgrade kills morale

sorry, i seem to be scoffing my questions

Poor AI 

By the way, with regards to the 20K "barrier", how exactly does this work again? I've seen a lot of mention of the 20K but as far as I can remember (and the search function doesn't really help a lot) no full explanation...

Do you get an overall penalty to your econ score once you
- rake in more than 20K bc per turn
- have more than 20K bc in treasury at the end of your turn
Or is the only effect that once your treasury at the end of your previous turn was above 20K bc, your income this turn will be severely capped?

At >20,000BC treasury:

Income gets a 20% racial penalty.  So if you were at 10,000BC/turn thanks to a 100% racial bonus (whereas you'd be at 5,000BC/turn without any bonuses, which tech bonuses, customization points, anomalies, etc, all count as racial bonuses), you'd now be at 5,000x1.8 or 9,000BC/turn.

This does not directly translate into a 20% drop in score, for a number of reasons:
-The higher your economic bonus, the less of an impact the -20% has.
-The higher your income, the less "more score" you get from even more income (applies to everything else that score is derived from as well, as far as I'm aware).
-The portion of your score related to this is purely with regards to the threshold only going to influence your economic score, which is by and large not going to be the majority of your total score.  Military will almost always outdo it in a game of this scale, and population can as well.  Research is less certain but still doable.  In any case assuming a 20% straight reduction (which it is not) in the economic score, you'd probably be looking at about 40% of that, or an 8% drop in total score.
-However, we have failed to account for the fact that spending that amount of money on something tends to fairly massively increase your score for that turn (and hence subsequent turns as well); for example rush buying a huge hull filled with black hole eruptors.

Points are as follows:
-Your score is higher if you spend, regardless of whether you spend down to 20000BC or 30000BC.
-Your score is not influenced as much by the threshold as you think it is, making the threshold itself have less of an impact.
-Your economic score is not worth as much of your total score as everyone is acting like it is, which also makes the threshold itself have less of an impact.

can you elaborate?  this is a weakness in my game

Social score (from pop) can outdo economic score (from, well, economy).  But it's far less of a sure thing than military, and to be honest I don't play the kinds of games required to see that kind of effect, so I'm not the best guy to ask.

So long as you've got 20B pop a planet, there's not much more you can do, apart from growing them up faster, which Breeder is amazing for.

Regardless of whether or not you're doing Breeder, getting Aphrodisiac up during the colony rush would help, too.

Two VRCs on any planet that will grow to 20b.  Morale resources I'm not sure....it caps out at a certain level anyway, so I think past a certain point it doesnt matter how many.  Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong.

I also make sure to build Fertility Centers on each planet.  Once the population is grown I build over them with more Stock Markets.  Super-Breeder does kick butt too.

Snarkotamus, I had a dream last night that you submitted a 16 million point game, hehe.  Got anything like that in the works?

Sentient species taste better...

Yeah, at 20B, before depreciation, the "cap" is 294.  Or, well, 295 if you want to get the full 100 out of it, due to truncation.

I wish. Maybe 500K. I'm switching to "Pond Scum" for the next game to see what Ethics techs I can buy. The Drath tech tree has zero-zilch-nada ethics perks.

I had a really disturbing Valentines avatar that I was going to inflict on the Empire. If they get the Flash 10 issue resolved by the 14th, I may still be able to post it.

Disturbing is an opinion.  Rosie O'Donnel <rest of details removed by poster> is what I'd consider a disturbing V-day avatar.  Now, an evicerated cheerleader w/ her heart exposed...art.

I've decided to play the Terran Alliance with Oxor as their home system and Korx as their homeworld. Apperently it doesn't work with TA as good.

The one integral reptilian quality is hunting prey and eating it, wether it be Kzinti, Human, Klingon, Tyrant or any other eatable species.

They won't.  They've stated at least once, albeit perhaps not in so many words, that it's not their responsibility to fix something Adobe broke.  This doesn't necessarily mean they'll never get around to it, but it is not a priority, and to be perfectly honest I'd check again in six months.

The easiest solution is just to downgrade to Flash 9.

Thanks! It works now!

Tyrants aren't edible, but our ashes do make a dandy baby powder.

Snarkotamus: your avatar will soon become so enamoured... that it culturally flips to the Kzinti Empire

Time to draw open the curtains, let in some sunlight and uninstall the game KP.

J/K - How do you know you play too much GC2?

When you start dreaming about MV scores!

Anybody know a good place to compare video cards?  I was looking on www.gpureview.com right now, trying to figure out which card I'd like in a desktop computer that I may get once things pick up here at work and I know my job is stabilized.

Right now I'm looking to go thru Dell and I'm looking at the nVidia Geforce GTX 280 (1024MB) and the nVidia Geforce 9800 GT (512MB).  The one guy I work with said that the GTX 280 actually preformed lower than the 9800 GT, but for the life of me I cannot find 1 bit of info to hold what he has as true.  The only thing worse on the 280 was it's Shader Clock was 1296 while the 9800 was 1500.

the one guy you work with is full of sh--used litter. at least if you're talking about anything game related.

also, Dell? really? i would've thought you nerdy enough to build your own PC.

at any rate, i get the vast majority of my reviews from HardOCP. (www.hardocp.com). they're the most scientific, for lack of a better term, about their product testing - which ruffles a few feathers from time to time, but only on dodo birds.

are you set on going with nVidia? and also, what's your price range?

if you're dead set on being an nvidiophile, a GTX 260 is probably capable of meeting your needs. the 280s have only a small advantage over them. i'd say you're not going to really see it except at resolutions of 1920x1080 or higher, or if you play games with a lot of shader-intensive features (and use all of them). plus the 260s can be found for very cheap.

if you are open to the ATI side of things, a 4870 with 1GB of VRAM is another great card, but the 4850 is really the king of bang/buck right now.

Nah, I've never really put the effort forth into picking out all the stuff I'd need.  I would also be replacing my wife's laptop, and that's completely alien to me.  I've at least gotten my arms into a std case and done some work in them.

Overall, I'm ok with dropping around 3k on the two computers.  No monitors needed since I'm not getting rid of my 2 19" widescreens which have DVI capability.

My current rig is going on 5yrs old and the video card in there is even older (Geforce FX 5200 AGP) since I had it in a case prior to buying this one.  I want to make sure I'm getting a good video card this time.  Sure, mine has lasted me 6 years now and it was the 'budget' card, but I'm hoping to squeeze even more life out of the next one I get.

I'm still in the shopping stage.  I won't dare buy anything yet since I'm unsure as to my employment in 1 months time.  Damn San Diego job ~coughs~.

I may get ahold of my friend who built his and see what we can come up with, at least for my computer.  A laptop for her though really only needs a larger HD than what she got currently and some more oomph for photo editing.  I'm a bit more picky...

As for beign a nVidiaphile, eh, I dislike what they did to us 3dfx lovers back in the day, but I rolled with it.  My frankensteind Voodoo 5 5500 is still chugging away in my wife's company's computer.  Gotta love the fact it had an additional power supply plug on the board since the AGP power draw wasn't enough lol.

well a couple points then, especially since this isn't an "urgent, need to buy now" situation. wait for windows 7 (this summer), and get a 64-bit version. unless M$ announces a discounted rate for upgrading from vista, in which case you can pull the trigger sooner: in either case, you should definately get a 64-bit OS.

actually, that brings up a broader point. DirectX 11 is supposed to be part of Win7, though i wouldn't be surprised if it's released subsequently in a service pack. the graphics cards suppording DX11 should be out by the end of the year (GTX 300 and HD Radeon 5000 series), but whether or not you want to wait that long is up to you. eVGA and BFG Tech offer "step-up" programs when you buy one of their graphics cards, allowing you to upgrade for nothing more than the cost difference between the two cards. just to be clear, i don't think DX11 will be a "must-have" technology that will make a card you could purchase now obsolete overnight. game developers take a while to jump onto new APIs, and usually make them backwards-compatible anyway.

however, the other reasons to wait on buying a system at this point would be USB 3.0 and PCIe 3.0, both of which should be available by the end of this year. i realize 10-12 months might be a long time to wait, and if you get to the point where you need a new system, that's the bottom line, and these things would probably less important to you if you buy whole systems typically.