Hey Galcivers,
A few years back I lamented the loss of my favorite genre of game when I wasted hard earned money on Master of Orion 3. Given that MOO2 was one of my all time favorite games, the epic and immeasurable FAIL of MOO3 just broke my heart. Until someone told me about Galciv, which I quite enjoyed.
Fast fwd a few years. I played a couple games of 1st release Galciv2 lent to me by a friend and I love it. I just bought the Galciv2 Ultimate Bundle yesterday so I can experience the expansions
I started my first custom game of ToA yesterday and I figure its about time to get some of my nagging n00bish questions sorted out.
1) What's the purpose of farms? Before you laugh, I know they increase the max pop, but what is that good for? Tax revenue? Feedstock for transports & colony ships? Production capacity for various buildings?
2) Fighter Swarm or Capital Ship? In base version of GC2 it seems my fleets of small/tiny ships would lose consistantly against a single larger vessel with similar type (not quantity!) of armaments. I've allready factored in the rock/paper/scissors of weapon/armor combos, so I know its not a case of bringing a knife to a gunfight. So is it better to build a swarm of fighters or a single behemoth?
3) Upgrading ships? In base version of GC2, when you upgraded a design a really confusing screen came up. On the left hand side was a list of the currently built ships of that "class". Along the right is different cost options. You couldn't select more than one left side ship at a time. Is the cost the proposed cost to upgrade all existing instances of the class to the current spec?
4) Do starbase speed modifiers affect freighters? I remember putting stellar wake and interdictors on military starbases to increase the speed of friendlies and decrease speed of baddies in the control radius of the base. Does this work on freighters?
I'll probably have a bunch more as I dive into ToA, but thats all I have for now. Well, one more, but not strictly game mechanic related. I've been searching all over for people's custom race builds but I can't seem to find any good threads on it. Could anyone provide a link to any discussions?