Cauldyth

Cool, I didn't know about the Frogboy one. Thanks!

The one thing I find truly distasteful about political discourse these days is something Kelly touched on above, and something I've also seen echoed in Brad's recent blog entries. Too many people think of politics in the same way they think of sports. They pick their team, and then they slavishly cheer them on no matter what, deny any mistakes their team may have made, and bust the heads of supporters of the other team in the local bar at every opportunity. Interestingly, wher

For a GalCiv III, it would be nice to expand the political factions further so that there was actaully internal competition in keeping your empire under your control. That would be very cool.

Well, I disagree with a lot of what I've read on Brad's site too, but that's no reason to get depressed. We do share one common view - we think the government should be limited from mucking around in people's lives. The difference is that while Brad obviously focuses on the financial/economic aspect, my priority is the social one. I don't think the government should be telling people what they can and can't do, as long as it's not hurting other people. In the whacked out world of US

my fleet is considerably week Build up your military. A strong military improves relations. They don't want to ally with someone who's just going to call for help at the first sign of trouble. What do they get out of it?

bighouse said it well. I'd just like to add a bit more about complexity and feature creep. One thing I like in strategy games is something I think of simply as "situational" considerations. I don't enjoy complexity for complexity's sake, and I certainly don't like playing spreadsheets. What I do like is a game that allows for interesting situations to develop. Many of those situations can't ever develop without the game mechanics having the additional complexity required to

Different strokes, as they say. - Flashy graphics don't matter to me as much as gameplay. - I really do enjoy epic PBEM games against other people. - Epic PBEM games are even more fun if players have a wealth of options and tools at their disposal for interacting with each other. - I bought SE V knowing full well that it probably wouldn't be playable until patched. - There are plenty of other things for me to do and play while waiting for patches. - SE games are a lo

Well, maybe I'll just break down and order a copy and see how it goes.

Yeah, I generally ignore any date indicators in any of these games. For the most part, it's impossible to pick a timescale that actually makes sense. There's always some aspect of the game that's incompatible with any particular choice.

I think she's referring to the other discussions that have been going on, about what naughty things such-and-such group has or hasn't done.

I bought Dominions 1 a long time ago, but had trouble getting into it. I skipped Dominions 2, and then downloaded the Dominions 3 demo a couple weeks ago. I'm having the same problem with it. I can see that there's an immense amount of depth there, but I have trouble even knowing where to begin. The tutorial shows me some stuff, but it still leaves me a little lost. Any pointers? I read the Shrapnel forums occasionally, but it's full of people who've been immersed in this stuff fro

(frankly I like my original interpertation of it better) That makes two of us. Though I suppose it could be both... "user just died from exerting himself too much in the bathroom."

Warning: I started typing, and just couldn't stop... I think the key to doing something like this is some sort of "infinitely upgradeable" economic system. In all current strategy games, it's standard operating procedure to max out your planets/cities at any given tech level. You build everything you can build, until the planet is packed with everything and producing at 100% of its pot

OP has more or less admitted that he made an ass out of himself going in Yes, ES was big enough to swallow his pride and admit he was maybe acting inappropriately. Are you?

But the point still stands that LAN games would just be silly with a TBS when you could just have Hotseat instead, and thus only need one computer. Well, if the game allows simultaneous moves (as SE V does) then multiple computers on a LAN is a huge improvement over hotseat. You don't have to sit around waiting for Joe to do his turn until you c

Every tac combat supporter wants it to be done right. Well, the point I'm trying to make (and re-reading my post, I see I did a poor job of making it) is that it's not realistic for an expansion. Some people seem to want them to just throw it into the expansion pack now that they've now got a couple extra months. <TABLE cellpadding=8

Edit: Aww, nevermind, erasing my post.

Oh, I have no doubt that StarDock could put together a tactical AI that's up to the task, but it would probably require a lot of development time - more development time than implementing the actual tactical combat itself, I'm guessing. I was just giving my thoughts on why it should be done right, or not at all. A quick-and-dirty implementation could very well do serious damage to the game, not improve it.

The patch for SEV is released in monday,it fixes most of the issues. Yay!

The other problem with weak tactical AI is that the player can exploit it to make up for a weaker strategic position. As an example, in Space Empires IV, it's quite easy to build certain types of ships to defeat much more expensive AI fleets, simply by using some of the quirks of the tactical combat and the AI's incompetence to your advantage. Rome: Total War would be another example. It's possible to defeat numerically superior AI armies by doing things that the AI simply can't handl

Since Brad and company have basically said that GC2 is unlikely to ever go MP Actually, they've said that if the DA expansion for GC2 sells well, there's a decent chance a second expansion will be released with MP in it. By then, the MP code libraries for Society (one of their other upcoming games) will have been written, and can be used for Gal

I dunno what's wrong with some people, ES. It's like the 2-year-old who just figured out how to swing his arm, and then walks around smacking people because he thinks it's funny and makes him feel powerful. Ignore 'em. They'll quickly outgrow it after they do it one too many times, to the wrong person.

I love the "Okay, I'm not going to continue this argument. P.S. You're wrong, and here's why! ..." posts. Classic!

Hmm, this forum software needs a "rolling eyes" smiley for times like this...

Well, I'm guessing it's not "real-time" in the RTS sense, but more like continuous time. Some preliminary reports on their forums indicate that it'll take several minutes to travel between stars, and 10 minutes to travel between galaxies. That sounds promising. I also have a dislike for RTS games, but I'm cautiously optimistic. Old games like Harpoon (now I'm showing my age) were continuous time as well, but certainly nothing like RTS games.