I love the airspace option. Allow an attacking ship to park in orbit over someone else's planet. If that planet builds a defensive ship, it automatically engages in combat with the new ship getting first strike. This way you can leave a fighter or something in orbit long enough for your troop transports to arrive, and if your "ally" wants the planet they''ll need to take out your blockade ship (declaring war).
Just to clarify some things, ship defenses are definitely smaller than weapons, but about twice as expensive. I took notes from a Battle of the Gods game, for both Tiny and Huge hulls the trends are the same. Consistently up the tech lines (except early missiles, which do lots of damage), a point of offence and 1.5-2 points of defence are about the same. For example, Graviton Driver II (half way down the Mass Driver line) on a Huge hull is 13 size, 33 BC, 3 damage. Tri-Strontium Ar
Update for Huge ships. Damage per unit of space seems much more smoothed out. Nano Ripper is still the cream of the (early) crop, Quantum Drivers and Subspace Blaster still suck, the rest of the weapons do each offer improvements. Railgun VI is still an easy choice over V. On the defense side, Duralthene still sucks, Tri-Strontium I and II are identical (they were also identical on Tiny hulls), as are Droid Sentries II and III.
So, I'm going through looking up weapon/armor stats from a Battle of the Gods game, just because I'm the kind of guy that does that, and found some very weird things... This is from the latest (yesterday's) patch, playing default Terrans, with max tech. For comparison of module sizes, I used Tiny ships (component size increases as hull size increases). I'm also going to ignore the 3 aligned weapon techs (Evil I think) and 4 good-aligned defense tech
I have this forum account on a different email from the account that purchased GC2, and I'm trying to download the patch. If I just pass in the serial number, it says it's not registered to this account. Unfortunately, I can't create a new account with my GC2 email, because registration.aspx is having issues with an SQL query somewhere: Line 1: Incorrect syntax near '@Email'. It's been that way for at least the last 12 hrs.</fon
