Stromko

I've got 1.5 gigs of DDR RAM, an Athlon '3500+' 64-bit processor (approximately 2.2 ghz, single-core), and a Radeon X800 XL (AGP) with 256 megs of memory. I say all this in the belief that my system really isn't up to date for a desktop PC built strictly for gaming, but I =am= able to run Supreme Commander. I've played through two of the campaigns and a half dozen skirmish matches and I'd say it's always ran pretty servicably. That said, I never have more than five players in a CPU skir

Action games are short, almost as a rule, because action tends to get kind of boring after the 12th hour or so. A-list action games tend to push the envelope of graphical splendor as well, which means the content takes longer to produce. RPGs tend to be much longer, but they operate more by dangling a carrot on a stick rather than on the experience of the moment, also the experience tends to change constantly as you gain new levels and abilities. But, I think what you're really

He means he wants to pre-designate what to build on tiles that have yet to be terraformed to a usable state. Personally I don't see how this would really reduce tedium, it only gives you the option to do the work at the start instead of the end, meaning you can ignore your planet more. It doesn't really save you time by my reckoning. Though maybe a simpler way to introduce this feature, and that would really hit to the core of the problem it means to address, would be to allow

I wouldn't want a blind rock-paper-scissors model like MoO3 had, it was mostly just random but eventually I found out that clicking 'Flank' or 'Ambush' were the only valid options. Sitting here thinking I thought the most compelling idea might be a way to 'purchase' greater advantage by spending money, and then I realized that system is already in place in GC2 in the form of MiniSoldiers, Tidal Disruption, etc. It might be interesting though if the defender also had tactics they could

Awesome to see another shooter with a co-op mode in the campaign, there was a long gulf of time where it just got left out.. Duke3D was the last 'old' game I remember it being in, and then there was the console version of Doom3.. between those two there was a patch for System Shock II that added co-op, which was awesome, but anywho.. Gears of War is a very different kind of game compared to Halo, and personally I like that. The first Halo was great but the genre has to move forward

Sounds more like a rental to me, at most. There aren't a lot of good games out for the XB360 yet, true enough, but there's at least a handful that are better than CoD2, let alone a game that the consensus seems to think is an inferior sequel(CoD3). It really depends how hooked you are on the WWII genre however-- for WWII first-person shooters, I'd say Call of Duty is still head and shoulders above the rest. Personally I demand that WWII games be a step above other games in terms of game

I'm a bit leery of more X-Com PC games just from seeing how much it went wrong on UFO Aftermath. Then again, Aftermath was pretty much a remake of X-Com: Apocalypse, not Enemy Unknown. Whoever handles the next remake I hope would stay properly focused on good game mechanics, balance, and usability instead of devoting too much resources to being graphically competitive. I said I'm leery of more PC games in that vein, since I actually do enjoy Rebelstar Tactical Command on the GBA.

There are sites that deal in modding in general, such as moddb.com. Given the entirely different nature of The Movies and GalCiv II, it'd make more sense to have a community of =general= modders, than it would be to have a community focusing on GalCiv II and The Movies.. I can't even see how the two games can intersect at all, yes you have sci-fi props but it'd be pretty damn hard to describe anything in GCII via a movie generated in The Movies.

Food is only used for 'creating' more population, money is only used for maintaining and making things. Morale is another factor in 'creating' (or stopping the loss of) population, and taxes are a way of having more creation capacity (by ways of money) in exchange for less population growth. So, what about races that don't need money, or don't need food? No-Money races: 'Industrial Capacity' represents the proportion of resources that are assigned deliberately or otherwise to t

They can't actually take away your right to believe what you want though. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion is a double-edged sword. People who are born into a 'bubble' where they aren't allowed to believe whatever they want to believe are the true victims. I'm finding the pamphlets a lot easier to throw away personally, I find it really awkward and intrusive when strangers knock on my door for any ol reason. Marcathonas: <table cellpadding=8 width="95%" align=center bg

A few years ago there used to be an old man who went around our town wearing a placard saying the end is coming. He's dead now. That gave me a good laugh, thanks Evil Muppet <TABLE cellpadding=8 width="95%" align=center bgColor=#FFF394 class="mb-B

#6 -- I find it frightening if you actually believe that, I hope you're just putting that up there for fun. Sadly a lot of people do believe theories like that and deny the holocaust either completely or partially. Your 'bombed supply lines = dead prisoners' equation doesn't write-off why the concentration camps existed in the first place. It doesn't explain the gas chambers. The only reason anybody sent to a concentration camp survived long enough to start starving, supply-lines or no

I find the 'epic story generator' more interesting in theory than any of the game mechanic changes they're making. New random events or U.P. laws to vote on might be cool too. Everything else is pretty shrugworthy as far as the expansion goes, if they didn't have the epic story generator I wouldn't consider it a worthy purchase.

If you can't avoid the enemy engaging you in combat in the first place, then apparently your scout isn't quite fast enough to escape before it's destroyed, or its sensors aren't good enough to avoid stumbling into weapon range or being ambushed. Them's the breaks. You can check out the stats of enemy fleets to see how fast they're able to go and that sort of thing. So long as you stay vigilant th

There's more than one way to start out in a corner. If you're within a competitive distance with a good number of planets then you might want to give it a shot, the benefits could outweigh the drawbacks. Same deal if you've got some decent-looking starsystems cornerward from you, this gives you a 'backyard' where you're almost guaranteed first shot at any colonies, resources, or anomalies in the area. On the other hand if you find yourself seriously wedged into a corner, with rival plan

Post 50 summed up what I was dying to bring up-- when you register your serial number, you become able to not only patch up Gal Civ II, you become not only able to install it on any machines that you own (or just have access to), you also become able to download it again should you ever lose your CDs. In other words, if you sell your copy of GalCiv II back to EBGames or whatever, Stardock still lets you download it. You cannot resell GCII, because you cannot lose access to it.

I don't have serious orbital 'fleets', I've always found that the fact of the matter is if I can't secure the space around a planet, then I must be way behind in logistics or ship technology and therefore any ships left on planet defense are toast. I always build fast ships, ships that are fast enough to avoid fights they can't win. They can buy me time, primarily by killing off the much weaker enemy transports. If I'm able to kill all the incoming transport fleets, that does me

I remember trying out the Sword of the Stars demo/public beta (whatever it was) and going to the Kerberos boards to give some suggestions on how it could be improved. I went into the forums and saw threads where all doubters, and damn well anyone who found any flaw with SotS, was brutally flamed.. I started writing a reply pointing out how ridiculous the 'fanboys' were being in unfairly and unnecessarily attacking people, then noticed it was one of the devs! I'll go ahead and quote Dub

It could be excellent if done right. I like the idea of a seamless transition between a huge interstellar expanse, and the tactical combat between ships. There's been a fair bit of games with turn-based grand strategy and real-time combat but the sync-up between the different modes is hit or miss. There've been largescale tactical space games like Homeworld, good in their own right, but that have always seemed to me too small and mission-based-- you'd either have a campaign where y

It would be really neat, and maybe sell more copies, if additional functions that could be added to ships were included in Dark Avatar. Functions that aren't used in the base game can be unsupported and potentially buggy and it could be up to the modders to figure out how to make them work well.

I didn't like the first Galactic Civilization, it seemed like it was just a flat rush to get the capability to make the biggest ships or die. The learning curve was too steep for me to be comfortable with it. I find GalCiv 2 is much more accessible, it's easier to make rhyme and reason of it. You know why people declare war, it's pretty obvious what you need to get weapons and defenses and how to make them stronger, and in the difficulty modes I play at(usually the 'Challenging' level)

That's really too bad, it should really give the starbase a few levels everytime a constructor gets to it in order to beef up its HP at least.. but I have no way of knowing if starbases can even gain levels.

Any given ship should be focused entirely on one type of offense, at least from what I understand. Do extra attack types mean extra attacks, or is it lumped together and the sum is applied against the defense just once? If they have any defenses at all and assuming each weapon type on a given ship is treated as a separate attack.. then your ships are hideously nerfed. Really, a 'standard fighter'? What the hell is that? It depends entirely on technology, could vary anywhere fr

They need to keep the threads down to a reasonable level, anyway, and if so many people want carriers in GalCiv II I don't understand why they can't just find a way to mod it in.. it'll probably take more than some modifications to the XML files, but cry me a river. To implement carriers would require the ship hull sizes to all be changed in order to make it logical, and extensive rebalancing to make it useful/balanced. Most people will not want to use it, therefore it is not worth the

Performance-wise, I found Halo to be almost as laggy on my old machine with my old videocard as F.E.A.R.: First Encounter Assault Recon was. I definitely wouldn't recommend it for 'older PCs'. My definition of an 'older PC' for the sake of argument, would be a PC that has trouble running or is unable to run a lot of newer games. IMO, if you can get good FPS on Halo on your old PC then it can run any game on the market though not necessarily well. I found the optimization for the PC vers