Stromko

Interesting interview but light on new information. The screenshots looked juicy but I couldn't find any way to zoom in on them to see any kind of actual detail.

They might actually be the size of fighters, but the Altarians might just use a lot less 'glass' in ships of said class. I thought the initial post quite concisely made your point though, that the size differences between the ship types really isn't enough to make carriers logical. Not to mention that the low hitpoints of a tiny hull doesn't justify the cost of mounting a nice expensive gun or two on it. It's true you can swarm an opponent with large numbers of small craf

I don't expect they could be to scale within the limitations of the hull classes available. It'll be especially worrisome with fighters, unless you made an 'invisible' hull and then created very small X-wing, Y-wing, TIE-fighter, etc-shaped pieces of jewelry that could be attached at hardpoints to represent squads of fighters. I hope the mod will introduce extremely small turbolasers and such that can have 4+ mounted on a tiny hull, or fighters just won't make sense; furthermore, capita

I'm pretty sure that the income bonus being given to all civilizations, not just the player's civilization, is exactly what he intends. Personally though I think giving a tax revenue bonus alone wouldn't speed up development so long as we're stuck at 100% production capacity maximum. You'd have a lot of extra money but research and building wouldn't be faster unless you purchased things to speed it up, so this would require a change in strategy. More research buildings, less industry bu

With a good trade stratagem or enough 'good' moral choices, I don't think the Yor starting out as evil particularly balances out anything. It could be reversed, and meanwhile the Iconian Refuge could easily push themselves into evil by making a few 'evil' choices. Also it really depends on the galaxy, the Yor would not be alone in their evilness if the Korx and Drengin are in the neighborhood.. just so long as the Yor manage to have an equal or greater military and set up proper tr

Tiny hulls are quite useless right now, so while I guess people are entirely sick of seeing these 'carrier' threads pop up right now, making tiny hulls actually useful would be one benefit I could see. For me personally, any hull that can't mount at least two engines in addition to sufficient firepower is worthless, and the low hitpoints further close off any desire to use tiny hulls. I'm still not sure how useful carrier would make them however. Even without engines or life suppo

Play on a huge universe with sparse planets then? Only problem is, huge is as huge as it gets, so there'd be a lot less colonies and a lot less going on in general.

It'd be kinda neat if they made their fleets out of ships that were decommissioned or made obsolete within the last year or more. It'd mean they're rarely ever overly powerful, but more than a nuisence.

GalCiv II is a very very strong singleplayer game, with no real multiplayer to speak of. Dominions is not worth playing singleplayer, therefore it's pretty much just a multiplayer game. That's the argument for there not being a big crossover between the fanbases. Dominions 3 looks like a pretty good game from a trio of schoolteachers working on it in their spare time, but 55$ sets an extremely high expectation. That's pretty much maximum price for a standard-package (not collector) PC g

There's a limit on how cheap you can make a ship, even a tiny hull once you pack on the latest technologies will cost at least 1/10th to 1/6th as much as a huge ship. Taking into account logistics limits and their very low hitpoints, inability to mount heavy defenses, and severe limitations on how much Offense each ship can pump out even if they're nothing but guns.. I don't think it would be game-breaking, but depending on the makeup of the enemy force it might be useless.

I know that it isn't trying to be a graphical powerhouse, but the =art= in D3 doesn't look like something I can stare at for hours on end. It's fuzzy with obvious pixelation and there's apparently no animation. The special effects in the screenshots actually look pretty good, which makes the art they're next to look even fuglier in comparison. Master of Magic has better graphics, never cost 55$, and while the interface is somewhat behind the curve (it's at least 10-15 years old) it's st

I'd rather play World of Warhammer 40K. Starcraft is such a diluted version of the WH40K mythos. Blizzard doesn't really have anything to fall back on to make an MMORPG with unless they write up a lot of new stuff.. probably with the WH40K sourcebooks right next to them while they're 'inventing'. With World of Warcraft, they had a very broad body of content to draw from, even now there's stuff mentioned in the RTS series that they haven't turned into an expansion yet. There was only one

The question isn't whether anyone could survive on a class zero planet, it's if the planet would be hospitable enough and colonizable enough that within a reasonable timeframe you can have a burgeoning colony that actually provides benefit to your empire. The system in place now where each race tends to start with one class 4 planet in its solar system, assumes a planet like Mars. Just barely out of the habitable range, we can imagine the melting of icecaps or greenhouse factories or j

I could see this being interesting for a kind of 'Midway Campaign' scenario. Say you start with your usual building capacities, so you can make transports and small/heavy fighter-sized things, but you begin with a couple cruisers and one battleship. These can be massively important weapons at the start of the game, but if you lose them, or if you manage to kill one of the enemy 'capitol ships', then that is a highly decisive loss or gain. Or you could just make all hull types available

If your fleet would've been killed by their fleet anyway, then it's useful that they'll need to spend three movement points to kill your ships separately. Say they have a stack of nasty ships and some transports, all with two MPs. You have three fighters and a few freighters on your planet; if your logistics limits your fleets to 3, then it'd take them 2 MPs to kill all your ships. But otherwise, it'd take 6(so on turn 3 of the attack they'd be able to move their transports in). Persona

Perhaps you're thinking of the hull type, and not of actually mounting Transport pods on a combat ship. You usually don't get those back, it's a total waste, you carry less troops and you can't mount enough weapons for a one-hit kill. They'd be a favored target because of weapons and (likely) having no defenses so they'd be obliterated in any kind of battle. Regular troop-hauling transports are the last targets that get attacked in a fleet because they aren't a threat and it's assumed

I usually do engage in a lot of military activity but I usually build no more than one or two marketplaces per planet. My primary focus is production, my economy mainly exists to support it rather than buying it outright, so lots of marketplaces just strikes me as weird unless it's an Economic Capitol; and even then you want a few farms and entertainment centers to build up a large population. Marketplaces multiply population to determine revenue, but high morale keeps population growing q

The first reply probably hit the crux of the problem. Assuming his install isn't corrupted what probably happened is one of the AI got set to maximum difficulty. So not only is it playing as smart as possible but also getting huge bonuses from nowhere.

The tech tree is pretty straight-forward, what you get at the intermediate levels is pretty much what you get at the advanced levels, just bigger, stronger, more expensive. The only critical decision is splitting up your research so your empire is competitive in the short-term. I'm not sure if the tech tree even has multiple pre-requisites, if you want dreadnaughts all you'd need is Xeno Engineering, Basic Logistics, then choose Advanced Hulls and when it's done don't choose a new thi

Yeah wouldn't you have zero population on the refitted ship? That's awfully weird that it's even able to claim the planet, also you're going to have to send colonists eventually because the new population growth mechanism means a small colony barely grows at all. A colony that only starts with .1 population, years later, will have maybe .3 population.

I've had similiar experiences, yes defensive ships are expensive to produce but they're an investment. If I use them wisely they're less likely to take losses, and whenever they have a victory they come out of it with less damage. Less damage means I can employ them in upcoming fights instead of having to wait for them to repair. If one of my balanced fleets isn't able to take out one enemy fleet then I'm proper f**ked, but if it can take them on one-by-one, it has a decent shot at wasting all

As far as space games go, I thought GC2 had a ton more personality and told things on a more intimate level, also it's very possible to design and name your ships following a certain theme in order to create a bit of atmosphere for yourself. Sometimes I try to bear in mind a basic mindset of the race I'm playing, and make that a factor in various decisions, I'm not that great at juggling the numbers anyway so choosing based on my idea of what my people would do is just as well and ad

That is quite odd, I wouldn't expect that it was throttling the AI down it should logically just take longer if the system is slow right? That's a scarcely-educated guess though. Has your military been decently competitive, do you actually have poor relations with the Drengin etc? Also have you updated to the latest version 1.1? When you go into the foreign relationships screen and look at the Report on the Drengin, do they have 'too busy to risk a war' as one of the political modifi

The designers didn't just make them that way to screw us of course, thing is you have to modify your designs to fit the technology you have. Every time you get better engines or better weapons or better defenses, you can benefit from using the new ones because they're usually smaller or stronger than the old. As well as having to match defenses to the attacks you're facing, and making sure not to use guns the enemy has defenses against.

I was playing 'Warning Forever' just now (it's a freeware shooter game) and was just thinking, "Hey, ships in GCII =never= have this much guns on them.. why not?" See bosses in that game as is customary in shooters nowadays have about eight guns at the minimum. Correct me if I'm wrong but whenever I got dreadnaughts I never even approached that kind of weapon mass. Now I know there's good reasons this isn't default, they don't want people wasting too much time putting duplicate weap