Hopefully not (or at least not ALL the time), as I know IIWD (If I Were Draginol) I'd be very frustrated to discover that I'd crafted the most sophisticated, powerful, adaptive AI ever, but I had to give it a frontal lobotomy in order to get it to run on a customer's PC.
I for one am absolutely interested in a clear separation between intelligence and sabotage functions, enough so that I am feeling a little angst about purchasing DA if one doesn't exist. James Bond is fiction , spies do not spend the bulk of their time killing people and blowing stuff up, that's what a military is for. Assasination and sabotage are specialist / special forces type work. Ideally there'd be two different agent types a la Total War, but I realize that's a major code
Don't suppose there's any hope of transferring the "allow the AI extra time" option that already exists in GC2 to run full time on the second core of a dual rig, is there? Or is that GC3 material?
Want to second the vote for some sort of starbase management interface, although I would guess the easiest way to code it would be a third, bases, tab on the ships/planets button. This should allow you to sort bases by attack and defense ratings (see who needs a weapons module), ship attack & defense boosts (shows what mil base needs upgrading), trade / production bonuses (for econ bases), sensor range, influence % bonus, type, name, module space available, and number of modules installed. Unl
Would it be possible to extend the idea of the option allowing extra time to the AI? Say to the limit of allowing the AI to run full time on the second processor of a dual processor rig? Clearly this would have to be a checkbox option, the game default would have to be single processor. I just wonder if it's feasible to allow the "extra time" to happen in parallel while the user takes their turn, thus giving the AI huge amounts of time with no slowdown in game play. If this IS doable, is it
The problem (if I'm understanding your ideas correctly) is that the limiting effect on population has to be proportional to both ratings. A gigantic desert planet (low hab, high cap) should have similar pop limits (but not pop density) to a tiny, lush planet (low cap, high hab). What you've described is a very flexible and powerful system, but I have concerns about making its effects and implications intuitive to users (sliders, anyone? <img src="http://images.stardock.com/gc2/T_DL/smiles
I think there's also a loop for "This offer's too good to be true, what's he got planned?" If there's no or not enough overlap ebtween that loop and the "not good enough" loop, the AI becomes tough to deal with.
Gee Marshall, I thought I was the only one bitter at CA "Hissy Fit of the Poopy Lords", LOL, I love it.
You are correct, there is a form of double whammy. The morale buildings add a percentage of the base morale, which is calculated by the formulas in the post above. I solved the math problem by comparing the maximum possible populations of each planet quality rating to the number of tiles available on those planets, assumed a rule of no more than 1 tile in four would go to entertainment, found the PQ with the most pop per ent center, and that left me with one ent building per 9 billion po
When you've come up with more than three new minor race names based on your cow-orkers
Hosting your pagefile on a different physical drive helps a lot with speed. A pagefile on C: just results in the game data beign copied from one section of the drive to another, but a pagefile on a different drive lets your machine read from one drive and write to the other, keeping them both active and increasing throughput to your VM. Search MS tech support forum, their page for VM configuration walked me throuhg how to do this nicely.
Being the keeper of a dinosaur and an avid PC gamer both, I had to learn about the wonders of pagefile sizing. If you can possibly host the pagefile on a secondary physical hard drive, it makes a big difference in the utility of virtual memory. A second partition on one physical disk is worse than useless, but if you actually have two drives (say, the hard drive from your previous box installed as a slave), move your virtual memory to that slave drive.
If you guys have a secondary hard drive, moving your pagefile to that drive and setting it to the maximum allowable size covers a multitude of memory-hogging sins. I have minimal system memory, but my virtual memory is set as I described, and my gigantic map, bring-every-race-to-the-party games will save and load, eventually. My hard drives thrash like a wounded animal, though
Debt = amount you owe Deficit = amount you spend each (insert time period here) more than you make, thus the amount your debt will get worse during the (time period) A voter who supports a politician that reduced the deficit is much like the proud parent of a toddler who has learned to piss himself less often. All well and good, but much remains to be done.
I suspect that the constant actual rate / decreasing percentage rate is WAD (working as designed). Constant percentage growth is an exponential function that would make high PQ planets tough to keep happy as they generated huge new populations each turn in the mid to late game.
I got mine standard mail, but that might be because I asked for extra padding on my order, 'cause my UPS guy is in that habit of just throwing packages over my fence. Considering how awesome Stardock has been on every other customer support issue I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd sent mine special just because of my comment on the UPS guy.
Frogboy, I'd really like to second the idea that starbase bonuses be restricted to ships with the relevant type of equipment. It seems to me that there's already a check loop in the code to see if the ship in the base's area of effect has an attack or defense value, so I wouln't think it'd be much of a change to restrict that to an attack / defense value of the relevant type. This would make the starbase boosted ships devastating if and only if the b
I have noticed compelling counterexamples. Half a dozen times I've seen an AI pass up a double digit PQ planet in order to settle a PQ 6 or so that is closer to its homeworld. It's settling the first habitable thing it finds in-system. If it were cheating, why in the seven hells would it choose a PQ 6 over a PQ 26?
I have zero credentials in the field, but I do know what sold me on the game. I check IGN and Wargamer among others pretty much daily fo previews, and first encountered GC2 in that way. I came to this site to read up. What I dug more than anything was the "preorder to get into the beta testing" arrangement. It helped even out the cash flow up front for oyu guys when you needed it, it gave you devoted testers, and the fans got a chance to shape the
I'm not clear on how this differs in effect from spending money to research miniaturization. If you can afford to add cargo pods, you will in almost every concievable case. If cargo pods are cheaper on a per space basis than minaturization tech, miniaturization loses all value. If cargo pods cost more per space than the equivalent level of miniaturization tech, why bother with them instead of just researching mini? It just seems redundant to me, un
Does any offense / defense count or does it have to be of the right type? If my starbase boosts beam and shields and I put a ship with missiles and armor next to it, do I get the bonuses? Or does it have to be a beam snd shield equipped ship?
In an abundant all game, I had the opposite problem. I couldn't throw a rock without hitting a double digit planet. My favorite system had a PQ 19, two PQ 14s, a PQ12 and a PQ 10. This game exposed something about the AI's I hadn't noticed before, at least for the Torian and Korx AIs. They tended to colonize the nearest available habitable world
There's also an anomaly that gives you an instant 25% advancement towards whatever tech you're researching. If they found that, 40 turns becomes 30.
My only suggestion so far is to pare back a bit on the adjustments to planet quality and frequency. In an abundant planets, abundant habitables game I encountered a lovely little system with a PQ 19, 2 PQ 14s, a PQ 12, and a PQ 10. I don't think I found a single system on a gigantic map without at least one (and usually three) double digit worlds. It quickly surpassed even my love for ginormous empires.
I'm humble enough to go down a difficulty level if it hands me my head, in fact I'd be thrilled to havethat happen because then I'd know the game will challenge me that much longer before I get good enough to take it on the highest settings. Do your worst, Brad! Er, best! Er, something!
