Glostakarov

I have a planet in my current game with a crazy number of upgradeable tiles. The planet itself was only class 8 to begin with, but had three nice bonus tiles on it. It had 6 yellow tiles, 4 orange tiles, and 4 red ones. On the other side I've had worlds with no upgradeable tiles at all. It seems like I get more tiles on worlds which aren't so great to begin with, and the planets that are already pretty liveable don't have much room for growth. Mak

Well the population listed on any planet is just the taxpaying population, and presumably anyone loyal enough to join the military is loyal enough to pay taxes as well, so having soliers come out of the population total makes perfect sense to me.

Nice reviews, any favourable comparison to Civ 4 is high praise. Good scores from both as well.

I'm really glad Bethesda decided not to use starforce on their discs, or it would have been the first game I seriously want to play but won't buy because of starforce. The funny thing about DRM software, which Spearthrower kind of touched on in post #129, is that those who crack the CD protection are looking for the next big thing, the newest and hardest thing. They want to be first to put up an ISO for the game with the most hardcore protection. The 1.1 version of a game will actua

That is just unbelieveable. I'm now a bit less of a DRM noob, and will never buy a game with starforce on it, no matter how much I am otherwise interested in the game. In fact, if I find out a game I'm interested in is going to have starforce on the disc, I'll create an account on the game's official forums just to tell them why they've lost my sale. That sort of behavior is reprehensible. You'd think there would be some sort of legal action Stardock can take, they were providing a link to s

Not sure what difficulty everyone is playing on, but in the games I've been playing (at Tough lately) the good and neutral races tend to gang up on the evil ones, and while the evil ones are friendly with each other they don't necessarily help each other out. I've been playing evil for the most part, with the end result that I wind up in a 3 or 4 directional war mid-game with a few friends but no allies. I like the system as-is. The bonuses on any particular world are relatively min

Depending on my racial bonuses I'll lock taxes on either 59% or 69% and barely touch them for most of the game. With a 1 to 1 ratio of farms to entertainment this lets me maintain approval in the mid 50s. Most of my planets don't go over 15b, but I'll work to accommodate special tiles and get the odd planet with 20-30b or more on it. Late game my approval creeps up into the 60s or even 70s, at which point I'll consider raising taxes if it won't drop any worlds below 40% approval. T

In practice I find a bit of defense on my ships gives them significantly greater survivability. Even a single point can be significant, because it acts against every attack. If there are n ships in the enemy fleet your 1 defense is worth 0-n damage reduction (or just n if defense rolls really do start at 1). Let's try some numbers: Attacking fleet = 5 ships with 4 beam offense, no defense, 20hp per ship Defending fleet = 5 ships with 3 beam offense, 1 shield, 20hp per ship<br/

By contast, I have yet to build a ship larger than Medium and I'm doing well with that. Most of my military research goes into weapons, engines and miniaturization. Medium seems a good size for a design that many worlds can crank out in 2-4 turns even if they aren't specialized for it. Logistics important to ensure a large swarm, and engines are vital to ensure that you initiate the attack. When you start the fight, you deal damage first, and if the enemy doesn't survive the first volley he

In the economy screen, if you adjust your spending levels by using the sliders and reduce spending, the bar for the category that gets the money does not go up. For example, if I set military spending to 0 and lock it, then set social spending to 0 and lock it, research will properly show as getting 100% of the funding, but the adjustment bar will still be 1/3 of the way from the left (assuming its a fresh game with nothing modified yet).

I see that GameSpy has their review up, a glowing 4.5/5 stars. They have a love/hate relationship with the AI, calling it one of the best features of the game but also part of what gives the game a steep learning curve. They slag on the in-game tutorials (which I have to admit were largely too basic to be of much use) and of course the lack of multiplayer, but overall a very positive review.

Interesting. I had noticed that my laptop had been running warm (GeForce 7800, Pentium M 2.13ghz), but hadn't had crashes so I didn't think much of it. The game has run very well for me actually. So the throttle-down option just lowers the frame rate? It doesn't turn off the bells and whistles that make it look so nice?

Galciv 2 is the first game I ever preordered, and I've been playing on one machine or another since you had to load them on a tape drive. It was worth my money as released, and its only getting better. In regards to the population growth cap and the associated racial bonus: couldn't the bonus just raise the cap? Right now it gives a bonus to population growth that makes no difference because of the cap, but a 10% (or even 5%) increase to the cap would be significant and worth it.<br

It takes a "LOW" level of espionage penetration to get the ship data screen that someone posted above, and you get it simply by double clicking on a ship you want to look at. Espionage works as a cumulative effort; your spies and contacts build up a network over the span of many turns. Dumping a whole lot of money into it at once doesn't work very well. Instead set a low funding level early and let it build up; your level of spying will steadily increase through the game. Technically you don

Just tried for the first time and it worked great, so that fix did what it needed to. Uploaded a (massively shrunk) pick of the Ghost Head Nebula for my character's symbol (same as my account pic), and my stats all show up (at 0s of course).