Alfonse

Honestly, to me, the principle problem with the AI is the diplomacy system. When it comes right down to it, the diplomacy ability is effectively game-sanctioned cheating (though rarely in their favor). If the AI is supposed to behave like a human, why does it respond favorably to an otherwise useless number in the Civilization manager? If the AI is going to play like a human, it should play like a human. It shouldn't do something

I tend to devote two or three high-class worlds (my capital being one because it naturally has a pop-cap of 10) towards being money planets. I tend to get Xeno Farming and nothing better than that, and I build 2 Xeno Farms on these worlds. After that, it's just about building entertainment and money buildings. I tend to max-out the econ building tech tree modestly early (possibly after the chest-thumping phase where I yoke my tech advantage and murder

Allow me a monent to categorize certain programming zealotry (note: the following is 100% joke): I'm sorry any language that doesn't allow for pointer manipulation will never replace C/C++. There are too many really nifty things that you can do in a few lines of code with pointers that take two or three times that wit

so why bother having a radius for resource basess? unless you get an extra bonus. That's their influence radius. That's how far they project a (weak) area of influence.

There is no option for us to go "Offer us more"... we either accept or reject. What would be even better (note: not mutually exclusive. Both is good too) is if you could ask for something and say, "What would it take for you to give that to me?"

in the current Beta, that is fixed. At least it worked perfectly last night. I'm glad they're working on that. It's annoying to have to go around and rename all the ships you've upgraded.

It IS tied together. Not directly. You're allowed to "overproduce", but you simply go into debt doing so. When you underproduce, you have surplus money. The two are linked in that one produces the quantity that the other requires, but there is no hard limit of, "You need X number of people

Isn't the war itself enough of a penalty? I mean, really, isn't having to divert a significant portion of your money into military strength enough of a penalty? Let alone the possibility of having your trade interdicted. Why bother imposing more of a penalty on war than already exists?

Back when it was popular to keep movies/media on the CD and just install core game files for speed reasons. Harddrives have always been faster than CD drives. What they haven't been was bigger . Until recently (the last 5 years or so), the idea of dumping 1+GB onto a guys h

go to nearest starbase that needs a constuctor Define "need". Many times, I've had production starbases that aren't fully upgraded because I don't want them to be (I like having money, for example). Often, the worlds near there are building constructors. At the point in the game

The manual isn't clear on a lot of things. Every starbase provides a zone of influence, but it is pretty weak. Influence starbases have the ability to improve the influence in their area of effect. So, when you have an influence starbase with the full set of cultural dominance features on it and it has a 300+% influence bonus on it, it is taking whatever influence of yours is in the area of effect (its own, if no other planets are nearby) and upping it by 300%. That is why,

The current system rewards a 50/50 setup. Actually, I've found that my industrial capital is better at research than anything but the most intensive tech planets. By building all those factories and the industrial capital, and then focusing the planet on research (no research buildings built, of cours

Without farms all your planets are sitting ducks Shoot down troop transports before they reach your planets, then. I've only ever been invaded once, and that's because it was a distant corner of the map, and I had no idea that the enemy I had just attacked had a troop ship nearby. I survived, but barely. I don't agree with

The reason I ask is that on a tiny map, with four other civs, even after a couple of hours no-one had many military ships of note yet. Maybe they were building them up in secret, but I hadn't seen them. That's because you made a map that's too small for how the game wants to work and you put too many

Here's the real question. Say you trade a good with someone. Can you "untrade" it later if you happen to not want them to have hull plating while you're trying to conquer them, for example?

but it's hard to get into a game of Chess in the same way you can get into a "plausible" game[/qutoe] No, it's hard for you to get into it. You want the aspect of realism. A gamist approaches the game for what it is, and doesn't ask questions about why (unless he's analysing the game's mechanics) something is th

Because when i get home from work...i dont have the time or the will to Install/update the drivers...directx...then check compatibility issues...mount images etc...i just want to relax and play a little and nothing can compare to consoles in that case. Because in the console world PnP means "plug and play" vs "plug and pray" in t

On a side note, could someone also please explain the miniaturization value. What effect does that have on components? None. It makes your hulls X% bigger in size.

You have to realize that game manuals are generally made long before the game even goes 'gold'. That is because it actually takes quite a bit of time to put it all together. You need charts, and graphs and pictures along with people who writes the stuff and put it together. If you can't concieve this, think of it as one of those

1: Not on your life. 2: Unimportant. Cosmetic only. 3: Also unimportant. 4: It would be nice to be able to visually design a hull from scratch just using structural components. 5: ? 6: This is a game. Not reality. And shields/missile defense do make sense, so armor works the same way. 7: Cosmetic, and therefore unimportant. 8: Nonsense. Errant nonsense. But you can mod it in i

The propose changed I listed still allow for it to occur, but at a much less frequency, if you add more weapons. That is, if you use one blackhole erruptor, you could still do 0-25 damage. But if you use 4 nanoripers, although it's possible to do 0-24 damage, you are much more likely to end up with 12 because you use four rolls i

While the idea of building the Ur-Quan Hierarchy of Battle Thralls is most appealing (Submit or DIE!), I'm not sure if the idea of a side giving up all its techs is an appropriate one for this game. If they were to do so, you would be effectively giving players a really good reason to go to war with someone. The path of combat therefore becomes much more appealing. The guy who has infrastructure techs only (or mostly) would be your target, a

While you're at it, why don't you just have a "play game for me" button that makes the AI play the whole game for you. No micromanagement to worry about then... You're going to either be pressing the "Turn" button and letting the game play itself, or you're going to have to actually play the game. That's going to require some drudgery. Ferrying people about the Empire is not a difficult task. UI streamlining is one thing. Making a

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. Was there, perhaps, a gigantic, ancient space station Link in the system that had possibly moved tho

New version available. Same location. The buggy items are removed from the lists. You can find a bugs.html file in the directory for each of the 4 types of objects. If there's no file there, that's because there were no bugs (there are no buggy techs). Also, there's an index.html file in the root of the zip that links to the 4 main index pages. Just to make things a bit easier. Be advised: I'm not upgrading to 1.1 until it comes out of beta. So any 1.1 changes ar