cyberj914

Influence is a bit of a hidden number. You can see how much a planet is producing along with how much over that you are influencing it if you have a high enough espionage level. Beyond that to see how much of the galaxy you've taken over influence wise check the Victory tab in the Civ Manager screen. As for which race I'd play a custom race. Max out your diplomacy and morale bonuses. Almost a cake walk from there. A huge galaxy on Chall

Key for that particular style of play yes. However there are many paths to victory in this game. Sure some seem *easier* then others but then that mostly boils down to personal preference and what the individual playing has an easy time grasping in terms of game concepts.

Eh close enough for government work

Ok so even one less step assuming the change to the XML file does work.

Bummer ... I'm assuming the game was running fine for you before you downloaded the beta? Beyond that without knowing exactly what you upgraded from it's hard to guess. I know there have been a couple of patches now that were not compatible with say the older ship config files. Not saying that is what the problem is but just thinking of things that are missed sometimes when reading the upgrade notes.

(this is with beta4) I've found that placing an influence starbase next to an enemy planet that is already inside my influence is very effective in flipping that planet. I use them to *get the ball rolling* so to speak. Once you start the influence take over cascade it seems to take on a life of its own. Also as mentioned high population is key. If you can get the majority of your good PQ planets producing upwards of 50+ ip a t

yvw

I remember seeing something posted about one of the defined races having attributes that spent more then 10 points causing it to show negative in the ability window. Also in one of the beta versions of 1.1 they changed some of the costs for certain attributes. If you are using an older race config this could also cause this. Beyond that I'm pretty sure you can select more then 10 points of attributes it just won't let you continue or save if you do.

Yeah it was a shot in the dark anyway ... Only other thing that jumps out at me is your sound driver is from 2004. No idea if that is an issue or not but you may want to try to upgrade that if possible.

In looking over the planetary improvements XML file my initial thought would be that yes it is possible to mod that file and have all buildings be available to build throughout the entire game. There is a tag in that file that tells the game the building is meant to upgrade an older type. My guess is that if you removed that tag from all the buildings the game would react by letting you keep all the buildings in the build list. To upgrade you'd prob

It's hard to say with *under the hood* type things like this. I'll admit I've had games where none of these occur and then I'll have another game where two or three will. Maybe it has something to do with the alignment of the planets or something But I haven't seen anything posted that would lead me to believe this has changed in any way in the beta version.<

1) Been there since day one. Probably on the fix list but just not a priority. 2) This is fixed in the latest beta build. 3) This is fixed in the latest beta build. 4) Hard to say but I'm guessing this is by design to help stem some of the rush tactics. 5) Espionage is one of the things they are going to expand in an upcoming expansion pack. So we'll just have to wait to see what all that entails. But you

Generally takes about 20 minutes or so depending on ambient room tempurature for a GPU to heat up. Did you turn on GPU Throttling to see if it clears up your problem? It's been stated before (and not just by Stardock but other game devs as well) that things that restart your computer are not the result of software. This occurs when a device driver and/or hardware fails in some critical fashion. I know it's a stab in the dark but everything else in

People = Money. The easiest way to get more money is to have more people which in turn pay more taxes. As with everything else in this game it's all about balance. I know it sounds counter productive but don't expand faster then your economy can handle. This sinks more people then anything else. During those beginning turns you should be focused more on building your economy then you are building ships. Once you've g

Actually B4 is a stable version according to Stardock since it did pass their Q&A the other day. However to answer your question yes the random opponents option is in the new version. (v1.1b4) I think unless anyone has found any major show stoppers they are planning on getting it out sometime in this next week. But don't quote me on that unless you see Frogboy post <img src="http://images.stardock.com/gc2/T_DL/smiles/Smile.gif" border=0 ALIGN="absmi

Hey I recognize that text ... it's from my FAQ. Next time you might want to include a *I found this here* type statement

Yeah this has been there since day one. I'm sure the devs are aware of it. Who knows. They may plug it in the next major release after they take a couple of hours off from v1.1

Why can't I get the phrase *Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.* out of my head? Ah well if they all become soulless corporate pawns more worried about the latest blockbuster clone rather then truely great games we can all sit back and say *yep I remember when there were still companies that cared more about making a game fans want

But see this is what I've been saying... all these people get to play the same game GC2 but definitely not in the same way. Fantastic if you ask me. There is no one *right* answer here. It's all personal preference and in my book that is what separates an average game from one that is probably going to be on my HD until it blows up and I have to buy a new one. And you know what the second program I'll install is? <img src="http://images.stardock.co

CC: Yeah those all do still occur in the metaverse games. However if you have the *Lucky* ability as part of your race there are certain ones that don't seem to happen. That is I think they are termed unlucky to the game so that ability reduces or completely eliminates the chance of it occurring in the game.

Well again it's all about playing to your desired strengths. Playing as the Terrans means that you've got a really great start on diplomacy. This means that you can basically wine and dine all the other races from the start of the game. You know get them to give you good tech deals or even go to war with the others. Sometimes I like to see if I can get all of the empires at war with everyone else but me. It's tricky to say the least but if your di

Are you talking about random events like the *wormhole that makes everyone randy thus increasing population * or the ethics questions you get sometimes when you colonize a planet? The former appear well at random and I've had them in almost every metaverse game I've played. The latter stop if you research Xeno Ethics.

Alfonse: You know that may very well be what occured. I'm aligned with good in the game and I do believe the Drath are neutral. I tend to trade Xeno Ethics to everyone to force them to choose. So you are absolutely correct that they could have built on that square but I can't. And when I took over the planet the tile was still flagged as yellow. Interesting. Not really sure what the solution to that would be but my guess is this has be

For me personally I like to see if I can build a race that is tailored to my specific style of play. Therefore since pretty much day one I've been playing as a custom race. The abilities have changed as I've learned more about what works and what doesn't for me but for the most part I think it does pretty well against the default races. Hopefully sometime in the future you can mod the game in such a way to build a custom race for the compu

I believe the planet came from the Drath. However the region of space that it is in was where the Terrans used to be and they were at war with both the Iconians and the Drath at one point so it may have changed hands. All I know for certain is it was not a planet that I got from the Terrans when they surrendered to me. It came after I got the influence boost from the Terran planets.