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[quote]If you are spending mostly social with some planets getting military focus to build ships... you probably realize that you actually will build the ship faster if you are actually building a social project at the same time? The focus only shifts funds that are actually being spent, I guess, so if your improvement queue is empty that money goes to the treasury and the military factories never see it, so they siphon off only what you are spending on research.[/quote]<

It would just be a pure exploit on the part of the player. Mining bases flip very easily, so you could just make a secondary income at the expense of the AI by repeatedly selling him the same bases. Planets at least have their own influence and can be made resistant to flipping. Plus you don't know what harm he might do during the period when he owns your planet.

Depending on who you're fighting, you often can't use a lot of their infrastructure anyway, and it is automatically bulldozed when you conquer the planet. That makes tidal disruptors more attractive because they have a big bonus but don't damage the PQ, just wipe out buildings.

[quote]Take the long-term value of a car as an example. If you keep it moving at maximium velocity as much as you can, it will not be able to travel as many klicks as it could if you ran at optimum rather than maximum speed.[/quote] I don't think this analogy really works for GC2. Your research labs and manufacturing centers don't wear out if you run them too hard. More importantly, they cost the same maintenance no matter how much or how little you use them, and maintenance is a huge exp

I'm doing much better in my current Arcean game. Oddly enough, my current war against the Yor is again illustrating the importance of speed. Normally fighting the Yor you are pretty much at their mercy, but the Yor AI (set to genius) for some reason deciding not to research any speed enhancing techs or put engines on its ships. So I'm poking around in Yor space at a speed of 3, but the Yor ships are absolutely crawling at speed 2. So I can get my first strikes in and decimate them. In the land o

I just gave up on a game that demonstrated all too painfully the costs of plodding, trudging Arcean ships. In a no-tech-trade game, the Arcean speed penalty and lack of access to engine techs is a pretty huge disadvantage. Lack of speed is obviously a big problem at a tactical scale when you can't intercept fast transports or even sometimes invasion fleets. What I didn't appreciate until now was the strategic implications. Low speed means it takes you longer to gather forces for an inva

[quote]Seriously, who the hell thought that could compare to a +100% civ wide bonus to economy building?[/quote] Too me, this is the part that makes no sense at all. An extra +100% economy building that only operates on the one planet is pretty helpful. Add in the other (supposedly main) effect and it's pretty darn helpful. A building that gives you empire-wide +100% economy is absolutely silly. I can only think that Brad is himself suffering from the effects of some kind

[quote] Heh..I actually have Moo2 still installed (you can get it from Atari.com for 10 bucks, if you are nostalgic like me) and you are suffering from revisionist history. Moo2 was also "drop X million pop on transport ships and drop them to fight your pop" unless you had Telepathic. (Either your civilization, or your fleet commander) [/quote] No. In Moo2, soldiers and population were separate. You could contruct transports at any planet that had the required military installations

If you try to keep 100% morale it might take you 25 turns to build that factory. ... And you don't have to ignore military vs. building up your planets. This is way different then Civ IV where you can build either a building *or* a military unit. In Gal Civ you can build both. Just build a Starport and after that you can build military ships on that planet at the same time as buildings. Two separate build queues. </di

I don't want anyone to appease me or "dumb down" the game. I might be able to win easier, but the victory would just be hollow. I hate the fact that so many games are being dumbed down these days to reach more people who are still unused to the hardships of hardcore gaming. I simply want to learn, no matter how long it takes. Appease was definitely the wrong word for me to use. It's just that most of my thinking about changes to the game

The higher your tax rate the *more* of those shields go into military, social and research. Just try it on a mature world. Set tax rate to say 15%. Check the planet and note the number of shields in each production area. Now jack up taxes to 50%. You'll see a whole lot more shields in those production boxes and a ton more money rolling in to your budget. Have *you* tried it? I've never seen tax rate affect my productio

Whenever Mr. Wardell talks about trying to appease both the hardened veterans of TBS games and newcomes, I kind of shake my head. Surely these things are easy to figure out for everyone? I guess having historically played an unhealthy amount of these games does make things a lot more transparent. I do remember one old-time gamer writing something like: "Tens of thousands of hours of playing games and the mostly what I've learned is how to play new games without reading the manual."

Off type defense bug ? Check here: https://forums.galciv2.com/?forumid=274&aid=146134#1151081 Basically, off-type defences are a lot more powerful than they should be. Some people have found them to be *more* powerful than on-type defence, but that may be an exageration.

The 'super shot' is due to the fact that all of the bonus damage from weapons bonus and (I think) starbases piles on to a ship's first weapon shot of each round. So say an enemy had a ship with a designed attack of 60 (15x4) but due to attack bonus, it comes out at 100 attack. Not only are you facing a ship with an expected damage of 50 instead of 30 (assuming no luck bonus), the first weapon to fire on that ship does 0-44 instead of 0-4. If you have say, 60 defences, you cou

1) Yor are extremely frightening in battle. Their luck bonus combines with their miniturization bonus to give them quite an edge. If you want to be invulnerable to their 70 attack ship/fleet, you'll need to field in at least 140 defense. Huh? Even with a 50% luck bonus, a 70 attack ship should only deal an average of 35*1.5 = 52.5 damage per round. So 1 on 1, 70 defences on a single ship should be pretty decent defence, not typically overwhel

Hah, I meant to say cost per unit. I agree you can start to run out of places to stick those shield projectors rather quickly... Yes, you could just turn recharge to 1/4 and double the rating of all defence units.

I disagree. The problems we've been discussing have nothing to do with the off-type defense bug since we don't try against off-type defenses. This means that even if the bug is fixed, it won't improve the situation. I'm fine with defences being stronger in most situations than the weapon type they are designed to counter. If you are finding that shields do a good job of defending against beam weapons, then it's working as designed

If the Krynn had some juicy production bonuses on their planet, they could have been cranking out 1 colony ship per week at very little cost. Any game where I start out with a +700% manufacturing tile is practically in the bag. Once, I started out with a +700% and a +300%.

When I played around with range, I found there was a map-dependent value that figured in many places. I don't have my notes, but this is what I remember: ShipRange = 2*MapVal + RaceVal + nModules*(MapVal + ModuleVal); Measured in parsecs (little squares), the maps values were: Tiny: 1 Small: 2 Medium: 3 Large: 6 Huge: 10 Gigantic: 13 RaceVal was 0.2*RaceBonus, your racial range bonus. So, if you set the basic life support modules t

All I have to do is hit any key which will recalculate the sheet and I get a new value for a simulated round of combat. Ok, I thought you were playing these in-game, in which case the Korath weapons bonus would have an effect. I was allowing for some leak-through damage in my 7-10 range, it's just that 11.5 was a bit higher than I expected from my seat-of-the-pants estimate. However, I don't think you can conclude that an all-attack

If the attack edges higher, include one all-attack ship with a mostly Defense fleet. The purpose of the Attack Ship is to exchange with one of theirs. The exchange is in your fleet's favor because it lowers the attack of their fleet below your defenses. In general, you can't simply add an all-attack ship to a defensive fleet and expect it to exchange for one member of an all-attack fleet. The attack ship will be the first to be targeted, and whil

Well, now that I actually tried it, I'm getting an average of 11.5 damage for the attack ships, so there would be a slight advantage in favor of the defense ships in this case. But remember we are comparing 9/30 ships against 25/0 ships. Increase the attack ships to 27/0 and the advantage tips in their favor. 11.5 is somewhat higher than I'd expect, though I guess part of that is due to the Korath weapons

Invading troops can easily take out 3x their number, so to take out a planet with 12 billion population, you might need 4 billion troops. Those 4 billion troops come from your planetary population when you load a transport. The exact ratio of how much the invader will take out depends on soldiering, tech, invasion tactics and chance.

According to my quick calculations, which may be wrong, a fleet of three of my 9/30 ships against three Korath 25/0 ships would be a close battle, but mine would be more expensive to build. Not an especially close battle. On the first turn, you could expect to do 13 or 14 damage and they would do something in the range of 7-10 damage. Once you killed one of their ships, they wouldn't have enough damage to reliably penetrate your def

The big problem here is rule #2. I have no idea why the heck Stardock made defenses regenerate 100% every round. It's completely different from the implementation of shields or indeed any other kind of defense I've seen in any other space game that I can remember. Heck, pretty much any computer game period. If defenses could be beaten down over multiple rounds, then it would be a heck of a lot easier to balance them. I like this i