Need3Lives

Yep, have seen this in every game, all patches. They make great farming for getting your ship's HP up, but I agree it is pretty cheesy. I do see a mix of 1 AI Fleet + 10-30 individual ships, as well as 1-3 AI Fleets + 5-10 individual ships, all stacked in the same spot, but it is more common that there is just 1 fleet and lots of individuals. On the same note, I also see many AI fleets that are close enough to attack my fleet, but don't. They just sit there 'guarding' or whatever, wai

Damn Reavers and their huge fleet that can take out the entire Alliance fleet waiting in Ambush... oh wait... (But yeah, I agree - they do seem way overpowered when they appear late game - which thankfully has only happened once for me so far).

As Brillig mentioned, there are no invincible ships. Defense gets a roll, just like weapons do. In the OP's example, ship B could be damaged by ship A. Ship A would receive an attack roll of 0-3. Ship B would receive a defense roll of 0-3 (1 for beam defense + sq. root of 1 (also 1) of missile defense + sq. root of mass driver defense = 3). So, if Ship A rolled a 3 and ship B rolled a 0, ship B would take 3 damage. If B rolled a 2, it would take 1 damage. Only if B rolled a 3 (25% chance here a

@ Runemaster: I think either your #2 or #3 or some variation of both would be a good solution to the social production issue, as well as probably help improve the game economics overall. However, I have to disagree with 1) Instead of having every planet "auto-upgrade" based on the latest tech, have the individual manually go in to each planet to upgr

I assume cargo hulls can gain HP from experience like any other. Assuming you could use the cargo hulls selectively in battles they are guaranteed to win in one round (like attacking troop transports, colony ships, scouts or constructors), after a few fights they would start to gain some decent hit points. If you could get them past 10 or so HP, it would probably be (relatively) clear sailing from there... of course, their value would be pretty marginalized later when large hulls are researched.

Woah, thats a heck of a lot of taxpayers. I wonder what they did with the 4 trillion bodies after they died from not having enough food. The morgue must have been working some serious overtime

I have had one found by the AI in perhaps my first game, but haven't had one yet myself, or have one appear since...

Here's a suggestion (I have made this in another thread, and I believe a few others have as well): On the Colonies screen, show the current production focus of each colony by highlighting or bolding that production number (e.g. if military production is the focus, the military production number would be highlighted or bolded). Also, from this same screen, allow us to manage what focus we want each colongy to have - military, social, research or nothing. That would be a very

Thanks Phoenix - was going to test that as well since I surely hadn't noticed it being the case before.

Well, it isn't suprizing since there isn't any tactical battle. Those techs are useful only if there is a tactical battle. That is hardly true at all. There could be a wide variety of specials that could still be of effective use even without tactical battles. Many of these specials could provide passive benefits, or 'auto-fire' at the start o

@ above, it does appear possible if the production potential is there. But you will end up with annoyences no the less. Uponr esearchign new tech that upgrades your factories lets say,y ou uber 20 factory planet that had nothign queued socially now has a queue of 20 items. Same for every other uber planet out there. Out of nowhere you find it that the ships which yo

In many ways GC2 is superior to MOO2 - as others have elaborated on above. Perhaps it's biggest strength is the strong AI that doesn't need to cheat economically to be competitive. That has been probably the biggest problem for many turn-based games in the past, so that makes the game worthwhile for me right there. That said, there are some issues with GC2 that could be improved upon. The biggest for me is the lackluster tech tree as uncle_bob pointed out. Whereas MOO2 had some unique

Now if only the civilization manager colony list allowed you to see which colonies were focusing production, and let you change the focus from that screen. Had this exact same idea the other day - this would be INCREDIBLY helpful, given the necessity the social production issue causes that planets be tweaked for focus constantly in order to ma

When I play, I crank these up. So I guess it depends on how you define a penalty. A good player will usually have trouble keeping the industry producing as fast as their economy. I agree here - usually my economy outstrips production. I should clarify that social production bonuses would be very helpful yet early game. But, end game, when you

Now if only the civilization manager colony list allowed you to see which colonies were focusing production, and let you change the focus from that screen. Had this exact same idea the other day - this would be INCREDIBLY helpful, given the necessity the social production issue causes that planets be tweaked for focus constantly in order to ma

Thanks for the replies drank and Frogboy. Unfortuantely, I am now more confused then ever in regards to research and morale bonuses. I guess I will keep playing blindly here. Also disappointed about the social production issue. I can see that going forward I will no longer be creating any custom race that has social, research or moral bonuses as the mechanics for these are so obsured as to be worthless, or in the case of social production bonuses, actually a penalty.

I will always regard paying for worthless social podcution to be a bug. I agree. As it stands now, I look at social production 'bonuses' (such as those when creating a custom race) as more an end-game tax than anything. Social production bonuses may help in the early game, but are severly penalizing in the late game when you have moved the majo

Very good post. In regards to the problems with Virtual Reality Centers and Stock Markets, I assume that we could simply edit the PlanetImprovements.xml file to change these until Startdock makes a fix? I would probably changed VRCs to have something like a 70% morale bonus and the Stock Market to keep the influence and morale bonuses, but boost economic bonus to 30% (a slight increase over the banking center, but the morale and influence bonuses probably make it worthwhile for the up

If the starbase mining the resourse is destroyed will the bonouses to the vessels all revert back to what they were at the begining???? Yes, guard them well, and if possible, take out the AI's military resource starbases as your first step in starting a war with them, or as soon as possible if they attack you.

Agrree- my last game, which I completely dominated militarily, showed me ranked #6 out of 7 for the majority of the game. Even at the end, when it was just me and two other races left, I was number 3. When the game ended, it showed I had killed about 1200 enemy ships while only losing about 25 myself. The AI definitely had larger fleets than I did, but the majority of them were small ships with 1-3 offense and 0-1 defense. Whereas most of my ships were pushing 20-50 offense, and 10-50 defense. I

Yes, a MOM game would be awesome. That stands to this days as one of my all time favorites. I wish I could get it to run - I still have it somewhere on 3.5 floppy The game had such great flexibility in item creation. If Stardock applied the same performance to item and spell creation for a follow-up game as they did to starship creation for GC2, I would be a happy camper. Of course, no worries if they wai

Bump for a Stardock reply (hopefully! )

Ah, thanks for the info about some of this possibly being intentional to avoid Metaverse exploits. Too bad it is so frustrating for those of us that just want to play. I agree, #1 and #2 are very minor. #3 and #4 are particularly annoying, but for me #5 is the largest pain since it requires you to manually go through all of your planets looking for ships that need to launch that you didn't get any notice of completion for. I have had a few games where many turns later I find a troop transport or

Oh, I should add - there was also no pop-up screen from the Arceans declaring war like you would normally see if they declare war on you, and I was never actually at war with them over the course of the entire game since we started in opposite corners.

I just finished a game that ended with a nice cultural victory. After getting to the 75%+ mark in galactic influence, I was watching the 10 weeks countdown, as I was planning to test out one last mega-ship I built on someone before the game ended. At 3 weeks to go, I received a planet from the Arceans s via cultural rebellion. After accepting this, and viewing the victory screen, I was surprised that instead of saying I had 3 weeks until victory, it said I couldn't win a cultural victory while a