arentol

Traditionally AAR actually stands for After Action Review, not Report. After the US military completes a field training exercise the unit commanders meet with their troops to discuss the results of the exercise, what went well, and what went poorly. This meeting is called an After Action Review. The commanders also meet with the other commanders for another AAR from a more strategic viewpoint. This was the original source of the term, which has since been modified in forums

I would implement cloaking like this: Two races have Cloaking on their tech tree. Cloaking is pretty early on the sensor branch for one race and a couple techs further down for the other race. Cloaking could not be traded, but could be stolen. Default cloaking reduces movement by 1 for each engine installed (making it almost useless in the early game, and automatically a lot more useful later on), and there is a 75% chance to be detected when ending movement in "sensor"

I would think you could mod the game to create an engine with 90 speed or something I think. That would simulate warping to another location, though to use it fairly you wouldn't want any non-human players to have it, and you would want to limit yourself to more realistic per-turn movement when not simulating a jump. You could probably also mod the game to have "fighter bay" as a weapon class, and do up graphics so that instead of firing a "Missle" or "laser" the ship fires "Fighters" a

[quote]with the GalCiv engine i think that will be little overwhelming thing to do for the Computer.these guys are good but there no geneses. every thing need to be taken in to account like if we add so and so, some questions come up like will it crash the system, will it run propley, and can we do it. these guys are good but not that good(no offence Stardock)And i think now that TA is out i don’t think there going to touch GalCiv for long time. i think there working on something for Sin of a So

[quote]My concern with this is twofold. Firstly it's sub-optimal to have the majority of your planets not building anything (social) and instead using their points from social spending on military spending. That's because if you set the slider to military 99% instead, you'll find your military production much higher. Thus if you only have a couple of planets falling behind it's better to do a split between military+social, or even go all military, and buy buildings for those planets struggling.A

I would like to see 3D maps. Instead of moving from square to square you would move from cube to cube in a giant cube-shaped map. Expanding and maintaining your empire and influence in three different directions would be quite different and exciting.

I've had stacks of as many as 30 ships before, but I would always fleet those up into 4 to 8 fleets and then send them all in different directions, or send them in paired fleets in half as many directions. Either way I just can't imagine a situation in which I would have a stack of 20 fleets, let alone 20 fleets I would be moving in the exact same direction at the same time.... It amazes me how many different ways there are to play this game.

[quote]I've only been building farms on my economy worlds. Maybe I'll try shoving one on all my planets and see how it works out. Does anyone know the formula for how population affects taxes?[/quote] Keep in mind that more population = more influence = more tourism income. So you really should look at more than just the tax benefits.

[quote]I feel like an idiot. I didn't know this - I thought factory output was only used to create ships - I had no idea that it had an impact on the rate of creation of buildings! At last I understand why some of my planets are inexplicably slooo-o-oow at producing buildings. Cheers[/quote] Yeah, welcome to the confusing world of Gal Civ 2. The economy actually works really well, but it does not work in an intuitive manner. For instance, research, social, and military producti

[quote]Okay, here are the broad strokes of my play style. I keep getting smashed. Would like any suggestions. I play: All options off except Tech Stealing. Common for everything, 0 minor races, very slow or slow tech. [/quote] I would turn minor races on, and go for 8 of them. They are excellent trading partners, and you can take them over mid-game and get a really nice planet for it. [QUOTE] Gigantic or Immense galaxy. Right now I am trying to play the Terra

[quote]One can see pretty easy what a ship is meant for, and names do not collide with each other between different games.[/quote] This is an issue I have run into recently.. If I try to use a different type of weapon on a design it might still end up with the same name as a previous design, thus forcing me to overwrite... So I have decided to try and rethink the numbering portion of my naming scheme. Any ideas are welcome!

I generally play Yor, so building an "economic" planet is basically impossible, especially early in the game. I also don't build research planets because I do 1/99/0. So if I found a PQ 26 early in a game I would build it up with around 16 collectives and 4 misc bonus type tiles. I would leave 6 for later galactic achievement and trade item buildings. Basically it would replace about three of my normal industry planets and would probably be the only military a/o construction ship producing plan

Your problem is clearly a general strategy issue, not a specific problem with how fast the AI develops weapons. There are a LOT of strategies that can work, but none of them involve a 33% spending split. My personal favorite, which works for me with all races in DA and many in TA, is the 1/99/0 strategy. You can probably find a more detailed description elsewhere, but here is basically how it works: For racial bonuses take the highest +Econ and +Morale bonuses you can afford.

(Everything below is my text, but based on other ideas long past presented and practiced by others on the strategy forum). One of the key issues that hasn't been mentioned is that building markets on low population planets doesn't actually work that well because the markets increase income as a percentage of population. So +10% of virtually nothing is still virtually nothing. What does work well is to not build anything on low population planets so the planets expenses don't overshadow

[quote]The people that click the review links, the ones that buy the magazines are the hard core users, the pirates, the video game elitists. We will accept your advertising money as much as the next group, and we won't refuse to review a good game, but to expect the same amount of coverage as the "mega-hits" is contrary to the very logic you present in your post.To clarify, I very much agree with your position on all of this, but to properly defend the video game journalists to anyone who reads

FYI, if you go evil there is another +20 soldiering available to the Thalans. The Thalans can easily dominate tiny and small maps because of the Hyperion Matrix. It allows them to jump to an early game lead by giving them two low cost uber-planets right from the start. The Hyperion Matrix also allows them to dominate medium maps if they manage to put it on a 300% bonus research or production tile fairly early, and the same for large maps if it is built on a 700% tile. Beyond large, a w

[quote] There are three main reasons to build Robots. 1 to do jobs that we cannot do. 2 to do jobs that we do not want to do. 3 to do jobs that we do not have enough people to do. jobs that we cannot do. work in a nuke core work below a certain depth underground or underwater. jobs we do not want to do sweep the floor cook weed jobs we do not have enough people to do factories. <br/

I played a Thalian campaign recently too. I took a different tack though. The third planet I colonized had a Precursor Library. I built that one kick-butt building on it and suddenly I had 16x8=128 research on one square. I quickly researched the techs for the technology capital and built that too. I then stopped my colonization rush entirely (ended up with 7 planets in the initial rush a large - common game), and researched a ton of techs. Then I colonized a total of 6 more planets, mostl

Don't forget that TA is coming with tools to make it relatively easy to heavily modify the game. So anything you don't like you can change any time you like. They idea is to allow the community to decide the future of the game until, and even after, GC3.

I am a pure Hydran's man myself. If I got my first three turns timing right (which I used to do about 70% of the time against the people I played) then my opponents biggest ship was eating so many fusion blasts at range 0 or 1 on a single shield that half of them would surrender then and there. Especially if the year was late enough for me to have fusion fighters with Phaser G's as well. If my timing was off, THEN it was an even battle. In other words, I won at least 85% of the time....

Duh, (meaning both the poster a couple above, and an exclamation) I totally forgot about the Dreadnaught class from SFB until I saw this: (MIDN) Huge hulls I think I might just replace my BB designator with DN, and make my BC's BB's instead. To make this work I will probably have to redo half my list... thanks a lot!

I generally try to have a population cap of 16b on PQ12 and above planets (including 9's that will be 12's with all three terraforming techs), and a cap of 10b to 12b on PQ11 and below planets. Morale is easily controlled with a 16b cap, and with a few econ boosts on the bigger planets I can easily make plenty of money without needing to use morale buildings at all.

Interesting responses, some people have some neat ideas. I just want to point out that my system is all on a spreadsheet that fits on one page when printed. So I just have that sitting next to my keyboard and if I can't recall what something should be named I can look it up very quickly. So it is actually quite easy for me to use my system, takes no time at all.

I thought I would reveal my ship naming strategy to everyone since I have spent a lot of time on it, and I thought I would also ask what system other people use. The name of all my ships follows the following basic format: Race-Designation-Total Weapon Strength - Total Defense Strength - Speed Here is a quick sample: Ter-DDK-20-4-9 Unarmed ships (colonies, constructors, etc.) do not include weapon and defense strengths though, so a colony would be: Ter-CNY-5 I sometimes

[quote] Mumblefratz, just to confirm, are you still playing DL-only games? Yep. However once I get my TA disk I'll finally have the latest DA version without being forced to use SDC which I refuse to do. [/quote] I certainly don't want to get into an off-topic debate over this, but let me just say that I consider SDC to be the greatest game distribution system ever. I can understand other points of view,