Seth Gaines

[quote]It's absolutely pathetic.Your strategy?...Probably. First, 45% morale is bad. It means that your population growth is very low and on some planets of yours you'll even lose people.But since people = money you're dooming yourself. Try to maintain 100% morale as long as possible (double growth!). Finance your early expansion with tech selling, anomaly hunting, and other forms of diplomacy.But get your morale up, that's the key to a healthy economy.[/quote] I know about morale, but

The beginning of the game is now incredibly frustrating. The economy absolutely sucks. As the Korx, I was able to colonize a grand total of 5 other worlds before my economy tanked completely. Even with taxes as high as possible (in keeping with 45% morale), and my economy at 0, I'm losing 45bc/turn. After about 80-100 turns, I'll slowly start to break even, and can raise my economy up to something like about 20%. By the time I produce another colony ship, a few hundred turns may have passed

It is not the mega events that are a problem. It is the surrendering. I'm kind of amazed that you haven't had frustrating AI surrenders before this. They love to give up on the second turn of a war. The Drath will completely screw up any game that allows surrenders.

I like having a lot of room between the tight clusters, mostly so the AI will leave me the hell alone while I am in my 100 turn economic crash. That said, the distribution, especially on immense, is crappy. Most of the clusters end up crammed together on 1/2 of the map, there's a little bit of stuff on 1/4, and 1/4 is just empty. If they were more evenly distributed, you'd still have a lot of space, but you wouldn't end up with 6 close neighbors. There's always one guy who ends up with half

Actually, loading a save from within the game (at least a save of the same game), seems to screw everything up. If you launch a ship after loading, and attempt to give it orders, it will give you the out of range message. You have to quit the game, and start fresh.

It will always hang if you accidentally 'blind' navigate your ship into a star. Happens a lot when I'm using ships to explore. The 'Find' button will not work in these circumstances.

It had been a turn or two. The ship had 2hp left, and survived the battle. It was in the fleet until the next turn. Having trouble reproducing it, mostly because of the insane damage the defender does. It generally does 40-60, which kills the ship outright.

If you load a saved game from within the game, and immediately attempt to place a spy, the game will crash, at least for me.

Playing as the Yor, I'm involved in a few wars. Invading a Korath planet, I stole Hardened Hulls (I have tech trading off). This increased the hit points of my attack ships from 23 to 26. I then attacked a Krynn planet. They have absolutely insane defenders, with attack around 120 and defense at 30. I destroyed the defender, but it did 23 points of damage on its shot. The next turn, my badly damaged ship was gone. I suppose it had something to do with the bonus HP not being applied consis

No, it's just flavor. The Thalans have a 30% penalty to growth. I think there might be a race or two out there with bad diplomacy.

I might use those, but I often build high speed defenders that I then use to pick off strays. Or I form all the defenders in a system into a fleet and take out the enemy fleet. Maybe they should make a new 'Defender' hull type.

The same is true of planets. I had this happen with a planet which was awarded me by the UP, and I eventually lost. I still had phantom sensors active there for the rest of the game.

That would be my normal strategy. I trade for every possible bonus. But, to see how immersive it is, I'm playing with tech trades off (for the first time). I've been pleasantly surprised. It's fun to keep each race unique, but the new economic rules have put a serious hurt on some of the money-marginal races.

I love the fully built out starbases in the early to mid game. Just leave a maxed starbase of any sort on the border with your enemy, and watch it eat their entire fleet. The AI is obsessed with them, and will continue sending little fleets of small ships to give you free experience. Later on, yes, they are pathetically fragile.

Because it says '+ 28% Population', not '+28% Population Growth', and all the events are about the amount of space you have on the planet. Given the problems large populations cause, the growth bonus is much better.

Oh, and here's another little bug: In the text that you get at the beginning of the new year, when the robot is explaining an influence victory, he uses the phrase: '...falls under the influence of the dominATE civilization...'

Does the population bonus or penalty you get from random events actually do anything? Is it actually meant to be a growth rate effect, and not a cap effect? The way it reads, I'd expect my colony to have a cap greater (or less than) 6b. If it actually is applied to the growth rate, it needs to be clearer. If that is the case, I'll assume it's working.

I know what you mean. If I had a dollar for every time I moved my space miner instead of the new colony ship I just launched...

I've gotten pretty far into a game as the Yor, and even with full economic research and an efficiency center on every planet, I cannot get above 85%, and this is with NO military. I have 34 worlds out of 570, so I'm one of the smaller empires. I have a few trade routes running, and they help some (probably keep me from having to run at 70%). With tech trading off, I cannot buy an economic treaty from a minor, even when some survey ship luck got me above 4,000bc. I was able to get a few of th

[quote] While this is not really a bug per se, I've also noticed that research has become substantially faster in this Beta, which in my opinion is not a good thing. I noted that one of the things changed according to the change log was how research costs were calculated. Even on very slow research, the research just seems way to fast to be enjoyable. For example, on the "painful" difficulty setting, I didn't even build a warship until I had already achieved photonic torpedos, which was a

I like being at peace, and if that's the intent, I don't mind, but with upkeep now... I can't afford any warships at all, much less one defender for each world. I'd have to cut back to 15% to fight a war, at which point I'd never finish any ships anyway.

I'm with you guys. The maintenance is ridiculous. Just the initial flagship and miner is 14bc/turn. Start building colony ships, and you're really screwed. I've played well into several games and never gotten my economy running above 55%.

What were these people doing over MY holidays? ;)

My first game trying out the Altarians featured fully 1/4 of the map as a giant empty area with three stars tucked way down in the corner. I know some poor sucker spawned there, and will never leave that prison. I was playing on abundant with tight clusters. Immense maps seem to just be a huge map's worth of stars in even more space. The map needs at least 20-30 more star systems to allow everyone a little room to expand. I often spawn right next to two or three other races, simpl

I understand that the Altarians and Drath have a shared history, but it seems that the Altarian tech tree (at least so far in my game) is nearly identical. Not sure why they'd want to build Drath temples.