Pnakotus

Which is why there's no importer or even a test to see if the files are cheats? 90% of players are going to remake their races, AGAIN. This is not optimal. And what's with the race styles? With all the lowend changes to TA, are styles still built on the DA hackjob and only work on the initial ships for AI players (ps, manual xml editing is not a game feature, if people have to do it, it's broken). Why would it, for instance, display the thumbnail for a Drath ship in the 'style select screen

Oh jesus. I have no idea what the issue is (it happened over on the Stardock.com forums too), but my carriage returns didn't work. Believe me, if I click 'edit' they're there and it's a properly-formatted series of paragraphs. Charming. Sorry, guys. In the edit window the paragraphs are triple-spaced now, but it's just a block of text in the forum.

I've seen some issues like the install problem show up on Impulse since launch, but I'm curious. Why do I have two separate installs of all three games, even though they were 'uninstalled'? The old ones were being launched by Impulse, so it knew where they were; they're still there. It's made a new x/stardock/totalgames/galciv tree and installed the new version there... for whatever vain reason makes developers always set default path to /we'recool/youloveus/rememberourname/ga

People who expected EU2 in space must be blind. The game is an extremely slow-paced RTS, it's not the pretend 'real time but not really' of the EU series. It isn't a spreadsheet - oh damn! :) The UI is fine enough. Minimaps are basically useless for anything requiring detail (ie, beyond 'there is a blob of red guys here', and since the game is node-based (the gravity wells), the empire tree provides 100% access to everything at all times. You can see where all your ships, buildings,

Is it *really* intentional that every time you load a game you're struck in the face by such a terrible bit of continuity? Oh yeah, we just got hyperdrive... four thousand turns ago. Why doesn't it at least use the most recent quarterly report? It really is a giant sign in the game saying 'indy software is unpolished'. You might be about to win an immense universe, but hell, human creatures just gave us the 'secret' of 'hyperdrive' and 'on this day' yadda yadda.

Hexes don't have to be visible, and so long as they don't have the directional problems square-based maps like Civ have I don't care what they use. AoW:SM's combat sucked balls. Reducing units to one figure removed 75% of the MoM combat's awesome: the per-figure bonuses instantly became far less important and the tweaking used to distinguish units less interesting. That said, I doubt Stardock is going to churn out a clone so uninspired, and at very least I'd expect dynamic stack sizes

They *are*? Wouldn't changing them mess up the basic races? Anyway, thanks for the pointer: I'm off to dig around.

That's awesome news. Rebuilding 100+ designs wasn't my idea of fun, but I have plenty that could really benefit from the animation functionality. The changeover from the old system to the 1.3 system, being unsupported to my knowledge, was enough to put me off DA for months after I bought it. Forcing people to use hackish workarounds to get the base three starting ships changed is pretty disappointing. It even appears to be a legacy problem (back from DL when it was just 'ship style 3

Really? Will I have to copy them manually to wherever TA looks, or will it natively read from DA sources? I dimly remember DL -> DA being quite a task for moving designs. The beta doesn't use DA designs natively at least. If they're supported, that's awesome. Did they ever fix the 'style not working for player unless you do a bunch of hackish workarounds' thing?

Will there be a way to import older ship designs and styles into TA? I guess they'd need to have neutral rotation information added, but a small applet should be able to convert and move them. I have 7 custom races with ship styles, and the idea of hacking xmls or making all the ships again does not appeal. I'm not sure if DA ever got a tool like this. Perhaps the editors that TA comes with will be back-compatible with older designs and styles, and able to write them out as TA-compatible one

I think the game itself is fine, but the engine and UI need work. I think many of the big gameplay changes should wait for a later game, while SD concentrate on polishing GC2. Pregame setup is fiddly, uninformative, and unfair. *Tech customisation - something many players never do, it's that important - involves eight million clicks. Display the point value of the tech next to it's name, problem solved. *No way of really knowing how the different map options inter-re

Am I a complete noob, or have all my savegames and design templates gone? The samegames don't really bother me, but since adding ship designs is so much more difficult in DA than DL I'd like to know how to get them back.

I'm downloading the newest builds now (250mb heightmaps lol) but I'm somewhat disappointed to see that custom maps still don't have thumbnails. Looking for 'that one with the spirals' is impossible. I'm not asking for dynamic thumbnails that change as you alter map settings (which would be neat), just a single thumbnail per custom map to show you what it is. No start positions, no big hints, just something identifiable. I was surprised when there were no such thumbnails (forcing everyone to

Most of the things I really want to see have been mentioned - making the Base/Custom races fair again, controls on 'tech revealation' in diplomacy, and UI tweaks to reduce the amount of clicking (suggested here ) Also, a design import/export system would make working with ship designs much more accessible than it is right now. Making the game easier to play is probably my biggest suggestion, and there are a few places wher

It isn't a 'big advantage' that they start with higher bonuses that will take several techs to catch, like +50 dip?? I want fairness - this is why the low-cheating AI is such a selling point - so why not have an even playing field *like GalCiv2*? And why is it now impossible to play Killer Humans instead of Diplo Humans, whereas before I could make the Drengin nice researchers or the Altarians pacifists? The game's flexibility has decreased. What benefit did the game get out of losing fairne

So it's an advantage that you can do with custom races what you can do with normal races... but the normal races get more? Sure, if you pick Yor and decide to take dip bonuses you might have less points to 'spend', but you've still got more picks worth of bonuses than if you chose custom. If you *appropriately* choose your normal race, you can start with both MORE PICKS and BIGGER BONUSES than is possible for customs. This is unfair. Frankly, that you think 10 vs 15 is 'a lot fewer'

Just pick an official race and tweak their abilities, name, portrait, etc. Viola, custom race with all the inherent abilities PLUS your bonus points. Theres no real difference in the end result as a "unique" race, other than you get more stuff. The only reason to be an actual "custom race" is to get to (exactly) pick your starting techs, but its rarely worth passing up the native race packages. So requiring a longwinded, non-native workaround

So, I need to use workarounds because the builtin races are 'just better'? I'm supposed to manually edit custom races to keep up with the 'way better' builtin races? I should try to counter the huge advantage they have instead of playing in an even field? I don't see the logic behind 'builtin excel at one thing (when they have half a dozen unmatchable bonuses) but customs can spread out (when they have less total points and can never match the builtins in individual bonuses)'. <br

Well, ST uses 'many worlds' anyway, so you're really creating a new branch not changing the 'original'. This is probably why time travel isn't used to solve wars etc, because creating a new timeline where you win doesn't help the guys in the original timeline. But 'temporal shields', ie shields that protect you from the very idea of cause and effect, consequence and logic, are utterly absurd. Sure, ST is pop stuff, but that's just waaaay out there. <img src="http://images.stardock.com

Someone should slap it in the library so lazy people like me can do it. I also yearn for MoO-style short ranged ships.

That doesn't balance it at all. In the Yor example, they can start with a soldiering bonus higher than any custom race can choose (by adding the highest bonus available to their pre-existing bonus). I'd have no problem if everyone ended up with 15 points of bonuses all up, but that doesn't happen, and the existing races can get higher bonuses than anyone else. In GC2 everyone had 10-ish points of bonuses and full customisation, now the existing races have 'inherent abilities' but you can stil

I'm not sure if this is a 'change' or a bug, but the documentation doesn't mention it. The existing races recieve their racial bonuses *and* give you about 10 points to buy new ones. This means that custom races are significantly disadvantaged and it's possible to start with huge bonuses (for instance choosing Yor, getting a big soldier bonus, then buying a new soldier bonus). I checked GC2, and it wasn't done that way: the existing races had their points pre-allocated, and you could get 'ref

Remember, they had shields that protected them from *logic*. That's not 'bending the rules', that's fairy-tale nonsense. What you really want is a Time Control Room. Monitor all of history and throw out time loops and edits at the press of a button. Repair First Law damage. Save the world!

This may shock you, but your ignorance doesn't bother me at all. It's just funny to laugh at illiterate people on a text-only medium like this. I thought there were new custom maps already? The Library has a few up. How'd people make those without an editor?

Wow, I've never seen AOL babies respond with abuse before! Wait. It's our fault you're illiterate? And they need custom map thumbnails before a map editor. SO THERE LOLZ PH34R M3!!!111