I've created example images to illustrate what I'm talking about. The 'tech info' tooltips were a patch-added feature I believe, so it could always use a little polish. The tech-select screen is one most people probably don't spend a lot of time looking at, but it's very simple to make it much more n00b-friendly. Showing the cost on the 'tech banner' makes getting the best-fit tech choices less of a c
Knightsedge, that's exactly what I'm talking about. Of COURSE you can work around it, but that very workaround is a failure of the UI. It's irritating and it shouldn't exist: it's not like you have to carefully choose between two options: zero pop simply will not work, and you just wasted your time. The ability to drag to zero only performs one function: to prevent you launching empty. Thus, what should be a one-click function requires far more attention and use of the arrows than should be
Yes, I noticed the 'launch direction' thing, and it's pretty neat. I'm less interested in game-changes than play-changes: Stardock is going to make the game they want, and I'm going to like it or not. Either way, it should be as easy to use and play as it can be. It's pretty sad that many people don't appreciate how important the UI is to any piece of software - of course Stardock have plenty o
I've recently started playing the DA beta, and it's lots of new content and long-awaited features and fixes. However, when starting a new game, I notice some UI niggles that still exist. A quick search suggests they haven't been mentioned (at least recently). - Tech information display, particularly RU. When choosing your starting techs, you have to click on a tech to select it, then remember how many RUs it is to fit it into your starting set. When you right-click on a tech in a t
Random customs, with the ability to save them and keep ones that were interesting (yes, that means you have to be able to save them after the game has started, or even at the end) would be awesome.
The best way to start is to get piles of money: the best way to make money is trade. Start with a tradeship, pick at least engine and tradeskill. Take everything off it except the engine/fueltank. Do a google for 'plan' to see if you can see any good trades where you start, but as quickly as possible you want to fly to a business base and take out the largest loan you can and do a business study. This will leave you with several profitable routes and a pile of money. Simply t
SR2 is awesome. The best part is the unscripted war and random-seeded galaxy: I've had games where the Coalition is clearly winning from the start, and I'm left to my own devices. I've also had games where the Coalition loses half of it's territory almost immediately, and I have to prop up the military with fat donations and personal leadership to turn the tide. It's AWESOME. Some of the adventure puzzles are frankly INSANE, though. I hope everyone remembers calculus and algebra. <i
The AI often hugely undervalues deals - I've had offers (with massive, absurd diplomatic superiority) of 350 bucks for a class 16 planet right in the middle of their influence. I've sometimes been able to make money by deliberately making similar ships to theirs (ie, weaker than mine) and selling them... but you'd think you'd be able to really make money (ie, actual profit over manufacturing costs and time etc) but you can't. Even if they'e got 200,000 in the bank and are losing, they won't bu
The surrender system is just broken. I know everyone harps on about the secret hidden depths of the amazing surrender decisions... but all *I* see is someone starting a war, me jumping in YEARS later and contributing little (maybe capturing a few planets, slaping some fleets around etc), then the sap calls me up and says 'lolz we own you by surrendering to those guys that we really hate but haven't actually made any progress into our space! YOU LOSE!'. Clearly, the way to get surrende
O rly? Based on what? It doesn't answer his question, anyway. 'In orbit' can cover a pretty absurd amount of volume around a planet, and late-game with a sizable empire the planet could be host to thousands or millions of non-military spacecraft. You should at least be able to SEE the ships in orbit.
Sorry, the result of defaulting on loans is that you can't get more loans. This happened to whole governments in the past. You'd end up lost post-Revolutionary France, where your finance minister ran around assuring everyone you could repay your debts while taking out more, sinking your entire economy, depressing the value of your currency, breaking forgien trade, killing quality of life through inflation, ruining investment, all that jazz. Hence, stiffing your creditors is an extremely bad i
GalCiv2 loans are simple loans: any moron with a calculator is aware of how much the total repayments over x weeks are. The obvious 'early repayment' option is to allow this full value (principal + interest) to be repaid at will - hence the lender isn't losing money, and the borrower isn't getting credit for free. Adding some ridiculous 'you have to pay fifty percent more for no reason other than game balance' is not required. The Galciv loans strike me as mobile phone deal '$25 a week for tw
That's absurd. Credit and investment is the basis of a modern economy: characterising anyone who lends money to a government as a 'loan shark' is just ignorant. You certainly CAN pay loans back early, and it would be unusual for a business loan to penalise you for doing so. Get this - the lender gets x profit over 637 weeks, or can get that SAME profit RIGHT NOW in one lump sum. What do you think they would prefer? Why does anyone want to make the economic model MORE unrealistic? Have you
Does anyone know the cause of the frequent 'blank page' people get when browsing the forums in Firefox? I'm forced to use IE to get at several threads (even some of the journal threads).
Prolet, you should be proud to be on the bottom of that list - you don't have thousands of worthless scouts cluttering up the place! I'm not sure why the startup options seem so poor now, as they never really bothered me when the game came out. However, now I want to be able to use the seed options to actually define the type of game I'll be playing, and this is impossible without using a bloo
What. Word crashes? What does Word have to do with the forum software being pants? Why should I write my posts externally and c&p it into IE (like it's 1992) when no other forum on the internet has this behavour? Unlike others, I'm not interested in tolerating substandard solutions, and I'm curious why these forums are so crap and seeing them improved, instead of 'lol just workaround lol'. And why doesn't the form keep your text again? Once more, other forum software keeps it so you can pr
GHETTO EDIT - the tech problem is specifically with engines, apparently. Weapons don't seem to have the long list, but 'impulse drive' has a list of ships designs (including user ones) with a list of techs required after it. It's two pages long on 1280x1024.
Oh sure, but I've been away and probably missed the 'crap the dead turn is a bug' announcement. So long as it IS a bug, and they fix it eventually, I'm happy. The map seeding is a more serious problem - I've been experimenting, and setting everything to high results in absolute chaos every time you CTRL-N, with totally different galaxies emerging each time. You'd THINK they'd all have heaps of stars, habitables all over the show and every star with five planets, but you'd be wrong.
tlwhite, I can appreciate the possibility of partisan action within SK, but the NK military is simply appalling. Unless the NK knock out the SK military in the opening strikes, they'll get steamrolled. And again, the nukes are the deployed WMD of the US. Sure, they've got piles of rubbish gasses and newer products like VX, but I'm not aware of any deployment or planned deployment of these weapons. On the other hand, nukes are ready 24 hours a day to strike anywhere in the world. T
Marcathonas, if you start a new game in 1.2, at the start (with few techs) you'll have a huge list of techs for core designs in the tech pane. You should have a look - it's terrible, and worse than the older versions where they just listed what ships it lead to but not the additional techs.
A preview would be great - even a general one, like the continent shapes in Civ. Something showing the vague shape of the stars, the spread of planets/habitables and artefacts and start locations. At least then there would be feedback for your choices.
Well you'd expect that from random, wouldn't you? Although - here's a point - is random totally random (ie, a random number of stars) or a random choice of the other options (ie, 'random' gives 'rare' or 'common' etc stars). Who knows, because they're poorly described. And what is the behaviour of planets? Does the game generate planets according to 'planets' then convert a selection of them to habitable according to 'habitables'? Or is 'planets' just the empty, worthless ones? Why is the
Really? I guess so, but I've returned to the forums due to 1.2, and I managed to lose the same thing twice. Of course, it doesn't have it's contents when you press back (all phpBB forums do, so I'm quite used to it). It seriously challenges my understanding of the IT industry that Stardock can have such a terrible record with their forums. The early traffic problems were nowhere near as bad as 'not compatible with a whole browser'. I'd get sacked if I implemented software like thi
My point is that there are only one kind of WMD in the US arensal that is current atop missiles, in submarines and ready to load into bombbays. Of COURSE the US has all kinds of crazy weapons (although I'll point out VX isn't a WMD, since it's local and has low duration) but the only one they're going to use is nukes. Or do boomers carry a few anthrax missiles too?
The NK military is so hopeless the South Koreans could handle them by themselves. The only threat is massed chemical attacks on major cities like Seoul, but if NK uses WMDs the US will too. And the US only has one kind.
