mikeswi

Yes, because that planet can't feed them. Remove a farm from a planet and you'll lose the same number of population that the farm was feeding on the next turn.

I have the beta and the AI most certainly does still do a massive land grab as early as possible. That was supposed to changed to where they wouldn't do that. Every habitable planet in the galaxy - of any size - is colonized within the first 40-50 turns. That's annoying all by itself. Let me tell you what I find more annoying. That massive landgrab is done exclusively in my direction. I got tired of being crowded early on and bein

Trade Research as far as you can into the trade techs and build trade modules for all your economy starbases. As long as it doesn't crowd into someone else's territory, build more economy starbases with trade modules along your trade routes. Trust me, that alone can build up the treasury. Do enough of this and you won't have to tax your people at all. Population = tax Put one (and only one) farm on most of your planets, along with

It could be you'd researched a new planetary improvement tech and all your colonies were automatically building the new improvements. That tends to happen to me, because I build a bunch of stuff on my older planets, after their population goes up a bit.

A Ranger really isn't all that tough. It's only defense is armor. No shields, no point defense. So you go at it with ships that are heavy on beams and missiles, because mass drivers won't be as effective. Disruptors or even phasors will take it out just fine.

When I send a freighter to another world, who benefits? Me, them, or both of us? During one game, I chose most of the evil ethical choices to get the bonuses, because I was tired of getting whomped early on. I didn't research the ethics tree, but apparently you're evil, good or neutral despite not "officially" picking one. The United Planets decided that evil governments should be limited to 3 routes and it destroyed my economy. S

I tried to upgrade a ship (designed before I installed the beta patch) and it told me that every module was too large for the ship, even though I had a capacity of 55. Screenshot: http://www.mikehealan.com/pix/ss/upgradesize.jpg Here's the debug log, plus what I think is the section where I tried to upgrade the ship: Debug Message: Version v1.1 BETA-1 last updated on: Fri Mar 24 19:54:46 2006 Debug Message: Could

I'm starting to get disgusted with the UP. Case 1) I'm trying to build a defense network to defend against constant Dread Lord attacks on my core worlds. The UP suddenly decides that you can only put three modules per starbase. Gahhhhhhh Case 2) I chose the evil ethical choices early on, to get the advantages. Later, the UP decides that evil governments should be limited to three trade routes and my economy was devastated. By tha

There *is* an option to prompt to upgrade starbases. Options > Game > top left corner. You'll still get prompted if something costs, but free upgrades just ask you which module you want.

Trust me, you don't want pirates. Unless they spawn right over your enemy's most productive planet. They have impossibly advanced ships with impossible weapons, impossible miniaturization and impossible logistics. I know they say the AI doesn't cheat, but.... a fleet with logistics of 72??

That is annoying when someone parks a warship near one of your planets. Especially when they start killing freighters to that planet belonging to their enemies. What I usually do here is put a few of my ships near it, then give them to their enemy and hopefully that'll drive it off or get rid of it entirely. I don't

Yeah, I knew I was forgetting something. Starport: I'd like to be able to select multiple ships and launch them all at once, instead of just one at a time.

I gotta say, you guys rock. So many features of this game seem to be designed specifically to fix what otherwise would be a nasty annoyance. The little icons over planets, the rally points, the ability to turn off certain annoying features (GNN News, quarterly reports, etc), the fact that you can see how long each planetary improvement would take to build. And you not only admit when something is a bug, you call it a "screwup". Other publi

That's a slick feature, other races giving you support when you're fighting their enemies. Now if only it worked..... It shouldn't count starbases when figuring up which ship is the most powerful. After a game, if you look at the summary of what everyone ended up with, everyone's most powerful ship is an economy starbase. If I'm in a fight and someone wants to help me out, I'd much rather have starships than starbases. The Altari

Basically, their defenses aren't as good as your weapons from the sound of things. I designed a really nasty little fighter with four disruptor III's, Zero point armor and Ultimate invulnerability shield. It got jumped by a huge fleet of pirates. There were 15 of them, 1 of me and my one fighter destroyed that entire fleet without damage. Their weapons just couldn't get through the shield. So, defense matters. It just has to be powerful enough to take

but #3 military (I simply cant pump them out fast enough). Go to the civilization manager and look at all your colonies. Find the one with the highest production rate, then surround it with economy starbases with all possible manufacturing modules. You're production will skyrocket. See this pic to see

One more thing I'm confused about. When I send a freighter to another world, who benefits? Me, them, or both of us? I chose most of the evil ethical choices to get the bonuses, because I was tired of getting whomped early on. I didn't research the ethics tree, but apparently you're evil, good or neutral despite not "officially" picking one. The United Planets decided that evil governments should be limited to 3 routes and it devastated my e

I wish I could save the battle replays to a movie file. I just had the most AWESOME battle with a pirate fleet. Pirate Fleet: 8 fighters with Laser MK IV x 4 and superior deflectors x 2 + 7 Heavy fighters with....Phasors? I forget, but it was nasty. Plus heavy shielding and point defense. Me: 1 light fighter. Disruptor III x 4 + Zero Point Armor + Ultimate Invulnerability Shield Result: Total shock and awe - shock for

And your ship still takes 2 weeks to build? Must be quite the beast It is. The description I gave it was simple: RUN!

Never doubt the power of an economy starbase. Or five of them, in the case of this screenshot. (Dialup warning)

w00t! Reinstalled the game and now it'll reload save files. And I think I know the cause of the crash, if not the reason that cause exists. *DEBUG ERROR: ***Unable to find required tech ImpossibleTech for PirateShip. *** *DEBUG ERROR: ***Unable to find required tech ImpossibleTech for Starbase. ***

Thanks

I'm confused about trading routes. The value of the trade route is proportional to the length of the route, as well as the population of both the destination and home planet of the trade ship. -snip-. The income returned each turn by the route is proportional to the distance of the trade ship from the home planet. </TD

That didn't help, at least not with my latest save game. Maybe it's corrupted. I'll play a new game and see what happens. FYI, here is what Windows shows me when the error reporting thing comes up. I don't know if it helps anything: [url]http://www.mikehealan.com/stuff/errordump.txt[/url]

I didn't know about the new video drivers (too busy playing the game!). I'm downloading that now. I really, REALLY hate to mess with my sound drivers. I went through BSOD/reboot/BSOD hell the last time I updated them (Windows Update misidentified the sound card). I'll do that as a last resort, if nothing else fixes this.