sxt178

I agree with a lot of the comments you have made, particularly the idea of permanently open wormholes to act as choke points, These would be very interesting on larger maps. The UP council needs work in my opinion. Rarely do you get an event that makes a real difference to the game. The only events which can result in a change in tactics becoming necessary are when a change of government is forced or, if you're an evil civ and are limited to 1 trade route. At least those are the only on

I only use starbases when I have a very small number of planets and need to squeeze every bit of productivity out of them.

I was always a big fan of being neutral. I recently tried being evil again and was amazed with the results. The Artificial slave centre is fantastic. It recently saved me in a game where I had only 4 planets and there were 5 races remaining with 10-18 planets each. With good or evil you have to strike early to make full use of your advanced weapons/defences. The NRC means that in the long term Neutral will win as the ultimate weapons are reached more easily and it's much easier to dig

the metallic box is quite cool actually. This is from the european paradox release, I'm not sure which other regions got this style.

I didn't know the collectors edition jewellery became available with 1.2, why did I pay extra for it in the first place then. grumble, grumble.

what were they supposed to do?

yes

The E3 video of SC looks brilliant. If C&C 3 is any good 2007 could be the year that revives RTS as a genre. wow, that's a lot of abbreviations.

sorry, didn't mean to write so much!

In my current game(Crippling, Medium, everything abundant, 9 races, medium tech rate)I found a precursor mine on my second planet which got me off to a good start. I was quite near 3 other races and was panicked into buying too many constructors and so I misjudged my colony rush and couldn't buy enough factories to kick my empire into high gear. I used my precursor mine to churn out ships to keep my military rating high. In retrospect I used the mine too early because it forc

I bought the game from play.com for £12.99 about 4 weeks after release. Bargain.

Keep pressing ctrl-N until you get something you like. I occasionally get cramped up at the start but most of the time i find it to be quite balanced. maybe you're just extremely unlucky.

Each module should roll individually. If you have 10 zero point armours you should roll between 0 and 9, 10 times. This is alot fairer than rolling than 0 to 90 once.

If they're in a war with a powerful enemy you could give them advanced defences against the enemy weapons especially if they're using a different set to you.

Hulls that you can design however you like and then save in the hulls list rather than the ships list which can become crowded. Also, allow ship names to be reused.

That's it basically. send freighters either as far as you can to generate more cash or send them to your neighbours to establish good relations. When the route is established you should see a coloured line, that's the trade route, build an economy starbase so its area of effect overlaps the trade route and add trade modules to the base to increase the income from the route.

If it isn't already get your espionage on the drengins to max. Scroll through their planets looking for their best industrial worlds. Cherry pick the best ones especially if you spot a precursor mine. This will make the most of the few troops you have and will boost your production whilst throwing a spanner in the drengin war machine. I assume you already have some ridiculously fast transports. Send these around a few of your worlds and pick up a small number of soldiers from each. This will lea

If you've finished the tech tree shouldn't you adjust research spending to 0 and pump up your production levels instead? this would clearly mean 0 RP per turn

Looks like it's time to invest in some lasers

I often bide my time until I have a huge technological lead then build some ridiculously powerful ships. 1 fleet is usually enough to destroy every other fleet in the galaxy. (occasional upgrades are needed to change weapon and shield types) I've still not ever reached level 170 that's very impressive.

do it. do it now!

why do you want to add something else that can't be seen? we had enough trouble with the precursor library.

I redevelop my planets. The AI sometimes builds a farm on a precursor mine after it works out that it can't afford to support a factory there. That would be fine if it built that factory later and made use of the bonus. If there aren't many planets 1 precursor mine can win the game for its owner.

I crush everything I can as soon as I can. If they surrender to another powerful civ it just makes things more interesting. I prefer to push someone off the map over 20-30 turns than just blitzkrieg them in 2-3.

take off all your ability points at the start.