Ari

You can't make this stuff up

One of the AI's gave me all of their planets when they lost, and I set about upgrading their discovery spheres to learning centers. I consistantly had the game crash between turns on the turn that the center on one particular planet was finished upgrading. Removing the upgrade order let the game continue past that point. Anyone else seen anything like this?

I finally found the option that lets you keep functional components. Why on earth is that *off* by default (and the "keep turns from auto moving" option being off by default, but that's a different gripe)? Even this is pretty clunky, though, since when you upgrade, you'll want to strip most of those functional components anyway as your tech gets better (which is why you upgraded in the first place ). I like the idea of creating templates. Otoh, if I make "cargo+trade", I'll still need to m

Other than the need to estabish a trade route more quickly, is there any benefit to giving freighters a ton of engines? Late in the game when range is more or less unlimited, it's no big deal, but when I have to choose between range and speed, it's more an issue. So do freighters that are twice as fast have some sort of benefit? If I understand trade routes correctly, the answer is no, since you'd merely be affecting the period of the income wave, rather than the amplitude. Anyone know for sure?

OK, the obvious 'duh' answer: because then you can use them in the next game. That's great, but the next time I get to the point where I can build "nova 3's" (or whatever) I might have a better drive technology, which means that I could make the exact same ship, but with an extra pc/wk. Or I might have more miniaturization compared with when I initially designed the ship, and so I could cram more weapons/engines/range into the hull. So the "nova 3's" would be as bad as the pre-made sh

I couldn't agree more. In defense of the way things stand, however, you're not quite as blind as it first seems. When the parenthesis text indictates your high diplomacy is giving you an advantage, then you're almost certainly getting better than 1:1 beakers for beakers in tech. Granted, this is modified by certain things (apparently the AI values weapons techs more, and god only knows how it values money, ships, influence, etc when converting to tech

I haven't actually tried this, but in principle, could I buy influence points for bc's, and then turn around and sell those same ip's back for more bc's than I paid (due to my high diplomacy)? If all transactions are better than 1:1, it seems like it should be possible, and I could relieve a race of all of its stuff. Anyone play around with this?

Although they're not obvious based on the startup screen, I'm fairly sure each race does indeed have locked bonuses (can somebody with more experience confirrm?). So far, I've only played as the Terrans, so I can't say for sure, but when you select a 60% diplomacy for them, when you actually start the game, you see a +85%. I assume this is true of each of the races and that the "blurb" +/-'s in the startup screen lead to tangible bonuses above and beyo

I also assume that a high diplomacy AI also gets better deals on techs/alliances from other AI's, which indirectly aids it against you.

I don't think I've ever been able to successfully return to the game after alt-tabbing. I get music and a black screen. Which wouldn't be soooo bad ("just don't alt tab") except any number of programs can grab focus and force me out of the game (AIM being a huge offender). Is this a known issue, and is there some way around this?

I've seen this one too. Suddenly the entire galactic map turned light blue on me. Because it's the first game I ever played, and because I saw no skull-and-crossbones icons, I figured it was a glitch, and didn't even look to see if it was really "there" or not (for all I know all my planets were at 3.99x foreign influence). A few turns later it receded back to normal levels.

Try using "guard" instead of sentry. I believe that one only wakes ships when an enemy flies by. On the other hand, I've had exactly this issue with guard, even when I wasn't at war with anyone and it drives me nuts.

I also seem to recall reading that in the upcoming patch, it'll be harder to stave off militarily stronger races with influence.

In the wikipedia, there's a page that outlines exactly how many farms any quality planet needs to get to its maximum population (which has a hard limit based on planet quality that won't change when more farms are added). The original poster is asking (and I'm curious as well) if there's a way of knowing this *in game* before you plunk down another farm and discover that your population won't increase.

I was told (and will repeat) that the way to do this was to plunk techs down, and then alter the BC slider until you find exactly where it goes from red to green. This is a huge pain when you're used to civ's "what will you give me for this" option, but it seems like a manual way of doing the equivalent function. I'm still learning the game, but I'm discovering that not only are there multiple factors in determining the worth of a tech, di