OnlyAnEgg

Personally, I moved the NLC furthur down the tech tree and upped the research cost a little bit. Balanced out quite nicely for me. The NLC is still cheaper (costs half the research to go from Invention matrix to NLC as opposed to going to discovery sphere) and they'tre still better than discovery sphere's as far as output is concerned, you just can't get them quite so early. To those who feel it's overpowered, I suggest doing the same.

I agree and I've tried, but unfortunately those planets are currently unmoddable as far as I can tell. You can't do anything with them from a modders point of view, not even to just get rid of them entirely. The existence and complete uselessness of these planets are hardcoded. Hopefully with the next patch that and many other pieces of the puzzle will open up for us to play with, on top of just fixing the bugs with the current mod structure.

You could mod the guide book to give the race that gets it a nice espionage bonus, which would do basically what you suggest, sounds like a decent idea. Personally I have it modded to be a smaller version of Eyes of the Universe (+5 Sensor bonus) and my Secret Police Center (another useless wonder) gives an espionage bonus to the civ that builds it. Don't know if Ai use espionage that much, seems like a halfhearted feature of the game overall, but my mod makes it better than useless.

Adding Hotseat and Lan play to the game would NOT take the drastic amount of resources they claim it will. You have the code, instead of checking the ai routines, dump to the interface and let the UI (next player) decide what to do next. They could slap it on with a patch, and if that is all they are going to do with multiplayer then they can forget about anyone paying $20 for it. They *should* do at least that though, if only to appease people so they can ignore the hard work of doing a really

On the subject of your medium class ship simulation (fleets C and D). The conclusions I came up with are that the defense of fleet D (12) is woefully inadequate to deal with a 49 beam attack with only 16 hp's per ship. Therefor, the tradeoff to take defenses over more weapons in this circumstance wouldn't be worth it. The mean attack value of fleet C is ~25 - ~6 = 19 damage per shot. While for fleet D it's ~ 13 damage per shot. I expect that even using a mod that gave the fleets more hp's that f

I also would like to see the borders defined by our cultural borders actually mean something other than as an indicator to which way the influence is pushing. I really see no reason to add *another* superficial line. More diplomacy options is definitely the way to go here, something which has been asked for before. The current trade embargo button, which as far as I know just keeps that ai from creating trade routes with your worlds and removes any that are currently there

Can you really? Because I'm pretty sure that there's no other building that fits the "one-per-planet" mold you're looking for, so it's entirely possible that the developers never coded such a building type. Um....Starport? There are more, but that should be obvious. The code specifically, had you looked is. {PlacementLimit}1{/Pla

No, actually the upgrade path follows through, which is nice and something that was hardcoded properly as far as I'm concerned (not that a lot of things aren't, it's just nice not to have to create some workaround on this one is all I'm saying). In other words even if you never researched any research techs, and had only basic labs, and then got Neutrality Learning Centers from stealing or trading the tech, your bases will automatically start upgrading from the basic lab to the NLC. The game is

Multiplayer is not supported or even possible, not even hotseat (aside from using a cheat). It might be added later but not at this time. This is a single player game.

Bah, for some reason I can't edit that post ( kinda funny given the context hehe ) The line should be {S_UpgradeTarget}Discovery Sphere{/S_UpgradeTarget} replace all those { and }

I agree that auto upgrading should have been in there for the NLC's. You're also quite correct that it's easy to fix. Go to your GalCiv2/Data/English folder and copy a backup of PlanetImprovements.XML so you can mess with the original (using the mod folder for this file is currently broken at this time). Go to the very bottom where they added NLC's and add this line (any text editor will do, Notepad works fine) {S_UpgradeTarget>Discovery Sphere

I've done that sort of. Won a couple games (3 actually, conquest/diplomatic victory all 3 times) suicide level large galaxy (can't do gigantic) 9 opponents, tech trading off. I won largely due to 2 factors... 1) It's not hard to sweet talk the ai with a large diplomacy advantage, diplomacy ai is a little stoopid...and the biggest factor 2) First strike allowed me to win most battles even while out teched and out gunned. I tried each game with different tech rates ( normal, very slow, very fast )

in fact, I'm REALLY surprised they aren't forced to be limited to planets and mining resources Now that would be cool. Would really give class 0 planets a purpose and would be a self imposing limit on starbases instead of the current 4 per sector limit, which seems more arbitrary and based on technology limits (ours not the games). Unfortunatel

I just tried it with my orbital fleet manager (was trying to make them more available and common, but not use up a slot since I haven't figured out how to make the initial colony take on the same behavior). What I found was that the Enhance level tag makes them ONLY able to be placed on "yellow" squares. Now you don't actually have to terraform those tiles before making the placement, but some planets (mars? etc) don't have yellow squares, so this wouldn't work for my purpose, cool trick though.

Thank you, here the problem seems to be graviton IV, which gets a size jump from 6 down to 4, where as everything else in that area gets a 1 point size jump, making it superior to the next line of tech. Changed it in my mod, thanks.

So from a modding standpoint to bring subspace blaster into line we would need to bring that tech down to between phasor VII and disruptors yes? Interestingly, when looking at GC2types.xml, that is exactly where it's placed, even the internal name is phasor7 (phaser0 being the first phaser). The other way would be to increase the power of subspace blaster to make it fit between disruptor III and subspace annihilator (I wonder what ever happened to that weapon, seems to be missing? The tech is th

How do you counteract an influence resource? The immediate answer is either you get one of your own, or take theirs away from them, and make it yours...the influence resource then becomes PIVOTAL, which is the complaint, I believe. A good way to counteract it might be to mod it into something smaller than it is or get rid of it entirely. Personally I never liked the entire influence system in this game. Always semed pretty hokey to me that some starbase could cause the alien planets to rebel..<b

But this entire conversation needs to go into the Game Talk forum, not the modding forum Why not here? You could make a mod that limits influence buildings to 1 per planet and see if that improves things...there is a tag for that in the xml file...or just remove the influence buildings totally so they can't be built at all and see what happens.

Anyone that thinks you can tweak it by upping the HPs or changing att/def values by all means mod the game files and let us know what you find out On furthur thought, adding hp's *should* at least marginalize the effects of first shot...so I did just that, created a mod that gives all ships (starbases also) 10 times as many hp's...but changes n

Couple other thoughts that this change might make. (just off the top of my head) I'm guessing that defense would be more of an issue than before...the idea of better hp's might be a good one but is something that could be tweaked later. Speed would be an issue still but not nearly as much. Slow ponderous fleets heavy on defense designed to kill unmoving but well defended planets with few losses might be the way to go. There would definitely be more of a trade-off there for me in any ca

Hey guys...it's me, the one who started this discussion. I'd Quote you all but there's a lot of good stuff mentioned here. I've played Stars! (gotta include that exclamation ) and I remember the initiative system, and late game you'd have hulls that were all initiative boosters with 1 weapon, and stack massive numbers of those suckers in a fleet, first strike was everything in the late

I've played many games from "tough" to suicidal in sandbox mode (not metaverse, could care less) and invariably the ai always makes the same mistakes that don't provide the challenge they were designed for. There are quite a few of these, from underestimating the military or potential military might of their opponents (which might be corrected at least partially by changing the military might calculation as per this thread Link<

One way to quickly clean house on old ship designs that is currently in the game is to temporarily set up a Battle of the Gods game. Gives you all tech right from the start and your old designs are available to be deleted or modified.

Actually there's more bugs in the tech trading than that. Ever notice that the ai value certain techs WAY more than they should? A few early game examples I can think of off the top of my head....Xeno Research, New Propulsion techniques, Basic Logistics. I often play humans and use their diplomacy bonus to make up for the slow tech start they get. But those three in particular I found much better to simply research myself than to ever bother trading for, in fact you can trade for Ion Drive