I dunno, a couple are funny, like the higher end missile tech, where all the researchers were breakin' out champeign right before their project blew up... but yeah... they are really rushed. The ones with funny stories I like, personally. The ones like the above mentioned "self-deprecating" techs, however, do take away from the atmosphere of the game.
Man i must play this game way too much... through 10 or so games on huge galaxies, i've seen about 4 or 5 bonus 700% research tiles.
While the idea of a jack-of-all trades building is interesting, i like the way the game is already set up. The learning centers ARE a tad powerful though, so maybe a simple cost increase might help.
This is very interesting, and i especially like the graph provided with your post #16 experiment. It really helps to show where attack and defense start to even eachother out. At least in absolute victory tearms. I agree with moral55 that the cost of victory is an important factor to look into. Another thing I would like to see is how 2 fleets with the same logistics, but different ship sizes, compare. Using the same tech level, I put together four fleets to try out against one an
well it would be nice if the interface color could be changed in mid-game, as overly bright colors (such as the drengin red) tend to be annoying, and real dark colors become... erm... invisible.
I can vouch for Kanaric's initial observations, that it seems that the stronger AI's go exclusivly for beam weapons/shields at first. However, in a large game i've seen them change defenses against a smaller AI enemy using mass drivers. I've never seen an AI change weapons though, and probably 75% of the time they use beams. I dunno if this is because they trade eachother the tech or what. Either way, these are what I've seen in the games I've played at any rate, and could just be coincidenc
