Gre_Magus

Looks like a great update. I'm very interested in the fact that the different AI's are being improved in different ways. Should add more variety to the game. Will you ever be able to post what the key differences between the AI's are? It think that will help players pick AI opponents that give them the kind of challenge they are looking for, and especially help them decided what "AI personality" to give to custom opponents. Again, though, I'm definitely intrigued by this explicit dif

In your current game I think you can delete the "upgrading to industrial sector" in the list of improvements on the bottom right of the planet screen and keep the manufacturing center (or whatever) is already on the tile. Don't delete the upgrading tile, however, I think that will delete what ever is already on the tile too.

No problem!

Don't underestimate the economic toll of conquering new planets. A planet full of factories with only 1 billion population is going to be spending (in maintenance and production costs) way more than it's making. I suppose you could stop building (social and military projects) on that planet if you've got enough production on your other worlds.

Sounds like a bug. Care to post the exact stats for the two ships and what components you have on them? If you've researched impulse and warp drives you should have a +2 speed boost, making your ships have a "base" speed of 3 as you described. Adding a warp drive to any ship should give it +3 speed. Are you actually put a warp drive on the small ship? If you put an ion drive on it, it would have a speed of 4. Otherwise it's a bug, or I'm missing something.

... not to double post, but I also wanted to mention that I once had a lot of fun playing as the "Imperium Terrestre." I modified the Terran Alliance to make them more militaristic and pretended they were the Roman Empire which had survived all the way to the 23rd century. I had a great time coming up with Latin names and designations for all the ships. A fighter was "navis stellaris aggressor" and a defender "navis stellaris defensor". Medium ships were "navis stellaris pugnans". I name

If using the Terrans I give the ships navy designations - F-1, B-3 (F being tiny, B for bomber being small, FF for frigate for medium ships, DD, destroyer for large ships, and BB battleship for huge ships). Then I make up a name, trying to spread things out so they're not all American names. If I'm really feeling into the role-playing experience I will actually rename all of my ships from Medium on up with a unique name. Frigates are named for cities, destroyers for countries, and battleships

The Minor Races could sell them to other Major Races for a profit. But I don't know if that's actually happening... The value of the colonization techs should vary according to what kinds of planets are available, though.

Sounds like an interesting strategy. The only thing with the 1% military 99% social idea is that you won't get any race, planetary, or starbase bonuses to your military production, since when the social production gets shifted over to military you don't get any of the half-price bonus production. I don't know if you will get any bonus research from focusing on research w/o any labs. Another problem is that you loose the possibility of ever getting more than 4 research points / tile (n

Quick question: how exactly does upgrading work? Does upgrading say, a basic factory to a factory, cost as much as a building a factory on an empty tile (75 mps) or is there some sort of discount? What about upgrading unrelated improvement types, say, a farm to a factory or a research academy to a morale building?

Good post. I totally agree. The pirate and peacekeeper ships are exactly what a game-changing event needs: not lots of cheap ineffective ships that you can cut through like a hot knife through butter, but ships that are as good as or better than the best stuff the major civs have. Maybe the Dread Lords could start with a few ships when they they pop-up. Give 'em a few 300 attack 150 defense frigates and they'd be a real threat until endgame. ...and make the AI research the plague

I definitely agree that the AIs do not respond well to influence starbases. I also understand Draginol's concern about wanting to provide the player a "non-military" way to expand. It think working on AI influence base usage should be a priority to solving both these problems. I'd be thrilled if the AI would build (and upgrade!) some influence starbases to keep its planets from being flipped. I wonder if some of the problem comes from the way the AIs choose which techs to research.

In response to the original post: - as someone else said, trade goods apply to the whole empire. As an aside, it would be nice to be able to see a list what trade goods you have active, you know, both the ones you built and the ones you traded for. - You pay for half of bonus production and research. If you have 24 manufacturing points coming out of factories and sliders set to 50% military, you get 12 military production points and it costs you 12bc. If you have a 50% bonus

I think Brad once said that the sensor limit of 15 is meant to keep the game from slowing down to a crawl as the AI tries to evaluate all the things it can see. I had forgotten about the bonus of seeing all ships on the mini-map. According to the planetaryimprovemens.xml file the bonus is +10 with an ability factor of "0.20" That seems easy enough to change. Where is the mini-map bonus listed? Is it hard coded as an effect of the improvement? Interestingly enough, it is vulnerable

I almost always build the Eyes of the Universe wonder. I've never seen the AI build it. With it, I never have to worry about using sensor modules and I can almost literally fly in circles around the AI if I want to. In my recent game from the DA campaign, the turn after I built the Eyes of the Universe I noticed an unescorted transport flying towards one of my undefended planets - sneaking through what was my fog of war, but now plainly visible and easily destroyed. Is the bo

Hey, I don't know if my advice will help, but I've been having some problem with invisible (actually, non-existant) ships when I load saved games. It seems to be due to the shipstyles of all the players changing when I load a saved game - this means any custom ships I've made before saving cannot be found in the new file and come up "blank" - that is, they work in the game but have no model and no hard points to add things too. Through e-mail bug submission CodeCritter has advised me to re-

I'm just playing the campaign in the DA final on tough (the highest level before the AIs get bonuses) and while it hasn't been too hard so far, it has been much more fun. The AI is still a little fast and loose with transports, especially if I have eyes of the universe and can see them from far away, but they have gotten much, much better at planetary improvements. It's not just a matter of building choice, they're actually running their economies well enough to fill their planets with improve

I just played through the first mission of the Dark Avatar campaign. I saved towards the end of the mission, turned off the computer, and came back to it later. When I loaded up the quicksave, I noticed that the custom ships I had designed (even though I had used preloaded templates since I was in a hurry to get through the mission) were gone! They still existed in the game, but there is no image for them on the ship builder (icon on left and in main view), on the game screen, or in the icons

Nice to see that Dark Avatar works in the metaverse .

Seeing how frustrating video driver incompatibility was for Stardock was when GCII came out, I can see why Brad is excited about Vista and all the system rating stuff. Obviously people who know their computers don't care about stuff like that, but I imagine a developer cares about people being frustrated when they buy a game and it doesn't work (because of system incompatibility) and then posting about how buggy the game is all over the internet. I totally understand why people don't l

tetleytea - different strategies for different situations. For me (playing crippling or maso) the load of maxed-out star bases comes towards the endgame when it's me versus the one AI who's gotten real big by taking out his neighbors. Playing as good or neutral, I find that another good or neutral civ in that situation will start out with average-positive relations with me, but as it becomes clear that I am its main rival, those relations will drop like a rock (I'm talking about the last few g

Economy star bases are extremely useful all through the game because of their multiplicative effect. You just have to arrange them correctly. If you can get even 12 star bases (in three different sectors) to cover your technology or manufacturing capital you can get a 325% bonus when maxed out, and if you get 16 maxed-out star bases, it's 432%. A quick example: a planet with 15 or so discovery spheres (20 rp if I recall correctly), running at 50% research would pull down 150 rp's fo

Frogboy/Draginol - you often talk about the fact that the AIs (plural ) in GalCiv are not scripted and ever since you've been working on the AIs for DA you have mentioned that allowing "extra algorithms" lets the computer plan more turns ahead, so to speak. What does this mean for Planetary Improvements? Does the AI improve its planets with a long term goal in mind (so to speak, I know AIs don't have mi

Lenius - you don't necessarily have to wait for 4 factories to make a manufacturing capital worthwhile. Remember, the Civcapital puts out 24mp and one of the factories is on a bonus tile. So you have a total of 24 + 6x2 + 6 = 42mp right there. 25% of 42 is 10, so building a manufacturing capital at this point gives you 5/3 the mps of a third factory. But not only that, this planet has 3 mining bases giving 10mps each, bringing the total output of the planet to 72mps (as the bottom of the su

I just watched the "live unveiling" of Gamespot's nominees for the best games of the year, and sure enough, Galactic Civilizations II is one of the nominees for "Best strategy game of the year." Way to go!