Big Jim Slade

It seems to me like small ships do pretty well throughout the game already. It's been posted before, but I think a carrier mod would be really cool for small ships. Basically have a large module (maybe 50-60 hull points in size) that allows a large ship to lend its engine speed and logistics speed to all tiny ships in the fleet. Then your small ships can be flying guns and still be able to go on the offensive, if there's a big ship in the fleet to supply them. The trade off would be th

Also, since your tax base goes up by the square root of the population, losing 1 billion people really hurts when you only have 5 billion people. (24% drop in revenue). However, a booming population when you have low populations is equally helpful. basically, rush buying colony ships is most damaging when you have half of your empire in space not paying taxes.

Here's a trick I use that has probably been mentioned above: 1. Redesign the colony ship to make it cheap and fast. 2. buy a factory and a colony ship round 1. run your taxes up to red. 3. get a few more colony ships out over the next few turns. send out colony ships undermanned. 4. once you have a few colonies, do not rush buy stuff on them (except maybe starports if you have econ bonuses. they're cheap.) 5. Cut your taxes down to 100% approval levels. Let that ride a w

I think the surrender should go to the closest race ethically and diplomatically. On my last game where the drengin eventually became a powerhouse and sacked the altarians and torians, I ended up with both of their empires since I was nice to them. It works both ways depending on your play style. Evil expansionist races should not have planets given to them since they're probably just going to eat the citizens anyway.

I played the snathi as they were described (custom race of course). I'll usually pick a midgame play style that resembles the race I selected. I think my next sandbox will be altairan, and I'll see just how good and diplomatic I can be and still be a contender. For the record, I think that taking altairan just so you can choose all the evil event options and then end up neutral for NLC's is cheesy. Valid on masochistic if you want to win, but still cheesey.

I'd love for mining resources to have a capture option. Also, doesn't it seem a little odd that you can never mine one out? I'd like to see resources disappear through mining and occasionally be randomly generated, like maybe seeing 1-2 new ones per year on a gigantic map. Throw in some randomly generating anomalies and you have a reason to keep explorers and surveyors out all game long.

Not only is this cool, but the HTML idea positively rocks. If when you first build a ship it takes a screenshot and throws it in the AAR as an illustration for that event, the rocks level becomes an unbearable celestial choir.

I'd say so. Just start on an easy difficulty level and keep increasing it as you keep winning. Start with all the victory conditions on and turn off ones that you don't like winning by. (I find influence wins to be cheesey myself.) make galaxy settings with scarce planets and then the phase of the game between your final victory and your getting over the hump and becoming the most powerful civilization in the galaxy won't take very long since invading the remaining planets of the resistance wi

I invade with small fleets of 1000-2000 troops and use information warfare or mini soldiers since they leave the planet intact. I've often had situations with information warfare where my 1000 troops became 6000. If I have 20 transports, I'd rather try to invade 20 planets and fail on half of them than be sure to win on 2 or 3. Information warfare or mini soldiers if used when appropriate tend to really wreck the computer on a simultaneous invasion across his empire. You

I usually stick no defense on the tiny hulls, 1 on small hulls, 2 on medium, 3 on large, and up to 4 or 5 on huge hulls. I find this keeps my tiny ships first in line to get attacked, and they're easy to replace in fleets. I'll defend large ships because I'd prefer not to replace them. also, since the most powerfull attacker in a fleet is first targeted, if a fight is going badly, the AI's most powerful attackers will be destroyed by the time anything is shooting at my larger ships, and they can

I think there should be a small polarizing effect diplomatically. If you become very powerful, similar alignment races should gravitate to you and want to be your allies, while opposite alignment races should want to attack you. At least that will lead to a big war and an allied victory quickly in such games.

>>the starting over of research from the start each time just blew me away... not going to play it again for that reason and that reason alone Well, they either have to do that or limit the technologies available to research in every mission to just a few. Otherwise, there isn't anything stopping you from researching everything in the first mission.

I think Brad posted that he thinks he fixed the AI's wont to build diplomacy and entertainment centers with reckless abandon on the 1.2 patch, so Stardock does indeed patch the AI. I could forsee the AI in the expansion being better by being able to take advantage of the advanced espionage and diplomacy that was alluded to be under development.

Yeah MOO3 sucked hard. Sad. For me personally, when I see ideas on changes to the game posted here, I often think, "Hey that's just what MOO3 tried to do. OH GOD NO." Some posters here have outlined ideas for espionage improvements that end up being exactly like MOO3, which also sucked and was worthless. I think change is really good, and tactical combat would be good, but Stardock, or whoever makes the next great game, definitely needs to think outside the box and make sure they don't make othe

I agree. NLC's only work if you can keep everyone friendly with you while you rush for them. You also need an economy that can handle them, and then once you get them, you need some time to build them and research enough tech to make up for the deficit in your other areas compared to the computer. If the computer AI used this strategy, we as players would end up monitoring their planets and launch a pre-emptive war when we saw the centers being built, as that is when the opponet's deficit in oth

Different weapons techs scale differently. Missiles tend to start big and not increase in size, so large ships make better missile boats. I guess although is bothersome that one size class larger ships aren't a whole lot better than the smaller size class, it stops the situation where 1 tech advance makes a race suddenly way more powerful than another. Also armor hardly increases in size at all so its a lot easier to slip some on a large hull, further enhancing its survivability by making the 77

MOO3 ended up being worse than MOO2 in mircomanaging I thought.

I won a recent game by playing evilly but not researching evil for a long time. It was a smallish(random, I think small) map with sparse stars and planets and 9 races, so everyone basically got their homeworld and the other one in system and thats it. By being unaligned and evil acting, I kept getting pq events on my homeworld and ended up rocking harder than the other races that just aligned when they got the techs. Those evil events become huge boons on maps with no planets worth colonizing.

I'd pay for more random comments in the expansion.

I think I'd like the ability to pick the upgrades on the starbase screen and then constructors automatically fly to the closest starbase with queued upgrades when it is built. Just having constructors go to the closest base would end up with my econ bases in the back acres of my empire with 40 in every attack while the military resource on the front lines I need fortified is neglected.

All you need for a border is a naval blockade. If there was a way to set ships to patrol and intercept along a line in space, you'd have a border.

What a fantastic argument! Is it your own? Jeez, the ultimate argument used everywhere by the motley bunch under the banner of no tactical combat. No matter what change is made to any aspect of any thing in the whole world: an exploit is waiting to happen to it. Its pretty much a universal law. Exploitation is a fact of life, get used to it. <

Well, fake ships tricked the Germans in WWII. The british owned them in espionage though. Makes a better case for setting the influence of spin control proportional to how advanced the espionage is.

That would be nice. Or at least a button to turn on a coordinate axis ruler. I often end up looking for a rally point I lost track of at 44 x 63 and have no idea where that is either.

And makes it pointless to have the 90+ Billion person planet in the first place. All the transports your wasting time with to fill up one planet is the reason we want this sort of "Super Trooper" planet Well, if it was a super trooper planet, you'd need the transports anyway. So building them elsewhere and having them all fly over to the 100b p