CraigHB

You can assign the other races their points if you like, but they do it on their own if you don't, it just doesn't show up in the race selection screen, but the bonuses are there after you start the game. You can look for yourself by running the game in cheat mode and switching to the race using the hot-seat key combination. Look at bonuses in the stats and graphs section of the civ manager. There's some other interesting customizations you can do on the race

Hey Neilo, how ya doing. Haven't been on the forum much, but I still play the game when I get time. Been getting into the mods lately, lots of fun.

It depends on what you consider cheating. Sometimes I wish the AI would cheat a little better. They don't cheat in the sense they have to play the game in the same manner as a human player. They do have a lot of advantages, but they need them. If they didn't have those, the game would be too easy. For anyone that finds the AI too intense, simply turn down the difficulty level. You may want to adjust their intelligence individually. I haven't found the

Metaverse requires you to use the stock settings files. If you want to play a modded game, don't modify the original files. Meteverse checks those and will flag the game if it detects any changes. I believe the whole Metaverse thing is fairly idiot proof now. The game will tell you right out of the gate if there's a cheat flag thrown. Older versions didn't do that. You wouldn't find out the game was flagged until you submi

I rarely visit the forum (I'm here to look for some mod information), but I still play the game often. This game has wonderful replay and I imagine I'll be playing it for years to come. Please keep the fixes coming. This is my all time favorite game and I'm really getting into the casual mods now. It's amazing the depth and ease of customization with this game. What a masterpiece.

I agree with what GW is saying. I've been playing since the original release of DL as well. I've never played any of the campaigns all the way through. I started a couple, got rather bored with them, then never tried one again. I think the sandbox games are most interesting. Since there was no option when I started playing GC2, I started with DL and have enjoyed the new features and additional complexity of the game as the expansions came out.

Planetary influence does not immediately take effect after a game loads. Actually, the root of the problem is that the game does not incorporate influence bonuses initially. It takes some event in the galaxy to cause a recalc, like a starbase being built or a planet being acquired or any other event that affects influence. In a quiet game phase, it can take several turns for this to happen. You can force a recalc manually by

Yea, TA is so much more interesting, I've pretty much forgotten about the previous versions of the game. But yea, I imagine in DA, you could build heavily with less concern.

You can build ferry ships by putting several advanced troop modules on a cargo hull. With max miniaturization, you can build a ship capable of clearing or loading a planet in a few turns. You can also build super colony ships by adding advanced troop transport modules along with a single colony module.

I put the flagship on auto-survey right away and forget about it for a while. After I've built a few basic survey ships and all the initial anomolies have been found, I put it on auto-explore because it has better sensor range. Once I have eyes of the universe, I usually delete the flagship since the survey/scout ships I've built do the job more efficiently. So, it's very useful to me at turn 1, but depreciates as the game progresses. I have yet

I don't see how it would even be possible to fill all tiles on all planets right out of the gate. In TA, the maintenance costs for factories and labs are high so you'd end up in a hole you can't get out of. I add those buildings as population levels increase which provides the economy to support them. Economic buildings are going to be the first ones to build. However, they're less effective with low planet populations so y

Thanks a ton for the continued updates. Still enjoying the game greatly after playing off and on since the first release of Dread Lords. You guys are the best.

I've been playing large galaxies lately and I've been trying games with various extreme planet settings. It's a very nice setting they added. I think what's going is that with frequent extreme planets, the AI is not able to grab as many planets out of the gate. So, they have less research horsepower and it takes them a lot longer to get to the extreme colonization techs. I think you would need to raise the dif

You can see exactly what advantage or disadvantage the competition has by selecting a race in the "choose race" game setup screen then clicking on the edit button. Under Personality, you can view and adjust the advantage/disadvantage for that race. Selecting a game difficulty presets these values for all races. Selecting a race intelligence presets the values only for that race. At "challenging", the AI has no advantage or disadvantage.</p

[quote]Turns out I couldn't install it because I'd never registered my original games with Stardock Central, although I tried, it was a confusing process that I never quite got through. [/quote] I had no issue at all with the registration process. I can install all the game components and expansions without any serial number information or disks. All I have to do is install SDC and it fetches all of my registration info after prompting for&nbs

Well stated. I try to avoid games that violate some of these statements so I hope publishers that conform to them get better sales, but so far, it's only Stardock. I've been screwed by #1 a couple times, that's a biggie for me.

123. You swear your mother in-law is a drengin with a human disguise.

I'm not seeing any medals in IE6, does is work for IE7? I'll be upgrading to IE7 when I move to XP SP3, but I'm not going to run and do it right away. It probably won't happen until my "important" softwre (not games) requires it. I really hate upgrading, it inevitably leads to headaches I'm never in the mood to deal with.

[quote]Ok so I checked the xml and I didn't see anything that would make up for the fact that the Torian get only 8 ability points. It seems quite clear to me that they suck. Any custom race with the Super Breeder Ability can easily outstrip them.[/quote] You haven't mentioned which game you're playing which makes a difference, but in any case, not all races are created equal, custom race included. The developers have never made any claims they're supposed to be either. On

I haven't played DL in quite a long time so I can't really compare it to TA as far as maintenance costs go. You may be right in that maintenance costs are more similar to DL. Planet counts definitely are. I'd have to play a DL game to say and I don't think that will happen, I'm probably not going to play any more DA games either. [quote]By the way, most active Diplomats have moved over to Tyranny of Evil. Magnumaniac, DethAdder and myself along with Justinsane and pe

There aren't any "hidden" bonuses for the races. All of the inherent abilities and starting techs can be seen in the race setup screens, but you can also view them in the RaceConfig.xml file as mentioned above. When playing against them, they can have additional boosts in economy and production depending on difficulty level. However, those can be seen in the race setup screens as well. The only thing I've found that isn't ob

[quote]Another thing to consider is to bypass DA entirely and go directly to ToA. It's something that I'm giving serious thought to as well.[/quote]That actually might be a good idea from a performance perspective. I've found that TA is faster in some areas than DA. One thing to consider is that a gigantic/abundant galaxy in DA yields around 700 habitable planets. An immense/abundant galaxy in TA yields around 500 habitable planets. So, right there, you're going t

From the home page of the Journals; [quote]Right now, the team is working on the "unnamed fantasy strategy game" sometimes called "not-MOM" (not Master of Magic). It's a totally new graphics engine that makes use of multi-core CPUs and GPUs but will still run fine on lower end hardware thanks to built-in detection that will determine "how much stuff" to display in real-time. That game will go into public beta early next year and its release date will be largely based on

[quote]Can anyone give me an indication how much better the performance (frame rate) of Dark Avatar is compared to Dread Lords? With the same (graphic) settings, how much faster does DA go?[/quote]I'm running an 8800 GTS 512 MB and it's barely loaded by the game at 1680x1050 resolution. That's with all video options enabled and 4x AA. Video performance shouldn't be a concern at all with your card. However, the performance difference between DL and DA

As far as I know, the precise manner in which the game scores is still a pretty well kept secret. My feeling is that scoring is done before some bonuses/penalites are applied. In other words, in terms of raw abilities is the various areas. In any case, I'll be interested in hearing your impressions since I'm not really sure one way or the other. BTW, I've also had a cash anomoly put me over the limit before. Now I make sure I'm under 19K before