the Gorgon

For me a classic is a game that is not only fun and well balanced but that has that little extra that make you come back to it even after e.g. the graphic might be outdated. The final feeling of the game. IMHO the elements that can be improved are: better graphics - for more fetischism (especially in combat), less colony rush, completely revamped spying. The best feature of the game: the possibility to easily make up your own opponents with personality, stats and images ... As long as y

Exactly the same thing with the pirates happened to me. Actually I was already dreaming about a tech victory and then the pirates came and blocked the game until Icould easily achieve it. But I must say I really think this mega event is overdone, especially as it is called Pirates: pirates should sneak around, attacking traders, not wiping out whole star fleets. Save that for the Dread Lord Surge.

Firstly, while mega events should shake up the galaxy and everyone's plans, please do not overdo it so that you have to restart from scratch or making it completely impossible to win (your choices before the event should still count, for good or for worse ...) I would prefer less dramatic events so you can instead have more of them! Also, the best events are events that you can / are forced to actually ACT on, not just telling you that you just lost x and y. That said, I could sugg

... (continuation from above): but most importantly: giving you new missions you can accomplish, like assasinating the planet's leader, sabotaging buildings, spreading disease or even starting a reverse terraforming! (NB. the game Haegemonia has wonderful spy rules). Getting caught should be a question of your level of spying versus the victim's level of counterspying ... Stopping the spy would not mean that his origin is automatically revealed, but when the origin is revealed that would of cour

Dear Frogboy, One part of DA that would really benefit from further development is spying. There is a special reason for this. The AI always attacks only the weakest civs in order not to risk anything, so wars are often not very thrilling, it is just about who can grab most colonies from the weakest. However, as a weak civ there is not much you can do against the more powerful, because the smallest skirmish means you declare a full scale war... So, here some new spy rules woul

I have to add one thing I forgot to post earlier: the resources are ok as regards the game mechanics, but please note that they break with the "feeling" of the game in the sense that they are just shown as (rather simple) symbols on the map and not even named as something real in the game universe. It should be fairly easy to make an econmy resource into e.g. a golden asteroid or whatever. For me it is just not credible that you have a game symbol saying "military resource" and not naming and de

One key thing to fix in my view is definately the colony rush. It makes the game too dependent on luck in the beginning and force you as a player only to focus on building colony ships. Make it more expensive with colony ships, add a few techs necessary even to build a first colony ship. And above all: there should be a way to threaten colonies even early in the game (e.g. bombing them). The game would then be more about empire building and less about getting lucky in grabbing the nice star syst

I must say I really agree with the overall message in this post: the colony rush, even in Dark Avatar, takes a lot of the meaning out of the game. I usually play rather small galaxies due to time constraints. In these games it is actually settled during the first 20 or so turns what the whole game will be like. And it is not based on strategy, mostly on luck: did you happen to send your colony ships to the right stars or to those with only useless planets ... This can be so annoying th