gigolojones

Leverage the Drengin's military advantage. You should have been picking military production bonuses already as Drengin are all about conquest. But you cannot grow and support a strong military without a strong empire. Boost military production enormously from the racial picks - and colony rush. Now as you see, the military bonus naturally applies to the colony rush. Requires a balancing act with economy, but burn much of the initial money fast. It is much

[quote who="Sole Soul" reply="7" id="2048467"]Personally I don't look at the colonies themselves as far as profit/deficit goes, but if I did I'd probably see them fairly close to each other-some making 3BC, some losing 3BC-as mine tend to be relatively but of course not completely balanced. As such, looking at the domestic policy screen is all I need to determine whether I can afford to build something else. The rest of this post is entirely more information than anyone wants

[quote]You will need economic planets to support the other worlds. Decide which and what type of planets are more suited and zone accordingly. [/quote] Your recruiting and market center build times are exemplary. Initial colonies can be set to build starships right away to save your homeworld for colony ship spam. Tax and approval: [quote] Approval rating grants pop growth bonuses at 100%, 75%, and 40%. Achieve higher approvals when starting out; more population growth now

Universal Translator is useless until you have something to talk about and something to trade. Use the treasury in the beginning to expand as fast and as long as you can until you can't anymore. From my post on another thread regarding economy, [quote]Leave new worlds largely empty and resist the impulse to continually build them up. Think less of developing the worlds and more on developing a functioning economy. Look at your buildings maint costs and your tech tree advantages and dec

Confirmed a while back. Was too lazy to post about it. I tend to play evil and did not expect AI to replicate my results anyway. However, they are markedly worse than before, and I would like to be able to face the Drengin someday

Thalans are one of the strongest races in the game, and probably have the strongest end game as their infrastructure built with knowledge from the future comes online. A perusal of some of the previous ToA Thalan threads can give an idea of the characteristics of the race. Because they become invincible later on, they are a hollow paper empire in the early game for balance, but they expand rapidly and that early in the game you shouldn't be getting creamed anyway by the random jealous

:D Also, by "birth rate buildings achieved later than the beginning" I mean the Fertility Clinic, if your race gets it, not the Recruiting Center, also if your race gets it, which of course can be obtained right away and built on all worlds.

^ Don't build econ buildings until your tax rate and population on the relevant planets make it worth the maintenance cost. Birth rate buildings are achieved later than the beginning. Approval rating grants pop growth bonuses at 100%, 75%, and 40%. Achieve higher approvals when starting out; more population growth now means more tax revenue later. People will stay in the empire as long as approval rating on their respective planet is above 20% or so. When your empire is rich vast an

Those screenshots aren't that impressive. ToA has drastically changed. You should pay attention to the details on the new buildings.

Leave new worlds largely empty and resist the impulse to continually build them up. Think less of developing the worlds and more on developing a functioning economy. Look at your buildings maint costs and your tech tree advantages and decide what to do.

The Earthling cruiser custom ship works just fine. I treat the download as a .zip and the contents as a mod.

Enemy spies do disappear after you eliminate the race that sent them. The exception is if they surrender to you. Then their spies hang around. This can be confirmed through cheat mode

Thalans need planets, then they will become a war machine fielding massive fleets. Drath have been militarized in my games. Korx and Altarians are consistently exposed, and Terrans militarize too late; they put up fake defenders first.

I don't know about Gc2 being more fun than MOO & MOO2 were. But Gc2 ToA definitely holds its own. I play it instead of MOO in this present era. They are different games.

Haven't seen any problem with the Yor on Tough so far. Steamrolling the galaxy

I've had pretty much the opposite experience to the disappointed in my first game with the Yor; I have a booming economy as good as the Thalans while rush conquering the galaxy even faster than the Drengin, and this is against edited (for the better, I hope) opponents. Tough level

Take time to learn the new buildings and trees. I basically started GC2 with ToA and my economy ran fine. Having learned the Drengin, I then customized them to be able to do just that, the colony rush, the fast militarization, the works. I love the new economy, being as it is part of the expansion that got me to play this game. From how the old ways are described, I'm not so sure such a free and easy economy without cares is desirable or attractive.

I hardly played DL and so MCC has always been what it states on its tooltip for me. Thank Heaven, then, that they fixed it! Psyonic beams are very much alive with the evil Drengin. Total galactic domination when you jump from +1 to +12 weapons.

I build Nav Center immediately. (rush buy) This means of course you'll be left with a lot less money so learn to manage your economy accordingly. Don't buy until you are ready to produce. But produce fast, build those ships Save the Forge for your Manufacturing Capital. Arceans are meant to have a slightly weaker colony rush (intended to be balanced by weather control, high hp ships and starbase spam) but you don't have to let it be [i]that[/i] weak

I have for example 24 attack to their 3 and I still take damage. Put on defense

I have Terrans with +Research +Econ +Mil in addition to their innates on Tough; I militarize too fast for them. To be fair, I have no love for the Terrans (!) and purposely avoided giving them additional +speed and +influence which I would if I were seeing how to maximize their abilities. The few games I've done with the Terran tech tree do feel well rounded

Defense is very useful. Sufficient defense saves ships and makes them comparably immune. I roll with +50 Mil and still feel the loss of ships. Have good attack at the same time of course. Although I do not have experience at Suicidal, I do play Tough (soon to be Painful). Might change a little bit with patch with less research overhead, but you would still need ridiculous amounts of research to zoom down the line of weapons and miniaturization and maybe hulls to achieve massive w

If your downloaded file is missing an extension, try putting .zip at the end of it. Some of the ships I was interested in were misnamed at download. If the directory (folder) structure is preserved inside the .zip you may want to just extract into twilight\mods, making sure you've created the mods folder first as it does not come standard with twilight.

The new patch has made things much more agreeable.

Make a folder in your twilight folder called 'mods', without quotes. Create a folder in mods for the ships; let's pretend it's 'NewShipMod'. Create a folder called 'Data' in that NewShipMod. Create the folders 'ships' and 'shiptemplates' inside Data. Look inside your downloaded .zip and put the files where they go in these folders. I hope for your sake the ship author has preserved the folder structure in his .zip instead of having all the files jumbled in one big list. Now, you'll