Roxlimn

One of the most important corollaries that must be realized is that you must not indulge in 100% research unless you know what you're getting into. In most cases, your planets may not be equipped to handle the research you're doing. The most basic example of this is getting really, really advanced weapons and defense tech and then have crappy manufacturing planets. You'll be building better ships, of course, but the relative benefit of the research is laregly stunted by your civ's stat

jwburks: Your problem is population growth and money. 1. Do NOT set your tax at 49%. You need to grow population, and that needs good approval. Many recommend setting approval to 75%, whatever taxation is necessary to maintain it. Keep this in mind. Your maximum tax rate should be defined by your target approval rating. 2. Make an extra Colony Ship and later on a Transport Ship for the purpose of ferrying colonists. Colonies grow relatively fast onc

Oh yes - take it easy on the influence. Diplo techs that don't gain influence are best. What you want is to own the galaxy, not to inundate it with influence. Get only enough influence so that your bought planets don't revolt. Stop there. You definitely don't want the relations hit from a too-high influence count.

Buying the galaxy has always been extremely viable. That had been my winning Impossible strat in MOO2 so I immediately tried it on GalCvi2 the moment I played. It's viable through all versions of the game, at least at Tough difficulty or less. Super Diplomat, Diplo Translators, and at least a three Diplo tech advantage will provide the baseline. You'll need a large treasury. Techs are nice for buying stuff, but generally speaking, it's better to buy with money. Popu

I think it'll be interesting to merge the models. Have Small and Tiny Ships deplete defenses, but not Medium and above ships. We already know that Medium + size ships are major players in warfare. Giving the firepower of smaller ships a little extra "oomph" could give them the significance they currently lack.

"Super Shot" phenomenon certainly makes defense and offense planning a lot more complicated and a lot less transparent - not a good thing!

Here's a little something. I'm from the Philippines and piracy is a way of life around these parts. More than half the machines in the country run on pirated software, and of the gamers I know around here, almost all of them play from pirated copies. It's not that we like these games. Pirated copies have lousy side-effects on your computer. Sometimes they contain malware, and sometimes they cause your computers to crash. Sometimes they cause the game to hang mid-game and ne

1) Yor are extremely frightening in battle. Their luck bonus combines with their miniturization bonus to give them quite an edge. If you want to be invulnerable to their 70 attack ship/fleet, you'll need to field in at least 140 defense. The mini bonus ensures that you'll probably have a hard time meeting Yor with a defense strategy, though it's still possible. Outproducing Yor with Attack Mediums AND lots of manufacturing proves a good strat for me, at least until I can get enough t

No more decreasing in size and cost!!!! Please!!!! It already takes forever to put suitable defenses on a Huge Ship. Increasing defense values per unit without changing cost will have mainly the same effect as making them smaller and cheaper, without the hassle of attaching 30 defense units to every ship you design.

I think that more can be done with the system as-is. Simply changing up the numbers in the xml files would do a lot. However, a change back to the DL mode of defense for capital to capital ship fire would probably clean up the all-or-nothing problem.

It can be quite fast if you're built up for it the right way. This typically means that you're NOT built up for winning it with military might. You'll need lots of economy - lots of money to turn into lots of tech. Then you'll need lots and lots of tech planets - like maybe half your planets. This kind of setup isn't suicidal. You can keep them off with tech offerings, money, and/or diploimacy while you research the tech. Having lots of tech resource bonuses and bonus research tile

I don't know that colony rushing is the only way to start off the game. If you're stuck in the middle of nowhere with no planets in sight, the only way to salvage the game is to build starbases pronto to get to the good planets. Colony rushing won't help you there because the good habitable planets will most likely already be taken. If you only play the game when you're in the middle of a fat clump of planets, then sure, colony rushing is always the right thing to do. Games w

I disagree. The problems we've been discussing have nothing to do with the off-type defense bug since we don't try against off-type defenses. This means that even if the bug is fixed, it won't improve the situation. Defense is still too all-or-nothing. The "all" of it is just as problematic as the "none" of it. Small defenses not meaning much of anything is a big problem. The sudden turn into invulnerability is also a problem.

Yes, actually, they do. When you declare war on a substantially weaker civ, some of them do send out Tiny ships with an engine and a weapon to take out your freighters and asteroid bases. That is, if you don't wipe them out in a couple of turns.

We're not talking about vastly superior technology here. We're talking about like, a one or two defense tech advantage, offset by a one or two weapons and/or logistics tech advantage on the counterside. You can be functionally invincible without all that much investment in defense technology. Conversely, once your defense tech is superceded, it becomes obsolete for some purposes almost immediately. This "all-or-nothing" property needs to be remedied.

Upgrading the value of defense techs would certainly be a step in the right direction. However, if all we're doing with the new algorithms is try to approximate the old, why have to change the algorithm at all? As Rataan attests (and most people will suppport, I'm sure) Smalls and Tinies still won't win wars against larger hulls. Mediums won't win against Larges, intentionally mixed fleets don't make a whole lot of sense. It's the DL situation all over again, so what's the po

Rataan: Not at all. Defense Ships still win. Against anything less than maximum fleet power (and there can't be too many of those), your Defense Ships can handle them handily. If the attack edges higher, include one all-attack ship with a mostly Defense fleet. The purpose of the Attack Ship is to exchange with one of theirs. The exchange is in your fleet's favor because it lowers the attack of their fleet below your defenses.

Japan's economic might comes from its use of neighboring countries to supplement its income. While it doesn't technically own most of the land in Asia, Japanese corporations owning much of the economy devoted to building cars, for instance, in Thailand and Malaysia, makes it a moot point. The cash flows to the mother country, and that makes it powerful. As well, its population is not all that small, and they're mostly fanatically loyal and possessed of nearly insane work ethics. That

I think that 300% food tiles just need to be taken out of the game, since they have such limited and debatable benefits anyway.

Wyndstar: My point, typically, in bringing up the highest difficulty level is that if there is something the AI can't do there, it can't do it anywhere, so it is a hole at every level. The problem with your approach is that while your statement here may or may not be true the converse certainly is not - while something a high level AI can't do may be indicative of a system wide problem, solving the same problem at the hi

pahis: Re: Logistics Even so, their numbers and weapons focus makes Logistics more useful for them than it was for you. Re: Weapons Advantage Defense tech advantage shouldn't be costing you a significant Weapons deficiency. Perhaps one or two levels only, nothing more. A larger deficit indicates a significant tech advantage which means that your positions are not more or less equal. He has tech advantage on you. Re: Industrial Capacity <

Wyndstar: Your just using a logistics advantage. When the AI has even numbers with you and has mixed defense/attack ships, they will beat pure defense ships with only small guns just based on the tie rule. When the AI shows up at your door with fleets of 3-5 cruisers (huge hulls), your defensive strategy won't work at all. "Even numbers" is a weird qualifier. What qualifies as "even numbers?" Even numbers of ships in a fleet?

The solution needs to be more fundamental. Defense is either worthless or invaluable. That is indicative that the band of usefulness for defense is way too narrow. Some defense must have some impact, not all or nothing.

Tos Iceman: Yes, I was being a bit sarcastic, but that doesn't mean there wasn't a point to be made... In that case, make your point again. Less sarcasm, more clarity. 2178~2225 is hardly "so far in the future", that's what I meant. The date is largely for flavor purposes. It's like turn of the century books which have us flying the stars by 2025. Obviously that's

pahis: Anyways, if I'd have the power I'd probably change a lot from the attack-defense system to make balanced ships the best general approach, while leaving all attack ships some limited uses. All defense ships just don't sound very logical so I wouldn't really miss them. Now there's something I think that we can all agree on! I think that all kinds of ships should have significant usages - balanced design, lots of d