Fennel

I've seen it posted before something to a similar effect, but in the range of one year of play. Overall, though, I guess that does kinda make sense: If it's been a game year and you still haven't stabilized your economy, you're going to be in trouble. Of course, you could always hold off on getting a quick swipe at your opponent at the beginning of the game, colony rush only to a certain point, take a corner of the galaxy, then wait for the AI to get a solid enough economy to play the

Well, I'd say split the difference, see how many +50% bonuses you can grab for your armies. The ones that can take the hit, anyway. Also, change your civ's name to the Dead Lords.

Related link: "Smashing the Clock" from Business Week Summary: Best Buy's management corps is rethinking the whole 'chained to the desk' thing with more support for telecommuting and 'working on the golf course', so to speak. Long article, but a good read for those who're interested in the New Thing in Human Resources.

One thing that's important to realize is that morale buildings improve morale based on 'base' morale, that is, the morale of the planet after the population modifier alters its total value. For the most part, in Dark Avatar, even approaching 20 billion citizens on a planet will buckle the planet's approval rating, depending on the number of morale resources and your overall racial +morale ability.

I would have to say that the problem isn't that every ship has to survive every combat so much that 'there is no tactical withdraw'. Apparently in the future, even peace-loving species completely populate the crews of their ships with marines, or something, to the death and nothing less. Now, I know, there's noplace to hide in space and all that, but then if all science fiction worked with this same rule, there'd be plenty of times when our favorite spaceships would have been killed in

Ultimately, I suspect that the +30% to Espionage spending is a bug. I'm fairly certain that no one in Stardock would ever wish 'gee, I wish I could spend more than 25% of my economy on my spy network' instead of 'I wish the money I spend on my spy network was 30% more effective'. As for the Iconians and their SA, I think the ability needs something of the same buff that Super Isolationist has with speed limitation to stack on the barren world colonization bit. If the Yor could only co

I'm not sure, but I think that the evaluation of the current generation's wealth in comparison to the wealth of past generations comes from the analysis not of cost of living, but of quality of living. While the CPI and inflation are increasing at an astounding rate, the cost of electronics is simply plummeting; if you don't believe me, just think about the cost of, say, home computers in the past fifteen or twenty years. This isn't limited to just computers, mind you - nearly

Actually, this is an interesting topic that's been tumbling about economic circles for quite some time. When all is said and done, however, there's no real necessity for there to be poor people in a capitalism at all, if labor supply is willing to match labor demand. Every company, every entrepeneur, every venture seeks to grow; growth requires capital, and human labor is capital as well. Growth creates jobs, requires skill, and requires specialization to go with it. As long as the l

I'd like to see a more robust tutorial scenario for setting up a successful economy. As it is, it's probably the most puzzling part of the game for newcomers to address. Other 4X games tend to start off with little or no economic demands and slowly get more demanding as building complexities increase, but GalCiv2's model is a bit more complicated than that. I understand there's a need to limit the ease of creating an economic powerhouse, but the more limitations made to restri

Personally, I think it might be worth examining the possibility of having an alignment-based base morale setting for population, if they're going to go along the strength for conquest on the Evil side and strength for development and diplomacy on the Good side. Let's look at this from the point of view of the people being cattle and the government being altruistic, malevolent, or orderly. In a malevolent government, the government cares little for the people, so has to spend more time

One could always make the argument that a 'balanced' game could be tested by making a perfectly symmetric map that has a spot for every AI faction, every minor AI, a buffer of uncolonized worlds between them, and no points to spend on racial customization between them. Don't get a player involved, just have the AI automate and play against itself to see what happens. Of course, this would be a boring thing to observe, but it would be helpful not only in determining overall race balance