The Thalan tech tree (and/or starting stats). They put way too much work into making them possibly the most unique race to intend for them to be this gimped. I don't believe that is what they intend and will keep for the release.
Congratulations Kzintis on adding a hunter as mighty as Wyndstar to your ranks. I just today posted in the Diplomats forum that we ought to invite him to join us. Ah well. :) Have fun Wyndstar! That said, Magnumaniac is back, having noticed how far ahead you all have gotten. He's good. (is there an "ironic understatement" emoticon?). Allow me to take a tenative intial foray into the realm of intra-empire trash talk: It's on. :)
Zero Year Win. Some players have got it down to where they can crank out a 30,000 point zero year conquest victory in 10 minutes. Play 250+ of those, takes about 50 hours, but gets you a massive Alt-Meta score to go with quite a high traditional Metaverse score, in about the same real-time I believe that a Mumblefratz style ultra-optimized gig abundant all. That said, I don't see anything wrong with it. I think it's valid and admire the discipline needed to keep churning these out. I figure
That is spectacularly good news. :) First off - 37,100 is just crazyness. You just leaped past what the acknowledged ZYW masters had thought may be the theoretical limit (35,000). Nicely done. I'm even more glad to hear you've returned to the Metaverse battlefield, Achilles style, to re-enforce the Diplomats against the rampaging Kzinti hordes (composed of good guys, but nonetheless, they need to be stopped). :)
Magnumaniac! Welcome back! And such an entrance :)
I would not count we Diplomats out as dead. Purge, Mumblefratz and CraigHB are still around. We've had the last 4 #1 players on the Metaverse I believe. While we may not be the Metaverse force we once were and the Kzinti have grown strong, we're not done yet. I think Tennyson put it nicely: "Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts,<br/
Umm, I'm not entirely sure why we would want to destroy the Kzinti Empire. They seem like decent enough cats to me (pardon the pun). Even if we did want to, it's not exactly a viable option. At best, an empire could pass them on the meta and or altmeta, but I'm not sure how viable that is. That would have to mean all the smaller empires disbanding and forming/joining a conglomerate mega-empire. I'm not sure what the point of that would be. Admirable enthusiasm though! :)
Could you please take a look at the "Racial Balance as of Beta 6A" thread on the beta reports board? There is a lot of feedback I think would be relevant there. Thank you for considering our input! I'm sure I'm not the only one who truly appreciates it!
Go with very fast, tiny, one opponent, minimum everything habitable. The fewer planets and fewer opponents you've got to deal with, the easier ZYWs are. The same goes for the faster the research the easier they are. Abundant anomalies are helpful though. Hope that helps. :)
DarkMadMax, on a small map where each empire has 3-4 planets, 11% war profiteering probably won't generate anywhere near 1,000/turn. The empires at war would have to have 10,000/turn. War profiteering income scales up with galaxy size just like normal income. It's nice, but you can make a whole lot more off of the MCC, which the Drath don't have in their tech tree.
Silphius, there is merit to what you are saying theoretically, but in actual practice you can get the MCC built significantly earlier than turn 60, and Good simply can't compete, even if it's economic bonus comes 10-15 turns faster (which is a generous estimate). If you are playing very slow research it may make a differnce I suppose. One exception is if you are going for very rapid conquest or tech victory and are counting on your initial treasury to finance your expenses, going evil if you
Beautiful game. :)
Thank you all for contributing to this thread. Hopefully Stardock will find it useful. :) StarStriker1, I'm glad you've found the Thalan to be viable.. if you don't mind, have you had success with them on suicidal? If so (or even if you haven't), in your experience have they played as strongly as the other races?
Loupdinour, I agree that the Thalans need creativity and that keeping it at as low a percentage as gives a time to completion is an important tactic, but have you found going for their factories to be effective on Suicidal, or only on lower difficulty level? I've never been able to win on suicidal as the Thalans without trading for factory tech from another race. Even then, it was a much harder game than any other race I've tried.
Congratulations to Mumblefratz on the #1 spot! A long time coming and no one deserves it more! :)
I'd had a concern about Dark Influence, but I've never played as the Korath and so didn't want to question it. I know that by itself it outpowers every unique influence building the Krynn get with it's +200% bonus. Have you tried it on suicidal? I'd think the saving weakness of it there would be that the AIs would react to the influence threat by attacking militarily, which might cause enough trouble to counterbalance the benefit. Additionally, the Korath are a natural to select Evil as an a
Thank you to everyone who has posted! Please continue to do so! :) And thank you to BoogieBac. This game is great already, and I'm sure I speak for pretty much everyone when I say we can't wait to see how awesome it is when you guys are done with it! :) Two things I forgot to suggest in the intital post: Super Spy is clearly the weakest super ability. One way I think it could be made useful without making it too strong is to have it quarter the build time for the counter-espiona
I think it will last quite a while. I still play Master of Orion II and Alpha Centauri. Even Pax Imperia (not as good a game, but the second I ever got so it holds sentimental value). I think it's probably got at least 10 years from the release of twilight. Great games live a long time.
Why evil? Because in large maps it simply is more powerful. The Mind Control Center provides a greater advantage than the sum of all the advantages either Good or Neutral provide. Just look at how many race pick points +100 econ would be worth. It takes 4 picks for +30 econ, so the MCC is equivilent to 13.3 race picks. However, econ is commonly considered to be the most powerful starting attribute, so it's actually more valuable than a raw 13.3 race picks. The artificial slave center incre
One thing I would like to see is the Super Spy ability quarter the build time of the counter-espionage center (similar to how super hive quarters the cost of factories). I find it difficult to use spies offensively on higher difficulty levels if there are any number of opponents because I've got to keep burning them up defensively. If the counter-espionage center, for Super Spys, were cheap enough to be built everywhere, then you could use all of your spys offensively and focus them on a singl
In a post on the main page, Brad said that a focus of the remaining development will be balancing and that he will be looking to player feedback on that issue. I think it may be helpful if we had a central thread devoted to racial balance issues. In particular, I think that balance is best tested on higher difficulty levels, though any feedback is sure to be helpful. If a number of players could take the time to answer the following questions, I hope that it could be a usefu
Whew! Not a tech victory. :) That's a great game considering you only had one decent bonus tile. Nicely done.
My submission: 14,935 points 1 year tech victory on JustinSane5 as the evil Yor, submitted 12:15 4/3. DA v1.8g. Now I just have to plead with Wyndstar to go for a conquest victory this round. :)
Outstanding. We look forward to having you onboard. And more importantly, congratulations! :)
I didn't join the MVL initially quite simply because I was scared off by the post-count of the rule thread. This was stupid. I'll get to why momentarily. I joined the MVL A. Because I was finally smart enough to read their sticky thread and B. because in round 6 they had settings, a tiny map conquest victory, that I knew quite well and that sounded like a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I noticed all this less than 12 hours before the league ended. :) I signed up for round 7 an
