Tod Jones

I guess they already used the 'weapons of mass destruction' line on the last race they conquered.

Just wanted to point out that not all races get counter-espionage centers. I remember one game in particular with the Korath where I consistently had 15 to 20 spies on my planets despite pumping out counter-spies as fast as possible. This often happens on a smaller scale though with the Korath, and it just forces me to wipe out all the good races in the game just to get rid of the spies. The Altarians seem to be more passive-aggresive with their spies from my experience. I can't say I've lost a

[quote] Brad didn't give me specifics about what the minor races would be able to do, except they still can't colonize. [/quote] I've had minors colonize on me before in TA on rare occasions. With that said, it's usually on settings with a plethora of planets and never seems to be more than one extra planet. I honestly didn't even consider it a bug when it happened since I didn't realize it was suppose to be impossible for

[quote]As for drug addiction and pushers and addicts. Well I know of one "happy" place that actually got rid of them for a time. Post revolutionary China, they put all the opium addicts and other drug users and pushers against the wall and shot them. Those that dissagred with them they shot too. I guess that may be the type of world those code pink wakkos in Berkely Cal want. Not me. Funny those rough men in the marine corp waiting to do harm on there behalf allow them to sleep well at

[quote]I would make one caveat about sexual selection though...[/quote] True, in the end dumb people still have children. I'm just countering the claim that because the natural selection pressure might be reduced in modern society (which isn't even something that's even been proven btw), that the population mental abilities would necessarily devolve over time. In fact it seems likely that the initial evolution of intelligence in the first place may have had as much to do with sexual se

Well this partly depends on the quantity of planets in the galaxy. Assuming their isn't an overabundance of planets in the galaxy I'd go for the planet. The reason being is that the space station on the resource will be destroyed in the next war even if you don't destroy it yourself. A planet is alot harder to conquer than it is to grab a resource off of someone. A planet you can buy, but only if that race is losing a war already. And if you buy off another empire your probabl

First off what people here are forgetting is that intelligence is a sexually selective trait, both directly and indirectly. Guys may want to have sex with anyone with a nice set of boobs, but who would you want to marry? If given the choice between the attractive woman who is stupid or the attractive women who is smart? Would you really want to be stuck with some dumb bimbo for the rest of your life if you could have chosen a smarter mate instead who is just as attractive? This goes dou

[quote]Plus, how would you have a negative War Profiteering ability? It seems like it would be something that you're either good at or you're not.[/quote] Well it's probably misleading to think of it too literally as negative war profiteering. I think of it as a peaceful race that feels compelled to spend money to send peace envoys and humanitarian aid to civilizations at war. Strategically this would make for an interesting penalty, because it would force a civilization to spend some e

[quote] Never underestimate the power of instant gratification! Doesn't the influence victory say you have to control 75% of a map to win? If you had a much smaller area than the Terrans, they probably only had to flip one or two planets to beat you. Is it 75% of a map (area) or 75% of the inhabited planets on a map? [/quote] It has to be the map area, otherwise I couldn't explain how in one game I suddenly got the extra percentage of influence

[quote]Their Soldiering ability really isn't that weak, by the way. They have one tech that gives +30 Soldiering that isn't Tradeable, after all.[/quote] Their soldier ability is by far the weakest for any race in the game. Mechanized soldiers is the only tech in the planetary invasion branch for the Thalans that gives any soldiering bonuses at all. That means that not only are they lacking all the normal soldiering bonuses that other races have from the planetary invasion tech branch a

I'm going to have to correct myself here. The Gaea Vortex doesn't actually produce food, it only gives you a 10% food bonus. Which means it's useless to worlds producing 6 food a week. I certainly have to give the programmers credit for creating a balancing ethical tech tree this time, it's unfortunate that it on such an unbalanced race. The only strategy I can think of that might work with the Thalans on the settings I prefer to use (very slow tech and no tech trading) is to keep press

Honshu, you can actually get food on a third planet by researching good Xeno Ethics and building the Gaea theory galactic achievement, and you also get the Church of Valor for another 25% soldiering bonus, which probably makes good the better choice of alignment to go with when playing Thalans. Netherless, I'm just not feeling what the race's strength is suppose to be. They are super builders who have nothing to build for a long time. They can colonize quickly but then wait around while

[quote] i personally think that spore ships are the way to go! they're the easiest way to take out planets without losing troops. [/quote] Personally, even playing the Korath quite a bit I actually don't use spore ships very often. The reason being is that they don't leave you with any population on the planet and thus makes it highly vulnerable for a counter-attack and are often a drain on your economy as well. Sure you can bring a transport to

The Thalans were purposefully designed to not have farms. They're suppose to only have 6 billion population (except for wherever you put your galactic achievement). If they are tweaked, it will undoubtedly be by giving them some other advantage instead. Of course because they are such a weird race to play, it's hard to tell how powerful they are since any strategy you use with them is going to have to be completely different than any other race's strategy. As it is, every race does play

I pretty much always go for neutrality myself after picking mostly evil choices during colonization. The approval bonus, the Neutrality Learning Centers, the extra trade routes (if you go evil you usually get all but one trade route outlawed), the bonus on ground invasion against non-neutral opponents, the extra income from the temple, free terraforming for tiles, and you're usually in a better situation diplomatically than if you go evil. In my mind the only thing that makes evil that

[quote] I haven't seen so many of these since I started playing TA - there seem to be fewer extreme worlds on most maps of all sizes than in DA, and far fewer of these little beauties. [/quote] I suspect that they have started giving bonus PQ to extreme planets. I base that on the fact that I found an uninhabited class 29 toxic world in one of my games under the latest Beta. If I understand this correctly, then normally planets are only suppose to go

[quote]UGH!!! Again I'm glad I don't have to bother with the TA beta. However I have a question for you TA owners: has anyone checked if the tax revenue has been changed? Since so many cost in the TA have gone up significantly, the game should be mostly unplayable, but that doesn't seem to be from players' reports. [/quote] I'm not too sure how you would know for sure whether the tax revenue has been adjusted or not, but I've never noticed any world making more money t

Tir-Quan is actually 25% soldiering bonus. Ok, I grant you that the cumulative bonus of Cathedrals could be worthwhile with lots of planets if you have the tiles to spare. However, the improvement is still broken. If you read the description it's suppose to give a 33% planetary defense bonus, which it currently doesn't at all give you. The Arceans would be alot tougher if the Cathedral did what it said it suppose to do. I should also point out that the Yor are only ordinary soldiers onc

I haven't finished a game yet with the Arceans, but what I've seen of them I do understand what their advantage is suppose to be. They get the space cannons which give a 50% planetary defense bonus plus a small morale bonus. Then they get the Cathedrals of Valor which I think still needs to be fixed, but in theory should give you another 33% planetary defense bonus but right now only gives a 2% soldiering bonus which isn't worth it. Then you have the Stellar Forge and the special ability which i

Well the Altarians definitely need some work on their tech tree just so the non-ethical alignment tech tree is more than just a cut-and-paste of the Drath. The Yor are suppose to get some new invasion tech from one of the previews, and could use some tweaking as well. I'm mostly interested in seeing the new victory condition though. Was it last week that there wasn't suppose to be a beta or this week, I lost track.

I don't know if this is a bug or purposeful design change, but I did find an uninhabited class 29 radioactive world in a game I started playing. I remember that the maximum size of a planet is suppose to top out at 26. Could this have something to do with the attempt to fix the lack of tiles for Gaea worlds, or was it just decided to up the maximum planet size in the game? I'm going to have to try colonizing this one and see if any bonus tiles are available on this planet and get back t

I think one of the most fun games I had was when I had tech victory on and I had to rush ahead to destroy an opponent before he reached an imminent, and ended up just narrowly succeeding in taking him out. Of course this alot harder to do on a gigantic map as your playing. Depending on what he has on his worlds though, you could possibly catch up by grabbing his most productive research colonies. However, it's most likely you'll lose this game, especially with the size of the map your

[quote]Minor Civ's as protectorates.. or someway of telling the AI not to screw with your trading partners.[/quote] This right here would make a great UP issue. Pick a random (or the weakest) minor race and vote on whether to make it illegal to go to war with that race. Just made sure that the code automatically excludes the Dread Lords and the Jagged Knife as possible candidates for this law.

To be honest, I've played with the Korath a bit and I didn't even notice that the farms gave pop. bonuses to the Korath but that other races lacked that advantage. Netherless, it's still very rare that I will get to the farm techs before the dreaded expansion crash usually happens anyway. Without the farms, your looking at most a 10% bonus to population growth, and that's only assuming that the other races don't decide to go for their own fertility acceleration techs. What settings are you runni

I wonder if it would imbalance things too much to have a tourism slider in initial settings. Assuming that wouldn't be too difficult for the AI to adjust to of course.