Publius of NV

[quote]I certainly hope you do not view my comments as flames.[/quote] No, I wasn't referring to you. Meanwhile, comparing my current game (as Altarian, with a considerable research bonus) to my last game (as Yor, with no research bonus), I'm seeing much more inflation, so perhaps it is related to the ability point research bonus. Very early in the game I saw Trade go from 103 to 110 (note that in this case it did not double as some have reported), and over a longer period of

Haoh, I don't consider the game broken, I'm continuing to play it. And I do not care for those posting intemperate comments here. I would prefer to see the flames against Stardock stopped, and this thread devoted to attempts to isolate the cause of what we're seeing. My answer to almost all of your questions is yes. Some of us have been playing this game since the OS/2 days. This is the first time in all of those years that I've seen research costs increase like this. As I

I definitely saw it in games played as Torian (1) and Human (2 games). In all 3 of those games I had devoted points to enhanced research ability. In my latest game as the Yor, with no ability points for research, the tech inflation was either much less or was missing. Since the tech tree was so different, though, I can't swear that it wasn't there. The techs I noticed the largest inflation on as Human aren't available to the Yor.

[quote]Is the agent-placing requirement actually spelled out anywhere, or is this something people have figured out through experience?[/quote] The espionage system was changed in Dark Avatar, and the TA manual (though not yet updated for TA) does cover it (see page 32). In addition to gaining information on the civ you're spying on, an agent placed on an improvement on a planet will partially disable the improvement's function.

Are you saying spying doesn't work against minor races? Or that it doesn't work at all? If the latter, have you actually placed any agents on any other race's planets?

[quote]Is it me, or did my guide get stickied?[/quote] And deservedly so!

Back in Dread Lords, if I recall correctly, a military win counted more than an influence win (in terms of final score), which in turn counted more than a tech win. I don't remember where an alliance win fit in. Do you know where the ascension victory fits into this scheme? TIA

I saw in another thread where the devs know what the problem is but are having a hard time fixing it. They said it's failing in DirectX code. As a work-around, you can change the settings to run the game in a window. I've done that, and made the window size the same size as my desktop. Seems to work well.

Hmmm. I just submitted my first metaverse game in 2 years, and the Ascension win is recorded correctly.

Are you running TA fullscreen or windowed? Sounds like it might be the same as the Atl-Tab bug when playing fullscreen.

While the detailed naming systems described in this thread really do convey a great deal of information about the ships (and I congratulate you for inventing them and sticking with them), it's a little too much micro management for me. I tend to name my ship classes (especially when playing as Terrans) after the ship names in Iain M. Banks' series of novels about the "Culture". The ships in his novels are super intelligent "minds" who tend to choose humorously ambiguous names. My favorite is

I've seen the inflation in both of the games I've played so far, the first as humans with tech set to fast, and the second as Torians with tech set to very fast. Both times I had a 10% research bonus. tegac: I enjoy that IM also. The Arceans sent me (Torians) a message saying "Fear us! We have started researching mass driver theory!" A few turns later they surrendered to the Yor :LOL:

In a variation of that strategy, the Yor in my current game are attacking me with armed space miners :LOL:

Thank you for compiling and posting this. An excellent piece of work! :CONGRAT: About the shipyard's new "focus" feature. I'm disappointed that it works only on weapons and defenses and not engines, but I can see how that might have made it too complicated to get working right. But if I make my own design with an upgraded engine, is there a way to get the shipyard to start auto-upgrading it with new weapons?

Now that is funny! Thanks for posting ;)

I've seen this too. Since I normally buy the starport and then queue up a factory, I see this on every planet I colonize.

I agree with Formis6. And I've been playing GC since the OS/2 days, and was a beta and gamma tester for GC2. If the tech cost inflation is by design, I would really like to see it made an option. I'm on my second game in TA now, and like my first one I can tell it's going to end long before I can get to large hulls (this is in a large galaxy). In my current game I had 4 weeks to finish researching plasma weapons, but after stealing a tech from the Drengins (via invasion) all of a sudden I'm

I downloaded the game through SDC, and with that method of install the start menu shortcut points to GC2TwilightOfTheArnor.exe. If you change it to TAlaunch.exe you'll get a launcher window like in DA, that allows you to switch chapters. Not sure if the CD install works the same.

I got the "Invalid call" msg box while running TA in a window. It was after leaving the computer for over 20 minutes, and it had gone into power saving mode, so it might be the same error as the alt-tab bug. The crash happened as soon as I hit the shift key to wake up the machine. I do not see a debug.err file in the TA directory, and SmartException did not catch the error.

1.59[b].097 available now on SDC fixed the problem for me.

1.59[b].097 now available on SDC has fixed the graphic corruption problem for me.

The 1.59[b].097 version has fixed the graphic problems for me. Great job getting it out before the long weekend!

I'm seeing the out of memory crash also. For me it's happened only on saves, but it's pretty frequent on a large map. 2 gig RAM, XP Home, DA at 1.59[b].096. I had the heightmaps module installed.

Kryo, following up on your suggestion to uninstall and reinstall to address the loading time problem I posted - it didn't fix it. I uninstalled, and then downloaded and reinstalled (except for the multimedia and movies, those I reinstalled from archives). I'm still seeing 3 to 5 minute loading times from the launcher. On the other hand, since I'm usually in the game for several hours the slow loading time amortizes out to a small annoyance <img src="http://images.stardock.com/gc2/T_DL/smiles

Thanks for the hint, Kryo, turning off AA got rid of the video slowdown when running windowed. As for a complete reinstall to correct the loading time problem, is there a problem to turn on the collector's edition content when installing 1.4 from scratch? Is it included in 1.4?