Voqar

A "top player" is one who specializes in artificially jacking up their score? Interesting.

Jagged Knife is pretty rough, especially if it happens before you have transports. If you have transports you can usually retake your worlds pretty quick and just suffer the horrendous population hit from the invasions. Jaggend Knife seems to take a proportion of all planets from every major - so the bigger you are, the harder you get hit. Lots of mega events are just that - mega. Wait til you experience pirates, spies everywhere, or some of the other ones that might

About waypoints...if that's what you want to know... There's a little blue button on the top edge of the lower UI bar at the far left-hand side. Use it to create a waypoint. You can select a few different types of waypoints (like auto-fleet on arrival) and name them whatever you want. When a new constructor/whatever is built and you launch from orbit, press 'T' and you get a popup to select which waypoint you want to send the ship to (there's an icon for this on the lower UI

[quote]If I remember previous topics about this correctly, this inefficency was intentionally built into the game to force the player to make strategic decisions about spending, rather than being able to crank out as much as you want at any time.[/quote] [quote]This also explains why the all-x strategies are so powerful, even if they have been nerfed for TA.[/quote] IMO, the all-x "strategies" should either not be possible or should be obviously inferior to playing the game as

Some people do freak over games like GTA. GTA is wildly popular but still less "viewed" than a blockbuster type of movie though, and movies worth getting riled up about (for those that get riled up about such things) come out a lot more frequently than a similarly stimulating game like GTA. What can you say. As long as this country claims to be educated and full of intelligent people yet an alarming percentage of people believe in ridiculous fantasies that make LOTRO look believable,

[quote]How do I do this? By selling technology. Selling technology brings in ridiculous cash. It almost seems like I'm cheating.[/quote] This is one of the reasons I turn off tech trading (for lack of any other acceptable to me options) - the extremes you can go to with tech trading/selling and the collective research the AIs do similarly is unbalanced, IMO. Going with lots of minors makes it even more abusive. Tech trading off also somewhat affects the pace of the game since you can'

I don't like this kind of cheese (avoiding doing a real invasion by either using a last second spy on a farm to magically wipe out half the population or abusing this broken game mechanic described by the OP), so the solution for me is simple - I just don't do it. If I played metaverse games I might be a bit more concerned though since you can bet people abuse this kind of stuff regularly and it IS nothing but cheese. I would prefer to see a solution that involved you having to build "

I'm not sure if this is a bug, but it seems peculiar, and/or maybe I'm having observational issues. It seems like I can put a warship in sentry mode and it will wake up if minifreighters on a trade route get within sensor range. This is somewhat annoying since the minfreighters are not military vessels. I would think sentry mode would cause the ship to wake up when something potentiall threatening is near, not just when any ship, especially an automated minifreighter tha

Several things...more of AI issues than bugs...that I've noticed during my first ToA game... Terrans, Tough, default map size and options, no random intel, no map regens, tech trading disabled since IMO it's always been broken, so AI not reduced per se, but no tech trading seems to affect the AIs them since they can't do team research. I'm playing Terrans and at peace with everyone. Most everyone else is at war with 1-3 other except 1 AI who's so cornered he might n

[quote]Disabling tech-trade is NOT a solution. All 4X games have tech trading (since Civilization I) and without it, game loses a good deal of its appeal Exactly. Might as well remove diplo altogether if going this way[/quote] Well, IMO, Civ has the same problem. A lot of players beat high difficulty mostly by cheese like tech whoring and manipulating other AI deficiencies. I think the tech brokering option in Civ IV helps with the tech whoring a little. Appa

No tech brokering option That and only that, and I'd be happy.

I'll pipe in even though this is an old topic. I think one factor, at least in DL, is that AIs don't often build fast ships. If you have fewer engines on your ships you can pack in more weapons. I tend to like more mobility so my ships are eventually more tech-oriented to have both speed and firepower (as in, you need higher tech to cram firepower in with speed to match their slow but reasonably powerful ships).

It's not like Apple has ever worried much about accuracy or honest regarding itself or its advertising. And Apple's iFanboys eat it all up.

[quote]My thoughts? I don't like WoW...[/quote] That's nice. The issue goes beyond one game though - Blizzard just has the success and resources to attempt to do something about an issue that plagues the entire MMORPG genre, if not all of gaming. I hope Blizzard wins and it puts the royal smack down on all botters and cheaters. One can dream. Seems like something that'd be hard to enforce but at least if they win it'll send a message and it's a step in the ri

[quote]I used to play but quit long ago. After the better part of a year of playing WoW I'd had enough. Yes there was new content being added along the way, but over time it became the same old thing no matter what was added.[/quote] That describes all MMORPGs. You either like the gameplay or you don't, and if you do like the gameplay, you can't find anything better than WoW, and in fact, WoW is so vastly superior to all other current MMORPGs that it's no contest. There's WoW all al

[quote]Yeah, I'm a little confused. Why is Fallout 2 OK, but Fallout 3 gets rejected?[/quote] It should be rejected for being FPS style instead of true to the original games and style that made the series popular! I could stand to see government interaction here - Bethesda should be fined for ruining Fallout. I really can't see myself buying this Oblivion expansion, err, Fallout Abomination.

Is the potential for this "strategy" still present with the new expasion? I was hopoing it'd go away since it doesn't seem to fit the spirit of the game - but SD has never done anything about it then I guess not.

[quote]I have several games sitting in my stack (both PC and 360) that I have barely even touched. One of these days I'm going to catch up with them. One of these days...[/quote] Ditto. I've played the 1st mission from CoD4 and had it for ages. Barely started Bioshock. I bought a new ATI 4850 this weekend (sweet deal over the weekend at bestbuy, did manage to install that) and still never fired up either of those to see how they looked (24" monitor almost always reduces the potential

"If you jus want to update a piece of software, then all you have to do is load up Impulse, download the program update, and then you can close Impulse." I'll try Impusle - since I have zero choice if I want to update Arnor after it's patched and I finally buy it (and I'm sure I'll want other future SD titles like the fantasy strat game in the works) - but my initial impression is that the app looks like bloated overkill loaded with features that I would never, ever want, need, or use.<

I got banned from LOTRO for swearing in a GM ticket. I was highly irate at the moment and got verbally out of control. In retrospect (and even at the time) I knew I deserved it. Swearing is generally a low grade way of getting your point across and while f-bombing can be fun and relieve stress, it's not widely accepted. It's entirely possible to communicate effectively and even verbally/psychologically abuse someone if so desired (like a beggar) without resorting to language that'll

[quote]AoC beats the pants off of WoW. WoW just gets so, so boring.[/quote] Eh, WoW is the epitome of MMORPG - it does all aspects of the genre well and/or superior to all others. So, if you WoW got boring for you, then so will any other MMORPG once the initial newness wears off, especially a game that's buggy, lacks content, has no endgame, has weak PvP (unless you're a FFA ganker and have victims), and that has unrealistic system requirements vs performance. See how

Very disappointed that #1 hasn't been addressed already and holding off on purchasing until it's taken care of. I could care less about the political machine and would prefer to see them addressing release issues with TA (that apparently didn't exist in beta so wtf happened).

It's early june...where the patch? /sigh

[quote]Kryo - Can you check with Cari & Brad and see if this is a candidate for a hotfix and if they still need more saves to isolate the alleged bug?[/quote] I like the "alleged" thing because I've seen a few "bugs" posted that would be game breakers for me and no real official response as to whether they are bugs or not. At this point, for the first time ever, I've decided to hold off on getting a galciv product until after the first patch (I usually don't do beta but do buy

I don't know that it's dying but it does seem to be in a recession of sorts. I've been playing PC games for a long, long time and I've played and bought tons of games. For me, I don't care that much for RTS and only play the very best of FPS, and those 2 genres seem to be the bulk of what gets released. I miss the older days of PC gaming where most of the titles were strategy oriented or were more like "pc games" than console games made for PCs. What