Madfizzicks

My understanding is it goes a little something like this: The master difficulty label (challenging, tough, crippling, etc) reflects the combined level of all your opponents. If you pick all Intelligent, you get Tough, for instance. If you pick one fool and two genius, that might also work out to be Tough; I'm not really sure, but it's the combination that determines the overall difficulty. Now, if you toggle the master difficult

Something the game Alpha Centauri did that was kind of nice was an "accelerated start". You pick that option, and everybody starts with empires that are similar in power and have about 50-100 turns of development. It was a way to skip the mad expansion rush and get on with the empire management and warfare. It also ensured that everyone had similar power at first (no one AI or player gobbling up the whole map and ending the game before it even star

Whew... just got done with this one. Managed to crack it on my first try, on Tough, but it was close. Real close. I went for racial +2 speed, and started rush building 2-engine colony ships (I'm starting to wonder why I'd ever do otherwise, except maybe for variety or extra challenge). I sprayed those ships all over the map, and ended up with (I think) all the planets you can hope to get. My allies had one each, the DLs had one, the Yor