[quote]About four weeks ago, Sins of a Solar Empire permanently damaged my monitor, and Stardock refused to admit that the game could have anything to do with it.[/quote] Wait, what? It permanently damaged your MONITOR? How is that physically possible? I've written programs designed to intentionally attempt to damage computer parts before, but fry the monitor? How? This, I want to know. Because I want one of those.
I think this neatly illustrates the fact that the Metaverse scoring is simply irreversibly broken, as it gives the highest scores for completely meaningless nonsense. I personally believe that scores should count only two things: Time, and map size. The highest score is won by the fastest victory on the largest map. Period. Everything else means nothing and is purely a masturbatory exercise.
Bah. I hate surprises. Don't believe in spoilers, there's no such thing. It is always better to go into anything fully informed.
Heh, what does it say? That's probably the ONLY time you'd EVER want to use one, really, if there's an end game message. Otherwise, I can't imagine a single circumstance under which I would want to use a Terror Star. The hideous expense of researching a technology that has absolutely no worthwhile application to anything else, so that you can create an item which similarly has no useful value that serves only to destroy your own real estate, seems rather dubious. Combined with the fact that the
Starbases can receive "damage" if you have done something which upgrades their max hull points, and they have gained those points yet.
There seems to be a lot of weapon techs that are missing also. It's rather jarring going from quantum torps to Nightmare torps, which seems to have replaced BHE. There's kind of a HUGE power gap between them.
I dunno if it's SUPPOSED to be this way, but I find it extremely jarring that the weapons technology goes from phasers straight suddenly to doom rays...and that's it. I mean, one moment you're zapping away with strength 4(?) phasers, and suddenly the next thing on the menu is DOOM RAYS at strength 20-ish? What's the deal with that? What happened to all the other weapons?
I've never bothered with installing life support on my ships previously. Is this now critically important? I've never had a need to reach anything that couldn't be reached normally via the range given by colonies and bases. Anything so far out that it can't be reached is normally too far out for me to care about.
Don't fleet noncombatants. If noncombatants are not in a fleet, several things happen: 1. They do not participate in the fighting at all, meaning if your attack goes pear-shaped (or even if you win), they neither lose move, nor are at any risk for destruction. 2. If attacked, the attackers will fight your battlefleet before they can attack your noncombatants. Should you fail to defeat the attacking force, the enemy must still destroy each noncombatant ship one at a time, paying one
[quote]A sticky trap might also work - cover an area with overlapping military starbases with nothing but the -1 and -2 enemy speed modules.[/quote] Stickytraps work well in combination with the "wall of cruft". Not only will your enemy's ships be reduced to a single move, but it means their fleets can only kill ONE little piece of crap at a time....and you can replace them faster than he can shoot them down, so for every worthless POS he shoots down, 2 more take their place. [
This is probably done to discourage certain races from immediately selling their starting tech for a profit.
The target chosen to be attacked is normally, IIRC, the ship with the highest weapon to hitpoint ratio, with some adjustment for defense. However, I don't think that it evaluates the defense based on effectiveness by type, so if the other ships had high-defense, but of the WRONG type, they would have been evaluated as lower in crunchiness and thus disfavored. You should have used missiles.
[quote]super warrior (more hp attack)[/quote] I thought the bonus of Super Warrior was first strike ala original DL, so you can vaporize your opponents in the opening shot and they will thus never get to shoot back.
I doubt it. I've never had this event, but it sounds horrifically painful. Does it affect the speed boost granted by military bases?
Turn-based epic wargames fail at multiplayer, anyway. How many people, exactly, can you find to sit through an 80 hour campaign, most of which will be spent waiting for the other player to move? The way GalCiv's turns work is completely incompatible with a multiplayer format. There is no hope of retrofitting MP into this game format.
Bury them in an avalanche of crap. If you have no chance at all of taking on even a single Dread Lord ship in combat, and they *DO* have ship, just surround it in unarmed, engineless hulls flung into position by military space catapults. Every time he is forced to kill one just to leave dock, it costs him a move. As long as you can replace them faster than he can kill them (they cost next to nothing to make), he can do nothing.
Assume the AI knows everything anyway. After all, it already runs your game. Regardless of whether the AI does or does not "cheat" for its information, it will never be conclusively proven. Just assume the AI has complete omniscience over everything in the game, and that any behaviors to the contrary are nothing more than misdirection aimed at hiding the fact that it knows everything. It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you.
If the enemy fleet is vastly more powerful than yours is, turn out massive numbers of the cheapest pieces of crap you can: No engine, no weapons, cheapest hull. Don't fleet them. Just hurl them into the path of the enemy in a giant carpet. Weaponless hulls cost no maintenance. You can start building these anytime and just build an enormous wall with them. Killing them costs any ship or fleet a move. AI ships practically never have more than a few moves. Sacrificing these hulks that cost next to
The breakpoint between large vs. small varies widely depending on a great number of factors. The MAIN important thing about large ships is not specifically their combat power, but their greater capacity for ENGINES! Like the game says, "Honor, courage, bravery, integrity, none of these things matter if you cannot get to the battle!". Thus, size matters not. You should always build the best ship you can in the shortest time you can that can still get to the battle. Building tiny fighters
I am at a loss to understand why there is this specific hardcoded lock on ALL weapons technology, PERIOD, no matter how utterly valueless the technology is, to the point where the AI will not even sell you a completely worthless technology for an item that you already have a better one of. Even if you were absolutely convinced that weapons technology was THE end-all-be-all, surely you would not reject such a foolishly lopsided trade as giving someone NOTHING for SOMETHING. Instead, the AI will f
It should be intuitively obvious that sales are necessarily restricted by the system requirements demanded: You cannot sell more copies of the game than there are customers who possess the systems required to run it! Assuming, therefore, that your game's actual appeal before system requirements is the same regardless of what system the player actually owns, let's say, just for argument's sake, 30%, 30% of 60% of the computer-owning populace is a much bigger figure than 30% of 5% of the computer-
[quote]While reading one of my post I notice that someone said that the population of the planet are all killed by fighting to the death, and the planet is repopulated by the soliders, but it does not seem right. Frogboy or any other dev do you have the answer for this?[/quote] I believe I said that, yes. It fits, though. Consider: You invade the planet. The number of defenders coincidentally happens to be equal to the listed population of the planet. They fight very poorly, probably because
That description sounds neutral to me. I mean, the Arceans are neutral, and they tried to trick the humans into being invaded, so clearly there's plenty of wiggle room in "neutral" behavior.
[quote]so if all the players that spam illuminators suddenly died right now, it would techinically be "evolution"[/quote] Well, the PLAYERS wouldn't be evolving, but the strategies would. And people spam illuminators? I thought it was only the OTHER LRMs that got spammed, and Illuminators sucked as spam. Was this changed?
From what I can tell, only in very rare cases do planets that you conquer have surviving enemy population. Given that ground warfare is fought to the death by your population fighting against the enemy population until every last one of them is dead, and only when using the Info Warfare tactic does any enemy population not fight to the death (and those who joined you WANTED to join you), it stands to reason that there wouldn't be any resistance fighters because you slaughter everyone.
