CityMan

[quote]I could probably hack together a greasemonkey script to fix it, but I doubt you've switched to firefox.[/quote] Interestingly enough, this game and this forum is the only reason why I'm using Internet Explorer right now. For some reason, my Firefox doesn't display everything on the forum page properly. In addition, Firefox doesn't seem to release memory once it grabs it. So if I once had 20 tabs open, it is still eating up a huge chunk of my RAM even when I minimize it

Yup, now that I'm really paying attention to the Treaties window, I can usually figured out what is going on. Out of curiosity, is the trade line green? That would explain why I can't distinguish it from the RED war line.

[quote]cityman, IIRC the AI always used to treat the player and other AIs using the same ruleset for diplomacy (and, in fact, for everything!) Assuming this hasn't changed, then the only reason it offers you such lousy deals on suicidal is because it has enormous inherent diplomacy bonuses. This is good news (if you play non-metaverse games) since it means you should be able to fix things to your liking simply by modding in a high diplomacy bonus for your race. Have you tried that?[/quote] <

Perhaps it is too difficult. The fact that the developers did implement the current system probably is an indicator that it would take too much time to beef up the AI with all the possible behaviors. Let's assume for the moment that it is not possible to improve the AI's trading algorithms. I would still prefer to give the AI bigger advantages in other areas and have a trading system that is more fair. It would also be nice for planets and ships to be worth something that makes sense

If we ran the math, it might show that there is a point when the CEC is a better economic choice over the stock market. But you aren't calculating the opportunity cost properly. It's not how long it would take for any given planet. It's how long would it take for ALL planets. You are using up a tile for the CEC that could be a stock market instead. You have to calculate the cost over all planets, not just the one planet. Let's look at an overly simplified example. If there

In case the -/= keys don't work well for you, there are external programs that should be able to rebind the zoom functionality to something else. I haven't tried it with this game, but AutoHotkey should work.

[quote]One general thing I just thought to mention: On Suicidal, if you expect to get a "fair" trade from an AI without massive diplomacy bonuses, you're going to be disappointed. However, since humans are capable of much more subtle and effective use of many technologies, even if you've got to give up a lot more than you're getting back, the trade can often benefit you. Additionally, if you are playing with for instance 7 AIs, you may have to trade 4 techs to get 1. But if you trade the same 4

[quote]Perhaps the trade barriers are an intentional part of the Suicidal difficulty? Has that thought not crossed your mind at some point?Just because you have a problem with it, does not mean it needs to be fixed. Deal with it, turn trading off, or back the difficulty down a step.[/quote] Huh? Obviously, the current system is an intentional part of the Suicidal difficulty. Obviously, it was designed this way to make it more difficult for the player. If you actually read my post, in

Jasamcarl, what difficulty level do you play? At Tough, I didn't used to have much of an issue. Some AI were pushovers. Some AI were harder to deal with. At Suicidal, it's a whole different story. Even the minor races are unreasonable at that difficulty. Yes, I do understand the irony here. It's Suicidal. It's supposed to be hard and I'm complaining. But this is made hard in a way that feels really, really unfair to me. This is made hard in a way that basically removes

Heh, VV, are you sure you did it correctly? That's pretty funny. In any case, it works fine in DA, for me anyways. 3 turns:6 turns for Tiny:Gigantic at very slow or 1 turn:2 turns at very fast. Interesting. In any case, I have never had a game where I completed the tech tree. I never even came close. I can definitely see how it's possible at huge/gigantic/immense or whatever settings, though. People who love empire building can rack up some crazy numbers.

Note that none of this means that I don't still love this game. I do love this game and I think it's one of the best, if not the very best game ever. I've logged some crazy hours playing this game, especially recently. So congrats and thanks to the developers and designers. I was just hoping to get my voice heard about how I think the game could be made even better. :)

Well, anyone saying there is a "correct" way is just plain wrong. This isn't math or physics or some hard science where there is a correct answer. There are other very important criteria. Fun, fair, logical, popular, etc. Even though this game is an artificial world with artificial intelligences, we still want things to be fair and logical. We want things to make sense. This is a game about competition against AI. We want things to be fair. There are certain thing

Most of us aren't really arguing that our way is the correct way. I think we're just stating our opinions about how we wish the game would be. I think most people are also hoping for more options. In some cases, that is where the modding system comes into play. The game developers and designers have their own rationale behind every detail. But sometimes their priorities are different from the players. Even though I think I now understand the rationale behind the current tra

I just got the event in my current game. I agree with Iztok. This must be a leftover event from an older version. I offered this minor race a bunch of different planets and it valued them just as poorly as the normal races. It just makes me want to kill this minor race right now, since I have plenty of cash and I don't need it any longer. The minor races typically have a weak diplomacy ability and far weaker military, it probably is easier to trade for the new tech from that minor r

I've never built a CEC, so I didn't know the stats on it. I looked it up in Galactopedia. 400 cost for 20% morale boost and spy immunity. I didn't realize it had a morale boost. 400 cost could also build a 40% morale boost for the VR center. Hmm...my Galactopedia is crashing, so I can't look up the costs of other buildings that you could be building for that 400 cost and tile space. I don't know. I guess the morale boost means it does something even if spies aren't being

I haven't used spies all that much, except to screw around after I basically won the game already and defensive nullifying. What does the propaganda ability do? I've never heard it mentioned until now. How do you use it? [quote]Defensively, counter intelligence buildings are cheaper than spies in the long run. After 25-30 spies, you are paying more for a spy than you are for the building. Having one on most of your planets also makes the mega spies event a joke.[/quote] <

[quote]What the heck does 7 million look like? Pretty much like the picture I posted.[/quote] Oh, I didn't mean the chart. I was trying to imagine how many ships it takes to get a 7 million score. If you lined them up, single file, is it taller than the Empire State Building? Seriously though, is it thousands of ships? Gah, the mind boggles. In any case, it's amazing. Good luck!

[quote]AI's military doesn't matter if it's not in your way to AI's planets or resource starbases. You don't win by destroying their ships, but by taking their planets. Take most of them, and their econ will collapse from just a big ships' maintenance costs. If you really want to take ALL their planets, you actualy shouldn't destroy all their military, because then you risk they'll surrender to someone else.[/quote] The military rating seems to be very deceiving. The AI puts most of th

Thanks for the long and very informative post. That's exactly what I'm looking for at this stage in my skill development. Detailed AAR's are wonderful for learning the basics on how to implement various advanced strategies. But it's the details that make or break a strategy, and details can only be learned through experience. A player could try one of your strategies and execute the major aspects properly, but still lose horribly because the details were suboptimal and they lacked the experi

[quote]The mixed labs/factory approach that seems best there worked so well I've adopted it in DA also. Basically, I go nearly all factory for production buildings, but labs on research bonus squares/tech capital planets. I believe Mumblefratz has championed a similar approach. If there is a tech I need, I go 100% research until I get it.[/quote] How would this be different from the standard strategy of specializing planets? Having production planets, research planets, money pl

I think your problem is that you have to be 'Close' with the target AI. There is a better explanation in the wiki: https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Alliance

[quote]Imo, that the "Research Speed Option" should scale with map size. And if possible # of habitable planets, and so on. The farther up the tech tree, the more expensive techs should get, even more so than what is currently implemented on "Very Slow."[/quote] Well, it becomes a question of how much control to give the players when they decide the game settings. If it scales with map size automatically, there is a level of logic that bypasses the player. If it is the same with all m

I'm by no means an AI developer, but from my experience, developing AI is extremely difficult. It's not easy to create an AI to play as well as an intelligent human. In chess, computers can brute strength all the possible moves and figure out the best choice. Add some pattern recognition and it can beat most human players. But in a game like GalCiv or Civilization, there is no way to brute strength all the possible moves. Developers have to create 'cheating' AI because it's just not

I completely agree with the quoted text. There should be an option of ridiculously slow to avoid immediately making ships obsolete before they get built. Actually, the person who wrote the quoted text wants more than just a slower tech rate. He wants each tech to become more expensive than it is as it goes down the tree. That makes sense. At the beginning of the game, research speed is slow, but as your empire grows, the cost of the tech doesn't keep up. That means a "Mega

Oh, I'm playing DA. I've been playing this game for a while, but I'm new to the high difficulty games. I didn't want all the new stuff in TA to completely mess me up. This is also my first time trying the all-factory approach, so I'm probably playing it in a very non-optimal fashion. I wouldn't be too surprised if the all-factory and all-research approaches were specifically targeted by the developers to be less effective. The top players seem to beat suicidal quite easily (i.e. see