teaster

Civ IV Warlords, wonn't be a long wait though.

For all those worried about losing the forums, you should check out the Apolyton and CivFanatic forums. I've been a long time visitor to both those forums for Civ III and IV. They are well run and administered as well as having a large number of quality submitters. The important thing is will Frogboy, CariElf and the rest of the gang be regular visitors and submitters. I'll go to what ever forum they're lurking in.

But I like being Drengin

I may be wrong but I don't think a farm will help early in the game. It increases the maximum population of your planet but the max pop of an initial colony is already 10 billion. It takes a long time to get that many people. Markets won't help a great deal early on either. They increase the economy by 10% but since you don't have many people early there is not much of an economy to increase. Early while your population is low, you're better off with the factories and r

I definitely don't use the core scout design. I load a cargo hull full of engines, sensors, and life support so it can go fast, far, and see everything. I usually play on Huge maps and this is what I use as well. They are more expensive but Tiny scouts just can't match the speed and range of a Cargo Hulled explorer. It would take a lot of Tin

I use Cargo hulls early as exploration vessels, all engine and lifesupport with a sensor or 2, to explore the unknown and map the galaxy. But they are too expensive to use for military scouting. For that I use a more expendable small hull in 2 configurations. One as an early warning ship that is all sensors and no engine and line them up around my border. The second is a scout which combines all 3 engine,sensor and range to follow the enemy fleets. Of course if I have

I started a new game after installing 1.2 and the first planet I colonised was a size 11 planet with a 700% research tile and 3 100% research tiles. Needless to say I did a little dance and made it my research capital.

Gotta have garlic to keep the Torians at bay ..and vampires good ol' multitasking garlic

YAY TEAM

Access to military resources will often dictate how aggressive I am. If I have a couple of them I will take a more conquest oriented strategy. In one freak game I played I started with 4 of them (no other resources, just military) on a huge map. I actually quit that game before completing because it had made my ships unbeatable. Not much of a challenge, but fun to watch your small ships slaughtering a squadron of battleships with no losses.

beta's good, i'll take a beta

I think the cargo hull has a high logistics points value because it has the same carrying capacity as a large military hull. It may only have 1HP because it is meant to be an unarmoured civilian hull. This is reflected in the price of the hull (half that of a large military hull) and the fact there is no tech prerequisite. There is no reason you would not be able to use the large hull for purposes traditionally the domain of the cargo hull if you feel it may be placed in harms way.

every critic who posts always starts out with "I've been a programmer for 20 years.." and then launches in to how easy such and such would be to code. Look at how obnoxious it's proven to get the AI to build improvements on its planet effectively. You'd think that would be trivial to get right. I know I thought it would be. And when I play the game, the AI always uses its

There are at least 2 events that come up that cause class 0 planets to become habitable. One involves a vote to decide who gets the newly habitable planet and the other it becomes the homeplanet of a new minor race. I haven't tried my hand at modding yet but you may be able to mod those events.

The rationale for surrender is the same as it has been historically, independants nations have become a vassal/protectectorate of a greater power to protect themselves from an agressor (or that greater power). In theory this makes sense but unfortunately in practice in the game, as has been pointed out on this post, the AI often surrenders to an empire that is not in a position to defend them. Combine this with the fact that any surviving ships are disbanded it just makes the surrend

I uploaded v1.11 succesfully last night but when it got to the movies it seemed to hang. If I remember correctly I think the message was that it was uploading file list or something like that. I gave up and canceled, I was in a hurry to play and didn't have the patience for the movies

I agree. I rarely have the ability or the desire to upgrade an entire class all at once. I may not have the money, I may be engaged in a war, or some of my ships may be too far away from home to risk a lengthy upgrade. I also find it a nuisance to have to disband a fleet to upgrade the ships in the fleet. The ability to upgrade an entire fleet, or individual ships in the fleet from the fleet manager screen would be a nice feature to have.

I will make a concession to the not upgrade argument (or even decommision old designs as Undecided does). If your strategy is to overwhelm your opponents with swarms of cheap (and therefore expendable) ships, gaining experience would not be very important and upgrading old designs would not be cost effective. Instead of spending money upgrading you could build a newer better model and use the old one to take the missiles while the new one fires. If the ship isn't designed to survive anyway

I'm a huge fan of experienced "Elite" units so I rarely decommission ships. A fleet of small hulled ships can do some impressive things if you keep them upgraded and allow them to accumulate enough experience so they have more hull points than a large hull. It's even more important if you are not going for a conquest victory and want to keep your fleet to a minimum. Even if you are not involved on a lot of battles. If you keep using the same ships over and over they will gain exp

The time it takes to upgrade a starship depends on the distance to one of your planets. If you are close to a planet it only takes 1 week to upgrade, it can take several weeks if you are deep in someone elses territory. Research time is not proportional, I don't have exact numbers to call on but often the initial tech is often more expensive than the follow ups. For example Warp Drive is more expensive than Warp Drive II and Warp Drive III. I believe the logic behind this is it co

You could also set the Tech rate to slow or very slow and give that a try. It will change the dynamics of the game somewhat so you may not like the results, but it may be worth checking out. I don't think I would recommend no tech trading though, especially for your style of play since it seriously restricts diplomacy and that seems to be an important part of you strategy.

can't talk, got to kick Korx

Question 2 - seeing the radius your ship can move, that is a feature I would like to see as well (good suggestion ). Early in the game when you ships only move 4 or 5 squares it's not a big deal but when you start to get movement rates of 10-15 squares and you have to either squint or scroll to count the squares it becomes more troublesome. Question 3 - I want that too

With regards to your example for question 1 if you toggle the grid on you need only count the squares the enemy ship can move and keep your ship 1 square further away. That way you can avoid guessing...and reloading

This is a common occurance, there is a formula the AI uses to determine when they will surrender their worlds and to whom. I don't know whether historical enemy is part of that calculation or not