Inept

Seems to me that the fictional guy at Starfleet who designed these two ships must have been high on space crack!

Just to clarify: deficit spending doesn't mean being in debt. It means spending more than your income on any given turn. You could have plenty of bc saved up and run a deficit for as long as it takes you to build up a monstrous army without ever going into debt, for example.

What's more likely than anything is that your software is misdiagnosing the problem.

I once stumbled on a planet that had an embassy on a +300% manufacturing tile, and a factory on a +100% influence tile... This makes perfect sense! The AI is manufacturing influence (i.e. political lobby groups) and influencing manufacturers (i.e. unionized labor). Proof positive of the AI's incredible sophistication! <img src="http://im

When I recently had to loan 512MB of my 1GB to my sister, I was astonished by the decline in playability because I have a very high end system. This was with 1.0X. I suppose it's because I have the settings turned up. Anyway, I now have 2GB of RAM just in case.

I think that 32 is too low in terms of hitpoints. Starbases should be "bigger" and therefore capable of taking more punishment than most ships.

Great. Just great. I have plans for tonight, or had plans anyway.

The Arceans once gave me three mining starbases. A research, an influence and an economy. Early on in one game the Altarians declared war on me. I wasn't really in a pinch because I had all sorts of production capacity and I would have beaten them down quite handily, but the wonderful Arceans still gave me three mining starbases upgraded with technology well beyond mine at the time. They were each +10 mining and bristling with weapons. Cons

I tend to do 1:1 in terms of tiles, but I typically have my entertainment buildings 1-2 levels above my farming buildings in terms of reserach. With a high tax rate, it's all I can do to keep high morale. Functionally speaking, that means I don't usually progress beyond Xeno Farming. I can't say that this is an optimal strategy but it works pretty well for me. Saves tiles, gives high morale and allows populations that range from decent to wo

It will steal techs without continued money input. My understanding is that once you're at Advanced, there's no reason to continue spending money.

Perhaps that people don't want to pay $20 for multiplayer alone? I wonder what the results would have been if: a) The envisioned price was $10 b) The envisioned price was $0 c) The expansion, at $20, was to contain more than just multiplayer etc.

Anything other than hand-to-hand combat is a coward's option! I'd like to see the combat screen modified to show fleets docking with each other and then the occupants of each of the ships fighting to the death using fists, tentacles, knives, fangs and horns.

Wouldn't you have won before finishing all research, unless you turned off that victory?

Instead of complaining about the fact that you can't demolish it, you should be demanding a 700% bonus to the bonus the capital gives you.

At higher difficulties, you will be a ripe target for the AI if you don't have any military at all. They will declare war on you just as soon as they can assemble a few fleets and you'll be forced to veer off your plan to defend yourself. Best to include a competitive military in your plans to begin with.

I've had that event too, except that it was PQ11 and it was too much of a good thing. If the radius of effect were smaller, I'd like it a lot more.

Yeah, the problem is the dual core driver for XP. I've got a dual core on Win2K with no problems (and I don't have the driver). Microsoft's going to have to pry Win2K from my cold, dead hands.

More than the stupid random event where a political gaffe causes one of the AI players to declare war on you?

In addition to tense borders, I like to ensure that my key worlds have a nearby military starbase. If it saves your butt just once, it's worth it. Sometimes, when there's a lot going on, it can be easy to miss an invading fleet that's making a dive straight for your manufacturing capital or whatever. Nice to have a military starbase there to bolster your ships.

Up to date research suggests that planets are not as uncommon as we once thought or would have expected. It seems that most of our neighboring stars have planets of some sort and, in many cases, numerous confirmed planets. Search for the Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia.

Ah nuggets. That doesn't exactly make sense considering that the invasion took place regardless of whether or not it was successful. Probably a good thing too or the AI would be capitalizing heavily on such a strategy. In that case, mass driver the world to hell and use it as a peace offering if the battle goes poorly and a people farm in the interm

I'm faced with a likely impossible to defeat opponent nearing the end of a tough game and I'd like to ask a brief question about making missiles. What I want to do is destroy my opponent's planets with mass drivers so that his economic/industrial/research capacities are badly damaged. Does it matter how many troops I put on my "missile" ships or will a single one be fine?

Am I the only one who is no longer complelled to go to work? I mean, I didn't like my job in the first place but now all I want to do is play!

I was thinking about the entire population as soldiers question that has come up on these forums and I thought of a system that could add some dynamics to the game. I'm not sure whether such an idea has been voiced, but I was thinking of a "Standing Army" concept that would allow the player to determine what percentage of his population should be soldiers. If you take the current behavior of the game (everybody fights), that could be set to

Every one of my planets always has a fleet manager. I research planetary defneses early just for the fleet manager. I do also sometimes build the omega defense system if a key world is near an aggressor. It's occasionally worth it.