doogles

[quote]I'm gonna have to say be careful about multi-threaded libraries: Just because some code in a library is multi-threaded doesn't mean your own code is multi-threaded. Your own code can still be single threaded and can bottleneck a single CPU if you're not careful. The future will need to have a lot more support of threading in the language itself, not just the libraries.[/quote] I'm not talking about using somebody else's library as a part of your application, I'm talking about lib

Yes, I meant to add a "not" in there. My main point was that general corruption is going to have a lot more than just the factors present in a game, so citing real-world examples is pretty meaningless. As for proof, it's not possible. In GC2, the treasury "limit" of 20k is supposed to represent a civ that's outrageously wealthy. We're talking about having enough liquid assets to build the most complex structure in the span of a single week. In the GC2 world, this is possible because

Obviously wealth is the only factor contributing to corruption. You're pulling a classic straw man argument here, jmgarth. Nobody stated that when wealth = X, corruption = X * C. And furthermore, the specific corruption of which he's speaking is monetary only, as that's the topic at hand. A nation that's excessively wealthy (again, the topic of this thread is about the penalty for having a very high treasury) is certainly more likely to have corrupt leaders skimming from the top than

Ah, interesting. I'll have to try that out - I never felt like the game was "epic" enough when the entire universe went from unexplored to conquered in 5-10 years. Hiding the timeline might help me forget :)

Oops, looks like it's number 8 of all time. Whatever, it's up there really high.

[quote]Well, for my part, I purchased GalCiv 1 and will not spend any more money on this series unless multiplayer becomes a part of the game. I spend most of my playing time in multiplayer mode.I understand the cost/complexity issues with multiplayer. What is crap is the excuse that the single player experience would suffer. "Multiplayer mode may significantly change the game experience" or some such line is now displayed on a number of multiplayer games. Some sacrifices must be made to mak

[quote]As another half-aside, I'm about 250 turns (*love* that new option) into a 1.95 game, gigantic map, 9 opponents, with tech trading off.[/quote] What new option are you talking about? What have I missed? [quote]Plus, I'm playing Thalans again and it's really interesting to see how few structures make it across the new tech boundary when I flip a world. The Future Bugs are so weird they pretty much throw out everything the primitives built when they take over.[/quote]<br/

[quote]There is no "secret" to making an immortal game, it is in fact very easy.[/quote] I catch your point, but I hardly think it's easy to make such a game. Very very difficult, in fact. It's true, though, that the concept is both easy to understand and at least work toward, and yet so hard for big companies to care about. When you're seven levels of management above your product and its developers, all you care about is money, and it will show. I doubt people like Trip Ha

I gotta go with CobraAI on this one. For a typical commercial desktop application, where devs would normally struggle with the issues of 32 vs. 64-bit, it's generally a non-issue. Think of QuickBooks, Goldmine, and other such event-driven applications here. These apps don't do a whole lot that's terribly CPU-intensive. And the tools abstract the difficult tasks these days. Visual Basic, Delphi, C++ Builder, C#, etc. The devs usually don't need to worry about the low-level stuff. I

I suppose that explanation changes things. Unfortunately, if you explain your system as such, there becomes a balance problem. Point-for-point, technologists are already the best government available (or second-best maybe) when compared to the cost of getting what they offer via picks. Giving everybody a morale penalty for tech (an idea that will probably never happen, but could be kind of interesting), but giving the technologists a boost.... That just makes them the clear winner (a

Seriously, am I the only person who thinks this is awesome?

No, as I said I doubt it'll be fixed. But at least the morale penalty, for instance, has a popup. Once you've been in the red a while, you get a warning that debt is making people unhappy. This issue doesn't even tell you what's going on, which is why I think it's so broken. A real fix won't happen, but can't we get a popup like the debt moral penalty?

Curious. Why 32-bit Vista? That sort of caps your RAM at 3 gigs, so you'll have to replace again in probably less than a year. And didn't I see a post a long while back by The Big Cheese himself complaining that Vista should have gone 64-bit only or something? Curiouser and curiouser....

Hmm... the party in control doesn't reflect the average person's beliefs. Look at the democrats and republicans in the U.S. and tell me how many average people [i]that you personally know[/i] that aren't actually able to agree with some of the points from both sides. And that's not even getting into the fact that liking a certain party doesn't mean being the epitome of what they represent. I prefer democrats to republicans, but I am hardly a hard-core liberal. And that's just with a

Zydor, you're missing the point. There is literally [b]no[/b] explanation about this event whatsoever, much less a nice fix. Your suggestion sounds like avoiding programming an interesting and deep game because balance issues are inevitable. That's absurd when you consider the time spent building all the back stories and separate tech trees. Even though SD knew there would be balance issues and possibly a lot of updates to deal with those issues, and tons of new ways to exploit the A

I agree with Alfonse here - the limit is silly for sure. If the problem is that buying ships and improvements is too easy, then the game shouldn't allow instant purchases of those things. But even so, instantly buying ships is so outrageous that I almost never do it, so I still really don't see a true balance issue. A colony ship starts out costing something like 150 production points, but costs around 1300 BC to purchase. This is a huge discrepancy. For instance, in my save

I think I'm beginning to understand the "not enough useful in-game documentation" gripes I keep reading. A simple popup mentioning this fact might have been nice.... Thanks for the tip, though - at least I know how to deal with the situation.

Oh, and if anybody wants to see the actual saves, they're here: http://www.nerdbucket.com/blog_files/games/GC2-TA/DrathSaves.zip The "good" save is "Drath VIII.sav" -- the bad is "Drath IX.sav".

This may be TA-specific, I'm not sure, but in a few games I've noticed tax income appearing to suddenly drop for no apparent reason. Until this latest game, however, the discrepancy was small enough that I didn't notice it, or else I checked on it so infrequently that I couldn't be sure what factors could have affected my economy. This time I finally have saves just two turns apart, and I cannot for the life of me figure out what could possibly have changed. Econ stat is +85%

This is a huge success! But even more awesome - check out the PC games page: http://www.metacritic.com/games/pc/. Twilight of the Arnor, an [b]expansion[/b], is listed as the number 7 PC game of all time. Personally I think the reviewers have gone overboard because of how much potential this game has (let's face it, there are numerous bugs, balance issues, and other minor issues that need to be dealt with before this game is that perfect). But it's clear that TBS games a

From other reports, it looks like the formula is far more fair at this point. I only hope the inflation still hits hard when not trading techs, because it was actually pretty sweet in that game. Either way, looks like Uranium has one less thing to complain about.... Poor little guy.

(So naturally as I'm typing that rant, he posts something constructive. Damn it.)

Ah, missed that there was a page 2. So yeah, SD put in this system to combat speedy teching, but made the formula too aggressive, perhaps. Either way, I'd like to keep some kind of escalating cost in place. Really did make my game more interesting (and made planetary invasions far more useful - random crappy techs most of the time, sure, but now and again I'd get something really nice for free). Uranium, shut up. Seriously, all you do is whine, and not even in a constructive

This is interesting. I assumed the "bug" was to deal with all the massive bitching about the tech trees being plowed through too quickly. When I played a game on an immense map, I had no trouble getting the techs I needed even though I did see the costs rising (and sometimes pretty fast). My main enemies had large ships and decent weapons and shields. Transports were all over the map, mine and theirs. I have a theory. Tech cost goes up based on number of techs you have, not

I also should say, I consider honesty to be very important, and acting "professionally" is rarely very honest. When people treat each other courteously solely because it's expected, I despise it. It means nothing to be respected by somebody who never once has even shown the capacity for disrespect. Fake diplomacy just gets under my skin. My personality pisses people off at times because of this. Tact is good to a point - tell people the truth, but don't be a jerk about it. But it's