By gunning them down, just like non-suicide ships. If these suicide craft coming from nowhere but your mind were so effective against the Vasari, why are they not in the game? Why are they not part of the lore, instead of that the TEC hit disaster after disaster for years?

the lore states that the TEC stopped the vasari doesn't say how.

and if you had nothing but trade ships and you lost like 500 or more trying to take out a frigate wouldn't that be a disaster.

and it could take years to come up with the weapons for a frigate if you haven't been designing weapons. and every time you came up with a new weapon you would have to put it on a ship to see if it worked against the vasari. another list of disasters.

phew, discussion on the lore again. well, I remember that in particular organisational reforms contributed to stopping the vasari advance. remember the TEC is not the same as the trader worlds at the beginning. when the vasari first arrived the humans there were factioned i.e. they had maybe a dozen different governments negotiating with each other and so on. politics. it takes a really desperate situatíon to get people to give up their immediate rights and controlls. finally though they realised that they had to have a coordinated and united effort to stop the invaders. that effort was the TEC and by not just sending half a dozen fleets somewhere around they ordered some to defend, others to attack key targets, etc etc.

also: they applied their mastery of ecnomics to warfare ... that means nothing else than they had a huge industrial capacity for turning out consumer and investment goods and slowly adapted it to churn out frigs and so on. at that point I remember statistics of the US military output in WW II. just look at the numbers and how brutally they rise over the years. my guess is the TEC did the same and produced tens of thousands of firgs because they had the capacity and the resources to do so, because ... they were economists and knew how to produce efficiently at low cost and low use of res.

The jump gates are pretty cool (jump gates, phase gates, whatever)... but the rest.. well, its still not the difference between Humans and the undead in Warcraft 3, for example... or pretty much every race on Warhammer 40k. The differences there are much more apparent.
Each race in SOASE has trade posts, refineries and such. Each race harvests the same type of energy sources and its economy is based the same. Every race has capital ships and 2 sizes of other ships. Each race has to do research in order to colonize in Volcanic/Ice planets (even in Master of Orion there was a race that could colonize every planet).

I think the problem is that you and Ron are too close to this game. I see this in research often, another scientist will refuse to accept or look at other viewpoints of his work because he is too absorbed in the daily minutiae to look at the larger picture. When this happens, others in the field tend to discount the fellows opinions.

Bluntly, this is where your analysis is failing.

When a new player looks at this game, he sees a Vasari ship and then a TEC analog. Yes, the powers are slightly different and the exact roles may be different...but not by such a significant difference that a Vasari Missile Ship is different than a TEC missile ship.

Taking an example from molecular biology: The best demonstration of identical function of an enzyme is to take the unknown enzyme from the studied species and clone it into an organism engineered to lack that enzyme. If the enzyme that you cloned into the organism is similar in function to the one that the organism lacked, it will likely survive and rescue the phenotype. Use this test in Sins. Could I take the Vasari missile ship, swap it over to the TEC and have the race play in nearly the same way. The answer unequivocally is yes. Then do this to the other ships, in each case, the answer is again yes.

When one plays the races, they don't feel like two species with a completely divergent evolution, but rather convergent subtypes of a single species with the Vasari being the high tech spiky variant and the TEC being the 'vasari lite', 'buy one, get one free' variant. For many new players, this is what they see, and this is what they are reporting to the developers. All your denials and all your posts are coming from a person who is so deeply absorbed into the game that he cannot see what the larger picture is.

My analysis is that the problem is not that the races are not different, I'm sure that they are, but rather they do not appear to be functionally different enough to make a significant and fun difference within the course of a normal game. In my experience there are two kinds of people: those who look at something and see what it is right now, and others who see what it could be. We are all fans of this game and each of us has bought it already on faith that it will be good. There are many of us who are saying, 'Yes, this is the way it is, it seems the same and it could be much better.'

*Sigh* You've proved my point. You've already told us that you've been here 'nearly a year longer' than everyone and then reference a group of people that includes a person who is making the game. Of course Blair loves the game, he's making it. You're absorbed into this game to the point of paranoia, there is no reason to attack those who are trying are simply writing to the developers in order to share our observations. Nothing less, nothing more.

I gave an example of how you can prove identical/homologous function in a complex system. I can't help that you can't take an example from one field and apply it to another, I won't really expand on what that indicates.

I can see that you're not taking this well. It's okay, its just a game, calm down and take a few deep breaths. As for who I am, it just shows how weak your argument is that you need to attack me personally. I can give you my Federal institutional research credentials if you'd like, feel free to PM me and I'll direct you to them.

I enjoy this thread and want it to be useful, stay on topic Schod. If you need to try to attack me more, send it to my PM, I'll read them there when I have the time and it won't distract others anymore.

He happens to offend alot ppl, its something he has to learn that its not nice


sometimes your going waaay over the line man and when i read your post(s) where your going on a personal attack like this, it makes me sad and irritated as there are no reason for it.
So please stop this personal attacks and be the better person your trying to be.

Also i see his point, as some things gets blinded to those of us that are playing the game all the time. We get used to certain bugs and simply forgets them, thats also why i think its great with these beta stages so new ppl can come in an report them

More on topic i see the OP's problem and i concur that the lore is expressing something different then what we got, the lore will get better as i understood and will fix alot of holes. Also with the diversity of the races a decision Ironclad have made as its been said "so that newcomers would not be panicked".

I also got disappointed with the lack of diversity on how the Vasari is compared to the TEC, i was sorta expecting a "new game" but theres nothing to do about it as there are less then a month or so left of development time.
All we can do now is let the devs know what we would have liked to see, and hope for something in an expansion or sins 2

I've only been here a couple months, vasari have only been here a couple weeks. Only played about a dozen games with them so far, too lazy to play the ai much and I keep hitting ICO when no one is around. If I'm too attached to the game and can't see faults, that must mean there aren't any to see. Since I already have a text book explaining in detail what the minor differences really add up to, you can already read where I too am somewhat disappointed in having them start out the same. The fact is they are not identical or near identical races regardless of the superficial appearances.

Starcraft had primarily superficial differences, the tactical ones were still fairly unique, if partly ripped from warhammer, but getting your units from eggs and building creeps to alter the terrain and expand your base is largely superficial. Thanks to a complete lack of anything resembling realistic warfare, a small force is pointless, so a satellite base from the marines is just a weakly guarded free kill for the zerg, limitations in expansions are thus not really limitations at all. Having power distribution to get rid of against the eldar(oops, protoss) was a good one though. Now if that hadn't been the only thing they made unique about the side, since everything else was generic and stolen from the aforementioned wh40k side.

The tactical differences in sins far outstrip the tactical differences in starcraft, it's just severely lacking in superficial ones. It also starts out damn near identical in gameplay for each side. Of course, this is a staple of 4x games, and they'd probably lose a good chunk of that player base if they had three radically different from every perspective sides that never played the same even from the initial building.

Danielost, resources. You can build ten times as many factories just fine, you have to have the steel to make the tanks. The US didn't just have impressive production capacity, they had the resources to use it full bore. The vasari were stopping for a happy meal, they were low on resources already most likely. Using cheap suicide ships is even more costly than losing people. Building a ship, even an automated one, requires raw materials they were going to collect after creaming the TEC, by comparison, cloning new people(see the cloning tech in that list?) would probably be the lesser casualty to their resource stockpiles.

sorry this was not meant as a slam to any non americans.

that was a grasping attack, duh I'm regretting it as its the only thing people have held onto. the guy was born in 83, he's probably a graduate, doesnt mean he's any more qualified.

if you've ever seen me in an argument I never talk down to people, throw around my IQ (that was a fake up there) or talk with gross amounts of nonsense. people mistake my confident manner for arrogance.

I'm fully willing to hit the reset button with Caael, but I do not want to hear about how I've been brainwashed because I play the game too much.

if I may quote here:

very true, but as I said, superficial differences are also important, and because they are superficial implementing them doesnt hurt except for taking away time from other issues, but seriously, race balance is one of the most important things in an strategy game anyway.

and no, starting similarities to ease understanding the game and races is not necessary. most of the people here are used to both rts and tbs and can cope with differencies and a certain degree of complexity. hell, it may not even have that huge an impact on gameplay if vasari had just one lab for both branches for a equivalent cost increaes (just an example, probably a bad one at that), but it creates "feel" and thats what people see when they first play the game and get their mind shaped on it.

its like going to a job interview and being the perfect candidate, but making a bad first impression.

agreed, this is simply the "Vasari arent the Protoss" vs. 3.0, if someone wants to make a useful thread like "how to differentiate the Vasari more!" instead of more of these be-hatching threads then maybe we can have a little more usefulness, a little less confrontation and a lot less redundant and repedative whining.