Research Scaling

Also, if u extend research, then require more labs as well. If you have a ton of planets, labs would still be important.

This is why they put the game speeds in. If you play on a huge map use slow research.

Slow research wont help the situation. In the endgame have 120,000+ gold 20k plus og metal and crystal and only need to worky about fleet movement. Which is 5 or 6 fleets at most, unless I build a raider fleet or 2.

I basically have nothing to spend the money on. I have no more hard decisions. The expansion will help that a little with starbases, but in giant galaxies, there is an artificial limit on capital ships and total fleet size. You can build maps, that exceed the design criteria of the game. This would help that problem.

Features I would like to see added are colonial govenors. (Media Hubs help that so maybe isnt needed)

why not make it so that last reasurch takes off limits, you can have as many ships as you whant if you max out the reasurch?

Bump.

I second this idea.  I like VERY large long-lasting SP games and find the same problem.  It makes it very easy to beat the AI, even with them all allied against me.

But then again, the AI in general needs much improving... especially for mods.  It does the strangest things with new ships I make and has no idea what to do with the deployable mini-structures I made.

on topic. the long research times are indeed a balancer for longer games, I tried it from time to time and it really takes ages to reseach anything. on the cost side ... well, I guess higher costs will actually work, bc you also profit from the benefits a lot longer. if for example, a metal processing upgrade costs 800 instead of 400 and the according metal/ crystal adjustments, though with an unchanged effect, then it is likely equalled out by profiting from it for 8 hours instead of 3 or so.

so, research cost high - normal - low. why not?

also the other ideas with continuing research and extra levels and stuff. I'd say there is a few things you could do to make research better fit to very large games.

the ai does not handle it, because the ai was not made to handle mods. you will have to wait for skynet to get the functions you want. or you can try and fiddle with the ai yourself, which in all likliness is immensly complex work.

just to give you an example: if I made each race's battle capital ship 100 times as strong without any according changes to cost or other counter acting factors, my bet is that the ai will not change a bit in chosing what forces to employ. because it won't know this change has been made. at least that's what I think that the relative strengths assessments are more or less hardcoded and do not change dynamically with any mod induced change.

I built a new unit for TEC called an Interdictor that had it's own small mobile phase disruption field and could also deploy small phase disruptor structures.  Works great for building blockades at stars!

The AI builds them... but it never uses the deploy mobile phase disruptor ability... guess it doesn't know when or how to do it.

Did the same for Advent with a antimatter support ship that had a boost antimatter ability and could deploy a small mobile antimatter recharger.

AI builds em, but doesn't seem to use it's abilites...

interesting. does it replace existing units or are these really extra to what is already there?

play a map that has planets and asteroids with no resources. That way only a coupla planets will have what u need and it will add some strategic depth to the game. Mess with the map creator, it's almost fun

see this depends on how they programmed the ai. If the ai command string was in the format if(a)thenactivate(specialabilityslot1) or if(b)thenactivate(specialabilityslot2) then you could switch out and the ai would just activate the ability designated by the ui slot. However it seems the ai is not programmed with that kind of built in error correction. More likely than not they programmed each ability individually to respond to certain triggers and set off only certain abilities.

so it's probably if(a)thenactivate(colonize)... or whatever the particular scenario may be. This way is much more stable and less likely to run into unexpected walls, but it makes it a pain in the butt for modders to be able to jury rig some new ai for these retarded cap ships.

Not enough people seem to realise how the kind of map you can create makes for some intresting situations. For people who complain about fighter's being to strong, make a map wit ALOT of no fighter grav wells. Make a map of mostly 80%? ice world's and fight over the very little metal planets. All gas giants so your fleets have far to travel to get to usable space. I dont think there is enough weird maps like these in the vanilla game. Love it thou...