Eilarais

[quote]That said, I don't think RTS games "devolve" into searches for optimized build orders. Anyone who becomes too predictable is subject to getting countered. At a certain point, you can't improve any more just by having a better build order, and the game starts to revolve around strategy. The problem I have is that you need to learn all the build orders and their counters and their timings before you even get there. It's awesome once you do, but it takes months just to pick up a game.

1. Universal Combat 2. Earth 2160 3. Tiberium Wars

[Quote]Now I realise the first thing someone is going to remind me of is that impulse is not an DRM at all. I'm quite aware of that, but it feels and acts just like one. And that I just can't stand.[/Quote] I would agree with you if Impulse wasn't a value-added service, but it stays on my machine because it offers things that have nothing to do with DRM. For example, I can install the latest fully-patched SOASE in about a third of the time that it takes me to install it from CD.

Ugh, yeah, I was using the Forge tools, I never even noticed the ones sitting in the install directory. Many thanks for the quick help!

I am trying to convert the 1.16/1.02 entity files to txt, but the tool included in Forge Tools 3 doesn't work for me when trying to convert some files. 1.16 hangs on CAPITALSHIP_PHASEBATTLESHIP.entity and 1.02 crashes on PLANETMODULE_PHASEORBITALCANNON.entity. I thought I would get around this by using the reference files included with Forge Tools, but these files cause Entrenchment v1.02 to not start. Is there any way to get the correct entity files for the most recent vers

[quote who="sbradfor" reply="17" id="2135688"]I'd like to be able to turn off AI surrender. It happens to me all the damn time. Very annoying. [/quote] Same here. I see the point of having it but it's definitely not a feature for everyone. Having you demand surrenders from the AI instead of getting them handed to you would be a much better solution.

Didn't this exact same feature happen with GalCivII? Forum posters complain, devs change game, entirely different set of forum posters appear and complain, devs add option. It's too bad for us single-player types too, because we don't dominate the forums and patches get to be like minefields after a while. It would be nice is there was some kind of patch archive we could use after devs stop focusing on the single-player game. Any word yet on w

1. Improved AI fleet composition/retreat tactics. 2. Antimatter toggle low/medium/high for ships, so autocast will not use more than 33/66/100% of total antimatter. 3. Pirates attack random planets.

I don't know what this word 'blame' means that I keep reading. The point is that the patch process could be a lot smoother if fans brought more focus into the process. Ideally, I'd like to see forum work out proposed changes among themselves and submit official requests through either modding teams or the forum moderators.

What if Stardock tried moving to a reporting tool (like Mantis or Jira) instead of using forums to gather suggestions? That would eliminate a lot of the pessimism and duplication, since you can search and upvote/downvote (or leave comments) instead of having to read through flame wars to find good ideas.

I'd go for it, the code is better and if the unit stats bother you enough then you can just change them back (after getting the 1.03 reference data from the downloads section). [quote]1. Galaxy Forge isn't 100% compatible anymore (the maps are funky if they work at all in 1.03...update is coming I've no doubt)[/quote] The only differences I noticed were that versionNumber is now set to 1 and the browseName parameter was added. I've been able to get GalaxyForge maps to work by o

[quote]I don't' know which of us said we wanted badly nerfed illuminators(besides the newbies) or who said they wanted these market prices so cheap and the credit:resource prices be 3:1 not the 3:2 we had before.[/quote] No one asked for it, but no one considered whether it would have to be done in order to accommodate their suggestions. That's why you can't achieve design by consensus, and every RTS game forgets this at some point. You end up with DoW every time. (Off topic here, go se

Unfortunately I have to agree with the topic. Most of the changes in v1.03 were a direct result of the feedback on these forums. It did wreck the balance of the game, and that's as much a lesson for the fans as it is for the developers. I read an interview with a well-known game designer once (I forget his name), where he said: Always listen to your fan base, but not too closely, because they don't really know how to make good games.

Most of the time, when an AI is calculating whether it can win a fight, there should be some kind of 'as good as it gets'-type flag. If we're not likely to get a better match-up against this group of units in the near future, we fight regardless of the odds and devote all resources to replacing the units we're about to lose. For Sins, I suppose it would work to only use this logic when determining odds in high-resource systems, that would result in behavior very much like how human players act i