weasello

Well it balances the other way if you DON'T implement this system. If you research everything in your tech tree (or everything you want to research now, anyway), you can blow up all of your research stations and build additional trading posts/resource collectors. Not only do you get to keep your research, but you are rewarded by getting more income/profits as well! The person with the most tech, therefore, is also the person with the most income/resource potential, and therefore can mak

Right now it seems like there's no stopping the juggernaut that is research. Once somebody has something, BAM, they have it, and you are in for a world of hurt if you don't do something about it. But what can you do? I propose that for a technology to be available and active for a civilization, they should own the appropriate amount of research stations for that type. ie; if a civilization has 15 military stations and just researched Insurrection, if you blow up one of their st

Hmm. I think the designers don't play too much in the meta-game. If you never zoom in on battles and perpetually remain in system-wide view, there is no reason to have the empire tree - all the planets are on your screen, and it takes you just as much time to mouseover there as it does on the tree to the left of the screen. It's redundant information. I can mouseover the little bars to t

The thread title is "AI" not "Al". I have been experimenting with different play styles recently. I got pretty upset at my lack of Crystals, for example, so I went and played around doing nothing but aiming for good crystal allocation right off the bat. Researching nothing but crystal-efficiency upgrades. By the time I got there, I was squashed by the enemy - and the endgame graphs showed that I s

I think the confusion comes because, when you click on the structure, it overlays the tactical grid around your planet. It's easy to mistake this for a range circle. :/

If I have a fleet of 30 ships in a star system, and I tell them to jointly phase to the next star over... If a new ship is added to the fleet before it gets a chance to phase, the new ships always plots a course directly alongside the lead ship. This results in a bunch of ships getting "bumped" and the phasing is delayed until all the ships are ready to go. It seems like you guys thought of this as a potential problem, because even with joint-phasing enabled, the ships only wait so long

I know I heard tuesday for sure. >

I have a dual monitor setup, and I have to immediately thank you for caging the mouse to the active monitor. So many devs forget to do this, and I have to use external applications to get it locked! However, I must complain that alt-tabbing to check my email shrinks the game application to the taskbar. It's still running, I can hear my combat sounds and little radio calls coming out of my speakers, but I'm blind to the action! Argh! I must also complain that the game doesn't gi

To keep the UI congruent, I would recommend allowing the user to right-click on the "build" icons for facilities to set them up for detonation. I spend most of the game in meta-view and the only time I seem to have to zoom all the way in is to click on lab to blow it up. The same method currently works for changing up fights and bombers.

Figured out the problem: It did have antimatter, but my ships were too far away. When you click on the graphic, the grid pattern that appears makes it seem that any ship in the gravity well is within range. Perhaps make an area of effect circle?

Hmm, that might be it. Didn't realize they used antimatter. Do they start with antimatter when first built? It was fresh and never used. At the very least, write "out of antimatter" on the screen when you try to activate it, or grey out the button if not enough antimatter is available.

I built a repair facility but it refuses to repair (auto or manually) my damaged capital ship. Both hull and shields are damaged on it, and it is within range. GRr!

Best out of 5 maybe?

I'd really like to be able to click outside of the research/diplomacy window to close it as well, or maybe even a right click anywhere. It's annoying having only the one option

I almost reported a similar bug today but then I realized that planet C in the chain had a phase inhibitor in it, and the AI wasn't moving the ships at all. Instead of going as far as possible until hitting the inhibitor, it just refused the orders without any feedback. Doi on my part. But maybe something still to look into?

"Changing tides events" seems like he is referring to game-changing or huge-impact events. I agree though, the sun should remain neutral ground. If you could fortify it, you can pretty much guarantee deadlocks between systems instead of planetary battles. More variety this way. I also like the power and balance with the capital ships... I'd like to see the AI defend against them better, t

I missed the edit-change to the first post that gave the alternate link. Woops!

Using influence as a defensive measure works great just for those reasons, and perhaps it will hold more value to me when the AI gets a better brain. But right now, there is simply no chance the AI will ever populate one of MY planets.

All stars connected? Sweeeeeeeet.

Influence is an enigma to me. Can it span through a planet to another phase lane? Can one ultra planet influence the entire solar system? How does intra-solar influence work? Why don't my 5 broacast towers and full tech not take over a nearby planet with no broadcast towers? How long does it take for influence to take effect? Why would I want influence to extend to another star? ... I could go on for ages! I don't mind these questions being answered here in the forums, but the

This one has been bugging me since you first opened the beat up to us: The "Beta summary" stickied thread looks to have some broken HTML or something in it. When viewing in a FireFox browser, I can only see about the first 1/3rd of the entries; it seems to cut off at one particular line. If I "view source" or turn off CSS styling I can see the rest in plain-text unformatted goodness, but I think someone's got to close an open tag or something in there. <img src="http://images.stardock.com/gc2/T_

I don't post often but I lurk quite a bit. Love the game to bits though. Some helpful suggestions for the remaining 159:09:25 left: - It really bugs me that phase lanes overlap sometimes. I've had a pixel-perfect-match where a warp lane goes right overtop of another, through a planet, and beyond it. Imagine my confusion when I couldn't get my ships to take the "shorter" route! - Phase l

I just got the crash too! Error was "Could not generate dump file," so no help from me. I did send the MS error report, however. I was withdrawing from a large battle and can echo the "probably sometime around phase jumping" suggestion, but I was zoomed out far enough to not see it (or maybe the phase jump graphic was *just* in visual range, but the ships were definitely icons). Caveat tho

Purchase, download, and install went seamlessly and painlessly, thank you for the SDCentral! I'm really enjoying the game, but for the sake of advancement I'll be hyper-critical in this post. Tutorials: Going in completely blind, I lept immediately into the tutorials. They gave me enough informatio