TarlSS

Also- What you may want to try is to 'reward' players who spend time playing the game and getting stupid acheivements (Like Space Ponies, Woo!) with 'tokens' that allow them to access the games on your Totally Games Network, much like how Wii Points work. Frankly, I'm not sure how many of your older games sell. Most people have probably pirated the heck out of them now. But if you reintroduce them through the point systems, people will start downloading and playing them again. <

No one is going to pay a subscription for a game that A) Has a small multiplayer community B) Has no guaranteed content Look at your playerbase now, Frogboy, maybe 200 players online on a good day. That isn't going to go -up- when you make them pay even more to stay online, or divide them is it? People spit and spittle all about tournaments and what not citing the success of starcraft- and quite frankly that's a good example. The main issue of competition is that it bu

Really? I personally -hate- autopatching systems. They're super prone to breakage and failure. Just use SDC for crying out loud. Sins has it's share of problems certainly, but auto-update is really not a significant one. How about let's talk about culture?

Forget about shields for advent- Increase the power of culture, THEN let's see where we are. If we buff advent military and leave the game where it is, we'll see at least a 1/3rd of the tech tree completely out of use.

'battleship optimized for long range combat with additional special abilities for planetary assault'. >>>>> Specialized in long range weaponry against fortified targets?...Much like a trebuchet? Which is a ...siiiiieeegge engine?

The ship classes are there and mis-used because they have two classes of spaceships and had to call them something. Did you expect that they would suddenly include a whole slew of new units for the sake of terminological satisfaction? That would be rather unreasonable. The words were changed to fit the purpose, not the other way around.

I honestly don't understand the reasoning behind the carrier nerf. No one was complaining about it, in fact everyone wanted a carrier buff, so they nerfed flak and decreased the cost of TEC and Vasari Carriers, who didn't really need the buff anyway. Soooo. What is this? Are we going to have more random stealth nerfs and unforeseen balance tweaks? Have any of these experiments actually helped? The black market thing as a disaster, and I think everyone was pretty satisfied with the origi

Some hangers guarding the borders of his empire will more or less ruin you day.

There definitely needs to be increased utility of culture as well.

Quite frankly, culture and research ought to be really viable options as opposed to simply military-duking out or econ booming. Right now it's almost -always- much more useful to invest in economics or ships rather than culture or research (With the exception of improving ship access). Investing in a culture base and research means losing out on at least 1600 you could have used to build ships or planetary improvements, which is alot of money. More often than not that investment is not

What really needs to be done is an increase in the power of culture. Advent has neither military supremacy or economic; it's dominating tech tree is pretty much useless. I think that greatly contributes to the fact that they are indeed, suck worthy. Going completely down the tech tree won't help you do anything in anygame compared to the options available to the TEC and Vasari. Compare Free EXP to Pervasive Economy and Armada, compare the culture cannon to the Nova Cannon and Kosutra. It's prett

I don't see why we can't remove the whole Light Frigate counters LRM thing; LRMS already counter capital ships and buildings, which in turn are very effective against light frigates. They're also decent at countering utility ships, because utility ships don't have any damage dealing potential. The big problem here is at Tier 2 about 30 minutes into the game, you have a ship that can pretty much counter anything you throw at it, and is capable of breaking through your defenses to deliver

Whoa sweet. GPG is a great game designer, and matching up with stardock's patch/content policy is real key. I see the days of old TA mods and unit packs coming back.

That's exactly how it works now. >>>> Wrong. Shield mitigation is based on Damage taken overtime. So a cobalt's shield mitigation will quickly reach maximum after a single kol fires at it for a couple seconds. Or heck, even another cobolt.

Critical hits, and enemies being under fire being less effective than enemies not under fire are pretty much why people don't 'focus fire' in real life. There's a greater chance of hitting critical systems and protecting your own ships if you're distracting enemy ships with your own fire. Normally with anything, it's not about "Whittling away" HP, it's about getting in that ONE good shot. In tank battles, a single shot or two ought to kill a tank- reload times and other factors mean fo

Culture is useless, and that's what Advent is good at. What should be an available option it to build up defenses and let your culture do your fighting for you- It should flip neutral planets to YOUR side and be fast enough that it's as signifigant a threat as a fleet of equal cost.

Carriers DO kill Flaks. The problem is Flak+LRM> Carrier+..Anything but HC. The main thing is that counters against flak aren't very effective because of their tank power- they'll succeed at the mission before anything kills them, even HC (that mission being eliminating fighter/bombers) Flaks are not a hard counter to LRM and they don't kill LRM before their mission is completed, destroying structures. Carriers are a hard counter to LRM, but that are countered extr

Bomber improvements are so that they're effective in fleet engagements against the Flak/HC horde. More damage dealing won't help if they're shot down in seconds by like 8 flaks. The most important aspect of the patch is the rebalance of the black market values- it just might allow the Vasari and Advent to autofail against TEC Tradeport strats. As for LRMs, they're falling behind status quo from 1.02, so that's good. Honestly, I would just suggest reducing the speed of

Quite frankly I wished they had infinite queue.

The AI's not going to ever be able to outplay you by skill, it was possible in GalCivII were there were multiple variables to manage and that it could do on the fly planetary adjustments in pass quantities while a human player would just laze through them- That's not possible here. There's nearly no minutia that would give the AI an advantage over a human player. It's fighting on even terms, and therefore will lose, because AI is dumb.

I've been working on a mod that doubles culture rates, doubles allegiance drop rates, and then slashes the cost on special defensive buildings, and brings them down to a reasonable tech level. I've also reduced the cost of culture buildings to that of tradeports and then reduced the research costs as well. I've also ripped out the crystal cost of turrets and then cut metal costs in half, then doubled the range. Some other changes too. I slapped this ontop of the balance mod you came out

It's a much better idea to tweak the idea so it doesn't place weight as heavily on building siege frigates rather than anything else. I personally think Siege frigates ought to return to 1.02 status and be effective against buildings, while LRMS receive a nerf against buildings. That way Siege frigates will actually be...Siege frigates and be an asset to assaulting planets and structures.

RA, while certainly strong as anything, I think is intentionally so. I mean, the game MUST end at somepoint, otherwise the Vasari would just be sitting around like anyone burning infrastructure and the like. By the time level 8 premiere techs have been researched, it should really be a zero-sum C&C style game with superweapons blowing things up left and right. Of course with respect to the fact that other races don't have this easy "End the Game" ability, there is a problem. RA is r

I imagine if we took every map and split it into two systems, a great many problems would be alleviated. Sova rushing, and spam/rushing in general, would lose a great deal of power seeing how you'd be required to research long jumps, and then find the opponent in the other system.

I'm pretty sure we all know what competetive players are and why they do it- Mettra, your explanation is pretty concise but it's not really going to make anyone happier. The clear and alienating delineation is the willingness to use exploits (Especially balance) that were left in the game, probably unintentionally, by the programmers. Making some kind of case defending your actions is worthless, the very fact that you do them is making people angry, and you very well know why