Pnakotus

Turns out the mod makes 1.03 crash? Bah. :)

Mines are a good thing. Most games don't have them; no game does them properly. Entrenchment gets close, but for two issues. Firstly, each mine shows up in the tree as a separate ship, which is ridiculous. It renders the tree near useless once you've dropped a few hundred mines. Even if they were a) stackable by different amounts (I'd say 50) and b) in a slightly different 'mine' colour would allow people to track what's a mine and what's a ship.

That is the funniest post in the entire world. 'It is ridiculous for services to compete, all games should be available on all services'. What is a 'corporation'? What is a 'market'? What is 'profit' or 'investment'? Hilariously, he even says 'comes from being a sysadmin', when he says that he didn't buy Crysis due to it not being on Steam. Because Steam somehow makes game installs less invasive, right? :D Steam is a fine service which has dramatically improved fr

[quote]Invincible is probably not a very good idea, especially given that 4 out of the 6 HMS Invincibles have been destroyed... Tempting fate = bad.[/quote] Yeah, calling a ship 'Firebait' or 'Design Flaw' or 'Ineffective and slow' will improve their survivability because they have passive names, right? :D

So what's up with the ridiculous character limit anyway? It's too short to include longer words! You don't have to use ridiculous 40k-esque 'Holy Blue Triumph of the Craggy Western Knife Master Inside his Castle that was Also in Japan' names to hit it: you can't even fit 'HMS Invincible'. A 24-character limit would be ideal; even stupid names like 'Pillar of Autumn' would easily fit with room to spare for an outrageous clan tag. [x{*}x] Pillar of Autumn would fit, even. The current system (

Has anyone mentioned it over at Hard Light? If Ironclad's import tools work, it should be pretty easy to just use the FS2 models. It's amusing to hear people talk about how the space shooter genre isn't dead. After all, some crappy Euro games = genre is alive. :)

Maybe we should just wonder why they're called 'light frigates' when they're not light and they're not good against light either? Calling them 'frigates' or 'destroyers' would be clearer than 'light frigate with medium armour that sucks against light ships like LRMs'. :)

Saying Steam has issues throughout it's life and problems with it's very approach (Audiosurf takes way longer to start due to Steam DRM) is totally different to teething problems. Do you REMEMBER Steam's teething problems? They were far, far worse than 'Impulse shows a slightly different version available' and 'archiving wasn't implemented in the open beta'. Early Steam sucked so bad it's become mythological. Even recently there have been problems, and every problem with Steam is a problem f

Sins is already genre-standard: Terrans, zerg, protoss. It's not unusual, but it's not really bad either - at least they didn't give the typical races their typical qualities (ie, terrans are zerg-rushers, Vasari have expensive high quality units, etc). What I'd be more concerned about is 'stupid expansion race' disease. Expansion races usually don't balance with the old races and often don't fit the setting.

The only way 'make it work on crap computers' works as an excuse for average graphics is development time. Sins could look better, and since it's got these funny things called 'video options' that wouldn't impact lower-end systems. They probably just didn't have the time to devote to improvements they felt a small part of the market would see, preferring to work on other elements. I would suggest the expansion is the place for further graphics development. A game doesn't get a fixed

Damage modelling is good. RTS's are not really the place for this, though. Many (or most) players don't want random die-rolls determining if they win or lose. If the game had complex compartmentalised damage systems (like a sim) it'd be fine: but I doubt anybody wants retarded Armada 2 style 'oh yeah by luck the guns on your biggest ship stopped working lol guess you're doomed' stuff. Without targetable subsystems or a more robust 'missing' sytems (like Sword of the Stars, which at l

I dunno, advanced graphics effects are the major reason why new games look better than old games, and such effects are less of a performance hit than adding polys. Even crap models and textures can be made to look good with enough shading, normal mapping, etc.

SDC doesn't do any of the annoying rubbish things like Steam do, and it doesn't actually involve any DRM at all. It's just a delivery vector. And really, everyone with an SD game needs to use it to buy Space Rangers 2. :)

Just take the music out and release that. Nobody cares about the 10,000 other SW mods - many of which use music.

Imperium Galactica 2 sucked real bad. Even if it WAS the same, nobody would care. :)

Pax Imperia is actually from the early 90s. It's a bit rubbish, and not really as successful as Sins (particularly multiplayer, variable time flow = fail) but it *was* 1993 or whatever. It is however very much more sophisticated, and cribbing more ideas from Eminent Domain would probably help Sins. Remember, PI was a Mac game originally and I don't remember any real PC notice for it: it wouldn't be impossible at all for people to have never heard of it and cetainly never played it. H

So take the patch with you and update them.

[quote]I'm colourblind too, quite heavily infact. And if my friend asked me to attack the 'blue guy' I would quite frankly tell him he's an idiot and that he should refer to players by their name.. not their colour.So I guess in this instance, not only does your reply qualify as idiotic.. but so does your obvious ignorance of your friends condition.As for reading reviews.. I don't recall a single review I have ever read that said 'Hey, deaf people.. this game will be fine for you'. But fortuna

Does it still work with 1.03?

I'd like to see pirates BEING PIRATES, ie killing tradeships and trade bases then MOVING ON, not just 'attack x planet of y player and stay there'. If they exhaust bounty, they should move away to the next most profitable target. They should never use seige frigates: there's no bloody money in it, is there? The antimatter thing should just be a click on the antimatter bar: 'lock' a part of it so the autocast doesn't use it.

Man, that's pretty unreasonable. 'Game has no subtitles, I demand my money back'? Did it *say* it had subtitles? And you posted BEFORE YOU EVEN PLAYED? Needs more sour grapes and sense of entitlement, I think. Game doesn't have a colourblind mode EITHER, so my mate always attacks the wrong guy when I say 'kill the blue dude'. He should get his money back too! :CONGRAT:

[quote]Of everything mentionned here the point I agree most strongly with is: yes, Sins diplomacy needs serious work and we will be re-doing it (probably for the expansion). I've read just as many 'energetic' threads like this where the majority of people feel its more 4X than an RTS. It really just depends on the crowd. Hard core micro / tactics RTS players are particularly vehement that Sins isn't an RTS by their standards but there are just as many people who claim RTS games aren't really

Oh I agree re ships: you'd have to make 'factions' where each shiptype is a 'race' from Star Control. However, I'm not sure the factions would balance well unless you dumped many ships, and 'chronologically' I'm not sure what you'd do - taking the NAFS post-Chmmr is completely retarded because they will simply win, but taking the AFS pre-Ur-Quan conquest is also broken because there's only 7 ships, one is a fighter and only one is very big. You'd have to use a bit of 'creative license', especi

I don't think the difference between RTS and 4X is just 'victory conditions'. It's systematic differences in approach: in an RTS you resource and tech to get x unit and win, whereas in a '4X' game (christ, can't we just call it a goddamn strategy game instead of using a 15yo marketing term) you have to 'manage' an 'empire' that is more complex than 'need more vespene gas'. In an RTS if you tech to fast you die: in a strategy game if you tech too fast you have to manage the economic and social

The idea that anyone could go any length of time without seeing MoO2 fannishness boggles the mind. MoO2 fanatics are a given wherever spaceships appear, and they always have a very interesting idea of what makes a game 'good'. :) That said, I was throwing the idea of a Star Control mod around when Sins came out, and I'm not sure enough of the ships translate from 1v1 2-weapon fighting to an RTS. Things like the Earthling cruiser are fine, but the Spathi? You'd need to make it a reall