ReallyNotInVain

I mean, consider the fact that you might want to build ships out of other metals or other crystals. You shouldn't be limited to those two resources, right? Failed to read the thread. Ignored post. They should add a single button option that would would alter a game to remove all limitations for people to try out an open ended system when released. Maybe it can be called the "ludicrous option". Failed to read the thread. Ignored post

What I'm on about is not "I want to build infinite units". I really don't want that. However, when I look at any army in recorded history there has never been a unit cap. The Soviet Union didn't run out of fleet points. They didn't invade Iraq because of the amount of logistics points it has. If you agree to this you see that these caps are not how it works in real life. If you acknowledge that fact you should start thinking: "So why didn't they build infinite units in the cold war?

I don't think the game-engine runs out of juice when two factions are in a game and one of them attempts to build the 101st capital ship (two factions with 2000 points each, 101 capital ships at 40 points each = 4040 points). 101 units isn't really a high number, is it? Still someone at Ironclad thought that a magical barrier that makes it absolutely impossible to construct this 101st capital ship was a good idea... Also this doesn't solve the mytery of the dead asteroid that propably sh

Thanks for the explanation. Is there any reason behind the caps beside "The devs don't want you to build more"? Why is it so unthinkable to produce ships worth of 2001 points? Why would a light shipyard around a dead asteroid make the universe collaps? The likely answer is propably: "Because without this rule the players would construct silly amounts of ships." That would be admitting to bad game-design. Perhaps the developers should rather think about effectiveness and upke

Hello. I heard that beta 2 now includes a logistics cap. How exactly does this work? I'm personally very much against artificial game-rules. They are usually a sign of bad game-design ("Our original rules didn't work out, we have to limit this.") and seldomly fix the actual problem. Thanks in advance for taking your time to explain it.

In Freelancer, a game I often mention because of its well done universe, the systems were filled up with nebulars, asteroid fields and uninhabitable planets. Those usually had some sort of structure around them that was built later, like ship-production facilities, mining stations, military structures to encounter pirates within nebulars or research facilities. That way not every thing in space was a coloninized planet. So one important point would be that you should be able to construct thi

That made me laugh. This stuff is like impressive and whatnot.

Wether or not we'll get the disks here we'll be able to get it via StarDock Central either way. Though I would prefer a hard copy. This SDC-bogus has brought me more trouble than good.

From Multianna's magnificent ingame videos (thanks!) I know that I don't like the relation of development speeds in SoaSE much. Thus I'd like to ask: Can the player can adjust this at game-start? I would e.g. keep the movement speed but multiply research time by 2 or 3 and production time by something of a similar magnitude. In Multianna's video I can't see such an option so I'd like to suggest it. The setting is reasonably intuitive for almost all users and could perhaps be add

Would it be possible to use the stars for research? It is a bit far fetched, but one could argue that the close proximity to the star with a complete research-station offers unique observation and experimentation opportunities that can increase the productivity of research. I suggest this because it makes the stars a valueable resource since the player who controls it can easily gain a technological edge and it isn't a too special case. However, one would have to spend some thou

This is just an idea that might appear inappropiate, but I believe a concept similar to the government-sliders from Europa Universalis 2 would do very well in Sins and would immensly improve the governing-element of the game. I'll sum the concept up in a few sentences: Your style of government is broken down into a couple of attributes. Socialistic versus capitalistic. Liberal versus conservative. Religious versus humanistic. Militaristic versus pacifistic. etc. In EU2 you were

Take the trade station, it doesnt look as good on more brighter backgrounds. I even changed the view, so it would have more dark in it. Maybe they should use more lights on the ships and darken the univers abit more? Do you perhaps mean that ambient light is too bright in relation to direct light? Ambient light seems to have been set up to fit the backgrounds, which are rather bright. But as far as I can see there is very few to reflect ambient light in e

I didn't play the beta but I think I can give you a pointer to wether it's more RTS or 4X: What sets sins apart from most typical RTS games is that the unit AI is smart enough to lead battles without you. Your job is to manage your faction and put the right units in the right place at the right time. After that the units will start battling it out by themselves. That means you don't have to give individual units commands. You can, but they'll handle themselves. You do the strategy, the u

Wether I appreciate the delay depends on what happens in the meantime. I don't really believe IC is going to substantially change the game. After all, a lot of criticism was about the style of game-design. I'm one of those people who like games to be a window into a different situation. I don't want to look at a 'game' - the monitor should work like a window into the distant future. That are two different approaches. Many complains and ideas have been about exactly that discrepancy. I wo

The current explanation of weak areas in space which connect some planets is as realistic as the idea that they could have a jump drive that allows FTL travel. So than I guess we have to lose FTL travel (unless you have a realistic approach? Maybe Subspace, Hyperspace or an Alcubierre drive? I would hardly call those "realistic") and I mean, if were going to be realistic it should at least take afew real life days to get to another plant, maybe a month or so to get to

Games have to be realistic to be easily understandable. We are used to reality. If something behaves realistically it behaves normal. When something behaves realistically we don't have to read up about in a manual, we already know how it works. That's why realism makes a game easy to understand. If you want to know what that means for SoaSE, just open up the game-design paper, look at a section that sums up game-rules (hopefully you have that <img src="http://images.stardock.com

I personally would prefer to stay with a system with limited travel, and the potential for strategic points. Certainly there could be a high-end tech that may allow the opening of additional lanes, or circumventing such choke points by some means, but IMO that should be the exception, not the rule. Without the lanes, there is very little "terrain" to the map, which is a vital thing for strategy in an RTS, I think. Without the potential for choke points, you w

I also spoke about that topic in a different thread along the lines of DRavisher's post: Capital ships can jump into phase space as they wish. Smaller ships however can't. They need some structure to get them launched. Advantages: Enemies can't hop around your empire endlessly. There is no artificial movement restriction. Movement is restricted using a sensful system that is based on the actions of the player. (No more: "Why can't I travel from planet E to F?" - "Because

You could always tie the space-lane to a structure. So if you want to jump from planet A to planet B you need some phase-space-jump-startpoint-thingymabob to get the ship into phase-space. For each direction one structure. This structure won't work for enemies (except perhaps for a PsyTech hacking-ability?), but they could construct such a structure near one of their own nearby planets to jump in your direction. That means you can only attack planets that are near your own ones. That wou

Just a few thoughts on the z-axis: It is difficult to identify objects in 3d. What I mean is that if you load up a savegame of an unknown battle-scene from someone else in Homeworld you will be confused for quite a while until you remember where what stuff is. Once you know which objects there are and where they should be it's easy. So the basic problem is to move objects from virtual 3d space into your head. Not maintaining them once they arrived. HW shows that, if you can keep track of

I like game principles that are based on logics. That means basic laws, like newton, permanence of energy, etc. cause a game to feel sensful, which improves the immersion. On the other hand we can't conclusively argue with logics, because if we had knowledge about those techs we could just start building our interstellar warship right now. So my personal approach is to build game-logics that don't immediately break basic physical laws. It could, theoretically, be assumed tha

The GalCiv2 AI is particularly bad at this. The GC2 AI tries to win by mowing down the smallest enemy it can find. Ganging up is a consequence of alignment, not of analysis. Nothing is easier than backstabbing a GC2 AI. You go rampaging across the galaxy, extinguishing every race that crosses your path in the biggest genocide in the history of the known galaxy and all remaining parties go: "Hi my friend! Nice trading going on!" And then you move in that fleet and capture 5 of their planets w

My thoughts on difficulty levels: Is a world domination game supposed to be 'beatable'? Is 'beating' the game, 'winning' sensful in such a setting? If so, why hasn't someone already 'beaten' our real world? Why do we live in a multi-polar world if at some stage in history various powers had achieved a dominant position? Which international mechanism stopped the world from being 'won' by one party at some point of history? Can an AI, that lacks such a mechanism, create a sensful conte

I was thinking "Finally a sensful X4". But I quickly learned about Sins' flaws. Now I only check the forums once in a while to see wether anything has improved or wether my second impression was correct.

You can only have 10 players in a game, so more than that would mean there would be totally empty star systems, or only one faction per system. That wouldn't be fun. Actually that's exactly what I'm suggesting, because I think it's the only scenario I can imagin to be fun.