Apheirox

[quote who="D00my88" reply="3" id="3303001"]i wont speak about vasari, their economy sucks until mid game when tjhey can feld engouh trade post and cultural network. the only thing that help early vasari players is their neutral extractor easy taking, but this only works on randomly generated maps because most scenario maps tend to dont have a lot of these things. Vasari economy is the harder to play. [/quote] The deal with Vasari is they have the weaker economy in th

[quote who="GoaFan77" reply="2" id="3302971"] Quoting bilun, reply 1You're spot on on TEC being the strongest economically, but they are not given to turtling/defense as you seem to think(wells etting aside the loyalists- I'm only talking about general TEC tools available to both factions)> I agree. The turtling only applies to the TEC Loyalists. The Rebels access to truce amongst rogues allows them to move around the map at will if researched early enough. The earn

I think it would be interesting to chart up what the 'role' of each race/faction is in terms of the metagame. By metagame I here mean things like how the TEC are geared towards defensive, economy-focused play and how they should therefore typically adopt a playstyle where they attempt to maximize these traits in their play. I'll start out providing my analysis of each race and faction but I'd appreciate to have some of the much more experience

Haven't read thread, but a simple suggestion: Try turning down gfx settings when playing these 'huge' sessions and see if things improve. I think a smooth play is more important than having the graphics look absolutely pristine (especially since you'll often be looking at the ships from a distance and they'll be just an icon, anyway).

[quote quoting="post"] I realize they add a strategic component to the game but I don't think it fits within the fictional universe very well. A universe that makes no sense isn't fun. I do basically agree with a single phase line between star systems, that seems to make more sense than between planets.[/quote] So because the game has phase lines and you can't just fly from any one planet to another, the game isn't fun? Gotcha.

I don't find the 'announcement spam' inappropriate at all.

It's simply because the sale on Steam is so dirt cheap. 10€/10$ for a beefy quality game including the full set of expansions is fantastic. This is the time to purchase the game.

[quote who="Rhaegor" reply="2" id="3301499"]Worth buying!!![/quote] Fixed that for you. Get it immediately!

I don't think it's great. I think it's extremely elitist and way too 'hardcore'. There are two main reasons I don't MP Sins: The first is I hate playing 4x speed, turning this otherwise almost turnbased game into a StarCraft'esque clickfest where DPS is more important than strategy. The second is having to play people taking the game so seriously they forget it's just that. No, I'm sure you're courteous enough and just w

If your fleet was that much stronger than his that you instantly eliminated it whenever he touched your gravity well my guess is what went wrong on your offense is you didn't target the right stuff - for instance, your bombers hitting ships that were in range of repair pads rather than some that were not, getting torn apart by flak without dealing any real damage. Apart from the strike craft none of his defensive structures should be able to target you, letting you turn it into almost tha

It's true the pirates have no mitigation - which is a design that also really doesn't make sense to me: Mitigation exists to prevent gameplay being about focus fire to create more cinematic battles. Why shouldn't this include battles against pirates? Instead we have this cheese of ships with an enormous amount of HP hidden behind better armor than the main factions can field until the very late game - it's retarded. I also don't accept your point that pirate ships are weak

[quote who="GoaFan77" reply="14" id="3300796"] You don't create a balance where 'pirates' are so insanely powerful they can directly threaten an empire in open confrontation. This is the crux of the issue. And a game like SOASE that undoubtedly tries to take itself seriously needs to address it. Well that's just the thing, to me the pirates really aren't very powerful. They're an annoyance, not a threat. Heck, even their pirate bases are just a

No more ramblings, please, you're derailing the thread. This thread is about identifying SOASE's/Rebellion's weaknesses and coming up with solutions to them. [quote who="GoaFan77" reply="9" id="3300477"] ***Quoting Apheirox, reply 5 The problem is that in SOASE they're called pirates*** Hey, you make your own game universe and you can call them whatever you want. I think there is a canon reason why they are called pirates and not

Brilliant, informative post, Goa, thank you. I'll just address your points in order: 1) Perhaps you're right and pirates are hard to balance - I appreciate your detailed historical rundown - but I really don't believe it to be so. My point is simply that, as you say, I dislike the structure of the pirates. We have an exaggeratingly overfortified fortress in the center of the map spewing out waves of extremely large - if unshielded and with terrible AI, but t

I also don't see it as likely StarDock will change the pirate model since they've gone with it in four iterations of the game now. One can hope, however, and I think the issue is still worth debating if for nothing more than bringing some attention to the issue. Have they stated officially somewhere they are happy with the pirate model and won't change it?

Played a few games of Rebellion now and would like to start a discussion about some large problems that have been in every iteration of the game (yes, it's the fourth time we're paying for the game!) and still persist. Note that this is not a "SOASE/Rebellion sucks don't buy it!" post - I think SOASE is a very good game - it is rather a kind of 'disappointed' post in that I feel the StarDock team has yet again left their in some

Honestly, I'd be much more interested in a Sins 2 than an expansion pack. Actually, I wouldn't be interested in a expansion pack, at all. That is, unless some serious patching is done to core game flaws. No, I'm not talking about LRF imbalance or anything like that though those problems are also very real. My real issues are with the poor AI, alliance/diplomacy facets and metagame problems. I hope IC will have recognized some of the serious blunders that continue to plague Sins and ge

Both alliances & cease fires need to be harder to break. A cease fire can be broken instantaneously and breaking an alliance requires what, a measly two minutes or so? Please. We need cease fires to have a 2-5 min warning time and alliances to be set at no less than ten minutes. Otherwise, we get the stupid current situations where it's so easy to abuse alliance breaking on the AI it's not even funny. You can basically get a cease fire going with an AI, move a huge army th

I completely agree, it's senseless that the AI will punish you for having a small fleet and reward you for a great one with complete disregard for the strategic situation. This does tie in with the lack of a 'there can be only X winners' game mode as it's not so problematic having a 'big brother' ally with a much larger fleet who could crush you at any minute if things turned hostile when said big brother really has no incitement to break the alliance.

Well this is interesting. I always found it annoying how each AI will use the exact same text phrases even if the audio ones are race-specific. Please correct this!

Instead of having to make random (repeatedly) guesses to find out what sort of $$$ reward an AI will require to accept a certain mission, implement a 'what do you want for this' option that has the AI telling you what the price would be for it to conduct the mission.

While it's clear that a TBS has some advantages over a RTS in this regard, explaining the poor AI decisions by this would be make-believe. The issues I see are not ones that would be consuming a lot of computational ressources - they're about how the game is built in the first place. Darvin's example showcases this, to name just one instance: A missing option for 'there can be only X' and the AI's missing understanding of this concept has nothing to do with being a RTS.

The 'asteroids' tab under the 'Search' panel is missing its sound.

The abysmal AI is one a the major reasons Diplomacy fails (a contender being logical fallacies such as the example of faulty metagame logic pointed out above by Darvin). The irony of it is funny though, basing a whole expansion pack around the relationship to the AI when the AI is completely broken in the first place. Being a naysayer sucks, and yet I'm not going start to post suggestions on what to fix instead. I could fill page after page about metagame problems such as the aforemen

@ Shunmaha, you can look at some of my threads to see my view on this. Basically, Scouts being able to defeaut LRF is a major oversight on the developers' part but since it 'fixes' the LRF balance problem (which for some unfathomable reason the developers STILL haven't fixed), many people are happy with the Scout imbalance.