I've seen this too. It's been minor, there's one large group that jumps, then a smaller group that immediately follows. I didn't think much of it, just thought my fleet was too big, and the software could only handle breaking it into smaller groups to do the jump. didn't think to report it, they jump close enough together that it didn't cause me any problems, but I saw this frequently.
I agree on the friend-or-foe sensing business... by the time you're starfaring, you'd think you'd be able to prevent your own mines from blowing up in your face. But for the sake of game balance, perhaps mines *should* damage all ships. If you make the AI smart enough to navigate *around* (or take the time to destroy/sweep) detected mines, mines become much more practical and much less worth spamming. Minefields then effectively block (or dramatically slow) tra
Giving the sins process high priority had no effect. Upping the priority should only have an effect if the process is competing with other processes for the cpu. My machine's rarely doing anything else of note when I'm gaming.
yeah, I think it's the mines -- the sluggishness isn't correlated with how "busy" the screen is. And the AI has carpeted stars and planets with mines. :( I'll try lower gfx settings anyway, at least it should make the minidumps happen faster.
sins has grown to 1.3 GB of memory, fwiw CPU shows about 50%, but both cores are running at about 50% (as opposed to one core running at 100%). Page file usage up to 1.7 GB, 121 MB real memory free.
I have a Geforce 8800 GTX w/ 768 MB ram. call of duty plays like glass at 1920x1200. More likely it's memory -- can't say I've alt-tabbed out to check the process monitor for memory or cpu stats, guess I should've done that first. :P
I started a large map (the huge multi-star standard one), and a couple hours in I have a relatively small chunk of real estate, but all the action on the screen has begun sputtering along. I can only assume my fellow empires have expanded, built, and mined enough stuff that the computer is struggling to keep up with it all. This is a dual-core core 2 duo 3.00 GHz system (E6850) with 2 GB of RAM. save games available as well as minidumps, which occur regularly
Right -- avoiding minefields and being immune to them are two completely different things. Avoiding them means you can only pass if you can find a safe path AROUND the minefield or clear a path through it. Being immune means you can ignore it and charge straight through it with no delay or other penalty, which is absurd. I agree the mines need work (See also other threads on this subject), but granting immunity to certain frigates is not the solution.
Uh... why should scouts be immune to mines? I agree that scout AI should be smart enough to AVOID mines, but if they hit them, they should absolutely detonate and take damage. If you're dumb enough to park in the middle of a field of homing mines, you should die. What should happen is that ALL ships should avoid detected mines, and scouts just happen to detect and map all mines within its detection radius. So in theory, it should detect and dodge any mi
I had the same problem as the OP, but only when playing TEC -- my group (chock full of flak, light, scout, and siege frigates plus a few light carriers, marza and kol battleship) was set to group move, and I told it to attack a neighboring planet. Note that the "group" in this context was actually comprised of 2-3 "fleets" in the game sense When I went back to look at how things were going, only the marza had jumped... the others were still lingering in the original planet dee
It would certainly be great if you're the defender to just stuff mines into the phase lane... then you avoid the pesky business of planning your minefield. I don't think anyone can deny that "in the phase lane" or in the phase lane exit is where we all really want our mines. But it's open to debate whether this would be oversimplifying the mines. I definitely don't like the idea of sweepers just clearing the phase lane as they fly through, unless the time it takes to do t
While playing the TEC, I was assaulting a system with an advent (stationary) starbase. I cranked out a bunch of scout frigates with the timed explosives ability, intending to swarm them onto the starbase to set their explosives and hopefully put a big dent in the starbase. Imagine my surprise when I am told that I can't use this ability on the target unit (the starbase). Timed explosives are for use against orbital structures (as distinct from ships or planets). Is the s
seriously? If the Z axis is wide enough to let you just fly over the mines, I'd call that a bug. The Z axis allows for some nice cinematic action, but I'm pretty certain it's not seriously meant to allow you to outmaneuver defenses.
Note that one race (vasari, I think) has a gravity mine option that does indeed slow enemy forces. If you only slow advancement, big carrier fleets can still be devastating, because of their strikecraft. Perhaps there should be some area-effect weapons cruisers that can just sterilize sections of the gravity well. They wouldn't have to be too powerful, just strong enough to clear minefields. Could also be used in groups to pound densely packed installations.
So a big problem is people carpeting gravity wells with mines, right? How about having detonating mines damage other nearby mines? If you get the range and damage dealt tuned properly, you can clear tight, large clumps of mines easily, because they'll set each other off. But a more reasonably sparse field of mines would have to be swept one mine at a time. Small clumps (3-ish?) would be okay because there aren't enough of them to set each other off. (say, 10 da
I've found that I need to put a scout near the mines and wait a couple seconds or nearby friendlies to acquire the mines and start shooting at them. Fighters and capital ships seem to be the biggest participants... since the phased-out homing mines are born from a fighter squadron, you likely need/want some form of anti-fighter unit (fighters, flak boats) to be effective against the mines. The mines are clustering around your hangar because the squadrons auto-deploy after fully
All three races have some form of long-range frigate... the tec lrm boat, the assailant, and the illuminator. What's wrong with that? Haven't played as TEC yet (always select random), but not being able to deploy mines outside your own gravity well seems a major disadvantage.
Regarding using the mine-laying ships... I found the best way to use them is to set them to autocast and queue up a zigzag pattern in the area where you want the mines. Then just leave them to follow the path and drop mines as they go. If you group a few ships together, you get a pretty nice, dense field of mines. I like the mine laying ships much more than I like the mine-squadron method. The squadrons are a real pain to manage. The advent homing mines are h
The only issue with starbases starting with capital ship level weaponry is that you would then have to require a player to *pay* for all that weaponry. There are cases where you may want a starbase somewhere for reasons other than combat. For example, the listening post I mentioned, or maybe just a cheap phase inhibitor deployment to slow ships down in an otherwise uncolonizable system, or to beef up your economy or culture with installations in uncolonizable systems. Sure, a st
I think this thread needs to be split into multiple threads -- the mines, the starbase range, the starbase upgrades... But it's not, so... First, the simple one -- the mines. Mines are ... mines. They do not expire. They should not require maintenance, they should not disappear unless cleared or otherwise detonated. This is the nature of a mine. If everyone's getting a little too mine-happy, perhaps mines should cost a small amount of resource (fo
Aha, there it is... under tactics management. Serves me right, I've never really messed with the tactics or fleet management, I just group ships with ctrl-1, ctrl-2, etc like most other RTS games. I'll have to mess with the fleets and see if they're worth using, looks like they'll keep the fleet in a tighter formation. Thanks!
Either the ship movement AI needs to be smart enough to NOT charge headlong into a clearly marked minefield, or there needs to be a "hold position" command for ships. I keep telling them to move the heck away from the mines, and they keep auto-attacking and moving back into danger. The only thing that works is turning off auto-attack. I want them to *shoot*, I just want them to stay put. This is particularly true if you've got the upper hand on the edge o
I agree with th original poster -- auto-deploy on mine squadrons should be off by default! Not only is this a problem when enemies enter the gravity well, but once a squadron is fully populated with mines, it auto-deploys. Before I understood what was going on, my hangar was surrounded by mines! In that vein, it would be nice to designate where you *would* like mines to be placed automatically. I would really like to just mark a series of points where I'd like
