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Space Voyager makes some good points. The game is meant to be sort of a compromise between traditional RTS and 4x games. It will never please everyone, there'll always be someone for whom games are too long or too short. The goal, I think, should be to stay true to the original concept and scope of the game, because that's why most of us became interested in it! It's always a fine balance. You don't want to make the game in a way that the player is required to micromanage every little d

The defenses too powerful? You can fly right by gauss cannons with minimal losses. And this is the key. Massed gauss platforms have several weaknesses. First, even when supported by repair stations they can't survive LRM/bomber barrages for very long at all. Second, their range is limited, and if a planet is not a dead end, usually they can only effectively cover one jump-in point. A lot of difficulty in dealing with defenses comes from letting the AI pi

Not really -- my last game I barely had any defenses, its just that it takes too much time to build up the economy needed to build a fleet capable of crushing an opponent, if he's even slightly capable. Depends on what you do, I guess. The first thing I usually research is ice planet colonization (if I have those near me), then trade outposts, and I build a trade outpost on every planet I control. Even with 4 planets, the income from trade ships adds qui

And not fun for the rest of us? I say we hold a poll. Considering it's a "maybe this would be kinda cool" thing rather than the devs taking actual input on how to implement it, I'm thinking a poll is jumping the gun quite a bit

as I said, make it variable, it will NOT de-generate into a click fest..... unless that is what the players want. Just about the only way to make it variable but not degenerating into a click fest while keeping the concept of the game intact is to make smaller maps. This is assuming the general game speed will be increased a bit since the common consensus is that it is slow (and I agree, for the most part). But at the core of it all, the issue i

You're quite right in saying that losing solely due to chance is frustrating, unless everyone in the game agrees to take the risk Me, I wouldn't mind. Granted just making it so that your home system becomes vapor without giving you anything in return is harsh and extreme, there are quite a few possible concessions to make to the player(s) who were affected <img src="http://images.stardock.com/gc2/T_DL/smi

I think making research free, or much simpler/easier/faster than it is now would be a terrible idea. Why, like a lot of people said, is because it lessens strategy and dumbs it down. Right now you actually have choices to make. In the beginning, do you build ships and rely on numbers and combined firepower, or do you take the risk to set up a research infrastructure and have stronger ships/planets but fewer? There's room for both, as someone who rushes to build lots of low tech ships might have

It could just be added variety to logistics/tactical improvements to a planet. Maybe instead of massing gauss batteries you'd rather invest in a military station and fully upgrade it. It would cost a lot of tactical points and a lot of resources to fully upgrade it, but you would get the benefit of several fighter/bomber squadrons, missile defenses, shields, repairs, maybe a few unique special abilities. Or, if you're in a dead end system deep in your controlled territory, maybe you'd want to ma

Well currently the number of capital ships is tied to research, another idea would be to increase the costs and tiers of that research so that capital ships would be a little rarer. In principle I agree that it's too easy right now to get them. The way I think of them is, as someone else mentioned, sort of the fleet flagships, their numbers should be few compared to the rest of the fleet. But right now even on small maps you can easily research 2-3 ranks in officer training and have 3-

Oh that makes sense But the main reason for that paragraph was to find out if the prices when you buy are meant to increase dynamically as you're buying, or after you close the window and open it again. Currently it behaves like the latter, and since some other things are dynamic it seems like prices are meant to rise per purchase too.

I'm with Gauntlet, and that's why I made sure to mention that it'd be toggleable, and very rare. And, obviously, it would only happen on huge maps with multiple solar systems. Since something like a supernova would be a huge change and potentially empire ending, something like a 3-5% chance per *game* may be good, or lower. More basic random events could be in the 20% area. I don't want it to be like other games (I remember the old SimCity) where random events would be almost constant somewhere.

It takes a while for the culture to fade and allow you to colonize, the best thing I found to do was to leave a ship or two behind to prevent the AI from re-colonizing, and then keep moving the bulk of your fleet forward. You need to be knocking out broadcast centers to deplete the influence, so you need to bring a large enough fleet to be able to mow through several planets with relative ease, otherwise it'll be real slow. Your capital ships *should* also help drop influence faster, t

Very true - We wouldn't hear all those cool lasers and see all those explosions in space! My favorite is still a scene from Wing Commander: "Quiet! Shh! If they can't see or hear us they won't find us", as the ship is hiding in the shadow of a crater on a moon/planet. Naval warfare mechanics in space ftw But all in all, the more unique atmosphere the gam

Basically you just have to read the forums to pick up the little details, they're not really documented anywhere That, or press random keys on the keyboard and see what happens.

Well, 15% allegiance still *helps* albeit barely. The regional governors idea is interesting, and it would go well with spying that may or may not be added. But it's also fairly drastic. How about instead either modifying a civ tech that deals with influence spread, or adding a new one that basically either increases the base allegiance of far away planets (this would be in addition to the +10% from 100% influence), or just lessening some of the more noticeable penalties, like the resou

I'll second the very hard to tell thing, but taking into account that most of the animations (or lack thereof) are placeholders, I expect that eventually we'll see what it's repairing.. even if nothing flashy, a targeting line to the ship/structure it's fixing (like the targeting line when ships attack) would do okay, assuming nobody's lazy enough to mouse over the repair station.

"Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered." Which is true if you leave it long enough the game continues but you get the constant repeating sounds effects until it does. and afterwards this time constant lag... The error itself is very generic as seen from this 113 thread on nvidias forum http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=25381 Funky. I started getting this once in a while with Worl

If I had to guess, I would say the issue is the 64-bit edition of Vista. I've got the 32 bit running with similar CPU, GeForce 8800gtx is the largest difference, and the game hasn't crashed once, even with the beta drivers I installed for Crysis.

Well according to the FAQ, you have to archive the dump file and email it, so I'm assuming that it's not sent automatically, but I haven't had one yet so I can't be sure..

Tried to think of a good topic for the thread, I don't want to make it sound like I'm beating a dead horse or anything, that's not the point. I've noticed that the "speed" difference between single player and multiplayer is very noticeable, when in theory it should be the same. The problem is, I think, that when you play multiplayer (or at least when I do) even when there's no noticeable lag (like orders taking longer to register, or mouse clicks) everything is 'twitchy'. It's pretty ea

1) I can see your point, it could stand to be a bit bigger, but I do kinda like the spinning planet in the background. I guess it could be full-screen too since most people probably wouldn't spend that much time in it. 2) Definitely, that confused me quite a bit when I just signed on for the first time. It can be something simple, like use italics if the player is in the game, if not just take them out of the main lobby when the game launches and put them back in once it's finished.<br/

The one thing about zooming that bugs me is if I center on anything using ctrl+click, as soon as I zoom in or out it'll break the camera 'lock'. I think this is one of the issues DatonKallandor was talking about as far as Homeworld-style camera goes. There you stay locked on your object until you actually move the camera yourself, zooming in/out keeps the camera centered on the object. That would be a fantastic feature <img src="http://images.stardock.com/gc2/T_DL/smiles/Tongue.gif" border=0 ali

It is pretty slow in the beginning, and I can see it being an issue in small games. In the one against the AI I played (1v1), I got to the point where I was cranking out much more money than I could spend and if there was much left to destroy the pace would've been quite fast But yes, the start is slow. You need ships, labs, research, trade all at once and you're barely making anything for a while.

There is a pause, in single player at least. The pause key Here are my impressions, and note I haven't played the earlier betas so some things may not be new/repeated/whatever I've only had a couple hours to play so I didn't jump into any MP games, waiting for the weekend when I can guarantee t

Got the e-mail of doom, re-ordered and got the serial! Wasn't too bad