Durikkan

Errr... how does it differ from steam? For as much as it's being hyped I can't see any differences.

Want : Add more variety to the tech tree. Most of the techs seem to fall into +% to something. It starts to feel pretty stale after a while. Needs more abilities/ unique traits, instead of just stat increases.

[quote]You can't preserve capital ship levels, abilities, etc.[/quote] Awww. It would have been an interesting experiment to have said super-carrier launch sova carriers to launch smaller fighters.

apparently you can't edit anymore but I'll add that that quote is from some time in march. (err, I can edit this one, but couldn't the one above...)

I think by this point it's basically established that they're going to stay worthless for a while. The best choice is to use siege capitals or simply not play the game. [quote] In classic developer over-reaction format, they nerfed them so badly that it actually became more cost effective to just build siege capital ships rather than siege frigates. Oops. So Ironclad was in such a frenzy to correct the perceived “imbalance” they neglected (or at least, made a decision) to ma

With the way the AI seems to be setup, I'm not sure how much of a difference changing the difficulty level would have. If a weaker AI has only managed to obtain say, 3 planets by late game, suddenly turning him to hard won't make much of a difference, because he doesn't have enough resources to do much against your 12 planets or whatever.

I think there's some way you can give your AI teammates orders, but since I've never played team games, I don't know it off the top of my head, maybe someone else will.

There's a demo out for this game, you should try downloading it and see how it runs on your computer and make a judgment call based on that.

[quote]I tried to make an empty map, many suns and few opponents, so I could get the feel of it, but I notice on every map every planet is already infested with opponents. Are these pirates?[/quote] These ships guarding planets are neither pirates nor other players, they are just a squad of ships preventing you from colonizing it until you kill them, for whatever reason.

The AI isn't very good yet, but it's gradually being improved through the patches. 2 hours in against an unfair teching AI, you might not see even a single heavy cruiser.

I've heard the advent sieges cost 14 supply instead of 15, but that's not extremely helpful, either.

I started out liking them, but have grown to dislike them. Their primary role seems to be as an annoyance. They don't seem to be cost effective. Plus the fact that they are magically generated doesn't help their case.

Maybe they should adjust the cost of techs by the galaxy size. In less than 15 planet galaxies, they're rarely worth it, even the first level ones, and in huge galaxies they are basically required. It takes around 60-70 light frigates before the first 5% hull upgrade is worth it. Oh, and most of the stuff in the OP is pretty spot-on.

There's an option in the menus for 'disable sound if the application is not the primary application' or something like that, that caused sound to not play at all for me until I disabled it, even though it was the only window running. You might try messing with that button and see if it changes anything for you.

edit: nevermind, I'm tired and that didn't make sense, sorry.

retro: Yeah, I know, it just pisses me off when pirates actively taunt developers.

It seems to me they could put together enough information to persue legal action against this guy. They probably have his IP address, his email, .. well, they could at least scare him.

This game is cheap as far as recent releases go, if $30-45 is too much for a new game for you, you probably shouldn't be playing new games. Seems to be to also be a very poor decision to post on the official boards, telling them you're going to keep pirating their game, while seemingly using the same user name as you use other places (both a 16 year old austrailian male)

Well, I think how you see the game is largely up to you. I expected a hybrid, so I was disappointed as the game is basically entirely an RTS.

[quote]If one AI isn't hard enough for you, play against two. If that's not hard enough for you, play against nine.[/quote] They should at least give us the option to set the AI handicap or something. I'd rather face one powerful computer than an army of weak ones.

I just won a 4 hour 1v1 against a random unfair ai where I only built capital ships, and nothing else, so I'd still say there's room for improvement. There was a planet that was on the front lines for an hour, and when I finally attacked it, they had never bothered to upgrade the planet's health even a single level, so the planet was easily destroyed before reinforcements could arrive for it. They still run even when they have a significant advantage, one of my capitals was a few hund

[quote] Researching the capital cap [/quote] Well, the thing with that is that you only have to research that once, if you lose the sieges, you have to pay their full price every single time. The capitals may be a little more expensive the first time for pure sieging purposes, but if they die, you don't have to research capital ship crew again to build them again.

Just experiment against an easy fortifier AI, you should be able to figure things out fairly quickly.

[quote]Think of it this way...the important thing is how much DPS is your entire fleet doing, across the entire map?? If you are using your cap ships to bombard, you are GREATLY reducing your overall DPS galaxy-wide.[/quote] Trading away 300-500 supply points of combat ships for ships that can basically only siege wouldn't greatly reduce your dps galaxy wide, though? I would think that would be enough of a fighting handicap to lose a game.

Yeah, they're basically worthless as a general rule right now. In 1.02 they were already pretty crappy, but then 1.03 came and made them not worth building at all.