Durikkan

I think HuntingX's assessment is spot on. This game is entirely RTS in my eyes. The tech tree is easily ignored, for the most part. Micromanagement wins the day in all the battles I've fought. You can get away with only building 1 or 2 types of units, even against hard AI. The Best strategy is generally to use your entire fleet as 1 unit, and not bother to split it up into sub fleets, in most cases. You acquire a planet, click 3 or 4 times, and then can largely ignore it until ei

One point on the 'too much complexity kills a rts' train of thought. In IG II, you could manually build all the buildings on your planets, but it was much easier to just assign an ai build priority for each planet, and an AI would build buildings as the population rose, focusing on what you specify. When you have a very controlled 'AI' component like that, it's not taking anything away from the player, the player knows exactly what the AI is going to build, it just gives him

Isn't Imperium Galactica II a pretty good example of a functional rts/4x hybrid? That's sort of what I compare this game to in my mind. You could design your own ships/ send spies/ build up planets, etc. all in real-time. I don't know how well it worked in multiplayer though, since I never got a chance to try it online. [quote]I see what you mean, I can't seem to edit my post. Sorry if the tone for that was a bit off. I was just trying for an analogy.[/quote] You

It looks like I must have edited it while you were posting, sorry, I tend to edit my posts continously until I'm satisfied (I'm just weird like that). You say something about the TEC's low shields and high health, but, shield mitigation applies to hull as well, and phase missiles completely ignore mitigation when they strike, in my various tests. When it's just hull left, occasionally, you'll see that a phase capable shot will seem to do double or triple damage to the hull, but it's be

This is not an unanswered question. Phase missiles are a huge increase in average damage. Imagine a missile hits your ship for 100 points of damage, but you have 75% shield mitigation. If it hits normally, it does 25 points of damage to your shield, if it phased, it would deal 100 points of damage, directly to your hull. If you were lucky enough to get all phase shots, you would avoid having to deal 50-66% of the damage (his shield would still be at full strength when he dies), and

[quote]Where is the replay, and was that before or after the patch? Also were there other factors like weapons upgrade technology, or defensive structures.[/quote] You've got to be kidding me, you aren't willing to re-read this single thread to find it? It's on page 2, look yourself, though it really seems like you're just trolling at this point. I mean you even quoted part of that reply where the guy posted the replay.

[quote]#1 Each race has about 100 different technologies to research. I just counted them up and if you count the military and civilian technologies plus the fleet supply technologies you end up with about 100. And that does not count the fact that many technologies have multiple levels to them. [/quote] Well, Some of the techs, like metal mining, a small 30% bonus is broken into 6 pieces. When something that would be 1 or 2 techs in any other RTS is merely broken into a lot of smalle

[quote]Either that or you folks aren't taking all ship factors into consideration. You're definitely IGNORING the huge shield advantage the Disciple has over the LRM.[/quote] Advent has 825 total hp, LRM has 780 total hp, that is not a major overall health advantage. The light health advantage is counteracted by the fact that LRMs do much more damage, and have longer range. Also, there was that replay posted earlier [B][I]in this thread[/I][/B] where 80 LRMs fought 118 disci

I hate misinformation, and I've been trying to fight it back, with little luck. I posted https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=302204 , but someone needs to make a bigger list and get it stickied or something so everyone can see it. I know a lot of new players are fooled by the constant posts that complain about balance issues but the people never bother to post replays or anything, they simply complain things are broken and you have to take their word for it.

You compared their antimatter, seriously? In your example, the light frigate's antimatter is used to steal anti-matter from the LRMs, but the LRMs don't have any, so both of their antimatter counts are completely irrelevant, plus as you advertise it only requiring level 0 military, it wouldn't be able to use its antimatter no matter what. In reality, you would need *at least* 1.6 light frigates for every LRM in order to win, and that's not even taking into account the LRMs taking advan

[quote]Yeah, it's a lot shallower than it's advertised to be, what can you do but live and learn from the error? You and I both should have waited for the demo. I'm hoping future patches, or failing that mods, will add some needed depth and diversity to the game.[/quote] Yeah, I feel the same way, but I have faith in patches or mods, I mean look at the 'complex mod' that came out for homeworld 2, that thing is many times more complicated than the game itself (it's awesome), I have a fee

[quote]In general though, it's pretty common these days for games to not be save game compatible across different versions. It's unfortunate, but such is life.[/quote] I'm not sure about that, it's been my experience that very few games make their save games incompatible.

Damn, I already found sieges next to useless, now I will have no reason to ever build them. 3 Sieges for the supply cost of a capital ship, the capital ship does 94% of the bombardment damage per second as the 3 sieges, not to mention all of the other advantages a capital ship has over 3 sieges. Siege frigates are now completely worthless in my eyes.

[quote]How do you figure that number, though?[/quote] I just did it with a recursive spreadsheet, though that wouldn't be 100% accurate due to shield mitigation and regeneration. You can also approximate it with: SQRT ( ((1.05 * X * X) - (1 * X+Y * X+Y)) / 1.05) Y = 2.4 for the cost multiplier. Simplified it is 40.494 * The cost multiplier for any +5% damage. 40.494 * 2.4 = 97.19 units to be worth it. Again, that leaves out mitigation and regeneration

With Lrms attacking other lrms the breaking point to research the tech, even if you already have all the labs required, is at around 95 LRMs. [quote]Really what Jodonnell is showing is how ridiculous LRM's are DPS per dollar.[/quote] Well, with light frigates vs light frigates, the point is around 85 light frigates before the research is worth it. That's really not that much different. What it shows is how cost inefficient weapons research is in this game.

[quote]How is this remotely fair?[/quote] It's not at all. Since it's a premade map, and a mirror map, you'd think it would be balanced, but it's not.

Archpsi -- Not just stardock, he's the product manager for sins (though I have no idea what that encompasses).

[quote]why would you assume that the developers want to discourage micro-management of a battle?[/quote] [quote]Craig Fraser: Low Micromanagement Auto-attack – any unit that can attack and also auto-attack with the click of a button. The unit AI picks targets intelligently based on the ships role, so you don’t need to worry about micromanaging every single ship the whole game. Fleets – grab units, click the fleet button and just command the fleet leader. Y

[quote]it is mechanic to enable tactical management as a relevant factor in battle by slowing damage dealing at a rate related to the amount of damage being dealt.[/quote] The thing about that though, is that when there's only a few ships, it's not needed, because ships last a long time anyway, and then when there's a lot of ships, it's irrelevant, because ships die in a matter of seconds, anyway. Plus, I thought it was supposed to discourage microing, not encourage it.

The capital gives a tax bonus, but I forget if it's percentage based or just straight added in.

If you had 5 planets in an X shape , moving the HQ from a limb to the center would raise your total max allegiance from 480 to 510, which isn't much. 9 planets in an X shape, moving the HQ from the edge of a limb to the center would raise it from 750 to 870. (16% bonus on average to each resource collection) Obviously an X would be rare, but this gives an idea of the kind of gains it can bring. There's a few factors to determine if it's a good idea: The the size

[quote]Do the commercial software sector has as much problems with software piracy in comparison with gaming software???[/quote] Ehh, I think it's about the same. I would imagine graphic editing /modeling programs are near the top for piracy rate, since I remember some of those things approaching a thousand dollars, but that could have changed.

[quote]The increased overheads might be true, but you are living in lala land if you think that anyone will deny themselves a gaming experience because of that. No one 'learns to do without' these days.[/quote] Some people do but I'm not naive enough to believe it's a majority, anymore.

I think the vast majority of games that I own, the purchases were made, based on my impression of the demo. Games that don't have demos, I tend to just ignore, unless it's something I'm almost positive I'll want (Master of Orion 3, x-com apocalpyse, Sins) Hmm, of the 70 jewel cases of games or so I can see from my chair, I think those may be the only ones I bought without playing a demo, or seeing someone else play.) That shows how incredibly important demos are to me. Maybe I'm a rare excep

Well, going back to the OP, I think the growing success of stardock and steam shows that digital distribution is rapidly gaining support, so I agree that the industry's business model is going to go through significant changes.