mehoo462

sorry for lots of bad spelling and punctuation in the above... i do know my grammer, but sometimes I mistype things, and there's not edit button for me to go back and adjust. And given that this is an online forum for a computer game, I'm not that interested in spending a lot of time proofreading. I noticed your post after I made my post, and I can't go back and edit: Playing detective is fun.. but playing the game and knowing how it works is more fun. IMO. Is that

okay.... so things got a little better when I started mixing up my fleets. A neat thing I noticed is when you hold down alt you get red lines showing what a unit is attempting at, and green lines showing what a unit is attempting to cast at. We don't see the green lines very often because most ability's instacast (although if you look really closely you can see the green lines . Where they do show up however is 1) when a unit has decided to cast at something that's o

ahh Ke5strel, good to see you. Thanks for weighing in on my most recent diatribe. :) 1) I just had 15 light friagtes in a fleet vs. 15 cielos and hoshikos. I did try them unfleeted and got the same results. I haven't tried mixing fleets up much. Let me play around with that and see comes of it. Do you really think auto-cast is contextual based on fleet composition? This would be great. I thought fleets were just grouping mechanisms to get units in formation with eachother

Both good points Annatar. Especially interesting about the processing power bit. However, I'm not convinced that this is a less-critical AI element. I understand that there are people on both sides of the "micro-fence." In a previous post I mentioned that a game can't please everyone and probably shouldn't try. The best bet is to pick a side and go for it. Given the scale of Sins, I thought I had a pretty good idea of which side of the fence it was on, but I could be wrong.

see Idunno that this is not what they intended. I trust that they played the game a lot... and it's kind of a critical issue. These Light Frigates abilities are THE counter to utility cruisers... so if it wasn't functioning properly they would probably notice. But there have been so many times where I've come across issues like this, and thought "what the hell are they thinking?" But after some heavy investment, i understand the issue in a different light, use it differentl

K, i did some work with offensive abilities of the utitlity cruisers. It seems to pick targets a little better, but it's still seems to be associated with the auto-attack. The utility cruiser fleet AI seems less intent on focus-firing (which is fine), so therefore we get slightly better de-buff coverage. But these things still aren't functioning optimally. I think autocast should do a better job... or am I using it wrong?

So it seems like the light frigate abilities are designed to neutralize utility frigates. But in practice, when I see the enemy build a ton of utility frigates, I start spamming lights with thier ability, and it doesn't seem to matter. As you can expect, I've used Galaxy forge to run some tests to see what's going on. The results were interesting, and I question why. Here's what I did. I took 20 skirmishers with interference (double cooldown and cost

Ke5trel, i think you're absolutely right forge results don't cut it for formulating strategies in the wild. [quote] I think the reason for this is that scouts are very weak against everything but LRMs, so your opponent can adapt to your scout swarm by producing *any* other unit. [/quote] This is an excellent point... However the fact (which i have proven in forge) that scouts ARE good against LRMs, is still relevant to the game, and I hesitate to d

[quote] A good counter should be something cheaper or faster to get up and running. [/quote] hence scouts!! :)

[quote] So am I to understand that the AI players are busily asking each other for "freebies" in order that they each are "liked" at one extent or another? Yep (although whether it actually occurs within the game mechanic is questionable). [/quote] i don't think they do. I think they cheat here... a LOT. Played a couple of games on medium maps and got hit by 3 AIs at once. When I watched the repaly, every AI was in at least a cease fire with someone elese, and a cou

if you play on the right map sizes games are generally a reasonable length. I play 1v1s with my buddy on 13-18 planet maps. These games generally take about an hour fifteen to an hour and a half. I don't think we've ever played for longer than an hour and 40 minutes. 2v2s are probably the same so long as the map size is proper. (we play with everything set to fast) This are fun games that definitely have a sense of early-game, mid-game, and late-game. And you hav

Hm... it's true, I just did some tests with more ships and a larger mix of units... and the fleet did indeed attack multiple targets. However, the fleet was trying very hard to make each unit type focus fire an appropriate target. For example, it made all my LRMs focus fire a light frigate. And all my light frigates and heavy cruisers focus fire an enemy cruiser. And sent the flak after enemy strikecraft. When the fleets get so large that there wasn't a single enem

sorry Dafeaz, good luck getting a critical mass of kodiaks out before facing this combo.

Okay, I've done some more research and have some information about how fleets work. An entire fleet will always focus fire a single unit. So the point of a fleet is primarily to serve as a focus fire group. The fleet will choose it's focus fire target pretty wisely based on damage type vs. armor type. I've occasionlly noticed some wierd behavior, i think sometimes it may choose wierd things based on the units that are in it's immediate proximity. But generally it chooses

Foraven, you're a genius. This came up before and I dismissed it as pure lunacy, but now that I've gotten into running tests with Galaxy forge I thought I'de try something a little different. It turns out that at a 2:1 ratio, scouts pwn, and i mean PWN!! LRMs... they even do pretty will at a 3:2 ratio. as in, they will win... but take significant losses. Add to this the fact that a scout cost less than half an LRM, and builds in less than half the time... an

LRMs- counter with fighters fighters - counter with flak flack- counter with light frigates light frigates - counter with LRMs So one approach is LRMs+lights. Use the lights to kill the flaks then send the LRMs toe to toe. The trouble here is flak frigates take so long to die, and LRMs pop lights like balloons. So I lose 2 lights for each flak i kill. However, this sort of works, but only if you micro like

Hi all, I feel like I'm starting to grasp the game, and am finally getting some high-level skirmishes with my buddies. What I'm finding though is that most my battles turn into micromanagement nightmares. Not just nightmares, we’re talking hideous twitchfests that invovle wrangling with an interface that wasn't designed for such things and a unit AI that makes terribly unintuitive decisions. I'm talking Warcraft 3 level twitchfests, and it's driving me nuts! This game was supposed to be t

[quote] Oh yeah, about the pirates' obsession with trade ships (the pirate ships have the ability to steal credits from your empire (100 at a time)... [/quote] What?! Can you please explain where you heard this, or how you've observed it in the game? Thanks

[quote]Love the pirates, not a huge fan of the implementation. My main complaint about them is the way they work with bounty; if the pirates are to be mercenaries then they should have their own secret bids. If at all possible,I would like to see pirates reworked with a secret bid process and bounty more focused as a FFA enticement for other players.Should this occur, pirate raids should occur with no warning on a semi-regular time table to make them more Pirate like instead of like cl

You think so? The deeper I dig into this game, the more I find good answers to questions I've been looking for. For example, why are trade routes so resistant to tradeship harassment? Because if they weren't we'de have to micro our trade routes, which would probably require the addition of a whole new interface element. Some sort of trade route overlay or something. This would a significant extra layer of complexity to this already overwhelming game. So why do

k... i set up a couple of different scenarios to try to observe something about Trade Ship routing... I got nothin'. I can't discern any pattern to the trade ship routing, except that trade ships try to get move to and from friendly trade ports, even if it means attempting to move thruogh enemy owned grav wells. This isn't something they wanted us to worry about, which is why destroying them doesn't affect the game very much. But i still wonder if t

Okay, I just verified, the allegiance does indeed begin changing as soon as culture starts moving towards the grav well. However, it takes a long time for the allegiance rate of change to get to it's full value. (sometimes longer than it takes for the culture to make it all the way down the phase lane) If a planet is being hit by several cultures at once, the allegiance simply changes in favor of the faction with the strongest culture affecting the planet. The affect of

yah, it's surprising but I'm quite sure that the allegiance begins to change as soon as culture starts moving down the phase lane. It starts very slowly at first, but ramps up and hits the full rate of change long before the culture actually reaches the planet. You can look at the infocard for the planets allegiance, and you'll see that the "allegiance shift" shows a non-zero value as SOON as a culture is moving towards that planet. Fronetier planets that

can't edit... dunno why. This should probably go on a WIKI somewhere. Does anybody have any suggestion where and how to do that?

k, got some information here: First we review the basics. Planet A is yours, planet B is mine. A-----B You build a culture production center and start shipping culture down the phase lane at a rate of 1. + is your culture. A++----B Allegiance at planet B immediately starts shifting in your favor. The rate of allegiance change is a fixed thing that is not affected by culture spread rate or anything else the player can upgra