mehoo462

ahhh... that's an excellent point. At some point I have to get back to my life, but i'll see if I can deduce something about Trade Ship routing next time i have a chance. : )

Excellent, This is all very insightful. Do you know how neutral planets are handled? I.e. When "you cannot colonize this planet because enemy culture is too strong." At what point CAN you colonize this planet? Do you have to repel the enemy culture entirely? Repel it halfway down the phase lane? Or simply reduce the difference between your spread rate and his spread rate below a certain margin? Thanks.

well Defeaz, that seems to go against everythng I've documented. Perhaps you could check the replay to see what was going on?

Hi retro, Where did you check to get that bounty info? That's actually not bad. 80 credits. 50 for trade ship bonus, 30 for bounty. And the're easy to kill en masse. But yah, wierd it doesn't cost you anything to lose them. (again, i may have missed it, whatever it is. This is the part that I'm least confident about)

Sorry to spam this thread, but my brain is really munching on this and I keep thinking of things. I've run a couple of experiments to try to see what it would take to set up an effective trade blockade by setting up a line of planets with a pirate base in the middle. Turns out i couldn't get the pirate base in the middle of my trade lanes to have any effect on my trade income until i reduced it to one planet on either side of the base, each with 5 trade ports. This way there

Trade ships are worth 5 xp. Which aint bad considering how easy they are to kill, and how many there are. It's a nice, easy way to collect bounty and level up my new capships. The problem here, is that's there still no penalty for losing them, there's no strategic reason not to shoot down my own tradeships. (The only reason I can't is because the game won't let me attack friendly targets) But everything else is just too well designed for me to believe this... i mus

I found this in Gameplay Constants.entity, I don't know what it means, but it suggests bounty awarded is based off of experience points worth. [quote] bountyPerExperiencePointMin 6 bountyPerExperiencePointMax 41 [/quote]

Okay, i went to Mod school and modded the game to remove tax income, therefore isolating trade income so I could run some experiments. Here are some things I discovered. As I expected, trade ships function the same way that Caravans do in Rise of Legends. They provide a constant stream of income regardless of where they are or what they're doing. So there is no insta-deposit when a trade ship hits a trade port. They serve as money factories just by being alive. <br/

Well damnit, I want to be able to exploit them offensively against a competent player!! It just sounds like so much fun! :/

Hi Retro, I suppose it's possible that my income WAS dropping, it just wasn't being displayed in the Credits infocard due to the way those numbers are calculated. But that would be a really tough one to figure out. It's tough one to eyeball because the income goes up due to all sorts of different values at all sorts of different times. And creating a map that isolates trade income would be a tough one to engineer because we'de have to figure out a way to turn off tax

I'm continuing to explore and experiment. I'm finding that there are so many ways to exploit the Pirate AI and distract them from being dangerous it's scary. I believe they're targeting priority is 1) Trade Ships. 2) Defeding Fleet and Static Defenses. 3) Other structures. But when it comes to 2) they don't function tactically at all. They just shoot the first thing they come in contact with. So my favorite exploit is to build a hangar bay, and let the pirates com

Hi all, I'm imagining a world where we can attack an opponents trade lanes, kill their trade ships faster than they can be replaced, and cripple his trade economy. Or ya know, hire the pirates to do so. But this doesn't seem to be the world we live in. Trade vessels move so fast, and are replaced so quickly it's virtually impossible to use them as a means to affect the enemy economy. I just created an experminet in Galaxy Forge... I crated a trade nextwork on

We have a lot of vague speculation here. Harassing and destroying trade ships seems like a useful and important tactic, but it's difficult konw you're achieving maximum impact unless you understand exactly what these little buggers are doing. Some official help with some more details would be very useful. Thanks.

Well there's also this bit from the Gameplay constants: [quote] raidStrengthThreshold:0 0 raidStrengthThreshold:1 .25 raidStrengthThreshold:2 .45 raidStrengthThreshold:3 .7 raidStrengthThreshold:4 .9 [/quote] I'm strongly inclined to think that the "Threat Level" is a global thing, and does not vary depending on whose looking at it, or who they are attacking. First of all, that would be a very silly game design decision IMO. And second of all

Thanks for the tips retro. Which entities did you pull this from? Thanks.

Hi kids I found some useful info about Refineries that I'de like to post. I found this in the planet entity files where it lists values for extraction rate and a value for "Refinery Rate.' For example : [quote] neutralCrystalResourceAsteroidSetup<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsof

okay. Thanks for the tips retroboy. I've started looking n the .entinty's myself (now that i know that's where you go for that information). Trade ports have a base incom rate of 1. They generate up to 5 trade ships. Which respawn in 25 intervals. It seems like in order for the economic impact to add up, you'de have to be killing trade ships faster than they respawn. They respawn pretty quickly. A strong pirate raid will do this, unless they invest signifi

I'm mostly interested in online games vs. competent human opponents. I understand what you're saying. I'de still very much like to hear some alternative view points before totally declaring this neat new feature completely null and void. It would be awesome to see Frogboy or someone come in here and tell us a bit about pirates.

Do the pirates actually matter? I understand that the first couple of raids can mess with the tempo early on. But once I get a hangar bay up, I can keep them spinning in circles out on the edge of the grave well chasing fighters. So do the pirates actually matter if they are this easy to neutralize? What incentive do i have to get into a bounty war if my enemy can just brush the pirates off so easily. Here are a couple thoughts. Fighter

Does anybody know how much resources each trade/refinery ship generates? Is it .2, or .5, or .whatever? I know this varies depending on whether or not the trade port is part of a longest path. Lets use default values of an isolated trade port for this example. I'm trying to figure out what the impact of attakcing trade/refinery vessels are. Given how quickly they reproduce, it seems like you've have to be hitting a lot of them for a

When enemy cultures collide I don't understand how the game determines which culture will win the day and which culture will be repelled. My experience seems to show that the amount of upgrades invested in culture has nothign to do with this caluculation, and the defender seems to be heavily favored. But I have NOO idea precisely how this important mechanic functions, I can't find accurate any info on it anywhere on the web let alone in any official documents. Frogboy me

what happens when a culture contacts an emey culture? My friend researched all his culture upgrades, and was affecting allegiance at one of my planets. I build a broadcast center there and it repelled the culture to the planet 1 jump away. Even though his culture was full upgraded and mine was lvl 1. For experimenatations sake, I built another broadcast center 2 planets away, (a planet already affected by the first centers culture). Then i scuttled my center that was

Hi, The Info card for the culture research says it improves the "Culture Spread Rate" is this just how fast the culture moves down phase lanes? Or is it also how quickly the allegiance of a planet changes? Thanks.

Hi, I'm interested in finding effective strategies that focus on something other than military production. This is a brainstorming thread about how to play the current game, not about balance. I'm thinking primarily about an intense and competetive game format, where every strategic decision has a direct affect on the other player. Specificaly a game such as a 1v1 on a medium map like say "Devil's Cauldron." CULTURE VICTORY? I read a post a little whi

Hi, This is probably adressed somewhere, but a search for "pirate threat level" returned something like 23 pages of stuff, and nothing on the first 3 pages was relevant, so I'm going to just post again. What specifically controls the pirate threat level? And which planet they attack. I'm interested in strategies that involve sending high level pirate raids against my opponent. There's obviously more to it than the size of the bounty. Because placing re