theRetroboy

It's an interesting question, and I think Sins could easily benefit from a truncated multiplayer experience as an option because I know there's no way I'd ever be able to finish a three-hour game, let alone a longer one, and picking it back up after a save would be just as difficult. One thing that concentrating on Sins single-player would do is allow StarDock to contrive a better near-end-game variety and challenge, possibly through some of the "ideas" you mention. To avoid distractin

Yes, as per your other thread. -- Retro

Salvage is the same as self-destruct. Alt-H is the hotkey; the "caution tape" just below the ship picture in the screen middle bottom is the button. You have a few seconds to reverse the decision if you clicked it accidentally. All races get a percentage back of the cost of the unit they're salvaging, and they can only salvage units that they own. Vasari upgrades allow them to retrieve a greater percentage of the cost. Many players start the game by building the capship factory

The splitting effect is also correct. If any frigate or capital ship in your 2-capship fleet kills a 50xp siege frigate, your capships get 25xp each; if there are three, they each only get 16.67xp. This is why loading up a fleet with eight capships can actually hurt you in the long run because it prevents you from levelling up quickly. Note that you don't get experience for your own ships getting killed so if it's you with a capship versus an enemy AI fleet with a capship in a gravwell

I'm sure they will. -- Retro

Now THAT was a whiny and unhelpful post. All "young" games are buggy - Sins has less bugs than many. There have been a number of patches, more than most developers. Developers are working right now on 1.1. If the games are too long, try a different game. -- Retro

...perhaps whatever forum programming bug that's causing it could use a little shot of cleansing brilliance? ;) -- Retro

OMG Sins technorave! :D -- Retro, chuckling

[quote]1) If you factor a 5% increase in damage, then you need to have at least 20 of a single type of ship to get an increase of 1 ships worth of damage.[/quote]This analysis is missing something, though. It considers only damage-per-second without factoring in the state of the game and location of your fleet. Consider: an upgrade applies an *immediate bonus* to the ships and structures it affects wherever they are on the map. You don't have to wait for additional ships to be construct

[quote]Goodbye Malice [/quote]Nonsense, I'm sure this thread will degenerate into malice soon enough! :) P.S. read the news announcement on the main page. They definitely nerfed it. Which is good because it needed to be nerfed. -- Retro

[quote]It doesn't make sense to me that one can build a ship faster than it takes to destroy a ship.[/quote]I think this is really a call for injection of more "realism" into the game when really it's a gameplay mechanic that is required to ensure buildings aren't too fragile. It doesn't make sense if you think about it in real-world terms, but it's very sensible indeed within a balance context. When you look at the Sins "metagame", there is a certain balance of power associated with st

Ah, gollies. I did not know that! I just assumed that price-setting was completely disabled in SP. An interface improvement suggestion would be to break the button in two with an up-or-down arrow next to it. -- Retro

THESE DAMN FORUMS DRIVE ME NUTS.

K looks like my reply was eaten. Things you can do - Immediately sell on the black market at current discounted prices (SP and MP) - Put your metal and crystal on the black market at the going price (usually 450-500 or so) and wait for an AI to buy it (SP and MP) - Put metal or crystal on the market at a price you prefer so you can control the cost of the market (MP only). The difference between the first two is that you get less money in the first, but it's immedia

[size="7"]OOPS. [/size] :) -- Retro

Good point, Annatar. On the OP - just checking to ensure shield mitigation has been factored into the damage observation. If more weapons of greater damage are firing very quickly, shield mitigation would jump up faster incrementally and make overall damage appear a bit lower. So 50 points of damage might be mitigated at, say, 25% level (depending on hit point health of the target) for 37 points, but 200 points in the same level would be mitigated at 65% for 70 points of damage, making

The explanation could also be simple random bitflipping in your computer. Even the stablest of computers sometimes crashes when an electron jumps out of its channel and collides with a different circuit. It's fairly rare, but I've had stuff in my computer go wonkabillically haywire through no fault of the computer. Heat and dust buildup often have a lot to do with it occurring more often. -- Retro

Not a bug, but it's also annoying that issuing the deploy-platform command frees up your siege capship's attack queue and it'll go off and chase down any enemy scouts in the gravwell instead of continuing to siege the planet unless you reissue the command. Fixing the OP's bug would also fix this annoyance because you could trust autocast to deploy the platform effectively. -- Retro

No, but what you can do is get more money than the black market with them. Single-player has two choices. 1) Sell on the black market for the quoted price (usually 220-250), and you get the money right away. 2) Place your resources UP FOR BID on the market (lower left button). They will earn you the full price (usually 440-500), but only give that amount if and when the AI decides they want to buy them, and they pay the market value [I]at the time of purchase, not of placing the

ALSO ALSO - you have to factor in the type of armor that's getting damaged. A flak cannon has a huge damage rate if you look at the infocard for that ship. But flak is pretty much useless against heavy armor, and it tears through extra-light armor. -- Retro

Scuttle command. Look in the exact centre bottom of your screen - it's the button under the central window that looks like hazard tape. -- Retro

[quote]what is salvage, and how does one use it? (i'm sort of a newbie)[/quote]You get back a percentage of the resources that went into any structure or ship when you scuttle. Vasari have some research upgrades that increase this amount. So, by going RA and then scuttling the ships that come in, your economy gets a boost for free. This boost can pay for fleet supply upgrades and other research. -- Retro

The brown-earmuff portrait *might have been* a guy, but still looks like a rather butch girl to me. Thanks, tunabreath - I read the lore, and there are definitely guys, but the lore also indicates a burning desire for revenge that's driving the society, so who knows how much actual freedom the men get when "the ends justify the means"? Maybe they're the equivalent of drones in a beehive - in the Advent's zeal to achieve psionic perfection, maybe the males with the best psi-carrying gen

[quote]Real life, nobody just up and demands tribute, unless they've already achieved a significant power imbalance in their own favor.[/quote]Actually, in real life, they certainly did. There was all sorts of cases in our own human history where empires basically paid other cultures not to attack them, or paid tribute to gain allies. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't, but many a barbarian empire got a bunch of trinkets to make them go off and sack some other city. No similar

The reason for shield mitigation is to reduce the benefit of focus-firing, and not because it represents some sort of "physics theory" of how shields work in Sins. Consider - five frigates versus five 2000-hitpoint targets, each shot does 100 damage. (These numbers are made up, and healing is not included in the description) 1) No shield mitigation at all: Case 1: five frigates all fire at the same target first. First salvo does 500 points, second does 500 points, third does, and