PekkaR

I believe it's working as intended. Traders wouldn't pick a longer route to get to their destination if a shorter one exists. The long route income bonus itself is very simplified, but works nicely and results in a mini game of its own. One could consider it a measure of how scarce some trade goods are at a fringe planet because it's so cumbersome to get there safely. Like you said, adding the trade port in middle still clearly increases total income. It might be more efficient to focus

What ships did the opposing fleet mainly consist of? With Kols and their broadside guns this certainly seems nice. Not sure about Kodiaks. It's been said that TEC ships generally have their guns in front and Vasari ships to the sides, so when attacking aliens with a more generic TEC fleet, doing this would decrease the damage of both fleets. But Vasari should have much to gain from this against TEC. Nothing has been said of the Advent, they probably have guns coming out of thei

I also think some of the pirate ships are so light that fighters hurt them more than bombers do.

Which in turn means that it's everybody for themselves. There can be temporary or even long lasting alliances but nothing is certain. ;)

AI doesn't go past well defended worlds if it cannot get around them through other systems that you don't own. (Ok, the scout ships do.) Isn't this even stated somewhere? Only way it'd keep distance and fly past is when it's headed to another phase lane that leads to a world that isn't yours, then it might jump to another world of yours from there. [quote] sry when this is off-topic and smart-alecky, but the plural should be "boni"...[/quote] Then so is this, but it really

Some of you might want to try the following default keybindings. V zooms in, B zooms out. (IIRC) Z, X and C have been set to useful zoom distances without any time wasted. X and C are useful anyway, Z is vanity view. ;)

It's manual.pdf file in the game's folder.

Do you change something in video settings that only takes effect on next launch? Or do you change any settings at all?

[quote]besides the auto focus, will each planet be given a numerical key to press to auto look? i think this might be featured on the left hand collapse windows but not really sure.[/quote] You can probably bind a planet as a command group if you want. Select planet, press ctrl-5. Now tap 5 twice and it switches view to that planet. Or select it from the empire tree and hit space. (Hopefully I remember this stuff right, only got the game recently and I can't test them in the game right

Substantial bonus to what? :O [quote]Yup, if they're just crossing a system on the way to somewhere else afte you've paid them you should get a different message methinks. Maybe just a regular insult instead of a threat...[/quote] Anything from "You'll be spared this time, but pox on your sons and daughters!" to "Just passing through to collect that bounty you put on X's ships guv, feel free to throw more credits my way anytime." would do great. :p

In single player you can pause the game so you have time to read through the whole research tree etc. By default this is bound to the Pause key.

[quote] Moving ships has been beat to death during beta, and this is one thing that is very unlikely to happen. To everyone comparing it with Homeworld, the only ships that moved around were your fighters and bombers.[/quote] Not true about Homeworld. I had focus fired ships moving backwards to pull the enemy in while keeping their front guns to the enemy, for example. Especially Ion Frigates. This kind of movement is certainly a non-trivial addition (the more I think about

I like the pirates so far. I have couple of small UI~ish issues with the them. ------------ Someone above noted that we should listen for the "bounty on your head has increased" messages. I've found that these do not always play, probably because some other sound effect like a different event or unit sound is already playing. When I and the enemy are both raising the bounties multiple times near the time limit, I often miss the second or third bounty increase message if I'm als

As far as I've seen, AI makes no effort to keep long range ships away from short range enemy ships while attacking. It seems possible to give them a move order and they'll keep shooting if enemies happen to be in their firing arcs while moving, but I can't tell them to back off slowly to keep the distance for a while longer. That's something I'd really like to see. It could be initially implemented without the AI part. Or if that makes micromanagement too important, then only have it af

[quote]This is probably going to sound dumb, but where do I browse/find MP games to join? In the MP screen all i see is available Lan games and a place to type the iP address.[/quote] Multiplayer is basically LAN. Below it you can select Ironclad Online for logging into chat and game server. I had to create a new account for that with the serial number (couldn't use the account for Stardock or these forums), which was odd.

I don't think anyone can legally help you there. Copyright. I hope Ironclad considers putting the manual up for download on this site (or just allow people to upload it on various sites) because it won't hurt paying customers and it'd help sell the game to some people who can't decide just based on the other stuff. I'd like to occasionally have access to it when I'm visiting a friend and didn't bring a copy of mine.

You can see the keybindings in the game settings, and generally in the tooltips of all buttons.

[quote] 3 races is the standard for any RTS , see SUPCOM.[/quote] One could argue though that the standard in 4X games is lots and lots of (alien) races. See MoO series. ;) Better not look at Master of Orion 3 actually, you might go blind.

While credit cards are not as common in Europe as they are in US, I ordered mine from totalgaming.net with a debit card that has Visa Electron chip/service. Perhaps you have one of those?

If you have them on auto join to the fleet and have the fleet leader bound as control group, will it be enough? Maybe if you'll describe how you then try to order them around (battle micromanagement?) the veterans can point out other ways to accomplish the same.

My first tutorial didn't initially give any instruction either. This is a bug. I followed a suggestion on this forum to start another tutorial first, then come immediately back to the first one. That's when it started giving me the tutorial popups. Another suggestion I've seen is to switch back to the default 1024x768 resolution, but I didn't need to do that.