boxox

Well, it breaks a few of other things badly too: 1) due to the XP from destroying siege frigates being 3x more than light frigates for far less effort, making loads of capital ships is by far the best strategy in SP. You can get by just fine with repair yards and cap ships until you hit support cruisers. Removes all but 2-3 cruiser types as necessary or even useful in SP. 2) the huge fleet cap usage from a fleet full of SFs means the AI needs to put its fleet cap up far more

It doesn't seem like IC have managed to kill the AIs love of siege frigates even with 1.03. I just played a game on Gateway FFA vs the AI where it almost never did anything other than light frigs + siege frigs + 1-2 caps through to autosave 5. Slow research speed settings really bring that old habit out, since it can't seem to tech past it as quickly. I went through 10+ such raids before the first LRM-equivalent unit turned up, and even then, every single raid it launched came

It's supposed to be a military supplement, but it ends up being the most powerful research ability (almost completely decoupling ship designs from military labs), the most powerful economic ability (decouples income from tax/trade/refinery revenues with vasari scuttle tech), and the most powerful military ability (outproduces industrial juggernaut with no cost and no micro).

Why not play online? Seriously. It's like you bought counterstrike and decided to pick a fight saying it sucks because the bots don't have anything interesting to say.

I think the main issues with 'fixing' the dark fleets is to keep it consistent with the lore and to make it comparable to the other end-civil abilities. So these ships are from remnants of the scattered vasari fleet, and you can open a gate to communicate with and summon anyone listening and vector them to your planet. Why not make the RA ships occasionally 'compromised' versions of vasari ships, taken over by whatever the vasari are on the run from? It would seem to keep vaguely in c

[quote]And for more casual types, it's an annoying buzzword that has no meaning whatsoever because the single-player AI wouldn't know how to play properly if the game were balanced anyway.Also if a game is balanced in single player, can the same techniques or principles applying to the single player balancing issue can be successfully applied to multiplayer.[/quote] The reason why devs are usually a little timid to alter unit values in an RTS is that if the single player and multiplayer

[quote]honestly, a carrier is weak a heavy cruiser is only moderately powerful compared to caps and all the other ships are weak little frigates so RA is not overpowered just hard to beat it only gives one or two good ships per use so no big deal. [/quote] Yeah, but flak + heavy cruisers is pretty lethal on its own, and you get enough carriers free to either neutralise bombers or assassinate cap ships. How many ship types would you say you manually build once you have RA?

Steal/transfer antimatter is so super handy once people start filling out with healing-ability cruisers though. Their repair rate gets knocked out much earlier and you get to malice them more often, what is not to like?

Yes, damn those ladder players, especially people who play WC3 and TA. Those are the worst kind! Is there a plugin I can use that can make an entire thread shown as glittertext?

Does anyone who plays online any great deal find the AI a challenge? If you have ever played a team game where someone drops and an AI takes over you know there is almost no advantage sufficient to stop it snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Now that I think of it, it actually does a pretty good job of emulating a bad, kind of dickish* human player who will absolutely lead to your team losing the game. 1 Its macro play is wasteful and it does not understand how to manage supp

The value of 'free extractors' is questionable given that TEC can research, what, something like a a 50% cost reduction and a 33% build speed increase on them anyway.

TL;DR

Please don't assume that just because you got beaten in the first 25 minutes that their strategy lacks skill. Think of it as playing tennis vs, I don't know, Mark Philippoussis - there would be an infinity of other ways for him to humiliate you if you ever got past that point, but you will probably never see them, because you're not even good enough to return his opening serve.

[quote]So, since they've made the PJI better, they haven't let the AI know that it would be smarter to fight and/or take out the PJIs before running.[/quote] Yeah, I am pretty sure the PJI change and the Siege Frigate change were the same panicked response to single player complaints about the AI. Problem 1: AI love of siege frigates Problem 2: AI hatred of mismatched forces Leads to most people's experience of single player being this endless series of half-

[quote]The beta had developer voices in it, this version has "hollywood level" voice acting. (IIRC, the voice actor for StarScream was specifically mentioned as being the guy who did the Vasari...)[/quote] I could have sworn I read that some of the TEC voices were the devs. Oh well. I don't know why it didn't occur to them that a game of sins of a solar empire is this long: =================================================== whereas listening to starscream g

If you can't get it to work you could always hamachi it and do a direct connection through the 'multiplayer' interface rather than the ICO one.

[quote]It's not easy to get everyone on the same mod for multiplayer, how about you mod your single player, which you can do for yourself and have no opinions about balance that you have to deal with. You can make the game as balanced as you want with no issues.[/quote] That's funny, I thought you would have had an excellent social network full of people who respect and trust you who would be prepared to sit down and test every wonderful idea you can come up with. And yeah, I

[quote]Boxox, there are pretty clear descriptions of some issues on the forum. Why would adding 'oh and I changed x to y and it was better' add any weight to it? In any case, I think the thread has moved from 'What Brad said about his focus' to 'zomg people who think about game mechanics are teh failz'.[/quote] I think high level players are a great resource to the game community, however, this expertise is not great enough to escape the law of unintended consequences. Nobody knows a

[quote]You do have to watch out for Advent players with the special ability that puts a bounty on players when they destroy Advent trade ships. I don't just mean watch out when you are destroying them yourself - since the money comes out of nowhere it can become a useful income stream for players at war with whoever is blockading Advent trade trade routes.[/quote] Yeah, the other thing that puts Advent a little push against raiding is their in-culture vision tech thing which means they

It strikes me as strange that in a game that is so incredibly easy to mod, and provides both an auto record/playback feature and an endless list of graphs at the end of the match, that the discussion is still revolving around vague references to 'math' and 'I'll fight ye!' chestbeating. If you have: a) notepad b) a second PC and/or someone willing to test a modification out with you on ICO Would you care to explain why you are wasting your time trying to lob

[quote]It's not that easy because the constant drip-feed of credits and resources [/quote] You've got it there though. I don't see people take much notice of trade ships, they often have to pass through non-colonisable space, stars etc. There is no way for someone to defend them other than to divert enough ships there to kill a raiding party, otherwise you just slowly peck their trade income to death. Carriers are awesome at this because you can keep them at one edge of the well and

[quote]I say it'd make a little bit more sense to use and abuse the overpowered stuff to really get a good understanding of all the nuances that makes it so powerful so that we can possibly guard against a similar change in the future.[/quote] Well that's fine, but that's not really what I mean. Last I checked everyone is still alive with all limbs attached after 1.02's market exploit, people who spend a lot of time in the game found it and decent people didn't use it. If you can find

You probably have the team colours option selected.

[quote]He says over and over that his priority is the single player experience. That makes sense since the majority of people that play this game play mostly single player. He's also probably much more concerned about crashes and bugs and things of that nature than any kind of game balance discussion. That doesn't somehow mean that game balance will never be looked at. It just means that fixing AI issues and crashes etc. are more important than game balance to the overall community.[/quote]<

[quote]Maybe its nostalgia, but weren't the ships in Homeworld better? And that game came out like 5 years ago or so. [/quote] HW ships were excellent, probably haven't been matched for a consistency and excellence in their art design by any space game ever since. I don't think we will see anything quite so good again. [quote]For instance finding my frigate building building, it takes a while to go through all my buildings to find. I've done the interface tutorials but I still