boxox

Two things about pirates: 1) they tend to show up at the closest planet(s) to the pirate base planet, and attack trade structures and ships first 2) they have no shields 1 means you can fortify up the worlds nearest the pirate base (number of jumps and jump length matters). Repair yards and turrets tend to work well because they often come in with enough flak to muck up a hangar-based defensive system. 2 means that they have no shield damage mitigation and ha

Spazotron, have you watched a replay of the game? I haven't played single player in 1.03 all that much yet but in 1.02 it would often seem like you were being ganged up on, but if I watched the replay with 'all visible' on I would see the AIs bashing each other quite often. Do they just ignore each other? Do they seem to have auto-attack turned off when their ships pass each other? What's happening?

Brad, thanks for continuing to show up and talk to us about this stuff. The last guy who had anything like the same availability I can remember was Oleg from 1C who used to come in and chat about all sorts of flightsim related things over on the Il-2 ubi forums. Unfortunately the same thing happened there, people just took it at license to scream and whine (usually a BF-109 bug would be treated with more passionate anger than a topic about the holocaust - not hyperbole!) and after 2-3 heroic y

The 'researcher' AI will throw a vasari fleet with a good whack of Subverters and Overseers (and other race equivalents) together and use their abilities in combat. It suffers instead from failing to build a fleet with enough big hitters in it and being terrible at picking which of your units to kill first.

That sounds pretty reasonable..... but: When you make huge swinging changes (siege frigs, -50% development mandate, black market) it looks a lot like nobody knows what the hell they are doing. Anything more than a few percent change from any original values suggests that maybe a longer-term rethink of the entire concept is worth doing. While I appreciate that you have two different audiences for the same game, mashing up the underlying data in order to fit it into what the AI code wan

Somewhat indicative - first game I played Vs the 'unfair' AI, I was kind of impressed when I saw it throw 18 cobalts at me right from the start. I ended up pulling my cap back from the fight, and it arrives at a dead asteroid... where the computer has decided to send both an akkan and a colony frigate and have them circle the thing aimlessly.

How will we survive without overblown self important pompous fogey #2305473?

Alright, just thought I would check. FWIW I have an asus 7900GS and I have literally never once had Sins crash on me. The only weird thing I get is an occasional split-second white screen effect late in a game when things get very heavy. I'm using 169.21 on XP. I know IC mentioned that this seems to be an internal Nvidia bug and that people should wait for the next release, but, whatever is causing it is obviously not happening for my hardware/driver/os combination. Just as a thou

[quote]At the DoW comments. When you have a new faction severely OP shortly after release of an expansion, you know it is not an oversight, but a business decision :/[/quote] Dude, it's warhammer. The entire tabletop game revolved around releasing imbalanced and overpowered new units and sides to keep the money rolling in from people buying them to keep up. I would be much more surprised if they hadn't done it that way given the license ! ;)

Yikes, beta drivers? You know that there is no actual naming consistency from Nvidia with those and half of the 'betas' you see are internal, card-packager-specific drivers for one particular revision of one particular update for one particular card, right? Have you been using a driver cleaner and rebooting before you go play with installing all these different versions?

[quote]innociv and his « high-level » buddies must account for less than 0.1% of game units sold.[/quote] They might be 0.1% at launch, but as Activision discovered with Quake and Blizzard with Warcraft II, etc, if you have a solid multiplayer game and keep it clean and free of hacks and horrible people (or at least make a decent attempt) you get a continuous drip feed of sales over a much longer time period, rather than the usual peak and immediate abyss from a conventional single play

No, just hold on. I'm not suggesting the SF change was the best idea ever, but at least we got a reason as to why it was changed. Brad knows his stuff about competitive gaming and has access to logs of every game ever played on ICO, so if he says an exploit was possible then I will give him that on trust. But without explaining the reasoning for any change, it just looks arbitrary and weird.

[quote] We read through the posts on the forums and make our own decisions. Having been designing PC games for a decade and a half, I am always looking for new ideas and take suggestions seriously. I also know that a lot of the complaining about "balance" is dubious because they are looking at it from purely a particular way to win at multiplayer versus general strategy. 1.03 wasn't really designed as a balancing update. Some changes were made so that we could gauge their effect fo

You can shift-tab to reverse the order of the cycle through the list.

*tumbleweeds* Errrm... I don't think ICO has ever actually killed anyone. Yet. It's not a great service. It's not as bad as it could be given the game design in Sins. For team games, the level of coordination required tends to mean that 'player level' has a diminished role compared to your communication skills with whoever you've paired up with. People who don't use chat at all are worth much less as a teammate than someone who is just, well, new. So ideally someone

[quote]Can I just click "play" and expect to be matched up with someone roughly my skill level (or at the very least, win/loss ratio?) Can I team up with my friend and tell ICO to find us another team of the same skill level (or ratio) (aka, "Arranged Team")? Will there ever be profiles on the web? What else am I not thinking of, that is, what other great features are there in ICO?[/quote] No. No. Dunno. You are missing that it is behind battle.net from D

Can't say I've noticed that it's any better. The only difference I've noticed is that once an AI surrendered when it was down to one ice planet, and once a fleet stuck around getting killed rather than running. Other than that .. still not even as good as a total newbie human player.

Use the Sins launcher, click 'update game'. After entering a valid login linked to your serial you will get a direct download link to the patch.

Wow, damn you guys are harsh. Bigdogbigfeet, since noone is interested in helping you enjoy the game right now, two things: 1) As a couple of the rare helpful comments said, multiplayer team games with an unknown partner and opponents are a bit hit and miss. Try 1v1s vs other new players, or play with the AIs first. More than anything the game is hard first off because there is a very long learning curve and if you're still reading tech and ship descriptions vs someone who ha

[quote]The RA advantage gets bigger the larger the fleets, since the Vasari player is free to use his resources on select units and what is most likely a severely lacking economy. There's just something wrong fighting large fleets appearing independently of their owner's economy. It feels like I'm playing against a badly written AI.[/quote] I've seen people stuff themselves up trying to max their fleet cap to get the most out of RA - barely enough cash coming in to replace even an imper

[quote] You can no longer damage structures that are at 0% completed.[/quote] Phew! That is a lot less bad than it sounded :CONGRAT:

Don't mean to sound like a broken record but I don't seem to be able to go back and edit the last bitch about this, but: If you increase the cost of any unit for LRM style units or any others for future balancing issues, aren't you making the free units from RA even more valuable in comparison?

Played probably the best opening 45 mins as TEC I have ever done this morning - 2 development mandates, most extraction techs, trade network on 7 planets (massively out-colonised everyone), 1st level industrial juggernaut, almost all planets taken to max logistics and packed full of trade/tech, got kodiaks and repair yards and had 6 frigate factories up... probably the best 50 minute start I have ever played, though I kept the fleet cap too low and went for one too many cap ships. Bot

[quote]I'm not saying that the siege balances are necessarily good, just that everyone needs to remember that there are two "different" games going on here, and Ironclad shouldn't just focus on the multiplayer one.[/quote] - AI: -Fixed various AI researching and building stall outs for the various trees (military in particular). -Rewrote AI siege building and attack logic. - Um, OK. So they needed to do this AND nerf siege frigates to make it work in singleplay

Is Returned Armada / Dark Fleet working as intended then? That is not great news.