Starhaus

My radiance got killed by the Sova's bombers though, and the Sova rush typically jumps in and hits embargo while your radiance is off getting its first asteroid or planet. Also, if the Sova cruises out of range, I am not so sure that will work. It would only work I think if the Sova sits in one place, within striking range of your radiance. Stealing antimatter would succeed depending on how the other person handles the Sova rush in the first place. Also, if you are cruising your radiance aro

Basically due to the costs involved Advent takes longer to build its first illuminator than TEC, so TEC would have an edge if they started out at the same time doing the same thing. But that is the problem: as a player you have to assess the situation from the start, which a player can only do if they explore early and effectiely. If one is close to an Advent opponent (like 2 jumps) then you will have a big advantage over Advent if you rush. But if you fail to understand that, then you will

"Chokepoints" are meaningless unless you have phase jump inhibitors. That is really the only requirement for a chokepoint. Otherwise, why would anyone care if someone loaded up a planet or asteroid with the maximum number of tactical guns and hangars? Just bypass it. Besides, chokepoints usually don't defend anything all that important. Moreover, the only important thing to attack, especially early in the game, is the homeworld, not some chokepoint dangling out in space.

Out of dozens of sova rushes either made by me or made on me, the only defense I can see that works are the presence of some sort of long-range attack craft, if TEC then lrms, Vasari then assailants, and so on. The problem is, with Advent, because of the much higher cost to get to that stage, and because a sova rush can occur before you even get your first asteroid, as far as I can tell, unless you have some really good teamates who can quickly counterattack the person rushing, then the

P.S. I was just sitting waiting for players as a host for a game on the Ironclad "Join" board when I got a huge popup "Disconnected from Ironclad" which immediately cancelled the pending game, dumping me back to the login screen. So it seems to have nothing to do with the game itself since no game was actually in progress there. Are there server problems?

In a few games today, usually midway when it is just getting interesting, the message "Disconnected from Ironclad" has popped up, immediately freezing the games. The only way out is to quit the game in progress (more accurately, the game that was in progress). This has been occuring today more frequently than the mini-dump problem, which incidentally, I have not encountered at all today. However, this new problem is just as lethal to a game it s

I found sometimes just clicking on the wormholes doesn't work as you would expect, at least not in the same way as it would if it were just a new starlane. Before the patch I could simply auto-path using it as if it were another starlane, but after the patch I found two new features (could be old though, I'm not positive): 1) In order to use them now you have to actually force the ships at the wormhole to converge [B][I]at the very center of the wormhole gravity well[/I][/B] which caus

Is the server down? I was trying to log on for the last half hour and it says "disconnected from server". About an hour prior to that I was playing a game with the new patch, so I know it was working earlier.

So which is the "bad" patch, the one on the stardock website? I used that patch and i don't have any problems hosting a game, and people can join.

Yes, multiple factories produce that many more ships for the same amount of time, but you have to remember, if you don't have the econ to actually [I]buy[/I] the ships out of three or so factories, then multiple factories are just dead weight. And you will be dead also if someone catches you. If you see someone overstretching themselves, best strategy is to hit them hard early while their econ sucks. They won't have as many ships as you because they wasted their resources in expansion

If they were sporadically exploring and discovering metal, then you would expect to see periodic spikes of "discovery" amounts. Their summary curves all resembled a steep upward line from the start, then around mid-game slightly leveling off to a more slowly rising, but still rising, and continuing to the end. There was no stepped activity as one might expect. Moreover, all three other players had almost identical curves, very little difference. Didn't look like "discovery" increases

Bounty is what you are supposed to play with, but it doesn't "defeat" them, only utilizes them. Sounds like you are starting to learn the game. I rarely try to to kill the pirates as they are very useful alive. Also, fighting pirates, (either the stationery squatters or the raiders sent on a bounty quest), is useful to level up capital ships as well. If I have a few new capital ships laying around, I send them to the planet the pirates will raid and put no money to bounty, letting t

Pesky, if that is true, why did they have rapidly rising levels of metal from other sources, but I as Vasari, had zero? I had been in a number of battles as well, pirates mostly.

If that is right, then the other players had massive metal income from that, and it rose very sharply for all their civs as a function of time. They would have had to scuttle their entire fleet and base structures to get that kind of income. And I was Vasari, if anything, I would have had the most from reclaimation, but I had zero. They were TEC and Advent, (plus, I had already researched all the nanotech upgrades on resource reclaimation and had been in a few big battles). If you

Only the Advent civ has research to accelerate research. Each civ has its own specialty, and the religious civ is a research civ, specializing in artifact research as well as speed-ups for other kinds of research. Rates are fixed otherwise for other civs.

After a multiplayer game, I was looking at the summary stats under the "Metal" tab, and besides the usual mining, black market buying/selling, refinery, etc., there was a summary of something calle "metal from other sources". As I was playing the Vasari civ, I assumed that meant scavanging metal, but my summary line showed zero throughout the game, while the other three players had massive useage of these "other sources". What are these "other sources"?

I never have much problem with the pirates as I usually just buy them out and have them attack someone else. Maybe near the middle to the end of the game I might stop in the pirate base with 7 or so capital ships and then just micro each pirate ship (takes awhile as there are about 100 or so). At most I have lost 2 of 7 cap ships, usually no more than 1. Before I knew what I was doing, (like increase the cap crew complement for more cap ships..lol), I once cleared out the pirate bas

Thanks, I just noticed the "Home Planet" was not set for this map, - I didn't realize the massive impact lacking that upgrade had on tax income. Even so, because you have to blow so much of your starting cash on upgrading the planet first, the game gets going very slowly on this map. However, I think I ended up buying every single pirate run against the AI after that. I ended up doing much better than on most maps because it forced both the AI and myself to go slow. I just went civic develo

The following question applies to the single-player map, Gaia Cresent. With normal default player settings, the Gaia Cresent map spawns you on a pop. 10 world with a -.7 to -2.2 (yes, negative) tax rate. The starting credit amount of 3000 disappears really fast if you don't jump on building up your planet fast. After some trial and error, I found if I immediately grab 2 planet population upgrades (to get the planet to pop. 100), queue up a cap

If you are really playing a larger game with more than 2 players, cooperative behavior will always win, so if you are known to be turn-coat, people who reliably stay in a pack will easily defeat loner types. Divide and conquer pretty much always wins. Of course, if the game is FFA, and there can be only one winner, then obviously at some point even an ally will have to declare war on another ally to win.