Bobucles

How about if RA provided ships unique to RA? Returning Armada may be potentially pulling ships stranded in the middle of nowhere. These ships may have been away from support for so long that they have to cannibalize internal systems to stay afloat. The ships designs may be more useful in deep space where it may have to fend for itself for several, dozens, maybe hundreds of years, but both its design and age causes it to suffer compared to a modern warship fresh off the assembly line. Ba

It is contained in each of the race's research topics for training ships. Simply open them up and adjust the base value.

Let them attack. The computer is painfully slow at conquering your territory. As long as your main fleet has a colony ship in it, you can stay on the move, and destroy the territory faster than the computer can. Also, you don't need a perfect fleet to defend. Since it is your home turf, you have the advantage of having instant access to reinforcements. Build more ships if your defenders are hurting, and build turrets if you think an enemy attack is coming.

So THAT'S why TEC have shield generators. I always found it odd that they could defend against their own superweapon, usually enemies aren't the same race. Now I know.

Those are some excellent effects! I have one little nitpick though. The big explosions seem to "cool down" too quickly. I understand it's important to get the effects out of the way so that it doesn't slow the game down. But the transition from a blue hot explosion to cold black seems to be too sudden. I like that the blue heat goes away quickly, it's just that I think the red heat should linger around a bit longer. This is another thing, but I couldn't really see it in the video so

Well, if the enemy is blowing your stuff up he isn't fighting your ships. That puts your ships on the advantage. Use this advantage to blow up his ships, then charge into his territory to do some damage of your own. Against the AI, you can trounce a bombing strategy by placing a few defense turrets.

Wow. I saw this EXACT same thing on another forum. Must be a new advanced advertising bot going around. Or just someone showing off their e-peen.

[quote]Planetary bodies found where you would expect them to be: Volcanic are close to the sun, Desert just beyond volcanic, Terran and other habitables are in the green belt, Ice are near the outer edges of the system, etc.[/quote]I'd just like to point out that Jupiter's moons are really large and varied. IO is definitely volcanic, Europa is a strong candidate for ice, and they're all large enough to trump out asteroids. Things do get pretty strange when a gas giant is tossed into the

The AI missions may sound like extortion, and it is. But try looking at it this way: It is FAR FAR FAR cheaper to meet their demands and make peace, than to wage war on a new front. Let's see... give 500 credits, or destroy 40 ships, 4 planets, and lose a potential ally. Take your pick! Destroy part of one enemy armada, or fight TWO armadas at once! Kind of tricky to pull off IMO. I don't see how the AI does it though. There's no way in game to figure out where your tributed resourc

Is there any chance of this becoming a menu option? The option is great for normal times, but when I do a game large enough to kill my system, I need the camera to be as steady as possible.

[quote]you would have to go into every entity file and alter the buildtime line. good luck![/quote]That's just painful, and not necessary. In order to mod, you'll need to download the game packs from the downloads section. That will provide the game in raw text to work with. From there, go into the GameInfo\[b]gameplay.constants[/b] file. Do you know how you can change the global game settings from slow/fast poor/rich? This file states how strong each of those settings are. Scr

[quote]What should be there instead of mitigation is "structural cohesiveness", and as enough damage to the shield is done, that weakens and allows more damage in as it lowers.[/quote]If you have to reach a minimum amount of damage before you can hurt a ship, then you won't kill ANYTHING without using focus fire! In fact, if you spread your fire out you will only maximize the protective buffer of shields, which could ultimately cost you the battle. The current mitigation system is not b

Wow. Haeso just... snapped. Unfortunately, the only real argument he has is that players would smurf the system. Did he bring any possible solutions to the table? No. Seriously, the amount of dented egos coming up out of the woodwork is atrocious. I don't care how you justify how noob stomping is fun. If a good player is beaten by a handicapped opponent, he is NOT going to suddenly be scarred and admonished by the gaming community for life. It's a god damn [b]GAME[/b], get over it. I'm

[quote]How do you quantify, in resource percentages, the amount that player B would need to beat player A? Why has player B been losing all of his/her games?[/quote]The system, in a way, would figure that out for you. If a player has a bonus, and then starts winning because of that bonus, then the bonus is too high, so the bonus goes down. The player then starts losing because they aren't as good, so the bonus goes back up again. Wow, the problem solves itself. In a massive online community, it

Just convert those decimals to percentages, and you have a pretty good idea for how it works. When the pirates are at 10% they'd only send 22 supply worth of ships. When they are at 100% they send the full 220 strength of ships. In addition, at every "checkpoint" the fleet makeup changes according to how the randomizer is set. I'm not sure how pirate strength changes based on the number of players in the game. When you start a 10 player match there are 10 home worlds owned, but the pira

It seems that when you say "diverse fleets" you mean a fleet with a wide array of ships filling multiple roles. The thing is, when others want "diverse fleets", they want a fleet that they can customize to suit a particular role/strategy.

Damn. Wait, does that mean an AI player would be an equal burden across all the computers? Wouldn't they just another client playing the game like everyone else?

A typical star will give a bonus of 2 antimatter/sec to all ships aroudn the star. Also, stars are important because the game is Sins of a [b]Solar[/b] Empire. The Solar part is sort of a dead giveaway to the presence of stars. If this were Sins of a Black Hole Empire, or sins of a Nebula, or Sins of a Mutant Spacial Anomaly, things might be a bit different.

I've looked a bit around trying to mod a few things. The hardest things to mod appear to be the buffs. There are a LOT of buffs, which do a lot of things, and each of them seems to be hard coded in their own way. Making a new buff means you need to make several files, and get the dependencies correct. I found it very frustrating to look at that and figure out how to work with it. I also found that special effects(such as for weapons and abilities) in general were very difficult to work

From what I've seen, culture divides among every phase lane that it encounters. If you have one planet backed into a corner pumping out culture, that single lane will fill up VERY quickly, as it's only dividing up by 1. It's very unlikely that you'll be able to overwhelm that planet's culture, as your nearby stations will have at least 2 lanes to divide on. Culture seems to be "rooted" at the originating planet, with the culture lanes pushing out in every direction. The planet info show

There are 3 modifiers in gameplay.constants file that increase the number of pirates: [quote] strengthPerOwnedPlanet .10 strengthPerCargoShip .0025 strengthPerBounty .00003[/quote]This suggests that the pirate's power is based mostly on the size of the empires in the galaxy, and partly on the strength of your trade network. While the bounty seems small, keep in mind that it is added in chunks of 250/500, so it does add up pretty quick.

I recall that Stardock said they won't add in multicore support due to the difficulty and lack of audience. Other games don't have the option either, but I have found that I can sometimes work around it. For example, I played UT2004 a ton back in the day. As time went on, I tried more demanding and crazy mods, and crank the settings WAY up. Some of the mods had massive amounts of monsters and chaos going on. After starting it up again, I got an idea to use both parts of my dual core. I st

[quote]Hull Restore Rate Hull restore rate is the amount of hull points regenerated per second. Regeneration occurs both in and out of combat. Hull Restoration is dropped to 33% while in combat.[/quote]That's strange. I get this: [quote] InCombatHullRegenerationPenalty 0.5[/quote] Straight from the gameplay.constants file.

When you enter a system, the enemy tends to attack the first ship you send in. Tell your capital ship to jump first, so that it takes the brunt of the fire. This way your escort ships won't get killed off. Your ships tend to attack the enemy flak frigates first. This is horrible, as flak frigates are both very durable, and they are harmless to your ships. Focus your fire on the LRFs, heavy cruisers, and light frigates. Leave the flak for last. There's no reason that kind of fle

[quote]So you want to artificially make people not suck?[/quote] You fail to grasp the concept entirely. A typical response. Handicap modes have existed in games. It's not always possible to pit 2(or more!) equally skilled players against each other, but that's what makes a good game. The few games that do have handicaps have them as a manual setting. Such handicap options are TERRIBLE in online play. The reason is because no two strangers can figure out a fair counterbalance to the skill betwee