Alexboculon

I abandoned the many caps idea long ago. I usually win games without even buying a second one. My rule of thumb now is that when one cap gets close to level 10, I might as well start another just for the fun of leveling it up. Or, one cap per fleet, if I need to fight on two fronts. I do still entertain the idea of getting multiple Dunovs (those are the ones with the shield restore beam right?). It would be fun if you had 3+, and the shield restore at 1100 points per pop completely neg

[quote]To destroy a ships, you just need to destroy its hull. If your phase missiles can destroy the hull before the sheilds, then you just saved yourself a lot of time.[/quote] But it can't. That never happens. You'd need 60%+ likelyhood of bypass for that to work.

Someone must know the answer. Why do we need to theorize at all? Bypassing shield mitigation would be good, but not that great. If you bypass likelyhood is ten percent and you are getting a 50% damage increase by doing it, you are basically even with a simple 5% damage increase. However, it only benefits during focus fire, so attacking a single target would have almost no benefit. I'd rather have the 5% damage increase. Anyway, we can all agree that the damage increase is prob

I don't get it. They bypass shields a certain percentage of the time? How exactly is that helpful? In the end, to destroy any ship you have to get rid of all the shields and hull points anyway (you aren't realistically going to kill the hull while the shield is still there, since the bypass percentage is so low, unless you were fully upgraded and shooting at a guardian or something). It just seems pointless. And all the upgrades are to increase the bypass percentage, not dama

I think the upkeep should be on a sliding scale the works automatically. Every time you build a ship, it changes slightly. It makes no sense having these huge "upgrades," that instantaneously double your upkeep percentage. ...As if 101 ships were somehow [I]two times more[/I] difficult to maintain than 100. I just don't see any point to this arbitrary "buy logistics" system. regarding caps, I think there should be fewer, not more. Make them stronger. the way 20 LRMs own caps

When a planet battle is at the point that they are bombarding you, they are probably also at the point that they are destroying your orbital structures. It would take about 10 extra seconds to destroy a shield generator, so I think the slots are better spent defending the planet in the first place. I do see an advanatge if people are using novalith though.

You mean it's time to actually APPLY this patch. I downloaded it, but I still can't use it since I can't find any games online using that version. It needs to be mandatory to update, so that everyone has the same version... the one that works!

It's true that using multiple cores would help a lot, but... I think this is just a problem of huge games being too hard for nearly any computer. The issue is related to how large a game are you loading (and how far zoomed in?)? I've played this game smoothly on my old computer (an old AMD 2200+, the bare minimum at 1.8ghz), and I've bogged down my brand new computer (intel q6600 OC'ed to 3.0 ghz, 4gb 1066, nice HD, 8800GT 512mb,--5.9 windows indexes across the board) on larger games. O

As far as I can tell, if you have any quad core processor, it is fast enough that you can run everything on the highest settings and wouldn't need the last two cores anyway.

Hmm. I don't really have any friends who play this game (I like to pretend I'm not a computer nerd when I'm out in public), so I usually just go online and join random games. Since this special version is not compatible with the standard 1.04, and since even now it takes me 10-15 minutes to find a game to join, I'm assuming that if I got the new version I would practically never get into games.. Maybe the best way to get this special version into use would be to release it along with a

Is there a chance your comp is just overheating under high load? Have you run a stress test? You could try opening up the case and pointing an extra fan in there to see if it helps. You never know, sometimes obvious things like this cause problems. I recently had a computer freezing up under load and it turned out my GPU fan had completely broken and stopped spinning due to being too dusty.

This seems to happen on a regular basis to me, so I have a hard time believing it's "statistically very rare." My system is brand new, and composed entirely of parts that were chosen specifically because they are very popular, proven-reliablity name-brand high-end pieces (all have 1000+ positive newegg.com customer reviews). If this happens to me, it must happen to nearly everyone. How's progress? Even if this problem were rare, which it is not, there must have been quite a few minidum

With no plot or storyline to follow, there is only one reason to play single player: you just bought the game and have no idea yet how anything works. That's perfectly reasonable, but playing against the AI gets really really really easy after a 10 games or so. Hell, you can beat an insance computer opponent using nothing but cap ships. I doubt there are that many people out there satisfied to challenge themselves by resorting to playing against more and more and more (3v1, 4v1, 5v1, et

If these games took any longer, nobody would play them at all! As of now, there are usually fewer than a few hundred people playing online at any given time. I think the reason for the lack of players is: 1: minidumps, and the generally unwieldy online experience. 2: most normal people don't want to spend 4 hours in a game. I think the ideal amount of time for a single game online in any RTS is 45min-1.5 hours. After 2 hours it just gets boring. Everyone has all the tech b

That would be an awesome feature, but considering there are generally far fewer online features in this game than most, I wouldn't hold your breath for this super-advanced feature. It'll never happen. Maybe Starcraft III will do it?

I think most of my frustration comes from the fact that this game seems so popular, and it was not cheap, so the budget to make it run well ought to be there. To be honest, I pirate most software I use. In this case, though, I bought it at full price, expecting it to be a big-name fully streamlined game. Sins is not some bargain-bin game you can pick up for $5 at Target. In fact, since this is the first new game I've bought in two years, I expected it to be even better-designed. Well, i

I agree with the OP regarding the general idea of making caps stronger and more expensive. Here's an idea: Why give them away for free at the start? It ruins the whole sequential build order thing (frigates to cruisers, etc.). Make capitol ships a bigger deal. Individual upgrades for ships is a good idea.

It's not a non-issue, it's just an annoyance. Just like having to refresh the 'join games' screen manually, just like not having a ladder system for auto-matching games online and having to find them manually, just like not having a proper win/loss reporting system online, just like having the occasional minidump, just like having a system that requires everyone to manually open their ports without any guidance, just like the cumbersome in-game communication system (e.g. lack of hotkeys for alli

OK, I noticed that my caps get massacred by LRMs when they have more than about 10. Lesson learned. I still say they're more fun.

I'd guess that the shield mitigation changing still doesn't make up for the fact that if you were to hit all the ships at once instead of focussing, they would retain their full attacking potential against you until the very end. Of course, if you kill them one at a time, the enemy loses firepower with each ship he loses. It's a good question though. Regarding letting AI fight for you, I've always found that they end up focusing fire anyway, so the only question is who do you want to fo

Ah yes, that reminds me: the alerts. I am not sure if this is an option that is easily changed, but the alert voices are basically useless in this game. When you play a large map there is always going to be some trade vessel getting attacked. I don't want to hear about it, but at the same time I DO want to hear about when a large enemry fleet is attacking me or an ally somewhere. My biggest complaint is not even necessarily that these issues are unsolvable, but that they are not easily

I'm hoping that the online experience is made a bit more user-friendly. As of now I have a hard time telling who's on my team, both when playing and when looking at the diplomacy window. I recommend making the "fog of war" and alliances more clear. Also, the system of finding games is a bit old-fashioned. Just sit and watch the game lobby until one pops up... Other things that are occuring to me: --Ther

deleted in the interest of not thread-jacking.

I realize this may sound stupid, and I realize perfectly well that you technically get more firepower per resource spent by using smaller ships, but I still don't get why you'd want to use them. Whenever I make a mixed fleet of just one cap and a variety of smaller ships, I find that the smaller ships get destroyed and I have to constantly spend resources to rebuild them. Obviously I am paying closer attention to my caps, so it is much easier to pull them out without taking any

I realize this may sound stupid, and I realize perfectly well that you technically get more firepower per resource spent by using smaller ships, but I still don't get why you'd want to use them. Whenever I make a mixed fleet of just one cap and a variety of smaller ships, I find that the smaller ships get destroyed and I have to constantly spend resources to rebuild them. Obviously I am paying closer attention to my caps, so it is much easier to pull them out without taking any