lbgsloan

Easy answer: Piracy. Just look at Demigod day 1. 18000 legitimate users, 100000 pirates. Want to know what's killing PC gaming? There's your answer. Requiring authentication for patches and updates is going to be the way of the future, if it isn't already there, with most games going through Steam, Impulse or their own system (ie Battle.net) and I have no problem with this. You don't need to log into Impulse to play, what's so hard about downloading Impulse

There was some discussion about this on other forums, and someone brought up a very good point. A lot of this piracy (and bad server performance) probably could have been avoided had there been a demo. There's a lot of interest in this game, but many people (myself included) are unsure if this is worth $40US. It looks fun, but will it hold my interest past a couple of weeks? I don't know, so without stealing the game my only option is to hold off for a couple months an

[quote who="icen9ne" reply="19" id="2102370"]It's one of this games biggest cons in my opinion. I felt the first Dawn of War did a good job creating unique factions, even in the expansions. I hate that "it's a RTS" and "balance" are excuses for devs to not create multiple races/factions.[/quote] Excuse? Balance is damn good reason for any RTS that wants to be taken seriously. DoW 1 was a fun game, but after Dark Crusade it was impossible to mention 'DoW' and 'l

Lock teams, forget about the bad mission system for now. If you don't make nice with an AI early on, they will all team up against you. Most 4 players FFAs turn into 2v2s with teams unlocked, so just keep it locked if you want a FFA with AIs. It's a shame since each faction has a diplomacy based research that goes completely unused 99% of the time, but it's kind of hard for a RTS to have a strong diplomacy aspect anyhow. This is hopefully getting an ov

This is something they need to sort out with the next add-on. I recall Total Annihilation handled expansion and downloadable maps and units the best - if one player didn't have one they were simply disabled for all players. Thus as long as everyone had the same patch version, you could connect to each other and play regardless of what extra units you had installed. It will be interesting to see how Ironclad does this, because this will hurt the online commun

This is micro-expansion, not a full blown expansion pack right? That's an impressive changelog, and there's still going to be at least one more round of fixes before release. If only other RTS makers put in half this much effort.

With the upcoming expansion adding better static defence options, I really don't see the harm in improving siege frigates. They really need to be buffed slightly across the board. Too expensive, too weak, too many required to pose a serious threat. As said, just fix the AI so they don't spam them.

Awesome stuff. I really hope this gets out before the weekend as I'd really love to play Sins again. DoW 2 being Warcraft 3 in spaaaace makes me sad.

How important are commanders overall? I'm really worried this game will be Warcraft 3 with 40k units, where the hero unit decides the game moreso than the army. The commanders in DoW 1 were exactly as they should be in the DCPro mod. Powerful if fully upgraded, and fun to use, but they won't win a battle by themselves. Hearing things like techmarine turret spam cheese winning games frankly scares the hell out of me; I would have hoped Relic actually learned from their

I wasn't expecting a new windows so soon after Windows Vista. I haven't even had time to upgrade yet (because frankly, there hasn't been a reason to do so). I usually let a few years pass by before updating to the latest windows, so that it's actually stable and.. y'know, usable. That's because Vista was more or less DOA. The poor performance, lack of sup

I heard the DE turned out okay; they were probably worked on first. I still play DoW, but I can only stand it with the DC Pro mod. It cuts down on the mindless spam and insures all units scale through the game and remain useful. They're working on one for SS now. Maybe by the time it's out SS will have dropped to $20 and I'll pick it up for the new factions. Alternatively, the Witch Hunters mod is in open beta and seems to have much higher quality models than the

Never played 2, but my friend and I played 3 to death. Eventually got rid of it because the AI just wasn't enough of a challenge unless you made a silly army. Simple game, but really fun. Being able to play an 8 player game from start to finish in under 2 hours was a huge plus as well. Wasn't actually a big fan the Battlecry games though. I tried 2, but just couldn't get into it.

I'll always remember the old VGA Planets fondly. It was a pretty cool game for its time, and I recall it being really stable for an independent game of such complexity. Sadly, the new version of the game never got finished. I guess the developer just couldn't find the time for it anymore.

[quote]Thank God I own Soulstorm[/quote] You are the first and probably only person on Earth to say this. Hopefully Relic learned a valuable lesson about letting other companies make their expansions from that mess. Thank goodness I listened to the boards first instead of blindly buying it.

I've noticed this as well, plus it seems like the recommended requirements listed are becoming increasingly 'optimistic'. I know marketing doesn't want to admit their game needs SLI'd GTX 280s to run smoothly on decent settings, but if you lie to me I'm just going to be less likely to buy anything from you in the future. They need a better defined standard for this sort of thing. Like 'minimum' means, "This game will run smoothly on low settings with this hardware, even in m

Glad another company came out and announced they recognize DRM doesn't actually do anything but punish their paying customers. Hey EA, how many people pirated Spore? Oh, that's right more than probably another other game in history. Purely out of spite for the most part, as it certainly didn't sound like a fantastic game from the reviews. Anyhow, I generally like Relic though I'm upset they removed LAN play from the CoH expansion. Their Relic Onl

The bounty system was clearly designed for FFA games. There is makes complete sense since other players can attack that player to get the bounty money. The pirates are definitely something that needs attention in one of the micro-expansions.

I've noticed this as well. If it doesn't work with cap ships anymore, there doesn't seem to be any point to the ability.

I've always wondered why the hardcore online players don't just form an IRC channel for Sins. TCP/IP play seems far more reliable than ICO, and the same was true for Dawn of War and their terrible Gamespy hosted online. Most good Dawn of War players use IRC and the DCPro mod to play these days; Since there isn't a ladder for Sins anyhow, why bother fighting ICO to play? Be happy Ironclad is nice enough to provide the TCP/IP and LAN alternatives, as this seems to be disappear

[quote who="Shadow_of_Light" reply="10" id="2002422"]im actualy more interested in some more unit balance from 1.12 then i am waiting for entrenchment's release...... beta sucked so far, there's to much problems to write down and even if i did write em down the topic would prolly get closed for me being negative >.>[/quote] What changes does 1.12 still need? Basic frigates need to scale better, carriers need a speed reduction, and cap

I agree that turning anything off is a bad idea. It made sense in Total Annihilation and SupCom because there were more units in total, but in Sins there just aren't enough different units to justify turning any of them off. There hasn't been a single balance update yet, so give them a chance to actually tweak the new defences before complaining they should be removed entirely. Mines are easily fixed by putting limits and improving detection. They should also remove th

I'm pretty shocked Soulstorm did so well. Anyone who visted the forums after release would have quickly realized the expansion was of very inferior qualitity and buggy as hell compared to the last one. And it was $10 more (initially) than the last one. Don't get me wrong, I love Dark Crusade (with mods), but it's disappointing Relic didn't get punished more for getting lazy and contracting out all the work for their cash cow franchise. I feel bad for t

My only real criticism of the new tree is that it makes civilian labs even less important that they were before. Lets face it, with all the cool new toys you get from military who's going to go beyond trade ports in the civ tree now? Other than that, being able to research more at once is good. And really, most of the stuff in defence is specialized enough to warrent its own tree. Most of the old techs that were moved into the new tree were never used.

I'm sure they're aware of the major multiplayer woes since since 1.1. The reason there hasn't been any major patches for the beta yet is probably due to investigating these problems that were clearly not resolved in 1.12. If things aren't stable for the majority of users by the release of the expansion, I concur that dumping Alloy until they have more time to test it internally is best. I would gladly take having trouble hosting over crashing and desyncs.

The only time I bother with searching planets is when I'm Advant and have the level 2 upgrade for the cost reduction ability. Only then is it worthwhile to search planets. I totally agree the power of most of them need to be boosted. The only ones that are somewhat decent are the weapon boosting one, the research cost reduction one, and the one that halves in-system jumping. The rest don't give enough of an advantage to even remotely concern me if an enemy finds one.&n