TheStarchild

I think "final micro expansion" means that after Diplo the next "micro" will just be included in the $30 full expansion, right?

Yes, Zoythrus. The Vasari have huge powerful ships but apparently their system of government makes the citizens rebellious (what's chasing them?!). Advent have powerful mind-control culture so they wouldn't have a problem with this... TEC are a loose affiliation, so they would be midway with loyalty/allegiance. I suppose the TEC could use their economic model to keep their citizens loyal.

So, fleets are not useful. If you have a capital ships and others in a fleet they move rather slowly and ultimately not useful for multiplayer. How could they be useful? An old game called Conquest:Frontier Wars had "admirals" that you could hire and place in your fleets. The admirals had AI as well as giving a boost the fleet. In sins we don't need Admirals per se, but at least we could have some AI on the fleets. Simple, like, "defend gravwell" or "at

If you're growing your empire and you need to support more ships you need to pay more money to build more advanced supply distribution systems (fleet supply). Administration could work the same way, increasing the base allegiance with culture from 35% to 50%, 60% or something (too high?) at the cost of more money "off the top" to be paid to your new levels of bureaucracy in order to run your HUGE, multi-star, (single player!) empire. I suppose that with this new diplo expansio

A TEC player in a drawn-out game with against Vasari and/or Advent will just be surviving with his weaker ships but if he can survive long enough and defend enough planets with a good economy he can build a bunch of Novaliths and start turning the tide of battle very quickly. Once the Starbases are in a TEC econ player will really have a good strat. Am I off?

Ok... So I'll look up that long list of commands then... Thanks.

I'll try out the quotes thing, but I just looked at the instruction booklet and even there I find no mention of a pause button. I feel really stupid now if there's a pause button and I've haven't seen it in 2 months of playing this great game... Where is it?

Hello, I've played over 30 MP games and even 10 of them but I never found out exactly how you pause the game. I've seen it done, but I can't seem to find the button for it... Also, could someone please tell me where to find a list of all the commands that work on ICO? I am familiar with battle.net and some of those commands work but I'd like to know all of them. Thank you. Also, is Ironclad familiar with the bug in MP that doesn't allow me to whisper to players wi

I think it's an amazing idea.

Best in late game versus AI? While Vasari is awesome with free ships and easy phase jumps, I must say that I prefer the TEC because it's going to be a pain to kill the AI beacause they put up a fight on all fronts and with TEC you get to build the Novalith cannons. You can fight the enemy fleets while your Novas take out their planets and you've got the game in no time.

Some other microing that you can learn (by experience) is how to maneuver your ships. Today, I faced a guy who focus fired on my Akkan while my fleet (mostly LRFs) focus fired on each of his frigates (mostly scouts). I had better numbers and better ships than him, but my Akkan was still losing health quickly. In situations like that sometimes I just have my cap ship leave the fleet and retreat to the next grav well, but that's only for emergencies. What also works is sending my cap s

Neither can I.

Play a few single player games to get over the learning curve as well as to see which race most corresponds to you. Read the forums for strategies if you have trouble and then get onto multiplayer to practice your mettle for real... You learn so much by losing a couple multiplayer matches, e.g., "Damn, I shouldn't have fought so hard for a couple asteroids" or "Why didn't I keep building my fleet and expanding?" and stuff like that. Also, one last tip, use Long Range Missile Frigates/I

Well, I'm not as experienced as most of the others on the forum, but it seems that LFs are useful in the very early game to expand to your first couple asteroids/deserts/terrans. Beyond that, I'm not so sure... I can imagine if you're super at Micro and you have the Sabotage Reactor researched you can use a squad of LFs to take out the antimatter of your enemy's capital ships.

About those automatic replays... I'm having trouble finding them and watching them. How exactly do I do that? I can't even seem to manually set a game to record and watch it later.