InfiniteVoid

Again, probably the costs of the CI upgrades will give a clue, seeing as the cost of new infrastructure is the same, whether the colony had been previously bombed or not.

What faction? If you're Vasari and you have minelayers, leaving their ability to drop mines on autocast could be eating your crystal reserves, but outside of mines, the only other abilities that cost resources are Starbase constructors.

We certainly already know the upfront costs of establishing a colony as given by the costs of the Civilian Infrastructure upgrades, which are as follows: Lv 1: 450cr, 150m, 75c Lv 2: 550cr, 175m, 125c Lv 3: 650cr, 200m, 175c Lv 4: 750cr, 225m, 225c On the basis that 1 metal/crystal = 4.5 credits (the average cost of buying metal/crystal on the Black Market), then the equivalent credit cost for each of the four levels are: Lv 1: 1462.5cr Lv 2: 1900cr (cumu

It's probably easier to just destroy the military installations on the planet's surface to force surrender rather than to haul in the necessary ground units to take the planet in a more conventional way, not to mention it can avoid additional losses to the attackers. Infrastructure is easier to replace than personnel, after all.

For Gravity Mines, you can simply get ships to run them all over if you aren't going to jump them out very soon. These mines do no damage - they simply slow your ships and deny Phase Jumps for a while.

I imagine the Pirates don't keep a very large population on their base since their income is solely from successfully collected bounty - the more time they spend roaming about blowing up trade ships/structures or bombing planets, the more credits in their pocket.

If by "processing plants" you mean Refineries then that largely depends on what planets and neutral extractors you own. Refineries have nowhere near the same income output as a decently long string of Trade Ports, but places that are good to build one are those where the refinery can reach a large number of extractors (I usually go for 12+).

Diplomatic Victory occurs when one player has accumulated enough Diplomacy Points (the amount is determined by the number of players in the game - the more players there are, the higher the required DP is). You can check each player's DP and the rate at which they are gaining/losing them at the Diplomacy screen. Positive relationships increase the rate of gain, negatives increase the rate of loss. The game actually does give you warnings as to whether a player is approaching a Diploma

This is science fiction . There are bound to be things in the game that have no explanation .

They kick out the former government and some local party takes over?

Natural births?

Human thinking is hardly infallible. What has been done in the past is prisoners of war would be asked to make copies of documents by hand, in recent cases, those documents promoted Communism. Even though the POWs were never asked to believe what they were reading and rewriting, they eventually started thinking along the same lines as those documents and when they were repatriated, they were going about talking about whatever they saw. It only takes exposure to do so.

Well, relationship gained by resources given will be slowly lost over time, and often you want to research only what is necessary.

Larger maps tend to have some inter-system wormholes. Ancient Gifts is one case where the only way to move from one system to another is through wormholes.

Cloaked ships have been experimented on by modders, but afaik, no successful ship has been made so far. Current "cloaking" consists of phasing out the ship much like the Vasari Scout is able to shift itself into Phase Space at will - the problem is that it is still visible to other players even when phased out. Stealing technology, though it fits with war, may not work out so well in Sins. For instance, the Advent would have no use for stolen phase missile plans - they use exclusively

Yep, the Advent Hangar costs 6 slots. On the flip side, Shield Bestowal grants not only shields to it and other structures, but also mitigation. Minor point - there is an Advent research subject that allows them to add 5/10 tactical slots to all planets, so the Advent can cram in as many hangars as the other factions can once this is researched. This allows for up to 45 tactical slots on non-asteroid planets (before bonuses are considered). The most extreme case for available

[quote who="DirtySanchezz" reply="4" id="2845900"] Advent used to be the race of choice but now that the Illuminators have been nerfed and the Skinatra Scramble Bombers ability buffed, it's mostly Vasari/TEC in the online multiplayer pro games.[/quote] I thought Illums fell out of favour only because the bug associated with their damage (allowing something like triple damage, can't remember) was fixed?

Probably the easiest way to improve your relationship is to attack a third player (that is hostile to the player you're trying to form a pact with). This will start boosting your Military Actions with that AI. Although you can get 20 relationship from that, only up to 10 will count to the overall relationship (the other 10, however, can be used to cancel any negatives you have).

The auto-explore behaviour is set to visit planets with the oldest intel first, so often what happens is that auto-exploring scouts will tend to go for planets far behind the front lines and end up having to go through heavy defenses. If those defenses can consistently kill those scouts, you'll basically be throwing scout after scout at the same place with the same results.

You can only request to form a pact if it is one that you have researched. That means if the two of you are different factions, the pacts from the other player are only available if they offer it to you.

Consumer goods? The answers to the questions you're asking seem to be fairly obvious/intuitive... I don't see the need to ask them.

IC is nowhere near the same size as Blizzard... there simply does not exist the manpower to do that sort of thing on top of other projects. Sins, after all, was produced with a budget under $1 million.

[quote who="Photoloss" reply="11" id="2835043"] I am aware of relativistic effects, but the difference between 0.99c and c is negligible anyway, and you should be able to reach 0.99c rather comfortably. (Mass gain until then is about 7*original mass or so) [/quote] 1% of 3x10^8 m/s is still 3000 km every second... it's negligible compared to c, but in absolute terms, it's a large difference in velocity.

[quote who="michaelwalters" reply="62" id="2834859"]... the pirates are still heavily fortified ...[/quote] As long as the Pirates are turned off, they won't harass you. In fact, the Pirate Base is more or less a wall between you and the AI player - they never attack a Pirate Base and the only thing they send through them are scouts and the occasional light frigate or flak frigate on a scouting mission (AI only begins to use LFs and flak for scouting when you start killing it

A replay is already a recording of the game... I don't see the need for a video.