N3rull

I managed to break through the AI's blood frenzy. Guess what worked for me? SPAM. Yeah, spam. I made 15 envoys and channeled a steady stream of them through a chain of the enemy's planets. After such a trip, all those planets had 1.0~1.5 diplomatic bonus and I managed to get a ceasefire, which sealed the deal. I think "military actions" bonuses should decay over time. Maybe not completely, down to +/-1.0 or +/-2.0 so that the memory of your help/aggression is n

Here's the deal. I finally got diplomacy and I launched a single player game. I set a map designed by myself, which looks pretty much like a little enlarged version of the Huge Single Star random map. I set unlocked teams (gotta check the diplomacy rite?), turned off the pirates (I've read enough about these lads, thank you :P) and picked 6 AIs. I grouped the AIs in pairs (one with me and then two more pairs). One AI was left, so I made him Cruel and left him alone. <

[quote who="DirtySanchezz" reply="13" id="2613476"]Heh, that's interesting. I always thought all the turrets would remain hostile regardless of whether or not you now owned the planet. I always kill them for XP. [/quote]They would. But they can't shoot the planet and if another player wants the planet, he has to go through the turrets ^^. And yeah, Vasari can "Kostura" the turrets and "Vulkoras/EGG" the planet :P though it takes 8 mil labs.

I think the best buff to pirates (from what they were in entrenchment) would have been to make them attack a number of planets at once with small-moderate forces. That's what pirates did, they attacked ships that weren't guarded, they were everywhere the navy wasn't looking. That's what SOASE pirates should do as well - attack a few planets at once. It would be harder to defend against a multi-front assault and the pirates would be up fer some bounty. They would be a serious nuisance and

^^^ lol. anyway, jt_west, all your issues sound a little like you haven't played the tutorials. I advice you do. It helps.

I think the Diplomacy expansion makes it clear as to who exactly chased the Vasari off - the PIRATES :P

[quote]wrong, they attack the person who has the highest bid against them[/quote]which, with the annoying habit of outbidding you 0.0001 seconds before the end of the 'auction' the AI presents, means that yes, he is somewhat right: the pirates always attack the player ;p.

I don't think it's been mentioned, but (at least in Entrenchment, didn't play Diplo yet) the pirates always attacked the nearest planet the auction "winner" has colonized to them. Therefore, if you scouted and found their base, you could easily predict where they hit. Moreover, the speed at which they traverse the system is also quite regular, meaning that you can not only predict where they hit, but also guess when they arrive. Utilize this and build 2-3 repair bays plus some handful of ship

Unfortunately, the devs accidentally assigned the decision of where the GRG projectile hits the enemy ship to the non-deterministic RNG, causing a likely desync after the ability is used. Great news for us today as the devs finally decided to cut down the idiotic motorboat-like yes-I-have-to-fly-50-miles-forward-to-take-a-step-back movement!

Don't think of it as the ugliest ship in the fleet ; think of it as having the biggest balls in the galaxy!

Keep telling them until they hear :P

I think the simplest way this might be done right now is by manually adding a debuff to every ship which would reduce your income by some fixed amount per each supply point the ship is worth (as in, you manually give each ship a debuff reducing owner's income by X, where X:=your_fixed_cost_per_supply*supply_worth_of_unit). It is troublesome, even though quite simple, and it might make the game a little messed up.

Placing a bounty on one AI usually had this effect - he bountied you back with more money. Now you are one of the two favorites again. Solution - you have to make MORE favorites for a bounty. Try bountying three different AIs for 500-750 credits before you have any bounty on yourself. That usually forced them to start placing bounty on each other, at least in all my games I was safe for 2-3 raids after doing that until all the accumulated bounty dispersed. Try that and

As far as I know, orbit radius just changes the minimal distance of the planets from the star, but not the general scale of things. It just makes your systems more ring-shaped instead of disc-shaped. I think ^^.

That's right. The map size slider on top right of the screen controls the scale, i.e. how much greater the distances are between gravwells compared to the gravwell sizes. That directly influences how fast ships phase jump.

[quote]Perhaps I put too many resources in to try to build bigger and better ships.[/quote]As someone said before, your best bet in this game, until you are familiar enough with it to de more effective stuff, is to spam LRFs (long range frigates - Javelis, Illuminator and Kanrak Assailants, respectively). Colonize 3-5 (or more if they're easily accessible or weakly defended) planets, research LRFs and start pumping them. Do not stop until you have 50+ (40 if it's illums). If you're doing mili

I believe it was Z-Axis Control, in the "Globals" group. To use it, left click on the "move" button in the ship's abiltiy tab (or use the appropriate hotkey for it, was it D?) then move your mouse over the point you want the ship to reach in the 2D pane. After that, press the hotkey that you assigned to Z-axis and move your mouse up/down - the destination will go up/down accordingly. It's the biggest cheat in the game ATM, by the way.

A game can be concluded in under 45 minutes (against an AI) when the map is small and you rush the enemy quickly. However, large games take noticeably more time. My first Random Huge Multi game against AIs took me 16 hours to conclude. I believe the two hour estimation applies to multiplayer games, where people are in teams and tend to quit the game in groups when the situation is hopeless. The AI doesn't quit the field (sometimes it does, but not as soon as a play

I've just come back from my skiing holiday with some grand news: THIS STILL HAS TO GO!

[quote]I have another option and two words that solve the problem: Target Filter. All you have to do is have a target filter for SC, one for capitals/SB's, and one for frigates. SC receive say 10 hull/s and have their armor increase by say, 1/2/3 for the duration. This would make it better for SC as they become harder to kill while the ability is active and also are healed. For frigates, you could have 15/25/35 hull points healed and a temporary armor increase of 0/.75/1

I will be off skiing for the next ten days so flaming me will not meet any resistance - enjoy. Just don't let them convince you that crashing into the enemy fleet, starbase or minefield in front of you has anything to do with "smart" , "sensible" or "retreat". Take care.

Yes, I've heard hundreds of "experience based" arguments. Like "WTF are you talking about, I've used Vulkoras a thousand times and Assault Spec is awesome for bombarding planets!!!". And then the next patch log brings a fix for an assault spec bug that nerfed Vulkoras' bombardment speed instead of boosting it. It's big, it's tough and it moves, so obviously everyone sees it as über. [quote]The point I have repeatedly stressed is that the orkulus trades damage deal

[quote]From deceiver's chart it appears that orky's do the most damage out of them all. Even if the modifiers don't favor them with disruptors it still evens out. If you cut disruptor damage in half it would still put them even with everyone else. Add that in to the orky's superior tanking abilities and I don't see what you guys are griping about EXCEPT AE attacks which the orky does not need. Its understandable to want it upgradeable through research, deceiver, but I am not sure that it need

[quote]SO, the issue is that 30 HP/sec is FINE in itself (about on par with shield restore, since one point of hull is worth mpore than shields because it also includes armor damage reduction), [/quote]Which means that making it permanently spammable would make it on par with a permanently spammable SR, which would be OP.

It is a tough nut to crack here. Look at Shield Restore. It is an antimatter demon, but nobody argues it is bad. It restores a lot of shields for a high cost fast and when you need it. The problem of repair cloud, which is relatively the same toy only for hit points, is that every damage comes at shield first. Even phase missiles, while doing some directly to the hull, still do most of the damage to shields. So ANY kind of damage can be mitigated by restoring shields. Rad