I've found abilities like snipe start out awesome, continue to be awesome (so long as you add points to them), then suddenly start to suck near the end game. Same goes for just about every other single-target damage ability. They stop improving at level 15, but heroes continue improving long after reaching level 20, so inevitably they're not going to scale well into the late game.
Capital ships already fill the role of "hero" units in Sins. In fact, gameplay-wise, they're almost identicle to the heroes of Warcraft III.
Early game, Vasari are kings. Late game, Advent are kings. TEC comes in somewhere in the middle with its cheap spammable hordes of units, and the mighty Marza. Allure of the Unity is an awesome late game tech for a big empire, but the problem is that Advent has very little reason to build more than 3 civic labs, so usually it comes out very late in the game. I personally don't think resource focus is worthwhile (if you have allure of the unity and cult
[quote]I think one of the Red Alert games had AI that used the end game weapons heavily, and the game unfortunately turned into a big rush to see who could get that tech first.[/quote] I think you're referring to RA2. The issue there was more that the AI had a significant resource cheat (that puts the unfair of Sins to shame...) and then spent it all on spamming base defense. This made its base virtually impregnable. As well, its resource cheat was so high that it co
[quote]why would you want carriers in the middle of a battle anyway? they are just fodder at that point.[/quote] If your opponent is using light frigates, they can scoot past your LRF and start blasting the carriers, forcing them to jump and breaking up your fleet. If I'm up against an enemy with lots of LF, I keep my carriers close to my LRF so they're covered. This is doubly true for Advent with shield regeneration and repulsion.
[quote]Ships will die simply by picking the mothership early. It's weaker, you wont be able to use shield restore early on if you are colonizing and you'll lose that 1000 credits just through light frigate deaths.[/quote] I don't know where you're coming from here. The mothership is the best capital ship in the game for preserving friendly forces and keeping them alive for as long as possible. Picking the radiance leaves your light frigates far more vulnerable than they wo
This is why I like to put my support ships in different control groups. There isn't a graceful way to get around the issue, since you either have to have several control groups for each task force of ships, or one big control group that isn't useful for issuing tactical commands in battle. I will say that alt-click is your friend.
[quote]destra really benefits from its own fleet. +34% fire rate (22% from halcyon, 12% from plasma research). research; +10% shield mitigation. and in a long term battle, ruthlessness will chip away at your forces.[/quote] Most of those features also benefit illuminators, which get you better bang for your buck in most cases and have longer range (which is critical for the Advent battleball). The plasma research, as Dostillevi1 mentions, is not something you have completed
You don't consider each unit alone, but in the context of the rest of their fleet. One of the big advantages of the Kodiak is that it shares its damage upgrade with fighters and flak frigates. On the other hand, the Advent and Vasari heavy cruisers share their damage output only with capital ships (and siege ships, but they don't deal appreciable damage to begin with). There are no questions that the Vasari have the best special abilities on their heavy cruisers, which leave
[quote]yes yes i realize the mothership is pretty much always the best option. However, it seemed like if you actually wanted to be really agressive and play offensively, the Rapture would be next in line. However, you would proably agree with me that that decision in untacticle[/quote] Advent are probably the last faction you want to play as if your intent is to run directly towards the enemy homeworld and wreck havoc. Even so, the Rapture is possibly one of the wor
[quote]Progenitor is a much better second ship. You will be getting colony ships to aquire neutral nodes anyways, so colonize is pointless early on. Get a Radiance first. [/quote] This is dead wrong. You will need colony ships to acquire neutrals, but don't waste time and money using them on planets. The progenitor's colonize ability has a special bonus; for a few minutes after being colonized, you get a discount on all planet upgrades. This is 20% at lev
It's generally not a good idea to put bounty on more than one enemy. The pirates go after whoever has the most bounty on them, there's no "consolation prize" if someone happens to have a lot of bounty on them as well, so don't waste your cash raising bounty on multiple AI's. There are two conditions under which you could get a pirate raid even if you weren't the "most wanted" player. The first, as has already been mentioned, is that pirates often have to travel a long dist
The problem with this is that there is a key difference between RPG and RTS: cause and effect. In a RPG, the player is the sole source of causes ([i]maybe[/i] something pre-scripted happens after a certain amount of time, but I've found the genre has unfortunately been moving away from time sensativity altogether), and if you have a strategy guide on your lap you know the end effect. This is why they can be simplified so much. User action A causes game response B. This happe
[quote]I'm now wondering if it's possible to ALT-GROUP up shipyards across severals planets and have them all build units and send to a specific location. make for some nasty reinforcements when coupled with phase gates.[/quote] Just click on the planet and select the "create frigate" button from there. It will automatically split the work between your frigate factories. As Hack mentions, you [i]do[/i] need to hand-craft your longest trade route.
[quote]I've read that is the maximum benefit you can get is 3.[/quote] You can get 4 on neutral gravity wells (gas giants, asteroid belts, space junk, plasma storms) [quote]So culture spreads faster? what about if its deep in your controlled space?[/quote] There are two reasons to build more media hubs. First, culture spreads faster, and second you can drive off competing enemy culture more easily. If there is no competing culture, the only benefit to multi
Pirate bases never have resource asteroids (unless you're using some mod), so you must have been mistaken about that. Destroying the pirate base means pirate raiders cannot deploy from that gravity well. If there are no more pirate bases, then pirate raids will stop for good. Colonizing a pirate base is useful, since it has bonus tax income. As well, it starts with 6000 hp without need for any upgrades. Most enemies will simply ignore it because it takes too long
The Vanilla AI could also get "fixated" on specific planets and continually attack them, exposing its flanks to counter-attack. However, this is the first time I've heard of a foolproof step-by-step that actually allows you to provoke the AI into fixating on the system of your choice. I think one of the underlying issues is that the AI doesn't know when to fold; it often enters into battles it cannot conceivably win. Another issue is that it never makes good use of multipl
Against the AI you can do almost anything and get away with it; it's not too smart I think good advice should encapsulate both singleplayer and multiplayer. You have to generalize your statements somewhat to make them applicable to all playstyles and skill levels. I never said build your trade ports at the X minute mark, what I said was "ensure you're able to defend yourself first". Clearly that bar is much lower if you're playing an AI, and it's up to the
You need to use special anti-strike craft abilities. That's a Kol with flak barrage, a Dunov with magnetize, a Halcyon with telekinetic push, or a Kortul with jam weapons. These will disable or destroy enemy strike craft, and they just get more effective as the enemy throws more strike craft at you. You'll want to follow up with fighters to clean up the remaining bombers. Flak frigates are good for dealing with fighters, but if the enemy is massing bombers they aren't
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I don't think the TEC ships are that bad. Certainly they don't even register on the level of the Vasari... or the desolator for that matter.
The way RTS games are made these days, the only prolific cheats are map hacks. I don't know if one exists for Sins, but it's not going to ruin your day if one of your enemies is using it. Not like a resource cheat can, anyways.
Games with hundreds of planets are not normal, and can last a very long time. I've never played a game with that many planets, so I can't tell you how long it should take, but my longest game was a 100 planet game with 5 stars and 5 AI's (all enemies) which lasted seven hours. A lot can affect the length of a game. The layout of the map, the way your enemies behave, and just a random stroke of luck can greatly change the time the game takes to play out. In a 1v1 game
The one comment I have to make, Deceiver, is that moving directly to trade ports is often foolish on smaller maps. You need two trade ports to even get started, and including research this is about 2100 credits, 250 metal, and 400 crystal. We're talking about the cost of a small fleet of units here just for a starter set of trade ports! Unless you're protected by allies or have a nice choke point you can hold off at, this is not something you want to rush into. Get you
As much as that's mostly true, Strangey, it's not really applicable to the early game. The biggest difference between races in the early game is how many labs you need to place to get access to basic units. The most important ones are long range frigates and carriers. Long range frigates (LRF) are your damage workhorses. You get the most bang for your buck in terms of damage output from these guys in the early game, and aside from bombers and heavy cru
Basically like the Spore space age... except good. I'd agree with you, this has never been done well and I'd like to see it, but on the other hand I've never seen a game that can gracefully scale from the individual level to the empire level. It's all well and good to say you can go out and adventure in a single starship, but empire managing usually detracts from this part of the game. It'd be a significant challenge to get a nice balance going between the s
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