To be honest, the vast majority of single-player campaigns suck. They're just glorified skirmishes with a contrived story and weird victory objectives that still essentially boil down to "destroy the enemy". I honestly think we're better off without them.
Actually, rushing with scouts to kill constructors (preventing key buildings like labs from going up) is a very viable strategy.
The auto-cast is broken; it just randomly targets any nearby capital ship whether or not the ability will actually do anything. Don't use auto-cast with this ability. In fact, there are almost no ultimate abilities you would ever want to set to autocast.
[quote] The Vasari Battleship whose name escapes me [/quote] It's called the Kortul :-P I don't blame you, I can never remember the name of the Vasari Desolator.
Basically, if you lose a level 6 radiance, you can target a new level 1 radiance to immediately upgrade it to level 6. This is quite nifty, as so long as you have ressurrection you never actually lose experience progress on your capital ships. Of course, this makes it less useful for your first capital ship and more useful later in the game once you have multiple higher level caps.
If there are conventional phase lanes that go between stars, then yes you can follow those. However, very few maps have them. The vast majority of the time you make your research, move to the star's gravity well, then target another star.
[quote]actually, i'd say that if you had a horde of bombers descend on something, they'd melt right through the debris. then again, not that that kind of attack leaves debress unless their hulls are made of dust. [/quote] Ok, so you melt the ship's outer armour. There's still going to be a thick plume of super-heated plasma surrounding the target afterwards. I think that will block just about any missile. [quote]why not just make the cap for bomber D
[quote]A DPS cap doesn't make sense. Damage disappears? That would buff animosity quite a bit, and would severely punish players for using focus fire. A synchronized fleet attack could end up losing over half of its damage output over a frighteningly long time, ruining a larger fleet for no apparent reason.[/quote] Actually, it makes perfect logical sense. After an explosion, there's going to be a cloud of debris being blasted off of the capital ship which will absorb some of th
Return ticket is the only useful superpower. Everything else is either a novelty, will start a massive war against you if you use it, or is absolutely useless. The holo-projector sounds cool in theory, but once you use it you realize there's actually nothing to [i]do[/i] while using it. You walk around and the creatures look at you funny and sometimes run away. Really, it's representative of the problems in the entire game. Lots of cool sounding
Couldn't we just get a similar effect by lowering the effectiveness of regular weapons against capital ship armour types? Really, we only need to look at LRF and strike craft. Light frigates and heavy cruisers don't have the range to swarm around a capital ship effectively, and nothing else can seriously damage a cap anyways. Bombers are the tricky case, because they scale [i]too[/i] well, and if we nerf them for the late game we stand to make them worthless early and mid-
Capital ships are pretty tough as is. The issues I have with their longevity have more to do with the units killing them - nanos and assailants or huge swarms of bombers being the most likely culprits.
The beams seem to cause ripples and electric storms in the atmosphere. That seems pretty destructive to me.
The only faction that really has much use for siege frigates is Advent. Both TEC and Vasari have excellent bombardment specialist capital ships, so you're almost always better just getting one of those. Advent lacks a good bombardment capital ship, so sometimes when you need to break through a 6000 hp planet you may want to bring them in to speed things up. Siege frigates just cost too much and are useless in battle. What's the point of being able to quickly raze a p
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Maybe I'm just a bit slower on the fleet upgrades than I should be against the AI, but I almost always have lower fleet research than the AI until the late game when my economy starts to really take off and their's is just left floundering.
They'll only attack them if they are choke point. That case is the exception to the rule. Typically pirates are actually a benefit to whoever they attack later on in the game. With adequate defenses, they become free experience for your units, and can actually help make your capital ships stronger. This is particularly true for Advent which can research an experience boosting upgrade late game, and they can easily get level 6 abilities this way.
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[quote]actually im fairly certain that the AI fleet level is nearly hard coded to exactly match your own[/quote] Nope; try playing a game without buying any fleet upgrades (you can easily survive just by picking a Marza and power-levelling it). The AI will happily advance through the fleet upgrade levels regardless of the fact that you are not. I often will stay at one fleet level upgrade against the AI throughout the early game, since it's easy to have higher level units
To be honest, I consider the evacuator (and to a lesser extent the mothership) to be on the same page as the missile barrage. It's simply out of this world compared to everything else out there.
[quote]Yes, that's because Will Wright likes to make "digital toys" rather than games.[/quote] But there's nothing to actually [i]do[/i] with the toys. Each of the five stages was scripted to the letter, and there wasn't really that much to actually do in them, and certainly no replayability. The creatures themselves had great aesthetic variation, but there was no [i]functional[/i] variation. Oh, sure, I could have more bite force by selecting a better mouth, but thi
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Each AI has its various strengths and weaknesses. Aggressors can actually build huge armadas quite early on, but they're all unupgraded siege frigates and light frigates. If you survive their initial onslaught your capital ships will be such a high level that the enemy will pose no further threat. An aggressor grossly mismanages its economy and nearly ignores research. An aggressor AI is dangerous for about the first 30 minutes, and a contendor for the first hour. 
I'd agree that I'd like to see shared control, particularly as an option when a friendly player quits. Shared control isn't perfect, but it's better than leaving a stupid AI at the helm.
I'm aware; the early comments are not very applicable to the game anymore. That's one of the problems with necros, the old conversation is not necessarily valid anymore.
[quote]Sure on huge maps there will be neutral sites you can't easily reach, but that does not mean you shouldn't secure all sites near your planets.[/quote] As I said, I pick some neutral wells to focus on, and then put my efforts into keeping those. If I'm in a situation where there are some remote neutrals, I don't bother competing with a Vasari player for them. I'll take them once with a fly-by, but I'm not going to commit forces or expensive colony frigates to stick a
Spore had great editors. That's just about the only nice thing I can say about it. It's case in point of how [i]not[/i] to design a game. I honestly don't know what to think about this whole disaster. It's very clear that it was a screw-up, but [i]why[/i] it ended up that way with pedigree game designers and virtually limitless development time is a mystery. Some people say it was an attempt to "dumb down" the game to widen its target audience. This is do
After you've researched the necessary technology, you can jump directly from one star's gravity well into another's. You must enter and leave a star system through the star's gravity well. Some systems will also have wormholes that may lead to another star system, but this is not always the case.
[quote] Even with oversimplifcation this would be quite a bit pain[/quote] And even then, what does it actually [i]mean[/i] to your strategy? That's the real bane of statistics; the numbers don't lie, the problem is in the human interpretation of their meaning. It's only helpful if we can say how those numbers impact a real fleet and battle, and that's more difficult than acquiring the numbers in the first place.
