Are they planning on adding more races, perhaps as DLC or something? The Race Selection screen is like 2x the size it needs to be for only 8 races.
They are planning a custom race option, but I don't know about more races.
Also, in that monster list of nitpicks, you realize that you can retrofit existing fleets to new designs, right? It's in the fleet menu, just select the fleet and hit the "retrofit" option. It's expensive, but that option does exist.
Their Fleet Errant ability allows them to pack up an entire colony, sans 1 population on each planet, and just move on to a new colony.
This is especially nasty when you combine this with their special tech that they get after the first anti-Anom tech that gives a straight + to industry. What this means is you can take a colony that has built this + to industrial ability, pack it up, fly it to a new world, and bam, instant colony. Then, and this is key -- you can immediately do it again, spreading your empire EXTREMELY fast.
The colonies that build the Fleet Errant will lose out on all their buildings, but with the building AI they will immediately build them back up. If you have decent happyness (and the Pilgrims get a + to morale) they will immediately begin breeding like rabbits again.
Fleet Errant is nothing, literally nothing, compared to their flat +20 approval bonus which allows them to conquer constantly without fear of striking.
And their ability to trade with people who aren't allies (which is a one-way deal), giving them a huge dust and science boost in the mid to late game.
I have been trying to find the key for the sowers but I am having some trouble.
It seems like their primary bonus is the ability to colonize without tech but with the mallus it rarely ever pays off. The only times I have really found it useful was early methane gas giants for a little industry shot early game and grabing some trade goods on inhospitable worlds. They seem a slow builder type but it alway feels like I would be better of with the horatio.
Sowers are great, but aren't broken like the Pilgrims are or the Amoeba can be. Maybe a bit more powerful than some of the old races.
Basically you only improve industry (actually nothing else), get the planet terraforming techs to get your colonies up to speed, and grab approval boosting techs when you need to. When a planet isn't doing anything useful, use the turn industry into dust option.
I've been doing well with them at least.
Is time a gift or punishment?
0
Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
I have been trying to find the key for the sowers but I am having some trouble.
It seems like their primary bonus is the ability to colonize without tech but with the mallus it rarely ever pays off. The only times I have really found it useful was early methane gas giants for a little industry shot early game and grabing some trade goods on inhospitable worlds. They seem a slow builder type but it alway feels like I would be better of with the horatio.
Anyone having any luck with them?
Sowers are hilarious. Their key power is a bit clumsily worded though. They take a 50% food production hit, but they also get a food production bonus based on 50% of your industry.
So, what you do is just build industry worlds and spread yourself as thin as possible as quickly as possible. You're looking to fill in the weird planet types that other races can't touch without tech. Then, once you've occupied as much of the map as you can, you start developing the systems).
The only way you'll end in a bad way is if somebody comes at you very aggressively early on and you end up fighting a major war rather than expanding.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
I did it somewhat differently with Sowers. This is on normal difficulty, but I more than tripled the next score. Their ability to colonize any planet really isnt a big thing for me - its the -30% industry cost for improvements. They finish everything so goddamn quickly.
Industry techs are something you obviously want to focus on, but other than that, approval. Their second racial tech in the Diplomacy/Trading tree is amazing. +30 approval, +25% industry, +10% research/dust/food if your colonies are at ecstatic. Combined with a hero that is pumping labor, the industry bonuses become absolutely ridiculous. Most of the time none of my colonies were not building anything but were instead feeding my science through ind to science.
Fleet Errant is nothing, literally nothing, compared to their flat +20 approval bonus which allows them to conquer constantly without fear of striking.
And their ability to trade with people who aren't allies (which is a one-way deal), giving them a huge dust and science boost in the mid to late game.
I don't really get the trade thing. I noticed that some of my random planets suddenly had trade routes but I didn't set them up, and have no idea how they started.
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Mojo_JojoWe are only now beginning to understand the full power and ramifications of sexual intercourseRegistered Userregular
Trade routes happen on their own if you're at peace with another race and can see some of their planets. Obviously, getting peace with another civ is hard fucking work.
Homogeneous distribution of your varieties of amuse-gueule
With the placeholder AI peace is pretty much out of the window. Since they see you as a threat for being expansionist, military powerful or technologically advanced, and will prey on you if you small or weak.
I think I'd just prefer ships to move at the start of a turn.
This would cause problems, though. If you allow for queued movement and simply have the unit blindly follow the queued path at the beginning of every turn, you give the player no time to react to new developments. Like, if you queued up a move for a colony ship to take a new planet in an uninhabited system, and then on the AI's turn a hostile ship moves into the system, you won't have time to stop the colony ship / move it elsewhere.
That's one of the things I've always found to be incredibly frustrating with Master of Orion 2, actually.
Star wars rebellion is one of those strange games that who's mechanics seem to come from no where and leave no trace afterword.
There are a ton of good ideas in it on how to make intelligence operations in a strategy game interesting but for some reason no one ever ran with them.
I think the problem was that they were so poorly implemented that the good ideas underneath the bad implementation were obscured.
Some of the missions were extremely tedious (Diplomacy, I'm looking at you) and some were extremely cryptic (Research, I'm looking at you), and the systems as a whole had replaced much better, more intuitive systems implemented in other 4X games. The great stuff (espionage, assassination, sabotage, the idea that you could 'flip' the allegiance of enemy stronghold and incite rebellions, etc) only came into it's own if you cold struggle through the mind-numbingly boring & confusing early portion of the game, which I think few people ever did.
Oh, and I only ever played Rebellion with quick combat turned on, because MY GOD THAT COMBAT ENGINE WAS SO BAD.
Oh, and I only ever played Rebellion with quick combat turned on, because MY GOD THAT COMBAT ENGINE WAS SO BAD.
Let's not forget that in Rebellion, building the Death Star was nothing but a big symbolic power move that did nothing but troll the enemy player at that point in the game. It was slow, the charge time for the superlaser was absurd, using it on a planet threw support in the rest of the sector over to the rebellion, losing it would throw support across the galaxy to the rebellion, and you needed no less than the entire galaxy worth of fighter squadrons to keep the rebels from launching a trench run without tethering it to a planet that wasted a precious energy slot on a Death Star Shield.
And on top of that, it was a big round insult to the Star Wars lore, because only the second Death Star had the targetting systems revised enough to hit capital ships with the superlaser, but only the first Death Star was built with the exhaust port that destroyed it, the second one had that port designed out of it(which was why it was so critical for the rebels to attack in ROTJ before the core was sealed).
But it had both of these things. You kept building it with the exhaust port intact every single time you built it. How stupid are your engineers?
Let's not forget that in Rebellion, building the Death Star was nothing but a big symbolic power move that did nothing but troll the enemy player at that point in the game. It was slow, the charge time for the superlaser was absurd, using it on a planet threw support in the rest of the sector over to the rebellion, losing it would throw support across the galaxy to the rebellion, and you needed no less than the entire galaxy worth of fighter squadrons to keep the rebels from launching a trench run without tethering it to a planet that wasted a precious energy slot on a Death Star Shield.
And on top of that, it was a big round insult to the Star Wars lore, because only the second Death Star had the targetting systems revised enough to hit capital ships with the superlaser, but only the first Death Star was built with the exhaust port that destroyed it, the second one had that port designed out of it(which was why it was so critical for the rebels to attack in ROTJ before the core was sealed).
But it had both of these things. You kept building it with the exhaust port intact every single time you built it. How stupid are your engineers?
Most hilariously, in my opinion, the auto-combat actually allows you to merrily kill Death Stars all day long using nothing but Nebulon B frigates and Mon Cal Cruisers, because of the apparently dumb way the random number generator for auto-combat works. Crank out enough ships and you can blitz right through Death Star after Death Star, even with the stupid number of Death Star shields the AI builds.
With Love and Courage
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cptruggedI think it has something to do with free will.Registered Userregular
Got this game this weekend and it is great! I'm rocking the Sowers and they're industry bonus is just nuts. Funny thing is. I totally forgot about the food bonus from industry while I was playing them.
I tried the Sophons thinking that like every other 4x game that the science race would be completely dominant. But it really didn't feel that way at all actually.
But I do have one question. Is there any indicator to what invasion is actually doing? And progress or win / loss? It just seems to me that I tell my ships to invade and then it sits there for an in determinant amount of time then I take the planet. Same with the time it takes for an outpost to become a real colony. I just can't seem to find any indicator of progress. Where should I be looking for these things?
Got this game this weekend and it is great! I'm rocking the Sowers and they're industry bonus is just nuts. Funny thing is. I totally forgot about the food bonus from industry while I was playing them.
I tried the Sophons thinking that like every other 4x game that the science race would be completely dominant. But it really didn't feel that way at all actually.
But I do have one question. Is there any indicator to what invasion is actually doing? And progress or win / loss? It just seems to me that I tell my ships to invade and then it sits there for an in determinant amount of time then I take the planet. Same with the time it takes for an outpost to become a real colony. I just can't seem to find any indicator of progress. Where should I be looking for these things?
There should be a progress bar under the system itself on the galaxy map that shifts to your side a little bit every turn.
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cptruggedI think it has something to do with free will.Registered Userregular
Got this game this weekend and it is great! I'm rocking the Sowers and they're industry bonus is just nuts. Funny thing is. I totally forgot about the food bonus from industry while I was playing them.
I tried the Sophons thinking that like every other 4x game that the science race would be completely dominant. But it really didn't feel that way at all actually.
But I do have one question. Is there any indicator to what invasion is actually doing? And progress or win / loss? It just seems to me that I tell my ships to invade and then it sits there for an in determinant amount of time then I take the planet. Same with the time it takes for an outpost to become a real colony. I just can't seem to find any indicator of progress. Where should I be looking for these things?
There should be a progress bar under the system itself on the galaxy map that shifts to your side a little bit every turn.
Ah! Could be that I play on nothing but large maps and stay max'd out viewing distance. Maybe it doesn't show up unless I'm zoomed in a bit.
Also, BoTF was awesome. But cloaking was completely broken. First strike in combat? Yes please. Even a few Romulan warbirds would just wreck anything with zero losses. The only weird thing in that game for me was the empire attitude and how it was adjusted by what the race preferred. Hence my ALWAYS having to be at war as the klingons. Even if it was a minor race. Those blood thirsty bastards would be happy as clams. But that's another reason to love the romulans, they seemed to like everything you did except lose battles. Expansion? Yay! Conquer? Yay! Diplomacy? Yay!.
I just re-played that game this year while I was watching ST:TNG on netflix again.
Got this game this weekend and it is great! I'm rocking the Sowers and they're industry bonus is just nuts. Funny thing is. I totally forgot about the food bonus from industry while I was playing them.
I tried the Sophons thinking that like every other 4x game that the science race would be completely dominant. But it really didn't feel that way at all actually.
But I do have one question. Is there any indicator to what invasion is actually doing? And progress or win / loss? It just seems to me that I tell my ships to invade and then it sits there for an in determinant amount of time then I take the planet. Same with the time it takes for an outpost to become a real colony. I just can't seem to find any indicator of progress. Where should I be looking for these things?
There should be a progress bar under the system itself on the galaxy map that shifts to your side a little bit every turn.
Ah! Could be that I play on nothing but large maps and stay max'd out viewing distance. Maybe it doesn't show up unless I'm zoomed in a bit.
Also, BoTF was awesome. But cloaking was completely broken. First strike in combat? Yes please. Even a few Romulan warbirds would just wreck anything with zero losses. The only weird thing in that game for me was the empire attitude and how it was adjusted by what the race preferred. Hence my ALWAYS having to be at war as the klingons. Even if it was a minor race. Those blood thirsty bastards would be happy as clams. But that's another reason to love the romulans, they seemed to like everything you did except lose battles. Expansion? Yay! Conquer? Yay! Diplomacy? Yay!.
I just re-played that game this year while I was watching ST:TNG on netflix again.
My only big gripe about the game is that there was a bug that was never patched, if it goes into a battle and there were large enough fleets on both sides, the combat engine couldn't handle them all and the game would out and out crash. I imagine this could happen in single player, but I've only ever seen it in multiplayer as that's the only time you'd really see big big fleets on both sides.
And yes, Romulan ships(some Klingon ships also had cloak) could devastate borg cubes and other overpowered AI bosses(Edo Guardian, Crystalline Entity). Although I usually left the Edo Guardian up if I could, as if you had the Edo allied with you, the guardian would attack enemies that entered the system.
The Romulan Singularity(dilithium) generator was also ridiculously good even if it took an insane amount of energy.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
So I just decided to give this a try last night.
Six hours immediately vanished.
Started as the United Empire because that's the race it had selected by default and I figured why not, which was probably a mistake because while not really having any super terrible faults, they also don't have much going for them it seems.
Right now I'm in a cycle where Horatio is separating me from the rest of the galaxy, and every so often I declare war on them, steal a couple systems while destroying huge swaths of their fleet, and then either they offer a cease fire first or I offer and they accept. Then I repair and rebuild, build up my fleet a bit more, and do it again.
Let's not forget that in Rebellion, building the Death Star was nothing but a big symbolic power move that did nothing but troll the enemy player at that point in the game. It was slow, the charge time for the superlaser was absurd, using it on a planet threw support in the rest of the sector over to the rebellion, losing it would throw support across the galaxy to the rebellion, and you needed no less than the entire galaxy worth of fighter squadrons to keep the rebels from launching a trench run without tethering it to a planet that wasted a precious energy slot on a Death Star Shield.
And on top of that, it was a big round insult to the Star Wars lore, because only the second Death Star had the targetting systems revised enough to hit capital ships with the superlaser, but only the first Death Star was built with the exhaust port that destroyed it, the second one had that port designed out of it(which was why it was so critical for the rebels to attack in ROTJ before the core was sealed).
But it had both of these things. You kept building it with the exhaust port intact every single time you built it. How stupid are your engineers?
I really wish I could read the design docs for that because it seems that the death star was supposed to be the focus of the late game.
It's fun to imagine that after a couple more balance passes the rebels would slowly gain power over the imperials and the imps would build the death star in desperation. Then an entire galaxy's worth of both conventional and clandestine assets would converge on it for the endgame.
Anyway, the largest problem that the game has is that it expects player to take it more seriously than they (normally) do. Your average joe doesnt care enough about the diplomatic team going to Rigel 6 to set up a security detail.
Oh jeeze. Something occured to me a bit ago while playing a few rounds before work.
As the Sowers, you want to colonise just about every planet, because you can. You need that population to get your economy up to speed. But lots of bad planets or anomalies can stifle your growth by pissing off your people. So you can't always take a system because it's 3 gas giants and two barrens and you just can't afford that approval hit.
However, your primary source of income as the Sowers comes from converting industry to dust, not taxes. Once your industry real starts coming online, taxes only provide a small fraction of your total dust production, in fact. A wholly unneccesary fraction that drains from your approval. Which is keeping you from expanding.
So just get rid of taxation completely; by turn 60 or so you won't need it at all. Your people are happy, even if their planets aren't the best (you'll still need to get some of the approval boosting techs if you have lots of shitty systems like I tend to get), and you are free to continue to expand you empire without fear of strikes.
You should give 'em a try! They are pretty simple to play, compared to other races at least (they're probably broken, just outshined by the Pilgrims atm). You don't have to figure out things like "What do I want to focus this system on?" because every system should be focusing on industry. You don't have to micro your planet specializations, because industry.
MegaMek on
Is time a gift or punishment?
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Started a game as the Cravers tonight because I think they're pretty neat
But then I wondered why I ever bother with military in these games because after a long enough protracted siege I just get bored and wish I was doing cool stuff like researching and building things other than ships to send off to the front lines
Think I'll waffle again and start up a game as the Sowers
Oh jeeze. Something occured to me a bit ago while playing a few rounds before work.
As the Sowers, you want to colonise just about every planet, because you can. You need that population to get your economy up to speed. But lots of bad planets or anomalies can stifle your growth by pissing off your people. So you can't always take a system because it's 3 gas giants and two barrens and you just can't afford that approval hit.
However, your primary source of income as the Sowers comes from converting industry to dust, not taxes. Once your industry real starts coming online, taxes only provide a small fraction of your total dust production, in fact. A wholly unneccesary fraction that drains from your approval. Which is keeping you from expanding.
So just get rid of taxation completely; by turn 60 or so you won't need it at all. Your people are happy, even if their planets aren't the best (you'll still need to get some of the approval boosting techs if you have lots of shitty systems like I tend to get), and you are free to continue to expand you empire without fear of strikes.
Isn't that inefficient?
You want every pop to being making as much as possible at a given time and most of the advanced planets aren't really that good to start with, let alone with the mallus for not having the tech. Plus, if you colonize a you lose time to build improvement and dust to run them.
You should be colonizing everything your approval rating will allow (except maybe barrens and gas giants; those can wait, but you do want them eventualy). Lava planets and asteroid belts have great industry bonuses but nasty approval penalties, so you can hold off on them until you get some improvements in the system, but don't wait too long.
You do need to consider negative anomalies, especially if they are on already iffy planets (like arctics, or smaller planets with tiny pop caps). But if you see a large desert with like, poor soil or something? Who gives a shit, throw people at it till it works. Deserts generate 5 industry per person, you need as many little robot people there as you can get away with.
You should be colonizing everything your approval rating will allow (except maybe barrens and gas giants; those can wait, but you do want them eventualy). Lava planets and asteroid belts have great industry bonuses but nasty approval penalties, so you can hold off on them until you get some improvements in the system, but don't wait too long.
You do need to consider negative anomalies, especially if they are on already iffy planets (like arctics, or smaller planets with tiny pop caps). But if you see a large desert with like, poor soil or something? Who gives a shit, throw people at it till it works. Deserts generate 5 industry per person, you need as many little robot people there as you can get away with.
But colony ships don't make population, they just move them.
(numbers pulled out of my ass) if we have a pop working a jungle making 2 science 2 dust and 4 industry it doesn't make sence to send them to a a desert that only makes 3 industry after the no tech mallus.
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lu tzeSweeping the monestary steps.Registered Userregular
edited June 2012
Yeah, that's a point a lot of people seem to miss. Colony ships don't magically generate people out of thin air in this game, so in the above scenario you just end up moving population from a productive/developed planet to a marginal one, with the added bonus of lowering your system approval!
Generally, you want to fill your systems up one planet at a time, unless the others have good anomalies you can take advantage of, or you're really desperate for their FIDS (usually production).
You're going to have to expand sometime. The sooner you do, the sooner your colonies are fully operational, tho if you really want to you can wait for your staging planet to finish populating first. I don't. And I tend to get tundra, arid, and desert improvement pretty early, but I still grab whatever planets I want while the pickings are good.
Also (dunno if you know this) you can directly colonize planets in-system, you don't need colony ships for that. If you're talking about sending colony ships directly from a new colony to virgin systems, yeah that's not the best idea; unless you need to secure it before a rival civilization does.
Is time a gift or punishment?
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lu tzeSweeping the monestary steps.Registered Userregular
Also (dunno if you know this) you can directly colonize planets in-system, you don't need colony ships for that.
This has the same effect... you can't create population with production.
I don't understand how you haven't noticed this. The colonization option is greyed out if you don't have the spare population in system (i.e. if you only have a one pop planet you can't colonize another until it grows... except by moving it in from another system with a ship, obviously).
Edit: Yes it's often worth the production hit to capture virgin systems before your opponents (this is the eXpand part of 4x!). But you have to recognize that it does come at a cost.
Posts
They are planning a custom race option, but I don't know about more races.
Also, in that monster list of nitpicks, you realize that you can retrofit existing fleets to new designs, right? It's in the fleet menu, just select the fleet and hit the "retrofit" option. It's expensive, but that option does exist.
Their Fleet Errant ability allows them to pack up an entire colony, sans 1 population on each planet, and just move on to a new colony.
This is especially nasty when you combine this with their special tech that they get after the first anti-Anom tech that gives a straight + to industry. What this means is you can take a colony that has built this + to industrial ability, pack it up, fly it to a new world, and bam, instant colony. Then, and this is key -- you can immediately do it again, spreading your empire EXTREMELY fast.
The colonies that build the Fleet Errant will lose out on all their buildings, but with the building AI they will immediately build them back up. If you have decent happyness (and the Pilgrims get a + to morale) they will immediately begin breeding like rabbits again.
And their ability to trade with people who aren't allies (which is a one-way deal), giving them a huge dust and science boost in the mid to late game.
It seems like their primary bonus is the ability to colonize without tech but with the mallus it rarely ever pays off. The only times I have really found it useful was early methane gas giants for a little industry shot early game and grabing some trade goods on inhospitable worlds. They seem a slow builder type but it alway feels like I would be better of with the horatio.
Anyone having any luck with them?
Basically you only improve industry (actually nothing else), get the planet terraforming techs to get your colonies up to speed, and grab approval boosting techs when you need to. When a planet isn't doing anything useful, use the turn industry into dust option.
I've been doing well with them at least.
Sowers are hilarious. Their key power is a bit clumsily worded though. They take a 50% food production hit, but they also get a food production bonus based on 50% of your industry.
So, what you do is just build industry worlds and spread yourself as thin as possible as quickly as possible. You're looking to fill in the weird planet types that other races can't touch without tech. Then, once you've occupied as much of the map as you can, you start developing the systems).
The only way you'll end in a bad way is if somebody comes at you very aggressively early on and you end up fighting a major war rather than expanding.
Industry techs are something you obviously want to focus on, but other than that, approval. Their second racial tech in the Diplomacy/Trading tree is amazing. +30 approval, +25% industry, +10% research/dust/food if your colonies are at ecstatic. Combined with a hero that is pumping labor, the industry bonuses become absolutely ridiculous. Most of the time none of my colonies were not building anything but were instead feeding my science through ind to science.
I don't really get the trade thing. I noticed that some of my random planets suddenly had trade routes but I didn't set them up, and have no idea how they started.
EDIT: Actually they can trade while at war too :?
This would cause problems, though. If you allow for queued movement and simply have the unit blindly follow the queued path at the beginning of every turn, you give the player no time to react to new developments. Like, if you queued up a move for a colony ship to take a new planet in an uninhabited system, and then on the AI's turn a hostile ship moves into the system, you won't have time to stop the colony ship / move it elsewhere.
That's one of the things I've always found to be incredibly frustrating with Master of Orion 2, actually.
I think the problem was that they were so poorly implemented that the good ideas underneath the bad implementation were obscured.
Some of the missions were extremely tedious (Diplomacy, I'm looking at you) and some were extremely cryptic (Research, I'm looking at you), and the systems as a whole had replaced much better, more intuitive systems implemented in other 4X games. The great stuff (espionage, assassination, sabotage, the idea that you could 'flip' the allegiance of enemy stronghold and incite rebellions, etc) only came into it's own if you cold struggle through the mind-numbingly boring & confusing early portion of the game, which I think few people ever did.
Oh, and I only ever played Rebellion with quick combat turned on, because MY GOD THAT COMBAT ENGINE WAS SO BAD.
Let's not forget that in Rebellion, building the Death Star was nothing but a big symbolic power move that did nothing but troll the enemy player at that point in the game. It was slow, the charge time for the superlaser was absurd, using it on a planet threw support in the rest of the sector over to the rebellion, losing it would throw support across the galaxy to the rebellion, and you needed no less than the entire galaxy worth of fighter squadrons to keep the rebels from launching a trench run without tethering it to a planet that wasted a precious energy slot on a Death Star Shield.
And on top of that, it was a big round insult to the Star Wars lore, because only the second Death Star had the targetting systems revised enough to hit capital ships with the superlaser, but only the first Death Star was built with the exhaust port that destroyed it, the second one had that port designed out of it(which was why it was so critical for the rebels to attack in ROTJ before the core was sealed).
But it had both of these things. You kept building it with the exhaust port intact every single time you built it. How stupid are your engineers?
Most hilariously, in my opinion, the auto-combat actually allows you to merrily kill Death Stars all day long using nothing but Nebulon B frigates and Mon Cal Cruisers, because of the apparently dumb way the random number generator for auto-combat works. Crank out enough ships and you can blitz right through Death Star after Death Star, even with the stupid number of Death Star shields the AI builds.
I tried the Sophons thinking that like every other 4x game that the science race would be completely dominant. But it really didn't feel that way at all actually.
But I do have one question. Is there any indicator to what invasion is actually doing? And progress or win / loss? It just seems to me that I tell my ships to invade and then it sits there for an in determinant amount of time then I take the planet. Same with the time it takes for an outpost to become a real colony. I just can't seem to find any indicator of progress. Where should I be looking for these things?
There should be a progress bar under the system itself on the galaxy map that shifts to your side a little bit every turn.
Ah! Could be that I play on nothing but large maps and stay max'd out viewing distance. Maybe it doesn't show up unless I'm zoomed in a bit.
Also, BoTF was awesome. But cloaking was completely broken. First strike in combat? Yes please. Even a few Romulan warbirds would just wreck anything with zero losses. The only weird thing in that game for me was the empire attitude and how it was adjusted by what the race preferred. Hence my ALWAYS having to be at war as the klingons. Even if it was a minor race. Those blood thirsty bastards would be happy as clams. But that's another reason to love the romulans, they seemed to like everything you did except lose battles. Expansion? Yay! Conquer? Yay! Diplomacy? Yay!.
I just re-played that game this year while I was watching ST:TNG on netflix again.
look, revisions have to go through the bureaucracy, okay
My only big gripe about the game is that there was a bug that was never patched, if it goes into a battle and there were large enough fleets on both sides, the combat engine couldn't handle them all and the game would out and out crash. I imagine this could happen in single player, but I've only ever seen it in multiplayer as that's the only time you'd really see big big fleets on both sides.
And yes, Romulan ships(some Klingon ships also had cloak) could devastate borg cubes and other overpowered AI bosses(Edo Guardian, Crystalline Entity). Although I usually left the Edo Guardian up if I could, as if you had the Edo allied with you, the guardian would attack enemies that entered the system.
The Romulan Singularity(dilithium) generator was also ridiculously good even if it took an insane amount of energy.
Six hours immediately vanished.
Started as the United Empire because that's the race it had selected by default and I figured why not, which was probably a mistake because while not really having any super terrible faults, they also don't have much going for them it seems.
Right now I'm in a cycle where Horatio is separating me from the rest of the galaxy, and every so often I declare war on them, steal a couple systems while destroying huge swaths of their fleet, and then either they offer a cease fire first or I offer and they accept. Then I repair and rebuild, build up my fleet a bit more, and do it again.
I really wish I could read the design docs for that because it seems that the death star was supposed to be the focus of the late game.
It's fun to imagine that after a couple more balance passes the rebels would slowly gain power over the imperials and the imps would build the death star in desperation. Then an entire galaxy's worth of both conventional and clandestine assets would converge on it for the endgame.
Anyway, the largest problem that the game has is that it expects player to take it more seriously than they (normally) do. Your average joe doesnt care enough about the diplomatic team going to Rigel 6 to set up a security detail.
As the Sowers, you want to colonise just about every planet, because you can. You need that population to get your economy up to speed. But lots of bad planets or anomalies can stifle your growth by pissing off your people. So you can't always take a system because it's 3 gas giants and two barrens and you just can't afford that approval hit.
However, your primary source of income as the Sowers comes from converting industry to dust, not taxes. Once your industry real starts coming online, taxes only provide a small fraction of your total dust production, in fact. A wholly unneccesary fraction that drains from your approval. Which is keeping you from expanding.
So just get rid of taxation completely; by turn 60 or so you won't need it at all. Your people are happy, even if their planets aren't the best (you'll still need to get some of the approval boosting techs if you have lots of shitty systems like I tend to get), and you are free to continue to expand you empire without fear of strikes.
That said it is a solid strategy bit would need lots of micromanaging to ensure you aren't overproducing dust at any point.
There's no such thing. You should be buying improvements for all your new colonies, and ships at all your old ones.
And yeah, by end game you should have all jungles with no negative anomalies.
But then I wondered why I ever bother with military in these games because after a long enough protracted siege I just get bored and wish I was doing cool stuff like researching and building things other than ships to send off to the front lines
Think I'll waffle again and start up a game as the Sowers
Isn't that inefficient?
You want every pop to being making as much as possible at a given time and most of the advanced planets aren't really that good to start with, let alone with the mallus for not having the tech. Plus, if you colonize a you lose time to build improvement and dust to run them.
You should be colonizing everything your approval rating will allow (except maybe barrens and gas giants; those can wait, but you do want them eventualy). Lava planets and asteroid belts have great industry bonuses but nasty approval penalties, so you can hold off on them until you get some improvements in the system, but don't wait too long.
You do need to consider negative anomalies, especially if they are on already iffy planets (like arctics, or smaller planets with tiny pop caps). But if you see a large desert with like, poor soil or something? Who gives a shit, throw people at it till it works. Deserts generate 5 industry per person, you need as many little robot people there as you can get away with.
But colony ships don't make population, they just move them.
(numbers pulled out of my ass) if we have a pop working a jungle making 2 science 2 dust and 4 industry it doesn't make sence to send them to a a desert that only makes 3 industry after the no tech mallus.
Generally, you want to fill your systems up one planet at a time, unless the others have good anomalies you can take advantage of, or you're really desperate for their FIDS (usually production).
Also (dunno if you know this) you can directly colonize planets in-system, you don't need colony ships for that. If you're talking about sending colony ships directly from a new colony to virgin systems, yeah that's not the best idea; unless you need to secure it before a rival civilization does.
I don't understand how you haven't noticed this. The colonization option is greyed out if you don't have the spare population in system (i.e. if you only have a one pop planet you can't colonize another until it grows... except by moving it in from another system with a ship, obviously).
Edit: Yes it's often worth the production hit to capture virgin systems before your opponents (this is the eXpand part of 4x!). But you have to recognize that it does come at a cost.