RemingtonRyder

Some more digging through the XML to figure out what the problem was. Turns out, the Kiln of Worlds Complex has its ImprovementType set to DurationalProject, not Special. This means that it shows up in the build list for the colony where the Kiln of Worlds Center is, but building it does not do an upgrade. Never mind. It just seemed strange because I had never come across it

So, I've been adding a support ship with a beam magnification array to each of my fleets... trouble is, it has no effect on the beam weapons of those fleets. I did a bit of digging in the XML and here's what I found. Beam Magnification Array (BMA) looks to be coded in XML to give a 25% bonus to ships which have a component of type BeamWeapon, but there are in fact quite a few beam weapons of type BeamWeaponEnhanced and those are not specified as targets in the BMA's XML. So, s

After playing the map editor today I felt a little bit underwhelmed by the size of nebulas/storms. So, I made a mod which overrides the default TileAreaDefs.xml setting the size of them to be a bit bigger than normal. The minimum size of nebula you will see now is 6x6, though it may not fill that entire area. The maximum is now 18x18, but the actual largest nebula you might see depends on whether two of them get generated next to each other. Instructions: Extract the ZIP file

Synthetic races don't have the Environmental Engineering tech, which the first co-ordination tech has as a prerequisite. They can still get +10 Administrators from the Bureaucrats trait, but that's all.

The other day I had one of those ideology choice events with an empire saying that they would declare war on me because according to their spies, I assassinated their ambassador. Okay, well, uh, which ambassador would that be and hi, how are you, nice to make first contact with you. In other words, I had never even met this empire, and after this event I still hadn't. Checked Diplomacy screen, nope, nobody new there.

Seems like what I did way back when I created the civ, was use the Terran Inverted palette as a starting point and then pick my own colours. Through a bit of trial and error, I managed to put together an XML mod which adds my custom palette. The first hitch was that the default 'Diffuse Gradient' colour palette has a big ol' gap. Simply counting to where your desired colour is in-game won't work past a certain point. Opening up the palette in GIMP gave me a vague idea of which colour

Hey folks. So, got a tiny problem with the ship designer. The one that you choose from the main menu. See below, I have picked a custom set of colours for my civ's ships. (Sorry, if the screenshot is huge) When I go to the ship designer, I can't pick my custom civ's ship colours from a menu. I can on

I play stock Yor on an Immense galaxy. I had only a few opponents selected. It took a while to meet any of them but by the time war was upon me I was well on my way to becoming an unstoppable juggernaut of raw production. The thing to bear in mind as the Yor is that social production is crucial to doing Assembly projects quicker, which gives you more population so you can research and do the more expensive Assembly projects quicker. You do need military production in order to keep mak

Single player is also not stable, just so you know.

"Deez Nuts are yours. Except Cashew. Attempt no landing there." :)

Ships on Sentry duty will react (appear in the unit cycling) when a friendly ship is detected e.g. a Snathi scout ship moving through the sector will cause Sentry to disengage.

I'm not sure if this is new in the 1.71 opt-in or whether I just haven't had the circumstances to create it before. If you have a lot of weapons firing off in the battle viewer, in my case about a half-dozen disruptors from the same ship, then from what I can hear some of the weapon sounds are not played, so there's a little bit of a disconnect between what you can see happening and what you hear. Not a big deal, I know, but I thought I would throw it out there and see if

Hey Derek, there's a bit of a problem overriding certain XML files. For example, if you want to override MapSetupDefs.xml then it has to go in Mods/data/Game rather than in Mods/ModFolder/Game - at least, that's what I've observed.

Old bug, still present!

Well I had a look in MapSetupDefs.xml and what I found is that None allows the same chance of Antimatter as Rare. :P Still doesn't explain why I found Durantium in an asteroid field, but... *shrug*

I decided to take a crack at an Insane-sized galaxy. I have been playing with Resource Frequency set to None in the options and up until now I assumed that it worked, that no strategic resources would generate. But then I explored a bit and found one black hole with an Antimatter resource, and an asteroid field with a Durantium resource. Checked just now and my last settings used to start a new game include Resource Frequency set to None.

It's okay for the AI to kick your ass while you're getting the hang of the game. Remember, while it may have been programmed to play to its strengths, your strength as a human player is being maddeningly unpredictable. I've been playing as a Synthetic race and it took me a while to realise that yes, I need to spam Assembly projects to keep building up my economy and offset the loss of population from sending out colony ships. On the upside though, as far as I can see there

I think the greatest weakness of the AI in GC2 was that it didn't hold anything in reserve. You could stomp its planets and it would react in a very limited way. A human player though, when faced with such an invasion, fights tenaciously. They can marshal their forces and send them where they are needed in strength, instead of diluting that strength with a number of limited-strength strikes against strategically-unimportant locations. When they go looking for a place to strike bac

Dear lord, does anyone actually bother to read the part where you can toggle this on and off? ;)

So, I was sort of toying with the idea that Brad planted in my head way way back, about an AI which remembers how you played last game and doesn't just forget about your misdeeds in previous games. But on the other hand, doesn't forget about some classic turning points in previous games. So let's say that you play your first game against an AI called, well let's say Steve. Steve takes note of your diplomatic dealings in the first game, and decides that you&

Here's a suggestion, not sure if it's something everyone would enjoy but here goes: An option to make make all or parts of the tech tree blind and/or dynamic. For example, if you make the weapons tree blind and dynamic, you and the other players will be able to research 'Weapons' and gain advancements like new iterations of an existing weapon type, or boosts to an existing weapon type from a dynamically generated set of weapon techs. Dyanmic only would me

I guess my curiosity got the better of me because, as the title says, I saw an uninhabited planet, clicked on it, saw that the 'Rush' button is available despite there being nothing in the queue (obviously). Clicked it and and the game crashed.

Basically, the 'Maintenance -20%' mouseover for their Handy ability does not display properly - the mouseover balloon isn't quite big enough, it seems.

One of the (fictional) stories that I'm writing is about a developer's partner being assigned to review her game. Rather than focusing just on the controversy that arises (or not!) when news of their relationship surfaces, I'm going to look at how their relationship is affected by that game and 120 hours of trying to compete for attention. Will Sasha be tempted to bring in Richard Ridings as a voice actor to put a little Easter egg in the game for when the clock stri

I guess that what we would all like to see is some kind of offline fallback. Like for example, GC2 - if you've registered it, you're pretty much sorted as far as offline playing is concerned.