Uncle_Joe

As an update, a handful of techs further down the line and pop growth is up to a fairly good clip. All of my Cap:4 worlds are full and my worlds with Cities are starting to fill. I would still think about reducing the raw production from Asteroid mines as they are still the single greatest contributor to your econ for a good while (including research which seems kind of odd). And they are still randomly generated leading to situations where the strength of your early econ

[quote who="JerkClock" reply="7" id="3742108"] I think what it comes down to is that there's really no way to completely discourage colony rush, at best you can force players to be more strategic about it. [/quote] Which is quite possible, but players don't like to be 'penalized'. And I think game devs now run in fear of Steam reviews from players who quickly spam out 'Not Recommended' reviews because they were challenged in the game. :/

[quote who="admiralWillyWilber" reply="6" id="3742100"] At the beginning of crusades they tried making less important by square rooting raw production instead nobody liked that, so they changed that back. [/quote] Ya, and now we're pretty much back to the same thing, but without the square root...instead, pop is just an insignificant proportion of your RAW now. And it's still a colony spam, you just are hard limited by available pop (since it take a min amount to bui

Correct, it's not pop growth based on a fractional amount of pop, but pop growth based on the number of planets you're on. So you get more pop the more planets you're on (however minor at this point). End result though is that pop is a far less important priority than having nearby asteroids or other things that give magical +1 RAW.

Well if the goal was to slow down the initial colony rush I don't think it worked. Everything I have seen that is colonizable has been taken before turn 50. If I didn't take the ones near me, someone else already had colony ships on the way (including Mars in the Sol system). So the planets are all taken, but with minimal pop on each. Research or production doesn't seem to have suffered as a result (as I said, I'm getting techs almost too quickly and I can building any ship in my tech

I'm not necessarily saying that it's a bad thing, but what was the rationale behind reducing the pop growth so far? This isn't some minor tweak, its another massive whipsaw of economic change to the system. I'm not terribly far into my first game using Retribution but I don't seem to have any focus whatsoever and at least part of it stems from the extremely low pop growth. There used to be a push to get planets up to secure food and build cities to grow the pop but at current growth i

I think most of the systems introduced in Intrigue are a very good start. Yes, most can use some refining and expanding. I would love to see more governments to allow more role-playing immersion (more government for Machine Empires and Hive-style etc). I think the events are just the tip of the iceberg and more will continuously be added in future expansions. Unfortunately, the change to their DLC policy seems to preclude things I would love to see such as a 'Government Pack' or an 'E

I'm no authority on the game by any means but a few things: Are quick colony grabs still number one priority? I think that is still the case. It will depend a bit on map size and number of opponents but so far on Medium/Default/Gifted, all colonizable planets are snatched up very quickly. Note that in 3.0, there seem to be a lot more planets that require some research to get so there will

I didn't think Cities were supposed to cost any resources anymore (other than Food)?

Be that as it may, I'm sure it's a relatively quick fix if they decide to change it. It's probably just tweaking a few variables here and there. I'm sure people abuse it and it starts to make a blip on the Metaverse, they'll look at it more closely and make adjustments (just as they have each time something is changed and people find ways to take it to places they didn't intend).

Yeah, the trade routes are displayed on the map, but currently don't do anything that I'm aware of. It would be cool if you could station ships on those routes and steal a portion of the income (depending on the number of ships present etc).

Out of curiosity, what has really changed in the economic and food systems that has completely reversed the game from ‘complex econ’ to ‘overly simplified’? Is it because they removed the exploitable mechanics that allowed players to abuse the mechanics and break the game system? Sure, that took some time and effort to come up with but clearly it’s not what the designer intended to allow (ie, planets making 250 re

Too many options can easily be worse that too few. The more options you have, the more time you have to spend testing each aspect of the things you add to make sure it's balanced in all options and combos. Eventually that would become impossible. So very quickly you have people playing almost entirely different games and the feedback and criticism they send becomes almost meaningless since everyone is playing from a different baseline. Personally I think they have done a good

Yeah, given how powerful they are the AIs either need to try for them or the benefits should be seriously reduced. It feels like a crutch for human players. Sure, the player can ignore them blah blah but if they are going to be in the game, they should be balanced for the way the AI plays too. Yes, in a grand scheme a somewhat minor issue, but it just seems like an oversight to me.

I'm VERY happy with the 3.0 beta. The food issue make a lot more sense now and building cities is far easier. I like the upgrades to the Colony Centers too. The AI seems to handle food fine too and seems a bit better in trading and whatnot. The AIs doesn't seem to use Commanders or explore the power guarded Anomalies, both of which weaken it quite a bit. But as a whole I think 3.0 is a great step forward.

4 Food/City seems excessive? I find it hard enough to strategically plan that (since it rarely makes sense to have the food and cities on the same planet). I can imagine it makes it hard on the AI. How about 2 Food/City but the cities are less powerful? I dunno, it also just seems fairly odd that in a future with spaceships and massive star bases that planets have to devote massive swaths of land to farming to feed even a single city on a distant planet (granted 'One Cit

Yes, Crusade.

Have to wait for a revert/mod of the 'cosmetic FOW change'. I just find it too difficult to play efficiently with it like this.

My opinion? It’s been the whipsaw of core economic changes that keep setting the game back. Wheel, no wheel, partial wheel, population is super important, population is less important, now super important again etc etc. I said back with the wheel disaster…pick a system, stick with it, and develop from there. And I was castigated for voicing that. Well, here we are years later, and the CORE ECONOMY of the game is still in massive f

[quote who="tungchiawah" reply="23" id="3691187"] Quoting Frogboy, reply 19 Not really. We are changing the way farms work in 2.6 but ultimately, unless you have quite a few planets, the strategy you outline isn't that good. If you play on larger maps, you should choose leaders. The specialists are s

Yes, it's interesting about the AI. I happen to agree with you that it is VERY important. But there was an interesting discussion regarding AI in the Civ6 forum a while back. Basically some folks were bemoaning about how bad the AI is in Civ6. And then someone (probably correctly) pointed out that these days, most players don't really WANT

Huh, I've found Crusade to be a bit easier than stock GC3 was. I think it mostly just comes down to whether to do the 'land grab' correctly at the beginning. If you do, it's a relatively easy game. I think people complained about AI land grab so it was sort of toned down, but that just makes it easier for the player to get a bigger slice of the pie. What I would prefer is a reason not to WANT to just go out and grab as many planets and mines as possible. The Admin points and Sta

I go back and forth on it. I enjoyed it at first, but successive games have followed a similar grind pattern. To ease that, I think true military action needs to be an option much earlier in the game. The early game is just a land grab for both planets and resources. If you get a lot at that stage, it's usually fairly easy to ride that to a major advantage. If, on the other hand, you get squeezed out a bit in the land grab, you'll likely be behind the most of the game since you

I remember when games on floppy disk (5.25" floppies) cost $59.99 at the local Diskovery or Software Etc stores lol. That would have been mid-late 80s on the Atari and then the first IBM 286's in the late 80s... So yeah, the cost of games has gone down dramatically in comparison. The major difference in the marketplace is that there a TON more games competing for market share. In 1988 say, I might have bought 4-5 games the whole year. Now, I typically do that in a month or so (i

[quote who="barrybeal" reply="2" id="3678405"] With Crusade it was decided that "Production Wheels" or +25 % bonuses to one of the three MaxProduction targets would be eliminated so now Production is split evenly and automatically into Planetary Economy, Research, and Social Manufacturing, Military Manufacturing (if you have an associated shipyard). I have not tested to see if Raw Production splits evenly into the first three and then MaxMan