naselus

[quote who="Lord_of_Void" reply="12" id="3562214"] What I couldn't figure out is how do I know how many habitable planets there are going to be. Does anyone know the calculation principle or what hte absolute max number of habitable planets is? From the later at least one could count backwards to roughly get the desired amount. [/quote] Absolute maximum as in the most the game can handle before crashing horribly appears to be somewhere around 3000. You

Currently experimenting with a couple more changes: * hulls bigger than tiny now require increasing quantities of Duranthium to build (1 for small, 5 for huge. Cargo ships not included) * Tweaked AI to like expanding more aggressively in the early game * Made the AI like starbases a bit more, too * AI made more likely to aim to acquire cash. The AI seems to be handling it fairly well tbh - I'd feared that

[quote who="Lord_of_Void" reply="9" id="3561989"] This sounds like a valid mod idea just want to point out one thing that seems to me had been mentioned b the DEVs in some places: The idea behind the extra large maps is to accommodate around a 100 AI players. This would give the universe a strong sense of immersion and empires could form and perish without the player even noticing. Sadly I could not test such a scenario yet as one would have to create all the custom races with

Updated to add 1.03-compatible version.

[quote who="Goatmeal" reply="2" id="3561858"] First and most importantly is maintenance. This is a game wide problem where money isn't an issue and is easy to make. I suspect maintenance values will go up but I would also tack a hefty cost to just the capitol building. It represents the start of a colony after all and it gives you significant power. If you want to use ICS as a reference it fits perfectly. Most of those strats abused the free production

[quote quoting="post"] Most of the people who participate in Beta testing are nice, kind, courteous people who understand the importance of complimenting others and supporting companies. [/quote] Clearly, you've never been in a closed beta before.

GC2 is presently the better game. GC3 has the potential to be far, far better, but presently hasn't fulfilled it (unsurprisingly, given that GC2 had 10 years of feedback and upgrades while GC3 has about three weeks worth since it reached completion).

I've got some pretty cool ideas lined up to play with on top of this regarding the resource economy, tbh; want to test out what the game will let me do and what the AI can handle with it, but I think I can a) create a deep manufacturing economy (so you mine Duranthium, process it at a refinery into another resource, and then can use that resource in another process to create something else) and b) using a similar system, turn 'food' into a strategic resource so you have to build a

You're using the 1.03 opt-in (unless SD put 1.03 live this morning). Stardock have added a line at the bottom of that file, so any mod which changes global global defs won't work on both 1.02 and 1.03. You can either opt-out and revert to 1.02 and play now, or you can wait til I get home tonight and I'll put up a 1.03 compatibility patch.

[quote who="Sansloi37" reply="2" id="3561667"] Also "* Increased free starbases to 24 (from 4)"; unless you mod 0 to be something other than 0, the "free starbase" line doesn't currently appear to have any affect.[/quote] Yeah, I had it set to 5 at one point but have removed it while I balance the maintenance fees. [quote]While I have no personal use for insane

Changelog: 0.1-0.5 changes: * Removed large empire penalty. * Added maintenance cost of 3 credits per turn to colony capitals. * Added 0.2 credits per colony per turn to the maintenance cost of colony capitals * Removed maintenance cost of economy, manufacturing and research buildings. * Increased free starbases to 24 (from 4) * Increased star base sensor ranges by 40% * Increased maximum habitable planets to 2000<br

[quote who="Stalker0" reply="54" id="3561548"] Is that per weapon or per barrage? Lets say I have 8 25 damage lasers as a quick example. Would that 1 point of shield counteract the whole 200 points of damage, or just 1 25 attack....leaving the rest of the damage to go through? [/quote] It seems to be per barrage, calculated on a ship-by-ship basis (so if those 8 lasers are 4 each on two ships, one ship will just destroy the shield and

lag spike Double-post, delete please.

Insane Abundant Balance Mod A mod designed around balancing the game for large maps with many planets. Features: * Massive AI work, to make the AI more competitive even on normal difficulty. * Replaces Large Empire Penalty with stacking maintenance costs. * Reworks the balance between 'wide' and 'tall' empi

When I did it, I added [code] Maintenance Colony Flat 3 [/code] Into improvementdefs.xml under the colony capital building (this makes the base cost of each colony 3 credits). I also removed

[quote who="a0152570" reply="1" id="3561199"] Starting at the same "level" as the played could badly put the AI behind the 8 ball and impossible to catch up. [/quote] This; the game rewards early expansion heavily. If the AI is struggling in the late-game, it's usually because it didn't do as well early on as it appears to have. Tbh, the thing that will make the AI better late-game isn't any artful tweaki

So I tested out a Civ 4-style maintenance system last night. Modded in a basic cost of 3credits for each colony hub; removed the maintenance of factories, research labs and econ buildings (in Civ 4, no building cost maintenance, only cities), and then changed LEP from -0.2 approval per colony to (-0.2 credits per colony) per colony. This seemed to help a lot (though I may have set the stacking penalty too low). By the time I hit 20 planets, I had to stop colonizing beca

A couple of things occurred to me during a fairly intensive testing session last night: 1) Weapons seem to have a 'threat' score. How does this interact with preferred targeting? It appears to apply [i]after[/i] class - so you'll target the escort with the highest threat before attacking a capital ship with a vastly higher threat level. 2) If defenses work as <a id="ctl00_ctl00__Content__Content__RepeaterReplies_ctl17__LinkU

[quote who="marigoldran" reply="50" id="3560871"] The thing is that it's MUCH EASIER AND FASTER to increase production and population by colonizing new planets than to build up your worlds. [/quote] This is really the story of the entire thread. There is no significant advantage to not taking a planet the moment you see it, even if it's terrible. In GC2, this strategy would not have worked. Marigoldran would have bee

Nice analysis. I'm not exactly delighted with the idea of out-sourcing defenses to other ships (OK, it makes sense with PD, but with armour it's kinda harder to justify), but it does mean that defensive escorts can counter maiden's point about defenses not stacking fleet-wide like attack does.

GC2 AI is the benchmark by which I measure a decent AI tbh. It's rarely surpassed. Of course, it is still just an AI and so a little plodding, but I'd be have rather surprised if Stardock had produced Machine Sentience instead. The GC3 AI isn't dreadfully bright yet - if it can just get to grips with the adjacency system it'd be a big improvement. But at this stage in the game's life cycle there's whole mechanics which might be changed betw

[quote]Was more or less the same also in GC2. I suspect this is being done intentionally to introduce chaotic fluctuations to the military might.[/quote] The next armour up (the top armour, in fact) has the exact same mass-to-defense ratio. It's 30:15 vs 32:16. That definitely doesn't seem right. [quote]Ok let's for the sake of the argument constitut

[quote who="Maiden666" reply="47" id="3560818"] Do you really think a specialized player cannot be more dangerous than a few pirates esp. in a smaller map and in close proximity starting regions? [/quote] On turn 40? Yes, I do. The pirates just single-mindedly churn out military ships from half a dozen shipyards that completely surround my empire. They have me encircled, they never waste time building a colony ship or a constructor, and they produce a

[quote who="NightshadeXL" reply="33" id="3560759"] These are all great ideas, but so far no one has addressed the issue that you can just avoid a MSB, go around it and take out planets. I know some people are against having so much power on MSB to defend planets, so maybe MSB should have some modules that give them production and a shipyard so that you can still function if all your planets are taken. I know this idea is terrible as where would the economics come from fo

Just use Buck's, it does pretty much what you want. Steam lets me opt-in and opt-out of beta patches, but I have to have release patches, those are unavoidable. Steam re-downloads the other fork's files (just the differentials, not the whole lot). However, after I told Buck about this he said his didn't work the first time he'd tried it - and then did after I suggested it. So it may be an intermittent steam bug (I know, I know - Steam's so universall