Azunai_

you could probably raze all the buildings on his former planets to cut the maintenance, set them to full wealth generation and slowly start start building some of them up as "wealth" planets. it's usually not a bad idea to have at least one planet fully specialized in wealth (with the economic capital and lots of markets/shopping centers). a single planet can pay the bills of a medium sized empire failry easily.i usually do that quite early - the homeworld is my first factory world, the f

when i first played the "tutorial" map i got about 15 points. i replayed that recently for no particular reason other than "fooling around". i basically grabbed the 2 planets that are not yet settled, built them up as efficiently as i could and made my way through the tech tree fairly quickly (i think i had most of the techs unlocked around turn ~200, which i think is decent for only 3 planets). to finish the map, i built a couple of giant ships with the final tier of weapons and defenses (co

you can beat them. those 800 points you see are mostly fleets of orbital defenders that will neve leave their planet. taking a look at the after action statistics, they managed to build a whopping 18 ships in the ~60 turns it took me to win. and most of them were probably constuctors ("favorite ship type"). according to that statistics screen, i destroyed ~500 drengin ships. so the vast majority of their stuff is already there at the start and each of their fleets you wipe out is wiped out fo

some of the ships you get in the campaign have modules that reduce the logistics cost by 50%. i.e. the medium ships with that mod cost 2.5 instead of 5, the large ships cost 3.5 instead of 7 and the huge ship costs 4.5 instead of 9 (i think - not sure if the base cost for huge is 9 or 10). if you add up the numbers manually, the fleet probably has 25.5 points so you can't add +1 without getting over the cap of 26. so it's more of a display issue, but it only affects the campai

regarding the constructor problem: imo it would be helpful if they changes the default scaling of the auto-designed constructors. that script is pretty weak now - it will just fill up all hull space with the best (most expensive) life supports, so in the late game an auto-designed constructor can be quite expensive due to haveing 10 life supports that each cost 50 manufacturing or something. they should probably change the scaling to put in more construction modules if the hull size a

if you factor in the 5 base production from the colony capital, it's closer to the previously mentioned 20 pop - 20 prod. but if you do that, the "production per pop" curve is also much flatter and small planets with little to no farms are more efficient. my rule of thumb is that i only grow the population if i can get enough approval to keep them at 100% WITHOUT entertainment buildings on the planet. if you have to plop down a stadium for every farm, there aren't that m

i've seen that too on conquered planets. not really sure what it's supposed to mean. the "improvements lost" and "sectors lost" statistics are a bit confusing to me. i think GC2 had similar mechanics, so i figured that "improvement lost" means that some factories got blown up during the ground combat, so the building is gone but the tile is still there. "sectors lost" means that some tiles are unusable. the conventional ground combat doesn't seem to destroy sectors, though

hehe i think that would just cause an endless loop and crash the game... each fighter-carrier spawns new fighter-carriers which spawn new fighter-carriers and so on :)

fist off, don't know how to embed images with this forum software, sorry if it doesn't work right away i did some fooling around halfway through a game and found somethign that i found a bit hilarious: Here's an image of the current "Assault Fighter" deployed by the Carreir module. The ship design is hidden in the normal ship designer, but you can refit/upgrade existing small ships to that design anyway the ship is nothing overly special, so miniaturiz

stacked ships/fleets are indicated by a little red icon, i guess that's what you mean? i think you can see the same icon when you move some of your own ships onto the same tile (i.e. 2 fleets that are too big to auto-merge or some ship that ends its auto-move turn on a tile where there's already another ship)

the game seems a bit inconsistent regarding "borders", though. you can sign "open borders" treaties and AI factions will show a negative "you have ships in or ZOC" diplo modifier if you send your ships into their ZOC or ZOI or whatever you want to call it without such a treaty. so apparently the ZOI is already treated as a ZOC in that regard. i guess it wouldn't hurt the game if the borders were treated more like actual borders. at least you should have diplo options to demand tha

hmm wait - "Victory" implies some form of competition, an competition is more or less of the opposite of coexistence. so i don't think that's going to work all that well. on a more serious note - i guess it doesn't really work as a victory condition. it's probably a bit too ... passive? you can always turn off all victories and play a "free play" with no pressure to do specific things to "win", though. don't think you reall need a victory condition for that type of

hmm at the end of that map i was allied with the thalan people. they even sent a troop transport an took the final drenign planet while my transport was on the way ;) i picked the more diplomatic answers in the opening sequence and then once the map actually started i did some trades with the thalan (open border, some tech trades, sold them my first few durantium for some BC per turn etc.). also sent a freighter to their capital (and later with some higher trade tech some more freight

umm, you "discovered" that the projects scale with manufacturing. that example was just to show that the scaling is so weak it might as well not exist. the planet in that example is NOT specialized. not at all. it's literally a 50-50 split between research and manufacturing. let's do another example with the same planet, but this time we use our buildings differently. again- 20 total production, this time we'll have 360% mfg and only 1 res building with 40%

sure it scales with the amount of manufacturing you invest, but it's not really worthwhile to use more than 1% for the research and money projects on most planets. 10 manufacturing for a 10% bonus is not going to do much when a single research building at the lowest tier already gives a 25% percent bonus that doesn't eat into the "raw research" that gets multipled by it. assuming a fairly generalist world with 200% mfg bonus (for example 5 tier 3 factories a 40%), 200% res bon

i kinda agree with JorgenCAB here. the old empire wide sliders in GC2 were bad, but the new "per planet" sliders aren't much of an improvement. they succeeded in making an empire with highly specialized worlds efficient, but the price you pay for that efficiency is constant slider adjustments. i can somewhat agree with the military-social slider that allows the player to build/upgrade structures and build ships at the same time, but the production to mfg/res/wealth slider seems re

with the current weapon balance, changing their weapons to missiles only is hardly going to "nerf" them. missiles are the strongest weapons now. if you remove the weak kinetics and ok-ish beams and add more missiles, they will just become even better ;) overall, i think carriers are a bit too strong. i don't really understand why those assault ships have to be free of charge. they basically spawn out of thin air each battle and they just respawn for free the next time even if you

where exactly did i say anything like "building econ star bases sucks" ? actually i said pretty much exactly the opposite of that... my criticism is that the upgrades are lackluster, which they are. sure, i'll also spam constructors to add modules to the existing bases if i have nothing better to do with my manufacturing worlds, but that's somewhat besides the point. the point is that it's counter intuitive that the first ring is by far the best. if you send out a colony s

i don't think the "1 item per turn" rule will change, and i'm not convinced that it should. 1 item per turn basically means that it's overkill to stack multiple super structures on the same planet. just put the mfg capital and the death furnace on two other worlds and you can now build your best ships at a 1 per tunr rate on three planaets, rather than haveing one planet that can build them with 20% of its capacity. it's just not a good strategy to stack stuff beyond the point

actually that last carrier upgrade works the same way as the first carrier module, the only difference is that you get 5 fighters instead of 3, but both modules spawn the same assault fighters with all 3 weapon and all 3 defense module types (not sure if they use all if you don't have enough hull size % increases and/or weapon/defense size reduction% techs). in the campaign, i lost some of the weaker excort ships of the crusader, so i built a few "assault carriers" (large hull, one baseli

i think the system is quite viable as it is. population, approval and modifiers to both the raw production and the final yield are all useful. there's room for improvement, though. the initial economy starbase ring is by far the most powerful ring - so much so that it's plain an simple a bad idea to upgrade the star bases when there is still room for another baseline economy base. i think that's somewhat counter intuitive. my first impulse would normally be to build about one base

don't think patriotic is a "must". it's kinda overpowered. a bit like taking subterranean and creative in good old MoO2 ;) the game should be playable with the stock factions or custom faction of similar power levels. if it's not, the devs should cook up some solution that affects huge galaxies but is not required/feasible on smaller ones. they could for example expand the tourism concept a bit and add a global happiness boost to it. add some spammable (not "colony unique") touris

@Bamdorf: i think you got the starbase thing wrong. the pretty sure "1 construction" is the cost of the upgrade (i.e. 1 construction module) - not the yield. there are some higher end modules that require 2 construction points, so it makes sense that the game actually shows how many modules are needed. the production bonus you see is probably the baseline bonus of the "economy ring" which is 10% bonus to total production. the factory upgrade 8and subsequent upgrades) seem rather

no idea when that infinite growth thing will stop working. the math probably gets really messy once you try to factor in size increments of the planet. that size 10 planet isn't going to stay size 10 for the whole game. chances are it will be in the 20's after the ultimate terraforming is complete. the "perfect balance" will shift not only with tech upgrades to the relevant structures but also with every new tile you get (first gradually, then at the final stage it gets crazy on some

i think the math is not that simple. you don't just build that extra farm, you may also need an approval building to keep those extra people happy (if they go down to content orr even discontent, you get a % penalty which probably more than counters the bonus production). and you first have to grow to that new pop cap, whereas a new factory is online and fully upgraded in a matter of a few turns. so far, i usually sticked one farm on each somewhat large planet. with approval passi