ThoseDeafMutes

I played for about 25 hours last year and did fine as a GalCiv 2 vet, was having some fun games but left to play other things. Since the new Expansion is out I fired up a game last night to see what had changed in vanilla through patching since mid last year. I didn't notice anything odd at first, I did my usual "expand peacefully and get a good economic and tech lead, crank out high tech ships when the AI starts bullying me" strategy. This backfired and I got killed by the Drengin in an

According to steam, the release date is the 14th of August. Last year. [e digicons]B)[/e] (Wikipedia says April)

One possibility would be to rename the list entry as simply "Industry" or "Factory". At minimum the behaviour definitely needs to be explained, I got wielded out when I was rushing buildings and then I checked back and it looked like nothing had been built! The hologram representing incomplete structure threw me off.

Culture flipping is weird because the citizens stop being their old species and start being your species instantly. Like, if the Yor can survive on an extreme world, then changed their political allegiance to some other civilisation, why would they stop being Yor? They would still be able to inhabit all of the same places they previously could. It's one of those weird quirks that come from having such a heavily abstracted game.

Alternatively, cloaked ships can have an icon representing their general area, but you are unable to attack them until you get specific sensors. Thus, it's less cheese and more of a strategic advantage based on tech.

Depends entirely on how the FTL works and how the sensors work. For example, if the long range sensors operate through hyperspace or something like that, it's plausible that you're capable of detecting ships that are moving through hyperspace at incredible ranges yet be unable to detect anything in real-space except by bouncing light off it. Conversely it might be the case that it's magic trek sensors that can see everything at implausible range through unexplained mechanisms (exc

[quote who="Bamdorf" reply="19" id="3519263"] Quoting ThoseDeafMutes, reply 17 /snip/ a beam from the Earth to the Moon (~1.3 light-seconds) the intensity of the beam would be 1/4 of what it was at the source /snip/ Still 25% after 238,900 miles (384,40

One light-second is 186,282.397 miles. The intensity of a laser drops over distance because of quantum phenomena causing photons to spread out. In practice, hand-held laser beams in the visible spectrum bloom enormously, to the point that a beam a couple of mm wide will be several times wider on the other side of a football field. Larger lasers of specific types are much less prone to blooming, but the theoretical minimum that an ideal laser can expand over distance in a vacuum is su

[quote who="charon2112" reply="38" id="3519023"] Just a question for you history buffs, what was the primary function of the planes on a carrier? [/quote] Reconnaissance, interception of enemy aircraft, striking enemy warships, striking ground targets. Carrier based aircraft are often multirole and capable of bombing missions as well as interception / dogfighting.

Good ideas ITT. I feel like it shouldn't be using tiny ships, it should be using some hypothetical drone / fighter class vessel that is smaller than tiny. The in-universe justification for this is pretty obvious, ships must be a sufficient size to take any hyperdrive at all, and fighters represent non-FTL capable ships. Even the smallest ship would be larger than this since hyper-drives are not trivially sized, and would presumably require significant power-generation capabilities.

[quote who="Taslios" reply="14" id="3518964"]Also Kinetics should lose some "oomph" at distance as well... even in space there is small amounts of particulate friction.... solar winds etc.. [/quote] Over very large distances this is true, but I don't think that would be worth modelling in-game simply because combat distances of light-seconds would have negligible slowdown, and even at those distances it would be tough to hit anything. Impossible to hit a

Shouldn't missiles be the longest range in principle? Object in motion stays in motion, and missiles can accelerate, jink and steer into manuevering targets. Kinetics should have "unlimited" range but be trivial to dodge until you are relatively close. Beam weapons would be unavoidable within a light second or so, but because of blooming, be broadly ineffective at long distances, increasing in power the closer you got / decreasing in power the further away you got. n

[quote who="Gilmoy" reply="10" id="3518087"] In modern Earth tech, carriers do absolutely rule a radius slightly less than their planes' round-trip ranges (although we don't know how modern ship missiles, or next-gen railguns, will change this). Future-fiction has conjectured that the same holds true, c.f. Battlestar Galactica and Star Wars -- probably because it keeps the spotlight of relevance on individual pilots, which is great for cinemati