Franco fx

[quote who="erischild" reply="22" id="3512669"] I think about how I would react as a player. I know I would be upset if you took one of my planets, by any means, but we are talking about influence. The first time, I would complain at you. If we are friends, I would forgive you, but I would get resentful. The second time, I would chew you out with emphasis. I might respond diplomatically or economically if I can. The third time, I wo

One consequence that has not been mentioned is the fact that when a planet is flipped the shipyard does not flip. This provides a defensible base right next to your planet. More than half my games are culture victories. Except for small maps very few are won without war. Culture flip is the perfect solution for the mop-up phase, which I hate. It becomes much like surrender at the end of a war when you are overrunning an enemy.

BTW, there is one wild card in the deck. The UPC has the Cultural Preservation Council proposal, by which planets are no longer affected by the influence of another civilization. If you are President, propose it and it will likely be adopted since the AI doesn't care for influence over their planets. If you are not President and you have been flipping planets there is a good chance it will be adopted if you don't have the votes to stop it. This happened to me in a game and I w

[quote who="Dumhed" reply="7" id="3512583"] Quoting drakkos137, reply 3 So, you're saying, when you peace someone to death, not only should they get angry about it, they should be violent, particularly when it makes no sense to do so? Not quite. I think it should de

Why not just turn off influence victory. I don't think it is a popular way to win anyway so why include it if you don't like it? Do they still flip if influence is not a victory option? If so that should be fixed. I doubt an influence victory would be easy with smarter level AI and a big map. I can see that it might be easy on a small map if you can hold off a smart, aggressive AI. Dumb it all down and any victory is easy. Maybe the improvements should be destroyed and

I have started a game on uncommon and it seems to be about what I expected for rare. Huge map, 6 players and I have 3 nice planets in addition to home planets, about 60-70 turns in. I have only found 2 players so far. Playing random intelligence, the Altarians have the same number and the orange guys (I forget their name are lagging with only one. Both are ahead of me in power. I assume because they are already building fleets and I am relying on lost cutters, defenders etc. I have no

I am well into mid-game on a huge map. At least half the galaxy is visible and all of the races have only their home planets. I made the choice just to see how it would go and to cut down on planet management, but I figured on a huge map there would at least be a couple of dozen out there up for grabs. Is there a formula for each of the choices to give a range of what should be expected?

Devs have already said that there will be substantial change to the tech screen so I will not say anything more than, I skip to the Tech tree to choose my next tech. I think it would be helpful to have a tech governor where you could enter an objective tech and the AI gov would auto-choose the shortest route to that tech. When the objective is reached it would go back to manual or a new objective set. In the huge map games micro managing becomes a huge problem so any help is u

Huge improvement in the game aspect. The AI is more feisty and war appears to be inevitable or at least it will take a lot of skill to avoid. This is as it should be imo. I) Yes, the mouse over text problems are annoying, but understandable for a beta I suppose. I am still having some problems understanding the Yor population growth and several things seem contrary to a non-organic species. Showing food as the OP mentioned and soil enhancement for instance, but I guess they co

The turn sound is not a problem for me but the sound for building ships is a bit much.

I have zero population growth and I have researched every Yor population tech and build all population buildings. It has to be a bug Scratch this, it is no bug I finally realized the Yor have to be on Assembly in the build queue to grow in population. They have to choose between buildings and population, it seems.

I am fooling around with a game where I am allied with the Altarians. A couple of interesting things, in the UP meetings they always vote for you so, you double your power in the UP meetings. In trades the alliance probably helps a little but basically they require the same incentives. This is good and to be expected in the real world. There have been no wars yet but no doubt they will be a faithful ally. Someone said it did not seem to make a difference what difficulty level you set.

Buying the survey ship is a damn good idea. I will do that, but frankly is seems to be more of a beta exploit. I doubt they will sell their survey ship in the final release. :) I am big on the influence starbases, econ, research, etc. not so much on the mining starbases

As some have suggested, I think the game would be improved by increasing the colony improvements available. A few ideas on how that might be done... Instead of terraforming tech, which seems odd for earthlike planets, I would like to see the core worlds increase on a timed schedule, that becomes slower as the distance from your homeworld increases. By early end game, the home world max out to a class 20 world. Somehow the game should recognize the power of core planets vs frontier pla

Some great ideas here and in the other thread. I particularly like the prime world ideas and adding some layers to planet improvement. A game like that would interest me but I am not sure we will see anything like it in GCIII. The planet rush does get a little tedious in mid-game, medium sized maps. At the end of the expansion phase I do get a kick out of beating the AI to the last planets. I have to agree with the criticism of the UP stuff. In the beta I usually find myself b

These days we are able to find planets from our home planet. It makes me think it is silly to produce a game that takes place over 200 years in the future that is so far behind in technology to what we can do today. I completely agree, but there are some who like the option of adding difficulty to the game regardless of it's realism. I have known some who try many different things like playing only when they have a toothache, or playing with their mouse upside down. :)</p

As for Civ BE, they still own the rights to SMAC. They should have rebuilt that game instead of moving Civ 5 to another planet. The reason imo, Sid Meier had little to do with the Alpha Centauri game and resents it's popularity. Brian Reynolds made that game and left Sid soon after.

It probably should show the planet name. I guess I never noticed because my decision is never based on that information.

Interesting exchange. The only thing I can add is my firm conviction that those who pirate a full version of a game will ultimately buy the game at a rate of less than 2%. I make no moral judgement. I simply don't pirate because I have a compulsive aversion to being caught with my hand in the cookie jar. [e digicons]8C[/e]

I would say the GCIII is, at this point in the beta, mostly an update/improvement of GCII. This is not a bad thing. Once you have played III, even in it's beta version it is difficult to go back and play II. It is a similar, but much richer game and it leaves GCII in the dust, visually. I am sure the final release will have features that set GCIII apart more than it is now, but it will still be the GC universe and the objectives will be essentially the same as they were in GCI. No

[quote who="Larsenex" reply="3" id="3501750"] Still I do think the Drengin need a slight motivational buff. I would LOVE for them to come onto the scene and say, Hey, "Give me your lunch money or we are going to send a fleet and destroy your starports" and I would love even more a snappy reply like ' I'd like to see you try' with the end result ONLY being a decrease in how they like me with war not likely unless we are already hated and/or weaker in terms of military. [/

I noticed the typo again. It is in the dialog for the UP's Interstellar Patent Board. "In order to stimulate research the United Planets proposes the formation of a Patent Board that will allow INVADING races to make a profit for their effort." I know you guys will clean up all this kind of stuff eventually. The only reason I mention it is because using the word invading instead of inventing is sort of droll.

Theblackknight13 [e digicons]:grin:[/e] I guess when you are naming billions of stars you will get almost anything if you keep looking. I wonder if there are Theblackknight 1-12 as well. That definitely seems like a founders name choice but it seems to me that the game is selecting star that are related to the race. I know, in the game I just played, all the Drengin star names seemed to be what you would expect Drengins to name their stars. Maybe it is just my imagination.

Ah... Thank you eviator

I hope that devs will put in something to keep track of upgrades. When you have a lot of SB's and you are sending a lot of constructors to upgrade, it is next to impossible to keep track of the ongoing process without clicking on every base to see if a constructor has made an improvement available while you were looking elsewhere. Also if you send a constructor to the wrong base, apparently you can't recover the constructor if you wish to send it elsewhere.