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I just bought this game, I have a feeling I'm either going to hate it or become totally addicted.
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May 26, 2014 14:39
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I'm playing through the Tutorial but I'm still a bit confused about Resources. Basically, you should always build Gas Mining Stations on gas giants (makes sense) while building normal mining Stations on normal planets?
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May 26, 2014 15:44
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Thanks. I have another question, is there a way for me to tell which resources I am getting a steady supply of? The game already told me I lack helium, but I'd like some kind of overview as to how much I'm bringing in of each resource. e: being attacked by a pirate Capital Ship, it's destroying everything I have and I can't even make a dent in its shields. This is a pretty hardcore 'tutorial'. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 16:54 on May 26, 2014 |
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May 26, 2014 16:37
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I'm going to give it another whirl tomorrow with Pirates set to Weak or something (I haven't even found that slider yet). One thing I have to say about the visuals on the main screen is that they can get really confusing. It's just a total clusterfuck near your main planet. I wish it was easier to tell the types of ship apart and that there was a clearer visual distinction between economic and military ships in particular. You almost have to use the hotkeys to manage them.
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May 26, 2014 20:30
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I somehow won a game without really knowing what I was doing. I must say, even though you're supposed to be handling the military side of your empire, I had no idea what my ships were doing throughout the game. I got a few colonies going in other systems, started building ships there, but as soon as they were built they vanished, mostly to my home system but I found a couple of them aimlessly flying through space as well. How do I get them to stay put and defend the system that they were created in? For that matter, how do I rebase my ships in a different system? I felt like I had almost no control over them, which was frustrating. Turning automation off for individual ships is not an option either, because they will even stop refueling. There needs to be a level of control where you can say 'do whatever you like, form fleets whichever way you feel like, but at least stay in this particular system and don't retrofit halfway across the galaxy when there's a perfectly serviceable spaceport right here.' I couldn't figure it out.
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May 27, 2014 17:42
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nutranurse posted:Yeah, leave individual ships on automation. Popular Thug Drink posted:This is what fleets are for. Any ships you don't want loving around on automation should be placed in a fleet. You can give each fleet a stance, such as offense or defence, as well as assign a home base on the fleet screen. I'll generally have small fleets which I label squadrons with a regional defensive stance around small bases, covering a few nearby systems to chase off pirates, and at major worlds I'll station one or more full sized fleets for military duty. It's also easier to handle upgrades if you have distinct fleets and you can stand one down for a while - for this reason I only station fleets at worlds which have significant dockyard capacity for refit and repair. Thank you for the explanation. So your advice would be to manually organize my ships into strike forces and fleets and then to order those fleets to defend/attack X? And my fleets with the appropriate posture will, for example, automatically warp to the enemy intruding in their system even if the individual ships supposedly have Automation turned off? I am going to try this now.
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May 27, 2014 19:07
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nutranurse posted:No, you can leave fleet/strike force organization up to the computer (you can start to organize your own fleets once you get a better sense of what ships you might want for your fleets). Just manually control the fleets by setting their postures and stuff, make sure that the individual fleets and strike forces are not automated. What I did was manually assemble my fleets and then tell them to guard a particular solar system, leaving them on Automation. It worked alright, though I didn't get into any serious conflict except with some weak-rear end pirates. What I'm still having trouble figuring out is how you defend isolated mining outposts and freighters/construction ships. I built a separate fleet to protect those, set Posture to Defend and Range to Anywhere. They did absolutely nothing whenever I got attacked. I switched Posture to Attack, but still nothing happened. The Expansion Manager really is crucial for managing your resources. I used the Unfulfilled column to see which resources I was lacking, then I used the Galaxy Priority (?) filter to find planets with that resource. If it's close and has a high resource percentage, send a construction ship. Trundel posted:So I spent about an hour playing today after picking it up off of steam and everything that I build gets wrecked by pirates. Every time I've tried to construct another space station they warp in and blow it up. The trouble is that the two pirate factions that I've met so far both have a negative modifier to my diplomacy with them because we're 'competing over the same colonies' or some such, so every time I sign up for a protection plan they cancel within days and the ships that they've got orbiting my planet just blow everything up. Does this generally happen or did I get an unlucky galaxy gen? This happened to me as well during my tutorial attempts. If you want to figure out the interface at your own pace, I would suggest starting a custom game with pirates set to Few and Very Weak, and every other setting as favorable as possible. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 21:58 on May 27, 2014 |
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May 27, 2014 21:50
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But...how would that make them different from the system defenders I already have? Is there no way to create a mobile strike force to deal with harassing pirates or monsters no matter where they are? I figured that was what the Anywhere range was for. Maybe a Sector range is the next best thing?
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May 27, 2014 22:11
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I had a pretty good run yesterday, dominated the galaxy - with the easiest settings, of course. One thing I noticed is that my construction ships stopped auto-building after a while, is that normal? It didn't really matter because I already had ludicrous stockpiles of everything, but I wonder what the trigger is. Another thing I noticed is that my construction ships in an earlier pre-warp game didn't retrofit when I got warp technology, and I had to manually scrap them. Does that always happen?
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May 28, 2014 11:30
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I tried a standard game in the Age of Shadows and I had the same problem, constantly a -10,000 cashflow. I don't know why, my fleet was small if anything. I don't even know how you make money in this game other than through taxes. Also, my exploration and construction ships weren't doing anything most of the time, despite the fact that they were both on Automation. I have no idea what the trigger is for them to actually do stuff so it just strikes me as completely unreliable, it's frustrating. Of course it's all moot because the pirates killed me before I could even get my second colony. e: hadn't seen Archonex's post, thanks for the tips. I did have two defensive bases around my home planet, are they really that expensive? Also what I meant with auto-building is that they stopped automatically building mining stations and I have no idea why. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 13:25 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 13:18
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Thank you again. I started up a new game with warp technology already activated, and I'm doing much better than last game. I've noticed in general that I do much worse in pre-warp games. No real money problems this time, and I set pirates to Few so they'd be less of a hassle. My current main issue is a sudden lack of resources now that I already have a fairly well-established empire. The best way to identify shortages is through the Expansion Planner's Unfulfilled Empire Requests (?) column, correct? The problem is that there's often a bottleneck effect where your construction ships lack the resources to build the mining stations that you need to get more of those same resources. Half of them going off to retrofit just makes progress even slower. I'm still figuring out the most efficient way to deal with resources. It seems like the game is constantly bombarding me with messages of resource shortages even when I'm constantly telling my construction ships to build new mining stations at the right locations. Another thing, how do I finish off pirates? I stopped paying protection money to a pirate faction, but I don't know how to actually kill them. I've destroyed several of their bases, but apparently not enough. I tried stealing all sorts of maps to find out where their remaining forces were, but it didn't give me any new information. Meanwhile they just keep harassing me. When the Diplomacy screen says a pirate faction has x colonies, do they mean actual colonies or space stations? How do I find out what I need to conquer or destroy? Kilroy posted:So, I just picked up this game about 15 minutes ago. And, I start it up and it tells me to play the pre-warp tutorial. So I bring that up. Tells me to build a spaceport. I start building a spaceport. I get about 10% completed on that and some jerk with a spaceship comes along and demands money. The 'tutorial' is poo poo and my advice would be to play a custom game with all settings on easy (particularly pirates set to few and very weak), combined with asking questions in this thread. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 17:31 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 17:28
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To reiterate my question from the last page, how do you deal with pirates? I have a reasonably successful game going, but I've been so absorbed with fighting pirates that I haven't had a chance to start any proper wars yet. Three of the pirate factions are harassing my shipping, they took over a couple of my planets with their Criminal Networks, and they're being dicks in general. Every time I find out where one of their bases is I go out and destroy it, but they just pop up somewhere else. How do I root them out?
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May 29, 2014 13:28
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King Doom posted:Go to the colonies screen (f2), locate the planet, go to the facilities tab, select the pirate base and select attack. Beware though, There are always A LOT of pirates in those things. Like stacked ten deep. I was wondering the same thing, goddamn pirates always building hidden bases on my planets. I'm going to ask again, is there a way for me to find out where a pirate faction's space stations and hidden bases are so I can actually root them out? They stopped bothering me in my current game and now they just have a couple of ships floating aimlessly through space so I guess they were brought down somehow, but I'm not sure how I suddenly managed that. queeb posted:This game is awesome but I instantly get overwhelmed as soon as I get warp tech and can go to other systems. Should every system have some sort of starport in it? something for refueling? is there a refueling base? or can ships only refuel at a starport. My standard set-up is to build a space port and a defensive base on each new colony. I'm not sure if it's necessary to build more than one space port in each system, but I think they help with resources (?) so I do it anyway. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 16:41 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 16:37
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Panzeh posted:There's no easy way to find every pirate base, but trading maps with other empires will get you eyes on some of the pirate bases. You can pretty much tell where the pirate hidden bases are by looking at the independent planets. Those independents are basically ripe for getting raided and hit with pirate buildings because they can't prevent pirates from landing. After a few years almost all of them will have the buildings and be giving income to the pirate factions. Eliminating these will significantly weaken the pirates. Thank you. Is it a good idea to just send some ships to explore systems near their area of operations? Will a ship automatically reveal any pirate space stations in a system jus by entering it? Also, and I haven't encountered this situation so far, but is there something you can do if you find hidden pirate bases on another empire's planet?
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May 29, 2014 16:51
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Matrix Games is probably still  at the Steam rush.
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May 29, 2014 18:38
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Zilkin posted:Ugh, how do I deal with pirates in pre-warp start. They quickly require more money than my one system empire can afford to pay, and if I don't pay they pf course just blow everything up. Eg. in my current game it hasn't even been ten years since the start, and I got two pirate groups harassing me. Other already has 97 ships including cruisers which I can't even build, and the other 40. The pirate settings for this game were normal amount, and normal strength. I've been meaning to play a standard Age of Shadows game to the end, since I get the feeling that's how it meant to be played rather than custom, but the pre-warp piratefest is extremely annoying to deal with. J posted:They have to be. I know when I first saw this game on steam, I figured it was just another buggy unfinished 4x game, since that's always my assumption with 4x games anymore. Then I start reading about it...and found it the game was already out for many years, just not on steam? And people are actually saying good things about it? To be fair, even if it was totally buggy I'd have absolutely no idea and just chalk it up to AI shenanigans.
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May 29, 2014 19:15
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Archonex posted:Pirates in the Age of Shadows are waaaaay different from pirates in the classic or ancient ages. They're a nuisance in those two, where they're essentially on par with empires in the age of shadows. I just tried another Age of Shadows game and the same thing happened, finances in the red and pirates constantly attacking me. Either I try to pay most of them off and then I have no money or they capture/destroy my mining stations and disrupt my shipping, and then I have no money either. It was the early game and I'd already encountered more than twenty different pirate factions, I'm not kidding. I can't believe this is how the game is meant to be played, it's loving impossible. Even if it's possible to eventually get the upper hand, it's just tedious to constantly be bombarded with attack messages. I think I'll stick to custom games from now on. axelord posted:I just paided them off and when that didn't work took the beating. Kept my taxes low and growth high and ran deficits when possible. So you kept your taxes low until you had a huge population? It's gamey, but gently caress those pirates, I might try this as well. How did you keep them from spawncamping your home world, and how did you eventually build up your defense? Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 21:30 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 21:27
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That makes sense, I think I just have the mindset where I want to start from nothing and grow into a transgalactic empire. I assume I'm just frustrated because even with my lack of experience I don't really see what I could have done differently. I tried to expand as quickly as possible, build the appropriate mining stations, colonize, but my finances were constantly in the red and pirates were harassing me non-stop, pretty much putting me in a vicious cycle of stagnation. I will play Classic from now on, now that I realize you're not missing out on much.
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May 29, 2014 21:53
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Zilkin posted:When should you build small, medium, or large spaceport? So far I've only build large at my home planet, and then medium ones at all my colonies for defense. I figured they automatically upgraded, I didn't even know it was possible to choose.
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May 29, 2014 23:43
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Hav posted:Yeah, you can totally expand out of your finances very quickly. The first stages of the pre-warp game are quite sedate because you're speed limited. Once that's out of the way, and if you aren't watching like a hawk, the automation will start prioritizing planets from underneath you. Basically, if I see my income figure go red, I pause expansion for a bit. Resorts are crazy good for generating cash. I know it costs money to build mining stations and colonize, but the only way to get more money is by getting more resources and a bigger tax base, right? The Age of Shadows start is kind of a catch-22 for me and I don't really know how to solve it with what I know about the game. I mean, regardless of expansion my cashflow in the last game still would have been in the red simply because my maintenance outweighed my tax income. As for resorts, do you need to research a specific tech for them? It often seems impossible to build them in the beginning of the game. e: oops, double post
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May 29, 2014 23:54
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:This is DEFINITELY the The general setting of this game kind of reminds me of Asimov's Foundation series that I happen to be reading through right now. Archonex, thank you for the offer, I might take you up on it later. For now I'm going to play a standard Classic game and see how well I do. bobtheconqueror posted:So far my only complaint with Distant Worlds is that I've had a really hard time finding a good balance with the automation. I'm spergy enough to WANT to do everything myself, but not spergy enough to find it fun. The biggest challenge so far seems to be finding the right level of automation and finding out how automated Automation actually is. For example, I'd like to be able to leave the fleet formation process on automation while still being able to tell one particular fleet to stay in one particular system while still having it automatically refuel/repair/retrofit. e: could anyone tell me which specific tech I need to research to build resort bases? It says CANNOT BUILD when I try to queue a construction ship. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 13:36 on May 30, 2014 |
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May 30, 2014 12:48
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in me but I love just the thought of playing an Age of Shadows game where your race has overcome millennia of history in which there were wars, viruses, advancements, set backs, everything, just to finally pitch the entire world together into building one giant space dock. At which point space is both privatized and governmental, from there on it just expands, forging on through history until you discover first contact, hostile and threatening at that. Then you learn to fight back, and soon discover warp technology, quickly connecting and threading your system together. Travel is no longer a slow endeavor since everyone, government and civilian alike, have the ability to move from one end of the system to the other in the blink of an eye. Then you branch out, slowly and cautiously exploring the rest of the galaxy...
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How do you guys handle invasions? It always seems to take ages before I'm ready to take over an enemy planet. Specifically, micromanaging your fleets and recruiting troops is really slow and I always have to override the AI if I want to get a decent number of troops on a single planet. I just got out of a really long war in which I ended up dominating but I still only managed to snag two or three planets. I'm wondering what the most efficient way is to go about it. As for space ports, do they automatically grow in size? People here have been talking about choosing between different sizes of space ports, but I only ever get the option to build one particular type on each planet.
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May 30, 2014 19:34
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Is it worth it to colonize planets in the 40-50% quality range, or are the penalties too severe? I colonized one in a system that I already owned with a nice development bonus from ruins.
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May 30, 2014 23:06
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The planet had a quality of 48% and the ruins gave a 17% development bonus so I'm assuming it was worth it, though I'm not sure how a development bonus works exactly.
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May 30, 2014 23:29
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Zilkin posted:What galaxy size are people playing on? I've been changing between 250 and 400 stars myself. It's nice that at least on 250 stars you can still keep relatively good control over things without having to automate everything. Right now, I'm playing a Classic game with everything on the standard setting (700 stars, 8x8). It's not that hard for me to micromanage a little, since I only have about twenty colonies. It's been an interesting game because the AI in general was so good at expanding and keeping each other in check that even with that low number of colonies I'm still one of the largest empires. My humanoid alliance is kind of poo poo and the brainy-guy race in particular has been reduced to two planets, but so far I'm holding my own right in the center of the galaxy.
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May 31, 2014 11:11
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I'm losing really hard against one of the insect races. I don't understand how they can be so good at invading. If I leave it up to the computer there's no guarantee any invasions will ever happen, and even if I micromanage with automatic troop recruitment off I can barely scrape together enough troops to take over a single planet. How do you guys deal with it? What settings do you use? Going overboard with troop recruitment is a good way to go bankrupt, but if I leave it on automation the computer will only put a single unit on vital border planets. I am having a lot of trouble both with invading and defending against invasions.
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Jun 1, 2014 14:55
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Thank you for the rundown. If Planetary Defense Units are so expensive, that would explain why I was going bankrupt near the end. If you don't mind me asking, what settings and techniques do you usually use during wars? Do you recruit troops manually? Do you put together special invasion fleets? I feel like I am really inefficient during wars and that it takes me a really long time to get enough troops together for a proper invasion.
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Jun 1, 2014 21:17
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Is there a way to see a planet's max population? And is there a reason my special forces don't want to get on my troop transports?
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Jun 7, 2014 19:47
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I had no idea Grey Hunter was even doing a Paradox mega-LP, thanks. Question; how do I actually finish off the Shaktur Supremacy? They're down to their last planet but they have 6000K troops on there with max Planetary Defense, and I can't bombard them. And is there a way to see the max population of a planet before it reaches said maximum?
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Jun 8, 2014 22:00
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How do you defeat the Shaktur empire? They only have their home planet left and I'm blockading it, but it's impossible to invade since they have about 8000K troops there. I don't know where they're getting the money from.
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Jun 15, 2014 20:09
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My main problem with the game right now is that there's about a 10% chance of it crashing every time it tries to autosave. I don't know what causes it, I thought maybe it was due to me being in the process of zooming in or clicking certain parts of the interface when it starts autosaving, but I honestly have no idea. I think I'm just going to turn it off.
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Jun 21, 2014 15:48
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Update on the autosave issue, turns out turning it off was not a good idea. It crashed when I tried manually saving and I lost two hours of progress. It's giving me an OutOfMemory message, anyone ever had anything like that? Any ideas on how to solve this if it's a memory issue?
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Jun 21, 2014 21:35
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winterwerefox posted:Are you on a 32 bit system? If you have more than 4gb of RAM, DW can only use 2gb of that. Its hitting the memory limit when trying to save. Try this. I was crashing all the time. Upped my virtual memory from 2048 to 3072, no crashes anymore. Thank you, but I have a 64-bit system. 8 GBs of RAM, processor is an i7-3820 quadcore running at 3.6 GHz. It should be enough for a game that was released four years ago. The slowdown itself isn't actually that bad, it's the save crashes that are ruining it for me. Before the most recent patch, I also used to get different error messages about the game being unable to reference objects and things like that.
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Jun 22, 2014 01:26
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I played a Gizurean Democracy last game, I remember at one point during my racial cycle some of my planets had 80% population growth. The only downside was that literally everyone hated me, except the cheerful space lizards for some reason (I forget what they're called). So, has anyone ever encountered this bug when trying to save:  As I've said before, I think I have a decent computer memory-wise, so I don't know what gives. I was playing a 400 star, 8x8 game so it wasn't a ludicrously big galaxy either. Any ideas on how to solve it? I used the Task Manager to change the game's priority to High and played for a bit without any problems, but I have no idea if it's actually helping.
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Jun 29, 2014 12:54
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I figured maybe it was a virtual memory issue, so I went to take a look at my C: drive and it only had about 15 GB of free space left. So I 1) freed some space on C:, 2) reinstalled the game on my huge secondary drive and 3) increased the virtual memory swap file size and set it to use both drives. I haven't had any memory-related crashes since then, but I don't know what the actual solution was or if it's even been solved for good. It does seem that the problem may have been on my end.
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Jun 30, 2014 21:48
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Kilroy posted:Just to add, if you're going to do this, to also change the default tax policy as well. I go with <200k=none, 200K-2M=none, >2M=low to start. The default seems to be high, for the highest tier. Wait, how do I change tax policy? This sounds like exactly what I need but I can't find it in Empire Settings.
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Jul 3, 2014 07:27
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Okay, why do parts of my empire keep splitting off? The first time it happened I thought it was neat and it made sense since I had massive war exhaustion at the time. This time it happened during peacetime and despite my empire not having any real problems except a Notorious reputation. Not cool. Is it the Reputation that's caused this or is it just a random event?
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Jul 22, 2014 18:37
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They don't defect individually, I'm referring to the civil war event. I don't think garrisoning would help, groups of planets just seem to flip with everything on and near them. The event text says something about massive unrest, but as I've said, the second time it happened I had no problems at all except for a Notorious reputation. It's a bit ridiculous that there are now four different Quameno empires, and the only plausible reason for the fourth one to exist is that one of the splinter factions got hit by separatism themselves (lol). It's cool because I'm still one of the most powerful empires and I've already taken half of it back, but I don't like not knowing what triggers it. I just assumed it was like the Jagged Knife in Galactic Civilizations II.
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Jul 22, 2014 21:20
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It's your second game, go easy on yourself and just restart. I think I'd restart even if I got that now.MagnumOpus posted:Different races have different sensitivities to your empire Reputation. Phone posting so I can't check if Quammeno are particularly sensitive right now, but my anecdotal experience is that Quammeno seem to splinter often in games where I've not played them. That's something to keep in mind, I had no idea. Do you have a link with information about this kind of stuff?
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Jul 23, 2014 18:50
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nimby posted:Allying the Shakturi is a bit game-breaking, though. If you join the Guardians, they give you a fleet and that's it. If you join the Shakturi, you can trade for all the techs. You'll need to part with a lot of mining stations, but you can get the entire tech tree from them. You can do this with the Ancient Guardians as well, actually.
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Jul 24, 2014 06:29
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