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So someone with the pirate expansion sell me on this. What is it like playing as a space pirate? The previews are nice and all, but $70 on a game like this is a bit much to drop blind. Despite the concept being intriguing, that's a poo poo-ton of money for what's basically just one expansion that really piques my interest.
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May 24, 2013 04:21
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Frog Assassin posted:Shadows-compatible Extended mod has been released. Can get it here: http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3141149 Out of curiosity, what's the max number of empires and pirate factions this game can have in a single game with the latest expansion? I've checked around for details, and I haven't been able to find any on that point. I kind of want to play a game that has ridiculous numbers of factions duking it out, but nothing like that really exists on the market at the moment. That extended mod looks to be hilarious if you could just throw all the races into a single game for a massive galactic clusterfuck. Archonex fucked around with this message at 22:43 on May 24, 2013 |
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May 24, 2013 21:54
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So my pirate cartel is cruising around the south end of a recreation of the galaxy in size 900 ships I found in a debris field, a fleet of insanely lethal cruisers I custom built, and some high tech frigates. One problem though, I can't find any goddamn Chromium. There's seriously like two planets in the entire south half of the galaxy that have it. And both are owned by an empire. I have a facility on the planet that controls part of it, but apparently the planet is permanently blockaded? Is there any way to get more out of it? Also, the death ray doesn't seem to do any damage to stations. How does it work? Edit: Apparently the gunners on the carrier I retrofitted to be the Death Star have terrible accuracy. That was why they were missing the stationary object the size of a small moon only a few pixels out. 
Archonex fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Dec 22, 2013 |
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Dec 22, 2013 03:00
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FredMSloniker posted:So I'm finally getting into the game, and I'm trying the 'play as one guy in one ship' method of working my way into the game. There's just one thing, though; the computer keeps transferring him off the ship, and when I go to transfer him back on it asks if I want to turn off automatic transfers entirely. Is there some way to say 'no, this one guy I want to move manually'? You can just say no do not turn automation off and then click the option to never bring up the warning again. The whole warning message is misleading in that you can make tweaks to automated processes while not disabling it. The only thing I know of that will get reset is taxes, as the AI checks them periodically. Also, putting him in a fleet might ensure he doesn't get transferred off of it. I had a fleet commander that never moved off of the ship after I did that.
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Dec 23, 2013 04:58
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King Doom posted:There is a super weapon that can kill planets (There are two of them in each game world) but they take hours realtime to repair. It's possible your opponent found one or both of them. Keep your eye out for something flying about the size of a world. If you can't see it, then it sounds a lot like a bug, albeit one I've never seen. God help you if a pirate gets a hold of one of them in the age of shadows too. Keep in mind that they don't have to worry about the reputation hit from using one. So nothing stops them from going all Palpatine on the entire galaxy if they want to clear a huge buffer between them and the empires.
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Mar 24, 2014 14:33
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Were you using the game editor? Were your enemies? Here's a better question. Is there an asteroid field in some of the systems now? It's been awhile since i've seen one touch off a planet, but I believe that asteroid fields are whatever is left of the destroyed planet. That's a pretty surefire way to know if someone used a planet destroyer on them or not. Archonex fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Mar 24, 2014 |
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Mar 24, 2014 14:58
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ArchangeI posted:Also the lack of terraforming (the terraformer only repairs damage up to the original quality of the planet, you can never turn a volcanic planet into a terran planet). Good news, you can probably fix that now!  Also, on that note, some impressions i've had of the new expansion so far:Apparently the new expansion gives pretty much full mod control over the game. The new ancients campaign appears to be an example of some of the new stuff you can do with it. There's a pretty hefty amount of capabilities modding-wise now too. You can even attach events to research and add new research items. From a quick browse of the new tech tiers in the ancients campaign this apparently includes creating the ancient guardian race and a super plague event that slowly murders the entire galaxy as it spreads among a bunch of different things. I know DW Extended was able to come out with a new version using a few of the new modding capabilities like a few days after Universe was released too. So apparently the mod tools must be extremely easy to use. For those wondering, Extended apparently just added new races with unique tech trees and more racial behaviors to each race. Which puts the mod at 40 unique races overall that are added to the game. Which itself is pretty crazy given how much variety the races added to the universe in terms of gameplay and AI personalities prior to this expansion. Edit: Actually, upon closer inspection the Ancient era campaign is basically a story mode that shows off how much batshit insane customization the game has on the modding front now. For those on the fence about it, here's a quick review from what i've seen so far. I'm seeing weird alliances I have no idea how to get into (They even have names!). And this special alliance is unilaterally excluding me from a massive inter-species trade pact out of spite towards what I did towards a new member.  At the end game galaxy spanning apocalyptic research projects that are probably not a good idea for anyone to research are obviously present just from a brief and incomplete five minute perusal of the new tech tree for humanity. Some of those research projects make planet destroyers look weak too.Interestingly enough, one research option I see requires an in game event to happen. Which I believe is another moddable thing now too on top of all of the other moddable stuff. Case in point, the aforementioned Shakturi plague research option that humans have at the end of one path in one tech tree. Which if you played the prior expansions is one of two or three things that backfired when it literally depopulated the galaxy to the point where every planet was catapulted back to the dark ages, and every ancient era ship was left dead and drifting in space for the classic/shadow era empires to find. Presumably that also includes the ability to make that loving horrifying space outpost you can find in classic/shadows that produces enough space worms to devour everything left alive in the universe after the plague gets done with it.  The end game really seems to amp the apocalyptic poo poo up to incredible levels beyond what your usual planet destroyers and such allowed in most games.There is also a ton of neat features to the campaign i'm noticing. Derelicts have about as much stats as your producible ships at the start for instance. And the story elements are all there in gameplay format from the backstory of the previous world types. This include new custom features for the "campaign" (more like a sim) that none of the other expansions has. Ever wanted to form the freedom alliance? You can do that. Or just delve into research while sticking your head in the sand as the galaxy goes to poo poo. Or a poo poo ton of other stuff that I won't get into since this post is getting a bit long. TL;DR: The new campaign is basically a "Stargate: How The Ancients hosed Up And Got Murdered" simulator from what I can tell so far. Humanity even starts with the "Way of the Ancients" government. The modding potential of the game is pretty crazy too. If you have the prior expansions you'd be stupid not to pick this up before the release discount ends. Even without the new campaign with the inclusion of it on Steam it's almost a certainty this thing will get a crazy mod community if it catches on enough and word of mouth about it spreads. Plus, it's currently only 9.99 for previous expansion owners, at which point it'll be about 19.99 afterwards. Archonex fucked around with this message at 18:39 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 14:32
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ArchangeI posted:You can't Going up against it is pretty unique since it doesn't want to start a war with you (It can "lose" if victory conditions are on by starting wars.) but can pretty much push your poo poo in if you tick it off enough. Case in point, the times it'll touch off a war and pretty much come barreling out of nowhere to murder a civ, all so that it can preempt a ton of other wars getting declared on it due to the chaos the murdered civ was liable to cause. Given how inexplicable some of its actions are it's about the closest thing to an eldritch abomination style AI opponent that i've seen. I've been paging through the config files and you can do some neat stuff like create entirely new governmental systems from scratch. Though you're right that facilities look a bit lackluster in terms of modding capabilities at the moment. Edit: Also, you can do stuff like this: quote:Anyway, here is a little tip on something I discovered just this morning: Someone needs to mod that in for that T-Rex race. Or just create a horrifying insectoid swarm that wants to eat everything. Maybe like the Tyranids? 
Archonex fucked around with this message at 21:24 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 20:26
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quote:How do you find an "Unknown pirate base"? I've just stole a territory map from a pirate faction but I still don't know where their headquarters are. How do you finally wipe a pirate faction out? I had these guys down to nothing an in game year or two ago then they went back to being pains in the dick again. One of several things is happening here: 1. The pirate faction was wiped out and regenerated around when the map was stolen. Unless you set the pirate strength to a ridiculously high number though the regeneration takes quite awhile. This is on top of the fact that the new faction will need to re-arm, get re-established in the local politics, and basically have some prep time before it can do anything but raid poorly defended frontier worlds. 2. The map that was stolen is in fact accurate. When it was stolen they lost their last pirate base. Unlike empires pirates don't just lose the game because they lost their last base of operations. If they have a constructor they can still build a new one. Granted, most of their forces will defect away if they can't refuel in the meantime, but it would explain why the base is "unknown" instead of giving you a location to look for. Most likely another empire (Or if it's an age of shadows game, another pirate fleet.) is the cause of this. If you're wanting to kill a pirate faction, there's a few things you can do: 1. Guard your outer colonies. Mid to late game, this is how savvy pirate and AI players survive the tech advantage empires have. Throw up a few escorts at least until your ships can get there. 2. Destroy every pirate facility you can find. This will absolutely cripple their economy. Doing that leads to defections if they go into the red. Check all your planets for pirate bases and fortresses to assist with this. 3. Keep an eye on independent planets with lots of pirate activity around them. Pirates and empires can use them as refueling points. Pirates can also raid them, which means they can become a hub of activity over time once a facility is set up too. Worst case scenario, the pirates make their top tier pirate facility and they get control of the planet like an empire would. This means they can do everything an empire can, and basically become the local equivalent of the Hutt Cartel from Star Wars. 4. Set up ambushes for their ships. Leave a few destroyers over a planet they commonly refuel at. Or a fleet if need be. This is a really good way to gently caress with a pirate empire that is raiding from far away or has few bases. Since energy weapons require fuel, they'll drop in with low supplies and get butchered by a fully prepped and ready group of modernized military ships. If you have some good interdiction tech you can even make the planet a no jump zone and put a starbase or interdictor over it, effectively cutting it off from usage. 5. Murder every base, ever. If you can't find the base, send out exploration ships. If that fails, board or murder some ships. You can see 3 and 4 for tips on that. I think the boarding option is better than killing them too, since it gives a higher chance of getting an event where you discover the location of a pirate base. Once you have it, run wild on that sucker. Even if it's a gas station go after it. This cripples their supply lines. If it's a fuel based harvesting base it'll also give them one less place to refuel at too. 6. Be aware that smarter pirate factions will put bases in out of the way places. If there's a nebula that murders everything that gets built inside, they'll happily put it in the center and use it for refueling only. If it's a spiral galaxy map, they'll hide a base out in the fringes of the galaxy in a gas cloud. Also, I think they can make discoveries, so they'll happily pick up special stations if possible. 7. Pirate factions don't work like empire factions. When a pirate faction is doing badly, pirates will start to mutiny. They may even start plotting to put a cap in their factional leaders to try and turn stuff around. Generally this means that the more damage you do to a faction, the more likely it is another faction will get their remaining assets. Don't be surprised if this leads to you having a second fleet from farther away show up. In reality it's probably the first factions ships. The plus side to this is that if a faction likes you/if it thinks it'll spite someone, it may give you its stuff when it dies. This can include stations which can vastly increase the range of your ships, along with ships you can retire at your shipyards for huge tech boosts in the early shadows era. Archonex fucked around with this message at 13:38 on May 25, 2014 |
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May 25, 2014 11:39
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nutranurse posted:Just agree to pay them at first, always jumping on the chance to offer payment rather than have them demand it (it's much cheaper if you offer), then, once you start to get your hyperspace legs, pick the weakest pirate, cancel your agreements and throw everything you have at them (including hiring other pirates to off them). Slowly work your way up, pirate group by pirate group, and you'll have a bunch of safe core systems. Alternatively, do what I did. Design a specialized series of deep space and in-system military bases that can gather fuel and other needed resources at vital areas. I use the deep space stations as "hopping" points to new systems I can't normally reach in the early game. Later on they usually get converted into wide range radar stations and shipyards that let me get a huge edge on incoming enemy pirates and fleets. The system stations act as a sort of all purpose shipyard/mining station. Seeing some pirate jump in to try and gank the equivalent of DS-9 or Babylon 5 is pretty hilarious. Especially when they try to get into boarding range only for like 50 torpedoes and laser volleys to just tear it apart. Personally, I prefer playing in the Shadows era with the strong, respawning, and many pirates settings on. Makes it feel like something out of a particularly dark sci-fi series. Especially with epic tech research times. Then I add the DW Extended mod in to get about 40 races in for maximum political backstabbery and chaos. Warhammer 40K ain't got nothing on a galaxy that's so hosed that the only permanent stability is in a few isolated solar systems that are either owned by criminal cartels or the most politically savvy and ruthless empires that can survive that poo poo storm. And then the Shakturi show up. WYA posted:Does this game run really slow/take 10 million years to start up for anyone else? I own a modern gaming PC with the latest drivers, wtf It ran fine for me on an old laptop. Archonex fucked around with this message at 22:32 on May 27, 2014 |
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May 27, 2014 22:25
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Westminster System posted:It's always fun coming across a dead zone full of scarred habitable worlds and finally realizing the AI triggered one so early on it basically made a group of sectors a no-go zone. Giant kaltor swarms in the shadows era are  incarnate for empires. They're rare, but if you're just setting foot into the galaxy it's pretty nightmarish stuff. Picture a capital ship sized spider-scorpion that can inexplicably propel itself through space, sometimes has enough armor to withstand bombardment from fleets, and will hunt down and devour entire ships. Then add in like five or six of them per asteroid field and gas planet/planet with ruins.And just wait until you find a lone space station with a few hundred of them idling around it out in a creepy "dead zone" in the middle of space! That being said, the real reason to enable monsters is Silvermists. Which will straight up aggressively depopulate and destroy entire sectors, all while growing in size and numbers with each kill they make. They're basically a space borne grey goo plague. If the empire that releases them isn't prepared to deal with them it's not uncommon for there to be a hundred or more of them a year or two after they're released, roaming the galaxy, snacking on random ships, stations, and even entire planets. The dead space out in the corner of the map in one of my spiral galaxy games is basically off limits because one of them devoured an entire empire before moving on to the local pirates. It's nothing but devoured planets, hungry nanomachine swarms, and whatever few pirates managed to dodge the purges of both the native monsters and the few empires that tried to clean that mess up. quote:Is there some way to tell your ships not to attack a particular creature? My ships were all trickling out and engaging this space scorpion thing one at a time, dieing and then leveling it up. Before I realized what was happening it am become death, destroyer of worlds. The thing has like 700 hp and is larger than most of the moons in my system. That's a Giant Kaltor. Early game they're pretty horrifying. They may also randomly decide to leave their nest to go hunting in your system too. So have fun with that. If it's early game your best bet is to scrape together a ton of expendable ships into a fleet and just blow the living hell out of it before it can take out the last few of them. Typically your biggest edge up on them early on is that you have Archonex fucked around with this message at 02:54 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 01:52
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Grey Hunter posted:I should do a Rogue Trader style game, load up a pirates game, fill the galaxy with humans and angry aliens and see what kind of empire I can make. A 40K mod shouldn't be to hard to do, if I could find top down ship images for all the races. A 40K mod would be very easy to do, if you had the images. Heck, with some careful modding you could have a permanent god-emperor leading mankind, Tyranids could get huge pop bonuses on devouring worlds, and with the new custom tech trees available each race could have their own things there too. The Moon Monster posted:I seriously have no idea how to deal with these things. I started a new game, created a fleet of 10 destroyers that it still tore through instantly and now it's huge again. And of course my automated ships are still trickling out to fight it. I guess my new plan is to build no military ships until I get warp and then try building twenty at once, making them into a fleet, and attacking. It seems like only the first one or two attacks land and then it just sits on top of the ship and destroys it with impunity without taking any damage. What sort of weapons were you using against it? Phlegmish posted: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. If you have AI automation turned on for building the game tries to balance the number of ships with the size of your empire. That's why. If the workload for your construction ships was also low that might also be why. As for not retrofitting, the way retrofitting automatically works is that it's a queued order. If you didn't wait long enough it would appear they weren't going to retrofit if they had a build order across the system. Alternately, if you removed that queued order by ordering them to do something else, you'd see them not retrofit. Personally I scrap all of the ones that are across the system and just rebuild them if I have the cash. Getting extra-solar and long range inter-solar stations is key to booting up your economy. Delaying on that is a pain in the rear end. Some other general tips: I'd also advise against turning off automatic retrofits. Instead, turn off automatic ship building, and make it on suggestion only. The AI is a bit of a warhawk and will happily deplete your economy if it means getting those last few ships out and about. In reality, as an empire, you can make upwards of 100-200K in income right out the gate after getting out of the pre-warp era by judiciously spending. Just use your own common sense for ship building. The same goes for base construction. Have it suggest it. Bases are the big drain on military financial resources. The AI will happily put half a dozen of the things around your capital if it can, meaning your income will drop like a rock and the more likely planets to get hit won't get any use out of them. Instead, save the massive amounts of cash you get to create specialized deep space military stations and defense bases for outlying planets that are in trouble. Also, never not put up resort and research bases. Resort bases attract migrants from across the galaxy to shop at your tourist traps. While research bases are the core of your empire's advancement, especially on epic settings where just having phasers is an accomplishment. Doubly so on those "dark age" settings I posted up above. Always go for free trade agreements if your race allows it. Certain DW Extended races don't permit this for racial victory conditions if you want to win, but it's a great way to amp your economy to insane levels otherwise. Archonex fucked around with this message at 13:44 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 12:44
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Phlegmish posted: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. That's exactly why. Open up your ship designs and check out their maintenance costs. It's anywhere from 3K to even 7K or more. That's a lot in the pre warp era, but chump change later on. The offset for this is that defense bases are an utter bitch to take down once you research basic shields. But you don't really need them outside of maybe one to fend off surprise attacks at that stage. You can just pay off the pirates until you unlock and research warp field precursor tech and then expand outwards from there. They probably stopped building stations because you ran out of money. Either that or you had no explored planets. Keep in mind that your exploration ships need to explore a planet before the resources are revealed on it. And in the pre warp era it's entirely possible that there will be a lull in building due to a lack of known explored planets. Thankfully your exploration ships do that automatically, so you don't need to babysit them. As for money, you get money in a few ways. However it all boils down to the civilian side of your economy (Except with free trade agreements and other diplomatic treaties, which give a percentage of another economy to yours.). Unlike in a lot of games the government can't just magically generate money from nowhere. Instead the civilian side generates cash through trade of resources, population, and other neat stuff, and you get a cut of it from there. To explain: Trade is done on the civilian end. As I understand it this means that when a freighter buys up a cargo of iron and lead from a private station, the cash is being put into the civilian and governmental side of the economy from a private merchant's hands. Likewise when they purchase a ship, which in that particular case actually dumps an influx of money into your coffers directly. Taxes are just one aspect of the economy, unlike in many 4X games. Think of it less like MOO and more like what would happen if you were one of the empires in a space simulation/trade game like X3:AP or Elite. Of course this means if you have no stations you get severely reduced funding. And if you have no trading partners (Merchants will do this automatically even without a trade agreement. This is what trade embargoes are useful for.) you get less too. So it's in your interest to ensure that your civilian ships aren't stuck twiddling their thumbs at a spaceport, waiting for something to do. This is also why you want a few very rare luxury resources, since they will make you insane amounts of money. Especially since most of them are rare enough on a galaxy wide scale to be expensive. Doubly so since almost all of them increase development rates for planets. Which means they constantly get used up instead of sitting there until something needs to be built, repaired, or refueled. Which means there's always a demand for them from civilian traders and planets. It's not uncommon to see your income almost immediately shoot up by like 10-30K if you get a really good source of them. You can see the financial aspects of your empire if you open you open up the financial menu for your empire. It should be that button in the middle of the rest of the buttons at the top of your screen. You'll see a government/military and civilian section to finances. Part of the civilian section gets taxed to your government side regularly, which is the side you have more direct control over. As a side note, you'll also probably notice that the civilian side is much larger in terms of finances than the government side. That's normal. There's a few neat cheats you can do there to dump that money into your control, but I won't get into them. I will say however that automatic retrofitting of civilian ships appears to be good for your economy. Since they're dumping their cash into upgrading their ships. Which equals up to more money going into the military/governmental side. I notice fairly large income boosts not long after I research a tech they use. Like increased cargo bay sizes for instance. Edit: Also, apologies if all of these posts are really long, but this game has so much depth to it that it's actually hard to condense explanations down into a sentence or two worth of posts. 
Archonex fucked around with this message at 14:13 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 13:51
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Bloodly posted:Then there's fighters, which even now I can't be certain of the true effectiveness of. Though I love them to death. Fighters are force multipliers. Strap a single fighter bay on every escort you own and they can solo down pirate frigates so long as they stay out of range of their weapons. It's probably the best way to make them actually have some staying power. I haven't tried gravitic weapons, mostly because there's a ton of different weapon types out there. I do know that beam weapons have everything from phaser cannons, to blasters, to lances. The range of differences within one "type" of weapon are pretty crazy. With extended one race (outside of the Shakturi) even gets the Shakturi Firestorm Torpedoes, which double as high end torpedoes and a planetary bombardment weapon. Phaser lances are also  as hell though. Many abandoned capitals have them on them, and they boil through armor and shields like they aren't even there. I usually run with a torpedo/lance mix, with me subbing in Shatterforce lasers until I can commonly fit lances.According to the ancient campaign phaser lances are apparently one tech down from super lasers too, which are the 20,000 or so damage a shot "Death Star MKII" lasers that can pop any ship and most bases if they hit. Super lasers themselves are one step down from the planet destroying tier of lasers, which can only be found on world destroyers (Or researched in the ancient campaign.). I picked up two size 1100 capitals that had 612 or so firepower each in my current game. Most of it comes from them just annihilating things with the phaser lances, which they use once a tractor beam has yanked any ships in the fight in range. They're part of the reason why i'm one of only two empires that have actually gotten past two colonized systems 35 years into a shadows era game on a max size galaxy. The ships are longer than some moons. 
Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:56 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 16:19
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Panzeh posted:The derelicts in your starting system are not the ones that can instagib you early on, though they are somewhat powerful. It's usually the capital ships they pick up on the fringes of the galazy. Just pray they never get the devastator pulse super technology. It will annihilate every ship at a port while severely crippling it. The plus side to that is that if you get it pirate bases become treasure boxes. One shot of it will give you like five abandoned ship and station locations since it'll take out the pirate space merchants too. Or failing that you get all the cash they were carrying. quote: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. Space ports are what build civilian ships. So I always try to at least have a small spaceport at a planet, since it gives more shipping for my empire. Archonex fucked around with this message at 16:42 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 16:40
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Phlegmish posted: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. 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. Hell, it's not too uncommon to see a few of them establish actual colonies and sectors they control entirely. For that reason it may be easier to either start with a slight advantage in the AoS if you're new, or just play classic first. When I get a chance i'll show a screenshot of what an area they largely control looks like in an AoS game. It's pretty crazy. Just bases everywhere as each faction squabbles with each other over who gets to raid empires and independent planets. Archonex fucked around with this message at 20:15 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 19:19
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Phlegmish posted: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. Since you're having so much trouble with a AoS start, if you want I can upload my current AoS save so you can see what a sturdy empire looks like. That might be useful for puzzling things out. It's about 30ish years after the start. I've got a fairly large empire (One of only two multi system empires, though both are superpowers.) for the early game and i've exterminated most of the pirates nearby. So that gives you some breathing room to learn the game. I'm also easily pulling in 200,000 even with a huge fleet of ships and stations, along with private military stations for my fleets to refuel and retrofit at. So you can do a fair bit of dicking around without stuff going up in flames. If you want I can even use the editor to give you a bit of a boost so it'll be easier to learn the game without much pressure. That ought to help you get some time to learn how AoS era mechanics work. Only thing you'll need to do is run it with the DW Extended mod. Archonex fucked around with this message at 01:32 on May 30, 2014 |
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May 30, 2014 01:27
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Dirk the Average posted:It's funny, the only thing that stops me from really enjoying this game is, ironically, the ship design system. I like having a lot of choices, but it's a pain in the rear end to set up all of my ships, upgrade them as tech comes online, and deal with the foibles of optimized mining stations and the like. You can just let the game handle that and create specialized ships where needed. That's how you should be doing it anyways. The game is fully capable of handling ship design on its own. Trying to handle ship design yourself is an exercise in futility given how efficient it is at making ships to fulfill your baseline needs. Speaking of specialized ships, I had an idea for a neat way to cross the galaxy early on. I was considering making a bunch of fuel dump stations. Nothing but the bare essentials, a cargo bay, and if it's useful a gas collector. Pretty sure you don't need power to dock and refuel, so you could just have a bunch of defenseless low maintenance stations hanging out in dead space to act as jump points for your shorter range vessels. The only downside is that you'd need a ton of gas collectors to fill them up. It'd probably generate a fair amount of cash too. Archonex fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Jul 13, 2014 |
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Jul 13, 2014 04:22
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Less Fat Luke posted:The in-game description is pretty accurate; they target planet facilities, focusing on ones that provide defensive bonuses first. Very useful to mix them in with invasion forces as it turns out! They're also pretty hardcore in the right circumstances. I dropped three of them on a world and they pretty much slaughtered an entire heavily defended planet with only a bit of minor armor support coming in to support them halfway through. If that Warhammer total conversion mod doesn't make space marines take over their role i'll be pretty disappointed. They seem like they're built for it.
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Jul 28, 2014 22:37
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 16:39 |
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So it's been awhile since this thread had any updates, but some of the stuff people are modding into it is pretty crazy. Notably, it seems that most people use the Extended mod as a base for insanely huge gameplay mods. One of the biggest is the Beyond Extended mod. Which gives every race a unique tech tree progression, makes each one actually unique in terms of how they play, and adds a few extra races. It's actually making some significant progress. http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3657646&mpage=1&key= It's pretty loving bonkers. Just playing as your bog standards human race is pretty crazy. They apparently spec pretty heavily into cruisers, cap ships, and centralized production. I'm running some sort of hideously inefficient Firefly-esque frontier empire where everything moves so loving slowly and there's only the occasional space port. The upside is that my ships utterly destroy anything that actually fight them once they get there. Edit: Also, I just realized the Beyond Extended install is larger than the actual game itself.
Archonex fucked around with this message at 23:05 on Dec 5, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 22:17
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