Bring on the wafer thin mints--surely some of us are trimmer than Mr. Creosote.

That's because that's just a chopping of the overall income of the empire, whears the production/research is something entirely on it's own.

I wouldn't give it an 'exploitable' tag though lol.

Marvin, what you say has completely reasonable in a real world.

It would make sense for the debt limit to increase as your economy grows.  Things like multiple ship upgrades and rush buying can easily take more than ten or twenty thousand bc, so a bigger debt limit means that you can afford to do 'Upgrade All'.

Having a larger debt limit would mean being able to avoid the treasury penalties for more turns.  I'm not saying it wouldn't be ideal for larger maps to allow for much larger treasuries before any penalty sets in (it would!) but one of the ways of avoiding these limitations is to spend down to the last bc.

I think I get you now. My favorite 'little helper' idea for the spend-down problem, an Upgrade All Ships of This Type in This Fleet check box for the Upgrade dialog, didn't manage to make it into 2.0. I wonder if that was because it was for too small a share of the user base (seems plausible) or it was actually a real coding hassle (seems odd, but I'm not a coder). An option like that would save *lots* of clicks that I do now mainly to spend my way back below 10K or 20K treasury.

But maybe a scaled debt limit like you suggest would do the same thing only better-letting us borrow a big pile and get back out of the deep, deep red in a few turns. It would seem weird to see my treasury at like -50K, but when I'm pulling in over 20K per turn, maybe that's not so scary a thing.

Great topic and great posts. Here is my two cents:

1. I'd like to be able to differentiate my planetary improvement options into "favored" and "less favored" categories as opposed to "new" and "old" categories. It is a pain to have to look at a lot of improvements you know you aren't going to use, or aren't going to use right now, every time it comes to making an improvement. It is also a pain to have to go look for an improvement in the "old" section when that improvement makes so much more sense that what is being offered to you in the new section. I'd like the improvement list to be customizable into the improvements I regularly use, while all the rest are stored in my "library" of improvements until I wish to move them onto my quicklist.

2. I'd like to be able to combine starships with starbases into stationary fleets for defense purposes.

Not entirely true, and entirely beside his point. If a starbase has had weapons put on it, its considered the same as any other ship in a stack when attacked. The highest priority fleet gets attacked first, so it's completely possible to have small ships defending a base by sitting on top of it and have the base blown out from under them.

Besides, his point is that you should be able to make the base part of a fleet, adding its firepower to the fleet defending it. And if they hard coded the base to be the last targeted ship in a fleet, you could put fleet modules on the base for added kick. (Not hard coding that would result in the base being targeted first, of course).

Not sure if Frogboy is only refering to TA and how many of those things  they've changed since October. But I would have disagreed with him on a couple of points and maybe added a few different ones to the list, gotta keep it at a nice number like 10.

Dark Avatar:

3. I think the AI is good about getting mining techs. They tend to get some before I do, especially the Terrans.

8. The defence techs are pretty cheap in DA. By the time i get to them I can set my research slider to around 60% and get like one a week.

What the game should change is the AI's ability to invade with transports, not just in making and sending them, but in protecting them and having a large enugh force to take a planet. They need to build farms for higher populations to protect against invasion as well as creating transport filler. Almost all AI planets are maxed at 6 billion while mine are at 13.

I'm now playing a suicidal game, the Korath had me completely and utterly outmatched when they declared war. However I saw just one spore ship that was destoyed and some transports that kept attacking the same planet and got it down to just 400 or so million before the transports stopped. I'm now going to win this war having aleready taken about 70% of their planets. At one point I didn't have a single planet defended and yet I lost no planets.

I just started playing but all I ask is not to be invited to the UN meeting when I dont have Universal translator. Thx!

Someone suggested on page one that you could only trade techs you yourself can research.

Good luck. I barked up that tree non-stop leading up to TOTA and it never went anywhere. Tech brokering is a good start, but for those of us who want truely unique races, that was really the only option I foresaw working the best. And I STILL believe that.

First of all, the research tree describes the potential knowledge of your civilization. This means that due to some sort of unique circumstances, your race can understand certain concepts that other races cannot. After all, are you telling me that I can design a gun that fires BLACK HOLES, but not a way to make my planets more fertile and healthy? Obviously something about that technology is dependent on a very special set of circumstances that exist ONLY to the Altarians and the Drath.

Here's an in-game comparison - the Thalans. All the Thalan history is based off of Gravitrons and Temporal Mechanics. You cannot trade these technologies to anyone. The reason is explained in the lore - the technology is all based off understanding a fundamental particle of nature that nobody else knows exists (Gravitrons) that exists in dimensions nobody else can comprehend (11 of them). It's IMPOSSIBLE for another race to understand.

If you want an idea of what this is like, I want you to think about how you'd explain what the color 'red' looks like to someone who has been blind since birth.

The fact is, for lore reasons, most races have no business trading semi-unique technologies. The Drengin and the Korath, being Drengi, have unique physiology that allows them to sense and derive pleasure from pain other creatures feel. No other race can do this. Therefore, exactly WHAT USE would Terrans have for Pain Amplifiers? Go ahead and puzzle THAT one out for me.

This would also fix exploitable behavior. Torians are supposed to be poor researchers, hence their weak +Research% bonuses. Have you ever seen what happens when the Torians trade for DISCOVERY SPHERES? They go from the WORST researchers to the most brilliant minds in the galaxy.

Not only would this provide a very SANE and PRACTICAL set of limitations around the completely-broken tech-trading system, but this would also:
 - Encourage trading amongst 'similar' races - Altarians and Drath, Drengi and Korath, for example.
 - Curb the obscene 'everything must go' behavior of the AIs.
 - If you're worried about this crippling your races, think again - probably 80%+ of ALL tech trees share most of the same technologies - miniaturization, weapons, defenses, hulls, diplomacy, etc.

Seriously, throw me a bone here. I couldn't POSSIBLY make a better case, so I don't see why this keeps getting swept under the rug. Hell I don't even see how this would be difficult - you wouldn't have to revise the tech tree .xml files with new flags - conceivably, nothing more than an 'If - Then - Else' would work.

Indeed.  +45% total if memory serves, and about +30% that is actually worth getting if you're not going for a tech victory.

Probably was meant to be "hence their weak research buildings with +Research% bonuses."

Which is funny when you think about it, because although their highest "normal" research building is only 10tp, they do have access to neutrality learning centers, which oddly enough in their tree doesn't even require that they have any of their research techs researched.

Yes that's what I mean - other races get direct +TP bonuses, Torians are stuck with 'Schools' and research technologies that give them a percentage bonus. And I completely forgot about the neutrality learning centers. Still, the point stands. Torians have no business with that technology - the reflection here is that the Torian mind simply doesn't work in that way. Again, the Thalans rely on massive computers to brute-force their way to new technology - they are simply unable to comprehend spontaneous creativity. So what good would a research center do them? Not an ounce, lore-wise.

Feh. To me that's no different than complaining that Dawn of War is too hard because the Space Marines don't get certain Necron units. Finding a way to justify why they should have Necron units doesn't change the fact that them having Necron units is stupid in the first place.