Oh, but that is ALSO true... a ruleset shouldn't dictate to me how my optimal choices of a strategy can influence my performance as it compares to some AI opponents. Once known, any rules can be adapted to -- but, seriously, if an AI has built-in "functions" that favors it too much why should i even bother myself trying to find THE way to defeat it **IF** i'm enforced to play under a different (and most probably weakened) ruleset.

All this does is create the illusion that *wow* these AIs are sooooo greatly coded, i can't even match their strengths while in fact, the tactical aspect of competition becomes simply useless not to say hopeless.

To me, the actual normal race (while brokering is On or Off, btw) for Techno edges is plenty enough to gain or lose any sort of an advantage at any gameplay point. Supplement this factor with artificial - hidden or otherwise - boosts, you cancel out purely but instinctive balance altogether.

Should Iran get the Nukes? If somebody else has it. That's reality. If the past is any indications, we may yet again have another Cold-War where nobody *would* win, but everyone *must* lose. Now, that's stupid... using your words.

Gameplay principles aside, an AI mimics human behavior along with some capacity.

I'll go with no.

Zyx has lots of good points in general, but his command of the English language is not quite as impressive as he thinks it is (no offense intended, seriously).  So he uses words slightly out of order and slightly out of context and the rest of us are left to ponder the true meaning of them.

I actually quite like Zyx aside from this quirk.

But, you see, I come into this thread already having this information about his posting style, and have in fact not actually read the post in question; I merely skimmed it.

Apart from that, I would agree with your post wholeheartedly: Assuming that's what he meant (which is never as clear as it perhaps should be), that's a perfectly valid response.

Good points too, in general. Truth be said that while i mostly mod around a huge number of "concepts & assets" for both DA and TA, i also play+ed many (count to 100's and keep going) test_games with those tasking priorities in mind.

If i were to simply step out of this mental framework and actually PLAY for real, i'd certainly enjoy a different perspective on the whole but uncustomized thingy - for sure. Deeply involved into finding the right balance for some mod features, i also tend to forget what the core design principles of SD coders are meant to create gameplay wise.

In fact, when it comes to modding -- it's Tabula Rasa. All hell brakes loose, every last values and data found as defaults *must* be examined & fiddle with. Scrutinized to the point where usual concept(s) fall apart to such extremes that the casual gamer WOULD feel completely lost. 37 Trade-Goods instead of 11 in X-Worlds is just the tip of an iceberg. I'll freeze 'hem all solid with the upcoming TerraForming system in 06-A.

Thus, why i'm sooooo inclined into comprehending the entire scope of the Ruleset & how some specific alterations can indeed introduce chaos to an already shuffled up deck of random rules. It's like swinging a sortof magic wand impervious to the fact that it may just screw things around sooooo much, it IS becoming even more unbalancing in itself.

Techno race (12 times over, btw too) can indeed introduce huge implications in most logical strategies of the many types of players out there (one being only me, the tricky modder with weird thoughts of his own) while brokering, IMHO, limits our control over important gameplay issues. It's a two way sword that only cuts through someone's emotional state IF their reaction includes sharp distinctions between fairplay & what kind of influence they might have over the *predictable* outcome_S -- again, Win or Lose.

While 95% of SD designer's programming work (absolutely amazing, btw) may simply reside in the Ruleset, it's what we make of it (in a bazillion different ways) that defines "gameplay" situations.

I ***REST*** my case.

-The Yor's SA is at least in the top three, even in the colony rush.
-The Yor's economic bonuses aren't reliant on a government, so you don't need to keep morale as high.
-The Yor don't need as much of a boost to morale, given their farm/morale dual improvement, which works fairly well due to increasing population only slightly.
-The Yor economy is not as hard as everyone thinks it is, and is oddly enough well suited to all-factory.
-If you play with Mega Events on, the Yor are top dog assuming you can get Disease and/or Plague to trigger-their tree has preventative measures, and the Yor themselves start with both of the techs in question already researched.  Granted, at present this is almost AI abuse except for the whole getting specific events to go off thing, but assuming the AI did respond properly, it would still be an advantage, because the AI wouldn't be doing something else.

I would say at a minimum the Arceans and Korx are worse than the Yor.  Possibly even the Thalans, but the AI seems to have been fine tuned for them.

The AI not being able to play it, and most human players not being able to play it, is another thing entirely.

I've rarely ever play Yor, but as Sole mentioned, the AI doesn't have a clue how to do any of that stuff. Either way, with all things the same, and if you had 2 players of exact same play styles and abilities going at it, the Yor do not stand on near even ground in most scenarios. Having good farms and morale gives them the ability to make there territories and worlds a bit harder to invade, other than that, they aren't capable of reaping in the BC that most other civ's can. Isn't that the game 'Money Wins'. I find it odd that you feel the Thalans are worst (granted I haven't played as Thalans in some time, so for a human player they may be), from the AI's perspective, they tend to do quite well with them during gameplay... unbalanced perhaps from a players perspective, but any AI balancing issues I feel stem from personality coding issues, and many of the civ's weren't programmed as well as, say, the Torians and Terrans.

I think the Korx are viewed this way due to the fact that their main ability relies on trading, and since trading is nerfed to an extreme in the game, it is almost worthless other than to improve relations with other civ's by sending a freighter there. Granted the most BC I've been able to make per turn trhough trading is 5000/turn, but there was a very high cost to get there, required over 30 or so economic trade starbases to be spammed all over the map. But since half of those economic starbases did double duty to help my local planets as well, it wasn't too bad. This took more than half the game (3+ years) to complete. That was w/o the Korx, Korx could have probably gotten that up quite a bit.

But all in all, those abilities don't quite do much, since every civ will research trading anyways.. the advantage isn't big enough to make them particularly great at anything. There may be some other things, but that may be the main one.

Not only did trade overall get nurfed, the Korx starting abilities got decimated in ToA. In Dark Avatar, they actually up'd them a bit from DL.

Dark Avatar
Economics: +15
Trade: +50
Trade Routes: +3
Courage: +10
Logistics: +6

ToA
Trade: +50
Trade Routes: +3
Loyalty: -20
Logistics: +6

So, they get rid of the Korx Ecomomics ability (why? who knows, they are money hungry mercs, they should get an economics bonus), but not only that, they get rid of their Courage ability, and add a -20 loyalty penalty! So now their planets will flip at any sign of culture. Talk about making a civ going from alright in DA to crap in ToA.

Same thing with Arceans, in Dread Lords they were pretty good, in DA they lost some very strong abilities, including +20 to social and military production inherent abilities. Then in ToA they took away their +20 to Morale and ADDED a -10 speed 'feature'. The reason why they used to be pretty good and now they suck except under very specific circumstances.

Granted, all starting abilities changed quite a bit for all the civ's, it's just strange that the game under DL and DA used to seem much more balanced overall. I don't think enough playtesting went into ToA to test all the massive changes that were made.

If you knew their names, you could knock them off via the maintenance/loan screen.

I just replied to a post just like that like two days ago.

If you hit the Delete button when you have a fleet selected, it will ask you if you want to decommission all of the ships in the fleet, but you'll (at last check) only get money for one of them (my guess is the first one).

The map is still too small... Even the biggest. Should be ad least 5 times bigger. And more minor planets. It should be the size of the star trek universe with several quadrants. One quadrant should be 4 times GC2 largest map imo.

Also, i find it hard to find a planet or ship. CTRL F should be great.

And you should be able to liberate conquered civs.

Here's the few I have:

1) Reduce the aggro generated by fleet modules: I like that fleet modules make a ship more desirable to attack, makes armor a lot more useful. But I think right now the aggro bonus is too high. Its too easy to pack 1 weapon and godly armor on a ship with a fleet module and make your fleet practically invisible for very little money. I know there are other ways to do this with hp modules, but with armor its dirt cheap and very easy.

2) Remove obsolete weapons/armor/modules from the ship building screen. Not a huge request, but in many cases when I get new weapons and armor they are completely superior in every way to what you had before. No reason to see a screen full of 20 weapons when only 3 of them I might actually use. Sensors are the easiest example, sensors III is superior in EVERY way to sensors I (cheaper and smaller with same benefit). So why not just have sensors III instead of the less optimal choices.

3) Star Base Automation...allow me to turn off certain kinds of modules: I love that I can automatically have constructors build modules on my starbases. I hate that unless I watch them like a hawk I suddenly get sensor modules and the like when I do not want them. Heck in many cases for economic bases I would love to just build production modules and not trade modules.

4) Consider reducing bonus from luck/creative traits or increasing their cost. For the points, these are the best traits in the game.

5) Either decrease unhappiness caused by high population or perhaps consider an extra bonus for a high population planet. To me its sad that 3x food tiles often go to waste because you just can't afford the morale to actually get the population maxxed out. Or perhaps an extra econ/influence/production bonus for population past a certain point...would make all attempts to increase morale worthwhile.

6) Make voting more useful. For one, it would be nice to know what resolution is coming up before I vote so I might actually consider whether to trade influence. Or perhaps increase the frequenty of voting, sometimes even having two votes that you split your votes between. I would say out of the entire game, the voting is the weakest part of the gameplay, its random and is never something I actively work to get a big stake in. If I happen to have a dominant vote, then great...but I never make it a game goal.

7) Reduce asteriod attrition with distance. I think its fine that asteriods provide less resources the farther away they are, but right now the amount drops like a stone. It would be nice to have asteriods a bit farther away still provide a good bonus. Perhaps this could be apart of the space mining tech tree...or even an economic starbase module.

8) A way to increase the radius of military starbases. I'm a big fan of miiltary starbases...starbase building is actually my favorite part of the game. Unfortunately as the game progressions, ship speed increases to the point that it becomes impractical to maintain a large amount of miiltary starbases as there is too much ground to cover. If there was a module, tech, or other criteria that could increase the radius that would be very useful I think.

GalCiv II 2.0 still needs to let starbases show the exact names of modules which can be installed. Cause "3 modules left" can mean just about everything and it is a major pain to see whether a miner module can, or cannot be installed already(or yet)