Sci-fi issues...

[wtiger]

Questions...

1. In the Science Fiction game, when you play as the humans, there is an advance called Primitive Weapons, that has no prerequisites, is not a prerequisite for anything, and does not allow you to build anything (In other words, it's useless). Was this intentional?

2. It appears that the Dreadnought and the Hammer have advances that make them obselete (IMHO, prematurely). Is this a game-balancing issue?

3. [BUG] It appears that the Spaceport allows any unit to teleport to any city (that has a spaceport) on any world, even though the unit cannot use a teleporter and/or cannot survive on that world. Is this fixable? Will it be fixed? Is there any workaround for this (apart from honesty, that is)?

Thanks.

--
wtiger

[John Possidente]

Primitive Weapons got caught in the balancing process. It was originally the prerequisite for humans' first defensive unit. However, not providing a military unit right from the start turned out to be a very bad idea. After that change, other bits and pieces of the game balancing gradually whittled away at PW's usefulness. By the time it was completely meaningless (except for a few research points, I guess), it was too late to do anything about it. (No way was I going to rearrange the research tree that late in the QA process.) So it was an accident, but one we recognized before it went out the door--and decided. "What the heck. It doesn't hurt anything. Let it go."

The Dreadnought and Hammer were originally much more powerful, so they were set up to not last very long, to balance out their unbalancing strength. When we tuned down the power, I also spread out their obsolescence so that they'd be more useful. However, while in game terms they do become obsolete a little too soon, the technologies and units that become available would, logically, make them obsolete. This is one of those situation where we had to try to balance realism and gameplay; the solution is rarely perfect.

Do you have the patch installed? I honestly don't remember whether the Spaceport is supposed to act that way, but I think if it does allow units to go where they don't belong, we would have set it up so that those units can't leave the city once they get there. (Inside the city, we could say, they're protected from the dangerous elements.)