Ascendancy

[Cyclotron]

Plasmatrons with positron bouncers and accutrons are better.

[Asmodean]

Originally posted by cyclotron7

waiting for a response.

That, in four words is the story of The Logic Factory.

Asmodean

[Grumbold]

I still replay ascendancy occasionally. Definitely a game with unrealised potential. Just getting the AI to build the right buildings on the right planetary resource tiles would have been nice.

[vmxa1]

Originally posted by cyclotron7
Plasmatrons with positron bouncers and accutrons are better.

There are better weapons than Plasmatrons. The nanomanipulator is very powerful, but I just love to sit outside of the range of ship or base and ping them with the trons. I also like to whack attackers with Long Range missiles.

[Earthling7]

Just checking in as an old Ascendancy player.

I haven't played it in years and probably won't play it again as I've moved over to a totally different platform, but it was a great game at the time.

[vmxa1]

No matter what platform become available, I will keep one to run all my old games. I learned the hard way to hold on to them, even if I only start them up for a few turns.

Alien Legacy is one of those games I like to play just a bit, but find it hard to finish any more. Just to refresh my memory.

[Earthling7]

I'm on Mac now. Ditched all Win machines. Still, there is always VirtualPC where one could install Win98 or something.

Talking of online play. Is EVE Online something for old Asc. players?

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by cyclotron7


Personally, I'd rather have it rushed and have the beta released as the final product than never get it at all.

I'd say it's a toss up.

[Cyclotron]

The most unbalancing part of ship design is the wave scatterer; fill half the hull of an enormous ship with those suckers and you can make yourself totally invulnerable (except from a disintigrator). Since they don't use power, even a nanomanipulator will never get through, ever.

I suppose the only ways to pierce a defense like that would be disintigrators, shield blasters, and gizmographers (if they do what I think they do). I always thought it was interesting that any multiplayer ascendancy would probably hinge on those specials, which aren't used very often in single player (if you're like me).

On the other hand, maybe the Myrmidonic carbonizer could crack open a wave-scatterer ship at ideal range, but it's pretty hard to figure out exactly what that range is. Now that's a pretty wierd weapon.

[vmxa1]

Too me the one thing I was miffed about was the lack information, not the crappy AI.

I had been playing Moo1 and when I got the guide for Ascendancy, I was shocked. It had nothing, ideas, no concepts, no data. Just a bunch of generalities about each item.

So as you say, we do not know the range from the docs.

[Cyclotron]

If you mean the strategy guide, it's true that it didn't give much in the way of hard numbers, but most numerical variables seemed pretty evident; i.e., the power of weapons, power of shields, output produced by buildings, aren't too hard to see with the interface. The kicker is range, which involves a lot of guesswork to "know" where you must be to be out of the range of a hypersphere driver but in the range of a plasmatron, for instance.

Ideally, in Ascendacy 2 selecting a weapon would bring up a "range sphere" around a ship, so you could see what your range was (and in the case of a carbonizer, tell where your ideal range was).

Of course, if you look up "Ascendancy FAQ" on google, you'll find a lot of FAQs that claim to know range values for various weapons, such as this one on neoseeker. Of course, I haven't checked these figures, but they seem about right.

So, would anyone contribute to a ship design contest?

[vmxa1]

All I can remember is that you need to have enough power to run your guns. I remember how easy it is to mess up and forget all the parts needs to go out of the system.

[Grumbold]

Originally posted by Earthling7
Talking of online play. Is EVE Online something for old Asc. players?

EVE has nothing in common with it apart from the superficial space setting really.

[Cyclotron]

I'm not sure there is much in the way of an equivalent game, at least not that I've played. I'm not exactly sure why a lot of Ascendancy's basic ideas were never copied.

[vmxa1]

Space Empires has some aspect that recall it.