Using the option of running...

[bakalov]

I think Micro is important in the early game when you do not have so much planets, so its not so frustrating. Placing the DEAs on the newly colonized/captured worlds is a one time operation - and even find it interesting :-) . If you let the AI do this then it can put a completely inappropriate DEA on a fine special for example. The bad thing about the AI is that it tries to satisfy the current needs but its decisions seem to be useless in the long run. I think that once the DEAs are marked it goes OK.

Besides the thing about the overflowing of the richest planets treasuries - if you set the spending to 1% the AI will let it be such for certain amount of time and then will change it. (I hate it about this). I have a game where by overflowing of the top 20 of my planets nets me ~15M AU each turn, so I do not need any system or imperial taxes.

I like playing human too :-) I always did in MOO2 - the picks there were equal for everyone.
The good things in MOO3 is that the humans do not have natural enemies besides the Ithkul (or am I wrong?) By natural enemies I mean such that declare war on you from first sight.

By my observations the diplomacy system works as follows: The aliens will be peaceful to you while you are big as much as they are. If you are much smaller or much bigger then they will tend to declare wars. You should try to make so that the reason for the war is the second :-) When you are bigger then you probably will be able to win the war ...

And may be it is better to play more slowly, and to win and become a space emperor :-)

[Anguille2]

Originally posted by ChristopherC

This genre should really be maturing, as home computers become more powerful, and I do firmly believe, it will remain a popular one, but neither game makers or the marketers are investing enough in it, why? For instance, why did the developers of 'Galaxy Andromeda' pull out when it was so near completion? That was so frustrating for many of us! Why didnt they take what I would have regarded as a justified risk? Isnt that what marketing is all about?

They were not funded anymore....HOWEVER!!! I have good news for you, the game will be released with a new publisher. The Game has a new name: Nexus.

http://www.nexusthegame.com

enjoy

[vmxa1]

I am always glad to see new space games, but I just can't play those Homeworld rts types. They look great, thought.

[ChristopherC]

That is greattt news, Anguille2. Many thanks for the information. I will watch out for it!

Bakalov, if I remember correctly, some one said that the game was not properly balanced in the play-testing so the humans have an inbuilt disadvantage! I just dont think any sort of strategy will work! If that is true, I am dismayed! It must be axiomatic, at least on the easier levels, that unless you are even more incompetent as a space emperor than I am, (I grant you I am no great shakes as a space emperor but I cant be the worst ever to click on a cursor!) you ought to be able to win! This is where a scenario editor, as in Alpha Centauri - Alien Crossfire helped me! I LOVED that scenario editor feature in Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire where you could set up who would be your friends, allies or neutrals before the game started.

Bakalov, for all your attempts to help me, which I do appeciate, I dont think I could ever begin to rival the expansion of other races than human even on the easiest levels. The game just seems rigged against the humans! If I replay the game, there is apparently a MOD, as I told you, which I have yet to test, to give me extra points to award to the humans. I think I will try to use that; I see that as my best hope! But thanks again for your thoughful suggestions.

Things would easier on my heart, which having had a heart attack at Christmas, I must now be more careful of, if I started stamp-collecting instead! But no, for me the most wonderful, the most sophisticated and the most endlessly fascinating and challenging of game challenges lie in space! I think though that if you are, like me, a Sci-fi fan, as I imagine most of you are, no other genre will do!

In short, gentlemen, the basic problem is that we are alive forty to sixty years too early, the AI which will replace our humble home computers will tailor games exquisitely to our tastes, while they are secretly planning to take over the world from us!

Live long and prosper, my friends.

[bakalov]

I am sure you can beat them even on impossible with humans. In spite of the lack of ballance. I am sure you can have all of the X's at about turn 130-140 with humans. At the start just go expanding and researching towards the Research Laboratory in physics. Then build and send 5 armadas with maxed out research labs. This should happen at turn ~80-90.

If you are constantly expanding the AI will not declare war except if you hit Ithkul. With those racial picks you can compete with the aliens even on impossible - be sure!

Once you accomodate the 5 X's there will be no problems to beat them - just pick the smallest and eat him. Do not build troops from your race - gargantua or mrrshan or bulrathi will do fine.

[ChristopherC]

Many thanks for the advice, Bakalov...

... will consider it for a future game...

... though with more select and I hope helpful MODs in it!

Like the one giving me more bonus points and possibly Jazkal's 'optimist' MOD if some one can tell me how to apply it! Hey, Jazkal, if you are out there, your MOD sounds interesting about delaying the confrontation between empires. Can you add a read-me to it, please? And also, have you had problems with DirectX errors with it? As I did when I applied it, admittedly in the middle of my present game, which maybe I shouldnt, particularly as it is so modded already! Still, while isnt helping me win, though, the presentation looks better and at least the diplomatic exchanges are intelligible, even grammatical now!

Many thanks again, Bakalov, for trying to be so helpful to me.

God bless and take care, my friend.

[Keeblerdawg89]

Hello... I read at least most of the more recent parts of this thread... I got a suggestion of what to do (which almost always works for me) when you get that "DirectX surface..." error... Instead of killing the power or yanking the power cord and hoping Windows forgives you, push the CD drive's eject button! You may have to hold it down until the CD pops out, then just wait a second... If it does or doesn't pop out right away doesn't matter, BUT this will cause your computer to kick out to a new screen asking you if you really want to pop out the CD and also shows the "stop/error" box which shows that MOO3 just committed a major error and will be shut down... Once you got all of that showing, just close MOO3 and any window related to it... If you get a blue screen saying something about or complaining about popping out your CD and more-or-less requiring that it's put back in, then close the CD drive with the disk in it... At this point, your computer should be acting like you simply shut down MOO3 normally or never ran it and can restart the game... And all of that without rebooting your computer in any way......

Next... Editting programs.... In the interest of saving your very threatened empire, there is a save edittor out there called something like Moo3Editv0.51. Make a copy of your save file first in case of bad editting. You'll always get one of those DX surface errors if you do something wrong... You can do many things with it, but I recommend you don't change your population numbers... Adding to your population causes major unrest... Also, you can move startlanes around quite extensively or create new ones entirely!! Be carefull how you do that as deleting existing lanes tends to cause the DX surface errors nearly 100% of the time... But, you can "edit" or move one end or the other of a lane to wherever you like! You can even completely isolate any empire from any kind of access to you unless they go "off-road" (which, I don't think I've ever seen the AI even try to do yet). You can also move your star systems to wherever you want by editting the X/Y/Z coordinates... X is left to right (Orion is usually "zero" with left being more negative and right more positive), Y is up and down (Orion is again "zero" with up being more negative and down being more positive), and Z is more a function of brightness with more positive being brighter... I don't know what the boundaries are for any of those coords, yet, or if it depends on the starting map size... Here's a fun idea (which I actually did)... Start a huge galaxy with 12+ other empires then isolate 70-80% of the stars to being connected only to your system and all the other races have to try to go through Orion to get to your starlanes... Hehehe!! Since they won't be able to do that for a loooooooong time, and aren't likely to go "off-road", that gives you plenty of time and space to do all sorts of stuff and experimenting without any more influence than whatever happens with the Orion Senate (if you're connected to it).

As for modding... I'm just learning that now... I would like to know how (if possible) you can add/remove any specific technologies to the tech tree of any 1 race or type/grouping of races... I have an idea how to go about figuring that out for myself, but want to hear from someone who's already done it so I can get to it faster...

[bakalov]

I think you can mark a tech as mandatory but then it will appear in the tech trees for all races (like space shipyard modules and the different hull sizes).
For the various species you can modify certain constants but I think they only affect the speed at which they research at certain fields and not the appearing techs.

[Keeblerdawg89]

Hmmm... What does this setting do?? In Spreadsheets.mob/TechTables ... SpeciesPref section... Down the left column it goes "School_ID" then "TTL" then "TAR"... I got an idea what the first one does, but not sure... I think TTL stands for total percentage of techs you can get, but (so far) changing th value to 100 or to 20 doesn't seem to make a difference... Then there's TAR... No clue what that is for... Anyone got any ideas?? One of those settings may give me a chance to research all the techs... In case you're wondering why I would want to do such a thing, I just want to be able to see how each tech works in-game without having to play every race (maybe at least twice each) in order to see them all... After that, I might be able to see which race will end up with the best over-all techs...

Also, I couldn't find that area you were talking about to mark your techs... Maybe you could tell me which file you're talking about???

Oh... and here's a fun idea.... How to insert/add a new tech not currently being used in the game... Or even to create one from scratch...... I got an idea on that, but not sure of how to do it right... I'll get back to that...

[Stormhound]

TTL and TAR are two things that may or may not have been implemented as designed (and since I designed them...)

As originally created (and you have to keep in mind, this was back when you got a lot more choice in which projects you did or didn't pursue), TTL was Tech Tolerance Level, a measure of how quickly much accumulated change your race would accept. Every time you researched a new tech, it added to a number which was compared to the TTL. If your accumulated tech improvements rose above the TTL, you got empire-wide unrest. TAR was Tech Acceptance Rate, which was a number subtracted every turn from the number that got compared to TTL.

The idea was that people would accept a certain amount of change without getting unhappy about it (including reasons like workers getting teched out of jobs, and such). It was meant to make the player decide whether a new available advance was really needed now, or could wait or even be skipped entirely.

The numbers have nothing whatsoever to do with how many techs you get...that is handled in racemodifiers.txt, and is the very last number for each race in the Racemod table (the first one in the file). However, even setting that number to 100 will not guarantee all the techs; there's some additional number-shuffling that goes on which I didn't have a say in, and for which I don't have the formula.

[bakalov]

Keeblerdawg89, look in the TechTables.txt for "KEEPTHIS". This string marks the techs that always appear.

Stormhound, I've found that with the races I usually play I research physics and mathematics harder than the other fields. Any idea from where this can be tweaked?

[Stormhound]

Nope, sorry.

[Keeblerdawg89]

OK... So setting my TTL to 100 and TAR to 0 (if it will accept this) or 10 is a good way to make sure you don't get any unrest from technologies gained... Also going to the "racemod" section of the racemodifiers.txt and changing that last number (66 for most of them) to 100 supposedly can get you all the techs...

I didn't know that was what TTL and TAR meant... THANKS!!

I tried the 66-to-100 change last night and still didn't notice a 100% change or that I was suddenly getting all the techs (note that I picked the Psilons and started new games each time I changed something). I DID find (or think so) a way that guarantees getting all the techs in the tech tree... Under that "racemod" section is a string of values under the "modifiers" column where you can add (within the quotes) "TechKnow+=50" (or more)... If I understand right, that number is the number of techs added to your tech tree over your base/starting tech tree settings including whatever you would've gotten that was random and from some non-cheating game... So... If 50 is more than the number of techs left-over from what you would otherwise get, then you'll get tech-tree adds until they're all out of choices!! Does that sound right?

I'm also thinking that putting the "Keep this" into every tech's appropriate slot would give all races all the techs with that tag... That also sound right??

I'm also trying to figure out a concept to bring back the stargate from MOO2... My thoughts are (so far):
--it would take 2 turns to use, 1st to establish a temp. wormhole, 2nd to move the ships
--it can send non-warp (system-only) ships
--it would be considered a planetary item
--both sending and receiving systems have to have one built
--it should be added to (but only a thought) to military DEA's or the same way shipyards and other "planetary" items are organized
--call it either a Stargate or Temporary Wormhole Creator

I'm also trying to figure out what to do about that tech level limit I'm seeing... 50 levels may be too soon an end to getting all of them... What about a way (like in MOO2 or other games I've played) where you begin researching advanced theories of making the tech types better? In the way this game was constructed, I see no easy way to do it except to outright add new techs to the TechTables file where needed... I've already begun construction such adds, but have them set outside the tables for further contemplation....

Last thing for now... I saw a cheat mod on MOO Guardian (by Zez, I think) which put me on to another idea... Adding more starting options (in the way he did) caused all the headers ONLY to show in the race editting page (after you chose your race) with no descriptions when I think he had good descriptions in his patch... Any ideas what structuring I need to look for so the game will match all that up correctly? I got some ideas already, but want other ideas, too.

...I'm still thinking about other stuff....

[Keeblerdawg89]

Here's a biggie.... I'm looking for ideas on how to add the option set to choose a starting planet size? I already know I'll at least need to edit wsRaceDesc.txt and racemodifiers.txt, but I don't know about any other editting...

Also, I tried to add "Very Rich" as an option to starting mineral richness, but can't get the game to pop up the proper sellection description (in that far upper right window of the customize race picks screen). I thought I editted those 2 files to put that into the right place, but that first description always shows the top description of any other option I click on (upper left side) then back to Mineral Richness is what's shown instead... I also changed the kUnicodD and kUnicode info as needed in both files.... Now I'm outta ideas for the moment....

[Stormhound]

I don't think you CAN choose a starting planet size. Your starting planet is supposed to be nearly ideal for your race, and size would affect that significantly.