Zerg_Food

Reply to Why Master of Magic is Cool. Might want to get a drink and cancel any appointments. in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

The Halfling Hordes are strong starters, particularly with Warlord and Alchemy. Only Halflings, with their unique innate food bonus, can field a large army of slightly above-average troops in a very short period of time. Because of the way the "unit multipliers" work, and because Halfling troops come in squads of 8 instead of 6, you can turn those slightly above-average troops into superior troops with just a little bit of tweaking, and Warlord and Alchemy do the job right out

Reply to Mini freighters and Starbases in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Is there a way to tell how much money a given starbase will make next turn? When you click on a freighter and your VP tells you the cash it will bring in that turn, does that value include starbase trade enhancements?

Reply to Altarian Campaign? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I downloaded the update but still don't get mission briefing text. Oddly the update seemed to be for GC and GC multimedia, not for AP. I can and have always been able to read the mission briefings in the scenario editor. Would I need to restart the campaign in order for the mission briefing fix to take effect?

Reply to Why Master of Magic is Cool. Might want to get a drink and cancel any appointments. in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

If you've never played the original Master of Orion, you should absolutely go out and get it. Underdogs has it for free. There's a game that was done right: micromanagement is almost nil, you can build and manage fleets of thousands of ships as easily as managing half a dozen in any other game, and you get to design your own ships. Even though the most important part of the game is building an empire that can compete industrially, technologically, and militarily with an insan

Reply to Minimap Error in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Ahh, ok, thanks. I found something else that is most definitely a bug: If you capture a planet and take technology from an opponent, you lose all your accumulated research points REGARDLESS of what tech you're researching. If I take Battleship from an opponent while I'm researching Battleship, I expect to lose the accumulated points, but if I'm 2 turns away from Battleship and take, say, Stellar Cartography from an opponent, I LOSE MY ENTIRE INVESTMENT in Battleship te

Minimap Error in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Enemy ships within scanning range aren't showing up on the minimap.

Reply to Trading deals in Strategies Stardock Forums

How do you tell what the "home base" of a ship is? Are freighters "re-homed" if you buy them from the AI? To what planet are they reassigned?

Reply to Need some tech tips... in Strategies Stardock Forums

Do "newly hatched" minor races get all your techs? Is there any way to keep them from being intimidated into giving "your" techs away?

Reply to Why Master of Magic is Cool. Might want to get a drink and cancel any appointments. in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I've personally experienced the terror of a "Barney Rush". Yes, I can officially confirm it: Barney is a Doom Drake.

Reply to Any ETA on GC 1.21 ? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Wouldn't it be cool if someone designed a strategy game that didn't rip you off if you didn't micromanage the various budgets every turn? That's really what it comes down to. Practically every strategy game ever designed will rob you of your hard work empire-building if you don't also work even harder managing production-per-turn, based upon the near-universal, seemingly-arbitrary design decision "you can't take it with you" -- from one turn to the next, that is. That means th

Reply to Any ETA on GC 1.21 ? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

How about skins? I don't really need a new control, I just need information to appear in a new place. If the amount of research left to acquire the next tech could simply be DISPLAYED in the Econ tab, the other number I need, actual research dollars for the next turn, is already there, in the upper-right corner, so it would be a simple matter of raising the research slider until the two numbers matched. I don't know if UI mods are possible or not, but I know a lot of o

Reply to Any ETA on GC 1.21 ? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Thanks for the tip, I already read about the research slider being bugged, so I drop it to 0 then bring it back up on any turn in which I expect a research discovery. Hmm ... I wonder if it might be possible to make a mod that does that for me ... a "research optimizer mod". That's probably not a game component that could be modded, but you never know until you ask. Even a mod to the UI that allowed me to see the projected research completion time and change the research alloc

Reply to Why Master of Magic is Cool. Might want to get a drink and cancel any appointments. in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

The only thing better than the Halfling Hordes are the Halfling Hordes on pink steroids! (Adamantium, the pink super-metal ...) That pink stuff made the "Barney Rush" possible, too. (The "Barney Rush" refers to Draconian Doom Drakes, which incidentally look a lot like loveable purple dinosaurs, racing across the map exploring and taking over poorly-defended cities while the slower bowmen besiege the harder targets. The pink super-metal turned Draconian stock units into fairly decent

Reply to Any ETA on GC 1.21 ? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

What I'm wondering is whether trade income enhancements are capped, like if I build a dozen starbases in 1 sector and jack up the trade bonus to 500% does it cap somewhere below that, like it does for production? I'd also really like to know if research points carry over, as microing the research slider is one of the less enjoyable tasks of the game.

Reply to Why Master of Magic is Cool. Might want to get a drink and cancel any appointments. in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Ahh, the Halfling Hordes ... my best friend preferred the Voodoo Trolls. MoM had so many ways of setting up "the perfect army" ... in addition to being one of the most enjoyable strategy games of all time, it's one of the most replayable.

Reply to Any ETA on GC 1.21 ? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Err, I misspelled "Altarian" as "Altaran". Also, I didn't "miss the news" that the Altarians had given me a ship. They kept the ship. (oops) However, I still think saving and restoring at just the right (wrong?) time it does seem possible to miss the news of a tech discovery. Another bug: if you orbit a colony ship in a colonized system and hit "Next Turn" a clock appears and the game seems to lock up. However, you still have control of the UI, and if you move the ship bac

Reply to Altarian Campaign? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I never get mission objectives, either, just "End of Action Reports" which tell me after I've accomplished them what they were. I chalked it up to bad design, not realizing it was a bug. I'm running Win98 SE and used all the standard "Drengin.Net" install options. If the bug is related to over-long pathnames, perhaps the D.N users are more likely to be affected, as the path to the AP directory is longer.

Reply to Help..!! Having problems updating GV to Altarian P in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I thought Startide Rising and The Postman by David Brin were both very original, Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein were unashamedly brash satire, and Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and 1984 by George Orwell set the standard for political dystopia.

Reply to re poll: Would you pre-order on-line a Master of Magic 2? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I can run MoM in a DOS prompt under Windows 98. Even the sound & music work! However, it took EMM386 in config.sys to do it and I barely got enough stuff loaded into upper memory for the game to run. If you cut it too close you get the intro screen but it crashes when you try to actually play the game. Get another 8-12k freed in lower memory and you've got it.

Reply to Any ETA on GC 1.21 ? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Oh, yeah, one other thing: the "SitRep" you receive when you load a saved game always seems to say "We have fallen behind technologically" even when the "technology graph" shows the player in the lead. They both can't be right. I suspect the "Load Game SitRep" is incorrect. Err, this is an edit because I don't want to spam. It seems possible to "miss the news" if you save your game at just the right (wrong?) spot. I saved my game early this morning when need for sle

Reply to Any ETA on GC 1.21 ? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Hey, is there any way you guys could cancel autopilot or guard on a ship when an enemy ship comes within its detection range? The only alternative to setting little "search patterns" using autopilot is to manually move every picket one square at a time. Also, sometimes when you try to double-click on an enemy ship to see what it is the first click generates an "error beep" and changes the focus to some ship halfway across the map. A SINGLE left-click on an enemy ship s

Reply to re poll: Would you pre-order on-line a Master of Magic 2? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

SC 3's plodding boredom was mostly due to stuff the player had to micro which could've been either managed by the AI or abstracted out altogether. I would never have to allocate workers to mines if the AI just assumed that the mining output should always be whatever is needed and did it for me. Meanwhile the refinery should've had a set level of "reserve" RU's as its only control, and the computer would again automatically set the fiddly bits to make it happen. If you wanted a

Reply to Good early game/beginners tips? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

I, too, am a newbie, but I've found at least one way to remain financially solvent: selling technology. In GalCiv techs are VALUABLE! If you research a few cheap techs you can sell them to the whole galaxy. Any one civ might not pay a great deal, but getting paid 6-7 times makes up for it. If you buy a tech from an AI, get it out to the others as quickly as you can, and recoup some of what you paid. Diplomacy is also extremely important. You can't sell a tech 6 tim

Reply to Trade Routes Questions in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Both bases are in the same sector as my trading planet, and the freighters spend almost all their time in it, as the trade parter's planet is at the near edge of an adjoining sector. The trade enhancements seemed to stack, but they also seemed not to take effect until 1 turn after they were built. I read a tip that said put speed-enhancers in unimproved sectors and leave the enhanced sectors slow. I have often wondered while driving on a major highway through a small town at 3

Reply to re poll: Would you pre-order on-line a Master of Magic 2? in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Instead of looking for sequels to titles we all loved, which leads to horrors such as MoO 3 and SC 3, we should instead look for game designers we trust to make good games and provide good customer service. Stephen Barcia made some great games, including Master of Magic and what I still think is the greatest 4X space game of all time, Master of Orion I. I don't think he's in the business anymore, though. So MoM 2 is just a name attached to whomever is going to design it. That