Doktor Teufel

Reply to Diplomacy in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote who="Annatar11" reply="6" id="1988054"]You'll have to elaborate on this one. How does it abuse the system?[/quote] Well, I'm primarily going by what was written in the OP here, as well as things other posters have said. For example, other empires having peace treaties within the first minute of the game, while you're expected to complete nigh-impossible missions (again, we're looking at the very beginning of the game) to get on their good sides. Missions which, if you d

Reply to Diplomacy in Strategy Sins Forums

This is a serious question for Sins players who are more experienced than myself. Considering that the AI apparently abuses the diplomacy system, that the "missions" system is a bit silly and unreasonable in the early game, and that it's overall a bit wonky and unsatisfying, is there ever a good reason to play single-player games with anything but locked teams?

Reply to Diplomacy in Strategy Sins Forums

Yeah... I'm not even sure why they released the game with diplomacy in this state. The first expansion isn't even out yet, going to be a while before the second gets here. I pretty much go locked teams anyway. What the OP describes is ludicrous.

Reply to What to do when the AI gangs up on you. (Late game) in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]If you are playing FFA, and you allied with an AI, and all the other players have been eliminated, the AI immediately breaks all peace treaty/cease fire/trade agreements/etc and declares war on you. "I need my own space" is what they tell you (or something like that).. [/quote] Ahhh, good to hear. I've never been in that situation before (at least, not yet since I picked the game up again), so I wasn't sure. That makes a lot of sense. Personally, for most games, I'd re

Reply to What to do when the AI gangs up on you. (Late game) in Strategy Sins Forums

Yeah, that's pretty much what I thought. I'm fine with the fact that you (more or less) always have to kill everyone else to win, but if so, I think the AI should realize this as well, and be prepared to go to war once it's the only CPU player remaining aside from the player.

Reply to What to do when the AI gangs up on you. (Late game) in Strategy Sins Forums

Is it possible to attain anything other than a military victory in Sins? I haven't played it in over six months, and I've just started to pick it up again. If not, it seems sort of like cheating for a player to turn on a CPU ally. It makes sense for anyone to ally with anyone else to defeat other enemies, but once there are only two civs remaining, the result will inevitably be turning against each other. Does the CPU AI anticipate that, or does it assume peace will continue forever a

Reply to The High Resolution Graphics Mod V2.0 for Twilight of the Arnor in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I actually did get it to work just now, and it looks great. The process of installing it seems a bit jury-rigged and shady to me, though. Here's the problem -- no text actually shows up for selection corresponding to the mod, which practically screams "I'm buggy" even though it's the right thing to do:

Reply to The High Resolution Graphics Mod V2.0 for Twilight of the Arnor in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

[quote who="deandoodles" reply="17" id="1932222"]I have the game on impulse and tried installing the mod to stardock games/ gal2/ twilight/ mods but when i run the game and go to options i can still only see default. When i hit 'change' theres a grey box with no text that i can highlight but when i move the cursor out of the window to the 'done' button it deselects itself. Any ideas? [/quote] I'm having the same problem as this fellow. I have the mod's readme

Reply to Why are all the races the same? in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

Well, let's see: -- Different races' ships have unique and distinctive hull models. -- The weapon visual and sound effects are different for each race. -- Two races' ships in the same role will nevertheless have different stats. -- Two races' ships in the same role will have totally unique special abilities. -- Each race has unique tech trees that effect their ships differently than anyone else's. This is not "the same".

Reply to Where would you like us to advertise? in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

[link="http://www.rpg.net/"]RPGnet[/link] might be a good place to advertise. It's a tabletop role-playing / miniatures games site, and I can imagine dozens or hundreds of people from there picking up the game. Of course, a lot of people from that forum will already know about Sins anyway, so whether putting ads there will do any good is a judgment call.

Reply to Death by diplomacy in Strategy Sins Forums

[quote]The first part I agree only on the tweaking bit, but have you played the same game I have is the real question. With enough rapport the AI will aid you in fights and even follow you around systems, I am also pretty sure it might go to where you ping at. So there is balance, that and they give you friggin' resources for doing those quests. There are also researches to min-max those quests allowing you to skip the ones that do not favor your situation.[/quote] Yeah, the AI will hel

Reply to A Guide to the Sins of a Solar Empire Forums in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

Tying in to what Snacko said, it seems to me that threads take thirty to sixty minutes to update properly. Even ten minutes after I make a post, the thread I posted to will be dark and down on the list, as though I hadn't posted to it at all. I can still see my post if I open the thread, though. This makes it difficult to follow all the threads going on here during the hubbub of SoaSE's release.

Reply to Death by diplomacy in Strategy Sins Forums

I haven't bothered with diplomacy (or anything other than 1 vs. 1) yet either, precisely because I've been hearing all these horror stories about missions. Playing musical chairs trying to kill fleeing enemies for half an hour, while the other AI sends a gankfleet in to blast your home planet, isn't my idea of a good time. Diplomacy needs to tweaked / fixed, I think. It's unbalanced because it's not give and take... it's just give, give, give. The NPCs don't have to do jack squat for yo

Reply to Sins Lore - single player backstory in Single Player Sins Forums

[quote]How much extra work would it have been to make a campaign mode?[/quote] I dunno, but in my opinion it was effort better spent on adding features and polish to the sandbox. I've owned GalCiv II for a while now, got each expansion as it came out, tried a lot of mods... and never played through the actual campaign.

Reply to Cowardly AI needs fixed in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

I haven't had a huge problem with the "cowardly AI" factor so far. If he flees from my fleet, I'm perfectly content to let him do so. I'll simply take over his system that much faster, and move on to the next. Eventually, he'll stand and fight. The key, I think, is to focus on systems, not on chasing down and eliminating fleets.

Reply to Let us know what you'd like in v1.03 in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

Modify the font slightly to make it less "fat" and more clearly legible on InfoCards and the like. Add some PDF documentation or preview functions that allow players to see how ships' special abilities work [i]before[/i] they build them. How am I, as a new player (or a player trying out a race I haven't before), supposed to make intelligent research and build decisions when I don't know what ships' special abilities even do?

Reply to Sins UI Suggestions, Minor Glitches, and a Radical Add-On Concept in Technical Sins Forums

Some good ideas here, and I'd like to add a quibble of my own: The font on the InfoCards (and in a few other places) is a little too "fat". It makes the letters slightly difficult to read; you can see what I'm talking about in that screenshot in LazySumo's UI thread. It's the same effect you get when you change 12-point Impact font to bold in MS Word or some such.

Reply to Game design flaw in Beta Feedback Sins Forums

There's no way to reasonably balance the game in such a way that one player can stand up to, let alone win against, two other players who are as competent as he is (or nearly so). There are countless strategy games that contain this "flaw"... if you get ganged up on two to one, you're going to lose, even if you're strong and smart. Also: If you allow people to build more ships based on the planets they control, then "underdog" players (who control less territory) have even less

PDF Manual Somewhat Borked.... in Sins of a Solar Empire Sins Forums

[IMG]http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f24/nukacola2000/borked_manual.png[/IMG] As you can see, the manual is a bit borked... at least this part of it. Some numbers are missing, mislabeled or duplicated. Also, the manual as a whole could have done with a wee bit more proofreading. Yeah, I know, no one reads the manual except me anymore. ;p

Reply to Fixing Grammatical Errors — Feasible? in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

I've made some progress, and have finished editing several .XML files so far. I am also making minor cosmetic changes to some passages in addition to correcting technical and syntactical errors, to improve the narrative flow of sentences that just don't sound quite right. Here is an example from the "Anomalies" .XML file: Original Text : Our survey team has uncovered the remains of a device that produces soothing sound waves that

Reply to Fixing Grammatical Errors — Feasible? in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

Should be fine. As those making foreign translation mods have seen the mod folder support is not entirely perfect, and since this'll be similar in the files changed, it may be best to just not use the mods folder. So you'll basically just need to reprduce the structure of the Data\English folder. Installation then would be a simple matter of making a backup copy of the folder and unpacking your files over the originals. Actually, yeah, that's pretty much

Reply to Fixing Grammatical Errors — Feasible? in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

Yep, and feel free to do so. Okay, I'll get started, then. My plan is to copy the .XML files in question from the GalCiv2 directory, paste them to my desktop, edit them, save the changes, then check them using Internet Explorer. I will then check them against the original, unaltered .XML files from the GalCiv2 directory, to ensure that only the flavor text has been changed. Finally, I'll place all the files I alter into a directory stru

Fixing Grammatical Errors — Feasible? in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

GalCivII is pretty solid as far as its grammar is concerned — certainly better than Space Empires IV — but it's far from perfect. Here and there in the race descriptions and event dialogs, there are omissions, mistakes ("it's" instead of "its," for example), and other grammatical errors. I am cursed with an unfortunate hypersensitivity to such errors, and so they detract from my enjoyment of the game... just a little bit, mind you, but it's an issue for me all the same. I have

Reply to Modding Tutorials in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

This tutorial link in the above list needs some work: "How to: Add a major race in DL" First, I had to register in order to view the forum at all (or so it seemed, since I got a login request instead of seeing threads), which is always annoying. After I registered and activated my account, I clicked the link again, and got this message: "Sorry, only moderators are allowed to view this forum." So... like I say, it's kinda broken.

Reply to What software do I need to create my own models and textures? in Modding GalCiv2 Forums

Never mind, I answered my own question. I found Blender online (it's free, as opposed to costing several thousand dollars), and I was able to import .X files into Blender using some of the custom ships in the library. You can export to .X from Blender, too, so I know I'll be able to use Blender to make .X ship models eventually. It's going to take me a while to learn to use Blender and