cibelon

Join Date 04/2006

Early campaign weirdness - enemy with weapon tech builds only unarmed ships, etc.

EDIT: The "Enemy with weapon techs building only unarmed ships" is still happening in the released 1.1 version for me. You can see post number 11.

So I just bought the game the other day, played a tiny universe, then a small, and then decided to start the campaign yesterday. I've completed the first two missions and noticed some things:

(I'm playing on normal difficulty and have patched to the most recent version available as of 2 days ago.)

1. I don't understand why the Drengin seem to be building large numbers of completely unarmed ships. They were held to only their homeworld in the first scenario and only 2 planets in the second, but by the time I researched up to planetary invasion they had plenty of time to research the basics of SOME sort of weapon. What gives? The scenario amounted to limiting their growth, waiting until I could build troop transports and taking them out.

In one scenario they'd spent all this production on 3 military starbases, yet had no weapons on their defender-class ships???

2. In the first scenario, my allies grew really fast and colonized all available planets before I or the Drengin could react! So I played it again and planned for faster colonization - but I'm not sure if I could have even reached the enemy planet with ships on the first one, since the life support tech tree was missing.

3. Since I did replay a scenario I noticed that while planet positions and quality are fixed, tile bonuses and anomolies vary a lot.

4. I do not yet understand starbases - I had ship assist defenses on one, was within the blue ring from the base and seemed to get no bonus from the base. The ship display did not show any defense - yet it DID show the bonus to beam attack value... And yes, I was paying attention to the difference between starbase attack/defense and ship assist a/d

5. Balancing the economy is interesting and challenging - I think I've been focusing too much on social production on my planets. I can quickly achieve massive deficits if I'm not careful. When I restarted the campaign I changed the distribution of ability points for the humans - the morale bonus seems HUGE to me in terms of its economic impact. I really missed it once I removed it. Even the economy bonuses don't seem as large to me.

Any comments are welcome, of course, but I'm particularly interested in why the Drengin are unarmed. Bug in the update? Deliberate design to make it easy for newcomers? (If so, one scenario of unarmed opponents would have been plenty, I think.) I only scored 2600 and 2800 in the first two scenarios which didn't seem like crushing victories to me - I didn't seem particularly efficient in managing my economy and research selections.

Thanks,

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1. It's a bug. Restart the campaign and the AI should build weaponry. And yes, the mission is incredibly lame.

4. You need to have defenses on the ship in order for it to receive the bonus. Ships with no defenses receive no bonus.

5. There are certain thresholds in approval ratings where you will get a population growth bonus if you are above the threshold. At 30% approval, your population will diminish. At 75%, you get a 25% bonus to population growth. At 100%, growth rate is doubled.

I believe there are other thresholds but nobody has been able to verify.

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2. The idea is to colonise at least one of the planets, I haven't managed to get more than that initially, then sit tight while you research hard, get planetary invasion and take the world the Drenging colonised before moving to their base. If they don't manage to colonise and/or you cant reach them then just dump an un-upgraded influence starbase near the edge of your range, it will project far enough for you to reach them.

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Thank you for the information. I have played the first mission of the campaign twice - completely restarted the campaign, not from an early save - and the same thing happened! I suppose I can try once more.

I'm running 1.1 BETA 4B which is what I received from the downloads page on the updates link.

I was unaware of the population growth bonus levels - I don't know if I think the double for 100% makes sense, such a huge jump from 99 to 100...

When I replayed the first scenario I colonized three worlds - I had the speed bonus ability I'd chosen for the race, sent my first ship north, bought a colony ship and sent it "north" as well, and the finally colonized the one near me, as I recall. It was costly, but taught me the importance of early growth and the crushing financial burden of having too many planets too soon. Anybody know how maintenance is calculated yet? Just distance?

I'm the sort who really wants to understand the mechanics of the game as much as possible. It drives me nuts that I can't see the cost of technologies in the trade window, for example, so I can't tell when I'm "paying too much" when trading for a tech. I have some sense of tech costs, but not a strong one.

Thanks,

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Yes, morale is a huge bonus, happier people, makes more tax payers faster and the ability to set a higher tax rate in general. I think the 100% bonus is a bit odd, but since morale caps there it could be a bonus since you could theoretically have the potential for morale much higher than 100% that you'd never get any benefit from. If you try to get full morale for all your colonies for example, some will just be happier than others so you'll be losing out on potential tax money.

I'm not sure if the no weapon ships are a bug though. They did add for races to do that in some cases to help prevent the transport rush thing. While I don't consider it worth while, they do cost no maintenance if they have no weapons / defenses I think so they are an early and cheap way to prevent cheese tactics. Although they didn't stop my 1 laser 500 capacity formerly colony ship transports, they do slow me down since I had to get space weapons.

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It drives me nuts that I can't see the cost of technologies in the trade window, for example, so I can't tell when I'm "paying too much" when trading for a tech. I have some sense of tech costs, but not a strong one.

It drives a lot of us nuts. I can't believe it's not in the game. Hello, Stardock! Can we cut down on the guesswork required to play, please?

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The "unarmed Drengin" phenomenon continues. This time, in scenario 3 of the campaign, I checked more thoroughly. I put a ship by their homeworld and can see they have two defenders circling it - both ships are defender class ships, but have no weapons of any kind and don't fight back when attacked. I then talked to them via diplomacy and confirmed that my various beam weapon techs do not appear on my list of techs to trade, so it seems to me like they should have the needed techs.

I have a saved game if it would help someone debug...

I guess I'll try restarting the campaign, but it's kind of annoying.

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Up your espionage with them to see what they are building/designing/researching and what techs they have, very strange.

Also what difficulty is it set at?

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Hi,

I don't think I had any espionage going, but I'll try that. I can say, though, that no weapons techs up to and including laser2 showed up in my list of techs I could trade when I talked to them - in my experience that implies they have them. I even checked for the early ones "galactic warfare" and "space militarization" and "space weapons" in case they were stuck early in the research path.

That was in the previous campaign, which I've kept the saves for. As I said, I've now restarted the campaign:

I've improved and it took them a LONG tmie to get Space militarization, and as of a few turns before I conquered them (August 16, 2106? 3006? something like that) they didn't yet have space weapons - so this one wasn't a good test. I'll reload and hit "next turn" for a while and see what they do. (This time I scored 3600 on the first scenario - I don't know if that's any good or if I'm still slow and inefficient. I did much better with my economy this time, though.)

I've been playing Normal difficulty. Perhaps I should restart on a higher level. But come on! No guns??? Fish... Barrel... Not so exciting.

Thanks,

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If you actually read the journals you'd see that the AI puts unarmed defenders on their planets so you can't sneak-invade them. Obviously a much cheaper and quicker form, i.e. a living shield so to speak. It could be that hadn't researched weapons much if at all yet, and were focusing on a cultural victory.

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Hi

Yes, I saw that in one of the earlier responses to my question (don't know what "the journals" are, though. EDIT - I have since found them on this site. I will look at them, but please keep in mind I came here with a specific problem and the search function applied to forum posts, so that's where I looked first. And, as I mention below, the unarmed ships are only explained in one of the two situations I describe. End edit.)

However, that only applies to my second play-through when my tech pace was sufficiently faster than theirs. I'm pretty sure I mention that above. I'm not opposed to the idea of unarmed ships protecting their planet.

I'm opposed to them having weapon technology but still building a defender ship design with no weapon. In the first play-through it's pretty clear that they have beam weapons, but aren't using them in their ship designs.

And they certainly ought to to have (and be using) at least level one in SOME weapon by the time I've researched all over heck as a newbie, wasted time with techs I didn't "need," researched planetary invasion, sat on it for a while, finally built a transport, etc. Perhaps I should mention that I had a tiny ship with a level 1 beam weapon sitting by their homeworld that would kill ships as they built them while my transport was on its way. So they were building new ships - I wasn't just wiping out older models.

Thanks,

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I'm really trying to give the campaign a chance. But now I've updated to the released 1.1 and the same thing is happening even though I started a brand new campaign from scratch. The Drengin have tech up to laser2, but in the second scenario of the campaign they are still building exclusively unarmed ships. I went to their homeworld, killed all the ships on it and watched it for 10 turns. First they built another unarmed ship - well, maybe it's cheaper and faster and the AI is worried about imminent invasion, so I keep watching. Next they build a scout. They don't send it out, but they build it. I figure, "Well, maybe the AI wants the capability to explore, even if they're not going to use it right now..." Next they build another defender with no weapons - there are already 2 unarmed ships circling the planet, so there's just no reason for this.

I just can't believe I'm the only one having this problem, and I don't get how it could possibly be system specific. It's not like I'm running "Windows XP Pacifist Edition" or anything...

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I'm playing the campaign with version 1.2 AND 1.3 beta and they only build unarmed scouts and defenders. Even on level 3. I am playing on PAINFUL level and I wiped out 4 defenders and a scout on one planet with a converted scout ship (which i added on level 1 laser to) and clean their clock.... then I simple flew around (while researching invasion) wiping out all their ship on each planet, and then beginning the circuit again... newly build ships, no weapons. My espionage indicated that they had PHASOR-II !!! still, only unarmed defenders and useless couts that didn't scout.

I am beginning to get annoyed with the campaign. Sandbox games they will build weapons and once in a great while actually try to fight me....but 99% of the time, they still produce scouts and just muck about aimlessly (v1.2 Normal).

Am I the only one who this is happening to? Maybe I need to restart the entire campaign since I updated it to v1.3b after the first mission without an armed enemy figuring i could do away with the bug... but no such luck.

Please advise,

--Aezar

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kryo

Join Date 05/2003

+458

How many turns in were you? Without the "CPU intesive AI" option on (which I don't think is available in the campaign), the AI only gets to design new ships once every 52 turns. So it may have researched up to that point but simply never got a chance to design ships using those techs.

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Hah, I did the first campaign mission with dread lords (version 1.2) in it on crippling and it was easier than when I played it the first time on normal. Not only did the Drengin / Yor not build ships with weapons, but the Dread Lords themselves never did anything. I actually had unarmed ships sitting around their one planet (they never expanded) and those ships were never in danger. All of the enemies got steamrolled over and I finished the mission without losing a single ship. Weee.

No, this wasn't meant be trolly, I still really like the game. I just found it funny that the mission was so much harder on normal than on crippling.

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Let's hope that swarm of unarmored defenders thing gets fixed in 1.3

For such waste of industry they could've made several real ships.

Btw, Humans use this "strategy" in sandbox mode sometimes too.

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