When I say "250," it's meant in context, of course, as in "only 250 billions." We don't know how a trillion people might live on a planet. We don't even know if interstellar travel is plausible. Arguing reality in a sci-fi game is just - weird.
[b]Sole Soul:[/b] If you read the entire thing, you would note that I agreed that the SA's taken in isolation were as you supposed. That said, if you haven't played any of the stock races for a long while, how can you confidently make assessments on their relative strengths, all things considered?
I think that the actual percentage of pirate "converts" is greater than 0%, but I also happen to think that Frogboy is right - most people who pirate and proceed not to buy the game won't actually buy the game if they lacked the ability to pirate it - they would simply go without. Against that, match up against the number of people who, through piracy, were able to get the game for free, then decided that they wanted to get a legal copy just because they wanted Stardock to make more s
In TA, new ship modules allow you to add HP to your ships. For Iconians, this HP add-on can be so efficient that they outweight any possible benefit of defenses in the early to mid game. Even for other Civs, the HP add-on module significantly changes the attack-def valuation ratio. If you can get a Small Ship up to about 26 HP, then you don't need to negate all damage from an enemy fleet to prevail. You only need to ameliorate as much damage as is necessary not to de
Games with realistic populations, times and scales tend to be [i]very boring[/i] - because it begins to resemble real management of real problems, which have limited appeal to the general population, and to the general gaming population. One of the ways to deal with population is to simply imagine that planets everywhere have plastic populations that contract or shrink depending on what's internally consistent. When you ship 250 billion people to a planet, it could either be t
Yes, there is. Shut down the factory. Use the credits to pay for ship upgrades. It's a workaround solution, but in terms of actual effect, it's pretty much the same. Once I have an active fleet going, I tend to shut down all but the primary ship building starports I have. Saves money.
I've played both the Yor and the Iconians in TA, and I find the Iconians much more my speed. Their manufacturing and research in the early game is phenomenal - if you can get your economy in order, you can be off to the races no prob. The reason for this is due to the efficiency of Replicator and Interstellar Refinery buildings, with the accompanying efficiency of the research buildings. If you can find multiplier tiles, that efficiency goes up even more. Also, their
Also, beating the AI to key resources and asteroids also allows you to get up your war economy faster - for taking colonies from the AI. Colonies have significant start-up time and costs. Resources and asteroids set up significantly faster.
DRM CAN work, but only if it's honestly about DRM and there's no underlying motives to make it about extending copyright law and milking the fiction for all it is worth. In terms of what I said, the money you fork over at point of sale is not the only cost. Reliability and product support are benefits that go along with an original copy. If you can sell the product within reach of the target market and also provide additional value, you get the sale. T
The best way to destroy pirates is to outcompete them - make THEIR products expensive, yours cheap. It's that simple.
It's actually true - books are all over the internet. If you accept that the essential part of a book is its intellectual content, then books quite simply "suffer" much more piracy than software, for the simple reason that few books become obsolete, there's more books to be had, and they're easier to upload and spread. The last time I tried looking to download a book I couldn't even find the book I wanted because the sea of information out there is just so vast.
Jonnan001: I think you understand what I'm talking about, but you didn't get my point. Whether or not insurance premiums for legal protections are financially justified is immaterial. Each minor case you file against MDs increases the collective fear of MDs that their own number is up. It's not the fiscal sense of it that drives the premiums up - it's the fear and annoyance, and those are hardly ever consoled by reason. If the entire popula
The US healthcare system is in trouble because you pay way too much to middle men and because your financial penalties for the most ridiculous of medical transgressions is unrealistic. All medical malpractice settlements and decisions should have been kept private - or if public, kept to a reasonable minimum. Granting someone a million dollars, or jailing the MD for an understandable mistake (according to standard of care) means that YOU pay for it. MDs will seek the shelt
Roller123: It is pointless to persecute individual pirates in Asia because game developers do not have the power to make it painful enough for them to desist given the rewards they get. It is NOT pointless for game developers to pay attention to market forces and fight piracy by competing with it directly.
If they care about stamping out piracy, then they care about markets that spawn pirates. It's that simple.
More likely, the [i]parents[/i] of most little girls who patronize Sims2 fall into 2 categories: 1. Don't know enough about computers to pirate it 2. Want to spend money to feel good about pampering their little girl Or both. Heck, if a pirate forced them to accept a pirated copy, they would probably shove 50 bucks at him just to be rid of the money. The Philippine and Chinese software market is relevant because I believe that many of the m
I use chains of stripped-down military starbases in key locations for the following modules: Warp Disrupter Inverse Tractor Beam Stellar Wake Sector Surveillance Module This ties in with my policy of keeping Smalls and Tinies as individual garrison forces on planets, plus a substantial system-fleet garrison defense. These modules slow down enemy ships and speed mine up, slowing invasion and speeding reinforcements to the front, as w
Intellectual property is something that's really a weird concept to many Asians. If I think up a great story, it's my obligation to make sure as many people as possible hear it. I owe them thanks for deigning to hear my story, and I can make money off of mass market economics. It's always been that way, for hundreds of years now. The influx of Western copyright ideas has changed many minds about that, but hearts are difficult to change. A lot o
Here's another look at the Asian market for PC games: As far as I know, Asian game developers are the only developers in the world to offer MMOPRG software [i]for free[/i]. In fact, a substantial number of Asian games [i]can be played ALSO FOR FREE[/i]. When your system software is free for everyone, it can't be pirated. Simple and effective. In fact, you WANT pirates to host your software platform on their servers so you can approach as close to 100% gamer sat
News flash, people: console games DO get pirated. In the Philippines, the only reason the PS and the Xbox sell at all is because pirated game are available - otherwise they would be high-end luxury items with very low volume. That doesn't mean that legit games don't sell here, but they cater to a different market altogether. I stand by what I say because I see it everyday in practice. When you make a good game, people will want to buy it legit, even at a small premiu
I would rate them similarly. It's harder to do graphics for fantasy animation because it has to look organic. Ships and planets are much easier to skin and animate - just turn them around and zoom them off. In terms of technical skill for graphical rendering, I have to say that even ToA is no great accomplishment. It wouldn't surprise me to see something along the same (basement) level of graphical rendering. World of Goo is an excellent game, but it's not a grap
Sole Soul: I wasn't referring to you in particular, which is why I didn't direct my post to you. I was speaking in general. We are of like mind in putting gameplay above graphics. If you have to put it in a 16 bit shell to make it amazing, do that. Of course, one hopes for better. That said, have you actually looked at a DL screen lately? I assure you that the ToA graphics and the DL graphics are worlds apart. Elemental's sc
Stardock is a small company. It doesn't have dozens and dozens of coders whose only function is supply eye candy. For my part, I don't mind low-graphics philosophy, as long as it's done well. If you can't do an Ironman, stick to a half-triathlon and finish that. I would prefer a good 2D sprite-based graphic engine that's fabulous rather than a badly rendered 3D. That said, I don't mind graphics at all, really. As long as it has good aesthetic sense, I'm g
Torgamous: You would be wrong there. I can say with considerable confidence that most pirates exist in developing countries because there's more people in developing countries, there's a absurd number of tech people in these countries with nothing better to do, and they get paid to pirate software and hardware by people they can sell these copies to. Given that there's more pirates in the developing world because of these factors, I would venture to gues
Nintendo is abandoning core gamers? That's news to me.
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