Happy Thanksgiving to you too, and thanks for the updated list of changes

A welcomed adjustment which may allow me to finally give this feature some attention or at least enjoy what the gimmick does - gameplay wise. Mopping up a weak opponent with it is certainly what fun is all about... but the previous development loooong steps were a kinky obstacle to its basic use.

On a more serious note though -- i *still* would want the planetary terrain tiles/images scramble to be fixed as i mentioned elsewhere.

That's no goose(!). It's a must to even start thinking about implementing the extensive terraforming options in the X-Worlds mod. And, since the raw frameworks will also receive HUGE amounts of new features & values for height gaps i can't even imagine how tedious testing or necessary verifications would get without a steady flow of **real** information given by the UI.

Thanks for everything - so far...

Happy Thanksgiving from Europe to you guys! I was invited by some american friends for a Thanksgiving party tonight! Looking forward to it!

By the way: You guys from Stardock are insane... Do you actually earn any money for your working time with all those free updates and fixes...? Thanks a lot!

And how do I give Karma to the OP?

Very nice!   Thank you! No more buying a fleet-manager when expecting an attack and replaacing it after the thread is eliminated.

Ok, found it... There is an invincible button on the right next to the number of Karma...

Of course its been said before, but the button seems to be invisible in Firefox and Google Chrome...the buttons on individual post replies are there, though.

I agree - the TS is quite useless. BTW - how big is the increase in military rating by this? This would be one factor that could make it more useful in an easy and realistic way - just the pure military pressure the development of a super weapon puts onto other civs.

Terror stars don't increase your military rating.  While it might be interesting to have them do so, it would seem to me that their current "animosity" value (i.e. making the AI angry at you so they attack the TS and by extension you-IIRC this is only a diplomacy modifier but the same point applies) would be in conflict with a military rating increase, if not be canceled out entirely.  Secondly, many would agree with my view that the AI overvalues military might for this purpose.  It would be too easy to make it too powerful of an effect, and too difficult to make it worthwhile in light of both of these conflicts.

Woot! Change log.

Will this apply to all ships in orbit, or just what your logistics can handle? Can you turn it off for each individual planet? I don't always like to burn through defending ships against a stronger opponent just because I can. Having them fight one at a time can sometimes buy you a few turns as the enemy has to burn through a bunch of weak ships before it can even invade.

Does this occur indefinately? If not, to what end? Does this change at the very least help the economy limited civs?

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Anyways, enjoy your thanks giving. What I mean when by saying enjoy, I mean eat lots of food, and by that I mean don't come back until you gained atleast 5 pounds.

Exactly! There is an extremely delicate balance issue with the TS use. One may think of such a feature as icing on a cake for a complex (but final!) military victory OR actually consider it all a simple waste of time & resources.

Trick is to determine why or when an AI would attempt an attack with it on a human player IF the game makes it probable or easier to manage.

Properly escorted & supported, this alone can make a terrific party out of ending turns in ANY games.

Besides, who wouldn't want to blast  the very last planet & system of any tough(est) enemy after an epic battle round of 200+ turns! Just for kicks.

This is awesome, and a required addition.  There's a problem, though.  That pop-up, has everything else in the background faded out so you can't see the stats of the planet you're colonizing.  This is a problem because we generally base which governor to use on the PQ.  When the background is faded, we can't see the PQ.

Thanks a ton for the continued updates.  Still enjoying the game greatly after playing off and on since the first release of Dread Lords.  You guys are the best.

This little change affects gameplay a lot. In the past the OFM was quite useless to me, therefore i had most of the time no ships in the orbit, trying to defend planets rather by intercepting the enemies transports before arrival. My style of play changes a lot with this for it is now possible to have guarding fleets on every planet without sacrifizing a tile every time for the OFM (and the time to build them).

It is hardly to believe how good this game gets over time, the AI really seems to become very nice, i actually had to use it in my first game because korath and drengin allianced very fast and i was bombarded by transports and spore ships. I may have overdone the colony rush, my area of influence was overwhelming that time, but obviously i lacked military capability because soon the terrans joined in, realizing i had my problems. I lost this game, though it was "painful" only. I remember games in the past the opponent seemed way more passive than in this game, but actually that isnt what i want out of an enjoyable game. Great job, SD.

Has anyone noticed a big change in economy since this update?

I bought a copy of TotA but it turned out to be illegit, since I own all the others on impulse I decided to legitimise and bought it again through impulse yesterday. Having played the game a few days ago [old version] and again today and last night after purchase and newest update.. it seems like the starting economy is different.

Basically I go into negative rates with only my basic colony (not even using my colony ship), so I start again and try to colonise all over and get pop rates up, this worked slightly better but I'm still completely stymied. AI seems to be spreading out ridiculously and colonising all my surrounding planets whist still churning out super projects, and I can't even get close to having 0bc.

I tried once more with my customised race set to have more points in economics, but it still didn't help.

Any ideas? I've never had such eco problems at teh start of a game before (or if I have, it's been self-solving in a short amount of time)

Edited for typos galore

If there's a drastic difference, you might try reinstalling.  Jonnan managed to run into an economics bug that made it something like 5-10x harder that was fairly impossible to reproduce, but he fixed it by reinstalling.

The first thing to check would be your first turn tax income on your home planet.

At the default tax rate of 33%, my custom race with 10% morale and no economics bonuses is at 74% approval on the home planet (TA) at 8.0B pop and an income of 22BC from it on Tough (sub-normal difficulties give the player an economic bonus).  Raising my tax rate to 49% leaves me with 52% approval and 32BC income.

This is without colonizing the secondary, to keep things simple.

The next question would be what two versions you're comparing here.  Especially in the early betas, TA went back and forth along the entire spectrum of economic difficulty.