Conquered races - additional benefit: forced migrations and growing of planets

Yojinbo · #1 January 5th, 2001, 05:14 AM

Why wait for enemy submission? In a "quiet" begin game my first three research topics are: Mil Strat, Mil Strat and Ship Capture.

Then I arm all my scouts with cheap boarding parties and capture any unguarded colony ships I see. I often wonder what kind of propaganda my guys sell the hydrogen breathing crystals to make them work for us...

Needless to say my home sector is always diverse. Often I can grab a conlony ship from an AI player on first contact and still make a trade or other alliance right after (all alliaces are, of course, temporary).

[This message has been edited by Yojinbo (edited 05 January 2001).]

[This message has been edited by Yojinbo (edited 05 January 2001).]

Puke · #2 January 5th, 2001, 07:20 AM

quote:
Originally posted by Yojinbo:
I often wonder what kind of propaganda my guys sell the hydrogen breathing crystals to make them work for us...

hehe, im willing to bet its not cholcolate bars wrapped in political leaflets. a better question is how your black ops guys infiltrate their crews and populous.

Tomgs · #3 January 5th, 2001, 08:12 AM

Thats easy they just use their portable brain wipe equipment and write them a new personality. Then they see that my empire is a much better place to live. This works much better than those old fashioned re-education facilities.

warp nine · #4 January 5th, 2001, 09:10 AM

Don't you think conquered populations should retain their own Race abilities? They always switch to MY racial abilities. Are they genetically altered or something? They could change their cultural abilities as the new culture is imposed on them, but race should stay the same. Then it would be beneficial to capture a planet from a very intelligent race and turn it into a Research Compound.

Puke · #5 January 5th, 2001, 09:53 AM

quote:
Originally posted by warp nine:
Don't you think conquered populations should retain their own Race abilities?

think thats annoying eh? how about when you conquer a race with advanced storage, and you are left holding all these funkey planets with 24 of 20 facilities, and the population is doing screwy things because they are over the maximum for the planet. it would be very nice if each planet recieved the bonus for whatever race is in the majority (since its probably far to hard / error prone to do a percentile of racial benefit for split populations)

General Hawkwing · #6 January 5th, 2001, 06:30 PM

The racial bonus being retained was addressed in a post about a month or two ago. While it would be cool and more realistic, it would greatly throw the balance of the game off. The AI would be nearly impossible to script to take advantage of other atmospheres, the pop. transport minister has problems with it.

You also lose any ability to use special technology from racial traits. I can understand not allowing more research in the field, but to not allow the use of already discovered/used tech is not believable. "No commander we can not create any more shard cannons for the fleet, we forgot how!" You can not even modify a former enemy ship and keep the special comps. (If you wanted to upgrade engines for example).

But it comes back to game balance.

Baron Munchausen · #7 January 5th, 2001, 08:00 PM

That's probably the biggest single thing the AI needs to learn. If it could manage races that breathe different atmospheres properly so it can use planets to maximum advantage it would become much more powerful in the late game. That and planet modification technologies.

[This message has been edited by Baron Munchausen (edited 05 January 2001).]