<t> Thanks for the quick response Edmesa. Completely overlooked that screen (Had also been wondering how to turn off the suggestions for pirate smuggling spam).<br/>
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Boarding/scrapping stuff:<br/>
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The ship was pretty heavily damaged, but not excessively so. I'd ballpark it at just ...

<t> Finally throwing off the shackles of the pirates' protection rackets and am having to now deal with some pretty decent sized raids. And, amusingly enough, I'm currently using a fleet setup almost identical to one of the pirate factions I'm dealing with: Lasers and assault pods.<br/>
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<t> Be aware, however, that using fleet postures can occasionally screw you over with poorly timed refueling runs. You can minimize the risk by topping off your fuel tanks at the last gas mining facility before your new colony, but it's something that I had to learn the hard way in one of my ...

<r> There are also other factors at play here.<br/>
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The frequency and size of independent colonies, for instance, will greatly influence how strong pirates are able to get.<br/>
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It's also possible that those powerful ships haven't been built by the actual AI. In the exploration phase ...

<t> You're right on the point re:population being larger. I had forgotten about the importance of setting your tax rate to 0% initially as I misran an early test regarding happiness's influence on population growth: I failed to take into account that it takes a decent amount of running game time for ...

Hah.

I was going to tease about me having the name first, but considering you join date is all the way back in '01, that's still a solid year before I first used this name anywhere, and a good four years before it became my go-to username.

Would it be viable to upload the save somewhere for someone else to poke around in?

Since you already started a new save to run tests on, you could also just follow your various passenger ships and see where they're going.

<t> But it's not just about the colony's potential GDP when fully developed. It's also about how the addition of a 2bil colony can nearly double your empire's population in the early game. This increases your research output, nearly doubles your colony ship output, decreases your required tax level ...

<r>
<QUOTE><s>[quote]</s>ORIGINAL: Spidey<br/>
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He's probably talking about those lost colony type ruin events where you get info on a "lost" colony, which is then spawned on an ice moon somewhere.
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Correct. And unlike independent populations, they don't even ...

<t> Is it possible to remove certain types of ruins from map generation?<br/>
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Finally picked up the game in the recent sale, and on my initial game I felt like the game's balance was completely thrown off by the late-game ships many factions had acquired through various events.<br/>
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