Late Game Woes

[76mm]

So on my second attempt I've been able to build out my empire and dominate the galaxy. The problem is that the last several hours have not been much fun, and that doesn't look during the next several hours it will take to achieve the victory conditions. Could experienced players pls help me on the points below?

1) Overwhelmed with messages: now that my empire is pretty big, I'm getting tons of messages, so many that it is difficult to play. I've tried changing my settings, but am not sure what to change to reduce the clutter. For instance...I'm so tired of these messages about tsunamis and earthquades all over the galaxy...who cares? What am I supposed to do about these disasters? How can I turn them off? What messages do you keep on late game?

2) I am totally dominant in the galaxy, and have "euphoric" relations with three other empires; I've been beating up on an enemy empire for ages, and it is now it last place. But during that time, I haven't advanced any closer to meeting the victory conditions. I guess the only way I'll be able to win is to destroy a couple of my long-time and close allies. Besides preferring not to stab my digital buddies in the back, I dread the tedium of taking over their empires. I guess I'll just quit the game pretty soon, but I'd rather had a set of victory conditions that can be achieved before hours of boredom set in. Any suggestions?

3) At this stage, my main task is to invade enemy colonies, so I need lots of troops. But they take forever to raise, even on long-time colonies and especially on newly-conquered ones. Any suggestions on how to speed up recruitment, or on how to reduce the need for huge numbers of troops? I guess I could bombard planets into the stone age, but was hoping to avoid that.

4) One of the thing that is driving me crazy is fleet management. I try to keep fleets on "guard x" so that I can tell where they are and they won't go anywhere. But sometimes they change to "No mission" anyway, don't know why. And when I attack an enemy system and try to move my fleets into it, once they are in the system I've been putting them on "attack" and "Same system" thinking that they would, you know, attack the enemy in the same system. Instead, usually they reverse and head to some system half way across the galaxy to refuel or refit....why? How to get fleets to do what they are told?

5) I don't think I'll play another game until it is easier to upgrade fleets without losing specialization. It seems pointless to create my own designs for ships, and then a fleet of those ships, only to have them totally transformed into a totally different design the next time they retrofit. Even if I wanted to upgrade each component manually (which I don't), the fleets often retrofit themselves. So if I design a fleet of "pursuit frigates" (or whatever), how do I prevent them from being turned into generic, albeit more advanced, frigates within a few "years"?

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Argor]

> I haven't advanced any closer to meeting the victory conditions

If you press V you'll get to the victory screen.

There's 4 different "categories" that each can give you max 25% score. You need 70% score (default, can be changed).

The categories are Economy, Population, Territory and race specific victory condition.

Holding your mouse over your bar you get more info. Perhaps you'll see:

Economy: 3/25%
Target:
Empire's private economy (GDP) generates 75% of galaxy total.

Your Empire:
yada yada 9% yada yada

In this example, my % of the galaxy's economy is small. I can still win with the three other categories. Up to you what's easiest.

The race specific ones seems to me to often be the easiest to go for. They vary. The cat people want to lose the least # of ships. The humans have 5 sub-categories, such as colonizing the most continental planets and having the most defensive pacts etc. etc.

Some should be easy to get. If you're playing the Zenox (cat people) and don't have the galaxy's fewest lost ships then you need to, somehow, make sure those who are ahead of you (in that metric) needs a few accidents. Like, being at war with you, or war with some other neighbour or Hive Carrier or whatnot.

Good luck!

[AKicebear]

Messages: once a category is overwhelming I simply turn it off entirely.

Late game stagnation: I suspect you need to both a) increase the difficulty of your next game, b) set a few starting empires as advanced, far away, races that dislike yours - this can set-up a mid to late game challenge empire to take on.

[76mm]

Now another late game problem, and this one is a show-stopper: since knocking out a rival empire (and taking over their ships, etc), the mouse has become almost completely unresponsive. Is this common? I've got a 700 star, 6x6 galaxy, and my computer is a 2-3 years old...

[Erik Rutins]

Now another late game problem, and this one is a show-stopper: since knocking out a rival empire (and taking over their ships, etc), the mouse has become almost completely unresponsive. Is this common? I've got a 700 star, 6x6 galaxy, and my computer is a 2-3 years old...

Could you share a save file which reproduces that for you please?

[76mm]

Could you share a save file which reproduces that for you please?

Forum says that file is too large...

[Erik Rutins]

Feel free to zip it and e-mail it to me at erikr@matrixgames.com if the forum will not accept it.

[76mm]

e-mail sent.

[kissb]

a few of my related thoughts :
1. Tsunami messages are bad, but not "freighters are attacked by gravillex bad", if you turn them off, you can miss an attack on important stuff.

2. In a 1000 stars very hard/chaotic galaxy ( playing as ackdarian/human ), have 1 old, tech lvl4 boskara ( if you are pre warp ), starting at the other end of the galaxy, and have only 1 other boskara, pre warp like you. They don't attack each other, so if there are more, they block each others growth. Start in galactic arm. Make sure it's lvl4, if lvl3, you'll dominate.

3. There are tech/location and general (good recruiter) bonuses, although I'm not sure they work, because generals have no effect on recruited army strength for example, so they could be as useless as an ultra genius trait.

4. Agreed. Guard something has zero effect on fleets ( everything set to manual in my case ). 30 sec, and they are on their way to kill some enemy freighter in the middle of nowhere

[Rising-Sun]

Yeah those popup messages is annoying, as long i can enjoy playing the game without being overpowered by AIs, such as pirates, etc. Then i would enjoy it. I know there some players out there want challenge while others want to relax and enjoy the game without getting overrun by AIs.

So i havent played in awhile, i alway play on something around 800-1000 systems and keep those pirates out, cause they can ruin your gameplay for sure. Turn off the events as well and play as sandbox. Now i dont know what state the game is now, but i been reading alot of comments on Steam that the pirates are way too strong from the beginning.

[thegreybetween]

To be fair, pirates are supposed to be strong in the beginning. They are the hardened survivors who never gave up their technology for safety on a planet. We represent people who are struggling to remember and recover what was lost. We're taking our first steps into a place we've forgotten, and that attracts these pirates who never forgot. They are drawn to us now because they don't want us to become an unchecked threat to them, and now that we have basic knowledge of spacefaring, we may actually have resources worthy of pirating.

Jumping into pirate conflicts when we know 2 techs and can only build escorts is a recipe for failure, but pirates can serve a purpose even then. And they do represent a great "coming of age" moment when our people advance to the point of actually stopping, then defeating, these factions.

I think a lot of the negative criticism is from people who expect pirates to work like Barbarians in a game like Sid Meier's Civilization - a nuisance and source of early XP. But that's not what we have here, and pirates are actually a great thematic and mechanical crux for early DW2 empires. So the negative feedback is more of an issue with user expectations than it is with game balance.

[arvcran2]

To be fair, pirates are supposed to be strong in the beginning. They are the hardened survivors who never gave up their technology for safety on a planet. We represent people who are struggling to remember and recover what was lost. We're taking our first steps into a place we've forgotten, and that attracts these pirates who never forgot. They are drawn to us now because they don't want us to become an unchecked threat to them, and now that we have basic knowledge of spacefaring, we may actually have resources worthy of pirating.

Jumping into pirate conflicts when we know 2 techs and can only build escorts is a recipe for failure, but pirates can serve a purpose even then. And they do represent a great "coming of age" moment when our people advance to the point of actually stopping, then defeating, these factions.

I think a lot of the negative criticism is from people who expect pirates to work like Barbarians in a game like Sid Meier's Civilization - a nuisance and source of early XP. But that's not what we have here, and pirates are actually a great thematic and mechanical crux for early DW2 empires. So the negative feedback is more of an issue with user expectations than it is with game balance.

Sure ... opting for fictional realism whereby Pirates have some of the most advanced tech in the game, when a player is just learning to play a game is intriguing and 'Story setting relevant' makes sense.

[AKicebear]

Sure ... opting for fictional realism whereby Pirates have some of the most advanced tech in the game, when a player is just learning to play a game is intriguing and 'Story setting relevant' makes sense.

Isn't this explained in game via story events?

Personally, I am fine the pirates - I find they add to my experience.

[arvcran2]

Sure ... opting for fictional realism whereby Pirates have some of the most advanced tech in the game, when a player is just learning to play a game is intriguing and 'Story setting relevant' makes sense.

Isn't this explained in game via story events?

Personally, I am fine the pirates - I find they add to my experience.

I read my post again and it does ring a little sarcasm. The story context for Pirates is in the beginning of the game manual as well.