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Do they always dominate every game?

3 games in a row now not only have they been pink, but the galaxy has too! Until I max my tech and come for them that is..

Are your results similar?

na they get stomped in my games most of the time, i believe who does well and who dies is largely related to how many races and space available to expand, how hard the pirates/starting systems and surrounding are.

Yeah, but that's probably mostly because I'm always playing as them. That 90% research bonus is plain ridiculous and so damn addictive that any other race feels utterly stupid by comparison.

The quameno can easily out-tech the other AIs, and because most of the AIs research the same things, quameno get everything faster. They get hyperdrives faster, colonization faster, weapons faster... It can snowball, but it depends in great extent on difficulty - their slow population growth is something the AI doesn't know how to deal with, also being an ocean race hampers them at start, as the AI seems to colonise anything with 50% or more quality and tons of ocean planets are in the 55-65 range, those planets really don't do much. If you play on higher difficulties, all the AIs have more money than they need so it's ok, but on normal, or even easy...

Now, in the hands of the player, they are unstoppable.

EDIT: what you have to understand is that playing quameno, you get Technocracy and your racial 40% bonus. Plus you can diversify your fuel sources early game (helps a lot). But everything else about the quameno is bad - they only have 2 planet bonuses (compared to 3 most other races get), slow population growth, no bonus on troops, not a stellar starting planet type. Playing them yourself, you can easily ignore the bad things - conquer independents and other races and use their good stuff - their troops, their colonization options, their pop growth, their race bonuses. You can have only your homeworld be quameno and that's all you need to keep your bonuses.

ORIGINAL: Spidey. That 90% research bonus is plain ridiculous and so damn addictive that any other race feels utterly stupid by comparison.

Races with lots of cash can perma crash research at 3 times the rate. Can quameno do that?

What makes Quameno so powerful is that their early expanson lets them get to the independants, ruins and wrecks first, which gets them other races bonuses, a massive economy (colonizing independants is like getting a fully developed colony instantly), and gets a number of overpowered deathships they can use to defend their new territory, as well as a much greater chance of first dibs on super weapons and super governments.

As for their strength, a lot of it has to do with the combination of very powerful racial bonuses and an extremely overpowered special government. Aside from Mechanoids and Shakturi, Races with more than 30% bonus in a respective area are rare, and more than 50% bonus is nonexistant outside of War Weariness, and Quameno, government and racial bonus combined, gets a whopping +90% to research, on top of having slightly better diplomacy due to their ambassadors automatically starting with the linguist trait (+10% diplomacy, +10% tourism income).

They also have no permanent weaknesses that cannot be covered up by including other races into your empire. Infact, in my current game they have -20% Ship Maintenance and +1% Colony Income from other races they included, and this is still early game.

As for Technocracy, when it alone can turn an otherwise mediocre race (Zenox) into a powerhouse, something is wrong, especially when the human/ketarov special government is a piece of junk.

Though, racial bonuses/penalties could possibly use across-the-board tweaking.

ORIGINAL: buglepong

ORIGINAL: Spidey. That 90% research bonus is plain ridiculous and so damn addictive that any other race feels utterly stupid by comparison.

Races with lots of cash can perma crash research at 3 times the rate. Can quameno do that?

When and on what difficulty? with how expensive research? Quameno have the 90% research bonus all the time. Plus they have Ultra Creative scientist (+20%) with 39% in Energy research at the start by default. They can research space travel so fast, that by the time the AI gets to space, you can have half the galaxy explored by then, even on extreme difficulty.

There is absolutely nothing you gain by crash researching something for 2 milion credits on normal diff in the endgame, because by that time, you have already won the game, you could have built ships/troops and just end it. The important part is at the start, how fast can you get exploring to grab the nice stuff and how fast you can grab those nice 90+ quality planets before the AI does. There is no way to have enough cash to crash research the gyrax hyperdrive or colonization when you need it and later, it doesn't matter anymore.

And as I pointed out, you don't need to have a lot of Quamenos in your empire to get those bonuses. just grab an independent with great growth and colonize with them.

You can perma crash everything even on max cost research with money spinning races. Its even more important to crash at the start when everyone is racing.

I play Quameno a lot. By trading tech I get enough money to crash too, selling at 30 to 40 percent of market value. I make enough profit to finance my entire military expansion, generally all the spare cash in the galaxy plus what little I get from taxes. Of course once the game gets rolling about year 5-7 I don't really need to sell tech for cash any more, and just sell when an AI empire is about to learn it...

Lonnie Courtney Clay

ORIGINAL: buglepong

You can perma crash everything even on max cost research with money spinning races. Its even more important to crash at the start when everyone is racing.

again, what race, what difficulty, what research price and what game year are we talking about? As a quameno, you build a tiny spaceport, 50+ speed explorer and once you explore your warp ruins, you can start researching Warp drives with around 1.5*1.4*1.2*1.39 = 3.5 multiplier. So even on Extreme diff (wchich starts you at about 270k research cap), you can get to almost one milion research strength in energy There is no way you can achieve that research speed with any other race at that time.

True, you cant match them in terms of single category research speed, but you can get overall research speed practically as fast, with the flexibility of money.

If i play Securan utopia, max difficulty and research cost, i can tax 90% and crash drive research with 300k research points in any one category, but also crashdrive the remaining two as well. I also swim in money and can buy anything, as well as grow at a super fast rate

On the subject of money and crash research, Quameno will be the first to build most wonders. The large development bonuses they offer translate to substantial increases in planetary income. Obviously, they can do a lot of crash research as well. They also get more money from the private sector because they are ordering retrofits with greater frequency.

Quameno da bess