Any idea when it'll be ready?  And from the way you're beating around it... will we see Romulins??? 

Loki, how in the _world_ do you guys make games of SOA2 last only 1 or 2 hours? Play on a tiny map? Constantly rush with tier 1 tech frigates? Disallow starbases? You gotta be doing something different than I am...

Oh, I also play the game single player on "normal" speed, that may have something to do with it... but I do increase the game speed to 8x when I'm just waiting around for resources to come in and can't do anything else. And it STILL takes a long time.

But for me, I usually don't have the confidence to attack at all until at least 1 - 2 hours into the game. I usually get rushed pretty early by an aggressive AI, manage to fend them off while taking light / moderate losses, then gradually turtle up my defenses and research while holding off increasingly larger waves of enemy ships. I guess my strategy lends itself to long games. But I couldn't really enjoy a game that goes by so quick that you can't get all the tech, or at least all the ships.

On the other hand, it might be fun to play in a SOA2 multiplayer game and see how long it takes people to kill one of my starbases with 200k shields

I re dled it again and used winzip to extract and got this

Extracting SoA2 03E1\Textures\Curry-cl.dds Error: CRC mismatch in file "SoA2 03E1\Textures\Curry-cl.dds

This is the 3rd time I dled it btw

Eh, that's a rough way to do it.  An easier way to do it is to send in a fleet of 6-8 Defiants (about twice the damage of a Sovereign) and and ~25 Akiras.  Don't mess with the enemy ships, just go straight for the starbase.  Even if it's fully leveled up, it will only take a few passes if you've got your weapons all the way leveled up.  The Defiants are that powerful (which is why they're making some new restrictions on them).

Loki says:

Mostly due to the following pictures, and my experience in previous games.  Note the small, circular emplacements in the following.  In previous drawings and games I've played, these are disupter turrets.  Maybe somebody has reason to believe they're not weapons, but that's what I've seen them used/described as previously.  They're pretty well spaced out over the whole hull, and with something the side of a D'deridex, it's inconceivable not to have a good weapons arc.  The ship is too blasted big for anyone to believe it's tough to add another gun or two to cover a blind spot a fast ship could exploit.  Now grated this is one ships, and I don't expect the smaller ones (e.g., later versions of the bird of prey) to follow this, but it would seem to be the precedent for the big ones.  Anyway, the turrets are as follows.

Top view: two pairs, one along the centerline abound halfway between the bow and stern, one pair slightly outboard and close to the aft end:

Bottom view: one pair clearly visible near aft end, slightly outboard of centerline:

Elevation View: not counting those shown above, there are three more pairs (another is on the opposite side):One on the forward hull section, one on the aftmost hull section (joining the upper and lower hulls), and one on the small piece running from the forward hull section aft to the lower hull section.

I don't know what you're doing wrong, but I've never needed that much fire power for the starbases.  Even the 220k shields variety doesn't take more than a few dozen cruisers and four or five capital ships.  They will absolutely rape frigates, as well as cruisers if you're not very careful about running them off when they start taking hull damage.  You only take massive casualties if you want to though, and you do not need a maxed out fleet to do the job.  You don't even need an optimized one.  Just send in four or five of the top end capital ships, then follow in with your cruisers.  The capital ships last forever, even against a maxed out starbase, so run the cruisers through and retreat after they make a pass or two.  Wait long enough for the low refire rates to recharge and run them through again.

One top tier capital ship is more than a match for an unimproved starbase, they really aren't that powerful, the frigates are just really easy to kill with all that damage against the comparatively poor armor.

I went back to page 29 and didnt find this??

For those who can't understand what to do with the curry file to un-break your download, I extracted the original .rar, dropped the replacement curry file in, and re-compressed it using 7-Zip into a self extractor. I then hosted it on my webspace. No annoying filefront ads and I have 100mbps upstream. Feel free to link to it in the main post.

http://tiyukquellmalz.org/SoA2_03E1.exe

Feel free to virus scan/malware scan/etc. before you run it, but you have my assurances that it's *just* a 7-Zip self extractor. Keeps people from whining about using a file format they can't open.

I don't know if that's such a good idea Allquixotic, they said something about wanting to keep track of downloads from their filefront counter.  You might want to consult with the team before posting something like this.

 

OK I've removed it for now. The link should give you a 404 until further notice. I'll look into implementing a simple download counter though so the team can still get that benefit.

One thing I would be a fan of would be increasing the range of a starbase to be roughly on par with a defensive platform, but making their weapons do less damage than current to compensate for the increased firing time.  After all, the Sov has Type XII Phasers, and I believe those are "Starbase Class" weapons.  When a tiny little platform has more range than an entire station which costs significant chunks of resources, something just seems a bit wrong.

To me, as they are, starbases are more like something to toss into a gravity well to try and prevent your planet from being lost by bombardment than a major tactical advantage.  Sure they do lots of damage, but they can easily be avoided or their damage minimized, and if you avoid them you can attack the more vital structures like research/trade stations and resource asteroids which can severely cripple an enemy economy which is a major threat in itself.

I suppose if you cluster all of your buildings within the firing range of the starbase it might increase their overall effectiveness, but their range still makes that somewhat difficult.  Even if you warp right into their firing range you can quickly move out of it before it can cripple your fleet, especially if you've upgraded to higher level tech.

Yes, killing a starbase that someone has spent a significant chunk of time and money on is a major kicker in the goal of conquest, but if it can't serve a major purpose as a defensive structure, it almost seems like a waste of resources, unless you're really keen on the delay it can cause by preventing loss from bombardment.  To me, I just feel that a starbase should be something that, if you choose to invest your time and money on, it should give you back at least the equal cost in defensive ability.

Please understand that I am by no means saying that I hate the starbases in any way, just that I see a way they could be better and add more of a strategy to the game than they already present.

Couldn't make the last multi-player game; anybody up for an ICO game this weekend?  Note that here in the US, Monday's a holiday too, so that may help us out.

To the people talking about how excited they are for the Romulans:

I am too!

They've always been my favorite race, and I can't wait to play them again