Caltrops - Gamerasutra





	[quote name="laudablepuss"][quote name="Mischief Maker"]You create your ships with the absolute most loving attention to detail. Maybe you even write little development histories in the box provided. You carefully reshape nacelles for maximum aesthetic values. You spend hours crafting the most fearsome looking battleships possible. Then you take your creation out into battle... ...and learn that combat success is revolves entirely around your boring economy! Ha ha! My honeymoon with this game ended long ago. If Starships Unlimited had a tinkertoy ship-designer GalCiv2 would have nothing to recommend it. Still, the tinkertoy ship-designer <B>is</B> pretty frigging sweet. Maybe if someone put something like that into an Elite clone it would kick ass.[/quote] If they made it so I could design ships without even starting up a game proper, I might not even play the thing. Just to get a little more specific about the AI, I think I mentioned before (but am too lazy to check) that there are a few main areas where the AI R DUM. It attacks with swarms of shitty little fighters instead of capital ships (although one civ in my most recent game <i>didn't</i> do this, which might represent an improvement), they never escort anything, or the escorts are hillariously in front or in back of the transports instead of grouped with them, and their ships never have defenses or only have token defenses. All of these were still evident after the expansion. Even dumber, one of the civs I was fighting declined to put <i>engines</i> on his ships, so they all moved at a speed of 2. Anyway, I do appreciate Stardock's attitude that AI should be smart and not merely given huge economic bonuses. [/quote]