[geoschmo]

Personnally I am happy with it the way it is now. (Of course at Last count I was still in first so I am not sure its fair to ask me. laf)

I am very concerned about the no maintenance "trick" that Drake found. I think that is a serious flaw that could have destabalizing effects. I tested it out myself and it was too easy to get.

You start with a Merchant race which is free and gets you +5% off of maint. Then with your 2000 points you can get you your maint apptitude up to 117% which gives you 22%. Then it's simply a matter of knocking 5 points or so off of 3 other categories and you can get to 25% off maint without any noticble deficencies.

Because of the strange way its calculated, +25% off maint (which is base of 25%) give you Zero Maint cost for your ships. It should reduce your maint to 18.75% (75% of 25%) but t doesn't. IMHO that is a pretty serious flaw.

Of course if everybody does it then it isn't really unfair. But some may not know how to do it, and if you know how but don't do it it puts you a serious disadvantage, which eliminates some of the variety of available race characteristics that I like so much about SEIV.

You would end up with all pretty much identical races in your contest. Kind of a IROC challange for SEIV. If that is what you want, and I don't think you do, then post a preprogrammed race on your website and require people to use it.

Otherwise you should at the very least inform people how to do it on your website, for those that don't read the forums, or put a limit on how much maint reduction is allowed in the race that is used for the contest.

Perhaps a third option would be to allow people to use one of the 8 stock races that are in the retail game with no modifications. I don't relly like that idea though, especially since that would disqualify my entry that I have already posted.

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"Today is a good day to die" --- Cherokee Indian saying (What, you mean you thought Worf thought that one up?)