I'd suggest for the time being that the merchant and perhaps engineering cultures be disallowed due to the maintenance balance problem. Either that or just say everyone must be neutral (more extreme, obviously). The cultures weren't rebalanced for the change in maintenance in the latest patch, and I think that disallowing the problematic ones will be the least painful remedy to fix people getting ridiculously low maintenace costs.
quote:
I had thought about those, but decided that someone who could force the AI to surrender swiftly deserved that advantage. It left in the rivalry between economists and warmongers. Maybe you could enslave them with troops faster than I could build up my score, maybe you couldn't.
The problem is that the AI surrenders based on score, which is mainly the number of ships and bases you have, not your economy. Since you can blockade the AI homeworlds early with an escort, generally reducing their score to 4k, you only need to build a few colony ships and a repair base or two and you'll have a 40k score and the AI will give in.
It's simply not possible for someone to beat this using troops, since you need to research construction, troops, build transports, etc. Thus, if you even try to play as a warmonger, you'll be at a severe disadvantage, especially if you keep any points in strength or ship combat, as I can set these to their minimum, and not have it affect me even a little.
I'd be all for keeping it if I thought there was even a remote chance that some other tactic would be competitive. I had been using the troop method and ship capturing until I came across this, and they just aren't anywhere near as effective...
-Drake