[Rigelian]

Check settings.txt for the damage to kill one population setting (I forget exactly what it is called). I do not recall what the value is. But basically, take damage done / that number and that is how much pop you can kill in each shot. Planetary Napalm III may well be able to kill those <100 M people.

Aha, there it is.
Damage Points To Kill One Population:= 10
Those monster napalm bombs are going to be doing about 800 if I remember correctly, so that plus the 'overspill' from the Last WP hits is going to finish off 100M pop more often than not.
Thanks.

What are the problems you really care about that were not fixed in Gold? Maybe they have been fixed in a recent patch and your friend is unaware of the fixes?

For the detailed arguments see my earlier Posts in this forum, rather than me repeating them here. But my top ones would be:

- trade relationship values should be based on smaller economy
- edge effects (don't want to rehash that one again!) - even if I accept the additive system, there is still that massive dropoff at max range
- Volley fire (player A fires all, then B fires all). There's no processor-power reason to persist with that I'm sure. Alternating fire would take a lot of the luck out of big battles.

These are the ones that can't be modded away or dealt with by house rules. I have a lot of issues like that, but they would be the same in 1.49 or Gold.

Then there are some PITA user interface issues, like not being able to jump from ALL the lists to the planets or ships. The one-or-all fleet windows. Not being able to assign the same build to multiple queues at a time. No context menus. Non-sizable list windows in general. No option to turn off the graphics and get more items in a list. No use of high resolution screens. Can't tell a freighter to load until it is full, or a minelayer to lay up to the limit, or pre-order a freighter to pick up/drop off less than the maximum. No zoomable/scrollable galaxy map.

Basically Gold doesn't give me anything extra that I think is needed. But then, I haven't kept up with the patches lately - what would you say are the main advantages of Gold? And BTW, that list looks like I hate the game, doesn't it? . Actually its my favourite computer game, but I think a few small fixes would make it so much better.