[spoon]

Originally posted by geoschmo:

It sounds to me as if all these people think the game is unbalanced and then realize it's not as bad as they thought.

It's pretty bad. But, the game balances itself by being multiplayer, and allowing everyone to exploit the imbalances equally, or to team up against people who have done so.

Unfortunately, this requires knowing a lot of non-apparent factoids about the game. It's sad to me that people invest a lot of time developing and playing empires, only to lose the game horribly because they didn't realize that maintenence reduction subtracts from the base, or that your chance to hit can quite easily drop to 1% unless you pour some points into aggressiveness.

-spoon