quote:
Originally posted by Puke:
hardly, first you have to have the resources to build all the stuff, and the tech to build decent stuff. you will most likely have neither since you blew all your racial points on zero maintnance, so you wont have very fast research, you wont have a high resource production, you wont have a high shipyard bonus, and you will probably suck in combat.
the big limiter to the flood-the-galaxy abilitiy (if you started in a low-population large galaxy where you had time to build up in the first place) is the recently fixed ship / unit limits. so no, i dont really think this is a bug. its actually kinda neat that you can choose to sacrifice everything else and not pay maintnance.
Check my math. It looks like the best combination you can get with your 2000 points w/o getting an advanced attribute and leaving everything at their default value is to set research to 120, mineral prod. to 120 and shipyard rate to 125. Does that sound right?
Those values don't seem to provide a decisive advantage over someone who isn't paying maintenance. At some point in the game, you *should* have more ships than the zero maintenance race because you are building faster with more minerals. But then, you'll max out ships vs. minerals. If you can destroy the maintenance empire before you hit that wall, sure, I think you are going to win.
But if you don't, then he is going to keep building ships until he has two or three or four times as many as you. With your faster construction rate, you are expanding faster. But can you build enough new mining facilities bringing in 20% more minerals to match the fact that he isn't paying any maintenance at all?
Your ships are not going to be any better than his. The only thing the zero maintenance race has to sacrifice is 20 pts off of repair aptitude. I don't think that is going to hurt that much since he can afford to maintain infinitely more repair bases/ships. In fact, I think you could drop that all the way down to 50 and use the extra points to buy more research, mineral production or shipyard rate.
I don't buy your argument about the 2000 limit. Sure, in the TG game, they hit that limit. But that is one of about a dozen things that happened in that game that I don't expect to see in the vast majority of games. Certainly, in a game against the AI, you will have won long before you hit that limit. Against human players? I don't think it's going to make much difference.
If zero maintenance means that I can have four times as many ships as you and still be building ships, how can you say that *any* combination of other bonuses is going to beat that?