[spoon]

Originally posted by Suicide Junkie:
To me, knocking off only 5 points of damage from the APB would be reasonable.

Seems worth a try.

As for PPB, perhaps an accuracy penalty to reduce the effectiveness and add a bit of flavour at the same time?

How much of a to-hit penalty were you talking about?

I really think these should be nerfed so that they are only really good against ships that use unphased shields. As it is, unphased shields are only good for preventing ships capture and engine killers because of the prevalence of PPBs in the mid game. It would be nice to see them in the game as actual damage soakers. If PPBs weren't as good a general utility weapon, you might risk putting 4-5 shield V's on your battleships. Changing reload to 2 or reducing it's damage across the board is easier for me to see what the impact would be than giving it a to-hit penalty - though that is still a very interesting idea...

Food contamination seems OK to me... Its quite effective on small colonies, but to larger planets its only a turn's worth of population growth.

It's all too easy to wipe out a whole system in one turn, and then prevent repopulation through ship-capture. I use this all the time, and it is so effective, it almost makes me feel like I'm cheating.

PPP and Comm Mimic are definitely overpowered, but increasing the cost will cause the AIs to get stuck on such projects when they do try 'em.

Would removing them have an impact on ai? (I would think so for PPP, since it is the only item you get for level 4 applied intel, so the ai would waste time researching it, not to mention hapless newbies...)

So I'd suggest raising their cost as high as you think you can before "getting stuck" becomes an issue. 1M doesn't seem that high for PPP, (250% increase). Comm Mimmic - maybe at 100k?

Trade disruption and crew insurrection aren't too bad.
perhaps 60k or 75k each would be more than enough, IMO[/QB]

Sounds reasonable

The trade rebuilds on its own, and a ship or two rarely makes much of a difference.

Heh, I guess you haven't had your minesweepers stolen from your main fleet... Crew Insurrection can completely stall an attack...