[mvstang]

I'm trying to keep the number of ships down compared to a vanilla game. A lot of that is already working due to the increased build times. I've seen strats floating around where you use emergency build to pump out 10 colony ships in the first 10 turns. With the settings right now, it'll take a little over a year to build your first one. As I get farther into test games, I'll be able to see how it comes out affecting the total number of ships an empire has.

Right now, in my latest test game with the beta Version I'll release later today, I'm about 14 years into the game. I've explored about 1/5-1/6 of a large galaxy with around 230+ systems. 19 planets on 13 systems, and only 11 ships. Most of my ships are currently population transports or scout ships with solar collectors to explore the galaxy. Granted, I don't have as much experience with SEIV as many others probably do, so others might have strategies that would develop the empire faster.

I did run into one non-neutral computer player 2 systems away from me, and eventually forced his surrender after I built a ship bristling with Napalm and flew it into his home system. Interestingly enough, he did have an orbital shipyard above his home planet, so I'd assume he was using it at one point to produce ships, but I can't be sure. The neutral races aren't producing bases, but 3 of the 5 remaining computer races have at least 1 base built, so hopefully it won't be too hard to rewire the AI to use space ship yards effectively.

Tweaking or re-writing the AI is something I'll probably have to do by the time I'm done with a finished Version of the mod. It's something I haven't done before, and it'll likely be the Last major step after I try to get the ships to balance. Right now I have something like 116 races installed into the mod, but I'll probably scale that back to the default races so people won't get errors when the mod tries to load a race they don't have the pictures for in the main folder.

[ November 26, 2003, 17:45: Message edited by: mvstang ]