[Atrocities]

All weapons are lower powered so having uber shields is counter productive to the mod. The game has been tested over and over and over again and the shields work fine given the weaker range of the weapons. I will test the borg out, again, and try and fix any problems they might have. Thanks.

The problem with designs is that there is only so much you can put on a design before you have to manualy add AI tags to the design to get it to add additional weapons or components. In later games, after players have Shield Generator X, you MUST have shield destroying weapons on your designs or a huge fleet in order to take out one well defended ship. This is call technological progression where shield tech has out paced beam weapon ability to peneatrate it. So you change tacticts and start equiping your ships with shield penetrating advanced weapons, and or weapons that target shield generators.

I have gotten a lot of statements about the AI and the pace of the game.

For a long time I thought I was doing something wrong, that is until now, I was sent a save game for an older version and the player had over 500 turns. The AI in this game had huge, HUGE, fleets of ships of every size from scout to Dreadnought. Their planets were all colonized and full, they were creating new planets and moving about via new warp points. The AI was permorming brillantly.

So it occured to me that the problem is not really a problem at all. People expect to have engaging game play within a few turns of starting a game. They are fixated upon getting into the action as soon as possible. They often play a game of about 100 to 150 turns before calling it quites. In this time they expect the AI to have dreadnoughts by turn 20 and providing them a challenge as early as turn 10.

Well SEIV is not a 100 to 150 turn game, it is a long range game with turns as high as 1,000 and beyond.

When you start a game of SEIV one must realize that an average game is NOT 100 turns, as in the demo, but rather 500 to 1000 turns.

If players would be willing to play the mod to those numbers they would find that the AI is quite formiddable. However, most are just interested in getting right into the action. To them I will now say, start the game with High-tech levels and by turn 20 your should start to see dreadnoughts.