[Talenn]

geoschmo et al:

While you are quite correct that it does eventually come down to outthinking the enemy, I think he brings up a valid point.

If you know what the 'best' weapons and ship archetypes are, why bother to have a tremendously rich tech tree of items that are clearly inferior to the 'tried and true' method? I think most people are convinced that Missiles are utterly useless past the initial stages of the game. Same goes for half of the weapons in the 'standard' tech set...they just arent worth it compared to some of the other weapons.

So, in essence you have plenty of choices, but if you want to compete, you really dont. It comes down to strategic maneuver, yes, but why include the rest if it isnt anything but window dressing?

I went through once long ago (v1.21 or so) and modded the heck out of the game to try and rebalance a lot of things in the game. I was quite pleased by the results, but I had to spend entirely too much time tweaking the AIs to accomodate my changes and I eventually lost interest after the patches kept adding to the workload. Now, I just play the 'standard' techset simply to avoid having to constantly update my date for patches.

But after a few games recently, I'm inclined to agree with askan in that there is really a fairly easily found 'formula' to success. Personally, I think future patches should be devoted to tweaking the existing gameplay so as to make many of the option already present in the game seem more palatable. One thing I've noticed about SE4 is that there are rarely any 'Guns or Butter' decisions in the tech tree. Most of the econ techs arent worth it vis a vis the military ones. The only real decision is which military techs to research and even that is limited by the somewhat unbalanced state of the various weapons.

At any rate, I think that askan's point is very valid and would like to see those points addressed at some point in the future if balance tweaks are still possible in the 'real' set.

Thanx,
Talenn