quote:
Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
"THe Neural Combat Net is not effective, Unless you have a dreadnought at Novice and an Escort at 50% Legendary or something like it."
If you're using large fleets and taking losses all the time, it can make your fleets more effective, faster- you don't need to spend time at training facilities, and ALL ships get the bonuses of any ship over 20%. Well, as long as you don't loose the experienced ship(s) 
IMO it really should be a standard tech tree item.
Phoenix-D
Yeah, I think it makes sense for the Psychic tech tree. The problem is, the two 'racial' tech fields most in need of a boost are Deeply Religious and Temporal. The others - Crystalline, Organic, Psychic -- have plenty of cool toys.
Temporal needs a defense, not necessarily armor like Crystalline and Organic, but something to improve their defenses. I was thinking there ought to be a 'displacement device' that makes the ship 'shift around' and causes a fixed chance for a weapon to miss no matter what the true percentage to hit it. A fixed 30 percent chance to miss, even for missiles, would go a long way towards negating technological or even numeric advantages. An interesting question would be how this would interact with the Talisman!
Religious needs something more to help it on the 'offensive'. The shrines are all very nice but only work in your own systems. Figuring out exactly what would make sense is a real tough question. You can see that the effects of the shrines are supposed to come from their ability to rally the population to do various things that improve the society and environment. Even the 'death shrine' and 'war shrine' could represent excellent training rather than some 'magical' power. I've been trying to think of a 'pseudo-science' (erm, 'pseudo-religious'?) explanation that would make the neural combat net usable in the religious techs...
[ 29 April 2002: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]