[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Silent Sorrow:
Another batch ...

1. When using an armour such as emissive I, does the "negate 10 points of damage" feature stack? That is, if I have three of them on, does it negate 30 points of damage? (Otherwise, I don't see any use for it on that end since even a DUC I does more than 10 points of damage.)

2. Is espionage working properly? I got a message about political espionage claiming that enemy forces had "learned of your relationship with the Cryslonite empire." Um, except that I hadn't yet encountered the Cryslonites--and many turns later have yet to encounter them. What gives?

3. What tech increases population growth and where is it?

4. What exactly does a climate control facility do and is it worth it?

5. How does remote mining work on a system with more than two planets in it? Does the robo-miner mine from all the planets in that system or just the "top" one?

6. How do "force concentration" reports intelligence work? I got a report saying enemy forces were building up in a certain system but it didn't show me WHERE that system was. Less than useful.

7. Will a ship's pont defence weapons attack targets that are actually attacking some other ship? That is, will PD weapons on ship A also defend ship B against incoming fire if in range? (If so, this opens up a realm for dedicated PD ships which would be great.)

8. Is there any way to change or upgrade weapons platforms? It seems like you have to jettison them and simply build new ones--a real pain given new technology you want to add. Starting over each time is incredibly tedious.

9. After I've built a weapons platform is there any way to see its hit points before actually building one? (You can take them into the simulator it seems.) I want to be able to compare the effectiveness of different combinations of armour and shields, etc., before choosing to commission one.

1. No. However, the emissive armor has one weird quality. It is 'transmitted' to every component in your ship. So if you have an emissive armor ability on ANYTHING in your ship EVERYTHING in it will have the ability. Even if it's not armor your armor will be emissive, and even if it is armor your internal components will resist 'skips armor' or 'skips shields and armor' weapons as if it had the ability.

At this time the emissive armor ability has no effect if the damage is over it's rating. This is NOT how it worked in SE III and we're still pestering MM to fix it.

2. That's one of the bugs in the intel system. When it 'randomly' selects victims for some operations it doesn't check whether you are in contact with them. Of course, in this case it's not 'quite' a bug. If they learned that you are NOT in contact with them, they learned your relations to the, right?

3. The only standard tech that increases population growth is the Urban pacification Center which increases population happiness. You can also research Climate Control and imporve th condition on your planets, but that's very slow. Organic Tech has some facilities that improve reproduction directly.

4. The Climate Control facility improves the 'Conditions' on a planet, which allows slightly faster reproduction. That's it.

5. A robo-miner will mine all UNCOLONIZED objects in the sector where it is located, so yes a loation with three uncolonized planets can be very rich.

6. Force concentration simply reports the name of the system with the largest number of the target empire's ships. That's all. If you don't know the name of the system or where it is, too bad.

7. Yes, PDC will attack anything that passes into their range, regardless of what other ship they may be targetted at. I'd like to be able to set the range at which they engage. Currently they always attack immediately at max range.

8. No, weapons platforms cannot be upgraded. e've been pestering MM for ages to at least let us SCRAP them. So far, no go. You can only scrap units that can be placed in space. (Satellites, fighters, drones.)

9. Not at this time. It would be nice to be able to see the total 'hit points' of a ship or unit, especially a drone since drones are rammers. Something to request from MM.

[ July 12, 2002, 21:01: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]