I just launched stardock for the heck of it, and 1.04.60 was there waiting! Here's a list of the changes:
Tweaks/Enhancements:
+ New lease system implemented.
+ New AI economic/research enhancements (smarter technology pathing)
+ Minor Races get diplomatic penalties in trading (easier to take advantage of minor races)
+ Diplomacy ability more important during trade.
+ General AI tweaks to be more intelligent overall, all civs.
+ Evil races smarter about colonizing planets and taking advatnage of random events
+ Scoring system enhanced (provide higher scores, bigger difference between difficulty levels).
I think these address a lot of the complaints that've been floating around lately.
There's a glitch with the score reporting between the game and the metaverse so scores submitted with thsi build will seem higher than what they'll eventually be recorded as. But otherwise hopefully you'llf ind this build to be a big improvement in the fun area.
I also noticed that the multimedia and bonus pack had updates as well - from 007 to 008 for multimedia and from 006 to 007 for the bonus pack. The history doesn't give any details for these. Anything important we might be interested in?
The scores should be Score ^ .75 power. That's what is missing.
So now we have to make a really tough decision:
a) Do we go back to 1.04? or b) Do we have the confusion where someone submitting a score of 250,000 actually has it only come out at 12,000 on the metaverse?
Hmm - I haven't had a chance to play it yet - but I note Frogboy's latest score:
6/5/2003 (1.044000)
Morality: Chaotic Good
Galaxy Size: Small
Difficulty: Painful
Alliance Victory
Score: A whopping 5663
Frogboy's been involved in a little "insider trading"
In his selfless desire to stress test this last minute emergency fix to the game he submitted a stack-o-games he must have been sitting on for some time. Coincidence that this version has higher scores than previous ones, I think not
I need to start up a game tomorrow and check out this lease system.
I'm happy to see diplomacy get even more boosts. For a while there, dip had been made pretty much pointless, but in recent builds I've been very pleased to see it making a comeback.
I started a game today with +50% diplomacy on "painful".... yeah, this is fun.
Frogboy & co: It's very well playable as it is, but don't make trading any easier or diplomacy further more powerful - the way it is now is quite good, but anything beyond would make it to easy.
In my last maso game, I managed to keep out of wars till I was ready even though I was a Good race among mostly evil and neutral ones. I had +10 diplo racial pick and diplo trans so the recent boosting of diplomacy was a real lifesaver for me.
Let's see how the further tweaks to diplomacy plays out.
This is definitely the best-balanced and most fun the game has been. Playing on Genius/Large. I have to suck up to the AIs just enough to stop them declaring war - then rush for Battleaxes. This holds them off for a bit and they start demanding stuff again - just in time for me to build Battlecruisers. Trade Goods are expensive to build and expensive to lease but not excessively so. Just enough that I can build Diplomatic Translators, Aphrodisiacs, Grav. Accelerators and that Tritonium thingo, but can't beat the AIs to the other stuff. Which is good. Plus I can get decent returns for them from minor races.
You've hit a sweet spot with all the settings. Good stuff.
I applaud Stardock for making changes to the game based on player feedback. I know how difficult it can be to listen to people criticize your creation in minute details, to the point where you wonder if it's worth it. It shows real dedication and professionalism to not give up and keep pushing to make the game the very best it can be.
Wow, just when I thought I had my strategy down of buying all the early very useful trade goods/wonders like diplo trans, grav accel, tri-steel, and gal stock exchange, along comes this update. 47 per turn on the long term lease per pretty much shuts this down. I love it. Am in the middle of a new game and really enjoy actually having to build it, sweating it out to see if someone is going to beat me to it.
Not sure if this is a bug or not but I can only establish one trade route. I'm not evil and no UP resolution limiting evils to one is in effect. The trade route slots show up but my freighter can't land on a planet.
