Hypergates

[ops]

I play on gigantic sectors. Given the isolated nature of colonies and star bases, the ship speedup given by zones of influence is rarely adequate. Not having gotten much past turn 100 in any game I have been unable to get anywhere near researching the very few speedup techs like hyperdrive optimisation etc. It TAKES FOREVER, certainly multiple tens of moves in the larger sectors to get from one side to another. Can we please please please have hypergates back !?!?

[captainpatch]

I suspect that IF they were to bring back hypergates (which seem to have been replaced by inter-sector slipstreams), the tech for them would be well past where you get Hyperdrive Optimization.

[Illauna]

Originally posted by ops:

I play on gigantic sectors. Given the isolated nature of colonies and star bases, the ship speedup given by zones of influence is rarely adequate. Not having gotten much past turn 100 in any game I have been unable to get anywhere near researching the very few speedup techs like hyperdrive optimisation etc. It TAKES FOREVER, certainly multiple tens of moves in the larger sectors to get from one side to another. Can we please please please have hypergates back !?!?

Devs are looking into it. It's a pretty common end game complaint. For right now I use a rally point and setup a giant conga line feeding all of my ships to the front line. When at all possible I try up a forward colony to help build ships nearby. The beauty of this is I have a giant line of ships so if I need to respond to something near my rear lines I can just peel off a few ships and go. I never stop building military ships. If I have too many...which isn't an issue right now with maintenance being so low... I just decommission the older ships.

[captainpatch]

Side query:

Originally posted by ops:

I play on gigantic sectors.

During Setup, I've seen an option to set the size of the GALAXY MAP. But how/where set the size of the SECTORS?

[ops]

The size of sectors appears to be somewhat random. I re-roll/restart once or twice (or better yet wait 24 hrs) which usually gives me a large starting sector. GalCiv3 had the same problem of giving me (ymmv) increasingly bad start positions the more I restarted.

[SLG]

It is not a setting for the size of the sectors, but the number of them.

[Illauna]

The galaxy size determines how many tiles are available. It then divides them amount with all the sectors. If you have a large galaxy and few sectors they will generally be very large sectors.

[captainpatch]

Originally posted by Illauna:

The galaxy size determines how many tiles are available. It then divides them amount with all the sectors. If you have a large galaxy and few sectors they will generally be very large sectors.

Is there a way to set the number of sectors? If that's randomly decided by the AI, then there's no way that the _player_ can influence whether there are few BIG sectors, or many SMALL sectors, or a mix between the two. And of course, with the Fog of War (and NO cheating/peeking) the ONLY sector the player will see initially is just his own Home sector.

[Frogboy]

You decide how many sectors there are in the game setup.

You first decide the galaxy size.
Then you can choose the # of sectors (binary, a few, several, many).

If you want to get into the modding of it, you can play around with that in the StarCluterQuantityDefs.xml file I believe. It's pretty straight forward in there.

[captainpatch]

Thank you for that clarification! [Unfortunately, I'm not computer-savvy enough to do modding myself. Strictly a consumer when it comes to mods.] (Does this mean that modding has been activated?)

[Illauna]

Originally posted by captainpatch:

Originally posted by Illauna:

The galaxy size determines how many tiles are available. It then divides them amount with all the sectors. If you have a large galaxy and few sectors they will generally be very large sectors.

Is there a way to set the number of sectors? If that's randomly decided by the AI, then there's no way that the _player_ can influence whether there are few BIG sectors, or many SMALL sectors, or a mix between the two. And of course, with the Fog of War (and NO cheating/peeking) the ONLY sector the player will see initially is just his own Home sector.

No it's not random. What is random is whether or not you start in the one that you prefer. I would actually enable cheats and use 'fownc' without quotes and generate a few times to play around with the sectors to find what looks interesting. Then turn off cheats and generate with the same settings.

[captainpatch]

Even if you get a tolerable starting Home sector, the AI can still find a way to scr... foul you up. My current game gave me a good-sized sector with only one slipstream pathway out. (No one can "get behind you".) But then it put the Altairans in a _small_ sector at the other end of that path. Before I could decently develop MY Home sector, I had Altairans fanning out all over MY backyard. And by the time I could slipstream to the Altairans' sector, it was almost 100% Altairan territory. REAL hard to create a "stepping stone" to the next sector short of going to war with the Altairans. Managed to find ONE place to put a Communications Starbase near the other exit from the Altairan sector. (Which led to a HUGE up-for-grabs 5-way sector..)

And it looked so promising to begin with.....

[ghost88]

Choose a lower difficulty or less AI. This games AI is designed to be tougher.

[courtneyme109]

Originally posted by captainpatch:

Even if you get a tolerable starting Home sector, the AI can still find a way to scr... foul you up ...

And it looked so promising to begin with.....

Only one way to deal with it:

Start building probes and research both the slip stream techs as soon as possible.

Find all slip streams and block every hex around the entry/egress point with probes. Doesn't matter which side of the stream you block - just block them.

Replace the probes with fighters when tech allows the range to do so, along with influence star bases.

[captainpatch]

Originally posted by sexybeastrocks:

Originally posted by captainpatch:

Even if you get a tolerable starting Home sector, the AI can still find a way to scr... foul you up ...

And it looked so promising to begin with.....

Only one way to deal with it:

Start building probes and research both the slip stream techs as soon as possible.

Find all slip streams and block every hex around the entry/egress point with probes. Doesn't matter which side of the stream you block - just block them.

Replace the probes with fighters when tech allows the range to do so, along with influence star bases.

CLEVER! You get a hearty Attaboy for that one.

[ops]

The xml for hypergates is still there. Thus it appears that the code has been disabled as a conscious decision of the devs !!!