1.03 Better than1.02 ?

Tax and morale did not change from 1.02 (or 1.0 for that matter).

The AI will trade for cash but will not trade all of its cash, especially early on when it's trying to build up its own civilization, unless the deal is really really good.

that is something i have been wondering....how in the world do the minor races bust out the trade goods so fast....in my current game, the only empires that have gotten trade goods are minor races...i have seen 4 of them (different ones...that is a good thing)....

Actually, it is a little more challenging now. I like the changes. Before, it was too easy to run the AI economies into the ground with trading.

Now, I have to trade much more and the AIs always seem to be right behind me in tech as a result! The Drengins even passed me at one point, but I took care of that (heh heh)

BTW, I have acquired every trade good and galactic wonder so far... I'm going for a clean sweep! (Tiny map, all Intelligent AI)

I am having a much, much harder time of keeping my morale up. It *seems* to me like there is some morale vs. taxes change as well.

My guess would be leases. I was able to crank out aprodiasiacs and diplomatic translators quite fast early in the game. I chose the one with the cheapeast up front payment and cheapeast bc repayments then sold some of my techs for cash and did the same for diplomatic translators. Then I simply reduce spending and increased tax to give myself a positive cash flow.

Re: minors and trade goods

I don't know, but they could just be leasing them for an instant buy. The AI can and does rushbuild in this game and a minor civ is actually in a better position than others: its econ isn't going to be bogged down under maintaining 2 dozen colonies so it has more cash to play with.

You have a very good chance of getting the wonders and trade goods you want on all difficulty levels if you are willing to lease-rush them (like the AI will do). There are some critical ones which supplement my strategy which I always rush. This is made easy by the very long lease period that is offered by the last supplier (Mitrosoft?). Once you get past the initial critical growth stage, it is very easy to service these leases.

Before Brad and team goes and tweak this , I do share the concern that game balances should be done consciously so that the game remains accessible to all gamers - casual and otherwise. It should not be focused on providing increasing challenge to more hardcore gamers who spend lots of time thinking about how to beat the game.

Though we can say that casual gamers can still play on lower AI difficulties, I doubt they want to pit themselves against fool AI all the time

I've found 1.03 much harder (in my 2 hours of playing) but I haven't figured out why :notsure:
Maybe better AI? Anyway, you screwed my PQ strat;p

*sarcasm*

1.03 is a great improvement IMO. I think the AI in diplomacy is MUCH better now but still not much of a match for me at Intelligent. Took me a little longer now to get all the AI's under my grip in my current game, but by deftly playing them off one another, making sacrifices at the right time and strangle-holds at other times, I'm the tech leader, master of their diplomatic fates yet again. But I *earned* it this time, and was scared at times (for once), the Arceans ripped me a new one for all of three turns in a war where they outnumebred me 2-1 but I taught them the futility of that whn they saw what a 100% ship-producing economy bolstered by the finances of the other three races' tributes can do to their worlds.

I think .03.053 might hand me an even harder deal if the Arceans actually manage to defend their planets this time. Have to see. Need to finish up my current game.

So, count this as a disagreement to the original post... keep it up Brad, Cari and others!, the game is getting better and better!

~SDC~

Before Brad and team goes and tweak this , I do share the concern that game balances should be done consciously so that the game remains accessible to all gamers - casual and otherwise. It should not be focused on providing increasing challenge to more hardcore gamers who spend lots of time thinking about how to beat the game.

YES !!

Moral VS Tax Rate.

Over time I learned early in the game you can set spending to 100% and Tax rate to 60%.

This allows you to get some techs early in the game and build some trade goods.

The moral early in the game on Earth was 100%
and 60% the moral on Earth was still 100%
With this build I set the Tax rate early in the game to 60% and the moral on my planets drop to 17%.
So I had to lower the tax rate to under 40% and I get over 50% moral.

The effect is I can not build the first trade goods before a minor race has already built them. Nothing I love better than build a trade good and with in 4 or 5 turns before the good is completed I find out some minor race built the trade good before me, AND ALL PRODUCTION on the trade good goes out the window !!
I said it before and I will say it again I which you had some warning that another race was about to build a trade good "OS/2 GC" had the warning but at least with OS/2 if you lost the trade good your production could be used building some other trade good.

Does not matter much I used to be able to get 100BC for 10 months for a Trade Good. Now forget it a Race is gives you 40BC if you are lucky. What does this mean well I can not trade for cash as I get more leases for social projects completed on my systems I can only drop my production level.

It takes longer to build and research everything so Aliens races in out winning. I dummy down the major races the effect is at this point minor races end out controlling trade good etc. Minor races seem to play at the same level in all games.

@Technician

I don´t have experienced yet these drastic changes you noticed in the game.

You are more less complainign about three different things:
1.You have to drop tax levels to 40% to mantain a morale of round about 50%, 2.due to the lower income you have to drop your production level (You can´t run full steam economic 100% all the time now) ,3. minor races are quite fast in building trade goods you don´t get an adavance warning.

1. I "real life" an approval of 50% is quite hard to reach => 40% taxes is pretty high but you still can win the elections. If it is as "bad" as you say I say yes at last you get back some balance in the tax levels (I am personnally running 71% taxes and doing fine. By the way AI´s have to play by the same rules as you do though they don´t get an advantage here.

2. In my book running 100% spending rate is telling your people working full overtime never sleep spending more money that you have in forced production programms for war times / Running all the time at full steam is IMO not quite realistic and not fun for me (where is the strategy?) .
The periods when a society can mantain these kind of production levels are normally during wartimes and you risk running into debts. => more strategy involved then letting your sliders all the time on 70% tax / 100% spending.

3. Lets see you can see what kind of research the other races have though it is quite simple to deduce who is able to build the tradegood you want. If you decide to build slowly this tradegood, is a risk you decide to run. You could always buy this tradegood in one turn. Telling you beforehand that another civilization has nearly finished a tradegood would force you to rushbuild the item simply. No strategy involved in this improvement you demand. Perhaps a popup when you start a tradegood who is also able (not necessarily buliding) to produce this tradegood you want?

Uh, I pay 15% taxes and I'm pretty pissed. The highest tax bracket in the USA is 38% with no deductions and those are usually large corporations with not enough debt. Anyway the point is that excessive taxation does piss people off. Heck the American Revolution was caused over taxes of like 5% or something stupid like that.

Once you build enough moral boosters later in the game it should get easier to raise the tax rate. At a certain point the population growth you get for a lower tax rate goes away and your morale is stuck at 100 ( with lots of morale boosters ) so you might as well boost taxes to get more revenue.

What I do is start the game off at 20% tax rate and keep it there for as long as it takes to get a huge population. So far I've never had to raise it.

Sounds great! I've used tech whoring and war purchasing to make too easy of a game, even with all AIs on Genius. So I can't wait for this version!

But definitely do let the casual gamers have options for making easier wins. This is really important in keeping a wide fanbase, as you know.

Technician:

Quick question, you weren't starting with the PQ ability before it got nerfed were you? That would provide a huge increase to quality on Earth, which would lead to a much higher morale value, which would allow you to tax them more.

Now that PQ is effectively gone, you would be seeing the "real" starting condtions for the first time.

If that's not the case, then i have no idea.

About making the game more difficult... the AI on Intelligent should always been playing by the same rules. Any increases in difficulty should come from AI improvements. At this difficulty, anything possible on a level playing field should be allowed because that is what the humans are going to do.

For example, why don't the AI's immediately come to me and offer me a "great deal" on a trade good? Are we willing to buy some to gain the benefits? If not, then why should the AI?

At levels below Intelligent, obviously the game needs to be easier.

Perhaps I can shed some light on what Technician is experiencing. I think he started with a bad luck of the draw planet, usually class 16 or 17. When you start out with planets like this, then no, there's no way you're going to be able to raise your taxes very far without killing your morale/approval rating.

You can counteract some of the approval rating hits by using the propeganda sliders. Makes a huge difference if you're trying to maintain political control.

I'm running my taxes on 1.03 around the 50% mark, with my spending fluctuating between 50% to 60%. My economic power is around the 160 to 180 band.

Now currently I'm playing with the computer set to I believe Intelligent (2 levels above normal, 2 below the hardest), and had some sticky moments when I ran into the Drengin. Basically I had to back off my typical constructor strategies and did alot of wheeling and dealing with minor races. I manage to get a little cash out of the richer ones, but I generally found it more to my advantage to trade up for technologies. Doing this allowed me to rush toward the Battlehammers.

Drengins went to war for a short while, but I knew that within a few turns, I'd have an armada of battlehammers waiting in the wings. Right as they got near me (my military rank was about 3rd at that time), I took a chance and negotiated a treaty by handing off frictionless, and I believe harmony crystals for peace. They backed off, and this bought me enough time to bring my fleet of battle hammers online.

Now I got a #1 military rating of 248, which the Drengins falling behind. I'm second to the Acreans in technology (who are weak militarily but strong tech-wise). I got A TON of trade coming in.

Now that I'm past that rather sticky opening, I'm well on my way to going after my own agenda at my own pace. My cashflow is still positive, and I have some bargaining chips if necessary.

The point I'm getting to is, its still feasible to marshall a decent economy. It's still feasible to maintain morale. And above the normal level, its still possible to overpower the AI oponents. Alot depends on your opening moves and how stingy you are on the social improvements. Also trade trade trade trade... get those trade routes.

I'm not a hardcore player by any stretch of the imagination. You can look up my metaverse scores to see this, but I feel this game is challenging enough. If nothing else, I like the changes here and there.... helps me to see how I can adapt to change.

SeanB

I think Earth may of been class 16 come to think about it. Next time I get such a poor quality starting planet I will quit before I even begin.

The new constructor cost combined with the 5 bc starbase maintenance is hurting me a lot. Which is sort of irritating since I was never one of the ones that stacked starbases anyway, now I have to pay the price for those that did in 3 different ways (higher cost contructors, 5 BCs per starbase (which early in the game is a -killer- on your economy), and 3X planet max production for free (which can be reached even by one fully upgraded starbase if you set your slider high)).

This updated gimped people who trade, people who use PQ, and people who build starbases. I expect there'll be quite a few disgruntled people around for a few days. I'm not real thrilled now myself, but I expect once I adjust to the new balance that everything will be fine. Nothing is really wrong with 1.03, but to be honest it's really not the same game as 1.02 and a lot of people are going to spend some time getting burned finding that out, and I expect they'll share some of that frustration here.

Frogboy, are you sure moral hasnt been changed? Maby it was affected by mistake when something else was changed, but it seems to lower faster than it used to . :notsure:

Frogboy, are you sure moral hasnt been changed? Maby it was affected by mistake when something else was changed, but it seems to lower faster than it used to . :notsure:

I said morale with regards to tax rate hasn't been changed. Morale with regards to population has.

oops ssorry bout the double post

It's cool that the game changes all the time. You have to keep re-learning things.

Not that 1.03 seems very much different.

I have a hard time figuring out if tech trading has changed much. I guess it's now a little harder to get good deals from the AI now.

Start out with 70% Diplomacy, pick the Populists party (+20%) and then buy the Diplomatic Translators (+30%)from Mitrosoft as soon as you can, and you still have no problem keeping up with the AI tech.

With the +15% PQ option gone, I say that +70% Diplomacy is now the most useful skill you can start with.

I'm not sure why maintenance costs on Battlehammers were lowered. In 1.02 I thought that the Battlehammer gave you the most bang for the buck, now I will build even more in 1.03.