Some Noob Questions

[iob]

Hi,

playeing a nice game with some guy from the netherlands who enjoys cheese

We are chatting a lot in game, and i wonder - is there a chat history? Often i fail to read it in time and it seems to be gone.

Also, i thought there was a button to halve all selected ships - i can't find it anymore, am i confusing that with another game? Is there a good trick to halve your forces quickly to split them up?

Those are my two burning questions so far . Oh, and i'd love to have a better view on what is selected so far on the menu on the right - it seems to be a very very light border that i can't see.

[x4000]

Welcome to the forums!

There is a chat history, for the last 40 messages or so.  Just hover over the little chat icon next to the minimap, or on the left of the big galaxy map.

There is a button to halve all selected ships -- just hit the L key.

Hope that helps!

[iob]

Ahh, thanks. Though i looked for that hotkey i didn't see it at first under controls.

We had a Dyson Sphere in our last game, and it stopped attacking us and went like really everywhere in the map supporting us, then my mate captured a station on the dyson sphere planet (but destroyed the station again) but then the dyson stopped actually flying off to other planets shooting the ai -did that have something to do with the station he build or does a dyson sphere gatling need to be "lured" to hostile planets or something?

[x4000]

My pleasure.

Yeah, if you take the planet that the dyson sphere is on, that pisses it off at you.  You're lucky not to have gotten killed from it, in the latest betas in particular it will send everything it has right at your home planets.

[iob]

Well, he captured the planet and instantly killed his station so we only had like 5 hostile gatling guns. He then had the factory he wanted, but somehow the dysons didn't engage the ai anymore.

Before the capturing of the planet the dyson gatlings where virtually everywhere

[x4000]

What version are you on?  That's been tweaked significantly in the latest betas...

[iob]

We weren't playing any beta - so it was the last stable version. 3.1.2.0?

I can't tell because i just started a game who wanted to play the beta so i installed it. Now i am figuring out how to get rid of the beta.


Seems my botched windows vista needs to be reinstalled because i can't install ai war from the setup.exe to have both - one beta, one vanilla version . Damn windows vista. (My Vista broke down because i installed another hard drive, now it thinks it isn't activated and i can't seem to fix that problem without reinstalling - i can't install the latest .net update with it atm).

Maybe i can redownload it via steam and then make a copy and patch one of those.

4. You could just leave the turrets until you destroy the command stations on all the adjacent planets to your target planet, at which time the turrets will go out of supply and will be laughably easy to kill because they won't even be able to shoot at you.

Copied from another thread - i already noticed you can't steal "knowledge" from planets where you have no supply - does that apply to colonizing worlds, too? I was thinking about skipping one ai planet and then colonizing, or do i need supply to colonize?

[x4000]

You can't run the installer to have two seperate copies of the game, but you can easily just copy the files to have a second copy: http://www.arcengames.com.php5-12.dfw1-2.websitetestlink.com/forums/index.php/topic,6075.0.html  Much easier than you were thinking, hopefully.

You definitely do not need supply in order to colonize planets, skipping planets is a major mechanic of the game.  I would strongly suggest the latest beta, it's practically an official release but we've delayed on pushing it out because of a few things we want to get in there (there's a post on that in the main AI War forum, too).

[iob]

So the ai can "lose" supply if its planets are isolated, the player planets have their "own" supply? If I understand that with the cannons right...

So the human colonies have some advantage there!


Well the problem with my vista atm is that i can't install the .net service pack, so the normal installer won't work as well - i can download it via steam though (though it tries to install .net everytime i run the game).



I got windows 7 recently maybe i should install it .

[x4000]

So the ai can "lose" supply if its planets are isolated, the player planets have their "own" supply? If I understand that with the cannons right...

So the human colonies have some advantage there!

Actually, no, it's the same in either case -- the AI only loses supply if that planet AND all the adjacent planets don't have the command stations.  It's the same for you.  If an AI or a human planet is surrounded by enemy planets, it has supply.  If ships are on an enemy or neutral planet surrounded by enemy or netural planets, there is no supply.

But, the trick is that colony ships can operate outside supply.

Well the problem with my vista atm is that i can't install the .net service pack, so the normal installer won't work as well - i can download it via steam though (though it tries to install .net everytime i run the game).

If the game is already working on your machine, you don't need to install the .net framework.  Just skip that in the normal installer.  Or, just skip the normal installer completely and copy the steam files to a second directory.  See the link I put in the last post, you don't need anything special if the files are already on your machine, you can just copy them to a second location and you're good to go.

I got windows 7 recently maybe i should install it .

Definitely a worthwhile upgrade, I can tell you!

[iob]

So the Command Post hast to be destroyed for him to lose support, i understand!

This makes for some pretty interesting strategies if there is some hard level 4 planet and its surrounded by weak planets.


One last question, when i do a lot of scouting, the scouts often find a lot of differecent key structures, though i am not sure what those abbreviations mean - and i can't look what the tooltip is at the planet because my scouts have passed.


So either the overview of the planet should have a tooltip or i would need a list of what those abbreviations are - distribution for example? First i thought those were things like data centers, i was surprised when we had some lame booby trapped ressource pool

[x4000]

If you're ever wondering what an icon is, then you can go back to the planetary view and hit F1 to cycle through the different "pages" of all the ships in the game on the planetary summary (to the right of the screen).  That can be helpful if you need to find something and you know what mark level it was, but due to the volume of icons it can also be overwhelming.

Another thing you can do, is in the latest betas you can still look at all the stationary ships on a planet after your ships have left, and can hover over them to get info, etc.  If you zoom out to the level of the icon view, that becomes a lot more straightforward.

[x4000]

Just hit Message Log in the upper right of the screen.

[Zamjr86]

Hi,
playeing a nice game with some guy from the netherlands who enjoys cheese
We are chatting a lot in game, and i wonder - is there a chat history? Often i fail to read it in time and it seems to be gone.

Try google talk. you can run it in the backround, and voice-chat, provided you both have a mic.