Prerelease 3.152 (Science Lab Mark III, More Knowledge/Lab Changes)

[drum]

can science labs mk 1&2 still be put in transports?

[superking]

I miss OP transports, deep raiding is way more work now

[x4000]

can science labs mk 1&2 still be put in transports?

Sure. They just don't work on enemy worlds, is all.

Regarding the tutorial, that is something we update from time to time, as major things change, and the part with the knowlede raiding would almost certainly need to be updated. Also, the context menu is something we will try to work in, that's a good idea.

[Winter Born]

Did we fix that?

Seems like the tugs tow all the way now

[x4000]

New version now out: http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,5612.0.html

[rubikscube]

I miss OP transports, deep raiding is way more work now

you could deep raid for home planet and destroy their core command station, come back within an hour

[Loops]

All the info you want is here: http://arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,5522.msg40222.html#msg40222

[...]

Thank you for the link (I'd read parts of that discussion thread, but had missed that key page), and your reply.  That does clear up a lot of things.  I was confused because the tutorial has you do some knowledge raiding, so I thought that was supposed to be a core part of the game.  I can see now how that was basically happenstance.  If/when you revisit the tutorial I'd propose replacing that bit with something involving starships or transports maybe.  Experimenting with the different starships has been fun, but personally I wish there had been some starting point beyond just the tooltips. 

[x4000]

Yeah, we should introduce more about starships, that's for sure.  We didn't really have much in the way of starships (just two lines) when the tutorials were originally written.  Knowledge raiding was supposed to be a core thing, as an option, just not something so central.  The fact that players were knowledge raiding was not an exploit in and of itself -- and no one was cheating -- but as the game had been gradually rebalanced over time, that activity had become trivially easy, which led to "over grazing," so to speak.  Which is what led it to becoming an exploitative thing, not that anyone was trying to do that.