Some questions

[Coppermantis]

These are a few weird things that I've noticed over the course of my AAR that I may have missed or are otherwise weird:

1. Trade routes with non-spacefaring races. The Thoraxians can't build spaceships, so why can I start an interplanetary trade route with them?

2. Spreadshot is listed as highest DPS for literally everything. Shields, hull, all enemy types. Is it bugged, is the tooltip misrepresenting something, or is it really just the most effective weapon?

3. "Hates Wimps" relationship modifier. The Thoraxians hate the Evucks because "You harvest nothing but the weak-willed for your foolish federation," yet the Evucks are not in the federation. Even stranger, they hate the Federation races for the same reason, but they themselves are part of the Federation!

4. I have the option to "Convince to join Strong Federation" for the Burlusts, but the requirements are not met. I only have the Thoraxians, not the Acutians, and I have more than one other race in the federation. Selecting this option results in them successfully joining at some relation penalty with their enemies, but this seems like it shouldn't happen.

[Misery]

For number 2, I'm pretty sure that it's calculating as if every single shot fired in the spray hits the target.

Of course, this is only the case if you're firing at point-blank range.

[Coppermantis]

Mmm, I see. Makes sense.

It's still a super effective weapon, since I've found that dealing with large groups is easy if I just run circles around them (their shots are too slow to catch up) and fire spreadshot into the whole group, hitting basically everything.

[doubtful]

Yeah I agree with Misery about Spreadshot, although I'm not privy to the way the calculations are done or anything of course.

But generally speaking, it seems to have TREMENDOUS dps against swarms of small(er than flag) ships, with the caveat that  there have to be a lot of targets for it to be doing a ton of good.  A notable exception being when you just can't even HIT the target with anything else because it's too small and fast, in which case, again, Spreadshot is pretty great.

Sometimes when using Spreadshot, you just have to pay attention to the actual damage you inflicted over a round to really determine its effectiveness, so the DPS listing for it may need to reflect the DPS of individual streams of shots x however many spreads there actually are, or something.

I.e., maybe the DPS should say (10x1,000) instead of (10,000) or something.

[Giaddon]

As for #1: How could the European powers trade with the New World civilizations when they didn't have ocean worthy ships? You just land, trade (or steal) the Shit you want, then fly back home.

[Coppermantis]

As for #1: How could the European powers trade with the New World civilizations when they didn't have ocean worthy ships? You just land, trade (or steal) the Shit you want, then fly back home.

Yes, but there were literally Thoraxian ships crossing the galaxy. The New World peoples didn't send ships back, so that analogy doesn't work.

[Giaddon]

Ah, I didn't realize it automatically generated trade back. That's an oversight.