Okay, if I need to explain this...^_^

Anyways, to start us off, in 'We're Here to Take Over', my Fortress's populations don't grow, and large values of ships tend to result in odd things involving fuel usage, specifically, negative numbers, or negative range.

I had a crash to desktop crash. I attacked a fleet that was above my homeworld and lost and then it crashed.

The Reference Manual has this to say about Hunter-Killers:

I have this to say in response:

Enemy ships show no evidence of having any difficulty seeing my HKs. I thought they'd be useful for paring down GDMs before the main assault begins, but they never make it there. I experimented with deploying them as a seperate fleet and having them attack on their own, but that made no difference. Anyone have any idea what I'm doing wrong?

Are you sure to keep them on advance, and not attack? As soon as they attack they become visible and stay thay way for the rest of the battle.

What Sero said. If you're playing the graphical version, then your nontransport units will always autotarget something every round. After every "engagement", click on the HK to select it, then right click on it to undo its targeting selection. If you're playing the DOS version, then I think ships always retain their last targeting order, so you don't have to be so concerned about it.

No, on the windows version, at least for transports, they go back to default each round.

I thought of that. I thought I was setting them to advance each turn, but I may be mistaken. I was able to use HKs successfully once, just now; I attacked an atomic world with a single HK and was able to get into low orbit and take out the GDMs. I'll try it on a world with ships and see if I can't get it to work.

- I've never had any problems hiding my hunterkillers in space combat in any version of the game. Make sure Target = Defend. You can "Advance" and still be targeting and attacking ships and therefore will de-cloak. I would like to see an indication in the new graphical version as to whether a group of HKs is cloaked or not - like in the old Anacreon.

Other things -

- Fleets comprosed completely of Hunterkillers move at a warp fleet's initiative, not a jump fleet's. It'd be great to get this fixed.

- There's a serious bug involving trading technologies in 2.1d. An empire can be given a technology from a more advanced empire of a level they coudn't normally develop. This is bad in itself, but furthermore it tends to crash the game.

As an example - a Gate level empire could give Gate technology to a Biotech level empire. The Biotech level empire could then actually use it to build a Gate. However, when the Biotech level empire would normally advance to Starship level, it would cause the game to crash. That turn would be skipped and the game would go on normally until the empire again would have advanced to the next level and then the game would crash again.

It's a pretty serious bug.

Starmantle42 said:

- Fleets comprosed completely of Hunterkillers move at a warp fleet's initiative, not a jump fleet's. It'd be great to get this fixed.



I'm not sure that this is a bug, and I rather like it. This allows HK's (especially NPE HK's but players as well) to execute "pirating" maneuvers, even if you have an outpost or other scanner.

Otherwise, HK's can get picked off too easily (especially once you have LAM's).

Plus, it makes the game more interesting. Now their are three types of fleets. Slow fleets with slow initiative, fast fleets wtih fast initiative, and fast fleets with slow initiative.

Things change again when you get a gate, and again, I don't think this is a bug.

Zippy - I'm alright with HKs working at warp initiative. The important thing is that the manual needs to reflect that. Right now, everyone thinks HKs move at jump initiative and they really don't. :)

On a different note, there's an impossible to defend against tactic that takes advantage of a game flaw. You can take an enemy planet, liberate it back to them, and retake it again (and again, and again) all in the same turn. This can destroy the morale of an empire completely, causing all worlds to rebel. We have house rules that simply outlaw this, but it'd be better if it was just impossible to do in the first place.

Or, if you libreate it, you can't take it again... cause i like libreating.

Starbases (outposts, fortresses, command bases, industrial complexes) can scan right through a HK's cloak.

Perhaps worlds of a certain tech level can as well.

Nope, just starbases.