Mystery Techs

[SpareTire]

Hello,

I just got SEIV on Fri., played about 12 hours worth over the weekend. I'm enjoying it but I have a question.

I was playing Last night ( and I thought I was winning ) I was ranked 2nd and way ahead of my opponents in Tech (or so I thought)...

I had a 17 odd battleship armada taken out by 3 of my opponents ships. I looked at his configurations ( PC opponent I should add ) and his weapons were literly 100 times better than mine. The PC player had some guns (?) that looked sort of like hot-crossed-buns that did several hundred points of damage at close range + he also had guns that enabled him to take over my ships!?!! Arrgh! Boarding parties schmording parties.

Is there a tech list (with pictures) so I can figure out how to research those super-guns the next time I play? Most of my reasearch choices said 'completed' so I thought that I'd covered my backside on the weapons count anyways.

Are there 'techs' that can only be discovered on ruins for example, that might explaing the 'buns of death' and the 'barrels of ship capturing'??

And another point, I was playing this same game Last night, and *everyone* wanted to ally ... for about 50 turns it was one friendly game... then, somehow, I found that *I* owned one of my 'soon-to-be master's' ships?? Is it possible that I stole it with a covert ops? Or does the PC occasionally toss a ship over to it's allies?

Apologies for all the questions, I thought more was going to be in the manual...

This is one great game, btw, I found myself thinking about it while I was at work today - that's rare for a PC game nowadays...

[Seawolf]

Spare,

QUick answers,

1 Getting ship was probably intel ops.

2 Taking over ships may have been a racial trait specific to 1 race.

3 there is alot of tech, could be they specialized in one weapon class. Without more details I can't help.




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Seawolf on the prowl

[Baron Munchausen]

ANY weapons, even normal Meson BLasters and Anti-proton beams, can be made very powerul with the use of Weapon Mounts. On ships of Light Cruiser size or larger, you can choose a weapon mount and increase the power of your weapons. The button for choosing mounts is at the upper right in the ship design window. Use it if you want to survive in combat after the first 50 turns or so.

The "buns of death" sounds like Time Distortion Burst -- it has a special advantage of doing 4 times as much damage to shields as its normal damage rating. It still only does normal damage to your ship, but really burns away those shields in a hurry. This is only available to races with the Temporal Knowledge special ability.

The "Barrels of Ship Capturing" are the Allegiance Subverter, which are only available to races with the Psychic special ability. You didn't see ONE race using both of these, did you? The thing about the Allegiance Subverter is that it is shorter ranged than most beam weapons, and it only fires once per combat. Just stand off at long range and you can avoid it, or use Master Computers instead of crew. Anyway, the AI is usually stupid about using it, and you can send in some lightly-armed decoy to take the hit, and they waste it.

[KillerManJaro]

"Buns of Death" may have also been Graviton Hellbore, which does 360 points damage at range 1 with a Heavy mount.

AI is dumb about the Alliegence Subverter, too. I've had mixed fleets of biologic and computer manned ships, and the AI will fire it at the computer ones if no biologically-captained is in range. It should save the shot for a time when it would do some good.

Are we sure there's not an AI -.txt file that could be edited to account for this?


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KMJ

[Taqwus]

You should probably be able to find out what weapons were being used by checking the 'enemy design' section of your ship designer. Pick enemy ship, start right-clicking on components. Do this in combat, as well -- if there's a ship class you've never seen before, you *really* want to know things like weapon range and so forth. You might actually want to build ships with long-range scanners if you've not fought that race before.

Likewise, as soon as you achieve First Contact with a race, check their racial characteristics. If they have a special trait like psychic, crystalline, etc, you'll really, really want to know ASAP, in case things sour...

You might want to leaf through the .txt files (Data/Components.txt, IIRC) as well, if you don't feel that's spoilerish. Weapon capabilities, prequisites, etc, everything's in text (except for the .BMPs of course).


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-- The thing that goes bump in the night

[Cyrien]

Hrmm... also I remember in the demo their being techs that could only be gotten from Ruins on planets etc... don't have full so can't say if those continue there but at least within the demo (specially earliest Versions of demo) there were techs that could be gained no other way.

Massive Ionic Disperser
some other massive weapon and a planetary shield base were ones I saw in demo.