Latest developments?

[Martok]

Thanks, Peter. Yes it does.

[Badbru]

The other downside is that often these minor race ships are better than those of your own empire.

You can find yourself relying only on these ships depending on what situation you find yourself in.

Doesn't feel right.

[KrazeeXXL]

The other downside is that often these minor race ships are better than those of your own empire.

You can find yourself relying only on these ships depending on what situation you find yourself in.

Doesn't feel right.

On side A I have to agree. In early stage games they might be a bit overpowered and tend to unbalance things a bit. But wasn't that compensated with mark I and the upgrade to mark II minor race ships?

Side B means I disagree in another point. It would be unlogical to have much more powerful vessels then the minors.
As it now is: they have some value - and can complement a fleet for good. (until some high techs where they lose their value)

I don't understand what shouldn't feel right about that. Just think about ENT. Starfleet didn't have the best ships there and also in VOY minor race ships were always a good match.
Or TNG: f.e. the Tamarians which where quite a match for the Enterprise...

The best thing would be to add some mark III,IV and V upgrade-stats for some of the minor race ships. But I don't expect that to be easy.

Would be very cool though

[Badbru]

Just to clarify, I've most recently been playing AAM, which does have several levels of Minor race ships. The problem, if indeed it is a problem, is that old chestnut, how the minor races advance, compared to how the player advances.

The issue presents itself most prominently in the middle portion of the game. Around turn 100 to 150 and continues untill 250-300+. By turn 150 most minors have reached (more so if you've met them) their final tech level. For the Vulcans this means they have the Class IV cruiser with 10 phasers doing 30points and 10 torpedoes doing 30 points each. With 450 or so hull points and over 1000 shield points, If I'm still on Constitution refits my ships are more like 156 hull points and 300 shield points with 6 phasers doing less than 30 points and only 4 torpedos doing less than 30 points.

So am I going to put the vast majority of Vulcans pop into research like we allways did in vanilla or am I going to start churning out Vulcan cruisers?

Am I still playing the Federation or am I playing the Vulcans now?

It corrects itself late game when you can build Galaxy and Soveriegn class ships it's just that mid game period which hi lights that old exploit of minor races advancing faster than human players.

[PTRACER]

I have another question to ask...how many turns does an average game take and when is a game considered "complete"?

Whenever I played in the past, I managed to get about 70 turns in and by then everyone on all of my planets are "Miserable" and someone suddenly declares war, or the Borg come along and destroy me.

[Peter1981]

Single domination:
The check for single domination victory seems to work according to the game manual i.e. requirements are over 60% of the cumulated current population of all empires and over 60% of all systems on the map.

Note: Possible inconsistencies of the system count regarding additional starting/adjacent systems or destruction of star systems (supernovas) could distort both calculations!

Team domination / Alliance:
According to the game manual this value should be 75% but is infact 67%
A serious defect apart from this is here the missing star system count. So, in the majority of cases, the alliance domination is easier to reach.

Note: If one of the empires reaches 50% of the cumulated current population of all empires then BotF adds a borg-cube to the game (assuming random events / BORG = ON & borg-cube cost check vs. empire fleets = OK

[Flocke]

don't forget, you can simply turn off borg or/and randoms in stbof.ini/options menu.

How long your game takes depends on:
is it multiplayer? whom do you fight?
or what mod you play, map size, tech level, minors, to name just some key aspects.
Dependent on this it can take less than 20 turns or more than 300!!
I prefer games with less than 100 turns and choose settings accordingly, especially no huge maps.

[KrazeeXXL]

In an impossible T1 game, on a large map with many minors, BORG=ON (stbof.ini setting)... the length varies as it depends on the map/mod as Flocke already told but mainly under 200 turns.

could now take a bit longer with this overwhelming back-breaking star density in most mods which makes the games last way longer then b4...

[Ian_SIN]

Guys I would like to play the game if the multi installer file worked with mods of course

[thunderchero]

Guys I would like to play the game if the multi installer file worked with mods of course

Files work fine use a download manager to download them.

thunderchero