first of all is this still an active forum? its a friday night an i see no posts newer than a few hours ago...which is odd if you goto most other games forums.

I love a lot about this game but i swer to god it cheats way too much. ive read guides on happiness effecting your game, how you need administration heroes, how you need to rush to colonize everything in sight and rush for the certain techs that let u build +research crap. ive done all this crap. i cant seem to ever keep up and im only on normal difficulty. im the same size and population density as my AI rivals and im bigger than a few in most games but it dosnt change shit. i enjoy a challenge, but there is no joy in struggling to stay off the bottom of the list when you are doing everything right. i cant think of any legitimate way to explain how someone could take a civ my size as get the scores the AIs do.

what i want to know is if the expansion changes any AI boosts ect? i cant seem to enjoy this game very long after 200 turns and find myself sucking again and again. i even tried cheating and cloning ships and technologies and STILL the AI who were my size were doing better than me.

Add me on Steam and we can play a game together. http://steamcommunity.com/id/profoundglee/ I will hopefully be able to figure out where you're going wrong.



That aside, don't get the expansion until you get the main game, it's much less refined and harder.

ok ill add you. i actually got the main game about a year ago. its just been kicking my ass this whole time. my account name is dyecocker btw

Most of the issues that most people had with the expansion were sorted out already.



So it's more or less a matter of preference what you like better.



The problem with this particular expansion is that it not only added things but it also took some away and changed some.



I'm pretty sure I've done this in the past but since I don't remember where, I'll do it again and list the changes with my opinion:



Positive:

New combat-formula, that prevents the possibility of invincible ships.

New options for combat that add at least some more tactics.

AMAS-AI let's different races behave a lot more differently compared to vanilla, where everyone was about the same and mostly too tame.

More diversity between the races by adding race-specific technologies.

Changes to several buildings that were either too bad to bother building them or so good, that you had to always get them ASAP.



Negative:

The transition to the new combat-formula was very clunky since the new the values for ship-equipment weren't chosen very well. Most of that has been treated with patches but it still feels that Huge-Hull-Ships are too hard to kill.

While AMAS allowed diversity between AIs behaviours, it pushed too many of them to the warmonger-edge and trading is hardly possible since most of the AIs refuse to sign peace-treaties.

The reduction of the amount of weapon-tiers while at the same time adding a lot of useless junk-modules makes the military-tree boring to research.

For everyone who liked the fluent gameplay of ES the biggest bummer of the expansion probably is the introduction of the need to make specialized invasion-ships, whereas in vanilla all combat-ships could invade. This adds a lot of micromanagement I was happy to not have to care about in vanilla. This change also kinda defeated the purpose of previous changes to reduce invasion-times for colonies. Since now you can't punish rapid expansion anymore.



I also have remaining but imho easy to fix wishes:



Selecting more than a fleets worth of ships and then pressing "Merge" should create several fleets. Microing that in the lategame is painfull!

The game should memorize my battle-cards, formation and targetting-settings so I don't have to pick them over and over again in similar situations which costs a lot of time.

The very helpful-micromanagement-reducing-feature that had been tested over a month ago should finally make it in.

I don't agree you can't punish rapid expansion in the expansion. The troop module does exactly this. But apart from that I agree with Ail.



"Selecting more than a fleets worth of ships and then pressing "Merge" should create several fleets. Microing that in the lategame is painfull!"

This i agree 100% with.



"The game should memorize my battle-cards, formation and targetting-settings so I don't have to pick them over and over again in similar situations which costs a lot of time."

Also agree 100%.



I have much more wishlist but I cant write all. But three important are hotkeys, a button for producing 1 turn out of the next item you click, and a button to buyout the entire que you have. (if you have 100's of items it is quite tedious to click buyout 100's of times.)