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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Heretic Apostate" data-source="post: 730222" data-attributes="member: 696">AzureTrance:Be warned:  There is a rather steep learning curve.  This game is not for the casual strategy gamer.  I've been following the forums for months, and I have little clue how to play the game.The problem is, there are a bunch of nifty features (e.g., the development plans, which tell the planetary viceroys what to build), but there's not sufficient documentation.  The manual is out of date, there's some info in the readme file, the master notes (in game tips) tell you how to do things but not why, and the encyclopedia is sparse as well.I know these development plans work, but I don't know how to set them up so that the viceroys do what I want.  You see, the computer looks at the world, and assigns two development plans based on the world's situation.  You can't look at a world and say, "Hmmm, I want this to be my research world."  Nope, the computer looks at it and decides what it wants it to be.  You can set up five custom (Player Defined 1 to 5) development plans to override the computer's choices, but you can't tell it that this world is Research.So, the planet is affected by two development plans, either those chosen by the computer, or among the five custom plans you have made.  It's also affected by the aptly-named All Planets plan, where you set your empire-wide emphasis (do you want to concentrate on research? then put Research in primary).  Then go through the forty or so development plans, and decide how you'd like the computer to respond to each situation.  Planet in starvation?  How would you handle that situation?  How about a mineral-rich world?  A mineral-poor world?  And so on.It's really annoying because, after spending an hour doing that, you can't save the plans for a future game.  But that will undoubtably be one of the first things tossed into the patch.Some complaints that have so far been solved on the link provided above:  There are instructions on how to correctly (the readme file is slightly wrong, so it doesn't work at all) move the music files to your hard drive (it'll still do the copy protection checks, but at least your drive isn't spinning constantly).  (Or maybe this one is fixed on <a href="http://forums.orionsector.com?" target="_blank">http://forums.orionsector.com?</a>)  There are instructions on how to change the clunky font.  There are instructions on how to get the viceroys to stop building troops ships and army units and start building actual warships (i.e., get your economy off of Peace and Prosperity and up to Total War, and your funding for military will go from a trickle to a nice river).Okay, enough for now.  Just realize, the game isn't for everyone.  If you don't have the time to get used to the game, don't buy it.  If you don't like leaving a lot of the minutae to the computer (which will do a good job, if you know what you're doing when you design a development plan), you're going to be very frustrated by this game.  If you don't want to bother with a steep learning curve, this isn't the game for you.Heh.  I'm hoping someone comes out with a Corion and a PickHack for the game soon.  Already, they're figuring out what the cheat codes are (though they don't know how to enter them yet...).</blockquote>

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