Hows the taxes in Georgia?

Living in NY is SO EXPENSIVE. Taxes on everything from Clothes, Food, Movie tickets, etc. We even now have a tax or something for every bottle of water / plastic soda you buy... Your charged 5 cents more. Me and my wife always buy the 24 bottle Poland spring water... (about 4 bucks)... after the tax and bottle tax (yes 2 taxes ... one for sales another for bottle) = over 5.25

Sales tax in Georgia is usually around 8% (state + county combined). I don't know the income tax figures off the top of my head, but it's not bad.

If you want to avoid taxes, move to Knoxville. Tennessee has no state income tax, and the town where I grew up there doesn't have any property tax either (Farragut, TN).

Hello every one !!!

any updates on the AI or the battle engine front ?

The AI is on hold as Mike is coding on a working multiplayer version of the basic game. The game will be on display in the vender section of the Las Vegas Star Trek Convention in August of this year. Mike hopes to have the multiplayer version ready for that. Look for us at the convention. I hope we can beta test this before the convention.

The combat engine is not ready but I have not seen any updates in a while.

Hey Guys! Wow it's sure has been a while!

I know you guys might not need these ideas as you may or may not be worried about how the intelligence system might work right now but here they are anyways:

1. As per the last game intelligence should be based on some sort of numerical value that players can understand, (E.G. If I could see your Intel screen and compared it to mine i would know right away who has the superior intelligence.) Oh and by the way make the numbers actually mean something, for example in BOTF 1,It would suck when you knew that as the klingons that unless you had vastly more systems to produce intelligence points, then you were going to get sabotaged.

2. Now, I differ from BOTF 1 by the way I think the effects of intelligence should be played out. Simply put intelligence should be more .... information gathering than sabotage. Think about it, in all the next generation episodes attempts at sabotage generally failed, but data and intelligence gathering mattered. Let me give a example of how i think intelligence could play out.

2a. Faction A has say (for the sake of argument) 1000 intelligence points and Faction B has 200 intelligence points. Faction A should have two different routes to use said intelligence points, (as in BOTF 1) espionage and sabotage. Lets say Faction A chooses espionage, i believe there should be 5 categories of target able espionage: General, Economic, Intelligence, Military, and Technology.

3b.General should attempt to give you a sort of state of affairs overview, what's the morale of the empire, how many planets do they own, ( BOTF 1 gave this away for free!!!) and overall score.

4b.Economic espionage should attempt tell you how much money they make per turn, what certain systems are producing, ( and if you have a little bit low score) what a system is making a turn.

5b. Intelligence should attempt to probe their intelligence to determine for you how strong their intelligence is and give you a percent chance how likely a sabotage will work (more on that later). By the way, this category, and the following ones should have a higher intelligence difficulty in trying to get meaningful information.

6b. Military should attempt to tell you where their ships are, where they are going, and where they are being built plain and simple.

7b. Finally, Technology, obviously, should give you a overview of what tech level the enemy faction is at and what they are capable of building.

3a. In the previous example Faction A could get use their intelligence points and get data on UP TO DATE information. I personally think that as long as you have more intelligence points you should get some data, even if the data you get is old ( which I think would be realistic) . The closer and closer Faction B gets to having more points the more and more likely that Faction A could get old, or incorrect intelligence. Oh and by the way in BOTF 1 if I just used espionage it would sometimes sabotage... just to be clear all espionage is DATA, nothing more nothing less.

I personally think this will add a layer of complexity to the game, imagine if you were faction A and you got word that a fleet was headed your way.. what would you do?????? Making intelligence more meaningful than BOTF 1 should really add depth to the game.



P.S. More on Sabotage Later

Thanks for the good ideas. We can look back at this when the time comes.

I also worry from time to time about how you make 3D combat more than just a computer driven slug fest.

Any ETA on the combat engine?

No. The Vegas release will have Diplomacy, Espionage and a non 3D combat system. We are still looking for someone to program a 3D engine. With any luck we will generate some buzz at the convention and attacked someone with the skills we need. Mike is busy coding everything else.

When will the Vegas release be ermm... released

The convention in Las Vegas is during the first week of August. We hope to release the multiplayer version of the game before then. We do not have a more specific date.

Also there is someone working on a conversion of the 3D combat engine from XP to Vista Windows 7 compatible code.

Is there going to be an update before then with the diplomacy AI and major race AI? (without combat)

No, there will not be any updates before the Vegas release. All work is being done towards that release date, and since the Vegas release will NOT include an AI update, there most certainly won't be an AI before August. In fact we probably won't see an AI until next year at the earliest.

I can say that we're working really hard on the update though. Sometimes I just want to shout out across the forums about how amazing some of the content we've produced or acquired is. There is some serious talent working on the game, and I can't sing the praises of the contributors enough. All will be revealed in August. Please just be patient.

Well more like June July because we want to be ready to show the game by the first week of August.

Well this is a good point! We have this whole forum of enthusiastic beta testers. I would think there would be good reason for us all to debug it a while before Vegas. This might save some very embarrassing moments for Mike. Put the best foot forward and all. Captain B

Unfortunately, it looks like we won't be having a booth at Vegas after all. CBS apparently did not approve of the idea, though I am not privy to the details yet. This won't affect the development roadmap, but some of my upcoming business travels might (I will be spending roughly a month in China). I'll post more details on the Vegas convention once I have them.

Jean is still talking to the convention people about a talk on fan game development. Mike and I are still willing to go to Vegas for that much. If we can not do that I will ship the banner to Mike for the Dragon*Con.

I would guess CBS Paramount does not want a quality fan game in the vender area taking attention away from the mediocre commercial games made for the franchise so far.

I would guess that CBS's objections have less to do with the fact that we'd be showcasing a fan-based game, and more to do with the fact that Jean was proposing a pay-to-play model in order to subsidize the costs of the booth, computer rentals, etc. Any time there is money exchanged in relation to protected and unlicensed IP, there's a whole Pandora's Box of issues that send the lawyers running and screaming. I imagine there are a ton of legal issues that they just didn't want to deal with, and sadly, a mere promise on our part not to profit from the experience won't be sufficient to calm the lawyers' nerves.

You can thank the United States' unnecessarily complicated legal system.

Gah, I wish Jean would learn to hold back on stuff like this. We banned him from the forums - more than once I might add - because of his over-zealous nature. Some people just don't learn grr.

He means well. If he can set up the fan-game talk in Vegas he is an as-of-yet-unfinalized personnel/heroes.

The game looks beautiful so far, I have a few suggestions.

In BOTF, it was possible to see a list view of all your systems and their attributes (food, energy, population, what they're building), unless I missed it the only way to currently check* is to manually cycle through every system.

Will it be possible to use credits to buy the completion of a system's productions (once again this may already be possible and I've just missed it).

At the moment, it's only possible to see a ship (or fleet's) fuel status etc by going into the 'redeploy ships' option.

Once again, thought the game was brilliant and am on tenterhooks for more.

* I thought I'd split an infinitive for old time's sake

Welcome to the forums nefarious. We are glad to see you here.
Thanks for the good suggestions. Mike is planning some changes.
Matress may have more to say about that.

BOTF's summary only included + excess or - underproducing food, morale and building queue.

Hey nefarious, welcome to the forums.

We've already asked Mike to add a system list. He's also said he plans to colour-coordinate the system and allow players to reorder the list to how they want, eg. systems with no build orders at the top.

No, the game won't have an instant-build function. It will have an option where you can pay to slightly reduce build time, but the instant-build function won't be coming. We've been discussing this feature for almost six years now and far more people want it gone than want it back.

The Fuel status is a bit buggy at the moment. Mike has said he intends to make it more user-friendly in future.

More will be coming in August.

As it stands, larger pop systems get to usually multibuild on a single turn, anyway.

A few more suggestions - it may already be in the pipelines but.... once a ship has been selected it doesn't seem to be possible to deselect it without clicking on the map which can be annoying if you've already programmed in a complicated route.

The time it takes for a starbase or science station is far too long. It takes less time for a cruiser to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other (that's in the region of about 75-80 years traveling at Intrepid class speeds), obviously we don't want them built instantly but that's just silly.

In this version of BOTF, what are credits actually going to be used for? I couldn't see anything in the manual and if the instant build goes then I'm trying to see the point of them.

The clicking issue can probably be resolved by adding extra clickable areas. I'll mention this to Mike.

Station construction has not yet been balanced. The construction rate of the Construction ships is pathetic and the cost is currently huge. We know it needs to be decreased, we just can't do it at the moment because the game editor is being overhauled. In fact, there's a Boatload Of Updates That I Need To Do once I get my hands on the new editor.

Credits will be needed for ship and station maintenance as they were in BOTF. Bribery will also still be in the game, although they won't be anywhere near as effective as they used to be. Some races will even be offended by bribery attempts. We will also have a pay system for increasing build rates where necessary, but this will not be instant-buy. There will also be other uses for them, such as special events where a project, mission, or emergency actions require funding, and it will cost credits (and possibly resources) to bring ships out of mothball (Mothballing is replacing the scrapping feature). We're also toying with the idea of adding maintenance costs to special structures.

So credits will have a use in future game versions, they just don't have much of a use in this version.

The install instructions explain to use the winzip trial or winrar trial to extract the zip file...
May I instead suggest 7zip from http://www.7-zip.org/
it is a very robust open source (and free) zip implementation.

EDIT: I got to play it some, it is absolutely AMAZING!

The installation instructions suggest Winzip simply because that's the best-known archiving software. We're not intentionally advertising a particular type of software, it's just easier to help someone with software that most people have at least some experience with. I'm not familiar with this 7-zip, so i'll check it out. Thanks for the heads up, and welcome to the forums.

*Edit - I just checked it out. The developers seem to be a bit arbitrary with their release numbers. And it's been a long time since they released a stable update. Their website is also comparing their software to very old versions of their rivals, which is also unfair.

I tried zipping some files in both Winzip and 7-Zip. I've got Winzip 11, so my version of Winzip is newer than the current stable version of 7-zip, but Winzip was definitely superior. The archive Winzip created in .zip format was 2% smaller than the .7zip file created by 7zip, and Winzip created it considerably faster. And that's with a version of Winzip that is now three versions out of date.

Mike asked us to change from .rar to .7z (7-zip) for SharePoint.

I've never used .rar's on Sharepoint. When did that change happen?