They’re called “subspace projectors” and are built by construction ships. You actually start with the tech for them, so to build them you can bring up the “build” menu with the B key and lay them between your planets manually. If you’d rather automate the process, you can bring up the automation menu (H) and tell it to autobuild projectors. There’s a small maintenance fee for each projector you control, but they make travel far more efficient than if they’re not around.
Thanks!
After a weekend of driving stars (or having my stars driven as the case may be), the AI seems perfectly challenging on normal within the first 3 games of play. I think this game is a fine choice for any space empire gamer and worthy in any collection. DLC and expansions can only make it better.
btw, just a thought regarding the stuttering in warp issue: your recharge in warp may have been negative in one of your designs. That causes your ship to drain power while in FTL (where energy costs double), and it will stop its warp speed when its energy runs out, plod along at STL while it charges up, and then resume its course in FTL.
Well, I’ve been locked in some deadly but awesome 3 way battles, I have played on hard AI and its doing its best to make me suffer. I was fine for a good while with my cannons until suddenly he appeared with beam ships which ripped me to shreds…
My corvettes with beams are now trying to fill the gap while I desperatly try to get a frigate assembly line going. It’s clear that ship designs aren’t just packing tons of guns into a hull, I have to think about what situation the ship enters, and trust me, guns in all directions actually works, you may not get the alpha but in a scrap, its nice to be able to return fire anyway you can.
Also, I have to build COPIOUS amounts of ground troops, the invasions are massive, the land battles huge and my poor timid troops are not faring well at all.
I put some time into this yesterday, and am really digging it. I turned on all the automation so I could just focus on flying around, but then the game felt much less interactive and engaging that way, so I plan to turn it all off next time. That and some AI oddities (enemy forces orbiting a planet near one of my colonies didn’t even bother my colony or its freighters) are the only downsides I’m seeing so far.
Oh, and this might be silly to ask, but how does one build ground troops? I’ve yet been able to figure that out (not too thrilled with the game’s lack of documentation, honestly).
You should have three tabs above the production queue for a planet - buildings, ships, and troops (or something like that).
You can initially only build ground troops on your capital until you research the military outpost tech. Only then can you build barracks on other planets to train troops remotely. Otherwise, you should just be able to click the “troops” tab in the colony window to build your available units as long as you’re looking at your capital.
Oh herpaderp, that makes sense. Thanks guys!
Trying this out. The interface is laggy as hell. I hit pause but I cannot even access Sol’s construction queue. This is in a small galaxy with 5 races.
My PC is 4 months old and reasonably beefy (Core i7, GTX 680m) so I am not sure what’s going on :(
Smooth sailing on my computer which is way crappier than yours, so it’s a bug.
Judging by your specs it sounds like this is a laptop? Make sure your laptop using your dedicated graphics card and not integrated video when running the game.
Oh! I’ll make sure and try it again. I’m still not used to this laptop business.
How do you transport marines to other planets to explore anomalies?
Not to be one of those guys, but I have not experienced any slow down or performance dips.
As to the troops, double click the planet, right click as many built troops as you want to launch, then right click anywhere empty to get back to space view and grab or double click the newly launching troop shuttles to direct them to new planets. To save some headache, to LAND the marines wait for them to orbit the target planet, then click the lower flag button on the smaller planet picture, at which point the planetview will pop up and the troop tab will be at the top left allowing you to drop in the orbiting marines. I mostly mention this as I had a battalion of troops blown out of orbit when I could not hold the orbital siege, but still had many, many troop transports waiting for their commander to find the deploy UI. The horror.
Oh and Janster is right, when the AI comes a knocking with ground troops, they don’t mess around. I thought I learned my lesson as I put 5 or so troops on each planet. Only to then have the AI show up with enough troops to fill every square (and more to refresh losses) on nearly every planet at once. Good times.
How would you guys compare this to GalCiv II?
I like space 4x tbs games, but I’m always pretty cautious about buying one, sinking untold hours into it in order to try to “figure it out” only to figure out that I was ripped off.
I had an issue with a small game which was not configured properly or recognized by my laptop drivers which would constantly dump to integrated graphics and die. There is a list of programs you can configure somewhere in your graphics driver package (mine was configured via the Intel driver, even though my goal was to run it on my nVidia card), and all of the programs on the list will run using your dedicated graphics only, and won’t be shuffled to one or the other by your driver. Find the list, add the executable, and enjoy worry-free gaming.
snerk This game is fun? This game has soul? ;)
Sorry, couldn’t help myself.
Yep, I did all that add the exe stuff. Does not make a difference. After an hour playing it drops to 5 FPS.
I tried to see if I could completely disable Optimus, but apparently the Sager 9370 I have does not even have that enabled at all, so switching problems should not be at issue. Oh well :(
haha alright, alright. I actually liked GalCiv II a lot. But I know what you mean. Your snarky comment is actually a point in StarDrive’s favor.