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[Eagle of Fire]

Originally Posted by Philos73

Hello guys,

even though I answered Juogo's question I'm still a bit of a Newbie at this game myself.

So noone seems to have figured out my question on the Arbryls above? There is no way to unblock a lane blocked by the Arbryls? If they block the only lane out of a restricted area you cannot get out? Well, I abandoned the game in question and started a new one. Doesn't happen all of the time. Still kinda bugs me that I cannot get my hands on the Arbryls homeworld...

I'm not really sure of what you are talking about. You probably mean those red blockers which prevent you from entering a lane. Those things are lame: just shoot them down and get thru. If you can't it would simply be because you don't have strong enough weapons.

Now I have another question as well. The game limits the display on ship stats. If you build giant ships you can easily reach the limit of the display for energy supply and for weapon power. For instance if you put 8 to 10 Van Creek Hyper Splicers into a ship this will exceed what can be displayed in terms of generator power in the ship strength display.

My question now is - is that energy still available in battle just the same or does the program simply cut off what is in excess of what can be displayed? The extra energy is actually needed in battles. That way you can keep your shields up longer than the enemy does. The AI seems to tend to build underpowered ships.

It does work with the weapons though, since each weapon slot is handled separately. For example if you have more than 6 Hyper Drivers (or even stronger weapons) the weapon strength of your ship will exceed what can be displayed in the ship strength diagram. You can still use all these weapons as long as you have enough energy - but the question is - does it work likewise with the generator power?

The problem does not arise with shields and with propulsion speed though. I found out there is no use in putting more than 2 shields into any ship since it's more a question of having enough juice to keep them powered up than a question of absolute shield strength.

Same thing with the propulsion drives (intra starsystem drives). Once you have the Ion Banger (and that comes along early in the game) there is no need to use more than one propulsion drive on any ship. Normally only my very first ship will have the Tonklin motor. And that will be a small ship - since my homeworld will still be in the build-up process. As soon as I build my second ship I already have the Ion Banger - so I never need more than one propulsion drive. It is possible to bust the display limit for shield strength and propulsion strength as well - it just doesn't make sense to put in that many of these two. So the only problem is knowing whether generator strength actually gets wasted once you fit in more than can be displayed in the diagram.

I don't understand why you are asking the question. There is not much use for so much energy on a ship. There is also next to no use for shields in the whole game either. All you need is a big enough ship to be able to take damage in rare circumstances in which you happen to get in range of the ennemy plannets as soon as you exit the lanes (and even then I use those shields which don't use any power and are always on) and enough weapons to blow everything to bits.

The more engines you add, the further away you can go in one click. This is very usefull to get away from ennemy ships and out of range of planetary missiles... And thus why you don't need much shielding if any. The computer AIs are so lame... I often simply custom build ships with enough engines to slip past thru all the ennemy defense and colonise all their worlds they didn't bother to colonize themselves. The game is half won already.

Also, the more lane engines you put, the faster you will go in those lanes. Save a lot of time for long travel. Oftentime your home world and the surrounding worlds are very well developed while border worlds have trouble doing anything, so I often produce huge ships at my home worlds with a lot of lane engines and then retrofit them in the core worlds.

But believe me when I say this: even with the patch (which for me change absolutely nothing whatsoever), if you didn't win already before you even come close to getting to 2/3 of the total tech in the game then you are doing something wrong... This game is way too easy to win when you know what you are doing.

[Juogo]

i found it ^^

it was right: shift and the mouse arrow get a Help sign with left clit it opened a window to explain the Ship Technologies and Buildings now it is much easyar to play

thx a lot guys

[red_avatar]

Originally Posted by Juogo

left clit

Someone had other things on his mind when writing that post

@ Eagle of Fire

Aaaahhh! I can shoot at those darn lane blockers!! Will try that out. Wonder
what blocked my mind in this case. Already aimed at lane gates quite a few times accidentally. should have gotten the idea to try my weapons on the lane blockers. Just didn't get that idea.

Okay the ship stats display thing. You and I seem to have different battle tactics. I actually like a bit of a battle in this game. You just evade the battle - which is fine in terms of strategy - I understand it is possible to win that way. Still your strategy might be useful for some rare game where I really need to zip past the AI.

I do put quite a few lane drives on my ships if they have to get to a point
far away on the map - or if they have to go through a red lane before I have researched the lane destabilizer tech.

But one of the reasons I asked about this is that I like finding out more about game details in large 4x games - even when it is clear that Ascendancy is in no way as hard as MoO 1.

I noticed the various game displays reach their limits rather quickly. For Instance the planetary displays for research, industry production and prosperity reach their maximum state long before you have actually maxed out a large planet. Since you still get the correct figure when left clicking on one of the planet stat fields I figured that a higher amount of indurstry production or research would still be calculated correctly when calculating the totals.

There are other areas where the graphically displayed strength of a player maxes out. For instance in the intelligence display for the species. There is a maximum for the number of colonies in that display. Also the fleet strength of a player can be stronger than what this display can show at maximum. The correct strenght is shown in the saved games screen though.

So there seems to be a pattern throughout the whole game design that they did not make the displays to show the maximum values possible in the game but cut the graphics off at a certain point.

Using the weaker shields that consume no energy might actually not
be such a bad idea. Will try that out too.

Maybe I will still find out somehow if an amount of energy that exceeds the ship stats display is actually lost or still available nonetheless. The first question about the lane blockers was bugging me more than the second one.

By the way I now found out that the Antagonizer patch handles maintenance a bit better than the original maintenance patch. There are less structures built by the AI on wrong squares than with the "maintenance" patch - still not perfect but within reasonable range. Does anyone know whether the maintenance patch appeared earlier than the Antag patch? That would have given the author of the Antag patch the possibility to check the maintenance part in the other patch.

Thanks again for your answer Eagle of Fire - that cleared up quite a lot for me.

[Eagle of Fire]

Okay the ship stats display thing. You and I seem to have different battle tactics. I actually like a bit of a battle in this game. You just evade the battle - which is fine in terms of strategy - I understand it is possible to win that way. Still your strategy might be useful for some rare game where I really need to zip past the AI.

I think you got the wrong idea: I don't run from every battles. I really do destroy every ennemy ships I can intercept safely. I happen to be able to do that to 100% of the ships which enter my system past a certain part of the early game... That's the main problem.

I too like the battles... But I'd never go as far as to "badly" design my ships simply to give a chance to the AI.

@ red_avatar

.... haven't seen a woman with 2 clits yet. Have mercy on Juogo
- his mothertongue is probably Spanish. 2 clits sounds like some alien
filly - might be an idea for a game character...... just imagine the effect of stimulating her...

@ Eagle of Fire

- ah, I see. But then my question was not useless because it is aimed
at designing better ships. The question whether there is a relatively tight limit of the amount of energy you can have on a ship is not irrelevant.

Having to struggle a bit during the early game phase when there are other species visiting your home system before you even build your first ship is actually the most interesting aspect of the game. Playing with the Antag Patch of course. That's the only phase that really poses a good challenge. Do I rather build an orbital shield and an orbital missile base first because they take less time to complete than the first ship? There where a few games where I actually needed a basic orbital defense in effect before getting my first ship. I just found out you are still allowed to have 2 ships if another species settles a planet in your home system before you even get to produce your first ship. So I put invasion modules on my very first ship. That was a fun game when that thing happened.

[Borodin]

Originally Posted by Philos73

By the way I now found out that the Antagonizer patch handles maintenance a bit better than the original maintenance patch. There are less structures built by the AI on wrong squares than with the "maintenance" patch - still not perfect but within reasonable range. Does anyone know whether the maintenance patch appeared earlier than the Antag patch? That would have given the author of the Antag patch the possibility to check the maintenance part in the other patch.

Last time I spoke with the developers (admittedly several years ago, at an ancient E3 convention), they told me the antagonizer patch was the latest.

[Oskatat]

planets from the AI are still badly managed, research badly planned and ships badly designed. As mentioned, as soon as you can make more than a few ships, it's usually a cakewalk. It does depend on the race you choose though. The research or construction bonus races tend to be easier to play (chamanchy or something, and the cloud thingies), while some don't have a useful special ability

[The Yawning Dragon]

Hi!

This is my first post here! Ascendancy was one of the first games I played (back in 1996) and enjoyed it immensely. I was playing it lately and I decided to write a small tool for viewing art assets from the game - Ascendancy Explorer. It can also serve as converter from Ascendancy internal formats to more common formats (i. e. raw music files to wav). If someone thinks that it could be useful, more information can be found on my homepage

The Yawning Dragon

PS Sorry for this shameless self-promotion

hi guys,

dumb question, I am unable to start the game. I extracted the zip moved the folder to my DOSbox, started Dosbox and could not find any executable to run except the UVconfig.

Downloaded again, same behaviour.

What did I miss?

Thanks in advance for any hint,
knurps