ludek wrote on Sun, 09 April 2017 11:37

JoaT
I do not think that forbidding to take NAS or requiring to dump points gained from NAS is fair, because:
- if NAS SS dose not pay more for it .. both races get similar advantage as they both get penscans .. Joat with NAS just build more cheap scouts to get planet scans, with penscans SS with it's first scanner emulates Joat with elec 4/5 increased cost is peanuts compared to resources spend on warships and research or just planet dewelopent. Midgame cloaked robberbarons are IMO far superior to joat scanning ships .. they allow to scan whole enemy territory while Joat simply can't if that territory is deep enough .. and they have other uses during planetary siegeges .. or raids and again expenses on them are irrelevant as they are tiny fraction of resources spend elsewhere.

Actually, SS does not get the same massive point mine from NAS. It's worth half of the 95 for them and it does actually negatively impact their scanning abilities with a smaller selection of pen scanners.

Trying to level other races with SS intelligence is a practice in futility.

JOAT pen scanner is based on elect level. What you say is only true if the JOAT doesn't bother researching elect at all, otherwise they only need research level 12 elec to have an equivalent to a robber barron and can eventually have one over twice as good. They do need elect 20 to match elephant which means the only real disadvantage is the elect 16-19 range where their pen scanning is a bit worse than a non-NAS race. If they want to make the investment JOAT pen scanners are the best in the game at what they do.

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- how often one sees Joat in the game ? Far lees often than IS or SD,SS I would say. This prt does not have any special ability .. it just have more resources (but it does not translates into minerals so after midgame this becomes more and more useles) .. I would not gimp it further. Good scanning/penscannig may be only thing going for Joat in lategame and still not magic bullet as tachars are.

I don't know what things are like now. But it was overwhelmingly popular when I was playing frequently in 2005-2007.

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- also proposed method to taxing for is bit unfair as it requies to dump base NAS pint gain , what about case when NAS point gain is lowered by number of LRTs taken? my point is that in such cases point gain from NAS is lower and thus impact on economy settings.

Doesn't matter, if you're taking lots of LRTs you should have to pay for the quantity just like everyone else.