Let's just say that I was of an age were the scenes with a certain blueish skinned alien were extremely interesting. 

For you player vs. player melee experts: how useful is the Slylandro ship?  I've always thought it was an extremely difficult ship to use.

You could install a language pack, and play the game in eg. Russian.

There's an idea.  Is there one for French?  I took that in high school.


Another idea: I bet you could complete the game without mining (other getting the radioactives for the starbase), hunting, or destroying any ships that it isn't absolutely necessary to. 

Speed run doesn't sound fun to me either, although I might do it sometime.   

The other two are great suggestions, but I've done them already.  Flagship only is obviously easy once you get  the upgrades, escorts only is different since you get to deck out the flagship with all crew pods (except a fuel tank obviously).  A fleet of Orz and/or Utwig backed by lots of crew pods can do alot of damage.  Of course, since you can avoid almost any fights you want to, that makes it easy also.

Does anyone have any interesting ways to play the game?

I've done "be the bad guy" and "bounty hunter."  I've tried not visiting the starbase, but I'm not quite good enough at melee against the probes to pull it off (mainly I have a problem with running into the planet  ).

Any other ideas?

Of course there are quicker ways to get credits 

Also, from what I read I guess everyone is in agreement with the drop in value the Mycon had from SC1 to SC2.

What about the change for the Earthling, Chenjesu, and Syreen ships. 

The stock market  type approach (adjusting the prices for the most and least used ships) some have mentioned would be the best way to balance the values.  Assuming of course you have good and experienced players doing it, you wouldn't want me doing it for instance since I'm terrible at multiplayer.   

The idea of using the AI to test it, doesn't work at all.  I actually did that a couple of years ago.  Using the AI, I had each ship fight one each of all the other ships in as big of groups as the ship could handle.   I then calculated what the ship "should be" valued at.  (Repeat experiments proved the results to be more consientant than I was expecting.)   

For instance the shofixti ship is a 5, which if it were perfectly valued for the setup I used, would mean that it would take 437/5 = 87.4 shofixti ships to defeat one ship of every type.   Here's the results I got (which actually tells you about the AI more than the ships):     

ship - real value - calculated value - change

Androsynth   15    18.3   +22%
Arilou           16    10.1    -37%
Chenjesi       28    25.1    -10%
Chmmr         30    48.5    +62%
Druuge         17    11.3    -34%
Ilwrath         10    10.6    +6%
Kohr-Ah       30    30.0     ----
Melnorme    18     9.9     -45%
Mmrnmhrm 19     8.8     -54%
Mycon         21     9.3     -56%
Orz              23    10.1     -56%
Shofixti        5       7.7    +54%
Ur-Quan      30    26.6    -11%
Utwig          22    55.3    +151%
Vux             12    10.0    -17%
Yehat          23    32.6    +42%


These ships couldn't be valued because they had at least one ship (which is listed after it) which the AI couldn't beat even with 14-1 ship numbers against it.   


Earthling - Chmmr
Pkunk - Syreen
Slylandro - Chmmr
Spathi - Chmmr
Supox - Chmmr
Syreen - Chmmr
Thraddash - Chmmr
Umgah - Spathi
Zoq-Fot-Pik - Chmmr

Some impressive stuff...

You should be able to out run them.   You really shouldn't get caught in pileups like that.   That's once you've got all your thrusters of course.

Besides they might tell you something interesting.

I recently noticed that lander bolt shots are blocked by earthquakes. 

Maybe not that interesting, but I've played the game through over a dozen times before I noticed it.

ZOQ-FOT-PIK

Yes, all 3 of them. 

Actually, private Hendrix accidentally broke it (or at least turned it off), after which they brought it aboard the flagship for further investigation. The Thraddash don't really give the captain a chance to explain himself.

Yes, the first time I wanted to give it back.  I was focused on making allies and I hadn't found the Utwig yet...

Later I it occurred to me that's it's pretty rude to be stealing other people's treasured artifacts...

I mean it's not like the Captain knows he can't win without it.

Why should I take it and used it to fix something for the clumsy Utwig?

And the Thraddash seem to like it so much...