Yeah, Mega Events have ruined several of my games for this round. I enjoy them, but it does mean that you never really know if you are in control or on the path to doom.

Still, that is balanced out somwhat by the ability to turn off surrenders. Oh wait....




~ Wyndstar

Elwood, I used to feel the same way and played with tech trading off for probably the first full year that I played the game. However, I eventually realized that I was giving up a potential advantage for the human if only I could figure out how to use it correctly.

Generally nowadays I make diplomacy an early focus and the resulting diplomatic advantage makes you feel not so taken advantage of in trades with the AI, but even so you have to be willing to give more than you get, particularly on those early trades. Where you make up for it is in being able to trade the same tech to multiple AI's within the same turn and essentially get "paid off" more than once.

It's like the vendor that sells an item at a loss but makes up for it in volume, except that in this case it actually makes sense.

In any case I encourage you to try and learn use it effectively whenever you can enable it, but I agree that I don't find it nearly as crippling as perhaps others do when it's not enabled.

The point to playing with tech trading off is to realize that against AI with bonuses there's simply no way you can compete in technology evenly across the board. The only advantage that the human has is that the AI tends to research evenly across all technologies and researches the early techs in all branches before moving ahead in any one branch.

The human can gain an advantage in any one particular branch by simply concentrating all research into one area but the large bonuses that AI gets precludes the human from researching a number of different areas. As long as the human limits his research choices to those techs that are truly essential to his strategy and "makes do" in other areas with a far lower tech level than the AI then the human can prevail.

Comment removed by Admin: Pornographic images not permitted.

User Exiled

What's with the weird post by Winhop?

[Edit]

Sorry. That should be Wonhip.

I already notified the admins to remove/delete that weird posting. It has disturbing/innapropriate images.

Sentient species taste better...

Well i missed what it was....thankfully. Though i have the train crash syndrome. It's gone, i cant see it, you guys have made it clear that i prolly don't wanna see it...but yet.....I wanna see what it was....

Strange that someone who has been a member for so long, July 05 according to the profile, would suddenly choose to behave that way.

Back on Topic....I hope that everyone else's despair at this rounds settings have eased your frustration CalifDude. It's not an easy round that is for sure, just beating the settings at any level is an achievement.

Knock the game back a level if ya need to mate and try it on DL. A win is all you need mate, it's a juicy 2 points for your team.

Some additional ideas which are commonly used when tech trading:
1) Sell military tech to a weak AI that is being bashed by other AI's. It's profitable and it will weaken the stronger AI's. When an AI has almost been wiped out (unless that's your doing) it's time to sell whatever they can still afford.
2) Sell terraforming techs to slow down an opponent a bit before you plan on attacking him. Usually they will start terraforming several tiles before building ---> gives you both cash and some time advantage.
3) Weak minors are ideal to sell tech to.
4) Sell techs to AI's that have little cash, to drive them into debt or prevent them from buying rather than building stuff.

At higher difficulty levels, the primary advantage the human has is the ability to make more effective use of resources that the AI also has. Even with equal weapons tech, if you can leverage the money you gained by selling it into some other useable asset, it gives scope to outplay the AIs strategically and rely on better tactical ability to hold militarily in the mean time.

If you are running a tech based economy (all-labs for instance), most likely your greatest need is income. Selling weapons tech can be a good trade off in this situation, since what you need most is to keep the research going until you've hit research goals critical to your intended strategy (for instance, concepts of evil and psionic beams). You might have to sell off every beam tech you research to every, or nearly every other race in the galaxy to fund your research, but once you've got the MCC up and are attacking with Psionic Beam weapon equipped ships, it can all be worth it. Diplomacy based strategies, such as building the diplomatic translators and then racing for the SCC, also reward aggressive tech brokering.

It's not always smart to sell your weapons tech of course, but personally I usually do (though I tend to try to keep 1 or 2 generations ahead of races I am likely to be at war with in the near to intermediate future.) Your mileage may vary .

Now that it seems that the discussion about ARC and straw man opponents has died down a bit there's another topic that I want to bring up for discussion prior to the end of this round.

I've already discussed this with some folks within the MVL and I'm pretty sure they have discussed this with others so I assume that most people have heard about this one way or another, however there may be a few folks that haven't heard anything yet.

Anyway, I'd like to bring up the idea of moving the MVL private forums from the Core to the Tyranny of Evil site. To avoid upset to the league I suggest that this change, if approved by the league, should happen between rounds.

I've been asked why the league should do this and there are a couple of decent reasons to do so. However the reasons that the league should consider this and the reasons that I have for bringing up the issue are somewhat different although they are closely related. In any case I feel the need to explain both.

Basically this first came about when I heard someone mention that the only reason they go to the Core is because they're "forced" to because of the MVL Team private forums. At first I didn't think too much about this because you can't always please everyone. However later I found out that although this might be an isolated attitude there were others that felt the same although perhaps not as strongly.

The feeling that I got from a few others was that although they didn't necessarily feel "forced" to go to the Core they did feel that some of the folks there seemed "snobbish".

This concerned me. It certainly wasn't how I viewed the site nor was it how I preferred to be viewed. Anyway I mentioned that there are those that view the site this way in a particularly contentious thread. My expectation was that this would concern others just as it had concerned me. However I was surprised by the response that I received. There were certainly overtones related to the political nature of the thread that I chose to express this concern in, but basically the response I received was not one that encouraged me to think that anyone was interested in dispelling what they believed to be an incorrect opinion.

The following is a quote of how I brought up the topic followed by a quote of the response I received. You be the judge of how to interpret this.





Certainly you need to be careful about taking things out of context and just as certainly one brief interchange in a single thread doesn’t totally by itself negate close to two years of positive interaction, but to me this definitely indicates an attitude that frankly I don’t particularly care to be associated with. To me this reads as total unconcern that others may view the site negatively and is basically a statement of “like it or lump it”. Personally I think I’ll lump it.

Anyway that covers my personal reasons for bringing up the topic. As far as reasons that it would be in the best interests of the league to make this move as well, I can simply point out that the Core has pretty much lost most of it’s focus on GC2 and has moved on to other interests and pursuits. That’s not to say that there aren’t folks there still interested in GC2 it’s just that they have essentially become a minority.

As far as the Tyranny of Evil site, it’s smaller and it’s only focus is GC2. True, some threads do seem to wander a bit but the reason for anyone to be there is strictly because of GC2. I don’t think there’s a single person there that isn’t in the league already and this probably represents half of the league. It’s where the league “offices” essentially are. I think it makes perfect sense that the team’s private forums should be located there as well. What do you think?

I don't have a opinion on "snobbishness" since the only reason I go to The Core is the private Team C forum. I play the trivia pretty regularly, but that's it. For me it's just a "show me where you be, and I'll come where you to". But since I've already registered at ToE, it looks like I'm already where you to.

I've always like the core and personally have never encountered any snobishness. When I was very new to the game and knew pratically nothing the Diplomats were patient, welcoming and helpful. The only areas I've only frequented at the core are the Galciv2 general board, the Diplomats board and the team E board, so I can not speak to what attitudes prevail elsewhere, but personally I like the layout and reliability there.

If everyone wants to switch I'd have no strong objection to that, and I understand that the core has drifted from a Galciv2 discussion forum to something else. However, I think it's compartmentalized enough that it's pretty easy just to stick to the Galciv2 areas and ignore the rest. Well, that's my 2 cents.

There is no way for me to evaluate that, because I only have one reference point. I do find it unusual that there are those that hate the Core that much. To go to a team forum, you click on the forum link, click on your team forum link, and you're where you want to be. You dont even have to really look at any of the rest of the website to get there. Doesnt seem too aggravating in my opinion.

Perhaps those that feel that it is will speak up.



Relax Mumble, I dont recall anyone saying you were just making it up.  

Sentient species taste better...