It isn't.   

I don't think I'm as skilled as the other guys, but I only win about 1 out 5 game attempts at that level and I'm fishing for a good start. On Maso, I can win for sure with a good start on every attempt. The thing is, I know when I'm going to lose pretty quick so I try again. The Metaverse record doesn't reflect that.

It didn't take long for that score of Spacetimer's to get around heh. Like mentionedin the diplo's area at the Core, it is obvious he found something. No games for two months and non out of the ordinary then to come in with three in nine hours. Seeing as the scores themselves are in no way possible even with any known cheats, I'd say he's editing them in the saves somehow. If he hadn't got greedy he could of snuck a few more believeable ones by before being noticed.

Now we just have to get Purge back playing and it would be a three way battle for the gold Great job all of you! I remain in awe of your skills.

There was thread about Hex editing saves to give you whatever bonus tiles you wanted. In that thread it was discussed that the same method could be used to cheat the MV. I agree with DA and that perhaps the 2Mill score was meant to be a 200K score so that his progression up the MV ranks looked gradual. His first game was 90K then the intended 200K (actual 2M) and then a 400K game.

If that was the case then there would have been little to attention payed to him.

Get the bonuses you've always wanted reply's 38,39 and 40 are about cheating the MV.

Maybe this guy figured out how to do it.

Actually that's no games for 14 months and then suddenly 3 games on the latest DA version all with unbelievable scores. Well perhaps the 1 year 94K tech win in a small galaxy is just this side of believable.

Also if you check out his forum presence the last reply he made to any post was in November of '06.

As far as hex editing I was under the impression that SD had hash code in place to prevent this. I'm going way back but games like the Ultima series had line checksums that were fairly obvious and easy to calculate for yourself. Typically the last byte in a 32 byte line was the line checksum and if you changed any byte within that line then all you had to do was to change the line checksum to compensate. This could be used to duplicate magical items for all members of a party or even to scan through the list of all possible items and thereby be able to give yourself any item in the game without having found it. Hash code conceptually should be far harder to break for one reason the location of it's storage is not made so obvious and what bits actually contribute to the code as well as how these bits are mapped to the code should be non obvious as well.

I think this is what Cari was refering to with her response in that thread.

I did follow the link to the thread and it does seem like old fashioned Hex editing without even the subtlety of a line data checksum. I really do find this difficult to believe. However I really don't believe that giving oneself a precusor mine or a precursor library on every tile of every planet in a small galaxy is going to get you close to two million points. The only way to get 2 million points in a small 2 year game would be to directly edit the score itself. I don't care what kind of in-game racial bonuses you give yourself except for perhaps a 1 million percent economic bonus, nothing could make such a difference in the score.

The fact that SD even allowed that thread to stay around implies to me that they were not particularly worried that games edited in this manner wouldn't trip the cheater flag. SD has historically been quick to shut down and even delete material that exposed exploits let alone the outright cheating that this is.

Those of you that have been around awhile should remember the issue of editing racial bonuses to extreme levels that was used in the v1.2 timeframe. However this was quickly exposed and dealt with. In that case I think it involved editing the prefs.ini file.

However in that case the results were scores that the person would probably not otherwise be able to achieve but nothing that could even get close to 2 million points in a small galaxy.

Again all this points to the ability to simply rewrite the score which most definitely implies the cracking of the hash location and mapping. However even in that case this should be detectable I would think. I would expect that when you uploaded a game to the MV the essential data that contributed to the score would be uploaded as well. By this I mean the income, population, military and research curves from the timeline that are displayed in the endgame sequence. These graphs wouldn't directly correlate to a score but it should be clear from these curves the game score could never have approached the 2 million mark. From the endgame.sav file you can see the entire games development and any direct score editing should be easily apparent.

i tried to find his last post and all i could find was his last active date. how did you find that Mumble?

First I went to Metaverse Home and then under High Scores went to Forum Stats. I then searched under Top Authors and didn't find him and then under Top Commentors and that told me that he had made 46 total replies.

From there I went back to the forums and clicked on Advanced Search and then entered spacetimer and selected Find Replies by User. This brings up a list of threads to which the User has replied. These are sorted in reverse chronological order based on the last reply in the thread which is of course not exactly the same as the last reply made by the person you are searching for.

However the last reply of the latest thread was Dec 8, 2006 and so you automatically know he could not have replied to anything later than Dec 8th. To refine this a bit more I checked his reply in that thread which was Nov. 25th. Checking the thread prior to that I also found his last post in that thread was Nov 25th. Since the last post of the next thread beyond that occured Nov 28th I can conclude that he's made no reply on this forum since Nov '06.

Obviously there wasn't all that much need for me to chase back even as far as I did but you wanted to know how the process worked hence the explanation. The reason you may need to do this in some cases is if the user had replied to a pinned post that may still be active. In that case he may have posted a year ago to a thread in which the latest reply was yesterday and you would have had to do something like I described above to narrow the window.

The last visit from his profile was two days ago which was when he posted both the 2 mil game and the 450K game. I guess the 2 mil wasn't enough for the day.

Also the search is somewhat limited in how much it finds, like if you find all my replies the list says there are 28 pages of replies but if you try to access much beyond page 6 I think it chokes on you. Too bad you can't qualify a search by user name with a search by keyword but apparently you can't.

oops I didn't look close enough at the year.

That one was a pretty obvious cheat actually. All you had to do was edit the values in the race's xml file in "My Documents\My Games" with a plain ol' text editor. You could give yourself the maximum bonus in every area and it would get through the normal race setup in that state. There were no checks of any kind on that data.

Stardock does try to keep the Metaverse environment fair by dealing with things of this nature, but after all, it's just a game. You can't expect them to bend over backwards.

Yes it is just a game but then it's a game that SD is in the business of selling so it does have some importance to them.

More germane to the issue is that it only affects the Metaverse which certainly isn't the bulk of all GalCiv2 players but still they have invested effort into the MV and into some amount of protection mechanisms into the game to avoid precisely this situation. I'm sure it is of significant interest to them to find out how this was managed. I agree that this isn't SD's highest priority by any stretch of the imagination but I'm confident it will be resolved sooner or later. If the guy just goes away then I doubt it's worth anyones time to bother with. If he continues and more importantly if it becomes apparent that he's not the only one I'm sure the importance of this will escalate.

One thing that I do is to keep the endgame.sav file from every game I've submitted to the MV just in case there is ever any kind of question. Although the endgame.sav doesn't tell you everything the timeline curves give a very accurate history of how the game progressed and the validity of something as dramatic as a 2 million point 2 year *small* galaxy game should be pretty easy to see from those curves.

Does the endgame save get transmitted when you post to the Metaverse? I was under the impression only a few game statistics are transmitted, as reflected by the endgame xml file in the Metaverse directory.

I doubt the entire file is transmitted but I would hope that at least the information in the timeline curves are. My sav games seem to have gotten bigger proportionally with the score score but that's most likely directly associated with the number of ships in the game which also correlates to score. Currently my sav games are about 32MB each.

Clearly SD is going to be a little closed mouth about precisely what data is transmitted but I am under the impression that they do have enough data to be able to see basically how the game progressed. The four curves of pop, income, military and research really tell you pretty much everything about how the game progressed. It doesn't tell you "how" someone conquered the bulk of the galaxy but it certainly tells you when.

That would probably be sufficient in a case like this because it's so extreme. If someone figured out something that merely doubled the score that might be a little less clear but we are talking about a 2 million point game under settings where a great player would have difficulty achieving 50K, that's a 4000% increase. We aren't talking about anything subtle here and I extremely doubt that you can gain an advantage factor of 4000% by editing a few racial bonuses or by giving you precusor mines and libraries on every tile of every planet in your small galaxy. I really see no manipulation of any in-game mechanic that could account for a 4000% increase.

In my metaverse league games I think I've done about 50K for a conquest victory in a small galaxy but in that case the best I could manage was "only" a 16 military SB array with about 2000 ships under it and that took far longer than 2 game years. If only accomplished via the military score this would imply that he was able to produce 80,000 ships in a two year small galaxy. Clearly his score increase would also assume increases in the other components of score, but this gives you an idea of the scale of things.

And what other component could he have increased by 4000%? Population? Hardly, even a 40 fold increase in pop is totally ridiculus but I'm also under the impression that your pop score is based on a logarithm of your pop and so a 40 fold pop increase wouldn't even do it. So whats left? Income? Research? It really just is not in the realm of the possible.

I have to agree with your conclusions Mumble. I suspect you couldn't get that kind of a score on a small map if you started with every planet fully developed and fully populated with bonus tiles. Although I thought there was a conversation at one point in time on the forums about them cross checking the final total against it's component parts. My memory on it is vague and long ago though...

BTW the Advanced Search button doesn't show up in firefox (but if you cut and paste the link over to FF, it works just fine), so if anyone out there is looking for it, you might have to find it with IE first.

I have FF Purge and it shows up for me, it is just the little button and took some finding, but it is there.

Has Kryo commented on these games at all? Does he know? I'd really like to hear from the devs on this, maybe we need someone to pm Brad or Cari.

Concerning the advance search button; My browser blocks it as an ad for some reason. It may be a plugin filter or something that is causing it not to be seen for some.

That's probably it. My FF is locked down fairly tight since it's my primary.

I haven't seen anything from the devs, but I can't imagine that they are unaware at this point...

Hi all

How you all keeping?

RL has been ridiculously busy for the last few months and has not given me much time at all to play this fine game. However i have been 'playing around' with TA and look forward to the time we can start playing MV games on it.

As for the 'person' who has been editing the game files to get a large score, well i hope it gave him great satisfaction to have to resort to that strategy to gain points. To me that is removing the base idea behind playing computer games which is to have fun playing them!

Anyhow i hope to pop in again real soon.

Laters

I'm hoping that Stardock offers a combo package of DA and TA for those of us who are still playing DL. I looked at the features offered in DA, and the ones I liked weren't interesting enough to me to buy the expansion. TA is a different story, the specialized tech trees will help people like myself who "immerse" themselves in the race they are playing.

I'm guessing that spacetimer is not easy to get a hold off since he isn't a regular here or at the core. I would imagine that the stardock people are trying to get some more info before they do anything that would effect his account. Plus they are pushing a March release for TA so I guess their focus is on that.

They already do. Here it is.

SD has been touting a march release yet that link states April now. Not that i mind i'd rather they push the release back till they get it all sorted out...Frankly i find it a bit of a mess so far...though that's what a beta is for i guess.

SD just being sneaky pushing back another month.

I think they're going for a "it takes as long as it takes" approach. That's fine with me because I'd rather not see big changes after the official release.

Yea for sure get as much fiddling out of the way pre-release. I think they want to avoid what happened with DA...i believe it could have done with a little longer in beta.

I think this was the community consensus back when they did a poll. I know that is the option I voted for as another month or two is no big deal to me...

It's always good to see you pop in and chime up! I hope all the RL concerns are good things, not bad things...

hmmm...only another 10.25 million points before I overtake the Diplomats...seems easy enough (and yes, the old fashioned way )

but mostly i'm just out for the bling bling