Well I hope those scores in a small galaxy are believable...





If it were me, this is how I'd attack it. If playing a very short game population is where I see all the score difference between tiny, small and medium.

If you could hex edit to get farm space for 30 trillion people... the game kills them very slowly. It would take a couple of years for them to fall to normal levels. During the whole time you could tax them as well.... and if you gave yourself "perfect worlds" you would have no problems.

For instance... if you could give your worlds PQ40ish... you only need 20 spaces of VR cneters, or 10 spaces with VR centers and morale improvement tiles to hit the "magic point" where all population increases were covered because the morale forumla zeros out the negatives. Make the rest of the tiles +300% farm tiles...

I still don't know if there would then be a way to set all planets to max pop... but in theory once you hit the magic morale point on any planet the skys the limit as far as population/tax goes. If you had 30 trillion people in the first year taxed at 79%... what would your score be? Econ and pop alone.

It depends on what he has figured out that he can edit that they aren't running any check on. I can't believe they aren't doing a checksum on the score... which makes me think he might just be being clever in game. You could never get a score that high through production or research... and I doubt hes using starbases spam either. Assuming there is a solution which isn't direct score editing (why not end a score in a 7 or something to prove you cracked that to the developers... hackers like infamy) the best way to do it I think is editing population and being able to tax them hard early.

The reason I'm suspicious of a straight score edit is looking at those last 4 games. You get many less points for a tech win... I suppose he tried that first with whatever he is changing, and was impressed with the score. His next game wasn't getting greedy (the theory if he just edited score)... no, he tried his same cheat, but this time at suicidal instead of beginner and a mil victory instead of a tech victory.

The result of 2 mil probably blew him away!

The next two games with 300K+ plus scores are in quick succession... he's feeling out the ranges he can get with his cheat and trying different play styles. It looks to me like someone testing an ingame cheat, not like someone directly editing the number.

I come to this partly because I have run my own game company, and I use to have to deal with people trying to crack a high score system. Typically you could see the hacker feeling around, trying to find the max he could set something to show you how clever he was that he hacked something. Because after the 2 mil game the scores drop, I think he's testing an in-game cheat... not sending the devs a message.

IF its a military cheat somehow (adding starbases from turn 1 somehow?) I notice he goes very good every time, which gives a % increase to defense and HP. As both HP and def go into mil score.... that is the only thing to me that suggests it could be military and not pop.

Its a cheat of somekind, and I believe he's just bounds testing what he can do with it. Perhaps he's altering the score directly, but the pattern of the games suggests something else to me.

~ Wyndstar

P.S. you know, I should really switch to the diplomats. I talk to more of you guys on a regular basis and my empire has been dead for a while....

You of course could join the Tyranny of Evil, sorry to recruit on the diplos thread here guys but you got rex from the HCH i'm just trying to compete!!

There are many HCH members in the Tyranny Wyndstar, and diplos too.

Though if you choose the diplos i would not blame you, they are a great empire and a great bunch of guys.

Interesting theories Wyndstar. And from the foremost expert on scoring on small maps too!

I have actually pushed an entire galaxy into population loss with 8-9 trillion people before. I didn't write the numbers down, but my impression was that I lost a pretty significant amount of people (~.5T a turn?!?). I had assumed this was a percent, not a fixed number. But if it was a fixed number, you could add 100B to each planet from turn one with no VR centers, but stock exchanges instead, letting the population fall every turn. I've found income to be a huge score booster as well.....And it is true that no one really knows what a large population or income would be worth in those first months of the game. I have achieved enough domination to be relatively confident that the start of year one would be too late.

On the empire note. You would be a very welcome addition!!! If you do switch, drop a PM to one of the admins over at the core and we will get you into our private area as well.

Really, I can't blame neilo for trying to snag you as would be a valuable asset and a welcome companion for any empire.

BTW One quick reminder to all Galactic Diplomats. It really is worth your time to get an account over at the core, and drop in from time to time, even if it's only every couple of months of so.

One more note out there for anyone who is not a Galactic Diplomat. We are an open empire and all are welcome to join. Just click Join Empire.

The only thing is, you don't *have* to submit a score. You can still look at it without posting it. I can't think of why he would post something that outrageous, especially if he wants to look like a legitimate player at all. Maybe he just want's to be a dick and screw up the scoring system, but then why aren't all the games 2 million points.


One person expressed a feeling that he wasn't a skilled enough player to participate in our empire. Let me add that based on what we've talked about at the core, we're more interested in people willing to help keep our empire active by participating in discussions, regardless of experience playing the game.

Gracious Diplomats,

So I've been tossing around the idea of working on a 'series' that would focus on a particular game aspect every day or so, a singular post that would be on that topic geared to help new players and veteran players alike. I personally loathe traversing 20 threads to find relevant information, so am thinking having a concise and pertinent thread that utilizes the wealth of information found throughout the forums.

I bring this to you for a few reasons: One, many of you are considered to be the 'best' and most knowledgeable personages of the game; and secondly, while I am a capable writer, editor, and organizer, I sometimes lack the technical skill of this game that many of you have. Your input and help at making sure such information presented was accurate and useful would be most kind.

Any feedback will be most appreciated. Thank you for your time,

Silver

it could suggest that, or it could simply suggest he's a tool and doesn't really know how to play the game well (by avoiding good).

great analysis though, really great.

I personally think this is a good idea. Feel free to use anything I've ever posted in any way that might be useful to help the community at large...If I see something that I think you have missed, or something that could be pontificated one, I'll add my 2 bc. If it's something that you think I might have some kind of unique insight on, feel free to PM me as well at either here or the core.

thanks. It will probably take me a few weeks to combine thoughts, topics, etc etc. I do have school work to do on occasion too you know...like the public policy quiz i get to take later today, joy

Work?!? What's that!

Yes, those scores are believable for a number of reasons. For one they are all in the context of your other games. Secondly a 6 year 100K tiny/small galaxy military conquest is a much different beast than a 1 year 100K small tech win.

The population theory is flawed since even if you were to get past the 10% base morale multiplier of approval at 25B that exists in DA there still is a 100B fixed limit on the population of any planet regardless the number of farms or VRC's or anything else. How many planets in a small galaxy? 50 seems like way too many but even getting 50 planets to 100B only gets you to 5T total pop. Also, do you believe that any conceivable pop growth rate gets you to a planet of 100B in less than 3 years? No way.

As far as the defense and HP bonus of being good that gets you nowhere near a 2 million score.

Consider these numbers from my 7 year 957K gigantic military victory. These are approximate but at least within the proper order of magnitude. First off I had 7 fully populated military mining resources for a weapons/defense bonus of 273%. Round that up conservatively to 300% for normal in game racial and tech bonuses. This multiplies any attack/defense values that I have by 4 (i.e. 300% bonus = multiply by 4).

OK so now I have 16,000 ships with a base defense of 450 (45 ZPA's) and a base attack of 25 (1 BHE) on a huge hull (75 HP). This by itself is the equivalent of 475*4*16000=30.4 million worth of attack/defense points. In addition I have these 16,000 ships plus another 9,000 1/1 attack/defense huge hull ships under a 24 military SB array which gives another 24 times 54/9 attack/defense bonus. This is another 24*63*25000=37.8 million worth of attack/defense points, note that the racial bonus doesn't apply to the military SB bonus. It's hardly worthwhile to consider but then finally there's another close to 2 million (25000*75) due to the ships HP. This is a total in excess of 70 million attack/defense/HP points.

Now consider that theses values accumulated in a relatively linear fashion starting after the first year of the game until the 6th year and then were held constant for another year at this final 70 million level. Now tell me how some in game mechanic could conceivably more than double this kind of score in a 2 year small galaxy game.

Of course this totally neglects the contribution to the score of my 1.6 million bc weekly income and 8.4T total population both of which were held at these levels for close to the last 4 game years. Both levels nowhere approachable in a 2 year small galaxy.

The only kind of thing that I can think of is some kind of underflow where some small negative is taken as a huge positive.

[edit] Oh. I forgot to mention the ten 400/10 attack/defense ships (plus muliplied by my racial bonus) that I had under the SCC for the last 6 game years. [/edit]

I was playing a game recently where some kind of bug put the treasury at a really huge number, I mean huge, probably the biggest number the treasury can register. I saved and reloaded the game and the number was still there. I could have used that to build easily 20,000 maxed out ships. I went back to a save before encountering the bug because it really just ruined the game and it would have been cheating of course. This has only happened to me once and I have no idea how to reproduce it. Maybe this person has found a way to reliably reproduce this bug and is using it to make these giant scores.

Yeah, this is more like it. However, this wouldn't work either. First off how much tech would you have researched in a 2 year small galaxy to "max" out ships with. Keep in mind my maxed out ships required 7 fully mined military resources as well for a 4X bonus. Secondly you still need to buy each one of these ships one at a time per planet per turn.

Going back to my ridiculously high estimate of 50 planets in a small galaxy these 20K maxed out ships would still take 400 turns to just purchase, that's 8.3 game years. You guys are missing the scale of how incredible this really is. This is not just impossible, it's two orders of magnitude beyond possible.

No I don't. I think maybe he is manually setting the population levels. It is a cheat we are trying to sniff out after all.



Well....



I admit I don't know what they are checking and what they aren't. I really really can't believe that they don't have a checksum on the final score though. And I don't think he's getting his score through military.

But what if you could set your military rating to -1? Or your tech rating?

I know he doesn't HAVE to submit every game he tries, but maybe he isn't. He could just be submitting the ones that turn out allright. It seems to me he is trying to figure out the scoring formula, and what he has to change to get the kind of scores he wants. We don't know how fast a game like this takes... but small and tiny galaxies will let him test what he is doing fairly quickly.

Perhaps he is just straight altering the score number... I have nothing more than instinct telling me something else is going on.

~ Wyndstar

Yea, hehe, I've never been one for crunching numbers

Oh, agreed. I'm pretty sure that score has nothing to do with military rating at all. I wouldn't be surprised if he had no military.

And its obviously a cheat. But what value is he setting? Maybe if the game thought you had spent 4 million research points in the first year it would give you a huge score?

And I see what your saying about his first, 90k game. Its on BEGINNER and its a tech win. Those are some serious penalties to final score. But that's what makes me think he just did the exact same thing a second time, switching to suicidal and getting a mil victory. Thats about the difference I would expect in score magnitude (90k to 2.4 mil) for two identically played games where one was a beginner tech win and one was a suicidal military win.

~ Wyndstar

I agree that is very doubtfull that SD doesn't have hash totals, CRC or whatever to protect the score. In any case I doubt its as simplistic as a simple checksum. But really there has to be something that's not just an extension of normal game play, just cause it's so far out of the normal realm. I know they have limits and checks on all your racial abilities. I know you can't get that kind of score out of military, population, income or research. There's really nothing left. Once you eliminate the impossible then whats left no matter how improbable must be the cause, but what do you do when only the impossible is left?

All I know is that SD is aware of the situation and will deal with it somehow other sooner or later. The best solution is to find out how it was done so that it can be prevented in the future however failing that they could conceivably mark the game as a cheat on general principles but that's a slippery slope for them as well without some kind of "proof" and though I "know" that score couldn't be achieved legally that doesn't constitute real proof.

hmmm... i wonder Wyndstar if you did hit upon something. It if it as 'simple' as a multiplier to score it may be easier to track. 9000pts for Beginner Non-Military may be extremely unlikely, but necc. impossible and 250,000 for a Suicidal Military small/medium map, again while extremely unlikely, again not necc. impossible (this with assumptions that everything went the Player's way and maybe even included editing to achieve these 'normal' scores and the multiplied them).

its the ratio of points that made me wonder about this possibility.

Post deleted by author.

I wrote a nice little piece about MV empires that can be found here: Why Should I (You) Join an Empire?

Nicely done Silverbeacher.

I wrote up a little something for us over there. If you would like to add to it, feel free!

Well I missed out on being able to post a 872K win because I had uninstalled SDC and that deleted the GC2 Serial Number from my Registry. This made the next game I played unsubmittable, plus it was with the Korx which is an annoying race to play in DL because they get a wimpy 15% inherent economic bonus. You would normally select the 30% economic bonus but since this causes you to lose the "free" 15% bonus I chose some other bonus that's not as important and kept the 15% economic bonus. I think when I play them again I'll just take the 30% economic bonus and simply lose the inherent bonus.

Anyway by my calculation that 872K would have put my MV total at 1.5M which would have recaptured the gold medal by a significant margin. Oh well. I guess Craig gets to keep the top spot for at least another month, perhaps longer since I'll probably have to complete two MVL games before I get a chance to get back to a gigantic abundant all game.

Well, no one said it would be easy. I guess I can chaulk up being unable to submit an 872K game to "building character" except that I think that I've had no real shortage of character building experiences in my life already, thank you very much.   

IIRC you keep all your endgamesaves correct Mumble? Cari or Kryo could answer this obviously MUCH better than I could, but shouldn't there be a way to "save" that game since it sounds somewhat similar to an Error 12 (or is it 16? whatever the registry one is) message. Just hate to have you waste your efforts.

Hehe, guess I get to keep the gold a little longer. Sorry to hear of your troubles Mumblefratz. I actually went through the same thing some time ago and it was discouraging. In any case, I think the last game I posted is going to be it for a while. I plan to pick it back up when TA is released in a couple months.

Yes I do and it is an error 16 registry issue but I think error 16 is a catch all category that includes many things. In my case I had been going along fine and then I installed SDC. Even then everything was fine until at some point I decided I wasn't ever going to use SDC and I uninstalled it. When I uninstalled SDC, unbeknownst to me, it also deleted the serial number in my registry.

The first indication of any problem was more than a month later when I went to submit my game and got an error 11 serial number mismatch. This actually relates to the SerialNumber key that is present in the LastSubmittedGame.xml file which is simply the serial number in the registry at the time the game is submitted. Since at that point my registry was empty it reported that my serial number didn't match the one stored for me on the metaverse server.

Once I figured out what was going on this was simply fixed by restoring the registry to its proper pre-SDC values, which I did. So I was then able to resubmit my endgame.sav and this time it did generate the proper SerialNumber key in my LastSubmittedGame.xml file. However this time instead of a error 11 serial number mismatch I got an error 16 can not submit. In this case the cause was not the SerialNumber key but the fact that the OriginalSerialNumber key was missing.

I have checked this out with both Kryo and Cari and in my case there's no hope. Basically your serial number is used twice when playing/submitting a game. I've already described in the above how the serial number is used when you submit the game. However, when you start a Metaverse game the serial number from the registry is also stored in encrypted format somewhere within the bowels of the save game file. It's the serial number from the save game that becomes the OriginalSerialNumber key in the LastSubmittedGame.xml file. If the registry was blank at the time you started the game then there is no way to get a serial number into the save game and since this is part of the protections against cheating there's no way to edit the save game to include it. In fact I would much rather lose the submission of a single game than to suggest that any anti-cheating features be in any way compromised.

Like I said I did discuss this with both Kryo first and then Cari. Cari said she is putting in code to check for the existance of a serial number that will let you know if there's a problem when you start the game. This is sufficient to protect folks from this ever happening again. Certainly I would have preferred to somehow be able to submit the game but to be truthful I was a little disappointed that I wasn't able to beat my previous best score of 957K. In that game I had 7 military resources while in my last game I only had 5. Otherwise I did improve other parts of my play during that last game so except for military resources I should have received a better score. I'm still shooting for that elusive 1M mark in DL. I think it's at the extreme boundry of achievability but I think I just might be able to do it if I get lucky with military and economic resources and otherwise play a perfect game. The Korx are probably not the best racial choice for this feat but since they're next on my list, I'll have to make do.