One question, what’s up with the star trekish logo? I was kind of attached to the blue bot who reminded me of good old HK-47.

As for the website.. the URL will take a few hours to work fully. Until then please use this link > http://www.diplomats.thegalacticcore.com/ to see the website...

Hey damoose! How's it going?

No other crazy Canucks for you to hang out with around here yet then?

Going good thanks! Been a little busy with work, so not doing much on the gaming front apart from a brief sojourn with Civ4 - but the thing was so damned buggy and slow... and not really that good IMO

Anyway, got Stardock's e-mail about my eligibility to get GC2 for free (hell, you can't knock Brad & co for customer support and loyalty ), so thought I'd see what it was like... well it all installed smooth as, and looks good so far! Will give it a good test drive over the weekend and see how many Yor I can crush - if I get into it again, then maybe a return to the Meta is in order.

Whatever, it's nice getting a free quality game (especially as today is my 40th birthday). Now just going to check that all body parts are intact and go and get some birthday beer.

HB Magnum. GCII as you say is a quality game. And customer support is one of those things that I really like about SD. Hope to see you around here.

Cheers for the Birthday greets folks!

Just played the first full game, and it went OK. Here's one little niggle for you, dunno if this is by design but it's weird if it is:

Got a nice approval rating going with Zero-G Sports Arenas built as required (+55 morale). Researched VR Centres and all the ZGs were set to auto-upgrade to VRCs..... which only carry a +40 morale bonus

Some new definition of "upgrade" here I think

Finally got a non-bugged game submitted!

Cant get it right all the time Dracil

ROFL!!! One can always hope. I won't be able to submitt until my SN gets sorted.

Too funny. Oh well... More aliens left to kill.

As there are some familiar faces and old friends around here, I've decided to become a Diplomat (as long as you've got no rules about exterminating Yor with extreme prejudice)... for now.

Was toying with the idea of starting up my own Empire, but haven't really got the time to maintain a website et al right now, so lets get it on.

One point you might be interested in, a Cultural win now scores more than a Diplomatic win (was t'other way round in GC1). Game I finshed last night with a Cultural win, submitted for 67K, reloaded to 2 turns before win and bribed an alliance to win on the same turn... 57K.

Tech-whoring is how I turned my 33k score to 65k (the one that didn't submit right). I just left the AI one planet while I researched all the techs and reloaded whenever they decided to flip to me.

Military wins still seem to give the best scores, so turn off all those victory conditions.

So plan of action now is:
0) Turn off victory conditions, tech rate to very fast.
1) Achieve dominance through whatever means until enemy has a single planet left
2) Turn all manufacturing centers into research buildings and research everything.
3) Turn those research centers into farms and morale boosters, reduce tax rate as needed.
4) Declare war and make that last planet surrender and submit game when your pop is about as high as can be sustained.

That should maximize score yield per game.

Also, max score so far seems to be over 100000, as the top player in the metaverse has a single game played.