Good score Norad. I guess I am going to have to play larger maps and put in a few more hours/week to stay ahead of you. We now have solidified a top 10 spot and 9th is in our sights. 8th is not too far away either. I promised I would have an early game strategy posted by the weekend so here it goes. I start with the pre-game settings for diplomacy and economy set at the max level. Use the last bit for research. I usually start wiyh the industrialist party. Make sure you have hyperdrive as one of your starting techs. Planetary improvements is a good one to start with also. For the first 10 moves or so I set the industrial capacity to 100 %, and leave it there, and set the taxes so that the approval stays at about 75%. At 75 % you get a population growth bonus. 100 % you get even more but it costs to much at this point. I then set the research slider to 50%, the social to 50% and Military to zero. Send your Flagship out to find the best planets available. Send your first colony ship to the best one found. Before your second move design a colony ship with 2 hyperdrine engines and purchase it. Every move after this purchase another new improved colony ship until you get down to about 1000 BC's left. Build a factory first, then an entertainment network, then another factory. When the ent. net. is built you will see your approval go up so keep setting the taxslider to 75% approval. This will reduce the amount being taken from your balance BC. When the second factory is built set your sliders to 50% research and 25 % for the other 2. Start building more new and improved colony ships making sure you upgrade them as you acquire new techs. When the Flagship has scouted out all the reachable planets set it to autosurvey and it will nail all the anomilies. It will find anomilies that you cannot see in the fog. You should find a few nice ones to build your BC back up. When all the planets are taken start buiding the best fighting ships you can design. The first techs to research are xeno communications and then Universal Translater. As soon as you get UT, Contact every race and trade averything you have with every race. To max out the gain of techs you will probably have to contact each race 2 or 3 times in ths one turn. When you have all their techs trade the techs you have for as much cash as you can get from them. Trade the techs individually as you will get more money than if you trade groups of techs. Rinse and repeat this process every few turns. Dont wait until you research another tech bfore you check out what they have researched. The techs you should then research are the finance techs, the approval techs and the Political/Diplomacy techs. If you can, dont trade the Political/Diplomacy techs, as these maintain your trading advantage. This should help you get a good start. If you have any questions please post to this thread. Bye for now. TBAY

Norad. When I play with tech trading on I use the fastest tech development. I like to get the trading and the tech tree finished as quickly as possible so I can lower the research slider to 0% and concentrate on developing my military and social aspects. I think thats enough tips for you for now as you are gaining on me a little too rapidly. I dont think the game rewards a player enough for playing at the higher levels. It takes a lot longer to play a suicidal game as you have to concentrate on every aspect of micro-managing. Ican finish a game on the painfull level in about half the time and receive about 90% of the score I receive at the suicidal level. If you miss one little thing on suicidal the AI is on you like flies on shit. Excuse my language. Also, my last 10-12 games have been won on the suicdal level and my overall rating only moved form painfull to crippling. I like the challenge of the suicidal games but they are slowing down my quest to be no. 1. Many of the players that are ahead of me play at a much lower difficulty level. Till next time TBAY

Well the game I was playing when stupid on me so I had to quit it since I was so far in debt I would never dig myself out.

Oh, the above link now works so I'll have to get busy and actually put something together. What is there is just something I was playing with, but not sure it is how I wnat it to look.

Till later!

Welome Jarru. It is good to have another top player in our midst. Ypu have just moved us up a couple of placesin the rankings. I can see from your scores that it may not be worth my while to continue to play at the suicidal level. I am not rewarded enough at that levl fo all the extra time it takes to play. OK we are on a roll now lets set our sights on the top 5. Bye for now. TBAY

Greetings! I have been watching your empire progress and your posts here for some time. When I saw that you had jumped from tenth to seventh, I decided I had to join while you were outside the top five, or it would feel like I joined after it was certain you would get to the top, rather than when I could still help you guys to do so.

Norad, you would know better than the other two: does having the racial victory medal raise your score any in itself, or is it just cool to have?

Yes, I've been wondering about the medal system too. For instance, I have wone 22 games, but acording to my medal count I have won less than five and have played only 15. Whats up with that?

Numbers: for fellow members, and anyone else who is interested, on checking our scores today I found some interesting numbers. We need just more than 28,257 points to surpass "the Paradox" for sixth place. We will need to increase our score by one and a half times to get into the top three, however. Within the Empire, our glorious leader and Norad are separated by just 5,210 points. On a personal note, I need about 4,500 points to become the fourth highest ranking member. However, Razius hasn't posted games in a month, so that's not the achievement I thought it would be.

Greetings Fellow Orcas. I am just about finished a huge suicidal millitary victory. This should move us up to almost the top 5 with the scores the rest of you post. If I do not receive close to 100,000 points for this submission i am going to create a new Character and play with it for a while at a lower difficulty level and rattle off a large millitary victory every night. My current character is being held back by the 4 defeats I posted when I first started. The new character's total will increase at a much faster rate as I will not post any defeats. Within 2 weeks I should be ahead of my TBAY character. Bye for now and lets get the top three empires looking in their rear view mirrors. TBAY

Norad. I dont think it will delay us at all. If you create a new character, and leave the original in the empire, you will be adding a new character to our empire. The scores from the original character will remain unchanged in our empire total, and the new games posted to the new character will add up faster than if you added them to the original character. It is a win win situation. I will be able to keep one character for prestige at a higher difficulty level and one character to greatly add easy points to our empire. Bye for now. TBAY

I see my last post did not show up. I will welcome Spludge for a second time. Glad to have you become an Orca. We are now in 6th place and should move up to 5th by the end of the weekend if I can finish my latest game by then and Jarru and Norad continue at there bistering pace. My new Character is Spontaneous Combustion. I will start to post all my new games at a lower difficulty level (crippling) as it takes me about half the time to play a huge map at this level compared to Suicidal. Also since the new character has no losses posted its' score will increase faster than myt original Character. This will help our empire catch the top three sooner, especially if we keep gowing in numbers at the rate we are now. Bye for now. TBAY

Welcome aboard Couche. Do you know how to join? I don't see your Character listed in our empire. If you need any help signing up I believe one of our ealier posts has directions. If not, feel free to ask and one of us will gladly help you. Have fun helping us become no. one. Bye for now, TBAY. Great I see your Name there now. I was able to come back and edit this post. The new forum seems to be working better.

Thanks Norad.

All I have done almost a week is playing all my free time. Now i keep a short break and do something else.
So, it's your others turn to keep our empire going on.

It´s 12:26 AM and I go to sleep.