Norad. Put them both in the empire. Both characters' scores will count for the empire. I have my original TBAY character in the empire and have also added Spontaneous Combustion. It seems you can have as many different charracters as you want in the same empire. I checked the Web site and it loks good so far. There is quite a bit of space to the left and right of the text you have now. I assume this is for more additons. If not it might be because of the resolution your machine is set at . Bye for now. Tbay

ras1310 Have you tried increasing your virtual memory. If you have 512 of ram try setting your virtual to about 1500. The game will slow down towards the end of it, but it shouldn't crash with the extra virtual. TBAY

Bump

I would like to welcome our newest member Gallagher118 to our ever growing empire. With his score added to the existing scores and Jarru's latest score we now have a solid lock on 5th place in the Metaverse. 2 weeks ago we were in 21st. I think we should be proud of our accomplishment. This does not mean we can slack off though. No. 3 is in our sights. That would give all of us a new medal. Orca 777, Can you and Norad figure a way to get your logo on his new website for our empire. Maybe email him your logo. I will leave that up to the 2 of you. All the time I have spent recruiting seems to be paying off and maybe now I will have some time to try to catch Jarru. It will probably be easier to catch him/you with my new character as there will be no losses to post. Bye for now. TBAY

Hi Jarru. I know that it will be a major challenge of my abilities and stamina to catch you. Watch out for Spontaneous Combustion. He might just be able to catch you. As for advice, what are all the pregame settings you like to use? The easiest way to beat the top levels is with diplomacy maxed out and tech trading on. Trade techs with everyone for other techs and cash. Then trade the newly aquired techs for more cash. Take a look at one of my earlier posts, # 27. It has a long pregame strategy for starting at the higher levels. If you play with tech trading off, it is much tougher to beat the AI at MASO or higher. The pregame settings I use for no tech trading: max out economy and research and use whats left over for influence. Bye for now as I have to go to work. How many hours ahead of PST are you? Is it 8 0r 9? TBAY.

Hi guys. You still need fresh blood to feed the orcas? I'm thinking about joining you. What do I need to know?

I would like to welcome our newest Orca. Please give a big hand to floris2burn. Welcome aboard. I will make you a Senator. If you can keep your score in the top 20 within our empire you will keep your senator seat. Bye for now. Tbay

Norad. Good to see you are still with us. If you are playing with a new character, add it to the empire and keep your current character there. I now have 2 characters in the empire. My second one is Spontaneous Combustion. I think you can add many different Characters to the same empire. When I play 5 games with this Character I will Create a 3rd and add it to the empire. Our empire's total score will increase faster this way, and we will attract more players as it looks like we have more members. It may be sneaky but other empires are allready doing it. Bye for now TBAY

Norad. What was your population at the end of that game. I have finished a gigantic map on suicidal with 2.8 trillion people, amassed 2,000,000 BC and had the tech tree maxed in less than 9 years and scored 20,000 points less than your last game played on crippling. The only thing i can see is that you ran it out 0ver 20 years. They told us that there would be a penalty for over-extending games. By looking at your score, I would say not. I suspected this and am glad you proved it for me. From now on I will keep a pet planet and press end turn for ten years to get my score up. I am very upset with this scoring system. It does not reward proficient play at higher levels. I am tired of spending hours micro-managing, sometimes days, to maximize everything in the shortest period possible, only to see someone taking twice as long to do the same thing, at a lower difficulty level, receiving a higher score for it. Please let me know your approximate end game specs so i can max out my current game and bring us to third place. I am playing at the crippling level on a huge map with my new character Spontaneous Combustion. I am about 4 years in to it and should have all but 3 pet planets conquered by about 6 years. I should finish pressing end turn by late tommorrow night. Maybe I can hire my neighbours 8 year old to finish my games for me while I start another on my other computer. Gallagher posted a nice game also. Jarru is due for another. Within 3 days we should be in 3rd place. Thanks again for showing me that the game can still be exploited. I wish it couldn't be. Then we would have a better representation of players skill. But lets become the # one empire and then we can try to convince the developers that their single game scoring system and their metaverse totals scoring system both really suck. I am tired of pointing out how it could be improved only to have the devs not even acknowkedge that they read what I wrote. On top of that I get labelled by some people on this forum as a complainer. I love this game and am only trying to improve it for everyone by creating a level playing field. Okay I'm done. Sorry for the rant.. I'm all better now. Lets do it. Lets take # 1. By for now. TBAY

Jarru, thanks for that info. I'll have to see if I can put it to use. TBAY, I had over 8T population at the end of the game and over 7 mil bc. This was actually not planned but when the AI started its come back on me I had to re-group so it actually took me that long to conqure the map again. I will admit that I had put a farm on every planet I owned and 2-3 on some of the larger PQ ones to test the population theory. I still think the bonus food squares suck. When using them it ia almost impossible to keep your people happy. On the planets I had 2-3 advanced farms, I had to have 7-10 virtual reality centers to keep approval up. It does suck that one's score can be effected that much by just hitting end turn a few years after the game is basically already won. I probably could have had more people but I also tried to keep approval at 100% as well. I do not like exploiting the game either, but like you, I think it is going to take exploiting to get the devs to fix it. I really like this game and I'm impressed by the way the SD crew has handled some things that I've not experienced with the big gaming companies, but the game does have its problems too. On my next game I'm going to test another theory since Jarru brought it up about wars affecting (or lack thereof) the total score. I'll let you all know what the test was if I can prove my theory.

In case you all haven't noticed, you can now build over starports! (yeah!!) I didn't try to build over capitals because I just found out that I could build over the starports near the end of the game. I'll test capitals on the next game. Till later!

The scoring forula seems ok. Adding that the game level is involved with the factor 1 - 12. Since your total score as shown above is divided by the square of the turnnumer it makes no sense to play (ehm ... hit return) for a long time. I prefer "real" playing. With my gaming speed (quite a bit defensive) my found my best results after 7 years. Population seems to be very important, but an additional mix of economy, influence and military is necessary to get the real big scores. I think it schould be possible to get a minimum of 150k then. (Of course trying to do this soon). My very special hint to boost your military score is to start building "score fleets" in the advanced game. Take the huge hull, then ad only blackhole erruptors (not shure playing not english version - I mean the rocket one). They make the bigest damage for your space ... Build untill you almost get no more income - just the money you need to run your wars ... This will really boost your rating! Of course you should keep this fleets at your planets to get all bonuses on the weapons. So each ship will have more than 600 damage ... kind a lot of points since the score is based on that value (+ hp and def). It also make sence to start putting them on your planet(s) with the spin-control center (The thing at the end of the diplomatic tree) ... 5x for free. So your tactic of a new char and only 5 games could result in the first position. But enough hints of mine so far - all others can read this too ... btw TBAY: should take your main char additional 8 sui games to get the next medal.

Syrrus K, how is the difficulty medal calculated? I have been playing on Challenging for quite some time now, and I have been wondering when the medal was going to be upgraded from the Normal one. Norad, what do you mean when you say you can build over Starports? Do you mean that you will still be able to build ships, even though the Starport has been replaced?

ras1310, your medal will only improve after 3 more tough games to the challenging one. But let me explain why ...
Every level is worth a score from 1 up to 12. Normal gets 5 points, suicidal 12.
Your medal is the value of (total score)/(number of games)
BUT: there is no rounding up. In your case ... the normal medal goes from 5.00 up to 5.99. As you can see with only challenging games there is never the jump to the 6.00 for the next level. You need at least three more tough games when i'm right with this, because you once have played 4 normal games.
So the rule is like that: To reach the next medal one have to play 2 levels above the actual one. If you played 100 challenging games and then finish one normal game, your medal drop to normal. This also means, one (me) can never reach the suicidal medal if you played once other levels.
The more games you play on lower level, the harder it is to the next.