OK, that page severely needs both updates and amendments. Not that I work in documentation or anything...

Are you talking about one of those Empire areas? I haven't gotten that far in my learning and hasty carrying-on. I'm sticking almost exclusively to the MVC areas at the Core, so I (unhumbly?) figured *I* was the EoS presence

That's true. And you'll continue to be the EoS presence on the MVC. I just thought maybe it would be a good political move to open a forum there.

My personal opinion is that they can visualize my middle finger. Players will likely have several games under their belts before considering outside sites beyond GC2. That means a _slow_ migration to the Galactic Core. It definitely wouldn't work for recruiting.

Nevertheless, maybe setting up shop there isn't a bad idea.

If you would like to move this thread to the Core, that's fine with me. Bravo Evil, for posting your losses as well as your victories. I just checked the stats of the top three empires: 2907 wins, 89 losses. My as*. I believe the EoS to be above that type of hypocrisy. I don't set the parameters of the game just to be able to get a victory with a high score. I could set things up so that I could win every game if I wanted to. I set the game up to be challenging, entertaining, and intellectually stimulating. AAMOF, I lost a game today. I wondered, "what if I were the only good civ in a galaxy populated with nothing but overly aggressive evil civs?" Would good prevail? Apparently not. Picture a goldfish dropped into a tank full of piranhas. I fought the good fight, but I still ended up as piranha poop. I would have posted this to the meta, except that (out of habit) I started it as a new game, rather than a meta game. I will try not to make this mistake again. Let me know where we decide to light, and I'll be there. Starting a new game now; wish me luck. M

AFAIK the purple heart (wounded in action) is the only medal that doesn't show up in your posts. It is a pity because the purple heart is a pretty medal. It takes a man to admit a defeat as well as showing the perseverance to keep on trying. I've yet to play a DA game, so I really have no good advice for you. Actually, the MVC has really eaten up a *lot* of my time. I have a v1.4 game that I've started and I am damned sure going to finish it, but once that's done I'm not sure whether to do a v1.5 or go right to DA.

As far as getting to the Core, first you need to get registered which usually is a simple matter and only requires an email address. However, some folks get messed up for one reason or other and then it can take a bit to get straightened out.

I know that Evil is registered at the Core however I think one of the admins had to set it up by hand. If that's the case you may not know your own password. It should have been mailed to the email address that you used to set up the account. If there's any issue I'm sure we can get it straightened out. You can always go to the Core and read any public forum. You can also post to the Open Area which you should do if you have any kind of problem registering.

Mistralok is also registered although he's never posted anything so I'm not sure he's totally OK as well. Wheel is the only one not registered although it's clear that he has done a bit of lurking at the Core. It's good that folks know certain aspects of history. I'll be very happy to have some things I've posted be proven wrong.

Anyway, once folks are registered I'll make sure we get your private area set up. By default your emperor (Wheel) would be the moderator of the area. The only other people that could possibly read what's written in your private area are the 6 admins of the Core (I'm a moderator but not an admin so I couldn't even see that your private area existed). It's not their policy to go trolling through other empire's private area's however they *may* do so if there are reasonable suspicion's of rules violations (please read the posted site rules).

The privacy of your area would not be absolute but would be pretty reasonable. If you feel like bashing other folks in your own private area no one would complain or even notice, however serious infractions like displaying pornography would not be tolerated anywhere. In general, bashing other folks in the public areas is not something that is well tolerated either. I'm not suggesting that anyone would do anything like display pornography, I'm just trying to set reasonable expectations on the level of privacy of your private area.

Anyway, if you do decide to take us up on our offer, we will indeed welcome the EoS to the Core.

Certainly keeping your thread here is a wise idea. The Core is just another tool for the Metaverse player, it by no means is intended to replace the GalCiv2 forums, merely augment them. It also has a number of other things going on in which people have found interest.

As long as the middle finger is left to the imagination, I think we can get along just fine. Let's just try to keep it from getting too explicit.   

The rules sound easy to handle. Thanks for stopping by.

The empire areas are 'hidden' so you have to gain access to them to see them.

Oh blah, didnt see the sedond page...  

Like our empire states, we ARE playing for fun... and I had a great time getting my ass kicked! I'd thought about not posting my very first game due to a loss but then I realized that would be against what the EoS stands for, wouldn't it. I agree with you Mistralok in regards to the 'top three' empires. I don't honestly believe that people are posting 'all' of their Meta losses, and from the statistics standpoint I can understand why, but it doesn't make it legitimate in my eyes. You guys know why I never cared about the Meta, and unfortunately since my very first Meta game, I have to admit that it is kind of 'addicting' in a sense. I'm not there to be number one but if I were to make it, it would be honestly, by posting every humiliating defeat right alongside a victory. I did start a seventh Meta game set up the exact same way, only with the diff on cakewalk. I still don't know if I'm going to submit that one (an obvious win of course ) based on the difficulty level. To me it just doesn't feel 'fair' if you know what I mean, but that's only because I started all of this out on the normal difficulty. To back down the difficulty now would be a personal defeat, not a gaming defeat.
Good luck with that game Mistralok! Remember, at least for me, it isn't about winning or losing, it's about playing the game (and of course handing out a little bit of 'in your face'! ).

Darn. I just got the latest copy of 'Playbug', and was hoping to share the centerfold. The March Miss Thala has a pair of feelers on her that just won't quit. And thanks for taking time to come by.

I don't want to discredit people that can truly destroy the AI. There are people that simply cannot lose strategy games. At the same time, if we checked the directories of many of these players, they'll have dozens of unfinished, unwinnable games.

That's why I want to see a Metaverse penalty for unfinished games. DNF and disqualification exist in every organized sport. They should exist in the Metaverse.

What does it prove, and to whom, when players can publicly post only their good games?

These are not unreasonable goals, however, their implementation requires some kind of change from Stardock.

Eventually, if the metaverse council can prove itself to be a benefit to the game and metaverse players alike, we could be in a better position to request these kind of changes, but at the moment from Stardocks point of view, why should they spend work and effort on something that it seems only a few folks want, particularly when even they don't necessarily agree on the proper implementation.

I personally liked the idea in the Iron Man thread. All these kinds of things become a lot more realistic when they're presented as a well thought out solution to a problem that has general agreement among *all* metaverse players. These are definitely the kinds of things that the metaverse council wishes to address, however, before we can tackle problems that require work and effort from Stardock it behooves us to demonstrate that the council can both be a benefit to the game and can speak with the weight of all metaverse players. Currently the jury's out on both of these counts.

I agree with this completely. I've often wondered if people don't start a Meta game, save it, play it, and then check out the surrounding galaxy for the goodies. If the game takes a turn for the worse you can always quit without saving (provided you didn't save at any point from the first few turns)and then just go back in and 'revise' your strats accordingly. I'd thought about this myself last night after putting in about two hours and then the game just started to go very, very badly. I quit without save, restarted, and was able to 'get the jump' on the AI since I knew where things were from the start.
Believe me, I know there are WAY MORE players out there who put me to shame with their knowledge of this game and I don't want to take credit away from them either. But I can see how a 'handful' of people are probably in this for nothing but the scores and therefore would do whatever it takes to log a good one without sending up the cheat flag. Just my opinion.

Ok, gentlemen, we're ready to roll at the Galactic Core. Not sure what we'll talk about that shouldn't be publicly viewed anyway but we have the space regardless.

You should be able to see Empire of Standards in your forum list. Make sure to drop your 2BC at the Metaverse Scenarios thread I started at the new site.

We'll keep this one going. Maybe I'll start another with the Empire of Standards as the prefix.

Standards Bearers,

I should be close to finishing my first DA Metaverse game on one of those barbarous huge maps. I want to get the empire's opinion on whether I should post b/c there's some conflict between Standards, specifically Hedonism and Cheese-hating.

That's an overly ornate way of backing into a fairly simple question: Should I post a game that I finished after save-gaming my way around the pirates mega event?

I play the big maps b/c I really like them. I leave the mega events on b/c I really like many of them. But on a huge map, especially when you play with a sub-par video card, the pirates are just too much hassle (even if I'm pretty sure I could work through them at the cost of *ludicrous* amounts of clicking).

Aside from that unfortunate moment, the game has been very good fun for me, especially because I finally tried using an AI request for peace to demand tribute and scored big real estate. The only trick left is to hope my allies will finish off the AIs in the other alliance before I accidentally get an influence win.

Well G.W. it all depends on you as far as I'm concerned. I will post any and every meta game I play, period. Wins and losses don't matter in my eyes. The part about saving and then 'restarting'... I have a meta game right now that I did that with and I myself am wondering if it is 'worth' submitting. My opinion is 'I cheated' by doing so... but I don't think the meta catches this kind of 'cheese', but I'm not 100% certain. Bottom line, if you enjoyed the game and found it fun, as you said, then by all means post it. I doubt Wheel would have a problem with that considering our standards.

The standard is fun. You sound like you had a great time. Saving and reloading for the pirate event means that Stardock should have an option to turn it on. I'm sure you're not the only one that wants to fight pirates. Post.

I concur. In my opinion, holding ourselves up to a higher standard doesn't mean that we have to be the empire of sackcloth and ashes. Having this question come up in your mind at all shows me that you have the type of 'gaming morality' that I admire. Darn glad you're part of our little empire here.
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Thanks for the thumbs-ups, gents. There's a lot of typing over at the Core about "milking" scores, etc., and I have an unpredictable weakness for propriety despite being a scruffy barbarian at heart.

Milking scores involves having a force size of 1000:1 against all enemies, not wanting pirates in the game. One leverages your score, the other is a fun element that should be included anyway.

I find "milking" to have a large eye-of-the-beholder aspect. I developed several tendencies that I've seen called milking (like preferring overwhelming military superiority so I can swat down interference in my non-military muddling). But I got that way long before I thought more than 8 seconds about scores.

For all I know, I'm "milking" my game right now b/c I'm fixated on a diplo win but the AIs in my alliance are not being very quick about dispatching the remaining troublemakers (I gave up deliberate expansion a long game time ago).

This situation means I'm getting a slow but steady stream of culture-flipped worlds I don't exactly want and are harder to give away with the new diplo timeouts (which I like). I'm also steadily building fleets, but that's by intertia and not need, and I have no idea if your total firepower at end game is part of your score.