gallagher118

Join Date 07/2005

Affirmative Action in GC2

I've got a game right now, that I'm ready to throw the towel in on. An event happened, that restricts ships to 5 to avoid damaging the fabric of space... Ug. Its a gigantic universe !! What am I supposed to pile into my ships now that engines are useless ?

My bigger point, is that it now seems quite a few events, and/or features of DA seem to me nothing more than affirmative action for the shortcomings of the AIs. ESPECIALLY this one! Lets see:

1) restrict ship speed to 5
2) vote to stop "sneak" attacks...
3) vote to have a "neutral" zone... Gee do the AIs ever vote against these? They might as well be standard parts of the game.
4) economic/population booms. I swear these occur when you are doing just fine, and the AIs need help.
5) "jagged knife" event. You lose 50 planets to their 5 or 10. I've never had it happen where I wasn't the most effected.

Come on guys. There are maybe 5-6 things the AI doesn't even try to do right, why not try to code those things before adding these crappy features. I like the idea of events/votes that effect the game, but not ones that are so obviously against the player.

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1) restrict ship speed to 5
2) vote to stop "sneak" attacks...
3) vote to have a "neutral" zone... Gee do the AIs ever vote against these? They might as well be standard parts of the game.
4) economic/population booms. I swear these occur when you are doing just fine, and the AIs need help.
5) "jagged knife" event. You lose 50 planets to their 5 or 10. I've never had it happen where I wasn't the most effected.

1) Everytinme this has happened in my games, it helped save my bacon. Since you can max out speed with out wasting space on extra drives, means you can heavy up the defenses (or, late in the game, the bang-sticks).
2) Declaring war - if you are ready to go to war, how is this an obstacle? And the AI always does it already. So I don't see the problem.
3) Yes, the AI sometimes votes against. I've seen it.
4) I always seem to benefit more from Eco booms than the AI does (possibly because they can ALREADY calculate their supply-demand with 'machine-like' precision??). And the Population Radiation thing generally seems to hit when further pop growth, for either side, is pretty much a moot point. It is nice when it strikes just after you have siezed a planet or two, though.
5) Hmm...I always LIKE to see the Jagged Knife show up. They always take way more from the opponents than from me. What alignment are you playing? I'm almost always Neutral by the time they show up.

I think a lot about how you view these events depends on your style of play.

drrider

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I both hate and love the jagged knife. They show up and steal one of my favorite worlds almost every time. BUT they end up with the combined tech of every major race (think tech theft upon invasion) AND allow me to conquer what once was an opponent's world without declaring war on my opponent.

As far as who gets hit the worst from the Jagged Knife... how high do you set AI intelligence? Because I've played games with low AI (I end up with more worlds) and the jagged knife hits me the worst, then I've played games with high AI (the AI ended up having more worlds than me) and the AI lost 3 to my 1...

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Mystikmind

Join Date 06/2004

+20

My bigger point, is that it now seems quite a few events, and/or features of DA seem to me nothing more than affirmative action for the shortcomings of the AIs. ESPECIALLY this one! Lets see:

I suppose if your doing well then you get hit the worst? Although how well a player is doing is rarely reflected in the power graphs, so as far as the game knows, your usually a crap civilisation. So then yes it is as you say, 'affirmative action' from that perspective.

I have even heard of somone loosing all their worlds to the jaggard knife event(although their game was modded), then the game ended next turn! I thought that highlighted nicely how overly biased this event is against the human player.

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I do play evil, so that does have some relevance. I probably shouldn't have mentioned it in the post.

The ship speed and ability of the AI fight a war are the real issues. To me, the events/resolutions are clearly affirmative active to help the AI which is pathetic in these dimensions.

I'm close to giving up my game with the 5 speed limit. It is just too tedious to wait for transports to cross the galaxy. I geuss I'll never play with mega events again.

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I typically don't play with mega events myself...If I'm going to play a game with them on any of the larger maps, I would be sure to save regularly and just reload if I got the speed limit event. The other option would be to simply abandon the game like you are contemplating...Why play it out if it stops being fun?

In fact, I would recommend saving regularly under different names anyway. Every now and then I get a save game file that I can't load. I lost three months or so of game play time once due to this on a later stage gig map, and I was lucky not to lose the whole game.

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I do play with mega events, and I think I may have gotten one once.

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KzintiPatriarch

Join Date 05/2007

+95

There are some events I have a problem with, because the AI votes the same way very single time. As gallagher mentioned, they might as well be hard coded. Some of the ones I can think of off-hand are:

Starbase Module Limit - always NO
Tax on Foreign Planets/Tax on Foreign bases - always NO
wait one week after declaring war - always YES

The only times the outcome of these votes is different is when I own over 50% of the UP and vote in the opposite way. There are also likely others I cant think of at the moment.

Sentient species taste better...

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I pretty much completely disagree, but let's take this one at a time:

1) restrict ship speed to 5

If you don't want the dynamics of the game radically changed, turn off mega events. For my part, I love that one. It totally changes the dynamics of the game and forces a radical adjustment of strategy. It also gives the whole thing a more "hard sci fi" feel, with a massive tech gap between your front lines and your ship yards. But yeah, if you don't care for that kind of thing just turn them off.

2) vote to stop "sneak" attacks...
3) vote to have a "neutral" zone... Gee do the AIs ever vote against these? They might as well be standard parts of the game.

I quite like these, too. They provide a serious incentive to withdraw from the UP, so you have to give serious thought the the advantages and disadvantages thereof. When I'm playing good and/or honorable races, I never sneak attack anyway, so I usual vote "yes" on these. When I'm playing evil, it usually forces a UP withdrawl, which makes things very interesting.

4) economic/population booms. I swear these occur when you are doing just fine, and the AIs need help.

Not my experience at all, generally I tend to make better use of these events than the AI does, and I've certainly had them come along at life-saving moments for me in games before.

5) "jagged knife" event. You lose 50 planets to their 5 or 10. I've never had it happen where I wasn't the most effected.

I've never seen it happen that I'm hit much harder than anyone else by this event. Are you in control of far more planets than everyone else? One would then expect a proportionate loss on your part.

In short, all of these things serve to make the game more interesting and challenging (except the boom events, which often make it easier) so I've really got no problem with them.

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Mystikmind

Join Date 06/2004

+20

In fact, I would recommend saving regularly under different names anyway. Every now and then I get a save game file that I can't load. I lost three months or so of game play time once due to this on a later stage gig map, and I was lucky not to lose the whole game.

I save 4 games and rotate between them. Saving between 4 games reduces the load on each save file and therefore reduces the risk of critical errors. For DL players, Avoiding unnecissary reloading also helps - if you have to go to the shops, leave your computer running! I hear the reload AI bonus is fixed in the latest patch of DA though.

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