thanks MottiKhan   the newest beta has already resolved the MV issue, but it only applies to games started under the new beta. the game i posted above was on crippling, which is what i usually play on. i decided to challenge myself to a maso game this weekend - whew, what a major difference! i did manage to win, but i took 6 or 7 game years IIRC, and there wasn't a major improvement in my score.

i've been playing GC2 since shortly after it came out, but up until i joined the MVL the other week i'd never bothered playing MV games because it had no appeal to me, and i like mods. in addition to being used to crippling, i'm also used to taking my time in games and stretching them out to 20 or 30 game years; it's what i find most fun. so it's a pleasent surprise to me that i was able to achieve such a fast win on my first serious attempt at an MV score.

also, i mentioned to Mumble on a core PM, this group here seems to have a really great spirit of camaraderie, both within and between the teams, and that's what's finally gotten me to play MV games (even if the submission of my first one was thwarted by a beta bug).

i may even still try for a 2-year maso win this round - but it'll definately take a different method than the one i employed in the game i already posted (and what that method was shall remain between me and me team  )

I'm here to submit my (pathetic) game.

points:4500
race:Korx
Years:6
Win type:tech
Postdate:10/1/2007

This was my first game, I thought it was a low score. All my sub-score were pretty high but my military score was at rock bottom so I tried to fix that in my second game but it took another year to finish, and I was penalized. So I decided to put this one in 'cause it will soon be too late for me to put another game in.

There is still another 2 weeks to go. I haven't yet started mine because I'm trying to finish up one of my gigantic games. Hopefully I'll finish it soon so that it's out of the way but I'll start my League game in a day or two even if I haven't finished it.

I don't see that as such a low score. The scoring range should be pretty low on this round due to having only 3 opponents and so few planets. I think you'll find that all scores are pretty low this round.

I'd think quick games would also be common for the same reason. Mine isn't going so quickly, but those are the breaks.

Just letting you know. CornHusker has PM'd me and he says that he will rejoin the league in Round 4.

Prior notice given. No penalty.
-Fire

Hey, check my profile. The character General Hawkins.

How does a Tough difficulty guy go from (barely) mastering Painful to getting Suicidal done on his third attempt? I know Mumble or Motti will say "A victory on that map is too easy" But I beat suicidal(in 8 months). Yey.

10500 points
Tiny Galaxy
Suicidal Difficulty   
1 Year
Military Victory

Yee-hoo-yip-ta-da-hoo-ha!      

Also, do galactic wonders give me a higher score? If they do then does having -7000 BC treasury hurt my score?

-Fire

First: congrats to you. Quite a game you've played!

BUT: THIS IS NOT A ONE YEAR WIN.

It's a zero year win (check your own profile!)

Cool! I thought 8 months would be registered as 1 year. Final date was 14 august. The AI was just 2 weeks away from building an attack 14 heavy fighter(in the first year!).

I know this cuz of a bug. If you select an AI planet and go to the domestic policy screen and adjust any slider the starport bar of that planet will display how many weeks until that planet will produce a ship. It doesn't say which ship, just the time it will take. I did this victory with nothing but a 100% research and 100% manufacturing tile on my homeworld.

My treasury and economy were pushed to the limit to provide the driving force of my ambition. One more turn of going at -200 my economy would have breached the -700 BC mark. In fact I couldn't make a profit even with spending at 0 percent and taxation to make my population at 40% approval. Now thats a market crash. But really fun too. Those Thalans and Terrans did not go down without a fight.

I would never say such a thing and I highly doubt Motti would either. In any case congratulations are in order.

As far as your scoring questions galactic wonders don't help your score directly. Indirectly they can. For example getting Aphrodisiac makes your pop grow faster and therefore your pop is higher which results in a higher score. A negative treasury doesn't hurt you directly either. It may possibly indirectly hurt the score since if a negative treasury exists for an extended period of time then it does lower your approval, however it's not clear whether or not a lower approval results in a lower score. In your case with a 0 year win I'm sure it couldn't have had time to possibly hurt your score.

The only way a negative treasury would lower your score would be if it was a bit longer in duration, it will bring down the "Average BC per month" stat on the economic page of the summary, but even then, I doubt it's much of a penalty.

Good game Firebender. But my question is, Is this a game submittal, or does it have to be on a medium map?

Two days ago TheDoomBringer posted the following in the MVL Signup thread.


I gave Neilo two days to respond to this just in case but based on the above quote a response from him is unlikely. Therefore I will presume to detect the pattern in Neilo's recent team assignments and will assign TheDoomBringer to Team C just in case he wishes to submit a game for this round.

Both TheDoomBringer and Noctilucus haven't made any further post about their requests to join the League and so they haven't made any commitment to submit a game for this round. In both of these cases I feel that it doesn't hurt the League one way or the other so they're free to submit for this month or not as they choose.

Clearly we will need to reorganize for next round anyway so these assignments are temporary. In any case if TheDoomBringer (team C) and Noctilucus (team are going to submit a game for this month then they should check-in with their respective teams.

I left essentially a duplicate of this post in the MVL Signup thread as well.

Ooops. Yes this technically doesn't count for MVL Round 3 because it's a tiny map and the settings for this round require a medium map.

That by no means diminishes the quality of this game but it does mean that this isn't a valid MVL round 3 submittal. Did you intend it to be? Or was this intended to be a "side" game all along?

I suppose if you intended it as a League game and mistakenly picked the wrong galaxy size then we could possibly treat this as a "win of the incorrect type" but hopefully this wasn't your intended submittal for this round.

Let us know what's up with this.

Oh, no this isn't an MVL game. I just tried a suicidal game in tiny because I didn't have enough time to do a larger map, it wasn't a mistake. It was done in one hour. And the settings were not the MVL Round 3 specifications.

My experience of this game shows me that I really can't do a victory with suicidal with anything other then a tiny map. Although with the Yor miniturization bonus and speed 6 cargo hulls I can try it on a slightly bigger galaxy. I just know if I can't beat the AI before september in year 0 I don't stand a chance.

This is just a game I tried for fun. And it certainly was! Just 4 autosaves in the entire game! Suicidal is scary. The AI researched Research Academies by mid april.

I recall mumble mentioning that Magnumaniac can build up 2.5 times as efficiently as suicidal AI and that he can do it at 1.5 times as efficiently. My question is, HOW????      In my game my civilization could not keep up. In fact it was just a matter of the treasury with me. The AI focused on things that were unwise considering what was coming to them. That and Thala could produce a transport every two weeks.

-Fire

Thanks for the clear up

Oh good. I would hate to think that this was a game you wanted to submit and just made a mistake on galaxy size.


IIRC the jump to suicidal is a huge jump. I had thought they had put in another level so that the transition wouldn't be so abrupt but I'm not sure about that.

The first few times that I played suicidal it was just like you're asking. How can people win against such huge bonuses? Basically, there are a lot of ways and variations on the theme. Purge has posted a Detailed Suicidal AAR for DA about it and there are many other ways besides that. I outlined a few ways in reply #38 of the Alternative suggestion to Right of Passage Treaty thread.

But basically the biggest thing that you need to overcome when playing suicidal is the idea in your own head that you can't win. It's a self fulfilling prophecy. You believe that you can't win at suicidal and therefore you can't.

The thing is that people look at the huge bonuses that the suicidal AI receives and think that if they gave these kinds of bonuses to their kid sister then she could wipe up the ground with them. This is probably correct. However an AI is something far less and at the same time far more than your kid sister.

I have to stop for a moment and preface what I'm saying so that it isn't taken out of context and construed to be critical of the AI. It's not meant to be. This is also not a request to make suicidal more difficult.

In all honesty this is the first game that I have played where I would dignify the computer player with the title AI. Certainly in Civilization and other such games I always referred to them as "computer players" and really that's all they were. Certainly the AI in GalCiv2 is a very noticeable step up from the typical "computer player", however to intuit human intelligence to an AI is an extreme case of Anthropomorphism. The bonuses that the AI gets at any particular level mean nothing in relationship to how an inferior human player could utilize similar bonuses. The bonuses at any particular level are neither good nor bad they just *are*. That the suicidal AI can be beaten is evidenced by the fact that many folks do so. The fact that they can beat the suicidal AI means that with sufficient experience you can do so as well. So don't say that you can't beat the suicidal AI, it's more truthful to say that you can't beat the suicidal AI *yet*.


First off I doubt that I ever implied 2 digits of accuracy in my estimate of how effectively Mag or I could colonize versus the suicidal AI. IIRC my statement was closer to Mag could reliably outcolonize the suicidal AI close to 2 to 1 and that I on occasion can outcolonize them by a bit.

In any case the question of "How?" that you're asking me is the same question that I asked him. It's not that he didn't want to tell me or that he didn't try to tell me how he did this, it's that you can't describe what you do in sufficient detail to allow someone to repeat some cookbook formula and thus simply replicate the process. Just as he was unable to tell me, I am unable to tell you. Basically, the how of it is to simply do everything that pretty much everybody does. Just do it faster, sooner, cheaper and better. There is no way I can transfer literally thousands of game hours of experience to you in the space of a few paragraphs. If I were to dedicate a month of effort to doing nothing but trying to define how I do what and when, I probably would be unable to do so and I don't have nearly the time to begin to make such an attempt.

Basically, you're looking for an easy answer that doesn't exist. What I do and why I do it may not even work for you. I know this is very Zen and can seem like passing the buck, but you really must find your own way. There is no easy answer. The answer is to refine the way you colonize so that gradually, over time, you do so faster, better, sooner. Then some day when someone is asking you how you are able to outcolonize the suicidal AI then you'll be the one struggling to express an answer.

Actually, producing a transport every two weeks is not that difficult. Also this is something that I can easily sustain for a year or more.

Let me preface this with the statement that this is DL and some of this will not apply or be different in DA.

This is certainly one small part of being able to keep up with the Suicidal colonization rate. Basically I always make my home planet my manufacturing capital. It certainly helps to have a manufacturing bonus tile on your home planet but it's not absolutly required. Anyway I buy my first factory and start building my manfacturing capital immediately if I start with the tech, otherwise I'll research this first and start building it within a turn or two. The goal is to be able to produce a colony ship every other turn like clockwork. It may take 10~12 turns to get to this point.

Actually, you can usually do a bit better than this. Basically you use deficit spending from your initial 5,000 bc supplemented by cash anomalies to fund your development. The first planet you colonize will become your 2nd home planet. You focus all initial development for the 1st quarter on this planet. You even bus a few colony ships worth of pop to boost the population. You certainly continue to spit out a colony ship every other turn from your home planet but within 6 months you should also be able to produce a colony ship every 3 turns from your 2nd home planet. This gives you 5 colony ships every 6 turns. At this rate out colonizing the suicidal AI is a piece of cake. The true difficulty is funding it all.

Basically other than your 2nd home planet you don't build anything on any other planet. You simply allow pop to grow and the colony will soon become profitable. It's well worth it to keep your taxes low so that your approval is at 100% so you get double pop growth. Spending a turn or two researching Sensors I to get the survey module and building a new survey ship instead of a colony ship every once and awhile is well worth the trouble. This helps with those cash anomalies that can really extend your rush. However sooner or later you'll have to increase your taxes. Once I can't keep 100% approval I'll raise taxes to just barely keep my planets growing at 41% or above.

Also everyone knows the benefit of economic bonuses from abilities and political party choices. Almost as obvious are the income benefits of moral abilities, however a lot of folks overlook the financial benefit of pop growth abilites. Income is based on pop, if you want to get your colonies profitable quickly pop growth bonuses are key.

Also don't forget to use the leapfrog technique. You colonize a planet and rush build a starport for 156 bc and then purchase a colony ship for a little less than 1,000 bc and you take most of the pop and continue onward and outward in the very next turn. You can backfill the inner planets with more pop from your homeworld later. But this gets you "out there" faster so that you can grab those planets before the AI can. Actually the AI uses this technique rather extensively.

This is just the tip of the iceberg as to things that you could possibly do to help you out colonize the suicidal AI. However another method that can be just as effective is to not bother.

Certainly in a mad rush to colonize planets you can manage to out colonize the suicidal AI but in this case you end the colony rush in a rather weak state and it takes quite some time before you can develop the planets at which point the tide can begin to turn. Until then you have to tiptoe through the AI and certainly have to pay off a number of AI to not immediately kill you. But this can work.

Instead of focusing on the quantity of your planets you can instead focus on the quality of your planets. In this case you end the colony rush with far fewer but much stronger planets than the AI does. Now it's the AI that is weak while you are strong. You definitely need to jump on an opponent or two rather quickly and take them over before they get a chance to develop all the planets they colonized, but this method can work just as effectively as outcolonizing them to begin with. I use both methods and go back and forth between them. But the quality over quantity method makes for a little more laid back colony rush that's not quite as frantic.

Great stuff Mumblefratz. Thanks for the insight.

I've been reading these MVL threads since they started, but haven't joined yet because of work related stuff. That'll change soon though. I enjoy reading them because I'm intrigued by the idea and like to follow the development of the league. But I certainly didn't expect to find excellent tutorials in these pages as well.

Nice job guys!

Thanks, but like I said these are no different than things most people do one way or the other, it's just a matter of a little bit faster here and a tweak there. It's very often no great earth shattering secret strategy but the same things everyone else does with perhaps just that little extra twist that makes it a bit more effective.

It's easy enough to describe these things at some high level by glossing over the inevitable details, it's far harder to actually get in a game and then carry it out. It's your own experience that is the only thing that can fill in the gaps between these "great insights" and actually getting them to work. That's what I mean by there's no easy answer. At best I can kind of point you in a direction that may help you but ultimately it's up to you to make sense of it and to incorporate it into your own "style". No matter how great the advice may seem on paper if it doesn't help you out then it's no good to you.

However, the other side of this coin is that advice that you aren't able to get to work now may help you out later on down the road. You'll have gained a critical piece of experience and a light will go on and you'll suddenly realize how you can get something to work that you couldn't get to work before. It's well worth it to keep this in mind as well.

---

This line of discussion reminds me of a year or so ago when I was FireBender and I was asking the same questions then as he's asking now.

I had recently just read Killzone's The Uber-Research Planet - Neutral Alignment post and used this strategy to jump into the suicidal end of the pool. BTW this thread is a must read for everyone.

Anyway, I got into the end of my colony rush and setup my uber research planet and was instantly dismayed when the AI didn't essentially bow down and simply hand me all their planets in fear of my incredible research ability. Anyway you can see where I was over a year ago when I posted the How can you compete with a Suicidal AI? thread.

As it turns out I did win that first suicidal game and since then there's no turning back. The answer in that case was that even though the Suicidal AI bonuses can result in more raw research than a 5000 RP/week planet (although I later went on to get planets in the 20,000 RP/week range), the AI spreads it's research across the entire tech tree and by focusing on only the techs that you deem "critical" you *can* out research the suicidal AI.

Even though I won that first suicidal game and have won every game since, I often come to a point in pretty much every game where I wonder if this will be the game that I lose. Generally there's always something that doesn't work out like you planned and throws a monkey wrench into the works, but if you squirm and delay and just hold on you'll usually think of some way to get out of the particular mess that you've got yourself into.

What?!? two weeks?!? holy cow......... oh well.

Maybe the star setting should have been put ABOVE RARE!

not quite sure what u mean SW lol, tho, i do love the quickness of the games on a rare, medium map, its a big change from playing gigantic maps (no pun intended)

Glidescope (and anyone else interested), i'll toss in a few 'dirty tricks' of my own. I'm not going to reveal my entire set of tricks - i'm still after all trying to help the A-Team win this round   

i'm not sure if this feature made it into a DL update, so this might be DA-only. the devs added a feature that allowed players to decide what adjecent parsec a ship would be spit into when it leaves orbit. when a ship enters or leaves orbit, it doesn't use movement points. when your home planet and second planet happen to be separated by only 1 parsec, you can move as much population from one to the other in a single turn as you want. further, if your ship's path would ever take it directly past a planet you own, you can shave 2 parsecs off its journey by putting it into orbit and then launching it on the other side - think of it as a gravity assist.

Thank you. What does IIRC mean? Isn't It Really Cool?  



Cool. I'll share a trick of mine too:

If you select an AI planet and go to the domestic policy screen and adjust any slider the starport bar of that planet will display how many weeks until that planet will produce a ship. It doesn't say which ship, just the time it will take.

-Fire

IIRC = "if I remember correct"...if I remember correctly.

The standard usage is as Piznit mentioned which is "If I Recall/Remember Correctly".

However if you google it you do come across the following 19 meanings for the term. Interestingly enough FB's guess is number 14 on the list when ranked by common usage. Of course perhaps number 5 is the most appropriate for a response of this level of detail.

If I Recall/Remember Correctly
Interactive Illinois Report Card
If I Read Correctly
Image and Identity Research Collective
If I Really Cared
If It Really Counts
Internet Information Research Center
Impedance Imaging Research Center
International Interpretation Resource Center
Immunity and Infection Research Centre
Information Integrity Research Centre
International Internet Recruiting Consultants
International Inter-Society Research Committee
Isn't It Really Cool
Inactive Item Review Code
International Interdisciplinary Research Colloquium
Interstate Insurance Receivership Compact
Iraqi Islamic Reconciliation Conference
IVF & Infertilty Research Centre