Hi!


Some random thoughts.

Pitty the "judge/jury" can't create a game, post it on the net, and let others battle it out. Or maybe he coud? But then he'd need to manually check each of those 20+ finished games. Too much of work?

Why there's no difficulty level specified? When the prime source of points is a victory/defeat type, then playing suicidal doesn't make sense. Why don't you assign more points for the difficulty: like 1 for maso, 2 for obscene, 3 for suicidal (-1 for cakewalk?)

There's no scores for game version. To my experience DA is significantly harder than DL. You may consider giving some revard for winning a DA game.

Winning with some races is significantly easier than with others. Maybe add a rule no race can be used twice in a team, or a revard for playing "underdogs" like Iconian.

BR, Iztok

Well, the difficutly is indirectly specified. You have to play at the displayed difficulty of your main character or higher. But bonus points for playing at a higher level could be a nice incentive.

Creating a game probably would make it impossible to submit that game to the MV, as the savegame contains information about the account with which it was created.


What I would like to see is perhaps a round with a set starting race or opponents. Currently you can cherry-pick not only your own race but your opponents as well. Or at least bonus points like you suggested, e.g. for achieving a diplomatic victory with the Drengin or something like that.

Although its never been suggested before, it would create too much confusion. i.e. when mumble posted savegames of his Round 1(or was it 2) I couldn't get my game to run it, for some reason, so I had to downgrade DL and then upgrade it again later.

Though then any one lucky person wouldn't gain an advantage and couldn't really get an advantage. The main opposition point for this is that each player plays at his or her own comfortable difficulty level. This could also be avoided if each game was individually made for each player's difficulty, but then its anulling point no.1 which would be the main benefit to this. Besides, luck gives less experienced players a good chance to compete. And most players use MVL games to improve their standing in the MV(atleast I do).



Pndrev covered this point well.

Depends on how you play. The extreme planets give me an immense window to stage an attack against SUICIDAL.



Its been suggested before. The MVL includes 24 plus players. You can't expect them all to play the same way. Motti plays mostly drengin. I play mostly Yor or Thalans, Mumble with the Drath, Neilo with the Krynn and so on...
It wouldn't make much difference to all the players. Just a select few who don't play those races.

Btw, wanna join?

I think i got off really easy in my game. Arceans + Iconians + (custom race) + Altarians against the Krynn for influence... not really much of a challenge there. I lost 1 ship i think because i was stupid in how i attacked and it was at i think 3 of 8 HP.

The custom race that was chosen got rolled over very quickly, it had 3 planets but was the best in military for the start of the game. I wasn't able to just buy transports to kill them off so it was more a war of attrition at the start. Then I got Point Defenses and Medium hulls...usually once that happens I win :: is sad for the destruction of everyone due to stupid AI on tiny galaxy ::

I took out the Arceans next with my remaining transports and created more using the Custom Opponent's homeworld once it was converted to All-Tech. Arcea fell and gave me a huge influence boost, and the rest of Arcean space fell to the Krynn. Then I thought that I had some time to just sit and wait to win...I had almost all of the influence i needed to win, but couldn't because of stupid Altarians taking up space with their influence satellites. I moved into Iconian space and declared war, a few weeks later the Iconians were dead. Then 10 turns later I won

How do other people here win their Cultural Victories?

GalenEvil

I started off as Thalans with Influence and Econ boni. Opponents were Korx, Torians, Arcean and Terrans. Strategy was more or less all-factory, but I got lucky and colonised two planets far away from my corner starting position -> Easy influence gain.

Treaties and incoming trade as well as a good military strength kept everyone on good terms, allowing me to build a couple of Influence bases with insane boni.

The Korx were my first military victim, since they controlled quite a sizeable area but had a weak fleet. After that I started to influence the Torians, but Superbreeders... I decided a quick strike against the Terrans would do nicely while waiting for the Torians.

I blitzed Earth. That resulted in the entire map suddenly under my influence (87%). I won. More or less by accident.

Basically this could be done if we didn't require the games to be submitted to the Metaverse. But since this is the Metaverse League and since any game started by one character can only be posted by that character then this is not possible to do.

The real answer is because we want to encourage people of all abilities to play. We do require that people play at their normal difficulty level and we also encourage people to raise their difficulty level over time but we wanted to avoid the appearance of an "experts only" league.

Basically we are trying to promote the concept that simply winning the game under settings that are (mostly) not of your own choosing is an achievement in and of itself. Score and game speed are considered indicators of skill but we wanted to "tone down" the value of potential huge swings based on raw score so instead only give minor bonus points for game speed and score. The focus is more on simply winning.

I don't totally agree. You may be correct that DA is harder than DL. However, when it comes to score it's easier to get a better score in DA because it simply has more planets, generally double that of a similar DL game. Also it's not correct that DA will be easier than DL under all conditions. I maintain that a diplomatic win is much easier under DA than it is with DL because DL has a limit of 9 plus relationship factors whereas DA has two additional plus relationship factors (economic and research treaties) that make it easier to get to "close" and make an alliance. Also the existance of Super Abilities and extra racial ablity points offsets the assumed difficulty increase of DA somewhat.

In any case the true reason we don't differentiate between DA and DL is so that people can play what they want to play. Some people play DL exclusively, some people play DA exclusively, others go back and forth from round to round. We don't want to turn people playing DL into 2nd class citizens by saying their games are in some way not as valuable as DA games. This also goes hand in hand with allowing people to play at their own desired difficulty level.

Again I don't totally agree with this either. Certainly some races are better than other races for some particular game settings. Also some races are indeed better than others however I don't think this difficulty difference is really that big. Also which races are better and why is subject to debate. Under one strategy a certain race may be at a disadvantage but not necessarily with a different strategy.

We did discuss this and there is some possibility to consider this but at this point it just seemed like too much micromanagement for the league to specify this and we also wanted to leave some game parameter selections up to the players themselves. You could possibly take this a step further and specify what racial abilities to use or allow people to gain bonus points for *not* using all their racial ability points. But again avoiding too much specification and control by the league and leaving some discretion up to the player is what we were going for here.

Iztok, firstly great to hear from you in one of our League threads, i hope it is a sign of your possible interest in the League. Please feel welcome to come and join, as you have seen by the responses, we are willing to look at all and any points made about the league. We are very open as to how things are done and i welcome your suggestions.

Your query's have been well answered i believe but i would like to add a few things,



As was stated earlier, one of the first rules we came up with was to play at or above your default difficulty level. I can see your point that if all we require is a win than why do it on the hardest level. Well that's what the bonus points are for. There are bonus points for 4 top scores and 4 fastest games, plus team bonus's as well. So a player playing on suicidal will stand more of a chance of getting a higher score on one of our given maps than one would on challenging. That in and of itself is reason enough to play at higher difficulties. On the flip side to that it is easier to attain a faster victory on the easier levels, so that provides equal opportunity for players at lower difficulty to score bonus points as well.

I do agree that the point system you offered would more than likely give some incentive for players to up their difficulty level, but could they compete and win at those higher levels. That is the challenge. Take me for instance, if you were to look at my Centurion Neilo character you would see that i was a "challenging player". From playing in the league and wanting to better myself to compete against top players (something one could not do outside the MVL unless you play suicidal, gig abundant alls) i quickly took my MVL character to "tough". As of this round, and for all of my games, i now play at "painful". The increase in score due to the higher difficulty will allow me to easier compete for those high score bonus points but without the sacrifice of losing speed as i was not thrust into the higher levels but got there gradually.

That is bonus enough.



I do believe we have spoke previously about having games stated that you must use a specific race for that set challenge. I do like the idea but think it might only serve to highlight the skill gap between players. A player may not be able to compete in score or speed, but choosing the right race might help close that gap somewhat.

That being said it is an idea with merit, and one i would be happy to explore.

Again your comments are more than welcomed mate and feel free to drop by any time. Of course you would be best served i believe by at least trying out the League, if only for 1 round. It's not all about the games, the camaraderie between us is actually quite high, even across teams. And that is not withstanding the high amount of taunting that occurs, no-one takes it to heart and it makes the games all the more fun.

Just ask Kzinti.... MVL Rulebook Thread

The Commish.

I want to let folks know about a couple of things.

The first is I've opened up a thread at the Core for people to vote on their preferance on how to deal with ties. I think this has been discussed to death and by now everyone should have an opinion on which they prefer. This thread will be open from now until the start of round 6. There should be no excuse for anyone to not have time or not have an opinion. Everyone should make sure they vote on this issue. Please see the MVL Tiebreak Criteria Vote thread and vote.

Secondly, I've added a Rule #3 in the MVL rulebook about how we should deal with the occasional exploit such as the fleeting/unfleeting issue that was exhibited in a recent rev of the game. This also has a bit of verbage about the honor system and another part about prohibiting games under your league character that "look" like league games but aren't. Please take a moment to read the updated OP as well as the most recent few posts in the MVL Rulebook.

Finally, I am still in the beginning phase of my "real" game for this round but I do expect to get back to the write-up of the League for the The MVL and the AltMeta thread.

Please help by keeping up with the state of these topics and by adding your 2 cents to the discussion. And by all means absolutely everyone should vote.

There is something to be said in dictating, for a particular round, what race you must play, and secondly what opponents you should have.

For example, in the last round, for an alliance victory, there was nothing said about not creating 5 straw dogs to play against. 5 custom super traders is easier to get an alliance victory with, than let's say 5 core races. I guess that could be argued but...

As for mandating a particular race to play, I think it gets players to play with a race they are unfamiliar with. I for one, have never played Drath, Arcean, or Iconian.

WooHoo! My first game posting for the MVL. After seeing the first 3 scores posted I kind of feel inadequate but I can only do my best for my team!

Amalric Starstrider

Years: 5
Race: Terrans
Type: Cultural Conquest
Points: 4800
Difficulty: Challenging
Size: Tiny
Version: v1.80f Dark Avatar test 2 (Dark Avatar)


So, can I keep trying for a higher score or does the first score count as your only score? I didn't see this in the rules.

Hi Amalric. Welcome to the league and to Team C. You probably want to hold off submitting a game to this thread until you're sure that's the one you want. You can post as many games as you like to the Metaverse and chose which one to submit in this thread. Also, you should PM FireBender, our captain, for the password to our protected forum on the Core. There you can post anything you like, get feedback, and get goals to shoot for.

Again, welcome.

(MVL officials, can you rule on whether this is has to be Amalric's official submission.)

We had an almost exact same situation occur with another player in Round 4. Unfortunately, we did decide at that time that the individual was not allowed to resubmit another game.

Obviously, we want to make sure that this kind of occurrence not be repeated yet again.

It is because of this that I am setting forth a proposal on procedures for new members that wish to join the MVL in the MVL Rulebook thread.

did this happen in round 4 too? i must've missed that. something similar happened to me in round 3, but i wouldn't call it almost exactly the same situation. regardless of how the ruling falls on this, can we get a big red disclaimer on the OP of the round threads from now on that reads "all games posted here are final"?

PS: and personally, i think he deserves another chance.

sorry, i meant Round 3 then, i was thinking of the situation with you.

my situation was different because of the error 16 issue. i was side-tracked by the error 16 issue and got carried away making sure i could post screen shots as the alternative submission method.

i think with Almaric, it's probably a case of zeal about being newly involved in something. maybe our cases aren't all that different, and in that case i'm appealing to reverse prior precident. i think it'd be discouraging--to Almaric and new players in general--to rule this as a final submission on such a new player (if i'm reading these time stamps right, it's been less than 24 hours since he posted in the sign-up roster).

in all honesty i agree, and this is why I have made a proposal in the MVL Rulebook thread about such matters in the future. I am personally for, and willing, to in this unique situation allow Amalric to make sure he gets into contact with his team and allow a future submission. I will say that I would only be willing to make this kind of gesture this time and would want a set procedure agreed upon in the future as it is not really fair to current and new players of the League to allow some games but disallow others.

Well i at first was going to call for approval to allow Almaric to play another game, since he is new. Then Silver pointed out to me the situation with you Dystopic and i thought, that to do so would have been extremely unfair to you. I do agree that some leeway should be given, and i don't recall the exact situation with you mate, but in hindsight perhaps some there would have been good too.

Again i agree that to discourage any new players for any reason is not in the spirit of the league, especially those who have shown such enthusiasm as you have Almaric.

I then am more than happy for you to play another game Almaric but remember you do not need to post it in here straight away. Submit your game to the MV as normal and then once you have a game that you are happy with post it in here.

I would like to add that this is only possible with your blessing Dystopic. It was you i was thinking about that to allow this was not fair on you per the earlier ruling. Since you have no issue with it and as you pointed out, this is a different situation then i am happy to see Almaric play again.

I hope the rest of the league can see the situation here and would agree?

Play away Almaric....Play away.....

The Commish.

/Edit\ And yes a ruling in the Rulebook could help with this plus i will edit the OP so it is clear that once a game is posted in the round thread it is official.

Agreed

no worries. i was a little disappointed when it happened to me, but sour grapes aren't in my nature. plus, it makes me look good, and that's a nice perk

atta boy, dys

Yes, this is all in the real spirit of the league. Let the guy learn and post later this one time.

will someone from Team C (FireBender or otherwise) please make sure Almaric is aware of all this; I'm sure he'll check this thread eventually, but just in case.

hey everyone, I have posted a draft version of an idea/project that Mumble, Dystopic, and I were discussing in the MVL Rulebook concerning new players. Please check it out and leave your thoughts here Welcome to the MVL! before I make a final version to post here on the GC Forums. Thanks!!!

Very excellently done. One suggestion is to strike the harrassment sentance. It's not that it's not true that we wouldn't tolerate any such behavior, it's just that to my knowledge there has never been any such behavior, there is no expectation of such behavior occuringand we wouldn't want to give anyone the impression that there ever has been any such thing to be concerned about.

Another point could be to add that you haven't offically joined a team until you submit your first game or perhaps signed in at the the Core. I did think we wanted to have one extra confirmation step just to have some assurance that folks will follow through on their desire to join.

Finally it's good to have the link to the Core but links to the main MVL threads should be provided as well.

On a totally different topic, how can you stand the advertising content links that pervade the entire Tyranny of Evil website? That's just awful. You do know that you can have a Tyranny of Evil private forum or even a whole directory of private forums if you'd like for free at the Core don't you? That advertising would just drive me crazy.

I've sent Amalric a PM filling him in on this, and send him the password to our protected forum on The Galactic Core.