Without firing a shot? That's a concept beyond me, unless others were at war and you took the opportunity from their attacks. Year 0 doesn't sound like that though. Then again, there are a lot of things left undiscovered in the game for me.

I always have some sort of pea shooter built before I take my first planet. There's usually a colony ship or defender there for me to sweep away. Undefended AI planets are rare in my games.




I like the 10% PQ as well.

Nowadays, I usually go for ethics before going to war. That's pretty new for me. Strats are always fluid, aren't they?   

Yes. The first three colonies did not have even a defender although most of their home planets did at the time. I may actually have had to fire a shot at a scout or two but I really didn't count them because they can't fire back.

Anyway it didn't really matter since a pair of attack 3 phasors on a small hull far outclassed anything the AI had at the time. I think I took my first planet in late July but it may have been early August. Certainly I had all of my 4 opponents highest PQ colony before September of year 0.

One thing to note is when I say rush to phasors and planetary invasion I mean exactly that. Other than Impulse drive and planetary improvements, I researched nothing that wasn't directly on those two research paths. Also I didn't mention it but I actually finished my colony rush *before* the AI's finished theirs and I wasted no effort on developing my colonies. Just instantly put them on focused research as soon as I colonized them. Once my colony rush was complete (Mar 8th) I put my sliders to 100% research. Having a 300% research bonus tile on my home planet didn't hurt either.

I had planetary invasion and two small fighters with Impulse drive and dual phasors while the most any AI had was two attack 1 defenders, two AI's had only a single defender and one AI had no attack ships whatsoever. I went after each players highest PQ colony because I could capture them with a single 500 troop transport. I did have to build up a few more phasor fighters to get my military might up to where the AI would accept peace, I was at war with all 4 at once but there was little they could do with a defender or two and without planetary invasion.

Once I had peace from all four then I had some time to develop my colonies. I actually started my military SB array shortly into the beginning of year 1 and parked my handful of "fleas" under it just to keep the AI off my back while I developed my colonies. I did this for the remainder of year 1 but did take over all opponent home planets before year 1 was out as well. By then I had Pysionic beams and warp drive. This left four opponents each on a single planet of PQ4 or PQ5 and there was little they could do but pick on each other while I took all of the galactic resources.

All in all I had 75% influence before the end of year 0 but you can't get an influence victory until year 1 at the earliest. I actually had to quickly research up the influence tree to start gifting influence SB's before year 0 was over. This actually delayed other research that could have been used to develop some score a bit earlier.

The key to everything is doing things quicker than you used to think possible. The trick of building a bare cargo hull per turn and upgrading to a colony ship on the cheap allowed 7 colonies within ten turns without using up all of my initial 5000 bc. In fact by turn 10 not only did I have 7 colonies I also had the two morale resources and the one economic resource in the galaxy. Of course I only had the 5% bonus from each to start with but gradually built that up once I got each AI's top colony. In fact it was the factories rush bought by the AI on their colonies that produced the Pysionic beam fighters that allowed me to take the AI's homeworlds because I still had not built up my own colonies.

Actually for me this is now the other way around. I used to get to evil and the MCC, ASC and psyionic beam before attacking but that leaves too much low hanging fruit on the table. With just phasors you can take the best colony from each AI usually with two or three factories already prebuilt for you.

Now I ignore anything that isn't planetary invasion or beam technology up to phasors and then take each AI's top colony. Once I have that I go from ethics directly to concept of malice then psyionic beam to finish them off. Again this is a tiny or small galaxy strategy that might not be applicable for even medium galaxies and would be pretty much doomed to failure in my normal gigantic galaxy games.

As far as fluidity I have to agree. There are many paths to victory even under one set of game settings. If you add to that the different ways you need to play based on different game settings you can come up with a myriad set of possibilities.

Hi guys!

Some of you are familiar with me from the Core, where I have been a member since Jan 2007. I am interested in trying some of the Metaverse League Challenges and would like to get put on a team please. I am still on the current Dread Lords version (no expansion), is this a problem?

no it is not at all. Mumblefratz in particular uses only DL.

Neilo will be along shortly to assign you to a team, but i believe the open spot is on Team D.

in any case, welcome Rex and may I hope to beat you soundly even if you usually beat me at the quizzes

Welcome Rex, glad to have you on board. Indeed, you shall be in the Domination of Death, Domination, please welcome Rex to the team. Hopefully this should alleviate the no show issue that was looming for a few teams.

Kzinti will pm you the private forum password at the core mate. Welcome to the league and good to see you on the GC2 forums.

Good luck mate, the round criteria is in the OP and you still have some time before the end of this round.

Hope you enjoy the league mate!

The Commish.

My GalCiv2 character is Saladin Al-Bashir and if I understand the workings of this correctly, I post my game to the metaverse (using the appropriate set-up and victory conditions) to make sure no cheat flags are tripped, then post a recap in the round 5 thread. I have been hopping from thread to thread, but frankly my eyes hurt and I haven't found the precise info on this yet.

Welcome to the league

Yep , your correct Rexman. I know the league's threads can be a bit much to try to go through one shot.

Just a quick point though, you may submit to the MV as many games pertaining to the current round as you like. But only one submition to the league is allowed, so play as many games as you want/need, pick your best effort and submit that to the league.

And yes, our threads can be a bit overwhelming, we are working on it with the Rulebook thread, but it is slow going.

Just a quick reminder for those who haven't voted already and for those who are new. Please drop by MVL Tiebreak Criteria vote and toss in your $0.02.

I'm having a great game with these settings! I have never played with blind exploration and stopped midway in a no tech-trading game. These two conditions are forcing me to change my normal strategy... and I LIKE IT!

I'm going to take this moment to thank Mumblefratz for his voluminous info/insight/advice to all players of GalCiv2 on strategy for this game. I wouldn't be able to play as quickly, frequently or enjoyably without the knowledge you and others have passed on.

Bravo Zulu!

I second this.

welcome to the league, Rexman!

i'll third the homage to lord mumblefratz - all hail!

so, does it seem like we might need a team F soon? i'd like to propose "The Flunkees"   

Wow, Mumble, that sounds like a really boring game, lol! Do you think you'll ever try one of the expansions? Considering the cost and size of engines in DA, coupled with extreme planets, one would be hard pressed to follow the same strat as you did in DL. But still, supreme dominance in the first year? Very nice!

not that I'm even remotely in the same league as Mumble, but...well, its just a matter of speed and planning...kinda like chess. if influence victories were allowed in the first year (0 game years), i would had one, just had to wait out the 10wks once it became 2227.

Ok guys, I have a score to post, how did you guys make that nice little screen cap on page one of the thread?

Anyway, I got a 6300 in 3 years using the specified settings.

Link for that is here:

http://metaverse.galciv2.com/index.aspx?g=player&id=11555

I'd like to thank Neilo for prodding me to do better (unknowingly however!) in this round. I was ready to submit a 5 year 6650 score and asked for the password to Group "D" to see if that was good for the team. His PM back essentially said that if it was 3 years or less that the captain would be happy. 3 Years! Crap, I better get back to the drawing board I thought!

PS Neilo, that wasn't the right password BTW.

well Neilo shouldn't know the password to team D... thought it would explain a few things (I'M KIDDING GUYS!)

Neilo sometimes has scrambled brains though...he may have forgotten that you, RexDaddy, are on Team D; and Iztok Bitenc is on Team E

as for the nifty lil photo, you need to take a screenshot (hit cntrl+prntscrn, then open up a image editor to paste the image, finally, upload it to a photo file sharing site) if that sounds like too much work

post the following info

Character Name and MV Submission Time
Victory Type
Game Years
Score

You see the great and powerful commissioner is not infallible after all.

You see what i was doing was showing the consequences to all of you of what reading and posting in our threads whilst drinking vodka are.

Sorry for the confusion, i shall submit myself for 100 lashes Captain Silver. And no Fembots for at least...an hour.....

i heard you aussies had somewhat draconian forms of punishment, but i never realized you'd violate the geneva convention  

As far as the expansions I will indeed play them. There are a couple of issues that prevent me at the moment but in all reality the biggest reason that I haven't moved on is because I'm simply not done with DL as of yet. I’m still learning different ways to play and refining ways that I’ve used for awhile. If I was in any way bored with DL then none of the "issues" I have with DA are anything that would really prevent me from playing it.

One concern that I do have is that I am very beta intolerant. I appreciate you guys that can jump on a new version and help find issues and solve problems but I simply don't have the patience for it. For the record I did purchase the DA Beta back in November of last year, received the CD and simply haven’t installed it.

The two issues that I have with DA are that it requires Stardock Central to install (at least any upgrades from the CD version) and the issue with engines. I want to make it clear that my dislike of the engine nerfage has nothing to do with any particular strategy. Certainly there are strategies that use speed to overwhelm an AI that potentially has both a technical and strategic ship advantage over you. Elimination of this kind of strategy was the stated intent for the engine nerfage in the first place but I feel it was a very misguided attempt. I feel it was misguided because it doesn’t even really prohibit people from doing what it was intended to stop them from doing and the only real effect is to punish people that prefer gigantic galaxies.

I basically like the micromanagement of this game, you have to if you like gigantic galaxies, however the biggest pain I have are issues with autopilot being unreliable either randomly or after a reload or whatever the rhyme or reason. To my knowledge this issue has never been resolved in any version of the game so far. To slow ships down only accentuates this issue.

One of my biggest concerns with DA, TA, beta this and beta that is that I have no clue what is what. Which rev has what issues. Which rev fixes those issues and what new issues are introduced by the rev that fixes that issue. I really just simply cannot keep track of them and honesty have no desire to.

My position is this. DL really did not become stable until the release of DA. So far as I can tell the v1.4x version that I play is functionally identical to the v1.5 version that’s incorporated in DA with the exception that it didn’t require Stardock Central to be installed on my machine to get it. Once TA is released and marginally stable then I feel it’s safe for me to venture onto DA. I have no clue what needs to happen before I feel that TA will be stable. Perhaps the rumored version 2 which will also assumedly have a standalone installable version is the answer, I don't really know.

Don’t get me wrong I appreciate Stardock trying to improve their product it’s just that I simply can’t deal with these changes so quickly nor can I deal with the inevitable issues that crop up seemingly with every other version or so. I could deal with a single new version once a year but there seems to be a new version at least once a month and some months more than one. I would rather have a devil I know even with its autopilot problems than having to figure out what the issue will be with this month’s version. I’m simply too old to be able to deal with the constant change. To me it seems more like churning than progress.

I really do not mean this to be taken as any criticism towards Stardock or any of the developers. Perhaps I am simply just too old, but I do think fewer and more widely spaced updates would be far preferable from my point of view.

Official Submission for Round 5:

Character: Saladin Al Bashir
Submission Time: 28 December 2007
Victory Type: Cultural
Game Years: 3 years
Game Score: 6300

from everything you said, it doesn't sound to me like you're "too old." it sounds like you're more invested in each game you play than the average player. maybe that investment is related to age in some way; you seem to think so, but i don't see why it'd need to be. age could quite as easily bring no interest in video games whatsoever, or no real difference at all. anyway, i'm not trying to give you a pep talk or anything. i thought your previous post was thoughtful, but you spent most of it explaining how and why you're still invested in DL, then at the end you shrugged it all off to being too old, and it seemed a bit of a non sequitur to me.

whatever the reasons, as long as you enjoy the game, you're playing it the right way

My entry for round 5:



Reading over Mumble's post, I know exactly where I went wrong - I left my last opponent too many planets. Sure, I didn't have to worry about building them all kinds of influence starbases, but they had enough research going to get within striking distance of a tech victory. I wasn't set up for a blitz that could have stopped their research in time, so I bit the neutrino bullet and built the influence starbases that began the 10-turn influence countdown. Darn it.

sigh... I'm quitting the MVL goodbye.

SW, sorry to hear that you have to leave us. Hopefully, things will work out for you. Just know that we all will welcome you back with open arms. best care mate.