Hmmm...

Certainly FB's opinion is worth something here although in the past a clear exception to an established rule required commissioner, not vice commissioner, approval. It's a bit different here since as I mentioned it has been allowed before. The reason I first mentioned commissioner approval was because with it there is no ambiguity nor any concern anyone overstepped their bounds in allowing it. Failing a ruling from the commissioner a fairly universal response from members of the league along with vice commissioner approval is pretty much equivilient.

So far we haven't had all that many folks respond to the request but I don't get a sense that anyone would object to this, it's just that without something from Neilo I feel I'd be overstepping my bounds to suggest approval without FB *plus* a good handfull of MVL members in clear agreement with this.

As far as Submission time that is an interesting question. I got the sense from his post that he was testing the waters about the use of another character but that his goal was a game that bettered Iztok's and/or Wyndstar's. Although the game under the wrong character is better than the best under his normal character it still didn't meet the criteria of beating Iztok or Wyndstar and so he was still looking to better his score and wasn't immediately interested in submitting this very instant.

I would suggest that if this is the case then waiting a few days for Neilo to make a ruling is no big deal and that is what we should do. If Ferrel responds and says that he wants to submit immediately then as long as a few more MVL members speak up and indicate that they're OK with this and no one speaks up to object then I would guess we could collectively strap on a pair of balls and make a decision, so to speak.

Hey gang. No need to do anything right now. I still have 14 days to go and I'd like to try a few ideas for raising my score. I probably should have said nothing and crossed this bridge if I needed to.

its ok. Its just me and Mumble going back and forth so we can hammer out our standing guidelines for the future. We get...antsy...when there isn't an organized manner of handling something.

Since per your posts, we don't have to worry about the submission time which lets off the hook with that. Now, its just the principle, and one that doesn't seem to bother anyone
(not that it should really), of posting (accidentally in your case, or possibly purposefully in the future by a player)a MVL game under the "wrong" character.

Agreed. But given Ferrel's response then there should be no issue waiting for Neilo which is the safest way to proceed.


In our current format I see no real issue with "right" or "wrong" characters. Basically everything gets specified when the player submits his game to the league in this thread. The one downside is the idea of the automatic submission of an "obvious" MVL game posted to the metaverse but not submitted to the league. Clearly the league can only consider games posted to the MV under the players "regular" MVL character. Otherwise for normal submission purposes no one should really care. This is really not all that different from accepting screenshots of endgames when the player has some kind of difficulty submitting a game to the MV and we could easily consider this an extension of that practice.

The only time this does become a concern is in trying to move to a more automated process within the AltMeta since the AltMeta only knows your defined MVL character and doesn't understand GC2 forum user names.

Actually there is one potential abuse that I see and that is that this might allow you to post games to the MV that your competitors might not realize are games that could later be submitted. I think this is sufficient reason to discourage this practice in general in the future. However in this case this argument doesn't apply since Ferrel is obviously pointing this game out as one that he would like to consider submitting to the league.

Sorry, I had computer problems.

Back on topic: Do we even need a ruling? This has happened in Round 2 also(by me IIRC). Besides, accepting a game from the wrong character makes not much difference in anyway to the outcome and not accepting it seems... silly.

And it wouldn't be much of a problem in the AltMeta either. Since teams would have a separate access to the team's page, they would be free to change a character around themselves as they would feel like it("MVL and the Altmeta" thread).

I agree, Silver agrees, now you agree. The more people weigh in on it the more obvious it becomes, but clearly if Neilo says the same thing then there is no doubt, whereas at the moment this is just a cumulative opinion even though I would tend to give the vice commissioners opinion a tad more weight than any random opinion.


I doubt this will be the case. Though it's possible, the association of a character to team will not be something that can (or should) be modifiable from the team page. The only purpose of the team page is to define the game to be submitted by characters already defined to be members of that team. The assignment of characters to teams will most likely be reserved for the overall MVL system administrator.

In any case this point is moot for deciding Ferrel's request. However, as I pointed out there is reasonable cause to discourage this practice in general since it could be used to disguise a person's potential submissions. We can discuss this further in the rules thread once the round is over.

Character: Idazen
Years: 3
Race: Yor
Victory: Military Conquest
Score: 9450
Difficulty: Challenging
Mapsize: Tiny
Version: v1.80g Dark Avatar (Dark Avatar)
Date: 1/25/2008 5:54:12 AM

My Round 6 submission:



I decided to ramp up to suicidal for this one. Motti, I would like to apologize for beating your score by such an inconsequential margin. I had much loftier goals for the remainder of the last game year, but those cheese-eating surrender monkeys suddenly caved with several powerful warships (that I had let them keep, to nurse them along) still in their possession. I had thought that would let them hold out longer. I know, it's a random chance every turn, but it's still a bummer when that happens.

It's a wonder that I like DA as much as I do when the scoring is so much of a mystery. Two of the factors are Military and Technology. I've consistently built the most ships, killed the most enemy ships, and lost the fewest ships, yet my scores for Military have consistently been among the lowest. I've leaned toward a lot of research in my games and consistently researched more techs by far than the AI, yet my Technology scores have consistently been among the lowest. Explanation, anyone? Thanks.

When did you do what?

Researching 60 techs in year 1 is worth a lot more than having researched 60 by year 4. The AI is generally great out of the gate, then mismanages its money and crashes... but great out of the gate will lead to a decent score in whatever area they focused on.

- Wyndstar

Killing enemy ships does nothing for your military score. Losing the least ships does help as well as building the most ships. Your military score is merely the front end weighted area under the curve of the military rating curve that's shown in the civilization manager under the timeline tab. Your military rating at any one time is simply the sum of the attack points, defense points and hit points of all your ships. For purposes of calculating military might your weapons and defense bonus, the 25% defense bonus you get for ships in orbit, the bonus you get from the Spin Control Center (SCC) and any bonus you get from ships being in the area of influence of military starbases all count.

It's really very simply. Higher values of military rating held over time will result in a higher military score. Like all score it's logarithmic, that is linear increases in score require exponential increases military rating. Also as Wyndstar points out early is more important than late. Basically the military rating is divided by some function of turn number and this function is summed up turn by turn.

The issue is what are the constants of proportionality, and no one knows precisely. So you say you have this great military yet score poorly. The question is, what is a great military? Having the SCC early in the game with 10 cargo hulls full of phasors could easily be more valuable than 1000 ships with 100 attack and 50 defense during year 2.

The only thing you can really tell is more is better. Taking the above example lets say you get 1000, 100/50 attack/defense ships accumulated by year 2 in one game and in another game you get 2000 100/50 ships in the same timeframe. The only thing I can guarantee is that your military score will be greater in the second case. I can also guarantee it won't be twice as much because of the logarithmic nature of scoring. Like I said the constants of proportionality are unknown but I would expect that if you had 1000 ships in one case then you would probably need closer to 4000 ships within the same timeframe to double your score.

To give you an idea of the scale of ships you need to score in the 45K range in these kinds of games I generally end up with about 2000 ships under a 16 or 24 military starbase array that gives a per ship bonus of 1000/1500 points and you need them there for a few years.

If you do something like this then you will definitely notice an increase in your military score. Or get the SCC by June of year 0 and put up 10 cargo hulls full of phasors. Then get psionic beams by August and upgrade the phasors to psionic beams. But if you just have regular attack/defense ships flying around with no SCC and no military SB array then your going to need 10,000 of those to notice much of a difference.

So when you say you've consistently built the most ships I say, so what. Are you talking about 10,000 or 200 ships, it makes a huge difference. The simple matter is, if you aren't noticing a difference in the score then what you're doing is not significant enough and you need to do more, generally much, much more than you have been doing.

Idazen, you had PM'ed me about having problems getting to the Core. I've sent 3 PM's in response and we've reset your password as well as given you a direct email for tech support but you still haven't seemed to be able to access the Core. Have you tried the things I suggested in my PM's or are there other issues you are still having?

I sent an email to the individual you suggested. And tried out the new password. Still no luck on getting in. Right now I am thinking of setting up a ew account under a new name may be the simplest way of getting things fixed.

Sorry you're having such difficulty.

Actually I'm not sure what is going on because I had no difficulty logging in as you with the new password. I even made a test reply under your account.

I'll PM you again with the account name and password. You do realize that it's case sensitive?

Moot. Same score, but with my MVL character.

M, I appreciate very much the time and thought you put into replies to questions in the forums. I print out what you have to say and refresh my memory the same as I do with the manual.

That said, my questions were asked in the context of comparison to what the AI did in the game, your reply was given in the context of how to run up a game score of 10,000, or 20.000 or 40,000 points.

I didn't build 2,000 ships and 24 starbases, but neither did the AI. My military crushed theirs, winning every battle, because I had more powerful ships, more offensive power, more defensive armor and more hit points. After reading some of your stuff, M, as early as possible I kicked out some cargo hulls with one beam offense so as to get my military timeline up early. At some points in the game, some of the AI may temporarily have had a higher count of ships than I did, because they tended to build lots of weak ships, but as the game went on they were wiped out and by the end I had built a total of around twice as many ships as any of the AI. The only place the AI was stronger than I was, was that they hsd more military starbases than I did, and they developed theirs with more modules. Yet, three of the AI's were awarded military scores between 3,300 and 3,800 and my score was something like 2,400. The crusher was given a lower score than the crushees. That's not rational. That's why I asked for clarification.

After seeing your reply, I understand the analytical geometry of the area under the timeline. The game continually plots the timeline by an aggregate of stats for each week, in such a way that the gross number of ships regardless of size, and the effects of military resources and starbases, is given greater (too much) weight as against the higher throw weight of offense and defense of fewer, more powerful ships. Worse yet, battles won has nothing to do with it. Still not rational, in my view, but there it is.

If DA has Spin Control Centers, I haven't found the tech that allows them. Maybe they are in a branch of the tech tree that I haven't explored enough. I didn't see any mention of them in the DA manual. I plan to ask about this in the DA forum.

In battles, I haven't seen evidence that DA gives a 25% bonus to ships in orbit...I haven't been surprised by losing a battle to a weaker ship in orbit...and I don't see that in the DA manual. I plan to experiment a little with this in my next game. I plan to ask about this in the DA forum.

Something maybe of great value that I got from your reply, M, was about scoring for ships in orbit. Not knowing that there was a 25% defense bonus for ships in orbit, if there is such in DA, I've tended to defend my colonies with ships nearby but not necessarily orbiting the planet. And I've noticed that sometimes the AI will have a starport totally full with ten crappy little ships in orbit. That might be a clue to the (irrational in my view) higher scores for the AI.

Again, thanks for your replies, which are valuable to all of us.

Get a higher mil score early, crushed or not, you get a higher score.

~ Wyndstar

the Spin Control Center becomes available with the Cultural Conquest (final Diplo) tech.

Total Majesty, maybe?

yes thank you FB, thats what i actually meant

Yep. It isn't the best of systems but it is the system in play. Beside the direct effect on scoring it is also the underpinning required to understand AI behavior that otherwise can make no sense.

Ideally the system should correlate to someone with a higher military might being able to beat someone with a lessor military might value. However the AI can spam 200 attack 10 defenders against your 10 attack 100 defense 50 capital ships. Technically the AI has a higher military might and so may be very happy to declare war on you and if you were to offer peace would essentially laugh in your face. However your ships can wade through theirs like butter and once you do so eventually the military might ratio shifts and suddenly they're asking for peace on your terms.

One of the most important things for you to keep track of is the ratio of your military might to an opponents military might. Based on this you can know exactly what they will do if you get into a war. This is displayed in your civilization manager under the Stats & Graphs tab. This allows you to scroll through and see who's rated stronger than you are and vice versa and by how much. Clearly this isn't the reality of the situation because it takes no account of the quality of your ships versus theirs but this is what dictates how the AI's relate to you.

If you have a 3 to 1 advantage or better they will cower in their boots. You can still prod them to declare war on you by simply parking transports near their planets but once they do you're free to take a nice handful of planets and all their resource mining and then offer them a peace treaty and they will pee their pants in a rush to accept it.

And if your ratio is 10 to 1 in your favor you can often demand they give you planets along with the peace deal. Using the military might ratio is an extremely powerful tool in your arsenal. If it's high you're impervious from attack regardless of the real situation. So besides having the SCC for scoring purposes having it merely to keep the AI's off your back before you're prepared for war can be huge.

Basically at the higher levels of difficulty the AI gets huge advantages that you really have no chance to directly compete with. If you try to keep a legitimate standing navy to keep your opponents at bay and continually upgrade your ships with each new tech that you develop then you will never keep up with the AI. The only chance you have is to have a set of "paper tigers" that pump up your apparent military might to keep the AI off your back while you focus your resources on tech to gain a weapons/defense advantage in one area. Only then do you start producing "real" ships which have the capability to actually wade through a selected opponent.

Based on my response above I don't defend my colonies at all. Putting actual ships in orbit around all my planets still won't really protect me if the AI thinks they are stronger than I am. If the AI thinks they are weaker than me they will simply never attack you and you need no other defense at all. So all the production that you put into building ships merely to orbit planets is a huge waste of your productive capacity. You are far better off researching to total majesty quickly, putting up the SCC and building ten cargo hulls with nothing but phasors on them. Then you're safe from attack. The side effect of this strategy is that you build up a large diplomatic advantage to the AI and so get far more favorable tech trades from the AI. It might be a bit more restricted in DA than in DL but I can usually research pretty much just the diplomacy techs and trade for weapons and speed and even hull techs. So while I concentrate on diplomancy I can gain most other tech directly from my enemies. Be careful to try and get the highest wepons possible *before* you put up your "paper tigers" because the AI is quite willing to give weapons tech to someone they feel is weaker, once your ration goes above theirs by about 3 to 1 they will no longer give you any useful weapons.

In his seminal theses in 2007 on how to win GC games, Wynstar taught us that the key is to take a fast track to Planetary Invasion, implying that there will be blood relatively early in the game.

In this thread, M teaches that the key is to take a fast track to SCC, meanwhile avoiding war with smoke and mirrors, trickery and deceit, implying that there will be no blood until much later in the game.

Fascinating stuff.

I have two more questions about scoring that may be of general interest:

I note that when not at war, the AI generally keeps all of its ships orbiting planets. Does this increase their Military score because of the 25% planetary defense bonus?

Do you get higher Military score for ships with larger hulls? I inferred from something M said earlier this year regarding paper tigers, that a cargo hull with one beam offense gets a higher score than a smaller hull with one beam offense. True?

Thanks for the time and thought in the replies. It is appreciated.

The beauty of this game is that both methods work. You can even combine them.

My personal supposition is that the path to 0 year DA victories that we've seen posted so far could actually be achieved without even researching planetary invasion. If indeed DA is a bit more surrender happy than DL it is possible to go the SCC route, get a 10 to 1 or greater military rating ratio, get an AI to declare war on you and then offering them peace but requiring them to give up *all* their planets in exchange for it.

Believe it or not I've seen it happen. But certainly a combination of SCC for military might advantage along with planetary invasion to start off the surrender process would work as well.


Yes.


No. IIRC military rating is attack points + defense points + (hit points/10). So there is a minor increase in using a larger military hull with more hit points than a smaller military hull with fewer. It's actually worth less points to use a cargo hull versus a tiny hull from consideration of hit points alone. The benefit of using a cargo hull is that you have it early and you can cram many more weapons on it than what you can get on a small hull.

You get more points from a small hull with a single point of beam attack than you do from a cargo hull with the same single point of beam attack. But you get far more points for a cargo hull with 10 phasors on it than you get from a small hull with 2 phasors on it. When you're putting up "paper tigers" in orbit about your SCC you don't mess with engines or defense, just cram the most offense you can on it. If you are attacked these will be wiped out in an instant with their one hit point each but with the military rating advantage this gives, you will never be attacked. That's why I call them paper tigers, because they are totally useless in a real fight.

One other interesting point is that you can upgrade cargo hull based ships to large military hull based ships later on in the game once you get the large hull tech. I often have upgraded my initial paper tigers into true fighting ships later on in the game when necessary.

Here's my submission for Team C.

Learned a lot this round. Couldn't beat ya I.B. but a tie is good enough. I don't know how you do it Wyndstar.

Character: 4 20
Years: 0
Race: Korath
Victory: Military Conquest
Score: 17850
Difficulty: Suicidal
Mapsize: Tiny
Version: v1.80g Dark Avatar (Dark Avatar)
2/3/2008 4:13:37 PM

Here's the link: 4 20