Thank you very much for that AAR Wyndstar. Absolutely fascinating how rapidly you can pull that off.

interesting; I don't have time tonight, but unless Iztok or someone beats me to it, I'll try to make sure I check into it for DA tomorrow.

All I can say is thanks. To both the ones asking the right questions and the ones answering them. I learned a lot today .

Even without spore weapons you can pull off a zero year win in a small(not tiny) galaxy. Its easy, I've done it 3-4 times.

I used Yor Super Breeder with the Thalan HW(Adv. Race Customization by Silver) in my league game.
One misconception that I think many people have is that supporting all that research needs a strong economy. And thus they devote ability points to economy along with the Federalists party. That racial bonus will get 50-80 bc max in the zeroth year which isn't a lot when you're producing 300+ RPs from your homeworld. Its better to take bonuses which will help you win the game before you burn through your treasury. In these fast games, I think the main source of income is anomalies.

Wyndstar's screenshot shows that I'm not alone in spending 200+ bcs a turn.

Don't be silly. You're presence alone is a big help to the league and I know you better than to think you feel winning is everything. I have no doubt that any team with you is far better than any team without you.


Actually I've thought the same since the round thread is really where everything happens.

The idea behind the results thread is more to have some kind of history to the league and a place to go to see the performance of you and your team over the course of the last few rounds or so.

However this really doesn't work so well in an environment where everything is just in one thread or another. This is one good reason for us to get back to pursuing the idea of getting the MVL incorporated into the AltMeta where we could have some kind of nice display of results both short and long term.


I take that as a given. I was more concerned that my questions would be taken as questioning, which are two entirely different things.

The thing is that when something isn't adding up or making sense to you every little discrepancy adds to the confusion. Once you understand the essense of the question then a little discrepancy or two doesn't really matter. And once the first problem is solved then perhaps you figure you can play around and figure it out. But before you figure out that these things are totally unrelated it can get very frustrating.

Anyway I find it somewhat amazing that something like this could be in the code for so long (it's been at least a year) and no one ever noticed before. It all goes back to "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".


Yeah, I was thinking about this as well. With no income bonus and taxes at 50% starting income was 40 bc. When I selected 30% econ bonus plus Federalists for a total 50% econ bonus starting income was 60 bc, with taxes again at 50%. Both of these are at suicidal. So income appears to work properly. I did a quick check at Tough and got the same results.

I then tried the 50% military production bonus and the 50% social production bonus along with the 20% bonus given to both military and social production (70% total) by the Industrialists and my military production was 43 but (24*1.7=40.8) so this is a bit off. This planet happened to have a 300% manufacturing bonus tile so I tried that as well and got 86 out of a base of now 48 so it stayed the same. A production of 86 requires an 80% bonus (48*1.8=86.4) so this is a 10% increase. Not sure if this is significant enough to be conclusive.

The total social production bonus is 80% because of the initial Xeno Engineering tech and for social production I get 91 which is again 10% higher than it should be (48*1.9=91.2). Again both these production bonus cases were at Suicidal. I then went back to Tough and got identical results. So for production there seems to be an extra 10% although this doesn't vary due to difficulty. Yet another little discrepancy.

I checked out Influence with the 30% pick and the 20% from the Pacifists and had 44 without and 60 with. I should have had 44*1.5=66 so this actually seems to be a 13% decrease (44*1.37=60.28). However I get the same results at Tough and at Suicidal so this discrepany is not dependent on difficulty level.

That's pretty much all I could check out, Trade and Espionage, Moral and Diplomany and the catch all Universalists didn't lend themselves to be easily checked out.

So it looks like there are other, smaller discrepancies, not dependent on difficulty level in production and influence but income is spot on. The 30% income pick and the additional 20% from the Federalists is the one that I always use, but like I said I probably will mix this up a bit in the future particularly in our small games.

The point of all of this is to always question your assumptions. We all fall into patterns of play that work in the games we play and sooner or later we take those patterns for granted. But then something changes, either something just a bit different in the game or perhaps a different set of settings than what you're used to. It's always best to think about what you want to do as opposed to simply doing what's always worked before because what's always worked before isn't always the right answer.

I think the one of the points of this league was to get people to play games that are outside of their normal settings. Certainly that's been the case for me, my normal gigantic games are totally different from league games. But it is difficult to just forget you normal patterns of play and truly change them to fit the current problem at hand. It's clear to me now that I'm still struggling to adjust.

This is exactly what motivates me as well. The AI are Chaos and I am Entropy.

I particularly love it when I capture a world before they get a chance to spoil it with some stupid super project that you can't later remove. I love to kill the production of things like the secret police center or hyperion re-supply center before they can be built.

OK got a 0yr win on suicidal, however it did take alot of the fun out of it for me. But thank you for the lessons here. and not a bad score, almost 17000 as the yor.

Nice! I can only got those scores in 0 year wins on small galaxies.

I find my econ takes a donkey kicking though

Ouch! My brain hurts!   

Good info, Mumble. I might have to try switching some of my strategies to a more research oriented focus. Until now, it's been mostly population & economy driven. Just gotta find the balance in there somewhere.   

My understanding of how the MV works is that only the person who starts the game can submit it. This isn't technically equivalent to a cheat flag, but it accomplishes the same thing; in fact, probably more so than a cheat flag would. In essence, your idea, while interesting, is not possible at this stage of the game.

While I'm aware that as equal footing as possible has its charms, I'm curious if you'd really want to give up the roughly infinite galaxies that can be generated to have everyone play just one (per round).

As Sole Soul points out, only the person that checked the game out can submit the game.

However, this is an idea that I've had for awhile now for a form of tournaments where someone picks out a game and whoever wants can play the same game. While no one but the original player can submit it to the metaverse that doesn't stop someone from playing the game to completion and then being able to post screenshots of the endgame or of any point along the game.

I would view something like this as more instructional as opposed to competitive but the advantage is that people could play or not as they chose from game to game. There would be no need for formal teams or concerns about team scoring or non-submissions or any of that stuff.

I view this as an addendum to the League because there are many things provided by the league that this form of tournaments can't satisfy. However it does address a point that probably stops a lot of people from joining the league, and that is that the League requires a commitment to play and if you don't, you let down your teammates. A league structured as a group of individuals playing the same game has some of features of the league, mainly the idea that everyone plays the same game and the type and style of game can change randomly, but without the teams, anyone that wants can play or not play as they chose. If someone doesn't "submit" a game it's no big deal.

I think both of these operating together has a much greater appeal than either by themselves. There would be some issues, like how to handle different revs of the game that not everyone may have or how to handle different difficulty levels, but I think we could figure something out.

Basically the way I saw the process was to first get the MVL settled into the AltMeta and then use that as a model of how to hold this new form of tournaments.

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This brings up the point that awhile back we had the Metaverse Council which I think did some good work and made a significant contribution to the current state of the AltMeta. But while technically still in existence, the Metaverse Council hasn't been relevant for quite some time.

Basically I viewed the Metaverse Council as the focus of metaverse activism. Today the focus of metaverse activism is really the MVL. Essentially the MVC has morphed into the MVL. Many of the Metaverse Councilors are prominent in today's MVL. Neilo, TGE, Marshall, DethAdder, Wyndstar and I; fully half of the old MVC councilors are in the MVL.

Initially I was a little bit disappointed in the change going from the MVC to the MVL. Basically the reason was one of focus. While the focus of the MVC was specifically to come up and implement ideas that promote participation and activity within the metaverse, the focus of the MVL was more let's just play games and have fun.

While simply playing games and having fun definitely promotes participation and activity within the metaverse, it’s not quite the same thing and at times I became a bit frustrated by what I saw as the desire to just play games and not be bothered with other things such as improving the League and the Metaverse in general. I’ve since come to accept things as they are.

There are those that simply want to play the game and really don’t want to be bothered with the requisite behind the scenes work that’s involved with it. In some cases the work is merely paying attention to long complex threads where people are arguing about points that most folks hardly even care about. All in all there’s nothing wrong with that.

But there are people in this league, over and above just the former MVC councilors, that do embody the spirit of the old MVC and are willing to put in the behind the scenes effort that’s required.

I guess the point I’m trying to get to here is that, yes, the MVL is a league where we play games and have fun. However there is a certain responsibility for the care and feeding of the metaverse that we all share as metaverse players. I would like to see the Metaverse League do some of the things that we used to envision the Metaverse Council would do. Simply getting our own League into the AltMeta is one of those things. Also coming up with a more professional presentation for the above mentioned tournaments is another such thing.

Certainly I’m not expecting that everyone will want to bother with this but I do think some will and those that are willing should contribute. I don’t think we need anything formal like saying so and so is a councilor and so and so isn’t. If you want to help then help, if you don’t then don’t. It’s as simple as that.