Mumble, please see my above post. This option is how it works in DA.

~ Wyndstar

Not quite totally explained. In particular will the AI surrender if not at war? Secondly assuming the AI will only surrender while at war does they player always have the option of offering peace to keep an AI in the game?

What I'm trying to figure out is whether this is something that should be specified randomly on a per round basis or if there is a reason to leave it on all the time or off all the time. I think it should be one of these three options. The one option I'm not comfortable with is to allow the player to pick and choose it.

If the AI doesn't surrender unless at war *and* if the player can offer peace pretty much at will to keep an AI from surrendering prematurelly then it seems pretty equivilient to DL and I would think that surrenders should always be allowed.

If the AI can decide to surrender even if not at war then I would think surrenders should never be allowed.

If the AI doesn't surrender unless at war but the player cannot offer a peace treaty pretty much at will then I do see this as a potential disadvantage to the high scoring game but it probably would always be an advantage for the fast game. In this case then I would say that this should be considered one of the rounds random settings.

I agree with this but the reason is generally fairly clear. Situations like this happen when you have a high military rating and you've killed off most or all of the AI's ships. Even thought they may have plenty of planets and resources they will surrender.

However, knowing this allows you to continue taking what you can and then offer peace before ending the turn which will be accepted and thus the surrender is averted.

I do believe that as Wyndstar mentions that DA could be a little more surrender happy but as long as you get a chance to make peace or even pay their attacker to make peace and thus avoid the surrender then the case between DL and DA is not all that different and I would favor leaving it always enabled.

If the player can be suddenly confronted by bulk surrender without any recourse then I would favor leaving it always disabled.

In DA the waiting period can keep you from making peace with them, since you can't talk to them. I haven't played enough DA though to know if they will surrender to another before the waiting period is over.

No. If you are at war you can't talk to them for 16 turns minimum (that was changed I think in Beta 1.6 of DA)... but they can and often do surrender the very next turn to someone else. While surrendering to my empire is... irksome and makes the game go too quickly, typically several weaker AIs will suddenly turn into one large AI in a flurry of activity as everyone surrenders to whom they think can keep them the most safe. You can't go back to peace with a race save the UP event in less than 16 turns with anyone in DA (and TA). This is one reason the Drath super ability can be so powerful used between AIs.


The player should not be able to choose. As I said originally, it has a real effect on my playstyle... if surrenders are on I go to great lengths to keep my military rating near zero and go for a blitz win... it'll happen anyway. With it off I build huge militaries and take my time and score grind. The problem is, with the trade fatigue and increased chance of surrendering it has to be a part of your strategy.

This is just one of the differences that isn't going to be easily leveled between the two versions (like mega events, super abilities, allowing custom races). Personally I favor randomly setting it by round, but if you find that distasteful surrenders should always be enabled, because that is the harder variation.


Only when at war, but any war will do. A typical, weird outcome will be like this: Turn 1: Thalans declare war on the Snathi. Turn 2: Thalans say, "the snathi are just too powerful" and surrender to the Korx. Turn 3: The Korx were already at war with the Altarians and Torians, now that the Korx are larger, the Altarians immediately surrender to the Korx. Turn 5: The Torians also think the Korx look big, and surrender to them. The above happened to me three games ago while I was playing the Iconians. Less than two months had passed, and the Korx more than doubled in size. During this time period my trade fatigue was up with everyone, so I couldn't even open the diplomacy screen. I lost to the Korx. Hence why leaving it on is harder. Harder isn't necessarily a bad thing.


This is the situation I try to avoid by turning it off, and is always a worry. It will either end your game very early as everyone caves to you, or as is more likely in my game, suddenly everyone but me joins one other empire and I'm crushed under numbers. It makes score grinding very difficult. However, it isn't predictable either. Sometimes the cards will fall just right and no one will surrender. Sometimes the AIs all surrender in a fashion that seems to make sense. But in DA you are really rolling the dice, as once the surrenders start they usually snowball... because whoever gets the first surrender (and their ships and planets) suddenly looks big so everyone just caves to them. The player has no control in this situation.



They will.


I agree you should have one way of dealing with this option. Always dis-allowing surrenders just makes score grinding a breeze because you give the AI one planet in the corner and pray and pray that they don't influence flip to you while you grind (and building the MCC doesn't help this... its very sad - although many people seem to believe having this building stops flipping). With surrenders ON the game most of the time will be over quickly, once you have about 60% of the planets the next war declared will be your last, and you can't control when the game ends. This just means that because you don't know if you can score grind for 2 years or 5, its better to blitz and avoid the situation.

Hope that is a little more clear. I'm always happy to help.
~ Wyndstar

Edit: By the way, in my above game, the Snathi had NO military when the Thalans decided to surrender because of that war. I think the way the AI checks in DA is if it is at war it compares itself to every civ to see if it is on the low end and needs to surrender. That is just a guess.

Yeah I see what you mean about it not being easily leveled. As far as what I think there are really only four options.

1) Surrenders always allowed.
2) Surrenders never allowed.
3) Surrenders allowed/disallowed randomly defined as one of the round's settings.
4) Leave it as a player option.

Of these four options the only one I object to is number 4, but as far as a preference between the other three I would tend to defer to the opinion of those that normally play DA.

As you say as a random setting you can let that help you decide what type of game to go for and this adds a bit of flavor to the round. However there is a choice that folks have in this regard that you haven't mentioned and that is the choice to play DA or DL on a round by round basis. I know some folks do this even without regard to the surrender functionality. I think this kind of a choice is a reasonable thing to encourage as well.

Anyway for the purposes of this round it's clearly specified in the OP to allow surrenders so there is no doubt about how this round should be played. I do think that we should revisit this discussion in the rules thread after the round is over and come to a decision about how this should be dealt with in the future. I'm not really sure what we've done in the past. I don't recall that this was specified for previous rounds, but since it's DA only I may not have been paying attention.


I find for getting a big score there is really no worry about culture flipping the last AI planet. The real problem is in not winning prematurely simply by having greater than 75% influence for 10 turns. I find I generally have to build 8 to 10 fully maxed out influence SB's (337% influence bonus each) and gift them to the AI to keep from winning by culture prematurely. I actually like this because it adds another element that you have to balance properly to get a high score.

In fact I still find the ten turn issue comes into play because of influence not being calculated correctly on the first turn after a game is reloaded. Once the ZOC (zones of control) become dramatically skewed from default values due to high levels of influence tech and the presence of influence starbases, I find that even though I don't control over 75% of the galaxy I do get credited with a turn at greater than 75% every time I reload the game. This puts a count down limit on how many times I can turn off the game towards the end. This has affected me during at least 3 of my MVL games where I ended the game before I could reach the max points that I could have achieved. However I still was able to get top score in all 3 cases even with this issue.

Actually with Iztok and you now in the League I was hoping that we could have some more competition on the top score end of things. Most if not all of the top scores have come from Motti and I and we're both playing DL. You would think that someone playing DA which typically has twice the planet count of DL could give us a run for our money. Then you both come out with nice impressive 0 year wins. Still with a decent score but nothing that can't easily be beat by someone going exclusively for score. Oh well, there's always next month.

[Consider the above the obligitory MVL taunt]

Yeah, I also give influence starbases when score grinding... and I also give every influence tech I research to the last AI. And I also usually make sure the last planet I give them has the restaurant of eternity on it. Its still a constant problem... too much influence that is.

I know you won't get it soon, but in TA many of the Drengin buildings come with a - influence effect, which as you would imagine helps a lot in score grinding situations.

I consider myself taunted. I'll see what the next game involves and what my team thinks they need when the next round starts. I'm a team player first. This time, in our thread they were concerned with getting some fast games out.

~ Wyndstar

I'll consider myself taunted... Now I know I cant compete with fearsome M & M, but I did manage 21000 points this round, though it took me six years and some points-farming (as I call it), to do it. Next round I'll take it up a notch!

Surenders should always be allowed, as in DL you cant turn them off. That would unbalance the playing-field.

Sentient species taste better...

Actually I give the last AI a PQ3 with the Re-Education Center which *does* prevent culture flipping along with some cheap innocuous super project/wonder like the Secret Police Center and take all their other planets and kill all their ships before giving them peace. That way all I need to keep around to kill them off is a single transport.

I would agree except for the comments that the AI's in DA are more surrender happy and due to the minimum time you can be at war you may very well not be able to do anything about an AI stupidly declaring war on you and then surrendering to someone else the next turn once they recalculate their military might ratio.

In DA I dont think you have the option of peace. Whenever it happens to me, the little screen pops up and tells you they surrender to you or whoever. If you click the "speak to" button, it says they aren't a sovereign governing body or some such mumbo jumbo and they are gone.

Either situation is not optimal, but I think that is the lesser of the two drawbacks.

Sentient species taste better...

I agree, which is why I support randomly setting it per round. Lots of opinions...

Glad I'm not the one who has to make the final call

~ Wyndstar

well...no offense to anyone, but isn't it part of the challenge of the game if the AI surrenders to your enemy making them stronger? Its not like we're playing on large maps here; and rarely do we even play on All Abundant, so well...I mean, come one, if Wyndstar can win a game with only three planets for how many years? I think handling the AI getting an extra few planets wouldn't really be that big of a deal.

and side note: y'know...it always scares me a little that Wyndstar has an unfinished Death Star, and since I don't see an X-Wing floating around anywhere to blow it up, I rue the day that he finally gets it completed.

Like I said, I'm pretty much OK with any option *except* letting the player choose. I can see valid arguments for any of the three other combinations and I personally would tend to defer my opinion to those that have more experience with how it plays.

As far as who makes the final call it's really a democratic decision which implies we should vote on it. I do worry about the percentage of folks that participate, the last time was OK (~75%) but the first time was rather anemic at less than half.

I suppose I should setup a vote on this at the Core. Hopefully people will respond. Please note that this is defined in the OP of this thread so this won't be changed for *this* round but we may as well start on this for future rounds. People that feel strongly should make the strength of their opinion known because that may influence those of us that may otherwise be ambivilent between some of the choices.

Anyway please cast your vote in the MVL DA Surrender Setting Vote thread.

Coming to the table so recently, I'm not aware of all the lore of the MV, the Empires and the MVL, and I assume there are good reasons for everything, but I was surprised at two things:
That the MVL teams are not Empire teams.
That the MVL does not have separate divisions for DL and DA games.

As for the surrenders vs no surrenders question, as a DA player I would vote for no surrenders in any MVL round, because I've had experiences like Wynstar's and I feel that the AI surrender syndrome is more a challenge of luck than skill. Of, course, If you cannot disable surrenders in DL that would be a problem.

Please cast your vote in the Voting Thread at the Core. That way it will get counted.

As far as DA versus DL the idea was we didn't want to exclude anyone and we are still fairly new and didn't feel that we had enough folks for two separate divisions. Also I do kind of like the idea that some folks may go back and forth between both. I think the fact that separate divisions would probably mean double the work involved in organizing things would tend to keep things combined as well. Finally I assume that once TA is out and metaverse worthy we will probably acccept TA games as well although this does warrent some discussion.

As far as empires and the MVL, the empire system itself is very old although some empires are newer and more active than others. There are not necessarily the same levels of activity or communication within an empire as there is within the MVL. Also the idea that everyone is playing the same random and changing settings one month to the next is a major difference. Simply that games are on some kind of schedule is a major difference as well. The MVL is still very new and is being continually defined and refined as we speak, hence the need for votes and discussions and such.

Thanks, M. I prefer to not vote on anything for the time being. You all have a good game going here and I don't know enough to vote intelligently. Maybe after a few rounds. If I have a problem with any of the game specs, I'll just deal with it.

That's cool although if you have an opinion you should express it without regard to being new or not knowing enough. In any case if you really do want to go this way that's fine but please put in an abstention in the voting thread, that way your presence is counted.

I posted a MVL round 6 eligible game with my Dionysus character. If I decide to use that game, is it a problem?

best. god. ever.

...

actually, maybe not. Śiva ("Shiva" in english convention) is kinda cool. a toker, you know. but also totally ascetic. so, wine and sex, or pot and abstinance? think i'll stick with Dionysus after all

Well you haven't submitted any other game yet so I guess the issue is that your "normal" MVL chacter is 4 20 and you want to know if it's OK to submit a game under a different character.

I think that Neilo should make a ruling here to be official but for my 2 cents worth I see no issue with this. Basically people have been pretty consistent with playing MVL games with a specific character but if I recall correctly during Round 1 there was a person or two that designated one character as their MVL character and then mistakenly submitted under another character and the game was accepted. So there is some precedence for accepting this. On the other hand to the best of my knowledge this did only occur during round 1 when people were new to the league and since then I don't think that this has happened.

My recommendation is that this should be allowed with perhaps a slight admonishment to be more careful in the future, but I do think these middle of the round exceptions do require commisioner approval. The worst case is that you have a 0 year 16800 game instead of a 0 year 17500 game. I guess it's an embaressment of riches.

One thing to note is that when and if we do move over to the AltMeta that this kind of thing would be a problem. I'm just saying this so people understand the ramifications, not that I think this should dictate how we handle this now.

Neilo will be unavailable for the next few days due to a family situation. May I suggest that FireBender make a ruling on this matter in his stead.

Again, we do have some precedence on this issue from Round 1 and it doesn't actually affect the game at all as it currently stands (since we're not in the AltMeta).

I would suggest an slight admonishment but thats it.

also...if FireBender or Neilo are unable to get respond in a timely manner, how does this affect Ferrel's submission time since he would have posted when he made the mention of it being under the wrong character.

Since I'm trying to better my score it might not matter. I'm still trying to beat Iztok and Wyndstar, but they sure have set the bar high.

I'll fight you there. I worship Ishtar. There is no god ever better than Ishtar.

Female goddess of love, fertility AND war? Sacred prostitution rituals? Do I need to go on?

~ Wyndstar


Edit: Wiki on Ishtar