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

Yeah but this time I was only looking for the 100% research bonus tile.

Actually I repeated the same experiment except with the Torians and got the same research of 73. So this is nothing unique to the Yor. I chose the Torians because they have the same set of starting techs as the Yor minus Ion Drive.

I then tried the Terrans and same thing. I tried both metaverse and non-metaverse games and got the same thing. I even tried changing research speed from slow to fast to very fast. Still got the same 73 points of research.

I even looked at the raceconfig files and nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.


There's something obvious that we're missing here because I can't get anything different than 73 research with these settings no matter what I do.

Ah... I found it!

I reduced my difficulty to Tough and lo and behold I got exactly what I expected. In this case I didn't bother to find a 100% bonus tile I just plopped down a basic lab which with the civ cap gives a base research of 30 set my sliders to 100% and I get 42 research which is exactly what I would expect since 30*1.4=42.

Well this is a shock. Getting a research bonus at Suicidal that you don't get at Tough? What's going on here?

I then tried every difficulty from Tough to Suicidal and everything worked fine until Obscene where you get an additional 35% research bonus and then Suicidal where you get an additional 60% research bonus. This was with the 40% total bonus between race and political party.

However I then took the Technologists party out of the equation leaving only the 20% research bonus in play and in this case at Suicidal the total extra bonus was only about 20%. As a check I did it the other way leaving the 20% from the Technologists in play but removing the racial ability and got the same extra 20% at Suicidal. Finally I tried it with no research ability and everything behaved as normal.

So it appears that Obscene and Suicidal are getting an extra bonus that in some way is proportional to your research ability. Actually the relationship is stronger than linear since a 20% reseach bonus yields an extra 20% and a 40% research bonus yields an extra 60% at Suicidal.

Has anyone ever noticed this effect before? Sounds like a job for Iztok.

I would never have noticed this before because I've never taken a research bonus. Perhaps I should start.

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.

Yes, I think that is exactly what is going on. And a very diplomatic response to my paragraph:



It was early in the day for me too, and I was getting frustrated because I thought people thought I wasn't trying to give them the whole story. The round is over. Its a single player game. My gameplay approach secrets don't make me a better person if I horde them to myself for my whole life. I was just failing in communication because I've gotten to the point where this seems easy and automatic, and I wasn't understanding what I wasn't saying that stopped anyone from grasping it. I'm glad the AAR helped. I have no doubt you will all now practice this and become much better than me!



Of course, I don't seem to be too much of a help to the league, my team practically came in last place! It took me a while to find the results Silverbeacher posted. I'm not in charge, but I think final score tallies and team rankings should go in the first post once the round is over. Just an idea.

A little more interesting is what you have discovered from my screenshots.



My first question is does it work that way with all political party choices... perhaps to continue to make them matter at top levels? For instance what is the actual effect on income at suicidal with a +20% economy bonus and federalist party? Does that result in a behind the scenes extra boost? What about +20% morale and populist party? Or (gasps) +30% weapons and war party? The stats on those endgame ships could be... could be... wow!

Add THAT to the Arcean Stellar Forge in TA and I betcha I could get a single huge hull up over 2000 attack before SBs. Now I need to go do some testing as well...


Always fun to chat about this stuff. And again, I'm sorry if there was any misunderstanding earlier. I've always loved chatting with everyone on these boards (with a few notable Troll exceptions) and I always mean well even if I come off curt or dismissive.

~ Wyndstar

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

I may try it, but I am afraid it may take a little of the fun out of the game for me.

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.

Please play how you like... but. Why is it HAVE to invade, don't you WANT to invade? Which are cheaper, colonizers or transports? Personally I find the cost roughly equal. So: Do you ever steal a technology from colonizing a world? Do you ever colonize a world that's already built for you? Do you ever have to research advanced technologies to INVADE extreme environment worlds?

IMO, colonizing is a mistake unless you HAVE to do it.

~ Wyndstar


P.S. I know that might seem crazy. Let me say that typically when dealing with more than about 60 habitable planets (assuming 9 opponents) you do HAVE to colonize. It is an important early game strategy for Huge and larger maps... because you need to colonize to extend your range so that you can start invading.

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.

@FB
I've been toying with the idea of Yor Super Breeder with the Korx homeworld(s) myself.

You heard me, Korx. You (and everyone else) are welcome to share their thoughts on that particular choice-or the other ones, too, I guess.

I keep on being victimized by a rounding error that's extremely difficult to track down, though. I've sent in a couple of savegames to Cari but I'm not expecting anything-I can't even always duplicate it, though I can reliably do so, and the conditions it occurs under make no sense from any standpoint whatsoever. Let's just say it's annoying only having 74 industry when you need 75 to build that factory-and based on your production x bonuses, 75 is what you should have.

@Wyndstar
Personally, I like colonizing. But then again, I like invading, too...
Mostly I think it's me building the worlds as I see fit, rather than as the AI sees fit. I'd probably do a bit better if I cut off colonizing about halfway through, though.

@Mumble
Were you perhaps on a planet with (a) moon(s)? Seems the most logical place to look for the 10% bonus, and I didn't test whether moons worked in DL, just noticed when rings didn't-though I admit it'd be REALLY odd if one worked and the other did not.

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.

Yep Earth. That explains the 10% production discrepancy. See how easy it is to ignore the obvious.

As far as the 13% influence discrepancy I doubt anyone really cares about that one.

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.

I love it when I take a planet that's building a tech capital (note: already built is nice too, but in build queue is preferred). At that point the planet is fairly useless anyway, but it just feels like so much of an accomplishment. And, at least in theory, they should still be able to build it somewhere else, as they no longer have a planet with one/theirs on it.

Yay! More tech capitals!

I've always been a little curious about influence as it relates to tourism, but given the factors involved, it seems it's probably not even worthwhile to attempt to work out a formula for it. So, yeah. No one cares about influence.

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.

2nd try was a 22050 pnt game. UNREAL. defenately nice for points.

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

I just read that thread recently for kicks.

Anyway, having finally found time to read through Wyndstar and Mumbles dissection of year zero wins, I have to say... Wow. Especially Wyndstar, who makes it sound so easy... Guess I have a few things to try out over the weekend.

I find my econ takes a donkey kicking though

Actually this is not all that uncommon.

When I went to MIT in the early 70's I had a lot of very high powered lecturers. However one of the main benefits and what turned out to be the most helpful were the graduate teaching assistants and it was for exactly this reason.

It's wasn't that the TA's understood the material better or presented the material better because they didn't even come close. What they understood that the professors didn't was where people tended to have difficulty and how to help them get past each sticking point.

I once had Nobel prize winning economist Robert M. Solow as a lecturer and he was by far the best lecturer I've ever had. He basically sat in a chair on the podium of an auditorium like classroom and talked for an hour without reference to any notes.

It was a 2nd level quantitative macro economics course and he made the material seem so logical and simple that it seemed obvious. So obvious that it seemed as if the whole course boiled down to only a few basic mathematical relationships and everything else could be easily derived from these few equations.

Sort of like Maxwell's equations but for macro economics. Anyway it came time for the first test and in the middle of it I discovered to my dismay that perhaps this wasn't so logical and simple and I couldn't quite manage to derive things from first principles after all. Soon after I had to drop the course.

It wasn't a course I needed. As an Electrical Engineering student at MIT, a 2nd level quantitative macro economics course was actually something I was using to satisfy my Humanities requirement believe it or not. I ended up taking some kind of Contemporay Moral Issues crap that to me was really painful instead, but I never forgot that experience of being lulled into thinking something was easy that really wasn't easy. What came through was that it was easy, *for him*.

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.   

A quick thought here;

Have any of the previous rounds tried using one initial saved game file for all the people playing on DL and a different one for all the people playing DA? I don't understand if the Metaverse would pop up a cheat flag for that, but if it doesn't it would make for an interesting round. People would be able to compare their strategies in a more "apples to apples" fashion if it could be done.

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).

Correct, the character (and corresponding serial, IINM) is somehow encrypted in the savegame.

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.

---

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.