ARG!!! I think I just tripped over the anti-cheating code without cheating.

Could it be due to the re-loading? It seems like a common thread among the others who have complained about this problem. Just my guess.

It could do done to discourage people from reloading too many times to get a better advantage.

I think Brad had asked someone else to send him his savegame so that he could look it through. You may want to do that as well.

Oh, forgot to mention: This was with 1.03.054, bonus pack 1.006, multimedia package 1.007, no MODs installed.

I reloaded an autosave and saved it in case anyone wants to take a look at it.

I think I need to take a break now. This is only a game, something like this shouldn't ruin my weekend. (yeah, I know, it's monday, but I took the day off, and no, not just to play GalCiv, though it was the major reason I didn't get as much done over the weekend as I wanted to

After this, I don't think I'll ever play another gigantic map again. Sigh.

My last 1.03.054 game had hundreds (literally) of CTDs. Between the new save game CTDs (crashing when it is time to save the Human info), to the crashing caused when giving an AI a planet it abandons, I hit lots of CTDs. No problem with my scoring the game.

I'd suspect it was having all the good and evil techs. Or your extreme score in one or more fields.

Quite possibly the reloading. I normally don't get CTDs more than once, maybe twice a game. But I found that the game, on my otherwise stable machine, just didn't want to stay up for more than 6-8 hours at a time with a gigantic map, sometimes not even that. This is on an AMD 1500+ with 512MB RAM and a 64MB GF3 TI200 video card.

I also had serious problems with invisible ships during this game, so there may have been some corruption issues.

One other thing that might have tripped the cheat-detection. My population graph was almost a vertical line near the end of the game, because I was still expanding (grabbing Class 12 and up, between the Terraformer, 5% PQ pick and the two +10% PQ techs (not social improvements) since they were immediately inhabitable, plus expanding into the other empires space), I was culturally assimilating star systems, and I wasn't invading any planets, I'd just take out all the races ships and then demand all their systems for peace.

Frogboy, are you interested in the saved game?

I had a very similar problem - and, like Popup Target, I had a problem with an invisible ship in the game. (Funny, though - I'd never built an Overlord [did it just 'cause I could], and I thought it's invisibility was a *feature*... doh!)

Anyway, Frogboy had me e-mail him my saved game (which also had a few re-loads due to the interruptions of real-life known as sleep and work), so hopefully we'll have an answer soon.

BTW, my game was also on a Gigantic galaxy with a Beyond Human victory that scored me FAR more points than I'd ever earned before (because I'd never played on a Gigantic map).

Hope they figure this out...

Yea, I figured it out. We will be putting out an update and you should be able to resubmit your score. So save that game.

Is this related to the overrun on the Tech IDs? And if so, will the fix be server side or game side?

Thanks for the good word, Frogboy! (Now, I sure hope I saved that game for resubmission to the Metaverse... otherwise )

i just finished a game where all sensor drones, and class 25 planets were invisible. it was a gigantic/abundant game. it froze in the last 4 turns of the game(may have just been the turn taking a LONG time to advance). when i posted to the metaverse there was no issue with the game's authenticity.

~SDC~

Frogboy, any estimate on when the update will be available? See what you've done, you've got us thinking all of our problems will be fixed within 48 hours now .

I've noticed that on gigantic maps when there are already lots of ships about that the random event that gives 100 corvettes can -really- take awhile to process. So anytime you get a freeze be patient before ctrl-alt-deleting it, it might just be processing that event.

The new update is available.

OUCH! Was the bug fix supposed to drop my score that far? It changed from (if I remember correctly) 9784 down to 2665. Was it incorrectly computing my score before, and that's why it triggered the "anomalous" flag?

Hmmm. It won't load either of my previous 03-era saved games. Okay, the first one was started in 51 and finished in 54, but the last one was a pure 54 game. Darn, I didn't even submit that one. That's life.

-Robert

~SDC~

Popup - hard to say on the specifics. But the new scoring system has been modified a bit. You don't get nearly as many points for winning beyond humanity. The metaverse analysis program is indicating, for lack of a better term, running up the score type behavior. Where players were just getting near the end and just not finishing the game to run up their score.

The new system takes the amount of time played into account more. I.e. better to finish them off quick if you can. If you go beyond humanity, you get a big bonus for doing that but it may not overcome the time it takes.

Incidentally, down the line pre 1.03A scores on the metaverse will be retroactively adjusted based on the new algorithm.

~SDC~

Fair enough. I tend not to push hard to end the game fast, so it's reasonable that my scores are going to tank with that modification. Good thing I play for the fun of it

I also noticed that the 5% PQ pick is gone, so I probably lost the benefit of that pick, which would have caused morale to tank on some planets during the last few turns while I was replaying the end of the game.

...? the 5% PQ is gone?

And the metaverse takes into account reloads? I typically only play 1 - 2 hours a day in a game, so I save it a lot, and load it a lot....

Yeah, I reload a lot, since I don't play for more than an hour at a time most sessions. Not that it matters, since I suck to no end and always play difficulty levels way above my ablities. But that's the way I like it

The pre-1.03 scores will be adjusted accorindg to the new algie?

PANIC! That could really shuffle the Top Empires around.

::begins a new game intent on military domination::

I suspect a reload is defined as loading the game (presumably the same game) when there's already one active, not firing one when the game's just been started. Obviously the idea is to cut down on battle/invasion cheese.

I'm not sure how fair penalising the player for taking 'too long' will work out to be. How do you distinguish a player that took ages because they eventually won a long, drawn-out battle of attrition (or cultural conquest), vs. one who belted the 'end turn' button until their population hit 20 trillion?

I think a better way of doing this would be to have a very minor penalty for each extra turn, and a decaying curve for points-per-population, so that there's maybe only a thousand points difference between 6 trillion and 12 trillion.

~SDC~

For some reason 57 let me upload an unsubmitted old game (that the previous version wouldn't let me), including the one that went up with a zero score as Difficulty: Anomalous, but that went up yet again as a zero score and Difficulty: Anomalous.

Is it possible to just get those removed?

-Robert

~SDC~

"I think a better way of doing this would be to have a very minor penalty for each extra turn, and a decaying curve for points-per-population,..."

A most excellent proposition. This would also diminish the unfair scoring disadvantage of players who prefer small maps.