rogerano

Join Date 10/2005

Start game... unbalance?

Anybody see anything wrong with this arrangement of players at the start of a new game? On the one hand it could be seen as pretty crowded and potentially unbalanced. One player could dominate quite easily. Worse, the light blue player is severely hamstrung from the outset. Realistically this player is dead meat. Thankfully it's not me (this time) but I've been put in that position before and you just don't have a chance - espeically at higher levels of difficulty.

On the other hand you could argue that that's just how things are...

Are there any plans to make the distribution of player starting locales not so random? Personally I count this as a bug, or unbalance. Even if this layout were some sort of "race to empty space" scenario, the light blue player never had a chance.

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Well, If you look carefully to colony maitenance costs (25BC per colony at minimum), I am not sure that the domination is so obvious

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From what Ive seen, the AI still has huge amounts of colonies.

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definently agree with rogerano the light blue guy can only expand so far b4 its expanding nieghbors cut off any colonizable planets and since in the beggining of the game he dosnt have enough range to go beond his nieghbors his nieghbors can take there time and expand out whenever they want

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well this just means you have to switch from your usual peaceful expansion at the beginning to other strategies: go for transports early, together with a simple defender design or something, and invade the major 2 or 3 planets of the guy blocking you in, while he is building colony ships.

It may be harder than the usual style, but then, every galaxy needs a slightly different strategy!

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looks like randomness to me, not unbalance.

if i were playing light blue i'd try to make friends with pink while colonizing straight across the board, hopefully pinning red in the corner, then take him out and work on the rest.

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Even if you start with a more war-like attitude and are able to start conquering planets early, Pink isn't going to release those planets without responding meaning both players will be spending their efforts on developing weapons, transports and capturing planets while the purple and red will be able to expand and build infrastructure.

After a while, you will have purple and red with a strong base and still able to expand while pink / lt blue have barely moved out of their starting sphere. It's a matter of economics, pink / lt blue will never be able to compete (all other factors being even) against the stronger base of purple / red.

Now sometimes that can be challenging but I suspect most people play with the computer turned up to the highest level they can compete against without being further handicapped. Most times if you start in the lt blue situation you're better off just resigning and moving on unless you've specifically turned down computer opponents and hope for a poor placement to handicap you.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2411

You can always hit Ctrl-N to regenerate the galaxy.

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Yes, Frogboy, though I find that reloading games in combination with checking the map with "show ownership" to seldom survive more than a single regeneration of the map, and since I'm one of the people stuck with a 2 minute startup time for GC2, Ctrl-N doesn't save as much time as you'd think.

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2 minute startup time!?!?!?

Dear Lord. I thought my pc was old.

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You can always hit Ctrl-N to regenerate the galaxy.

I sincerely hope that isn't your final word on the subject! We should not have to resort to exposing where the other races are to check for a balanced start. That takes all the fun out of exploration for me. Perhaps instead we can be given a choice on one of the startup screens for "random" or "balanced" distribution of race homeworlds.

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That's the silly part about it, LAB72. The machine sits at 0-2% CPU usage and NO disk activity for the entire 2 minutes, and is by far the fastest machine I've tested GC2 on. It's my primary game machine. AMD64 3500+ in a socket 939 MB, a gig of CAS 2.0 400 Mhz DDR memory (512MB in each channel, also normally 1.5G of same, but I dropped down to 1G to make sure that I wasn't having memory issues, and just haven't gotten around to sticking the rest back in), an nVidia 6800GT video card with 256MB of ram, WinXP, and one of the faster 7200 RPM 80G ATA hard drives. Stuff that was cutting edge enough when I bought it that I got free copies of Doom III and Farcry just to show off the games on good hardware. Once I get into the game, the game is capable of going so fast that if i blink, I miss the fact that my last defenders at some important planet just got blown away.

I think it's waiting on something and timing out, it's the only thing I can think of. I'm not the only person that has seen this, but it's definitely rare. I've tested GC2 on 3 machines, and this is the only one that has shown this problem. I only definitely remember one other person in these forums mention having this problem, though there might have been two. It's NOT a major issue for the general gameplayer base, just a major issue if you're one of the handful of people that are affected by it.

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