I know Wyndstar put some effort into score grinding in that one. I have a decent start going in a game I left for lack of time where I think I may have had a shot, but only like 30% or so, of beating that score. One complicating factor: In the beta, the MCC worked. I don't know if that is something that can be overcome, score-wise.
Congratulations on bumping me to second in the Drengin Gambit tournament CityMan. :) I'd been #1 on three of the four tournaments for a bit, but there was not way that was going to last once more people started playing. :) If you haven't tried the tournaments, you should; they are a lot of fun. In addition, there's still a Diplomat on top in two of the tournaments, and I doubt the Kzinti empire can allow that for long. :)
The Altarians have a bunch of cool technologies from Good alignment, but none for Neutral or Evil, so Good is clearly the way to go with them. :)
Nice game Firebender :) Personally, I think the 3 keys to getting 10,000+ are speed and econ and social score (which basically equates to pop growth). I could be wrong though :).
It's terribly easy to avoid the other victory conditions.. Influence victory is impossible if you are at war with another empire, so all you've got to do is whittle the last remaining opponent down to one planet and then stay at war. You can score grind to your hearts content. And I don't see how this would level the playing field between Gigantic and Tiny games?
If they go good alignment, the Altarians also get a tech that gives them an additional +1 PQ. Combine that with the two buildings, and it's a very powerful combination. :) Unfortunately, the Arceans always seem very slow to research Weather Control.
My approach has been kind of a colony rush in waves.. rush, stabilize economy, grab more planets, re-stabilize, etc. The tight budgets do slow things down, but as others have mentioned it seems to impact the AIs even more severely (though I still can't keep up with their colonization rate on suicidal, it's closer than it was in DA). Magnumaniac is right about the Torians. They are rather terrifying. They talk all peaceful like, but don't trust them ;) .
Either in the official Meta or the AltMeta it would be great to have seperate ratings for Twilight, since as Wyndstar has pointed out, it's going to score a lot lower. It may be too large a request though (personally I've no idea how much work would be required for something like that). It's an interesting thing to think about at any rate :).
I think you underestimate the skill level needed to post those obscene scores. There is an element of tedium but a much larger element of skill. It's comforting to think that the best players only score so well because they have a higher tolerance for monotonous score-grinding and that you or I could score as well if there was different scoring metric, but having (as a Galactic Diplomat) seen what these guys are capable of, what they have to do from a pure-skill perspective to reach those scor
Fair enough. Actually, I'd thought you revealing your economic strategy would be more of a threat to my chances for a bonus point than yours, since even if everyone else knew more or less exactly how you'd managed your economy, the chances of 4 different players scoring higher in a 1 year game seemed remote (and I don't believe 0 year is possible personally), while 3 outscoring me is a lot more likely. But I can certainly understand waiting to see what everyone else comes up with independently
Advice: Hope Wyndstar answers your question :LOL: . Other than that, all I can suggest is that you colonize a few planets and get your population up and do a modest econ building build out before you go into "click end turn 40 times until the victory screen pops up" mode. Make sure to pick up Xeno Entertainment, Xeno economics and Star Republic too if you're having economic trouble. Worked decently for me.
Long term, I think optimal play is still to not waste tiles on them and put stock markets up instead. With tidal disrupters and maxed ground combat tech, you can win ground battles when you need to anyway. If this is broken it should be fixed though.
1. Fix the MCC 2. Fix the MCC 3. Fix the MCC 4. Put BattleStations 1 in the Thalan tech tree 5. I've not check this myself, but if the Yor and Korath have no way to improve resource exctraction starbases, that needs to be fixed.
I agree that from a pure game balance perspective, the MCC is/was not balanced. As far as I know, the highest known score in any game was Magnumaniac's 975,800. The highest known score without using the MCC was 529,900 Neutral game by the same player on his Storyteller account. To the best of my knowledge, there has not been a legitimate game with Good alignment to score over 200,000. All of the highest scoring games were played with Evil, and the MCC is the primary reason why. The
Is there any way we can convince you to restore the MCC to it's (evidently unintended) state, with the +100 econ bonus? I can fully understand not wanting it to function differently than you'd originally envisioned it, but changing the MCC now is really the mother of all nerfs. Very simply, it would make the game much less fun. No one wants to buy a new expansion so they can build empires that are markedly weaker than their old ones. It would also have a rather devestating impact on
The MCC is now broken. They've added maintenance, kept the "enemy planets will never influence flip to the player" feature, and taken away the +100 econ. It is now worse than useless. It's still a fun game without it, but not competitive for Metaverse purposes compared to DA or DL.
It's not :( It worked in the Beta, but it's broken for the release. This renders Evil essentially unplayable and Twilight unusable by players looking for Metaverse scores competitive with DA and DL. I'm grieving. :(
I've tested it with the Krynn and the Korath, and it's broken. It is now quite literally worse than useless. It has no discernable benefit, prevents enemy planets from culture flipping to the player, takes up a tile and has upkeep. This is really a massive problem for me personally. It may not have totally killed my enthusiasm for Twilight, but it's certainly put a huge dent in it. This means that anyone interested in scoring decently is stuck with DA or DL. It renders Twilight nea
Shattering records all over the place. :)
The problem is that tech victory for the Twilight Altarians is at the end of the Dark Energy tech branch rather than the research tech branch, which means the total number of research points required is much higher. Additionally, they've lost their econ and morale bonuses, and upkeep costs are higher, and starting funds are lower, so money is going to be a lot tighter too. I love Twilight, I just don't think it's a good fit for this round. In other circumstances, the Twilight Altarians can be
11,020, 1 year, Suicidal, Beyond Mortality, DA 1.80g time stamp 5/5/2008 11:54:54 on JustinSane5. Not the best game, but the quickest submission time, so good for 2 bonus points at least. :) I don't think Twilight is favorable for tech victory personally :(.
Congratulations Magnumaniac! :)
Silver, any ETA on the bonus round? If not, that's fine. Just curious where we're at :).
Twlight does play a bit differently, but it's quite manageable once you overcome the initial shock to the system. Personally, I've found some success making recruiting centers a high priority, building only those on my colonies, and relying on my homeworld for industry. I do generally cntrl-n till I get a precursor mine on my homeworld, since it saves so much on upkeep now that even basic factories run 3 upkeep/turn. It's much cheaper to build and maintain one on a precursor mine than 8 in se
I never was able to get those first two games to post, but it seems to be working normally now, so it's all good for me. :)
