How to keep things playable on gigantic?

Your post seems to answer your own question. Set up the gigantic map with fewer stars, less frequent chance of habitable planets, keep ahead of the alien hordes through technical superiority and work towards building a small number of Huge Hull warships to defend your now highly valuable assets.  If you want to play at the higher difficulty settings look for a starting planet map that provides at least a 700% bonus to research tile.

As far as salvaging your current set up................................................TIME and patience and wait for the inevitable crash.

Good Luck

 

Awell. I already restarted because that was getting silly. T'was a 600+ k score so I was definitely on the right track but the final crash was probably too much because it wouldn't submit. Maybe next time.

Restarting is no big deal to me. It's just a game and I'm not getting paid for completed games. So what?

Fewer things is bad juju, though. I'm a builder. I'm not building all these pretty ships just to send them into a war! That's a horrible thought.

Besides, using fewer mighty ships is not compatible to the Mil SBA because that gives a fixed bonus per ship.

I probably suck at (multiplayer) RTS because I'm perfectly happy just building and marching my troops in parade formations. Having to attack with them is just annoying. Total Annihilation was great because I could build pretty castles with "moats", gates, and towers. Ahhhhh, pretty! And lots of heavy artillery so my troops wouldn't have to actually fight. =P

Actually the better way is to build fewer ships. What you want to build is a *huge hull* ship with an attack value of 1 and a defense value of 1. You still want to make this ship be as cheap as possible.

There are differences in DL vs DA vs TA in this regard but what I did in DL was to rush buy a ship at pretty much every planet that I own but leave it next to the planet that built it. I did this by setting a colony rally point at every planet just to get the ships autolaunched but then each turn I would kill the autopilot destination using the governor. Then every 7 or 8 turns dependent on my logistics I would go around to each planet and form up the ships into a single fleet. This was the time consuming part but it was perhaps only 15 minutes every 7 or 8 turns.

Once all the fleets are formed you can use the shift-click functionality to select all the fleets in huge areas of the map and then send them to their destination under your MSBA. The shift click selection of multiple fleets is a bit tricky and probably needs some more explanation but if you play around with it you'll get the idea.

Anyway this can pretty much eliminate the tedium of ship movement but note that I've used this primarily for DL where ship speed hasn't been ridiculously nerfed. In DA most folks just let them "trickle" in to the rally point. But usually they do at least go for a speed of 16 or so. That's part of the reason you need a huge hull.

The other part is that, sure a MSBA gives you 1512 points for each and every ship but dependent on how many military mining resources you have a huge hull fully populated with BHE/ZPA's can be close to 3000 points per ship or even more. I go for 1 BHE and as many ZPA's as will fit because ZPA's are more points per hull size *and* typically you have a higher defense bonus than you do a weapons bonus.

Then you do a final bankrupting upgrade or possibly multiple upgrades the size of which depend on your machines capabilities and then you turn all your 1/1 huge hull fighters worth 1512 points under your MSBA into huge hull dreadnoughts worth closer to 4500 point under the same MSBA. I generally upgrade 17K ships in one turn. Now *that* turn can take an hour.

BTW my machine is a Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.4GHz but more important than raw CPU performance is minimization of the number and size of memory resident processes since most game perfromance is dependent merely on memory size.

Hmm. Maybe a  twist to that would work even better. In TA you can set all newly built ships to autolaunch regardless and if their automatic rally point (for that colony) means at least 1 square travel distance, they automatically  form up into fleets, too.

Alas, that 1 square is necessary. If they are created on a fleet waypoint they don't form up into fleets. Still - the pathing algorythm for traveling to an adjacent square can't take that long to calculate.

And then the guvner can send "all ships without rally point" to the MSBA. That catches all waiting fleets and saves me the whole fleet-forming and shift-clicking steps.  In theory. If the delay is not from pathing the long distance travel but from looking up the ship record it wouldn't help any. But it's something to try. Far less work than your system in any case since it's only a few clicks however often I decide to do the long treck.

Might have to filter out any asteroid miners I still have going at that point (no destination, too...) but if they are on auto mine it would be enough to set their destination back to zero. That only affects them while traveling to their next job and they are welcome to pick a new target. So only one click, too.

Good point. In my current game I'll soon have 8 military resources. That's pretty sick and if the Yor do something well, it's mining...

Last time round I had trouble maxing out the starbases, though. I was (and am) playing Yor and although I had the full Starbase tree researched, the Hyper-Phasors (Phoser tech) were no available build option at the starbases. Might be a Yor oddity or I was missing a hidden requirement like Sensors X or whatnot.

Hmmm. Numbers! Love that game within the game. =P

Many schools of thought on this one as well. Magnumaniac did one TA game where he essentially "mined" the different AI's for their unique tech's. It took some time but he did manage to get to a 65% bonus per resource mine. Combine that with 8 military resources and you get a huge bonus. Combine that with gaining a handful of "extra" Hyperion Shrinkers and you can reach ridiculous levels of per ship values. Note that if you get to the point of a ship that approaches 6000 attack points then your MSBA becomes obsolete since you gain as much or more from the 25% bonus a ship gains from being in orbit about a planet than you get from it being under a MSBA. Of course your overall ship limit is then only 10 times the number of planets that you have but it does avoid all that ship movement.

Mostly though I think the conventional wisdom is that it takes too long to mine all the AI for their unique techs and shrinkers and it's probably better to just go ahead and take them out as early as possible since the "front-end weighted" aspect of score is so important. That plus the logarithmic nature of score with respect to each individual component of score.

My typical compromize for the ship movement issue is to build in collector rally points. Assign sectors of planets to zones with rally points that don't make their ships move out of their way to the array. It slows the game far less to collect everything in ~12 (depending on star geometry) rally points and only send fleets to the array. This reduces the number of ships/fleets in motion 75% or more.

Another interesting point:

Just to see what happens I built ships with 400 components each. At around 1600 ships built the game crashed with an Out Of Memory error during the build phase. There was no movement involved at all.

So apparently, every single component of every ship is getting dragged along through the entire game and ships should be built with a minimum of fluff.

I'm surprised no one has suggested this yet:

Just before you click the turn button, zoom your camera into a region of empty space.  This will speed things up tremendously.

The basic reasoning is that even with the game options you've selected, it still has to draw the ships moving.  But if you're only looking at a tiny piece of empty space on the map, the game knows it's unnecessary to draw the ships moving and can move them more "instantaneously".

In any case, playing a very similar game on my old Quad-Core (pretty identical specs to yours) would still take almost ten minutes to process a turn at that stage of the game.  How long it took depended a lot on trying to keep the game from moving my camera back to the 'traffic jam' rally point... which depending on game version can be quite a pain. (Dark Avatar is a little better than Dread Lords at avoiding this.)

Thanks but I had already done that. What did work to speed up the turn time, however, was a combination of the waypoint systems from posts 4 and 6.

Single ships would travel shorter distances. Then the formed up collector fleets were sent to the MSBA. That cut at least 2/3 off the time required for the "autopilot movement" phase.

 

In my last game I hit massive out-of-memory problems, though, but I found a workaround.

The problem: upgrading (from the shipyard screen) a whole shiptype with 1600 ships to another shiptype (without useless engines...) would result in something that looked and felt like a memory leak.

The operation worked but afterwards I could not save any more. Never again. As a result, the game reliably crashed upon "winning" when it was trying to create the End Game save. Well damn. No score for me.

The workaround:

manually upgrade enough ships so the bulk upgrade was less than 1000 ships at a time. That way GC retained the ability to save and did not crash at the final moment.

Manually upgrading 500+ ships sounds like a ton of clicking but that's what Autohotkey is for. A keyboard macro did the clickeroo in some 30-60 min while I was reading. Jobs like that are what we have computers for, right?

So after several days of trying to "complete" this already won game it would finally upload the score... http://metaverse.galciv2.com/index.aspx?g=player&id=17099

But why the saintly alignment? The Harmony Center (or wutsisname) adds another 25% to ship defense and since about 2/3 were military score, every point counts.

I did indeed go with "fewer ships" this time. With Yor + (stolen/traded) terran mining tech I had abilities like +454% Weapons and +506% Defense. Is that crazy or what?

 

It was a very painful experience, though, (mainly for my wrists...) so not sure if I'll try that again. Are they any more shiny medals than "Top 25"?  The medal legend here http://metaverse.galciv2.com/index.aspx?g=legend doesn't show any.

Oh, I don't need first place or anything lofty like that. I won't be playing this seriously enough to try and steal any die-hard player's thunder. Not interested in the empire dealy, either. You know those T-shirts that say... DO I LOOK LIKE A PEOPLE PERSON?

You can and should make note of this game in the The Millionaire's Club thread. You're only the 9th person to achieve a million point game and I do believe that you might very well have the top TA score.

I think most of the TA 1 million point games did not include an upgrade and went with a more balanced approach that included a fair amount of focus on your tech score, although I'm not positive about that. I'm sure some folks would be happy to discuss various strategies in that thread.

Anyway regardless of your seriousness or lack thereof this is not a trivial accomplishment.

 

One die-hard player's opinion....something earned is not stolen.  Your mem # and posted game suggests your'e not a casual player.  Go for the thunder. 

Take Mumble's advice and screen your game in the Millionaire's Club.  It's a great score and should be recognized.

Finally, not all empire members are people persons.  Most encourage and respect the einzelganger. 

I wouldn't call myself a casual player. I played Everquest for about 7 years, 5 of those in one of the highest end raid guilds there are, playing up to 5 characters simultaneously (without macro software!), and had almost 4 years of playtime logged on the main account. Normal? Sensible? Nawwwww. Powergamer it is. (or certain latin terms come to mind...)

I just don't think I'll play GalCiv anywhere as seriously as that.

Besides, I'm usually off modding/scripting X3: Terran Conflict.

So okay, here's my Millionaire's Club card:

I'm just leery of empires because they smell of raid guilds. And those are virtual heroin.

Sure there are some great trips. Going XP grinding with an all Club FU party is like watching Delta Force in action. There is no argueing about who has to do what, when, or how. There is no need to. So what if the cleric lets the tank drop to 20 % HP? It just means she's going for efficiency and saving mana... to nuke. A nuking healer scares the bejeezus out of "casual" players but with powergamers like that you're simply not playing on the same terms. Sounds like swaggering? It's not.

And just like heroin it can easily destroy your life. Or rather... eat it whole.

Thanks for this one because you also answered your question i guess.