Creativity/luck reloading

Hi,

in a short game on a small map etc such behaviour could be helpfull esp. in the very beginning of the game (ie the colonizialisation of your homesystem) but pls notice that reloading will resett your influental zone; thus, on a bigger map you will make less bc through tourism; and if you are aiming to achieve a cultural victory or try to snap foreign planets to your empire then this chance will also be decreased.

I've not done any maths to the method you're describing (SoleSoul is the man for this^^) but one thing I encountered was that the chance that such an colonization event will happen is not totally random, but can be influenced by the things you were doing prior to that findal step of colonization.

For example, if I had a colony ship one click in front of an habitual planet, I'd just qucicksaved, colonized, and reloaded if nothing happened.

However, now if there was a colonization event, the chances were fairly high that upon reloading such an event will happen, again. So, basically, you could just safe this event, reload your quicksave, and try for some time until an event would happen that would play greatly to your strategy.

On a note, if that colony ship just had some movement points left you could just take another move around that planet and by that, greatly alter the chances to get such a colonisation event (this is the way of influence you have of this thing).

Of course, if you had such a colonization event, there wouldn't be the need to do so, but on the other hand, if you didn't get or almost never got such an event, then you could just take your colony ship and fly another route or consume the last remaining movepoints, and repeat this until you would get a colony event and then take this safepoint.

Good luck

You mentioned that your influence is reset when loading. Is that a bug? Does it correct itself after the next turn or is it a case of its not worth playing games that will take multiple sessions to play?

Yes, it does correct itself after a turn has been played, which means it's not typically a problem unless you reload every 3 turns or less.  Tourism income is also generally a smaller component of your income as compared to tax, at least until mid to late game, at which point reloading shouldn't be nearly as necessary, so it's not any great loss.  And as far as a culturual conquest goes, that'll be mid to late game as well.

Furthermore, if memory serves you can simply keep some spare constructors on hand to build influence starbases with, so as to force-update the influence areas.

It is technically a bug, but seemingly not one that was deemed important enough to fix-to my knowledge, it's been present in all versions of GC2.

The Influence reset bug also allows an exploit.

Specifically, if you have a planet that is threatening to revolt or switch allegiance, one can "buy" time - one turn at a time - to build a constructor or influence planetary improvement by saving and restarting.

Similarly, if one is in the middle of an influence takeover run, saving and restarting (say the next day) means that all the planets you have poised to join you all reset and you have to wait a turn, etc.