The Holiday Issue of the Metaverse Review is now out!

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Headlines Include:

~ Altarian Prophecy beta released
~ The Centurions appear!
~ Euros, then Fellowship surpass 1000 games

And Much, Much More!

Am I seeing things? Does the Tech list in 1.13 actually remember that I like it sorted by cost? Permit me a small Dance of Joy...

Actually, it defaults to Cost now. I actually like mine sorted by Months to Completion. I have to change it back when I restart GalCiv.

I just sent my join email. I should have this game before new year .

We can't add you until you actually have the game, because you have to register your player name before you show up on my control panel.

We're looking forward to having you onboard, though.

- Sirian

Well, then you've lost nothing, right? But those of us who do sort by Cost have gained something.

- Sirian

LOL I was just hoping it would remember your own personal preference. That way we all gain!

RB, it will take a lot more than the Evil Empire losing Lord Megatron to beat us. Haha, I would like to see that day.

Well we made it to 7th place, with a very small lead on the pirates. Can we keep that position until the new year? Merry Christmas everybody!

~SDC~

Damnit

7th RudeBoys - iz you all on da bex? mmm where iz me stash of bex......

We've eked our way up to 7th, but it is as yet far from secure. We have a lot of covering our tails to do before we set our sights on the next target. There could yet be plenty of hot action left in the current wars, especially if JaxomCA tires out, wanders off to another pursuit, or gets assassinated by the Evil Ones.

- Sirian

Reinforcements have arrived.

My email has been sent (again), my player has been registered, and I've posted my first win (on normal, but hey, it's better than a loss ).

Christmas Kudos for Chenglian and MeatSac, both of whom have ventured up to Maso with some success. MeatSac is ripping up those Tiny maps. Helps to balance out my Medium-to-Huge range and Jaxom's Huge-Gigantic preference. Chenglian has been doing Small-to-Large.

Welcoming Smegged finally. 9k on a Normal, that's pretty good. I didn't score that much until I moved up to Crippling. Of course, I didn't have a friggin clue how to play until about then, either, but still, it's a good sign.

Now if only we can get our smooth talkers, Charis and Occhi, to tune in, we can liven up this joint a bit. I'm waiting to see what happens if Charis gets unleashed on the Metaverse. The place will never be the same again. In a good way, of course.


- Sirian

Yeah, we need his maths skills to make sense of all the formulaes and numbers.

~SDC~

Finished a 33k alliance win (maso, large, occasional), playing as populists but with no other diplo picks. I blew half my picks on Economy +30 just to see what it would do (my economy turned out not noticeably better than normal.) Drew a not-too-hot start too, got stuck in a corner with only a few stars in my immediate vicinity. While the Torians in the center of the map got a monster start, I managed to get all of 1 PQ 17 and 3 PQ14s as my initial colonies. Managed to claw my back from there in my usual fashion, by gobbling minors and poaching on AI wars against the weaker majors. Look for a brief AAR on the RBGC forum shortly.

That game felt a bit less like milking than the last, and I can see some of the good points a larger map brings. Moving ships around got pretty annoying after a while, though; that took up most of my time. I think small/abundant to medium/(?) might be a good range for me, possibly with the occasional tiny or large map.

That one game managed to catapult my player score from pitiful to 327 overall, so I must have done something right. For someone who has already won a couple times on Maso, I'm no longer embarassed by my position in the RB empire player list.

Woah--go away for a few days, and the empire is jumping up like crazy! I have been slowly working up the difficulty game--my last being at maxpainful, with all but the altarians and drengins @ genius.

I have to echo Zed's map thoughts. I am playing my first (other than the sg) large map, and the ship movement is a pain. I think I may be stuck in this range--mainly for time contraints. I expect to be moving up to maso within my next two solo games. And I still don't have a clue LOL .

Oh yeah--and TBC's now up in the SG. Speaking of SGs--I am doing a lot more micromanaging in the SG than I would in a solo game (same trend for CivIII). I think that means that RBSG2 should be on maso

Happy Holidays to all the RB crowd!
[Message Edited]

Which ships are you moving around? I used to scout in details, using scouts, colony ships and freighters. Since moving to gigantic maps, I thought there must be a less tedious way. Now I research stellar cartography early and send freighters directly to star clusters with an habitable star. I do my best to build the Eye of the universe and once I have built it, I send one sensor drone per stripes of 3 sectors and just set them to autopilot from one side of the map to the other. This has removed a lot of tedious ship movement.

Congrats on graduating to the maso class, time to break the black leather.

~SDC~

The Metaverse Review is updated!

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Headlines Include:

~ Jedi Republic shows it's heart
~ New Empires

And More!

Are you using the goto commands much? Build extra sensor drones (no maintenance) and just send them out. Even if you don't get Eyes of the Universe, that will take care of most of your exploration needs. Jaxom's idea of research Stellar Cartography early is also a good one, for huge and gigantic maps, although I doubt you'll ever do a Gigantic.

Eyes of the Universe makes scouting a breeze. The real pain, though, is constructor management if your alliance options are thin or nil. GalCiv can stretch out significantly on the rare occasions when the late game remains highly competitive due to runaway AI's. Wait until you see my upcoming AAR.


- Sirian

My weirdest game so far, so I thought I'd share it with you. Sorry, no pictures, my camera is broken.

The setting was a gigantic size galaxy of tightly clustered stars of rare habitability. I wanted an easy game on this boxing day so I took the populist party with an extra 50 in diplomacy and military production, with the extra 2 points going into creativity and luck.

Earth was a PQ 19 sitting in the most lower right sector. The system held nothing else of value and I was tempted to restart but there were at least 20 stars within range of my initial colony ship so I decided to have a go at the map. Outside my initial range, there is a big cluster of stars near the middle of the map, a smaller one straight north and an even smaller one straight west. Influence scouting reveals Arcean presence to the west and nothing of interest in the other 2 clusters. With a bit of luck, settling one of the reachable stars to my NW and with the help of controlled gravity and gravity mastering, I might be able to reach the big clusters with my colony ships.

So my initial colony ship went his way NW while my surveyor went to take a look at 4 nearby stars to my west. The surveyor discovered a system with PQ 15 and 14 planets to my west. Since a certain discussion, I now bow to the great philosopher Sirian and don't hesitate to land settlers on such low quality planets, specially on a rare habitability map. This would turn out to be my only 3 planets for a long time.

My colony ship did find 4 yellow stars in the NW cluster. Unfortunatly, they were already infected with Alexians lifeforms. While it may look as a boon to some, after researching the requisite techs to open negociations I realized the Alexians already had quite a research powerhouse. Instead of selling them techs, I ended up buying Basic environment, Impulse drive, Artificial gravity and Nano-Metals from them. However they sent me 2 freighters and I quickly did the same, kickstarting my economy early.

This put a hamper on my plan to reach the middle of the map. Amongst the other 15+ stars around the Alexian territory, the best available planet was a PQ 10. This would let me reach the easternmost star of the middle cluster if I researched controlled gravity AND gravity mastering. Before investing so much time in those techs, I decided to make a quick run fro stellar carthography, ignoring my usual economic package hoping the Alexian would provide the needed techs in that area. This revealed 5 yellow stars in the middle-of-the-map cluster and influence scouting revealed they were infection free, at least from any major civs. It also revealed 4 yellow stars in the north cluster, but these would remain out of reach until I could send a constructor halfway there.

So I researched Controlled gravity and gained the range to reach a lonely star closer to the middle cluster. I sent a group of colony ships that way and settled the pq 10 when my fleet reach the end of its range. That lonely star had 0 planets! I would have gladly settled a PQ 1 in order to reach the juicy yellow stars.

During the trip there, the Kwilasian built the diplo translator somewhere, the Arcean nabbed frictionless clothing, the Torian got gravity accelerators and the Altarians opened a galactic stock exchange. I was getting less than my share of wonders, so I cranked up the military spending as much as the budget allowed to get a couple of constructors out of Earth. +50 in military production means I had to do this only for 4 turns to get 2 constructors. During that time, my other 2 planets built more than a handful of colony ships. The plan was to use both constructors to let me reach the middle cluster and the northern one. Influence scouting revealed the Arcean had already laid claims on one of the five central stars so time was of the essence.

It would take 10 turns to research gravity mastering, allowing my forward colony ships to reach another sector with 2 unknown stars. It would take 20+ turns to get one of the constructors close enough to extand my range toward the middle cluster. Either solution would probably mean losing all chances at getting a yellow star in the middle of the map. Then I thought about all the colony ships I had back home, and all the ugly, yet empty planets in that sector. My PQ 10 was contributing 15+ research to the pool, how many of these worlds would I need to reduce the 10 turns to something more in line with the time requirement? Well I landed people of the 6 ugliest planets and this reduced the time needed to 5 turns. It would completly empty my war chest but it was worth it.

My surveyor did his part by findind 2 research anomalies in a row, each giving a 25% discount, bringing the time to research to 2 turns. Creativity is rumored to improve your chances at getting a discount on a research anomaly. I don't know if that is true, but it sure feels that way after taking the pick for a few games. However, I remember one game where I hit 6 of those anomalies while researching Evolution Control and not one of them granted a discount, so go figure. What creativity does do for sure is, enabling me to research Xeno-intimidation, an evil trade route tech, even though I was at 35% morality. After getting gravity mastering, I kept all the death trap worlds a couple of more turns to research Xeno-intimidation, also helped by another fruitful research anomaly.

My forward colony fleet moved ahead, found a planet to land on and continued toward the juicy middle of the map. There I met both the Arcean and the Altarian, beating them by one turn to the last yellow star, a pq 15 turned pq 19 by a pq event. The Arceans got 2 of the yellows and the Altarians got the other 2. The Arcean had roughly the same size empire I did but they must have felt very lonely in their neck of the woods, they lacked all the most basic techs. They did however have knowledge of instant communications and alliance, meaning they would get star democracy soon. On the other hand, the Altarians were scary, they had at least 15 systems to their name already! It looks like they had concentrated on military techs, having knowledge of battle armor and space militarization, prerequisite to battleships. Something would have to be done about the runaway Altarian, but he would only go to war against the Arcean, who were to frail to pose much of a threat. Even without building a single warship, my fleet of constructors, colony ships, scouts and a single corvette my surveyor found, my military rating was twice as high as the Arcean.

Maybe the Altarian were already at war with the other 3 races. I started scouting the influence map to find them. I found the Torian way to the west. It looked like they had 5 systems to their name. But the Yor and Drengin were nowhere to be found. I looked and I looked and I looked and couldn't find a single system where their influence was dominating. Out of curiosity, I saved, enable cheats and revealed the map. Well guess what? There was no Yor or Drengin civilizations, they were both gobbled up by the monstruous Altarians, all this before battleships hit the starfield!

I was a bit worried this might be my first defeat but I kept on playing. Eventually I met the Torian who were almost the military equal of the Altarian. It costed me a lot of money (75 for 99 turns along with some decent techs) to get them to declare war on their friend the Altarians but they did accept and even gave me gravity accelerators as a bonus. This may seems costly but I needed to turn the Altarian's attention away from my evilness (now down to 29% but slowly rising). Gravity accelerators and Hyperspace, which I researched myself, let me beat the Altarian by one turn to all 4 free stars in the north cluster, one of them a natural PQ 20.

So there I was, with my 3 pq 19+, 4 pq 15+ and 3 pq 14, to the Altarians 18 systems with God knows how many planets. The Torians and Arceans had 6 systems each, so I kept the Altarians at war against those 2 for most of the game. After the early wonders debacle, I built all the other wonders and trade good. My planets were churning out waves after waves of constructors, all heading toward the middle of the map where the Altarians had the highest concentration of planets. My cultural dominance of the middle cluster striped the Altarians of 10 planets, while the poor Arcean lost 3.

From this point I could have one by culture or by alliance easily, but I already had all those stacks 7 constructors ready to spread our culture. Given the way the metaverse scoring works, they were quickly converted into 5 packs and sent to each remaining planets with a very important message "The galaxy belongs to humanity, time to die!"

This is the first game I fail to meet all the major races, even in my recent string of gigantic maps, that's what I found so weird and wanted to share with you.


~SDC~

Hey Sirian,

while I would like to take credit for such a gigantic score on such a low difficulty level, if you look at my profile, you will see that I have acheived two wins thus far. One on normal (with a couple of ctrl+n's since it was my first game and I wanted to get at least 3 worlds), and one on challenging (with no ctrl+n's).

The second game was.... odd. I did a good job of grabbing the worlds closish to me, and managed to out-expand everyone but the runnaway Altarians. I was already shifting my alignment to good a fundamentalist event hit and took every single evil world in the galaxy (all two planets :notsure: ). The altarians by this stage were at close relations and so I allied with them. The Arcean's had long since surrendered to the Altarians, and the other good AI was allied to the Altarians and was friendly towards me. It was a simple matter of giving them all of my tech advantage, all of my trade goods, and my whole fleet+starbases to get them to close (yes, all that stuff). After which I was too poor to afford an alliance with them, so I gave them one of my worlds in the deal and they accepted. Not the most elegant of solutions, as I reloaded once, after a massive assault on their homeworld resulted in an Altarian declaration of war (which I did not want to fight). But a win is a win is a win. In retrospect, fighting both AI wouldn't have been too difficult, since I had a stronger fleet, was using the War Party, and had 9/10 bonus points in hitpoints and weapons. I was exhausted after playing two games in one sitting (on X-mas afternoon mind you). So the alliance was the only way to go.

Perhaps I will attempt another war bonus picks game some other time. For now, I will continue to play harder starts and move my way up the difficulty ranks.

-Smegged

PS, after seeing LotR part 3 three times now (in two days - it only came out on the 26th over here), I will heartily recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the first two movies.

Jaxom's gone berserk. Ten gigantic Maso's in twelve days. That's insane. Hey now, don't burn out on us. We may need your contributions to continue gaining ground in the Metaverse.

- Sirian

hYE HOW'S IN GON'E YOU BLOKES

just dropped in to say hi

I was going for 12 in 12 but I had to shovel snow twice. Darn winter!

~SDC~