I tend to leave the ai at default and sometimes randomize the moralities. This usually ends up in Pure Evil Altarians and Pure Good Drengins for some reason. It's usually easier to get along with the good civs, but they tend to ally themselves together, so 5 good civs would be quite hard to beat.
Jexal, do you mean you can bribe to stay out of war, or bribe to end a war? As Wombat, I avoid entering war because it usually costs too much to get out of it (even giving all I have is often not enough).
The diplomacy model uses a too simple evaluatiion function. After they have been wiped out, ai's should only value planets as non zero values. There are many cases when trading something is silly, and I think it must be a pain to program all the cases.
I picked rare to make things easier. The Drengins had about 3 stars and I had 2. I bet a tiny abundant would be much harder because they expand fast and have a huge culture (Alexians tend to flip fairly fast with that settings).
[quote]This seems to be the heart of our argument. You are talking about casual reloading whenever you hit a problem, and I am talking about reload spamming. [/quote] Agreed. I agree that a reload trap actually ends up harming players in order to prevent some cheese. Since the game is first a single player game, there is no reason to penalize people who don't care about the metaverse.
It allows you to submit a game if you don't want to continue the game. Since submitting a game is no more useful as far as ai tweaking is concerned, it's only worth points, so it's very much like submitting a loss. You could try to abuse the system by submitting tiny maso rare games and see what this does to your score.
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[quote]the invisivble ships..- saving the game exiting from gal civ and then reloading the saved game has always fixed the problem for me... I think the bug has something to do with the "CNTRL+N" feature.[/quote] Nope. I (almost) never Ctrl-N and I get them sometimes. It has to do with the load on your computer, probably memory leaks or too much memory usage?
As far as I know, Alex-ians, Cari-noids and Scott-lingas all take their name from a developper. Scottlingas seem to be part of the starting minors on bigger maps. I-League happen everytime a planet is so unhappy that it revolts. You can get them more often if you use destabilisation or put your taxes too high. Fundies are spawned randomly if there are evil empires out there.
Most games have been submitted recently because 1)some people want to have points in the metaverse and since the XPack is out, maso is the way to go; 2)the strategies to beat maso have been discussed a lot, so it is easier to do it today than it used to be, despite the game being harder (no more money taken from the alexians etc.). Point (2) comes along with the fact that players become better and better and want to play a higher challenge.
[quote]and that is NOT going to have any discernible effect on your final score, because it isn't something that you wouldn't be able to do by other means without too much trouble. [/quote] Yes it is because it saves time. You can save 1 hour by reloading. You can submit 3 games where you reloaded instead of 2 where you didn't reload. I think this is unfair. Reloading also allows to uncover the map 'for free'. This allows you to have a better expansion, and removes all tough choices
CypherPax, that's a nice trick. The ai is too gullible, alas, as they don't think "what's he going to do with that thing I give him". I know I will happily destroy a few colony ships in order to settle a planet first and then give techs and money in exchange for peace. I think it would be a fun experiment to see if you could make money out of the trading trick: Buy a transport, invade a planet, sue for peace, sell the planet back. ???
You don't lose your money, you spend your money. Look at it this way: If you don't set to 100%; all the money you have isn't invested, you get no benefit from that capital. You wouldn't keep all your money in a chest if you could invest it somewhere where you can get some benefits from it, would you? Same here. You can build nothing and hoard money, but this will ruin you long-term more surely than using all the money you have now to build an infrastructure (planets, PQ, population, social i
I got it done on a tiny map (because it plays faster). I used +60 diplomacy and +50trade. My first idea was to trade with the Drengins so they'd love me. They never got close and I was killed. So I decided to trade with only the minors. This resulted in the Drengins at war with the minors, thus they traded with me and loved me. The minors, receiving my money, could build ships and resist the Drengins. Soon enough, the Drengins were close and I got an alliance victory (from an all
[quote]But of course the anti-reload trap would treat such a situation exactly the same if the game kept crasahing in the same place.[/quote] No it wouldn't. Even a game like Nethack has a recover option. Sure you CAN cheat, it only makes it harder. [quote]It is your sort of reasoning that would say, if a person were playing an FPS and had only a few HP left, instead of reloading until they got past a certain point they would have to restart whenever they die.[/quote] If yo
Sirian, I just stated a fact, that the budget is exhausted, and that I believe features are more interesting than the score. I think score is pretty useless because no system can't be milked, and people never agree about how much skill must be rewarded wrt dedication (number of games). But yes, I'd happily trash the whole metaverse for more features.
[quote]Unfortunately, the firewall here at work won't let me check out the Realms Beyond site. Apparently, corporate does not think my visitation of gaming sites is appropriate. Luckily, corporate does not view this site as a gaming site (for some reason).[/quote] Welcome to the club ;).
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When reloading a game, the influence map is lost, so you may experience different things. The "Load last game" loads the last saved game, so if you didn't set autosave to 1 turn, you will lose some turns. As for space monsters, just leave them alone, they won't be a problem if they stay in their eggs.
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Paguma, this is different. That the ai doesn't try to wipe you because you pay them is okay for me. They do get some benefit from your continued survival. It can be seen more as a truce than peace. They should wipe you out of existence when they have reached final frontier, though. When you are allied with them and there is noone left, however, the alliance provides no benefit at all wrt a peace treaty, so why keep it? I'm not asking for a declaration of war but that the ai realizes that, if
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If tech victory is enabled, the ai wouldn't feel the urge to betray you until they have discovered final frontier. Ans even with alliance victory on, I think it would be fun to have the Drengins break an alliance at least once in a while. I never saw an untrustworthy ai, but I'm usre there are many humans that betray their galactic friends.
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What's the point of turning off alliance victory? OK, it's worth less points than a military victory, but... An overwhelming military victory is a logical consequence of an aborted alliance victory, so penalizing alliance victory actually means rewarding people who are ready to spend 1 hour plucking an overripe fruit instead of playing a new game. I don't really care for the metaverse though, so my point is not about the score you can get from backstabbing the ai. My point is that, o
[quote]But then you'd just end up punishing someone who is save/reloading because they botched their strategy repeatedly and wants to give another try.Such as if I bought a full combat transport from an AI (but don't have the tech for it myself) and need to invade another AI before the planet rebuilds its defenses or gets captured by the other AIs. The problem is the population/soldiering works out to just about the same as that on my transport, so I would need to save/reload a few times if I ke
The most importat point to know is that the metaverse budget is exhausted, therefore it is highly unlikely that any change to the scoring system will be done. I know I personnally would rather have features than a Nth tweak to the scoring system.
[quote]My suggestion - stop colonization random events once your morality reaches 0 or 100, or disallow the character to select the evil or good path once he reaches the maximum.[/quote] I think preventing people to enjoy the game in order to penalize those who exploit its weakness is a bad idea. You're not addrssing the good problem. If you want to fix that, just use a seed in the save game and thus you will be sure that random events are always the same after save/open. No need to tra
[quote]Now for my opinion, as if you'd asked for it:Although a 3D galaxy is more realistic, many would question whether it really adds anything to the game play. To me, it would just be a pain in the neck to keep adjusting my view so that I could see things clearly.[/quote] qui Gonn, can you please stop stating my opinion and pretending it's your own? ;p
[quote]You must remember GalCiv entire design is not centered around specifics but global decisions. [/quote] I disagree. You have rush plenty of specific decisions. You have rush-buying options and propaganda available in planets screens. You can customize every ship by renaming them, and training them (getting them experience). Additionnally, survey ships, starhawks and rangers boost themselves. What I propose can probably be done without adding lots of user interface