AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGG!

I was 3 years into the game before I realized I needed influence victory instead of alliance......   

Hi!
Sorry for being absent for a few days. Holidays, birthday and whatnot...

What shall I do to join the league?

BR, Iztok

Good to have you on-board Iztok. And yes, a post on a league thread is all you need to join. Neilo should be along pretty soon to assign you to a team. Although with someone of your stature, I jolly well hope its Team C.

I guess we'll be taking 6 possible players per team then? (I really don't like the idea of excluding suspected no-shows from the league)

Iztok, Neilo will be by later and can randomly assign you to a team. In the meantime, I suggest reading our MVL Rulebook (WWW Link) thread and looking through the 'Welcome to the MVL' that I have been working on (and I think completed), it should answer (hopefully) any questions you may have about how the MVL works and what is 'required' of you.

Hi Iztok! It seems that we have two teams with possible no-shows this month, Team D and Team E. Since i am on team E and wish too have the placement process as transparent as possible i defer the placement ruling to the Vice Commish.

FB, if you please, toss your coin or whatever and please place Iztok randomly into the Domination or the Villainy.

Glad to have you on board Iztok, i think you will find the league a fun way to play the game.
Good Luck!

Iztok, great to have you in the league....welcome!

Sentient species taste better...

Eternal Villainy wins the toss. Iztok is now a member of Team E. Be sure to register at the core and check in with Silver for your forum password.

Hi!

Err, to conform to team's name, should 1 from now on play only as evil?

See you after Xmas!

BR, Iztok

yes, but that has nothing to do with being on team E

also, welcome to the league.

Welcome to the Eternal Villainy Iztok, Silverbeacher should be along soonish to pm you your core password to our private forum.

Glad to have you on board!

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I'd like to wish all the MVL players a safe and happy holidays! Hope you all enjoy the festive season and have a happy new year!!

Merry Christmas!

Here's my submission for this round.

Nice score Mumble....

Thankx. It was not without quite a few challenges, not the least of which was having only 16 of the total 19 planets in the galaxy.

Actually I'd like to bring up a difficulty that I've been having in these league games in general. I had quite a bit of an issue with this in this last game although it's something that I think everyone has had to deal with during every league game.

The issue is that to maximize score you essentially have to take over all of the resources and almost all of planets in the galaxy as quickly as possible, while building your income, population, military might and research spending to as high a level as possible and keep them there for as long as possible.

Once you get to the point of being unable to keep at least one of these four components of score dramatically increasing over time you rapidly get to the point of diminishing returns where increasing the length of the game yields very little increase in overall score.

The point of the above is that since our league games require all victory conditions to be enabled, the above process has to be accomplished while keeping your influence from reaching the 75% threshold and winning the game prematurely with influence.

Obviously this is an issue when influence is not the designated victory condition however even when influence is the designated victory condition it still applies that to get a high score you must keep from winning by influence *too* soon.

How I have dealt with this is to research down the influence branch of the tech tree to Cultural Conquest relatively early in the game so that I can buildup influence starbases to gift to selected AI to keep my influence below the critical 75% level.

However there are two major issues that I have with this. The first issue is that my overall influence fluctuates significantly dependant on whether or not it's the first turn after reloading the game. As long as I leave the PC powered up and the game doesn't otherwise hang and force me to reload, then my influence is consistent. However, the game does occasionally hang, particularly when saving the game, although this happens very rarely at other random times as well. Besides hangs, I do not leave my PC on overnight or when unattended and so save and reloads are inevitable over the course of even a tiny galaxy game like this that took me 5 days to complete (4 of which were weekend/holidays so normally this game would have taken me longer than that).

This difference in influence between normal and the first turn after a reload starts out rather small. However once your influence ability grows with various techs, a burgeoning population, the introduction of stock exchanges and in particular the existence of influence SB’s, then the differences between your "normal" influence and your influence the first turn after a reload gets to be huge.

Also what is particularly interesting is that your reported influence under the victory conditions tab seems to be totally opposite to that shown in the minimap. For example in the late part of my last game where the difference between "normal" influence and influence the 1st turn after a reload was high I had a "normal" influence of 50% and an influence of 78% for the 1st turn after a reload. However looking at the minimap my area of influence was actually smaller when it was reported at 78% for the first turn after a reload then it was the turn after that where it was reported at the "normal" level of 50%. Actually if I did not force a Zone of Control (ZOC) recalculation by building then deleting a SB then the 78% reported influence turns into 43% the next turn with no modification of the ZOC’s as shown in the minimap.

Now you would think that the solution would be to merely gift more influence starbases to the AI but it seems to me that this is actually the cause of the large difference between "normal" influence and 1st turn after reload influence. The more influence SB's that I've gifted to the AI the larger this difference becomes. Seems like a catch 22.

So all of this would still be no real problem except for another issue and that is that once you have had a single turn of influence greater than 75% of the galaxy then that is remembered and counted as one of the ten turns required to achieve an influence victory. Even if the very next turn your influence goes back down to it’s “normal” level that turn counts as one of the ten turns and the next time it happens you only have 9 left and so on until you’re forced to take the influence victory.

I’ve tried building another influence SB and gifting it to the AI before pressing end turn but that doesn’t change the fact that for that one turn after reload you get credited with a turn towards an influence victory. Plus as I've mentioned this only increases the difference in "normal" and reload influence. In fact I’ve tried everything I can think of to cause a ZOC recalculation in order to avoid this, all to no avail.

So thanks to anyone that bothered to read through this rather long missive and I wonder if anyone else has noticed this behavior (at least Motti must have) and has any ideas as to how to deal with this.

The influence drop and then re-calc is definitely a significant aggravation. The only mitigating action I take is to have a constructor ready on reload to build another influence base to force a 1 turn recalc, but there is still that 1-turn lag...annoying!

Sentient species taste better...

Have you ever noticed that when you reload the game to a point where a planet of yours that was on the verge of converting the next turn... doesn't. The effects of influence resets every time you load.

For players looking to use this to their advantage, know that it works both ways.

One possible way to avert a premature culture victory is to gift a culture world to the AI (1 colony capital, all culture exchange centres) and take it back later.

Yes. However since I usually have the MCC I've only once ever had a planet flip to me in the last year or so. I seldom have any kind of a concern of my planets flipping since it's almost always too much influence on my part that's the issue. Also I find playing the Yor is an advantage in these small galaxies due too their initial speed advantage that results from their miniaturization bonus. The Yor's 100% loyalty bonus also helps with this.


I haven't tried this because it is pretty drastic. Probably any high pop planet with a lot of stock exchanges is an equivilient thing to gift, but again I still think you get hit with the one turn lag and if so the same issue exists.

Just to make sure people realize the level of SB gifting that I'm talking about, in this last game in a tiny galaxy I gifted 12 influence SB's with a 255% influence bonus each (I didn't do the diplo modules) in order to keep my influence level down to 50%. In the previous small galaxy game I gifted 16 SB's with a 377% influence bonus to keep my influence down to these same levels.

In fact small galaxy 45K political victory under Toshiro Mifune was shortened by a year or so due to this issue. I actually did get hit with the tenth influence "timeout" due to the reload issue however I was able to get an alliance with the remaining AI that same final turn and the Political Victory superceded the Cultural Conquest.

I have been viewing this as just another challenge in getting a high score under the designated settings, after all if it was easy then everyone could do it.

I notice the recalculation also, but assumed it was the same "bug" that prevents planets from revolting after a reload (which I assume is intentional so that people wouldnt save/reload repeatedly to get enemy planets to flip sooner when the crossbones appear).

I've done the SB gifts as well as planets with high populations and no starport built. Usually the easiest thing for me to do is just plan ahead and declare war on someone before the 10 turn countdown appears.

Hi!

I had a similar issue with GalCiv-2 on my old comp (dual P-II 300): game load time was anywhere from 3-6 minutes. Solution: I started to hybernate my comp. After that I needed to wait only about a minute to be able to continue playing GC-2. Sigh!

BR, Iztok

Nice score, Mumble!   

I haven't noticed the bug, but I might reload fewer times than some do. 10 times on a tiny or small sounds like a lot if you're already to the point of an influence victory. I like to play out at least one game year per session when I can.

The "disappearing turn button bug" probably accounts for the majority of reloads for most people, but I've always found a way to continue without reloading. I still get the game freeze and CTDs, but they're rare enough now that I'm using a RAM handler when I remember to load it for Galciv2. I should probably tie it to the game's shortcut, since I don't need it for any other program.

Actually I'm usually to the point of an influence victory before the end of year 0. As everyone knows one of the biggest contributions to a big score is a bunch of ships under 16 or 24 military SB's. In a tiny galaxy with only 16 planets and no tech trading I didn't finish the final tech's needed to top off the final 12 attack points per SB until the end of year 7 (Disruptors, Neutrino Bullets, BHE) at which point I had about 2000 ships under the array. Also I seldom seem to get enough time to get anywhere near a year per session, for me it's closer to a quarter. Getting more than an hour undisturbed is a rarity for me plus I don't leave my PC on between sessions although I may have to start doing this.

In any case forewarned is forearmed. The first time I encountered this I did have to scramble to salvage the correct victory type out of the game. This time I was aware of the issue and took steps to avoid it. I still ended up using up 5 of my 10 turns before I ended the game at my own choosing but I was in no real danger of ending the game before I could maximize my score. However, the fact that this situation exists (I wouldn't necessarily call this a bug because it easily can be "works as specified") did cause me extra work and effort that I otherwise would not have needed to take.

I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. As I mentioned earlier there should be some extra hurdles that need to be surmounted. If getting a big score was a simple matter then that essentially defeats the purpose.

What I meant by this is that when you reload the game, the influence is then given in circles outgoing from planets. If you just keep making your move, ending your turn saving and reloading(wash, rinse, repeat) the count won't start... ever. No need to build a single influence SB. It works for me anyway. In my game I delayed the influence victory to just 10 weeks before 22 Dec 2228(DA), the only downside is you must go back a few turns and wait for it to go back to its real level at the exact point 10 weeks before the year ending(trial and error).

I've never tried this but I doubt it will work for me because I usually get myself down to one opponent on one PQ3 pretty early, at least by the end of the second year (year 1). Even with default planetary influence I would expect the count to definitely start once you own all the resources in the galaxy as well as every planet in the galaxy except one.

Year 0? I'm impressed.    It usually takes me a bit longer, but different styles have different outcomes.

I never got to the high tech point in my League game, but I was under a challenge constraint to limit the game time to 6 years. That made it interesting, although the goal of 36,000 IIRC was a tad high.    That challenge was revised down to 20,000.

I understand about getting an hour or less uninterrupted time. I leave my game running if I'm going to return to it on the same day, so I consider that the same session. That might not be an option every time.



It is, and thanks for the insight. It might come in handy and certainly can't hurt.

End of year 0 for this tiny galaxy. Not quite so quickly if there were more planets involved. I equalled the colony rush total of all four of my opponents. I colonized 7 planets for a total of 8 planets and they colonized a total of 7 planets which plus their home planets gave them 11 planets. However 4 of their total 7 colonies were merely their PQ4 secondaries whereas the smallest planet I colonized was a PQ7 that eventually upgraded to PQ10 and my next smallest colony started at PQ11. I also had a PQ18 with a 48% PQ bonus colonization event that eventually turned into a PQ32.

I also rushed to Phasors and Planetary Invasion and had stripped all the good planets from my opponents before the end of year 0, most without having to fire a shot. But the biggest benefit was the tremendous colony rush that I had that was really only possible as the Yor who can start out with a speed 6 colony ship on turn one and a speed 8 colony ship by turn 3 when they get Impulse drive by the end of the second turn. This coupled with building a bare cargo hull per turn and then spending 350bc to upgrade to a colony ship allowed me to colonize the 7 best planets in the galaxy before the first 10 turns were over. From there the game was essentially mop up and galaxy management for maximum score.

BTW in these small galaxy games I give up the pop growth racial bonus and instead take the 10% PQ bonus. This automatically turns those PQ10's into PQ11's which is an important break point to get that 10% high PQ planet approval bonus.