Good job on the ships Seth, your designs continue to get more interesting.

Excellent...keep up the conquests!

Ferrel, I think the main difference in your score and a straight Swindle score is speed.  Most of what you are doing is very similar to what I do.  With my latest swindle games I was able to capture every enemy planet (save one) before the end of year zero.  The influence domination strategy is relatively fast, but nowhere near as fast as swindling.  Generally, all my planets are completely built by year 2 at the latest.  I use all-factories, so things get built pretty quickly.  The starbase array is completed during year 1.

One major thing I do differently is I use huge ships for the starbase array.  It cuts down on the tedium of rush-buying ships, but may not be optimal for score.  This also lets me have far fewer starports during points-grinding, and consequently more stock markets.

With minor races, if your mil rating is decent, you can declare war on them, save, re-load, and make peace that same turn, taking everything they have including their planet.  If you dont want to be so cheesy as to use a re-load, just wait the requisite number of turns and do the same thing.  You can do this as soon as you have an appreciable mil rating.

Sentient species taste better...

Thanks KP. I'll try an all factory in my next game. Though with ToA's decreased focus, increased weapons research cost, and the extra techs you need to reach the "sweet" techs, I'm not sure it can be done in a year. Middle of year 1 might be though, and that's faster than the influence approach. Nothing to it but to try, eh.

Didn't know you could bully the minors into giving up their planet. That is definately going into my next game.

Still confused about tiny vs huge ships for the array. ToA has increased maintainence cost for ships, but increased tourism revenue may offset that. So, you build a huge hull with 1 att, 1 def? I wonder that the effect of putting Integrity Grids on them is? They add 8 hits points per.

I also wonder about putting, what I call, command ships in the fleets within the array. These command ships have a module on them that gives either an attack bonus, or a defense bonus to ships within the fleet. Two ships are needed. One that has the attack bonus, and one that has the defense bonus. You cannot put both on one ship.

The huge ships I put under the array are maxed out with weapons, not just 1/1.  They cost around 44k to rush-buy, hence the having to buy many fewer ships per turn.  My ships have one of each weapon type (to take advantage of the ship-assist modules on the starbase), then the the rest of the space is taken up by Black Hole Eruptors, and 1 Aereon Missile Defense.  It seems to be fine for scoring, but perhaps not optimal....I'm not really sure.  My best score on a huge map is 662k, which I believe is the record for that size map (but not many people play huge), so maybe it works just as well as 1/1 ships.  It would need some experimenting to know for sure.  Also check out this thread Notes from a 1 million point game from Livonya, where the ships and array issue is discussed some.  My approach is different from Mumble and Livonya, but it appears to work as well, or nearly so.  Mumble's idea about letting every AI get a Hyperion Shrinker (when captured will allow you to cram more weapons on your ships) is a good one too, but the Swindle is too quick to allow them to build one.  Perhaps if you research the appropriate miniaturization tech very early on and gifted it to them, it would work.

Command ships sound like a possibly good idea, though since my Swindle games have been with DA up to this point, I cant say for sure.  It might reduce the power of the fleet too siginificantly with the loss of weapons on those command ships.  The reduced focus in TA would definitely be a hindrance to any all-x strategy, which is one reason I havent done a swindle with TA.

Sentient species taste better...

As opposed to tinies?

Due to the depreciation of military rating based on the number of ships you have that Mumble discovered, this would actually result in a higher score.

This is categorically not true.

TA weapons are anywhere from 16k to 22k to max a tree, whereas in DA they're 49k to 75k.  TA weapons get a 50% increase to their base value, as of 2.x, and I haven't yet investigated what influence this has on tech inflation, if any, over the old mechanism, but the bottom line is this: weapons are at least 50 percent cheaper in TA.

Additionally, with regards to focus: In DL/DA, you took 25% of military, 25% of social, and transferred that to research.  In TA, you take 25% of military, 25% of social, and then transfer 20% of military, 20% of social to research.  You're still getting approximately (due to rounding) 80% of the research you would otherwise get from focus.  While it is relevant that improvements have less production overall and cost more maintenance, you should still be able to pull about 65-70% efficiency as opposed to DA (DL would be a different number entirely due to the production and maintenance changes going from DL to DA).

Yes, I think in theory that is probably the case, but I'd have to do some testing to make sure.  Very good point to bring up!

One thing which speeded up my Swindle games a lot recently was to set the relations of all the AIs to anything other than unknown.  This allows you to contact them without actually finding them on March 1, and get research treaties from all of them, minors and majors.  If you are playing all-factories this will at least double your research output very early on.  It's another cheesy element, but then again the Swindle is about scoring, not giving the AI any reasonable chance to win.

Sentient species taste better...

Thanks for the info. I was working under some false assumptions.

One thing though, it seems I can't get a treaty with anyone until year 2. The AI just says it's too early to enter into treaties before then. Hope I'm not missing something there as well.

That may be a change in TA too.  I know that in DA at least you can get research treaties by March 1 of year 0, and econ treaties on Jan 1 of year 1.

Sentient species taste better...

They're just horrendously expensive for the first year or three.  Research treaties should be doable, but economic treaties should be 30k-70k BC.

DA is kind of the same-TA just has an extension of the time period where they're horrendously expensive.

(Don't ask me how I know that, or how I even have that much money that early.  :))

Loup, I did get the Ur-Quan Masters version of SC2.  Definitely some nice improvements I see already, like planetary graphics, interface, etc.  I listened to some of the voice-work and didnt like it that much, so I didnt download that part.  It didnt sound that great.  I'm not sure about the 3do remixed music yet.  The original music has some sentimental value.

Who wants to Super-Melee with me?! 

Sentient species taste better...

I've been reading this Grand Theft Auto fanfic about Claude (the guy you play as in Grand Theft Auto 3)'s past. It's really sad and haunting, mostly at the beggning. Just read it for yourselves.

@KP: yeah, i need to redownload the UrQuan Masters; its one of my fave games.  Though I'm not terribly good at melee- though I do alright with the Orz or PKunk ships; and even a baby can win with an Utwig Chugger

Hyperion Shrinker

Have gifted to all AI in year 0.  One or two can be captured from advanced tech AI in year 1 or mid 2.  After that I don't know.  Probably won't work with "Swindle", but a cheap tech and worth a try.

Great, a victim....errr, I mean a "competitor".    I used to be pretty good at melee, but I hadnt played for many years until just recently.

Good to know.  That's too slow for a swindle game, but maybe if you leave each AI one planet after the swindle, they'd build the HSs.

Sentient species taste better...

For some reason, the HS isn't in ToA.

Hyperion Shrinker?  Sure it is.  Expert Miniaturization.  It's in every tree.

@KP  

did I understand you're post yesterday, that you scored >600 points using a 16 MSA and a few thousand heaily armed ships?    if so, you may have solved  a problem I've been dealing with for the last couple of months.

Yes, check out reply #1759 of this post for some details: https://forums.galciv2.com/167924/page/71/#replies

What problem are you referring to?

Sentient species taste better...

a good player without score mongering should be able to acheive a very respectable 300-400K score without going crazy.  But to get the truly high scores (600K+) you really have to start thinking about it in a totally different sense, where it really does become a chore of sorts.  Some people enoy that, that sense of order and control, but i have to stop once i cant legitimize a "reason" for it

With the depreciation in mil rating increasing as the number of ships increase, and also the effect of reducing the tedium, makes building huge hulls maxed out with weapons a better choice.  I think your problem might be solved.

Sentient species taste better...

Here's the score progression for my best swindle games with common and abundant habitables:

I do score tests at year or 1/2 year intervals.  You can see with the common-habitable game, I did it in only 6 years.  Despite being my third highest scoring game, I consider that to be my best game.  It was the first siwndle game I played using the trick of setting AI relations to anything other than unknown (to get research treaties on March 1 from all AIs), so I was able to get to the war-swindle point in late year 0, which was a lot quicker than any of my games before.  I could have had the first ZYW on a all-abundant map with that game.

I think with an huge all-abundant, I should be able to score over 700k now.

Sentient species taste better...

Has anyone here ever played GTA IV? Cause it's really good and there are so many ways to get killed, examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLiWkhfUqow

I only played the first one long ago Seth, so I'm not real familiar with it.

Sentient species taste better...