Its typical of people to blame AI and say that its cheating, especially if you are loosing game after game and thats why threads are getting more hostile. Its like when you play Counter Strike and there are one or two guys that kick some serious butt. Everyone accuses them of cheating and they get banned. Typical human pshycology...

(did i spell pshycology correct? :notsure: )

Dearmad, you might wanna make an exception to that <15 PQ rule. There are times when what's holding your expansion back is your range. In those cases colonizing any planets, simply to extend your range so that you can get to the next cluster is worthwhile. The <15 planet can be abandoned once it's no longer useful.

Also with the +15% PQ trait, class 14 planets become class 16, and class 13 planets (I think) become class 15. Not a bad deal if you ask me.

Shoujo,

Absolutely. Forgot about that. Haven't had to do that lately.

If I can spare the time, though, I'll build a constructor and use that instead, but in a bind for time (which is more usual) *any* planet will work as the "bridge" planet for me.

Shoujo, nope, with the +15% PQ trait, a 13 becomes a 14 (13*1.15=14.95).:( I know because I decided to try that as my main trait in the game I started last night. Gave me *3* Class 14 or better in Sol alone

I never colonize the first planet I find without checking the next system unless it's at least a 19 or it's obvious that there aren't any other yellow stars near. Between a Survey ship, a scout (my only purchase), and the colony ship itself, I can check out a handful of stars within two or three turns and pick a good planet to drop the colony ship on, and a good start is essential. And yes, I check every star type, especially with a +15% PQ pick.

Doh crap. I thought the game rounded bonuses up There goes my plan to take advantage of class 13 planets (:(

"I've seen posts recently practically asking that I start posting source code to prove this or that."

Brad: This is, indeed, a compliment! People simply can't believe that the game isn't cheating! While some are too immature to think it through on their own and understand that they *too* can do the things the AI is doing, then let them piss into the wind.

What would be much, much worse in my opinion is people coming here and saying "There ain't no "I" in this AI!"

I've seen that happen on many games that hyped their AI too much. Try to see that you've actually got the OPPOSITE problem: "Whai; no way there can be this much "I" in the AI."!!!

Seriously, you're getting flooded now with the unwashed masses, something you might not be used to.

My suggestion would be to take breaks away from the forum, assign some tech people to do the lower-level type answers, and save yourself for the posts from people with enough respect to ask the hard questions in the right manner.

Oh, and have many beers. You deserve them!

Yeah... heard that, but I wouldn't know about a 20 or 20+ planet if I fell on it - have never seen one. My current situation is that I have 7 seven decent planets ranging from 19 - 13 in a 64 sector map. At maximum spend/build rate my total colonization capability yielded this result... and I'm OK with how to maximize that capability. I am cranking hard to establish other supportive attributes that will allow me to be a player, but having major infrastructure planets in support ain't there for me.

AA

Brad,

God bless you and this game! I know it's hard, but try to seperate your feelings from the criticisms (warranted or not) of the game. You've got to have the faith and courage to know you are right, and trying harder than anyone on these boards to make things right. It's hard, I know. Every time I hear "I've never made an (not A grade) in my life before your class", I don't doubt either my ability to run my course or my ability to evaluate fairly. I am constantly striving to improve, but I can't doubt myself and my commitment. And neither should you.

The AI "cheats" by getting an economy boost at the highest AI levels, and the equivalent of Stellar Cartography from the start of the game.

Anything else that looks like it's cheating is a bug!

The AI definitely researches the basic tech, for example. I know, because I made quite a lot of money trading around the various "TECHTYPE Theory" advances in a recent game.

~SDC~

Oops... Should read "Anything else that looks like it's cheating is a bug, or you just haven't seen how what they're doing is possible."

~SDC~

Thanks for your kind words.

The AI *does* cheat at higher AI levels. What we went for though in GalCiv was for the AI to play by the same rules other than the aforementioned knowing where yellow stars are. It's the playing by the same rules that is really crucial from a "fun" point of view.

When I play a game I want to know that destroying a star base or destabilizing the AI or takin ga key planet is truly going to hurt the other player.



~SDC~

I'm definately a newbie to the forum, but I for one enjoy and value the partipation of those associated with development of the game. I am hyped on this game most notably for the focus on the AI. The "inside information" posted in the past on how the AI reasons from one perspective (from Brad) has been really interesting. Considering building something like this myself, as a hobby. I've played many strat games before, but I have really enjoyed this one the most, especially so due to the participation I've seen here and the uncommonly good job done on updating the game on an almost on-demand fashion. No buyer's remorse on this one. Keep it in perspective; it's a game, albeit one heck of a good one. Have fun with it...
-Anxiety

~SDC~

Shoujo, sweat it not, drop Soil Enhancement on top of that, and it goes all the way to 16 In fact, if you can afford to buy Soil Enhancement (700bc, if I remember correctly), a Class 12 goes straight to 15.

Not sure I'm going to keep playing this way, but it will be fun to find out how well it works. I'll be expanding long after the other races are packed in tightly

"Let me put things in perspective, a week and a half ago Stardock central was deleting people's C:\ root and the posts from thta haven't been nearly as hostile and demanding as some of the posts in the last 48 hours."

That's because the people who hung around here during the launch of the game had followed the development of the game, thus they knew that the little Stardock team is a highly involved team trying it's best to give the players the best. Looking at the schedules you guys have made lately, it's logical that an error (albeit a big one with the root files on c:\) happens.
People back then were mature enough to accept the apologies and move on, knowing the dedication of the team and knowing they are now playing a brilliant game.

Now that the game has gotten such positive reviews and positive mouth to mouth the masses join in (and sadly a lot of warez people too I fear). It always happens to succesful games and there's always people among them who start to whine because they can't beat the game on day 1.

Like Yin said, I would take it as a compliment Brad. Sadly we'll have to live with a degrading community for ahwile. But the real players will stay and the shallow players will move on soon enough.

[offtopic]
Brad: Two Thumbs Up!!

I have actually bought the game for two reasons:
1. It's a GREAT game
2. I love the way you listen to us 'gamers', and try to make it a great gaming experience for us all.

So, please stay!

Just had to say this
[/offtopic]

Gotta wonder who would store *anything* valuable in their root directory though... only thing there (in fact on that partition at all) for me is the OS. No big whoop if that gets deleted. I do it all the time.

~SDC~

For me too, but a lot of people DO panic when they restart the computer and it says that there's no OS available.

About the Stellar vision thing: It might not be neccessary to see where all starbases/ships are, but it would be VERY nice if you could always see where the resources were once you'd scouted them. Without any kind of tech. It's just silly that they vanish from the map once they get taken. I sometimes forget where my own starbases are!

You can make the map show ships, and then starbases show up. Don't know how well this works on large galaxies.

Also, resources disappear off the map when other people take them, and I think this happens even if it's not currently in sensor range, which seems a bit strange. I'll check this in my next game.

Isn't this new "Stellar Vision" tech a lot like "Eyes of the Galaxy?", except infinite range?

Something that might be worth implementing are some "see what the enemy is doing" cheats, like a Fog of War remover, an insta-espionage cheat, a "see the AI economic/political/social choices" cheat, etc. All of which would of course disable submitting to the Metaverse, and may disable game saving. They would take some work (I'm not sure exactly how much; FoW and espionage would probably be pretty simple), but they might 1) reduce the number of AI cheating accusations, and 2) improve the signal/noise ratio on bug reports, since people will be more able to check on what's actually happening instead of trying to make inferences.

>#25 by Citizen Kevin Jaekley - 4/3/2003 7:24:48 PM
>I might be able to shed some light on one of these >questions (the colony ship one). I think there
>could be a wrap around bug working here. I am playing >on a tiny 5x5 galaxy. The Drengin started in
>the lower right corner of the map and spread >immediately to the upper left corner.

I have seen this on a large map, also with a race (Arceans) in the lower right corner colonizing planets in the upper right corner. I started near the upper right and when I got to the upper right it was already colonized as the Arceans second world.

"Gotta wonder who would store *anything* valuable in their root directory though..."
For some people it wasn't just the root directory.

~SDC~

Arcanum3000, there's no way to keep that from being exploited. Trust me, I'm a sneaky b*****d when it comes to thinking up ways to get around the system.

The closest way to do that would be to have a unique ID generated for each game that is started, and when one of the cheat commands is invoked, the program *FIRST* contacts StarDock, and only upon sucessfully notifying the server that this game ID is invalid from this point on, invoking the function.

Anything less, and using the cheats on a game and then submitting them become trivial.

1) you can't keep track of the cheats in the file itself, because someone will save, run the cheat, then reload the untainted save.

2) you can't keep track of which maps have had the cheat run on them seperately (like HOMM IV does) because it's trivial to shoot the saved game off to a different machine to run the cheat there.

3) you can't have the cheat work if it can't contact StarDock, because I can have two computers on the same network, one that can see the whole internet, one that can't see any of it, just by tweaking my firewall rules.

O.K., so I'm paranoid *AND* sneaky.