CityMan

Reply to Change the metaverse scoring system and create a new ladder for ToA in Metaverse GalCiv2 Forums

I wonder if everyone is aware of what it takes to get the top scores. It's basically point grinding. You keep playing to maximize your score after you already won the game. Once all the AI is basically dead, you leave just one AI planet so the game doesn't end. Then you start maximizing your economy, building dozens of starbases and literally THOUSANDS of ships. Yes, it takes skill to even beat the AI on a suicidal game. In addition, the best way to maximize the score is to

Reply to Change the metaverse scoring system and create a new ladder for ToA in Metaverse GalCiv2 Forums

Another thought... People are competitive by nature. That's why some people willing to do whatever it takes to get the top scores. BUT this has a huge downside. Players look at the metaverse scores, see the scores from their own games and just give up. The top metaverse scores are so astronomical that playing in a normal fashion can't even begin to compare. Great gameplay gets sales, great reviews, etc. But it has been shown time and time again that a great communi

Change the metaverse scoring system and create a new ladder for ToA in Metaverse GalCiv2 Forums

The current Metaverse scoring rewards patience and CPU/memory, more than it rewards skill. If you look at how far people go to raise their scores, there is no way that it could be considered fun. Some skill is required to get the very top scores, but realistically, it's more a test of patience than anything else. Take a look at the thread talking about military starbase arrays in the game talk forum. Is that really how the game developers want people to play? It a

Reply to How do I build a military starbase array? in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]I think this neatly illustrates the fact that the Metaverse scoring is simply irreversibly broken, as it gives the highest scores for completely meaningless nonsense. I personally believe that scores should count only two things: Time, and map size. The highest score is won by the fastest victory on the largest map. Period. Everything else means nothing and is purely a masturbatory exercise.[/quote] That's a bit too simple. Shouldn't difficulty play a role? Why shouldn't the pl

Reply to Forum update removed the metaverse signatures? in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

A quick update. In Firefox (2.0.0.14), the metaverse rank and trophies appear, but the difficulty icon is blank. It's been broken ever since I started posting (months ago), which is why I've been browsing these forums using Internet Explorer 7. Unfortunately, the entire metaverse signature is currently blank in IE7.

Reply to Left-over social spending wasted? in Strategies GalCiv2 Forums

Why is social and military production treated differently? I was under the impression that you don't pay for what you don't use. For example, if you have sliders for military set to 50%, but a planet isn't building a ship, you still have to pay for military production on that planet?

Reply to Detected cheat codes? in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

Just to make sure... Did you delete the folder in My Documents/My Games?

Reply to Economic changes (not liking it). Am I alone? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Well...looks like changes will definitely be coming. I don't understand how Frogboy and others weren't aware of the MCC issue, but now they are definitely aware and have acknowledged the problem. First of all, high metaverse scoring was already impossible in ToA. The economy in ToA is much more difficult to manage. Even constructors have a maintenance fee. The old MCC isn't enough to make ToA competitive with DA or DL on the metaverse. So properly fixing and balancing the t

Reply to Economic changes (not liking it). Am I alone? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I fully expected the MCC to be fixed properly for ToA, so I didn't expect the economic bonus when I built it. I just saw the thread in the support forum. Looks like the nice side benefit was removed and replaced with nothing. When (if?) the MCC is fixed, I highly doubt they will change it to the DA version. I haven't played enough to see the differences between good, neutral, evil in ToA. Is evil really that bad off without the old MCC?

Reply to How can I transfer my custom races from DA to Twilight? in Game Talk GalCiv2 Forums

I have a text comparer program just for situations like this...editing text/xml files. Go to download.com and search for text compare. I'm sure there is a freeware program. It lets you load up 2 text files and tells you exactly how they differ. As for transferring custom races, I personally recreated them from scratch using files newly saved from ToA as the base text file. I didn't want to risk any changes in ToA making any potential problems.

Reply to Economic changes (not liking it). Am I alone? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]If you are going evil, you've got to research to and build the MCC. This is usually the point I have to increase taxes until morale drops to 40% on my least happy world so that I've got enough income to hold things together till the MCC is built. From there, smooth sailing .[/quote] I haven't played many ToA games, but in one game, I did try for MCC. I looked at my income before and after purchasing it. It dropped by the lease amount. I didn't get the economic bonus that I'm

Reply to Economic changes (not liking it). Am I alone? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I have to admit that I am not a fan of the economic changes. I understand why the changes were made, but that doesn't mean I have to like it quite yet. I will eventually get use to it (hopefully). Before I played Metaverse games, I modded my games so economic buildings provide a bigger benefit in DA! I've definitely not made the adjustment yet. I've only played a handful of ToA games so far and I basically suck at managing money. I feel like I have to win the game before I run out,

Reply to still unsure about ship combat in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

There is one problem with your information. If the defense is not of the appropriate type, you square root the defensive value...not the roll. So armor can still defending against missiles, but it's significantly weaker. The wiki has a very detailed writeup. https://www.galciv.wikia.com/wiki/Ship_combat 1. The defenses are added together. 2. It looks like the roll is from 0 to the max value. 3. It still uses the sqrt of the other defense types. Another inter

Reply to Forum Ranks, Metaverse Medals, Member Number and Karma....... in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]A simple, *basic* search is desperately needed.By a baisc search I mean just a list of posts that a particular member has made or a list of threads to which they have replied. Trying to do this in google is a real pain in the butarkis.[/quote] Can't you click on the user's name and select 'Find posts by...'? It seems to work well enough for me.

Reply to Completing the gravity accelerator crashes the game in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

He's right. This is probably what caused my game to crash as well. I just loaded up the same game (as mentioned in my bug report posting). Instead of waiting for the gravity accelerator to finish building, I bought it and my game immediately crashed.

Reply to Easy to make an AI that can beat a typical player? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Interesting read. To summarize, most seem to think that the statement of Draginol either refers to an AI that cheats or Draginol just got carried away and claimed something that is not quite true.[/quote] I doubt anyone thinks he lied or anything like that. I think there is a misunderstanding around the phrase 'typical player'. I don't have a problem with him saying that the AI can beat a typical player. As for suicidals, I haven't played TA enough at all to say how mu

Reply to Two crashes, and one is preventing me from continuing the game in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

No, I started the game after I downloaded the release version. Oh well. Just spent some odd hours uninstalling, then downloading the entire GC2 package, just to make sure that something else wasn't messed up. I installed it to a different drive and restarted the system. I still crash in that game when I end the turn. I tried deleting all the constructors and bases, as well as waypoints, but no luck. I have no idea what happened. I started another game, so hopefully

Reply to Easy to make an AI that can beat a typical player? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

[quote]Personally, I play GC2 to relax. I like to build a fleet that is a technological terror and rampage around the galaxy. That is fun for me. By the same token, I don't want the computer to be a total pushover either. So, I usually play at "Tough." On "Suicidal," it is highly unlikely that I would hold a tech advantage for much of the game, so that level would not be very fun for me even if I knew how to win under those conditions. Some people really get off on the "David vs. Goliath"

Reply to Two crashes, and one is preventing me from continuing the game in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

Let me try uninstalling and making sure it's clean before you bother with trying to figure out my problem. Perhaps it is as simple as an obsolete file. I'll post an update.

Reply to Twilight Feedback! Let us have it! in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

Until I ran into my crash which is preventing me from continuing the game (see bug report forum), I was definitely liking the new expansion. It changes the core gameplay enough that I have to play differently now, so that's a good thing. If I want to play the old way, I can just load up DA. I do have a problem with the Civilization Manager spreadsheet. Many changes aren't updated until you refresh the window. If I double-click a planet name, change the queue and close the planet win

Two crashes, and one is preventing me from continuing the game in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

I'm playing the Tournament game (umm...something Hard Rock...the one where you fight against Arcean and Drengin). First, I had a crash when I selected one the AI planets and clicked the spy button. I can't seem to repeat it now, but it was my first crash for this expansion. Sorry I can't provide more information. Second, and this is a big problem. I'm pretty much done with the game. The AI just has one planet left. I was just screwing around and experimenting with bases and te

Reply to Easy to make an AI that can beat a typical player? in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I'm also a bit iffy on whether turn based strategy games can have AI that can beat human players without bonuses. The number of degrees of freedom far outdoes chess, so the AI can't brute force and figure out the best moves. It has a limited scope, so in a way, it's more tactical and less strategic. So it might win a battle, but it would lose the war. I think you need to define typical player, perhaps? People who care enough about this game to post in these forums are probably not t

Reply to Forum update removed the metaverse signatures? in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

Heh, I'm so jaded about forum postings that I immediately doubted you rather than thinking you were telling the truth. Nice try though. :) I don't remember what I did now, but I did notice a broken javascript message that sounded like it was related to this problem, though.

Reply to Super Fast Download! in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

I'm not sure how fast my downloading is because SDC is telling me the speed is fluctuating a lot. But I will say that faster servers are always worth it. People with broadband get used to pulling down stuff at fast speeds and when a website/service doesn't fill their bandwidth, people get annoyed and impatient.

Forum update removed the metaverse signatures? in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

Are the metaverse signatures coming back? It's not just a fun way to show off your metaverse achievements. I appreciated the fact that you could tell something about the poster. Advice coming from someone who plays mostly normal difficulty games might not be applicable to me if I play mostly suicidal.