Rules Question - contest
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>I had thought about those, but decided that someone who could force the AI to surrender swiftly deserved that advantage. It left in the rivalry between economists and warmongers. Maybe you could enslave them with troops faster than I could build up my score, maybe you couldn't. But I am open to suggestions, after all, it is a contest for your benefit, we're just the hosts.

Another one I contemplated but didn't go with was the team option, all AIs vs all humans.

Geo in particular, how would you feel about those being ammended? It is getting late in the contest.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>(Don't tell Nyx though, I have a good game going and I don't want to start over again.)<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Sorry, I'm evil and darn near omnipresent. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif


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Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at www.twingalaxies.com.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Personnally I am happy with it the way it is now. (Of course at Last count I was still in first so I am not sure its fair to ask me. laf)

I am very concerned about the no maintenance "trick" that Drake found. I think that is a serious flaw that could have destabalizing effects. I tested it out myself and it was too easy to get.

You start with a Merchant race which is free and gets you +5% off of maint. Then with your 2000 points you can get you your maint apptitude up to 117% which gives you 22%. Then it's simply a matter of knocking 5 points or so off of 3 other categories and you can get to 25% off maint without any noticble deficencies.

Because of the strange way its calculated, +25% off maint (which is base of 25%) give you Zero Maint cost for your ships. It should reduce your maint to 18.75% (75% of 25%) but t doesn't. IMHO that is a pretty serious flaw.

Of course if everybody does it then it isn't really unfair. But some may not know how to do it, and if you know how but don't do it it puts you a serious disadvantage, which eliminates some of the variety of available race characteristics that I like so much about SEIV.

You would end up with all pretty much identical races in your contest. Kind of a IROC challange for SEIV. If that is what you want, and I don't think you do, then post a preprogrammed race on your website and require people to use it.

Otherwise you should at the very least inform people how to do it on your website, for those that don't read the forums, or put a limit on how much maint reduction is allowed in the race that is used for the contest.

Perhaps a third option would be to allow people to use one of the 8 stock races that are in the retail game with no modifications. I don't relly like that idea though, especially since that would disqualify my entry that I have already posted.

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"Today is a good day to die" --- Cherokee Indian saying (What, you mean you thought Worf thought that one up?)

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Yes, the 'cost' to purchase maintenance reduction is ridiculously low given the current effect. I cranked it up to 200 RPs/point of Maint and that number seems to be working fairly well.

Anything lower and it becomes a 'no brainer'. Ship maintenance is easily the largest expense you have and painlessly reducing it to nil is far too attractive an option at the 'default' price.

Talenn

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Make sure you e-mail Aaron about this so it gets fixed in this coming patch.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

geoschmo wrote:
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Because of the strange way its calculated, +25% off maint (which is base of 25%) give you Zero Maint cost for your ships. It should reduce your maint to 18.75% (75% of 25%) but t doesn't. IMHO that is a pretty serious flaw.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

As I mentioned under another topic, this is intentional (just don't ask me why it is intended). It used to work they way you thought, geoschmo, but got changed in 1.08 (which means patch 1.19 for us non-beta people). Reproduction got the same change. Very annoying if you ask me. I hope they unfix this soon.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Yes, I saw your post Zanthis, but I could not remember what thread or who said it before. But I remeber it helped me understand what was going on. Thanks.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

I'd suggest for the time being that the merchant and perhaps engineering cultures be disallowed due to the maintenance balance problem. Either that or just say everyone must be neutral (more extreme, obviously). The cultures weren't rebalanced for the change in maintenance in the latest patch, and I think that disallowing the problematic ones will be the least painful remedy to fix people getting ridiculously low maintenace costs.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>I had thought about those, but decided that someone who could force the AI to surrender swiftly deserved that advantage. It left in the rivalry between economists and warmongers. Maybe you could enslave them with troops faster than I could build up my score, maybe you couldn't. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

The problem is that the AI surrenders based on score, which is mainly the number of ships and bases you have, not your economy. Since you can blockade the AI homeworlds early with an escort, generally reducing their score to 4k, you only need to build a few colony ships and a repair base or two and you'll have a 40k score and the AI will give in.

It's simply not possible for someone to beat this using troops, since you need to research construction, troops, build transports, etc. Thus, if you even try to play as a warmonger, you'll be at a severe disadvantage, especially if you keep any points in strength or ship combat, as I can set these to their minimum, and not have it affect me even a little.

I'd be all for keeping it if I thought there was even a remote chance that some other tactic would be competitive. I had been using the troop method and ship capturing until I came across this, and they just aren't anywhere near as effective...

-Drake

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Ok so here's a proposal:

No merchants, no engineers.
Maintenance reduction not to go higher than 104% (IE nothing above the Average Category).
Trade off
Tech gifts/trades/tributes off

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Now, to my knowledge there's no way to ban diplomacy with the AI. You can ban trades, and tech trades, but nothing more than that. We can't rightly propose that people mod their AI files to turn of AI surrenders, and that's really what it would require.

Anyone know how the Team Play Mode works? What if we implemented that?

And if we alter the rules, we'll see about what happens with already submitted scores then. I think that the odds are the final scores will be well over 2.3 million so it won't really matter either way.




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Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at www.twingalaxies.com.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

No objection here. And I am sure you are right about 2.3 mil not holding up. I'll be beating it myself if noone else does. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon6.gif

On a side note, I think it's really cool that Nyx/Twingalaxies give a flying flip about how we think the contest should be run. Seems to me that is probably a little remarkable as far as Online contests go.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Sounds fair to me.

I don't know if teamplay mode stops the AI from surrendering to you. I know it makes them declare war on you immediately, but I haven't tested their response to threats and such yet.

If you wanted to disallow surrenders, you might have to just tell players not to do it, like you currently are doing with the rule where you ban trade offers.

-Drake

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

You mean I would have to start over for the 4th time? Heh I love playing the game but the way you have this set up its too boring at least give the AI a bonus and make a larger galaxy so we can at least have something to do besides sit back and build bases for the Last 50 turns. Or shorten the game to 100 turns.

Long before I knew of this latest exploit about maintaince I set my race to 110 in Maintaince so my latest game is history if you change the rules again. I have 5.5 M points at turn 77 in the latest game so under the current rules I will have plenty of points to gain the lead.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Let's look at this another way. To get the free maintance you have to expend 2500 points AND take the merchant trait. This makes this trait more than any of the other advanced traits excpet emotionless (which is worthless in the contest).
I agree that the culture traits are not balanced. Scientists get 5% extra on research. Workers get 5% extra on each of the three minerals. You can't look at just the raw percentages put look at the number of racial points that each area gives you.

I don't want to restart again either. I found the merchant trait beneficail after anaylsis this and put my maintaince at 110% (the point where the additional racial point cost kicked in) so my +5% was worth more racial points then before the break point. This gives me 10% maintainence fee which has been rather sucessful.

This may be an undesired affect by MM but I believe all of us had the availablity to look at the empire set up screens and decide. If we want to take the randomness and skill of creating a race out of it and make it equivalent to a video game then probably need for Twin Galaxies to provide a save game at turn 0. This way we all have the same settings and throw out the factors of setting up the game. I beleive Nyx has mentioned before, they have strict rules on video games in that the players always use the same specs to play on.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

For the proposed new rules do we turn off allow gifts, tributes and also turn off Allow Technology Gifts, tributes, trades? And is Surrender not allowed? I just started a game like that. It looks like a very slow starting game expecially if you don't have a good coloniziable planet nearby. It takes a while just to research troops and probably will take many to take over an intact homeworld. It may even favor peaceful treaties with the AI but unfortunately my Empire will not allow me that option http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif.

On another note I speed finished my old game and submitted the score. If you change the rules don't worry about it being so high just make it an unoffical score. But why did you limit the high score so low. It won't accept any scores over 6M I got that much in 80 turns or so. I just did high level strategy in the Last 50 or 60 turns and just kept the building queue's full and some technology being researched. I wanted to turn all the asteroids into planets and make 15 or 16 Sphereworlds but I will do that next time.

[This message has been edited by Tomgs (edited 26 January 2001).]

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Hydraa:
Let's look at this another way. To get the free maintance you have to expend 2500 points AND take the merchant trait. This makes this trait more than any of the other advanced traits excpet emotionless (which is worthless in the contest).<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I'm starting to be less concerned about maintenance after all. I have a feeling all the winners are going to have 2000 bases anyway, and if you have to take 0% maintenance to get there, you'll probably have less points in resource production, and so will lose on the resource difference.

-Drake

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Nyx:

I posted a mod that changes the default races diplomacy techniques to better fit their race description. And so far with testing I haven't run into problems. It is now much more realistic in regards to surrendering, some warmonger races don't surrender period, and peaceful races stay peaceful, hence you can now have allies with the default ai races. I didn't touch the whole MEE section, but my mod definitely makes diplomacy a lot more realistic. Good luck with your contest.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Yes 2000 bases are not hard to get to I had 2000 bases on turn 107 so I could have had far more than that by the end. If it is ruled that you can have 2000 ships and 2000 bases the final score can be a lot more than what I got. Since the game limits of 2000 really don't kick in at least for bases some interpretation will need to be done.

A low maintainence helps but your right its not the only thing. A lot of micromanagement in moving population around helps a lot also. Also the order and speed that things are researched make a great deal of difference and how resources are handled. Those thing have a far greater impact on the final score.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Oh, you don't need that many, just around 200 meduim troopers. That's after you decimate the planet to less than 1500 M...

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Yes but how many to capture an intact planet most of them have 2000 colonists so it can't be a lot more than that. I would rather just come in and capture it whole http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif. Too bad that you can't get tech advances from capturing planets if we are limiting all the diplomatic ways to capture tech. Well I guess there is always Intell to get tech and capturing the colonizer ships for the colonization techs.

Hmm the racial traits picks are a lot harder choices if you have to use intell and maybe even have a few fights with the AI. Although without a bonus its research is real slow so it will take a while before it actually has any real weapons.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Even without the surrender tactic, if you just research organic weapons to level 3, it should Last you until you take all the AI out with troops. That'll also give you cheap effective troops if you use the small org. weapons.

I hope we hear some decisive news on the diplomacy issue soon.

-Drake

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>I hope we hear some decisive news on the diplomacy issue soon.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't the AI surrender to you even if you don't demand it? It looks like the overwhelming majority are for forbidding surrender, but if the AI will just do it anyway, then that doesn't really change much. You leave your ships blockading their worlds for three or four turns and it's just as if you sent the demand isn't it?

BTW, on the grond conquest issue, I've taken full-strength homeworlds, guarded by WPs and defending troops with only a single partly-loaded small transport carrying only small troops. It doesn't take anywhere near 200 medium troops.

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Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at www.twingalaxies.com.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>You leave your ships blockading their worlds for three or four turns and it's just as if you sent the demand isn't it?<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I have never had an AI surrender to me without my demand. Although that doesn't prove it can't happen. I can't say I have ever waited around that long.

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

Well I tried it out. Blockaded the first opponent I found. Blew up all his ships and beat him down to the point where I am sure he would surrender if I demanded it. Then I waited 12 turns and nothing. Every couple of turns he pumps out another ship which I promptly destroy. He did offer me a Trade treaty which I turned down. He is now pretty ticked at me and I am sure he's about to declare war. But still no unilateral surrender. I just don't think it is written in to the code IMHO.

Anybody see this happen in a game?

BTW, count me as a vote AGAINST forbidding demanding surrender for the purposes of the contest. I don't think it could be qualified as a "cheat". It's not like the no maint thing or mothballed ships still counting in your score which everyone might not know about. Anybody who has played the game a few times I would guess has tried demanding surrender.

At some point we have to pick a set of rules and ride with it. Otherwise those people who have already turned in scores, or have games they have been playing for days/weeks are penalized. 150 turns takes a LONG time with the ammount of micromanagment that this game requires. If you have to play a few turns a day like me, then that's quite an investment to start all over like I have had to several times now.

Ok, I'm done whining now. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/images/icons/icon7.gif


[This message has been edited by geoschmo (edited 05 February 2001).]

Re: Rules Question - contest
 

I've come around to geoschmo's way of thinking on the matter. The way it works is really the way the game was designed. It's not a bug like the infinite retrofit, or an oversight like the maintenance issue might be. It'd would be like saying that taking over a homeworld with just a freighter and troops is too easy, so don't do that.

If the developers didn't want surrendering the way it is now, they could have changed more races to surrender at 50x score, like the Amon'Krie and Sergetti. If you don't nip those guys early, you may be sitting over their HW for a while, trying to strangle them to the point of surrender.

I guess I'm pretty much against any changes at this point that don't deal directly with obvious, serious bugs, or ways to maniuplate the scoring system.

Multiple retrofitting, mothballing ships, and bare bones ships can be problems. People who use these techniques can either build ringworlds from start to finish in a cpl of turns, maintain a massive fleet for scoring purposes for no maintenance cost (mothball), or minimal maintenance (bare bones).

Purchasing lower maintenance has trade-offs,(and I think the trade-off hurts you) so it isn't something you have to do to be competitive, even though it doesn't seem like the effect was intended.

Forcing surrender is just another tactic that can work well if you handle it correctly, not an exploit that should be Banned.

Just my opinion, of course. http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ubb/ima...ons/icon12.gif

-Drake

[This message has been edited by Drake (edited 05 February 2001).]