Somewhat peculiar PBW situation
 

I find myself in a peculiar situation in one of my PBW games. At this stage I don't feel confident to yell foul but I would like some advice.

I oppened up my turn and almost from the start I felt something was odd. I discovered to my dismay that a neighbour had declared war on me, and there were perhaps hundreds of reports of battles. This is fair enough if he was ACTUALLY playing. For some time I have been one of the few players actually sending turns. I believe the amount of players left is in the area of 4 maybe 5, out of maybe 14-20 empires. Of course an AI in charge may have decided to do it but the tactics don't fit an AI. The enemy had built plague bombers and sent one plague bomber to each of my colonies. This is the first thing I find odd, the possible AI can actually strategically use specialised weapons. The other odd thing is that the enemy bombers now sit over my dead planets SURROUNDED by intact minefields. How did he get there?. Possible answer: he moved there before declaring war. So now the AI is being sneaky http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...s/confused.gif. I checked and he didn't do his latest turn. I can see I DID do my turn and I didn't notice this before. Strangely the turn was done off line and there seems to have been 2 turns done, and it didn't do the last stuff I said to do. Possible I sent in the wrong turn, but why have 2 turns been done. The enemy also just annexed another race just as they attack me.

This by the way is a pet peeve of mine. I work to defeat other empires while large empires become ever more powerful by suddenly telling empires, they are not at war with, to surrender when their players aren't playing anymore.

I'll be blunt. I suspect the whole thing has been manipulated offline and set up to attack me. That is how it appears but I won't come out yet and cast accusations. The GM is in charge of another empire.

Re: Somewhat peculiar PBW situation
 

If people are pulling domino surrender exploits, plaguing under treaty is just as bad.

It is entirely likely that you could have uploaded the wrong turn, or missed a deadline by minutes (thus missing a turn AND uploading a plr for the wrong turn in one deadly move).

Given a galaxy wide series of combats, it is not unreasonable to imagine that PBW would time out and require manual processing...

It sounds to me like bad luck combined with ruthless munchkinism making for a gamekiller.


PS:
Would you like to join a CBmod game instead? Honorable, stand up combat. No plague bombs, no mines, no cloaks, just beating each other to a mutual pulp with Gunboats, PD ships, artillery, Carriers and lots of units.

Re: Somewhat peculiar PBW situation
 

I suppose your explanation does make sense. It does seem to have been awhile since the last turn.

My conduct in a game depends on what I decided to play as at the beginning.

As Klingons I DO not use ship computers, bio weapons, or planet destroyers.

As Terran Empire (ST mirror) I will spy, I would backstab if I feel I can get away with it (always with the hope the player doesn't take it personally), and "cheat" within the game. eg. I would break a treaty after I had moved in to position.

I can see the benefit of forcing AIs to surrender, but as the Dominion I fought the Andorian AI only for the Federation on the other side of the galaxy to suddenly annex them http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gif Of course after that I demanded all the other AIs to surrender.

I have been avoiding new SE4 games so I can play SE5 but it doesn't look like that will be starting any time soon.

Re: Somewhat peculiar PBW situation
 

Also if you send your turns via email and not uploading yourself the server may have been down when it came back up the dealine passed and it executed without your turn

Re: Somewhat peculiar PBW situation
 

You can see in the turn history if you have missed a turn. You should have also recieved an Email when the turn processed. Look to see if there is one more than expected.

Look at the turn dates of your old turns to see if one was ran offline.

Re: Somewhat peculiar PBW situation
 

Well it doesn't look like I missed my last turn, but as I said it was done offline.

Re: Somewhat peculiar PBW situation
 

You could always ask why the game was run offline.
Have many turns been run offline ?

Re: Somewhat peculiar PBW situation
 

If there was an error running the turn, it would be listed in the turn history. I used to get turn error messages every once in a while and would have to run the turn off-line. It would state that the turn could not be run.
It may be that the GM used the offline turn to set the players to computer control in his GM panel. That would explain the sudden attacks by the AI. They should now be active and you will notice them moving around and declaring "WAR" with you.