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I understand that the Twin Galaxies tournament requires every ship to be filled full of components
Not true, a destroyer needs 210, more than would fit on a frigate. Not completely full, just enough to require the hull chosen. There's a big difference. Thanks for the post though, this one's going in the FAQ.
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I guess what I'm getting at is I find this to be a little... well, arrogant. The tone implies that there's a line that should be clearly drawn, and if you don't see it, you're a 'cheater' not a 'champion'. No hard feelings here, but while most would agree on the infinite retrofit being a cheat, I think you'd see a lot of different opinions on things like maintenance, taking advantage of AI, and the like.
Well, arrogant wasn't intended, elitist was. A champion at anything is a rolemodel. In an ideal world they'd be both skilled and morally upstanding. This isn't always the case, but it is what we, as an officiating body, are obligated to aim at. A number of our best players, Billy Mitchell, Ron Corcoran, "Captain Canada," and Ben Addair, to name a small number off the top of my head, are really great guys who help out a lot in ensuring things are don fairly, making sure that the person who really is the best player gets the credit, not just someone who knows all the best rules exploits. Not all our world record holders are that kind of person, but that's what we aim for. And I definitely appreciate bringing the subject up (hopefully you could tell I was inspired by the length of my response) and I'm really enjoying people's thoughts.
The more I deal with this contest the more I'm becomming aware of the difference between you guys and the people playing our other World Championship (Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2) We've got people in that group cussing out our refs for catching them cheating and telling us that we're not running a fair contest because they can't avoid using the bug we caught them using so we should have made it legal in the contest. All the rules changes we've made for SE4 came when people e-mailed me about bugs they discovered with the scoring system. Not once have they come up because we caught someone "cheating."
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I'm guessing that if an empty Star Base contributes more to your score than a fully loaded cruiser, then this also means that a fully loaded cruiser which took 20 turns to build contributes the same score as one which took only 2 turns to build.
As well it should. Score is *supposed* to represent your power in the game. How long that cruiser took to build shouldn't impact that, IMO (though I think total shipyard capacity would be an interesting value to add to score). By your premise, anything built at a shipyard 2 should only provide 2/3 the score points of the exact same ship built at the lower tech shipyard. And anyone with temporal tech and their 4xs speed shipyards would be realy screwed.
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I would agree that he is a skillful competitor in the Twin Galaxies tournament, but I might not agree that he is a good SE IV player.
A good strategist knows how to alter his strategies to fit the required victory conditions. Those strats that will give you a fast military victory aren't as valuable in a game where the only victory condition is first one to reach a specific % of the tech tree. The better players recognize what is required to win, and find the strategy that will achieve that victory fastest and most securely. When victory is defined purely by tactical combat, your definition holds true, but what good does it do if he uses his knowledge of score manipulation to get such a high score so swiftly that three AI players surrender to him and your "perfect" destroyer, able to kill cruisers one on one, gets attacked by huge fleets of cruisers, more than it can handle? He beat you with economics. Tactics is battlefield only, Space Empires is a strategy game, economy and diplomacy and many other variables are important. mastery of only one is not the same as mastery of all. So your fleets are indestructable, fine, do you have enough of an economy to defeat me in a war of attrition? Can you withstand my intelligence onslaught? Can you protect your stars from my stellar weapons? Do you control the pace of the game or do you only react to your opponent's actions? IMO, limiting skill to one strategy alone is not a good idea.
And I said that Geo's behavior was *a* sign of a good player, not the only one. And I didn't mean score tweaking itself. Taking the time to figure out what exactly are the best methods to achieve the required victory condition, that's what I was complimenting. In this application it meant learning the ins and outs of the scoring system, but that same behavior would also apply to learning which weapons provide the best range, reload, damage, tonnage, and research costs. I've seen a lot of info on range and damage, bt very little on research costs. In a Last-man standing game is the wave motion gun really all that good? I'll top out on the psychic weapon tree about the same time you've just gotten access to ripper beams. It gets back to the question of is a dreagnaught really better than a cruiser, the cruiser may well obliterate the shipyard before it finishes the dreadnaught. In a purely tactical situation, the dreadnaught is always superior, but this isn't a tactical game, its strategic.
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Really it wouldn't make sense to use anything else in those games. Maybe how many beers you drink while playing?
What a great idea! Sadly we had to ban marathon games, but I think a contest to see who could drink the most beers while playing pinball might enable a comeback of the marathon-style contest!
JK
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Compete in the Space Empires IV World Championship at
www.twingalaxies.com.