Rules Question - contest

[Drake]

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.

quote:

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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.

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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

[Nyx]

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.

[geoschmo]

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.

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.

[Drake]

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

[Tomgs]

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.

[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).
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.

[Tomgs]

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 .

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).]