does the "place empires evenly throughout galaxy" work?

deccan · #1 July 21st, 2003, 05:36 AM

I have to say that this is a really big problem.

I just quit playing my first single-player TDM because of this. I've heard good things about the TDM AIs, particularly the United Flora and the Rage, so I made sure that they were in my game. However, as it turned out, I started out at the very eastern end of the map and had taken control of over a dozen systems before I met the first AI. I was far and away the leading player throughout the entire game.

I took control of some of the AIs to see what they were up to and discovered that they were all bunched together. The Rage had started in a system with two warp points, with a Neutral on one side, and another AI empire on the other, and had gotten nowhere (DUC 3 when I had PPB 5 ).

I've just started a second TDM game, and this time I've started with two neighbors very close to me, and things are much more interesting and challenging.

oleg · #2 July 21st, 2003, 02:15 PM

Yeah, I hate it too. I like to play Proportions or AIC with many AIs. But given the insane starting pace of bonused AI, I prefer to have some buffer spece for long entertaining games. Unfortunately, that means low number of AIs

May be i should generate map, place starting positions manualy and load it ? But that will reduce the joy of exploration

Nocturnal · #3 July 21st, 2003, 03:28 PM

Hehe, in my current game I started in the same system with the Rage and blockaded their homeworld immediately, then researched troops and took them over with minimal fuss. Poor things are my servants now. But my highest-population world is an airless Rage world.

Suicide Junkie · #4 July 21st, 2003, 04:07 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by oleg:
May be i should generate map, place starting positions manualy and load it ? But that will reduce the joy of exploration

Use a custom map generated by someone else.

For some really tense action, try the FQM sphere quadrant. You don't need lots of AIs to make that one hard

Silent Sorrow · #5 July 21st, 2003, 05:24 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Ed Kolis:
The rest of the galaxy wasn't filled with uninhabitable systems (nebulas, black holes, etc.) was it?

Nope, all standard.

Silent Sorrow · #6 July 21st, 2003, 05:35 PM

Quote:

Like Geo said, it doesn't work.
By the way, are you playing with "bonus"?
Would be great to me, know how the Tessellate performed starting close to you.

I just downloaded the Tessellate race yesterday after reading though the ENTIRETY of that AI deathmatch 2 thread to find out which AIs I should play against. I didn't give the AIs any bonus points. Should I have? (All I did was set their difficulty to "hard".)

As for how the game's going, I'm crushing them simply because I expanded fast and was able to bottle them up in about five systems. I'm about to deliver the coup de grace. So it hasn't been anywhere near as challenging as I'd hoped for.

But I'm hoping the Vikings will give me more of a fight. And then there's the United Flora (which I haven't run into yet and I assume are on the far side of the quadrant opposite me), but from looking at the scores, I'm guessing that the Vikings are kicking UF ***. So it'll probably come down to me vs. the Vikings.

All that said, I think this match would be ENTIRELY different if the four empires really had started evenly spaced.

Silent Sorrow · #7 July 21st, 2003, 05:38 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by geoschmo:

quote:
Originally posted by Krsqk:
Does it evenly space empires, but not across the quadrant?

No. I have seen it stick five empires together on one half of the quad with one or two systems between and stick the Last empire by themself 8 systems away from anyone else.

It just flat doesn't work at all.

Geoschmo

Do you think this is something that could be fixed by a modder or is hardcoded?