Avoiding Evil Empiredom

RiTz21 · #1 June 13th, 2002, 04:42 AM

Woah !!

Hold a sec. What do you guys mean by this "evil Empire" ? Could someone clarify please?

thanks !
RiTz21

Will · #2 June 13th, 2002, 04:59 AM

It's when an empire reaches a certain score (something like 500k points and 70% above second place empire). There's a flag in the AI's happiness that causes them to become extremely pissed off if you get this big, and thus gang up on you.

This prevents super-big empires from quickly gobbling up all the AIs, since you have to fight all at once.

capnq · #3 June 15th, 2002, 03:19 AM

The trigger conditions for Mega-Evil Empire can be modded or turned off entirely in Settings.txt .

The unmodded threshholds are a score of 500 thousand, and 170% of second place for a human player, or 250% of second for an AI.

raynor · #4 June 15th, 2002, 07:51 AM

Your score is calculated based on a number of factors but the tonnage of your ships is weighted more than all of the others. In particular, the game uses your ships that are active. So, if you wanted to, you could either scrap or *mothball* half your fleet, and your score would go down considerably.

Similarly, I would guess that you could use mothballing to keep your empire from ever becoming Evil Empire.

This is an old, old issue. But the score is sorta unrealistic because folks discovered they could build tons and tons of empty bases to over-inflate their score. Since a comparison of your score to that of the AI's plays a big part in surrender...

Recall the tournament to see who could get the highest score in 150 turns. They figured out that you could get all the AI opponents on the map to surrender to you in about 20 turns using the cascade surrender. It was a combination of building empty bases to inflate the score while simultaneously blockading the AI planets.

Another interesting point is that the game doesn't seem to figure units into the score calculation. But they can be just as effective at defending your empire as ships as well as almost effective offensively. By focusing more on units, you can avoid MEE altogether until you are so powerful that it doesn't matter if they all band against you.