Metaverse review

[PLATO]

Did anyone see the article that Dan posted that quoted a review of the metaverse as saying that the Apolyton Empire was "near lifeless"

I don't know about you guys, but I plan on starting a game for submission this weekend.



...Or do you just want to roll over and play dead? Hmmmmm???

[PLATO]

Okay...24 hours and not a single response. Guess that explains a lot about the "near lifeless" comment.


*PLATO wonders if he is just conversing with himself*

[LDiCesare]

I no longer am interested in submitting games. I just miss the point.
Games I'll send won't be used to improve the game or the ai.
The victory types I like (alliance) aren't worth many points and the scoring system is generally broken.

[vee4473]

Well Plato,

I have a few comments. I started a thread a while back about the empire.

I still play, but the main thing that I can't stand (and this goes for civ too) is that you really have no idea what increases your score.

Of course I know that higher difficulty will earn higher scores, but other than that, the scoring system is very mysterious.

Someone set me straight if I am wrong.

And I say this because I have seen scores on the metaverse where players on normal difficulty have a higher game score than someone who won a game on challenging.

After scanning the scores, it seems that there is no clear scoring system.

A large map on normal can outscore a medium map on challenging, and does alignment factor in somewhere? what about type of victory?

Without knowing what truly factors into the score, it's hard to know what you need to achieve for the highest scores.

Just when you think you have seen a pattern for what makes for a higher score, you will find a game score that ruins your theory.

Again, I may be missing the scoring guidelines posted elsewhere.



As for the metaverse in general, I like it, but it seems to have fallen short of advertising.

Maybe I don't know how to use the metaverse for this, but wasn't it proposed as a way to download ai behaviour based on top players' games?

Or did they use top players games to tweak the AI behind the scenes via patches?


I love the idea of having empires that accumulate scores, and I wish civ3 had this. (Only, i'd like to see civ 3 broken down into civs of course..for example, you can join the americans and contribute to their score etc...)

I have been playing, but games take a while and when you spend days on a game and when you finally win and you get a score lower than you expected.....AND DON'T KNOW WHY!!!!!!!........that's a game killer.

It's not like you can say, "well, this is the reason I lost points here etc.. I will try to improve next game".

Scoring wise, each game seems like a crap shoot. It's the massive time investment with no knowledge as to what would improve your score that, in summary, is why the meataverse loses interest.

I will keep going on with it when I can however.

[LDiCesare]

Or did they use top players games to tweak the AI behind the scenes via patches?

That's more or less what they did. At a point, they used the research path of a player for the Arceans research path for instance.

The scoring system is obscure, though at a point they explained how it was supposed to be computed. Since this didn't seem to be correct, and since the breakdown of various scores doesn't mean much, indeed it's hard to understand what gives you points.
Mostly, way of winning and difficulty matter. Military victories are worth much more than anything else. Don't even try a tech victory if you play for points.

[Code Monkey]

I believe at some point they realised that fixing the scoring was going to eat far more programming time than it was worth. Every time they responded to complaints about something, it altered the balance until the only non-nerfed victory was military. Now, the only thing they seem to do is increase the score between versions.