Dark Avatar Impressions

[yin26]

That could be fun...sort of like Apolyton University. I'm deep in testing another game at the moment, but I'd gladly make time for an on-going AAR with us starting with the same save. What should be the settings? Do we care how we report? I'm up for anything.

[Hydro]

What might be more instructive is to have a base game that is played by several different people and benchmarked every 10 turns or so as part of an ongoing AAR). This would be excellent to see how different styles of play can do different things.

I’m game. We’d have to agree on a start, though.

Perhaps:
Small galaxy, common everything; standard settings.
Race – I like Iconians, but am open (and probably need to play other races anyway)
Opponents – at least 6, split between good, neutral, and evil: Korath, Drengin; Thalians, Arceans; Altarans, Torians.
Tech trading - disallowed? Restrictions?

Hydro

[LordTheRon]

What could be an idea, is to play a succession game at one point.

I've seen this done for Civ and it's great fun to play and to read. I'm not sure if the concept will work for GalCiv, but I think it might be worth a try.

We form a team of several players and every player plays a set of turns, saves and passes it on to the next. After doing so he reports on the forum.

How about it?

[LordTheRon]

I got sucked into the game pretty badly yesterday.

Played till late in the night so I didn't have time to post again. By then I hadn't read the screenshot tips yet. I'll post my findings (it won't be a very good AAR I'm afraid) later today. The game isn't finished yet, but I'm in pretty bad shape.

Hope to finish the current game tonight, but I don't have much time. I DO have time on Wednesday and Thursday so I'll start a new game with screenshots and DAR (during action report). I'll play and post, just like Yin did and hope for some nice tips and strategies.

Edit: Ok so here's my gamereport of yesterday

I chose the Krynn on a small galaxy with 2 minors and 4 random opponents set to intelligent. Tech trading was on, but I decided as sort of a houserule not to start trading myself, only if the AI came up with an offer. I focused my extra points on Economy and Espionage.

My starting location looked pretty promising with a few clusters of planets rather close to my starting location. I bought a factory and a colony ship and one turn later a scout. All my ships started exploring in a different direction.

The promising start turned out to be a pretty sad location. Every single planet with quality of 4 or higher in the neighbourhood was an extreme planet. So I was stuck with my home PQ10 planet and the usual PQ 4 planet in my system. Sadly one of my opponents would be the Iconian Refuge. With their Superadaptor ability they would take away quite a few planets.

Good thing was that all the others seemed to notice too. The others being Yor, Torians and the feared Korath. I probably should have just gone straight for military to grab a few planets from the Iconians or Torians. One of the minors (dunno the name anymore) had a very nice PQ 15 planet close to me, but I decided to research extreme colonization and try to take the peaceful route.

In one way I succeeded. I managed to get two radiation planets under my control. One PQ11 planet and a PQ6 planet. Still not really top of the bill as I now had 4 planets. A PQ11, PQ10, PQ6 and PQ4.

Knowing (too late) I had to get some warships up and running I started researching weapontechs, bigger hulls, better engines and logistics. But it was too little too late. The Yor declared war on the Torians shortly followed by the Korath declaring war on the Torians. Toria was gone in 60 seconds (and with the wind too). I really wonder if the Torian AI had the same problem as the Drath AI from Yin's game. They didn't really do anything about the invasion and were taken out really quickly. Maybe they just weren't prepared and let's face it, even on intelligent they look stupid.

Looking at the graphs I saw myself falling behind the Korath and Yor. The Korath were way stronger in every aspect than anybody else. Might be the fact that they managed to grab five galactic resources! I missed out on all of them, finding them just a few turns late.

Next up on the menu were the Iconians. This time the Korath stated the war and the Yor joined the party. The Iconians put up a fight but their ships were nothing compared to the heavy Korath fighters (3 vs 12 firepower).

So now we are down to three. Me (trying to be neutral/good), the Yor and the Korath. I really have a bad feeling that I'm the next victim of evil. My relationship with both is wary. I do have quite a few medium fighters, but with firepower 2 they won't stand a chance. I'm frantically researching large hulls now. My advantage is that with a nice economy I saved up about 7000 credits so I might put them to good use by upgrading my ships. Still it's probably impossible to hold evil back. I have 5 planets (a flipped Yor planet joined me), the Korath have 16 planets and the Yor 13. I don't have the power for attacks.

BTW I had some fun megaevents. One of them put a spy on every single colonized planet. I HAD to remove them quickly cause the were wrecking my economic capital and my techonogical capital. Also had the event where all ships engines are limited to 5 parsecs. Last one brought in higher tax revenues.

To be continued... but it might be a short continuation I fear.

[yin26]

Once again, Hydro, great info. I'd never thought of rushing 3 factories, etc., but will try that. Well, I thought of it but was instead rushing one of the colony ships, but, as you say, map size is critical in such decisions. That's the sign of a good game, or at least one sign!

I wanted to get a raw record of what my first game looked like. Again, no real strategy there (obviously!) other than figuring stuff out. Still, it was fun. My plan now is to read up some more, fool around, and come back with an AAR that might be of some use to people. In the meantime, I hope you and others will keep posting.

[Hydro]

Oh, by the way. One of my favorite storytelling techniques in SMAC were AARs from multiplayer games. Some of them went for hundreds of pages (I think the largest was 500 pages!) of turn-by-turn storylines from me and my worthy opponent.

With screenshots and a nice storyline GC: DA could be very compelling. I think there was one like this at the GC2 forum. It was nicely done, even if the setup was rather formal.

Hydro

[Hydro]

Wow, this thread has morphed a lot! And in a good way!

As to what Vista cost: $6 billion. Or at least that is what The Economist reported recently. Moreover, it was 2 years late since they re-wrote all the ancient code left over from DOS and Win95 days that was giving them fits. The Economist also speculated that the huge cost and late delivery of Vista were reasons why Bill stepped down as CEO (or was it pres?) of Microsquish. Now they have business people and not techies running the show, and I wonder what that will mean? I have zero interest in adopting Vista - none. I may with my next PC, but I'll not likely have a choice. XP funs fine, thank-you-very-much.

Anyway, I think the topic of how to start and play a game has lots of potential since it depends on your starting planet size, bonus, race abilities, and galaxy size (among others).

I admit I'm a bit boring with my starts: Huge galaxy, 6-8 random opponents, common or maybe abundant everything. For my initial builds:

* Buy at least 3 factories (maybe less if I have a good manufacturing bonus tile)
* At least 2 labs (not purchased), and I generally like three for four depending on the class of my home world (Iconians have a PQ14 starting planet, which is very helpful).
* One happiness facility
* Two trade, maybe more
* The balance of the tiles depends on whether I want to max production or (more generally) science rate. If I am lucky to have a few good lab bonus tiles I go for tech capital. I rarely get a production capital at my home world.

My production slider is at 100%, of course. I tax until I get to 60% approval, or maybe 55% if I’m desperate. I don’t get below 50% or I’m in deep doodoo since growth will stall. My allocation for production is 50% military, 20% social, 30% labs. As Solver said, cranking out colony ships is a priority and I like to see one every 4 turns or so (this generally takes 4 or 5 factory equivalents – industrial bonus tiles help here!).

Now, do I buy colony ships? Almost never. But then I play on huge galaxies, which puts a strong emphasis on industrial longevity. I’ve watched lots of AI industrial production collapse and take years to recover since they obviously overspent and didn’t have the economy to sustain their industrial output. Moreover, my starting techs emphasize propulsion, with the idea being that spd 3 is 50% faster than spd 2. My new colony ships will, perversely, beat my old ones to new colony planets, and this is even with GC2A having severely toned down engine usage. I always run a deficit that is funded by my cash reserve (which I am loathe to deplete), with judicious additions from anomalies found by my fleets of survey ships – sensors and the survey ships they allow are a tech priority. As my cash reserve declines I reduce industrial output so that my deficit equals 10% of my remaining cash reserve (e.g – if my deficit is 120 bc and my remaining cash is 900 then I reduce industrial capacity until my deficit is 90 bc). This lets me have a soft landing instead of a crash, and give me a chance to let my population-fueled population growth take up the slack.

In smaller galaxies this strategy will be totally wrong since spd 2 is plenty fast, and the good colonies will be gobbled up quickly if you don’t buy your colony ships and get them out of the gate ASAP. Note that this does not apply to the Super Adapter super ability. I suspect it is even stronger in small galaxies since they will get half of the planets out there before the other races have a hope of colonizing any of them.

Yin – thanks for the screenshots, and the instructions on how to do them! I’m very glad LordtheRon asked.

Perhaps a few AAR threads showing peoples style and how races play would be enlightening? I know I’d be VERY interested since these act as tutorials – with lots of pretty pictures! I like seeing other people’s game styles.

Sadly, I’m swamped at work this week and won’t have much time to play. **sigh** Maybe this weekend…

Hydro

[yin26]

Originally posted by LordTheRon
Wow that was a fast game Yin. By the time I got home from work, did some groceries and ate you played the game and put down a very nice read.

That's being kind! It was funny, though, to lose both juicy planets on the same turn...also funny that I didn't realize the Spore Ships can take planets. Thanks for the AI tip. I'll have to pay close attention.

As for screen shots, I press the Print Screen button, then drop them in the Paint program that comes with XP. I clip out the portion that's important to me and re-paste it back into a new Paint canvas (Control N should do it for a new canvas, then Control V to paste). Save as a .jpg file. I then upload to Image Shack, a free image hosting site that even gives you the ability to resize images automatically according to use. I use the Bulletin (Message?) Board setting. You then get urls that you can copy and paste into forums.

Looking forward to your AAR!

[Solver]

Oh, wow... I just figured out, thanks to the official forums, that the Super Dominator Corvettes the Drengin always have are thanks to their superability. That's seriously messed up.

If you haven't seen those: they're really crappy ships that appear in large numbers for free for the Drengin in wars. They're poor. And there I was wondering why I always destroy so many of them...

That's a messed-up super ability. The ships are so damn poor that even competently put-together fleets of Small fighters beat them, not to mention capital ships. And, once you're talking capital ships, they just get free experience from these corvettes, which is worth a lot.

It's more a weakness than an ability, really. A human player might be able to use those crappy ships reasonably well for decoys or freighter/starbase raids, but the AI is seriously only hurt by their presence.

[LordTheRon]

Probably me, but what keys do I have to use to make a screenshot in Galciv?

[LordTheRon]

Wow that was a fast game Yin. By the time I got home from work, did some groceries and ate you played the game and put down a very nice read.

Sometimes in vanilla GalCiv it happened that if you put the overall AI intelligence on tough there could still be one AI set to fool. I thought this bug was squashed quite some time ago, but that might be it. I always doublecheck to have all the individual AI's set to the same intelligence level. Going to play my own game now. Will try to report, but I'm very bad with screenshots, so don't expect much from that.

[Solver]

Yep, some unexpected stuff there... but no, Spore ships do give you the planet.

[yin26]

Is it possible that the Drath gave it as a gift? Anyway, some good lessons learned this game:

Colonization might not be as frantic this time, but missing out on a planet (or two!) can pretty much put you in the tank. On a larger map, I might have not run into losing these planets one turn away from getting them myself. So keep that in mind on the small map!

My population bonus and friendly trade with the Korx really kept me alive. Under better circumstances, that could have been a great foundation for a strong empire. It was also nice that I got the Korath to go to war with the Drath, though, obviously, I didn't achieve my goal of getting that planet.

So there you have it. A loss on my first try. I'm curious that the Drath didn't respond better under war. Is there some AI setting I'm missing? You saw that I had it set to 'Tough' and no randomization of intelligence.

[yin26]

Hey, something odd just happened. That Spore Ship actually took the planet...can they do that? I read that it can kill life on the planet but not take the planet! Is this a bug? Well, at this point the game is over for me, but I'm awfully curious about this Spore Ship taking the planet.

[Solver]

Ohh, good to see a sporeship there. If you're lucky, the Korath will use it well on the Drath... before coming with some more after you .