Hot posts in thread: What I have seen so far

The AAR is in progress. Challengers welcome.

Terrans Challenge - Turn 1 to 38

 

Ok, so let's have a go at it, assymetrically, and see what happens.

I am pretty sure that the Draguul in my last AAR wouldn't have presented any threat even if I hadn't sent out a survey ship at all, e.g. without all the assets that netted me.

Let's leave other games for later. I am normally playing Heroes III (plenty of great handcrafted maps) or Heroes V (with my own AI enhancements).

If someone else is interested to take up the challenge, please feel free to download the starting savegame and post your own AAR in the subforum here.

 

Well that's just it,
If you have the factions optimised, and we are repulsive, unable to enter treaties... we should be hated by all the AIs. If under those circumstances, the AIs still pose no problem or threat... than we have a very serious problem and I am quite interested in seeing the severity of it.

Now it is understood, that even though I do not know you well, it is safe to say that neither one of us is an "average" player. Still, if ISG can come close to posing a challenge for either of us, that would be valuable information.

So let us then play our own separate victory conditions, You attempt yours and see how it unfolds and I will attempt mine. My interest is still more on game research rather than competing directly against you. For that, I have some excellent games we could try as PBEM should you ever want to go one on one.

 

Negative. I understand your sentiment, but your suggestion doesn't hold much interest for me either.

Conquering AI factions with the military skills they displayed is just busy work for me.

The idea behind my suggestion is that we have to play intelligently. The challenge is to be faster. Certainly there is a lot of unpredictability involved in how the map is layed out, maybe there are wormholes leading straight from your empire to the objectives, but it could just as well be that one of the remote objectives will be part of the biggest and meanest computer empire on the map sitting in a far away corner. Also the AI factions are optimized.

I don't think you will have an easy time in this scenario.

 

I'm sorry, I looked at these victory conditions and they don't hold much interest for me.

I would prefer something simpler and more natural

You have 8 players total yes? that means 7 AIs

Domination, the following have to be met, (not either/or)

Full territorial conquest of 3 AI factions, you may destroy colonies/outposts to achieve this

The conquest and control of 5 AI Capitols (with original occupants, no razing the planet and re-colonizing)

Galactic council, not allowed to accept outcome, meaning that if a winner is declared,(even if it is the Terrans), you decline to accept the vote and are now at war with everyone.

Also, some house rules

Cannot accept any treaties with the AIs, (no trade, research etc), we are xenophobic and homicidal.

 

Bingo! Give Excited Photon a cigar, he totally gets it. Existing bonuses would be adequate if AI behaviour were tweaked. More bonuses to the existing AI, means I have to slaughter more helpless ships, or deal with an AI making questionable decisions that much longer. Not fun.

The answer is elsewhere in my opinion, giving additional cheats will just make me play with a more buffed custom race to counter the cheats. It will make me ignore sections of the game, as I optimise research and builds to strike quick, hard and fast. That's fine sometimes, but this game has so much more to offer.

If the AI were able to build a credible military, with better designs, and spread out in a way that it could actually defend itself, while not leaving valuable assets such as support ships and assault ships undefended... well, things would be quite different. Mind you, I haven't even touched on AI aggression and who it is directed against.

I'll digest this when I get home and respond accordingly

 

@Excited Photon I was responding to his complaint about difficulty. There is the Galactic Council victory condition, which is the way I've won, but I agree in a future expansion--if we can get enough people buying the game to Adam doesn't starve--science and cultural victories would be nice, and maybe eventually quests.

But the blob thing is partly on the player. I play 4x's in turtle mode because I enjoy focusing on my own empire and maximizing research and culture internally. If I attack other factions it's because I've already won by maxing out the culture and tech trees, and really want that victory screen--usually I just quit at that point, satisfied I won on my terms.

Just because you could get an easy but empty win by conquest doesn't mean you have to do so--especially since you don't find it fun.

In general in any single player game if there's a cheesy but unfun way to win, the simple solution is to just not do it, rather than demanding the devs find ways to prevent you from doing what you can decide yourself not to do.

It's like the guy that went to the doctor saying "It hurts when I do X", and the doctor replied, "Well, don't do X."

 

My question is: would increasing the difficulty level via AI bonuses actually make the game more fun? If the bonuses make the game end the same, but on turn 387 instead of turn 243, with the final battle between fleets of 42 vessels instead of 19 vessels, is that really more fun, or just more tedium? I've encountered that with modding other games, succeeding in making them take longer, but not ultimately more fun or more satisfying. AI bonuses can increase the chance of losing, but even that is unsatisfying 'because it's just the bonuses'. In another game forum (sword of the stars maybe), someone made a really perceptive observation: increasing the difficulty level just increases the exploits you feel justified in using.

Options for setting personal difficulty levels (AI bonuses) are a good idea, since players have different tastes. However, I think a better path to increasing fun is to offer more options for winning aside from 'invade someone, then use the spoils to become more powerful and take over someone else; repeat until you get bored'. The AARs so far have all been the same: explore/build a bit, take over this neighbour, then take over that neighbour, and hmmm, I guess the game is effectively over. I'd like to see more non-war treaties and interactions, where you have to decide whether the benefits from a trade deal are worth the benefits that the other nation receives towards their winning conditions. Ideally it would have some depth, so that you could effectively 'fight' a rival by making strategic treaties with other nations. I'd like to see more chances to provide military assistance to a partner, and have it actually mean something, rather than just a minor plus to relations.

I'd like to see an AAR that is more than just the blob of one colour that eats all the other blobs.

 

Here it is. I hope the races will give you a few surprises, as they are optimized quite a bit differently.



The start looks like this:



As victory condition I suggest the following:

• Ownership and colonization of a star system
  • All colonizable planets in the system need to be settled, i.e. only gas giants and asteroid belts are excluded
  • Barren planets need to be terraformed to terran biome
  • Vault built on each planet
    
  • Population on each planet maxed
• Victory requires to fulfil the above settlement criteria for all designated star systems
• The designated star systems are as follows:
  • white star in sector A,0
  • yellow star in sector A,11
  • red star in sector O,0
  • orange star in sector O,10
• If a designated star system has no planets, it is replaced by:
  • the nearest star with planets
  • if the distance of two possible replacement systems is equal, the more westward system is selected
  • only major star systems visible on the starting map are valid

The idea behind this victory condition is that you are required to develop your logistics and empire far enough to reach these systems and possibly wrest these from other empires. All means are allowed. The galactic council victory is ignored, i.e. you play on. Elimination of all other empires is a failure.

The first player who fulfils the victory condition wins. Turns count, not real time. Speed and efficiency matters. Exploration and intelligence may as well.

AAR documentation requires screenshots of all events, galactic, colony, survey, failed or otherwise. All other documentation is voluntary.

You find the savegame attached.

Anyone who wants to join us is welcome. The difficulty is the max what the game currently offers.

 

That's actually a good suggestion but it doesn't work that way, our immediate neighbors are totally random. Therefore, if we spawn next to a race with the same biome preference as ours, we benefit from them having very favorable worlds nearby. It's happened to me a few times already, usually I restart when that occurs as a second productive world early on makes the game even easier to beat.

 

I assumed that under emperor/impossible we get unfavourable starting conditions while the AI get favourable ones. I.e. we would automatically be pitted against the Moltar, while the Humans would tend to be far away.

 

Have a nice dinner sir, that sounds good. I almost forgot, keep in mind that if we spawn too close to either the Humans or the Lemurians, we may find ideal worlds early on, defeating the purpose of playing on Emperor.

 

Ok, 8 players it is then.

After dinner I will have a bit of time, set up the game, and then propose a few victory conditions for you to review. After that we can have a go.

 

Unfortunately 8 players is the maximum allowed,

Very well, go for it, optimize them all then, though I do not entirely agree that the stock races would be so easily dispatched with a less optimized race, your Lemurians were very specialized and somewhat OP. Even though I played them in a different manner than you, they still kicked butt.

Here is how you need to set up the Terrans

Dictatorship
Repulsive
Warlord
+1 research
+1 production
No unique racial traits at all

Let's give it a go

 

My idea was we play with your Terran race, which I understand isn't heavily optimized, or even gives us a few burdens.

As the AI is quite weak, playing on emperor/impossible is a must, but in addition to that I would like to have better optimized opponents, to give us at least a modicum of challenge.

I don't think the data that we gather playing against the stock races has any meaning at this point, as the AI would need a massive upgrade to be even modestly challenging.

If you like you can even give your Terrans a few penalties, while I optimize our opponents. One would be the Lemurians. This is the setup that makes most sense to me.

I would also like to look at a game with twelve opponents in total, simply to see how that impacts gameplay, with space being more scarce.

 

On cheats in MoO2
@Quantomas @Adam Solo

The AI in MoO2 did in fact cheat, though I am not certain to what degree. One recurring thing that always happened on the harder levels, was that your tech was stolen without the AI actually having spies assigned against you.

A nice little cheat to give their research a boost.

Command point limits may or may not have been ignored, as it is possible the AI simply switched over to producing money to cover the over cost.

But, having played that game to death, I do not believe that it was a matter of the AI having a few extra picks only on the harder levels, far more likely, in addition to this, they had reduced research and production costs.

The buffs given to ISG races on severe and impossible are actually quite potent, extra pop, extra infrastructure, free techs and on impossible, a mine and econ cap.

Giving them production and research bonuses on top of this will only delay the inevitable, not alter it (for veteran players)

The AI needs adjustments in other areas to become far more challenging than it is now, areas specifically dealing with war-time behavior and war making capability would be a great start.

 

Yes, You can create as many customized races as you wish, set their biome preference and race pic among the existing choices.

For example, you could create a custom race based on the existing races, then when setting game parameters, disable the stock races, and choose how many players you have in the game. In this instance, only custom races would be in play.

For our own exercise, I don't recommend this, as we should receive a far greater challenge from the stock races than the Lemurians did, and I want more data on how the stock races perform when the player uses a race that doesn't really excel at anything all that much.

To be honest, I can create a massively powerful race, and set it against custom AI races that are also fully optimized... but it would dampen the experience for me. Knowing that the races I am up against are well optimised, I would be then tempted to optimise my own, as well as my game play, skipping parts of the tech tree, etc.

I would then prefer we play with a good but flawed race, no more or less optimized than the AIs, while giving those AIs all the advantages allowed in 1.04 so we can both get an additional feel of the challenge posed, but not be reduced to playing a pure puzzle with a single solution.

 

Is it possible to add additional races that you can customize?

 

@Adam Solo I will say more relating to ISG in private.

In general, a 4X game employing cheats is not attractive to me, except for the sightseeing and initial exploration.

There were two high profile grand strategy games that stood above the rest over time: MoO2 and Heroes of Might and Magic III. It is a myth that you cannot write an advanced non-cheating AI. These two games had exactly that, and this was what made them great, because it gives them an integrity that permeates to all features of the game. The AI of Heroes III doesn't cheat. I have seen the source code, it's a beauty to behold. There are smaller things that could be seen as cheats, but these are more like rounding off the edges.

The same goes for MoO2. I'd treat comments from players that play with 100+ ship fleets with caution. That's not the way to play the game, you never need fleets bigger than 20 ships, even to defeat the Antarans or capturing Orion. The one thing that MoO2 did, and this is very smart, on the higher difficulties it added more race pick points to your opponents, essentially giving a randomized extra trait which is different every game. Now, this is very powerful, as this allows your opponents to grow and build up considerably faster. But still, for this to work, it requires a top-notch AI. I haven't seen the source code for MoO2, but based on my experience of countless matches on the highest difficulties, and being a guy who is highly aware of anything that remotely resembles a cheat, I have severe doubts that MoO2 used anything to cheat beyond the race pick setup. For me, it didn't feel like cheating but rather encountering a superior race. Again, the reason why they could hold up against me wasn't these picks, it was that the AI knows the ropes.

You will be surprised.

 

Yes, I like their flair too, (I wrote some of them), but they tend to help far more than they hurt, i want to diminish the player advantages this time.

You cannot customize the existing races, but don't worry about the AI races not being optimized well, neither are my Terrans, it should be a fair contest.

Edit
Up to 8 races may play at the same time, but I prefer we leave it at seven, the custom race against all standard AIs