You know, I had the same problem in one of my games. The AI did expand, just much slower then usual and they built almost nothing militarily.

It was a larger map, high difficulty level, stars were uncommon but everything else was abundant.

I quit the game just after year one. There just wasn't any challenge. It was a cakewalk.

I don't know what's up with this sort of thing. Just seems to happen now and then. But extremely rare.

I had 9 AI on suicide, gigantic map, loose clusters, all abundant, very fast research.

I cononized 130 planets before I got bored of the lack of challange.

17000 is extrermly low for a suicide win.

perhaps the scoring takes into account what the AI get up to and all.

17000 score gigantic, suicidle, max everything. it was like cakewalk.... the AI did not expand. so I played with it...on year 4 after colonizing loads, kicked the hell out of the Ai in one move.

I cononized 130 planets before I got bored of the lack of challange.

Well 130 planets in year 4 for that map is quite low from what I've read and seen.
You probably did not have all that much population and hence not much economy and/or research and production.
You did not need much of a military so that was also prob pretty low.
Maybe you were taking it easy because you saw the AI being lame?

I remember in my first games I would just end them with a tech victory in year 3 or 4 after taking out 3 or 4 of the AIs; and I got around 25K - 30K points for a suicidal, gigantic, scattered, all normal, 9 opponents, normal research rate, approx 170 habitable planets( I think ), year 3 or 4 victory.

BTW, what you describe is definitely a bug by my standards ( but the score is probably right ) .

When going into debt, I could only go 2000 into debt.

This is the game that you posted under Impy? Everything you've said points to a difficulty level of cakewalk but the game clearly posted as suicidal. I think the points part of it makes sense but selecting suicidal and getting cakewalk is definitely a bug from my perspective. If it was me I'd post this to the bug reports forum along with the debug.err and any savegames that I might still have.

With all the time and effort you invest in a game this is certainly disappointing. I sure hope it doesn't happen to me.

The last game u posted was 189,500 pts 22/09/06, surely this is not it?

Yep. That's the one. Did you think it should have been higher or lower? I could have dragged it out a few more years for a higher score, but there's no fun in that. Actually, I maxed out the income at 900K per week as long as I spent all the money each turn. Once I got tired of that the income dropped from 900K to 550K because of the treasury over 20K bug. I don't think Stardock is too interested in fixing this one though.

I could have developed my pop better in the game and although I did buy a lot of ships that helped my military score, I ended the game with over 50,000,000 bc in cash so I could've bought a lot more. Anyway, I was happy with the 189K.

Back to the OP's post. I think 17K for 130 planets and 4 years is in the ballpark. This could have been an opportunity to pump up a big score against inferior competition that posted as a suicidal victory. I applaud Taziker for not taking advantage of it. In my opinion this is a serious bug that has the potential of cheapening the scores we've all worked hard to achieve. Whether someone got 17K, 35K or whatever for an obviously flawed game doesn't concern me as much as someone taking advantage of whatever caused this to post a 300K+ suicidal victory that played like a cakewalk. I'd hope that would concern you as much as it concern's me.

Also has everyone noticed the top players scores going down recently?

Yes. I've noticed mainly in Syrrus K and Magnumaniac's scores (hard not to notice scores in the millions). It catches up with everyone sooner or later but as long as you keep posting you seem to make forward progress. You can always start a new character if you want (Magnumaniac's two previous characters are both former number 1's).

Back to the OP's post. I think 17K for 130 planets and 4 years is in the ballpark. This could have been an opportunity to pump up a big score against inferior competition that posted as a suicidal victory. I applaud Taziker for not taking advantage of it. In my opinion this is a serious bug that has the potential of cheapening the scores we've all worked hard to achieve.

yeah thanks.


I thought about going mad and taking the galaxy....and developing an uber score, just to see if i could, but slashing my wrists with boredom seemed to be entering my head.

OP, did you ctrl n? I have seen after starting my huge masos that the difficulty will reset *rarely* but it has happened when using ctrl n.

OP, did you ctrl n? I have seen after starting my huge masos that the difficulty will reset *rarely* but it has happened when using ctrl n.

I've heard about this and may even had one myself. In my case it was a game I was *sure* I selected suicidal but it posted as maso. In that case I really couldn't tell the difference in play and anyway the game posted at the lower difficulty level in question.

In this case the game was selected to be suicidal, played as if it was a much easier level but submitted as suicidal. This is similar in some respects, but the difference is that if someone discovers a way of making this happen reliably it would be a major exploit to say the least. Even if this happens only occasionally, I don't think that everyone would be as scrupulous about it as Taz has been.

I always press ctrl n if I dont like the starting position, as I recall, aye I did use ctrl n. I think I overwrote the quicksave it was on

I never use ctrl n, never had this problem.

Read other posts about this happening, strongly think its a ctrl n issue.

In metaverse when u press ctrl n, u after go through the entire customise process, so may as well start new metaverse game, rather than using ctrl n.

It could just be that they hit an economic difficulty, or that they've shifted focus to something else. Just because a human player is an obsessive colonizer doesn't imply the computer is. One game I dropped had the Torians start off doing nothing for a few turns, no expansion, no colonization. They were in very close proximity to me. When they finally did go boom, they were all over the place. Their colonies so interlaced my own territories, I cut the game because they were already slamming me on Influence, and I would not have been able to recover because the random placement boxed me in too quickly.

In metaverse when u press ctrl n, u after go through the entire customise process, so may as well start new metaverse game, rather than using ctrl n.

This is not true in 1.31. When you Ctrl-N you wait a while and get a new map and new positions. You don't have to type in anything else.