Help! I've Played 8 hours or so and The Game is too Easy!!!

marigoldran

Join Date 06/2013

+41

I'M LIKEABLE, DAMNIT. LIKEABLE!!!!!!!!

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Guys, knock it off, I wanted to make a joke, not start a bully train...

Do his posts make it sound like he wants to show off ? Maybe. Was it his intent? Irrelevant.

Does his tactic work? Yes(this is relevant), and it is very very simple, which is a problem. Hardest difficulty should not be won by using simple tactics. Let us get back to a more productive discussion...

Did he use an OP race ? Yes- this goes to show that some traits and abilities are more powerful than others which is something that should ideally be balanced(I am not talking about colonizer, this 'only' sets him back a few turns(or how much it takes to build/buy a shipyard))

This also means that rapid colonization and expansion is the best tactic, something that (in my opinion) should not really exist. AI does have preferences, growth, wealth, military etc, and they should be pretty balanced. For example, it should be viable to choose to develop first, expand later, or wage an early war, or keep a wealthy population etc. but it isn't. Expansions and mad colonizing trumps those approaches down, even with mad production bonuses and AI is not aware of this. Maybe colony ships are too cheap ? Maybe colonization process is too simple for a game of this caliber. Maybe AI needs adjusting, maybe game needs to be less grind-y on a large map... These are, i believe what should matter in this discussion.

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Quoting marigoldran,

reply 101

I'M LIKEABLE, DAMNIT. LIKEABLE!!!!!!!!

You really aren't mate. Sorry. This kinda self-deprecating humour is pretty good though

Look, you're kinda grating to some people. I think there's a few reasons for that: You state your opinions as facts, while appealing to inconsequential authority justifying yourself (master chess player? lol). You seem unwilling to take advice; the very first reply in this thread - that is, after your own reply to yourself, wut? - has the solution to your 'problem' which you dismissed out of hand, suggesting you'd employ a strategy which is both in-effective and totally at odds with your play-style. Reply 23 had a nice challenging suggestion too, which you didn't follow either. I conclude from this that your posting wasn't really so much about wanting to make things a little harder as it was simply bragging.

And I don't mind bragging, really. What makes people roll their eyes is that you make a blanket statement 'the AI is awful and I can take teams of the strongest AI on' but then it turns out this is based on scenarios where you basically set up 100-turn no-rush timers by spreading just a few AI over hundreds of worlds. It's 1) not nearly as impressive as you presented it as, and 2) not in the slightest bit representative of the play experience 99.9% of people have who set the game up with less favourable conditions.

When I can work up the energy to read through your interminable posts there are some interesting tidbits and real issues that should be addressed, but the stuff you complain loudest about mostly comes down to 'yup, he gave himself room to get 50 planets and eclipse the AI's production handicaps again'. Is the 50-turn no-DoW exploitable? you bet. Should planets probably not be able to rush a shipyard through the Colonizer trait? That's something to be seriously considered.

I don't even disagree that the AI is poor! It needs a lot of work. Basically everyone in this thread, even the head of the company agree with you that the AI isn't all that great (FrogBoy rated it 6/10, for instance). But the stuff you keep going on about doesn't translate in to solutions, and you ignore the options offered to you until the AI is reworked then meh, I don't feel much sympathy.

None of this is to say that I dislike you. You're clearly dedicated to playing extremely efficiently and testing the game to its limits, I like that a lot; I think you contribute a great deal here.

Could you perhaps try, on occasion, to present your thoughts as opinions? "I think X needs to be different because in my experience Y happens" instead of "X sucks, my personal code of ethics means X totally blows. Who can help me out?". Just a thought

+1

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Seafireliv

Join Date 03/2006

+9

Yep, it`s all in the detail. It`s why I am never impressed when someone makes a blanket statement with barely any details. Anything is easy if done in certain ways. I need to know the detail before I`m impressed.

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Quoting Seafireliv,

reply 104

Yep, it`s all in the detail. It`s why I am never impressed when someone makes a blanket statement with barely any details. Anything is easy if done in certain ways. I need to know the detail before I`m impressed.

In fairness, Marigoldran isn't the only person who's made the point, and some of us have covered in great detail why colony spam is overpowered (see https://forums.galciv3.com/466675/page/3/#3562801 for instance). It's not an AI issue, it's a mechanical issue; the AI can actually (fairly easily) be taught to exploit it, too, though not to the same level of cheese that Marigoldran does. It all ties into a few things, but primarily I think the devs weren't really looking to see if the mechanics scaled, and didn't anticipate players might be interested in playing maps with more than 15-20 planets per empire. LEP is heavily balanced around this figure, the AI doesn't cope well once you go much beyond it, and generally the game breaks down fairly badly.

I think it's quite telling that, in the dev stream, they spoke about increasing the cost of techs depending on the number of planets you have. It means they have recognized that using Approval as a mechanic to limit 'wide' empires doesn't work, much as the Civ 5 team eventually admitted the same thing. This is kind of sad, given that a scaling maintenance system works (as several players have already shown), and would also give money some meaning (as presently it has none).

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Quoting naselus,

reply 105

In fairness, Marigoldran isn't the only person who's made the point, and some of us have covered in great detail why colony spam is overpowered (see https://forums.galciv3.com/466675/page/3/#3562801 for instance). It's not an AI issue, it's a mechanical issue; the AI can actually (fairly easily) be taught to exploit it, too, though not to the same level of cheese that Marigoldran does. It all ties into a few things, but primarily I think the devs weren't really looking to see if the mechanics scaled, and didn't anticipate players might be interested in playing maps with more than 15-20 planets per empire. LEP is heavily balanced around this figure, the AI doesn't cope well once you go much beyond it, and generally the game breaks down fairly badly.

Absolutely. A lot of the issues here center around lots-of-worlds per faction.

I don't think it's unfair to suggest that this may have been foreseeable, given the game goes up to immense sizes but there are only 8 standard factions

As I recall there were some people complaining about the game being limited to ~300 or so habitable worlds at one point due to some bug or another.

To me, 20 worlds per empire seems like a lot (managing so many seems tedious already, let alone once you start capturing other empires)... so I wouldn't set it up that way. But that isn't to say that the game should be balanced the way that suits my play-style and not the lots-of-worlds way.

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In fairness, Marigoldran isn't the only person who's made the point, and some of us have covered in great detail why colony spam is overpowered (see https://forums.galciv3.com/466675/page/3/#3562801 for instance). It's not an AI issue, it's a mechanical issue; the AI can actually (fairly easily) be taught to exploit it, too, though not to the same level of cheese that Marigoldran does. It all ties into a few things, but primarily I think the devs weren't really looking to see if the mechanics scaled, and didn't anticipate players might be interested in playing maps with more than 15-20 planets per empire.

To be honest, with ~10 or even less planets to start with game goes by the same scenario for me (on Tough, large maps). You go through the colony rush, develop, select the strongest of AI opponents near you, destroy them. Repeat as many times as you have AIs. There might be slight variations, I.e. if Yor or Dreignin have shared borders with you , destroy them first.

Haven't tried suicidal yet. It will be different there by the order of magnitude I would imagine. The amount of time player have to spend to get out of initial deep hole would be bigger if possible for any particular game. But if it is done then the road to victory is clear. Sure, big amount of available for colonisation planets helps player a lot to overcome initial bonuses for AI. But it can be done without it and without any exploits on any level but suicidal. At the moment AI gets weaker as game progresses. I think it is because it a) doesn't have clear idea what the situation on the board is at any particular moment. doesn't seem to have a plan to how to win the game. Therefore, it has problems prioritising what next step supposed to be.

Sorry for messing up the quotes. It seems that it never works properly from my phone. Difficult to put it right since I only see part of the text at the time.

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Quoting Auramagma,

reply 107

In fairness, Marigoldran isn't the only person who's made the point, and some of us have covered in great detail why colony spam is overpowered (see https://forums.galciv3.com/466675/page/3/#3562801 for instance). It's not an AI issue, it's a mechanical issue; the AI can actually (fairly easily) be taught to exploit it, too, though not to the same level of cheese that Marigoldran does. It all ties into a few things, but primarily I think the devs weren't really looking to see if the mechanics scaled, and didn't anticipate players might be interested in playing maps with more than 15-20 planets per empire.

To be honest, with ~10 or even less planets to start with game goes by the same scenario for me (on Tough, large maps). You go through the colony rush, develop, select the strongest of AI opponents near you, destroy them. Repeat as many times as you have AIs. There might be slight variations, I.e. if Yor or Dreignin have shared borders with you , destroy them first.

Haven't tried suicidal yet. It will be different there by the order of magnitude I would imagine. The amount of time player have to spend to get out of initial deep hole would be bigger if possible for any particular game. But if it is done then the road to victory is clear. Sure, big amount of available for colonisation planets helps player a lot to overcome initial bonuses for AI. But it can be done without it and without any exploits on any level but suicidal. At the moment AI gets weaker as game progresses. I think it is because it a) doesn't have clear idea what the situation on the board is at any particular moment. doesn't seem to have a plan to how to win the game. Therefore, it has problems prioritising what next step supposed to be.

Sorry for messing up the quotes. It seems that it never works properly from my phone. Difficult to put it right since I only see part of the text at the time.

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Quotes go wonky in this forum because sub-quotes are hidden in the HTML, and you can very easily delete the [ / quote] code at the end of someone's message without seeing it

The AI does get weaker as the game go on. It's partially a planning issue, and I think also in part its because of how the AI gets its 'handicapping' bonuses. The AI gets a whole lot of multipliers to make it more competitive at higher levels; it gets its manufacturing multiplied by 3, and the cost of production halved at Godlike, leading to x6 production capacity.

But... it doesn't design its planets very well. It also can't really specialize in production/sci/econ on a per-planet basis. That means that as the game goes on, human players who are specializing planets will close the gap in manufacturing by increasing their production planets' multipliers way higher (600% production increase is quite achievable) while the AI is likely to only get +150-200% manufacturing, and isn't focusing all its population in to manufacturing because it needs to maintain cash reserves and science spending globally.

Once the player has a production planet in the mid-game, they've caught up to the AI's base advantages and face them on a broadly equal playing field. At that point, the AI basically has no chance.

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admiralWillyWilber

Join Date 05/2009

+99

so many things I'll probably be back when I remember I forgot something. I guess it's time to change settings tight clusters help to put the Ai on par. I'm. In favor for a better Ai. Here's an idea how about finding the best player to help you out with strategy. You could even Skype him instead of flying him out. It sounds like it's. Time for modding. Even when they had a reasonably expanding Ai players complain. I like the idea of Ai colony rushing since that's my tactic. Still think the best way for stardock is split the maps, and settings down the middle on bigger maps with more habital, or extreme planets settings colony rush. On smaller maps, or rare settings don't as much. That way both camps will be happy. Don't. Mind exploits if the Ai was using it to. Here's why it does not work as good as civilization. In civilization all cities, including starts out with only citizen. This is the equivalent of 1 billion people in galactic civilizations. Every settler is 2 billion people. Where in galactic civilization you could have as little as half a citizen to everyone. The capital starts out with 5 citizens. You even have an option where every new colony starts out with an extra 3 new citizens. This is different than civilization. Encouraging large empires. In civilization build is only limited by technology. In galactic civilization it is limited by class and technology. It would help the Ai to cut default colonists from 2 1/2 to 1/2. This would speed up the colony rush. Brad I don't. Understand why can't. You tell the Ai that they need certain number of specialized planets, and line up the adjancencies after they check tiles for being together and other bonuses. This would make specialized planets differently depending on tiles, and when they colonise better planets after there done convert the two. Here are my thoughts for right now.

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