Fastest possible Ascension Victory?

from GalCiv3 Forums

This is something I've been wondering about lately, since I've played two games in a row now where I set out from the beginning to get an Ascension victory with settings I thought were favorable to that victory condition (medium map, godlike difficulty, abundant crystals, normal tech speed). Both maps generated 5 crystals, and as far as I can tell, at most you get 5 points per turn from one crystal. That means, even if you were gifted all the techs and necessary starbases on turn 1, it would take 160 turns to get that ascension victory (25 points a turn, with 4000 points required). The two games I just mentioned ended in tech victories on (IIRC) turns 108 and 125, and despite controlling all 5 crystals and trying hard to maximize my ascension points, I only had about 1400 and 1200, respectively, at game end. Unless I've missed a way to generate more ascension points, it seems like there's no circumstance where an ascension victory is an optimal choice, given my chosen game settings and the number of crystals generated. So the question that comes to mind is, what are the most favorable circumstances for an ascension victory, and realistically, can you ever actually outpace a tech victory (on normal speed) with the crystals? Presumably dropping the tech speed low enough will make this possible, so what tech speed is required?

17,655 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I don't think you could outpace the tech victory even with tech speed at slowest. There are just too many ways to increase research and the tech speed setting is not as effective as one could hope for. And there is no way to increase ascension gain other that getting all crystals as fast as possible and get the relic starbase techs.

Reply #2 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I bet you could force it to be better than tech with garbage planet settings. Your research ability scales with the number and quality of your planets, of course, but you don't need that much production to pump out a few constructors. Turning off tech trading would slow down the tech victory quite a bit, as well.

 

To try to make this all a little more concrete, does anyone know the maximum possible ascension crystals on each map size?

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

Hm, I'll look into the xmls and see what I find...

Edit:
The points needed for Ascension start at 2000 for a tiny map and go up by 1000 for each bigger map.
Abundant settings have an AscensionGates frequency of 0.05 and a minimum of 3 gates but I don't what that frequenzy aplies to. :/

just made a quick count insane map 55 crystals
second count had a similar result
so 55 * 5 makes 275 points per turn
10.000 / 275 = ~37 turns
okay on extreme settings it's probably faster then tech

Reply #4 from GalCiv3 Forums Top

I've been looking at the XMLs a little bit myself, and if I understand it right, it seems that there's a minimum of 3 crystals, no matter what the map size or relic frequency, so the worst tiny map should be better for ascension than either of the two games I mentioned. It looks like there's no hard limit on the number of crystals. I think there may be some potential in the very large maps, because the point requirement increases by a flat 1000 per map size, which (past small or medium) is proportionally a slower increase than the actual number of tiles.