Exponential growth, and the power of Benevolence Level III and super traits Patriotism and Colonizer.
Also, there's no maintenance costs to speak of, apparently.
I look at the people who actually try to build up their world early game and I'm like: TROLLLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.
Just build colony ships with different engines (slower and cheaper colony ships for planets close by. Faster and more expensive colony ships for the distant plants). Literally that's all you have to do to win the game. You don't even need to put any population into the colony ship. Just colonize planets as aggressively as you can and win.
Once I get Benevolence Level V (research line) and the Thalan Hyperion Matrix, ALL of my colonies are generating 7-8 science per turn. With 100+ colonies, that's close to ONE THOUSAND research points per turn with my research slider at ZERO.
Problem is: game is too easy.
I believe it was. Even Frogboy said as much. And I'll tell you I only play with max fractions because those games are a blast on Immense. in fact I can't play with less that 50 faction.
That wasn't my quote but, actually a quote from Franco FX on reply 23, I quoted him in reply 24
I'd say stop playing on maps with 100+ planets available to colonise!
The game is not balanced for that scale yet.
Play with less habitable planets.. say 7-10 per civ. Much more fun, and the AI will be much more competitive.
I'm on Tough, Large map, uncommon habitable planets, common stars. There were only 6 planets I managed to grab in the first 30 turns or so.The rest are all taken..
I am not making a declaration naselus, I am voicing an opinion. I was fully aware that some, maybe a lot would disagree. I also expect that some will think the way I play is silly, or worse.
More opinion:
Your car has 120 mph or more on the speedometer and I am sure the manufacturer would be proud to say that speed is attainable. I doubt, however, that they would encourage you to drive at that speed on a daily basis and if you do your car is likely to break.
Still, if you have the right machine, full speed may not be a problem. I am seeing frequent posts regarding modding the maps up to even larger sizes and more habitable planets. If you have the system for it go for it, but the run of the mill quad cores with a middlin graphics cards will never work long term with 100 faction maps, unless the map is nerfed as we recently witnessed.
Insane maps in v. 1.02 with abundant and 100 factions would give you 4-7 planets per faction on average. So you don't need to stop playing with 100 factions
I can bury my needle on my car (or at least I could when it was new) , however, no car manufacture will advertise the top speeds of a normal every day car, they will advertise the key features. Stardock advertised 100 players as a feature. Therefore it should and does work in the game 100 player maps are not broken (although I'm always for more planets )
I just hope they put it back to where it was in 1.03! This game was advertised on this forum by Derek Paxton with his 100 opponent game which is what got us all interested in buying GC3 that's why I bought a brand new computer to be able to play vs upto 100 AI and issue was insane maps are 4x bigger than the old immense but are now nerfed downwards to only have 1.5x the stars and planets.I digress, you want a harder game up the amount of opponents and put the pirates on abundant with slow research and abundant minors and if you win that map I'll doff my cap to you.
That's the exact game im playing now. On immense. With abundant everything. Rare habitable and extremes. AI godlike and tough difficulty. At turn 100 now. Pretty hard Iwill say!
To the op, I would like to see that saved game so we can all see how you did it.
to everyone else, back off the op a bit.
the op is highlighting a potential exploit in the game...and this not some super cheese start that requires a lot of weird combinations. This is pretty simple to do.
this doesn't mean the sky is falling, it doesn't mean the game is doomed. Just means it's an area that the devs need to look at.
to use a reference that the devs will appreciate, there were times in sc 2 when reaper all ins were outright brokenly powerful against Zerg on certain maps. Blizzard didn't throw in the towel or say "oh well don't do that". They fixed the problem
The OP hasn't replied since he posted or right after he posted when we started suggesting he let Stardock know how he was exploiting the game or making the game too easy so they could fix it. He hasn't replied to any of those questions in any of the 3 posts he has on the subject.
Yeah, it's not entirely aimed at you tbh - more a general thing which has come up several times in numerous different threads (indeed, CreepyD's post immediately before yours repeats the same fallacy yet again). I think it would be helpful if we stopped hand-waving these outlier concerns away, though, and even in an oblique way avoided dismissing valid out-of-the-box settings as not important.
That's not really a sound analogy. The modders pushing 2500 habitables are the ones pushing the edge of what the machine can do here. The out-of-the-box map sizes aren't. You don't even need to be at the max settings to start seeing issues, in fact - a 2-player game on huge/common will cause the AI to hit the 'limit' on colonies. Sure, these are outside edge case balance issues, but they're still indicative of a system which doesn't scale properly - and that cascades into the more reasonable settings too. If the AI tops out at around 80 worlds (which it's done in 5 of my test games so far), that means any circumstance where it hits 80 is problematic. Those at the limit will spot it first, since we can get that many worlds without even fighting... but on lower-end maps this will still act as a cap on the AI.
In addition to this - I'd have thought Insane maps with 50+ empires is basically the correct way to play, really. I've been waiting for a game that can handle it for at least a decade (and have played Civ 4 mods which tried, and inevitably broke the game by 1000AD). The idea that a galaxy can only support 8 Empires, when just Earth has 170+ countries, seems a little ridiculous to me; I want multiple superpowers, dozens of regional powers, and a huge number of also-rans. I want to support proxy wars and see alliances of 10 or 20 powers going to war against a background of intergalactic politics. I want a 'minor race' to be a faction who control only 4 or 5 planets. THAT is a Galactic Civilization, not 8 races bickering over 100 planets
You get this currently or even in v.1.00 or v.1.01 both I played with 50+ races and I'm currently playing 90+ races in v.1.02 (All maps had Insane map sizes and all have abundant planets). The game can handle the races just fine. Yes you may need a machine with 8 GB + memory (recommend 16GB memory personally) but, the game handles it and is playable. In fact as stated above with 100 races with the current game settings each race averages 4-7 planets which as some pointed out is where they prefer.
I know - I'm actually holding off playing atm because I'm away from my main PC and am stuck on a 4gb laptop. The game won't even let me pick a map above Gigantic on this thing My games at home have all had at least 30 races and I've only played a couple on anything less than Insane. You get a real clash of might empires thing, rather than the tiny kerfuffle in a sand pit that a medium map offers.
I'm presently fiddling about writing a mod balanced for the biggest maps (reduced LEP, changed starbases, restored the hugeness of insane etc) which I might post when I've run some more tests; it works around the main balance problems I've encountered so far.
Good, it's working. I actually like this game and I'm trying to get as many people to figure out the exploits that I've figured out so Stardock will start fixing it. To answer someone who is asking how to do it:
Map settings: Immense or larger, 10 or so AI. Abundant, abundant, abundant.
Custom race: Colonizer and Patriotic (duh).
Put all of your points into useful things like Dense ships or Fast ships or More Military Production or Ship Range, or Fertility. Take points from the useless things like "Resist Planetary Invasion," or "Influence" or "Economy" (who needs that?) or "Faster Ship Repair."
Thalan Tech.
Starting from turn 1, put ALL of your points into military production of colony ships. Rush buy maybe a factory or two on your homeworld.
Get Pragmatic, 3 free constructors and convert into colony ships.
Next 3 ideology points go into Benevolence Free Colony Ship and all the way up to level 3 of that tree. Follow that by getting the Benevolence research tree to level 5.
Every time you colonize a world, Colonizer will give you a free shipyard. Use that shipyard to immediately start producing more colony ships.
USE SHIP DESIGNER TO MODIFY YOUR COLONY SHIPS. USE CHEAPER, LESS ENGINE COLONY SHIPS FOR THE WORLDS NEARBY AND LONG RANGE MORE ENGINED COLONY SHIPS FOR THE ONES FAR AWAY. YOU WILL BE EXPLORING WITH YOUR COLONY SHIPS (hence it's a good idea to get sensor bonus as your civilization bonus).
For tech, hope your survey ship finds some for you. Emphasize two types of techs:
1. Hives (the best early game building ever)
2. Better engines.
If you manage to find techs with your survey ship, trade with the AI for the SMALL hulls tech. With the small hulls tech you can build MUCH cheaper colony ships.
But the key is that every time you colonize a world, you set that world to produce more colony ships. As a result your growth becomes exponential. 7 colonies by turn 10. 14 by turn 18. 28 by turn 26. 56 by turn 34. 100 by turn 40.
Of course to do that you have to get a little lucky like finding free tech with your survey ship. If you don't get lucky you'll probably end up with 70 or so colonies by turn 40.
Also, the AI is dumb, so sell the resources you find on the colonies for useful AI tech like Small-sized Hulls and increased ship range, and production techs.
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