What's interesting when winning Godlike with this victory type is observing the AI (see latest game on the Metaverse).  At least some the AI are still researching a lot with it's bonuses but none of them seemed to target the technologies needed here i.e. exactly as per the scripts comment from Naselus.  

OK, the Thalan tech tree is very nice, but I caution against the over-nerf. Tech trees and races need to be different to make this game interesting and fun. Hives give +4 Raw Production and +1 bonus to adjacent tiles. Is that OP? Well it is nice as it can come so early in the game. Perhaps they need to require longer to build and be more expensive to buy?

Hmm.  I usually buy 1 factory for my home world, and then as many colony ships in a row as I can afford.  I take the free colony ship with my first ideology points.  So you should have 5 colonies pretty quickly.  At that point really its game over.  AI will never catch up.  I use the trait that gives the first improvement for free, so each new colony gets a quick factory.

After the free colony ship, I take malevolence for the building that gives ideology points, and build one on every planet I colonize, so I get malevolent manufacturing bonuses on my home world asap.  I also get the three point-giving buildings from the other trees, because after I get the last manufacturing bonus from malevolence, I switch back to benevolence for the free planets and tiles, and free conquest of planets in my influence.  I get the pragmatic building simply for the +2 to military which boosts the Hyperion Shinker - I really try to maximize the shrinker.  I start looking for a world with a +3 military tile asap, then surround that tile with + military improvements.

If I have a good tip, its on the naming of the planets, which helps with organization and dedication.  I name planets that will be my main shipbuilders PMSP-1 (primary military star base, the 1 is useful in case that planet has a back-up, which gets a -2), PTSP (trade) for my trade good ship builder, which I load with the trade capital and wealth boosts, RSP for research dedicated planets, and so forth.  I look for the planets that are size 9+ with +25% growth for my PMSPs, and make sure they have a hospital and adjacent farm, which is useful for when building troop transports rapidly.  And I use the resource factories for the raw production boost.

I *do* use the military option in the build queue of my home world, because it allows me to pop 1 war ship per turn if I have all the malevolent boosts there (and I usually have the death furnace or whatever its called by the time war breaks out).

I don't bother building up my offense until I get to medium hulls.  I don't care about the AI's fleet, because they won't get to planetary invasion fast enough.  I think I've only ever lost one planet to invasion - just this past week, and then I switched production on my homeworld to my medium star cruisers and retook the planet pretty quickly.  You get a lot of AI's trying to bully you for awhile, but meh.  Soon enough they will start sending you gifts instead of asking for them. 

And I don't stop building colony ships until I've seen nearly every cluster.  Its funny how some clusters remain untouched for awhile, so just keep sending out constructs to expand your range and spamming colony ships until there is no where else on the map to colonize.

My message was not to you, but since you put yourself in the line of fire, I`ll answer you. The way I see it, once you`ve chosen your parameters in the options and are happy with that, you should not Reload except for real-world needs.

Reloading because you don`t like the way the planets fall is still cheating to get a better win for yourself. So anyone that posts on the forums, saying `I can`t lose because the AI is bad,` is being disingenuous since he reloaded until he got an optimum setting he liked.

The real skill, is being able to take the cards whichever way they fall, and still win. .

But, before you get all umbraged, my original comment was not to you, only to those who boast here. My main point is, if people keep reloading then posting to the Devs that the AI is bad because they can`t lose, not mentioning they always reload for every thing that doesn`t go exactly their way or lie about it, the Dev could make the game needlessly harder until the only way to beat it would be to reload every step in every game.

http://www.sirlin.net/articles/playing-to-win

The ultimate objective of playing video games is subjective, since people have their own goals in mind when they play games. The vast majority of people, however, play to 'have fun,' and in my experience the masters have fun even if they lose. To say that your fun should be held above my fun is ignorant of what good game design should truly aim for. If someone has fun by save-restarting until they get a perfect opener then, well, that's their perogative.

Both perspectives are easy to understand and eminently reasonable:

"I don't want RNG to really be a factor because it's dumb to lose to a skill-less and frustrating random reason I had no ability to overcome. I'd rather my optimal starting strategy, the mastery that I've gained by exploitation of the game's mechanics, be brought to the forefront, and perhaps I can optimize it further."

Likewise, the others would say "I want RNG to be a factor because my optimal strategy would be forced to change or be uncertain. I like my mastery to adapt under self-imposed limitations be brought to the forefront." Most people, I think, are the former mentality for the early game and the latter mentality for the late game as 'save-scumming' becomes inherently less effectual over time, and that the loss feels more deserved because it's based less on RNG and more on the 'skill' of the AIs / the mistakes of the player.

Fun for one person and fun for another aren't mutually exclusive. The purpose of options such as 'difficulty' or 'galaxy size' is to cater to the different play styles of people and how they go about having fun. However, the pride of some people is so great that they think their preferred play style should be able to beat all things. This is the scrub mentality which says all ought bow to a particular set of favored options and circumstances. It's elitist. Catering to these people is not good design, though it might be financially beneficial to release multiple titles each catering to a different play style. On the other hand, I believe a truly great title (and thus huge sales) can come from being able to cater to all peoples, that a wide variety of preferences and strategies towards fun at all levels be viable and on display. At such a point, it might become that changing one option makes an entirely different game with an entirely different group of fans.

What this thread addresses, then, is the problems that halt those who've mastered the game to a high degree from having more fun by facing a more difficult opponent. Stardock will likely solve this the correct way by adding more options, or differentiating the available options more, and I think this'll take the form of the more difficult AIs starting to mimic the mastery that human players have shown, or otherwise changing things that are overly meta and strategy centralizing, such as how only a narrow band of strategies are viable in competitive / high level play because of the overpoweredness of one tech tree / underpoweredness of another tech tree.

For now, I suggest you'd be humble and be open to them making the game "needlessly" harder for the people who want to play that game, and be happy with your lower difficulty and having more 'honor' than they do because you don't reload.

Ignoring everything else, this has an obvious answer.

Because he wants it to be harder, more balanced, under his preferred settings, etc.

It's disappointing that this game can currently be beaten with such a formulaic strategy.  It comes down to the fact that there's currently no balancing feature for empire size.  It's just a free-for-all to grab as many planets as quickly as you can.  I know that the devs have hinted that they will be making balancing decisions in the next few releases which make having a small empire more rewarding so I look forward to that.  It shouldn't be so easy and rewarding to nab up all the planets you can immediately.  One thing that would probably help a lot is to be able to destroy other faction's colonies without planetary invasion.  So you can only really have a colony if you can defend it. 

 

Actually, to really make the game a bit more balanced, they should greatly limit range.  If it were up to me, I would put a substantial range penalty on any ship that is a certain distance from the nearest planet, then put a tech that divides that penalty in half somewhere past the first series of techs, and another that removes it in the third.  I might also put a % chance of having a ship "lost in space" if its a certain distance from your nearest colony, that increases the further away it gets, again with a tech that removes this chance or reduces it somewhere up the line.  This would greatly slow player expansion, which is the player's greatest advantage.  And it would make the range traits/abilities have much more value.

Hmm, then you could also have a ship part that is some sort of navigation booster that reduces the chance of being lost in space.

Having said that, I think I might add in wormhole constructors at some point so fleets can teleport.  Very late game of course.  Or some kind of ship part that allows ships to teleport if they are a given distance from the nearest system/planet.  A true hyperspace drive.  Once you get to a certain point in the game, range and distance are non-factors, and just a pain in the ass.  At least on insane maps.

Finally, you could add in an "Ancient Empire" option that has a setting for how many colonized planets each AI can start with.  Or make it a trait.

Again its all about this particular players experience. He wants a harder experience. I offered a setting which may or may not give him one. The ai is VASTLY better than it was in Beta and Vastly more so at release. 

Its kind of funny. Me and others including Tung are in no way a majority of how players play, yet we are all very vocal. I am sure Stardock has metrics which can show us how most players play and on what settings. 

Tung, I realize you are unhappy and want a tougher better ai. Everyone does and it  will come with time. I can say this is the best game engine and ai so far on the market. There simply is not another game around that can do what GCIII does and have such a good ai. 

I think there are several ways to deal with overpowered ship designs.

First, we could nerf the cargo hulls. I've always felt that 90 was too much capacity. 

 Or there could  be a limit to how many parts of each type a ship can have. You could start with a limit of 1 engine, 1 sensor, and 1 life support, which increases to 2 and then 4 after researching the required techs. 

Or you could have ship part mass scale with the size of the ship. Theoretically a bigger ship is going to need bigger engines and more life support than a smaller ship.

I am completely against nerfing the way ships are built currently in any way. Instead what we need is for the ai to use all designs that players use. This means if you make say 7 different ships all with various techs unlocked when you get those designs should be immediately available to the ai and it should weight them vrs any enemies it currently has. 

I do not know how hard this would be. Ultimately us building super awesome ships is not the problem.  Allowing the AI to use our designs against us would be a huge step in a more challenging game. Having the ai build adaptively against us is also a good step. 

The AI does use the player ship designs, but it doesn't have the ability to evaluate ship designs.  Also, unless I'm mistaken each ship you design is specific to that ship style. So if you want all the races to have the same awesome ship designs, you'll have to copy them 8 times.

 If I build a colony ship with 12 move, having the AI also build colony ships with 12 move does not change the fact that 12 move is overpowered for a colony ship at the start of the game.