Well, the site still has not resolved. Just my luck! I finished my huge game finially and posted a good score for the group (as well as myself). Hopefully I'll be able to give TBAY a run for his money before long Guess I'll fire up photoshop and see what I can come up with as far as a site is concerned although I hate not being able to see it online! It seems earthlink (my isp) isn't very fast at picking up new nameservers.

Good score Norad. I guess I am going to have to play larger maps and put in a few more hours/week to stay ahead of you. We now have solidified a top 10 spot and 9th is in our sights. 8th is not too far away either. I promised I would have an early game strategy posted by the weekend so here it goes. I start with the pre-game settings for diplomacy and economy set at the max level. Use the last bit for research. I usually start wiyh the industrialist party. Make sure you have hyperdrive as one of your starting techs. Planetary improvements is a good one to start with also. For the first 10 moves or so I set the industrial capacity to 100 %, and leave it there, and set the taxes so that the approval stays at about 75%. At 75 % you get a population growth bonus. 100 % you get even more but it costs to much at this point. I then set the research slider to 50%, the social to 50% and Military to zero. Send your Flagship out to find the best planets available. Send your first colony ship to the best one found. Before your second move design a colony ship with 2 hyperdrine engines and purchase it. Every move after this purchase another new improved colony ship until you get down to about 1000 BC's left. Build a factory first, then an entertainment network, then another factory. When the ent. net. is built you will see your approval go up so keep setting the taxslider to 75% approval. This will reduce the amount being taken from your balance BC. When the second factory is built set your sliders to 50% research and 25 % for the other 2. Start building more new and improved colony ships making sure you upgrade them as you acquire new techs. When the Flagship has scouted out all the reachable planets set it to autosurvey and it will nail all the anomilies. It will find anomilies that you cannot see in the fog. You should find a few nice ones to build your BC back up. When all the planets are taken start buiding the best fighting ships you can design. The first techs to research are xeno communications and then Universal Translater. As soon as you get UT, Contact every race and trade averything you have with every race. To max out the gain of techs you will probably have to contact each race 2 or 3 times in ths one turn. When you have all their techs trade the techs you have for as much cash as you can get from them. Trade the techs individually as you will get more money than if you trade groups of techs. Rinse and repeat this process every few turns. Dont wait until you research another tech bfore you check out what they have researched. The techs you should then research are the finance techs, the approval techs and the Political/Diplomacy techs. If you can, dont trade the Political/Diplomacy techs, as these maintain your trading advantage. This should help you get a good start. If you have any questions please post to this thread. Bye for now. TBAY

Doh! I'm such an idiot sometimes! Seems I screwed up when I created my account with my host and put a "s" on the end of my domain...one would think I should know my own domain but... I sent off an email to my host to get it changed, but I don't know when that will be.

I noticed we are sneaking up on 9th place and should be there soon. I started a new huge game but I won't finish it tonight tho. I think I may post medium games during the week since I only have a few hours a night to play and just do a huge maps on weekends.

Nice tips TBAY! What tech speed do you play on? I normally play on fast tech and use the Yor race. I have turned tech trading back on, but I've played so much without it I keep forgetting to use it.

Till later!

Norad. When I play with tech trading on I use the fastest tech development. I like to get the trading and the tech tree finished as quickly as possible so I can lower the research slider to 0% and concentrate on developing my military and social aspects. I think thats enough tips for you for now as you are gaining on me a little too rapidly. I dont think the game rewards a player enough for playing at the higher levels. It takes a lot longer to play a suicidal game as you have to concentrate on every aspect of micro-managing. Ican finish a game on the painfull level in about half the time and receive about 90% of the score I receive at the suicidal level. If you miss one little thing on suicidal the AI is on you like flies on shit. Excuse my language. Also, my last 10-12 games have been won on the suicdal level and my overall rating only moved form painfull to crippling. I like the challenge of the suicidal games but they are slowing down my quest to be no. 1. Many of the players that are ahead of me play at a much lower difficulty level. Till next time TBAY

LOL! I think I've set myself into a rhythem that i'm comfy with as far as the way I play to change it up too much. It is rather difficult to teach this old dog new tricks! I have to agree with you on the scoring of difficulty levels. Compairing our games, I was shocked to see that there was little difference in the scores from tough-suicdal. While I seem to be holding my own on crippling, I'm almost thinking of dropping back down to tough. Like you said, it isn't a mico management intense. As far as getting the highest score possible, I think they have a few things backwards. From what I've read, one of the main scoring factors is population. This is the reason for such a jump in score in the larger maps. It seems that it is more of a reward for scoring to get to the end of the game and just sit and hit end turn and let the game pass for a long as possible before actually "winning" to keep the pop growing as apposed to winning as quickly as possible. Who knows, looking over some of the top player scores (excluding the pre v1.11) the scores are basically the same no matter the level (tough-suicidal) with the only difference being in map size. Since the time it takes for larger maps, I'm not sure if it isn't more of a benefit to post 2 med games as apposed to 1 huge and get 10-15k more total points. This may be something to look into. Gotta head to work. Till later!

Well the game I was playing when stupid on me so I had to quit it since I was so far in debt I would never dig myself out.

Oh, the above link now works so I'll have to get busy and actually put something together. What is there is just something I was playing with, but not sure it is how I wnat it to look.

Till later!

I just joined in. Let's see how good you boys really are.

Welome Jarru. It is good to have another top player in our midst. Ypu have just moved us up a couple of placesin the rankings. I can see from your scores that it may not be worth my while to continue to play at the suicidal level. I am not rewarded enough at that levl fo all the extra time it takes to play. OK we are on a roll now lets set our sights on the top 5. Bye for now. TBAY

Glad to have you join us Jarru!! Now I'm really going to have my work cut out for me! I was just starting to gain on TBAY and now I got a long way to go again!!! We are now in 7th place and only need 90k or so to take 6th! I have to start a new game tonight since the last one threw me into a minus on bc's of a little over 2 mil. Later folks!

Greetings! I have been watching your empire progress and your posts here for some time. When I saw that you had jumped from tenth to seventh, I decided I had to join while you were outside the top five, or it would feel like I joined after it was certain you would get to the top, rather than when I could still help you guys to do so.

Norad, you would know better than the other two: does having the racial victory medal raise your score any in itself, or is it just cool to have?

Welcome aboard ras1310! Glad you decided to join us in our quest for the top. To answer your question...no, it doesn't do anything for your score. I just did it to find out which race I found to be the best choice for my playing style and to get the medal of course. For some reason I like the Yor, but that just due to their minituration so I can have faster colony/constructors at the beginning when the colony rush is going on. I'll try to put together my tips as well those given by TBAY in the next day or two. I gotta get the site up and the tips would be a good start for it. After I get us something up, I can go back to trying to catch up with Jarru and TBAY.

Yes, I've been wondering about the medal system too. For instance, I have wone 22 games, but acording to my medal count I have won less than five and have played only 15. Whats up with that?

Orca777, I just had a look at your listing. You've got the "20 games won" medal. You haven't got a higher games played medal because the next one is 25 games. Anyway, judging by the number of games you submitted within a couple of days, I would say the medal system just isn't updated fast enough to keep up with you.

Numbers: for fellow members, and anyone else who is interested, on checking our scores today I found some interesting numbers. We need just more than 28,257 points to surpass "the Paradox" for sixth place. We will need to increase our score by one and a half times to get into the top three, however. Within the Empire, our glorious leader and Norad are separated by just 5,210 points. On a personal note, I need about 4,500 points to become the fourth highest ranking member. However, Razius hasn't posted games in a month, so that's not the achievement I thought it would be.

I've noticed the same thing with the numbers, but with one exception. It doesn't seem like my last game score has been added to the empire total. Although it is possible I looked at it wrong, but I thought that after posting that 47k game it would have put us in 6th place. I know that my ranking hasn't changed yet (and I"m assuming it would being only 5k behind TBAY). Hopefully it will have changed by morning.

Greetings Fellow Orcas. I am just about finished a huge suicidal millitary victory. This should move us up to almost the top 5 with the scores the rest of you post. If I do not receive close to 100,000 points for this submission i am going to create a new Character and play with it for a while at a lower difficulty level and rattle off a large millitary victory every night. My current character is being held back by the 4 defeats I posted when I first started. The new character's total will increase at a much faster rate as I will not post any defeats. Within 2 weeks I should be ahead of my TBAY character. Bye for now and lets get the top three empires looking in their rear view mirrors. TBAY

TBAY, I think you may be on to something. The first few games seem to give you 100% of the score posted but it seems to decrease at some point. I added up all of my posted scores and I should have a total of 239175. When I posted that 47K game last night, it only gave me 1/2 of it as a total score so it didn't put us into the 6th place spot. IF even the first 5 games are at 100% it will not take long to get back to this rank. Adding the 11 games jarru played he should have a total of 461322. Thawalk in our group has 2 games but his total points are exactly the two posted scores added together. I think I'll try out your experiement as well and see how it affects things. If nothing else it will just delay us moving up a few days.

Norad. I dont think it will delay us at all. If you create a new character, and leave the original in the empire, you will be adding a new character to our empire. The scores from the original character will remain unchanged in our empire total, and the new games posted to the new character will add up faster than if you added them to the original character. It is a win win situation. I will be able to keep one character for prestige at a higher difficulty level and one character to greatly add easy points to our empire. Bye for now. TBAY

I can already confirm that Norad is correct: when I submitted my sixth game, my total score was cut in half. There has been a discussion about it on this board as well, confirming that that is the change point.

I see my last post did not show up. I will welcome Spludge for a second time. Glad to have you become an Orca. We are now in 6th place and should move up to 5th by the end of the weekend if I can finish my latest game by then and Jarru and Norad continue at there bistering pace. My new Character is Spontaneous Combustion. I will start to post all my new games at a lower difficulty level (crippling) as it takes me about half the time to play a huge map at this level compared to Suicidal. Also since the new character has no losses posted its' score will increase faster than myt original Character. This will help our empire catch the top three sooner, especially if we keep gowing in numbers at the rate we are now. Bye for now. TBAY

I'd like to join. I was looking for an empire to join, and I like the idea of whales flying through space with Doom-Rays. I've always suspected whales were up to something.

For now my plan is to beat the game with each race at Tough level on a large map. This is my first Metaverse character.

I plan to post my losses though, just so I have an honest record of my Metaverse performance. Luckily, I haven't lost a game yet

Welcome aboard Couche. Do you know how to join? I don't see your Character listed in our empire. If you need any help signing up I believe one of our ealier posts has directions. If not, feel free to ask and one of us will gladly help you. Have fun helping us become no. one. Bye for now, TBAY. Great I see your Name there now. I was able to come back and edit this post. The new forum seems to be working better.

First of all I want to say howdy to all the new folks! Thanks for joining us!

Now I know that SD probably does not read this thread but there is something seriously flawed in their scoring system for the metaverse. This first 5 games = full price, 6+ = 1/2 off does not compute in my little brain. I just posted a game for my new character "Major Tom". This score was 64750 which puts me a little less than 100k behind my original character that has 27 games. With this method, it really doesn't matter as long as you max out your first 5 games. AFTER that you can go back to playing whatever you style you want since they are only worth .5 of the posted score. This in a way punishes the folks that begin playing metaverse when they get the game and slowly work their way up in difficulties. Sorry about the rant, but it just tics me off that in 3 more games I will have blown past my original character in score, yet it is the only way to do it so that I can get a jump on the "leaders" who did the same thing.

BTW, I'm not going to put MT into the empire until I get that score above the original character score, at which time I will remove it from the empire. Shouldn't take me long to out score that one and do the replacement.

Jarru, CONGRATS for breaking into the top 5!!!

Thanks Norad.

All I have done almost a week is playing all my free time. Now i keep a short break and do something else.
So, it's your others turn to keep our empire going on.

It´s 12:26 AM and I go to sleep.

Hey folks I need some feedback please. I've not worked on websites in a while so I had forgot that I no longer have my screen set at 1024x768. It is now at 1280x1024 so what looks fine at that setting may not look ok at a lower setting. Anyway, if that made any sense, would you all let me know how the site looks? Do I need to make the graphics smaller? Does the design look alright? Yes, I'm still going to add to it but wanted the opinion of you all before I proceed. Thanks! Link