Ok, I've played in the metaverse a few times now

Really... the metaverse is a wonderfull thing when you'r playing consistently. Kinda wish it was different in some way though; kind of hard to describe.

The human time problem on a 4x game is very, very real.

If MP comes, it should comprise of "play by email" and hotseat only. Some of my turns are so long that I can't imagine anybody else tolerating it and, in reverse, I can't imagine tolerating it.

As for the hard to describe, "different" thing we need in the Metaverse, I'll help Commander Futility because of my vast well of heart-felt sympathy toward the fraktarded...

We need Metaverse Scenarios. Support them in the aforementioned thread to keep the concept on the developers' radar.

I agree Wheel, I have tried playing 4x games over a LAN, and its almost painful. Wait, scratch that, it is painful. That was back in the heyday of MOO2, with all the new options available now, it would only be worse.

An email type multiplayer would be incredible! ~Fingers crossed~

Some of my OWN turns are so long that I can't imagine me tolerating it! In my last gigantic galaxy game (probably my last gigantic game for a long time), I could barely get in two turns a night once I started a-conquerin'.

Thanks for pointing out your Scenarios post, Wheel; I had missed it entirely and have added to it now. And yes, we all knew you had a vast well of something within you!

Some of my OWN turns are so long that I can't imagine me tolerating it! In my last gigantic galaxy game (probably my last gigantic game for a long time), I could barely get in two turns a night once I started a-conquerin'.

That's the other thing about metaverse. It makes micromanagement a lot less painful. If we were just playing single player, we would know that we could do a lot better by tweaking every aspect of our empire, but we wouldn't want to go through all of the trouble. The desire to attain a high metaverse score gives an actual reason to micromanagement.

Agreed. It also gives incentive to watch the game calendar mop up your enemies quickly.

We need Metaverse Scenarios. Support them in the aforementioned thread to keep the concept on the developers' radar.

I have tried to think of other things the Metaverse might need since I originally read your post on Meteverse Scenarios, Wheel. I have not come up with one. This idea was truly inspired and should be contemplated by the Devs.

I could barely get in two turns a night once I started a-conquerin'.

you don't need to worry about people dropping out of games.

Or listen to the endless rants of an impatient "fraktard". (To use a common term on these threads.)

This is why I believe multiplayer (if not done via e-mail) will fail miserably.

Quixen, are you saying that my "barely get in two turns a night" is ranting, or just pointing out that my (admittedly glacial) playing style would cause my opponents to rant?

There is one more thing the Metaverse needs, or rather that its proponents need; and that is a way to return to the good graces of the developers. I don't have an answer offhand other than groveling and pleading; but unless I've missed a climate change, I think we face a difficult time convincing Stardock to work up new features for the Metaverse. I would love to be proven wrong here, of course.

I keep reading about players thinking that the developers are going to kill the Metaverse but I've never seen the developers say so.

Here's the paragraph where Brad spells it out; the context is that preceding this is a chorus of whining and bitching about stock markets losing their 10% morale boost:

Given that the values of this data is in a text file, it's really hard to see how there can be so much angst. There will absolutely positively not be a Metaverse in any future Stardock game. It totally kills the game IMO (people won't change the values of buildings to suit their preferences because they want to compete on the Metaverse and then blame us if we decide that a certain default is too imbalanced).

It was in this dev journal entry: Galactic Civilizations II v1.4 Change Log

There's been no official line on this since that post, but in this case I take silence to mean no change in intent.

He's just blowing steam. The cheese tasters are a small percentage of the Metaverse. They are the same idiots that will turn down a seemingly poor starting position with a dozen anomalies and six economic resources just out of sensor range because they aren't in a corner.

Rather than getting rid of the Metaverse, SD should get rid of ctrl-N. Seriously... screw everybody that thinks they can have a prime starting setup AND play in the Metaverse.

Fighting for position is a huge chunk of the fun in this game. The people that say "if you lost the colony rush, you might as well start over" are absolute frakking idiots that should serve time as a visitor for dispensing stupid game related advice.

I lost the initial colony rush in my current game but I destroyed everybody in the anomaly rush by building super fast cargo ships. That allowed me to finance winning the resource mine rush as well.

They all became essentially frigates because of picking up the "improve our hit points by +1" anomalies. When the rush was over, I upgraded them to my "Assassin" class with one gun and faster engines to torch all undefended starbases. I destroyed three races. I'm down to one. The three Assassin ships spy on the traffic of key worlds in Yor territory.

The point is that the game is fun and when you decide to deal with the situation as is, it can be very rewarding.

I'd rather see Stardock ban people from the Metaverse.

He's just blowing steam. The cheese tasters are a small percentage of the Metaverse. They are the same idiots that will turn down a seemingly poor starting position with a dozen anomalies and six economic resources just out of sensor range because they aren't in a corner. Rather than getting rid of the Metaverse, SD should get rid of ctrl-N. Seriously... screw everybody that thinks they can have a prime starting setup AND play in the Metaverse. Fighting for position is a huge chunk of the fun in this game. The people that say "if you lost the colony rush, you might as well start over" are absolute frakking idiots that should serve time as a visitor for dispensing stupid game related advice.

At some of the higher difficulties you need to do good in the colony rush or you may as well quit. If you can't grab the same amount of planets as a suicidal AI, well, they'll steam roll you with their huge advantages.

I think that the best solution to CTRL-n cheese is to not show other race's spheres of influence until you make contact with them. That way, you can't quickly look at the positions of the other races and say "no, I don't like the looks of this"

On gigantic/tough, when I "lost" the colony race, it was by two planets. The drath and Yor each had two more than me. The Korx were the true losers with only two planets instead of 20 like the other three.

It's the second game where the AI in the corner fails miserably. Apparently, the AI has a different view on the benefits of a corner.

They are the same idiots that will turn down a seemingly poor starting position with a dozen anomalies and six economic resources just out of sensor range because they aren't in a corner.

Absolutely true. These things have a way of evening out. You never know when you're lucky or not. My last game I had no bonus tiles on my home planet. Turned out I had a purple star PQ32 one sector to my left and another purple star PQ32 one sector to my right. Overall, I ended up with 7 planets of PQ32 or better. Best galaxy I've ever seen. Some folks would have ctrl-n the instant they saw their home planet. You never know what you're giving up by doing this.

Elimination of ctrl-n along with Jeff Graw's Iron man are great ideas that go hand in hand. Also checking out a metaverse game and not submitting it should count as a loss. Or if not as an explicit loss at least still increment the "games played" count.

For non meta games ctrl-n is fine and can be used as a learning tool.

On gigantic/tough, when I "lost" the colony race, it was by two planets. The drath and Yor each had two more than me. The Korx were the true losers with only two planets instead of 20 like the other three.

Yeah, that's pretty good. But what if you're playing on obscene or suicidal and you only have half the planets that one of the AIs has at the end of the colonization race? You probably aren't going to win the game, and thats where CTRL-n comes in IMO. I'll admit that I use CTRL-n, but I do go through the colonization phase, even if it looks like I have a bad position, just in case I somehow do come out it good shape... maybe by finding high PQ planets like Mumblefratz did in his last game. I think that the best solution is to hide other race's spheres of influence until you actually come into contact with them. Hopefully that would curb some CTRL-n abuse.

Also checking out a metaverse game and not submitting it should count as a loss. Or if not as an explicit loss at least still increment the "games played" count.

There are a couple of ways to implement your idea. I think it would be justice for the developers to make the Metaverse games more serious.

First cheat flag registered is END OF GAME and an AUTOMATIC LOSS. Why should the developers waste their resources storing long game data of people cheating every few turns? Maybe that would have been informative 8 months ago but I believe the game is mature and stable so there's no need to accept such data.

Abolish ctrl-n despite Jeff's reasoned support. It's still a copout 95% of the time. Maybe 99%.

Starting and not submitting is a bit more problematic. The developers can email players asking if they are still playing a particular game. That would be a weird privacy issue to me and extra programming on the part of the developers. However, games played shouldn't be a problem.

Instead of games played, maybe there should be another field: In Progress. This particular piece of data would get updated at the START of a Metaverse game and would not be subtracted until the same game finally gets submitted as win, lose or retire.

Until it gets submitted, you're naval rank should be blocked from further progress or other medal penalties.

By playing a Metaverse game, you accept the rules of the version. Older versions should be penalized to some degree. I wouldn't penalize the gigantic galaxy player that started within a few days of the last version release but I'd definitely penalize the guy who started a Metaverse game at 1.2 when 1.4 has been out for months.

Maybe the Metaverse can instruct the player to update the game before starting.

I think it can be done. I think it should be done.

Hmmm... I think your suggestions may be a little bit too extreme, wheel.

However, if an Iron Man mode was added, I think it would be reasonable to count Iron Man games as a loss if they aren't submitted in a weeks time. I also think Iron Man should be optional, but that it should give you a massive point advantage (like 2-4x) over non-Iron Man games.

I actually don't expect to win the colony rush on suicidal games. I was playing huge suicidal maps with a typical colony rush of ~22 out of 250 planets and I have won every single one of those games. I'm currently doing a gigantic with 27 out of 460 planets in the colony rush and I will be posting a win on this one as well. Sometimes the difficult starting positions teach you the most about how to gain advantages over the computer since they challenge you to be more creative.

Sometimes the difficult starting positions teach you the most about how to gain advantages over the computer since they challenge you to be more creative.

Good point. I'll probably try harder and harder starting positions as I gain more experience, but right now I'm not sure if I'm good enough.

I most always take the first generated map. Like the suicidal I mentioned before, I knew I was pretty well toast an hour into it, but I played it out to the end for the learning experience. I wanted to try to see truly what I was up against. On painful I can usually pull myself out of any bad starting spot, except on the huge map tight cluster, where they put you and one other system way in the corner. You'd have to replace an engine on your colonizers with support just to reach the next system. Now that's a bad starting spot and the only one I might control+N. Usually that's part of the fun, not knowing what's right next door to you.

Suicidal and obscene were intended to be nearly impossible.
Not a level that some people play exclusively.

Getting rid of ctrl-N and making all games set up for the Metaverse count, whether you finish them or not, would restore these two levels to their intended difficulty.

Quixen, are you saying that my "barely get in two turns a night" is ranting, or just pointing out that my (admittedly glacial) playing style would cause my opponents to rant?

MarshallOneil, No sir. After looking at my post I see how you may have taken that and I do apologize. I also play fairly slow myself as I like to micro manage every aspect of my game. I would not define this as you ranting sir.

Or listen to the endless rants of an impatient "fraktard". (To use a common term on these threads.)

I should have expanded on this a bit more when I made the original post. I played Star Craft for awhile and found the constant ragging by my immature opponents extremely annoying. You know the type... They often try to rattle you by telling you how awful you are. By impatient I meant... annoying.

Sorry for the confusion sir.

No need to apologize; I thought that was the case and probably should have indicated as much.

I'm in complete agreement with your multiplayer frustration experience. At first it can be fun to wipe the gameroom with idiots who scream about how 'ur LAMME!!' (actual message I got once). But after a few sessions it just becomes too stupid to take any longer and sours me on the whole game.

I haven't played multiplayer anything for a couple of years now because of that same annoyance factor. It's also the reason I enjoy playing in the Metaverse; it fosters a competetive spirit - and some team spirit, as well, if you join an empire - without forcing you to deal with the immature "fraktard" element on an intensely personal level.