Well, I posted my Ascension game yesterday; my best score ever, but that was mostly the built-in score bias and not a sign of the game having been really good fun for me. It ran 500 turns, and the last 100 were pretty tedious because I was just waiting on that Ascension clock and watching the two remaining empires stew about how badly they'd be crushed if they tried to act on their anger about me ascending.

I still play on Tough b/c I don't want to fight bonuses--maybe I should try just one more notch, but I have "issues" that don't seem likely to be resolved soon. So maybe things would have been more interesting up at Painful or somesuch. But because I'm darned conservative in-game, I didn't go for even my first Ascension Crystal until I was solidly in the middle of the pack and able to keep the powers-of-the-moment fighting each other.

My Immense galaxy had only 5 crystals, 3 of which were pretty far from my core systems. The game might have been more than a hundred turns shorter if there had been another couple of crystals; five seems pretty skimpy on an Immense map.

Two other civs took crystals very early in the game, but they both ended up being crushed (I took down the Drengin, but they started it). No one made a run at any of my crystals, and I held a couple for the bulk of the game. I did feel cautious enough to lay down Military Starbases around each crystal, and I guess those augments plus the several defense fleets I kept close by might also have helped boost my score.

I guess I need to make myself try for a war win soon.

Congrats... and nice score. I better finish my game soon before I fall in the rankings.

I wonder what the multiplier is for ascension vicotories.

IIRC, it is 1.5 vs. 2 for war wins.

Very nice score GW. 

Thanks for sharing your experience going for the Ascension victory... very interesting.

I should give it a go myself, as it is the only victory type I have yet to try for, but then again I've only just dipped my toe in the TotA ocean as it were.

(now, back to finishing off my latest effort)

I'm playing the new beta..

First thing i've noticed is that you need to manager your spys a little better.. (or spam them out faster)

Can you say something about why?

It's more the way I used them.  When you put a spy out in the wild to do some passive spying you can't get them back to your active pool.  I had 20 spy's ready and I allocated all of them to do some passive spying. A few turns later I got hit with 10 or so active spys and couldn't unallocate the passive spies to hit the active enermy spies.. ( the sod's had all targeted my money buildings.)  Almosted put my economy in a US like sub prime spiral downwards dive.

Edit: Smelly grandma check

Hi folks.

Can anyone tell me what it takes to make your difficulty meter change.

I could be wrong, but is it based on an averaging system or something?

I've posted 10 games so far for our empire and 5 of those have been played on "tough" with the remainder at various other levels (3 of which were on challenging), but the difficulty meter still only shows "challenging".

(and yes, my character for The Gerontocracy is set as the default)

Good question. I know that the alignment medal is a little touchy b/c it showed me Chaotic Evil for a while after I posted my only Evil game so far. That one didn't seem quite like a straight average, or it would have stayed Neutral.

The Difficulty Medal takes the average of the difficulties and Rounds Down. (Cakewalk is = 1, Suicidal = 12)

The Alignment is the same way, but takes whatever value your race had in game.  That range is from 0-100.  So one could play 3 games at Neutral (50) and 1 game at Evil (Pond Scum = 0) and you would get an Alignment of 37.5- definitely in the Chaotic Evil range.  I haven't done testing (though I suppose I could) to see where the exact numbers fall, but that is basically how it works.

Now I see why I was confused. It's sort of an average of an average.

IMO, the medal would make more sense if it was based on a majority of name-level ratings (3 evils, 5 neutrals, and 1 good would yield a neutral medal). But maybe I think weirdly because I always use Xeno Ethics and all but one time have chosen Neutral.

Just posted my first game for a very long time.

84k Crippling. Latest version of TA

What happened to my medals ?

I have never played a cakewalk game. They have all been crippling.

It looks like you have Soltaran marked as your primary character but have been posting your games to Makara. I can't seem to see Edit My Account right now, so maybe a forum change has temporarily borked things. You should be able to view the Makara character and assign it to be the one that determines your medals here.

Go to the Metaverse button on the left hand of the Forums screen; go to My Account, and when that drops down go to "Edit My Characters".  Make sure the character you want to show up has its "Default" button highlighted.  That should do it for you.

If, in the future, you want to change or access your personal account information, you will be UNABLE to do it through the galciv forums.  In that case, go to www.forums.stardock.com and use the same screenname/password that you use on here.  You can access your "My Account" information on there.

SB made me bang on it again--at least from FF3, it looks like you'll need to log in again at the metaverse.galciv2.com "site." Being logged in here doesn't seem to count there any more.

Thanks guys.

That fixed it.

Shows how long it is since I was here last.

Thanks for shedding some light on that Sb.

Nice going Embird!

The geezers mostly seem to be falling asleep in their rocking chairs, but I've stirred my stumps enough to finally manage posting another MV game recently, although it wasn't a score to brag about.

But I'm mainly posting to give a Gerontocrat mini book review. This game seems to attract folks who like to think about IT both here and in the future. Vernor Vinge already has a good rep for working IT themes in really farflung settings, e.g. his A Fire Upon the Deep. For me, he managed to do a remarkably good job of pulling off the same tricks, plus more, in a near-future, Earth-based novel called Rainbows End. In addition to using the kind of elegant 'texting as narrative' that I almost took for granted in ...Upon the Deep, Vinge has dug into the 'medical industrial complex' themes that I first encountered in Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire.

The novel opens with the lead character tuning in to the fact that he's in the last stages of recovering from a successful Alzheimer's treatment, and as a side effect of his former wealth and the 'minefield of medical miracles,' he also more or less has the body of a late adolescent or early adult. There's all kinds of swell stuff about being out of touch with the new interfaces, etc., that I suspect might be a good read for nearly anyone who thought to join the Gerontocracy.

Madsko. If you are awake from your afternoon nap, I have just realised that I stand a chance of displacing you from top spot in our empire.

Don't get too worried. It takes me several weeks to complete a game, especially at this time of year, there are all those useless young shop assistants to complain too. Then of course there are always the idiot drivers and noisy kids in the street with all their expensive toys. In MY day......

Well gents, this place does indeed look to be the right place for me.  I just had my top bureaucrat, a right good fellow by the name of Auditor, send off the paperwork for approval, stamping, and filing in the proper folder.  You good chaps were quite hospitable towards me over in The Metaverse Recruiting Center, and I cannot fault anyone who supports a relaxing afternoon nap.  I'd even do a merry jig to celebrate joining if my back wasn't liable to act up.

Welcome InfernalRS!

Pull up a lazy-boy... warm milk and cookies at the ready.

If I recall, I think it was GW Swicord who threw out the invite to you.

Also, hat's off to Cypher for generating renewed interest in all things Meta/AltMeta(ish) and rekindling the fires of aging empires everywhere . 

Hmm, maybe it's just my eyes, but looking over the Metaverse I still don't see myself as officially in.  My join request is still shown as pending from the empire stats, and my account info screen still shows me as unaffiliated.  Is there something I need to poke at with my walking stick?

Hmm. I get a "Compiler Error Message: BC30560: 'controls_myaccount_general_ascx' is ambiguous in the namespace 'ASP'." when I try to access Accounts from the MV home page.

I've barely ever messed with the basic MV settings, so I don't remember what you should be seeing if Ghostwes managed to correctly set the empire to "Open," but it sounds like it might be a little broken somehow.

Kryo, anyone, got any suggestions on how we could work through this problem? Ghostwes is on record as wanting the empire open during his hiatus. It'd be a shame if we had to ditch to a new empire and lose all our legacy scores on the official Meta.

You can acces that function from the main Stardock forum site, but not through the link on the MV page.

Sentient species taste better...