Notes from a 1 million point game

Actually you could have achieved a much higher score, much easier than this. A military ranking of only 10 million with over 50K ships is very poor. I have achieved a military ranking of over 13 million with only 17K ships.

Like you said the speed with which you conquer the galaxy is key and that can pretty much be accomplished in a little over a year in DL but probably takes closer to 2 years in DA.

Economics is key as well. Partially from a direct score perspective but even more importantly as an indirect effect to the rate at which you can put up a military SB array and the rate at which you can produce ships for it.

Again I suspect that you could have done better on the economics side of the equation but there you're probably in the ballpark. Mainly again it's how early in the game you get that income up and how precisely you "produce" ships for under the military SB array.

First off getting a high income early is not about when you get 800K income. It's more how early you get to 100K or even 50K. That early income is more important because that's what allows you to quickly develop all the planets you "conquer". Getting your first 600-650 planets profitable quickly then allows you to produce ships, both constructors and fighters for under your military SB array, more quickly and just like everything else you get more value for early points than later points.

The other aspect is the build versus buy choice for producing your ships in the first place. Here the economics of DA versus DL come into play. Certainly in DL it's far more effective to go for a 100% stockmarket economy and merely buy your 1/1 fighter for under your military SB. In DL I get my income to about 1.3 million bc per turn and with that income I can buy in excess of 300 1/1 fighters per turn which then takes me a year to reach my 17K goal.

In DA the jury is out but it is likely that a combined strategy is best. That is have a enough industry on however many planets that "produce" ships to build a bare hull each time and then use your cash to upgrade to your 1/1 fighter. It will then take you some time to figure out where the "balance" point is of how many ships you can build/upgrade per turn but 300 per turn is probably the metric to shoot for.

A couple of concrete suggestions. One is build a 24 military SB array instead of only a 16 SB array. The advantages of this are obvious. Secondly by building 50K 1/1 fighters you are extending the tedium of the game by a *lot* and ignoring a very important source of quick and easy points.

Basically your 1/1 fighter should be the cheapest thing you can build. Usually you want sparrow missile and armor plating and then as many engines as you can fit on a *huge* hull. You definitely should use a huge hull for your fighter. The reason is that you want to end the game by doing a final upgrade from your 1/1 fighter to something like a 25/450 dreadnought.

Here's what you do. You build 17K 1/1 huge hull ships as quickly as possible. The reason you build 17K ships is because it's a magic number. What is magic about it is that that is the maximum number of ships that you can upgrade in a single turn without running out of your 2GB of memory. It's doesn't matter how much memory you have as long as it's at least 2GB.

So what you do is build your 17K ships and set yourself up so that you have everything you need to conquer the last remaining AI. The reason you need to do this is because you're going to go massively in debt for the rest of the game and you will be unable to build or buy anything else for probably the last three years of the game.

So you have your 17K 1/1 huge hull fighters and you design a huge hull dreadnought with a single BHE and as many ZPA as possible. This usually results in a 25 attack/450 defense ship. There are two reasons for this style of ship. One is that you get 10 defense for one ZPA of size 4 (or 30 defense for size 12) versus 25 attack for one BHE of size 12. Also in general your defense bonus is larger than your attack bonus. Here the number of military mining resources you get in your game will be the key determinant to your final score.

So before you do your final upgrade you make sure you overbuild all Starports, Industry and Research buildings with Stockmarkets. You also insure that your approval rating is in the area of 80% because a few years in massive debt is going to kill your approval.

Once you're all set up will all stockmarkets and whatever farms/VRC's you need for the pop/approval levels you want to maintain then you upgrade your 17K ships from 1/1 fighters to 25/450 dreadnoughts. Then you merely hit end turn for another 2-3 years until your score stops increasing dramatically. That's how it's done.

A few numbers are instructive here. I've already mentioned my 1.3 million bc per week income and that's important, but not nearly as important as your military score. With 17K 1/1 fighters you can usually achieve a military rating of about 6 million with a 24 military SB array. 24 military SB array basically gives a 1500 point bonus to each of your 17K ships.

If you look at the value of the final upgrade you can see that it depends on your weapons/defense bonus, i.e. the number of military resource mining SB's, or any other unusual source of weapons/defense bonus, i.e. such as the Drath's 50% defense bonus. Assuming the "normal" 6 military resources in a gigantic galaxy that's 234% bonus which along with other bonuses comes to about 250% maybe a bit more.

Anyway this 250% bonus results in your 25/450 dreadnought being worth 475*3.5=1662.5 which means the upgrade is actually worth more than the entire array of 24 military SB’s. So if the 17K ships under a 24 military SB array gives you 6 million points the final upgrade gives you another 7 million points. Also the upgrade gives you this 7 million point military rating boost over the course of a single turn and not over the year or more it took to build the 17K ship in the first place. This makes the benefit of the upgrade far higher that simply gradually building more ships.

Anyway with these techniques I’ve achieved a 957K game *in DL* where the next highest scoring game is probably a bit less than 600K.

I don't think 1.3 million BC in taxes in DA is possible. At least not in my games.

I was already at pretty much 100% Stock Markets, and I don't see how I could have gotten enough Stock Markets to make the additional 571,000 that I would have needed. I was getting about 60 BC per Stock Market, so that would have taken way more Stock Markets then available tiles.

I would need more Econ Resources to do that.

As for the 24 Military Star Bases. I was using 20 in my last game. I will have to look into it, as I didn't think 24 was possible. (EDIT: ah, yes, I see it. That was silly of me. 24 would have been much better)

Also, direct buying 300 1/1 fighters is insane. That is a LOT of clicks. My method takes a lot less clicks. It is mostly waiting. I watch tv, do something else, and come back every 5 to 10 minutes to start another turn.

I don't think I have the patience to direct buy that many ships as it would involve a massive amount of clicks.... perhaps there is a way to buy them all at once? Something I have never heard of... which wouldn't surprise me as there are a lot of tricks I probably don't know of.

Anyway, some interesting information to think about.

- Livonya

Certainly the number of econ resources makes a big difference, also the population of your planets makes a difference as well. 13B on PQ10 and below is a given. In DL 20B for PQ11+ is doable. I know this is more problematic in DA and this should to PQ13+ for 20B but that is a goal. Also you should *always* have the econ event.

Anyway your statement in the other thread that you built the most powerful ship that you could in 1 turn on each planet implies that you had too much industry that could and should have been stockmarkets.

In any case I agree that the economics of DA are more severe but I get my 1.3 million with 450 planets, it's hard to believe that you can't get closer to that than 875K with 750 planets (I count gross income combining taxes, trade and tribute).

Also don't forget the upgrade. I suspect that the upgrade alone is worth 300K points and remember you're building 50K ships I'm *only* building 17K to achieve a higher military rating than you. Whether you chose to build versus buy you can still avail yourself of the upgrade which ends all clicking other than end turn.

Plus building the bare hull and upgrading to a cheap 1/1 huge hull fighter doesn't require the clicks. The build is the same as in your case just much less industry per planet is required (definitely want evil and the ASC for this). Then the upgrade from hull to 1/1 fighter can be done in bulk each turn (not to be confused with the "final" upgrade). The 17K ships is the that you can upgrade in a single turn.

I think 875K on DA is pretty good. That PQ bonus must of helped with that as I can only muster about 700K when all is said and done with 766 planets. Hmmm.. I'll have to look into that for next game. Thanks for sharing .

Is this with 100% stockmarkets or do you have some industry for ship build purposes?

Also I thought PQ bonus only applies to planets that you colonize and *not* ones you conquer, if so then does this really help much? If not then I can see that it would. I would think in an upgrade situation the best place to spend racial ability is defense bonus.


[edit] Certainly number of econ resources is key. 6 is average and I presume that for my 1.3M DL number. 7 yields 1.6M. What are the econ resource counts for the incomes you're quoting on DA?

hmm I'll have to get a count when I load it up here in a few. I am almost sure that it is five or less though. I seem to have gotten shafted in that department this game ;p
I am running all SEs I have even taken and overbuilt every extra Starport to the tune of about 30K extra a turn.

And I wonder if you still get the PQ bonus if you negotiate for a planet and not necessarily conquer it. That does sound like it could be a big factor because there is a lot of class 16 and above planets in DA once they're all terraformed out making a PQ bonus pretty significant( if it does work that way).

edit

Question, Mumble: Have you considered building multiple classes of tiny hull 1/1 ships? For example, 17k fodder-class armed rowboats mark 1, followed by 17k mark 2s? The upgrade cost would be less, possibly allowing a second upgrade cycle. Has this been tried and shot down?

Also, thanks for the 17k limit. My last game ended at least 100k points low because I had 23k kitten-class attack craft and couldn't upgrade them. God, how I wished for an "upgrade all ships in this fleet" button! It would have cut my time by a factor of 30.

Has anyone worked out the math on how TA fleet modules can be worked into this? Fleet offense/defense bonuses sounds like a recipe for further point inflation  :SURPRISED:  

Yes I have, but you have to build all ships first and then do the upgrade. The reason is your economy can *never* recover.

The upgrade costs over a billion bc's (17K upgrades * 60K per upgrade = 1 billion bc) so you start out that much in debt, however once you've done the upgrade of 17K ships your ship maintenance costs exceed 3 million bc's per turn so even though I'm making 1.3 million bc's per turn, each turn I'm adding another 1.7 million bc's to my debt. You can never recover.

The thing about the 25 attack 460 (size 196) defense versus the equivilent 400 attack 10 defense (also size 196) is the cost of defense is far higher than that of offense. Basically the 25/460 ship costs 6K to build and 60K to rush buy whereas the 400/10 ship costs 2K to build and 20K to upgrade (approximately). You could consider trying multiple upgrades by upgrading to the cheaper 400/10 ship for *only* 340 million but still your maintenance costs will far exceed any possible income you could have so you can never do two batches of upgrades.

But you could build 17K of Ship1 and any number of Ship2 and then upgrade all your Ship1's and I have done that and it does perhaps yield a bit more points but the effect is muted by the fact that you've had to delay the huge boost to your military rating provided by the upgrade by the time it takes to build all these extra ships. All in all I believe the most effective strategy is to build all the ships that you can upgrade at one time and do the upgrade as soon as possible. This also limits the tedium of the method which is no small benefit.

One final point about the 17K number. To my knowledge that has only been verified in DL not DA and I discovered it by basically doing a binary search to find the point where my machine crashed. Dependent on your machine and how many services you have active and how much memory they take this number will vary. I have a very low number of active services as well as a very small amount of memory dedicated to them but at least I don't have to kill my anti-virus for example. However your mileage may vary. Also the speed of your machine shouldn't affect this limit but it will affect how long it takes to do the turn.

With my E6600 Intel Core II Duo @2.4GHz it takes me about an hour to do the upgrade. It can take 10-15 minutes just to *schedule* the upgrade of all 17K ships. On my old machine it took an hour to just *schedule* the upgrade and as near as I could tell close to 4 hours to do the upgrade, I just usually went to sleep leaving it running.

No clue as to the TA methodology in fact the DA methodology is really still being worked at this point. I think DethAdder is the closest to being able to tell us how this works out for DA.

Excellent information, thanks much Livonya! Truly an epic-scale game. A lot of this will prove very useful.

Sentient species taste better...

Congrats on being the first to make it to 1 million points, Livonya!

A daunting task. I had suspicions of how to get there, but never could muster the patience. Even now that you've explained it, I doubt that your record will be challenged anytime soon. Even if it is, you'll always be the first to have done it. :CONGRAT:

Awesome game!

Now, if you're tired from all this boring extreme score-milking style, stop by for a pint at the Year Zero Club and enjoy the opposite end of the spectrum!

I can understand the point of view and I don't take any offense to the comment. However, achieving #1 in the metaverse by spamming many hundreds of 15 minute ZYW's has it's own aspect of mind numbing boredom. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

In other words, people that live in glass houses probably shouldn't be in the habit of throwing stones.

That post probably could've used a couple more smilies.

It was more ironic, tongue-in-cheek than a serious comment on that playstyle. I have the utmost respect for your skills at getting such scores. I tried, and fail miserably.

The thing is, both ways of playing have elements of repetetiveness - and the top players in the MV have mostly demonstrated their ability to master both types of game   

I wager it will be harder for a ZYW to retain top spot though, with the law of diminishing returns meaning each game scores less and less - whereas one more similar game from Livonya would breach 2 million total points.

Damn plexi-glass, the stones I throw keep bouncing back and hitting me  :HOT: 

I did some calculations and it appears that one more million point game would probably put me at around 1,800,000 total points.

Due to the time that it takes to do these long games, and the declining value of each game, I think the top ten will pretty much be dominated by ZYWs or by characters that only post 3 or 4 games before either starting over or creating new characters.

The Metaverse scoring system is pretty weird... and the ZYW strategy appears to be a better approach for getting to the top ten.

I do intend to try some ZYW as it looks really interesting. A totally different way of thinking about the game. I am not used to tanking my economy as a means to victory.

For example, I would never have thought of just tanking my economy and upgrading all my ships as was suggested by Mumblefratz. I just never thought in that direction, and the ZYW games seem to be thinking outside of the box so to speak.

It will be interesting to see what happens with that.

- Livonya

I'd say it's a very fast way to get there. More time efficient even. However, the low # of super-high score games will get you there in more time, but you'll last longer up there due to that law of diminishing returns.

In my mind, perhaps at a certain # of 1m score games, it would be worth your while to change gears into ZYWs. When you net TONS of % of each game, milk those large scores for what they are worth.

For example, if your first game would have been that 1.06m game, you would have gone from unranked to #9. Drop another game like that and you'd be in first (or top 3 with the change in scores over time). Third game would clinch the #1 spot for a while and the #4th you could probably hang up your hat and go on vacation for a month and still have a great lead. That is if your opponents all ran ZYWs.

I spent 4 weeks now, mainly running ZYWs and I'm only in 15th. Each game now I'm lucky to move 10k in points.

The gear-shifting point however I'm uncertain as to when it would be best for the time/diminishing returns standpoint.

Don't worry we both had one smilie and I think that was probably enough. As a metaverse player you need a thick skin about such things to begin with. Basically to many that have no chance at replicating either of these game style choices there is absolutely no skill involved. But those are not the people whose opinion I value.

While I've always readily admitted that there are many aspects of scoring that do not correlate to skill, I also believe that there are many aspects that do correlate to skill.

There's pros and cons to each method and like Mag mentions the true good players can win in many different ways. I think its very important that everyone be able to colonize well and are able to slog through a good old fashioned fight of conquering the galaxy one planet and transport at a time. I do suspect that there are a few players that have gotten to suicidal only by taking advantage of the trade screen and if forced to actually fight it out against 9 suicidal opponents couldn't.

However I'm in no position to criticize because I use the same methods that we all have come to use. Even though I know I could certainly succeed fighting through the AI the old fashioned way there's no way that I could achieve the same kind of scores with those methods.

In any case I truly did take no offense whatsoever from your comment and was in effect tossing my own stones at the ZYW method.

You do have to watch out mixing the ZYWs on a character with just a few higher scoring games on him. I had a character with 4 games, 3 ranged from 126K to 226K with one weird fluke on Normal of 11k(That I don't remember playing). Add two ZYWs and my overall metascore dropped by what looked like 60K. I have since only done ZYWs with my League character, saving the others for the big games .

All i want is a Secondary Metaverse which would use X-Worlds framework and rules, and only then we would possibly truly find who's best even if below a relative number of points or on top of a ranking list.
Cheat flags everywhere, since it is a MOD... call me a hack but what stops anyone from hex-editing a saved game and submit it for a fake glory tag added to the stash already there?
I'm NOT suggesting to do it, btw. Unless, it has been done by someone. Oh, they found the cheater and kicked it out? Well, i'll be darned.

1,000,000 is a benchmark to look up to? O-kay, i can run around that issue.
You can deviate a score, but nobody can claim being better than any other 1,000,001's scores since, the variable conditions are - how should i put it gently - nano-seconds apart and LY(exponentials) away each and every time something (by choice & options) boots up.

Sectopods would beat the crap outa Skeletoids if alarmed enough.
Start with a tiny map.
Go on.
And, de-militarize asap... cuz, peaceful aims should deserve a sharp edge - too.

Not quite sure what you're getting at here but if your point is that the metaverse is an imperfect ranking system that doesn't definitively determine the absoulte rank of player skill then I doubt there is anyone that would disagree with you.

Certainly your point about a player getting a 1 million point game versus a player getting a million and one point game being indistinguishable is true but I would go *way* further than that. I would say getting 500K versus 1 million is no proof of player ranking. At the most I would say that those in the top of the metaverse are probably (but not certainly) better players than those at the bottom, assuming those at the bottom are actually attempting to score well. I've known a number of excellent players that have never bothered to submit a single game to the metaverse.

But even so there's no doubt in my mind that Mag is the best player that I've ever met. I don't care where on the list he currently is, he's simply the best. How I know this is not by just his ability to take the top spot pretty much at will but also due to familiarity with his game and his proven abilities in so many different aspects of the game. There's no one I know that could ever out colonize him.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that anyone that looks only at the ranking on a high score list and uses that to decide who is the best player is a fool. But on the other hand someone's consistent ability to continually be at or near the top of the list *is* at least some evidence of superior play that must be considered along with other sources of evidence.

I think the best method to determine something like skill, would be to have a pile of game/map setups that would encompass every situation that could be came across in the game, turn off mega events (for game consistency) and have every player who wishes to be 'judged' play that very game. Get everyone on the same playing field and see who comes out on top in whichever method you prefer to judge by. Score may not be the best way to judge someone.

The MV however, I wouldn't say that the people at the top are better at the game than those below them, but like you said that not everyone who plays the game is out to post to the MV. I've been playing this game for a year now and just got into the MV a month ago. Where would I have been in the charts if I had gotten into it much earlier?

The MV scoring system just shows who plays more often/submits more of the games they play. I will be first in line to agree with anyone lower in the charts than me that they are a better player...I just had a ton of time on my hands this past month and got to where I am now. I've been trying to play a non-ZYW game on suicidal in TA now and I flounder each time. I know I don't hold water to my score if you'd assume I had the skill.

One thing I will give TA is, it really changes how you play. So many things have changed to make you work harder to get the same effect. Starting funds lower, lowered tile count, smarter AIs due to Brads overhaul, research treaties being given the same scrutiny as econ treaties, MCC no longer giving the +100 econ...the list goes on. I actually do WORSE playing DA now though than TA since I've socially conditioned myself into the not think of these 'loopholes' that would exist in DL/DA. Also, any TA game I've played not as a ZYW has been with tech trading & stealing off. I see it as ruining the uniqueness of the new tech trees.

I would entirely agreed on the principles at least you spelled out to indicate with hard evidence that the default "ranking" should always be somehow imperfect. The complexity found in the gameplay itself proves it otherwise.

Scoring to me is more like a straight maximal attempt at a simple toggle; Win_Lose. Bang, over... whatever the path or highly variable situations, the conclusion must be evaluated from a fish bowl distortion looking in.
There are specific players who devised patterns to obtain better results through analysis of common factors, yet again - that has more to do with a singularily presented or handled context.

The Metaverse sticks to a referenced and valid rules set. It's a perspective offered and deployed for our examination or to 'exploit'. With that in mind, i'd want some alternatives.

Which is why i sometimes wished for a secondary Metaverse where people whom are regularly playing in any given MOD enviro should be able to tally up some progressive scorings as it relates to the different situations or new rules.

Thus, X-Worlds 39 races and how the whole parties were put together offers such an alternative to some default but genuine SD built engine that invoques *A* performance ratio.

A million points may just become a 50,000 worth of mind bending choices and painful grind in *OTHER* Metaverse_s dependant on for example, CoSH conditions & what else.

Even more not sure what you're getting at here. I seem to be looking at shadows on the wall of Plato's cave whenever I try to read your posts. Could you please translate for the not so philosophically inclined?

Not "should" just inevitably "is".

I've always thought that the only true scoring method is for the contest to be to the death. Then it's clear who won. Other than that you're just guessing, perhaps informed and intelligent guessing, but guessing nonetheless.

There was some movement to provide something like this. Macmatt did in fact implement something of this nature although I'm not familiar with the details.

The rest of your post trails off into meaninglessness, at least for me.  :NOTSURE: 

Well, Mumblefratz... this world of ours is populated by a huge number of different people who weren't born or_and raised as a full blast Anglo-Americo-Londo fluent speaking and expressing ***intelligently*** whatever they have in mind.

I also - sometimes, don't entirely gain understanding in some of your own textual operas in tandem. Coherent or structured with intelligible paragraphs worth my precious readout free-time.
Do i live on a different planet than yours? Quebec is North of NY but that's doesn't make anyone bunking near that city any less capable of posting an opinion on a Forum such as this one.

But, that's beside the whole point isn't it.

Maybe Macmatt should chime in - explaining via comprehensible words all lined-up from academia knowledge of his own that the Metaverse millionaires *are* or *should be* considered crap or flap by whomever is actually willing to look at it for what it is without judging the superfluous details of the many.

Off my soap box... and, right back to some reasonably valid freedom(s) of expression in a thin can.