Starting place

Did you know that if you hold CTRL and hit N that it'll restart the match in a different starting place/planet tiles? This doesn't count as a 'cheat' for MV purposes.

Other than that, making a map yourself could fix that...but so much for randomness then.

Thanks! That helped

Ctrl+N is basically saying "I accept that the computers will have the disadvantage of not controlling where they start and therefore not really playing the game for it's full complexities".

"Cheating" to make the game simpler doesn't get you anywhere .
It's like restarting a game because you want more powerful tile boosts on your homeland.

Some people say "it's a game, it's about having fun". Well I don't understand how people have fun playing a strategy game when they cheat.

/rant
-1 karma to me for being a douche.

Huh?

I play games to have fun. If I regen the map til I get a position or overall map layout I like, I don't think that's cheating. I like a map with a good spread so that all teams (me and all AIs) have some room to expand. It's no fun for me to overwhelm the AIs anymore than it is to see one AI quickly colonize 1/2 the map while 3 of them are cornered and never gew. It takes me hours to finish even a medium map - and I have about zero interest, for ex, in starting a game where I have 1 planet in 1 system in the corner of a map surrounded by 8 blank sectors. Would it be a challenge? Yes. Who cares. Not interested.

I don't use ctrl+N anyways - it used to be (inconsistently?) bugged in such a way that every time you used it AI intel levels would drop, so if you did several ctrl+n's you could eventually be playing against all drooling idiots. I don't know that this bug was ever fixed and don't want to experiment to find out since playing a game for 1-2 hours just to figure out the AIs never left home is a waste of time. Another issue was that if you did ctrl+n with screens open you could get some real bizarre behavior out of the UI.

There is tons of cheese in GC2 in my opinion, stuff like tech trading, tech whoring especially with minors, using spies to crush population before invading, using multiple waves of transports with mass drivers first, and more. Lots of players play at high difficulties but use "tricks" like these to win, or leverage other AI deficiencies, or play on small maps vs 1 opponent, and so on - ie, they setup or play the game in such a way that is probably not the intended design but it gets them wins, sometimes letting them easily win at high difficulties. Is this kind of stuff cheating?

Can you really cheat in a single player game anyways? If you do, the only person you cheat is yourself. I guess GC2 has metaverse but I don't submit games nor care about it in any way so it doesn't matter to me if people cheese, milk score or do other silly things (they find fun) for MV.

You know the AI level shows up in the foreign relations stats tab? I think it's under misc, but I'm not sure. Testing whether AI levels drop from Ctrl-N would actually be pretty fast.