Congrats Mumble!  I thought we had all broken the MV before, but now I'd say it's complete, hehe.

Congrats to Sole Soul as well for helping to make it happen!

Sentient species taste better...

 

I'm glad you mentioned this as I wasn't sure how it would be taken but the credit for the strategy I used belongs to Sole Soul who I'm sure will easily surpass this mark. I do like to think that I contributed some to it as well but the basic strategy and most of the detail is Sole Soul's.

I do think that my main contribution was simply the fact that I still have an interest in the game and the willingness to help out where I can. I'd also like to think that I will at least be partially responsible for pushing him to finally submit a few games of his own so keep your eye out for that, however I doubt that they will be difficult to notice when it finally does happen.

 

Can anyone give me the idea behind this strat?

If you're simply looking for a general overview, it was a...how should I put this...no-holds-barred colony rush.  It wasn't designed to be a ZYW, but Mumble felt like submitting it as one.

More details will be forthcoming after I've gotten a game of my own in, as I suspect you'll have quite a few more questions then.

I don't mean to unnecessarily keep secrets, but I'd kind of like to at least play around with things myself first; up to this point I've just been living vicariously through using Mumble as my guinea pig. 

Yeah ok. I'm not interested in playing one, just wondered what was different.

 

Yup, I already did that!  

I like your score.  

Maybe KP should make a MZYW (Million Zero Year Win Club)

1) Maiden666 - 1,551,200 points

2) Mumblefatz - 1,218,000 points

 

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Empress Saint Mina of Ophelia VII of Order of the Bloody Rose of Orders Militant of Adepta Sororitas

Ah, okay.  Yeah, this definitely isn't something you could turn out in an afternoon, whereas the typical ZYW is.

I really do appreciate your efforts to inject more fun into the MV.  :)  And I'm seriously considering doing that no-research game I suggested not too long ago; it should be quite the challenge!

I don't play any ZYW's anymore. (and i still maintain that a "typical" ZYW ends on April 8.)

I'm interested still in the mechanics of high scoring games, but they don't qualify as fun for me, and that's what i want out of GC2 these days..



Oh and Mina, Maiden666's game is flagged. Just fyi. If we are counting flagged games i can have a 5M+ ZYW done in about 1 hour...done it before, just never bothered subbing it. (Also 10M+ 1 year games are possible, but what isn't when the cheat flag doesn't matter....)

I've forgotten precisely, but the upper limit on score simply due to how the game calculates it is around 27 million.  Of course, this could never happen in a real game, and it'd be few enough turns that it'd get flagged simply for that.

But anyway. 

Colonization has always been where it's at for me.  I've been known to quit a game after colonizing the last planet and start a new one just to see how much better I could do-repeatedly.  And that's pretty much where this came from, the desire to have all the planets as early as possible, without going broke.

And I do mean all the planets.  Hint hint wink wink.

I thought it was April 15 to be MV-legal?  I think it's just the "one-more-turn" syndrome in all of us. 

Mistress-of-Deceit has no cheat flag?

Mumblefratz has no cheat flag?

Flagged or Cheat Flag? I don't understand or is like when you submit a game that has a good score and nobody likes it because they can't copy it then you can flagged it but I would never flagged anybody else good scores! How would you know if it was flagged vs a cheat flag game? Please enlighten me because this is new to me! Oh wait minute, I change my Homeworld to New Iconia II to get three planets is that what you are talking about?

We are looking for players to join to become aggressive Admirals to lead your fleets across the Galaxy!

Empress Saint Mina of Ophelia VII of Order of the Bloody Rose of Orders Militant of Adepta Sororitas

I have no idea what your saying sorry. All i can do is repeat myself, but since i really could care less if Harbourne came back and dropped in a 3M+ ZYW that didn't flag i'll just forget it.

Seriously, not being an ass, i do not understand your questions/comments.

You're correct that neither of these games are cheat flagged.

However you may remember about a year ago we had a big fuss about the use of Dread Lord opponents. Although using Dread Lord opponents did not cause the game to be cheat flagged it was eventually decided after much grief that using Dread Lords was not acceptable for a number of reasons, most notably because they are essentially an unending source of cash that's otherwise not available in a game along with the fact that Dread Lords neither research nor do they colonize anything beyond their initial colony ship.

Finally after Kryo went public on his thoughts that he felt using Dread Lord opponents was essentially cheating KP agreed and so essentially by agreement among what was left of the MV players at the time it was decided that games using Dread Lord opponents would not be counted as MV legal games.

All of that caused quite a fuss at the time and I'm sure no one really wants to revisit this discussion. Suffice to say that although Maiden's 1.55M game was a major accomplishment for a number of different reasons regrettably he had started the game prior to the decision that Dread Lord opponent were not acceptable and so had used Dread Lord opponents in that game.

That is why KP listed the Maiden's 1.55M game as "not MV legal".

As an aside Maiden's game is a far cry different from Harbourne's or SpaceTimer's games or in fact from a game that receives a cheat flag. If I'm not mistaken Soul Sole has proven without a doubt that the scores achieved by Harbourne and SpaceTimer were not even theoretically possible and therefore definitely required the use of a hex editor to crack the checksum protections that are in every MV game.

Maiden's game was technically legal at the time he started the game, it was only while the game was in progress that it was determined that Dread Lord opponents were not acceptable. It's for this reason plus that fact that there were a number of other innovating strategies in that game that make it worthy of note even though technically it's been determined to not be acceptable for MV play.

Given my position on the use of Dread Lord opponents it should go without saying that no Dread Lords were used in my game. Given Kryo's and KP's statements at the time that such games would be unacceptable it should be assumed that no one today is using Dread Lords opponents for any MV game even if they do not generate a specific cheat flag.

Actually I think everyone here today lived through that time period and should therefore already be aware of everything I've said here. If not then this explanation should be sufficient and there should be no further need to continue discussion of a time that had more than it's fair share of unpleasantness.

 

@Neilo, sorry. I was trying understand it myself. The question I should of ask was:

What is getting flagged?

@Mumblefratz, thank you!

Now I understand the difference between getting flagged and getting a cheat flag.

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Empress Saint Mina of Ophelia VII of Order of the Bloody Rose of Orders Militant of Adepta Sororitas

That's more or less correct, at least for Spacetimer's game(s).  I can't say that I ever looked at Harbourne's, but if they're comparable, then the same logic applies.

The bottom line is that something like that is conceivable for a Gigantic, but a Small score curve will never be even a third as high (approximate estimate from memory).

It's a shame that the DL AI discussion got so out of hand, and that Maiden doesn't seem to be with us any longer because of the fallout from it.  I hope he'll come back some day; it's nice to have others around who explore the game's nooks and crannies as much as I do. 

Harborne did nothing with score, it was Spacetimer...and another name i do not recall. Harbone cheated with the sue of multiple characters tied to one registration. something like 12 characters to the normal three. His scores were nothing.

And AFAIK, the checksums did not show a hex edit prior to 2.0. One could simply hex the score value and be done with it. At 2.0 Cari put in place a check to see if the file had been hexed, no matter what the edit was.

I'm a bit fuzzy with the above, there is a thread around with it though.

Ah yes. I remember now. There was another name that posted unattainable scores so I just assumed that was who you meant.

In all reality I could have looked up the name easily enough since IIRC I authored the thread you're talking about, but it's not really worth the effort.

I totally agree on both counts.

Your right, it's not, just thought id clarify who Harborne was,

*Gasp*

I still hold spot #2?! I may well have to start up a few more of these and tackle my old score for the new year...

 

--Scanian

Maybe try to take the #1 spot in tiny, Scanian?

 

Sentient species taste better...

Well here's a somewhat better result again using Sole Soul's methodology.

1st place with a single game and it's a ZYW?

W.O.W.

It turns out that there is an artificial scoring limit of 3.5 million in the game. Actually I think it's dependent on the game type and the victory type multiplier. So 3.5 million is the military victory limit. Other victory types should have even lower limits but I forget the precise victory type multipliers and I'm too lazy to look them up at the moment.

This is something of a bummer since Sole Soul's methodology is probably capable of somewhere in the vicinity of 6 million points for a military victory. In fact we believe it's possible to achieve the 3.5 million limit in a ZYW so that's pretty much the goal at this point.

That is absolutely mind blowing.  I haven't played GalCiv2 in a while, but I'm dying to know how you/SoleSoul did/came up with that .  

SS mentioned that he would like to make everything public at some point. I believe there may be one or two aspects of it that KP would have to agree to release as well but I think SS and KP had at least discussed the potential of doing that. The last I discussed this with SS he was of the mind to tell folks how its done after doing his game but the artificial limit may in fact have discouraged SS sufficiently that he may have moved on, the strategy is capable of somewhere near 6 million but its essentially limited to no greater than can be achieved in a ZYW. He was kind of bummed out about the limit and I haven't heard from him in over a month now.

Basically I'd be happy to describe the methodology but I would need the OK from both SS and KP to do so. I haven't seen KP around in quite some time either so I'm at a loss as to what I can say ...

I would like to have a look at that methodology too please, but I can wait until you get the ok from both SS and KP. May I ask about how long it took to play such a game? 

We are looking for players to join to become aggressive Admirals to lead your fleets across the Galaxy!

Empress Saint Mina of Ophelia VII of Order of the Bloody Rose of Orders Militant of Adepta Sororitas