Base Growth per race in DA

Torian: 7%
Custom: 4%
Some stocks: greater than 4%, less than 5%
At least one stock, IIRC: 3%

I figured if anyone would know it would be you.     Thanks.

3% is the same as DL which implies you wouldn't reach the max growth cap until you've reached a pop of 2.5B (75M/0.03).

However I'm pretty sure in one DA game I had going where I was playing the Altarians I was getting a growth of about 1B per turn as long as I had a bit over 1B in pop which implies a 7% base growth (75M/0.07=1071).

In that game I took no pop growth racial abilities and so all I had was Aphrodisiac (50%) and the two pop growth techs for another 20% pop growth bonus and so my per turn growth limit was 75M*1.7*8=1016 (my SA was obviously Breeder).

I certainly also picked up a good double handful of +1 pop growth anomalies however I wouldn't think that would be enough to give me that 1B growth if my base growth was as low as even 6% (1B*0.06=60M → 1B/(60M*8)=2.08, i.e. I would have needed another 38% pop growth bonus to get 1B growth at a pop of 1B if my base growth was only 6% which isn't very realistic).

I also recall that once I had Aphrodisiac and the two pop growth techs my pop essentially doubled each turn until reaching that 1B per turn figure (colonizing with 250 became 500 next turn and 1B the turn after that and there on after continued to grow at 1B per turn).

So is it reasonable to assume that my recollection and math here is correct and that the Altarians at least have a 7% base growth rate or am I missing something?

Check the planet(s) for Fertility Clinics-I remember the Altarians having between 4 and 5%.

Your math does appear to be correct, though-it may be a bug; I'm certain they're not supposed to have 7%.

Apologies for not being able to give definitive numbers at present.

From the numbers you give it's doubtful, but could the "wormhole causes pop boom" event have been occurring at the time?

I definitely didn't have any Fertility clinics and I'm definitely sure about my pop growth ability being 70% (plus possibly another 5% to 10% due to found anomalies). The only real unknown in the equation is base growth.

Actually since Pop*BG*1.7*8=Growth and since in all three datapoints that I noted (250M, 500M and 1B) my growth pretty much equaled my current pop (i.e. Pop=Growth) that implies that my base growth, BG=1/(1.7*8)=7.3%. Since I assume that 7% is the max that would actually imply that my real pop growth ability was 1/(0.07*8)=1.79 which means that I picked up another 9% in pop growth ability via anomalies which is not unreasonable given that by that point in the game I had pretty much swept the entire galaxy free of anomalies. So all three datapoints imply the same base growth and while I also didn't think that the Altarians had a max base growth that's certainly what the data implies.

No big deal. In some sense all I'm doing here is talking out loud and looking for someone to take a quick look over my shoulder to make sure I'm not jumping to an obviously incorrect conclusion.

Base growth is certainly part of the decision process as to which race to select but far from the only part. All other things being equal it's nice to have a higher base growth than a lower one. However to some extent I was looking at this as a reason to justify whether or not it's worthwhile to spend ability points on pop growth ability. After thinking about it some more I think the question may be moot. Regardless of a races base growth if the ultimate rate at which you can grow your pop is important to you then it's always right to select max pop growth ability. All the base growth affects is the point at which you reach that max growth rate but growing at 1.25B per turn is always going to be better than being limited to growing at 1B per turn. Plus selecting the max pop growth ability gives you a bonus instantly, you don't have to wait until you've researched the required techs and built the required wonder before you get the benefit of the bonus.

I think I've convinced myself to always take max pop growth ability regardless of which race I select and regardless of that race's base growth, although it doesn't hurt that it seems that my prefered race has a max base growth.

I am in process of starting another game soon and I'm still at this point going to go with the Altarians so I will be watching this closely, however I still have a few critical decision as to how to spend my ability points that I haven't quite decided on yet. I'll let you know what I find out when I get there.

No. This is still rather early in year 0 and as far as I know random events aren't enabled until Oct 7th (or is it Oct 1st, I forget which) of year 1. Actually (again AFAIK) I was the first person to discover (and use) this fact.

I'm in the milking phase of a game which I hope will demonstrate the power of maximizing pop growth by passing 2M in score. Remains to be seen whether it will do so. If it does I'll do a detailed writeup of the approach. Score at Dec 22 of year one was 592,900, with military production just ramping up, having started to arrive at the SB array at about 1 year + 8 months.

Sole Soul is the true expert on max score but it seems you should have a chance at 2M. Based on year 0 score alone this seems comparable to Maidens 687K ZYW that later ended up at 2.2M. The problem however is at the time Maiden was using Dread Lord opponents and it later became accepted that using Dread Lord AI opponents was considered cheating. Even so that mark stands as a high water mark and is an accomplishment regardless of how it was done.

In any case *any* game over 1 million is something special that very few people have done so no matter precisely where your game turns out I'm sure it will be one of a very select few.

I've read about ARC and for me it is going too far, even without the Dread Lord thing. I am using a custom race for myself. I decided that custom opponents also seemed like going too far for me, even with just in-game settings. But I did in-game buff the opponents I selected to 200% economy and to use up their available ability points.

I'm using ToA 2.03. I don't know what advantages this may be giving me vs. DA or DL since I haven't played those versions. It does have one disadvantage. The MCC economy boost which I've read about has been fixed in this version of the game, so no early doubling of income. Without that overwhelming reason to align with evil I think the best benefits come from a neutral alignment and that's what I chose.

There may have been some other things fixed in TA as well. I'm pretty sure at least some of the things that you can do while bankrupt in DA and the current incarnations of DL (actually all spending while bankrupt was prohibited in the version of DL that I predominately played) have been fixed in TA although precisely which I woudn't know.

As far as ARC most folks looking to score big use ARC for the same reason that you've pumped up the AI's to 200% economy, which is an attempt at making the strongest opponent possible. The reasoning is that all the AI's development and planets sooner or later (and hopefully sooner) become the players resources and the faster an AI can colonize the more planets the player doesn't have to colonize themselves.

I assume that your moral prohibition against ARC does not extend to any prohibition on your willingness to use some form of "swindle" to capture the AI's planets at some point or other. If you don't then reaching even a million point game let alone a multi-million point game without a "swindle" would be truly amazing.

As far as TA and playing neutral it makes perfect sense. Back in the day before I realized that the MCC gave an undocumented 100% econ bonus I predominately played neutral as well. In DL you got a 10% morale bonus by going neutral which is a far bigger bonus than a 10% approval bonus if you note the difference (i.e. 10% bonus to *base* morale as opposed to a 10% approval bonus which is depreciated by a planets pop). Assumedly it's still the same today. Plus in those days I used to create an uber research planet surrounded by 16 econ bases to boost research and the Neutrality Learning Center was a big help in out researching the suicidal AI. That was long before I learned about the "swindle" or as we (the Diplomats) used to call it long before the Kzinti were aware of it "planets for peace".

Yup, quite so. I don't know of any way to spend/grow while bankrupt in TA. I do wonder if I may be getting a larger overall score multiplier or other advantage which might have been introduced to offset that possibility in previous versions of the game. I don't have specific knowledge of such a benefit but I do have a vague feeling, from the public posts I've read (probably far less detailed/specific than information known to various empires), that there may be some scoring advantage in TA to offset the gains previously available via now closed approaches.

Quite so! The sooner the AIs colonize, research, and make money, the sooner I can take all of that from them! I think money to be the single most important thing in the game, so having Dread Lord opponents seems to me (admittedly someone who is willing to remorselessly abuse the AIs in other ways) to be an exploitive approach which I won't use.

Bang on. I'm not sure I fully understand the nuances of the best "swindle" approach but your posts here have been the largest single factor in helping me toward a high score. I think I understand the key elements involved. At Jan 1 of year one I tripled my empire's size in trades for peace, with the Spin Control Center playing a key role.

I'm not sure it's still the same but I venture a guess that it is, because it is the only way I've played and it works. I haven't used the econ bases to boost research aspect because the basic gains (number of planets) which boost research with the "swindle" seem to outweigh anything I might gain by boosting the research of a few particular planets.

Actually I do think there are a couple of holes still in TA in this regard although I'm by no means positive that this is the case. I also prefer to avoid using such techniques mainly because I believe that there are ways to do just as well if not better without relying on them but I don't look askance at those that do take advantage of them precisely because that since you can do just as well without them they are not dramatic game changers.

The Dread Lords AI however was a much different situation since you could actually easily gain 160K BC's *per turn* from them and that really is a major game changer. Even hybrid strategies that used only 1 or 2 DL AI's could fund 20K or 40K extra cash *per turn* which still totally undermines the economics of the game.

As far as TA having some scoring advantage I don't realy think so. I do think there is some extra multiplier for the Immense galaxy size but then on the other hand I was also under the impression that TA had a planet limit of about 650 which puts it at a disadvantage with respect to DA.

I think overall that DA has a higher scoring potential than TA if only because of the higher planet count but that TA does have some subtle advantages that make the difference less than the difference implied by 100 less planets. Both TA and DA have huge scoring advantages over DL although the current implementations of DL that are compatible with DA (i.e. DL 1.5 and above) have advantages over the old standalone versions of DL (the last being DL v1.4x).

Actually I'm sure Sole Soul again has a better idea than I about multiple ways to swindle and the pros and cons of the different methods but I'm also sure that subtle differences are exactly that, subtle and therefore not all that major. A working understanding of the concept is more than sufficient, beyond that it becomes a matter of perhaps being able to do things a few weeks earlier if done one way versus another.

Of course due to the front end loaded nature of score (yet again another topic on which SS is the true master) being able to do something a month earlier can be a huge advantage.

I also assume that you use ctrl-n to make sure that you start with a precursor library tile and you use early tech whoring and general diplomatic abuse of the AI to support the huge level of early research that can thusly be obtained. While you can (and I have) done a million point game without this technique I do believe that a multi-million point game is pretty much impossible without it. So if you aren't using this then again that would be pretty amazing.

Points:

-Population gives you credit for each 1,000M pop, whereas research, economy, and military give you credit for each 10, 10, and 20, respectively, with regards to score.  The upshot of this is that there is no insane population game that will also give a respectable score.  Trust me; I've tried.  Fast growth does benefit score, but there's only so much growth you can get, and only to certain population levels.

-Immense scores approximately 10.55% more than Gigantic, all other things being equal.  However, all other things are not equal.  For one, TA Gigantic/Immense appears to be limited to approximately 500-550 planets, as opposed to DA Gigantic's 700-750+.  Secondly, the extra distance means almost regardless of what approach you take, even using the Swindle method, it will take longer to 1) obtain all the planets 2) build them up and 3) for your ships to reach the MSBA.  Notice I say almost, though.

-TA does have some beneficial aspects to it, mostly coming from the new tech trees, which allows one to achieve almost or equal to a DA score (with a LOT of work), thanks to racial bonuses, and the fact that (spoiler alert!) the purchase now reduction from Neutral alignment and two tech trees (nontradeable, sorry chaps) actually works in TA, whereas it has never worked in either DL or DA.

-At some point the approval bonus of a flat 10% that was not depreciated by population from choosing Neutral became a 10% morale bonus (which is depreciated by population)-but it's still useful.
-While it is true that you can achieve 20k BCs per DL AI per turn (aside from the slot 1 AI), up until I shared this knowledge with Mumble my (possibly flawed) understanding was that no one had done so-or even tried, for that matter.  Technically speaking, then, we can assume the difference between a DL AI game and a non-DL AI game to be (roughly) 20k BCs per DL AI-but not per turn.  It is worth noting, however, that this refilling of the BCs does enable you to get significantly more cash than you otherwise might for early techs, as one of the factors affecting an AI's perceived value of a tech is how much money they have-below a certain threshold, at least.

-SirPleb, since the ZYW fad took over, and perhaps prior, it has been customary to refer to the first game year as Y0.  That is, if your score for Dec 22 Y0 was ~600k, you stand a decent chance of cracking 2M.  However, if it was, as you said, Dec 22 Y1, then you quite simply don't.  Semantics, I know, but clarity of communication is vital.

Finally, I've done some testing in my game at home (no internet connection at present), and I can't get consistent results.  Either I'm doing something in my admittedly shortcutted testing to somehow change the base growth (which I wouldn't discount out of hand since I tend to test in Cheat Mode), or there actually is some random function that determines the base growth for a race.  Generally this seems to be 4% or 4.5%, but I did see 3.5% once or twice.  I've even seen a 4.5% for Custom, which I've never seen anything but 4% for.  I haven't done much testing with the Torians as of yet, but I'm fairly well convinced they'll stay at 7% regardless.

My belief is that this is a change starting with 2.x, as I don't remember inconsistent results in 1.8g, but it's hard to know for certain.  In any case, 4% base growth still seems to be a decent assumption when we run theoretical population growth numbers.

It's certainly possible that if it IS random you've lucked out and gotten an Altarians with 7%.  But, as you say, it really only matters when you're below the 75M growth point.

There is one other thing that I'm still looking into, but it's too early to say anything about it yet.

That sure is a game changer. I'd consider even just a onetime chance to grab an extra 10K BC's at turn 8 (first chance to trade in ToA without choosing the diplomatic super ability) to be a game changer.

I don't know what the planet limit is. In my current game there are 574 planets and that is the most I've seen on a map.

I used ctrl-n until I got a map which had a +300% research tile on the home planet and which had one visible colonizeable planet outside the home system.

And I sure did tech whore and use general diplomatic abuse of the AI in the early game. I may be exploring new depths of such abuse, I don't know. When I finish the game and post a writeup I'll look forward to your thoughts about it.

Thanks for all that information Sole Soul!

Absolutely vital! I am using zero-relative terminology, i.e. I reached ~600K after two years of play. Your statement that I don't have a decent chance at 2M from that point worries me. What would you guess the score limit from there to be?

Actually to get the kind of research needed to do everything as soon as possible a +700% research tile is pretty much required.

I had just assumed that what you meant by year 1 here was the 1st year or year 0 but after re-reading the above your mention of military production ramping up at this point while it took 1 year and 8 months for ships to start arriving at your MSBA then it seems you are talking about a 600K Y1 score not a 600K Y0 score.

As SS pointed out there are significant differences between these two.

The use of DL AI's is a dead horse as far as I'm concerned and I apologize if my bringing it up as part of this discussion seemed to give the topic more importance than it merits.

And yes 160K per turn is more of a conceptual limit as opposed to what is practically achievable. However with tech trading it is pretty easy to get 2K-4K per turn per DL AI (or 27K per turn from 9 DL AI's) and it's certainly not out of the question to recontact most AI's very frequently if perhaps not quite every turn. Finally there would at least be a one time 20K from each AI including the slot 1 AI. This magnitude of money dwarfs what can be obtained from tech trading with normal AI's, anomalies or any other in-game source of cash.

Wow, that's likely to be a lot of ctrl-n time. I'm guessing now that I've taken a somewhat new approach to things. A +700% tile would have helped me but would not have been a major game changer.

Interesting. I think something else may have changed importantly in TA. AFAIK I am unable to contact any given AI until 8 turns have elapsed since the last contact I had where any trade took place. I.e. once I can contact an AI, I can do so as often as I wish in the same turn and thereafter, until I make some kind of trade with them. After making a trade I can continue to trade with them as much as I like before closing the trade window. Once I close it, it will be 8 turns before they'll talk again. After a war starts they won't talk to me for 16 turns. If I choose the diplomatic super-ability the numbers are reduced to 4 turns between trades and 8 turns after starting a war.

Can one trade more often in DA/DL? Is there some trick to trade more often which I've missed?

No offense intended, but there's probably more than a few threads on Metaverse score-maximizing techniques already on the forum. Why start a new one?

Can we get back to the original topic? I'm curious about the remaining stock races' growth rates (mentioned in SS's first post).

Also no offense intend but this is just where the conversation naturally seemed to wander. There's really not all that many active folks around these days so it just seems best to let things be a little more free form and not get all that hung up about staying rigidly "on topic".

Sure we can however I'm not sure there's any more to say about it at this time. I'll definitely pay close attention to it when I get to that point in my new game and be happy to report back anything I find.

Also SS has indicated that there may in fact be some randomness on a game by game basis but unless he wants to put in the effort to study it then I wouldn't expect any immediate flood of information.

However most assuredly if there's anyone reading this that has any additional information about the base growth rate of various races I'd be happy to hear from them.

Actually not really. I personally think that you should be able to find one on average in an hour perhaps slightly more. Other folks may be luckier and get it even quicker but I always seem to be a slave to Murphy.

I've heard this was fixed in TA and I think that's probably a good thing. With normal AI's there's no real point in trying to trade with them so frequently since they tend to run out of money and it takes time for them to replenish it. The 8 week delay is not really all that much of an impediment.

But in DA and DL you can save and reload and then talk to any AI every turn except the one that appears 1st (i.e. top left) in the diplomacy screen. That's what SS meant by 1st slot.

Like I said in practical operation I don't believe it to be that much of a difference, however for purposes of "milking" a DL AI it would.

Valid points.

As I don't play Metaverse, the current topic is less useful personally for me then the original. Also, a personal pet peeve of mine is the way how so many forum threads are started on identical topics. On the other hand, with the search feature utterly useless, I suppose it's the only way new players will get a lot of useful information without having to manually search the forums.

Since you are in the planning stages of a new game Mumblefratz, I'll try to post a writeup of my current game so far in the next day or two. It is possible that some of my approach may be of interest even to the veterans here.

Population growth rates are of great importance to my game. To give a quick preview of what I mean, my population passed the 10 trillion mark on June 1 of year 1.

Edit: And it reached that level without any fertility clinics and without any morale boosting planetary improvements.

It's possible I spoke with too much haste concerning your ~600K Y1 score, considering that according to my models Maiden's 687K Y0 should have been capable of somewhat more than its final result (2.24M, give or take), but as I don't remember what maximum value my model gave for it, it's difficult to be certain.

It would be more helpful to know what your Y0 score was (although without the Y1 information you've provided, since the Swindle did not occur in Y0, I'd be perhaps even more in the dark); however, I'm prepared to speculate on approximately a 1.4M game-perhaps as much as 1.6M if you take advantage of every nook and cranny that is left to you-some of which, I'm sorry to say, you may not even be aware of.

You'll have to excuse me for not being able to give more accurate estimates, as I don't have the model handy at the moment.

Qrtxian, apologies from all of us for derailing the thread, but if you read the unmarked paragraphs in my previous post, you'll see exactly what Mumble just restated-it appears to be randomized to an extent in DA 2.x (and therefore almost certainly TA 2.x), but without knowing if I'm introducing anomalies into my testing it's hard to say.  I, personally, am sticking with a 4% rule of thumb, and a 7% rule of Torians, as it were, for my population growth calculations.

With regards to speaking to the AIs, in DL saving and reloading wasn't even necessary, and to my knowledge this workaround still works in TA, although I haven't tested it in some time.

Especially considering that, very generally speaking (that is, for the turns where research matters), techs cost more in TA than they do in DA, even for the same galaxy size, if a 700% tile would not have made or broken your game, then you probably don't have as good of a game as you think you do-but this much is probably obvious already from the fact that you didn't Swindle planets during Y0.

Which is yet another reason why it's so much harder to reach a score in TA as opposed to the same score in DA-but it is possible, at the margins.

And, finally, if you're still having fun, then don't let any of us tell you anything. 

I'm certain I don't have nearly as good a game as I could if I knew more. I'm just trying to play without knowing any empire secrets to see if that allows me to develop a slightly different approach.

My final score may yet surprise you. I'll play on and we'll find out. My current score at Sept 8 year 2 is 1,061,550. I think I'm on a different curve than the usual.

For sure! And thank you and all the other veterans who have posted so much helpful material. It only took me a few games to get past the 1M mark thanks to all the help here.

Just wanted to make a single point by itself.

SirPleb, consider the possibility of passing 10 trillion population by, say...October 1st of Year Zero.

Holy Smoke! If I could do that I'm almost certain I could pass 2M score. Wow.