Gilmoy's Nifty Beta: things to charm and amuse

BTW, here's my Steam methodology for images.  I dunno if this workflow is ideal; feedback welcome.

1. Within game, press F12 to click a snapshot.  This saves to your local disk.
2. From Steam, the Snapshot Uploader opens.  Click "Show on Disk" to open Windows Explorer to your magic folder.
3. Copy the .jpgs.  They have names of the form "yyyy-mm-dd-xxxxx.jpg", where xxxxx is a positive integer from 1 to N.  Edit them in any image editor.  (I clip out unneeded stuff.  For the image above, I did the collage.)
4. Copy the edited files back.  Draconian: You must rename them to a subset of the original names; otherwise the Screenshot Uploader will ignore them.  Corollary: You may upload only as many snapshots as you actually took.  (Work-around: obvious as all heck )
5. Within Steam Snapshot Uploader, "dumb-refresh" the thumbnails by menu-selecting whatever isn't selected (e.g. "Last Session"), then the game name (which for us is "GC3").  This refreshes the thumbnail display, which should immediately show your new images.
6. Multi-select and click "Upload".  Uploaded screenshots all appear in your Steam Community Snapshots wall.  If you set them to Public, then the community will gradually stumble over them, and maybe comment on the good ones.
7. Within Steam, select View | Screenshots to show your own Wall.  Click on any individual image to get its details page.
8. On its details page, right-click on the image itself and choose Copy Link Address.  It will be something like
        cloud-k.steampowered.com/ugc/<long integer>/<long hex string>/
   where k is some integer.  That's your image's URL in the cloud.
9. In this forum, post or reply.  In the edit toolbar, click the Insert/Edit Image button (it's a green tree, below the sunglasses).  Paste your image's URL.

This forum automatically shrinks huge (1080p) JPEGs to a thumbnail, as shown above.

You can also post images from anywhere else on the net, e.g. if you already web-host them elsewhere.  Just skip #1-8 and go directly to #9 with your own image URL.  (I could have done that with my university account, but I want to brag my screenshots on Steam Community anyways, and no sense being redundant.)

One starbase to rule them all!

My 3 AIs are "Godlike" (highest setting).  They kicked my butt in Power for about 80 turns, 2x to 3x ahead of me.

I'm catching up.  Around turn 90, I finally surpassed Altarian and Iridium.  Drengin's lead over me has shrunk from ~3x to ~1.6x.

GC2 "Genius" setting consisted of +100% economy (compared to the human player), and all AI algorithms.  I don't know what GC3 "Godlike" entails, but it feels similar.

Around turn 110, I encounter Drengin.  I slowly move ships to attack.  He has a fleet of Defenders (missile + chaff).

Ergo: On Godlike, Drengin have out-researched me .  (But ... I beat him on Approval)

Lol. The good old drengin, huge armies and somehow managing to pay for it all plus a few super weapons!

[Cute] Cultural influence hole of size 1 hex renders as perfect circle

Ignore the red text overlays.  I get it now: it's not a bug, it's my (non-)Influence.

It could have popped into existence when I destroyed some Consulate tiles to build Missionary Centers.

Glimroy,

You can factor a quintic polynomial. What is not possible is to factor a general quintic polynomial with a finite number of algebraic manipulations. But it is possible to factor every non-constant complex polynomial into n complex roots.

Other than that, this is some good info. I like all the little diagrams in the pictures.