by Citizen LG 18 - 5/3/2003 6:13:19 AM
Constructors are the predominant military units produced in the middle to end games, at least in my games. They do not cost any maintenance, build and upgrade starbases and produce some nice toys, like Terror stars.
How about an alternative? Building colony ships. Why? They are cheap, they also do not cost maintenance, and sometimes help in morale issues. But their real purpose has been overlooked, creating gigantic 100+ size planets.
It works the following; you take your best planet, preferably one with base PQ (without any improvements) of 26 and destroy the colony. Then you start building colony ships, but you load only 1 million people into each ship and send it to the planet.
When colonizing a planet you sometimes get a planetary event, which will affect your alignment. Production, research, starship, but also planet quality bonuses, remember the earthworms? Anyway send each colony ship to the planet, colonize, hope for an event, and destroy the colony. Repeat! Planet events improving the PQ do not occur often, but who cares if you send dozens of colony ships to the planet each turn?! Those benefits also do stack, meaning if you get an event improving your PQ by 15%, then destroy the colony and re-colonize. This time you get an event improving your PQ by 35%, now your planet has been improved by 50% turning your size 26 planet into a 39. Now you destroy the colony again an re-colonize again, this time you get an amazing event improving your PQ by 50%; guess what you have now improved your planet quality by 100% turning your 26’ planet into a 52.
To give an example, in my last game I took my best planet size 39(after improvements) and destroyed the colony, then I kept sending colony ships to the planet, destroying and rebuilding the colony. An hour, and about 200 colony ships later I created my size 105 planet. Nice! Two hours later, my second best planet reached size 101. I won't say too much about the production and economic ability of planets like this, just that a game by this point is pretty much over, since you can even create the biggest warships in a handful of turns, with a super-charged economy.
Alignement issues? Just pick a really bad planet, which you would never colonize and also send colony ships destroying and rebuilding the colony, just taking the good choices and voila your alignement will raise to a staggering 100 points.
So who cares about star creation if you can ‘create’ planets like those? By the way it’s cheap too. Is it cheating? Probably yes, since the AI will not do this.
Any comments?
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#1
by Citizen SprudL - 5/3/2003 6:31:15 AM
This sounds awfully boring... and smells like cheese 
 
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Well, I agree for one that it's cheese AND indeed boring, so I'll just add to the cheese and remove some boredom from the procedure:
goto your data directory, open the CoreEvents.EVENT file and remove all events except for the earthworm one (remember to backup your event file by copy+paste). Now every event you get is the earthworm one and it will occur more frequently. Also load+save will allow you to get the event EVERY turn.
And it is possible to cheat in GalCiv, just be a little creative...
But it is really your call. I get great satisfaction from legally beating the AI. And when you find two base class 26 planets in your colonization phase, the game is also as good as over, you really dont need PQ100+ planets. 
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#3
by Citizen 4D - 5/3/2003 7:05:02 AM
Almost as ethical as loading up excess citizens into colony ships and destroying them in deep space because morale was too low. (Wonder how much the government would have to spend on propaganda if the Altarans heard of it and flashed it over the Terran news nets.)
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Um, can we say major cheese BUG! WOw I heard of exploits in a game but this is a real big one. I will not do things like that to spoil my already entertaining and challenging game. Thanks for the info, maybe SD/Frogboy will fix that kind of thing from happening again.
       
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#6
by Citizen LG 18 - 5/4/2003 12:08:05 AM
I for my part think this major bug should be taken out. As it might be nice to create a huge planet once, it does hurt the game. Also think about the metaverse score of anyone deciding to create a 100 PQ100+ size planets. I hope nobody will do this since it might drastically offset any scoring, plus it will absolutely spoil the fun on the game, besides it will also waste a lot of time for the player. Btw I think the most fun is still to beat the AI without using any cheats whatsoever.
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I'm going to assume this whole thing is a bug.
Assuming of course that Stardock designed this as an object oriented program, this bug could actually be fixed with a couple of small code changes. Assuming they have an object...say Planet which has a set of attributes such as PQ, X position, Y position and so on, all they would need to do is add an attribute, say
private bool bPlanetEvent = false;
Declare a getPlanetEvent () and setPlanetEvent(bool event) method.
After a person with a colony ship hits a planet, the games event checker can do something like
if(getPlanetEvent())
{ setPlanetEvent(true);
// do some event code here
}
All in all, if I were to do this, I could probably fix this bug with about 10 lines of code. So I'd imagine that this shouldn't take too much to fix if the game is designed like I think it is. I wouldn't mind trying to program a strategy game of my own, just I'm not very good at AI programming, so I'd have a difficult time doing it. And yes, software engineering is my day job( java/c++ programmer)
SeanB
   
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Have you done this yet? I would be interested in hearing how much production a PQ 100 planet has!
 
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#12
by Citizen BobMayer - 5/5/2003 3:52:57 PM
I would think that by the time you can sit doing this kind of thing, you've already one the game.
A "one event per planet" flag would fix this easily enough though.
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#14
by Citizen Eishtmo - 5/5/2003 9:02:05 PM
I don't think this matters too much. Like was said earlier, if you wanted to build a +100 planet this way, you have no life.
No that any of us have lives in the first place, but you must be really bad off to do this.
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#18
by Citizen Juffowup - 5/11/2003 7:19:52 PM
Alright it's a oversight and LG 18 is exploiting it but that doesn't mean he's pathetic or has no life. Some people I guess have more rigourous ways of thinking and are able to exploit the game mechanics. Such a thing simply wouldn't occur to me. Now that the problem is identified, the game designers can address it by either having the planet revert to its original pq on destroying the colony or limiting events to one per planet. Either is fine. Well done LG 18 for discovering this bug.
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I did it ever cool I got my planet up to 115 a Dreadnaught in 3 turns and overlord in 6
  
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#20
by Citizen Vynd - 5/13/2003 12:20:34 AM
LDiCesare is right. This is a problem not so much because it lets you turn OK planets into super planets (after hours of work) but because it lets the player turn the many crummy planets into OK planets.
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