GalCiv2: Dread Lords

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Banedon
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Unread postby Banedon » 11 Feb 2010, 16:25

Just had the bug happen to me ... don't remember exactly what triggered it but I was in the process of war at that point. My game (first game in months, too) was on Suicidal, and I had the game largely won when the bug happened.

That said, although I did "win" the game it was rather unsatisfactory because of the number of reloads I did. My entire game basically boils down to one crucial planet invasion - if it works, I win; if it fails, I lose.

I pour mountains of BCs into climbing up the TeCH tree early and in doing so I dig myself into a huge money hole early. My gold per turn early-game is easily -200. The only way I don't drown in that money hole is to keep selling TeCHs, which works for a while. Eventually though I have to wage war or the AI's much-superior economy / influence / diplomacy etc wins them the game ... so pretty early I go up Space Weapons -> Planetary Invasion and all my Soldiering techs. Yet even though I can research all these fairly quickly, building a Transport takes ages (11 turns in this game), and I simply have no time to get another.

And therefore it all comes down to this. Once I get the transport, my nearest neighbour (if I get to choose, the guy without Soldiering bonuses) eats a Mass-Drivers backed invasion to his homeworld. If this invasion suceeds, I'm pretty comfortable - that entire race will soon fall under my control (via influence most of the time, since I don't have the $$$ to get many Transports), and I'd have twice as many planets as the next guy. If I get another chance to invade someone else without a military, I'd grab that with open arms. On the other hand if the invasion fails ... that's when I hit the load button. If I didn't the AI would probably build his own ships quickly and massacre me. Their production advantage is just INSANE - I ticked every option I could've used to mass research: +40% research, Altarians, AllLabs, 100% research spending, 100% production, leasing the first few Labs, leasing the Technological Capital the instant I researched Advanced Computing (cost me 700++ bucks with 38 bcs / turn maintenance), trading for +research TeCHs, and yet I didn't dominate the rest of the galaxy in research. Some of the AI races actually kept pace with me, only falling out when they all went broke. Haha, what cruel parody of my own financial woes.

It doesn't help that the AI, even with zero soldiering TeCH, still manages to field a soldiering score of ~21 (vs. mine of 71). Ouch! Maybe next time I should divert some points at the start from Population Growth to soldiering ...
I'm a hypocrite because I suggested that all life is sacred and should not be wasted without good reason.

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Ethric
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Unread postby Ethric » 11 Feb 2010, 19:38

Oh yeah, I should probably say how I worked around the bug: just save, restart the game and reload and it's gone. And I haven't seen much of it lately either. Weird stuff.

Of course I'm still plagued by small square ships and disappearing starbases, but that's just a graphical bug.

How are the higher difficulties by the way? I've just played on tough, which from what I hear is where it's all "fair"; I don't like the idea of making the game harder just by giving the computer players large bonuses. But of course the computer plays so dumb that that's the only way to get a challenge. Didn't galciv2 use to have good computer opponents, or was that just an illusion?
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Banedon
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Unread postby Banedon » 19 Feb 2010, 08:26

The higher difficulty levels ... well I read somewhere that up until Crippling (AI gets 110% to his economy) isn't hard, but there's a large jump in difficulty come Masochistic. Nonetheless I found winning on Masochistic and even Obscene fairly simple. Suicidal though is a different matter - the AI's influence bonus was so great, and their innate bonuses so major (like I said, 21 Soldiering with no techs!) that the knife edge on which my game lives got very thin indeed.

GalCiv AI is pretty good, far better than HoMM 5 AI for example, but in the end it's still AI. It will be maneuvered around, beaten and tossed aside by human players. It's a great pity there's no multiplayer in GalCiv, because eventually there comes a point when thrashing the AI is no fun.
I'm a hypocrite because I suggested that all life is sacred and should not be wasted without good reason.

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Banedon
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Re:

Unread postby Banedon » 13 Jul 2022, 08:21

So I started playing this game again and:
Banedon wrote: 22 Feb 2009, 22:06Superpowerful indeed lol, the game I had yesterday when I discovered the 'invulnerable ship' mechanism showed just how 'superpowerful' the Dread Lords are. What happened: I had a ship that could shoot at three opponents (as in an enemy fleet of three ships) at the same time. No idea why that happened but it's crucial. Then I deck the ship out with massive firepower and attack. The way the game works, if both ships are destroyed at the same time the attacker receives one survival hit point. So my single ship destroyed an entire invading force! It was so funny! About 20 of those Dread Lords swarmed my land and all I had were three capital ships (not a smart idea, smaller ships would probably have been better, but I was using All Labs so those took a fair while to build as well). I didn't know of this trick at that time, so I used the capital ships to break up a few fleets, then had no time to repair them and ordered a full-out retreat. Then I realized that so long as you had the cash you can instantly repair ships by upgrading them to a slightly different design. I repaired two ships this way, and used them to destroy another couple of fleets. The Dread Lords were still swarming me though, and I was on the verge of giving up when I thought, "screw this, take them down with me" and kamikaze'd one of my ships into their fleets. And won and won and won, and the entire invasion force crumbled before one ship that had only one HP remaining.

Was hilarious :D Too bad I didn't have Super Warrior as an ability, or I'd have completed the mission without exploiting this mechanism. Although the game did bug out and refuse to finish (was playing Twilight of the Arnor then and doing a Dread Lords mission), I couldn't even complete it using cheat codes. Oh well.
This doesn't work anymore. Does anyone know why? I attack a Dread Lord ship with 0 defenses and 22 HP with a ship that has 36 beam attack. Somehow the Dread Lord ship doesn't die. Why? It should take 36 damage and die, instead it tends to survive, often with much more than 1 HP too. The description on the GalCiv wiki doesn't help, it only makes it seem like the ship should die.

Edit: on closer reading, it looks like the game rolls a dice between 0 and the maximum attack. So a ship with 36 beam attack has a 22/36 chance to kill a ship with 0 beam defense and 22 HP. Which is annoying. I save-loaded my way through so many fights ... I wish for less RNG-heavy fights.
I'm a hypocrite because I suggested that all life is sacred and should not be wasted without good reason.


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