RBOrion Imperia Returning Next Week

[jmas]

@RefSteel: You may be right that the bug occurs when the AI can no longer support its ships, I know I have read that before. That does seem odd in the context of my Meklar game though, where both the Klackons (who appear to have a decent economy and of course have their extra Klackon production bonus) and the Psilons (who have a whole bunch of planets) have at least one ship group showing 32000. Thank you for clarifying the "64000 - X" formula, that is new to me.

@sargon0: Thank you.. I did not know that editors provide that information. Hopefully I didn't come across as criticizing, that was not my intention. Thank you for mentioning your new success with editing fleets in transit. I'll bring it up if I see the bug.

[dathon]

You may be right that the bug occurs when the AI can no longer support its ships, I know I have read that before. That does seem odd in the context of my Meklar game though, where both the Klackons (who appear to have a decent economy and of course have their extra Klackon production bonus) and the Psilons (who have a whole bunch of planets) have at least one ship group showing 32000.

Perhaps the bug is more pernicious then we thought. The AI is hard-coded to randomly re-design its fleet every once and awhile. Perhaps the negative fleets were spawned when a large stack of ships was scrapped during a re-design.

On a related note, there are two other limitations to using Oreo on the negative fleet bug. The first is that it can give spoiler information, so use in tournaments could be an issue. More importantly, Oreo wipes out any Future Tech obtained, from anybody. So if the game has reached that mark, you can't use it without fundamentally altering the game.

@sargon - Could your method of editing the save file be developed into something that anybody could use?

@Sullla - Glad to see the Imperia finally returning! You can bet I'll be playing when I can, and we can resume our debates on how to open the game, and what to do with poor planets

@Zed - I would be more than happy to lead a community effort to formalize the exploit list. Maybe we'll do this in conjunction with the results from this first Imperia game.

dathon

[sargon0]

@sargon - Could your method of editing the save file be developed into something that anybody could use?

Good idea, Dathon. In fact I thought it was so good I already wrote the script (in Rexx!) It will scan fleets enroute & at planets and reset any ship counts above 32,000 to zero and that's all! You will not see anything other than the ship group counts being reset. I will post shortly.

[sargon0]

I have posted my script for fixing negative fleets over at CFC in new thread: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=281283

[jmas]

Sullla, I wanted to get more clarity about the "Domination" victory, not for Imperium Ten, but in general. I see that you wrote:

"3) Domination. Your civ has settled and occupies half the stars or more in the galaxy, and you enjoy enough support from rivals to be voted emperor."

It sounds like stars with no planets still count, i.e. given a small galaxy (24 stars) in which 2 or 3 stars have no planets, it would still be necessary to occupy 12 planets rather than 11. Am I correct on this?

[Sullla]

Good question. Sirian was never quite clear about what constituted a Domination victory. Rather than quibble over what constitutes "half" of the stars in the galaxy, I've always preferred to define Domination as a victory in which you alone control 50% or more of the votes in the Galactic Council (while still requiring help from another race to win). In other words:

1) Extermination means wiping out all the other races in the galaxy. You have 100% of the council votes.
2) Conquest means having enough population to vote yourself the galactic emperor. 2/3 or more of the council votes.
3) Domination means owning 50% or more of the population in the galaxy, yet still needing some help to win. You are "dominant" but not completely all-powerful.
4) Diplomatic victory means winning without satisfying any of the above victory conditions. You need substantial support from other races to win this way.

That's how I understand the victory conditions, and I guess I'm proposing that we all use this system for the revived Imperia. If you would like to give some comments/suggestions, please fire away.

[Megafrost]

I was under the impression that Domination meant that you had enough planets to trigger the GNN "leaders preparing to merge" report (ignoring that someone else may have triggered it already, depending on how your game went).

If we're not real clear on which definition we're going by, our game reports should probably make note of the number of planets and votes that we have when the game ends.

Having said that, I much prefer taking one more step for a Conquest or Extermination victory over stopping at Domination.

[jmas]

Thank you Sullla. I think it makes sense to look at Domination as including 50% or more of the Council votes rather than planets.

I agree with Megafrost that it makes sense to tell the number of planets and Council votes in our reports if claiming a domination victory.

Although the "leaders preparing to merge" message must be triggered by an empire controlling some specific ratio of planets, it does not, unlike the earlier messages about an empire's expansion, specify in the message how many planets the empire in question controls. Also, I believe that in a small galaxy it is triggered at 10 planets--still 2 less than half; not sure why it's triggered at that point.

I like Conquest victories myself, but I also prefer small and medium maps because they seem to require less work. I saw that Sirian had more than half of the votes in his game entitled "back in the saddle again" and accepted a council win with some needed support; but that was in a large galaxy, while Sullla's win in RefSteel's Meklar challenge, though in a medium galaxy, looked labor-intensive enough that I probably also would have taken a Domination win.