Code Monkey

Reply to Economy: "Why?" in Galactic Civilizations II GalCiv2 Forums

It's even simpler than reading the manual. The OP is mixing up labor force with raw materials. In almost all fields, salary is a very small slice of the total costs. For example, I do scientific research for a living. It's funded by a mixture of government and private grants. Although my salary is a constant drain, it's a rather small percentage of the total costs. If the project is poorly funded, then the scope of the research is limited. If the project is well funded then new equipmen

Reply to GalCivII Gold - Why does my serial # keep changing? in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

Thanks, I'd been unable to activate Dark Avatar, which I assumed was due to needing to have all my records consolidated, but I wanted to rule out the ever changing serial issue as well.

GalCivII Gold - Why does my serial # keep changing? in Bug Reports GalCiv2 Forums

OK, short version of things is that I purchased GC2-Gold last night. I went through a bunch of hooplah to get my two email addresses merged. In the course of this, I've had the serial numbers for my Stardock products resent several times. Every single time the serial number for GC2-GOLD is different. Every time, even when nothing with my account has changed (for example, I requested the serial #s twice after finally getting everything square about my email addresses and received 2 diffe

Reply to Metaverse Scoring bug fixed in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Yet somehow I've dropped to *14* games when I checked. I don't think the 'lopping bug' is at all what we've been griping about but something we hadn't even noticed yet.

Reply to Altarian Prophecy Campaign Feedback in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]Here is one I havent seen mentioned yet - If I buy a trade good that someone else has produced, I cant then sell it ? Why ?[/quote] As was mentioned, this is basic game rules 101 for GC. A trade good that you get is merely a license. What has never made sense is why you don't get the license to sell it if you conquer the planet which holds the 'factory' for the trade good. [quote]From this forum it is clear that most of this is all old news - so it is rather strange

Reply to More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]Say what? I thought that calculation was for each month. And then you summed up the score of each month (with each month further adjusted for age). Interesting... [/quote] Scoring has always been total score (adjusted for age)/square root of the games played. What is changed with dropping scores completely is that if you stop for a year you are genuinely back at ground zero since nothing is dragging you down. Of course this also means your prior efforts were pointless.

Reply to Altarian Prophecy (Beta) Bug Reports in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]Oh, that was just a comment on your highly informative first post. Your second post should have been your first post. [/quote] Wasn't my post at all. I just failed to see how anyone could act as though the statement required clarification as the behavior occurs every game. As for your laxatives comment, whatever, I've been a fan AND critic of this game almost since it came out. Other people can be the "oh golly, they care about me!" type, I'll keep some objectivity in my

Reply to More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]The question you need to ask yourself, and I mean everyone who has a complaint about the system, is how important getting the system changed is to you. Is it extremely important and should be given top priority, or is it just something you'd like done?If it is extremely important to you, I'm sure Stardock will try to address the issue. If not, I believe they currently have other projects that need their attention.[/quote] Here's the rub: it's not that important for *this* game. I

Reply to Altarian Prophecy (Beta) Bug Reports in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]Okay. [/quote] Huh? :notsure: Autosurvey is quite broken. Many are the times that my survey ship will no go anywhere even though I can clearly see anomalies within sensor range of my stuff. However, as far as I know, this is an old bug left over from the GC code, just one more unpolished thing they don't want to spend the time on. The lack of a fix to the 'string not found' for alignments in this latest RC puts the nail in the coffin of my belief in their commitmen

Reply to Some thoughts on the state of PC gaming... in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]It's not to say that the console market cannot emulate that; they simply aren't there yet.[/quote] I think that's what Brad is missing. The X-box already has a large amount of people downloading whole games to modified boxes through the broadband connection available. Now, that may not be on the legal side, but it shows that console technology is already a small leap from even more seamless direct delivery. When the X-box 2 comes out expect more storage, more broadband f

Reply to More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]About Code Monkey's calculations... even with 10% retention, a person who plays a lot, scores a bunch of points in a month, then stops playing for 1 year, then starts playing again in the 14th month, would still always be ahead of the person who starts on the 14th month, ceteris paribus.[/quote] No, they probably wouldn't. When they start playing again in the 14th month their score is the total [total aged scores]/[sqrt of games played]. Their 14 month games add a fraction of wha

Reply to More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]Could we have a link to the numbers you mentionned. I have currently an hard time to understand (if I read correctly your sentences) why an aging of 30% is better than an aging of 10%.[/quote] http://www.galciv.com/forum.asp?BID=GF&id=67477 The program is no longer hosted on my website so the graphs aren't there anymore either unfortunately. The short explanation is that if you age to lower than 30% the old scores actually cause your score to *drop* even if you cont

Reply to Another New Poll in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

Interesting poll but needs some context: [b]Ship design[/b] only makes sense if the combat system is changed to make it important. If combat is changed to make ship combat actually *interesting* then ship design may or may not be a great feature depending on how well they balance the real ship features. Right now these ships are nothing more than numbers tossed at one another. There's no balance of swarms of fighters taking out capitals, there's no weapon type triangles, there's nothing

Reply to More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]On the other hand, any system that ranks people where they don't play head-to-head is going to have problems.[/quote] True, however many of the problems that exist at making the metaverse more 'friendly and accessible' are purely of Stardock's making. Some quick examples: *The military skewed scoring, e.g. a military win is worth 5X the score as a tech victory even when EVERYTHING is exactly the same - only difference is whether you hit 'end turn' one more time with mone

Reply to More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]That's why fixing the perceived problems with the Metaverse is something that should be looked at.[/quote] Agreed, but I don't think it's something they have much intention of doing. I believe the Stardock perception is that not that many people use the metaverse anyhow. I believe that the persistent flaws from day 1 in the metaverse are why people don't use it as much as they might otherwise.

Reply to More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

The catch with aging to 10% is it kills you. It actually reaches a point that you'd have to accelerate your playing to hold your score. You will actually drop faster than with them axing the scores altogehter. They originally were going to age to 20% and I did a bunch of number crunching showing how bad that was for the longterm player and the implication was that they were going to up the final aging to 30% which still causes your score increase to drop to a very mild upward slope after about 1

Reply to More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

double post [Message Edited]

Reply to More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]Browsing the Metaverse it looks like any game submited in May 2003 do not count.[/quote] Since that's one whole game for me, want to try and explain the wonk again? ;) They've done something very stupid in the variables used. Date of submission should have nothing to do with number of games played or submitted. If they are using the same variables for calculations as they are for medals and records than someone got very lazy on the programming. Oh well, no biggi

Reply to Newer Poll in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

The Allies always at normal makes sense. A little boost at lower diffs without them going all the way to smacking you around, and decent enough at normal and above. Better :)

Reply to More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]Fsk, if you click on your own name, your games still appear in your profile beyond the 331 days. They just don't appear in the game count on the high score table.[/quote] True, but your 'games played' should also show the total number. I don't care what games are and aren't used to calc (although the dropping off completely was something that was promised *not* to happen but that's a whole 'nother issue). As has been said, the metaverse should be a record of our playing.

Reply to More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]It seems that the games earlier than June 2003 do not count anymore, because the blocks end at 270 days. [/quote] Still doesn't explain what happened. I have 23 games June 2003 or later so that idea is wrong, at least for me. Also, doesn't explain why submitting a game dropped the count by 5. I gave up on the metaverse ever being anything more than a funsy thing a long time ago, but it's stuff like this that really points out how absolutely meaningless it is, how hard is

More Metaverse Wonk in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

OK, every time I submit a game I'm going *backwards* in my game count. For instance, this morning I was at 24 games, submitted a single game, blam, I'm down to 19 games submitted. I actually have 39 games submitted so this is more than a little bit off.

Reply to Pricey new colonies in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]What I would like to see is a way to have spending reduced for "new" colonies[/quote]Why would you want that? Spending is only a function of planet capacity anyhow. Your PQ 34 with every power plant and 4 +70% starbases nearby can produce a lot more, it costs a lot more. The new colony with nothing costs very little. What you want is to spend more on new colonies and less on old colonies since they're usually not building anything.

Reply to Pricey new colonies in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]Is there a way to adjust individual planet spending?[/quote] Nope, the idea of the game is to syay 'big picture'. This aspect has drawn a lot of criticism and I'd like to see GC2 address it in some fashion without forcing us to micromanage each and every planet. Some sort of 2/3rds return on wasted spending or something so it feels more intuitive to a game player.

Reply to Newer Poll in Galactic Civilizations I Stardock Forums

[quote]Yes but what's the point of playing maso if you sit and watch your teammate kill the opponents for you?It's not that difficult to survive if you've got an ally, except if the scenario puts you in a very bad situation.[/quote] It's a question of the slope of increasing difficulty. I don't like playing at the higher difficulties. Changes the "strategy" to nothing but AI exploits in my estimation. I will say that with the way the difficulty is currently scaled going from just normal