Sebbers wrote:
I have just had a look at your start Mokaiba, and if I'm being honest, it seems a little...ineffective. The idea of this thread is to learn off other people who have done better than us and understand where we went wrong- not about justifying why our strategy was correct---because looking at your FIDS, it wasn't (no offense). Look to fluffy's save on this one as that is currently the only good (legit) save on this thread- I will try another run through on this one and hope the population bug doesn't spring up again.

look at the score for 30 turns: 544. Now look at all the other 30-turn scores. Hows my strategy ineffective?

544 score.



pop 10, 3 heroes, and other things. Turn 30-40 would have been increasing the population. Then Turn 40-80 would have been expanding/training military-related stuff. By turn 80 I would have the best ship and the 11 command fleet. By 100, i would have had 6-8 fleets of the best ship. By turn 100, my score would be around 2nd or 3rd place (between 2000 and 4000). I play every game this way and they typically all work out the same for the score.



turn 30.zip







This is how I would have started.

davea wrote:
BTW, I ran this game up to turn 100 or so. I have killed the Hissho and I am working my way through UE. Ground combat is so slow, it really kills the momentum for me. I will probably study the save games here and replay from the start using their initial builds, so I can have a better economy to take out UE.

When it's going too slow, I end up stacking a few fleets together to hurry things, so far hasn't been too bad...



Just finished playing until Turn 120, I think it's looking good so far, but guess I'm less war thirsty than you



Turn 90 - Points 2,809

Pop 139 - Food 1,876 - Industry 1,466 - Science 2,033 - FIDS 6,198



Turn 120 - Points 11,161

Pop 236 - Food 1,936 - Industry 3,842 - Science 3,518 - FIDS 11,345



At Peace with Hossho (Orange), Peace + Trading with the Empire (although they are starting to get suspicious), At war with Horatio (Green) but they are losing against the empire anyways.



@mokaiba: Wouldn't you have "lost" quite a few turns waiting to get to that 5-6 systems considering they're quite a few jumps away from your starting system?



And also, considering davea is trying to figure and learn ways to improve, wouldn't it be better to explain a little if waiting that time (instead of going for a closer system) would give any extra benefits?
Eterean - Sophons - Turn 120.zip
Eterean - Sophons - Turn 90.zip

Davea get another 30 turn challenge going- I'm bored!

Thanks for the encouragement! It will be at least 9 hours before I can do that. What would you suggest, that either you would learn from, or you would like to teach about? I certainly don't have a monopoly on creating them. If you have an idea and the time, just do what I did: start a game; save at turn zero before you look at anything; play 30 turns; and upload. I have gone through 2-3 maps sometimes when they seemed too boring to even upload. But the sophons one, which is a pretty poor start, still seems educational.

davea wrote:
Thanks for the encouragement! It will be at least 9 hours before I can do that. What would you suggest, that either you would learn from, or you would like to teach about? I certainly don't have a monopoly on creating them. If you have an idea and the time, just do what I did: start a game; save at turn zero before you look at anything; play 30 turns; and upload. I have gone through 2-3 maps sometimes when they seemed too boring to even upload. But the sophons one, which is a pretty poor start, still seems educational.

Oh dw I'll wait for a bit- I've got work to do tonight anyway.



Your last two uploads were really great btw, very different from one another- the first one being about rapid expansion and this second one testing your management of the home system. Maybe do a 30 turn challenge with a young/old system next time, so we can get to grips with dealing with lots of hot or lava planets/lots of cold or arctic planets.



Edit @fluffybunny and all. Had a check at my autosaves and seems something was off- on one of my last autosaves, the population jerked up a few points the following turn. Not sure what brought about the bug but I can't seem to repeat it, from the autosave point. So it does seem that my score was unachievable!



Haha sorry if I misled you there!

Sebbers wrote:


Edit @fluffybunny and all. Had a check at my autosaves and seems something was off- on one of my last autosaves, the population jerked up a few points the following turn. Not sure what brought about the bug but I can't seem to repeat it, from the autosave point. So it does seem that my score was unachievable!

Phew another pop bug - I was going mad trying to figure out how to get pop growth every single turn from 5 onwards.

Eterean wrote:




@mokaiba: Wouldn't you have "lost" quite a few turns waiting to get to that 5-6 systems considering they're quite a few jumps away from your starting system?



And also, considering davea is trying to figure and learn ways to improve, wouldn't it be better to explain a little if waiting that time (instead of going for a closer system) would give any extra benefits?

Not quite sure wait you mean. At turn 30, I had three systems and they were starting to populate almost all the planets. While I waited on the population, the planet improvements, and the research I would have built a few colony ships and colonized the surrounding systems all while move to the right towards the wormhole. From what I can tell, pirates don't appear in unclaimed systems unless there were already there. My scout checked every system to the wormhole and no pirates were found so the only ships would have come from the wormhole, which the scout would have seen. Basically, it would have been no challenge at all to claim every system to the wormhole so why waste 5 turns moving to a better starting system.

mokaiba wrote:
Not quite sure wait you mean. At turn 30, I had three systems and they were starting to populate almost all the planets. While I waited on the population, the planet improvements, and the research I would have built a few colony ships and colonized the surrounding systems all while move to the right towards the wormhole. From what I can tell, pirates don't appear in unclaimed systems unless there were already there. My scout checked every system to the wormhole and no pirates were found so the only ships would have come from the wormhole, which the scout would have seen. Basically, it would have been no challenge at all to claim every system to the wormhole so why waste 5 turns moving to a better starting system.

I have just had a look at your start Mokaiba, and if I'm being honest, it seems a little...ineffective. The idea of this thread is to learn off other people who have done better than us and understand where we went wrong- not about justifying why our strategy was correct---because looking at your FIDS, it wasn't (no offense). Look to fluffy's save on this one as that is currently the only good (legit) save on this thread- I will try another run through on this one and hope the population bug doesn't spring up again.

davea wrote:
It would be interesting to have more of these challenges with common start points and frequent saves. I don't think I could do yours, I am not good enough, but it would be great if you started a challenge like this.

in my signature

mokaiba wrote:
look at the score for 30 turns: 544. Now look at all the other 30-turn scores. Hows my strategy ineffective?

That is a multiplied score on the end game screen. Your actual score is 109:

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/596970529056388981/ABD1EB521D2C940FB4D3841FFBEEB85FF8802522/

Sebbers wrote:
That is a multiplied score on the end game screen. Your actual score is 109:

http://cloud.steampowered.com/ugc/596970529056388981/ABD1EB521D2C940FB4D3841FFBEEB85FF8802522/

168

194 w/ duped pop

213

148

my 109.



I'll come back later with turn 100 and show you why 109 dont matter.





Edit:



Couldnt get past turn 83.



Score: 2837

AI-1: 2834

AI-2: 1167

AI-3: 301



Ending score for me: 14323

Horatio won economic victory: 14443









Eterean had: Turn 90 - Points 2,809



I had: Turn 83 - Points 2,837

Had another go, could only manage 21. Seems like the bug gave me more of an advantage than I thought! Fluffy what was your tactic with the colony ship, and how did you colonize that system way over near the warp?

mokaiba wrote:
168

194 w/ duped pop

213

148

my 109.

Huh? By my count, you had 32 food, 36 ind, and 76 science, and 10 population.

mokaiba wrote:
I'll come back later with turn 100 and show you why 109 dont matter.

As I said earlier, these challenges are about learning from other people's saves.



Looking forward to this god-like save at turn 100. :rolleyes:

mokaiba wrote:
Couldnt get past turn 83.



Score: 2837

AI-1: 2834

AI-2: 1167

AI-3: 301

Hmm I guess not expanding much allows Horatio to expand in your place. I happened to have a turn 83 save from when I was experimenting and Horatio had 1800 in mine with United 1k and Hissho 300 so looks like he ate the systems you didn't use.



I started attacking Horatio in my game about the same time as this save as I had run out of room and got bored. Turn 100 was 5.7k score which is pretty low as I was going mad for +20% science building on all my systems and had like 3 fleets.

Sebbers wrote:
Look to fluffy's save on this one as that is currently the only good (legit) save on this thread- I will try another run through on this one and hope the population bug doesn't spring up again.

Were you only talking because he used a good starting strategy that is the only legit one? Because I was checking every turn and adjusting Dust Conversion or Tax to not go below zero Dust to keep it legit. My start might not be the best but guess that's why we're all posting in here and try to improve from each other.



@mokaiba:



I was commenting about your screenshot with the order of colonizing the systems, guess if Horatio won by a Economic Victory, you didn't poke them enough to not hoard that much gold.

mokaiba wrote:
This is how I would have started.

Interesting. If I read this correctly, you go up the communication tree first, so you can trade. Do you usually get a lot of benefit from trade? I have never gone up that way *first*, usually I go around tier 1: food, one of the tundra/arid if I need it, and the industry exploitation (not needed if sophon obviously).



Then you go for all the planet colonization types, but still no food. Do you find the first level food exploit is enough? Especially on this particular map, that seems like you would get far behind on pop (which we can see from your result). Can you say more about your motivation for putting all these techs early?

FluffyBunny wrote:
My first attempt - Pop 21, food 210, ind 148, sci 294, dust 49.

Winner again! Probably ... uncertain how to count the accidental pop exploit.



I learned: (a) when your start system has high potential, and all the systems you see nearby are bad, hyperscale farms is important. (b) don't worry about spreading out your systems when you are relatively "safe" behind a wormhole, so you can take distant terrans over nearby inhospitable planets -- rushing lava was an awful idea. (c) even as sophon, all the tech buff buildings are popular: public->private, mag shields, and research park (research underway in your save).



I put up a cheap rush challenge here:

/#/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/8301-challenge-fastest-win-on-small-map



If I have time tonight, but probably tomorrow, I'll try a new challenge which focuses on *not* having a peaceful area to expand into.

Eterean wrote:
Were you only talking because he used a good starting strategy that is the only legit one? Because I was checking every turn and adjusting Dust Conversion or Tax to not go below zero Dust to keep it legit. My start might not be the best but guess that's why we're all posting in here and try to improve from each other.

No I just hadn't checked out your save at that moment. I'm sure you're start was stunning

What I meant by legit was that, certainly my start, and possibly 4x's, seemed to have been affected by the population bug.



Still don't understand how fluffy did so well! Ahh!

Sebbers wrote:
Uploaded to zippy as per usual:

http://www24.zippyshare.com/v/70625269/file.html

No debt ever

Food of 306

Industry 151

Science 295 (with +40 next turn)

Population of 31

5 systems colonized, with home system completely colonized (although I had 4 colony ships moving to new systems at that moment)- the home system itself is now able to pump out 2 colony ships per turn.

2 heros, 1 admin of lvl 4, the other miltary (or atleast will be)

Score of 213.



Edit: this was my first attempt on the map- don't hate!

Can you use the forum file attachment please? Firefox + ghostery / adblock etc really doesn't like "zippyshare".



Pop 31 ~ not sure how you got there, I'd like to take a look.

Sophon aren't really suited to 30 turns, just for a heads up ~ although their colony ship time / cost is one of the cheaper, they do best with a hold > sudden expand model, due to their tech synergy.



I'll give it a go though.





Btw:



Here's a game I am playing at the moment ~



Huge map, Sophon, Serious, 4 AI. And the Cravers are right next to you



There's no 30 turn save as the expansion doesn't really blossom until 50ish ~ you'll see the difference in turn 60 / 90.





If you want a challenge, turn 90 is the start of a war ~ you've just tech'd up, but have no ships & the cravers are attacking. Good luck [but,ifyouwanttolearnfromthese-thesavesshowhowtoexpandwithouttheAIgoingtowarwithyouand/orlargeempiremanagement...andthewarisdef.winnable,currentlycreamingthecraversasItypethis]
SOPHONS - Serious x4 AI challenge.zip
SOPHONS - Serious 4AI - Turn 60.zip
SOPHONS - Serious 4AI - Turn 90 .zip

If you want a real challenge. Choose cravers, impossible difficultly, and insane pirates. Leave everything else as default. Try to survive to turn 500.

mokaiba wrote:
If you want a real challenge. Choose cravers, impossible difficultly, and insane pirates. Leave everything else as default. Try to survive to turn 500.

Cravers are designed to eat ships for breakfast & to use them to raise econ / tech.





Not really a challenge, more of a snooze-fest: focus on beams / kinetic + missile defense [sincepiratesdon'tusethese?] and keep chomping whilst turtling, count on the pirates hampering the other AI just as much.

Fairly sure I found another way to dupe pop. ~ instead of double ship / build completion, I finished a build while moving all of the population to one planet (to fill it up) ~ wham, instant full tanks!



Three things:



#1 The position was pointless. None of the AI could get through the wormhole [meaningtheybasicallydidn'texistforthechallenge~couldhavebeen7oninsane] and the size/resource spread you chose with the spiral shape = obviously slow growth

#2 I'd be tempted to econ it + hopscotch to the eastern 5 usable systems, making that my base ~ there's simply not enough resources around to justify slogging through 5 crappy systems (with long connections) to complete the chain. The only reason I settled where I did was my ships (even with engines) wouldn't have reached east in time, so I dumped them closer. Add 5 turns, and I'd have settled near the wormhole instead

#3 Sophons don't do rush starts, really... even with x2 resource 6 planet systems







Anyhow, save attached ~ freely admit that I think I unwittingly duped population here on turn 21ish. Given how easy it was to do... let's just say I'm not taking these challenges seriously until post-patch.



Score: 194

Pop: 26 >Duped< (so, yeah.. if you're claiming to get >26... you accidentally duped, methinks?)







Edit:



Went back to a save & checked it out. It might have just been pop+1 and farming boost [tech] kicking in while the game auto-spread the population. Not sure.
Challenge 2 - 26 pop accidental exploit.zip

Actually the map layout is more interesting than I thought. (Warp drives, northeast, I'm just sayin...)



I would definitely be interested in advice on how to build econ on my start. I rushed Lava colonization for lack of anything better. But when I play the next 30 turns I'm going to rush weapons and see what UE thinks of Sophon beams.
davea-t60.zip

mokaiba wrote:
If you want a real challenge. Choose cravers, impossible difficultly, and insane pirates. Leave everything else as default. Try to survive to turn 500.

It would be interesting to have more of these challenges with common start points and frequent saves. I don't think I could do yours, I am not good enough, but it would be great if you started a challenge like this.

davea wrote:
Actually the map layout is more interesting than I thought. (Warp drives, northeast, I'm just sayin...)



I would definitely be interested in advice on how to build econ on my start. I rushed Lava colonization for lack of anything better. But when I play the next 30 turns I'm going to rush weapons and see what UE thinks of Sophon beams.

30 turns isn't enough time to rush weapons tech + atmospheric filtration on this map as your starting resources are so paltry.



~ Remember that it took until turn 60 using the Hss to take a single planet off an easier AI in the first challenge. Sophon really don't have the same fleet bonuses here.

Uploaded to zippy as per usual:

http://www24.zippyshare.com/v/70625269/file.html

No debt ever

Food of 306

Industry 151

Science 295 (with +40 next turn)

Population of 31

5 systems colonized, with home system completely colonized (although I had 4 colony ships moving to new systems at that moment)- the home system itself is now able to pump out 2 colony ships per turn.

2 heros, 1 admin of lvl 4, the other miltary (or atleast will be)

Score of 213.



Edit: this was my first attempt on the map- don't hate!

Here is the next 30-turn challenge. The first one is here:



https://www.games2gether.com/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/8097-30-turn-challenge-help-me-learn



On forums for other games I have been involved in, sometimes players share a game in order to learn. I consider myself an "OK" player but I usually play on normal difficulty and win 50/50 of the time. So obviously I can learn more.



The attached zip file has a save game at turn 0 of a small map, 4 empires, Sophon, hard difficulty. I have also attached my result after 30 turns. This is a pretty poor position but it should make an interesting learning experience. I would like to compare results. If you got better than me, I'd like to understand your strategy. If I got better than you, I'll explain what I was trying to do. I only played the start position once; I could do a little better if I used the knowledge from the first playthrough to guide a second playthrough from the same start. But that would be cheating :-).



My results at the end of turn 30: score=168, total population=15, food=47, industry=106, science=99. I will post more about why these results seem so poor, after a few people have tried the map. Also, although the game does not prevent you, please "play fair" by keeping your dust count above zero.



The attached zip has a save game "sh2-t0" which is at turn 0, and a save game "davea-t30" which is at turn 30.

4x_Fan wrote:
Pop 31 ~ not sure how you got there, I'd like to take a look.

Hyperscale farms on home system.

4x_Fan wrote:
Cravers are designed to eat ships for breakfast & to use them to raise econ / tech.





Not really a challenge, more of a snooze-fest: focus on beams / kinetic + missile defense [sincepiratesdon'tusethese?] and keep chomping whilst turtling, count on the pirates hampering the other AI just as much.

try it first. I also forgot to write use slow. You'll be lucky to still have 3 systems at turn 500.



/#/endless-space/forum/27-general/thread/7741-challenge-sophon-try-to-win-in-500-turns-or-less

Sebbers wrote:
Hyperscale farms on home system.

My 26 pop attempt also used hyperscale [the+4ones?] farms, rushed.

4x_Fan wrote:
My 26 pop attempt also used hyperscale [the+4ones?] farms, rushed.

I got them very early in the game, maybe (edt)5th tech to research.

Sebbers wrote:


Population of 31

Lol wow - how did you get your home system to 27 pop in 30 turns without cheating? Mine is at 12 with same food upgrades as you.



My first attempt - Pop 21, food 210, ind 148, sci 294, dust 49.



Edit : ah got the farms much earlier than me.
SOPHONS - Turn 30 fluffya.zip

Hmm not sure how you did it Sebbers - I rushed for hyperscale farms this go but still ended with 25 or 26 total pop with 14 on my home system. Can't get anywhere near 27 atm. I didn't use my free colony ship on my home system - suprised if just that makes such a huge difference.



edit : tried using my first colony on home system, rushing to hyperscale and doing nothing except building up pop on that one system and ended with 17 on it and literally nothing else. I must be missing something.

Don't know how you manage to get so high so quickly, guess I'm not a rushing type of player or maybe a "slow" starter or I'm doing it terribly wrong...



Turn 30 - Points: 148

Pop 18, Food 171, Industry 95, Science 210, Dust 6 (), FIDS 539

Systems 3 (on my way to the 4th), Planets 6, 2 Heroes on Systems



Turn 60 - Points: 747

Pop 55, Food 499, Industry 499, Science 829, Dust 43 (-5 per turn at that time, seeing if I need to adjust tax in upcoming turns), FIDS 2217

Systems 6, Planets, 17, 3 Heroes on Systems
Eterean - Sophons - Turn 30.zip
Eterean - Sophons Turn 60.zip

Eterean wrote:
Don't know how you manage to get so high so quickly ... Pop 18

That is exactly the goal of this thread! You are doing better than me. I plan to dig through their save games and find out what they did. If I can't understand, I will ask. The reason I chose 30 turns is to focus on the early game, with a short enough number of turns that we can still see what they did (approximately) from the save game. An actual replay would be nicer, but the game doesn't support that today.



BTW, I ran this game up to turn 100 or so. I have killed the Hissho and I am working my way through UE. Ground combat is so slow, it really kills the momentum for me. I will probably study the save games here and replay from the start using their initial builds, so I can have a better economy to take out UE.