Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri

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All Forums >> [New Releases from Matrix Games] >> Distant Worlds 1 Series >> Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri

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Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 1:52:08 AM

Liquid5n0w

Posts: 26
Joined: 12/18/2010
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It seems that after you get an agent to 400 skill, it becomes very easy to constantly steal tech from the super races once every 3 months. This leads to a massive tech advantage over the rest of the galaxy in a VERY short time frame.

Is tech stealing/trading going to be fixed so you don't get such a huge advantage over your rivals?

Also in the same game anything I colonize never seems to grow, and economies are growing even slower. This applies to me as well as the enemy colonies. By the time I had taken 4 other homeworlds, each of them were generating >400k GDP, while the most advanced and earliest colony I had settled was at 12k GDP. Not sure if it was because I had high tax rates that prevented growth, but the taxes were only always controlled by the AI and set to low. The taxes were high because my people were very happy all the time.

Any advice for managing growth?

Post #: 1

RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 5:39:36 AM

lordxorn

Posts: 768
Joined: 12/6/2009
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Besides corruption affecting your growth, the biggest factor may be your availability to ten different luxury goods. You must make sure that they are available in sufficient amounts that your civilian sector is supplying your largest colonies with all ten. Make sure you have a large space port with the best morale facilities included. I have seen a very profitably colony earn less than half due to my expansion and the lack of luxury goods, even though I had enough when I was not as large.

You must be a spy expert to get an agent up to 400 in a short amount of time.

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(in reply to Liquid5n0w)

Post #: 2

RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 6:19:48 AM

Liquid5n0w

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Joined: 12/18/2010
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Meh I just spammed a lot of simple easy missions on 1 month or 3 month time, seemed to level em quickly. I had 3 400 rather quickly, but after a couple of years of constantly stealing tech at 3 month intervals 2 of em got captured. Overall either I was really lucky or that 88% isn't quite true.

(in reply to lordxorn)

Post #: 3

RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 6:32:56 AM

Aures

Posts: 343
Joined: 9/13/2010
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Afaik the chance of success is as true as their random number generator.

What race were you playing as?

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Post #: 4

RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 6:55:49 AM

forsaken1111

Posts: 281
Joined: 3/30/2010
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quote:

ORIGINAL: Liquid5n0w

Meh I just spammed a lot of simple easy missions on 1 month or 3 month time, seemed to level em quickly. I had 3 400 rather quickly, but after a couple of years of constantly stealing tech at 3 month intervals 2 of em got captured. Overall either I was really lucky or that 88% isn't quite true.

Its entirely possible to get a 10,000 long winning streak on a 50% chance, it's just increasingly improbable. In a truly random system it can and does happen.

I once, during a pen and paper roleplaying game, rolled five dice and had all of them come up on their maximum value. Unlikely, but possible. (A d20, 3d6 and 2d10 by the way. Came up 20, 6, 6, 10, 10. I had to quit playing and take a break, I was that amazed.)

(in reply to Liquid5n0w)

Post #: 5

RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 7:26:39 AM

Shark7

Posts: 7937
Joined: 7/24/2007
From: The Big Nowhere
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quote:

ORIGINAL: forsaken1111

quote:

ORIGINAL: Liquid5n0w

Meh I just spammed a lot of simple easy missions on 1 month or 3 month time, seemed to level em quickly. I had 3 400 rather quickly, but after a couple of years of constantly stealing tech at 3 month intervals 2 of em got captured. Overall either I was really lucky or that 88% isn't quite true.

Its entirely possible to get a 10,000 long winning streak on a 50% chance, it's just increasingly improbable. In a truly random system it can and does happen.

I once, during a pen and paper roleplaying game, rolled five dice and had all of them come up on their maximum value. Unlikely, but possible. (A d20, 3d6 and 2d10 by the way. Came up 20, 6, 6, 10, 10. I had to quit playing and take a break, I was that amazed.)

I can remember a game of old PnP Battletech where a player got the perfect rolls...first shot hits with a small laser and takes out the cockpit on a pristine Atlas. 1 in a million shot...but it does happen. Basically you have to roll 12 three or four times in a row to accomplish that in a 2D6 system.

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RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 7:45:20 AM

Aures

Posts: 343
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Off topic but while we are talking about RNG I would like to take the opportunity to praise DW for its complete lack of state dependent randomness

. In case you haven't noticed, lots of games will have outcomes that are seemingly random but will occur the same way (or with the same chance weighting) every time if you reload a game from just before it happened or from slightly earlier and perform the same sequence of actions. However, if you reload the game and perform a slightly different set of actions the outcome of the random event will be different.

To name just a few examples this happens in Star Wars Rebellion, Medieval II Total War (and probably the rest of the total war series), Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire (and probably most of Sid Meiers turned based strategy games) and Galactic Civilizations II. GalCiv2 was particularly annoying because the order you moved your ships in determined whether you got a permanent bonus on colonizing a new world eg colonize planet A then planet B in the same turn and get nothing, colonize planet B and then planet A and both planets give you substantial and permanent quality bonuses when you land *shudder*. It is a major pet peeve of mine, escpecially since I find it hard to resist the urge to perform save scumming to get a better outcome (which is something I have no trouble avoiding if it is a pure RNG role such as spy missions in DW).

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RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 8:03:09 AM

forsaken1111

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I think the point of those games keeping the random seed and repeating the outcome every time you load the save is to prevent people from reloading a dozen times to get a better random outcome. Double edged sword, that.

(in reply to Aures)

Post #: 8

RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 8:25:08 AM

Aures

Posts: 343
Joined: 9/13/2010
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Well thats fine, but determining the random seed based from the game state (presumably by using some value in memory to generate the seed) is lazy, pointless and annoying. I completely understand the desire to prevent save scumming to game the RNG, but it is doubly pointless if you replace it with save scumming to determine the right order to generate the seed for the value you desire. In Medieval 2 for example it is usually possible to make every assasin get a kill every turn by experimenting with the order in which you move your units around. So in some respects it is even worse than a pure RNG that can be save scummed.

In the GalCiv2 example you can have it so that every single time you colonize A before B you will get nothing and every time you colonize B before A you will get the bonus. But in GalCiv2 it is semi-random as to whether there is any randomness, sometime the same set of actions will generate different results on different tries but the probability distribution is determined by the game state. So in many cases colonizing A before B will never give you a bonus but colonizing B before A will always give you some kind of bonus but there is say a 1/10 chance (using a proper RNG) of getting the permanent bonus (as opposed to some cash etc). If you move unit C after colonizing A it will give you a different set of probabilities which might not include any possibility of a permanent bonus.

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RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 9:03:24 AM

forsaken1111

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That does sound annoying. I never got into Galciv 2, though I did like the first one. The second one was a total mess when I played it and I haven't been back.

(in reply to Aures)

Post #: 10

RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 1:18:17 PM

Webbco

Posts: 682
Joined: 2/6/2010
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quote:

ORIGINAL: Liquid5n0w

It seems that after you get an agent to 400 skill, it becomes very easy to constantly steal tech from the super races once every 3 months. This leads to a massive tech advantage over the rest of the galaxy in a VERY short time frame.

I also use this exploit, I'm reeling in a ton of stolen research from the guardians who seem to have pretty much everything. I must have sent 2 spies (both level 400) out 50 times to get new tech.

(in reply to Liquid5n0w)

Post #: 11

RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 2:27:23 PM

Erik Rutins

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Enjoy it while it lasts...

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Post #: 12

RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 3:51:07 PM

Nalim27

Posts: 39
Joined: 12/16/2010
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quote:

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Enjoy it while it lasts...

Sounds like in prepared patch you will do something with it ... maybe no more super-agent 007?

Or you want to disable possibility to send agents against Mechanoid Guardrians?

(in reply to Erik Rutins)

Post #: 13

RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 5:29:20 PM

Liquid5n0w

Posts: 26
Joined: 12/18/2010
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I assumed that being able to steal their techs would get patched, cause it's kinda a silly problem, shouldn't happen. Glad to hear it's getting fixed.

(in reply to Nalim27)

Post #: 14

RE: Stealing tech from Mechanoids and Shakuri - 12/22/2010 6:06:31 PM

PaulP

Posts: 21
Joined: 12/21/2010
Status: offline

Yea, definitely shouldn't be able to rob the mechanoids :)

Funny thing is I think the AI might be doing it too, because the Ketarov in one of my games started right by the Mechanoids and have an unusually large amount of research for the slowest research game. They have a bad relationship with the Mechanoids too since the Mechanoids have mining bases in systems that they've colonized, so their AI is probably automatically sending lots of spies against them. The Ketarov have hyper fusion reactors and titan beams and its only about 10 years into a very expensive research rate game.

(in reply to Liquid5n0w)

Post #: 15