FreeOrion

I thought that it could be cool to have a pool of hardest games (game settings including seed, no need for saved games since those can lose compatibility over time).
Then people could try others' challenges and even compete among them, "who can beat this map before turn 150?" and the such, until L29Ah comes, beats every map in half our marks and calls us all weaks for playing against AIs xD
There are some hard games already posted in the forum, here and there, but having a dedicated thread for it could be handy.
Feel free to share your experiences and sorrows along the game settings.

Playing against humans has more challenges that playing against AI.

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Obviously! But I'm rather inconstant in front of a computer.

How close are maps from the same seed/settings in different versions?

Good question, because I noticed in replaying the same game in the Nerf Egassem
thread that many times the system specials are not the same even with the same
seed. Map layout identical. System specials can be different.

And monsters, I think.

Theoretically, everything made by Galaxy Generation stuff (in Python) is the same, this should include specials. But stuff created by scripts on turn 0/1 will be different: this includes guardian monsters, monster nests, drone factories and the Experimentors.

If you've got a provable case of specials not being repeated and those are definitely not nest style specials please open an Issue with as much detail as possible, same for differences across platform of any type, it's a design objective that the same seed should be the same map across all platforms.

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Mat Bowles

Any code or patches in anything posted here is released under the CC and GPL licences in use for the FO project.

In my experience in very limited testing, specials remained the same

When I played this game the first time I got Ancient Ruins at Duna Gamma
and Propus Alpha and so did Oberlus. We got different techs from them
but they were the same special. When I played it again I got Probiotic Soup
at both locations.

Would it make a difference whether Experimentors were enabled or not?
I always disable them, but sometimes I forget.

That's definitely a possibility. Specials placement happens after monster placement, so differences in monster placement might impact specials placement. And wether Experimentors are enabled or not has an impact on monster placement, so...

I can confirm that disabling the experimenters does change the
system specials.

Ha. Just slightly bottled up:

Yea, way worse than the one I had.
Curious to see if you manage to beat this one.

At least, he doesn't have to worry about an early invasion.