Best games ever, hardest you have found

[godel]

Some game setups produce games that are not much of a challenge.
This is a thread for the best games ever.
and I will add to it when I can.
The game I found on the Linux complied system that was very hard did not produce the same results for the windows version.
So we have to log version as well.

[godel]

5,14,4arm,h,h,h.l,m,agg,etty,2
on the linux system
Provided some challenge, the opponents were all hidden types.

4,14,4arm,h,h,h,l,m,agg,etty,3
Ended up with 3 hidden opponents. This called for a change in research goals and in tactics.

[Dilvish]

5,14,4arm,h,h,h.l,m,agg,etty,2
4,14,4arm,h,h,h,l,m,agg,etty,3

Were those indicating that you used galaxy seeds of 5, and then later 4, and that you were playing with only 14 Systems? That is close to the absolute minimum the game will be able to set up, I recommend more like 20+ per empire (even more if playing low planets)

[Kassiopeija]

hmm a game with only 14 systems should be easy to win premature.

anyway, I just realized you could manually write a seed (I did always click on the dice); could there be problems when doing it manually?

[Dilvish]

anyway, I just realized you could manually write a seed (I did always click on the dice); could there be problems when doing it manually?

Not really; there are no special constraints on the string you type in; I haven't tested that some odd character encoding wouldn't muck with it, but I don't think it should.

[Kassiopeija]

but what precisely is the function of this seed? for example, if I start two games, one with 100 systemcount, the other with 200... but both with the same seed (just 5), is then some part of the map the same or... ??

[Dilvish]

I think there are a couple different things going on that will change the final result, so that even if a bunch of the stars were the same, the map and starlanes would still be quite different.

[MatGB]

The seed gives a startpoint for the random number generator, which means if you want to play two games the same you can—there are a few things that change, but they're determined in "turn 0" instead of galaxy generation, guards for specials, that sort of thing.

So if two people have the same version installed (and the same contents in the default directory), using the same settings will give almost the same game with identical map, systems, specials and monster starting points. that's useful for a variety of purposes, not least fault testing and bughunting.

But if you change settings, even by a little bit, the changes will be more apparent, simply changing starlane setting, etc will move more than just starlanes.

[godel]

The only change I made, and it is obviously a major one, is changing versions from the Linux/Ubuntu/Mint version gto the Win 7 one.
The nice thing about that seed is that that you can repay the scenario with a different race. Thus the power of ecch race in that senario can be known.
The Etty are wimp and are very hard to play. If you ever give points for victory, upgrade this.

[Dilvish]

The only change I made, and it is obviously a major one, is changing versions from the Linux/Ubuntu/Mint version gto the Win 7 one.

If you were actually running the same version on the two different systems, you should still get the same starmap (and nearly the same everything else). But I gather from another post that you are running quite different versions-- they could both be on the same platform but the different versions of FO will give different results (generally).

[godel]

Linux to win 7 did not have the same scenario. I was used to using the same set up to get the same scenario.
And I started this presuming that the same setup would create the same game on everones machine.
Which does not seem to work so well, but then I hoped that it would help for the same build.