Start Position Determines Outcome?

Yes, I agree. The super-weapon that Humans have over the AI is the fact that we get to choose our starting position. That is why I'm for the AI getting extra bonuses at the higher levels just to balance out.

This issue is distinctive for all 4x games with the exploration and colonisation element. Probably what we could do is to suggest ways to lessen this influence of the starting position.

Someone has already suggested an accelerated start scenario where each race starts off with a number of systems. In fact, we could have a scenario whereby all the systems in the galaxy get divided equally.

Making it a scenario for those who like it this way would be best. Leave the current setting for those of us who like the thrill of discovering two class 26 planets in one sector

I think the fact that you play on a medium size galaxy skews that perception. The smaller the galaxy, the more the start postion matters. In larger galaxies, the distances tend to even out.

jason

~SDC~

Starting positions vary so wildly that they are indeed the dominant factor in what kind of game you'll have. Lots of resources? None? Minor AIs nearby? Major AIs nearby? Surrounded by trash planets? Surrounded by more yellow stars than you can count? Etc., etc. Often you can alter your strategy to deal with whatever comes up, but then sometimes you just get overwhelmed with an initial situation that just doesn't give you any angle to play that lets you improve it.

There is a very large random factor in GalCiv (and I'm talking all aspects, not just the starting location), larger than in any other 4X game I know of. If that kind of thing upsets you then this will at times be a very frustrating game. But when that frustration happens it's good to tell yourself that it works the other way around as well. I've had some nice random things happen as well (but strangely, I've played 19 games of GalCiv so far and not one of the best random events has ever happened to me once).

2 Class 26 planets in the same sector? Try 2 in the same system, plus a 15 and a 14 to boot. Can we spell Capital? I knew you could. And the best part is that it was in the Alexian's starting sector and I still got it. Actually, since I didn't get it until a couple of years into the game, and they had colony ships orbiting their home system, I wonder if they didn't leave it for me.

I play on humongous maps, and believe me starting position is everything, as far as I can tell. Just ask the Altarians, they're stuck in the corner, they have a total of 2 yellow stars and are 6 sectors away from the nearest yellow (which is mine anyway). Their homeworld is class 26 too, how did that happen, but that only makes up for so much. Plus, if you're playing on clustered maps, you can often get chokeholds by racing to the ends and filling up all the yellows that are within range of another cluster where the AI is and create chokeholds. I was able to do that one game, jumped two clusters over, filled up the sector that was within range of the Altarians, they couldn't go any further, and I basically had the entire galaxy to fill as the Drengin were behind the Altarians, the Yor stuck in a corner, only the Tor had a good sized cluster to themselves. And there was a large, empty cluster so far away from the others that I was the only one who could reach it, using a starbase to extend my range.

Yes, starting positions are hugely important, but I actually really love that you simply don't know what you're going to get. In my last game, I could only colonize *1* planet besides Earth. So I had to do some thinking: How do I possibly win this? The Alterians (sp?) had no fewer than 6 planets, 2 of which at 25+!

So, I made my neighbors (the Yor) my absolute best friends. To make sure, I even made all the evil choices, which is something I wouldn't normally do. And since I knew I'd be on the defensive, I sought out those techs and cycled in heavy defense ships and strong military starbase upgrades.

I say 'strong' here, but of course my production was woefully limited because I could only produce two things a turn at most. Sure enough, the other AIs ganged up on us in a 4 v 2. First, I have to say that it was awesome seeing the AI come after the weak link, even if I was that weak link...

The Yor and I did surprisingly well. At one point, I even got 3 of the 4 attack AI to pay *me* for peace (though, really, a more coordinated AI attack shouldn't have let that happen, but still...).

Just when I thought we'd turned it around, the AIs came back on us with even better technology and wiped us off the map.

The moral here is that even though I had a horrible starting position, it forced me to think creatively and employ new strategies. Sure, there was little hope I'd pull the game out (all AIs were on Genius), but I have to say that in many ways this was one of the more satisfying games I played of the 10 GalCiv games I've played so far simply because I *should* have lost, I *did* lose, but I came up with a strategy to make my demise as painful as possible to those bastard AIs!

I agree with YIN ... although we as human players can restart all the time, it is more satisfying to try playing a difficult scenario. I hate to say this but restarting is like giving up too easily without a fight.

No matter how bad it looks, I always play out the first few years to see how it goes. Doing this I've only found one game that was totally hopeless and prompted a restart, the others weren't great, but were worth trying out. Now, granted, I have lost all of my "bad" starts but one, but I was really proud of that one win from a crap start and I've learned a lot about trying to manage my crappy empire versus the AIs.

I have been playing Medium sized Maps/Loose Clusters OR Scattered/Sub-Normal AI. With these settings, starting position is the key to winning or losing as far as I can tell.

I've NEVER seen the Altarians able to colonize more than 3 or 4 planets under the above conditions. Usually they never get more than 1 or 2 planets. Usually the same with the Torians.

The Arceans and Drengin always seem to end up with the best spots AND/OR they colonize the most in 1.03.

So this usually means that I end up in a military race with the Arceans or Drengin and having to attack them so they'll stop killing other races and extorting me. After I smack them down a few times, it ends up in a major victory for me in some way (I pull ahead in every facet of the power races).

I think for my next game, I'll make the Altarians and Torians Normal AI. Maybe they'll actually be a factor in the game for once

I'm also guessing that after another 3-5 games, I'll graduate to all Normal AI and Larger galaxy sizes.

But yes, every single game where the Drengin, Arceans, or Yor have been my major threats was from more planets than me and/or better planets than me.

Starting position makes for a lot, but you can counter some of its effects:
Playing scattered helps, and tiny maps don't suffer from starting position (particularly with rare yellow stars, since your spare colony ship will probably be useless anyway-).
I think it is good to play by the position given. Right now for instance, I play a large clustered map and ended up in a corner far from everyone else. I have some stars, it should be easy to turtle in, but trade is very hard to get by, since my trade routes would have to be huge, I suffered from lack of contact zith the ais in the early game, but turtling it over should work. Who knows? They're only geniuses after all...
I like to play games that are hard. I like winning, so I move back from masochistic to painful after a while, then crippling again, then... Without the challenge of starting positions, the game would lose replayability IMO. Same as in chess: A new opening is a new experience.

AI intelligence is FAR more improtant than starting position. On easier levels (from intelligent downwards) then it is fairly straightforward for advanced players to win under nearly any starting conditions. The trick is in adaptation. On hardest levels then even the best possible starting position (highest class planet, lots of good planets close) may not be enough. Larger galaxies do tend to reduce the starting location importance.

Paul.

~SDC~

"Yes, yes I know the strategy of getting colony ships early by leasing and using starbases to increase range so that your colony ships can reach stars faster but doing that (especially the starbase part) can be totally crippling"

I tend to use colony ships to extend range. Settle on a poor planet, set production for a colony ship, use another colony ship to reach a good planet, then pull all the pop from the first planet. Leapfrog.

Atarex, it's been my experience that from Normal to Intelligent the Altarians and Torians are by far the dominant AI races. The only time they fail to be is when they have terrible starting positions. One reason is that consistently ally with each other, effectively doubling their military might. The reason they do poorly at lower levels is that their AI algorithms are more dependent on high-level choices, so they are much more gimped at sub-Normal settings than the Drengin.

Let's put it this way, when on the level I play at when I find I have the Drengin, Yor, or Arceans for neighbors I breathe a sigh of relief because unless they have a really lucky start I know they'll be a non-factor from the middle game onwards.

What's interesting to me is that everyone seems to be in agreement that the starting position seems to make a HUGE difference as to how the game is played out BUT that everyone is pretty much willing to live with it.

Seems like the most common strategy (which I shamefully admit that I employ) is to just restart the game after looking at the map for 5 minutes and figuring out that there's no way to turn this into even a fighting shot at a game.

To be honest I'd rather not have to do this. Wouldn't it be better for the game to figure out what a "reasonable" start position for all players is and give it to them? My feature request would be for there to be a "Equal Opportunity" starting position flag that could be set so that the game deals out starting positions in a way that gives everyone a relatively even shot at having a good game.

IMHO - it's not fun to play a game that you know you're destined to win or lose based on your starting position.

The problem with that is that the variation in starting position can be a good thing as well. The people who dislike it the most are going to be those who want to emply one particular strategy over and over, and thus will want one particular kind of starting location that best suits whatever strategy that is. But there is another kind of player, one that wants to deal with whatever the game presents them with. A 'fair' starting location eliminates this.

In fact, you could argue that a fair starting location eliminates random maps, I mean, for it to be fair every race would have to be surrounded by -exactly- the same mix of planets at the same distances and all equidistant from each other. Not much left to be random in that sort of setup. Even then you could argue is it fair to have X and Y for nearest neighbors? Is if far to start in the bottom-left vs. the right-middle? Once you start trying to make things fair you tend to open up an endless can of worms.

I like the current random map, it can give you about anything you can imagine, it's up to the player to decide when to accept it.

What can be done though is to have a set of standard maps here on the Stardock page, they might not be fair when it comes to human vs. the AIs, but anyone who downloaded and played 'Map X' would be playing on the same field as anyone else. Except for possible mods, of course...

BTW, I've never seen a starting position that was destined to win, though I've seen a couple that I could pretty much say were destined to lose. But then, since I didn't play those maps I don't really know that for sure.

I frequently really rotten luck on random starts, for most 4x games. In GalCiv, examples of this are generating 6 games in a row on Gigantic, being in one of the 4 corners, and no stars within 6 sectors of my home sector. Whoopsie! I'm not kidding about this.

Starting position is always the master of the game in random maps in 4x games. In games I consider "good", you can adapt and overcome most "moderately bad" starting postitions. But at some point, you have to recognize that there just isn't anything you can do, and generate a new map.

Some posts by Star Dock (and a feature) support the fact that your starting location is the master of your fate (whether you will win or lose). 1) Brad's comments under the "+10% PQ gone" thread, where he states that he removed the PQ +10% and +15% because it was allowing players to overcome *poor starting positions*. 2) The fact that a new map is only a CONTROL+N away. That's there for a reason. So it seems to me that it is accepted from the top down that this is just part of the landscape. And the truth is, in Geography has always been the determiner of Destiny for empires.

But when I've spent an entire evening wasting my time on restarts, just looking to get something that would offer me some form of winnable solution, I wonder if there is a map editor out there somewhere. Of course, that gets balanced out by starting a game with the a purple star... that only has one world of 15 and 4 of PQ 2. But then there comes along that home sector of 5 yellow stars each sporting at least 2 PQ 20+ worlds... Much rarer, of course, then unwinable isoloation by grand rifts starts, by such is the fickleness of the RNG.

I don't see this as a problem at all. This is a GOOD thing. Why? Perhaps not on the Metaverse.. but if a great score isn't the only thing you are trying to get, the option to either start:

1. In a great spot and cruise to victory

or

2. Start in a very hard spot and work for a win

is a benefit.. not a drawback. Those who are learning the game or enjoy winning without as much challange will enjoy using option 1. Those who are winning handily and love a challange can quite easily hit ctrl-n a few times and *poof*.. can start in a corner with perhaps 1 system hanging out in the next sector to try and win that extra-hard-to-reach victory.

And for those in the middle, just start with whatever it gives you, or only ctrl-n a couple times. You can start off (and usually do) in a fairly average spot, most times.

IMO, everyone should not start off in exactly the way. That would be unrealistic. Your race may start off with great systems around you.. or you may be in the galactic boonies. The ability to choose your starting position is something I like.. I wouldn't want that 'fixed'.. because imo, it isn't broke.

fleabitfox

starting posistion doesent determine wether you win or lose.techneique does.i could start off with the greatest location in world and losde if my tstrategy royaly sucked.in my opinion that is whaat will determine the victory or loss.

Coffee Freak, I can guarantee you that starting position can dictate that you will lose, unless you cheat.

It can also give you the win, unless you just decide to sit on your hands for a thousand turns.

GalCiv is a game about resource usage. if you have no resources (no world but your starting earth, no resources, etc), then the AI will beat you silly. Because it has more resources, and is utilizing them.

You can start a game and say: I'm going for cultural victory this time. But the game map layout will determine if you can or not. Hard to be the Culture King if you are off in a small cluster by yourself.

Geography is the determiner of Destiny.

I do agree with you all that the randomness of start positions makes the game fun and that exploration is key.

My only point is that the game should not have such large variation in starting positions.

Let's imagine that you were to rate your start positions from 0 to 100. 0 is you're destined to lose (stuck in a corner and nearest stars are 6 sectors away) and 100 is you're destined to win (in the middle with lots of yellow stars and everyone else is in a corner).

Does anyone disagree that playing a game at with a start position of 0 or 100 is just basically not worth playing?

I think that game would just be a lot more enjoyable if the variation were lower. Say from 25 to 75. So that way you maintain a random element but you're forced to restart until you get a decent board to play on.

Yes, good point. I'm hoping future updates will give time to polishing exactly this sort of thing rather than trying to roll out entirely new stuff.

I usually restart a time or two, until I get an Earth of PQ 18 or better and either another PQ15 or better or a resource visible from my starting position. I'm more in the mood to play than I am to hit ctl-n repeatedly.

Actually, there was one time that I got a very good/bad starting position, but didn't play it out. Gigantic map, PQ 20 Earth with a 15 and 16 in the same system. Two more stars in the same sector, a yellow with two 16s, and an orange that didn't have anything worth exploiting. And then, around that, 5 sectors of no-mans land in all directions (O.K., so there were only three sectors in two directions, but then you hit the edge of the map). I would have at least tried it (and probably had my butt handed to me) except that I was in the mood to go on a military tear, and that position just wouldn't work for that.

eloquence, part of the problem is that none of us would score the same start positions the same way. You obviously don't like starting in corners. I do (as long as I've got an expansion path, which I didn't have in the above case).

I always take whatever I get. The AIs don't get to Ctrl-n, so I don't either.

Starting in a poor postition often forces me to take gambles I otherwise would not, like early warfare. I enjoy the variety and unpredictability. There are worse fates that losing. Like, being bored.