Acutian Outrageous Production

[crackinthekraken]

Is it just me, or do the Acutians (and to a lesser extent, the Andorians) dominate every game?  It seems that while every other race has 1-5 armadas, they suddenly have 100+, and correspondingly outrageous space power.  Even if I mercilessly destroy their ships, they just keep making them faster and faster.  Has anyone else encountered this issue?

It's to the point where there are only 2 powers worth mentioning in the solar system, time and time again.  Which kinda defeats the purpose of having 8 races...

[SNAFU]

Oh most certainly. In fact, my very first game (though I didn't realize it at the time) the Acutian homeworld was under a housing boom bonus event, and managed to reach a population of 5 billion within 7 years. By the time I had finished a single research dispatch, they'd climbed to 3 billion population: for comparison the next most populous empire were the Burlust at around 600mil pop.

Despite then making every single effort I could to crash every part of their RCI, they still pump out armadas faster than I can destroy them. I now currently have -6000 influence with them, and every time new technologies 'unlock' over time, they manage to research all of them within 20 seconds of each other in strategic time. The fact their economy is sub -300 seems to have virtually no effect on their production or science output. Nevermind that even if it did have an effect, they have more ground troop power than all the other races combined since every citizen also counts as a soldier. I wound up abandoning that game.

So yea... every game since I've made it priority number #1 to attack the Acutians and keep them from gaining a foothold. Even then, they still manage to get the same insane science output and research technologies and build new buildings at remarkable speed.

[I-KP]

I's say two things are happening here:-

#1.  The Power multipliers are being applied multiplicatively when they probably should be applied additively.

#2.  RCI has so little impact on anything that you're better off not interacting with that mechanic at all, and instead focus your time on other actions (if there are any).  If the RCI stats were displayed as direct %ages they'd also be less opaque in what they do.

In my games it's the Skylaxians that end up with a Science power many 1000s of times greater than the next closest, often inside of ten years.  I my current game Science power ranges from 1.9 (Thoraxian) to 28,000 (Skylaxian). 

TLF is a great idea for a game but the more I play it the more I seem to discover that the maths contained within the simulation model is severely messed up.

[I-KP]

#1.  The Power multipliers are being applied multiplicatively when they probably should be applied additively.

To expand on the above,
Take the following string of science power bonuses: x1.5, x1.5, x1.5, x1.5, x1.5, x2, x2, x2, x2, x2, x2.5, x2.5, x2.5, x2.5, x2.5
Assuming a starting science power of 2, when you apply the above bonuses multiplicatively, which is I think what TLF is doing, you end up with a final science power of 47,460.9; however, if you applied the above additively you end up with a science power of 32.

I'm not saying that the above is how Power is calculated in TLF, because I don't know, but it looks like something similar is happening.  To me a Science Power of 3 vs one of 30 means that the 30 is going to pick up techs broadly ten times faster than the 3, and a Science power of 30,000 vs one of 3 is going to pick up techs 10,000 times faster (but in game terms it probably ends up collecting only one new tech every cycle with all excess power not being carried forward into the next tech).

[GC13]

It's pretty obvious that it's calculated multiplicatively; I've seen the Skylaxians with a Science Power in the tens of thousands. Once they get there, it's just a matter of time until the Skylaxian and Evuck Death Balls go into action.

[crackinthekraken]

Hopefully the next patch addresses this (please?) cause it's a sweet game that I'd love to really get into, but at current state there doesn't seem to be much point...

[lifehole]

Yeah I really wonder if they meant for exponential tech growth, it's a tad bit ridiculous if one person is even one step behind on the exponentially extending tech level, they're completely screwed. Atleast, that's what the numbers say. It sometimes plays out differently.

[I-KP]

I very large part of the problem is the opacity of the numbers being shown.  Do you know what 1,000,000 Science Power means?  I don't!  All I can tell you is that it's 250,000 times better than 4!  (Which incidentally is what I see in my game: Skylaxian Science is nearly 1,000,000 and Thoraxian is 4.)  Such numbers are, in effect, meaningless to the player, particularly when your influence over said numbers barely advances beyond single digits.

Like it or not, most folks who enjoy playing grand strategy games do like to drill down through the numbers to analyse what's going on but TLF does a very poor job of enabling the player to do that; in fact I'd venture to say that it's nigh on impossible.  TLF is a numbers-heavy game - those numbers must have 'worth' as well as just value.  Yeah.  That.