Gathering Storm: 2 questions

[Sticky Wicket]

New to gathering Storm. Liking most of it but 2 Q that hopefully have answers.

Space Race.
Iv'e launched my exo-planet rocket but the time its taking is ridiculous. Please tell me there is something I can do to speed it up travelling more than 1 light year per turn. (if there are no in-game solutions then I'm open to editing xml files to increase its base speed). I have clearly won the space race since all other civs are not even close; I'm just clicking turns and it's getting very boring.

Diplomatic favour.
I have too many negatives. Iv'e got -15/turn from captured capitals (which seems way out of proportion). I'm assuming Captured City states counts as *captured capitals*. I had to capture City States early on and have no way to return them to original owner now of course. Can I do anything about getting permanently removing this negative score? I have alliances with 2 nations and suzerain of 5 states which is giving positive but not nearly enough.

[Stormwinds]

1) In the Future Era, there are 2 projects to speed up your Exoplanet Expedition by 1 lightyear / turn each time you complete them, and are always the second-to-last tech in the tree. The first requires 30 Aluminum to start, and the second requires extra power per turn. Both projects can be done an infinite number of times as long as you satisfy the requirements and have a functioning spaceport.

2) City States do not count towards the captured capital diplomatic penalty, only capitals from major civilizations. It's -5 per capital owned regardless of how you acquired them. You can't trade capitals either as they are part of a victory condition. The point is that you should be penalized diplomatically if you do a lot of warmongering. If you want to have diplomatic influence while being aggressive, you will have to prioritize favor generation.

[grognardgary]

I don;t think there is anyway once launched to increase speed. I'd check the victory screen and make sure some one else isn't closing on some other victory and then I'd just put all my units on alert and speed dial to victory.
There are some wonders and a few other things you can do to offset Dip favor malus.

[Sticky Wicket]

Originally posted by Stormwinds:

1) In the Future Era, there are 2 projects to speed up your Exoplanet Expedition by 1 lightyear / turn each time you complete them, and are always the second-to-last tech in the tree. The first requires 30 Aluminum to start, and the second requires extra power per turn. Both projects can be done an infinite number of times as long as you satisfy the requirements and have a functioning spaceport.

2) City States do not count towards the captured capital diplomatic penalty, only capitals from major civilizations. It's -5 per capital owned regardless of how you acquired them. You can't trade capitals either as they are part of a victory condition. The point is that you should be penalized diplomatically if you do a lot of warmongering. If you want to have diplomatic influence while being aggressive, you will have to prioritize favor generation.

Many thanks for info Good to know about the future tech projects.

I noticed the Ethiopian DLC has a *diplomatic quarter* (presumably works like a government plaza district?) Is this available to all civs? and does it help a lot to regain diplomatic favour to counter these penalties as above? (for future reference).

[Stormwinds]

The Diplomatic Quarter is available to each civ and functions similarly to the Government Plaza in that a civ can only build one Diplomatic Quarter. Just the district itself will give an additional point of Diplomatic Favor a turn per opposing civ that have sent you a delegation or embassy. Most of its bonuses, however, come from influence generation and counterspying, so while it may stem the bleeding from losing lots of Diplomatic Favor, it is not a complete fix.

[gdshore]

One of the speed boosters for the exo-flight is a Lagrange laser station, the other is planet based. Each adds +1 light-year to speed, I understand in theory the Lagrange station's function the planet based one eludes my ken. I have however used both. In fact more than once, My record is + 11 LY per turn.

[Sticky Wicket]

Thanks guys for further info on GS mechanics. Much appreciated

[Lemurian1972]

Originally posted by gdshore:

One of the speed boosters for the exo-flight is a Lagrange laser station, the other is planet based. Each adds +1 light-year to speed, I understand in theory the Lagrange station's function the planet based one eludes my ken. I have however used both. In fact more than once, My record is + 11 LY per turn.

Imagine the tech they're using to power the ship as a laser hose. You're pumping energy from Earth in the form of a laser into space toward the ship, pushing it ever farther away. The more lasers you have pumping, the greater the flow of energy.

Completely impossible since light moving the speed of light would never catch up to a ship moving at the speed of light, but I guess since turns cover multiple years even in the modern era, your ship's never really moving at the speed of light? I dunno, it's just science sounding mumbo jumbo to represent filling a bucket up enough to win.

11 ly/turn isn't bad, but I've pushed up over 20 and I've seen Youtubers go higher. Getting the production boosts, the Great Scientists and Engineers and burning a ton of builders to complete multiple projects each turn in a huge production city is really the way to go.

Lastly, I'd have to look it up to remember exactly, but I know you have to be careful about the order you complete projects and the amount of power you have in a city. If you complete the project that takes electricity at the wrong time, the game does things in a weird order which momentarily sets your city to 0 power and thus not adding an LY/turn for that turn. Easiest way around that is to focus on the project that burns Aluminum, if you get a lot of sources.

[Berlin]

While my spaceship is on the way to mars, or wherever it's going, I fill up my time by nuking everybody. Zero consequences.

[gdshore]

I never 'nuke', just pump CO2 into the atmosphere and watch my enemies drown. (make sure you have lots of flood barriers every where)

[plaguepenguin]

Originally posted by Sticky Wicket:

New to gathering Storm. Liking most of it but 2 Q that hopefully have answers.

Diplomatic favour.
I have too many negatives.

No you don't.

You've launched the exoplanet expedition. Other commenters have given you advice on how to speed it up, but you tell us that the other civs aren't even close to starting the space race, and so your only interest in speeding up your ship arises from the fact that you have already won, and just want to avoid having to click "End Turn" fifty times.

You don't have to be ahead in every one of this game's many parameters to win. It's a good strategy game because it forces you to make trade-off decisions. You have to give up something that is nice to have because it helps you win, in order to get something nicer to have that is even better at helping you win. Taking out a neighbor civ always means you have to take grievances, most of which wear off in time, but the grievances from taking their capitals never erode. Grievances cause other civs to not like you, and that has negative consequences, but the benefits of taking a neighbor's land and cities is so huge that having the other civs hate you is almost always trivially harmful in comparison. That, and you can take advantage of all the ways you can counteract the factors -- such as being such a repeat offender war criminal -- that give you negative favorability, by cultivating factors that give you compensatory positive favorability,

Even if you had been a much worse war criminal and so racked up far more negatives, and failed to compensate for your life of crime, to the point that no surviving civ was any longer willing to make favorable trade deals with you, much less be your ally and give you those bonuses -- who cares? You've reached the point in the game where it is completely safe to cone in on this factor and this factor only, making sure you keep at least one space port operational long enough for your expedition to reach its destination. Earlier, before you were in the end game, there were definite upsides to keeping the other civs less unhappy with you, as well as doing all sorts of things to stay competitive broadly, across all aspects of the game. None of that matters anymore, so stop sweating the small stuff like everybody hating you. If you want a friend, buy a dog.

[Sticky Wicket]

Originally posted by plaguepenguin:

Originally posted by Sticky Wicket:

New to gathering Storm. Liking most of it but 2 Q that hopefully have answers.

Diplomatic favour.
I have too many negatives.

No you don't.

You've launched the exoplanet expedition. Other commenters have given you advice on how to speed it up, but you tell us that the other civs aren't even close to starting the space race, and so your only interest in speeding up your ship arises from the fact that you have already won, and just want to avoid having to click "End Turn" fifty times.

You don't have to be ahead in every one of this game's many parameters to win. It's a good strategy game because it forces you to make trade-off decisions. You have to give up something that is nice to have because it helps you win, in order to get something nicer to have that is even better at helping you win. Taking out a neighbor civ always means you have to take grievances, most of which wear off in time, but the grievances from taking their capitals never erode. Grievances cause other civs to not like you, and that has negative consequences, but the benefits of taking a neighbor's land and cities is so huge that having the other civs hate you is almost always trivially harmful in comparison. That, and you can take advantage of all the ways you can counteract the factors -- such as being such a repeat offender war criminal -- that give you negative favorability, by cultivating factors that give you compensatory positive favorability,

Even if you had been a much worse war criminal and so racked up far more negatives, and failed to compensate for your life of crime, to the point that no surviving civ was any longer willing to make favorable trade deals with you, much less be your ally and give you those bonuses -- who cares? You've reached the point in the game where it is completely safe to cone in on this factor and this factor only, making sure you keep at least one space port operational long enough for your expedition to reach its destination. Earlier, before you were in the end game, there were definite upsides to keeping the other civs less unhappy with you, as well as doing all sorts of things to stay competitive broadly, across all aspects of the game. None of that matters anymore, so stop sweating the small stuff like everybody hating you. If you want a friend, buy a dog.

You assume way too much, and most of what you say is way off the mark. People play in different ways.

Some people like nuking other civs, some people just don't care about cultural genocide but that's not me, and that's not how I operate so take your baseless accusations elsewhere.

FYI:
I had 2 Civs that were repeatedly trying to convert my cities and repeatedly spying on me and causing mayhem despite me asking them to stop. They were the constant aggressors, I was trying to play nice, they refused to behave reasonably. In the end they got what they deserved.

Other civs also hated THEM, not me. I had good relations with all the rest of the civs; alliances with 3 of them. When those 2 agitant civs were eradicated the rest of the world was pretty peaceful save for an odd skirmish.

Hence the clicking through turns after they had been rightly dealt with, and I was not going to *nuke* the other friendly civs ......just because I potentially could. I hadn't even built any nuclear weapons (which is something I don't usually do anyway) I'm not into casual Armageddon.

The reason I had 3 captured capitals is because a capital form another civ had been captured by one of the civs I attacked. So I ended up with the -15 penalty unjustly really since I actually did the world a big favour by getting rid of them. The diplomatic penalties mechanic in this game is way too simplistic, it just assumes you are the aggressor when in fact that isn't whats happening.

[grognardgary]

I am generally done with warfare after the ancient era but that usually means that I am stuck with 15-20 points of dip malus. Minus however many city states I am suzerain of which is usually 4 to 6

[plaguepenguin]

This game is not very good as a simulation of reality. It is even worse as a simulation of morality. Fortunately, it pretty clearly isn't intended to simulate morality, at all. While the language the AI leaders tend to use around warfare and other types of aggression is highly moralistic (that is sadly quite realistic), the game design rationale for grievances is pretty clearly based on the need to impose penalties on conquest. Make conquest too easy, fail to impose negative consequences, and it becomes the dominant strategy, making this a much worse game.

Look at the things that a conqueror -- not a player who conquers only in self or even world defense, but a player who simply wants to steal land for themselves -- can do to offset the negative favorability of being a serial war criminal. The easiest offset is to involve other AIs in their evil plan, by starting or joining a joint war. You can build up a regular gang that way of you and your group avoiding grievances with each other no matter how much crime you all get up to. The alliance mechanic available by mid-game formalizes and deepens the gang ties. Along the way, you can engage in the amazingly cynical practice of setting up scenarios where, in the wake of a conquest, you arrange the map for an inevitable loyalty flip, then, when the free city flips to you or you conquer it, you liberate it for a huge burst of diplo favor and grievance-offset. Of course the map still dictates that it will flip again, and you get to rinse and repeat, laundering your reputation over and over again as long as you want, even though the laundering process involves repeat revolution and conquest.

Then, in the end-game situation you describe, your exoplanet expedition launched and your cities left with nothing better to do, you can queue carbon sequestration in every city with an IZ, becoming a secular saint in the eyes of the world, no matter how bloody your history of conquest.

There are indeed plenty of completely satisfying ways to play this game. Its complexity allows that. Playing with internal restrictions against conquest, allowing yourself to do that only if attacked, or to rescue another civ, is a completely reasonable alternative to making the game more challenging without giving the AI the huge advantages of higher difficulty levels, because free conquest is still highly beneficial despite all the clogs the devs put on it it keep it from being the only strategy any player would ever pursue. But pursuing that completely reasonable ideal, whether to make the game more challenging, or to reflect some ideal of how the real world ought to behave, is not something the game can our should reward you for. In the game you describe, you carry the negative marks of capital conquest, but you could erase those with carbon sequestration. Why would either figure into any sort of idealism, either of modeling moral behavior or of limiting your game play to make the game more challenging? You aren't more or less moral for engaging in conquest that destroys only pixels, or for sequestering completely notional CO2. You aren't a better or worse player for taking the benefits of conquest whenever in this game conquest was justified according to your self-imposed restrictions on conquest. The thing is, you shouldn't expect the game to figure out some algorithm to model your ideals accurately. It has enough trouble figuring out how to beat humans just in its own very limited terms of realpolitik.

[grognardgary]

Interesting PP I figure the malus was there because at some point in the game creation process they figured out that the couldn't create a decent military AI for 1UPT that didn't cost way more than they thought people were willing to spend so as an attempt to at least make you have to deal with multiple enemies at once you got greivances and diplo emergencies and the like. It is not very effective against certain styles of play. I am fairly certain that were I interested I could do a world conquest victory on a huge Pangaea map and be done by the beginning of the medieval era.

[Sticky Wicket]

Originally posted by plaguepenguin:

This game is not very good as a simulation of reality. It is even worse as a simulation of morality. Fortunately, it pretty clearly isn't intended to simulate morality, at all. While the language the AI leaders tend to use around warfare and other types of aggression is highly moralistic (that is sadly quite realistic), the game design rationale for grievances is pretty clearly based on the need to impose penalties on conquest. Make conquest too easy, fail to impose negative consequences, and it becomes the dominant strategy, making this a much worse game.

Look at the things that a conqueror -- not a player who conquers only in self or even world defense, but a player who simply wants to steal land for themselves -- can do to offset the negative favorability of being a serial war criminal. The easiest offset is to involve other AIs in their evil plan, by starting or joining a joint war. You can build up a regular gang that way of you and your group avoiding grievances with each other no matter how much crime you all get up to. The alliance mechanic available by mid-game formalizes and deepens the gang ties. Along the way, you can engage in the amazingly cynical practice of setting up scenarios where, in the wake of a conquest, you arrange the map for an inevitable loyalty flip, then, when the free city flips to you or you conquer it, you liberate it for a huge burst of diplo favor and grievance-offset. Of course the map still dictates that it will flip again, and you get to rinse and repeat, laundering your reputation over and over again as long as you want, even though the laundering process involves repeat revolution and conquest.

Then, in the end-game situation you describe, your exoplanet expedition launched and your cities left with nothing better to do, you can queue carbon sequestration in every city with an IZ, becoming a secular saint in the eyes of the world, no matter how bloody your history of conquest.

There are indeed plenty of completely satisfying ways to play this game. Its complexity allows that. Playing with internal restrictions against conquest, allowing yourself to do that only if attacked, or to rescue another civ, is a completely reasonable alternative to making the game more challenging without giving the AI the huge advantages of higher difficulty levels, because free conquest is still highly beneficial despite all the clogs the devs put on it it keep it from being the only strategy any player would ever pursue. But pursuing that completely reasonable ideal, whether to make the game more challenging, or to reflect some ideal of how the real world ought to behave, is not something the game can our should reward you for. In the game you describe, you carry the negative marks of capital conquest, but you could erase those with carbon sequestration. Why would either figure into any sort of idealism, either of modeling moral behavior or of limiting your game play to make the game more challenging? You aren't more or less moral for engaging in conquest that destroys only pixels, or for sequestering completely notional CO2. You aren't a better or worse player for taking the benefits of conquest whenever in this game conquest was justified according to your self-imposed restrictions on conquest. The thing is, you shouldn't expect the game to figure out some algorithm to model your ideals accurately. It has enough trouble figuring out how to beat humans just in its own very limited terms of realpolitik.

All that is needed is for the game to recognise that there may be good reasons for someone eradicating a civs capital: refusal to stop spying and refusal to stop converting cities is an easy thing for the game to *log* as a good reason for any civ to invade and take action against a civ that is basically behaving like a prize A-hole. (and then reduce the negative penalties) I don't think such a thing would be very complicated. In the game I was playing if other (friendly) civs are clearly able to recognise that the 2 offending civs were behaving like terrorists then the algorithms are already there.