Mega Events

Mega Events are another fairly big feature in Dark Avatar, and an optional one at that. As you’ll have noticed if you played GalCiv2, there’s a variety of random events in the game. Most of these events impact the game moderately, though a few are fairly big. Mega events, however, are bigger than big. They’re intentionally unbalanced, and get triggered when the game thinks the galaxy has become too boring. The algorithms for selecting a mega event are fairly intelligent, in that the event drawn should shake the galaxy up pretty well and be appropriate for the current situation.

If it’s not your kind of thing, you can certainly disable Mega Events. Basically, if you don’t want huge game-changing events to occur, turn them off. Although I would recommend playing with them on once or twice anyway, just to get a taste of what it’s like.

Mega Events are mostly fun, unless you just hate that kind of a thing. There’s an event that can cause several civs to declare war on one. There’s an even more powerful version of the original “precursor artifact” event, which makes one weak civ start gaining power rapidly. All of their abilities keep increasing constantly – you have to wipe them out or win the game by other means soon. If you don’t, the civ will become so powerful that you will have no chance of standing up to them. A very fun event spawns “Peacekeeper” ships which spread out through the galaxy and attack any ships leaving their owner’s sphere of influence.

While fun mostly, there are also some tweaks that should be made to Mega Events. One that stands out is the Dread Lord event. It makes the Dread Lords arrive to the galaxy, which should send a shiver down your spine, as the Dread Lords are extremely powerful. This event, however, is not. It merely takes a random class-0 planet and gives it to the Dread Lords. Of course, if you allow them to build the planet up, they’ll turn out to be a huge problem. But, as it stands, all you need to do is send a couple of Transports to the planet quickly, and that’s it. Instead of having a Dread Lord armada on your tail, you’ll have a good new planet. This event can probably be fixed simply by also giving the Dread Lords a couple of defensive ships if they spawn.

By far the biggest problem with Mega Events is the Plague event. Currently, it should be renamed “Free Victory”. If you’re at all competitive, Plague should see you take an extremely dominant position, and even if you’re not, it might shoot you ahead of the others. The essence of the event is simple – the population on every planet in the galaxy starts decreasing rapidly, which continues until a cure is researched. Each civ must acquire the cure technology separately.

Clearly, any human player will respond to the Plague event by immediately switching research to the plague cure and increasing research spending if possible. I was hit by the Plague event and did just that, obtaining the cure quickly. I was, though, shocked to see that the AI didn’t seem bothered by the plague. In my case, the Torians researched the cure, although they took too long to do it. Still, the other civs didn’t bother researching the cure, they first did some other stuff. Moreover, they wouldn’t even agree to pay too much if I offered to sell them the cure. So, I witnessed the Drengin, the Korx and the Krynn practically die to the plague. The huge population loss eventually breaks a civ’s economy, which is, really, a point of no comeback. In my game, the Korx got the cure, but they had gone from a superpower to fairly insignificant in that time. The Drengin and Krynn died out almost completely and were able to put up no meaningful resistance to my subsequent conquest.

The AI, of course, needs to assign the cure a mega priority. I can understand, for gameplay reasons, maybe somewhat randomizing the cure priority, but in my mind, it should only go as far as having two options – research the cure immediately, or after the current tech finishes researching. Currently, Plague sticks out like a sore thumb among the events – while some events (Dread Lords) may fail to shake the galaxy, Plague is the only one that gives you a humongous advantage over the AI.

I’d also like to mention a few extra Mega Events I would like to see. One would be the “Technology Leak” event – every civ in the galaxy gains all the techs that the current tech leader has. This should be huge, negating the leader’s advantage. Another interesting event could be making weapons of one kind (missile/beam/bullets) completely ineffective, greatly harming civs who choose to only research one weapons line and have no other adequate armaments. Finally, I’d like a Mega Event that has something to do with ethical alignment. It could be similar to the Peacekeeper event – for example, powerful (but beatable) ships appear that only attack Evil ships.