What - nobody else is disturbed by the fact that anomalies disappear when saving/reloading games? Personally, since I play on gigantic maps, and games take a while to progress, I believe this results in a large anomaly reduction.

I can confirm now from save files that this definitely happens. If any devs happen to be reading this, I'm pretty sure it actually happens when a file is saved, rather than loaded (see *, below). It is conceivable, to me, that this is WAD, but whether its a bug or not, surely this is not desireable behavior!


* I have a file that when I load, there are 2 particular anomalies visible, then if I save w/ a new filename, before doing anything in the game, if I reload the new savegame, those 2 anomalies are gone. I pretty sure that they are completely "gone", and have not just become invisible, as described in the previous post on disappearing (although I'm not 100% sure on how to test that - I simply looked for tooltips, assuming the "invisible" anomaly would still show its tooltip).

Same problem for me. I also play on gigantic map.

Not to say it's not intended. If anamolies are rolled on once you run through them to determine what bonus they give, this will keep epopel from reloadign a game a million times tillt hey get the bonus they want. If they were fixed, some people would probably use some sort of save file editor to move them closer to their space, or in metaverse if it was tamper proof, they would just look up location and the bonuses they give. The incentive is there. I woudl say that the location of these anamoleis shoudl be redone everytiem you reload the game.

Not to say it's not intended. If anamolies are rolled on once you run through them to determine what bonus they give, this will keep epopel from reloadign a game a million times tillt hey get the bonus they want. If they were fixed, some people would probably use some sort of save file editor to move them closer to their space, or in metaverse if it was tamper proof, they would just look up location and the bonuses they give. The incentive is there. I woudl say that the location of these anamoleis shoudl be redone everytiem you reload the game.

Now isn't that a silly idea! For one thing, in a single player game, if somebody really wants to go to that kind of effort for an exploit, I don't see why the game designers would care. Making a single player game tamper proof is a waste of time, and worse, if it impedes the quality of the game for normal players, it's just plain stupid.

If the game designers did care (and for an RPG game, that makes more sense), they should use a fixed random number seed on reload - Civ 4 uses this (explicitly changeable by option), Wizardry 8 designers put a lot of thought into the question and implemented a perfect solution.

Guess I'm funny that way - I call a multiplayer game one that you actually play against another player, in the same game - but maybe that's just me.

Anyhow, using a fixed random number seed would solve the problem you are describing. If they did this, then everytime you hit the anomaly you would get the same result. As the game stands, you can use multiple reloads to change the colonization result on each load, so this problem exists independently of anomalies.

But any way you cut it, making a game "tamper proof" or even a little bit "tamper resistant" when the data resides on your hard drive, is problematic. Its just way too easy. If that's the way the Metaverse is implemented then there's going to be lots of people out there that find it easy to cheat.

Putting the saved game data on the server (as Diablo does for their competitive rankings), makes it much harder for people to cheat (although even then, people complain loudly about exploits and hackers). If the Metaverse were implemented that way (and for all I know, it is), then you wouldn't care about people tampering with saved game data in standalone games.


Bottom line, us standalone players really want a game that plays continuously, without weird save/reload issues. This is a critical feature for those of us who can't afford to play more than an hour or two at a time (or leave it running permanently, like Iztok Bitenc does).