Does anyone here play Virtual U?

[Young Drachma]

I mean, its pretty intensive, to be sure. But I was wondering if anyone out there played it at all?

I have some ideas and I wanted to see what other folks were doing first.

If you're not familiar with it, its a free game that was developed by a former Harvard President where you run a university. I've seen it talked about on the board before, just looking for players.

Here is the site, http://www.virtual-u.org

[TLK]

http://dynamic2.gamespy.com/~fof/for...hlight=virtual

[Young Drachma]

I didn't know where the thread was, I just wanted to see if people actually played it. My bad....

[SackAttack]

Hey, sweet. I didn't know they'd made it a free download now. I'll have to give it a try.

[Eaglesfan27]

I tried it this past weekend and couldn't quite get into it. SO much information. I might try again next weekend.

[Anthony]

guess you aren't "Harvard material".

[hukarez]

I downloaded this awhile ago, but never got into getting it installed and stuff. Saw some screenshots on occasion and all, but didn't quite get around to playing it and all.

[Young Drachma]

I know, its really crazy. I was trying to dynasty it, but heavens. There is sooo much going on. I've been playing it for a few months now, but I was trying to come up with a model that would work. It might be helpful to try a scenario first, to get an idea of doing each of the different things, before trying to do it all at one time.

I started playing in the summer and it took me months to really get it figured out to be able to do it all. But once you get it, its pretty cool.

Another idea is to put it on pause and do everything you need to do - like setting faculty hiring priorities - before turning on it. As for admissions priorities, the goal is really about getting selectivity down, without getting it too low because that's bad. I like the idea of having graduate students at a small or medium size school, if for no other reason than they graduate so often that it artifically increases the numbers of degrees granted, even if you simultanously make undergraduate admission more selective.

I've noted that spending money on sports is no guarantee that your teams will win. I haven't even correlated that increasing the numbers of athletes does that, honestly. As a rule, I generally cut spending on athletics every year. But again, it has minimal impact.

On the endowment, I've had a great deal of success with lowering the amount of money invested in big market stocks. I always lower that number to about 35% or so, while raising the amount in the bond market to about 45-50%. I dunno why it works, but 9 times out of ten I've been able to increase the endowment significantly in a short amount of time.

In terms of endowment spending, you'll want to ensure that you don't spend a lot, even if you have the money coming in. Like, never above 5% because you can't sustain that type of spending for too long. Of course, I always take a small college with a small enrollment. So, I guess it depends on what size school you get.

In terms of faculty hiring/firing, I would go through in the beginning and look at all your faculty. I would figure out if you can cut some of the non-tenured faculty who don't meet your desires for the faculty (e.g. I always like my faculty to be high in the teaching or scholarship area. If they're not at a high level, I cut them...especially if they were there before I arrived) If you do it once, you can get rid of most of them. Older faculty are generally less willing to take retirement packages, even ones far above what they're at.

I resist attempts by the computer to allocate faculty increases to certain departments, instead I just build up the ones I want. In terms of student life, I always increase the budget but I've never had students who were super happy. So, screw the ungrateful bastards. (hehe) In terms of dorms, in some games, I've actually spent more on building more. Other times, I've just let less kids live on campus.

Increasing tuition while you can is never a bad idea. Giving small amounts of aid to lots of students is a nice strategy too (like saying the school will pay 1-5% of tuition for 90-100% of students) and has worked well to improve numbers.

Hmm..I dunno what else. But that's a quick rundown in terms of my own playing. I'll have more eventually. Hopefully it wasn't a waste of space.

[Pumpy Tudors]

Wow, Dark Cloud, just reading all of that has me itching to at least TRY the game again. I'm going to start downloading immediately. Thanks!

[Young Drachma]

Oh, another idea too. Make sure that you set the priorities in terms of paying salaries for the departments you care about. Don't pay Technology Services people on the same pay scale that you pay your Business or Engineering people. That helps a lot too. That way, you can increase salaries often, but it doesn't affect you the same way it would if they were all making the same amount.

To that end, I would drop adjunct and assistant professors to 0, Associates and Full Professor-1 to a 1 and the last two could be 2 in terms of salaries increase scale. That's another way to save money.

Glad you liked it, I have other ideas...I never thought I'd ever have to inform anyone else about the game. But seriously, its addictive once you get the hang out of it. I stopped playing it for a while when I first downloaded it.

[samifan24]

Guys,

I downloaded the installation file but I keep getting the following error message during the install process: "An I/O Error occurred while installing a file. This is normally caused by bad installation media or a corrupt installation file." Any ideas to get around this?

[samifan24]

Dola- Nevermind. I downloaded a different file and installed it and things worked fine. Don't know what the problem was.

[hukarez]

I just went ahead and checked out the website again...seems like the version I had downloaded awhile ago, was an older version. Didn't realize it was brand spanking new!

[Young Drachma]

There is a new beta out of Virtual U that fixes some of the problems in the 2.1 version. They admit that there are problems - hence why its a beta - but you can download it, install it your virtual U directory and then load the cc.exe file to play the beta.

Just an FYI.

http://www.virtual-u.org/beta.asp

[Young Drachma]

bump...

The maiden voyage of a Virtual U dynasty....

Check it out...

There is a new version 2.11 on the site that is stable. So, if you had the old beta, you can dump that. It works a lot better now, the game does. Not that there aren't 100 other things out right now. But it's free.

That always does it for me.