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PurpleXVI posted:It's actually pretty impressive they kept it running for so long. Decoy Badger posted:The LP curse isn't real, you are cursed to LP. Subtle difference. The thing with Perry Rhodan is, thanks to the main protagonist being immortal, the authors could just make timeskips and/or brutally murder important characters with wild abandon, which kept things fresh. If you look up issues from different times, you'll also realize the series rather blatantly changed with the times: An issue from the 60s, 70s, 80s and so on reads remarkably different from the other ones. (For example, if you compare issues from before the first female authors to after, you risk getting severe brain whiplash) My pet theory is, thanks to creating PR via a collective of authors and editors working together, instead of something resembling how e.g. a corporation would do things, it avoided a lot of pitfalls that curse projects with less authors (or under corporate control). The publisher, Pabel-Moewig, leaves the entire work of creating SF-stories purely to the collective, instead of messing around. Instead the publisher messes around by creating comics, card games, models, music CDs, pen&paper RPGs, a movie, and video games, offloading all its capitalism energy away from the main product. But if you look at the world surrounding the series, you see the obligatory capitalistic abysmal failures and odd junk, interspersed with some rare gems. So it looks like Perry Rhodan survived this long by redirecting corporate energies around itself into the world of PR-merchandise, thus protecting the series itself from too much meddling. At least that's my theory! Libluini fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Sep 11, 2021 |
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Sep 11, 2021 14:20
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So Perry Rhodan has zero alternate timelines, resets or characters getting resurrected because they were popular?
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Sep 11, 2021 19:46
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Well, they did the PR Neo reboot, but that's running in parallel to the original series.
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Sep 11, 2021 21:14
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PurpleXVI posted:So Perry Rhodan has zero alternate timelines, resets or characters getting resurrected because they were popular? It's hard to tell, since there are so many characters and 60 loving years of history. I do remember some choice things happening: The Undead Son One of Perry Rhodan's sons turned out more popular than anticipated, but because of the authors at the time wanting a huge time skip and to kill off a lot of old characters, he had to die anyway. There are however rumors the outcry of him dying in issue 399 made them reconsider, since he was resurrected due to some timey-wimey bullshit after the 1000-year time skip and showed up again in the next arc (which ran roughly 400-499) They're just rumors because PR is planned years in advance, so slipping in adjustments is kind of non-trivial. Considering Roi Danton's ("Michael Rhodan" with his real name) body couldn't be recovered and shortly after, the entire loving star system around his graveyard went nova, him surviving thanks to a time traveling lion man showing up to shove him into his time machine could both be a retcon and the authors just being cruel to their audience.  There's also the thing were his stepson was allowed to live for thousands of years, but then was killed off anyway. Being a relative to Perry is basically being a fridge magnet, as authors often go "well, Perry is not allowed to die, so..." James Bond and The Cat Girl The Smiler, a fancy SF James Bond, was turned immortal because a significant portion of PR-fans can't get enough from SF-espionage. It's really vexing as it's boring me to tears when those issues happen, but welp that's part of the series success too: Being everything for everyone. Anyway, at one point Jennifer Tyron, his wife, got fridged too as her immortal rear end got toasted when their ship got blown up and centuries later, he stopped moping and married a cat girl from a species from another universe. This caused a lot of really bigoted people to rage up in disgust, since apparently marrying aliens is only OK if it's green-skinned space babes looking like they walked out of Hollywood The authors ignored this but eventually decided to break them up anyway. Some people rejoiced, some years went by, and then cat girl got to have some new adventures while The Smiler was finally retired. By death. Now there are rumors that this guy may show up in the future again, but nothing so far Psionic Mouse Gucky, the mouse beaver, is a bipedal alien looking like, well I refer to the start of the sentence. Plofre with real name until he got forcefully renamed by dumb humans. He has more powers than all of Marvel's Mutant Corps combined and a lot of authors wanted to kill him off over the years. But this dumb joke character by one of the more technocratic early authors to "show" the series could have more "feelings and stuff" and really stick it to his colleague, made a lot of fans and so while the authors eventually genocided his entire species, he is together with Perry himself on the official author list for "not being allowed to die, ever". Alternate Rhodans While PR Neo the Reboot is its own thing, the PR-Cosmos is really malleable: Multiple universes exist, and every universe is made up of five parts you could theoretically visit if you have the tech. So technically speaking, the authors never had to make up alternate realities since there are infinite realities already build in. One of my favorite arcs was PR traveling with a giant space ship to the minus side of the universe (part 2 of our home universe) to fight life-draining crystals and a recent arc had Earth switched with an Alternate Earth from the twin part of our universe (part 3 of our home universe, connected to us via part 5, the Grey Zone). Our real Earth had to survive in this strange alternate universe, since while plus and minus parts of the same universe can develop slightly differently, the twin parts of the same universe can't, so while their Earth e.g. didn't have humans on it and all lifeforms had evolved directly out of Ediacara-fauna, most of the alternate sol system was still the same. The main difference being an astonishing lack of life and FTL being harder. Eventually the stranded billions of Earth made contact with some species which also existed back home, but also completely new ones. Said species were the Topsiders, by the way. And then there was this weird alternate reality where evil aliens tried to take over Earth before all of Perry Rhodan happened, and Topsiders came to our rescue and they're now living together with us on what I dub "Earth 3". Resets Also inbuilt! At several points Perry got thrown some curve balls for drama, which led to a reset in power or rebalanced the stakes in some way: Freaky cosmic gods altering the laws of the universe to cause a collapse, freaky aliens visiting the galaxy to cause a collapse by making everyone stupid, several successful invasions and occupations, the list goes on and on. Of course, all of this happens in-universe, so I guess I never saw this kind of thing the same way then in other media. I guess retcons and resets are good actually, if they aren't done clunkily? Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:04 on Sep 12, 2021 |
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Sep 12, 2021 12:02
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Libluini posted:freaky aliens visiting the galaxy to cause a collapse by making everyone stupid Hang on a moment, this one is gonna need more elaboration. Also while I could never imagine starting in on Perry Rhodan myself, considering the sheer volume of PR stuff, reading what you write about it is pretty entertaining by proxy.
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Sep 12, 2021 12:18
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PurpleXVI posted:Hang on a moment, this one is gonna need more elaboration. So the freaky cosmic gods are split into two opposing factions across the order-chaos axis. You have Kosmokraten, and you have Chaotarchen. They can't usually interfere directly in the standard universe, so they have agents do their work. And often enough, "agents" means whole species. Those agents get cool, hyper advanced tech and then get told what to do. One of the tools the order guys used to employ were so called "Swarms", basically a giant force field containing thousands of stars, and their respective planets. Those swarms would fly through the various galaxies, and through their hyper advanced technology they were able to "locally" (i.e. galaxy wide) manipulate the higher dimensional fields permeating the whole universe. Which would cause sentient life in that galaxy to become smarter, helping them develop technologically (in the hopes they developed far enough to become useful agents for their faction of freaky gods). Inevitably, some things went wrong, and one of those swarms started manipulating those fields to make the inhabitants of the affected galaxies dumber instead of smarter. That swarm then decided to take a tour through the Milky Way. Which led to a dumbing down of most people, our immortal heroes (and some others) excepted. Setting up a 100 issue arc in which our heroes had to first rescue the dumbed down Milky Way inhabitants, and later fix issues in that swarm so that it no longer dumbed down sentient beings, and also leaves the Milky Way. As for time skips, there have been quite a few, some skipping several hundred years. Which only really works because the core cast doesn't age, of course. Edit: Just to give you an idea how far along the series is time wise, it's 2071 NGZ (New Galactic Time), which corresponds to 5656 AD. Meaning Jesus' death is not as long ago for us as Perry Rhodan leading humanity to the stars is for current PR humans. And he was head of state/head of government for hundreds of years (more than a thousand at least) in that time span. Torrannor fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Sep 12, 2021 |
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Sep 12, 2021 14:42
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Thank you Torrannor, you saved me from succumbing to the temptation to write a 5+ page essay about the Swarm-cycle. And my hands have already started to hurt because I spend Saturday-night writing extensive documentation on some minor Stellaris-mod I was working on. At this point I just restrain myself to add some meta-character info: As Perry Rhodan was meant to emulate the All-American Hero, but Humane, a lot of people back when the series launched got progressively disappointed when PR, thanks to changing times (written into the stories as Perry just slowly mellowing out as he got older and more experienced), became less and less the Cowboy-stereotype always going in guns blazing, and more and more aliens became friends instead of targets on a shooting range. At the exact same time, parents where dismayed about this openly fascist propaganda teaching kids the fascist ideals of tolerance and friendship. If you wonder what caused this dissonance, it's parents seeing issues with soldiers strangling robots with their bare hands on the cover and drawing conclusions based on that, and not on what the authors were actually writing about. One of the (later retconned as too silly) parts that are so German and PR it hurts was right at the beginning, when the authors didn't want China and Russia looking like the enemy, even though it was the Cold War. So there are some serious contortions going on to give the story some villains before the first evil aliens can show up, without making Russia and China too evil. Stuff I'm going to write about in my Perry Rhodan: The Early Years updates, so please no spoilers!
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Sep 12, 2021 15:11
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Obligatory "it's not archive time yet" update: Recently I was a bit unlucky and needed eye surgery. My right eye is still a bit hosed up and needs time to heal. So while I'm cheating a lot (like making all fonts on my PC way bigger), there's only so much I can do, and writing on my LPs has to be suspended until I can actually put some useful amount of work into them. The doctors at my hospital said, as long as I'm not straining my eyes too much, I should be back to somewhat normal looking capacity around November, so for now that's how long this hiatus will go.
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Oct 14, 2021 18:12
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LPs certainly count for straining your eyes so take your time.
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Oct 14, 2021 22:48
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Thread update: Today I tried writing again, after writing at work went well enough last week to give me hope. It's still not all over, as there are still 1-2 pieces of eye surgery in the near future, but the doctors told me the effects should be a lot less bad then last time and recovery a lot faster, so I can slowly start my threads back up again. My test today was beginning to write the OP for a Let's Play I want to do in the future and I managed to type up 5 pages of text without my eyes rebelling, so I'm willing to take this as a good sign for next week. Yeah, don't expect that one to start anytime soon, but thanks to switching to pirate mode (I'm wearing an eye patch over my bad eye) it seems writing a lot is a thing I can do again, so the hiatus will slowly go away over the next 1-2 weeks. So now you know! Hopefully I can actually churn out some updates next week as planned. That said, my other eye is supposed to get some lasering next week, but doctors (see above, etc.) and my experience with the last non-invasive lasering tells me that reovery time for my good eye is just a couple of days, not really a problem. (My bad eye is done until January-February, so that gives me a time window to get some work done before I'm hospitalized again.) Anways, wish me luck 2022 will see less bullshit rolling my way! I really want to finish my two LPs and finally start the next batch.
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Nov 21, 2021 14:21
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Well, here's to things working out fine. I trust you'll have the eye-patch off before the next surgery? Double eye-patches make for a funny idea though.
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Nov 21, 2021 16:53
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SIGSEGV posted:Well, here's to things working out fine. The lasering can't be done without using both eyes, that's why this took so long already: My right eye recovered so slowly the lasering on the left kept failing, as I was blinded left by the laser and couldn't see enough on the right to follow directions. The eye-patch is just for working, as my left eye otherwise tries to compensate for my poo poo eyesight on the right, which in turn makes concentrated working on a screen impossible. Like, without the patch it's like 10 minutes working, 20 minutes recovering on the bed. That's not sustainable. That said yes, after lasering I often feel like I should cover both eyes with a patch, as dumb as that would be. In truth I just go home, open YouTube and some music, then go to bed feeling sad (right after lasering my left eye is too irritated and my monitor doesn't have this soothing dark blue background my PS4 has). But since my left eye doesn't need full-on hospitalization and hole drilling, it then recovers pretty fast over a couple of days. And since last time they managed to burn half of what needed to be burned, as long as the next session works, I'll be home free for a couple months until my right eye needs its synthetic oil implant removed.
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Nov 21, 2021 18:18
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Well, it's good to know that medically at least the theory for fixing that is ready. I had a period of time with uncorrected eyes compensating for each other and it gave me some nasty headaches over time, I can imagine why the eye-patch is good to have there with a far more serious condition.
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Nov 21, 2021 18:22
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The details of eye surgery terrify me but I'm glad it's working for you!
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Nov 21, 2021 20:56
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Thread update: I have somewhat adjusted to life with one eye (the other being oil impaired and all that) and resumed writing. New updates should arrive this week. My current plan goes OE-Update, MO3-Update, rinse, repeat. Let's see how many eye drops it takes to get this train running again, OK?
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Dec 28, 2021 17:22
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 Lores of Rhodan: Who is Perry Rhodan? Part III Last time, we reached Perry Rhodan’s 8th birthday. This time I think we’re reaching his 10th birthday? Man, I’m so bad at this. More Childhood  Last time, Perry was still eight years old and learning to love astronomy and how to shoot rifles in Wisconsin. And how Jennifer Mannheim becomes the first Wisconsin farmer to grow an alien plant, which turns out to be perfect feed for milk cows. Something that’s utterly inconsequent in the larger scheme of things, I just thought it would be a nice anecdote to share. Then, thanks to the massive amount of anecdotes about Perry’s life littering 3000+ novellas, the actual author of this “biography” has to think fast to get Perry to the next anecdote, so Perry’s uncle accidentally reveals on the telephone to Perry’s mother that he’s teaching him shooting and she flips her poo poo. Since she’s still stuck as a military nurse somewhere in the Pacific, she uses her next telephone talk to organize for Perry to go from uncle to grandparents next. And so young Perry shows up in Chicago next, Andreas Eschbach silently curses whichever authors managed to put Perry at 8 years of age into different parts of the US and gives the reigns back to the “author” of the “biography”, Homer G. Adams. A Greyhound-bus transports Perry from the wilderness of Wisconsin to the civilization of Chicago, where grandma Katherine and grandpa Gerald await him. With a big limousine. And a huge mansion. Turns out the grandparents are filthy rich! He spends some time getting acquainted with his new surroundings, wonders why his grandparents don’t want to live in Chicago proper, since it’s a big exciting city! And then gets to sleep in the old room of his mother. Then the dreams start. The First Dream A grey man walks through an endless corridor, and Perry follows him. The man wears a grey business suit. But is it really? Perry does not recognize the cut, it seems alien. He man never looks back, but Perry can see from behind that he wears unusually long hair, even past his shirt collar at some points. The grey man walks past many doors, and sometimes, he opens one of them. Perry, always the curious child, can not help himself and looks into the open doors before continuing after the man. A door to Perry’s right opens to a desert landscape. A huge white city with enormous sky scrapers grows from the desert. The elegant and thin sky scapers are surrounded by green parks. A shimmering soap bubble the color of nacre surrounds this desert city. Before Perry can see more details, a hot, dusty wind blows in his face and slams the door shut. Meanwhile, the grey man has walked on. Perry runs to keep up with him. Next, the man opens a door to Perry’s left. Perry sees a dirty street, filled with destitute people, some not even wearing shoes. The walls of the surrounding houses have huge holes, the windows are destroyed. Some roofs have collapsed. The street itself is nothing but earth, no asphalt in sight. In some distance, something hits the ground. A yellowish cloud billows forth from the point of impact, engulfing the nearby houses. The people start screaming, and running. As Perry tries to make room for the fleeing people, he sees them protecting their faces with whatever pieces of cloth they have on hand. However, the people ignore the doorway as if it isn’t there, and the dusty cloud slowly draws close to Perry. Suddenly, just as Perry starts noticing a horrible, acrid smell, the door slams shut. Again, Perry is forced to run for the only living thing in the endless corridor: The grey man. Next, another door to Perry’s right springs open, and Perry sees the dark void of space. Six white suns hang perfectly even, as part of a hexagon, surrounding a circle of fire, which in turn surrounds a black nothing. As Perry watches, something exits the black nothing, but the door smashes shut before he can see what it is. Next, another door on Perry’s left: An ocean paradise, under a dark blue sky. He can see some fisher boats, some palms, even some birds passing by. Until suddenly, a bright flash in the distance births a wall of fire, extinguishing the island. And then he wakes up. Welp, after this dream Perry goes to school at Bowen Elementary, slightly confused about this very intense dream he just had. His first day at school goes exceptionally well, especially after he starts seeing the grey man in real life. He also learns two important facts of life: A hick from Wisconsin on a posh school in Chicago is kind of out of place, and school sucks. Days go by, and a poor kid being really smart on a school for the rich makes him even less friends then you would think. He becomes friends with the teacher staffing the school library however, and starts consuming books about astronomy, science fiction and eventually engineering and electronics like candy. Time slowly turns to Winter 1944/45, and he gets a big package of books for Christmas, as his grandparents eventually noticed his love of reading, while still being oblivious to the deep, seething hatred every other kid feels for Perry. Then the kids learn Perry’s grandfather on his father’s side is German, and all hell breaks loose, it still being WWII and all. After enduring slurs and Hitlergrüße for a while, he goes through his options, like starting fights with the kids organizing the hazings to beat some sense into them. But Perry, forever cursed with being a Good Kid, instead decides to go and officially report his bullying, not knowing that the school system really does not care. On his way to report, the grey man suddenly jumps out in front of him, and silently shakes his head. Perry eventually gets the message and reconsiders his plan to make himself even more of a pariah on a school where every kid hates him already with the fury of a thousand angry suns. Still, instead of instant social death, silently enduring the bullying turns out to not work either, and the year ends with Perry slowly turning into a silent introvert, as nothing he or the teachers (who at this point have slowly realized that something is going on) do can stop it for long. Until his grandmother gets wind of this and unleashes the power of Filthy Rich Grandparent on the poor school. The school however, counters with Grand Apathy and Do You Want the City to Know you Have a German Grandson? and wins the battle. Eventually, Katherine Tibo comes up with the convoluted plan of pretending to be ill, which makes it impossible for her to continue caring for Perry, so Perry’s mother relents and allows his uncle to take over again. After this waste of time for everyone involved, Perry Rhodan ends up back in Wisconsin. There, he gets to hear about the end of the war in Europe and his aunt and uncle take it badly when Perry tells them he thinks the war in the Pacific will still continue for some time. Because a dream told him about it. The rest of the year passes, and then Perry’s seemingly prophetic dream becomes truth, as nuclear weapons detonate over Japan and the war ends for good. Some time later, Mary Tibo Rhodan arrives back in the states, changed by the war. Still, the traumatic past seems to be forgotten, and normal family life will soon resume. Narrator: It won’t After that is a short intermission of Homer G. Adams still sitting in prison on July 22nd, 1971, where he gets to experience the first impact of what seems to be the start of World War III, launched by Perry’s escapades. Then it’s back to Perry’s life! But that’s for another time, as I suddenly remember this is supposed to be video game LP. So next time is actually a real update again! To Be Continued Next time: Oh god why is this book so interesting??? Libluini fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Dec 29, 2021 |
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Dec 29, 2021 14:41
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I guess the G-Man is Perry's fairy godparent.
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Dec 29, 2021 20:43
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PurpleXVI posted:I guess the G-Man is Perry's fairy godparent. If that G-Man is who I think it is, that would be a surprisingly accurate description!
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Dec 31, 2021 17:12
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Updates will resume shortly! Though first up is the other thread. (Note to self: Maybe next time finish your first LP first before starting the second.)
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Feb 14, 2022 17:00
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 Hiaturs Notice No, this thread is not dead. I just had some more eye surgery recently and I'm not in the shape to write lengthy posts right now. So this thread is on hiatus until I can look on a PC monitor for more then 1-3 seconds I'll probably pick this back up after Easter, no promises though
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Mar 30, 2022 18:29
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Hoping for a speedy recovery! Good luck, Libluini.
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Mar 30, 2022 18:31
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Wishing you all the best, Libluini.
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Mar 31, 2022 07:40
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LP STATUS UPDATE Right now my eye has recovered enough to slowly get back into things. Slowly. To not overdo it, I've started setting up a new AtariST-emulator for my next LP and looking at where my two current LP-threads stand. 1.) Operation: Eastside Apart from a basically infinite resource of lore posts about Perry Rhodan, the game itself is about halfway done. We've reached the point were manually controlling your colonies becomes a chore, and the build-AI is awful enough to not make things easier on the player. Current plan is to keep posting until we're militarily able enough to defeat enemy fleets without having to "run away" and then launch Operation: ColonyCheat when playing the game stops being fun. Easy enough to do, if the doctors can stop themselves from dragging me into a hospital every six months. 2.) Master of Orion III The undead thread. Ironically, last time I played I realized I was slowly marching towards final and ultimae victory, just that I keep getting stopped by weird poo poo happening: My apartment flooding, repeated eye surgery, etc. OK, this thread is more cursed then undead at this point. Anyway, in May I want to press this forward again. My two main goals for this thread are: a) Stop writing entire novels for each turn, you moron and b) Finish it 3.) [REDACTED] Upgrading my AtariST-emulation made a certain older game suddenly a lot more stable, reducing the number of nasty crashes. Well, it's not game 3 anyway, I just tested it after I finished setting up the emulator (I'm using Hatari, if you want to know). This game comes with an interesting internal limitation: Even the longest campaign possible automatically ends after 100 turns. If we get through this fast enough, maybe I'll let people vote on some of the shorter story campaigns that come with [REDACTED]! Currently though, I'm looking at the nice, simple and very readable print map on the back of my [REDACTED]-manual and compare it mentally with the one shown in-game. Yeah, 100 turns can last a long time, I think. By the way, the only review I could find of [REDACTED] claims the game is very hard, because actually conducting a war demands an insane amount of logistics to handle! That sounds a lot of fun, actually. But let's wait and see if I an at least make two posts before falling into a hospital bed again.
Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:01 on May 2, 2022 |
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May 2, 2022 18:34
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Glad to hear you're feeling better!
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May 2, 2022 18:58
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You could be the LP equivalent of Gucky. Just keep getting brought back by popular demand and you'll be immortal!
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May 3, 2022 19:53
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To ease my self back in, I've started compiling another lore post. And what the gently caress, why are you Americans so weird? The author of my Perry Rhodan Space Biography bringing up some heavy themes is one thing, but when I'm searching for a specific school's history, finding out that "Highland Park" is the US most favorite name for places and that Americans don't want to know anything about their school's history is oddly off-putting. My experience has lead me to belive US-citizens spend their entire days wandering around naming random things Highland Park. "Hey, we have a new park bench, what should we name it?" "Highland Park" "And this new Water Treatment Plant?" "Highland Park" "This Elementary School?" "Highland Park" "I brought some cookies" "HIGHLAND PARK" I know the school's today principal better (thanks to Linkedin) then his own school's history, which I think is the opposite of how things should normally go. Welp, it's my own fault for just blindly opening up that nearly 1k-page fucker of a book for a laugh. At least now I know how Perry Rhodan's school looks.  Next up: Perry learns about racism, and how bad it is. Also all natives are dead, did you know they were all wiped out before 1945? US fact.
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May 21, 2022 12:29
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That sort of thing is more common than you'd think. The best example that comes yo mind is the multiple Alexandrias.
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May 21, 2022 17:50
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Bloodly posted:That sort of thing is more common than you'd think. The best example that comes yo mind is the multiple Alexandrias. I'm well aware of the concept of multiple places having the same name, there are after all dozens of towns called "Neustadt" (New City) in Germany. But I did not expect literally 1638 hits to blast my innocent search straight back into my face. Or that in one state, "Highland Park" refers to schools, in another, it's a city. This is like us naming schools New City, and to be extra confusing, we do that hundreds of times. Hell, why "Highland Park"? What about this combination of words makes Americans think it's important enough to name over a thousand places after it? Basically, it's this sheer excess I did not expect. It's like the school equivalent of trying to search someone named "John Smith"
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May 21, 2022 18:01
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Recently, when working on the next update(s), I noticed one part of the LP ( a lore post) wasn't even linked in the OP. There were also a lot of dumb errors I found during my revision. Hopefully, most of them are now corrected! I also managed to first switch on the program I use to take and deposit my screenshots, and then switch it off again before launching the game. So now there's tons of poo poo missing and I'll have to go back to an earlier safe just to make the missing screenshots. I really should be forbidden from doing Let's Plays, I'm like the worst at this. Edit: At least Thursday is a holiday over here, and my company closes down for an additional day on Friday, so you can now actually expect an actual update before the weekend, as I have lots of time to play and write! Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:13 on May 23, 2022 |
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May 23, 2022 20:04
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I can't believe you went back and corrected errors, you're an LP criminal now.
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May 23, 2022 20:15
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Reptile Rising 13: A Time for Blues New update! And it has been a long time this thread got a proper update. We have learned a lot over the course of this LP. Like that part where I thought STL and FTL-travel were actually handled differently by the game, only to learn that oops no, I just didn’t realize I had to manually lower the flight time down to the theoretically minimum when ordering a ship from flying from its arrival point at the sun to the sun’s planets. After that, flight time for flying from planet 1 to planet 2 in the same system dropped down to 1 turn. Planetary systems in OE still have that whole weirdly realistic thing going on where distance from the sun is calculated logarithmic, so planet 3 is twice as far from the sun as planet 2, and planet 4 twie again, etc. But FTL trumps that poo poo, apparently! Man I wish the manual would have made that clear! But my stupidity is now over, and all future colony ships will reach their targets a lot faster. OK, rant over, update: Start!  Mission Log 011: 22nd August 2326 The last few weeks were intense. While our exploration and colonization program slowly trundles on, the political situation in the New Homellete Cluster has exploded, with multiple factions fighting each other. We repelled multiple attacks by the Akons, and eventually forced them to accept peace, after showing them our strength. We managed to remain at peace with the other humanoids, more or less. The Aras even helped us repelling a large-scale assault by the enigmatic Blues, who took objection to our colony Sheran I. But recently, things took a turn for the worse again: Both the Mehandor and the Arkonids betrayed us, the egg-eating tail-stabbers! Even yet worse things were to come, as the Blues came back, and this time, without help, Sheran I fell. Most of its population made it out in time through the transmitter-network, but not everyone escaped the wrath of the angry Blues. The Blues’s strange disc-shaped ships are heavily coated in an odd substance that withstands any known energy. Neither kinetic force nor energy weapons can penetrate it. The Aras were observed using their own methods of cracking this armor, but while amiable to us, they refused to share their secrets. Now to survive, we must turn to our own scientists. The hopes of our nests ride on their tails. Meanwhile, I must go. There’s a lot of work waiting to be done, if we ever want to set claw on Sheran I again. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  A lot went wrong, and this thread lingered in LP-hell for a good, long while. But now we're back on track! Mostly. I somehow managed to miss that my screenshot program wasn't running for 5+ turns but since I keep multiple save files, I managed to later go back and re-do some older turns to get the missing screenshots. So on we go! Some of those lines are from our scouts going around town. I think we‘re white? To be honest, I sometimes have trouble keeping similar shades straight. Could be we‘re yellow instead.  The situation we left last time: The Akons are trying to assault us, but are mostly at peace with the other colonial expeditions in New Homellete. A huge assault fleet of Blues (our native friends here in the Eastside) is rushing towards our important colony at Sheran I. Now that's bad news.  This is one of several attempts of the Akons to regain their lost colony. Our fleets maneuver to block the assault.  The Akonian ships are a wild mix of slightly better and slightly worse then ours. Well, our best ones at least. This could go either way.  Incredibly, the Akons do not fire. So even I need almost all of my fleet firing each turn to destroy one of their ships, they still lose one ship per turn and we don’t. I have no idea why the enemy AI just flailed around here, but I’m not complaining. Also  , are our weapons bad. Turn 218: We’re still slowly following our old plan of brute-forcing B-levels for both light and heavy industry, to unlock our second best research, defense and ship construction buildings. It’s very slow going, but we’re nearly one third of the way there! Also, surprise: Our XO tells Eresh-Tel about a discovery made observing Blues fighting nearby. Apparently, the Blues do not use shields. Instead, they are using an armor made from some sort of incomprehensibly strange material that seems to have undergone an insane process of molecular compression. How peculiar! After reaching heavy industry B we should probably do something about our current ships being as weak as little kittens.  Since Sheran I is one of our better colonies, I decide to reinforce the planetary defenses. Some last-minute shield generators and a grav bomb catapult. Both will be finished just in time before the Blues drop by.  Then something funny happens: In turn 219, the Terrans ask us for peace. We agree. Now we’re truly the good guys!  In turn 220, one of our scouts accidentally drops on top of a Terran colony. But since we just agreed to a peace treaty yesterday, the ships are now friendly! The “battle” ends with both sides just hanging around for a couple turns, not being able to shoot each other. Interestingly, activating auto-turn will just make the AI move our scout directly next to the Terran colony, as if it is attempting to take the planet. Since both sides run by friendly-fire-is-off rules, nothing happens and the battle then ends.  One turn after that happened, a huge Aras-fleet suddenly drops by Sheran I. Everyone panics for a while, but since the Aras are also at peace with us now, the Aras just move peacefully into orbit and that’s it. Originally, I spend several turns desperately trying to make our planetary defenses target the “enemy” ships, but of course friendly fire is switched off, so it didn’t work. I was quite embarrassed when the truth finally dawned on me. This screenshot is from attempt 3 of going back and taking new screenshots after I failed to do so during the main run. (Attempt 2 had the Aras not ask for peace, and so the colony was obliterated.)  This screenshot is from my third attempt of trying to restore lost screenshots. The orange highlight of enemy ships happens if you’re at peace with them, but without alliance or non-aggression treaty. Also, the stat window for our colony highlights a serious problem with this light-bulb style interface: Sheran I’s couple of planetary shield generators and the defenses of the weapon buildings combined is already enough to fill up the light blue row (for shield strength) completely. Every new improvement to shield strength will simply not show, as the interface can’t loving display it.  And then it finally happens: A massive Blues-fleet arrives. The Aras-fleet hanging around confronts them. We have two scouts, which I move out of the way, and our colony. In other words, we mostly get to watch.  First, our scouts need to go before they’re blown apart.  Strangely enough, the typical Blues-ship isn’t actually that much stronger than our scouts: Maybe twice the firepower, less range, no shields and low hull strength. If it weren’t for the nice female voice telling me that even the combined firepower of our planetary defenses does no damage, we could easily take them on. And so we instead watch helplessly as even our solar system crushing grav bombs just bounce off those weird space UFOs like rain drops. If the Aras aren’t prepared, this will be rather one-sided.  The Blues refuse all hails and start surrounding Sheran I. A withering bombardment follows, slowly breaking through the planetary shields. The Aras rush forward to meet them. Fun fact: In the actual battle, the Aras were a bit faster and managed to block most of the Blues from hitting our colony. This re-enactment is slightly more dramatic.  Amazingly, the Aras brought some kind of secret weapon: The first time one of their ships hit a Blues-ship, it does no damage. But then our spacers discover something very interesting: The armor of the afflicted ship begins to glow and flake off, and all subsequent hits tear deep into the ship’s structure. Soon they witness this happening all over the battlefield: First one Aras-ship will use their strange new weapon, and as the Blues-armor disintegrates, a second one will use conventional weapons to blow the now helpless ship apart. Since the Blues without their space magic are quite fragile, I’m even calling our scouts back for this battle, as even they can tear large chunks out of a Blues-ship after the protection is stripped off. Of course, the game does not tell you which ship is unprotected and which is not: Instead you, the player, has to memorize which ship can be savely hit and which can still nullify your attacks. At least this is the way of things for poor dipshits like our Topsiders, who have no special weapon ready and have to depend on allies. Make no mistake, without the Aras we would just be grilled lizard right now.  After some time I give up cheekily trying to snipe unprotected Blues with our colony weapons and just switch on auto-battle to get it over with. Countless turns later, the last Blues-ship is run down. Sheran I is safe.  In the aftermath, the Aras just laugh off all questions regarding their strange super-weapon, and just leave. A lot of confused Topsiders are left back on Sheran I. As the total immunity to conventional weapons bodes ill for the future, Eresh-Thel and her XO Vlaht-Om agree that something must be done. From now on, weapons research is replaced with “Molkex-Research”, as we now know what this strange substance coating Blues-ships is called. We don’t have to research this straight away of course, and I’m keeping the focus on industry research for now. But as soon as that’s done, I’ll have to drop everything and let our scientists try to find out how the Aras managed to pierce the invulnerable Blues-armor. Otherwise, the Blues could just effortlessly slaughter us over and over. Even worse, as their stats are so bad, battles against them will take longer and longer as our ships improve, but they’d still all die eventually, having done zero damage.  While the icon for weapons research doesn’t change in our main menu, the icon in our colony research window is now this cute little Blue, happily waving his ray gun around. Clicking on this option will tell you that this option is called “Molkex-Research” and until this is finished, the ships of the Blues will remain invincible. This event will happen automatically after a certain amount of first Blues shooting you, which will give you a message about Blues-ships being coated with some kind of special armor, then you shooting Blues, which will do nothing. And a nice woman will tell you so each shot. This then triggers this research project. Also, actual weapons research is impossible until Molkex-research is completed. I think. I wouldn’t complain if the game still gives me the next weapon level of course, but we’ll see. Probably not. Also at the Aras, the science race in Operation Eastside, already being Blues-safe. And since I’m using a patched game, the Aras then apparently continued researching stuff and are now masters of New Homellete. At least for now. (The game originally had a bug which prevented NPC-empires from continuing normal research after they finished Molkex-research. The patch fixed that bug.) Now that the natives were unexpectedly defeated, the Akons suddenly decide that they’re our best friends and agree to a peace treaty I randomly send them on a whim. Unusual for people who just recently send multiple fleets against us, but OK. Diplomatic behavior is somewhat random, leading to cases where your best friends won’t be willing to ally with you no matter what you do, and when you finally do manage an alliance, the 2,5% “random freak out”-chance will trigger and you’ll suddenly be at war. This chance is this game's version of the Mega Evil Empire Function, by the way. Like in Master of Orion III, Space Empires V and other space 4x games, this MEEF will slowly get worse as we get stronger. This 2,5% random war declaration chance grows in proportion to our victory percentage. Around the time we hit 80% of our colonization goal, the 2,5% will have turned into nearly permanent war with everyone. Luckily the AI was programmed by Germans. It is more concerned with building up its own colonies then attacking yours. AI-races do attack sometimes, but in general even when at war with you, you can easily have colonies in the same system and most of the time, the AI won’t bother attacking. There are some background calculations going on, which are supposed to slowly make an AI empire like you more in peace time and hate you more with each shot fired. But since you can just not attack the AI and keep friendly fire safeties on, only active war will see the dislike-ticker actually go up. And if no fighting happens for long enough, the AI starts mellowing out and then you’re eventually at peace again. This changes if the human player gets close to winning, of course: Then the random war declarations will start seriously messing with this system.  Sheran I, the day after the battle: As all buildings except defense buildings were switched off during the battle, the colony’s economy crashed heavily. The numbers tell me that next turn, things should return to normal, but I should also boost industrial production a bit. The defenses I had built up during the turns leading up to the invasion are now a huge drain on the colony. I could also just demolish some of them to free up resources, but eh, the situation is not bad enough to justify that.  Sculima IV, our desert planet and fourth of the four colonies I control directly. By this time, there’s something of a specialization thing slowly going on with our planets: Our main colony is producing warships and unholy amounts of resources for trade, our secondary colony can now spit out unending streams of scouts and colonizers, Sheran I is heavily militarized and Sculima IV has now more research capacity then even the capital. If I find a really good planet, I of course wouldn’t mind adding to that, but with the huge amount of work actually building up a colony represents, currently all but our main four are set to automatic. They’re basically just victory points. Sometimes I go look at how the AI is doing, and while of course it’s very bad at its job, so far it hasn’t managed to kill any of our auto-colonies.  Now that we’re at peace with multiple neighbors, there’s a steady stream of foreign ships arriving at Sheran I. This time around, it’s Terran and Akonian ships. Maybe they want to explore the aftermath of the big battle we had with the Blues?  Meanwhile, our scouts continue to explore New Homellete. Scudunris VI was settled by the Aras, but its first moon, Scudunris VI-1, is only slightly worse and still free.  Immediately, our scout relocates from the sun towards Scudunris VI-1, to become the protector of this future Topsider-colony. A colonizer from our core colonies is dispatched. As you can see, I’ve finally learned to remember how to not do dumb poo poo and instead of taking an insane amount of turns, our scout will simply take 1 single turn to move from the sun to the moon we want to colonize. Our core worlds are slightly farther away though. Our colony ship will take nearly 10 turns to get here.  Fusares I is a planet that went through the same process, and now has both a colony ship and a defense scout hanging around orbit. The planet is slightly worse then Scudunris VI-1, but it doesn’t matter, the AI-governor will deal with this, not us.  Our colonists march off.  And down they go!  Fusares I is a very generous map: Very flat, and the “35% ice oceans” turn out to be just a few frozen puddles here and there. Too bad this planet is so drat inhospitable, that much flat ground would be very useful otherwise. Operation Eastside truly is one of those weird games where a lot depends on RNG instead of skill.  Our future colony Scudunris VI-1 in all its glory: Tiny, cold and partially covered with frozen ocean tiles. Still, ironically it’s one of our better worlds.  Another system we scouted: Scucahe is just a bunch of dead worlds. This is clearly one of those systems I’d rather not colonize at all. Not even to score a victory point.  To keep our friends happy, I’m still giving out surplus consumer goods and light industry like candy. As a result, our major colonies are slowly filling up with heavy industry, as apparently the entire New Homellete cluster decided to build up their industry very equally. (Which then results in enormous heavy industry surpluses, as a lot of buildings use up light industry and consumer goods, while heavy industry is a less used resource.) Ironically, later we will need all this heavy industry, because larger ships need a lot more heavy industry units in proportion to anything else. Since our ships are still lovely, we haven’t actually reached that point yet. The AI of course, has massive production boosts on the highest difficulty, so they’re basically swimming in heavy industry anyway.  This makes consumer goods and light industry more valuable in trading with the AI, and it gives me the idea to give out large chunks of our reserves, to try and get some higher engine and weapon levels on the cheap. However, the AI is programmed to always prefer trades profiting them the most, which makes tech trades very unlikely to succeed. Here, I forget about this, and our “highly advanced super-weapons for PS5s, please”-trading deals get ignored. The only way to get tech out of the AI with any chance of success would be to have a higher level in something the AI values, and then try to exchange what you want for that. But since we’re so backwards in our ship tech, we actually have nothing the AI would want. On lower difficulties maybe, but on “very difficult”, everyone is already ahead of us. We can only try to entice them with resources, but they’re not willing to trade tech for resources. That said, at some point one of our colonies will have enough heavy industry build up I can try some sort of giga-trade with insane amounts of HIUs and see if some rear end in a top hat gets greedy.  Then, surprise! Terrans and Akons visit Sheran I. Very annoyingly, since all three of us don’t want to shoot each other, I have to play through several turns until the game eventually runs out the stalemate-timer. It’s very nice and realistic that neutral parties won’t shoot each other for no reason, but it’s also very tedious that the game still runs a full battle simulation without even asking you if you even want this. I’m hitting auto-battle of course, but that just makes the battle run like someone body-checked you out of your chair and now plays for you. It’s not actually that much faster, but it allows me to read a book or play on my Switch while the computer moves ships around.  In our capital system, things start getting busy on our moon colony. More and more spend colony ships are drifting back for repairs, and the yards continue to spit out scouts and more colonizers. My plan at this point has slowly shifted from “move scout around until viable planet found, then park it there and wait for the colony ship”, to just pair up scouts and colonizers in one package and have them scout in tandem. This should speed up colonization considerably. My second, secret plan will go active the moment we start to close in on that dangerous 80% victory, because gently caress fighting a forever war using OE’s interface. Instead we will, well, implement my secret plan.  Then there is Cor Caliris III. It’s not too small, and has no annoying ocean tiles. But, that’s because this planet is so dry, it tanks its habitability score immensely. It’s also very cold. This planet is basically like if it was always night on Dune. It’s also not very dense, so the gravity is unhealthily low. At this point it registered with me that we found a disturbing number of completely dead systems during the course of this game. A slight unease makes me still mark this system for colonization, just in case we need this victory point later.  Then I’m begging again for someone to give me better weapons, but of course no-one bites, not even for enough consumer goods to cover a small moon completely.  Of course, our NPC-friends have their own trashy trades for us, and I don’t want them to get unhappy, so I’ll have to take them. Even if strictly speaking, we don’t need all this heavy industry. Some choice quotes:  Good trade is as refreshing as a successful surgical intervention. Coordinator Uwasar accepts your offer. To avoid confusion, he is talking about us accepting his trade, not him accepting one of our tech trade attempts. It’s just weirdly worded.  Our commandant Tarpow is known in the entire galaxy to be a honest soul. Come, and trade with us. We will even let you pull a fast one on us, without much of a fight. Guaranteed! Is this an offer?  Crystal Regent Zoltral V has decided that you will need to be taught reason with a hard fist. And the dreaded 2,5% random war chance triggers! Our best friends are now our enemies! Now we’ll have to keep our tails low and avoid fighting until their friendship values tick up enough to accept peace again. How annoying!  Our capital now relentlessly builds new ships for defense. The fleet orbiting Shaulires II is now almost as large as the one parked in orbit of the Ex-Akon planet we grabbed. Just you know, with more modern, larger ships.  Our moon colony in the same system has taken over the task of building explorers and colonizers. Though sooner or later we will need more shipbuilding planets. Currently, we have two good shipyard colonies, one that could be good if I wouldn’t also need to boost research output equally urgently and the fourth is Sheran I, constantly under attack. If e.g. the Blues show up before we can even hurt them, that would be a lot of time and energy spend for nothing, so Sheran I is in waiting position until we can actually defend the colony. And no, running away with scouts stops working after enemies start landing with ful 50-ship fleets, as one of those covers a full quarter of the battle map (roughly 1/6th of the total number of tiles) and our scouts aren’t fast enough to avoid those huge blobs for long.  Then there are several turns with not much happening. The Blues (red) are sending massive fleets everywhere and others, like the Terrans, are responding with their own ship movements. The white triangles are our scouts and colonizers moving around.  Several turns later, ship movements die down a bit. The Blues are still moving around in force, but most of the ships left in our detection range are just single ships, probably scouts and colony ships.  Around turn 232, several of our colony ships have reached their marking scouts, and some new frozen hellholes can join our colonial empire.  Now that we’re at peace, even the Akons are trading with us!  Out of pure bordeom, we will accept your offer.  Merlipus III-1, a small, frozen moon. The surface is very flat and there’s almost no unusable tiles, as we can bulldoze those stone (ice?) spires no trouble. It happens. Another planet ideal for building, but basically a death world otherwise. I’m happily gifting this thing to our AI to toy with. Good luck, governor.  Scudunris VI-1 is another little joke played on us by the game: If you remember, this particular frozen moon isn’t even that inhospitable, it’s still hovering around the mediocre-range. But it also has some real frozen ocean and real mountain tiles, not just decorative ice spires. The usable ground is therefore effectively half of what Merlipus III-1 has. Kind of unfair, really.  Some bad news: Sheran I is under assault by the Blues again. Another small native force is coming in three turns. In our detection range, that is. I’ve been surprised before by large forces coming in from a nearby system in just 1-2 turns and arriving before I can react. If it really is just a small force, we can deploy our run-away scout defense. If not, welp.  One turn later, one of our scouts bumbles into the core system of the Aras-colonization effort. Multiple colonies, Dasala IX-1 here has near maximum habitability and 88 ships hanging around in orbit. Yeah, that’s their capital here in the cluster, no question. Like it sometimes happens, someone else managed to sneak in and take one of the habitable places in this system before the Aras did. The main planet of their weird moon system is actually an Arkonid-colony. It has lovely habitability, but is huge. The many tiles clearly made the Arkonids get greedy. Still, with the main Aras capital right next door, there better not be any war, or it’ll be toast.  Both Terrans and Aras keep pestering us with trade offers. To keep the peace, I keep accepting them.  And then, as I feared, some more Blues-ships join their detected fleet before arriving at Sheran I. The fight is on, and of course immediately lost since we can’t hurt them.  Our scouts do their best, but there just too many hostiles around: Some ship is always in range and can shoot. This means the 3-turn peace-out won’t trigger.  The light-grey tiles show where we can go from there. So nope, that scout is dead too. We’re simply not fast enough. Molkex-research suddenly gains a lot more importance: We need a way to hurt them!  As if losing Sheran I to the natives of the Eastside wasn’t bad enough, a war declaration by the local Mehandor-expedition arrives. Not that it matters much, since we barely found any of their systems, and they barely know any of ours, so that war won’t achieve much, but the timing is still awful.  Time for the oath of disclosure in front of our ray guns!  The ship movements we detect in turn 235 are kind of on the low side. No-one moves large amounts of ships around right now, nothing is threatening our colonies. Though of course losing the detection sphere around Sheran I means we now can’t see most of the Blues-movements anymore. Sheran I apparently sat directly on the cross-roads several of their fleets took through. Those ships should still be moving, but now they’re out of our detection range.  And then turn 236 happens, B-level research in heavy industry finishes and we’re drowned by a ton of new building options. This one is the “planetary fusion reactor” and simply, a better version of our current 1-tile heavy industry buildings. The amount of population and industry it needs to even run makes it hard to use on fresh new colonies, but the high amount of HIUs and transport capacity they give make them very useful on older colonies.  The larger, 2x2 tile variant, is an odd one: It actually produces less heavy industry then four single tile buildings, and the transmitter transport capacity it gives is just about equal, but it eats slightly less heavy industry per turn when running. I guess this allows some sort of min-maxing if you need even more heavy industry for some reason? But since the amount saved is less than the amount you would gain by building four 1-tile fusion reactors instead makes this thing kind of superfluous. Of course I then build them all over the place since I generally do not expect 4x game developers to be so incompetent, but really, this building has no reason to exist and I was very annoyed when I later looked at the stats more closely.  Neoanalytical R&D is our next step up in 1-tile research buildings. I beats our old C-levels with 8 research points per turn to the older ones 5, so of course I’ll need to build them. While 8 instead of 5 doesn’t sound like a great boost, that number is also depressed because of our bad research. I think Terrans would get something like 10 from our older C-level research buildings. NR&D would be something like 16 already.  The new 2x2 Central Lab gets us 24 research points, which is only 3x the amount of the Neoanalytical R&D building. What? Clearly, the developers made an error here. With this building taking four tiles and outputting research for three 1-tile buildings, it is again a building with no reason to exist. Of course again I already built some before noticing they’re straight up worse then their smaller cousins. What the hell, Operation Eastside developers? Did you not have calculators?  Four 1-tile NR&D-buildings take more population then one big lab, but when would that ever matter? Especially since the big thing still nearly eats the same resources as four smaller labs, for the output of three. That’s not very efficient.  I have to make a note somewhere “don’t build B-level huge buildings without checking stats first”. Anyway, here’s our obligatory new spaceport. 2X2 tiles, allows the launch of ships up to 1600m length or diameter. For Topsiders. Races with cylindrical ships could launch up to 1200 m and all sphere-ship builders only up to 800 m, because of the vast differences in internal volume and mass. Still, I assumed 800 m globes (battleship-size) would be the maximum possible, but apparently I was wrong. Welp, we probably should invest in ship research finally. Our largest ship currently is only 400 m long! That’s 1/4th of the ship sizes we can now launch and land.  The Terra-class shipyards are just the obligatory 1-tile, but better building.  It’s bigger cousing, the four-tile Arkon-class shipyard, continues the odd history of making the bigger buildings worse than just building the four smaller ones. Though in this case, big yards need tons of population to function, and the Arkon-yard needs approx. 500 population units less to function. Which would be a bigger deal if the Arkon-yard wouldn’t only have 2-3 times the output of one Terra-yard. You could gain the same effect for less resources spend by simply builiding three Terra-yards instead and using that fourth tile for something else. Personally, I’ll probably build one or two of those monsters in total, just so I can claim to have big shipyards, but if you want to truly min-max your building capacity, you will probably never, ever built this.  We’re still not done! We’re also gaining more military buildings! The planetary disintegrator doles out an incredible 480 damage up to 6 tiles away from the colony, at the cost of adding no defense at all to the planet. A pure offense building. I feel like I should point out that a planet only has one range, and that’s the one of the lowest range weapon you have. So I hope you remembered to go around demolishing the older weapons, or you can’t actually profit from higher range installations!  Now it’s getting technical: The 2x2 tile Heavy Needle Ray Cannon is a monster that’s basically a very specialized heavy impulse cannon. As a reminder, impulse cannons shoot out extremely dense particle beams, essentially a weaponized form of your basic sublight engine. During a time when people in this universe had some real trouble with energy shields, there were some Terran experiments with making the impulse of an impulse cannon ever more dense, or “needle”-like. A Needle Ray Cannon is optimized to pierce energy shields with their extremely concentrated particle impulses. As that is not exactly non-trivial to achieve, with a normal impulse cannon already shooting out extremely condensed impulses in the first place, the end result for us is a complex four times the size of our older impulse cannon installations. It shoots out 600 damage and has a range of 6 tiles, and like all B-level military buildings, it has a detection range of 2,5 turns. More importantly, the HNRC-emplacement also adds 180 armor and 300 shield strength to your colony, so this is the first time in a long while where building the bigger version of B-level stuff actually makes sense. The amount of resources needed to build this thing is cripplingly huge, though. Your economy better be ready if you want the HNRC on your planets.  Thank gently caress that’s done. Since we really, really need it, I change our major colonies immediately to research the Blues’ weird armor-thing. Ironically, thanks to ingrained habits, I keep forgetting that the patch I’m using added a shortcut to switch the entire empire to what kind of research you want. It’s a very basic “hit a number between 1-8 to change research”-kind of thing and only works in the main menu, but it’s there. And I keep forgetting it exists.  Cor Caliris III is officially the worst planet we ever colonized. But, it’s also very flat and easy to built on, so I succumbed to temptation and assumed direct control. Meanwhile, our technically far better new ice planets are all getting hosed up by our bad AI governors. My decision making skills work on the same level as space 4x AI.  As always when new buildings are available, I spend some turns going around ripping older ones out and placing the new ones in. It kind of works, as long as you don’t cripple your economy by overdoing it. It also only works because I’m replacing old buildings with new ones. And a B-level 2x2 monster is still better than a C-level 2x2 one, so mathematically it works out, even though I probably should play more efficiently.  Around turn 238, our scouting efforts have found this little “gem”. The Canokamal-system has one better option, but of course that one was taken already, as this is an Akonian system. I’ll still take this, though. I know after all, that just for winning, planet quality doesn’t matter. One single dying Topsider in an abandoned command center is all we need to politically claim the planet as a “colony”.  The same turn, several of my new explorer/colonizer-pairs are ready, and so this huge star of lines explodes from Shaulires, towards half a dozen unknown systems (and one lone colony ship is going to Canokamal). Spitting out our exploration/colonization in large, but manageable chunks should speed up our progress a lot. And of course, eventually it’s time for my secret plan.  Our Mokex-research has seen some progress, but we’re still a long ways off. Also, Star Lord Adanil of the Akons actually is the first of our fellow expeditions to go one step beyond peace and asks us for a non-aggression treaty. Well, why the hell not? Star Lord Adanil will show you that he is free from racial prejudice and will offer you a non-aggression treaty. As an inferior and hopelessly outclassed race, you should not wait too long contemplating our offer!  This update then ends with the Aras giving us light industry for a change. It’s even an equal trade! This is one of those rare moments where using OE’s trade function feels less like giving out diplomatic gifts, and more like actual trading. To Be Continued Libluini fucked around with this message at 15:05 on May 29, 2022 |
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May 29, 2022 14:59
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That's quite the setback, I hope you can turn this around. Isn't it a very bad sign that the AI is so much further along in their research? Since the scout ship trick has lost it's usefulness, how can you keep up with the AI with your outdated ships? Not to mention that Topsider ships are worse than most others in general.
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May 29, 2022 17:55
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I presume that with there being a tech ceiling, it's a matter of outlasting the AI and then once there's tech-parity, beating the AI by not being dumb as rocks.
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May 30, 2022 12:07
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I don't think the position is that bad. It's a 4x game, so still being in the explosive growth phase is good. Doing so while your opponents are spending money on fleets but, critically, not attacking you, is even better. I'd guess that if Lib can survive the next update's worth of diplomatic whimsy victory is practically assured via overwhelming output. This assumes that Topsiders can eventually throw more than angry glares towards the enemy, though.
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May 30, 2022 15:23
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Thread update! Yeah, I'm still not dead yet. The last two months I was basically absorbed into Stellaris and NMS and spent ridiculous amounts of time on these games. (Also Grandia II for the Switch in Hard Mode, because or some reason I got obsessed with finally beating the game. Still not finished though, I was mostly playing on my work commute.) To sound less than a lazy rear end in a top hat, I was also incredibly busy at work, and most of the days to mentally exhausted after work to do more than play with cat + play some random video game + listen to music + sleep. Sorry! I will try to get the thread(s) moving again, so you can get at least one fresh update before my next eye surgery in August.
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Jul 31, 2022 09:18
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Grandia 2 is an acceptable reason to miss updates.
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Jul 31, 2022 20:45
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So, thread update: Yes, I'm still not giving up. There were just some more health-related delays, like my 3rd eye surgery this year. Seems my doctors also don't want to give up! But from next week onward I'm deemed fit enough to return to work, and so I'm planning to schedule some time to work on new updates. No promises, as the last couple months sucked balls and I have no idea what else can go wrong
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Sep 11, 2022 10:09
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Goddamn that's rough. Take care, Lib.
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Sep 11, 2022 10:21
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Obligatory post so this thread doesn't fall into the archives. (I'm pressing really hard to finish my other screenshot-LP right now, sorry for the delays.)
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Nov 6, 2022 11:27
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Do threads even fall into the archives anymore?
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Nov 6, 2022 11:37
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