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Operation Eastside: The Natives Are Armed With Ray Guns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwY2vr_DUrg For newcomers: Here are the updates. Operation Eastside is a space 4x set in the unbelievably vast German SF-universe of Perry Rhodan. And while it can be played without knowing a thing about Perry Rhodan, it’ll probably help a lot if you actually know what is going on here, so I prepared something of an introduction for all the Non-Germans reading this thread. As always when I’m writing for my Let’s Plays, I put comments and stuff like this. In theory, this stuff right here is just added value and if you just want to read pure descriptions of space 4x things happening, you should be able to skip these parts and not miss anything. A fair warning though: I’m an idiot and may just accidentally pack something important in italics after totally forgetting this intro part I just wrote. An Overview about Perry Rhodan Perry Rhodan is as important to German SF as Dr. Who is to British and Star Trek to American SF. The German Sonderweg in this case is that instead of depending on lame TV and movies, Perry Rhodan is solely a literary experience, as should be expected from the superior intellectualism of German culture.   Perry Rhodan, All-American Hero Perry Rhodan started as (and still mostly is) a serial in a novella-format called “Groschenroman” or dime novel / penny dreadful in English. By now the series has bypassed the number 3000+, thanks to being released week after week like clockwork since the early 60s. No other published dime novel in Germany, and probably in the entirety of Human history, has ever managed to duplicate this success. The series managed to hit on a rather good formula for long-term success by doing mainly the following things: 1. Making sure Perry Rhodan and every really important character becomes immortal so the writing can continue indefinitely into the future. 2. The writing is done by an entire cabal of authors, instead of a single one. 3. The authors are over time renewed by new authors joining up. 4. Use the growing fandom to attract budding new SF-writers to the series. So while many, if not all of the authors from the 60s are now dead, Perry Rhodan continues. Of course there were attempts to get out of just being a series of penny dreadfulls, with more or less amounts of success. As this LP proves, there were video games (yes there are a couple more, but none of them in the space 4x genre), there was a bad attempt at a movie using an Italian director, some comics and finally, books and spin-offs. Even a short-lived series of model kits followed and there were two artbooks with highly technical lineart drawings, one for Terran and one for the most important alien ships. After the series managed to get into 4-digit territory, there were re-launches (I followed the 3rd and 5th edition for a while, but nowadays they’ve all been stopped) and then the mighty Silberbände (Silver Volumes), huge hardcover volumes with a neat-looking pseudo-3D hologram of one of the serial covers on the front. Inside, multiple (up to a dozen, sometimes) of the original stories, edited and corrected to make more sense (as keeping track of the growing PR-canon became quite the adventure during a time without internet and with mechanical typewriters). The Silver Volumes are now up to volume 150+, so even if you want to go go the “easy” route and reading only the improved version of Perry Rhodan, by now you’d need an entire library just for the hardcovers. Of course it’s the 21 st century now, too: You can easily get all the Silver Volumes as ebooks, which I honestly recommend to everyone interested in Perry Rhodan. Uh, and you should know how to read German, as translation in other languages always lags behind immensely. I think Japanese readers have a good chance of getting into Perry Rhodan nowadays, as Japan has had enough fans to sustain a Japanese translation, but English translations have run into a lot of inexplicable trouble over time. Perry Rhodan took hold in France, the Netherlands, Japan, Portugal and the Czech Republic, but English versions all failed, joining the list of other countries like Russia and China, where PR also perished. There’s some old American version that has been discontinued if you want to find something in English. Or better, the more recent Lemuria-cycle was translated into English as an experiment. That one is a small, self-contained cycle of six books set in the Perryverse, and as long as you aren’t willing to learn German or Japanese, probably your only possible contact with this series. Here’s a link! So here we are: In a parallel dimension where English-speakers are excluded from something awesome thanks to speaking a lesser, unimportant language. At least anime-fans could theoretically use their command of Japanese to get through the first third of PR using the Japanese version?  The French version by the way seems to be in another format, so there are less individual volumes, but multiple novellas are included in them. The French version has some weird holes in it, due to some books and arcs not being included, but after the Japanese one it seems to be the most complete apart from the original German one.  Even though it’s still a fun read, like the first original Star Trek series (uh, to view, I mean), early PR can be a bit rough along the edges. And it will probably lead to a serious culture clash as PR often obsesses a lot about technical minutiae: Both the original series and the printed versions of the Silver Volumes often come with technical cutaways of spaceships and other space equipment. Many authors (especially the early ones), also like to drone on for pages about whatever technological Wunderwaffe is important for the problem at hand. Another thing which will clash wildly with especially American readers, is the militant pacifism of Perry Rhodan: Sure, there are tons of armed conflicts, but even early on many of the most hostile aliens are converted to friends of humanity, instead of just being shot. And as the series leaves the 60s behind, pacifism gets more and more extreme: Even the stereotypical space empire (here good, by the way) eventually collapses and is replaced by a more democratic looking space nation. SF-fans who are accustomed to discussions about if Han shot first will probably at least raise an eyebrow at heroes who prefer to get knocked out and then talk themselves out of trouble instead of shooting at all. PR also has tons of non-lethal weapons, which allows authors several levels of escalation between not doing anything and blasting people with death rays. Though now that I think of it, if you’re into Star Trek instead of let’s say, David Weber, you’re probably familiar with Perry Rhodan thinking. It’s a lot like Star Trek on acid. I’m really unfair here for the sole purpose of making dumb jokes. Now of course all of this information doesn’t tell you why, when looking at the available races of Operation Eastside, you see HUMANS, HUMANS, HUMANS, HUMANS, CONEHEAD, WEIRD REPTILES as your choices. Weren’t there enough aliens around to fill the roster out a bit??? Well, yes. Even in the time the game is set, there were lots of possible interesting choices. But, since aliens in Perry Rhodan are seldom Star Trek-like rubberhead aliens, the developers ran into serious trouble trying to balance out the edges of the development triangle of budget, time and content. In the end they flinched and took the easy way out, as there also a lot of Humanoid species who all look rather similar in Perry Rhodan. There’s a lot less effort in programming five different versions of Humans plus space lizards, you see? Also easier on the art department, though if you know the style of PR-art, you realize that most of the in-game art was probably recycled from the books. So it’s not like the art budget was really high in the first place. Anyway, as this is a Let’s Play of a space 4x set in the PR-universe, and not an extended essay about PR itself, let’s next take a closer look at what exactly awaits us. 24th Century Imperialism Operation Eastside takes place around the year 2326, and the galaxy is dominated by several galactic superpowers. Thanks to copying advanced technology from the Humanoid Arkonids, Humanity has made it to the stars, colonized many planets, and formed a polity called the Solar Empire to protect itself. Thanks to getting some neat gifts from a minor space god and some technological ingenuity, the Solar Empire can command the same awe and fear among the galactic races as the old, decrepit Arkonid Empire itself, despite being much smaller and younger. The political system of the Solar Empire is a bit hard to describe, as it not only changed over time, it technically wasn’t even an empire: There is no emperor and Perry Rhodan itself, while being elected to lead the empire as Großadministrator again and again, only lead the Solar Empire directly during the about 10% of the time we can point to thanks to serial volumes talking about him being Großadministrator. Modern PR has him doing poo poo while not being king poo poo of space mountain way more often, but in early PR the basic assumption was that Perry himself was some sort of Space Churchill, regularly being elected when space poo poo hits the space fan, but not so often ruling during long, boring peace times. But since no-one wrote about those boring times, it looked a lot like he was space ruler 100% of the time. At least that’s the official retcon after the authors realized Perry being space dictator all the time looked a bit odd, regardless of how often they wrote stories about Bad McEvilDude trying to manipulate the people into voting against Perry but failing miserably. (Though Putin would probably really like those if someone manages to translate them into Russian in the future.) Aside from this oddity of the protagonist also being space president a lot of the time, the Solar Empire was at first founded in secret, with many of the first colonies founded many thousand light years away from Terra itself, to help keeping the coordinates of the motherworld safe from alien threats. Because of this, the empire was highly decentralized from its inception and only later became more centralized, including a later wave of colonization of systems closer to Terra. Politically, it’s a mess of councils and parliaments with people spending most of their time everywhere electing officials for all the moving parts of their government. The more hierarchical Arkonids find this amount of democracy disturbingly excessive. Atlan da Gonozal, an Arkonid and Perry Rhodan’s later best friend, helped revitalize the dying Arkonid Empire from its sad nadir in 1971, where some barbarians with primitive moon ships could successfully destroy an Arkonid battlecruiser and Arkonid emergency beacons where more seen as loot beacons for enterprising young species, up to the point where the slowly strengthening Arkonid Empire joined together with the Solar Empire into the galaxy-spanning United Empire. Even other, smaller polities and some rather strange ones like the realm of the Positronic-Biological Robots (Posbis) from the edge of the Milkyway, ended up joining with the UE.  A map of the Milkyway, from Perrypedia. Just so you aren’t confused, because some astronomical maps of our galaxy tend to put Earth into the southeast of the map instead: In the Perryverse, the galaxy is turned around so Earth is in the Westside instead. One of the more annoying things about astronomical objects not actually having a “north” is that you can do whatever you want as long as you carefully define your starting point. At least this here is something that’s actually been done sometimes, imagine the chaos if someone puts Earth in the Northside instead! Remembering where everything is in relation to everything else would be terribly confusing if you had to turn the galaxy like a wheel in your head to get the positions most people are familiar with. Anyway, now that you now where we are, back to galactic history: Around 2326, this monstrously powerful empire still holds together after over 200 years of troublesome existence. But even more trouble is brewing and the United Empire is now close to its dissolution. In this time, a large region over 60 thousand light years from Terra is discovered with apparently no huge empire holding sway over it. When asked, the Arkonids just shrug and claim they had better things to do then travel to the other side of the galaxy, with their empire falling apart and their civilization dying and all that. And as Terran civilization is still so young and inexperienced, they just kind of take this incredibly brazen lie at face value. So in a desperate attempt to foster political unification, the Solar Empire (somewhat the defacto ruling nation of the UE) decides to send out colonization expeditions to peacefully claim the new galactic region for the United Empire. But also to not-so-stealthily explore that side of the galaxy in force. I could pretend that this actually didn’t happen in the series proper, but considering the sheer amount of poo poo written for Perry Rhodan, it would probably turn out there are at least a dozen stories just like that from this time period I just don’t know about, so I won’t claim this. And now you, the player, gets elected to lead an expedition of hopeful colonists to the other side of the galaxy, not knowing that the imperial administrators responsible for the expeditions going out hosed up royally: Around the same time your ship arrives in the Eastside, Terran explorers stumble over the inhabitants of this side of the galaxy. The Eastside in fact does have a galactic superpower in it. Just a rather isolationist and decentralized one, which had until now not much interest in the rest of the galaxy. Your colonists are in for a lot of fun! Operation: Eastside  OK, so now you know why you’re here, colonizing space. But how does this game actually work? First, Operation Eastside is somewhat of a mix of different concepts. Combat works a lot like in Master of Orion 2, but building up your colonies works instead like a completely different game most of you probably never heard about : Utopia for the SNES. (Utopia is basically SimCity in space with aliens.) The way colonization works on the other hand, is a lot more involved than in MO2 and reminds of the later MO3. Like in Master of Orion 3, the game allows you to do dumb poo poo like putting your colonists on a tiny island in the middle of a planetary ocean or trying to colonize the 9th planet of the Hell-system. Only in this game, thanks to the second, SimCity-like game hidden inside the space 4x, you also get to watch your colonists die! OK, they’re still just numbers, but seeing those numbers go down on an individual planet shocks more if the abstracted “population unit” is only like 10 people, instead of millions or billions smooshed together like in other space 4x games. Luckily OE has some mercy and the RNG generating planets has several conditions which immediately make colonization impossible, like 100% of the surface being magma, for example. There are tons of boringly lovely worlds you can find and the rare “gem” with extreme low habitability conditions without hitting full 100% death world on at least one of them is rather hard to find. If you do find one of those rare super-poo poo planets, the game simply assumes you’re not dumb enough to drop your colonists on the one lonely tiny island on planet frozen hell. It won’t stop you either, though!  No relation, I just like this picture.  We will come back to colonization in more details later. Choose Your Own Imperialists The very first thing to do is to select which kind of evil space overlords we want to dominate the innocent people of the Eastside with, and since the game was made in 1998 with a rather tiny budget, the selection is rather lacking: Terrans  Terrans are the youngest and most ambitious of the Humanoid races. They’ve developed on some weird backwater no-one cared about for thousands of years. They think it’s funny to call their planet “Dirt” in one of their many local dialects. Starting with co-opting tech from the Arkonid Empire, they’ve managed from barely reaching their own moon in 1971 (local time, counted from the year of the birth of some local religious figure, a prophet or something) to building an empire with almost a thousand colonies, countless space ships and finally, merging with most other galactic powers into a titanic, galaxy-spanning power. Their ships are, since they copied everything from them, essentially the same as the Arkonid ones: Huge globes of metal with a ring toroid housing the main sublight drives around their equator. The main differences are irrelevant for this game, since we’re just a dumb colonist expedition thrown together on the cheap, so we won’t get planet-destroying transform cannons or any of that good poo poo. And even the mediocre poo poo has to be tediously researched, since we’re cut off from the rest of the galaxy until the end of the game. And after the game ends we obviously don’t need the help anymore! Statwise, Terrans are absolutely average in everything, which makes them the second worst race in-game. On the other hand, they also don’t have any downsides, so they’re at least very flexible. There’s a table in the manual, counting bonuses and penalties. Most races get enough bonuses to more than offset their penalties, only the Terrans and one other race are poo poo out of luck. Though technically speaking, at least Terrans don’t get a penalty on top, they’re just average in everything. Hilariously, the game attempts to cramp all of the convoluted history of up to that point hundreds of novels already into a few short paragraphs of fluff, trying to give you an overview. It makes Perry Rhodan look even more like a dictator, since all the nuance is lost and he is just the non-descript immortal leader of all of mankind for some reason. Also a lot of this information was obsoleted shortly after the game was set. Not relevant if you only care for this game, of course! Arkonids  The stereotypical empire. In every other piece of SF, they would also be evil, but evil is not really a thing in PR apart from individual people. Those can be revoltingly evil pieces of poo poo, but space nations or races are at the worst manipulated or misunderstood. Anyway, Arkonids. Their civilization developed in a far away globular cluster named Thantur-Lok (or “M13”, if you’re a Terran barbarian). Thantur-Lok is nearly 34k light years from Earth/Terra. It’s kind of humbling to think that at one point, Terra was a colony at the outskirts of their empire. They look superficially like Humans, with some physiological differences like a bone plate instead of single ribs. Makes operations on most of their inner organs a nightmare, but on the other hand, having natural plate armor instead of some loose ribs makes it helluva hard for the environment to injure said organs. They tend to be called “albinotic” a lot, thanks to a tendency to have fair skin, red eyes and white hair. The twist: This is actually influenced by their homeworld’s culture, as they normally tend to have a uniform velvety brown skin and at least the female Arkonids sometimes and rarely get to have blue or green eyes instead of unrelenting red. While the original population went space whitey so hard they even have skin creams to make their skin even whiter, many of the colonist populations went back to normal skin color eventually. Several thousand years ago huge pogroms killed or drove off everyone with darker skin from the homeworlds. That’s how serious they were with being white. They’re also unrelentingly aggressive space imperialists when not held down by degeneration. A whopping 18000 years ago the Arkonids split from another Humanoid race, the Akons. Before that, the Arkonids were simply Akonic colonists. After that, they used their superior technology to colonize and conquer most of the known galaxy. At their height, there was even an Arkonid colony on Terra itself, until enemies bombarded the continent of Atlantis until nothing was left but some ruins on the seabed of the Atlantic ocean. Strangely enough, it is rumored that the space adventurer Atlan visited Bolivia at some point. He was the only Arkonid to do so, though. Then everything went to poo poo. After a series of devastating wars against the hydrogen-breathing Maahks, the empire entered a long and peaceful phase of slow degeneration, with most of the population losing their will to create. The nadir of this development was when the most important scientific expedition of the empire had exactly two people who weren’t completely mental. On board of a 500 m battlecruiser which had to be controlled nearly 100% by its computer, as the hundreds of normal crew members spend all their time playing highly advanced Arkonid computer games instead of doing their jobs. By now, centuries later, the empire is slowly recovering, but still in a bad shape. This game plays actually just a couple years before the Arkonids decide they’re good enough now to leave the United Empire to do their own thing again. Their ships look exactly like Terran ships, since the Terrans got all their fancy space tech from Arkonids in the first place. Arkonid technology is still among the best the galaxy has to offer, but of course a dirty colonial expedition can’t expect to get the good poo poo, either. When starting the game as the Arkonids, feel free to imagine some insufferable official on Arkon, with lily-white skin, making sure your expedition of worthless brown people only gets the cheapest, most worthless poo poo to ensure you fail. Then he’ll rub some skin whitener on himself before leaning back to play some Arkonid video games. As Arkonids, a player gets a bonus to consumer goods production and a large bonus to living space. Light and heavy industry get some minor penalties, while trading, military and spaceship construction is just average. And since you’ll be playing Arkonid colonials, the aftereffects of the thousands of years of slow degeneration are mostly gone and you get additional bonuses to population growth and research. Springer  The “Jumpers” are another Humanoid race related to us. The Mehandor, as they call themselves, were originally just one dirty group of Arkonid colonials among many. They settled the planet Archetz just 44 light years from the Arkonid homeworlds in Thantur-Lok and over time developed into a society of traders. Living on a planet with 1,19x of Terra’s gravity lead to some adaption over thousands of years and the typical Mehandor of the 24th century Terra-time now is a huge, viking-like brute with wild red hairs and thick, long beards. Their beardless women tend to be tall and beautiful Valkyries –not that many aliens would be able to notice that, as the Springers are shockingly patriarchic. About eight thousand years ago the Mehandor used the weakness of the Arkonid Empire just after the Maahk-wars to snatch themselves the galactic monopoly on trading. Since then they’ve become a civilization of mostly empty planets and most of their population living on-board their cylinder-shaped trading ships. Mehandor are organized in clans and family-groups, generally with a male patriarch leading them. But larger threats can lead to them joining up in larger fleets to protect their interests. The name “Springer/Jumpers” comes from the main FTL-technology in use for most of known history until Terrans showed up and got uppity: The “Transition Drive” allows to make jumps through hyperspace, generally from one set of coordinates to another. Since Mehandor live on starships jumping from star to star, people started calling them “Jumpers”. Early on they became a prime threat for Terra, mostly because of the Terran love of free trade, which the Mehandor absolutely despise as long as it isn’t their trade. At the time of the game, the Mehandor have mostly resigned themselves to the fact that Terrans can’t just be shot with their space guns until they graciously gift them all their trade rights and the Terrans have learned that the Springers are really good at trading, so there’s money to be made, natch! Still, if you trust a Mehandor, be prepared to be scammed out of all your money. The Mehandor are basically just stronger, more phenotypically uniform space Humans. They’re good at trading because that’s what they’re doing for longer then Terran civilization has existed, but it also has made them somewhat mentally inflexible. If they can’t trade with someone and can’t shoot them to steal all their stuff, they’re generally at a loss. They’re space vikings. In-game, you get large bonuses to trading and space ship construction and a small bonus to consumer goods production, while pop growth, living space and military are average. They get some minor penalties to light industry, heavy industry and research, basically what you would expect from a civilization where everyone spends their time constantly flying around trying to sell you factories instead of building them themselves. Akons  What if space bastards, but harder? The Akons are the dudes the Arkonids rebelled against, and yes, they too are related to Terrans. Physiologically they’re darker skinned Arkonids with more hair colors available on your open world RPG character generation screen, but mentally. Oh boy. The Arkonids think they’re arrogant and haughty. And they’re also super-prideful! Living with one of them must be hell, even for other Akons. If the old enemies of mankind had had some sort of arrogance detection device, instead of looking for illegal time experiments, these guys would be so dead. But, they hadn’t and while the ancient empire of mankind perished, this group of colonials hiding in the Akon-system survived. Later on they decided to colonize M13, which ultimately caused everything else I described above to happen. When the Arkonids rebelled and took M13 for themselves, the Akons went back into hiding, making sure none of their dirty colonials’ primitive transition drives could reach their home system. This all went well until some pesky Terrans re-discovered a certain lost FTL-technology, allowing them to just drop by and say hello. Since then, the Akons have spend their time desperately building up their military and using subterfuge to keep Akon safe and dirty foreigners out. Apart from that, well. As long as you aren’t the victim of one of their terrorist strikes or not forced to talk to them, they aren’t too bad. I guess. Their ships are traditionally shaped like the ships their legendary ancestors used, they just “improved” on the traditional sphere-shape by flattening the poles. I have no idea what that’s supposed to do, apart from making their ships look weird. Normally, Akonic ships would come with strong anti-detection shields, or your colonies could depend on the mighty Energy Command to sabotage your enemies or to spy on them, but non of that is implemented in this game, so you just get weird ships. I guess you could roleplay that the EC hates you and wants you to fail, or that your group of colonists is arrogant enough to truly believe they can have success with just the tiniest amount of effort. Akons get slight penalties in space ship construction and heavy industry, and a slight bonus to living space. Everything else except consumer goods production is average. Consumer goods production gets a large bonus, by the way. They’re basically Arkonids with reduced bonuses but slightly higher production capabilities. It seems like that with the Akons greatest strength (espionage) not being a thing in this game, the devs essentially made up their stats at random. Considering how concentrated the Akons where on military matters after the end of their isolation, those stats make no goddamn sense. The Akons are one of two races where a military bonus would have made sense, for example. Instead no-one gets a bonus in this stat. No-one! One race gets a penalty, everyone else gets average. Weird. Either the devs slept on their job, or time constraints were too great. Either way, the Akons really got shafted here. Aras  Another Humanoid species. The Aras split of from the Springers thousands of years ago, essentially because they wanted to concentrate on the medicine sector. Over time they became the best doctors of the galaxy, widely sought after by everyone with strange problems standard medicine can’t solve. They’re also heavy into drug trafficking. Their society still has traces of their Mehandor-relatives, like their preference to living in clans and having large families. They also suffered from some mutations making them look like spindly, 2 m tall versions of the Coneheads. Like the Mehandor, the Aras prefer their space cylinders. As doctors, they do sometimes build their ships in other shapes, if they deem it necessary for medical reasons Them trying to colonize the Eastside is like Dr. Mengele and Dr. Moreau teaming up to conduct creepy medical experiments on their inhabitants. But let’s be nice and assume this is just some random Ara-clan down on their luck, trying to build the best space hospital ever out here in the boondocks. For our sanities’ sake, please? Oh, wait I forgot. Stats. The Aras (of course) get a large bonus to research. They also get some minor bonuses to living space and pop growth. Their capacity to produce consumer goods and trading is only at average, which you wouldn’t expect from the galaxy’s most renowned drug lords, but let’s just say the medical sector apparently isn’t included in “consumer goods”. They get light penalties to military and space ship construction and light industry, which makes sense, I guess. At the end they also get a huge penalty to heavy industry, which drops their final total stats below the Terrans, giving them the coveted 1st place in sucking. Wouldn’t have expected space science nerds to be so fertile, but OK. A nice deviation from the stereotypical cliche. Playing Aras is a challenge, since to leverage your science bonus you have to first build up colonies with lots of research labs. Their penalties to light and heavy industries makes this a lot harder to do. But it gets better: The tech tree in Operation Eastside is somewhat limited, so there’s a finite window to leverage your superior tech before everyone else has caught up. Then your enemies faster ship build speed and higher production capability will slowly grind you down. Or at least make the game really more tedious than it should be. The AI is rather basic and not really a threat. I hope I’m not spoilering anything here. Good AI in space 4x games is rather rare. Topdsiders  Topsiders are the only real aliens in this game, which is a shame. They’re also stereotypical fascist lizard people from space, which is even more sad. At least they got to change from evil to good the fastest, as they were one of the first enemy forces Terrans had to defend against. After their space fleets got blown up one too many times, they decided wisely that space fascism isn’t for them and since then did mostly their own thing. Physiologically, they’re cold-blooded lizards who lay eggs. That’s it. Not even some convoluted backstory. They developed naturally on their planet, went to space thousands of years ago and got inspired by the Arkonids to try this whole empire-thing. And after that went nowhere, they just went back to doing their own thing. They clearly lack the psychotic drive of Humanoid races to be the best in something (Drug trafficking, trading, fighting, being the most arrogant, and so on) but that makes them one of the “good” choices in this game. They even get their own ships, as the weirdos prefer their own designs, instead of just copying poo poo from other races. Tragically, this was one of the main reasons they got beaten so hard by Terrans earlier in PR-history: See, they’re not really that smart, so it took them thousands of years to get some very basic interstellar flight capacity and when compared to the insane 20k+ year old Arkonid technology, it sucked so much rear end, some Terrans with a stolen Arkonid corvette could just gently caress them up. Later they even lost their lone claim to glory: A stolen Arkonid battleship. After that thing went over to the Terrans, the Topsiders immediately gave up and went home. Not really, but it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of their imperialist dreams either way, they were hosed. Perry Rhodan called his new battleship the Crest, after an Arkonid scientist who helped humanity get to the stars, but he could have legitimately called his new 800 m toy globe the “Dream Crusher” instead. The Topsiders see themselves as smart, ambitious and brave. Their alien mentality has trouble with concepts like love or charity, and if they find a worthy cause, they like dying for it a bit too much for their own good. In later history, the Topsiders would have a rather more interesting time, with several different galactic threats clowning on them, the time spend as galactic mercenaries and facing many threats side by side with Terrans, after their tiny empire got absorbed by the growing Terran colonial sphere around them. But all of this is in the far future. Right now the Topsiders are basically an enclave inside the Solar Empire with some extra rights, like building ships which look like someone rammed a rocket through a melon. They also aren’t fascists anymore, as Perry Rhodan, born American, did some regime change and caused a revolution a couple centuries ago. Where was I? Ah yes, the stats. Topsider industry (both heavy and light) is only average, likewise trade and military (yes the space militarist faction doesn’t get any military bonuses, their tech is too lovely for that). They get good bonuses to living space and pop growth, and also to consumer good production. They also get a massive penalty to research, as they generally try to solve their problems by first shooting them, then shooting them some more. “Research is for pansies” is basically their life motto. Also building their lovely ships takes a lot of time, so they get a small penalty to ship construction on top of all that. The thing with consumer good production must be the Terran influence on them. The thing with them not getting a military bonus instead is rather mean-spirited, I think. Poor Topsiders, the universe really likes to poo poo on you.  At least in this game, thanks to everyone else getting the cheapest and shittiest tech and the Topsider-government enthusiastically giving the player the best of the best, everyone is on equal footing. Normally, every attempt to play Topsiders against one of the other great powers would end with every click on the UI generating an audio clip of Homeric laughter, followed by a crash to desktop. In this case the devs even gave you a secret cheat: Thanks to the tech tree being a bit on the small side, your huge research penalty doesn’t hurt you as much as it should in a better structured game, so you actually have a chance to win! If you can stand looking at their dumb ships, that is. Race Summary In case all of this information overwhelmed you, here’s the gist of it: Terrans: Standard protagonists of Standardizism. Sphere-shaped ships. Generic colonial expedition like many others. Arkons: Whitey in Space. Sphere-shaped ships. Colonial expedition sabotaged by officials thanks to space racism. Springers: Prefer to be called “Mehandor”, thank you very much. Very loud space viking traders. Tube-shaped ships. Some down-on-their-luck Mehandor clan is trying to create a new network of trading outposts. In a place where there is no-one to trade with yet. Very forward thinkers. Akons: The original space assholes. Very human. Prefer espionage and military isolationism. Both are not in this game. Akons like their sphere-shaped ships with the tops and bottoms cut off. Some poor Akon-bastard got pranked by the Akons’ espionage service and send with his flunkies on a suicide mission he thinks has something to do with “colonization”. Aras: Very good medical doctors. Very bad at ethics. As Ex-Mehandor, prefer space cylinders. Occasionally other shapes, but not in this game. Dr. Legmnee has decided to make the best drat space hospital ever. He and his clan decided on the target region after a drug-fueled orgy. As Aras, they’re too proud to reconsider their bad choice and are now en-route to the Eastside. Topsider: Militarist space lizards. Victims of Terran regime change. Their ships are bad and dumb. Terran propaganda made them think building up new colonies a zillion light years from home is a good idea. So now a newly-appointed military commander leads the best and brightest of the Topsiders into the Eastside. Game Setup  The pre-setup screen with your basic options like switching music on/off. The entire upper left is irrelevant since it only matters for multiplayer. The lower left is incomprehensible if you haven’t read the manual but a tiny spoiler for you: It’s best to keep those three options switched on, anyway. And now we never have to look at this screen, ever again!  After the really involved decision to either take command of an expedition of Humans, Bad Humans, Loud Humans, Evil Humans, Medicine Humans or Space Lizards, the next decision is to set up the game you want to play. First up is the map. The game assumes we’re traveling to some random star cluster in the Eastside of our galaxy, so the map will always be a 3D-map of roughly sphere-shape. We can choose between 40 up to 120 star systems. Every race we didn’t take is always in the game, so every map will have 6 players (us plus the five others) in it. This makes small maps automatically a bit crowded, and larger maps automatically a bit lonely, so either extreme is bad. For this Let’s Play, we’ll go with 80 star systems. That’s large enough to show everything, but not large enough to end in tedium. A small map can mean a blistering fast game, however. The reason for that is up next. Victory Conditions Victory conditions in Operation Eastside are somewhat basic: You can win by defeating everyone, there’s a “science victory” and you can set a colonization victory condition. Winning by defeating everyone means, well you shoot and kill a lot of people, then the game arbitrarily declares you the winner. Certainly not the winner of the Nobel Peace Price, though! The “science victory” is more of an undocumented optional goal. The manual tries to hide this as much as possible (because it’s a secret), but there are heavily armed natives living in the Eastside, and the six dumbass colonial expeditions arriving in this random star cluster will have to deal with them. If you “win”, you made your live a little bit easier, but the game will just continue until you also win by one of the other two conditions. More would be spoilers, so let’s get on with it! Remember the backstory of this game? Yeah, you’re supposed to found new colonies for your space nation. You can set up a percentage of how many star systems of this cluster you need to colonize to win, and it’s a rather elastic goal. The range is from 30% to 100%, but it counts for every race separately. So if both the Assholians and the Dumbotrons have a colony in 50 of 100 star systems and both set up a victory condition of 50%, whoever founded the first 50th colony wins the game. This is because you can have multiple races colonizing the same system, which allows for highly hypothetical scenarios where all six races achieve their goal by having colonies in every system together. Well not really, some systems have less then six colonizable planets, there are also the natives and of course the AI will start working together against you if you get close to your victory condition, so this would never work out. It’s theoretically possible, though. Luckily the game triggers the win condition as soon as the first colony hits the win percentage, so it’s not like Operation Eastside will get confused and crash. The devs were smart enough to avoid this kind of thing by making colonization immediately: If you can colonize, you immediately get your new colony. Since other players can only colonize during their own turns, this means there’s never the chance of several races triggering their victory condition at the same time. Either you win, or you’ve already lost. For this LP, I’ve decided to set the victory condition at 80%. This is clear-cut enough for a serious victory, without the tediousness of fighting down every single enemy colony. And it means I have some flexibility: If enemy attacks become a serious problem, I can spend extra time on growing new colonies to fight back more effectively, and if all organized enemy resistance collapses in on itself at the very end, I can just cheese it by setting down some colonies randomly until the 80% trigger. The victory condition doesn’t care about how good and well-build colonies are, it only wants colonies, period. Difficulty The difficulty of Operation Eastside mainly depends on how well a player understands the user interface. If you can use the UI reasonably well, the AI is almost comically helpless. If you have no idea what you’re doing, the AI can be a reasonable challenge. There are five difficulty levels in total: Very easy: NPC production capacity is seriously reduced. Their ships will suffer heavy penalties in combat. Verdict: Your five year old daughter would appreciate this level of difficulty. Easy: NPC production and ships suffer light penalties. Verdict: After you taught her to understand the UI, your five year old daughter will be able to play the game reasonably well on this level. Normal: Everything calculates normally. Verdict: After winning some games on Easy, your five year old daughter will find this level of difficulty more fun to play. Hard: NPC-production and ships get some minor bonuses. Verdict: After enough experience on lower difficulties, your five year old daughter will have no problems here, but expect her to get bored fast on larger maps. Very hard: NPCs get high bonuses to combat capability and production. Verdict: Your five year old daughter would think you demented for putting up with so much blatant cheating, but sadly, the AI needs it. The AI of Operation Eastside is well-known for making bad decisions in the slowest way possible. For this LP, I leave the ultimate choice to you, but be aware that everything below Hard is probably not even remotely challenging. So yeah, the game pretends there are five difficulty levels, ranging from very easy to very heard, but in the source code the levels are labeled “Waste of Time”, “Solo Run”, “Very, Very Easy”, “Relaxed” and “Almost Normal”. True story! It begins Now we’re ready to start! Just one question remains: Humans, Bad Humans, Loud Humans, Evil Humans, Medicine Humans or Space Lizards? Please give your answers in bold. Also add your favorite difficulty level in italics, we’ll go with whatever the majority votes for. And while you’re voting, I’ll prepare a cold run to show and explain some basic gameplay concepts. Libluini fucked around with this message at 22:43 on Nov 20, 2020 |
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Nov 17, 2020 23:14
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I for one choose hard and we play as the medicine humans to teach the unwashed masses the gospel of 
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Nov 17, 2020 23:57
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Let's play the only non-humans on hard. What can I say? They seem like real underdogs here.
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Nov 18, 2020 00:41
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Topsiders. The universe definitely handed them a rough hand, lets turn things around. Hard.
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Nov 18, 2020 00:54
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Evil humans on hard sounds good
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Nov 18, 2020 02:29
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Topsiders Very Hard Try to sneak the results into the next PR!
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Nov 18, 2020 04:22
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Aras on hard. Because we come from France.
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Nov 18, 2020 04:51
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Always love science races in games. Also love Aras for how ridiculously... focused they were in the series. Prominent Ara characters were just a joy to read. I lost interest in the series after like issue 2200, but I never played this game, so it will be really nice to see you LP this, Libluini. Edit: Also, PR spaceships best spaceships. Why do so many races make uneconomical space ship designs, when a sphere is obviously the best shape with the highest volume and lowest surface area? It boggles the mind.
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Nov 18, 2020 08:39
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Topsiders on Hard, since I don't want you to suffer too hard. 
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Nov 18, 2020 10:09
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Go Go Topsiders on Very Hard, because why should fascist space lizards suffer anything less? Also after Imperium and MOOO I think you like to suffer 
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Nov 18, 2020 10:16
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Further the glory of the BTW, the game making the Terrans really sound like the Imperium from 40k. An immortal ruler, countless worlds under human control, huge-rear end spaceships permanently fighting horrible enemies and Exterminatus!
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Nov 18, 2020 19:36
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habituallyred posted:Topsiders Very Hard Hah! I would really like that, just two small problems with that: 1. The novellas this game is set around were written during the late 60s. I'd need a time machine to go back and influence the outcome of PR. and 2. The authors have no idea I even exist.
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Nov 18, 2020 20:25
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Kodos666 posted:Further the glory of the Funny you should say that, around this time in the series, the authors slowly realized there were no credible threats left and the Imperium, oops sorry I meant to say the Solar Empire, had become far too strong. Everything from the moment the game starts into the next century is one relentless death march of the authors trying to top themselves while trying to prevent Terrans from going out of control. Reading all those old stories nowadays gives you this odd feeling of approaching doom, like you're reading a Shakespearean tragedy. Since you know what comes next, and all that. Though it does involve some unintentional comedy, like the first stories set after ~a certain event~ being just this relentless series of dick punches, when one badass protagonist after another gets dumpstered in flashbacks when the author collective cleans house. And the mascot-character gets to become a true immortal, just to rub it in.
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Nov 18, 2020 20:31
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Topsiders, very hard
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Nov 19, 2020 01:45
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Topsiders, Very Hard. The Space Lizards will have their day in the sun.
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Nov 19, 2020 05:32
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Topsiders, Very Hard You will look at the weird space ships and you will like them
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Nov 19, 2020 13:06
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Topsiders, Very Hard Let's grant them *some* success.
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Nov 19, 2020 13:26
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Topsiders, Very Hard Also, because I can't find the "summarize S/F novels from memory" thread: Dude goes on one of mankind's first spaceflights. He somehow gets involved with aliens and brings back amazing super-tech. After getting involved with successive increasingly overpowered aliens he becomes immortal. At some point some crazy alien infiltrator from Atlantis or something saw an upcoming civilization destroying disaster and hid in a submarine. The hero prevents the apocalypse. After some long long time the atlantian comes out of hiding to rebuild post-nuclear apocalypse civilisation. And he gets totally surprised at seeing a spacefaring empire. That is my whole memory from reading a stack of Perry Rhodan silver volumes that was higher then myself as a kid.
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Nov 19, 2020 16:56
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Testrun: Terrans Terrorizing Space While I’m waiting on your votes, let’s make a short Terran test run.  For testing purposes, we choose Terrans! Großadministrator Perry Rhodan of the Solar Empire sends us, some dude, the official order to “go over there and found some new colonies for reasons”. And so we do!  After clicking on start, the game immediately drops you, no additional intro or anything, straight on top of a random high-quality planet in the Eastside. The game just shows you the screen of SimCity 2000 and asks you to place your “landing unit”, expecting you to have already read the manual so you actually know what that is. For the record, your starting landing unit is extra large, because we’re demolishing our long-range colony ship to get all the necessary materials to set up our new capital far from home. After you place the landing unit, it transforms into your new command center, giving you some living space and production capabilities in everything for some starting resources. (Except research.) All following colonies will start with a tiny version taking up only one tile, since we have build everything from scratch now, including colony ships. So we can’t just going around sacrificing entire ships for a better starting building, is what I’m getting at. Don’t worry about green stuff like trees. You just laser them down automatically when building. Water, hills or other obstacles are there forever, though. This may look like a SimCity game, but it doesn’t have a bulldozer, so every tile not perfectly even is completely unusuable. And yes, this means all manners of fuckery if you go down on a large, nice planet with maximum available surface area and then find out after landing that the planet is 99% mountains. But at least our first planet will always be close to maximum habitability with a minimum amount of bullshit, so I suggest abusing your starting planet to the fullest! It will be your main source of everything for a long, long time.  Since this is a test run, I just drop the landing unit on the first 2x2 set of tiles my eyes move over and continue. Now on the right, a list of new building options appears, and on the upper right, our basic economy opens up. Don’t sweat all of this right now, this is just a demonstration! Also, placement of most stuff doesn’t actually matter: There are no adjacency bonuses, you can just spray buildings all over the place, and mechanically, nothing will change. I strongly recommend not doing that, as you’d need to be some kind of savant with photographic memories to make sense of the mess total uncontrolled expansion will cause later. But you can group everything however you want! There’s also no pollution or anything, so heavy factories are ideal neighbors to your living areas! As long as you can live with everything looking terribly wrong and untidy, of course.  I seriously hope you like games like SimCity or Utopia, or Operation Eastside will blindside you with this colony building simulation. Anyway, for this test run I just put down some basic buildings everywhere: Some new residential buildings to make space for new colonists, some greenhouses for food, some heavy and some light industry, and presto! Or wait, what is all this crap? Yes, just having resources means jack and poo poo. All you’re doing is ordering your colony to build something, but it doesn’t immediately happen! At first, only a construction site will appear. Let’s hit next turn and see what happens.  Now it’s turn 2 and all construction sites with full yellow bars turned into working buildings with green bars, and all sites with red bars didn’t do anything. So what happened? Let’s click on a building and open up this submenu right here. The game tries automatically to fulfill your building orders as fast as possible, but as your resources are finite, sooner or later your dreams will be dashed. At that point, you’ll have to set some priorities. See right here? Last turn we splurged on a lot of resources, but now we don’t have as much and more importantly: Some of our potential workers now work our new buildings instead. So now we can only insta-build this building if we pull the slider fully to the right, which will drain workers from the active buildings. Nice to know in an emergency, but also a risky move if you accidentally switch of the resource building you need to produce poo poo next turn! And of course, if your resources are limited and you still want to build more buildings, you still can, but you need to plan ahead since less workers and resources allocated means longer building times. This example here is set to finish construction in 3 turns. (See that tiny “3” on the right end of that window?)  I decide letting all those construction sites sitting around empty sucks, so carefully move some poo poo around until all three construction sites are running. You probably notice that thin line inside the slider turning red on the right: That’s because I’ve now allocated all available workers, so the slider can’t move further. But on the plus side, pulling out all the stops means instead of 1 building finishing in 4 turns, now 3 buildings will finish in 4 turns! Sounds better, right? In case you’re wondering: Yes, I can also drain workers from the other construction sites. If that’s possible, there’ll be a yellow line between the red and green. That’s how far you can pull the slider to still boost that one construction site. You can also lock construction sites if you don’t want to accidentally drain resources from them when setting up another construction site later. There are also more complicated interactions going on here in the background, influencing how well everything will go for you, but that’s for later.  Some turns later: More buildings have finished, including our first research building! Now I can go to this weird, sciency-looking menu on the lower left and bring up the research-submenu, which then will partially block your lower menu options until you close it again. Every option here relates to one possible research area. Click on it and the entire research output of your current colony will switch to that area. So be careful if you want to research something specific. It’s easy to misclick and accidentally research guns if all you wanted was a slightly better apartment building.  Welp, it’s now turn 12 and we have some basic resource production and research going on our capital planet. But wait, wasn’t this a space 4x? Why are we playing Space SimCity?  While we’re contemplating this mystery, let’s go to the main menu of the game. Here we can see basically everything important, smooshed together into one screen. On the upper right is research: Light green junk is our current knowledge, the tiny darkgreen speck at the top line is the expected progress with our current set-up and the green border frame tells us what we can get if we retool our entire research output to that particular area. Below the research area is the tiny portrait of our nameless commander, with tiny victory progress bar. Then there’s the blacked out part for messages, and six (currently closed) metal thingies on the right for diplomacy. The main window has the obligatory poo poo like saving, loading, exiting or going back to your currently selected colony. It’s all fancy and animated, however! I should probably make a small video showing this off at some point. Now let’s see what those other menus at the bottom are all about. The button on the furthest right looking like a Dune-Mentat thinking really hard about another Dune-Mentat is just the “next turn”-button. So let’s skip that one.  The button looking like a list of planet is: Suprise, surprise! A list of planets. Well, right now we own only one colony, so there’s only that one on the list. Every entry comes with a bunch of statistics, including some odd ones like “turns since colonization”, though seeing at a glance that your planet is rear end-old could be useful, I suppose? Other stuff like resources, free space for buildings and a little window with diagrams is also there if you’re into that stuff. Since things can get unreasonable fast later, the most important things are the tiny green arrow-ring and the tiny space ship: The green circle toggles planetary AI, the space ship toggles automatic ship building. The AI in this game sucks and has no sense for aesthetics. But sooner or later you’ll need to use those options, at the very least the AI-admin to prevent your colonies from slowly dying if you don’t babysit them each turn. Important note: Even if ordered to do so, AI-admins only build your very latest ship design without colonization module. If there isn’t one, they won’t build anything. If there is one and you don’t want them to build it, you’ll have to manually delete it or the AI will spam it for you. Originally, there wasn’t an option to just not build space ships, but a later patched “allowed” players to keep admins without them throwing resources away on unwanted ship building programs.  Let’s go further to the left: The next button (which looked like a grid-based starfield) was the solar system view! Now the game looks more like a space 4x, I hope? Ignoring the veritable flood of information you find here for the moment, you’ll spend a lot of time here clicking on planets and moons to find nice targets for colonization. There are a lot of possible traps here, but luckily gas giants are not one of them: You can’t colonize them, period. Every race has their own planetary preferences, which can be a good thing: Terrans love those Earth-like planets, but Arkonids like higher temperatures, since the Earth-like planet they made their new home like 20k years ago is slightly hotter than Earth. Topsiders like it hot and dry, which in turn is icky for Terrans, and so forth. This means a purely pacifist run is totally possible, at least until the AI notices what a cheeky bastard you where, only colonizing planets suboptimal for everyone else until you got close to victory! (This is possible because the AI is smart enough to want nice planets, and if your own race is different enough in their preferences, your nice planets will be poo poo from their view point. So they won’t mind as much if you start taking them.  In case the numbers are too much for you, a color-bar next to the selected stellar object tells you how awesome your people think this planet/moon is: The fuller, the better. Of course, green is even better, but the bar only turns green close to the theoretical maximum. You may have to search a lot for your trip to paradise! If a planet can’t be colonized at all, this vertical bar is simply empty and black. Like gas giants, or planet with a 100% magma surface. But there are cases where the nice, simple looking colonization bar is utterly misleading. (The game likes going “Psyche! The numbers were important, too!” at you. Ignore numbers at your own peril.) But enough of that! More details can wait, this is just the dry run, after all! (Also I saw a lot of votes in the thread, so I’m forced to speed this test run up asap. ) And finally, the button looking like a bunch of stars without grid is actually our star map! Like Imperium, (shudder), our main map is hidden in a menu instead of just being the main area of play. But at least the map tells you everything you need to know, and you can go into surveyed star systems without this dumb “let’s send the info to another menu and then go there to look it up”-thing Imperium had going on. The map is an open star cluster and in full 3D. Luckily there are a bunch of controls you can click on to move stuff around. The green marker is on our current capital system, but we can click on other stars to see what they’re up to. If we haven’t visited a system yet, there is only very basic information, though. And no planets to look at. Just above the move menu, there’s a simple filter selection menu with eight options: You can toggle on/off all stars, your stars, stars of other races (if you have met them first only) and space ships, since they’ll be quite often right in the middle of nowhere during FTL-flight. Instead of having to wait 30-40 turns, even slow ships can traverse the entire map in 8-12 turns, tops. Another difference to Imperium!  Now the only menu from the lower border that was left was the one with funky-looking space ships. It’s of course about our space ships: We can give movement orders to our ships here, order them back for repair or just look at what they’re doing right now. A tiny ship-looking symbol next to a ship means it carries a colonization symbol. But we don’t have any ships yet, so this has to wait for the main run.  A couple turns later, and we get our first research-breakthrough! In this case, an excited looking science dude (for Terrans only) tells us we now can build a slightly larger house for people to live in. More population is always better, and your population growth stops dead cold if you run out of space, so this should be your research first priority, anyway. Also some buildings only unlock after researching multiple basic levels in all four basic building research groups (light and heavy industry, living space and consumer goods aka food), so you’ll never get them if you don’t invest in boring stuff like this first.  It’s now turn 39 and we finally have enough stuff researched/build to switch to the more interesting stuff: Military buildings, space ports and shipyards! Some of those are buildings only unlocked after some research, see above. Since that tiny downwards arrow only works if those buildings are already unlocked, this can lead to some funny situations were you start the game, notice there is nothing below research buildings and then spend about a hundred turns wondering why you can’t build space ships. After you’ve unlocked your first special buildings, you can now click on that arrow and the category list will scroll downward to reveal them. And no, this hasn’t happened to me at all, why do you ask?   The first military building is just a basic missile launcher, but you can totally build a couple, if it makes you feel safer! More important: After building your first space port and your first shipyard, you can now click on the space ship symbol down below on the left and get to go here, to the ship designer. The Operation Eastside ship designer is very basic: You see the basic shape of your ship (all ships of a race look the same, always) and can move four sliders to automatically add firepower, armor strength, shield power and engine power. Ship size actually depends on your research, and how large your space port is, so putting all sliders on maximum at the start only makes a small 60 m corvette-class, anyway. Just a very slow one with heavy armor, strong shields and good weapons. For the start of the game, that is. What you actually want to do at the start is making a fast scout with maximum engines and nothing else. Why that is I’ll explain in excruciating detail later. Also, you can add colony modules to your designs here, delete designs and look at ships being repaired and in construction. But since we have zero ships, nothing to show there right now!  Designs are simply added with each click on the design button, so be careful not to clutter the interface with too many broken empty designs! Designs with actual ships existing are marked in (parenthesis) with stuff like (im Bau/”in construction”) to mark what is actually happening in your yards.  Some turns later, and our Terrans actually have their space force! You have your main list of ships doing poo poo, and some other lists I’ll take about later. You may notice that this will get cluttered real fast after a real fleet gets going. Just be glad we don’t have to actually fight people if we don’t want to.  Oh, what’s that? Our first other people! We meet the Topsiders, and they declare war on us. Something about imposters taking over the thread or something. (Checks votes) Welp, poo poo. They’re right. Let’s abandon those dastardly Terrans at the hand of their courageous enemies and switch to the real stars of this Let’s Play! Final Vote Tally Akons: 1 Arkonids: 1 Aras: 3  Topsiders: 8 Difficulty Hard: 5 Difficulty Very Hard: 6 The vote is now closed, thank you all for voting!
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Nov 19, 2020 21:49
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Reptile Rising 01: Dark History An Abridged History of the Topsiders ca. 28.461 BC The Grey Alien Tothoolar visits Topsid, and helps them reach Bronze-age level technology. ca. ????? BC Several thousand years before first contact with the Fiends of Terra, die dimensional fragment Pthor plagues Topsid. At least three Topsiders are abducted, and become prisoners in the Glass Palaces of the Sink of the Lost Souls. It is assumed several highly advanced pre-space civilizations are destroyed. ca. ????? BC At some unknown point lost to history, the Great Empire of Arkon invades, occupies and finally annexes Topsid. The Topsiders are grabbed by the tail and dragged into a glorious future. ca. 1000 AD The Topsiders rise up against the Arkonids. For a short time, the Great Empire rises from its stagnative stupor and sends a punitive expedition. The uprising is obliterated. ca. ???? AD At some unknown point during the following centuries, the Topsiders manage to break free of the stifling hug of the Great Empire. The Arkonid Empire has lost all interest to their region of space, and doesn’t take action. 1975 AD An Arkonid emergency beacon is detected by the small, but growing Topsid Empire. The Great Dictator of Topsid sends an expedition to plunder the Arkonid ship, but a navigation error leads the fleet to the Vega-system instead. Unbeknownst to them, the Fiends of Terra launch a dastardly surprise attack and destroy the crashed Arkonid ship on Luna, Sol-system. When the Fiends of Terra manage to construct a working hypercom using stolen Arkonid technology, they detect an emergency message coming from the Ferrons, an intelligent species living in the Vega-system. Topsid historians would later describe the immediate assault and massacre of the weak and harmless Ferron ships as “the Greatest Error of the Great Dictator”, as the horrifyingly effective Terrans immediately mount a rescue mission, using a fleet of stolen Arkonid battlecruisers. During the following series of battles, the Terrans capture the flagship of the expeditionary fleet, a great battleship of the Arkonid Empire, originally stormed and taken on Topsid during the Final Revolution (citation needed). Due to extensive use of subterfuge, monstrous mutants and incredible luck, they manage to manipulate the navigation computers of the retreating Topsid fleet, causing the destruction of 300 ships and more than 120.000 Topsid lives, when a failed transition jump re-materializes the fleet deep inside the core of the sun Capella. When news of the defeat reaches Topsid, the Great Dictator is forced to use sadly necessary amounts of force in self-defense against upset citizens carefully voicing their dissent. 1984 AD Mehandor invade the Lyrad-system and destroy the third planet, Esperdetyn. Due to some mysterious enmity based on trade, the Fiends of Terra warn the Topsid Empire of the invasion, and the small colony on Esperdetyn is heavily fortified. The infamous Jumpers however, manage to defeat the Topsid forces defending the planet, and use an insidious Arkonid super-weapon to destroy the planet. Topsid historians believe the unexpected Terran help was founded in some kind of religious significance of the Lyrad-system, as the Terran name of the system, Betelgeuse, is also the name of an ancient Terran Bug-God (citation needed). Beginning of the 21st century AD After a relentless series of defeats and disasters plaguing the Topsid Empire, the people of Topsid politely ask the aging Great Dictator to step back to let younger people take up the stressful work of government and reward himself with a well-deserved retirement (citation needed). The Great Dictator graciously accepts, after a short but vigorous debate in the streets of Topsid, and retires to his Summer home in the Southern Deserts. He dies on the way to his Summer home. The entire planet griefs (citation needed). Spring 2326 AD The United Empire has chosen the Topsid Republic for an important task: Aiding the exploration and colonization of the great galactic Eastside, a region unknown even to the mighty Arkonids and the ancient Akons. The best and the brightest have been chosen to travel to [redacted], an open star cluster deep inside the Eastside, and there they will… Tubtor Eresh-Thel closed the history text she was reading, and put her mobile terminal aside. She already regretted her impulsive curiosity. She should have immediately purged that so-called “Abridged History of Topsid” from her terminal, instead of trying to make sense of it in her free time. She leaned back from her work desk and contemplated the many absurdities of what she just had read. Was the unknown author of this oddly unfinished feeling text even a Topsider? “Stolen fleet of Arkonid battlecruisers indeed”, she bemusedly hissed to herself. A sudden ultrasonic beep from her terminal called her back from her daydream of crushing the eggs of whoever wrote this trite nonsense. She took the terminal in hand and immediately saw the symbol of Topsid Command, the cabal of high-ranking military officers leading the military forces of the Republic, blinking on one edge of the screen. It was also the official flag of the Topsid Republic: An uniformly black rectangle with two luminescent concentric circles inside. One circle white, the other violet, like the suns of Topsid. Eresh-Thel was deeply surprised and it took all her willpower to prevent her tail from nervously thrashing around her office. The last time this happened, her lack of discipline had send half of her record discs flying from the nearby data shelves. It had taken an entire hour to restore order! She had barely made it before a superior had arrived on an unannounced surprise-visit. Topsid Command sending her a personal message could be very good, but also very bad, considering how serious the Republic Fleet took its proper channels of command. Normally, Topsid Command would only send reports, messages and orders directly to whoever was the local commander. And since she wasn’t commanding a battlecruiser right now in deep space, the local commander in charge was the Ob-Tubtor commanding this asteroid base at the outskirts of the Topsid-system, Heleron-Dech. So every message from Topsid Command should, in theory, go straight to him, and not to any of his underlings. Still, she thought, not reading the message would be even worse than finding out Heleron-Dech would be upset because Topsid Command ignored the proper channels, so she tapped one of her claws on the symbol, causing it to expand and transform into an official briefing message. To: Tubtor Eresh-Thel, sub-command level C of Asteroid Defense Base C-44 Topsid Command orders you to immediately report to Ulan-Obtor Trefferd-Norn in Fleet Control Central for re-assignment to Project Egg-Layer. Hereby you are informed of your promotion to the rank of Ob-Tubtor, effective immediately. Ob-Tubtor Heleron-Dech, command level A of ADB C-44, is already informed and will replace sub-command level C personnel as needed. You have 3 days for reporting to FCC on Topsid. Not reporting on time is grounds for Advanced Dismissal and Processing for High Treason. PHT? That sounded serious. Eresh-Thel re-read the message several times, even confirmed the subdata to make sure it wasn’t a prank. For some reason, Topsid Command had chosen her for an impressively important sounding secret project. She was humbled. Suddenly, she jumped up. 3 days for reporting on Topsid? It would take a full day alone to arrange transportation away from this base! She had no time to slowly contemplate the unexpected news! She rushed out of her office and towards her quarters, barely remembering in time to snatch up her private terminal. Regardless of how long her snout was, a late arrival would make Topsid Command stomp it flat! To Be Continued Libluini fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Nov 20, 2020 |
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Nov 20, 2020 22:27
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I don't know why Eresh-Thel is so dismissive here, the Mehandor I spoke to before compiling this short history assured me everything he told me was of the most absolute accurateness. I consider her attitude to be quite hurtful! Anyway, what do you think is the name of the star cluster the history mentions at the end? I think it could be important, considering this new secret project our Ob-Tubtor is now supposed to join up with. It would be rather strange if this secret project had nothing to do with this thread, after all! Give me a name in bold, and puns involving eggs and nests are not only allowed, but expected!
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Nov 20, 2020 22:38
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I'm terrible at coming up with names, so I don't have any suggestions, but I want you to know that I enjoy your fiction writing for both this and the MoO3 thread.
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Nov 21, 2020 09:36
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The Colony ground tiles remind me less of Simcity, and way more of Transport Tycoon. As for the colony-name: Every 4-eggs game should start by Eggsploreing.
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Nov 21, 2020 09:37
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm terrible at coming up with names, so I don't have any suggestions, but I want you to know that I enjoy your fiction writing for both this and the MoO3 thread. Thanks! Though I'm cheating massively in this thread by looking up info on the massive Perry Rhodan Wiki. A lot of what I wrote is in fact a reference to stuff that happens in the series! SOLarian posted:The Colony ground tiles remind me less of Simcity, and way more of Transport Tycoon. About Transport Tycoon I can't say anything, as I never played that game. But I played a shitton of SimCity 2000 and Utopia, and the colony building system gives me serious flashbacks every time I play OE. Oh, and sorry for the misunderstanding: I need a name for the star cluster, that is, what are we calling the main map we're dropping in (as the "Eastside" is too vague, the Eastside is half the galaxy). Though for the time being I've noted "Eggsplorer" as a possible name. "Star Cluster Eggsplorer", rolls right of the tongue.
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Nov 21, 2020 14:04
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We must always be concerned about security, here in Star Cluster Eggliot Nest
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Nov 21, 2020 14:10
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New Homelette.
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Nov 21, 2020 14:52
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"Monstrous mutants" is right. PR wouldn't have had nearly as much success, if at all, without the ridiculousness that was the Mutant Corps. Even before Gucky.
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Nov 21, 2020 15:32
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There are plenty of Eggcellent names that can be used.
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Nov 21, 2020 18:08
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Our Eggcelcior class Battlecruisers shall rule the skies of at least the Sunnyupside planet.
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Nov 21, 2020 18:16
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The Benedict and Hollandaise systems are cultural additions to our people of great worth and diverse flavors
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Nov 21, 2020 18:42
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Obviously we are off to the Hothouse, we are talking about lizard eggs afterall.
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Nov 21, 2020 20:56
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SIGSEGV posted:Our Eggcelcior class Battlecruisers shall rule the skies of at least the Sunnyupside planet. This is wisdom.
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Nov 21, 2020 22:00
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Sunnyupside is a great planet name.Nuramor posted:"Monstrous mutants" is right. PR wouldn't have had nearly as much success, if at all, without the ridiculousness that was the Mutant Corps. Even before Gucky. Don't know what's so monstrous about a two headed man who can cause nuclear explosions just by looking at things??
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Nov 21, 2020 22:37
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Torrannor posted:Sunnyupside is a great planet name. Though on the other hand, a lot of aliens got easily spooked by a certain Sudanese chemist, just because his skin color was unusually dark. So maybe it's just a case of aliens looking at us like we're the aliens? Edit: By the way, by playing more test games I've confirmed that you can not rename planets or stars in the game. Sadly, this means your names can only be used for either ship classes or the main star clusters we're playing in (as that one doesn't get a name in-game, so we can name it whatever the hell we want). But on the other hand, I've played a first session for the main LP too and already used one of your suggested names! Now I just need to do a lot of writing. Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:57 on Nov 22, 2020 |
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Nov 22, 2020 12:54
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Reptile Rising 01-A: Where are we going again? OK, I've noticed I'm already using too many names starting with Egg- in this LP, so let's mix things up. Are we: ...traveling to the New Homellette Cluster? ...or the Sunnyupside Cluster? ...nevermind, of course it's the Hothouse Cluster? ...wait a moment, or was it the Eggliot Nest Star Cluster? Fake edit: I know, I know I said I thought there are already too many names with Egg-, but I liked that last one enough I put it on the vote, too. The other names will probably show up as ship class names during the LP, including the ones which fail this final vote! Edit: The new star cluster deep in the Eastside is: New Homellete Cluster: 4 votes Another short update is already prepared. After that, the true work begins. Voting is now closed
Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Nov 24, 2020 |
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Nov 22, 2020 15:31
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While I could vote for my own proposition, I will admit that I am deeply envious of New Homellette and I will vote for it.
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Nov 22, 2020 15:42
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SIGSEGV posted:While I could vote for my own proposition, I will admit that I am deeply envious of New Homellette and I will vote for it. Greatly agreeing with this one.
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Nov 22, 2020 20:32
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SIGSEGV posted:While I could vote for my own proposition, I will admit that I am deeply envious of New Homellette and I will vote for it. Just don't go to the play of the same name, it isn't worth it.
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Nov 23, 2020 01:49
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I prefer Sunnyupside
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Nov 23, 2020 12:58
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