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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. This is a solid pun
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Nov 23, 2020 13:05
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| # ? May 3, 2024 01:12 |
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New Homellette for me as well.
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Nov 23, 2020 23:25
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The new star cluster deep in the Eastside is: Sunnyupside: 1 vote New Homellete Cluster: 4 votes Another short update is already prepared. After that, the true work begins. Voting is now closed
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Nov 24, 2020 19:33
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 Reptile Rising 02: Arrival  Mission Log 000 After taking command of Project Egg-Layer, I have been put in charge of 1000 brave colonists and an aging, but still durable freighter, the Eggcelcior. In an odd reversal of our Social Directive 2 “Strengthen strength, those who strengthen weakness, weaken the whole”, this old ship has been retrofit to use a Linear Drive. This allows us to traverse the Libration Zone between Hyperspace and normal space. Travel is technically slower as with the older Transition Drive this ancient matriarch of a ship originally had, but we’re not wasting days on calculating jump coordinates, and even more days on recovering from jumps, so we actually make good time on our journey to the Eastside. Instead of taking nearly a full month, we have reached the inofficial border between Westside and Eastside in less than a week. The captain of the Eggcelcior and Tuphtor of my expedition, Vlaht-Om, tells me that in just a few more days, we should have localized our target, a star cluster deep in the Eastside. It is quite amusing that he, and not me, is commanding this vessel. But since we are low on officers and since this ship will be demolished and recycled for parts after landfall, I guess I can be nice and give him this. It is a rare gift for a Tuphtor to be allowed ship command. I hope he appreciates this opportunity. Topsid Command latest report said the cluster was originally visited by the Terran explorer Ex-3889 ten years ago and only given a very rudimentary survey and a number. After the United Empire began organizing this new effort of colonization and exploration, the cluster was given to the Republic as potential target for a Republican expedition. But when I asked why Project Egg-Layer had to be secret, if this is all part of an unified galaxy-wide effort, TC told me that they had been warned by Solar Empire officials that some Mehandor-clans had hacked the transmissions of the United Empire and started an illegal auction for the coordinates of several promising colonization targets ahead of time. So Topsid Command decided to put as much secrecy on the project as possible, to avoid forewarning illegal groups already in our target cluster. Topsid Command also warned us that due to the rather untidy political systems our Humanoid friends suffer under, many illegal groups could very well decide to pretend to be official expeditions, ask for and receive governmental help. And of course the Akons or Arkonids could decide to just claim the cluster anyway and push us out. We are to establish as much of a presence in the now officially named New Homellete Cluster as possible, to prevent us from becoming easy targets. A tall order, if it weren’t for the many resources and robots we are carrying together with our colonists. Especially the robots, which are based on Arkonid technology, will greatly help us. Too bad our “friends” have access to the same level of technology, but we’ll see. The Eastside is far from home for everyone, and our target is far from the next hypercom relay station. Until we manage to build a HC large and powerful enough to be received in the Westside, we’re all going to be cut off from civilization for a long time. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  Additional data file 023-S, Project Egg-Layer: Republic Freighter Eggcelcior. Length: 500 m Transport capacity: High FTL-old: 1500 ly/jump FTL-new: max. 4Mx light speed, max. distance 45k light years Warning: Due to space constraints, no new FTL-converters loaded in cargo. As a short aside, Topsider-ranks as known by now work like this: Tubtor: A rank originally taken from a parallel dimension where Topsiders saved Humans from an alien invasion of Earth. The rank is used in the Berlin-Enclave where Topsiders and Humans live together, but as information on other ranks was not easy to find, I took this wayward rank in to fill up our lore a bit. A Topsider with this rank is equivalent to a Oberstleutnant in the Solar Fleet, which would translate to a “Lieutenant-Colonel” in English. Both Tubtors and Oberstleutnants can be found as ship commanders up to battlecruisers. For the purpose of this LP I decided that this rank is too low for commanding a growing mini-realm of colonies, so Eresh-Tel had to be promoted. Ob-Tubtor: The next rank up, and one of only three Topsider-ranks my research turned up. So Eresh-Tel is now a full Ob-Tubtor (“Colonel”), which normally would allow her to command up to battleship-class ships or equivalent ground bases. Eventually I may have to promote her again, though! Tuphtor: This rank only shows up in Operation Eastside, and nowhere else. Fun fact: Operation Eastside gives the player a name and a rank, but neither the manual nor my online-sources showed this. Only if you play the game and look very closely at the messages you get from your research department will you learn those names. Eventually I will abuse this to give our enemies a face and a name, but of course Tuphtor Vlaht-Om is superfluous now. So I demoted him to be our XO. To keep things from getting too confusing with those alien ranks, he remains a Tuphtor (since that rank will keep showing up in screenshots) and “Tuphtor” is now officially a Tubtor-equivalent rank for administrative officers. Which is by the way the reason why he can’t command the expedition: His rank is not a front-level military rank. So actual fighting and leading will fall to us, “Ob-Tubtor Eresh-Tel”.  Other ranks: The other Topsider-ranks you will see, including Ulan-Obtor (“General”) are entirely made up by me, to fill the large holes in the lore. (You may notice Perry Rhodan is kind of a Human-centric series, so while I have a complete list of ranks for the Solar Fleet, the equivalents from alien fleets are often lacking.) To Be Continued
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Nov 24, 2020 19:38
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This is very eggciting  Also the Libation Zone likes like a real good time.
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Nov 25, 2020 00:45
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Hell yeah, time to make some dinosaur colonies.
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Nov 25, 2020 16:04
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Space dinosaur colonies
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Nov 25, 2020 18:50
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Deadmeat5150 posted:This is very eggciting Libration Zone. But after looking up some translations, apparently if you libate yourself enough you end up doing a lot of librating, so if that was the pun you were going for, thumbs up!
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Nov 25, 2020 20:29
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Reptile Rising 03: Hatching Steps Mission Log 001: 4th February 2326 After making landfall on Shaulires II, we wasted no time in establishing a first presence in the New Homellete Cluster. We used our robot contingent to excavate enough space to put our fusion reactors and on-board factory units safely underground, and then put our temporary living spaces and our ship’s command center on top of it. Constructing this new command center nearly used up all the material our freighter could provide, and we’re now dependent on our own stockpiles. As an aside, I’m proud of our people! In less then a day, all preliminary work was finished and our command center crew could start working! Even with our robots, that kind of speed is something you normally only expect from elite Terran soldiers. The first month after landfall was terribly busy, as we had to make sure to be self-sufficient. Now that I have time for extensive mission logs again, we’re already in a good position: Reinforcements arrive from back home daily, and our supply situation is well in order. Tuphtor Vlaht-Om, my XO, has begun work on reverse engineering more advanced technology, in preparation for the inevitable day when we make contact with one of the galactic super-powers that are allegedly are active in this cluster. Regardless of legality, if they find us before we are ready, the yolk will hit the pan! Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  Set up done, let’s go! The New Homellete Cluster has 80 star systems viable for colonization, and we need to colonize 80% of it to make our presence strong enough other galactic powers will avoid the political scandal of pushing us out. As the difficulty is very hard, we have our work cut out for us.  Immediately, the game drops us on our new capital planet, the still empty Shaulires II. After surveying a bit, I remember there are no bonuses for linking buildings, so I just drop our new colony command center in the middle of the map. Our colony is now ready, and the interface now allows us to begin playing! The placing isn’t completely brainless on my part, the biggest buildings possible are 3x3 tiles, and I put our command center on a place where a 2x2 building was the best possible option anyway. This way, we don’t accidentally take away one of the limited possible 3x3 slots on Shaulires II. This is very necessary because as you may notice, there’s a lot of hills and water breaking up the surface. Non of which can be used, ever. A very ominous beginning.  Later experiences make me realize the game must be fudging the numbers on your starting planet, because 87% water normally means most of the surface is ocean, and therefore not usable for building. If Shaulires II wouldn’t be the starting planet, it would be a trap option. I re-learned this the hard way when I colonized a water-planet with 67% water in a test game thinking “Oh, my 80% water starting planet wasn’t too bad, this is fine” and then the game was like “Surprise! Half the surface is an ocean, dipshit!” The vertical bar is a shortcut to immediately show you what all the numbers mean, but there are problems. One I’ve already mentioned (surface water), but there are other problems: Shaulires II is fairly large, about Venus-sized (Earth is something like 12k to our 10,8k km diameter here, which is more like Venus) but it has a fairly low density, which results in gravity only being 60% of Earth-gravity. Atmospheric pressure is also a bit lower, but not fatally though. Average temperature is 3 °C, which is loving cold (Earth is like 15 °C). As Topsid is a fairly hot and dry planet, you definitely wouldn’t expect our colonists to be so happy about this world! It’s basically Northern England, the planet.  The game is being exceptionally cruel, because it turns out Shaulires II has several Earth-like moons, but most have a twist. Shaulires II-1 has the twist of having 67% water. And because it’s not the capital planet, chances are colonizing it will give us a map with 67% unusable tiles. Annoying enough for a planet, but as a moon this tiny thing is a rather bad choice, regardless of what the vertical bar is telling us. See, the number of usable tiles also depends on the diameter of a stellar object in Operation Eastside, so if you start with a tiny moon and then cut the number of tiles in half, you end up with basically nothing. At least with an average temperature of 34 °C, it’s hot enough for our reptiloid friends. Topsid, the third planet of the Orion-Delta system, is a rather hot and dry planet with approximately 100 large lakes instead of oceans. Most of the planet is dominated by four massive mountain ranges, and a permanent mist covers most of the surface. Topsid also has three moons, so our weird planet with its many hills/mountains and lakes oddly resembles our colonists’ homeworld, minus the temperature and the mist. I’ve looked up some data on Topsid, but for some reason no-one ever mentioned the planetary temperature, so the vague off-hand comments to Topsiders liking hot and dry planets is all we can base our Topsiders on. Though from the data sheet I’ve found we do know Topsid is a chunky bastard of a planet, over 14k km diameter, 1,73x the mass of Earth and 1,3 g. Someone weighing 100 kg on Earth would weigh 130 kg on Topsid! Those reptiles must be swole to stand that gravity. It’s also 69k light years away from the native capital planet here in the Eastside, which is nice. We’ll learn a lot about the natives later, I promise! Additional Topsid-facts: Thanks to Perry Rhodan running for decades and being written by dozens of different authors, the Topsiders had to suffer some serious errors over the course of the series. Back in the 60s, one of the authors wrote a side novel in which Topsid and all its three colonies where destroyed and the Topsiders were left to wander around the stars, eventually founding a “New Topsid” to live on. In this weird alternate history, the Topsiders surgically removed their tails to better fit in with tail-less humanoids, since those were the dominant form of life in the Milkyway. Later though it was made clear that no, Topsid still exists in canon which made all those “New Topsid”-stories just highly suspect rumors. During a story arc written in the late 80s, some Terrans suddenly claimed that Topsid was a an ocean planet with 80% of the surface covered in water, and that Topsiders had developed on our equivalent of tropic islands. The modern consensus on that is that it’s bullshit and based on an author error. Nowadays, Topsid is canonically a dry planet with hundreds of lakes, lots of swamps and permanent mist covering everything, including the super-mountains. Confusingly, Topsiders are described as having developed in caves, presumably either in mountains or deserts, but over time they also created multiple artificial swamps on Topsid, just for fun. Though with no details given anywhere, that could be just the equivalent to Humans IRL trying to preserve natural regions like Mangrove swamps or coral reefs.  Shaulires II-2 is even more of a trap: While the green bar is brazenly lying to you, the player, the surface is 96% frozen ice (“Eismeere” = “ice oceans”) and setting up a colony here is just plain a bad idea. As a tiny moon, you can expect 4% of that particular surface to basically equal nothing. And of course, if not all of that tiny rest isn’t perfectly even, it’s also not usable! The wetness and coldness is probably even worse for Topsiders, one would assume. Oddly enough, when starting a test game with Terrans, I ended up on a scorching hot, very dry and very flat starting planet. That planet was perfect for colonization, but every other similar planet in that system was a hellhole. I can only assume the game again cheated a lot behind the scenes to make that planet useful for the player.  Shaulires II-3 is a step down: The first of these moons that’s only yellow instead of friendly green. It’s also larger (more surface tiles) “only” has 54% of them taken away by surface water and has rather high gravity and pressure for its size: Not exactly the worst. We could definitely put down a secondary colony here if we absolutely want to. With 39 °C and being a lot dryer, this looks a lot more like a planet Topsiders would prefer, and it is starting to make me think the background calculations of OE may not take alien physiology into account, at least not properly. By the way, Arkonids, despite being Humans, prefer hotter temperatures, thanks to the main planets of the Arkonid system all being hotter than Earth. 39 °C as an average would be chokingly hot for Terrans, but Arkonids would like it. Topsiders probably too, but then again, authors never got around to actually telling us their preferred temperatures beyond “hot”. For all we know, Topsid’s temperatures could be closer to Earth than those of the Arkonid capital planets!  The last of Shaulires II’s moons: Small, negligible mass and only 20% of Earth-gravity and 74% of its tiny surface is water. 25 °C sounds like it could be Topsid’s average temperature. Another trap for new players. Tiny, too much water, you get the drift by now.  The other planets are all like Shaulires I, just different kinds of hellish. The two gas giants can’t be colonized at all, of course. All those poo poo planets are colonizable. And since at least the main planets are all large and fairly dry, there’s lots of potentially usable surface tiles. Too bad that for reasons I’m soon getting into, colonizing them is another trap. And this time the game warns you to not do this, so you can’t even claim OE tricked you!  OK, it seems most of the system is a dud. But fine, more than one colony doesn’t count towards our victory score anyway, so let’s do the most with our hosed-up starting planet. First things first: Resources. We need consumer goods to supply our population, so Greenhouses are the first order of the day. Our other starting resources are enough to complete two in one turn, which hopefully gets us up from our terrible 70% supply rate.  Resources! We need a lot of them. From the top down: Living space: We need this for our population to live in. Our command center has enough free apartments for 3750 Topsiders to live in, which translates to 375 units of living space (for 375 units of population, as OE assumes that 10 people = 1 pop unit) and 100 of those units are taken over already by our 1000 colonists. The tiny yellow bar inside the green bar measures how much of our living space is used up. If it gets closer to full occupancy, it will turn red. As population growth is a complex calculation based on consumer good availability, local planetary environment, available living space and employment, hitting the red bar point is bad, as it slows down pop growth. And obviously, after space is used up completely, pop growth immediately grinds to a halt. “Pop growth” in this game functions more like a mix of birth rate and immigration, with contraception being freely used to make dead sure no additional colonists show up after the last apartment is filled. Consumer goods: Now things get weird: Consumer goods are shown by some kind of plant-in-glass symbol and Greenhouses are our main source of them. But they are not only food! It’s a catch-all term for everything our colonists could theoretically need for comfort, including food. In fact, one type of our factories will also make some consumer goods! Operation Eastside does some heavy abstracting here, as we probably shouldn’t assume that we’re growing PS5s in a greenhouse or that our light industry includes TacoBell. Population “eats” consumer goods and depending on how hostile the planetary environment is, the amount of consumer goods per pop goes up fast. Generally speaking, colonizing planets with less than half of their vertical habitability bar filled is already very chancy, with everything below that essentially creating a death world that needs constant babysitting to not die off. Even worse: Population in OE has a morale value, which determines the efficiency of the buildings they work in. And you guessed it, starving and not having the latest playstation games reduces their output severely! This results in red planets being a slow death march into extinction, as the only building you can build is consumer good producing buildings. But oops, on death worlds they’ll only work at a fraction of their capacity, thanks to everyone being so depressed from dying. This means you need even more buildings to produce “food”. But oops, they too only work at reduced capacity, and now you need more population. Which means more apartment buildings. Then you need more consumer goods… It gets silly fast. Even with constant resupply from other colonies, it’s simply not worth it. You’ll never do more than constantly trying to keep your supply rate at 100% to prevent most of the population from simply dying off (or escaping, if we’re charitable). Operation Eastside however, is very positive and gives you the chance to try. Don’t. And then there are planets so hostile you can’t mathematically sustain your population anyway. The game teaches you this by killing your population until you finally get the message and abandon the colony. There’s some good news for less bad planets, however: Getting a surplus (everything above 100% supply) gives you a bonus to morale, boosting your production. Not above 100%, mind you, but there are a lot of hidden penalties trying to suppress your production, so lots of greenhouses are always a good idea to counter those shenanigans. Population: The basis for everything we do. Every unit of population is 10 people in-game. The left number tells us total population this turn, the second number how many are not employed in any buildings or projects right now. The negative number on the right is population change for this turn. Negative is bad, it means people are running away/dying! Another reason why I immediately build food producing buildings. Our reptiloid friends need their playstations! The tiny red bar is measuring unemployment. The fuller the red bar, the worse it gets: The more people aren’t doing anything, the more depressed everyone is and production will go down. This is why massive consumer good overproduction is a good thing: It’s inevitable that later in the game, growing numbers of people will occasionally just sit around and do nothing for a couple turns. If that happens, production efficiency silently dove tails and a nice “food” surplus partially offsets that. As a properly German game, only constant working can truly keep morale up though. Take this into account! Of course, eventually every colony will reach a cap when every single tile is filled. I suggest building lots of ships to keep everyone happy if that happens. Or min-max your buildings until 100% of the now unchanging population is employed? The game doesn’t care how you deal with this depression disease, just that you do deal with it. Light industry: Necessary for all manner of construction: This tiny little microchip is a symbol for everything involving the smaller side of construction. Computer parts, cables, Sony playstations, tin cans, refrigerators: Basically everything important and not heavy and bulky comes from factories producing light industry. This is why light industry buildings will always also produce a small stream of consumer goods, by the way. The display shows you, from left to right: Current stockpiles, current production after current projects have been subtracted, and change this turn. When you order something being build, the current production number and the turn change updates in real time, so you won’t get nasty surprises. Keep an eye on your stockpiles! If they drop to zero when you’re already facing a production shortage, your industry will grind to a halt. The green bar simply shows you how close you are to maximum possible production. Giving build orders will deplete the bar and when you manage to use up more materials than your industry can generate in a turn, the bar will turn red and turn change will become negative. As an additional warning: The middle number doesn’t take the flat amount of resources taken by running buildings into account. This sometimes leads to situations where the game claims your production is still positive, but the bar is already red and your stockpile gets depleted by a big, fat negative number each turn. Looking at the turn change number is therefore the better way to plan ahead, as it’s essentially your production after all other variables have been accounted for. Luckily you can only use up resources by building if you can allocate workers. You can’t accidentally block yourself by building too many stuff at once: Your population surplus will seldom be enough for more than a couple projects at a time, and ordering more stuff will just create an empty construction site with zero workers and resources allocated. Heavy industry: Heavy industry production works exactly the same as light industry, just with a different sub-resource produced by the related buildings. Heavy industry units are basically stuff like heavy pieces of ship hull, large bulky fusion reactors and similar poo poo. The sub-resource in question is transport capacity. Every new heavy industry building adds more transport capacity you can use to immediately shift resources around between colonies. We’ll come back to why that is and how that works in more detail later. Right now transport capacity is completely irrelevant, as we don’t have a second colony to shift resources to. I’ll explain this game mechanic deeper when we can actually use it.  OK, basic resources explained! Now it’s day two of our expedition, and our contingent of robots with the aid of our free population managed to complete our two greenhouses. Consumer good production jumped from 70% up to 139%, which neutralized the penalties we suffered under last turn. Pop growth is positive, production is up, we can now actually start working on expanding our colony. The numbers next to the building in the build menu is the resources needed to build it in 1 turn, by the way. Greenhouses are cheap as poo poo, as you can see. Operating them is even just a fraction of that, so even a starting colony can run a lot of these things. Sadly, this also means an inexperienced player may start to believe colonies on hostile worlds are actually possible, since greenhouses are so cheap. Sooner or later Operation Eastside will teach that player what exponential growth means and their colonies of 90+% greenhouses will still die. Better to just avoid that headache by not even trying this losing fight in the first place.  The next important step for our fledgling colony is a research center. The basic starting research building doesn’t do much, but considering we will spend a lot of time trapped on our starting planet, starting research early is a good idea. If you look closely, you’ll see our future research center is vastly more expensive than our cheap-rear end greenhouses. It also needs more staff and industrial resources to run, so sadly, after this we’ll need to expand our industrial production first before we can build more research centers.  In fact, the research center was expensive enough we needed an extra turn to finish it! On day four, we can click on the finished building to bring up this screen. Our research center needs a whopping 20 pops (so, 200 people) as staff, and eats 16 light industry and 4 heavy industry each turn. We have a slider to reduce this, but this will make our research suffer, obviously. For all of this, we get two (2) shiny new research points! Terrans would get at least one more, but we wanted to play Topsiders, so two points is all we get at maximum efficiency. Playing around with that slider is a good way to waste resources for 0 research, so I’ll keep my hands of it for now. The red buttons below the production status screen allow you (from left to right) to center the map on the selected building, to delete it (refunds all materials used up in building), select a research goal and to close the menu. Centering the map is the most pointless option ever, considering you need to actually see a building to click on it, which means your screen is already close to being optimally centered. I never used this option. Let’s go to the research sub-menu instead!  You saw this menu already in the test run update, and it’s still the same. Now you only learn an additional fact: Instead of using the main research menu down at the screen border, you can in fact click on every research building and set a different research goal! Handling every research building individually is a recipe for madness. It’s a far better idea to use the main research menu to override all research buildings on the current colony all at once. After your second research building, there is no reason to ever go into the individual research menus ever again.  While our first research center is concentrating on developing better ways of living, our colony needs to expand its basic resource production. After putting down two factories for light industry and two energy converters for heavy industry, I suddenly realize the tiles will block some of the few spaces for huge 3x3 buildings in the future. poo poo. But OK, nothing prevents me from tearing them down again to make space later. For now, they’re more important than hypothetical future factories.  Day 9. It’s now the 9th January 2326. Our little colony has its first little batch of factory buildings running. Thanks to immigrants arriving in large numbers, there are now 1300 colonists living on Shaulires II. That “immigrants”-stuff relates back to our transport system. Sure, we’re supposed to be cut off from the Westside of our galaxy, but our transport system doesn’t need to care: The way it works means colonists can freely arrive here, but it’s a dangerous one-way trip and sending materials and resources from that far away would destroy most of it, so our colonists basically arrive with little more than the clothes they’re wearing. This will make more sense when we get to what our transport system exactly is, which will have to wait until our second colony is ready. As weird as that sounds, it’s still better than the alternatives: Turns can’t be more than days or the entire time scale of the game goes of the rails immediately, but if they’re not months or years, our population growth can’t be from natural growth because not even Tyrannids could procreate that fast. Operation Eastside ends up in this weird spot where the turns really can’t be a long enough time for purely natural population growth because it is supposed to happen inside a very specific time span: In a couple of years, this entire colonial expedition will be rendered pointless. And since this means the entire game has to happen inside those 1-2 years, a single turn ends up being roughly equivalent to a full Earth standard day and can’t be more. That’s the trouble with shoehorning an entire universe with tons of weird lore into a standard 4x format. Theoretically, I could have gone the opposite route and make the New Homellete Cluster forgotten forever to give us enough time for more conventional turns, but since our ominous transport system gives us an out, I’ll gladly take it to ensure 100% lore compatibility. Also this allows me to routinely make the relevant lore dumps when dumb poo poo starts to happen in the rest of the galaxy. I hope this all makes sense! Besides, needing months or years for building greenhouses wouldn’t be very reasonable, either. Going the standard 4x route would not actually allow us to escape the sillyness inherent in this game.
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Nov 26, 2020 21:46
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Reptile Rising 03: Hatching Steps II: Oops the Update Was Too Long  Now that our colony has its first rudimentary economy going, let’s go into our command center. As a reminder, all those menus below (except the mentat-button on the right for ending turns) are replicated in the huge main window showing our command crew going around doing their thing. Clicking on the huge main window inside the main window goes right to the currently selected colony. Some of the hidden menus of the main windows (they only show up when your mouse hovers above them) are added stuff like loading, saving and exiting. Living space research barely moved during the last turns. One single research lab isn’t cutting it, even for the most basic research with the lowest amount of effort needed. We’ll have to do something about this if we want more than our lovely starting buildings. The main menu is animated, with people constantly coming and going. And because we’re playing Topsiders, it’s a swarm of Topsiders walking around. This exhibit A of my case of why I think Operation Eastside was heavily constraint by its tiny budget: There’s enough attention to detail for this kind of thing, with every race having their own set of weirdos being animated, but then we later see where neither development time nor art budget were left over to expand on this.  OK, back to research. I’d really like to at least get the D-level buildings before going into space. Tile space is at a premium, after all.  Two research centers weren’t really the upgrade I hoped for, and our tiny economy is still robust enough to supply a couple more. So I decide to construct two more.  Day 14. We now have four research centers, with a colossal, unbelievable output of 8 shiny new research points each turn.  OK, we’re halfway there.  Normally, I would now slowly build more factories, then more research centers. But since this is a Let’s Play, I instead just crash my economy by putting down three more research centers. Now, in turn 20, there are a total of 7 running, employing 140 of our 222 pops. That’s 1400 out of 2220 colonists working solely on research! It may be nuts, but this also means we now generate 14 research points per turn! (Terrans at this point would have 21 and already leveled up, but them’s the breaks. Topsiders are more meticulous than creative in their scientific approach.  Still a turn away from living space level D. Welp, I’ve run out of industrial capacity and population to run even more research, so that’s as good as it gets for now. By looking at the empty green bars you can compare how much research every category needs. As you may notice, all of the four categories for colony techs have longer bars then the four ship tech categories, which means we’ve uncovered another new player trap: If you research ship techs first instead of unlocking better buildings, you end up wasting tons of time while you wallow around in the filth of your E-level economy. And then you’ll have trouble building and supporting your better ships because your economy sucks rear end. It’s a bit counter-intuitive, but it’s a lot better to first boost your colony techs to level D or even C before attempting to push into space. Around that time, you also have better research buildings and the higher tech costs for ship techs is suddenly not so bad anymore. I’ll always make an exception for ship engines, however: As you see the first ship engine upgrade and the first heavy industry upgrade have similar costs, so my ideal plan is always to first level up all building research to D, then ship engines to D, followed by all buildings to C. This makes your economy robust enough for a good, long while and then I can concentrate on researching and building better ships. After researching C-level engines, I then go back to upgrade colony techs to level B, rinse, repeat. And after the next cycle we’re already basically done, as this is not a Japanese game, level A is the highest tech level we can achieve and it’s the equivalent of contemporary Arkonid state-level tech (or Terran state-level minus the heavy weapons, as both Arkonids and Terrans are at approximately the same tech level around the era this game is set in.). The only thing slowing us down is exponentially higher tech costs for each level, so while we’re currently breezing through our limited tech tree, getting to C will be somewhat of a pain, and B is halfway towards endgame already. So, now you realize why research penalties don’t really mean anything. If we compare Aras (research-specialists) with our dum-dums here, you’ll realize that with both having a healthy economy, the Aras will finish the tech tree only a couple turns before the Topsiders can catch up. The tech tree is simply too small to make much of a difference. This makes the Topsiders a better choice than you would think at first glance!  Of course, right now we’re still stuck with our basic buildings, so we’re should at least take a closer look at what we’re using. This is the Fabrication Unit, a very basic factory. Like all basic buildings, it only needs one tile. Construction costs for building in one turn is 40 workers, 30 light industry units and 40 heavy industry units. The workers we get back after completion, the materials are used up. After that, the building needs 2 pop units (a mix of 20 operators, janitors and supervisors, I assume) to run, and eats 4 light and 12 heavy industry units each turn. In exchange, you get 50 light industry units and 15 units worth of consumer goods. At maximum efficiency only, of course. You may have noticed something here, and yes: Due to attempts at “realistic” simulation, every building needs at least some tiny amounts of resources from several other buildings to work. Even our greenhouses eat up some light and heavy industry! I guess my jokes about tin cans and playstations were closer to the truth than I assumed? This is important for your planning, because generally speaking if your stockpiles run low it’s almost too late to counter your shortage. Also important: The central command building of each colony produces a small amount of each resource, so you should never, ever bulldoze it and replace it with something you think is “better”. In the few cases that you manage to choke your economy, having at least one building keep on trucking will save your rear end. Or you could manually change worker allocation to your buildings until you can crab-walk your way out of trouble, but that’s a lot of micro on a larger colony. And obviously, on smaller colonies you tend to need every single building running anyway, so for this to work you’d need to committed some major gently caress-ups when building your colony. At that point deleting surplus production buildings would also help faster than pulling some levers in your factories like you’re Obama from that one infamous economy-caricature.  You know the drill by now: Everything under Bau/construction is the cost up-front, everything under Betrieb/operation is the cost-per-turn. As long as you can keep the Energiewandler/energy converter running, you get maximal 80 heavy industry units and 100 transport capacity added to your economy. The HIUs just go to your stockpile and/or are used up by your economy, but TC-points are static. All your heavy industry buildings produce a never-changing amount of transport capacity, completely decoupled from worker morale / capacity systems. The TC of your command center plus the pool of all your heavy industry combined is your total transport capacity each turn. And your basic command center having TC in-built is my excuse as to why we’re getting new people arriving so fast in our “cut-off” colony.  And to get to the point of explaining this mechanic faster, I turn back to expanding our economy. We’re gonna need a lot of resources for space travel. On turn 21, our research department sends a message to Tuphtor Vlaht-Om, our administrative sub-commander. After flagging it as high importance message, he sends it to us, Ob-Tubtor Eresh-Tel. Let’s read it!  A helper-robot based on Arkonid designs shows us our new tech breakthrough: Level D in living space grants us the Goshun-type residential building. It needs more resources to build, but has living space for twice as many people then our basic E-level doghouses. ”Goshun” is the name of an artificial lake near the center of Terrania, the capital city of the Solar Empire. Terrania was built in the Gobi Desert, around the place the original American moon lander Stardust touched down in 1971. Perry Rhodan and his friends managed to negotiate with the Chinese government the lease of the territory the city was build on and after Humanity slowly merged into a single global polity, Terrania became the political center of the planet and later the entire fledgling empire. Fun fact: The CCP was the only nation that nearly managed to defeat Perry Rhodan, in defiance to all his creepy alien technology. In case you’re wondering, after deciding that both the US and the Soviet Union sucked too much rear end to deserve alien super-tech, Perry Rhodan deserted from the US Space Force and declared that to properly unify mankind, the future global capital should be built on the most important continent, where most of the population lives: Asia. That’s why the Stardust landed in the Gobi Desert in the first place, deep in Chinese territory. You can imagine the faces in Houston when the Stardust deviated from her original course and made a beeline to China. Here we only need to know that this building is a Terran design. The “research” to get this blueprint involved some serious espionage, I’m assuming. Also, here’s another case of OE suffering from a small budget: Terrans get a grinning humanoid clown scientist here, we only get a non-descript robot. I haven’t tested it yet, but I’m assuming very strongly that the other Non-Terran races got similarly hosed. So no space viking scientist when playing space vikings. You get a robot with no face and you’ll like it!   Our population right now is 2330 people, and we have free space for 1420 more. As thanks to our healthy “food” surplus and nice environement, we get 120 more colonists each day arriving via our transport network (OK, I guess one or two of them could also have hatched naturally from an egg, I suppose.), that is not enough. And since zero free space immediately drops our pop growth to zero, I decide to be proactive and order construction of two new Goshun-type residential buildings. That adds space for 2000 more colonists in a couple turns.  Next up, near the coast of one of our huge lakes/tiny oceans, our industrial area gets expanded. Just in time before hitting end turn I remember to switch research to agriculture. More population needs more “food”, so our consumer good production needs expanding soon. Wasting our precious early game research into the wrong category a couple turns would hurt.  Turn 24: Mercifully, agricultural research is almost as fast as living space, so we’re already halfway there.  Day 28: Our robots and workers have neatly expanded our industrial sector, and I decide it’s time to look into defense and space. Heavy industry buildings produce on general more of their main resource, since transport capacity technically isn’t a “resource” and so are balanced to account for that. If you look closely at stockpiles and production rates, you realize that even with only 3 buildings compared to 5 light industry buildings, we’re still getting more HIUs then LIUs. Sadly the AI tends to run into similar problems, so heavy industry units tend to be really unpopular for trading.  And now, after making sure research and economy are up and running, it’s time for the real deal: Defensive buildings, space ports and shipyards. This is your basic E-level defense building. A simple station to launch missiles at enemy ships. The installation is fully automated and like all defense buildings, is only ever staffed in an emergency. Like all defense buildings, it allows the colony to scan for foreign ships, though the range of the missile base “1.0 R” is not very useful. It is roughly what a ship with E-level engines can cross in a single turn. Though we also get audio-messages if foreign ships just pass us by, which is both awesome and confusing, as there is never an actual message if the ships aren’t coming to you. You just suddenly here “enemy ship detected” at turn start and if the ship or ships aren’t actually going to your system, that’s it. Because of a formatting error, it’s not easy to see at a glance what the Raketenbasis/missile base actually can do, so I give you the numbers: When built, the missile base can attack hostile ships in orbit up to a range of 4 tiles and with a strength of 60. Ammunition is automatically made and loaded, it’s completely abstracted out of your way. We’re looking at ships later and a strength of 60 for your basic starting building isn’t actually that bad. The range is horrible, however: 4 tiles in space combat would be a ship basically sitting right next to your colony and you don’t want that. The missile base also has no armor and shield protection, which means every time an enemy fleet shoots, your colony will get hosed, as the combined armor and shield strength of all your defense buildings is also the HP of your colony in space combat. There’s no ground combat: Space combat can and will disable buildings and if a colony can’t defend itself anymore, it automatically surrenders. At which point everyone leaves through the transport network and the new guys get an empty colony they can only use after transferring over some population from their other colonies. Another reason to pump research into buildings asap, because without at least light and heavy industry at D, you won’t even get your basic shield generator to prevent every single enemy hit directly hurting your colony.  Even more important: Your basic space port. The Venus-class space port only takes a single tile and doesn’t even use a lot of resources. It can allow ships up to 200 m size to launch and land, which makes it a nice option for small repair yards, if you want to keep your scouts from clogging up main yards later. Without a space port, you’re not even allowed to build ships, as there is no space to transfer them to from the yard. The game just straight up doesn’t allow you to start construction if there’s only a shipyard and no port. Our basic ship size at the start is 60 m for all spheroid ships and 120 m for our weird melon-rockets. Adding a colonization module to your design tends to make your ship automatically larger, especially in the early game, when your first ships are still tiny. That’s the reason the basic space sport is so reasonably sized, as it has to account for stuff like a Topsider-player deciding to design an E-level colonizer, which ends up being something like a 200 m long melon-rocket ship. Would suck if you’re not allowed to colonize yet just because your dumb ships are too long. A worse game would just have told you to suck it up and play a race with properly shaped ships next time. (I think races with cylindrical ships start with 80 m long space cigars, and their basic starter level colonizer would end up being 120 m. For everyone else, their 60 m corvettes will turn into 100 m light cruisers.)  The “tadpole”-class shipyard is our starting yard. It doesn’t need much resources either, but as you can see, to be fully operational it needs to be fed with 32 units of each industry type per turn, and 24 pop units have to work the buildings constantly. The shipyard is another reason why a new player should first make sure their early-game economy is robust enough before attempting to go to space. 24 population is a good chunk of the 100 you’re starting with.  Our missile base will finish first, followed by our space port and then our yard. Space awaits!  The very next day, we reach level D in agriculture and Vlaht-Om relays another message from our chief researcher, Doc Bot. The Hydroponic Facility ™ barely needs more resources to build and operate than our greenhouses, but has twice the consumer good output. Immediately we switch to them and we will never ever build greenhouses, ever again. Hydroponic Facilities are a good choice for new colonies. They won’t tax a young colony too much and still give enough CGUs (“consumer good units”) to keep a lot of people happy. Greenhouses are now officially too poo poo to matter. Later buildings will really ramp up the resources needed to run them, so for new colonies, hydroponics will always be a good choice.  It’s turn 30. I change research to light industry and our space military-industrial-complex (SMIC) is still quietly building.  Three days later, we can design and build space ships. (Yay!) But by now our growing population has outstripped our consumer good production. (Boo, Hiss!) Welp, back to building more buildings.  By the way, I totally forgot: Clicking on the window with your resource stats opens this window, allowing you to see graphs with your various resources. The button “resources” directly opens up graphs showing the development of the resources, e. g. your stockpiles. You can also freely switch resources on- and off for better visibility.  “Production” only shows raw production instead of stockpiles. Because of this, living space and population can’t be selected, since technically speaking you don’t “produce” those two things. The bumps and dents on this light industry graph nicely conform to the turns we built new factories, followed by the inevitable drop when other buildings went online and then needed to be fed with some of our LIU-production.  The last submenu opens the “overview”-tab. Here you can find some statistics related to building. The yellow bar shows you the relation between arable tiles and total tiles. If I read this right, we can only use 27,3% of the total tiles, probably thanks to all those water and mountain tiles. This bar is static since the planetary surface doesn’t change anymore after game start. (Though the information in the manual is a bit confusingly worded. I’ll occasionally check this menu when we have more than one planet.) The second bar shows the relation between arable tiles and maximum available arable tiles on our planet. This second bar will slowly change colors as it shrinks while we pave over more and more tiles. It will first turn yellow, and when we really start using up the available space, eventually it’ll turn red. The same data is also shown in pure numbers. Maximal bebaubare Fläche / Maximum arable surface: The number of tiles the planet gives you after sea tiles and mountain tiles have been subtracted. Freie bebaubare Fläche / Free arable surface: The number of tiles that are still free and usable, right now. Mögliche Positionen für Bauplätze / Possible positions for construction sites: A short overview of how many 1x1, 2x2 and 3x3 buildings can fit on the planet. If you pull out a calculator you may notice the numbers aren’t fitting perfectly. That’s because our wild and unhinged building has already locked up some slots for larger buildings with our lovely 1x1 tile buildings. The lower part of the window shows you how many of your available resources and manpower are working on ship construction right now. On the right is what your completed shipyards can give you, on the left what is actually used at this moment. The latter zeroes are all in red because since we’re not building ships, the resources of our shipyard are essentially wasted. The resources of all of our shipyards combined is what we can use for shipbuilding. In theory, you could just use your basic E-level shipyard to build titanic battleships, in practice the heat death of the universe may arrive faster then your new battleship. Build more shipyards, ya dummy!  Day 35. It’s now February 2326 and we just avoided a PS5-bottleneck. Also everyone has something to eat. That’s important too, I guess.  Anyway, time to design our first ship! We first click on “New Construction” to generate a new design, and then we carefully avoid clicking on the screwdriver-symbol, because that would order our shipyard to begin this rather lovely ship immediately, loving us over in the process. Currently, all our ship techs are still at level E, and loving poo poo. Keeping all sliders on the left gives you the worst possible poo poo of all the poo poo. Panzerung/armor is also a ship’s hull, so with a Schirmleistung/shield power of 8, a single missile base could destroy this design failure in two shots. Also, with an attack strength of 1, it won’t do any good attacking a colony, even if there’s nothing to protect it. We should change this! Too bad some things can’t be changed: Basic stats are different based on race. Terrans for example, may be “average” on paper, but their spheroid ships are hulking brutes: The basic starter poo poo ship has a strength of 3 instead of loving 1, and nearly 3x the shield strength. Sure, hull/armor is only half that of our ships, but hull needs to be repaired, shields just regenerate automatically, even during a battle. Even better: Upgrades and slider positions calculate new values based on your basic stats, so as ships get larger and more advanced, our ships will fall more and more behind. Oh, but our hulls will be beefy as gently caress, which will make us really glad our ships can survive a couple more turns doing zero damage before exploding! Welp, you wanted to play Topsiders! I wasn’t joking about their lovely ships. And this game dutifully replicates how backwards their technology is.   Before just pulling all sliders to max, everything (armor, shields, engines, weapons) is influencing everything else, so a ship with maximum setting is less a maximum optimal ship and more a maximum mediocre ship. A strong battleship should probably be even slower if you want to go all in on weapons. In this example, I pulled shield strength to maximum, raising shield strength from 8 to 39. If I build this ship, a single missile hit by our most basic defenses would “only” take out all the shields and smash half the hull structure. If we want to actually get a ship capable of taking more than two hits, we need to also raise armor strength. But uh oh, that will also drop shield strength a bit again! For the future, since our hull is naturally strong and shields are more important, we will probably squeeze out more firepower by concentrating on shields and weapons for our combat ships. Though I fear because of the difference in base stats we’ll probably need to also use speed as our second dump stat to get usable damage out of our weapons. Anyway, fighting Arkonids, Akons or Terrans will be a pain. Luckily Aras and Mehandor have their dinky space cigars, which are a lot less superior in every way.  For reasons, the most important thing right now is a scout with maximum speed. I dub thee Eggsplorer, little scout. Our painfully low base stats mean this ship type can only do one thing: Run fast. The current generation of ships will be a lot less dangerous to us than planets, but still: With a shield strength of loving 8, almost every ship will take down our shield in 1-2 hits and start melting our hull. Actual combat ships of course will do similar damage to our ground missiles and possible even be able to one-shot our scouts. But enemy ships will have to catch this little bugger first.  The middle menu of the designer shows you ships that are being built or repaired right now. Eggsplorer-I, our very first ship, is of course the only entry here. The last menu would show all currently operational ships. That number is zero for now, so I spared you another screenshot.  After only 35 days living in the Eastside, our little Topsider-colony is already building its first space ship. You gotta love advanced future tech. To Be Continued Libluini fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Nov 26, 2020 |
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Nov 26, 2020 21:47
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I find it curious how detailed the ground section is, considering that the space section seems to be, roughly, Master of Orion levels of detail. Does it drown you in annoying micro of planets later on or do you have better AI governors than in MoO3?
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Nov 27, 2020 01:08
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I suppose ramming speed is not a thing?
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Nov 27, 2020 08:13
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PurpleXVI posted:I find it curious how detailed the ground section is, considering that the space section seems to be, roughly, Master of Orion levels of detail. Does it drown you in annoying micro of planets later on or do you have better AI governors than in MoO3? Let's just say that after playing a test game up to turn 150, my right hand hurt really bad. But the AI is fine, as long as you forbid them from flooding you with ships. There is no fleet AI or something, so having dozens of planets making GBS threads out ships you then have to deal with is a good way to go mad. It's just that the AI administrators have no sense of aesthetics and the way they just drop buildings on random tiles all over the place is giving me physical pain to look at. We will see this in action in later updates. habituallyred posted:I suppose ramming speed is not a thing? It's suicide. Ramming a ship is not possible in general in Perry Rhodan, with a few exceptions where a space people decided they want to ram ships and so retooled their entire civilization to specialize on ramming ships (and surviving). Ships are too fast and maneuverable, even the really big clunkers. It also doesn't help that ships are heavily automated, so you'd need to first incapacitate either the ship's computers or the crew controlling them, and at that point you have already won. From a standpoint of physics, every time you can surprise a ship enough to ram it, you can also just open fire. And if you don't have any weapons, well that never actually happened. Even our dumb freighter had four massive space cannons equipped. Perry Space is simply too flooded with weird poo poo and alien civilizations live on almost every planet. There's also tons of piracy. Going out without weapons is just plain dumb. Which is technically why we're still armed, though strength 1 comes close to just the crew opening a hatch and shooting at enemy ships with their handguns. This game replicates this by not allowing you to ram. If you try, your ship just ends its turn right next to an enemy ship. The best you can hope for at that point is that your broadsides are stronger. Our scouts would just be turned into crocodile steaks. OK but now let's be real, the reason for ramming not existing is the same reason as to why we didn't get a proper scientist: There was not enough time/money for programming it in.
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Nov 27, 2020 08:34
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Ramming is a bad idea, got it.
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Nov 27, 2020 11:36
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More like "keep your ramming manoeuvres for the bedroom"
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Nov 27, 2020 11:46
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So how is Topsiders pronounced anyways? Top-side-ers To-psi-ders Top-sid-ers Top-si-ders
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Nov 27, 2020 12:46
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Slaan posted:So how is Topsiders pronounced anyways? That's how I always pronounced them in my head. Edit: Ramming in PR is something that's basically never done. Especially after the first few hundred issues of the series, the ships have such powerful weapons and shields, that ramming is both of little threat, and likely not possible before your ship gets blown up. If your shields are down, you're already dead, apart from some extremely rare special cases with ultra-powerful armor technology that's not available to the PR mortals (Carit). That said, the game is set I think at the era of issues 150-199, so ramming might still be a theoretically viable tactic in rare situations. Torrannor fucked around with this message at 13:20 on Nov 27, 2020 |
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Nov 27, 2020 13:17
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Except if you're fighting the Solar Empire. Then a high-yield fusion bomb will just magically appear on your bridge, detonating before your brain even realizes what's happening Modern PR has a species which has this entire thing of using specialized ships, weapons and equipment to survive a ramming maneuver, including shield-neutralizing fields. The galaxy is terrified of them because they can just beam themselves on board of your ship if they breach the shields and then they can hack your computers and take over the defense systems from the inside. Apart from that though, no chance. There's also a second ultra-powerful armor tech that will even be relevant for this thread, but we aren't gonna see that stuff for a good, long while yet so please no spoilers Re: Pronunciation of Topsiders: Top-si-ders is also my pick. Not that I'm aware of any audiobooks with them in it, so I don't think there is an official pronunciation. The guy from the Perryversum-YouTube channel pronounces it Top-si-ders in German, which sounds just wrong to me. (It sounds like Top-se-ders in English, to give Non-Germans an idea how it sounds.) Too bad there are not many Perry-fans on SA, so I can continue pronouncing "Topsiders" the English way, and no-one can stop me!
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Nov 27, 2020 14:32
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Why doesn't the Arkon-type residential building utilize the most most glorious of all possible shapes for a building; the funnel? https://www.perrypedia.de/wiki/Khasurn_(Architektur)
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Nov 28, 2020 16:53
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Funny you should mention that, my very first reaction to seeing an Arkon-type building in OE was "Hey, that's not an Arkon-type building at all! " My guess is, like with the sublight-drives being in the wrong position during the opening cinematic: There was not enough time and budget to properly "loreify" that poo poo.
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Nov 28, 2020 17:43
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gently caress, now that I think about it, the Arkon-building in OE looks like a funnel backwards. Maybe the devs were told Arkonid buildings "looked like funnels", and they went "got it!" and then put them down the wrong way? And then there was not enough time left to correct the error?
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Nov 28, 2020 17:48
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It probably cropped up all the way to the end of the QE-process, as the designers went with the most reasonable way of putting up a funnel-shaped building. But the idea of making what are basically Terran-made pre-fabs (the lore generally mentions low-rise bungalows as the most important building areound the Goshun-lake) more advanced than a Arkon-made building held up by anti-gravity and advanced materials is quite weird. As well as having a species like the Topsider adopt a building tailored to the Arkonid social structures of individual clans living in privacy bordering on isolation.
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Nov 28, 2020 21:22
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At least they made sure that Topsiders have the weakest ships, as is lore-appropriate. That is important.
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Nov 28, 2020 21:26
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Kodos666 posted:It probably cropped up all the way to the end of the QE-process, as the designers went with the most reasonable way of putting up a funnel-shaped building. But the idea of making what are basically Terran-made pre-fabs (the lore generally mentions low-rise bungalows as the most important building areound the Goshun-lake) more advanced than a Arkon-made building held up by anti-gravity and advanced materials is quite weird. As well as having a species like the Topsider adopt a building tailored to the Arkonid social structures of individual clans living in privacy bordering on isolation. The Goshun-thing at least makes sense to me, as all Terran-tech is just stolen Arkonid-tech with some self-made improvements. The Arkonid Empire at this point is barely waking up from its long stupor of stagnation, after all.
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Nov 28, 2020 21:56
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Reptile Rising 04: Fledglings Taking Flight Mission Log 002: 3rd March 2326 Our second month here in the Eastside has come to an end. Now, with hundreds of new colonists arriving each day, we have become strong enough to shed our earlier vulnerability. Our capital is now protected by first rudimentary defenses, and we have successfully built our first new space ship here in this forlorn part of the galaxy. But while direct military action against us becomes less likely each day, subterfuge or competing expeditions are still huge threats to our security. Our position is not as stable as I would like. Therefore, I’ve ordered our first locally produced FTL-ship on a closer survey of the nearby systems. The data left to us by the Terrans is woefully out of date, and sometimes not even more than a cursory glance at the central star of the system. Not very useful for colonization! By now, the first reports are back, and while not all of it looks good, not all of it looks bad, either. A rather scrambled egg of a message, but we’ll deal with it. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  Some details I forgot last time: You can also click on a ship you’re building and adjust how many workers and resources should be allocated to each of them. Think about situations where you just ordered 3 bulky colonizers to be built, and suddenly, enemies are detected! Then it’s just nice if you can order some defensive ships and call all the workers from the other ships to concentrate on these ones instead. Far better than having to abandon the time and effort you put into the colonizers completely.  I also forgot to explain those other menus next to the build menu. The middle one I have open here shows an overview of all your buildings and how much output they generate. Right now, everything runs at 100% and all is well. This menu gets kind of unwieldy if you have lots of buildings. At least they are all sorted by category, so it’s not as bad as you would expect.  A cleaner screenshot. The globe-ship-in-scaffold is of course the ship building menu, and the menu with the weird building tool on the left would show any buildings currently being build. Useful if you don’t want to scroll all over the place to find construction sites. The last menu on the right is for trading. But we don’t have anyone to trade with, not even another colony of our own, so it’s unusable for now!  Turn 41: To keep up with our population growth, I’m forced to carefully construct new housing through this mountain valley south of the command center. One wrong move and I could block a 2x2 tile building slot, which would suck.  Around turn 43, we get level D in light industry. Doc Bot reveals blueprints for the Production Facility. Like all level D buildings, it’s a slight upgrade over level E, but doesn’t use that much more resources to build and maintain, so it immediately obsoletes our old factories. They produce 80 instead of 50 LIUs, but more importantly: CGU-production is doubled from 15 to 30 consumer goods per turn.  But for now we’ve seen enough tiles and buildings, let’s go into space! Now that we have a (1) ship, our fleet window actually has a purpose now! See that little ship crossed through? That symbol is for scrapping ships. As the symbol for colonizing looks similar and shows up in the same window close-by, it can occasionally happen that a misclick will just unceremoniously dumpster your colonizer, so be careful here! Sadly, there was also not enough dev-time to program some kind of feedback, like a window asking you if you really want to scrap this ship. One click, done. The ship symbol with blazing engines on the left is the fleet-counter: Each planet/moon and each ship going to the same place coming from the same place is collected together and normally name and health (“Zustand”) aren’t visible, only the number of ships in those ad-hoc “fleets”. If you click on the ships-with-blazing-engines symbol, it opens a list of individual ships. If this gives you a slightly ominous feeling, then yes. Each selected ship gives you its relevant stat block on the right. The block on the lower right lists known planets you can go to. The wrench denotes planets with shipyards, and the space alien helmet is actually a Terran ship launching. This symbol tells you that a planet has a space port. The middle block allows you to filter all known places by race, including known stars (“cloud of stars”) and unknown stars (“?”). One sorting option is missing, however! Operation Eastside goes to absurd lengths to keep the natives a secret, and I love it for this alone. The natives use a completely different sorting system so they don’t get a symbol here and they aren’t even mentioned in the manual, so if you aren’t a fan of the series, they will absolutely blindside you when you finally stumble over them.   But the most important element is this field right here: If you come here from the star map or your system map, whatever was selected last is pre-selected as a target here. It works like this: You click on a ship, then on the planet-symbol and presto: That ship is now set on a course to that target. Inside the fleet map you can select targets from the list on the right, which allows you to do advanced things like sending damaged ships back for repair. Only with a double-click though, a single click doesn’t actually change the target, which I think is really confusing in a menu where almost everything works on a single click basis The big number in the middle here is the number of turns it takes for the currently selected ship to reach its target. The + and – buttons allow you to adjust this up and down. Though of course you can’t make a ship go faster than maximum speed. Max speed is always pre-selected, and you can use the Min-button to immediately jump back instead of clicking a hundred times if you suddenly decide 69 turns was a bad idea. If you now ask yourself “Why would I ever want to make my ships slower???”, the answer is fleet coordination: This little sub-menu helps you set ships with different speeds to arrive on the same turn, which allows you to neatly set-up large-scale attacks from multiple points. I think OE is one of the few turn-based 4x where this kind of thing is even possible. Every other game I know has you tediously stagger fleets with different speeds and then hoping you won’t learn ten turns later that you hosed up somewhere. Also obviously, since there are no fleets you can still gently caress up since you quite often are sending single ships to the same target, but only the ones arriving in the same turn are counted as a single “fleet”. How this entire system looks with lots of ships is something we won’t see for a while, but it’ll become a lot clearer with more than one ship to look at.  Now that our first scout is ready, it’s time for space exploration! Coincidentally, this also means we get to use the star map! Here is the New Homellete Cluster, with all systems without potential colonies conveniently filtered out. Which isn’t that much, since New Homellete is an open star cluster. Open Star Clusters are clusters of stars which developed from the same huge molecular cloud and they can range from just about 100 up to several thousand stars. They’re completely unlike the Globular Clusters, which tend to hang out in the galactic halo and can easily consist of millions of motherfucking stars. GCs even sometimes come with their own black hole in the middle and a hostile “center”, basically Globular Clusters are miniature-galaxies and kind of neat. As the New Homellete Cluster is in the middle of the galactic disc, it’s of course one of those Open Star Clusters, which are a lot smaller and less hostile to life. I’m not even sure if this was planned like this, or if it just kind of worked out in on accident, but I’m not complaining! I think this is the only space 4x I know of in which you can just go “sure, what you see is what you get” in terms of stars and have it actually make RL-sense. Astronomy! Map controls Anyway, remember what I said in our test run? Yes, the map is a true 3D-map of a star cluster. Which means just looking at a screenshot like this is absolutely misleading, as a star right next to us may in truth be on the opposite end of the cluster. Luckily, OE just has all possible controls as conveniently large block on the right, nothing is hidden as short cut. The normal cardinal arrows let you rotate the cluster around, the + and – minus buttons are for zooming and the point in the middle automatically centers the map again. The oddly angled arrows on the left rotate the map around as if it is a flat circle. Kind of superfluous if you ask me, but I guess it’s just there in case a player misses it from other 4x-games? The vertical slider sets the rotation speed, which again is something that becomes important later when you have to zoom in to keep all your moving ships straight. Zoom in enough and you will be thankful for the ability to slow own map movement! Right now there is not much more to say, as we know jack poo poo about the New Homellete Cluster. All we know is that that white circle is marking our capital system, while the targeting cross is a star system close to us which I clicked on to mark it as a possible travel target.  Now that the Jabris-system has been selected in the map screen, it’s automatically pre-selected in the fleet screen, too. The turn number is of course dependent on ship type. Our Eggsplorer-I can travel over there in 4 days (“turns”), and as soon as I clicked on that planet-symbol, the course was set. Now our little ship is on its way! A fair warning: If a course is set, it’s done. You can’t recall a ship because it’s now accelerating for a hyperspace jump and will be gone by the time you finally rush to the hypercom! Your message will only reach it after it arrives over there, ya big dummy! Ahem. There’s no function to break off an already set course, so check twice before accidentally sending your most important ships on a wild goose chase. Not even inter-system travel, where it would actually make sense to order a ship to turn back, allows you this. For reasons that we will learn later, accidentally sending the wrong ship across a star system is even more annoying than “just” sending it to the wrong star.  As our scouts are rather cheap, I immediately order a second one. Then it’s time for waiting for our first scout to arrive.  19th February 2326: Eggsplorer-I arrives in the Jabris-system.  Another important travel notice: All interstellar voyages not directly targeting a particular planet end at the sun of a system first. According to the sun stats we’re given here, Jabris is a rather hot one. The main star of a system, as the main mass source, is a good target for most of the FTL-systems in the Perryverse. The two relevant ones operating in this era are the Transition Drive and the Linear Drive. And while it’s possible with both ones not to target the sun, there are often a lot of reasons why it’s not done. Some of the reasons are astronomical: If you leave FTL on the outskirts of the system, you’re blazingly obvious to everyone already there. In fact, in most cases their hyperspace-sensors will already have detected your incoming ship so in most cases, jumping to Pluto is a good way to get your face melted off as soon as you arrive. On the other hand, getting to the sun from even the inner system takes a lot of effort (one of the reasons missions to the Sun and Mercury take a lot more time then you would expect, and actually reaching the Sun takes so much fuel/time dropping a probe into our Sun would be at least as challenging as sending a probe to Pluto) so a ship showing up there isn’t in a worse position. And bonus: All stars are strong emitters of hyper-energy (they even cast a shadow into hyperspace), so you can use a sun to mask your arrival and presence. If your shields are strong enough, you can even move deeper into this “detection shadow” to evade progressively better sensor systems! This is why, in Operation Eastside, traveling to an unknown star system means the ships will always go to the sun first. Then, after the initial survey, you know where the other planets are with enough confidence you can then order ships to travel to the exact stellar object you want. This conforms to PR-lore, where nothing actually prevents you from going directly to, let’s say, Larsaf III (Earth in Arkonid) from 5000 light years away. But direct jumps are often dependent on how good your computers are: As a reminder, when the Topsiders in Perry’s little Vega-adventure got bamboozled into jumping to Capella, his little computer-manipulation sending the fleet directly into the core of the sun made the coordinates far more accurate then what the Topsiders would have been capable of on their own. That’s one of the reasons why the manipulation went unnoticed: On their own, they would have arrived at some very undefined point outside the Capellan star system, and with their computers, even if they had gotten suspicious, it would have taken days to check and confirm those 5D-hyperspace coordinates. And then their lovely computers would probably just confirmed that yes, the coordinates go to Capella. So they still would have jumped, and their entire fleet would still have exploded deep inside Capella.  The Linear Drive works completely different but planets, especially with the tech available in this era, can’t be targeted from inside the Libration Zone. Only stars and similar stellar objects have a hypershadow strong enough to be detectable. So with both FTL-systems of this time, it’s a good (in this case, the only) idea to go to a sun first. Only if you know the precise orbital data of a planet in advance can you take a shortcut! In large-scale military operations this is sometimes done, but most fleet admirals, even the really evil ones, don’t want to take the risk of just Kramering into the most heavily defended place of a system, so they all either go to the sun first or drop out of FTL far beyond the inner planets. And as a star’s hypershadow isn’t magic, trying to hide entire fleets there is a good way to have strong defensive fleets trap you with no way out. So, every invader always shows up around Pluto first. It’s logistically and strategically the equivalent of a well-planned, but boring operation.  So, the Jabris-system. It’s a dud. While it’s technically possible to colonize some of the planets here, they’re all hellholes like this one. The outer planets are either gas giants or frozen hellholes, so they’re out, too.  This planet deserves special mention as a huge gently caress-you to the player: Not only extremely hostile, it is also covered by lava oceans. 90% of its surface is unusable. But since it’s not fully covered with lava, the game will just let you land there. And then be extremely unhappy. The engine of OE is astonishingly complex under the hood: At game start, first all suns are generated, then each star’s stats are used to generate a planetary system based on what was known about planetary formation back in 1998. An updated system with what we know about exoplanets in 2020 would, ironically enough, generate lots of different systems, with a lower chance of completely dead systems like this. But alas, 1998 is all we have. Anyway, this means if you know enough about astronomy, you already knew this system was a lost cause the moment you looked at Jabris’ stats itself.  Welp, that wasn’t good. Let’s try this again. Eggsplorer-I will now jump to the Habila-system. The star is another chunky bastard, but from memory, F-class stars should sometimes have usable planets. With a little luck...  While we’re doing all this space stuff, I’m dutifully expanding our first colony each turn.  It’s a constant low pressure effort of making more space for our population, expanding consumer good production to feed them, and then building stuff to put them to work in research or production buildings. After 52 turns, our population has grown to 7850 people.  In turn 53, we go back to space: Our second scout is finished! Now we have Eggsplorer-I surveying the Habila-system, and Eggsplorer-II going to the new Sheran-system. Hopefully one or both will have usable planets!  Playing around with map modes: With these settings, only stars known by us and our ship movements are shown. After we get better FTL-scanners, this will become important to track our competitors moving around the map.  Welp. Habila VI is the best planet here. And by “best” I mean the best because all other planets are even more terrible. Another dud, but when we reach end-game, I definitely could see myself putting a colony on Habila VI just to push up our victory score.  Next try: Eggsplorer-I continues the search for new habitable planets. Aldecagor is 4 days travel time from Habila, and basically across the cluster from us. I may be forced to read the map more carefully next time.  Case in point: We’re kind of drifting far away from our lone shipyard here. Later you will thank the devs for their mercy in adding an easily accessible center-button, because you will also need to do a lot of rotating and zooming to keep up with what’s going on here.  Doc Bot drops by in turn 56 with a huge update: Heavy industry research is now at level D, and with both light and heavy industry at D, the next level of research and space related buildings has been unlocked! The new Structure Generator is exactly like all other D-level buildings: Better than E, you get more stuff for slightly higher costs. But let’s take a look at everything else that has been unlocked now:  Analysis Center: OK I lied the new special buildings are also just better versions of the E-level ones. Just as a note, the amount of population and resources Analysis Centers need can come as a nasty surprise if you aren’t careful. As Topsiders, we barely get 3 points to our old 2 per building. Other races would get 4-5 out of them. Though also as Topsiders, we will need every research point we can get, so I’m forced to still build a lot of them.  Our new Terra-class spaceport is also our first 2x2 tile building. It takes significant resources, but as all spaceports, it needs zero resources to run. Obviously this means I will immediately tear down our old spaceport for this new one. There’s no bonus in having more than just the largest possible spaceport on your planet. The only limit is the maximum size (here: 400 m), but if there is some limit to the number of ships, I haven’t found it yet. So there’s really no reason to keep your old spaceport after you’ve gotten the next better unlock. Just uh, if you’re fighting someone or expect trouble, it may pay off to keep the older one until your new one is finished. You can’t construct new ships with no spaceport, after all. Narrator: He did not heed his own advice.  The M-class shipyard is a more complex case: It is again a building of type “better, but takes more resources”, but shipyards all add up to your total building capacity. Later, we may let one of the older yards live for this reason, but right now our economy isn’t robust enough for multiple shipyards, so I’ll have to tear the older one down.  Our D-level defensive structure it the counterpart to our E-level missile base: The Schirmfeldprojektor/Shield Generator. It is a heavily armored base with a strong shield generator inside, capable of covering the entire colony. Each base adds 60 armor points and 240 shield points to a colony’s HP when in battle. It’s purely defensive, so there are no stats for attacking. Funnily enough, it has better sensors than our missile bases, so building at least one of these things upgrades the scanning range of a colony to 1,5 R. The “R” is nowhere explained, but from experience, it’s either for R(unden)/turns or R(adius) of a star system. I’m thinking it’s probably the first one. Star systems aren’t quite this close together here.  Next stop: Now that our buildings are out of the lovely E-lane of this universe, it’s time to make our space ships slightly better. We need speed, so better engines are go!  After that, I immediately work on expanding our weird little industry center up here in the north. Or is that northwest, considering the map is isometric? Eh, close enough.  The east of Shaulires II slowly turns into a network of science buildings, including our first Analysis Center.  In turn 57, Eggsplorer-II reaches Aldecagor. The star is a lot closer to our own, and this means the chances for the algorithm creating some nice planets is far higher here!  But it turns out the game engine rolled really badly here. Can you believe the other planets are even worse? I sure as hell couldn’t. The other planets were hot instead of cold, and mostly covered with lava. At least on this planet you have a lot of space to desperately build more hydroponics!  Another star, another attempt. Eggsplorer-I sets course for Elcath. Next turn, Eggsplorer-II gets a chance at doing it better.  After this string of unlucky surveys, I’m kind of on edge here. Will Sheran turn our luck around, or will it only add more disappointment?  The first look is good: As a G5 with luminosity V and near Sol-mass, it’s very close to optimal.  Yes! Our first truly colonizable world. Slightly above 50% habitability is not good, but also not bad. If we don’t find anything better, this seems to be it. However, Sheran I-1 is tiny, so let’s look around a little longer.  OK, that moon is officially bad now. Sheran II is bigger, slightly more habitable and even with 56% surface ice ocean, it’ll still have more tiles than Sheran I-1.  Remarkably, Sheran I is even better! It’s hotter (good for Topsiders) and therefore slightly more habitable. Tough choice. Sheran II has more tiles, as it is larger and has slightly less ocean, but Sheran I would drain slightly less consumer goods. As I don’t know how much the difference in tiles will turn out, I’ll take this planet for now. Especially as we don’t know how many tiles will be blocked by mountains until we actually land. A good/bad roll on mountain tiles could easily make one planet vastly better than the other, but we will only learn when it’s too late.  For now, I’m ordering Eggsplorer-II into orbit above Sheran I. This will give our future colony here some minor protection until local defenses can be built. We will think about Sheran II later. Explorers are cheap. Colonies being devastated by sudden attack, not so much.  After you’ve ordered a ship to a particular planet, you can go there and get a list of what ships will arrive and when. Useful when your ships are still in transit. You may have noticed how our scout will need 5 turns to get from the sun to the planet. This is for two reasons: 1) The game assumes that after arriving in a star system, you switch to sublight speed and stay there. No direct jumps to your target planet after you’ve arrived! 2) The actual distances in a planetary system are calculated on a logarithmic scale mapping to how distances in a real star system (like ours) would turn out. This means that a ship launching from the sun of a system has to first spend a lot of effort to get away from the sun to reach the first planets, and then every orbital line shown on the map is progressively farther away from the one before it. So our scout needs 5 days at sublight speed to reach Sheran I from the sun, which is at roughly the same distance from Sheran as the Earth is from the Sun. And then Sheran II is at roughly Mars-distance and so on. And yes, this means if you target a planet at Pluto-distance or even farther out from inside a system, you will be a very unhappy player! Luckily this is mostly important for our explorers, since as soon as we know about the planets in a system, we can then target them directly from the system view and send our colonizers and future defense ships straight to them.* Meanwhile, I’m sweating blood and water at the idea of finding a good potential colony as planet 9 or something, with the resulting ludicrous travel times. Though a fast scout taking longer to reach a planet from within the same system then the colonizer from back home, who has to be even build first, has some comedic potential. *Important update: Later I learned that no, FTL and STL aren't handled differently, the game just never updates the travel time set for your last ship order, so if e.g. a ship needed 11 turns to get somewhere, the UI will gladly make you let that ship move very slowly through the target system if you don't remember to click 10 times on the minus-button in the fleet window. That was a stupid lesson to learn. What is the logarithmically calculated system map than used for, you ask? Apparently for planet creation and habitability calculations only.  At the end of this update, I’ve reached turn 62 – 3rd March 2326. Our new and improved shipyard is already running, and our first shield generator will follow next turn. Soon, the first colony ship from inside the New Homellete Cluster will be ready. Ironically, I kind of ignored my own advice by tearing down our old spaceport before starting our larger one. Our new 2x2 spaceport will take some time, and until it is finished, we can’t begin new ship construction. Colonization will have to wait a little bit longer. Oops! To Be Continued Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:42 on May 23, 2022 |
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Nov 29, 2020 12:00
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Is there a Perry Rhodan lore reason why you can't make in-system FTL jumps between two planets?
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Nov 29, 2020 21:01
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PurpleXVI posted:Is there a Perry Rhodan lore reason why you can't make in-system FTL jumps between two planets? No. Later drives became so powerful that it wasn't advisable to use them in the direct vicinity of planets (or other structures that you didn't want to damage), but that's about it.
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Nov 29, 2020 21:50
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Yeah, this is a Operation Eastside only issue. It's because there is just one travel system implemented, and either system travel is handled like planets are multiple light years apart to make things work, or interstellar travel is secretly calculated like it's planetary travel and OE just conveniently "forgets" to tell the player that FTL-travel is abstracted away. The game doesn't tell, so hapless speculation is all I have. Hell, for all I know I could be totally wrong and there are both sublight and FTL travel systems, and the devs just didn't hook them up quite right Edit: I mean, if you could just FTL-jump from planet to planet, this totally awesome logarithmic solar system scale the devs came up with would be completely pointless, so there's a good hint at why the devs did it this way.
Libluini fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Nov 29, 2020 |
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Nov 29, 2020 22:52
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Could you rebuild a tier 1 spaceport to colonize sooner?
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Nov 29, 2020 23:30
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AJ_Impy posted:Could you rebuild a tier 1 spaceport to colonize sooner? You know, that's actually a good idea! So of course I never thought of it. Welp, I'll try to remember this in case I gently caress this up again
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Nov 30, 2020 01:42
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I'm bored and still not finished with the next update, so let me tell you a story. Knights of the Deep Once upon a time, a baby was brought to the Great Dome Kesdschan to be anointed as one of the mystical Knights of the Deep, to go forth and spread order around the universe. This baby became a great knight and faced many dangers to fight the negative powers of the universe. He became a great hero. But as he was traveling the universe, a dark knight appeared, stalking him. Calling him a fraud and a traitor. For the longest time, the two knights were at odds, fighting every chance they got. Eventually, the dark knight was vanquished, and order prevailed. The true knight fought many more foes, but eventually, he accidentally managed to wander into a trap designed by his colleague, the knight Armadan von Harpoon, and the hero was trapped and put into stasis. Armadan von Harpoon knew the truth, and had finally acted. A million years and more passed, and the Great Order of the Deep slowly fell into obscurity. Dark forces infiltrated even the Dome Kesdschan itself. During a time of great crisis, the sleeping knight awoke, but a dangerous secret awoke with him: His dark knight had been the true Knight of the Deep, and he was indeed a fraud. At birth, he had been exchanged with the baby that should have been anointed, and unwittingly taken his place. As the forces of order are merciless, this knowledge shamed and changed him: He became vile and mean, and his aura and his mystical knowledge fled him. At the same time, the Human Jen Salik was plagued with visions of the ancient knight Armadan von Harpoon, and it was revealed to him that the ancient knight had been a distant ancestor. The more Jen Salik awoke to his heritage, the more the knowledge which had left the fake knight streamed into him, and he slowly became the knight that had never been. On the day the fake knight was revealed to the galaxy as the fraud, he had fallen so much he accidentally killed himself with his own weapon. The day he died, Jen Salik became the true knight in his stead, and the ancient debt had been repaid. This was the story of the Knight of the Deep Igsorian van Veylt and his nemesis, the fake knight Harden Coonor. But which had been which? Today, only the immortals know.  Ancient painting titled: The Traitor Revealed! Libluini fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Nov 30, 2020 |
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Nov 30, 2020 20:25
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OK, next update should be up by Sunday at the latest. By the way, do you like me posting these dumb side stories? If you want to read them, there will be more in the future. After all, I have nearly 60 years of lore to draw upon, so that's a lot of posts if I put my mind to it.
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Dec 5, 2020 16:00
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Libluini posted:By the way, do you like me posting these dumb side stories? Personally I love it. Perry Rodan seems completely impenetrable to the outsider, so almost every story about it has that "two grade schoolers talking about a show that you've never seen before"-energy which somehow makes it even more fascinating.
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Dec 5, 2020 16:11
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I like them, and it is probably much easier than a full update.
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Dec 5, 2020 21:12
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I like them too, just to jog my memory. They're a nice change of pace from the updates.
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Dec 5, 2020 21:17
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I like them, and also long running series like these often have a stash of crazy poo poo hidden in some corner.
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Dec 5, 2020 21:32
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I like them just because it's a glimpse into what sounds like one of the more interesting sci-fi settings that, due to my complete lack of comprehension of any language other than english, I will never get to experience myself.
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Dec 6, 2020 03:11
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Nice to hear those mini-updates are appreciated! There'll be more in the future, but for now it's time for the next update.
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Dec 6, 2020 11:24
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OK, really thread? We're just two posts short of a new page?
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Dec 6, 2020 11:30
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Radium, I curse you.
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Dec 6, 2020 11:30
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