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 Reptile Rising 05: Exploring New Homellete  Mission Log 003: 16th April 2326 Slowly, but surely we expand our local space forces. But our first scouts encountered some setbacks, as not all of the nearby star systems are good targets for further colonization. In fact, most of them are just atrocious nests filled with bad eggs! Eventually, our surveyors did find some potential targets and now that our original colony is strong enough, we are building colony ships as fast as possible. I’m not really sure we were fast enough, though. We made contact with both the Arkonids and the Mehandor. For now, there is peace, but with those wily traders and the full arrogance of Arkonid might nearby, who knows for how long? Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  Turn 63: We managed to put a ship in orbit around Sheran I, our future colony. Too bad our colonizers aren’t ready yet, though!  Meanwhile, another scout surveys the Elcath-system. It’s a dwarf star with only one gas giant and both a frozen and a molten lump of rock. Not exactly what we wished for!  Even the gas giant moons are all poo poo. This is definitely a system I’ll be avoiding for as long as possible.  And again we try: Scutima is another chunkier star, with 13,75x the mass of Sol. As a K4, it isn’t as radiation-intense as a star that size normally would be though, which means: Potentially habitable planets!  In turn 68 we arrive, and it turns out I guessed correctly: The moon Scutima IV-1 is very habitable, with only a low amount of tiles blocked by surface water! Seriously, this is what the still intense radiation of this sun does to a system: Scutima IV and its moon hang around at around Jupiter-Saturn level distance, and the average temperature here is still almost the same as on Earth. All the inner planets? Scorched.  The main planet is slightly less habitable (for Humans), on account of being dry and hot. But it’s also both bigger and has no annoying water blocking tiles, so it seems like a slam dunk.  But I chicken out and choose the moon first, because of the better habitability. Funny, after our long line of duds, we managed to find two system with two possible colonies each. And in both cases, the info reported by the game wasn’t enough to discern from the outside which one’s better. But just because one colony per system is enough for our victory score, doesn’t mean we absolutely have to take only one planet per system: After taking the most habitable ones, I’ll definitely go better and take the bigger ones. Comparing what the game tells us beforehand with the end result should be interesting.  Turn 75: Our new spaceport is ready, and I’ve been busy expanding our research network. Too busy, in fact: Our now 16790 colonists have been running out of food and video games for some time now. Time for more consumer goods!  Three turns later, I manage to finally build enough hydroponics to keep up with our population, but then I notice we’re running out of light industry, so now I’m switching to building more factories again! And after that, more residential buildings as we’re running low on that, too! Yeah, colony management turns into a bit of a rat race pretty fast.   Turn 78 also has our Tuphtor Vlaht-Om relaying a message from Doc Bot: Engine tech has reached level D!  The first upgrade is a bit basic: Instead of having an impulse drive for sublight propulsion, we now can use a heavy impulse drive! Every ship designed from now on will be slightly faster. This doesn’t change our old designs, though. Also I wanted to make some jokes about how OE abstracts away the difference between STL and FTL, but then I remembered how much time this game forces our ships to stay at sublight-speeds, so I can’t argue against this being an upgrade. From the next upgrade forward, we’ll get actual FTL-drives as update. I guess with only five levels available, the devs were forced to compact and compress things a bit? Lore corner: Impulse Drive Perrypedia has a lengthy article with tons of numbers and details, because for the longest time, impulse drives where the main sublight propulsion method and the early PR-authors were often quite technically minded. To keep things short, the Impulse Drive is what happens if you have 20000 years time to develop rockets and are not creative enough to come up with something truly new. At its base, this sublight drive shoots out a highly compressed stream of particles, accelerated to almost 100% light speed. While at the outside, stuff comes out and the ship is accelerated into the opposite direction, like your basic rocket, the inside is a marvel of compressing and re-directing energy fields and their projectors, going all the way up to the basic myon-catalytic fusion process starting this thing. The German wiki has some things to say about this: It’s a real thing! And an idea going back to the 1940s, which is why it’s already in Perry Rhodan from the very start. Technically, even with this advanced tech maximum ship acceleration should be around 10 km/s². But the old Arkonids tricked physics by pumping bismuth into the particle stream as “Stützmasse”/”support mass”. The engines are still strong enough to nearly reach 98-99% light speed, even with the added bismuth atoms in the mix, but more importantly, the added mass allows our ships to reach these insane several hundred km/s² acceleration speeds. It’s a neat trick, which we sadly can’t quite replicate yet in real life because the strongest “energy fields” we know of are the strong magnetic field bottles used to keep our experimental fusion reactors running. Though we have our modern ion drives, which do something conceptually similar, by using electrically charged particles (ions) as the “support mass” for adding more acceleration. According to wikipedia, the support mass used for ion drives IRL is Xenon or sometimes Mercury. And like in our fictional impulse drives, the support mass is mostly lost, since it’s leaving the vessel on a stream of particles. If we ever get fusion reactors up and running we should totally try out if we can make better drive systems by pumping bismuth into the ejecting particle stream! And by this point you’re probably thinking about what happens if you point those things at someone before accelerating. And yes, there’s an entire class of weapon systems that’s basically just a more compact impulse drive without the bismuth-injector.  The Impulse Cannons have to wait for some other time, though.Ironically, now that you know this, re-watching the opening cinematic of OE reveals even more errors: Not only are the drive emitters not on the large donut-shaped drive ring, they are also too small and most importantly: Ships in Perry Rhodan don’t use impulse drives to start or land, or only in an emergency. On the ground of spaceports, specifically built to resist those drive streams, you can often see huge scorchmarks on the ground, even though starting ships only use their main drives after they’re already far above the spaceport. Even from miles up, the impulse drive emitters will just vaporize every poor bastard standing around below them instantly. Normally, ships in PR will at first engage their anti-gravity drive or in older, more primitive ships “impact-fields” to repel themselves from the ground. If we’re talking about civilian ships, without a burning need to get into space as fast as possible, consequences be damned: They will just silently rise upwards until they’re almost in space. Only then will those huge, rear end-blasting motherfuckers of a drive be engaged. A ship starting like the one in the opening animation would cause huge damage on the spaceport and a lot of those tiny glider cars you saw would be swept away by the resulting shock waves.  After all of this, I’m sure you’ll be glad to hear that we’re changing research back to better colony techs for the time being, so my next insane rant about Perryverse-technology will be someways off. Level C is where most of the meat is hidden in terms of buildings. If we get to level C, we can then spend some time developing better space ships, because it also will take some time to actually build and support the massive, beastly hogs of a building we’ll get at level C.  With our new spaceport up and running, nothing stops us from sending out some colony ships now! Except designing one first, of course. My basic “Nestmaker” is slow as gently caress, thanks to a mix of the landing module slowing it down and me giving it some basic armor, shield and weapons. From 700+ down to 201 km/s². Fast for us IRL, but not in the Perryverse. This fat bastard of a melon-rocket won’t be able to run away if caught. Luckily FTL-travel doesn’t care about that, the very nature of PR-FTL makes intercepts in hyperspace in this era impossible, and the devs were very glad this spared them the effort of trying to include something like that. But if one of our colony ships at one point happens to end up in orbit with a hostile ship in the same turn, things will turn out badly. Also, look at those stats: Armor, even with less than half of the slider used and with the worst tech-level, is up to 121 already. (A Terran-ship at the same level would be something like 50-60 hull) On the other hand, going near maximum on shields gives us 31 shield strength. Our OP-friends from Terra would get nearly twice that, even at level E. Weapon strength would be 8, but we only get 3. In actual combat, a Terran ship designed exactly the same way would slowly deplete our shields and then start melting our hull long before we could retaliate. Now, obviously having a strong hull isn’t bad, but in combat, shields regenerate, armor does not. And when shields go out, their generators get damaged and to get them back, the ship needs to get to a repair yard, asap. In an actual fight, the Terran ship could simply retreat when shields are close to collapse, and come back next turn undamaged. We, on the other hand, would first lose our shields and some hull, and then go into the next turn badly damaged. I foresee a future where we’ll need a lot of extra ships to keep up with other races, simply because of this need to constantly send ships back for repair after each battle. Strong shields now, does are always good. Too bad we have the opposite.   And then I added the Omelette-class frigate for some orbital defense of our capital. For reasons that will become apparent later, a fast ship would be better for defense, but I didn’t like leaving Shaulires II uncovered, so I made this emergency-design to have at least something. And because I am very smart, I hosed up twice here: First, I forgot to screenshot the stats for the Omelette-frigate. It’s basically an E-level ship with D-level engines and all sliders put to max. This creates a very mediocre ship and I promise next time I’ll try harder. This one frigate is essentially the only Omelette-ship I’ll ever build. The second gently caress-up is me forgetting that old designs don’t auto-update. So our Eggsplorer doesn’t get better speed for quite some time. In fact, not for 30+ turns yet. That’s when I stopped the session this current buffer of screenshots draws from.   We immediately start building a colony ship and our little defender. Also a third scout. A scout that is slower than it should be.  At least I accidentally ordered our colonizers first, which is why that ship gets all the workers and resources without me slapping my face and having to withdraw workers and material from the other, less important ships. Even though it will take some time, as the landing module adds a large chunk of population to the ship crew: The game draws new crew at a slow rate from your population, probably to prevent your pop growth from crashing if you are building multiple ships. This leads to the funny observation that preparing our new colonists and crew members will take way longer than building the ships themselves. Future tech!  Yeah, this will take some time.  13 turns later, and our first colony ship is nearing completion. Not nearing readiness, however: The crew will only be added after the hull is finished. OE doesn’t like the idea of fresh crewmen stumbling around an unfinished ship like it’s the Enterprise from Star Trek V. We do this the right way, even though it means even more turns waiting.   At least the waiting time allows me to expand our industry until we reach the point where we theoretically, could run two M-class yards simultaneously without much trouble.  I keep running out of living space, though. This dumb valley city was an amusing idea at first, but now it’s filled up and I still need more residential buildings. In a couple turns C-level residential buildings will be unlocked, and that 2x2 space in the middle will get our first 2x2 residential building. Just in case you’re wondering why I left this spot free.  At long last, our first colonizer is ready! And  , our other ships need so much less resources they’re already nearly finished, too! That landing module is such a big chunk of materials, it’s kind of funny. After all this waiting, I’m kind of glad we can send our colonizer straight to its target, with no excursion through an entire star system. In 4 turns the Nestmaker-I will arrive at Sculima IV-1.  But now I’m tired of waiting, and order a second colonizer immediately. This one should be ready by the time we’ve started our colony on Sculima IV-1. By “started” I of course refer to us building up the first basic economy on Sculima IV-1. Because building this bastard will take a lot longer then just 4 turns.  The very next turn, our third scout is finished and we can explore again. We had to put our other two scouts in orbit around our future colonies as some sort of very mobile defense platform, and there they’ll have to stay until I can scrounge up some alternative for defense. Thanks to our Omelette however, the scout above Shaulires II is free to move.  Eggsplorer-III seeks out Elebigas, another M-class red dwarf. I’m not really expecting much, but with 2-4 possible colonization targets already on my list, I won’t be sad if we don’t find anything.  Oh poo poo, aliens! On the 6th April 2326, we make first contact with our competitors. And even two at a time!  Patriarch Gutztol: Patriarch Gutztol, the greatest of all galactic traders, greets you.  Crystal Regent Zorgh III: Greetings, barbarians. How did you manage to get into space? Your ships look like they were stolen from one of our prehistoric museums. I did not make these names up. You can see the Patriarch’s name in the screenshot, but the Arkonids are one of those annoying bastards where the only way to learn the commander’s name is to start a short test game and advance until you get your first tech researched. Then you learn that you’re “Crystal Regent Zorgh III”. I can’t believe they did not even think of putting their names into the manual! The enemy commanders speak mostly in puns and stereotypes, so it’s the all galactic comedy hour here. As we play the Topsiders in this LP, we’ll need to come up with the obligatory egg puns ourselves, though.  Now that we know some people, we can begin to conduct diplomacy! The diplomacy-system of OE is very simple, you click on the victory screen of a race you’ve discovered, and the research screen changes to a diplomacy screen. Then you can send messages asking for a non-aggression treaty, an alliance, or send a sternly-worded letter. You can also ask for a beating (war declaration) or cry uncle (peace treaty). By experience, other races need to know you for a while before asking for non-aggression treaties makes sense. I always automatically succumb to my Master of Orion III reflexes and ask right away. It then always fails. Alliances are even more rare, but warnings and war declarations is something the AI is quite fond of. A “warning” ends alliances and has no other purpose, which is why it is grayed out right now. We need an alliance first to send warnings, obviously! Non-aggression treaties and alliances make it impossible to shoot each other. Nice if you are constantly stumble over each other, but don’t want a fight. War declarations are necessary if you want to attack and annex colonies, as otherwise you’re not allowed to attack them. There are some further complications: If you’re neutral to each other, you can order your ships to ignore a space nation you don’t want to fight. This can improve your relations over time, and may end in an alliance further down the line. Alliances allow you to go help your buddies out, and of course the AI will sometimes send ships to help defend your colonies, too! This is not enforced, and if you want to be an rear end in a top hat, nothing prevents you from ignoring the progressively more frantic aid requests of your allies. And this is literally everything you need to know about diplomacy in Operation Eastside! There’s also trading, but that needs planets as even research data has to be transported from planet to planet. As we don’t know any other planets yet (we only just met their space ships), trading has to wait for another day.  The very next turn, Doc Bot notifies us of reaching living space level C. Our first new toy is the residential building type “Kosar”. This is clearly a typo, as “Kosars” are not a thing, neither in Perry Rhodan nor in real life. “Korsaren”, as in, pirates and free traders, are a thing, however. Anyway, it’s one tile, and has more living space. That’s it. The Free Traders of Olymp are often called “corsairs” around this time. Though by the era this game is set in, Olymp is still a secret, and while the corsairs are slowly growing and expanding influence, they’re still mostly unknown. They are being known for new and innovative designs, however. It’s not completely weird that we could get our claws on some of their blueprints.  We also get our first 2x2 residential building, the large Kolonialzentrum/colonial center. It has enough space for 900 population points, aka 9000 colonists. Not exactly a small building! Before you take out your calculators, our best one-tile building would come out to 700 living space with four tiles used, so the colonial center wins handily. Fun anecdote: Back when I first started playing this game, I got confused here and thought the colonial center was supposed to be the upgrade to my command center, so I bulldozed and replaced my old one with it. It looks sensible at first, because 375 units of living space seems a lot less than 900, but the command center comes with good chunk of production capability in all three major resources. Demolishing it is not a good idea! Please do as I say, and not as I did.  As researching level B anything is kind of futile with our current research output, I’m immediately changing research areas to agriculture. I’m getting the feeling we need better CGU-production soon anyway.  And now I can finish this quasi-city here by putting down our first colonial center right in the middle! It’s about time, our pop growth has been stalled for a couple turns now.  Turn 106 sees some more space movements I’ll have to deal with: First up is Eggsplorer-III sitting around in solar orbit around Elebigas.  This time we’re lucky, and the first planet is still inside this star’s Goldilocks zone. Not really optimal, but with a low amount of ice oceans it’s still worth a colony.  Elebigas I-1, the first planet’s tiny moon, is even slightly more habitable! But also 50+% surface ice covered and less than half the size of the planet. So, not good. The other planets are just even more frozen hellholes, so Elebigas I and it’s refreshing cool average temperature of -13 °C has to do. I’m sending our third scout to cover the planet to keep competitors off our lawn.  Meanwhile, our first colony ship reaches Sculima IV-1. Looks like this moon will be our first (technically second, if we count our capital) colony! At this point I have to confess I would have already done this, but OE plays another short cutscene when you send down a landing module, and my recording software started acting up when I wanted to record it for you. I had some alternatives ready, but it turns out my main (and best) recording software was the only one capable of recording an rear end-old game from 1998 without loving up the scaling. The test recordings with my alternatives were all unwatchable garbage, so because of this our first colonization happens next update. All this tooling around with recording software ate up the time I had scheduled for more playing and writing.   By the way, by looking around I found the Arkonids who contacted us. Here we have one of their scouts at our sun, Shaulires.  And here are more ships orbiting and arriving on Shaulires II-4, one of the very habitable moons around our capital. Yes, they’re planning to put a colony here. Welp. At least they seem to be peaceful, for now? Luckily the AI fell for the trap of a small moon covered with oceans, but if we want to use any of our other moons, I’ll better speed things up next update. Also, the Mehandor are somewhere else, but I couldn’t find them. Either their ship already left or I missed them. Wait, did you think this game gives you easy information? Ha, ha, no this is old school “watch closely or perish” type of gameplay. To Be Continued Libluini fucked around with this message at 11:45 on Dec 6, 2020 |
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Dec 6, 2020 11:30
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That's a very aggressive move by the AI. Then again, maybe it's literally the best planet they've found so far and that would be funny.
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Dec 6, 2020 21:51
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How does the slew of basically uninhabitable systems work with our need to colonize most of the sector?
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Dec 7, 2020 02:10
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Munin posted:How does the slew of basically uninhabitable systems work with our need to colonize most of the sector? I think most of them can technically be colonized, they'd just be hugely unprofitable and unable to really do anything other than fight to stay alive.
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Dec 7, 2020 02:18
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To reiterate, only planets covered by 100% with bullshit (lava, oceans, ice) and gas giants are uncolonizable. Everything else is allowed. 1500 °C surface temperature and 99% of the tiles blocked by lava? Sure, go ahead! And as said, the habitability-indicator isn't perfect, either: A tiny moon with nearly all of its surface blocked by ocean will be loving useless, even with paradise-like conditions. There's also mountain tiles. OE doesn't tell the player this, but planets can have different levels of geological activity: Some planets will turn out almost disturbingly flat, others (like our capital) may turn out to be covered with unusable mountain ranges from pole to pole. You can't do anything about mountains, but with everything else the game needs the player to have an above average level of common sense.
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Dec 7, 2020 14:00
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Libluini posted: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. Late to the thread, but couldn’t you just FTL to a nearby system and then return to the outer planet? Or does that take about the same amount of time?
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Dec 7, 2020 16:47
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Narsham posted:Late to the thread, but couldn’t you just FTL to a nearby system and then return to the outer planet? Or does that take about the same amount of time? You know, I never thought of that. Time to do some testing!
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Dec 7, 2020 20:50
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I can't believe how much trouble I have making video recordings of this game, it's ludicrous. And that first video went so well! I swear if I can't make my programs behave I start putting HyperCam2 back on my drive!  Besides that and my next updates making me look really stupid, all is fine, though. Next update tomorrow!
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Dec 12, 2020 23:38
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Libluini posted:I can't believe how much trouble I have making video recordings of this game, it's ludicrous. And that first video went so well! I swear if I can't make my programs behave I start putting HyperCam2 back on my drive! Looking forward to it. And remember, only having trouble getting your recording software to behave is a mild form of the LP curse...
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Dec 13, 2020 11:26
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I was kind of fond of P.R., but well, --I got annoyed by a certain teleporting Rodent Deus Ex Machina. --Much of the suspense got los when it became kind of obvious that named characters dont die much.
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Dec 13, 2020 16:58
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Mightypeon posted:I was kind of fond of P.R., but well, There are tons of named characters that die. Just not the ones at the heart of the series, as reading about Perry and his friends is what draws the most readership. Killing them off would effectively end the series. You should have seen the shitstorm when a fake Gucky got killed. No, Plofre is now as immortal as Big P. himself. Fellmer Loyd and Ras Tschubai were two of my favorite characters, and when they died it hit me pretty hard. But otherwise, I get you. I really dislike Julian Tifflor, but every time the galaxy pushes his poo poo in, he somehow survives. I guess the authors really like having an Ersatz-Perry on hand, but honestly? We already have Bully and Bully at least has a personality. Just one of these days a gigantic piece of bullshit meant to decapitate the little rat will hit Julian in his stupid face because Gucky ducked in time and Gucky will do some stupid quip like "Guck kommt von ducken" while Julian's brain matter is splattered across the room and I will laugh so hard Until then I'll just quietly seethe whenever I have to read a story with Julian in it.
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Dec 13, 2020 17:26
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Reptile Rising 06: Expanding Nestworks Mission Log 004: 29th April 2326 We had some setbacks. The Mehandor and especially the Arkonids apparently scouted and surveyed some of the same systems, and due to an embarrassing engineering failure on our first Eastside-built colony ship, they managed to snatch a lot of our preferred colonization targets in the time we needed to call the ship back and repair it. It was send to a secondary target next and if it hadn’t worked again, I’d had to snap some tails. Luckily, Aphtor Zerr-Sham didn’t disappoint me a second time, and seeing as the engineering failure has been tracked back to a manufacturing error, I let him off with a second-class warning. It won’t even impede his career. Probably. For now, Nestmaker-I is to useful anyway and Aphtors for our expanding fleet are in short supply. The Arkonids are giving me some serious teething ache, however. First, they pretended to be overly friendly and welcoming, making it politically impossible for us to just shoot them. Then they marched into our capital system in force, trying to colonize as many of the moons orbiting Shaulires II as possible. Nestmaker-II was just finished in time to claim the last moon out of four. Afterwards, the Arkonids just shrugged and left us alone. Crystal Regent Zorgh III assured us that the Arkonid Empire would honor its commitment to the United Empire. Well, for the time being I’m forced to believe him. Patriarch Gutztol’s Mehandor are another problem, but since they are less in number and opted to colonize a planet safely away from the Shaulires-system, their odd little clan is not exactly one of my priorities. Our sensors detected a lot of fights in the sphere surrounding Shaulires-II, but our hyper-detection range is far too low to make out any details. We need to improve our defenses! Even our cave-living ancestors weren’t as blind as we are right now! Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  Turn 107: Our second colonizer nears completion.  And I found out where the Mehandor have been hiding! A Jumper-scout is hanging around our sun!  But more importantly: The Arkonids prepare to colonize even more of our moons. Uh oh As suboptimal as they are from a usability-viewpoint, they’re still very habitable and at least a good source of consumer goods, if nothing else. So we should speed up our game a bit!  But we hit a snag: Our colonizer can’t land!  After some tooling around with the UI, I decide it must have something to do with my vain attempts to record video, and send the ship back for repair. At this time I honestly thought I had managed to break something by saving/loading a couple times to get a good video of the landing cutscene, but this game is hilariously glitch-free, it just assumes at all points 100% attention and if the UI manages to confuse you, well sucks to be you. I’ve been playing this game on and off again since 1998 and I keep faceplanting into issues like this, because “idiot” is my middle name. Don’t worry, the secret will be revealed later in this update.  After that embarrassing failure, I tell to myself “at least I still have Elebigas I” and plan on sending our second colonizer here when it is finished.  Turn 109 and our economy is stable for now. 26300 people live on our colony now. Also I’ve decided to finally re-do our explorer-design and build a new ship based on the upgraded design. To my disappointment, the only visible change was the ship numbering resetting since this design with the exact same name is still “new” according to OE. I mean, I’m guessing a “heavy impulse drive” should be noticeably different than our old “impulse drive”, but maybe it’s less loss of speed if you make larger ships and small ships already go as fast as they could possibly go? I’m grasping at straws here, since I never considered the issue before starting this LP. That’s the kind of quality LPer you have here, folks. Anyway, I’m crudely scribbling a note right here: Make some experiments with the designer later and compare advanced ship stats to early game stats.  If a ship is damaged, which includes having used up the landing unit on your colonizer, you get this additional wrench icon next to the scrapping icon and now you can hit it to put a ship into repair. Your ship needs to be in orbit above a colony with a working shipyard, though. The tiny yellow ball is the symbol for “landing unit available”. All ships with a landing unit have it and count as a colony ship. If it is marred by a ugly red bar like with Nestmaker-I, you already used it. Or it got damaged in battle. (Though I never saw the latter happen.)  To keep at least one of our moons to ourselves, I start moving our newest colony ship to Shaulires II-3 at this point. After fooling around with the UI, I notice the interface was automatically set up to the minimum number of turns for our furthest ship away. I swiftly reduce the turn number down to what we actually can do with a ship hanging around right next to the moon. Which is 1 turn. Waiting time reduced! At this point I’m starting to wonder how often I’ve accidentally send ships around the long way without noticing.  Next turn, the colonizer arrives. It wasn’t exactly planned, but with “only” 54% surface water and being the largest of our moons, Shaulires II-3 isn’t the worst colonization target, even if it isn’t a ridiculous paradise like our other moons.  The ship-with-blazing-engines icon is what you need to click to colonize. You need a valid colonization target, or it doesn’t show up. Since I still can’t make videos, I simply click and get on with it. In three turns one of our scouts will arrive to play guard ship.  Amazingly, our tiny moon has more tiles than our main colony! Less mountains, and far fewer water tiles than you would expect. Now I’m suddenly glad I pulled Shaulires II-3 forward on our colonization plans. The landing module folds out into this tiny, one-tile version of our main command center. After watching the cutscene, you get to place it, same as with your starting planet and your original command center. I’ve chosen this place because it very carefully doesn’t block two potential places for later 2x2 buildings, and it literally doesn’t matter where your command center is. This tiny center has almost as much free living space as the large version (250 instead of 360), but only a small fraction of the production capabilities (+10 every resource, instead of +100). Still, it’s a better starting point than having nothing. Also at this tile-fuckery. Seems like mountains isn’t the only thing being RNGed here. My educated guess is that our main planet rolled very badly, and this moon here really well on some invisible tables to explain those landscapes.But eh, I’m certainly not complaining about getting a better colony than expected!  An important note on colonizing: Every colonization attempt only uses up your landing module. Your colonizer survives, just with a big hole inside. Nestmaker-II consequently goes back to our shipyards on Shaulires II for some big repairs. This means you don’t need as many colony ships as you would think. In fact, right now I’m planning to stop after the fourth one until we get some better ship tech. Also important to know: Scrapping a ship doesn’t give you anything, in opposition to deleting buildings, which gives you everything back and maintenance costs aren’t a thing. Both things balance each other out, so feel free to scrap older ships, but also feel free to build as many ships as you want, they’ll be self-sufficient after launch! Repairing your colonizer is a side-issue, though: Rebuilding a new landing unit takes time and resources, and of course the game takes the prerequisite 60 population units to create your next batch of colonists every time. Take this into account before putting too many colonizers into repair at the same time.  The next couple turns are spend expanding first our industry, then our living space on our capital colony.  Our new baby colony gets its first buildings, too: We need consumer goods to feed/supply the new colonists! As always, some colonists die before enough supply is generated. Though if I where actually smart, I’d remember to use the trading interface to send some CGUs to feed the colony during the first few critical turns. Alas, I’m dumb and so I never do.  Interface-time! Now that one of our ships is being repaired, we can actually use the wrench-icon in the ship designer and see something. In case you forgot what you were doing a second before, all ships in the repair-window are helpfully labeled (in repair).  The cog-symbol is for showing all ships currently in operation. It doesn’t show ships in construction or in repair. Now that we actually have some ships, it suddenly makes sense to occasionally look into it. The menu helpfully gives you the current position of a ship (in parenthesis).  Our Omelette-class defense ship. It’s stats aren’t as bad as I feared, thanks to not all sliders having direct relations to each other like you would suspect if you play this game like Space SimCity and never look too closely on what you actually design here. Anyway, while acceleration goes up and down depending on how much stuff you cram into a design, the other sliders aren’t actually dependent on each other! Like I thought they did. Oops. Playing since 1998! This means pulling all sliders to the right just makes a rather slow ship, but also gives it maximum shield, armor and weapon strength. Our Omelette isn’t as useless as I claimed! That said, our colossal maximum strength at level E is… 6! Compared with our “average” friends from Terra having 8, it’s bad, but not overwhelmingly bad. Shield is at 39, instead of 50-60, and our armor is of course more than twice as strong than our imaginary competition. By now I’ve refreshed myself on how combat works, and the important thing are the second row of stats to the right, as they are calculated from the main stats and what Operation Eastside actually uses during combat. A shield strength of 39 results in 3 “SW” or 3 shield points. Similarly, “215 km/s²” acceleration translates to 4 “BW” or 4 movement points. (Our scouts have 6, by the way. How an acceleration 3x as fast translates to 50% more movement? Beats me.) Stärke/Strength is not similarly re-calculated though, but from experience I now that 1 strength gets you 0 weapon strength in battle, so I guess 6 would be like 1? Dunno, we’ll have to wait to fight some space battles to solve this riddle. Edit: Later I went back and saw that shield strength 10 = SW 3 too, so I’m confused again. We need some actual fights to see what is happening here! Equipment You’ve probably been wondering where you can actually see the equipment we’re supposed to have. And it’s funny, because it’s right there in the screenshot: The four squares inside the bigger square just below the ship diagram contain our four main equipment parts. Every time we research a tech level in something, the old part is automatically replaced by the newer one. But hovering above the fields doesn’t work, and there is no text anywhere. Instead, if you click on one of the equipment squares, a loud female voice tells you what it is in German. It’s amazing and one of the dumb details Operation Eastside just blindsides you with. And if I ever manage to unfuck my recording software, this is one of the things I want to show you. Right now, the voice will tell us that we have: Panzerstahl/Steel Armor Schwerer Impulsantrieb/Heavy Impulse Drive Impulsstrahler/Impulse Cannon Prallschirm/Impact Shield Lorewise, having an “Impact Shield” is like having a seat belt: Nice to have, but don’t expect it to protect you against modern weapon systems.  After all that, I’m rushing over really fast to our colony list and switch the AI-governor off before he can unaesthetically poo poo all over our new baby colony. You can imagine how this list will look at 80+ colonies and yes, it will be painful.  And yes, all our other moons are now Arkonid colonies. I hope you rolled near zero tiles, you Humanoid fuckers!  Meanwhile, our new colony has its basic necessities met and we switch to basic industry. Heavy industry for new colonies is as important as light industry, as it adds transport capacity to the colony. And TC is important both ways: A colony can only receive and send up to its own TC in goods, so you can’t just transport tons of poo poo from an older to a new colony immediately, you have to slowly grow it first.  Our shipyards are busy: Several colony ships in repair, one in construction, another scout too.  The very next turn, our new colony starts running out of stuff. Uh oh, time for trading!  And here it finally is: The trading interface. Available from every colony. Every colony allows you to send everything to every other planet, up to the total transport capacity of the selected colony. Alternatively, you can set up trades, including tech trades, with other empires. Trades you do internally are executed immediately as soon as you click on that huge “+” icon on the lower left, so be careful when pulling that slider! The bottom half of the interface is for inter-imperial trades. You need to know your friends and need a valid planet of theirs to give them a trade to make this work. If you made a valid trade, it shows up on the left window. And of course, other races offering a trade will have their offers show up in the bottom right. Clicking on Annehmen/Accept will accept someone elses offer, while your own trades will wait until the turn ends. Then the AIs (actually all AIs capable of taking the offer) will contemplate and maybe choose to accept your offer. If no-one accepts, your trade fails.  Here the result of a fast mini-trade: A bunch of goods to support our new colony has arrived. Immediately, because trade in OE doesn’t use space ships. And here the reveal: Essentially, we’ve been beaming poo poo around like in Star Trek, just with different techno babble. So that’s where our colonists come from: They enter a so-called “transmitter” back in the galactic Westside, and come out through our corresponding receiving station here in our command center, and from there move outwards to our smaller colonies. And this makes sense because lore! Transmitting Transmitters And You Many years before Kirk was beaming around the galaxy, Perry Rhodan had its own version of this poo poo, and that’s the “Transmitter”. Instantaneous transport is fun, and constantly writing poo poo like “and then they entered the shuttle, traveled to X, and disembarked”, followed by “and then they walked back to their shuttle on X, and traveled to Y” is loving boring, so the authors invented this technology pretty early in the series, and it stayed forever. The first transmitters ever encountered were actually used by the Ferrons living in the Vega-system, though those guys didn’t really understood the technology, they just used the transmitter network left over by an older civilization.  The Ferrons, if you remember, where accidentally dragged into this mess when the Topsiders sent a fleet to hijack the Arkonid battlecruiser crashed on Earth’s moon and bolloxed their FTL-jump up something fierce. Eventually the Topsiders lost their entire fleet, while Terrans and Ferrons high-fived. Bad days for our reptiloid friends. After Terran scientists found out how transmitters worked, the technology proliferated fast around the galaxy and by the time this game is set in, almost everyone uses the drat things. It’s so convenient, after all: Just step into this thing, get a really painful headache, and appear in the receiving station on another planet. So easy! So how does it work? Inner Workings of This Thing It all comes back to physics. If you showed a scientist from the Perryverse a Star Trek transporter, you’d be immediately put into therapy because you’re clearly demented, because a transmitter doesn’t work by destroying you and then sending a bunch of energy to somewhere else to then turn that energy back into you. Instead it works by effectively destroying you, sending the energy that was you through hyperspace to a receiving station, and then turn that energy back into you. Completely different! OK, let’s be serious. There are two basic forms of transmitters: The first one is the Cage Transmitter, a device so reliable it’s often used in industrial capacity even a thousand years after this game is set. In a Cage Transmitter, the parts creating the dematerializing hyper energy field are built around the area you want transport stuff from or towards like a cage (hence the name). You go inside or put something inside, and then computers connect the transmitter to another transmitter. Your transmitter is switched to “send”, and the other to “receive”. If the computer malfunctions, bad space weather happens or the switches are stuck in the wrong position, hilariously gruesome accidents will occur. Otherwise, it’s perfectly safe. Now the transmitter will shoot the same kind of energy field allowing the Transition Drive to do its FTL-magic into the inside of the transmitter cage. The energy field will get repelled by normal space because it doesn’t belong here and take everything inside with it. On contact with hyperspace, everything is turned into hyperenergy and follows the carrier wave connecting the sender and receiver transmitters. When the receiving station is reached, a hyper energy field poled opposite will drag you down into normal space again, where everything automatically turns to normal. Because poo poo transforming back and forth between creepy hyper energy and normal matter plus energy is just a perfectly normal and natural phenomenon. (Everyone nods wisely.) While the principle is simple, the old Arkonids lost this technology long ago and didn’t bother trying to re-discover it, probably because they considered this beaming bullshit to be demented and unhealthy. That it’s painful as gently caress is probably another reason they never bothered until dirty Terrans got their paws on some new/old ones and reverse-engineered the tech.  A basic Terran archway transmitter from this era. The pain by the way, is mostly a phantom pain that results from your body, including your brain, ceasing to exist in normal space for an incomprehensibly short amount of time. But hyperspace isn’t magic, and is really another space you can totally go to if you wanted, so there is a very short amount of time you need to travel through hyperspace before reaching the other station. And while even intergalactic distances could be measured in microseconds, your brain notices the disconnect of every process suddenly stopping for that time on account of your brain not existing, and it hurts The longer the jump, the worse the pain. Similarly, matter gets put back together not quite right, and while it’s technically possible to send people and material all the way from Topsid to us this way, it’s not exactly a walk in the part. Stuff that’s really sensible to damage can’t be send, or send that often or too far away for the same reason. On the other hand, traveling this way at least doesn’t lead to weird philosophical questions, as from the view point of normal space, nothing ever happens to your body when walking into a transmitter: It’s just that normal matter can only exist in hyperspace as a cloud of hyper energy, so that’s what you will be when in transit. Something I almost forgot: When you come into contact with the transmission field, specialized detectors use short hyper energy impulses to make sure nothing bad can happen to you on your way. It’s a way to verify that what is you will still be you when received at the other end. You don’t want to end up with a carrot for a head just because you were carrying a basket filled with vegetables, for example. The detectors register details down to the subatomic level and allow your soon to be non-corporeal rear end to be added to a simple hypercom wave. Theoretically, you could therefore use a hypercom to intercept a transmitter transit, or try sending someone with a hypercom to a transmitter, but that’s the kind of thing that tends to end in gruesome accidents, so there are tons of fail-safes to prevent shenanigans. One of the reasons the protagonists stop using the Transition Drive after other alternatives become possible is that a Transition Drive works exactly the same as a transmitter, just with the ship being its own send/receive station. In both cases, the machine kicks the universe in the nuts until it breaks, and attempts to slip between the cracks. But then the universe kicks back. Ships jumping too far and too often have the very components they made off start warping and breaking, and the pain to organic beings can eventually turn to actual damage and death. Same thing with transmitters, though as long as you couple your transmitter with a receiving station, you can’t at the very least accidentally sent yourself into the vast nothingness of an alien realm beyond space and time without a way back. The other transmitter type was invented/rediscovered by the Akons. Their Archway Transmitters use dual poles as some sort of hyper energy circuit to create a door-like transmission field. As long as a connection is working, you can just walk into transmitter A to exit transmitter B like it’s a very fancy-looking wormhole. You still get the problem with pain and warping matter, but not as pronounced. Archway Transmitters are perfect for transport of people, but as they are more complex, mass transport of goods is still done by Cage Transmitters. A secret third type of transmitters doesn’t need receiving stations, and was eventually turned into a weapon. Since most energy shields simply don’t exist in hyperspace, transmitters work even with shields up, as long as the shields in question aren’t using some kind of fancy hyperspace-technology themselves. Imagine if Captain Kirk could have ended every conflict by beaming a high-yield fusion bomb directly onto the bridge of whatever hostile ship he was fighting. That is the third type of transmitter, which eventually evolved into the Transform Cannon used by the Terran Solar Empire. Ironically, right now Topsiders count as “allies” and members of the United Empire, so everyone is allowed to use those insane monster weapons for now. But Perry is already halfway convinced that giving everyone super-weapons may have been a bad idea and every Transform Cannon given to Topsiders or everyone else has been secretly sabotaged. Perry, as the current leader of the Solar Empire, can just press a button and all Non-Terran Transform Cannons will self-destruct. The devs were mercifully aware of the many problems caused by a weapon perfectly capable of destroying entire fleets in the hands of the AI or us, and so we’re not allowed to get them. (If there ever is a remake of Operation Eastside, I fully hope for an Easteregg where you can get your hands/claws/extremities on a Transform Cannon, only for every Non-Terran player to get a message on turn X telling you that the Solar Empire now considers you to be Bad Guys. Followed by all your ships exploding.) And this is why our transport capacity is bound to our heavy industry: Because the more power and heavy infrastructure we have, the more transmitters we have and can power to send poo poo faster. Our transport capacity is a handy way of calculating how much stuff we can cram into our transmitters each turn. Obviously sending ten times as much as the transmitters of a small colony can support is a bad idea with hilariously gruesome outcomes, so we can’t do it. The TC of the smaller colony is the hard limit.  Some more turns pass while our colonizers are stuck in our yards. The Arkonids colonize Sheran II, right next to our own target Sheran I. The Arkonids still keep on our good side, but if we dawdle too much, I’m not sure they’ll keep their hands from the first planet.  Elebigas I was sneakily colonized by the Mehandor. Good: Now we can trade with them. Bad: That was supposed to be our planet!!! Yeah, I fully expected the AI to pick a fight with us before trying to colonize. Another stamp on my idiot card. One more, and I can level up to moron! No idea how they managed to do this. Sneaky bastards!  Same thing, but with Arkonids: They managed to sneak a colony on Sculima IV-1 while I wasn’t paying attention. My educated guess is that the colonization attempt failed and used up the lander because the Arkonids where already here, or that the colony ship was somehow damaged in an auto-battle while I was just clicking through turns. Though both are things which are not supposed to happen. Elebigas I is at least easy to explain: In test games, the AI tended to leave planets alone when one of my ships was sitting there. But apparently neutral AIs only consider a planet off-limits if there’s an actual colony there. And AI-players can just not start a fight when arriving in the same orbit as your ships. That’s news to me, but apparently it just never happened in my other games. Huh. The manual also claims there should always be a fight if you’re not allied. Odd.  I feel like starting a war with our one (1) combat ships is futile, so I’m forced to give up Elebigas as lost for now. Our scout instead moves to survey the Poladunrez-system. Two colonizers should be soon repaired and the third one finished. Now we just have to find some planets that haven’t been taken yet!  Our capital, meanwhile, slides slowly into another crisis: Population and industry are nearing the level were our D-level hydroponics aren’t cutting it anymore. We really need the agricultural C-level buildings soon, or things will turn pretty ugly here.  Ironically, thanks to the AI targeting the tiny paradise moon, the technically better main planet Sculima IV is still free, so I’m throwing one of our first available colonizers at it before the Arkonids or someone else decides otherwise.  Our moon continues to grow. Now self-sufficient, I could theoretically switch on the AI-administrator, but where is the fun in that?  Shaulires II makes me sweat blood. We need more population, but our old D-level hydroponics simply aren’t producing enough consumer good units to keep up with population growths. If we’re not finishing agricultural research soon, I’ll have two bad choices to make: Either let the population growth slam into a wall, or keep flooding the tiles with hydroponics I’ll be forced to tear down again later. I think this is the first time I really feel the research penalty our Topsiders suffer under.  At least turn 121 is also the turn where our first (now repaired) colonizer reaches a still free target: Before something else can go wrong, I order the landing unit to drop on Sheran I.  Sheran I is a nice surprise: The middle is blocked by a huge mountain range, but the promised 60% surface water turn out to be weird puddles here and there. The rest of the planet is flat enough for lots of buildings. Looks like after loving me so much before, the RNG decided to be lenient here. Seriously, I had worse oceans on planets with below 20% coverage. There’s definitely some dice rolling going on in the background.  Our fleet window slowly fills up more and more. Nestmaker-I has to go back for another repair after colonizing Sheran I, Nestmaker-II is set to arrive above Sculima IV in two turns, and we have a growing number of scouts either moving or covering our colonies. And I promise, covering our actual colonies has a reason besides having an instant space gun to protect it! We need some space battles to demonstrate why first, though.  Let’s end this update by building two more colonizers and improving on our scouts. This new version has a tiny bit more shield strength and twice the weapon strength. It’s 2 now instead of 1! The price for these very small improvements is the lower acceleration, but I timed the slider positions just right to still get 6 movement points in battle instead of 7, which is still pretty drat fast. Not really an actual improvement, more a psychological one, as our ships now aren’t literally the weakest attack strength possible. They’ll stay scouts though. And cheap to make. The most important point. New rank unlocked: Aphtor – Equivalent to the Solarian rank of Captain. Used for the command of small-to-midsized space ships. To Be Continued
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Dec 13, 2020 17:48
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Please put Tifflor out of his misery. I still can't believe the cruelty of the authors, what with the million year march and stuff.
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Dec 13, 2020 19:12
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Libluini posted:There are tons of named characters that die. Just not the ones at the heart of the series, as reading about Perry and his friends is what draws the most readership. Killing them off would effectively end the series. I kind of started with the big silvery ones, and kind of dropped out at around the Swarm Saga, i believe to remember that these parts were fairly low on named character deaths. I occassionally try to read modern ones, but I no longer have any idea who anyone even is, other then the very central ones. Bully meanwhile is good and proper.
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Dec 13, 2020 19:43
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Mightypeon posted:I kind of started with the big silvery ones, and kind of dropped out at around the Swarm Saga, i believe to remember that these parts were fairly low on named character deaths. I occassionally try to read modern ones, but I no longer have any idea who anyone even is, other then the very central ones. Bully meanwhile is good and proper. After silver volume Alarm für die Galaxis infected me, I tried to keep up with everything for a while. I was reading the main series, the silver volumes and the 5th and 6th edition with their weird double-volumes. Then I eventually ran out of time to read everything simultaneously, the 5th and 6th editions got cancelled and nowadays my progress is very slow. 1-2 times a year I buy huge chunks of the main series as ebooks, and I try to buy 1-2 silver volumes every odd month or so. This means coincidentally that I have dumb details from across half the entire series stuck in my head. The silver volumes currently reached the point where ES' sister shows up, with people like the Sotho Tal Ker (called "Stalker" because that sounds cooler) annoying the galaxy. The giant viral engine called Viral Empire is working now and everyone got a severe case of Fernweh and goes traveling the universe with viral ships made by it. Everyone on Earth is already recovering from the day when a space goddess tried to take over, the Rain of Einstein's Tears is history and some of the most interesting poo poo I remember from reading 5th and 6th edition books starts happening. Meanwhile, I'm still stuck around the Endless Armada volumes and dropped out of the main series again due to not having infinite time. But anyway, Alarm für die Galaxis (Galaxy at Red Alert) introduced me to tons of characters which then immediately got killed inbetween story arcs when Cappins and Swarm cycle began. This predisposed me to call "characters" like space neanderthal Lord Zwiebus "dead meat", because I could already see where this was going eventually. Just for fun I'm sometimes use this broad knowledge about PR to see where old characters I've known since childhood started out, like Ronald Tekener or his first wife (which I originally met when Tekener's second wife mentioned her dying long ago). And now Tekener is apparently dead, too. It's like the authors punished him for dumping Daolin's rear end. The silver volumes have now gotten pretty close to the time where Tekener's first wife will get killed. Immortality doesn't protect you against evil author power, it seems.
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Dec 13, 2020 20:32
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You failed to mention a fourth way of constructing a transmitter, the Stellar-Transmitter. Essentially, you link the stars in a multi-star-system by technobabble and you get a transmitter you can pilot a planet through. Ang Gucky is obviously the Fursona of one of the authors (no idea who exactly), he is constantly sporting one-liners, is admired by everyone and is OP as gently caress.
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Dec 13, 2020 23:33
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Kodos666 posted:You failed to mention a fourth way of constructing a transmitter, the Stellar-Transmitter. Essentially, you link the stars in a multi-star-system by technobabble and you get a transmitter you can pilot a planet through. There are even more transmitter-types I left out because things were slowly getting confusing. I'll drop a lore-post about sun transmitters at some later time. And the other ones will probably be mentioned in that later post. Though I fear the fifth and sixth types of transmitters will have to wait for a third post to keep things from being overwhelming for people not familiar with Perry Rhodan. Fake edit: Oh god I just remembered, there's a seventh type of transmitters.  Definitely a minimum of three posts. Re: Gucky. You're not thinking German enough. On the official Perry Rhodan YouTube-channel, there's a video about Gucky, complete with interviews with some of the old authors. Gucky, as it turns out, was invented as a more Human, "emotional" counter-point to the rampant cold technophilia of the early series. Basically, one author was complaining about the all this emotionless technology being everywhere, and another author invented Gucky as a joke. "Here is something more emotional: A cute furry animal-person. You're satisfied now, right?"  (I'm paraphrasing here)Just that Gucky then took on a life of his own, because readers loved him. Some readers (and authors) hated him, too. But like we know with modern social media, hatred is a form of engagement, too! So every time authors tried to kill him, other authors (and the readership) conspired to keep him alive. Eventually, Gucky was put on the very short list of "essential characters", together with Perry Rhodan himself. As long as people like him enough to keep buying stories with him in it, he's as safe as the big guy on the front cover. If you want actual fursonas, you have seen nothing yet. That has to wait until I'm dropping a post about PR's resident Action Cat Girl, Dao-Lin-H'ay.
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Dec 14, 2020 09:10
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That's some tough luck with the colonies. Do we know how many planets the AI players have, or do we only know about the colonies we discovered? Ah, transmitters. Yes, there are a ton of varieties, including some that even work like Star Trek transporters (but better in every way, except for the "can't replicate these" part). I'm very much looking forward to those posts.
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Dec 14, 2020 09:42
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Who's Julian Tifflor and why do people hate him?
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Dec 14, 2020 12:39
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Torrannor posted:That's some tough luck with the colonies. Do we know how many planets the AI players have, or do we only know about the colonies we discovered? Only the ones we have discovered. To get accurate information, we need to survey every single star system in our cluster, otherwise there'll always be some rest amount of uncertainty. PurpleXVI posted:Who's Julian Tifflor and why do people hate him? A good idea for another lore post down the line. To keep things short: He's some dude who was one of the first to finish Terrania's new space academy back in the very early days. (Terrania is the city founded by Rhodan in the Gobi Desert, which later became the capital of the Solar Empire.) Perry got teary-eyed nostalgia when meeting him, because Julian reminded him so much of himself. Julian was then dragged into every dumb space adventure Perry marched off to. Julian Tifflor later became one of the immortals, basically just because he was friends with Big P. Meta-contextual, he became a living lightning rod for all the bad poo poo that wasn't allowed to happen to Perry, due to author fiat. But because the author conference decided that it's useful to have a Perry 2.0 around to show that bad things can happen to the protagonists, he never dies. Instead, more and more bullshit like getting mind-controlled by evil aliens is sandblasted into his face. For example he also gets to lose Earth to invaders on multiple occasions because the real Perry is needed in another galaxy and Julian's entire thing is being some kind of knock-off Perry Rhodan made by the cheapest bidders. His personality is literally "Perry Rhodan, but without the charm". If he'd been the main protagonist, the series would have died in its first year. The poor bastard has "running gag" in his job description. More would be spoilers for my planned future lore post! Libluini fucked around with this message at 13:08 on Dec 14, 2020 |
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Dec 14, 2020 13:04
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Essentially, Julian Tifflor would be perfectly summed up by an empty post. And if his lore post happens to coincide with April 1st, I'll be sorely tempted.
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Dec 14, 2020 13:13
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Are there transmitter denial systems? Teleporting bullshit (and time travel bullshit) breaks stories so hard authors usually need to add in some pretty heavy limits on the concepts to make things workable. Then again they jumped straight to teleporting fusion bombs so maybe the author collective just doesn't care.
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Dec 17, 2020 05:13
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Oh yes. Tons of them. There are also natural phenomena (think bad space weather) which can hinder or inhibit transmitter transports. There's in fact enough they probably deserve their own lore post. Two of the most common are passive (every type of shield operating with hyperspace shenanigans can prevent transports) and active (hyperspace guns which target transports mid-hyperspace to intercept the signal). Biological teleporters (mutants) by the way operate on a fundamentally different, but similar principle. If they hit a 5D-hyperspace shield for example, they tend to get kicked back to the starting point and "only" suffer extreme pain for a while. If this happens to a random red shirt walking into a transmitter, you're just hosed. You're like, super-dead.
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Dec 17, 2020 11:20
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Libluini posted:If this happens to a random red shirt walking into a transmitter, you're just hosed. You're like, super-dead. I think they call it "dispersed into hyper energy". As in, there is no "you" left afterwards. Thats also why 5D-Shields will have a regular shield in front of them. The regular shield won't stop any weapon attacks, but it will stop Johnny Random from accidentally walking into it and getting himself dispersed. Nuramor fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Dec 17, 2020 |
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Dec 17, 2020 17:39
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Nuramor posted:I think they call it "dispersed into hyper energy". As in, there is no "you" left afterwards. If you're lucky. It doesn't come up often, but Star Trek transporter style accidents do happen. There's even a very famous immortal who got mixed up mid-transit with some dumbass alien using its super-ability when it collided with his signal. Since then, a semi-organic fragment was left clinging to his face like the world's most dangerous amoeba. (It sends out insanity-causing radiation making you mad when you look at it, so he has to wear a mask at all times.) Also as I have seen the most famous 5D-shield explained to me, Paratrons are kind of special, because the paratron particles themselves have a natural repelling effect, so if you just accidentally brush a Paratron field, you're fine. But if you punch it hard enough, it'll make your fist connect with the actual Paratron field and a rift to hyperspace opens up when the particles travel back home, taking you with them. And then there's the Schatt-Armarong vacuum lightning, which opens up a rift at where you're standing and you get dispersed so fast and violently, it causes a huge explosion. (Of course, I can't guarantee this explanation 100%, Perrypedia doesn't explain the Paratron Shield in great detail, and most of my knowledge comes from remembering all that loving stuff I've read over the decades.)
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Dec 17, 2020 19:31
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Libluini posted:If you're lucky. It doesn't come up often, but Star Trek transporter style accidents do happen. There's even a very famous immortal who got mixed up mid-transit with some dumbass alien using its super-ability when it collided with his signal. Since then, a semi-organic fragment was left clinging to his face like the world's most dangerous amoeba. (It sends out insanity-causing radiation making you mad when you look at it, so he has to wear a mask at all times.) Right, they mostly used the second shield for HÜs and such. It's funny how basically every kind of stronger shield doesn't so much block attacks as divert them to other dimensions. What would you think is more economical: Block the gigaton warhead or rip a hole to another dimension and funnel the explosion to there?
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Dec 17, 2020 19:55
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Nuramor posted:Right, they mostly used the second shield for HÜs and such. It's funny how basically every kind of stronger shield doesn't so much block attacks as divert them to other dimensions. What would you think is more economical: Block the gigaton warhead or rip a hole to another dimension and funnel the explosion to there? Has it ever happened that the (surviving) denizens of that other dimension got fed up with that bullshit and send something of their own back?
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Dec 17, 2020 20:19
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Last Transmission posted:Has it ever happened that the (surviving) denizens of that other dimension got fed up by that bullshit and send something of their own back? Physically speaking, hyperspace isn't really "a dimension", even though mathematics have to work this through like it's a 5th dimension as our brains can't comprehend it directly. Hyperspace is the medium universes are inside of, they're the outer shell. To compact 3000+ novels of physics into one short description: Every universe is like our own physics describe it, but it has a plus and a minus side, and a twin with its corresponding minus and plus sides. All of the latter you need advanced hyperspace knowledge and tech to even be aware of. (There are gates built by far more awesome people than average humans you can use, if you can find them. If you lack knowledge about those other parts though chances are you won't be going back home later. Because you'll be dead.) Most of the time, you are "linked" too hard to your own universe for this knowledge to matter, but certain advanced FTL-systems come with a failure mode which deposits you randomly in one of infinite universes. In almost all cases, this means death as a random universe will have an almost infinitely high chance of being incapable of allowing a form of life we would recognize. Though even the very basic Transition Drive can, as we eventually learn as we patiently wade through 3k+ novels, shoot you into the wrong universe if you're terminally unlucky. (Though you could argue about this, as the alternative to a failed jump sending you to the wrongverse is often just dispersal in hyperspace (super-death), or getting stranded with a broken FTL-drive far away from home.) In the current era of this LP, all of this is mostly unknown, though Terrans do know there are other universes. The knowledge how to connect to a foreign universe in a controlled manner is 100% unknown in this century, however. Lifeforms outside the norm Is a complicated issue. Mostly, the hyperspace of PR works like an empty Warhammer warp space, with the creepy crawlies replaced by bad space weather. But, strange hyperspace life does exists! And even weirder poo poo: Eventually, Earth will get stranded in our twin universe, where the Libration Zone (mathematically between Normal and Hyper Space) works slightly different and huge, incomprehensible "objects" called icebergs drift through in huge numbers, causing the Linear Drive to fail. Which is important because other FTL-drives, like the Transition Drive, fail completely so huge icebergs it is. In our side of the universe, there are worms that are sometimes observed in the Libration Zone, though they're mostly known only as the "pets" of a specific species with a culture specialized in dealing with this weird not-anything space. Then there large-scale intrusions like Tryortan Maws (gigantic hyperspace tornados) hyperspace quakes which cause destruction and insanity, a hyperspace-induced plague which turns living organisms into oscillating hyperspace crystals and totally incomprehensible things like the Supra-Het. The Supra-Heterodynamic Lifeform. The Supra-Het though lived in normal space, it just was hyperspace-related insofar it "ate" by converting normal matter and energy into hyper energy, which it then absorbed. There are also real intelligent lifeforms who just plain live there, but I know nothing about them, as I haven't read those particular story arcs yet.
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Dec 17, 2020 20:37
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Hyperphysics, take two OK, let me try again: Hyperspace is the outside. In "classical" hyper physics, physicists had to go through awkward mathematical transformations to describe specific ranges of energy frequencies in hyperspace. The "5th dimension" was what the first and most commonly known range of hyperspace was called in this theory. Since all hyperspace-related technology depends on average dumbasses needing to interact in some form with it in the first place, that's as far as most intelligent beings in the universe ever get: You need something (psionic powers, special oscilating crystals hiding among your rubies or well, anything at all) to even know hyperspace exists! In most cases related to Humans, we just stole/appropriated technology and knowledge from other species/cultures that already knew about hyperspace. If you live on a planet without any hyperspace bullshit available, your species will never develop FTL, and probably go extinct eventually without ever getting to another star system. And if you do know, congratulations: You now know about the part of hyperspace which is physically speaking, closest to us. But as frequencies keep getting more energetic, they also get harder to detect, which is the main reason a lot of bullshit blindsided protagonists again and again. Eventually, the people of our galaxy made contact with people who used what everyone had to awkwardly call "6th dimensional energy", because in classical hyper physics, there was no room for the idea that there may be another space above hyperspace. And as observation seemed to say: Yes, there is, mathematics had to work really hard to keep up with nature's bullcrap. 6D-tech turned out to be mostly a dead end, as there is only just one type of oscillating crystal in the entirety of known space energetic enough to make it work. And oops, over the course of the series creepy super-beings changed the laws of our universe and it all crumbled to dust. The humanoid aliens from another galaxy who developed this tech were a prime example of how unfair this all is: They got better tech then everyone else and side-stepped the entirety of "normal" hyperspace technology simply because they had better magic crystals in their own galaxy. And presumably (we currently have no contact with them) their society crashed and burned when suddenly everything they built stopped working. They called their own, better hyperspace the "Dakkar Zone" (so spooky!) and later developments in physics revealed that it isn't actually a thing. Like the Libration Zone, the Dakkar Zone is a purely mathematical construct, in truth it's just a range of hyperspace with energy levels far above the common hyperspace. Also later, the attempts to cram all this new knowledge into the same theory of spacetime crashed headlong into a wall when even higher levels of hyper energy became detectable. Our plucky protagonists (some of which are/were scientists) eventually had enough when space bastards showed up with 7th dimensional tech and a new theory of hyperspace took form: In this, it's not really necessary anymore to transform formulas around to pin down a specific range of hyperspace as "n-dimensional" space. Nowadays and thanks to a disturbingly growing number of adventures outside our own universe, it is known that 5D-space and the Libration Zone correspond to hyper energy frequencies "closest" to our universe, while higher ranges that where once called "6th dimensional space" etc. are now just called by their frequency ranges in hyperspace. And if you keep going, you begin risking to later "fall back" to the wrong universe, as you keep moving farther away from "our" universe. That latter part is the fundamental basis of transuniversal travel. It can be fun, but also kill you. To get back to hyperspace lifeforms a bit, if you now try to square "there are worms in the Libration Zone" with "the Libration Zone does not exist", congratulations: You now know why there are types of knowledge in the Perryverse which can make your head explode. (No joke, there is knowledge that can't be "folded down" in a way to make it fit in a simple mortal brain. Learning those secrets just kills you.)
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Dec 17, 2020 21:10
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Libluini posted:Eventually, Gucky was put on the very short list of "essential characters", together with Perry Rhodan himself. As long as people like him enough to keep buying stories with him in it, he's as safe as the big guy on the front cover. If you want actual fursonas, you have seen nothing yet. That has to wait until I'm dropping a post about PR's resident Action Cat Girl, Dao-Lin-H'ay. Ah, yes, I remember the species from the crummy RPG. You know you're buying a top-of-the-line product, when the shop-owner says: 'I had no idea we had something like this.'
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Dec 17, 2020 21:21
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if you really want to hurt yourself, try to find the cheap Italian Perry Rhodan movie from the 70s you can make everyone involved in making Perry Rhodan quite mad when you mention it to them, they really like to forget it exists it's on German Netflix and/or Amazon Prime
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Dec 17, 2020 21:41
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Libluini posted:if you really want to hurt yourself, try to find the cheap Italian Perry Rhodan movie from the 70s I'm imagining it as something similar to the Lynch Dune movie, in terms of it being faithful to the original content.
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Dec 17, 2020 22:36
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The next update is in the works, but sadly delayed since I'm busier then usual next week. I'm forced to post-pone regular updates until the week after Christmas. Sorry!
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Dec 20, 2020 14:02
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm imagining it as something similar to the Lynch Dune movie, in terms of it being faithful to the original content. well, the Dune movie was at least recognizable in terms of plot and might even be considered faithful if the budget and screen time didn't run out towards the end. Furthermore David Lynch had actual talent and a budget to begin with. Let's say 'SOS im Weltraum' was a perfect example of the cashgrabs produced by Italy at the time. And I finally dug up a recording of the MST3K-like riff produced for this movie, my evening is secured.
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Dec 20, 2020 20:21
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OK, hiatus over. A new update is incoming. By the way, we've reached the stage now where  important story poo poo starts happening in the rest of the galaxy.Right now we're too far away to be involved, and it wouldn't make much sense for TopsidCommand to send us news about the events. But I'm already preparing the necessary story events that'll be important for our little backwater to know about, out here in the galactic Eastside. Still about a hundred turns / "months" before things get real. Though I may be injecting a couple "mysterious" messages when it makes sense that the Topsiders back home would take notice of the dominoes tumbling down about now and send us updates. But enough about that! Our lizard friends in New Homellete have their own local problems to deal with.
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Jan 10, 2021 15:10
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Reptile Rising 07: Encounter at New Homellete Mission Log 005: 14th May 2326 We continue to march forward on the road to making a proper nest out of New Homellete. A string of new colonies has joined our Eastside-capital and a growing number of colonists and military personnel keeps arriving, thanks to the United Empire gracefully allowing us to use their long-range transmitters. Too bad it’s a one-way trip for all of them, since it will take us decades, if not centuries, to build something as monstrous as a long-range transmitter to send people back. For now, us Topsiders are alone out here. Though not as alone as we could hope for, as almost everyone involved in the Eastside-Project has shown up so far. I guess the Mehandor who sold the coordinates to this star cluster made a lot of money from their venture. They even sold the coordinates to another Mehandor-clan! The Galactic Traders are daring enough to be a serious threat to our security, if we can’t keep them on our sunny side. But the most important news is the discovery of a completely alien civilization living in New Homellete. As far as we can tell, they seem to have lived in this star cluster for a long time, and may be even native to this place. Apart from strange sensor readings and chance encounters when our scouts stumbled into their settlements, we know nothing about them yet. Their only attempt at communication was a demented rant by some sort of self-proclaimed central leader. And of course both the Arkonids and Mehandor immediately started fighting them. Humanoids! The Terrans, as always, operate smarter: They remain elusive, and keep out of any conflicts. Like they always do. They hide when weak, and strike when strong. They’re a lot like us in this regard. The Mehandor and Arkonids don’t seem to know more about these bluish-furred aliens than we do, or at least they refuse to tell us more. Our knowledge about the alien natives therefore is barely more than you could scratch on your claw. Until we learn more about them, I’ve chosen to name the unknown aliens “Blues”, since their fur color is of the most striking blue I’ve ever seen. To prepare for the worst case, I’ve ordered to expand our space fleet. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  Turn 123 blindsides us with a surprise: One of our scouts stumbles over planets settled by Eastside-natives! Their leader here in New Homellete has a message for us:  Westside-Scum, what are you doing here? Harrprex the Graceful declares war on you. We will feed you to the horror worms! Uh oh, that doesn’t sound nice. Looks like we found the natives of the Eastside, and at least the ones living in New Homellete are instantly flying into a furious rage at the mere sight of us here. Doesn’t bode well for a peaceful future!  Interestingly, the message about meeting the natives comes with its own typo. Very stylish! Exhibit 101 for my argument for a cheap and rushed production. Apparently, money for quality control was not one of the more important parts of the budget.  Meanwhile, we scout the Aldekama-system and find a lot of interesting astronomical phenomena. No new colonization targets, though.  The Poladunrez-system looks better at first, with this big, bad dry boy of a hostile planet. Since the planet is huge, I’d be tempted to at least claim it for victory points, but uh oh  The natives have a colony on the planet’s moon! Smart choice, as the moon looks a lot nicer, but we don’t want to agitate the already raging locals, so this means the system is off-limits completely for now.  Thankfully, now that the natives have shown up, the star map will mark native systems with their portrait, so we can instantly see what we’re getting into. I’m not sure, but the map would probably end up looking terribly cluttered if the devs had used this “mystery-reveal system” as the standard, instead of going with the very Imperium-for-the-Atari-ST-like switch panel portraits.  On our capital, I keep running into supply problems thanks to our insane population growth. We really need the next agriculture tech upgrade asap.  And the very next turn, we meet another space buddy: Star Lord Adanil greets us, in as friendly manner as an Akon can muster.  Greetings, degenerates. In the realm of Star Lord Adanil you will feel safe and well off. Indeed we will, Star Lord Adanil. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel sends her regards.  Well, the Akons don’t have their Energy Command to send us explosive cigars or start a CIA-style uprising, so we can ignore them for now. I’m turning my mind towards developing our new colonies. Sculima IV for example, is in dire need of consumer goods. This turn alone 4 people have committed suicide because their Lizardtendo-games didn’t arrive.  So far, so good. Four colonies, and while dealing with planets in OE is like starting a completely new game of SimCity every time you add another colony, we’re still far from the point where I have to start trusting our AI-administrators to take control. Though to be fair, if you don’t like building simulators like SimCity, this game isn’t for you.  Just one turn after the Akons started harassing us, we finally get level C in agriculture. As always so far, the first new building we unlock is just a better version of all the single-tile buildings before it. The Hydroponic Factory is from now on our new standard on everything that isn’t a young, vulnerable colony. The cheaper D-level hydroponics are still useful if you just start out on a new colony, but E-level buildings are officially dead forever as soon as you reach C in something.  More importantly, we also get the Planetary Supplier, a huge 2x2 tiles monstrosity vastly superior to everything else, at the cost of being somewhat costly to run. 30 pop units have to toil endlessly, and it eats a whopping 30 light industry (and 5 heavy industry) per turn. This thing, in other words, is meant for an already well-established colony. Don’t make this the first building of your new colony, it’s absolute overkill.  With this, I can finally get ahead of our food rat race on Shaulires II. Our capital is already strong enough it can just straight-up finish the rather chunky Planetary Supplier in one go. Due to space constraints, I’ve already re-tooled our research to point to light industry, because the way our population is growing, all those food factories we’re building will sooner or later make us run out of LIUs. The smaller draw on HIUs is also slowly making itself felt. And our capital has too many unused tiles to just pave everything over with our D-level industry buildings, though in an emergency we’ll have to do it, inefficient space usage be damned. And then tear everything down again to make space for the better buildings later.  Anyway, let’s… Wait, are those sirens I’m hearing? WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!  Combat Time It finally happened: One of our ships managed to end its turn in exact the same orbit as an alien ship, and now the (very few) Topsiders on board are rushing to their battle stations. And this means I can now explain how combat works in Operation Eastside! Whenever a turn ends with ships from more than one side ending their movement in the same orbit, you get a (exclusively audio) message warning you of impending fights. Then, when you hit “end turn”, this screen suddenly pops up. The part on the upper right, next to the turn counter, gives you some additional info: The green/red lights show which sides are in battle with each other. If you remember the portrait positions, you can even guess which enemy you face! In this case, it’s someone we haven’t met yet. The tiny message right next to the light panel shows you the number of fights you’ll have to deal with in this phase, here it shows “1 Kampf/ 1 battle”, so we only have this one to fight. The square right below those very important information screens is the mini map. Since we’re not fighting above a colony, it’s just empty space. The four spots in each edge are where enemies or allies can show up. If you now ask yourself the question “what if more than four fleets show up to the party”, then I have bad news for you: I never had fights with more than three participants myself, and the manual stays silent on the matter. I guess things get messy if all six races plus a fleet of natives happen to stumble into each other. At the start of the battle, each participant gets to place their ships first, with the fastest ships going first. The lower right square contains a list of your ships, and you have to select one of the four edges and start placing ships. Every involved fleet alternates until all ships are placed. If a fight involves a colony, a planet with the powers of all of its defenses combined shows up on the map, and the defender is forced to place their ships in the vicinity of the colony instead of on the edge of the map. Theoretically, allied forces can take the same edge to show up, but like the hypothetical scenario of all 7 possible forces of this star cluster all smashing into 4 edges for a free-for-all, we’ll have to wait until something like this actually happens for us to find out. At least the manual bothers to tell us that every player can only take a maximum of 50 ships into a single battle. The number of ships in orbit is “almost” unlimited (whatever that means, there’s no number given), so like in Master of Orion 3, we can get into situations where you go into battle with whatever the game randomly chose for you. Yes, we can’t select our own ships. If there are more than 50 units hanging around, you get a random selection of them for your battle, that’s it. At least the game has one thing to trump MO3’s very similar system: The game tries to only select your strongest ships, so we’re not in danger of going into battle with a bunch of colonizers and scouts against battleships. In theory.  After all ships are placed, the same part of the interface which was listing your ships instead shows where you fight and who is here, in some more detail. (You get the portraits of the forces clashing here and the name of the place. Here we learn we fight the handsome-looking Terrans in the Merlida-system.) All ships are shown as tactical counters symbolizing our species ship design with a health bar. The principle at work here is dead simple: You click on your ship, then on where you want to go. Then another player moves a ship, until eventually it’s your turn again with your next ship. After all ships have moved and shot something, the turn ends. Together with using hex tiles, it’s like BattleTech in Space! Another question you might ask is “isn’t this very confusing, since all your ships look exactly the same” and yes, but there is also some extra information you’re getting besides what you see here.  This is the single Terran ship we’re facing. And it demonstrates here how to show stats in combat: Hover over a ship with a mouse cursor, and this little square filled with colored dots shows up.  The colors represent, from top to bottom: Green: How far the ship moved last turn. Light Green: Maximum movement. Here not visible because this ship used up all of its movement. Orange: Maximum range in hex tiles. Red: Armor strength Theoretically, also a measurement to guess how large an enemy ship is. Chances are, if the entire line is red it’s probably not a corvette. Turquoise: Shield strength. Blue: Attack strength. Yellow: The last line shows how experienced a ship is. Since it only grows when you successfully hit something in battle, this screenshot tells us this is probably a scout like our ship.  For comparison’s sake, here’s our ship: Our Eggsplorer can move more than twice as far per turn, has roughly the same range, armor strength and shield strength, though the game does a lot of rounding here. Our attack strength is so low it doesn’t show up, and of course we too don’t have any battle experience. This is just two unarmed scouts accidentally getting too close to each other, not really a serious battle.  OE makes goddamn sure you can see where you’re going, which is kind of weird when compared with the tiny lights system of stat display the game is going for. I’m not complaining, it’s just odd that you have to squint at the screen, manual in hand, to decode ship stats, but if you want to move, you get this very bright gray field showing you all the hex fields your currently selected ship can reach. As you can see, a speed of 7 already allows us to nearly reach a full quarter of the map. This system really doesn’t have much space for upgrades. Expect end-game scouts to just move across the entire battle map in a single turn.  Apart from just moving, we can also move and then shoot, move and shoot a valid target immediately, only shoot or rest, which restores shield energy. Any time we hit someone, the ship doing the shooting gains experience based on how “brave” the shot was. Accuracy and damage calculations are partly based on how high the tech level of a ship is, and experience “of the positronic”, is also supposed to play a role, but the manual is irritatingly vague on that last point. This of course means a low-tech, but strong ship, is still hosed if it happens to meet a high-tech ship with weaker stats, since it won’t be able to hit for poo poo. But to test the claims of the manual, we need to get into a real battle, of course. This one here ends after a couple turns, because the Terrans don’t want to fight us and just kind of move back and forth up there on the map. And the reason for this is already visible in the map: Hostile space people are marked in red, neutrals in yellow, friendlies in green. And apparently the Terrans really like us, since they’re colored green. I suppose this encounter was just a very aggressive greeting? loving Terrans.  After all battles are dealt with, a rotating star map shows you NO MORE BATTLES DETECTED and stays this way until you notice the “next turn” button on the lower right. Let’s get back to building space colonies!  Oh yeah, I forgot this: In case you’re suffering from dementia, the game helpfully tells you which space race you’re playing, and right next to this reminder are three extra buttons, from left to right: 1.) Auto-battle: Give the AI a chance to play both sides 2.) Retreat: Your mobile units retreat. Your colonies are hosed. 3.) Fire protection: If this option is toggled, your ships won’t be able to fire on friendly or neutral ships. A good option if you want to protect allies/make some alliances later. The third option is neat, and quite important: The attitude of an AI-player depends mostly on how you deal with them in encounters like this. If you just rush over and open fire every time, they’ll soon hate you and then it’s war time o’clock. If you don’t shoot on neutral or friendly ships, their attitude will slowly improve, or in case of allies, at least not taking a downturn.  The aftermath of our short battle: The Terran scout is now in orbit around Merlida, while our own scout automatically left the system because it was also in solar orbit and when I moved it to the left side of the battle screen, it automatically left the battle and retreated back to the star it came from. Oops! Another way to retreat from a battle is to move all your ships to one of the edges and wait until the turn ends. The ships have to be in hexes touching the edge for this to work, though. If you have 50 ships this may be a bit hard to pull off until enough of them are wrecked. That’s why there is an auto-retreat button, I suppose.  Our fleet window shows I’m as dumb and wrong as always: Our scout is actually retreating straight back to our capital! Or did I send this scout out fresh from the yards? gently caress, I shouldn’t have taken a couple weeks off for Christmas. I don’t remember.  Since I improved our scout design, but didn’t change the name, the numbering reset. This means thanks to my long hiatus I have no way of knowing anymore if this Eggsplorer-I is really old and therefore probably was punted to the capital after moving between two other systems, or one of our newest ships and indeed came fresh from the capital and is now just going back the way it came from. Man, I’m dumb. I could probably look through my old screenshots, but this question is really not important enough. I’m already wasting enough time by… writing… entire… paragraphs… about… well, poo poo  Anyway, turn 127! By now our new colonies have used up most of their starting supplies and their production is still too low to just sit around and wait -that would take ages. Instead, we start shoveling industrial goods through our transmitters. Our colonies need mostly LIUs, since light industry is used by so much stuff in the game, but HIUs are also important, since heavy industry comes way down on the list of new poo poo a colony needs to build, so there’ll always be a few turns of shortage until enough hydroponics and light factories have been built to cover your basic necessities.  Sculima IV can now support it’s tiny population of just about 2k people. Our industrial production is already feeling the strain of supporting multiple hydroponics, though. Next up: More factories!  Two turns later, one of our ships surveys the Tegbipe-system. It has multiple planets and moons exactly like this, but the “best” one (in pure habitability) has already been claimed by the Arkonids. But since we’re on not really unfriendly terms with them, we can claim the second-best as a consolation-price. Though with 85% surface water, we’re one bad roll from getting not much out of it. This planet will get put on auto as soon as the basic supply and defense is cared for. I really don’t expect Tegbipe III to be more than just a +1 on our victory scale.  Just in time I remember what I found out last time and manually reduce turn time. In hindsight, it’s kind of funny how I never noticed the game “helpfully” setting inter-system travel to the lowest possible speed so that theoretically every single ship in your entire fleet could make the journey to your target. I’m guessing this happens because the game can’t “see” that there is a ship of yours already in the same system when you go from the system view straight to the fleet view. And to be fair, there were situations where I got confused because I couldn’t find out why some of my ships were grayed out and couldn’t move to the selected target (because the pre-set speed was too high for them). Personally, I think the game automatically setting maximum speed would be more intuitive, but on the other hand the devs included a “min”-button to put your route on the lowest amount of turns and it’s probably just my stupidity which keeps making me forget it exists. Anyway, now that we know, our Eggsplorer-II can do the trip from the sun to the third planet in about a day, instead of wasting a full week on a pleasure cruise.  Thanks to now operating multiple giant planetary suppliers, our CGU-situation is stable. However, we’re now slowly developing a new problem: Our agricultural buildings help us supplying our pop growth, and our residential buildings keep the pop growth going, but our surplus of workers has reached the stage were morale problems are gunking up production. That huge field of hydroponics in between the giant food factories is just one of two, and it barely keeps our supply rate at 207%, which is not normal. We need more industrial buildings, but our old D-level buildings aren’t taking up enough population to prevent our unemployment from rising. We need the bigger C-level buildings to reduce our morale penalty! As a reminder: You want a lot of CGU-surplus, because a consumer good surplus also reduces morale penalties incurred from bad habitability and unemployment. To hurt even more, better research buildings are also locked behind the next level of industrial research, so we have some real trouble pushing our next research fast enough to not drown in Topsiders with nothing better to do. Ironically, our bad D-level analysis centers take up good chunks of population, which means building more of them will help a bit with research while reducing morale penalties at the same time. On the other hand, they also need lots of LIUs to run, so we need more of our light factories. Our terribly inefficient, D-level factories. After we reach our next two D-levels, there’ll be so much work tearing down and replacing buildings.Something to think about : Because the morale penalties work on your agricultural production too, it’s easy to get into a death spiral when most of our population isn’t working, as that will tank your consumer good supply, which in turn tanks your production even more, rinse and repeat until massdeath. This is also one of the many reasons why trying to raise a colony on a hostile planet is futile, even if the game cheekily allows it: The bad habitability makes it extra hard to keep your population supplied, and when you finally reach the point where everything is stable, the growing population tanks production through unemployment, and kills off your marginal colony in short order when all your hydroponics stop producing anything. Probably a nasty surprise after you just spend 50-100 turns trying to make this hell planet work. To get out of such a death spiral, you need to not only expand agricultural buildings to cover the tanking production rate, you’ll need to pump materials into the colony until you can get all your surplus population into work projects building poo poo until the sinking penalties from more people working and the growing CGU-production meet each other in the middle. This can be astonishingly hard to get right even on a good planet, on a bad planet I can only suggest: Don’t.  Sculima IV continues to grow. Please ignore the science building selected, I’m actually still just building light factories here, and just started randomly clicking through the interface. Supply rate is good and stable for now, and with the second factory we’ll soon have a small, but steady LIU-source. And as soon as we start building heavy industry, the transmitter-capacity will rise and we can boost everything faster with trading. Sculima IV seems on the road to success!  Turn 132: A colonizer joins our scout keeping guard on Tegbipe III. Time to add another planet to our growing little realm!  My recording software(s) still don’t want to work with OE, so we skip right to colonizing and our first buildings. Woah, that’s a lot of gray. I like how this surface is mostly highlands, with the “unusable” tiles being inhospitable lowlands. There’s some surprising diversity for the alien landscapes you’ll be facing. And apparently 85% water can translate to 50% lowland valleys, dry as gently caress. Or is that brownish-stuff supposed to represent mud? Sometimes I'd really like to see how those background calculations are being run. There must be a lot of dice involved, considering I had below 50% surface water result in tiny islands inside a huge, global ocean before.  There are also these… numbers? showing up in some of the valleys. Ominous.  Next turn we’re back to slowly growing our new colonies and filling up our last free spaces on the capital to combat our growing unemployment. Here I’m trying to boost industrial production so we can keep building analysis centers and planetary suppliers. All of these new buildings will need to be replaced later. Ugh. At least the unemployment penalties have dropped somewhat, as CGU-supply is up to 287%. As an aside, you should always aim for an optimum rate of 300-400%, as an abrupt change in your workforce can easily drop your CGU-production by insane amounts. I’ve seen a supply rate of 200+% dropping below 100% in just one turn. Penalties from unemployment can be nasty and sudden.  I think a short demonstration is in order. This is our colony on Tegbipe III. Currently, 520 people aren’t working, because our stockpile of material is running out. Now I’m sending new stuff via transmitter, so the people in the colony can fill up both construction sites.  Now both construction sites are building at 100% speed and will be finished next turn. Unemployment dropped to 270 people (or 27 units). This boosted our consumer good production from 41% to 117%, and instead of 40 people dying, our population stabilized. That’s the unemployment penalty at work, folks.  Meanwhile, with the new Eggsplorer A class I’ve unfucked that earlier problem with double-using our first design name and we can now clearly see which ship is older at a glance from the fleet window.  With the growing number of scouts and colonizers coming and going, there are currently 6 ships in orbit above our capital. Slowly we can start talking about lizards having an actuall, for real fleet. Though I probably should add some more guard ships, just in case our relations with the Arkonids break down. They have multiple colonies next to our cap, after all.  In fact, we may have too many colonizers now, since we can just repair a used colony ship. Putting a new landing unit in takes time and resources, but is still a little bit faster than just constructing a whole new ship. And so say bye-bye to good old Nestmaker-I, repairing you is too much work for me right now. Though it has to be said: Ships in OE do not need maintenance. There’s nothing stopping you from building a bazillion colony ships, except your own sanity.  Oh come on! Out of living space again??! Welp, more residential buildings, here we come.  Things start to heat up in turn 136: The Spilith-system has an Arkonid-colony and a sizable fleet here.  But the entire rest of the system is a string of colonies of the native Blues. They have their own fleets, and if they react to the Arkonids like they did to us, the Arkonids are soon entering Hurt World, population: You. While putting your colonies into the same system as another player race is ballsy, it’s also not too bad if you can keep the other side friendly. Putting your colony into a native system is just plain nuts. The Blues really don’t like alien visitors. I guess now we know why the Arkonids are so friendly with us, they probably really don’t want us to get angry and backstab them while they’re off on their own little colonial adventure here.  That’s our second native system marked.  Turn 137: Finding all these alien ships duking it out in a nearby system shocked our military command to the core. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel orders the design and construction of a new class of ships to improve our defenses. And she doesn’t gently caress around, the Yolk-class frigates are not too shabby for what is essentially still mostly E-class dreck. Its shields can take a few hits, and the hull strength benefits from our innate bonus and can therefore put at 2/3rd and still be better than what we can expect to face at this stage. This allowed me to keep acceleration just high enough to keep speed in combat at a breezy 5. Our weapon strength however is a problem. 6 is a barely visible one-dot on our battle stat screen. At least not every enemy ship will have maximum firepower, and this design should be able to deal with at least hostile scouts. Worst case, welp I sure hope our bulky hulls can pull us through when our weapons can’t.  Al-Nikath is another dud on our survey-list: The Mehandor already colonized it, it seems.  16 ships? Uh… Oh, and the Arkonids have a very strong presence here, too. Good. By which I mean bad.  Oh, of course, the natives live here, too! This system is a painful series of atrocities waiting to happen. We nope out immediately. Well, the game sure started getting lively all of a sudden. But at least now I can stop wondering why the Mehandor didn’t speak to us again and remained neutral. (The Jumpers/Springers are aggressive enough your communications in the beginning tend to be a string of threats and war declarations until you can avoid fighting them for long enough your relations start to get better. Them not doing anything to us was atypical.) I guess with the Arkonids and Mehandor both fighting the Blues, they’re not our enemies for a long time. We’ll stay away from this mess. Hopefully the Akons, Terrans and Ara were smart enough to not immediately rub their noses all over the angry natives. Though it would certainly help keep them out of our scales if their AI hosed up like this, too. In case I didn’t make this clear enough: There’s no peace possible between Blues and us, the invaders. They’ll always be at war with everyone else. Eventually, we’ll have to confront them when they start assaulting our colonies. Right now, we have at least two other dum-dums taking the hits for us. To Be Continued
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Jan 10, 2021 16:30
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So we finally meet the Blues. This will be very fun to watch. Let's enjoy the fireworks of the Mehandor and Arkonids tangling with them. I have my suspicions about those numbers on your planet, and if I'm right, I will so enjoy seeing what happens.
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Jan 11, 2021 09:15
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Is it possible to play diplomacy games with the natives, too? Or are they intended as permanently hostile roadbumps?
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Jan 12, 2021 00:09
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PurpleXVI posted:Is it possible to play diplomacy games with the natives, too? Or are they intended as permanently hostile roadbumps? We can certainly try!
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Jan 12, 2021 00:44
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Do the natives respawn if left alone like Civ barbarians, or are they treated like another full fledged faction with the possibility of extinction? Any possibility of trading with them?
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Jan 12, 2021 16:22
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