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Decoy Badger posted: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? Much of the answers would be spoilers, so I can only say: I promise to try and play faster so we can see what happens.  But as a teaser: There's is certainly the possibility of extinction. But not theirs
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Jan 12, 2021 17:34
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"Natives" in this case simply means "original inhabitants".
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Jan 13, 2021 00:24
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This makes some of the poll 'options' make more sense.
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Jan 13, 2021 10:47
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Got to say this LP is great, and thanks for bringing it to those of us who don't know German.
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Jan 13, 2021 16:48
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I do remember them when I played this quite a long time ago. Any further details would be spoilers though.
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Jan 13, 2021 17:24
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OK, thread update: I was forced to deal with some private financial issues, and it's eating up a lot of my time currently. So, it's not exactly a hiatus, as I'm still working on this poo poo, but, uh yeah. It's ugly. I'm trying to get this back on track, but between time to deal with poo poo, and time to relax so poo poo isn't drowning me, there's not much left. If things start up again, I'll post another update. 
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Jan 25, 2021 18:32
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Sorry to hear it, Lib. Take care.
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Jan 25, 2021 21:44
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 Reptile Rising 08: Chaos and Opportunities  Mission Log 006: 28th May 2326 Things are getting busy. Our fleet continues to grow to protect our new colonies here in the Eastside, and our efforts at surveying the New Homellete Star Cluster have intensified. There is some conflict, but for now it’s more the burned hide kind of conflict, no-one is biting anyone yet. Some of our colonies are struggling, due to being chosen more for strategical importance than for habitability. However, this is nothing which couldn’t be solved with some determination and more supplies. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  Turn 138, and it’s time for an experiment to confirm something I was wondering about : Our scout sits at the sun Al Nikath, and here I’m targeting the frozen wastelands of Al Nikath VIII at the outskirts of the systems. I want to see how long travel times are from the sun to the farthest point of a star system.  And after some fine tuning, it’s: 1 turn. Welp. I guess the manual was either lying, or the fancy logarithmic scaling used in the system map is pointless because there is no second drive system in the game, and from the game’s viewpoint, all objects inside a star system are all the same distance from another object in the same system. At least now it’s confirmed: I really shouldn’t believe everything written in a manual!   Well, that was disappointing. Time to build some more factories on our capital, because do you know what else is disappointing: Our capital’s production!  Turn 139, and now we’ve met almost everyone! The Terrans show up and teach me, that yes, there are actually alternate ruler names, which is completely undocumented. I know this because “Commandant Tarpow” here is not using the name my own Terran Test Ruler got. But the (for the purpose of this LP, demoted) Topsider-leader we got was the same as the one I got from an earlier test game. My conclusion here: There’s a small pool of available names, and the game randomly pulls one every time you start a new game. Note to self: Try starting a few times to see what names you can get. Narrator: He immediately forgot.  Commandant Tarpow the Terran sends you his regards. We are in favor of peaceful coexistence, but the history of the Solar Empire teaches us to be wary, too. Not entirely unexpected, and not criminal enough to pull something shady. But we’ll see what kind of egg the future will lay. -Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel  More stuff from this turn: Akons in a heavily settled system. The other planets are settled by Mehandor and Arkonids. The amount of colonies being thrown around is what happens on Very Difficult, but the AI being shoddily programmed means everything is still oddly serene and peaceful.  Since that system was another dud (no planet free for us to squeeze into here), off we go again. Next target: The Dakada-system.  Something I haven’t mentioned yet: Our color here is white for some reason. This will get confusing fast, since some of our enemies have friendly colors like blue when shown on the star map. Even at maximum map size, we’d be surveying the star cluster at a blistering rate. With New Homellete set to a relaxing size of 80/120 stars, it’s even faster. If we want to actually win, I think we’ll have to shoot somebody sooner or later.  Also something we’re doing: Since the interface is right there, we try to get a non-aggression treaty with the locals. Will it work? Let’s wait and see.  Diplomatic turn around is fast in OE: The very next turn, we get answers. And yes, I also asked the Terrans for a treaty, since they were friendlier than our other contacts. If you don’t want to attack us, don’t. Treaties aren’t needed.  Do you think we’re pussies? Welp, both reject our offers, though the Blues are hilariously over-the-top insulting with their answer.  Cacaran is surveyed in turn 141. And the one planet not total poo poo is 100% ice oceans, so the game won’t even roll for surface areas. We’re simply locked out of colonizing the second planet. Regardless of how wonky the background calculations can be, if 100% of the surface is blocked, that’s it. The game won’t even let you try to land here.  Our scout here moves on towards Borekaris, a very hot and large A5-star. Maybe we have more luck here?  The fleet status around turn 143: Three colonizers are ready to start from our capital, three different scouts are moving around towards their targets.  Just two turns later, suddenly battle: We stumble over two ships of the galactic druglords/doctors, the Aras. Their stats are roughly the same as our scout, they’re just loving slow. Aras in OE use a similar sphereoid shape as Arkonids and Terras. Lore-wise, they sometimes do this, but they’re also described of mostly using the tube-shapes favored by their close relatives, the Mehandor. No idea why this game went with the less canon choice, but since the ships at least look somewhat different from the other sphereship designs, I can’t really complain. Aras do sometimes use other ship design families besides the Mehandor-one, after all.  By the way, I went back to confirm every single space ship shape by starting a new game and looking at the construction window for each space people. I learned that we got seriously hosed with our starting planet, because 4 out of 5 new starts gave me planets almost flat, while only 1 start was similarly plagued with weird hills, seas and other unusable terrain like ours. The RNG hates us!  Well, let’s get on with this.  After both sides shadow each other for a couple turns, just flying in parallel, the combat abruptly ends. I feel like OE really does not like players not shooting at each other...  As a last dick move, the game decides the Aras “won” the battle and they get to go into solar orbit around Welida. Our own scout gets punted back towards Shaulires II.  Welida II is the only planet that not sucks total and complete rear end. It just sucks rear end, but we need some victory points, and thanks to game mechanics, we can still just send a colonizer here, despite just getting punted out.  After some consideration (the Aras), I decide to send our old Omellete-class frigate together with the colony ship. Welida II will be colonized AND protected! Which I’m sure will be comforting news for the poor bastards stuck on this hellhole.  And then I go through our lesser colonies to see how they’re doing. Tegbipe III has some problems, and needs constant babysitting. This doesn’t bode well for the future of even worse planet Welida II.  Sculima IV is slowly growing. And it’s not a constant fight against death, like Tegbipe III.  Also no problems on Sheran I.  Shaulires II-3, one of our capital’s moons, is growing fast enough I already had to construct some analysis centers to drain excess workers into doing research. Together with our capital, those four planets (well, three plus one moon, but you get it) will be the core of our small empire. A lot of what I’m colonizing now is as bad as Tegbipe III or worse, so expect a constant fight against doom there.  Turn 146. Our search for non-lovely planets continues. Borekaris IV is another marginal planet that’s probably a lot of trouble, but not bad enough to make it hopeless. The Terrans agree, and already colonized the planet. Welp.  Or wait, the planet has a moon, and it’s even slightly more habitable! Score! We’ll be abusing the fact that the Terrans like us and that this tiny moon is dry as gently caress, which means a good chance at lots of tiles. Though the habitability is an open question here. Let’s see how bad it will get!  The Borekaris-system is a long way from our capital, so our colony ship needs a whopping 10 turns to arrive. Meanwhile, now that I learned of this little prank the game was playing on me, our scout will arrive next turn already and hopefully incentivize other people to stay away from this moon.  A couple turns later, another scout surveys the Dakada-system. This tiny moon is the second best stellar object available for colonization. And it’s even 71% covered in water! Another colony purely for the victory points.  Aras colonized Dakada IX. The planet is a bit cold, but otherwise near perfect. Suspiciously so, in fact. It’s certainly possible that this planet could be the Aras-capital. Or not, considering there’s just one ship covering the planet. Anyway, as long as we’re not at war, this planet is off-limits for us.  OK, I still have four planets to build up, but I’d really like to get at least one more good planet, please game? Oh, and yeah: We made official contact with the Aras.  The galactic doctors greet you. Coordinator Uwasar extends his welcome to all new patients under his care. Having the Aras here is both an annoyance and a boon. Strange and exotic illnesses in this far away part of the galaxy will be less of a problem with them around. As long as we can pay. But we better make sure to suppress the illegal drug trade before half of our people are incapacitated… -Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel  Next turn, our small fleet of colonizer plus old combat frigate reaches Welida II, disturbingly close to systems settled by the Eastside-natives. If they really want to, they could of course still push us out, but on the other hand, Welida II is so lovely they’re probably pointing and laughing at us.  Video recording is still on the fritz (I hate OBS, I swear I’ll install HyperCam2 again if this black screen bullshit continues  ), so enjoy this slideshow.Every time you colonize a new planet, this cutscene plays. It starts with a rock hurtling through space. And before you panic, yes you can skip this scene.  The asteroid continues hurtling, and passes by a 3D-representation of our colony ship.  Ayep, that’s our good ole’ melon rocket right there.  The starting population then walks into the landing unit. Every race gets their own, slightly individualized cutscene. So we get walking lizards and melon rockets, other dudes get their own stuff.  Then the gangway retracts. Ha ha, I’m just now noticing I forgot to move my mouse out of the way. I’m just the worst.   The air lock opens.  The landing unit is released.  And off we go!  The landing unit here is a good representation of the starting command center of a new colony, but the perspective is all hosed here. I’m not sure how 600 people are supposed to fit into this tiny thing. Don’t even think about how the landing unit has space for 250 pop units or 2500 people. Even if we’re really generous, the landing unit should represent a goodsized chunk of the ship, not look like this tiny thing here. Though to be fair, eventually our ships will get large enough the cutscene will make sense again. Let’s call it artistic license until then.   Our brave colonists fall towards their new home.  The landing boosters engage.  And we’re done! Welida II has lots of tiles, but is also a frozen hellhole. 17% starting consumer good production is really bad. Though I’m now morbidly fascinated to see how the AI would deal with this colony.  From this point onwards, our initial planet window is full. Every new colony will need clicking on this part of the interface to move around.  In turn 151 we finally unlock C-level light industry. Our minion Tuphtor Vlaht-Om, our administrator, immediately relays information about the new blueprints to us.  Good news from Doc Bot, our research leader: The Production Facility Type Essex is an important Terran improvement to this old Arkonid factory design. It’s a straight upgrade to our old ones. As always, production of LIUs and CGUs goes up, but also materials and maintenance.  As always with C-level building research, C-level light industry gives us our first 2x2 tiles building: The System Generator Type A. It combines the production of four Essex-type buildings into one, at the price of having less than half the CGU-output of four Essex factories. But they use less materials for maintenance and slightly less population to run, so if you only need LIUs and are already swimming in consumer goods, they’re still the superior choice. System Generators just don’t immediately outclass their own C-level 1x tile buildings. If you need more light industry, build SGs. If you need consumer goods more, build Essex-factories. Simple as that.  In the future I’d like to massively expand our fleet, so of course I’m immediately setting up a System Generator on Shaulires II. Then I’m setting research to heavy industry next, and the waiting time resumes. We really direly need heavy industry, since only light industry + heavy industry research together unlocks new defense, ship construction and research buildings. We also need lots of LIUs. This means at least I can fill the waiting time with upgrading our infrastructure.  The situation on Tegbipe III continues to be bad. I’m already switching to Hydroponic Factories in an attempt to push our production higher. But our penalties are so bad, we also need more factories and power plants to keep them running. Which in turn drains more consumer goods. This colony is basically dead if it weren’t for me sending new supplies every other turn. Welp, it’s the death spiral in action.  Welida II isn’t completely hosed for now, but the population is still dropping and even a full C-level agriculture building only generates less than half of what we need. Most of those construction sites are more agricultural buildings. But to be honest, this may not work out. I’m more and more tempted to just leave our bad colonies at the mercy of our AI-administrators.  Our fleet continues to grow. It’s kind of relaxing to think about all those maintenance costs we’re not paying. I certainly won’t complain about this oversight.  Our fleet movements in turn 152. To Be Continued
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Feb 1, 2021 21:13
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So just to recap, the only win condition is to settle a sufficient number of planets, right? There's no diplomatic, economic or research victory options like in some other 4x games?
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Feb 1, 2021 22:32
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PurpleXVI posted:So just to recap, the only win condition is to settle a sufficient number of planets, right? There's no diplomatic, economic or research victory options like in some other 4x games? Theoretically, you also win by default if you kill everyone. The manual doesn't really say if you're still forced to make the requisite number of colonies afterwards, though. Also, there's an optional "research victory" that doesn't actually end the game, but saying more would be spoilers.
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Feb 1, 2021 22:49
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Is there any way to reverse the death spiral? Keep the colony supplied until technology/population advances enough to negate the penalties maybe?
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Feb 2, 2021 19:06
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Decoy Badger posted:Is there any way to reverse the death spiral? Keep the colony supplied until technology/population advances enough to negate the penalties maybe? The thing is, with higher tech buildings also needing more resources and population to run, it's not easy keeping up with the penalties. Also, the trading system isn't really made to keep a growing number of lovely colonies supplied. You will end up clicking so much you get carpal tunnel syndrome. There's also the issue of every turn starting with the unfun exercise of sending care packages to every single bad colony you dumbass colonized. I recommend against it. Next update will show the issue of bad colonies in more details, as we give our AI-administrators a chance to shine
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Feb 2, 2021 20:01
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Oh god why am I doing this to myself? I managed to overdo it again and cram enough bullshit for at least three updates into a single post. At least this time I realized what was happening before going over the posting limit! I guess. Still, I had to cut some content to make everything fit. And now you'll have to read it all. I'm so sorry.
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Feb 7, 2021 15:32
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Reptile Rising 09: Akonic Blues Mission Log 007: 28th June 2326 Our project has been running into some minor troubles lately. Some of our new colonies are struggling harder than ever. Since it’s been only a couple months, I’m not willing to just give up on them, but as I still don’t have an adequate pool of potential administrators, I’m contemplating taking them over again under my direct control. As this would nearly triple my workload, I’m hesitant. Shoving aside my own local administration would also lead to political problems down the road. A hard decision. Meanwhile, most of our competitors here in New Homellete are still determined to get into pointless scuffles with the native species we have dubbed “Blues”, because of their strikingly blue fur. So far we have not much information about these “Blues”, except for more angry screaming. As far as I can tell, they seem to live under some sort of decentralized military dictatorship. Recently we got a chance to take some sensor readings from one of their ships passing by. The readings were… odd. After some complaints from our local researchers I’ve ordered an expansion of our research facilities. Hopefully in the future our scientists can tell us more about the disc-shaped ships used by the Blues. More than how “odd” they are, at least. Oh, and the Akons, like us the only ones who seem to not have stumbled snout-first into shooting matches with the locals, have started taking an aggressive stance towards us. The mystery of the Blues must wait for now, while we prepare for war. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  Turn 157! Our capital has at last something resembling a defense. And several colonizers are ready to go, both from the capital and already hanging around the future colonies they’re supposed to settle.  The same turn sees us getting sad at Delirez, as the system is either the capital or at least a very old planet of the Terrans. They also settled the moons. And the high chance at extra space real estate would point to “capital”, so that’s what I’m betting on.  To keep myself from going insane, I’ve decided to concentrate on my main 4 planets for now, and leave the AI to develop every new colony. Like this one, for example! Borekaris IV-1 is tiny, but dense enough it’s still at roughly half Earth gravity. It’s also incredibly dry and slightly above 50% habitability. If all goes as planned, the AI should be able to develop this planet without needing me to babysit it.  OE laughs in RNG Oh come on, game!  Half the surface is either sinkholes or mountains like this one. There’s still plenty of space, just about half of what I expected. Not really an auspicious beginning of my plans. This moon is supposed to be number 3 on my list of AI-controlled colonies. (Out of a total of 7 we have, so far.)  OK, time for an even shittier colony!  Swampy, with lots of added mountain tiles that can’t be used. And it’s not really visible in this screenshot, but due to being a tiny moon, the map is a lot smaller in the first place. Plus 14% starting consumer goods coverage. The worst I’ve seen so far. Note to self: Lost cause. Theoretically, the AI should be able to deal with this, as I’ve seen the AI colonize planets like this sometimes. Though, the AI is braindead. poo poo.  Meanwhile, I’m forced to bulldoze more and more old consumer goods buildings on Shaulires II and replace them with Planetary Suppliers, just to keep our CGU-production above 100% pop coverage. The main problem here is our colossal amount of 44890 people not working. There simply isn’t enough for them to do! I’m seriously contemplating to stop upgrading our residential buildings. But we also need to seriously upgrade our industrial production, because stuffing all those surplus workers into science or defense buildings is the only way I can see leading out of this hole. The unemployment penalties are getting nuts! #capitalproblems  The first turn for our 4 now AI-controlled colonies. The administrator here removed workers from that one hydroponic facility at the map edge and set them to work building a couple new E-level agricultural buildings. Well, OK? They’re cheap, at least.  Turn 160 sees us almost halfway to C-level heavy industry, our next mayor goal. Also, suddenly the Arkonids want to trade!  Crystal Regent Zoltral V honors you in His unending benevolence with the privilege to trade with Him and His people. As always, overwrought words from an Arkonid noble. But is this attempt at trade worth our time? -Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel  Hilariously, the Arkonids need more CGUs, and have a surplus of HIUs they want to offload on us. Thanks to the way industrial economy works in OE, they have the exact same problems as us! I can’t even accept this trade to make some diplomatic browny points, as we don’t produce enough consumer goods to fulfill this demand. I can’t refuse, too. The game isn’t programmed for that. A trade is simply put up and stays until the end of the next turn. If no-one is buying, the trade decays and is deleted.  Suddenly, combat! A Blues-ship was waiting for us, orbiting the sun of the Sheligor-system. We use our speed to avoid contact.  The Blues don’t have energy shields, and this ship at least isn’t much heavier armed than ours. It has tons of experience, however: This means it has fought a lot already and survived. Also it’s probably still damaged, as zero shield strength normally means broken shield generators. It certainly looks like we could take this puny native ship! We won’t attack though, since we don’t want to antagonize the Blues too much. A couple turns of avoiding later, the battle ends without a shot fired.  The Arkonids are really serious about trading! Too bad we still don’t have enough of what they want, and plenty of what they’re paying with. Your cute struggles amuse us. Ho ho, your mental awkwardness is hilarious! We extend trade relations to you to extend the fun. So many specific German words to translate… translation… powers… fading… By the way, it’s the exact same trade as last time. Pass!  The Sheligor-system gets surveyed. A gas giant, some giant rock planets, and some moons. All deadly.  Our ongoing survey efforts. Looks like the Blues want to visit Welida! Hopefully only for a short scouting tour.  The 1730 colonists trapped on Welida II would probably see the fiery death of orbital bombardment as a sweet release right about now. The AI is struggling, but even with redeploying all personnel from our tiny local industry to the agricultural buildings, we barely make half of what we need. There’s another agri-building slowly being built, but without tons of supplies, this colony is doomed.  I half expected this: The Blues drop by at Welida, but then leave again. Just a scout!  At the same time, more giant planetary suppliers are going online on our capital. And yet more are in construction.  I’ve ordered two more frigates. After that, I’m planning to wait until new research buildings are unlocked, so we can upgrade our ships asap right after.  Oh come the gently caress on! The Arkonids are really insistent on trading, it seems. Normally contacts of this kind bore us, but since our museums currently have a demand on artifacts, we’re willing to exchange our high-tech products for your stone age trash. The Arkonids are really insistent to take our non-existent stockpiles of food and Nintendo Switches and give us tons of heavy machinery in exchange, but we still don’t have enough CGUs for ourselves, so we can’t accept.  Right after I break down and add another frigate to our construction list. The next tier of ship techs is still some ways off, and I’ve seen some of the fleets moving around here in New Homellete, so having some sort of home defense just seems reasonably cautious.  Huh. Turns out I was wrong. Since I’ve stopped building residential buildings a couple turns ago, our ongoing modernization efforts plus zero pop growth plus more ship construction means our CGU-production started rising again, as our unemployment penalties are plummeting.  Welp, I give the go-ahead. Our stockpile of heavy industry gets another, smaller stockpile dumped on top and a good chunk of our consumer goods are teleported via transmitter network to the Arkonids. According to this freight manifest I got we apparently transferred tons of dried, rotten meat and PSX/Gex bundles. What we got back is tons and tons of old power plant parts. From several different models, all jumbled together. There’s also some power plant blueprints encrypted in the form of an ancient Arkonid poem. There’s a note added saying the power plants should “probably work, if properly assembled”. I really don’t know which side got the worse deal.  From our ongoing survey effort: Arclimal is another star with the only non-lovely planet already occupied by others. Arkonids in this case. Bummer.  Oh well. Time to try, try, try again.  Shortly after, we make another trade deal with the Arkonids. I feel cautiously optimistic and ask for a non-aggression treaty after the deal is finished. I haven’t shown this before, but after you accept a trade, your trading partner tends to send you a second message acknowledging it. Normally we avoid childish games like this one. But you are in great luck: Crystal Regent Zoltral V has an interest in barbarian cultures and their trade products. A turn later we get an answer to our non-aggression treaty request: A childish thought and quite typical for your primitive style. They turn us down!  More ship movements.  One of our scouts reaches the Anbikar-system in turn 173 and finds a not-so-bad planet. But oops, it’s covered 100% in ice, so it’s uncolonizable. Unfortunate! Wait, that’s the second time this has happened. The RNG really does not like lizards, it seems.  Meanwhile, the no-residential-upgrades moratorium ends on Shaulires II and I start replacing some older buildings with new ones. Of course people living in there have to go while the construction is ongoing, and there are no hobos in OE: 2000 people disappear into the void, never to be seen again. When replacing buildings, you always need to take into account that you’re hurting yourself until the new buildings are finished. Theoretically, I could have replaced 2-3x more buildings in one go, but that would have killed off 2-3x more population, too! Likewise, obviously replacing anything else also lowers your production while the construction sites do their thing.  The very next turn, we tumble face-first into the probable capital system of the Aras: Merkala. The colonized moons are a wild mix of Mehandor, Terrans and Aras. Looks like the Aras had the same problem with foreigners barging in as we had. We will never know for sure, as Operation Eastside doesn’t have enough political structure build-in to delineate actual “capitals”. The best we could do is conquer the place, look at the local industry and make an educated guess. Which is a lot of work for some minor information!  Turn 175 rolls in with some great news: Level C in heavy industry is unlocked, opening up a huge wave of new poo poo to deal with. The first thing is the Integrator, the obligatory C-level 1x tile building that is just better and more costly than the older ones.  The Heavy Integrator is still like all the other level C upgrades: 2x2 tiles, combines the cost and production of four 1x tile buildings into one. The also obligatory twist here: The Heavy Integrator costs more to build and run than four normal C-level buildings, but the output in HIUs is vastly improved: Four 1x tile Integrators would spit out 640 heavy industry, this monster spits out 800 instead. Again, there’s a choice involved: Do you need a massive boost to your production? Build this. Otherwise, a normal Integrator (or four) is (are) fine. But that said, different level C mega-buildings seem to have different drawbacks: The light industry System Generator produces tons of LIUs at the price of consumer good production, while the Heavy Integrator is just loving expensive to run. And then the 2x2 tile versions of agricultural and residential buildings are just straight-up better. Oversight or planning by the devs? You decide!  Our first additional C-level unlock! The Main Frame Installation gives us 5 research instead of 2 and needs more resources to build and run. Our old Analysis Centers are living on borrowed time now.  And of course, C-level means our first monster building for research. The Positronic Center is a huge computer brain taking up four tiles and actually superior to just building four MFIs: Costs, both for building and maintenance, are a good chunk lower. But there’s a twist again: the Center puts out 16 research, which is a lot, but does not equal the output of four Main Frames (20)! Odd, but I guess the choice here is supposed to be: Do you want to spend more resources for higher research (4x MFIs) or do you want more resource-efficient research (Positronic Center)? I’ll build some of both, of course.  We also get the next better spaceport, the Type Milky Way Spaceport. It now allows up to 1000m in length on our space ships. It’s actually already kind of overkill, since we’re still a long way from building ships that large, but at least this means you can service, build and launch most of your fleet even if you can’t find enough space for the later space ports on your planets. Prepare a lot of empty tiles for dedicated shipyard planets, though.  Speaking of shipyards, our C-level shipyard is confusingly enough, also the M-Class Shipyard. It gets a different graphic and costs more to build and run, and that’s it. As a reminder, shipyards only cost maintenance when you construct ships, and the maintenance costs are the maximum amount of resources you can put into ship construction per turn. Therefore, higher maintenance means it’s better!  At least C-level means we also get the obligatory 2x2 tiles version: The Type Luna Shipyard is a reference to the gigantic shipyards the crazy Terrans filled Terra’s moon with and also comes with a twist: Its maintenance and therefore construction capacity doesn’t add up to what four M-class yards alone could pull, but the construction costs are also a lot lower. Like with the research 2x2 building, you get to decide to either use more resources to get higher production, or more resource-efficient production. Since build costs are 100% refundable however, the Luna yard is kind of a dud. A min-maxer would always just use the improved M-class yards instead. For fun (or lore, roleplaying, whatever), I’ll build one Luna-shipyard on our capital, but also add the new M-class yard next to our old one. That’s plenty for now. Besides, building ships faster also means you’re losing resources faster, so you shouldn’t overdo it. Manually changing construction rates is rear end, but unavoidable if your yards get so great they can crash your entire economy each time you order a new scout.  Yes, we’re still not done! The C-level defense buildings are waiting. The Impulse Beam Unit comes first. One tile, and this little planetary fort comes with their own armor and shields, so technically speaking you don’t need the older buildings anymore (though they’re cheap, and one is just a shield generator, those are always useful). The Impulse Cannons hidden in this building are immensely strong and have the same range and twice the firepower than our old missile launchers. Equally important: We can now detect enemy ships at twice the range (or 50% more range, if you have shield generators build) than before!  The (I promise) last building we get with this upgrade: The Gravity Bomb Catapult, based on ancient technology stolen from the Arkonids, it launches huge gravity bombs at incoming ships. The gravity catapult has a range of 5, twice the armor and three times the firepower of a single IBU. As with all 2x2 tile buildings at level C, there’s a twist: In this case, obviously four IBUs would min-max your colony higher shields, armor and firepower, but your range would be one combat tile shorter, which could gently caress you over if a fleet with slightly better range shows up. In fact, most ships around now have a range of 4, so if your colony is defended by gravity bomb catapults, you’re out-ranging every invader and get some extra-turns for unloading damage if they aren’t fast enough to immediately get into range. Situational, I know. Still, our capital will gain both this and an impulse beam unit for vastly improved defense. Then we will build a shitton more ships, utilizing our new shipyards. Edit: At the end I realized I was slowly running out of space for this update, so I had to cut and shelf a lengthy treaty about how gravity bombs work. It’ll be shunted to a later lore update.  Oof, that was a lot of new buildings. Time to simplify things: I’m switching research focus to ship technologies. Next up: Level D in weapons.  And because ship research is more expensive than equivalent building research, I’m stepping up our game. Three new Positronic Centers, plus two new Main Frame Installations. That’s 58 research points more. Or, the equivalency of building 29 Analysis Centers. It’s a huge upgrade. And the next time we have unemployment problems, I’ll start with tearing down and replacing some of our lovely older research buildings because drat, that’s an upgrade.   Turn 177: Another new system surveyed. The best candidate here is Dedunth II. It has an habitability bad enough it already dropped below yellow into orange. And considering the hard work I had keeping even yellow colonies alive, this is seriously bad news. Due to game mechanics, we need some victory points. And since this system is otherwise of no interest to our competitors, our people will need to tough it out. A colonizers jumps into hyperspace, transporting everyone who couldn’t jump out of the way fast enough to this hell planet here.  Same turn, another scout finds Borebirez IV-2, the moon of Borebirez IV. Well, one of the moons at least. The other moon and the main planet are even better colonies, but sadly already settled by Mehandor and Arkonids. For us, this only leaves this sad excuse of a colony. If I ever decide to expand the number of colonies I directly control, this one seems the best fit. On the other hand, it’s also nice enough the AI should be able to deal with it well enough alone. I’m torn.  Speaking of AI, let’s take a look at the work of our administrators: Borekaris IV-1 seems healthy enough. CGU-supply is above 100%, with some more population it should also have a healthy, growing industry. This planet apparently only needs some fresh supplies here and there, and can then be left alone. Sweet!  Next turn it’s already time for Dedunth II! Habitability is bad, and there are some mountains. There’s also some nice, flat open ground like here. Kind of a mixed bag, really. Another one for AI-control. I’m honestly interested to see what our AI-admin will do with this one. Also , this one was so fast because I forgot the ship I send here was already a colonizer, so I only had to move the ship from sun to target moon. Borebirez IV-2 is slightly better: The landing platform itself accounts for 29% of our agricultural needs, so the AI shouldn’t make trouble controlling this one.  Turn 179 interrupts our peaceful musings on AI, as the Aras show up to trade with us, and the Akons, which we haven’t even seen in a while, declare war. Welp. Medicine causes progress throughout the universe, and business is the fuel of medicine. Coordinator Uwasar is ready to trade wares.  We think it’s our altruistic duty to prevent scum like you from infesting the galaxy. Now we will drive you back into the holes you crawled out of. Considering the Akons don’t have their dreaded Energy Command ready in the Eastside to infiltrate and dominate us, them taking the direct approach to destroy us does not come as a surprise. Sad, but inevitable. Luckily we are making some progress in the process of recreating better technology to equip our ships, and have just expanded our shipyards on Shaulires II. If the Akons think we’re an uncovered nest, they’ll be in for a nasty surprise. -Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel  Speaking of, just in the same turn as the war declaration, we unlocked level D weapons. And are just 1-2 turns away from unlocking the missing two lvl. D ship techs. Our next generation of warships is coming, and if the Akons visit us, we’ll break their snouts. Sorry, got too deep into the role of a Topsider commander there. Anyway, Light Disintegrators. As with all ship techs, all new designs from now on will automatically replace our old light impulse guns with this thing. Disintegrators, according, to PR-lore, are the most simplest weapon using hyperspace-energy instead of conventional stuff. With the help of oscillating crystals, modulated waves of hyperenergy are focused and emitted as some sort of eerie, green beam. The weapon is utterly silent, only in edge cases can you hear some kind of very low humming, if the weapon is fired directly next to you. The beam itself dissolves molecular bounds, and the weird interaction between energy from two different layers of reality (hyperspace and normal space) prevents the sort of huge explosion you would expect when the energy bound inside molecules is suddenly released like that. You could imagine this as the hyper-energy, since it comes from an energetically higher-order layer of reality, neutralizing the released energy. In the end, even a stray hit by a disintegrator beam will turn your entire body into a thin, greenish-cloud of mono-molecular dust. All single atoms. Being ripped apart like this of course has some side-effects: The dust leftover from being disintegrated is highly radioactive from all those released atoms shooting around, and it takes a while until you can get close to the dust without getting unhealthy doses of radiation. From a strictly lore-perspective, it’s hard to tell if an impulse cannon or a heavy disintegrator is the more dangerous weapon. Disintegrators also come with the drawback that a lot of people don’t have a lot of methods left in use to find conventional energy discharges, while everyone and their space uncle has some sort of 5D-detector for hyper-energy. So while you may prefer disintegrators as hand weapons, carrying an impulse gun at least doesn’t make you immediately detectable from orbit. Disintegrators are also heavily used as weapon-of-choice when boarding or when fighting inside space stations, as disintegration weapons by design won’t transfer energy to their environment. In other words, you won’t cook yourself by shooting a couple times. In pure damage terms, there’s not much difference if you take out the insane amount of heat damage even a simple impulse hand gun will cause. (We’re talking about “the walls suddenly melt on top of you” levels of heat here). Another reason disintegrators are often use in environments were a wrong shot can cause explosive decompression: Disintegrators can be very easily altered in terms of strength and beam width. You can dial up to nearly 90° cones to hose down an entire room, which also will make the beam weak enough the walls won’t immediately disappear in a green cloud, the beam immediately stops disintegrating when you take your fingers/claws of the trigger, and so on. They’re very variable and efficient weapons! Impulse weapons are the exact opposite, as they either send a strong particle impulse into whatever you’r shooting, or not. Very binary. Either you kill everyone in the room, melt the walls and cause explosive decompression, or not. There’s no inbetween here. For ship-to-ship combat, things are more complex. But on the other hand, Operation Eastside has to deal with a very limited range of weapon strengths, as the truly dangerous weapons either haven’t been invented yet, or are still too strong for the scope of this game. For one example, if Terran ships were armed like they’re in the series at this point, their strength at corvette-level would not be 24 to our 8, and more like 24000 to our 8. There’s a range of basic weapons who are arguably weaker than disintegration and impulse weapons, the very vague “thermal weapons”. They’re mostly described as horfing this weird purple lump of thermal energy at things, and while they’re capable of large-scale destruction, they’re also terribly inefficient. But again, we only have 5 levels until we run out. Level E was light impulse cannons, level D is light disintegrators and then there are only levels C-A left for more stuff. I’m guessing “heavy” versions of impulse and disintegration weapons are for levels C-B and then I’m drawing a blank. Thermal weapons are more like level 0, and since the devs didn’t even use them, I’m kind of interested to see what the ship weapon unlocked at max level will be. Anyway, let’s keep on track. In ship-to-ship combat, heat dissipation can be dealt with somewhat with good armor, while a disintegrator will just be slowed down a fraction of a second before piercing through. So I guess it makes sense to label disintegrators as an “upgrade”, as good armor may lessen the impact of an impulse shot a little bit, while a disintegrator hit will delete a certain mass of enemy ships no matter what. On the other hand, armor density can help a lot by making more of the disintegrated mass armor and not the crunchy inside of the ship, but that’s about it. In lore, both weapons are about equal in pure damage. Only difference being, you use disintegrators if you need pin-point shots to disable enemy ships and impulse cannons if you want to destroy them immediately. As again, you can’t really make a stream of near-light-speed particles less deadly, but you can dial disintegration beams up and down very easily. And I think I have now officially wrung out every ounce of information from this thematic. Let’s move on!  Next step: I deleted our old Yolk I design and made a new Yolk II design, just so I can build some more frigates with better weapons while the other research is still incoming. Disappointingly, the damage doesn’t change and is still at 8 at maximum weapon strength. Topsiders really got the shittiest weapons. I guess stealing blueprints from more advanced space peoples can only get you so far… Again, because it still makes me grin how out of left field cruel this is, all ship types come with their own little quirks depending on how strong their races are “supposed” to be in the lore, totally undocumented of course. And Topsiders have the weakest shields and weapons, and the strongest hulls. A Terran ship using the exact same settings at everything level E (I tested this), will have about 100 hull, 100 shield and 24 weapon strength. I poo poo you not: Terran ships will just be straight-up be 3x times more powerful. And tech upgrades seem to work on %-boosts, so the gap will only widen. Take this together with shields automatically regenerating as long as even a sliver of energy is left, while every tiny scratch on a hull will disable the shields completely until a lengthy stay at a yard, and this game on Topsid is like challenge mode.  On my own, I’d liked to wait with our fleet expansion until we have a fully D-level hull ready to go, but with our competitors throwing huge fleets around already, I decided more ships more now are better then fiery death from above later. The Mehandor here have 28 ships in orbit. Even if this is their capital (I don’t think so), that’s a lot.  This tiny moon is available. But with 99% surface ice ocean, it’s basically a +1 victory and nothing else. I’m colonizing it, of course. At least if this doesn’t go well, the Mehandor are free to have this one. It’s literally not worth fighting over.  The map reveals multiple fleets moving around. Arkonids, Aras, Blues. No Akonid fleet so far. Kind of funny, everyone is busy, but our self-proclaimed enemies are sitting still. Well, I won’t complain! More time to expand our fleet.  And then lvl. D in energy shields drop. We get: The Energy Shield. In case you missed it, our level E energy shield was just the Shock Field used to prevent people from tripping and falling down the stairs, or from random particles in space cornholing your ship traveling at relativistic speeds. This right here is a shield based on gravitic manipulation and is the first actual basic energy shield you can have to defend yourself with. It’s bordering on comedy that the typical Terran ship still had shields more than three times our strength. Because this means even their equivalent of Star Trek navigation shields was better than ours. Otherwise, this thing is so basic there’s not much to talk about. It absorbs and reflects all manner of energy, including kinetic energy. Lasers, phasers, a good punch, it doesn’t matter: Energy shields in Perry Rhodan protect you from everything. Except hyper-energy. It can protect you from the modulated energy waves from disintegrators, and that’s about it. Most hyper-weapons will ignore basic shields like they don’t exist.  Remember that tiny moon with 99% ice ocean on the surface? Lesbicor II-2 is here, and those three tiles are already like 90% of the available build area. All this nice, flat ice is completely unusable. Take this as a warning: Everything above 70% surface something is generally a mad gamble, everything above 90% is mad gamble you’ve already lost.  You may think this other chunk over here is equally unusable mountain, but you’d be wrong. Some of it isn’t. There are about 3 more tiles flat enough for buildings here.  All those ships covering our growing number of colonies are one thing, but they aren’t exactly a mobile asset since moving them would leave all those planets unprotected. Our heavily armed and dangerous capital however, could in theory move those now 7 frigates if we need a strike force somewhere. This is only the beginning, of course.  Turn 182 comes in with our final D-level: Better armor. Arkonite is an ancient invention of Arkonid science, proliferated around the galaxy by now. It isn’t exactly easy to make however, which is why our plucky colonists couldn’t equip their ships with it. But now our industry has advanced to the point where we have the heavy machinery necessary for the process of using energy fields to compress the structure of normal steel to create the artificial material known as Arkonite: It’s vastly heavier and denser than normal steel, and has insanely higher melting points, stability and resistance. To melt Arkonite, you need something stupid like 100k °C, and everything else about it is equally stupendously advanced. Basically, what we had until now was what we on planet Earth right now, plus minus 50 years, could make. And this? This is what you would expect from a space faring civilization ten thousands of years old. Thanks to this game still having to pretend there’s something like balance, we “only” gain roughly twice the hull of level E at max settings.  Our shipyards in action: In just two turns, our yards constructed and launched three more Yolk II frigates. Sadly, they’re now obsolete, too.  Our cleaned-up designs: As we still have some left and I want to wait for some new, better colony candidates to show up, there’s no new colony ship design any more. (Though I probably add one later). The Eggsplorer R is simply the exact same thing as before, just with slightly higher stats thanks to now using lvl. D equipment, and the Claw Cruiser is our new standard combat ship: Hull strength is min-maxed to allow as much strength as possible without dropping speed too much, everything else is set to maximum. The result is a 400m long melon-rocket which still has 5 speed in combat, which is plenty respectable. The hull is nearly twice the strength of our smaller, older Yolk II frigates (350 hull to 179) and shield and weapon strength are also nearly doubled (to 75 and 15, respectively). The crew we need to train has jumped up to 16 units (160 Topsiders) This honestly feels like our first real combat ship. Most of the boosts come from our upgraded tech, though the way hull sizes work makes it look at first glance like the better stats come from just doubling the size. The reason for this is that hull sizes are actually fixed, and depend on your average tech level alone, with the landing unit moving your design to the next higher design automatically. To recap, originally we had 120m long melon-rockets with 200m long colony ships, and even at max setting this didn’t change. Now at level D in everything, moving even just most of the sliders to the right changes size to 400m. The unintended consequence of this is that your stats at around 120-200m will look mostly unchanged, but as soon as hull size jumps to twice that, all stats will also jump to roughly twice their value. This makes it look like our ships only got stronger because they’re larger now, even though there’s no actual mechanical difference between ship sizes. Well, except for what space port sizes a ship can use. You can abuse this fact to your advantage by min-maxing a ship class to be just below the cut, and e. g. create a 200m ship nearly as capable as your 400m ships. This allows you to continue to use the smaller space ports. That said, the benefit from that kind of min-maxing is so minor we won’t be doing it. If a colony is strong enough to support the infrastructure for building and repairing space ships, it’s also strong enough for a large space port. But if you want to be cheeky, you can go and try this. It’s possible.  Turns out I fell asleep at the wheel. Our new cruisers are hefty enough, we finally pushed our heavy industry income into the negatives. A stupid oversight! After this scout and our first badge of cruisers, I’ll have to go back to upgrading the infrastructure on our capital.  Meanwhile, some of our worst colonies are collapsing. On Welida II for example, nothing is being done. There are tons of buildings for producing consumer good, light and heavy industry, but no population is assigned to do any work. As a result, approximately 100 Topsiders die each day. [i]From what I can tell, the AI is trying to fill up agricultural buildings first, but this zeroes out our HIU-production, which makes running agri buildings functionally impossible, as they need a small amount of HIUs to run. The AI must have tried to square this circle of conflicting demands, and hung itself. Next time I’ll try to send some care packages of spare industrial machines. Hopefully the administrator will shuffle back to live if it gets some material stockpiles to work with.  Our situation at turn 184: The Mehandor join the circus of people who want to take our consumer goods in exchange for more piles of heavy industry, and all our ship techs are at level D, our buildings at level C. At least for the next 1-2 updates, I’ll probably concentrate on slowly moving towards lvl. C engines for our ships, but after that we have multiple avenues open for our research.  Our capital now has 11 ships in orbit, showing our friends nearby that we’re not dozing in the sun anymore.  The Future Vote Baby steps are over, from here on out there are multiple possible streets our space lizards can careen towards. So I’m putting things to a vote. The next 1-2 updates worth of screenshots will probably be just boring economy work with me slowly upgrading buildings and trying to find more good planets. Everything you vote for now will be implemented after that. (This thankfully means the option “play SimCity in space for a while” isn’t an option you can vote for. Only interesting choices that matter for you!) Research Focus First, I need a new research focus from you. Right now, there are three options which make sense for us to take: A) It’s A Living Under this focus, our fine dame Eresh-Thel will concentrate on dealing with the many civilian problems that have grown over time: Our unemployment rate is terrible on Shaulires II, and we’re running out of tiles for more living room. If Eresh-Thel decides on this focus, we will research level B agriculture first to get better options for feeding our people. Followed by researching level B living space. This should allow us to compact down the area we use to feed and house people, put more people to work in our more advanced buildings and maybe even help out keeping the lovely half of our current colonies alive. B) Captains of Industry On this focus, Eresh-Thel will decide that our current level of housing and agriculture is high enough and instead raise first light, then heavy industry up to level B. This will take longer, but inevitably end in a huge wave of unlocked defense, research and construction buildings. In theory, if we survive on our current ship designs for that long, the resulting boosts to research and production should give us a serious edge, as the exponential growth of research costs means even our insanely high difficulty level the enemy AI won’t have enough boosts to easily keep up if we concentrate our research like this. At least that’s the idea. C) gently caress Science, more Ships! Oh yeah, we’re also at war. Maybe we should take this into account. If Eresh-Thel decides the Akons aren’t just full of hot air, she’ll instead order research efforts to go into ship techs even after our engines hit lvl. C, at the very least until all our ship techs have reached level C. We may be able to churn out ships reasonably well already, but our Claw Cruisers are still only worth about 50% of a random average enemy ship. And enemy research will also not exactly sleep as we’re doing other poo poo. If you vote for C), I’ll continue to research ship techs until everything is uniformly at C), then ask again what we should focus on. Strategic Alignment OK, that was research. But there is also the general strategic alignment of our little space empire. Here too, there are multiple roads open for us to take. Which one shall it be? 1) Save Our Planets Right now, we concentrate on 4 core colonies and drop everything else into AI-control to minimize micro. But, as the AI is really, really dumb, we (by which I mean me), could re-take direct control and try to spend our time and effort on building our poo poo planets up until a single turn under AI-admin isn’t immediately killing off huge swaths of people. Under SOP, I will only do the minimal work of colonizing new planets, dealing with wars, our fleet, etc. and spend most of my time and our resources on babysitting our bad colonies, until I either give up in disgust or they stop being one turn away from total societal collapse. Please don’t do this to me. 2) Aggressive Nest Expansion ANE means more fleets, more industry, more everything. I will concentrate on make our four core colonies into terrifying fortress shipyards, expand our fleet up to similar sizes as we have observed all around us and then spend extra effort on more scouts and colonizers to scour New Homellete, but in a peaceful way. Good: This will probably push into end game and victory territory sooner or later. Bad: We will really need that expanded fleet when we get too close to our victory threshold. 3) “Alternative” Expansion, Intelligently AIE will see Eresh-Thel taking the Akons a lot more seriously than they probably deserve. This strategic alignment probably works best together with the ship-based research focus and just about the worst with A), since researching agriculture won’t exactly give you an edge in space warfare. Because yes, on this route we will concentrate on making our fleet strong enough we can start going on the offensive, instead of waiting for the Akons to do something. They want war? Sure, fine. Let’s send cruiser fleets to take over their colonies then. The prep work will make the first few updates look like we took 2) instead, but instead of the huge wave of scouts and colonizers, with our fleet waiting around in defensive posture, the end result will be the reverse: Some basic scouting and colonizing, but a huge wave of combat ships to tell the Akons how much we hate them. Now Vote! If you want to, you can combine your vote into alphanumerical shorthand, like “A1” if you want me to turn our lizards into isolationist peaceniks. Just please give your vote in bold, I don’t want to accidentally miss someone's vote. To Be Continued
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Feb 7, 2021 15:46
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B3 So out of curiosity, how advantageous is warfare in this game? In other 4x games, snagging someone's colonies also means taking chunks of their research and often "inheriting" a lot of their infrastructure, but is that also the case here? Or is the only advantage of warfare that you'll be ganking some real estate away from them? It feels like the tech tree here is shallow and narrow enough that tech-stealing wouldn't be a thing.
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Feb 7, 2021 16:55
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I'll go a bit more in-depth when we actually end up in a major fight one day, but yes, most of the time warfare is as pointless as in real life. A real deep moment here, Operation Eastside. -Tech stealing: Not a thing (you can trade tech, but no theft) -Enemy population just enters their transmitters after a surrender and goes home into the Westside. Your enemy loses the population, you gain an empty shell -Orbital bombardment: What are you, a fascist? (Buildings can be randomly damaged, claims the manual. Apart from that, you can't purposefully commit atrocities) Essentially, you gain someone's colonies and build-up infrastructure, but no research or additional population. In fact, since you need to transfer your own population to take control of enemy colonies, moving too far too fast represents interesting logistical hurdles you have to plan for in advance.
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Feb 7, 2021 17:00
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B3
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Feb 8, 2021 00:06
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Libluini posted:-Orbital bombardment: What are you, a fascist? (Buildings can be randomly damaged, claims the manual. Apart from that, you can't purposefully commit atrocities) At the risk of sounding like a horrible monster, but considering that each race has a "comfort zone" on planets, and you're at one extreme and at war with a race that's at the other extreme... why not just bomb the planet from orbit? To you, it's already borderline uninhabitable (or outright uninhabitable), and they (apparently) have the technology to just evacuate the entire planet anyways, so there would be no real loss to you to just level the surface and make it uninhabitable to them as well as you. I mean, if your preferred planet is akin Mercury, you sure as gently caress don't care about Pluto. From what you've said, the extremes in this game aren't THAT extreme, but there are enough borderline hell-worlds that you sometimes have to wonder why you can't just tilt it a biiiiit more into the "This world is uninhabitable to everyone" zone.
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Feb 8, 2021 00:12
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C3, and hope this doesn't screw us over in the critical land grab phase of most 4x games.
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Feb 8, 2021 04:27
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Randalor posted:At the risk of sounding like a horrible monster, but considering that each race has a "comfort zone" on planets, and you're at one extreme and at war with a race that's at the other extreme... why not just bomb the planet from orbit? To you, it's already borderline uninhabitable (or outright uninhabitable), and they (apparently) have the technology to just evacuate the entire planet anyways, so there would be no real loss to you to just level the surface and make it uninhabitable to them as well as you. I mean, if your preferred planet is akin Mercury, you sure as gently caress don't care about Pluto. Earth lost like two continents in Perry Rhodan because of this. Sadly, the game doesn't have the game mechanics for orbital bombardments. All conflicts in Operation Eastside are highly formalized affairs, ending with the official surrender of a colony when the military buildings are blown to bits. Also Topsid isn't exactly a galactic super-power. If orbital bombardments were possible, the obvious answer would be other powers deploying Arkon Bombs to super-radioactive decay our worlds into space dust, or gravity bombs to crush an entire system of planets all at once. Something we can't do, because we're space hillbillies The true answer is of course the devs didn't have the money or time to implement orbital bombardment
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Feb 8, 2021 06:26
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Thanks to whoever made the 69th vote in the thread-poll, that was nice. Also, the other in-thread vote on what we should do is still running. Currently, B3 is winning! Do you like B3? No? Then vote and I promise, your vote will be heard!In other news, my last play session had a lot of fun bullshit happening, and while I'm writing the next update, this is basically my face: I don't want to spoil anything, but if you thought Master of Orion 3 had some programming flaws, you haven't seen anything yet! Next update will be tomorrow, or Friday latest. It's already half-finished! Writing this one was fun.
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Feb 9, 2021 23:05
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B3 is good. I don't think there are any strategy games where tech rushes are ever the wrong choice. Also, the Akons have it coming, a race that's even more arrogant than the Arkonids deserves getting their faces kicked in.
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Feb 10, 2021 10:54
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Reptile Rising 10: The Art of the Run Mission Log 008: 16th July 2326 After long and tedious negotiations, we managed to secure a great deal to protect our people. Sadly, even though our new obligations will not be agreed upon by all our people, it is necessary as we are now at war with three of the factions sharing New Homellete with us. Meanwhile, our colonies are wrecked by a storm of sabotage and subterfuge. It seems wet and cold winds await us, with the dry cave of hope being just a long-lost memory. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  While you’re voting, our Topsiders have continued building ships. There are large fleets out there and we want one of them to be us!  Both Aras and Arkonids try trading with us again. The Aras need light industry, the Arkonids consumer goods. Both want to give us tons of heavy industry. Normally I’d say no, but I’m tempted now, as our current batch of ships is a heavy drain on our HIUs.  Aw, gently caress it. I accept both. We have stockpiles, after all. What could go wrong?  Next turn, the Mehandor want to trade. God damnit.  Today is your lucky day! Patriarch Gutztol gives you the chance to shore up your ramshackle trade balance.  Too placate the Mehandor, I accept. More heavy industry is piling up on Shaulires II, and more of our CGU stockpiles disappear. Enough to immediately drop us below 100% coverage, and people start dropping dead. Oops!  In fact, I hosed up. Royally hosed up. The game does not lock resources needed for maintenance when you trade stuff away like this. See that middle column in our resource window? That’s the amount of resources which are “free”, that is, what you can use without switching buildings off. We traded away everything and then some. Now our stockpiles are below the point needed to keep all of our buildings online. Tons of them have switched off and our economy has just crashed. Awkward! I now have 2 turns time before our last light industry stockpile is used up and EVERYTHING turns off. I need to spend this time to find a combination of buildings to get positive LIU-income, because loving EVERYTHING uses light industry. Narrator: He did not spend the time.  Then I panic and accidentally hit the turn-end button when changing menus. Turn 188 arrives with a bunch of messages. Are you dumb space tourists, or will you take the chance if there’s a bargain to make? Turn pale at the sight of our wares. Trade, make revenue, transform your dreary liabilities into shrill dancing assets! I love the Mehandor. But our last trades have literally killed us, so I have to pass this time. To our sorrow you only understand the language of violence. Well, let the weapons speak. Where the hell did this come from? Sudden war declaration out of nowhere.  This game sometimes.Recalcitrant patients need to be punished! Now we will show you, what we mean by progressive exitus! My translation website tells me “exitus” is a medical term and has the same meaning in German and in English, but my dumb text processor doesn’t recognize it. Care to guess what this word means? Also, another war declaration. We’re up to 3 wars now.  Luckily three of our new cruisers are ready now. Together with our older Yolk-frigates, that’s 13 ships orbiting our capital. A sizable fleet, and together with our fortifications, that should be enough to turn enemy fleets away. As long as it’s not three all at once, ha ha.  Turn 189. Another dumb trade we now can’t even fullfil, since nothing on our capital works. Except for some heavy industry buildings, apparently! Chalk this up on our list of evidence for the “Braindead AI”-hypothesis. You’d think the AI would try to keep as much light industry and agriculture going as possible, considering that’s what produces CGU, which our population needs to not die. But instead if tries it’s hardest to keep our production of heavy industry going. Completely wrong priorities.  The mounting economic collapse of our capital has wide-reaching consequences: Young colonies like Borebirez IV-2 will now have to fend for themselves, as no new supplies will be coming for a while.  Of course, the lovely colonies like Lesbicor II-2 are just plain hosed. Negative incomes, no stockpiles, no supplies. Those poor bastards.  In our many wars, the Akons strike first: A small force of 7 ships arrives at Borekaris IV-1, and our lone frigate is forced to defend the civilians below. All those ships are fairly slow and beefy. Probably due to a higher tech level, but most of it is just them having better ships to begin with.  Our plucky defender! Nearly twice as fast as the invaders, similar hull strength, tiny shields, and our weapons are so weak they show up as zero points in this hosed-up visual display system.  As a test, I move our ship to the right. The Akonic fleet just makes a beeline straight to us.  One turn later: Our superior speed has taken us far away from the Akons, but two ships have moved towards our colony and taken out the non-existent defense with a single shot. The colony is lost.  We may be hosed.  Sorry Akons, not today. After approx. 3-4 turns without firing a shot, a battle is aborted.  Ah well, Borekaris IV-1 was not so important, anyway. Let’s get on with it.  Borekaris IV-1 is another colony where the AI heavily struggles to keep everyone alive and the economy running. If it weren’t for this dumb economic crash on our capital, this colony would receive tons of goods to keep from slipping, but alas  But that’s enough of Borekaris IV-1. Let’s look what the Akons are doing after taking out our colony on Borekaris IV-1. Seems like only a few movements with 1-2 ships. Not a trace of that fleet that trashed us. Though our scanner range is poo poo. They could just be out of range. Hell, Borekaris IV-1 certainly can’t help us out here, with it’s zero military buildings and therefore zero scanning range. Wait, our frigate at Borekaris IV-1 has a scanning range of 1! Welp, at least something I guess. Luckily the Akons only took over Borekaris IV-1, and not Borekaris IV-1. What? Is something wrong? … OK, this is just mean. Let me tell you what is going on here: Since orbital bombardment isn’t a thing, ground troops aren’t a thing, and only military buildings can be damaged by ships, colonies only change hands if a military force can take the orbit and successfully destroy all defending ships. Or force them to flee. Our colony on Borekaris IV-1 was perfectly safe, and didn’t even take any damage from being shot at, since it didn’t have any defense. It just auto-surrendered! But then the Akons needed to either make us flee or attack and get killed. And while the AI would have obliged happily with one of those two bad options, we didn’t! Instead we used our insane speed to hop around like mad, preventing the enemy fleet from shooting us until the stalemate-timer triggered and ended the battle. And after that battle, our frigate was send back where it came from before the battle. Which was the orbit of Borekaris IV-1. Which means the enemy didn’t control the orbit after the battle. Which means the colony un-surrendered and stayed with us. Also obviously, the Akonid fleet was send back to where they came from, too. The Akons will now need to send another fleet, or wait until their old fleet hits their starting point, so they can send it again. For now, our colony on Borekaris IV-1 is safe. I hope you understand now why I made sure to put a fast scout on all our new colonies as “defense”.  And while you now marvel at this masterful battle engine programming, let me go back to our burning capital.  Something I suddenly remembered while doing with this bullshit: On AI-controlled planets, the AI administrator normally slowly switches buildings back on and off for a couple turns until the economy recovers. But there’s one planet that can’t be automated: Your capital. Yes, that’s right: I had to manually go through all our millions of buildings, and switch them back on one by one. And of course not all at once, as that would just crash our economy back again. I had to take multiple turns, concentrating on our agriculture and light industry, before the economy got back on its claws. This is turn 191, and half of our buildings are still off-line, since I have to wait another 1-2 turns until there’s enough consumer goods and light industry to safely switch on the rest of our industry.  We do better on the military side of things: Our scouts have found a system filled with Akonid colonies, but light on defenses. The Scusatan-system will soon feel our displeasure for that unprovoked attack on a Topsider-colony.  But since the vote about our strategic alignment and research focus is still running, I decided against going too far and just send our six oldest ships. If something goes wrong, I won’t be immediately cursed to play crisis management!  With turn 192, I finally leave that dumb crash behind, and everything runs again. The cost was 15070 dead Topsiders over the course of the last few days. A high price for stupidity. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel was on a secret diplomatic mission to the Arkonids to see if they could be convinced to stop their inane trade demands. Her administrator was left in charge, but fell tragically ill after imbibing some fermented meat juice and the three sub-administrators working directly under him couldn’t agree on a proper course of options. After they hosed up by agreeing to several devastatingly stupid trade agreements all at the same time, the ensuing riots killed thousands of Topsiders. Including sadly, the three underlings responsible for this mess. When Doc Bot’s medical helper bots managed to heal Tuphtor Vlaht-Om, the administrator, starvation and madness had gripped the Topsider-colonies of New Homellete. In just a couple of days he managed to reverse the chaos and restore Shaulires II to somewhat resembling working order. The intelligent bio-plasmatic robot Doc Bot leading the Topsider-research in the Eastside has suggested that it may look a bit suspicious how the sudden illness, the wrong-headed trade deals and multiple war declarations happened so fast, one after another. His helper bots found traces of a slow-acting poison inside Vlaht-Om’s personal stash of fermented substances, tailor-made to work on Topsider’s metabolism. But not only this: Shortly after, an investigation revealed all three dead sub-administrators had been suffering from drug addiction. Addictions to special, Aralon-made designer drugs. With the infamous Westside-capital of the Aras involved, everything now became clear: The events all had been manufactured with the express purpose of undermining the Topsider-presence in the Eastside. Ironically, by the time the investigation was over, all available free military strength had already been send onto a punishment expedition towards a couple of unprotected Akonic colonies. Now it seems further action has to wait until Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel comes back from her secret mission. And with this short story, all my dumb incompetence is explained away!  Before you panic, all those fleet movements are us! Two scouts and our small kill-fleet are moving around.  Turn 194: The last traces of my “misadventures” have been cleared away, and I even started to replace some of our still not running old research buildings. Also, the result of our fine leader lady negotiating with the Arkonids: They still want our light industry, but this time, they are willing to give us a level B Agriculture technology for it. But we just got out under a crash, and I don’t want a repeat. We refuse.  Though our minimal stockpiles at least allow some care packages to go out to our worst-stricken colonies.  And then our frigates show up near Scusatan VII-5. Our Yolk-frigates are far slower then our Eggsplorers, but have better hulls and shields, with a firepower high enough we get 1 shiny bauble to represent it instead of effing zero.  We managed to get intercepted by this one Akonid ship on our way to orbit, so no invasion attempt this turn. Also this ship has similar speed and hull strength to our ships, but vastly superior shields and firepower. With everything else being so similar, I haphazard a guess that this ship was just build with better tech then ours. Well, ours here are loving old by now, of course.  One against six are still bad odds, and we pummel first their shields down, then their hull. The ship goes through several more graphics depicting a more and more damaged hull, which is kind of neat, I think.  Welp, with just one ship they didn’t even manage to break through our shield regeneration and now explode. Too bad. Considering how bad our shields and weapons are, this is kind of funny. Though with comparable numbers, the Akons would have wiped us out without losses. (By the way, getting surrounded like this doesn’t actually trap you. Space has three dimensions, after all. You can just move out of that ring of death if you want, which this ship did multiple times. However, it was too slow to get out of range, so I just moved the ring of death with them each time. )  And then the second battle of turn 195 triggers. A loving huge gently caress-off fleet of loving dozens of Akonid ships. Attacking Borekaris IV-1. Seems like the Akons didn’t think our stunt last time was very funny, ha ha  Fast frigate, we choose you!  The inevitable happens. By which I mean get hosed, Akons  Revenge of the game mechanics stops our attack in Scusatan: Since there is no “attack here, now”-button, getting intercepted on our way means our fleet now sits here in orbit with nothing left to do. Because I wanted to know what would happen, I left our fleet here for a turn. Spoilers: Nothing loving happened. Apparently this dumb game only checks for colony attacks at the start of each turn. And only when a fleet arrives somewhere. Ugh.  A lot of fleet movements this turn. The Akons are concentrating ships at Al Nikath, and both Akons and Arkonids are moving into Hacatra. I assume there’s heavy fighting ongoing, even if we can’t see anything.  In the background, there’s still scouting going on, but nothing exciting found so far. After a turn of nothing, I set our expeditionary force to hop over to one of the other Akonid colonies in the Scusatan-system. The alternative would be to hop back to the sun, then back to the planet the turn after that. Or you can use any other stellar object in-system for this, I guess. But that would mean two turns until our next assault attempt, so instead we change targets since there are multiple enemy colonies here. Some other Akon-moon is now paying the price of war!  And it works! This time, the battle includes the colony and we move into shooting range.  This is 5 minutes later. Auto-battle is on, and our six ships shoot the planetary defenses over and over again. Very slowly the shields go down. The AI isn’t without its own tricks: The Akons build multiple shield generators and nothing else on Scusatan VII-5, exploiting the shield regen mechanics. (Shields regenerate as a percentage of their total strength.) Our lovely weapons at first can’t make a dent, but after five minutes of auto-fire, our ships gain their first yellow orb of experience. This makes them hit better and upgrades our damage output a tiny bit. The shield strength stops regenerating to full each turn, and instead slowly drops. We’re winning!  10 minutes after the start of the battle. I went to get myself a drink, then read a couple of blog articles on my phone while this was going on. Eventually though, the planetary shields collapse and the colony surrenders. Victory!  Our price: A brand new colony. And only four left to take in this system! Though technically, this one planet/moon already gives us the victory point for owning this system, so we don’t have to. If we take the other colonies, it’s more to keep the Akons from having a safe haven in Scusatan from which they could assault us each turn.  The Akons build up enough space for 23000 people, and just kind of randomly cluttered the surface with their buildings. Yards next to research buildings, heavy industry next to residential buildings, nothing makes sense! And of course, zero population since the Akons simply left after surrendering the colony. Remember one of the main problems of our capital being a serious unemployment problem? Here’s the solution!  4400 pop units are send from Shaulires II, and 2100 are immediately dying because I am very smart. That’s a good start. Very not ominous. I leave this colony on auto, because I definitely don’t want a second planet full of buildings I have to switch on by hand. I think together with the death toll caused by our economic collapse, we’re now closing in on 50k deaths, and not a single one caused by our enemies. I mean, except for that Aras-conspiracy I made up. Those cheeky bastards probably sabotaged our transmitters or something! It’s their fault and their fault only!  The very next turn, 24 Terran ships show up in Borekaris to assault our colony on the first moon of the fourth planet. Yes, again. I really don’t know why all of our enemies are so fascinated by this one little moon. Did they run out of better places to fight over already?  Like last time, our frigate bravely runs away, and the Terrans bombard the planet, doing zero damage. They very nearly catch us because I am very dumb, but the timer triggers before they can shoot at our frigate. We “win”.  I think Borekaris IV-1 has more real estate for building then even our capital, and isn’t exactly a bad planet in terms of habitability. But still, Terrans, Aras and Akons all know where my capital is. And that their fleets are stronger than mine. Why not decapitate our Topsiders? All three of them together? The actual reason is of course that while allies will work together if they end up in the same battle together, planning those alliance battles to occur is not really something the strategic AI can do. Pity. They could have already taken us out with some better teamwork. Galactic Civilization II this is not. I like to pretend that our enemies attempt a slow, methodical campaign to remove our weaker colonies and thanks to the Terrans, will probably stop attacking us after we’re safely contained on Shaulires II. Just to remind you, we’re playing on the highest difficulty level here.  Turn 198 sees the AI admin slowly switching on the lights on Scusatan VII-5. Though it’ll take a while until everything stabilizes. In the meantime, I’m sucking out tons of light and heavy industry to support our capital projects, like ship building. Just look at those giant stockpiles on a still not that old colony! This is not normal. In fact, this only happened because the AI gets huge boosts to production on very hard difficulty. Ironically, if you manage to grab enemy colonies like we did, very hard suddenly turns into very sweet difficulty.. Even if we’re eventually pushed off this moon, the resources we’ve drained from here until then will have made the attack worthwhile. However, in the future I should maybe try to not kill large numbers of our colonists when taking control. Just a thought.  Speaking of our capital, most of our older research buildings have been bulldozed. Some I replaced with brand-new C-level science crap, others got replaced by better light- and heavy industry factories. Doing this in just 1-2 turns was made possible by stealing, as the additional resources from our new colony restored our stockpiles to the point where I could start major building projects without accidentally switching off buildings again. Stealing: It solves problems.  Turn 199 sees the Terrans try again to attack Borekaris IV-1. The fleet is loving huge, taking up nearly 1/6th of the entire battlefield. Our frigate “defeats” them all.  The real reason you have a maximum of 50 ships in battle is poo poo like this. As you can’t stack ships on the same tile, or really organize them into something else besides “single ship”, bringing more than 50 ships would mean you could potentially take too much space. Then you run into 3+ fleets at the same time, 104% of all tiles are filed, and bad poo poo starts happening when the game tries to shove multiple ships into the same tiles. The programmers thought about doing something involving fleets and task forces, but then looked at their budget and instead decided to just divide the number of tiles through 6 (maximum number of sides in a battle), set that as your ship limit, and called it a day.  Around that time I suddenly remembered I used some non-explorers on some colonies. Also as it turns out, I totally forgot to update our design with new techs. Enter the Eggsplorer B. Shields and weapons are still poo poo, but it is extremely fast. Very carefully I’m building one and then another of our 400m Claw Cruisers. Hopefully our new, improved economy on Shaulires II is now robust enough to take the stress.  Everything works out fine. Our income is still positive. Next time, I’ll order two of each. But we really should start making shipyards on other planets, so our capital isn’t our sole line of failure.  Still only halfway to C-level ship engines. Whatever you vote for, I’ll get to it next update, I promise! Oh, and the Arkonids want to trade again. Your brave fight against fate, which equipped you with only inadequately working brains, has moved us. Compassionate as we are, we offer you trade relations. Oh, how nice. Let me guess, you want more consumer goods or light industry, and are willing to give us more trash from your junkyards, labeled “heavy industry” in crayon?  I take everything back! Two out of three Arkonid-trades this turn are the usual dog poo poo, but one is amazing: For a sizable, but doable chunk of 1350 LIUs, the Arkonids will transmit us level B light industry research! Well, I really hope there won’t be a wave of votes for something else, because this right here basically moves us to 50% of what our new research focus demanded. Seems the Arkonids also vote in favor of B3! As it turns out, the Crystal Regent simply did not know our production capabilities were too low to meet his demands. Half out of pity, half out of cunning looking towards future trading, he finally agreed to formally transmit us blueprints for more improved factories. Now we can concentrate on smashing our enemies, who have dared to show us their teeth! -Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel  That secret mission I totally didn’t make up was a great success! We are now like the Taliban getting help from the US. We’re moving up in the galaxy. Taliban and Topsider both start with a “T”. Food for thought. The first unlock from our unexpected gift is the Type Lisko 5 Production Facility. Apart from the awesome name and another piece of pixel art, it’s again simply a better version of the 1x tile buildings we already have. It needs more resources to build, maintain and shits out more light industry. You know the drill by now. Also important: The 1x tile light industry factories are a good 2nd tier producer for consumer goods, and don’t use up any by themselves, so they can be a good way to address both consumer good and light industry deficiencies at the same time.  We also get another 2x2 light industry building! The Type B Luna Generator is an improved version of our Type A System Generator. It produces more light industry than four Type 5 factories together, but has reduced consumer good production. The blueprint came with a note saying “You will find this building ideal for building ships or trading with Arkonids. Hint. Hint.” Those pranksters!  Important survey work continues, and more and more extremely hostile places are revealed. Soon all hell planets of New Homellete will be explored!  Turn 200 sees me finally preparing our three most important colonies for shipbuilding. Two of them still need more industrial build-up first, but Sheran I turned out to be strong enough already. A Luna-yard will be finished in a couple turns, then we’ll add a small M-class yard before finishing up with a space port. In the near future, Sheran I will take up production of explorers, to allow our capital to concentrate on warships and colonizers. Though eventually, I want one yard dedicated to scouts, one to colonizers, and two for pure combat ships. And fancy that, I have four good colonies right here.   Our tech tree around turn 200: Thanks to the Arkonids, we already have Light Industry research nearly maxed out. Though thanks to the exponentially growing tech costs, that level A will cost us as much as leveling up everything else together, or possibly more. As long as we don’t get lucky with tech trading again, don’t expect to see that last dot changing green for a long, long time. And since B3 seems to be winning, the next step after C-level engines will be level B in heavy industry. After that we should maybe rethink our approach, as levels like D and C may be passing grades, they’re still not really impressive when put on our space ships. And our greatest threat right now is the AI researching faster engines for their ships.  After some thinking, I’ve decided that Scusatan VII-5 is nice enough that I want to keep it. One of our new explorers is send to take up guarding position in orbit. Deploying our ultimate weapon like this will allow us to try striking at some more Akonic colonies in the same system. Will our slow-moving, barely armed Yolk-frigates capture some more planets for us? Or will they die hilariously when the Akons finally react? Stay tuned!  My play session ends with a short round-up: The Arkonids want more trading.  The fleet protecting our capital is back up to 11 ships. This time with some actual combat-capable ships in the mix, as I don’t think I can count on our frigates anymore. That fight with 6:1 numerical superiority was eye-opening. The Yolk-II class only has slightly better weapons than the original Yolks and that tiny squadron of four frigates orbiting Shaulires II would have been in danger of actually losing the same battle. I fear one of our unarmed explorers would work out better in actual battle than those poor frigates. At least an explorer could turn the battle around and save everyone on the planet! To Be Continued (voting ends on Friday)
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Feb 10, 2021 23:00
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Well, 100% of the people plus the game itself voted for B3 -industry research and ship building- So I guess we're doing this then. voting is closed And now I leave you some more time for reading and discussing the last two updates. Considering both together are enough material to fill up a book already, you'll probably need it.
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Feb 12, 2021 11:41
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Logarithmic combat power growth is a pretty crazy thing, it was pretty funny to see the skip power rounded to zero. Is it only due to wanting to stick to the source material or did the creators just not ever play test the game? Looking forward to seeing the egg fleet overflow the screen and still die to a single Terran.
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Feb 12, 2021 14:47
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Luckily our non-scouts have non-zero firepower, so it's not as extreme as that. And our scouts will never fire a shot in anger, their main weapon is their engines (I also suspect it's only the stat display which is rounding down, not the actual stat. I'm not going to risk our main weapons to find out, though.) Libluini fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Feb 12, 2021 |
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Feb 12, 2021 16:48
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Decoy Badger posted:Logarithmic combat power growth is a pretty crazy thing, it was pretty funny to see the skip power rounded to zero. Is it only due to wanting to stick to the source material or did the creators just not ever play test the game? Looking forward to seeing the egg fleet overflow the screen and still die to a single Terran. Ah yes, lore. Since I'm kind of drained right now after all that writing, I guess I can show this off over the weekend instead of a full update, but yes some of this is due to lore. Back when I played Operation Eastside for the first time, this thing just came as a big surprise. I was still kind of naive and blindly assumed ships had all equal stats for game balance reasons. For the longest time I only played Terrans and never noticed anything wrong, but then I started with some other guys and suddenly all my ships were poo poo. Surprise! (Ironically enough, it was Topsiders) The devs, in a weird attempt to shoehorn in both lore and game balance, did things like capping fleet sizes, but then also just made Terran and Arkonid ships plain better than everyone elses, because that's how it is in the books, you see... In said short future update, I'll show you the max starting stats of all ships side by side. And yeah, since upgrades aren't just applying a flat bonus, lovely ships tend to get progressively shittier when compared with their counterparts in other space nations. Oversight or design feature? I honestly do not know. In bitter irony to all of this, someone must have tested this game, because that huge hull bonus Topsiders have makes no sense otherwise. Topsider-ships are weird melons with rockets shoved through them, they're structurally weaker then everyone else, not stronger! The reason for this odd change must have been someone noticing that if you give Topsiders lovely shields and non-existent weapons, making their hulls equally weak would just utterly destroy every attempt at combat balance. And then all this testing was not enough, anyway. Because the end result included the Fleet-Ending Doom Scout, as seen in the second update on this page. Zero firepower, 100% victory.
Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Feb 12, 2021 |
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Feb 12, 2021 19:39
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So far the best part* is the nonsensical diplomacy engine, if you ever want to put the pre-WW1 diplomatic efforts in any logical context just think back to this mess. *for differing values of 'best'
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Feb 12, 2021 20:40
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I'm amazed by the scout that's foiled like, what, five or six invasion fleets by now? Give that crew some medals.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:47
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Intermezzo A: Castles of Arkonite Like I promised, this mini-update is about ships! I restarted the game a couple times, and compared your starting ships at maximum slider settings. This is what you get. The shittiest combat ships Operation Eastside can provide. Terrans  Our ruggedly handsome friends from Earth get sphere-shaped ships with all sublight engines packed tight into that toroid-shape around the middle, so you have maximum available volume plus maximum possible weapon coverage. The tech inside comes from the Arkonids, who managed to strand one of their battlecruisers on Earth’s moon, and the two survivors of the resulting mess made sure Earth could take as much of it as possible. Terran ingenuity then filled up the few missing spots. At E-level research and maximum settings, you get a 100 m sphere (classified as a “Light Cruiser” in PR-lore) with the following basic stats: Armor/Hull: 101 Shield Strength: 107 Acceleration: 190 k/sec² (4 movement points) Attack Strength: 24 Scan range: 0,5 turns* *Scan ranges are given in “Runden”/”Turns” though for your mental health you can also assume it’s talking about solar system radius instead. From the perspective of game mechanics, both are nearly identical. Differences would be less than a turn worth of scanning range, and therefore impossible to notice. Arkonids  Due to minor differences in design philosophy, tech base and aesthetic preferences, Arkonid sphere ships look very slightly different, but they also have exactly the same stats. I mean, Earthlings quite literally took over Arkonid robots to build for them and crammed their brains full with Arkonid scientific and engineering knowledge, so at this point in time, “looks” are in lore the only possible differences. Something I find in hindsight really amusing: The devs not only made distinct looking ships, even though both Arkonids and Terrans use the same stats, if you look closely you’ll see that even the four main ship parts (Armor, Weapons, Engines, Shields) all got their very own custom looks. If you click on them, a female voice will still call them by their standard part names, though. A shock field generator may look different depending on which factory on which planet made it, but it still is the same thing under the hood. Mehandor  The “Jumpers” aka Mehandor traditionally use ships shaped like cigars. The reason for this is actually making a lot of sense: The way their cylindrical ships land allows them to load and offload cargo at unbelievable speeds, which these space vikings think vastly more important than just having the highest possible cargo volume. An E-level ship with maxed settings is a 200m long cigar, their stat block is: Armor/Hull: 172 Shield Strength: 93 Acceleration: 197 k/sec² (4 movement points) Attack Strength: 20 Scan range: 0,5 turns Mehandor ships have weaker shields and are slightly faster, but not enough to measurably change their combat stats. Their Attack Strength is a good chunk lower, but with the way the battle engine abstracts stats it’s hard to tell if this is even doing anything. Their hulls are nearly twice as strong, which I have to chalk up to game balance reasons, not lore. There’s no lore reason their ships are better armored, as all their ships are mainly space traders with huge structural weak points inside, this would not make sense anyway. Strictly speaking, as the actual combat stats aren’t changing much, their ships are vastly superior thanks to their sturdy hulls. In a fight between a single Mehandor and a single Terran ship, the space cigar would probably win, thanks to the game engine neutralizing the small differences in all stats except hull strength. I’m not sure the developers expected this to happen. The Mehandor-ships also use less than half the crew, which means every ship “eats” a lot less of your population per ship. This makes them a lot cheaper resource-wise, as your population is more important than a bunch of electronics or whatever. In conclusion, those weird bulgy cigars are actually really good space ships! Warning: A Short History Derail Incoming Spheroid-ships are at a disadvantage for the most ironic of reasons: Everyone copying their designs from the Arkonids, who put cargo space and cargo transfer facilities at the bottom of their ships. By tradition, observatories and very heavy specialized weapons go to the top or “north pole” of a ship, and the main cargo hatch is always at the bottom. The rest of the surface is for hangars, engines and weapons. Some of said hangars may not even have a direct connection to the main cargo space, making offloading cargo at points which are not the main cargo area a pain in the rear end. This only changed in the era after this game, when especially Terrans moved away from blindly copying Arkonids and developed fully dedicated cargo haulers. Another great reason for Mehandor using cylindrical designs is tradition. Also, it’s never outright stated, but the Mehandor negotiated their galaxy-wide trade monopoly after the end of the disastrous Methane Wars against the Hydrogen-breathing Maahks. The Maahks preferred cylindrical ships and waged a war of extermination and survival, which lasted from 8229 BC up to 3900 BC, when their last strength was broken.  The battle which finally and decisively ended the “Methans”-threat as an existential crisis of the Arkonid Empire was the Battle of Yntos, at around 5772 BC, when their last large fleet was destroyed when trying to enter Thantur-Lok (the star cluster M13 and home to Arkon itself). Around the same time the Mehandor achieved their monopoly, and since they must have had a lot of encounters with Maahk-hordes devastating the empire, they apparently took inspiration. This is pure speculation on my part however, as the Mehandor have a complicated history. While they nominally split up from the Arkonids, this happened during the Archaic Periods (ca. 17000-16000 BC Terran calendar), when strong hyperspace storms made all FTL-travel impossible. During this lost part of Arkonid history, several alien cultures, one of them not even humanoid, mixed with Arkonid colonists on the planet Iprasa and later unified into the Iprasian Nomads, which left Iprasa after the end of the Archaic Periods and wandered the galaxy. At some unknown later point, an Arkonid noble ordered the colonisation of the planet Archetz near Arkon itself, and an overwhelming majority of the colonists came from Iprasian space habitats, as our proto-space vikings fled the matriarchic nomad structures to form their own independent society. So at the point the colonists of Archetz had turned into the Mehandor, they had already removed themselves so far from their Arkonid roots it’s hard to say where their ship design ideas where ultimatively founded. Especially as the Methan Wars lead to so much destruction, a lot of Arkonid history of this time is as lost as the forgotten history of the Archaic Periods. The Archaic Periods and the Methane Wars are the main reasons as to why it was a complete surprise when Terrans stumbled face-first into the Akons in their hidden system and it turned out the Arkonids where just an Akonid off-shoot. The Maahks are not in Operation Eastside, by the way. After their massacres where answered with massacres in turn, their survivors fled back to where they came from, plus a couple additional galaxies. Currently, space travel isn’t developed enough to even visit them. (They’re in Andromeda) Which is a shame, because they’re a wonderfully complex species with lots of odd, Human-caused twists in their history. Native to Andromeda, they were at first driven by Human atrocities to flee Andromeda, only to later run into another tribe of Humans. Their revenge-driven assault then ended in them again, being driven out of their home galaxy by atrocities committed by Humans. Then they were enslaved by the other, third tribe of Humans still living in Andromeda. At this point you’re probably not surprised to hear that our Human relatives in Andromeda were also originally forced to leave the Milky Way thanks to horrific atrocities. Thankfully not Maahks this time. Anyway, my theory about Mehandor ships came from this source:  It’s a bit bulkier, but the suspiciously similar shape makes things clear, I hope. Akons  OK, let’s go back to space nations which actually do appear in this game: The Akons. They started out using basic spheroid ships like every Human tribe since the old Greater Tamanium from before 50k BC, but after the ancestors of the Arkonids rebelled and declared M13 independent, the Akons had a prophetic vision about how another rebellion of 13 colonies would be going in the far future and decided wisely to not send a fleet across the galaxy. Instead, they shielded their home system to make it impossible to reach via standard FTL-methods and went into hiding. Their ships are build for stealth and versatility, and less for tradition. They cut the top and bottom halves of their ships off to create more flat space for hangars and stealth generator installations, without compromising maneuverability and firepower too much. The basic shapes are still a central donut ring to house all sublight drives, and a roughly spherical shape for weapons and minor hangars. Minor only in this case, as the Akons re-purposed their poles for the main hangars. Armor/Hull: 106 Shield Strength: 83 Acceleration: 203 k/sec² (4 movement points) Attack Strength: 17 Scan range: 0,5 turns Operation Eastside wasn’t nice to the Akons: As the game doesn’t take stuff like stealth systems and tiny spy-craft into account, the two major strengths of playing Akons are exterminated with extreme prejudice. As always with ships which should have weaker hulls, the devs made them stronger instead. Just a tiny +3 in this case when compared to Terran and Arkonid super-ships. Shields are a good chunk weaker and the weakest so far, but again not enough to actually measurably change combat stats. Losing all that mass by lopping off parts of their own ships gives them slightly higher acceleration, but not enough to change combat stats. (Seriously, this seems to be a theme with this game.) Their weapon strength dips low enough that in actual combat, you should now actually see a first difference. This makes Akonid ships the weakest of the bunch so far. And while I keep saying “the combat engine sees no difference”, this here is still ships at E-level. When your %-bonuses from upgrades roll in, those tiny gaps in stats will start to balloon in size until the engine will take notice. At end-game levels, expect Mehandor or Akonid ships to have significantly weaker ships than Terrans and Arkonids. Aras  Not much left to say here, the Aras split off from the Mehandor, and specialized into the medicine and drug sectors. They’re medical space vikings who are also drug lords. And while lore says they should use Mehandor-space cigars, the same mutation which gave their ancestors on Aralon those weird conehead-shapes, apparently also gifted them the mental flexibility to use different designs when they deem them appropriate. Lore also allows them to use sphere-ships, for example. And so they get them. Armor/Hull: 101 Shield Strength: 107 Acceleration: 190 k/sec² (4 movement points) Attack Strength: 24 Scan range: 0,5 turns The Aras got custom graphics for their ships and ship parts, but the stat block is a direct copy from the Arkonids. Not all is well in Aras-land, however: Their ships need more crew and resources for construction. Aras have to pay through their noses for the privilege to own the same ships as Terrans and Arkonids. Topsiders  Our best friends, the friendly space lizards! Endearingly stubborn about using their very own, independently developed ship designs. The game punishes them severely for this streak of independence. Also, they’re the only Non-Humans, so gently caress them. (Was apparently the design philosophy for their role in Operation Eastside.) All Topsider-ships follow some general principles: That bridge-like thing at the top of the rocket-part is actually an observatory or an especially heavy weapon turret, analog to how north poles on sphere-ships handle things. The bridge is in an exceptionally heavily armored central sphere inside that melon-part. Like with corresponding Terran and Arkonid designs, the central bridge has its own life support and sublight drive, so in an emergency it has a good chance at escaping the destruction of its ship. Thanks to thousands of years of Arkonid occupation, most of their technology has become similar to galactic standards this way. It’s just generally a lot shittier, though I leave it to you to decide how much of the difference in ship performance comes from pure tech disadvantage and how much from stubbornly keeping designs with the worst volume/size ratio possible. Armor/Hull: 183 Shield Strength: 39 Acceleration: 215 k/sec² (4 movement points) Attack Strength: 6 Scan range: 0,5 turns In a panic, the devs saw what they had done, and made Topsider-ships the sturdiest of them all. They’re also pretty drat fast. Space rockets, am I right? Shields are poo poo. Just look at that value! Topsider melon-rockets simply lack the space for strong shield generators and power plants, and it shows. Ironically, at basic E-level, the difference between 100+ and 39 shield points is still not enough to generate a different combat value (in both cases it’s 3 shield points) though really, by combat experience I confirmed that two 3-point shields can and will have vastly different performance if their basic stats are too far out of whack. So yes, this ship’s “3 shield points” will crumble like wet paper when compared to let’s say an Akonid ship’s “3 shield points”. The weapon strength is just sad. The other five races have values ranging from 17-24, and Topsiders start with 6. At basic E-level, scouts will have something like 2-4 attack strength, which is rounded down to zero strength in combat. As with shield strengths, display does not equal actual stat, so zero attack strength will still do some damage. But considering a squadron of six ships with 8 combat strength took 10+ minutes in real time pummeling an unarmed colony into submission, don’t expect it to be much damage. Every battle where we can’t just “win” by running away will need a 3:1 numerical advantage to pull off victory. That’s some challenge. And that’s our ships! Next time, we’re back to winning more with less, the Topsider way. To Be Continued
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Feb 14, 2021 15:38
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I see the lore reasons why they went with 5 human races, but it's unfortunate that we got basically 3 ship designs out of that. 4 spherical ship, the Mehandor cigar, and the Topsider space rocket. At least the natives don't use spheres. There are much more exciting ship designs out there, even if the most famous ships are spheres. Or cigars with spheres, or disks with spheres, or boxes with spheres. We should blame it on the Lemurians (Lemurids?) who were the ancestors of all the human races (and brought down by beasts piloting... spherical ships... it's spheres all the way down!).
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Feb 15, 2021 00:50
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I also assume these stats are not taking into account the NPC "combat bonuses" at the current level of difficulty, either?
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Feb 16, 2021 14:35
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PurpleXVI posted:I also assume these stats are not taking into account the NPC "combat bonuses" at the current level of difficulty, either? We're in luck! Difficulty changes penalties/bonuses to pop growth, living space, resource production and ship construction speed, but not combat-related stats. So, while the AI may send 5 ships on easy and 50 on very hard, the combat engine will be a fair arbiter of the resulting battle!
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Feb 16, 2021 15:18
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Lores of Rhodan: Who is Perry Rhodan? Part I I’ve already talked a lot about the universe this game is set in, but there’s always someone new tumbling in who has no idea who this Perry-guy is. So I thought to put together some posts for his life story, so everyone can just click a link in the OP and read up, instead of being left adrift whenever the Rhodan-lore gets too impenetrable for outsiders. So let’s ask the question: Who is Perry Rhodan? The Founding  Over time, there have been many artists trying their hand on putting a face to the character, but this right here is one of the oldest and it became something of a logo for the series. Sometimes in color, sometimes by another artist mimicking the original, but always “weird guy in a space helmet”. Obviously, he didn’t always look like this and today he has stopped looking like this, but after 3000+ novels trying to show you all of the variants would be nuts. Anyway, just use your imagination a bit! Also, let’s get on with this. Meta-textual, Perry Rhodan was invented by a bunch of German SF-authors in the early 1960s. Back then, German SF was somewhat thriving, but especially in Westgermany, heavily dependent on import from the US. Not only stories, mind you, but also ideas: Space opera, adventure stories, secret agent stories, the public ate it up. One big problem though: Most of the public could get weird when stories involved German heroes or if the author was too German. I have this giant clunker called “Allmächtiger: Perry Rhodan” / “Almighty: Perry Rhodan” (it’s a pun on space/god in German). This big fucker in the format of a huge document binder was a book sold on one of the many anniversaries, it came out at some point around 2006, I think. When talking about the series’ history, I’m using that thing as my source. So, back then German authors who wanted a space readership often had to do dumb stunts like giving themselves fake American pen-names. One of the most famous PR-authors of the first generation was “Clark Darlton” (not his real name), for example. Also, the hero had to be American, or at least needed to have some vague connection with the USA. My source is vague on how much of that is actually true, and how much of it was the typical fear of publishers wanting to avoid risks. All-American heroes sold in early cold war Germany, so that’s what they wanted to see. Another big thing back then were collaborative series -Perry Rhodan is neither the only German penny dreadful SF-series, nor the first. Just the only one even barely known outside our borders. One of the forerunners was “Sun Koh – The Heir of Atlantis”, a series written by the definitely not American writer “Lok Myler” and which ran from 1933-1936. It reached a respectable number of 150 issues and heavily influenced later Perry Rhodan authors. Ironically, the Nazis forbade several works of Kurd Laßwitz and Hans Dominik, basically the first German SF-authors ever, who wrote their works from ca. late 19th century up to ca. WWII, but apparently never batted an eye at some dude pretending to be a decadent American to sell childish fictional stories. The inconsistency of fascism, everybody! After the war, there was a growing demand on cheap fiction, and there was a flood of stuff incoming from the US, finding a ready public, which had already been prepared by stories like those of staunch "American" author, Lok Myler. German authors spend a lot of time playing translator during this era, and eventually transitioned to actually just straight-up writing their own stories. They were joined by writers who then just simply wrote their own stories to begin with, heavily influenced by all those American stories they’ve read. German authors started to get known under their actual, German names and authors like Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke and all the other great names all saw stories published in Germany, creating even more inspiration for the new German generation of SF-authors. It was like a nerd renaissance! Series like Jim Power, Mark Powers or Ad Astra were being printed and mildly successful enough, which eventually lead to the Moewig Publishing Company ordering a bunch of authors and their chief editor to come up with a similar concept for a new series. Karl-Herbert Scheer, Walter Ernsting (“Clark Darlton”) and Chief Editor Kurt Bernhardt sat together on 25th January 1961 and brainstormed the entire thing. Those three were the nucleus from where all this insanity eventually sprung. Back then they were going through basically a marketing-checklist to tailor PR to their known audience: - They were pretending to be an American series, like most German publishers did those days - The first arc revolving around a moon landing was very carefully chosen with John F. Kennedy’s famous speech in mind, which was still very recently at that point - Perry Rhodan: American name (check), US-citizen and military hero (check) The rest was just professional workmanship by professional writers. And it paid off: The first issue was sold out immediately and had to be reprinted, and with every following issue the numbers went higher, with no end in sight. Soon more and more authors were commanded to join the collective, as the first two simply couldn’t deal with the relentless nature of the growing demand. The series was first planned to reach 20 issues. But then the people didn’t stop buying, so the plan grew to 50 issues. 1962 arrived and people still couldn’t get enough. The rest is history. Before Rhodan And that’s how the Gods assembled the PR-universe. Before continuing, a short aside: The long history of PR has made a mess of the in-universe history before Rhodan’s birth, as Humankind’s history turned out to be growing each time an author looked at it. But that’s not Perry’s story, and I want to at least keep everything confined to the background of this game, so we’ll take up another source, Andreas Eschbach’s official fake SF-biography Perry Rhodan: The Greatest Adventure. This 800+ page door stopper was commissioned as a sort of retelling of Perry Rhodan’s early life, combining all that poo poo like off-handed remarks plastered across the main series and some background-notes that never left the editorial office before into one huge story, framed as a biography written in-universe. If you can read German, the book was published in 2019 by TOR, also known as the FISCHER Tor Publishing Company. Hilariously, it’s written very well, which makes it surprisingly dry reading, as it really is written like a biography, just not one written about a real person. It still was fun reading, even if I suspect most of your enjoyment would come from already knowing the PR-series, and if you just randomly stumble across this book, you’d be surprised to see this weird biography about an American astronaut you’ve never even heard about before lying in the fiction section and be super-confused. Until you actually read that thing. Depending on your level of ignorance, you could make it through nearly half the book without noticing that Perry Rhodan is not a real person and the Earth of Perry Rhodan is not ours. There’s a certain event, where all the stuff hidden from view suddenly shambles into view, and even the most ignorant person has realized that this is not our world. As soon as you reach that point, even the densest person alive will experience the dawn of realization. Next time, we’ll start with Perry Rhodan’s birth and early life in America. Also, we need to talk about the complete failure of the disastrous Apollo-missions. To Be Continued Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:21 on Feb 20, 2021 |
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Feb 20, 2021 12:13
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The Perry Rhodan backstory, as in the publishing backstory, is always fascinating to me.
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Feb 20, 2021 12:55
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Regarding these earlier German SciFi-authors: Hans Dominik was actually an engineer, and really did show his work. If you could deal with the purple prose (it were the 1920s after all), you get some quite interesting political manouvres around some interesting plot-device. Sadly, as far as I know, none of his works were published in English. In German, however, you can get everything for free here.
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Feb 20, 2021 16:12
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Perry Rhodan really is an extreeeeeeeemely long series. That's how 132 of the "Silberband"-books look like (which "only" include content up to number 1122 of the original pulp novels...). Reading this LP really makes me itch to continue reading...
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Feb 20, 2021 21:19
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SOLarian posted:Perry Rhodan really is an extreeeeeeeemely long series. That's how 132 of the "Silberband"-books look like (which "only" include content up to number 1122 of the original pulp novels...). Reading this LP really makes me itch to continue reading... And the Silberbände even cut some small extraneous things from the weekly issues iirc...
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Feb 20, 2021 21:50
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Kodos666 posted:Regarding these earlier German SciFi-authors: Hans Dominik was actually an engineer, and really did show his work. If you could deal with the purple prose (it were the 1920s after all), you get some quite interesting political manouvres around some interesting plot-device. Sadly, as far as I know, none of his works were published in English. That's funny, just last year I spend 4 bucks on a complete collection of Hans Dominik's works on eBook. Looks like I essentially paid to get the books into a better readable format and downloadable. SOLarian posted:Perry Rhodan really is an extreeeeeeeemely long series. That's how 132 of the "Silberband"-books look like (which "only" include content up to number 1122 of the original pulp novels...). Reading this LP really makes me itch to continue reading... Looks intimidating, isn't it? My own collection got to something like 103, then I noticed the books also exist as eBooks now and since then I've been collecting them in electronic format. It's a lot nicer on the tiny available space in my apartment! Torrannor posted:And the Silberbände even cut some small extraneous things from the weekly issues iirc... Sometimes there's also retcons when things have changed too much and the original issues said things that aren't palatable anymore in the world of today, like the accidental massacre on Russian spacefarers, or Perry's best friend in a later arc just straight up accidentally ordering the murder of a prisoner, or the time an entire species was wiped up ending up being reversed* *joke, that actually happened more than one The editor responsible also had no problem with excising entire issues completely, and in at least one case a complete, multiple-issues long arc was reduced to a single paragraph. Sometimes a "filler"-issue survives if it gives something important, like atmosphere or worldbuilding, sometimes they're taken out or also reduced to a single paragraph/sentence. Now that the Silberbände have moved beyond volume 150, the editing work has grown ever more complex, as the series sometimes has PoV-switches only after multiple issues now, and the editor had to start switching from a linear approach to a more flexible one: Some of the later volumes had a lot of original issues switched around to make a specific volume about a single PoV, because otherwise many parts of the story arcs would move at a snail's pace with PoV-switches sitting in the middle of the books. The hardest arc hit was the Cappin-arc, with the amusingly named Humanoid body-snatchers ("Pedopeiler"), as that happened around the switch from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, and everyone was still using typewriters and good memories to coordinate the series, at a point when the series not only grew slowly more complex, but also when the sales faltered because of every story arc after the best one ever seeming like a huge disappointment. (This "Cappin cycle" of stories is in the volumes 45-49, if you're interested. Psychic centaurs, time travel and intelligent neanderthals*. )*Originally, there was also dinosaurs, but the editor decided that was stupid and deleted them completely Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:46 on May 23, 2022 |
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Feb 21, 2021 11:27
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Libluini posted:The hardest arc hit was the Cappin-arc, with the amusingly named Humanoid body-snatchers ("Pedopeiler"), as that happened around the switch from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, and everyone was still using typewriters and good memories to coordinate the series, at a point when the series not only grew slowly more complex, but also when the sales faltered because of every story arc after the best one ever seeming like a huge disappointment. (This "Cappin cycle" of stories is in the volumes 45-49, if you're interested. Psychic centaurs, time travel and intelligent neanderthals*. The Cappin arc was fairly lame imo, the Swarm was a much better follow up. I'm curious, what's the best story arc ever? MDI?
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Feb 21, 2021 12:50
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