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Torrannor posted:Do threads even fall into the archives anymore? I think it's supposed to happen after two months, which means this thread was only a couple days from vanishing, 
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Nov 6, 2022 11:46
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Just gonna point out that people have made ship sets for all the main races in the Perryverse in Stellaris. Y'know. If you wanted to do another thread like this but in a more modern game.
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Nov 7, 2022 21:55
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King Doom posted:Just gonna point out that people have made ship sets for all the main races in the Perryverse in Stellaris. Y'know. If you wanted to do another thread like this but in a more modern game. Thank you, this made my day! Even a Topsider-shipset! Ha, ha, those dumb melon rockets look so silly in Stellaris, it's great!  And the science ship for the Terran shipset is the Sol! The motherfucking Sol-model, a ship spliced together from three Titan-sized ships is made into one of Stellaris unarmed scienceships. This is both so dumb and so fitting, I love it!
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Nov 7, 2022 23:26
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Libluini posted:Thank you, this made my day! Even a Topsider-shipset! Ha, ha, those dumb melon rockets look so silly in Stellaris, it's great! Yes, this immediately caught my attention as well. On the one hand, it's dumb because it's made up of three Titan-sized ships connected together, with Titans being the biggest (regular) ship class the Terrans have ever built. And there are like three bigger/more armed Terran built ships, and none of them are traditional spherical space ships. One the other hand, the Sol, while being a powerful warship, is very definitely known much more as an explorer, and unquestionably has done more exploring than any other Terran ship, but a huge margin. So it being a science ship is very fitting, while being reduced to a tiny non-combat ship is silly. It absolutely rocks.
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Nov 8, 2022 09:08
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Libluini posted:Obligatory post so this thread doesn't fall into the archives. :itshappening:
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Nov 8, 2022 12:52
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I'm still busy with my other screenshot-thread, so no updates! I've been working on three different lore-posts though. I'm aiming to finish January of with the most relevant of them, and then aim to post the other two after 1-2 regular updates in February. (By then I can hopefully lift the hiatus from this thread.)
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Jan 23, 2023 21:56
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 Reptile Rising 14: Expanding Shipyards Yeah, I know. That was a long wait. But recently my eyes have been better and my fourth eye surgery was supposed to be the last, so by now I've recovered enough I can risk eyestrain again by playing dumb games for you people. (To recap, since October 2021 I’ve been a regular visitor of our local hospital, getting holes drilled into my right eye.) This update is mostly to get back into the swing of things of Operation Eastside. I now remember what I wanted to do and got amazed again at how bad the AI in this game is. But enough of that, let’s start with a message from the woman commanding our lizards:  Mission Log 012: 31st August 2326 Just eight days have passed, but it feels like an eternity. I’ve ordered our researchers to get our ships some better shield generators and hulls, which delayed our efforts to crack the shells of Blues-ships somewhat. But on the other claw, our ships are far too feeble to keep our enemies at bay, and the local natives at least spend a lot of time fighting our enemies, too. Meanwhile, the rest of our colonies have been concentrating on getting more shipyards ready. If we can’t defeat our enemies with class, we will defeat them with mass. Politically, the situation in the New Homellete Cluster remains odd, to say the least: Now Terrans and Akons are our best friends, despite both of those humanoid species normally despising each other. The Mehandor claim to be at war with us, as are the Arkonids, but they have been ignoring us recently. The Aras, the galactic doctors, have likewise begun to improve their relations with us after earlier being a pain in our tails. According to messages from home, this recent weirdness seem to be related to the great Unified Empire cracking down on pointless infighting, though I haphazard a guess the fact that we accidentally stumbled into the territory of a rather numerous and hitherto unknown alien race out here in the Eastside might have something to do with this. Still, humanoids are flaky bastards at the best of times, so I’m not holding my teeth on how long the current pseudo-peace will hold. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  OK, we’re back in the command seat. Our little lizard empire has colonized 14 out of 64 star systems we need to have, and we’re already deep in the game’s limited tech tree, 240 turns in. We’ve met everyone there is in the game and despite some setbacks, we’re now mostly left alone. The more friendly AIs start spamming trade requests each turn, and to keep them happy, I’ll agree to all of their bad trades. As in past updates, there’s some serious economy issue at play here, as everyone, ourselves included, starts swimming in heavy industry units. And while that’s good for making big space fleets,, it’s also really weird that by now everyone tries to sell their big space fusion reactors in growing desperation. I guess it’s because light industry is used in growing numbers by everything, and the PS5s growing in our greenhouses (“consumer goods”, the game abstracts them) do double-duty for feeding growing population everywhere. In comparison, while a lot of buildings do consume heavy industry, most of heavy industry is used in ship construction. And since you can’t build more than 1 ship at a time per planet, there’s a sharp upper limit to how many HIUs you can use up at the same time. At least that’s my speculation about how this happened. The end result is everyone wants to sell us their heavy industry products, to the point where I have to start using other planets beside our capital to do the trades, as the constant trades start to slowly cause shortages in the other resources. But I really don’t want to learn the hard way that constantly refusing trades makes the AI angry, so we keep being nice.  So, since it has been some time, let’s look at our progress bar. The green part symbolizes the currently colonized systems. The empty black part in the middle are systems we know about but haven’t colonized yet and finally, the grey part is systems we haven’t visited yet. To win the game, the green part has to stretch all the way to the green triangle. That’s it. The game does not care if all the buildings in your colony are filled with dust and corpses, as long as it is “a colony”, it counts. The numbers below the bar are just telling us the same thing: The left number is currently colonized systems, the right number is the number of colonized systems we need to win. If you think about it, if the game would check how well-run your colonies are, the AI could never win.  There’s also the politics of our local cluster of stars, New Homelette. The galactic traders (Mehandor/Jumpers) and the Arkonids (space imperialists) hate our guts currently, but everyone else loves us! Depicted here are the Akons (space isolationists) who have very good relations with us and even agreed to a non-aggression treaty. The Akons currently fight a subversive shadow war against the rest of the United Empire of Terra, Arkon and everyone else. Luckily the Akons send to the Eastside are the less malevolent ones, also space espionage isn’t a thing in Operation Eastside anyway. It’s still funny that both them and the Terrans are among our friends over here in our backwater.  Our relations with the Terrans are even better at “excellent”! Probably because we didn’t have huge space battles with them, or just because the AI in this game isn’t capable of making decisions, it decides what to do based on weighted random chance. And so, despite being cool with us, the Terrans continue to refuse alliance offers. Quite unlike the real Terrans of the setting. But again, it’s not like most empires send their best people out here in the first place. For political reasons, only the Topsiders send their very best. If you remember, that’s how I explain why the Topsiders are just a little bit worse than everyone else, instead of being completely helpless, like they should be in canon.   And the last of our group of friends: The Aras. We wisely decided not to gently caress with their drug trade, and so the galactic doctors decided to be our friends. Which definitely sounds better than “this AI rolled a random number and it came up MAKE FRIENDS WITH LIZARDS”  Part of the bookkeeping for the turn: Going to a planet with lots of stuff on it and opening the trade window, agreeing to incoming trades, and maybe go back to the main screen to read their funny responses. This time it’s Terrans, and they want to trade their heavy industry for our consumer goods. Either Topsiders make really good game consoles, or our food is really tasty.  Our capital currently has 24 ships protecting it, and one incoming colonizer will be arriving in 6 turns for repairs. As the game has a maximum hard cap of 50 ships per side in battle, that’s not so bad. On lower difficulties, our enemies would have roughly comparable fleet sizes by now.  However, by now Shaulires II-3, one of our capital’s moons, is already far more productive and important, since the RNG rolled a lot less useless hills and mountains for the planet map. I’ve been continuing the expansion of our industry here, to support bigger ships.  Sculima IV is the third planet we took under direct control and last time around I was concentrating on boosting research here. There are still a lot of construction sites for science buildings here, waiting to be completed. In the near future, we’ll change tracks a bit to get a third planet building ships.  Tegbipe III was a planet I at first controlled myself, then later gave to the AI to play with. It immediately hosed everything up and now the colony is dying because the AI-governor wisely decided to remove staff from all agricultural buildings to do ??? This is exhibit 69 on a long list of examples of how we can win this game at highest difficulty with a dumbass like me at the controls: Our enemies have to suffer this exact same level of competency.  And after that there is a growing list of AI-controlled “bad decision” planets. Lesbicor II-2 shows off neatly what can happen if you decide to colonize a planet despite it showing you “99% of the surface is just ice/lava/water, you big dummy”. As a lot of things in this game, the exact result is of course subject to RNG. One of our better worlds has a rather high amount of ocean too, but on that planet we rolled really well when colonizing, and on this one we rolled extra bad. There’s enough space for only like 6 buildings here, and we’ve built all of them. And of course this means it’s one of our most stable planets under AI-control. There’s nothing it can do to gently caress things up.  While I’m stumbling around the interface, trying to remember what my plans were, I suddenly realize that there’s really no reason to make colonizers fast and cheap, as the landing unit alone is insanely resource expensive. To rectify this, the new colonization ship of the day is the “Heavy Egg”, equivalent to our current combat design. It’s a bit more expensive to build, but not by that much. And our bigger colonies get enough new colonists each turn that the drain of having to supply the obligatory 50 population units for the landing unit is basically nill.  I then immediately order two of them build on our capital’s moon shipyard. If the construction goes fast enough, I’ll just switch this colony to build our new heavy colonizers indefinitely. It’s important to our plan, after all.  Finally, a new turn! But our research doesn’t progress because I switched research from Anti-Blues weapons to propulsion, not realizing that’s already at C-level (and B-level ship research is still hideously expensive). What I wanted to do was researching C-levels in hull strength and shield generators, which we could do in a couple turns easily. But I am very stupid, and it’ll take me some more turns until I realize the slowly crawling propulsion research is already at level C and I’m just wasting precious turns spinning my wheels.  There were some messages this turn, but you already saw all the Terran ones (we got a trading request and they rebuffed our wish for an alliance, again), so here is a new one instead from the Aras. [Non-Aggression Treaty Refused] Skeletons and muscles of our culture do not support by Terrans. This message is fascinating, because the obvious error in it shows the devs really didn’t expect players to take Non-Terrans. It’s one of the weirder aspects of this game: Topsiders get their own cutscenes and little details like lizard people walking around the main screen, but then some of the standard messages talk to us like we’re someone else and our researchers are just a robot because that’s easier then making a Lizard-scientist graphic. Oh, and I just now realize that we don’t actually have any non-aggression treaties. I just forgot that the interface doesn’t make a difference between “message send” and “this diplomatic status is active”. Apparently I just send out a bunch of requests in turn 240 and immediately forgot after stopping my play session. Welp!   Our 3D-map. The white triangles are our ships, mostly little squadrons of one colonizer paired with one scout, moving towards potential new colonies. As far as I can tell, the only fleet not ours currently passing through our detection range are ten Arkonid ships targeting a planet in Blues-territory. Well, that’s not our fight!  After taking a closer look, the targeted planet is simply a mediocre planet not yet colonized. So it’s possible the Arkonids just want to colonize in strength. Also weirdly, not it’s 8 ships and not 10. Bad space 4x UIs will kill me one day.  The population growth on Shaulires II-3 is high enough to fill up multiple colonizers each turn, but our yards can only finish about one ship in 3-4 turns. Obviously, I solve this conundrum by spending some time to set up some more modern yards in this edge here. We’re also still building 400m-long “D-level” ships, our spaceports support C-level ships already (500m for sphere-builders like the Terrans, 800m for space cigars like the Jumpers and of course 1km for our weird melon-rockets) and if this colony needs 3-4 turns for 400m-ships, it’ll probably take almost twice as long to build 1000m-ships. And when I eventually unfuck my research, we’ll immediately get the C-level size so making our yards bigger is another important item on our to-do list.  Turn 242 sees one of our little scout squads reach Shaukahe, a sun with a bunch of tremendously useless planets. I’m sending our ships to the first planet anyway. It’s the least bad of the bunch and it’s another system for our win count, after all.  Next turn, I pull the trigger on Shaukahe I and we get another short cutscene of one of some Topsiders walking into a lander, then their melon-rocket spitting out the lander to fall down on the planet. You’ve already seen this.  Around turn 244, another squadron is now orbiting another planet from the category of “hellhole, but we’re desperate” and our system count ticks up again.  At this point I’m moving up and down our list of colonies, contemplating how nice it would be to have at least four shipyard planets instead of the 2 (+1 soon) situation we have going now. But they’re all so lovely I decline to take control of any more colonies for now. In fact, it’s probably better for my mental health to not even look at them anymore.  Turn 245 sees our Terran friends spam more trade requests at us. It’s like the AI is aware we have to agree if we want to remain friends. Considering the AI can just randomly decide to be at war anyway, this seems rather cruel. If you look closely, we now have a second big green bar in our research window. That’s because I finally realized I was pumping our research into the wrong thing and switched. This is the symbol for shield generators and in just a few turns more, we’ll finish this research. Also please note, that symbol wedged in between the green bars, is propulsion research. Trying to research the next step up ate our combined research for multiple turns and created only this tiny green sliver. So yeah, there may be only five levels of research per category, but the exponential growth of research costs will still make this take some effort.  Another turn later and we claim another barely sustainable colony. Ironically, the planet this moon orbits is exactly the same kind of poo poo, just slightly bigger. But while this made the Aras claim the planet first, my experience shows planetary building maps aren’t actually that varied in size, so the Aras aren’t getting anything from having the bigger stellar object here. Maybe this could be a pro-strat if you want to play this game by yourselves: Always try to only get the second-best colony in a system, to lure the AI into fighting among themselves for the better planets.  Some more insane trades follow. Especially the Aras, with their nearly 9k-demand for our consumer goods, make me feel like we’re subsidizing our neighbors. I had to actually go to a second planet to not crash our population growth. 9K consumer goods was more than our capital planet production, and after multiple trades like this, our storage on Shaulires II was slowly running out. What are the Aras doing that they need this much food/video games from us?  At least our shield research is nearly finished. We’re also up to 18 systems now.  Borekamal II-1 is our newest colony. This tiny moon is very marginal, but I’m desperate for a fourth ship building colony so I’ll take the risk to control this one by myself.  Asa I-1, which is far easier to type, was our last new colony and it apparently has nearly three times the free space for buildings. But it also only has about half the habitability, so it would be an absolute pain to build up. Thanks, but that’s a job I’ll leave to the AI.  Turn 248: Suddenly, Vlaht-Om, our main lady’s first officer, storms into her office with important news: We managed to replicate the newest Terran shield generation technology!  Our new shields are high-energy shields. Our ships can now use ultra-heavy, extremely dense shield generators to generate shield bubbles that in turn, are also have far more energy density then before. In practice, every new ship design will have shields that are approximately 33% stronger. Ironically not because of how more awesome our new shields are, but instead it’s because this new component makes our ships tick over into a new size category, which comes with a buff to all stats.  This turn also livens up the cluster map, as suddenly there are now multiple fleets not ours moving around.  All of them seem to go to this place: The tiny moon Al Nikath III-2 and its Blues colony. Over a hundred ships in total. If those fleets aren’t allies, that battle will be an absolute clusterfuck. As this system has tons of Blues-colonies in it, I think we’re seeing part of a concentrated effort to target the natives, as the Blues are programmed to always be hostile to everyone, so the AI-empires will eventually all gang up on them. I’m kind of fine with this, as this means less headaches for our own plans.  Our current heavy cruiser design, the “Tail Cruiser”.  And this are the new stats after we get better shields. Turns out the new “ultra-heavy” generators are so big our ships are now 2,5x as long! I’m holding off on new designs until the new armor research is finished, as that takes literally less time than finishing the two Tail Cruisers currently in construction. By the way, following official Perry Rhodan nomenclature, our new 1000m-long rockets are “battlecruisers”, and due to differences in available internal volume, are the equivalent of a Terran 500m battlecruiser. Luckily our space infrastructure is running far in front of our shipbuilding technology, as even our older spaceports already support ships up to battlecruiser-size. The bigger ones we’re currently building can already sustain the size above that, though it’s one we won’t see for quite some time, thanks to the exponentially higher research cost needed for the B-level components. That’s All, Folks! And that’s it for this update. Next up on my list is going through a bunch of forgotten screenshots for my other LP and making a new update out of that mess. But this LP will definitely see more updates, now that I’ve finally recovered enough to only need 6 eye drops from only 3 different medications a day! (Though still, doing all this writing would kill me if it weren’t for dark mode on my text editor.) Honestly, on the weekend I may even be recovered enough to continue my video LP! Maybe even finish it, as I was just about to finish the last game of the trilogy covered in it. To Be Continued
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Mar 17, 2023 15:05
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Glad to see the update resuming! Since it's been a while, and I forget whether we've heard a response to this yet, how canon is Operation Eastside?
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Mar 17, 2023 15:31
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PurpleXVI posted:Glad to see the update resuming! In a way, everything is neatly tied up to make sure the player can't derail the setting: You're sent to one specific star cluster in the Eastside, far away from the actual planets the protagonists later visit, the timescale is (probably accidentally) short enough the entire game can take place in a couple of years, and you start by dismantling the ship you came with for resources, cutting you off from communication and support by your homeworlds. On the other hand, we're clearly entering some nonsense-territory with how fast the colonists in New Homellete were able to defeat the invincibility-hack the Blues are rocking with. That took a lot more effort in the actual series. Clearly, we're not fighting the Gataser here (the Blues-clan that is the currently ruling clan of the Blues Empire) and it's my head canon that the local Blues only have some lovely, reverse-engineered version of the Gataser super-armor, and nothing we do here in this cluster will help the rest of the galaxy defend against the Blues. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised at how fast-paced the game is. Seems like the planetary maps are kind of a smoke and mirror effect, as only if you actually actively try to play every single planet as their own Sim City run will the game slow down enough you start thinking this game is actually a lot longer than it is. We took a fairly big map and are already 1/3rd down the road to victory, on the highest difficulty setting. Originally I had planned to count the turns as days, so I can post concurrently poo poo happening when the protagonists get around to it, but now it seems the game will be over before anything interesting happens in the lore, which is a shame. Ironically, making turns into weeks or months wouldn't work with the internal pace of the game, as then a lot of the constructions would seem insanely slow compared with how things are normally going in Perry Rhodan. Also, we would have overshot our lore already. And turns that are like, 2 days sound dumb. Anyway! I did my best to hide the seams, but overall I think the official position in canon for this game is "debatable". If you try really hard, you can make it fit because nothing we do ultimately matters in the grand scheme of things, but from a certain point of view, it's also a bunch of total nonsense. The population growth alone is a big headache for canonicity: With the resources here in the Eastside, our pop growth only works if each turn is multiple years as cloning on this scale isn't a thing in this era of the setting. But then you have very simple buildings also taking years to build, in a society where robots can construct an entire city in a matter of days. (That's what that weird workaround with "big one-way transmitters send colonists into the Eastside" is all about, and why sometimes important messages can reach us: A total isolation wouldn't work with the mechanics, despite what the background story of the game claims. It's a crutch to fit the game into the larger canon without breaking anything.) Libluini fucked around with this message at 15:59 on Mar 17, 2023 |
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Mar 17, 2023 15:56
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Libluini posted:DEEP LORE I think I've said it before, while I'm never going to read any Perry Rhodan itself, I find these lore breakdowns super interesting.
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Mar 17, 2023 17:04
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Also the population growth sure is interesting in such a short time frame, I don't recall industrial cloning and mind flash copying machines being a thing in PR.
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Mar 18, 2023 01:42
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SIGSEGV posted:Also the population growth sure is interesting in such a short time frame, I don't recall industrial cloning and mind flash copying machines being a thing in PR. Yeah, I'd really like to know how development of Operation Eastside went. Either it was never planned to give the player an actual time frame, because of problems like this, or at some point they must have realized that every possible answer to the question "how long is a turn?" would be silly in some way, so they just cut back to unlabeled turns of arbitrary length.
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Mar 18, 2023 13:16
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Little thread update: After having some eye surgery, I had to get some more eye surgery around Easter. I'm now slowly getting back into the swing of things, but the near future has some more eye surgery prepared for me, so I can't really say when I can stare at a screen for long enough to pump out more updates. Hopefully I get some good news from hospital-checkup in a couple days, but it doesn't look good. Also, my boss would like to preserve some of that eye strain for my actual work, since I just lost an entire month worth of time to my health problems. Again. Since I'm not getting paid for writing LPs, having to cut back on computer time at home of course means an even slower update rate. Next up, I'll try to at least finish my video LP, since I at least don't have to write a lot for that one.
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May 1, 2023 16:07
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Look on the bright side, this is increasing your chance of holding the crown for "longest-running SA LP."
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May 1, 2023 19:55
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yeah, but I'd like to avoid "longest running unfinished SA LP", so I have to step carefully, at least until I go blind at a rate slower than my progress through my threads
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May 1, 2023 20:19
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OK, I managed to fumble my way through a new play session. I'm currently writing the next update. Arrival date: Sometime next week!
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Jul 1, 2023 20:06
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Reptile Rising 15: Mystery Blues Finally, a new update! Mission Log 013: 18th September 2326 For now, things seem to remain peaceful. As peaceful as things can be in New Homellete, with all those mammals fighting each other. Though I do not want to be unfair, we know next to nothing about what the Terrans call the “Blues”. From intercepted and translated communications, we think their actual name for themselves would sound more like “Yülziish”, but no Topsider can pronounce that without breaking her tongue. Still, if we can end the hostilities with diplomacy, using their actual name will probably go over better. For now, we have concentrated on founding new outposts, to strengthen our claim on this cluster. We are also busy increasing our shipyard capacity, as the amount of resources our Non-Topsidian neighbors are putting into establishing their space forces is disturbing, to put it mildly. We must remain strong, if we want the United Empire to grant us political oversight over the colonies of this cluster. Otherwise, we would be dragged into a war we can not win. The few research capabilities we have established locally, are sadly still to understaffed to produce more results than occasionally “discovering” some advanced bit of Terran or Arkonid technology. While I’m still glad we do not have to rely solely on our own technology, not when surrounded by potential enemies, it will still bite us in the tail if the Blues come for us in strength: We still have found no way to penetrate their strange ship armor. Even after ordering our researchers to concentrate on what intercepted communication from Terran sources call “Molkex”, we are still scraping around in the swamp. No dry desert in sight. Our researchers claim we should try to get a sample of the ship armor, and I concur. Since this cluster is densely settled by the Blues, my subordinates and I have deduced that there’s a high chance that somewhere in this cluster mus be a source for the material Blues-armor is made out of. Otherwise, why would every single ship, even the ones constructed locally, be so easily equipped with them? Until our scouts can find a potential “Molkex”-source, our research has been redirected into more productive areas. Hopefully we can avoid clashes with the Blues. I am still mad at our current “allies” not being willing to share their Anti-Blues weapons with us. Ob-Tubthor Eresh-Thel, commanding officer Project Egg-Layer  The situation we left, on turn 248 (or “31st August 2326”): I’m busy tearing down old science buildings, to replace them with new ones.  On this turn, I do the exact thing I said last time I didn’t want to do, after seeing how much shield strength improves with our new shields. This is our old Tail-class cruiser.  This is our new (heavy) Topsid-class cruiser. Look at that! Shield-strength is vastly improved, and I even managed to min-max a little bit more hull-strength without making the new class slower.  Since our current space ports can handle 1km melon-rockets, I went ahead and ordered a lot of them.  Same thing with our colonizer-designs: The “Heavy Egg” was, like the name implies, a bit slow and with painfully weak D-level shields.  The return of the “Nestbringer”: Our new intermediary design has weaker hull, but stronger shields, plus is a bit faster. Since shields regenerate, this new model is a lot better at surviving fights if it gets caught.  Some of the other colonies I control directly, like Sculima IV, are also now slowly starting to produce ships. With everyone filling up their battlemaps with maximum size fleets, the day we could reliably defend a colony with a single, very fast ship, are slowly coming to an end. We could probably still pull it off, but an important thing to remember that against big fleets, this trick has zero margin for error: You can’t have any planetary defenses, for example. If the enemy fleet drives over to your colony and shoots them, even for a single turn, the timer for no combat resets and the maps are too small for a single ship to escape after that. With zero defenses, even the fastest possible fleet will fly to the planet first, and then waste a turn not doing anything. If you immediately moved your defender to the opposite end of the map, the enemy will still not be able to shoot you on the second turn. Then the battle will end and the enemy will be forced to retreat. And because of how incredibly tiny the battlemaps are, a single shot fired on a single defense installation on a planet will gently caress this up and you won’t escape. Well, not without losing the colony, anyway! Defeating attacks by destroying the attackers’ ships is more work, but also less fiddly: You just need a lot of ships and defenses that will keep shooting. No-one cares if you gently caress up what a single ship out of 50 is doing. We’ll do that in the future.  Next turn, not much happens. Some more trades. Though I’m again noting how this little cluster seems to have a real problem with feeding the demand on light industry and consumer goods. Kind of apt for a bunch of new colonies far away from home. Bad for us though, as light industry and consumer goods is also big in demand for us, and I have to tread carefully to not accidentally gently caress myself over by giving our competitors too much of our stuff. This turn, Akons and Aras want some poo poo, and I can accept. This will not always be the case.  I’m also doing this: I’ve spend the last turns slowly building up a batch of new colonizers, and now I’ve send them off, all at once, targeting unknown systems. Smart people who remember that this game doesn’t give a gently caress about military conquest and only counts the number of colonies towards your victory points, regardless of how you get them or how well-run they are, suddenly realize what my secret plan is going to be.  In turn 250, we stumble over another system with a really good planet, place of a strong Terran colony. Well, too bad. It’s too early to provoke AI-players too much, so this ship is going to move onwards to a new system.  And this is the reason: Now that our growing number of defended colonies and ship movements create a bigger and bigger bubble of space in our sensor range, we start detecting more and more AI-fleets moving around. Also look at all those confirmed Blues-colonies! Even without the need for conquest, this cluster is a potentially dangerous place. On the other hand, current AI-hostility is incredibly low: Only Mehandor (red space Vikings) and the Blues aren’t currently trading with us, and of them the Mehandor and us have not enough shared space to even find each other, and the Blues will only attack us if we aggressively move into their systems. This would change incredibly fast if I’d actually be dumb enough to conduct some invasions, then all those fuckers would be suddenly on us like flies on a corpse.  Turn 251, and I suddenly notice that the research into the natives’ super-armor is struggling, because I unwisely changed research-direction without remembering that at least this first step must be completed before other research is allowed.  Case in point: One turn after correcting my research back to the mysterious Molkex, our “weapon”-research jumps forward, indicating that our weapon engineers are again experimenting on how to break the invincible armor coating of native ships.  There are also new trades, even including a really good one: While the Terrans just want to unload surplus heavy industry on us, the Aras are willing to give us B-level ship hulls. Too bad the UI is preventing us from accepting any trades if one of them is far too much for us. If you look closely, you’ll see that while the trade window allows you to send goods in their 6-digits if your local transmitter network can deal with the strain, the display-window only has room for 4-digits, meaning that in some edge cases, like probably the research-trade offered by the Aras, there’s another digit out of sight, and this probably means the Aras demand more light industry than we currently have on Shaulires II (and even less on other colonies). Consequently, we can’t agree to this rare tech-trade offer. Sucks to be us. The Terrans want enough consumer goods to immediately let everyone starve on Shaulires II, and want to take another chunk out of our light industry. Luckily the UI can get hosed if one of the trades is out-of-bounds, like the Aras-trade, and therefore we can’t bankrupt ourselves with those bad trades, since the impossible Aras-trade can’t be taken, which blocks us out of all of these trades. Ah, the wonders of wonky 4x programming.  One of our colonizing expeditions stumbles over this little wonder of a stellar object: Scusahe V-5 is barely tolerable, but since it’s still better than nothing, I’m ordering the ship waiting at the sun to saunter over and drop a colony here.  Soon our rapturous reptilian researchers will know how to deal with the pesky Molkex-problem!  Yikes. The landing pod can only generate 16% of the consumer goods needed to keep this colony running. Scusahe V-5 is clearly below the spot where a colony can be made prosperous, this is probably not even a viable colony at all.  Game mechanics in Operation Eastside can be a bit depressing sometimes. Our new colony on Asda I-1, like the one on Scusahe V-5, is on a marginal world, which makes getting anywhere extremely hard, if not impossible. But Asda I-1 also has a giant, mostly empty surface, which you can absolutely plaster with the amount of buildings necessary to keep everyone alive. In another world, Operation Eastside would have been a more Sim City like game, and maps like these ones would have been a nice challenge to overcome. But well this is a space 4x, and have you tried playing 20+ different runs of Sim City, all at once? Yeah, that’s not gonna work out well for you. Our new colonies therefore all get put into AI-control. After all, even if every single Topsider in them dies, it still counts towards victory!  Did you know the Aras are the best at research? This is the second time they’re trying to offload some of their superior research to get resources they clearly don’t have enough off. And this time, we have enough light industry to satisfy both their trades: The lovely one that only gives us more heavy industry, and the unexpectedly good one, where we gain maximum research in agriculture. Hot drat, that’s one research category already finished and done forever. Maybe the AI shouldn’t actually be able to give away this kind of research for what is basically for free? I’m not complaining, just pointing out this is the highest difficulty level, and if this happens a couple more time, the race with the worst research has reached science parity with everyone else. Kind of funny how bad AI sometimes makes higher difficulties actually easier, since the limited tech tree means the giant AI-bonuses lets them breeze through the entire tree in short order. And then the player, lagging far behind, is just a couple of lucky trade offers away from maxing out their tech tree, too. And as soon as that happens, we can rip out all the now useless research buildings to get more population, production and planetary defense. Which the AI can’t really match apart from difficulty bonuses: The AI doesn’t know full research means it can now stop researching. In fact, telling the AI to do this could easily cripple it if the programmers overlook an edge case somewhere and the AI stops research too early. And so the devs of OE wisely didn’t do this. We, the human player, can of course massively exploit this knowledge.  Of course, the sudden boost to Agriculture Level A gifted us a lot of new agricultural production centers all at once. The first is also the last one to only use 1 tile: The Hydroponic Double-Facility. Again, a large boost compared to our old C-level buildings, but it also needs more material and population to both build and run.  Next up: The B-level inefficient monstrosity. Like all B-level 4-tile production buildings, it confusingly produces less than just using 4 1-tile buildings. And while sometimes, those buildings at least use less resources to run, the Planetary Supplier Type Cosmos is not one of them. It’s a building you maybe build one time as a novelty, and then never again.  OK, this is getting weird: The Supply Center is an A-level, 1-tile building. Not only is it the best source for consumer goods in the game, I was also wrong about no more 1-tile buildings after level B. Instead you get 3 new buildings with level A, instead of two. Well, I can’t complain, as this thing has nearly twice the production, but doesn’t need that much more population and resources to keep running.  The System Supplier Terraform-Class is the last 4-tile agriculture building. And it’s the first 4-tile building I see that’s actually more productive than just plastering the corresponding 1-tile buildings everywhere: The math says that this thing produces as much as 5x 1-tile versions. So sure, it’s more expensive to run than even that, but it’s actually giving you more consumer goods in turn. Finally a multi-tile production building you can trust!  And then you see our fist 9-tile building and suddenly, you are thankful that the smaller versions exist. I don’t know what wen wrong here, this giant 9-tile hog produces half of what the 4-tile buildings produce. It’s a lot cheaper to run, but 1500 production for 9 tiles is insanely wasteful. I’m guessing another typo caused this massive Hydroponics Center to get butterfingered down from 15000 consumer goods. Or maybe it was supposed to be 5000 instead of 1500? Both would make a lot more sense, since otherwise the most optimal configuration would be 2x 4-tile buildings and then a single 1-tile building, which in total would produce something along the line of 6600 units. Or I guess you could put down one of these on the same space and instead drop your production down to 1500. It’s your choice. Anyway, this building is very cheap to run for its size, so my guess is the original plan was the 5k-production, and then someone did an oopsie.  Since our capital needs it the most, I immediately start tearing down old buildings for the newer ones. The jump of C-level to A-level is colossal enough to even make the short dip from ripping down the bigger buildings a necessary evil.  The colony on our capital’s moon even gets the gigantic bad idea building, simply so you can see how it looks. This here is the construction site.  One turn later: The giant waste of space in its full glory.  Our capital is space-impaired enough I’m only willing to use far saner 4-tile version. The agricultural output has already visibly increased.  The following turns, I’m busy as gently caress. New colonies on the worst planets imaginable are being founded, while I’m juggling trades, replacing buildings, deal with building up the secondary colonies, and watching the star map like a hawk, so I won’t be surprised by hostile forces dropping by for a visit.  The poor bastards who are forced to settle on planets like this only deserve our pity.  Some of the planned future colonies are even worse than this lump of rock here. This kind of painfully masochistic expansion is certainly not one the devs imagined, I’m guessing. Or they would have made sure lovely colonies eventually just die and disappear.  This is new. Someone actually wants a peace treaty! That’s kind of cute. The Arkonids are now our space friends for real. An official peace treaty is signed between our local colonies.  After the unexpected good news, now the unexpected bad news: Our researchers failed to make any sense of what the heck the Blues are doing to their ships. Our researchers suggest a survey of all of our planets, to hopefully find any samples of this “Molkex”-stuff the natives have plastered all over their ship hulls. Tuphtor Vlaht-Om of course, being the poor bastard who has to tell our main character that our research sucks so bad we had zero results. Though to be fair, this thread runs on 1 turn = 1 logic, so it’s been barely a week or two in-game.  As a consequence, we’re going to switch research to materials. What? We haven’t finished the Anti-Blues Tech Quest yet, and while we now can progress through the tech trees again, I have the feeling weapon tech research may remain broken until we change back to Blues-tech. But we really need better hulls. D-level at this point is just embarrassing.  A couple turns later: We get another tech-trade request. A shitton of heavy industry for level B in guns? Hell yeah, we take it!  Another turn later: C-level hulls are researched, but despite completing the B-level deal, our weapons are stuck at level C. Bug confirmed: Or fuckery working as intended, take your poison. Seems like without continuing the Blues-chain, we can’t actually upgrade our ship weapons. Welp, I guess when programming the Anti-Blue tech, some shortcuts were made that prevent better weapons from simply automatically breaking Blues-hulls. But regardless of intent, until I finish up my next goal (we really need more room for people), our weapons research is stuck.  Time again for science robot! The Arkon-P-Steel is just an even more compressed version of Arkon Steel: Even harder to melt, very good for spaceships. It’s also showcasing what you can do if your methods of propulsion and energy generation are off the charts: Who the gently caress cares that your ship’s mass is now ten times higher??? At least we now may survive a single disintegrator beam for long enough to move out of the way before the entire ship is vaporized. Robot guy, friend of all non-humanoid races in this game. I still love the fact they made all those tiny lizard people animations for the main screen, but somehow couldn’t produce a single, static image for the Topsider research screen. Ah, priorities.  Next step: Better living conditions. And then we have to turn back to the Blues, asap.  To cap things off for now, we make our first 1600m melon-rocket, the equivalent of a Terran 500m spheroid battlecruiser. This is the old heavy cruiser with only improved shields.  This is the Topsid II class, now with better armor and fake improved weapons. Because as long as we don’t do anything about researching Anti-Blues weapons, we don’t get to use the better weapon, clicking on the graphic still has the soothing female voice go “Leichter Desintegrator”, despite the weapon-graphic changing. It’s kind of vexing, but at least the C-level weapons still count towards the hidden ship-class counter, so with all C-level techs, we unlocked battlecruisers now. And as always, skipping up to a bigger size gives our ships a bigger stat boost then just the techs on their own. Just look at those bigger numbers!  Of course our yards immediately start churning out our newer, better ships. They’re a bit hefty on the resources, though: Even our established colonies are dropping into the read until I can get production levels even higher. In fact, our capital can’t build them at all right now. I had to rip out the old space port and start building the next bigger sized one instead, and it’s still not finished this turn.  Currently, four of our colonies can build ships. Our capital is currently replacing its space port to make room for our new class, one is building the new class, one is building our older combat ships until the colony can actually stem the burden of producing heavy combat ships, and this last and youngest one is now churning out colonizers for the secret plan  But not all news are good news: Around turn 266, I’m forced to take a clear look at my attempt to build up a fifth colony by myself. All of this? Completely useless. Even with the newest buildings, the local conditions are bad enough to lower output to the point the colony is just constantly in the red. For a while it looked like I could get ahead of the curve, but every time a building finishes, its lowered output and its heightened run costs combines to make the problem worse.  The colony shows a viability bar that’s deceptively high, but I guess orange being just one step from bright red should have been a warning that something was wrong here. Normally that’s high enough for at least very low positive output. Hell, our 4th shipyard isn’t too far away from this one. As dealing with four Sim City maps simultaneously is already taking up a lot of time, I give up on this colony. That kind of struggle is not worth it if you have better planets.  Oh well, back to AI control you go. At least on all other counts, we made some nice progress this time. Can’t win them all! Topsid Command High Order Level 1 Warning: USO Message Intercepted in Region TO-ES447 Code Rank for Acknowledgement: Ulan-Obtor According to the intercepted message, several colonies in the Eastside have been reporting attacks by creatures now called “Terror Locusts”. Details are missing. Interpreter-Command believes an universal alert for all fleets of the United Empire may be imminent. 25% reliability. Terran and Arkonid governments may ask for assistance in rescue operations soon. 78% reliability. Annotation by Ulan-Obtor Kefhren Hardhoff: It is disturbing how this sudden threat emerged just after a galaxy-wide wave of gravitic shockwaves were detected, crossing through hyperspace. I seriously hope I am wrong in the assumption those two events are related. To Be Continued Libluini fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jul 6, 2023 |
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Jul 6, 2023 21:33
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quote:[img]pes23https://lpix.org/4546511/fpaceOE024.jpgimg] You've got a broken image link for the last of the new agricultural buildings. And also lmao that's one hell of a haul of bugs this time around. I love that the AI can demand more resources in trade than you can literally enter into the game's text boxes.
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Jul 6, 2023 21:54
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PurpleXVI posted:You've got a broken image link for the last of the new agricultural buildings. Oh gently caress, thanks for noticing. Should be repaired now. And, thankfully, the game only very rarely allows the player to actually enter anything into text boxes. Trading is solely done via the sliders. * Which of course makes it worse: The player has no idea if the AI, for example, demands 12000 instead of 92000 units, since more than four digits aren't shown. As long as you don't have the resources, you can't accept. But if you can accept, the AI doesn't give a poo poo about what you thought you were going to give away. So sorry, but now your stockpile of heavy industry is just gone. Too bad. *Note to self: Maybe mention the game's obsession with sliders next time
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Jul 6, 2023 22:02
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Libluini posted:Oh gently caress, thanks for noticing. Should be repaired now. I think the worst Game Sliders I've seen were in Albion.  Have fun entering goddamn codes with sliders! And it goes all the way to 99999.
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Jul 6, 2023 22:08
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PurpleXVI posted:I think the worst Game Sliders I've seen were in Albion. OK, this is so insane, I have to ask: Was Albion also made by Germans? Because I'll have to say, Operation Eastside's attitude of "we don't trust the player to fill out text boxes or set slider positions correctly, so all trades are immediate and as-is, also we trust the player completely and won't ask any questions if they suddenly give away all their poo poo to the AI" is very German, and this slider-insanity feels very German to me, too
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Jul 6, 2023 22:36
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Libluini posted:OK, this is so insane, I have to ask: Was Albion also made by Germans? Oh gently caress it was, Blue Byte was German!  This explains so much.
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Jul 6, 2023 22:39
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Sad to see sliders used for evil, unlike MOO... 1
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Jul 7, 2023 07:53
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Will a colony in the red just slowly decline to zero population but not disappear?
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Jul 9, 2023 00:24
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Decoy Badger posted:Will a colony in the red just slowly decline to zero population but not disappear? This came up a bit in the updates where we actually fought over colonies, but yes. This is because mechanically, the game has to empty out foreign population to clear a conquered colony for you, in this thread I explain this weirdly off-putting mechanic as quiet negotiations leading to the original colonists being send back home. The end result is sometimes a colony can be empty, and if an empty colony disappears, this would open a can of worms. Like for example, what if a bug causes the AI to not immediately move new pops in? What if the player forgets this? Since there was no time to make the war part of the game less janky, there consequently was no time to fill this loop hole.  And so an empty colony will sit there until the player remembers to send some new resources via the transmitter network, including people. (The AI of course will constantly and instantly trade to its lesser colonies, since it can't be overwhelmed by this incredibly tedious task. They are also heavily weighted to only get the best colonies they can, and then fight among each other when they can't find more good ones. This is logically because otherwise, the AI would also be perfectly fine to pay a growing tax of dead people and lost resources to keep their hellworld-colonies running.)
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Jul 9, 2023 17:02
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The next update is gonna get going soon, I've just been delayed by the ultra-combo of heat wave plus long work hours, but with the weather breaking towards sanity tomorrow (allegedly), I have high hopes to churn the next one out before the weekend is over. But I had some time today left over to look into more Perry Rhodan games, since with how short OE turned out to be, I'll probably not be able to squeeze in as many lore posts as I want. So, what new horrors await Non-Germans in the future? -There were some Atari-games that got Perry Rhodan branding, but after a couple years the branding was removed. Since Atari-games are not really complex enough for a screenshot-LP, I'm judging those three old titles to be unworthy. -There was a failed attempt at creating a computer RPG, but the attempt fell through when the development team and FanPro started having huge disagreements. An unfinished, unplayable demo was realized before the deal fell through. Basically a pixel movie. -There are three different Adventure-titles. I was aware of two of them, but didn't realize I only own the newest one! Depending on complexity on how good I can make the two older ones run on a modern machine, that's some potential. Related: This is an old teaser I uploaded back when I still naively thought "lazyness" was the only obstacle to getting poo poo done in my cursed life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRocpVJgAEc It's a short view into the third game. Since adventure-games tend to be rather short now that the internet exists and I can probably find some German walkthroughs if I get stuck, I'll probably roll all three adventures into one thread. Maybe I'll also try to get the weird demo movie of the 1995 RPG that never was, if I can get a CD without paying a hundred bucks on eBay for it. That should be good for a laugh, if properly recorded and uploaded. -After Operation Eastside, several more attempts were made at creating more strategy games, but only for selected phone platforms like iOS and Android. Also one of the two games is dead now, the developer link ends in a 404-error nowadays. Coincidentally, that one got a release on PC, too! The last one is phone-only, and I have no idea how to do a Let's Play of a phone game, or if that is even a good idea. I'll put those travesties of programming on the same list as the Atari-games. Welp! Now to actually finish a Perry Rhodan game so I have a slot free to work on the adventure games without overloading myself with work.  Edit: Huh, maybe I should make a better teaser next time? Or actually get the older games to run first, before I have another embarrassing failure like Stellar Crusade
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Jul 11, 2023 18:37
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You could also break out the pen-and-paper RPG set in the Perry Rhodan-universe. To quote the owner of the shop: "I had no idea we had this in our shop."
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Jul 12, 2023 18:34
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Kodos666 posted:You could also break out the pen-and-paper RPG set in the Perry Rhodan-universe. Could be an interesting thing for this American forum, true. Since it's also based on Midgard, a German RPG that's probably even less known outside our borders than Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye).
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Jul 12, 2023 18:57
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Libluini posted:Could be an interesting thing for this American forum, true. Since it's also based on Midgard, a German RPG that's probably even less known outside our borders than Das Schwarze Auge (The Dark Eye). As an RPG nerd myself I would be VERY interested in this.
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Jul 12, 2023 20:00
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PurpleXVI posted:As an RPG nerd myself I would be VERY interested in this. Well OK then, I'll put it on the list for the PR Adventures Thread. Would only be appropriate, if I'm planning to cover the CRPG that never was. I mean logically, they must have planned to use Midgard-rules for that one, too?
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Jul 13, 2023 07:39
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PurpleXVI posted:As an RPG nerd myself I would be VERY interested in this. Turns out I even had the demo-CD with the RPG-demo on it at some point! But I took the CD out of the hardcover book it was in and tossed it into a huge mountain of old CDs I still haven't sorted through. Luckily, someone sold me the CD on eBay for 5 bucks, so I'm safe even if my own copy turns out to be broken. The game was apparently supposed to run in DOS. In 1995! No wonder the game didn't make it to release, that's some yikes there I also managed to find two of the three PR adventure games on eBay to make sure my next project isn't delayed by me not finding the games when I need them. Also, apparently the third game (which I already own) had a English-language version that was released in the UK. I'm tempted to get that one too, but I'm capped out on frivolous expenses for this month. If I'm close to finishing this thread next month, I'll probably add it to the pile just so I can look at the translation* *also I didn't want to buy this version in case it turns out my old game CD already has an English version on it, because that would have been embarrassing, I want to check this first Perry in Pen&Paper Midgard is still supported today, but this game, which is nearly as old as D&D (release 1981), has seemingly stuck in stasis. I'll definitely take a closer look at this game, which allows you to play Elves, Humans, Gnomes and Dwarves, and nothing else, in the year 2023 (In comparison, in the Dark Eye of today, you can even play a bipedal cat, not a catgirl, a cat. A cat with breasts. If you have the right expansions and rule books. Dark Eye is nearly as wild as modern day D&D. I guess because all the boring Germans are playing Midgard.) Since I'm not as interested in playing P&P games (I neither have the time nor do I know people who'd even want to), I'll probably skip buying anything for Midgard and the PR-RPG. Probably. I'm after all, insane. If it's cheap enough, I'll get something to read through. But man, I really wish the makers of the PR RPG would have taken the Dark Eye instead of Midgard as their template. Anyway! For now, I keep playing this game. Hopefully I'll be able to crank out another update on Sunday.
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Jul 13, 2023 19:14
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Welp. Next playsession is done, the writing is ongoing. I'll probably make two updates out of this mess, I kind of got caught up in things and played for too long. Now I have too much material for one post! (I don't want to spoil anything, but we make a weirdly huge jump forward in terms of progression.) Also please people, think of those thread readers with lovely internet and post a bit more so we can get to the next page.
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Jul 15, 2023 21:11
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May your melon rockets find victory.
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Jul 15, 2023 21:36
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May your victories find melon rockets waiting at their end. Will we be asking, "Blue who?" at the end of the current backload?
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Jul 16, 2023 00:59
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Libluini posted:Welp. Next playsession is done, the writing is ongoing. I'll probably make two updates out of this mess, I kind of got caught up in things and played for too long. Now I have too much material for one post! (I don't want to spoil anything, but we make a weirdly huge jump forward in terms of progression.) Did the smoothskins decide to sell you their flashy new tech for a crate of lizard Playstations again?
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Jul 16, 2023 09:52
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Libluini posted:Welp. Next playsession is done, the writing is ongoing. I'll probably make two updates out of this mess, I kind of got caught up in things and played for too long. Now I have too much material for one post! (I don't want to spoil anything, but we make a weirdly huge jump forward in terms of progression.) One small step for a lizard, one weirdly huge jump forward for lizardkind.
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Jul 16, 2023 12:43
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Friend Commuter posted:Did the smoothskins decide to sell you their flashy new tech for a crate of lizard Playstations again? I'm fighting so hard right now not to spoil anything. Curse your basic pattern recognition ability!
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Jul 16, 2023 12:59
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Libluini posted:I'm fighting so hard right now not to spoil anything. You're welcome!
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Jul 16, 2023 13:16
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Friend Commuter posted:You're welcome! Or am I misdirecting? So, the next update is written, screenshots are uploaded, I'm just dealing with some minor last-minute stuff like setting proper links and writing the piece of intro fiction. I'm just mentioning this because I really don't want the update to end up literally being the last post on this side
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Jul 16, 2023 14:03
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I admire the commitment to pushing things off, I'm pretty sure my threads just straight up make people's computers explode with the number of images present. Nevertheless, here's another leap towards colonizing the next page.
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Jul 16, 2023 14:08
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