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Well, there goes that fleet. There's still a chance of recovery though, right?
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Jun 11, 2017 18:39
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 67: TOTAL WAR OK Klackons, it’s ON!  But before we can start to prepare for our counter-offensive, turn 206 begins with some more spy-news: Agent Löwe stumbles directly into a Raas-interrogation chamber while trying to cross the border. Man, that's some bad luck right there. In other news, some of our trading partners have a run-in with deadly assassins and disappear forever. Ouch.  OK, done. Now it's time to think about what happened to us last time. The Klackons absolutely schooled us. So what went wrong? Welp, my first stop to solve this mystery was our tech-screen. I switched to the Vchiitri Empire to see what the Klackons actually have, and was kind of relieved to find them still lagging behind in everything. Weaker shields, weaker weapons, weaker everything. Even their missile-tech (here demonstrated by the “Neutron Shock”-warhead technology) is lagging behind, and their entire fleet is mostly missile-based!  The strangest thing is, they even have weaker shields than us, and are still a long way from drawing even. (They have the weaker Class III layered gravitational shields, instead of our fancy Class IV [insert ludicrous sounding German SF-term] shields.) I have to confess, I'm feeling a bit confused here: With their technology being that much worse than ours, we should have been able to fight at least on even terms, with their numbers negating our tech-advantage. It certainly looks like our bad pathfinding cost us the victory here!  Next step on our list: It's time to go through our reserves and eliminate as many of our obsolete ships as possible. This will lower our fleet upkeep a little bit, and gift us some extra money back for future constructions.  Ugh, that screenshot turned out ugly. Anyway, with Daegwin 100% ours, there's no reason to keep all those ships flying around. A couple ships stay to combat piracy (nothing is more annoying than some backwater drowning in unrest because of pirates wreaking havoc), the rest gets their task forces disbanded. And in up to ten turns we can scrap those ships, too!   Yes, surprise! The Raas-colony on Daegwin III finally gave up and vanished. And to make sure it stays this way, we'll throw a colony ship on the planet asap. Yellow 1 (just one tiny step below green) for Silicoids and again very mineral rich. This planet is quite good, even bombed to poo poo. What's better, our Silicoids will be able to exploit this planet much better. Is what I'd like to say, but we need industry and research now, both to keep our tech-advantage and to rebuild our fleet. We'll still put down some mining DEAs, of course. It would be wasteful otherwise. Just not that many.  And now the hammer comes down: With the incredibly devastating defeat from last cycle, the Kingdom of Almandin has been thrown into political turmoil. Now the chaos slowly abides, and what is left of the current government decides to finally fully mobilize the entire Kingdom. As long as the Kingdom is threatened on three sides, there can't be another choice, if Silicoid democracy wants to survive: Total War is declared. In game mechanic terms, now two things will happen: Our AI will boost its military expenses a lot and both we and the AI will generate less unrest when doing this. Or to be more precise, under our old setting of “Restricted Warfare”, manual emergency measures could sometimes generate extra unrest. Now we're in a situation where only the threshold of diminishing returns can stop us. (By which I mean the handful of situations where a player needs to concentrate above 50% industrial output on their military queues are incredibly rare, so that extra unrest isn't something we will see ever again under this setting.)  Ironically, with the way the economy works in MO3, most of our industrial powerhouses can't actually use up all that fresh new and unrest-free capacity. Innar II for example, reaches orange-levels of diminishing returns when I'm just putting in 15% boost. Still, at least I can take this chance to build more ships! After some more single-queue spots to give us an emergency task force of battleships, Innar II will start building battleships five at a time. It'll take longer, but we will be spared the cost of uselessly paying upkeep for 1-4 ships, waiting for the others to be finished. As a reminder: When you put resources of your planet (money), into one of your build-sliders, the sliders start at green and progressively become redder the more of your planet's tax output is added in. When the color starts changing away from green, the amount of production or research you can get from your money starts dropping fast. So in this case, while I could put more into military construction, I can actually only reduce build-time of our battleship-program by about 1-2 turns before we start just burning money. And squeezing out those 1-2 extra turns would be like cleaning toilets with 100$-bills. Incredibly wasteful. 15% is basically the sweet spot for Innar II as it is right now.  The same goes for Almandin IV: In this case, lower population and lower tax base combines to allow us to go up to 20% production boost before we start reducing our income. However, Almandin IV's lower industrial output even at higher boosting-percentages means our new gold-class carriers will be build at a slightly slower pace.  But don't worry! The total mobilization means we started building our capital ships in more than just two or three places: The entirety of our main industrial centers now churns out battleships like there's no tomorrow. The AI and some of our lesser colonies will take over the task of building support ships.  Of course, as impressive as all this industrial might is, we're still a primarily Silicoid-empire. Which means to build ships as fast as a comparable empire, we need to have actually more bonuses stacked on top of each other from race creation and techs. Being equal wouldn't actually work, thanks to the inherent hidden penalty to industrial production in Silicoids. This means we will be forced to wait, while our shipyards grow all those expensive crystal-parts they need for our new ships. We need time. And so the Almandian Army has decided to concentrate multiple army on every single planet we control in the Tali-system. The Klackons won't be allowed to commit more atrocities against the Psilons without a fight. This way, we either force the Klackons to wait to amass more troops, or we get better chances for at least holding out on the ground for more than one turn.  With our preparations done, we can only do our best to hang on while the Klackons basically can do whatever they want. On the other side of the Kingdom, the Raas also do the best they can. In both cases, this means losing. The only difference between us and the Dila Empire is: We still have a chance, they don't.  Another difference: While the Klackon-AI is willing to wait until they have overwhelming force, the Raas-AI just sends in whatever they have available. Cue our blocking force in Theta Indi slaughtering some more hapless Raas-spacers.  At least the Ultima-Orion AI upgrade means the commanders on the ground can make the smart tactical decision to immediately run away like this. Even if it is annoying, this at least allows the player to pretend the MO3-AI isn't braindead. For a while, that is.  Strangely enough, while we keep bombing Raas-planets, the Klackons refuse to move against us. Well, good then.   Turn 207 rolls around. We still don't have a fleet capable of taking on the Klackons, while this long string of bombardment-messages shows that at least our Raas-front is safe.  Not everything is about war, though: Didi Hallervorden keeps dying and upsetting our population with his death. But don't worry! Another spy-technology has entered prototype-stage: From next turn on forward, the PSI-Signature Damper will allow our spies to more easily avoid capture when in enemy territory. Operation Payback XIII is already being planned in the holy halls of the AIA. Oh, and there is some diplomacy to be done, too. Hopefully the message we received has nothing to do with our leader Iggy Pop Dumb Name dropping dead.  Nnnnnnope, it's just the Imsaies telling us how awesome we are for doing our alliance-duty of declaring war to someone we were already at war with. Diplomacy! Just a standard message telling us our relations are getting better.  The Vchiitri Empire keeps its insanely huge fleet together. There are still 352 ships hovering around inside the Tali-system. It'll be interesting to see what happens first: Our counter-offensive or the Klackons finally getting their poo poo together and doing something besides waiting.  During the turmoil of the last few cycles after the Great Defeat in Tali, not much diplomacy with alien empires was conducted. Now that the turmoil is over and the Kingdom of Almandin is mobilizing the entire nation for war, our diplomats decide to stall for time. A carefully worded offer is send to the Klackons, asking the Vchiitri Empire for a short cease-fire. ”Short” in this context of course meaning multiple cycles (which at roughly 1,5 years per cycle adds up to about a decade at the minimum). Yeah, interstellar distances are a bitch.  In the following combat phase, nothing interesting happens: The Klackons still refuse to move, and the Raas get some more punches straight into their stupid snouts.  All three of these Raas-colonies are basically destroyed, their population sits at zero. Thanks to the automatic migration mechanic, this means nothing. It will take a couple more turns for the Dila Empire to actually lose control, thanks to the auto-migration shoveling more victims onto those planets each turn. In a sane game, a colony being destroyed would actually mean it's destroyed. But in MO3, a planet can survive sitting at zero population for quite some time. If it happens to you, you will be glad because the AI gets stuck on your planet. If it happens to your enemies, you will be annoyed because your fleet gets stuck on their planet. poo poo happens.  Galactic Cycle 312 starts with some important news: Agent Resonanz joins the AIA, and Ihavaxi Buskylo joins our council of I can only marvel at the names the game can come up with. I looked this up in the files: There's a ton of descriptions and name-parts, and the game can actually assemble new leaders out of those blocks, like some kind of leader-Lego. Though I have no idea if the vanilla-game could do this already, or if this was an addition by the mod.  Agent Resonanz is the first of our latest batch of espionage hackers. The other two of the trio are still in training. With mantle 5 and dagger 3 he is rather mediocre, though. A dud. Welp, spy-defense has to be done by someone, too. I guess.  Speaking of duds, Ihavaxi Buskylo turned out to be not exactly great, either: He is some kind of tiny (20 cm when fully spread out) blob-like thing. He gives us a great bonus to diplomacy, a mediocre bonus to spy-luck (+5% would turn luck 39 into luck 41, not exactly a game changer) and whatever he is doing makes our system taxes crash badly and we lose 5% income. No thanks. We don't need more diplomacy-bonuses when we're surrounded by two mortal enemies and a staunch ally. We're already at near maximum relations with the Imsaies and 13% more perfection is still perfection. And our enemies certainly won't stop hating us just because our diplomatic messages are suddenly 13% more polite. Even if it's not much, the luck-bonus for spies would have been neat. But not neat enough to off-set a 5% system tax penalty. Just to remind you, the system tax is collected from the entire output of a system's planets combined. 5% of that is a huge, huge sum. This guy was thrown out so fast I even immediately forgot what species he was. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 2-3: Nothing new. Expedition 1: Excavation continues. Next: Another Kind of Bug
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Jun 25, 2017 11:18
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So Tachidi or a computer bug.
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Jun 25, 2017 18:07
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habituallyred posted:So Tachidi or a computer bug. Oh boy, if you knew... This next week will be hard, I want to post about what happened so badly, but I have to write the next update first Edit: On a completely unrelated note, has someone experience on making MO3 run on Win10? (It's really 100% unrelated, honest! Just an additional problem I ran into!)
Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Jun 25, 2017 |
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Jun 25, 2017 18:26
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Does asking the Klackon for a temporary cease fire have any costs, or is it just something you may as well do whatever the odds?
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Jun 25, 2017 20:37
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Glazius posted:Does asking the Klackon for a temporary cease fire have any costs, or is it just something you may as well do whatever the odds? The only thing it costs is the time it takes to click through the interface to send the message Well OK, if it fails it will also reduce our relations to the Klackons a bit, but it's not like there's a special level below "bitter hate" we could unlock, so it will have no effect.
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Jun 25, 2017 22:22
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I have MOO3 on Steam and it works fine. Weird the Klackons have that massive deathstack of ships and aren't bombarding, aren't invading.. Just have three hundred and fifty ships in orbit. Not that it's a bad thing for you, but just seems weird even by the AI. So what are the odds of the Klackons responding receptively to the cease-fire? And I've always found the MOO3 method of population under X amount means you cannot invade, cannot bombard them, have to wait for them to starve out to be annoyingly weird too. With any of the remaining Dino planets it worth invading them or just bombarding them to gravel to take over at this rate and slowly genocide them or drop colony transports/migration onto?
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Jun 26, 2017 07:41
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wedgekree posted:I have MOO3 on Steam and it works fine. I have the original discs, which involves a lot more fiddling. That said, it's good to hear MO3 works on Win10, this removes one headache I had. Also if everything breaks down (see next update for as to why that may happen), I can still re-install everything on my old Win7-notebook, migrate the saves, and re-start the LP. So it's not like the LP-Curse is striking me down, we will just lose a bit more time. On the Klackons: Experience shows me the chances of them accepting a cease-fire are about 0,1%. In ca. 12+ years of playing MO3, I have never seen these options work on the AI. The AI will sometimes start begging for mercy if they are the ones getting crushed, though. On the Raas. Technically, most of their planets are good for taking over. The problem is, the planets we want (good for Raas, bad for Silicoids), are also the ones where the Raas have the best chances at driving us off from the planet. This means we're in this odd situation where the optimal choice would be to bombard the planets we can colonize the best and liberate the planets best suited for Raas. But if we do that, the war will turn into an even more terrible slog, since instead to wait around until a colony is destroyed, we now have to deal with ground combat slowing everything down. Ground combat will resume after we stopped the dreaded Vchiitri Empire from being an existential threat to us. Right now I'm concentrating on bringing down that huge Klackon-fleet at our border. Libluini fucked around with this message at 11:00 on Jun 26, 2017 |
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Jun 26, 2017 10:55
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Libluini posted:On the Raas. Technically, most of their planets are good for taking over. The problem is, the planets we want (good for Raas, bad for Silicoids), are also the ones where the Raas have the best chances at driving us off from the planet. This means we're in this odd situation where the optimal choice would be to bombard the planets we can colonize the best and liberate the planets best suited for Raas. But if we do that, the war will turn into an even more terrible slog, since instead to wait around until a colony is destroyed, we now have to deal with ground combat slowing everything down. Now that you have more than one race in your empire, is there any way to designate planets to be settled by specific races, or do you just have to pray that you get the right one on the right planet?
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Jun 26, 2017 15:51
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sheep-dodger posted:Now that you have more than one race in your empire, is there any way to designate planets to be settled by specific races, or do you just have to pray that you get the right one on the right planet? Directly?  , no.You can indirectly influence settling by specific races by building colony ships on planets where a certain race has a majority, then you can send colony ships with the right race to the right planet. Drawbacks of this: -As long as there are colonizable planets, the AI will build their own colony ships. This is entirely random and can lead to dumb poo poo like the one colony of Ithkul you accidentally got suddenly colonizing all the planets in their vicinity. -Automatic migration will sometimes just auto-colonize when enough migration pressure hits an empty planet inside your border. Of course the race ending up there will be the one the game thinks should be there. This may conflict with your own wishes. Both mechanics taken together mean that sometimes the AI will send the worst possible space people to their equivalent of hell just because their colony ship happened to be build when that one planet was free, while the auto-migration then slowly replaces the dying colonists with people who are actually suited to that planet. You may notice however, that this is the opposite of "planning"
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Jun 26, 2017 17:40
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Libluini posted:Directly? Why did I even ask?
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Jun 26, 2017 22:19
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Yeah... this game sounds like it's only really enjoyable if you like jank for some reason. Uh, no offence to anyone who does.
I can have moments of... eccentricity and sometimes be quite curious about things. Please forgive me if I do something foolish or rude.
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Jun 26, 2017 22:40
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In a...more advanced game engine, this would be interesting and a sign of a more lively universe. Private enterprise and the like filling all space regardless of what the government thinks. I'm reminded of one quote from Alpha Centauri for the Planetary Transit System. Hang on... "As distances vanish and the people can flow freely from place to place, society will cross a psychological specific heat boundary and enter a new state. No longer a solid or liquid, we have become as a vapor and will expand to fill all available space. And like a gas, we shall not be easily contained." -- Sister Miriam Godwinson, "But for the Grace of God" Distant Worlds can do auto-colonising, but in truth you'd generally want to direct it yourself anyway. Hmm. The damming thing is I can see what they might have been going for. The best thing to say is 'it's nice to watch, but I'm glad it's you playing it'. Bloodly fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Jun 27, 2017 |
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Jun 27, 2017 00:08
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 68: Another Kind of Bug Reminder: Before I started the session this and the last two updates were a part of, I deleted one of the two installations of MO3: Ultima Orion I had on my hard drives. At the end of the session I had played for long enough to notice strange new quirks appearing. Therefore, I decided to dedicate the end of this update to everyone who blindly deletes files.  Turn 208 starts with a bang: The Raas are just on fire today!  Also, surprise! Another of our three Antaran expeditions has found something. Now another excavation is under way. Those strange and foreboding Antaran ruins will give up their secrets yet! Other things new this turn: Our spies can now use PSI-signature dampers when operating in enemy territory and the new and better Zortrium weave enters mass production. Now our armies will fight approximately 1,5% better!!!  Spy news: Agent Löwe faces more torture. On the other hand, another Raas-spy tries to evade capture by accidentally stumbling into the way of a huge energy mining drill and gets pulverized. Comedy!  Still four turns before we can finally build tanks. Our fancy pants space tanks are old news by now, though: Instead the new thing here are the Special Commandos. Commandos make an army they are attached to up to 50% more “efficient”. In game play terms, I think they make units more likely to hit their enemy or something? As always, vague descriptions and observation are your only tools here. What, did you think this game suddenly turned into a better game while you weren’t looking? This is still Master of Orion 3 here, buddy! “Sir, the front has overtaken us just now. Now our own people are shooting us. Great idea, this disguise, Sir.”  News from the war front: The Raas are not giving up and send more transports into the meat grinder that is JustGniess. By now the space around the jump points must be positively choked by debris. The incredible hugeness of space is probably the only reason that there aren’t any collisions every time more Raas-ships jump in.   Just to show you the updated victory-screen: Expeditions 1 and 3 are busy with excavations. Expedition 2 is still somewhere in space, looking for ruins to explore.  Combat! In Space! Our forces in Alahain-B destroy some hastily built system defense. Normally I would again heap tons of scorn on top of the poor AI, but system forces can’t retreat and can’t leave the system, which makes it kind of hard to let a force survive in a sieged system. Additionally, STL-ships don’t end up in the reserve, so they can’t even be saved up until you have a larger force.  The only blemish this combat phase is again in Tali, which you can’t see here.  Turn 209: The Vchiitri Empire has declined our ceasefire-offer. Welp, that was expected.  The last combat phase also saw some dinos burn.  On the espionage-side, every sign points to torture: Agent Löwe gets it from our enemies, and we torture captured enemy agents. Of course when the Kingdom of Almandin interrogates enemy spies, they use a fancy crystalline mind probing machine, leaving almost no traces after use. Almost everyone who is suspected to Almandian mind needles survives, sometimes even until execution day! On the other hand, the Raas lack our highly sophisticated tech base, and therefore use more brutal methods. The Imsaies have adopted our own interrogation techs for their own use, thanks to our long and lasting alliance. What the Cynoids doing is a complete unknown to us right now. Also you don’t want to know about interrogation methods used in the Vchiitri Empire. Seriously, don’t ask about Klackon torture methods.  The only thing keeping us from marching forward are those 15 population units. Units which arrived via migration, since our last bombardment reduced population on Kindiilar IV to zero. Also I think my confusion from last time was a false alarm. (Remember that screenshot a couple updates ago, where Kindiilar IV dropped out of the bottom half of the screen?) This system is just oddly balanced with the first orbit starting so far away from the central star, the combat screen has trouble displaying the system correctly. But I keep an eye on this, I found some old warnings about “oddities” developing the longer a large game like this keeps going.  Of course just seconds later something dawns on me: I can just leave some ships here to keep bombing the almost-dead worlds, and move most of the fleet to our next target: The Tannjost-system! It’s kind of embarrassing, but I only remembered doing this because this is a LP. Normally, I would just forget about what that fleet was doing until everything is eradicated, then go “Huh? I guess there’s no reason for that fleet to be there now. Time to move it!”. However, that would make everything so slow it would be like torture to sit through, no way am I doing this to you guys.  Small correction: The units meant to continue bombing what is left of Kindiilar are coming through our wormhole-shortcut, not from our main fleet. Since taking the shortcut just takes 1 turn, there’s no difference in game mechanics terms between leaving some ships and moving those other back water units. Incidentally, I did want to leave some ships from the main fleet at the start, but then immediately after making that last screenshot, I decided to do this instead. Just seemed more efficient this way.  After that bit of confusion, I finally decide to use our back-up fleet in Innar offensively. In ten turns they’ll arrive in Theta Indi to help out our blockade force there. The AI keeps ignoring this new star lane, so there’s really no reason anymore to keep this large fleet just sitting around. Waiting for an attack which will never happen.  Our reserves are still in a sad state: While our AI has made sure that we have ample numbers of our new Samarium-class recon-cruisers, our capital ships still sit at 4 each. Since we don’t want to replicate the errors of the Dilarian fleet, we continue to wait to get more ships first. Also, good by little Infection-class missile cruisers. You were a neat little experiment, but now that everyone has seen missile ships in action, you are not needed anymore for this LP. Scrapyard time!  You can’t see it because the mouse cursor isn’t rendered in my screenshots, but I’m seconds away from clicking on “obsolete/veraltet”: This will stop the AI from building this ship. I’m doing this because we already have 13 scouts, and tons of planets where the AI is busy right now building even more. In the future, there’ll be more and more times where we will have to mark ships we still want to use as obsolete, just to force the AI to stop building them in absurd numbers.  The Vchiitri-ambassador thinks our cease fire offer was kind of interesting, but not interesting enough. Fucker!  The Kingdom of Almandin answers this insult by doubling down on this issue: Our diplomats now demand a truce! From a memo found on the computer system of the Almandian Foreign Ministry: “OK guys, I know our diplomatic corps doesn’t exactly recruit from our smartest and brightest, but stop pranking them with those stupid suggestions, we already had several dozen diplomatic incidents this cycle because of your jackassery!”  After that short jocular intermission, the turn ends and combat begins: After bombing so much in Theta Indi, our blockade force gets overconfident and targets the fourth planet and his formidable defenses. Will our small fleet be able to crack them?  This shot of our valiant 3rd Expeditionary Force shooting down missiles and fighters is a bit misleading, since there’s also a missile task force somewhere. Too bad that they’re too slow to do much after sending out all their missiles. I know I joked about carriers and their endless flood of newly spawning fighters in the past, but it’s also annoying when you overestimate your missile damage like this and run out of ammo without doing much damage. Welp, the massive missile first strike concept of the Almandian fleet has officially failed.  At least the battle goes over great otherwise. OK, so the planet got a few licks in and the 3rd Expeditionary Force is now significantly less awesome, but details.  Anyway, the following bombardment does a lot more damage than a couple light ships are worth, so it’s still an overwhelming victory. The final tally: Billions dead, 89% of all planetary construction wiped out, and a couple of drunk soldiers accidentally wandered out of their invincible bunkers and got atomized.  Cycle 315/turn 210: Merciless bombarding of Raas-planets continues everywhere.  And wow, that’s rare: A Non-Raas spy gets murderized. In this case, a filthy Klackon-spy is the victim of our proud AIA.  On the diplomatic front, our allies send us a nice, friendly offer. Annalona-ambassador (grumpy): “We want to help our economy a little bit. We would see it as rude if you refused to agree to a mutual trade treaty.”  Yeesh, and the Imsaies actually like us. Anyway, on the military front our southern Anti-Raas fleet rolls on into the Tannjost-system. Meanwhile, our Ersatz-ships have arrived in Kindiilar for mop-up.  The Klackon-presence in Tali is still oppressive. At least they’re also still not doing anything. (Besides assaulting our planets and not doing anything after humiliating the defenders.)  And then a Raas-fleet counter-attacks our blockade units in Theta Indi: They’re the task force on the left, already bleeding red damage numbers while multiple missile salvoes are bearing down on them. For some reason the missiles shoot out a lot faster then they should normally. I really should play this game more often, because I don’t remember this behavior from our earlier missile-heavy battles.  Anyway, the enemy fleet actually survives our missile strike and has to be torn down by our direct-fire ships.  Half a minute later, that fleet is dead. A full minute later, a single enemy ship hiding behind the planet is dead, too. The battle is over.  But another one follows on the outer-edge of Raas-space: Based on past experience, this should be easy. Sure, our missile-ships have already spent their entire ammunition to zero effect, but the 1st Shiva Force is a more modern force. One which hasn’t had any losses so far. This Raas-colony is in for a lot of trouble.  Or, not? For some reason our shields aren’t really registering and the planetary batteries just rip apart one of our ships after another. Sure, we in turn do the same to their defenses, but it’s still weird. Since the planet doesn’t have shields, the Raas must have built up tons of secondary crap to slow us down that much. We one-hit killed other colonies with far smaller fleets in the past.  OK, even with shield-penetrating weapons, that was kind of an odd and uneven fight. After losing 75% of its ships, the 1st Shiva Force retreats. Our missile task force, the 2nd Shiva Force, can do jack poo poo and sits there until new fighters launch from the planet, then they retreat, too.  This combat phase was remarkably strange: The Klackons assault our planets in Tali again, but do nothing afterwards and there was this odd case of our shields failing against a single, simple Raas-colony. Sometimes there’s this weird interaction between really strong weapons with shield penetration and small, light ships where the hits just ignore everything and do straight-up damage. But I swear it was never this bad!  So all these oddities made me stop playing at this point and look up if I should re-apply the patches made by Ultima Orion. And learned how all my patches were suddenly marked incompatible and the .dll referenced pointed to the old, deleted directory instead of the one the game was in. To tell the truth, at this point I hosed up because I pointed the patcher back at itself instead of at one of my altered mod .dll-files. Obviously the patcher still thought the not-.dll file was incompatible.   Of course this gently caress-up lead to fail cascade of more gently caress-ups, when I tried to remove the patches and re-apply them, using the wrong file.  Son of a bitch! Broken patch files and no way to remove them for a repair attempt.  Yeah, with the game slowly showing more and more odd behavior at times, and me completely messing up the mod from the inside, I had to re-install the entire game, official patch and mod again. Several times, because my original game for some reason absolutely refused to start on my new Win10 PC. But don’t worry, writing this update took me so long, the fresh install with our save game transplanted into it is already up and running on my notebook! From the next update on, everything should be back to normal. Except of course for strangeness caused by the game itself now, but there’s nothing we could do against this, anyway! Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 2: Still in flight. Expedition 1 and 3: Excavation continues. Next: A New Kind of Normal Libluini fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Jul 5, 2017 |
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Jul 5, 2017 16:36
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...well, that's absolutely weird.
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Jul 5, 2017 19:56
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Ouch. Was patching technology still kind of in its infancy when those patches were made?
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Jul 5, 2017 23:07
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It wouldnt be MOO3 without oddities abounding
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Jul 6, 2017 02:21
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Even the /game itself/ is out to get you!
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Jul 6, 2017 07:19
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That's hilarious! Even the game itself seems to fight against being played.
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Jul 7, 2017 00:42
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I wonder if I can get the ultima patch back to english or something approaching that so I can read things.
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Jul 7, 2017 18:52
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AtomikKrab posted:I wonder if I can get the ultima patch back to english or something approaching that so I can read things. Apparently that's not going to work, at least not with the Ultima Orion modpack. But! The patcher the mod is using and most of the fixes come from this guy. You can download the patcher and the fixes and very carefully apply them to your MO3-.dll. See the website for detailed explanations. If you're doing this, you get basically Ultima Orion light: No new graphics, no new leaders, but most if not all the bug fixes the mod included. Just obey those few easy rules: 1. Make a back up of the .dll file the patcher wants you to change. 2. First comes the game, second the final patch 1.25, then run the patcher and your mini-patches. 3. Speed for missiles is 13000, speed for fighters is 10000. If you patch in too high or too slow speeds, the game will start behaving rather badly, so be warned! Also, I finally have my new notebook-set up running! Recording software is there, I found a new and faster way to make screenshots, the game and the mod is running, etc. I even made a first batch of screenshots for my next 1-2 updates, so this LP is officially back on track! The odd behavior is now gone, too. Apparently my old installation was indeed borked. Edit: I think it's best if I add this info to the OP, for new readers of this Let's Play. Libluini fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Jul 19, 2017 |
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Jul 19, 2017 23:08
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Libluini posted:The new odd behavior is now gone, too. Apparently my old installation was indeed borked. Let us not forget, this is still MOO3
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Jul 20, 2017 08:36
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Libluini posted:Apparently that's not going to work, at least not with the Ultima Orion modpack. But! The patcher the mod is using and most of the fixes come from this guy. You can download the patcher and the fixes and very carefully apply them to your MO3-.dll. See the website for detailed explanations. You say that but I already put it back to english... mostly, got lazy with editing the encyclopedia.
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Jul 21, 2017 00:24
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AtomikKrab posted:You say that but I already put it back to english... mostly, got lazy with editing the encyclopedia. OK, just remember, the modders claimed this will cause problems with the Mod, so be careful!
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Jul 21, 2017 06:24
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 69: War Continues For now, all tech-problems are solved. Let’s get on with it!  Turn 211! The Vchiitri Empire tells us in no uncertain words that neither a ceasefire nor an armistice is acceptable. Welp, like I expected. In other news, people protest against the useless boondoggle that is the Triplanar Command Centre. Slogans like “Say NO to government overspending” and “Debt!” are visible among the protesting Silicoids. No idea what that is supposed to mean. We are still getting richer every turn, just at a slower rate. To smash our economy, I would have to go one step higher to “Holy War”. One reason why I will never do this. But let’s talk about the TCC in our tech news section.  Woah, looks like I got our Klackon-ambassador right while he was rocking his head up- and down. Seems I’m still bad at screenshots, news at 11. He tells us the Klackons “carefully pondered” our offer before rejecting it. Funny how our mortal enemies tend to be more polite than our best friends. Maybe the Imsaies just think they have to scream at us for some reason? A cultural misunderstanding, perhaps?  Another message dropped in this turn: The Psilon ambassador slyly asks for a better trade treaty, winking and grinning like a scam artist the entire time. But while our diplomatic corps is a bit taken a back by his attitude, the royal linguists claim the ambassador just wanted to make it seem like a new treaty is a joke we play on the Klackons, so all is well and we accept.  And now it’s time for new technologies! First up are the UV-Drones. This new tech essentially is our ancient UV-lasers, but with shorter range, less damage and higher costs. For this list of drawbacks we get a weapon 60% smaller and with 10% higher fire rate. After tallying up all numbers, it turns out UV-Drones roughly double the firepower of the old UV-lasers. Too bad they also reduce range by 20%, so they dip back again behind our current point defense techs. Another fancy tech we got too late! And about the Triplanar Command Centre: Since some time has passed, let me explain what it is. This machine is basically a giant tank-like mobile command center. It can swim, it can fly, it can drive! The alternative name FlieWaTüt didn’t make the cut during design phase. (Obscure joke only Germans will get.) In game mechanic terms, it’s utterly boring. It’s a huge boost to fighting unrest, but ironically it has zero bonuses related to ground combat. People will just be less unhappy while their cities burn. And it can be hit and destroyed by collateral damage, so that bonus against unrest won’t survive longer than a couple turns after the fighting starts. A last “drawback” is the matter of the TCC being something only a Military DEA can and will build. No Military DEA on your planet? Sucks to be you! In short, people can keep protesting against this as long as they want too, the TCC is useful but not exactly a game changer. But the game gets bonus points for giving us a military vehicle as large as a building which is completely useless outside of peace time. That’s a really good joke, don’t you think?  However, there are two very important things arriving soon: Tanks and Heavy Armor. Heavy armor makes a ship terribly expensive, but also makes it terribly durable. It’s a nice upgrade for our battleships. On the tanks we have waited forever, but the project is finally in prototyping phase and next turn it will be finished. A single tank unit is roughly equal to ten infantry and two mobile infantry units. They’re strong. Heavy army is not a good idea for smaller ships, but on our capitals it’s a god send. Not only get is the heavy armor three times stronger then normal armor, the damage reductiong gets a 50% boost over normal (medium) armor, which means a lot of smaller hits will now just plink off our hulls instead of doing damage. As soon as this tech project is finished (in 8 turns, if no protests happen), I will upgrade our battleship designs immediately. (At this point please remember, our battleships are technically renamed vanilla-dreadnoughts, and not having heavy armor for freaking dreadnoughts was kind of silly anyway. Also (real-true) Dreadnought-tech has just popped up on our tech tree. I just mention this because this means vanilla-Superdreadnoughts will become available in about a dozen updates. I love this name. Superdreadnoughts Of course, thanks to all this renaming and reordering, our actual for reals Superdreadnoughts are still a long way off. (The vanilla-titans are our Superdreadnoughts.) But I chose to see this as us getting Superdreadnoughts two times.  Next step: The obligatory scrapping of ancient ships crawling in from our transit fleet. Also, 17 recons now. Remember that number.  Hilariously, the almost-dead Raas colony in Kindiilar still clings to life while our main fleet here is already bearing down on Tannjost.  The small raid fleet I got maimed by throwing them against a planet during our “wonky”-phase is retreating towards Tannjost, too! That one ship in the 1st Shiva Force won’t be adding much firepower, but the missiles from 2nd Shiva Force is a nice add-on for this fight against a vastly inferior enemy.  Another sign of how weak the Raas are: Our AI sees nothing wrong anymore with sending colony ships directly into Theta Indi, though technically that system is still a war zone. Of course, an enemy presence prevents colony ships from landing, but only enemies in space! So because we can effortlessly kill everything the Raas throw at us for the moment, our colony ship will just fly in and land, easy-peasy.  The situation in Tali on the other hand: Still bad. If the Klackons were controlled by a real human player, we would be in serious trouble! At least a hundred of those 353 ships are warships. Every turn that giant stack doesn’t attack us is another godsend. Hopefully it stays like this for a while!  Before I forget, changing systems, re-installing and migrating saves means the spreadsheet we saved for later use is gone now. Luckily our save does include the one you have loaded/made by default, or our planetary AI would go haywire right now! But still, just in case poo poo happens, we should do something.  And done! Now, if I for some reason want to play Silicoids again some day, I don’t have to painstakingly recreate all those orders for my AI governors again, I can just load this spreadsheet here! If you’re playing Master of Orion III, for god’s sake, never try to handle your planetary AI without a sheet of orders! And remember to keep one handy for whatever races you want to play with. Using this Silicoid-spreadsheet with near-zero food production for another race for example would make your play-through a short and painful experience. For Meklar or Cynoids we could use the same spreadsheet with just some small adjustments (obviously, since robots and cyborgs need to eat, we would need a little bit more than just one order with secondary priority for one type of planet). Other races would need a major overhaul before you could trust your AI to not silently sabotage you while you’re busy with other stuff. Klackons would need both more food and more research orders, or your AI would make sure your starving little insectoids will soon be blasted apart by highly advanced weapons. Stuff like this. If you hate making spreadsheets, just remember, the available space is not that large, so it’s not actually that much work. And since you can save that crap, generally you only need to do a couple of them for your favorite races, and then you’ll never need to look at this ever again. From that point onwards, it’s just start the game, load your AI-orders, done.  And last for this turn: With all those hijinks related to bugs, broken installations and what not, I completely missed that we now have all three of our Antaran Expeditions digging up lost Antaran ruins. The first expedition even found something already! They have no idea what it is, but it sure looks weird, trust me!  To my surprise, during the following combat phase some random Raas ships assault our raiders in Theta Indi.  I really did not expect our old enemies to continue feeding us ships like this.  Another battle against the Raas: The cheeky bastards re-build the defenses of their near-dead colony, so the ships I left in Kindiilar have to assault the planet again.  They must have boosted their production like mad to get fighters, missiles, guns and a planetary shield running in a single turn. Kind of brazen, really. I certainly wouldn’t do this, considering this colony was just a couple turns from dying on its own. The Raas clearly see nothing wrong with wasting their resources like this, though.  In the end, even our third-tier back up fleet can hammer down the shield. It just took a couple minutes of constant bombardment.  While the planet burns, the last Raas space fighters meet the same fate. By the way, did you notice my new, faster method of making screenshots captures my cursor, too? My old method (simply pressing “print” on my keyboard and then pasting it into a new picture) never did this. Curious.  As always, the Klackons beat us effortlessly, followed by us beating the Raas effortlessly. Hopefully the Klackons continue to be even slower then us, or the true hurt will begin. At this point I have to cut this update short, since my last play session resulted in just a little bit too many screenshots for one update, but not enough for two normal sized ones. To make the next update average-sized, this one has to be a little bit shorter. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Partial discovery made (1) Expedition 2-3: Excavation ongoing Next: The Agonizingly Slow Death of the Dilarian Empire.
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Jul 21, 2017 22:06
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The Dila Empire has been dying for how many galactic cycles now? How long is a giant space lizard supposed to live, how many generation have lived completely committed to a fight that was already lost?
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Jul 21, 2017 22:36
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There's something kind of honest about a game that works best with a little Excel on the side.
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Jul 22, 2017 15:19
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 70: The Agonizingly Slow Death of the Dilarian Empire OK, so the last update was technically just one turn, that was a bit slow. Mostly this happened because of the way I'm playing: When I have time to sit down, I tend to go through stats, maps and other info screens to help me remember what I was doing last time. This inevitable leads to the first batch of screenshots of every session covering only one turn. The second+ batches then cover multiple turns, until I stop playing to write updates. And about a week later, after the updates are written and posted (ideally), the cycle begins a new. The more you know! I just thought I should explain this, to prevent people from thinking 1 turn = 1 update was supposed to be normal. I'm not that evil!  Galactic Cycle 318 sees another agent enter the hallowed halls of the AIA and XEOL has ended the war against us yet again. Agent Stahlbrenner is a welcome addition, but XEOL’s auto-timeout basically just forces us to declare war again. Two times, since next turn we’ll also be getting angry messages from our allies about this.  During combat phase, we bombarded Kindiilar I and Theta Indi V. Hopefully the last colony of the Kindiilar-system will be done now.  Even more important: Tanks are now available for production! Oh, and Agent Löwe got captured again. Another cycle of torture for him. Poor bastard. Meanwhile, our own interrogators are busy using neural probes to painlessly squeeze out the enemy spies we got. Because we are the good guys.  Alpecc II and Vela VI report some minor unrest. Huh, we should take a look at this… And then I forgot to make screenshots. Oh well. What I did was to look up the planets with our highest unrest (those two were on there) and raise ground troops to keep the populace "happy". The reason for the high unrest was a mixture of pirates (not enough ships in system), high taxes (I reduced them a bit on 1-2 of them) and being far away from our capital (nothing to do except more troops here). Luckily they were all young, AI-controlled colonies, so the piracy-problem will solve itself as soon as the planets build a couple system defense ships. The taxes ironically can only solved the opposite way: Manual control. Your imperial financial controls are mostly a trap: If you aren't careful with your spending settings, your planetary AIs will gleefully overtax and overspend all over the place, causing tons of trouble. Also for added hilarity, the more planets you control manually, the more worthless your imperial settings become, since they don't influence planets outside AI-control at all. The AI however doesn't seem to notice this, in my experience it looks like your AI will always try to meet your spending goals with only the AI-controlled planets at your disposal. So if you have let's say 10 planets and take 9 of them into manual control, the imperial settings will try to meet all your orders by abusing the hell out of that poor 10th colony.  Yes! The Raas-colony on Kindiilar I is finally wiped out! The system is now secured.  More good news: Our planetary governors already filled up some of build queues with tank units. In vanilla, this would cause me a lot of work, so thanks to the modders for forcing the AI to always build x10 ground units at once! Vanilla’s preference for 1x unit was weird, to say the least. Anyway, I went through some of our smaller colonies and ordered a shitload of tanks more, and some additional support units. In the near future we will have tank armies to solve our ground combat problems.  Some more old units are creeping into our reserves. That lone missile-cruiser gets immediately scrapped, of course. The five Kobalt-class carriers are still modern enough I hesitate to do the same. I’m thinking of re-deploying them against the Raas. And we are up to 25 recons now. "Sweet".  Expeditions 2 and 3 haven’t found anything so far, but our first expedition made a second partial discovery. Our archaeologists are going mad with excitement!  After science, it’s time for diplomacy again: XEOL gets our obligatory declaration of war to satisfy our allies. Their military strength looks scary (652 ships!), but since we know at least half of that will be transports, it’s still manageable. 90 planets also looks scary, until we remember Cynoids and Meklar prefer small worlds, so in terms of population and production, we’re probably about the same.  Something funny happens next combat phase: A small fleet of ships visits the Kindiilar-system. Seems the Raas wanted to desperately save their last colony here. It didn’t go well for them. With the exception of that one unlucky ship in the screenshot, the other task forces already jumped out. That ship did not survive long enough to follow them.  Our armada has arrived in Tannjost, and targets the first planet. I’m desperately trying to make things go faster, so I made a new strategic decision: Only certain planets, where I think Silicoid-colonists could do things better, are getting bombed out. The other planets will be assaulted by armies again. With our production, we can churn out tons of tanks and hopefully get some strong armies together before the Raas inevitably steal this technology from us and catch up.  Combat begins. As always during a planetary assault, first target is the giant lump of system defense ships, since they can follow us from planet to planet until destroyed. This task force includes a wild mixture of old and new ships, including missile ships and carriers. Reducing them first is important, or we will face a horde of ever-growing fighters while bombarding the planet.  Missile salvos on both sides disappear ineffectually into point defense, but our fighters come through and swamp their defenses. This time, AI-confusion hits the Raas’ fighters for a change instead of us, so those two green squadrons of fighters hover around for a while, unable to decide what to attack: Our ships, or the giant cloud of our fighters.  After a couple seconds of wasting time, the enemy fighters suddenly remember they’re in a battle and turn back to defend their carriers. Too late. The shields are collapsing and ship after ship blows up. Defiantly, the task force launches another feeble missile strike. Not even that one single ship in front gets damaged from that. And soon afterwards the last defending ship dies and we bomb the colony into submission. With the last ground battery and fighter base destroyed, combat ends.  Tannjost I would be a good planet for us, but a terrible planet for the Raas. Really, bombarding their colony into rubble is a good thing for them. We’re doing them a favor. Regardless how often I see the effect of orbital bombardment, I can only smile about how oddly balanced the damage is: Even highly developed planets tend to lose almost all their construction in one single pass, the first strike often kills half the population and the defending soldiers are never really harmed. For some reason MO3 is really convinced killing billions of people has no real effect on planetary defenses. It’s rather strange. In the future, when we can kill entire colonies all at once, it will be even stranger: Scouring a planet clean of all life in a single bombardment will for some really stupid reason often only slightly damage the defending armies.  Turn 213: We get messages about our terror-bombardments. And the colony ship you saw last time landed on Theta Indi III. With our cleansing campaign on Theta Indi IV, this means we’re making good progress on securing the system. Not bad, considering we’re using a fleet meant for raiding in this system.  More messages this turn: Diplomatic messages, still some minor unrest on Vela VI and Agent Löwe gets arrested for espionage. Also tortured, but at this point I would be more surprised if it didn’t happen. Ironically, his constant break outs show he is rather lucky, but it’s still not enough to avoid recapture every turn. ”Glück im Unglück” is a German phrase meaning getting a lucky break caused by something rather unlucky happening to you. “Finding fortune in misfortune”, would be a close translation. I’m only mentioning this here because Agent Löwe seems to be the victim of the total opposite, considering how his break-out attempts are always successful, and always end in him getting captured again before the turn is even processed. He finds misfortune in fortune.  This was (as expected) the “diplomatic messages” the game told us about : Imsaies-ambassador (slow): “We want to help our economy. We present you with our plan, which demands of you to declare war against XEOL!” Either the game threw a bunch of different messages into the blender, or the ambassador is drunk. Seriously, my translation doesn’t really convey how mashed-up this message was. Anyway, there’s no reason to say no here. War x2 it is.  Meanwhile, in the Tali-system: All three of the planets we liberated are doing great! Things are getting rebuild, the economy is running fine, and population is growing. Next turn our mobilization center will be finished on Tali III, and we will be able to teleport fleets directly into the system if we want. At this point I can only imagine the Klackons don’t really want this system. At least this would explain why the AI got really aggressive as we pressed on into Klackon-territory and why the AI just kind of stopped after getting that one colony back. If this is true, their fleet is only here to prevent us from invading their homeworlds. Too bad we can’t look up the AI-decisions to confirm this. Instead let’s say if they wait until we have enough ships to push them out of Tali, they only wanted to defend themselves. If they attack further before that, this theory is wrong.  On the other hand, the Vchiitri Empire has send reinforcements: There are now 385 ships in Tali. While I will continue to monitor the Klackon-buildup in Tali, after a certain point it’s not worth it anymore to guess what the hell the AI is doing. I decide to just take every turn they’re not attacking as a lucky break from now on.  Our reserves remind me of that time a couple turns ago when we actually finished off one of the three thirds we broke the Dila Empire into. This time, I decide to scrap the five old carriers, simply because they cost more money than an entire fleet of smaller ships. Holding onto them just in case when we have better ships seems like a bad idea now. (At least as long as the Klackon armada doesn’t loving move.) Two more old Infection-class missile cruisers show up and are shown to the scrapyards, and our AI dilligently finishes several more recons. With now 28 recon cruisers in our reserve and maintenance cost for them reaching twice the amount of those five older carriers I just scrapped, that’s a bit much. I decide to scrap some of them. If I were smart, I would design the heaviest motherfucker of a ship as a recon class, since this would prevent the AI from building it. The AI prefers building light ships and if you leave your planets on automatic, they will always, always try to construct only the lightest ships you have. If I had designed heavy recons, I would have to build them myself. On the other hand, no flood of light recons like what happens here. In essence, this is a choice between inefficient laziness costing you some resources, or highly efficient spergyness costing you some additional time. Since I’m the laziest bastard alive, I always decide to make my recons small and light, even though I know this will always end in me drowning in tons of the damned things.  The cold war with XEOL reminds me to look up some stats again: We have now 78 planets, tech level 42 (out of 100), our population is nearly the same as XEOL (1938k pop units) and our power rating sees us third place. XEOL is still second place, so there is one power out there we should be scared off. No contact with those unknowns exists, however. So nothing to say about them.  Case in point: XEOL has 90 planets, tech level 39, 1981k pops and is second place among the powers of the Orion Sector. After the scary behemoth of XEOL, it’s kind of a relief to see the Vchiitri Empire (light pink/flesh/what-the-hell-is-that-color) stagnating and the Dilarians (light blue) continue to take a dive. I promise you, I will not screenshot us plowing through hundreds of planets. When the time comes to fight an empire with 90+ planets, a lot of those battles will be abstracted away for your convenience. Also it warms my heart to see our two current enemies so far below us. The Raas are slowly collapsing, with more and more of their economy being used up just building up new planets, which are then bombed into rubble by us. With this, there’s the reason why the Raas can’t scrape together enough fleet units to stop us. This war is basically over at this point. The Klackons are another story: Thanks to their industry-bonuses, there is a good chance they can at least produce at the same level as us, even with us having nearly 30 colonies more and a far higher tech level. On the other hand, we continue to expand and they do not. Sooner or later, even their large fleet in Tali will not be enough to stop us.  Last turn, we assaulted Tannjost I and hosed this Raas planet up real good. This turn, we do the same to Tannjost II. This colony has ground batteries and one of the upgrade-techs for ground batteries, but only a shield otherwise. Since the ground batteries are trying their best to shoot our many, many fighters, the rest of the fleet can close in unopposed. The combined fire power breaks through the shield before the first minute is over.  Both Tannjost I and II are gas giants with heavy gravity. My future plans for this system are to colonize the gas giants and other planets with high gravity with Silicoids, while the planets actually good for Raas will see  Of course, the funny thing is that auto-migration would eventually lead to something similar happen regardless of what we are doing with colonization. My plan just goes faster and removes some unnecessary population from the future Silicoid-planets. Oh, look at that: 72% percent of the unnecessary population are already removed. Too bad 92% of the infrastructure of the colony was removed with them, but eggs, omelets. You know the drill. This bombardment was bad enough to even destroy nearly a fourth of the defending army. The tiny defending army, so in absolute numbers this is sadly a lot less impressive. Anyway, this new plan essentially means even if the Raas continue to stubbornly hold on to their worlds, with bombing at least some planets in the same system and colonizing them, we will still gain a foothold. And eventually a mobilization center to insta-teleport reinforcements into it. This will seriously speed up the liberation of the rest of the Dila Empire.  Turn 214 is calm. But not behind the veil of espionage! Black ops teams strike a Raas spy. He, and his entire family, is killed. Also half the team dies, thanks to the bomb hidden in the spies house, but again: Eggs, omelets. Agent Silhouette, who was responsible for planning this disaster, commits suicide after he hears what happened. Agent Löwe gets captured one last time. But it turns out one of his torturers this time around is a relative of one of the many, many security personnel Agent Löwe has killed during his many, many escape attempts. She arranges for Agent Löwe to “succumb to his wounds”. A secret report complains that Agent Löwe was perfectly healthy before the interrogation, but the report goes to an official on Tannjost II. Said official, and all of his personnel, then perish during an orbital bombardment by the Almandian Royal Fleet. Nothing comes of it. A minor scandal hits Vela VI when a Silicoid-farmer is arrested for eating his Raas neighbors. The unrest however, is short-lived and replaced with planet-wide grief when the official investigation reveals how many men, women and children the renegade Silicoid has slain and eaten over the cycles. Justice is swift, and the monster is executed by dis-synchronous molecular destabilization, the slowest and most painful execution method available to the Almandian judiciary. Also, Kindiilar I is re-colonized. The former Dilarian system is now 100% in Almandian hands.  One third of Raas-space is ours, and with our southern campaign hitting Tannjost, we’re on the way to liberate the next third. It’s still slow, but at least progress is visible.  Technically, we’re only raiding Theta Indi. But we’re raiding the system so hard, we now have a future colony growing here. If we can hold on until we have a mobilization center, the last campaign against the Raas will start early.  Triplanar Command Center is still three turns in the future, but our tanks will get Special Commandos as reinforcement on the ground. While our Silicoid Rambos will be less awesome than their movie counterparts thanks to the game modelling “Special Commandos” as only giving a bonus to hitting things (think artillery spotter), it’ll still be nice to have them. Considering Silicoids tend to be rather bad about hitting things and all.  Imperial Exchange Controls / Imperiale Währungskontrolle is our first important economic technology in a long, long while. Having this technology means your empire suddenly notices having a unified currency isn’t enough for a multi-stellar space nation, and an exchange control council will be founded to make predictions about the economic development. Turns out making at least an attempt at controlling the economy helps a lot already: The negative influence of bureaucracy, a hidden stat, is reduced by a whopping 10%. Most of the economic techs are best if you have at least reached mid-game: They’re a one-time bonus and the larger and older your empire is, the more your hidden bureaucracy-costs are reduced. Our empire is now fairly large and old, so the bonus should be rather large for the Kingdom of Almandin. How large? Well, I did say “hidden stat”. Imagine Master of Orion III suddenly using your PC-speaker to screech out gently caress You in Morse code and you have your answer. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Partial discovery made (1) Expedition 2-3: Excavation ongoing Next: Tanks Tanks Tanks Tanks Tanks Tanks Tanks
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Jul 23, 2017 12:51
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Yay tanks! And yay once more for this LP reminding me that this game models bureaucratic ineffiency, doesn't -show- you how inefficient you are, and also doesn't let you -do- anything about it directly either. Heavy Foot of Government. It exists. You do not know how much it exists. You cannot tell us how to deal with it.
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Jul 23, 2017 13:07
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To be fair, you can look up how much an empire suffers from "Heavy Foot of Government" under Overview/Übersicht. You get a percentage. Of what? Hell if I know. Does it mean the secret stat is growing to an unknown maximum at 100%? Is the game secretly reducing your income to zero at 100%? Since the game doesn't tell you anything about this and since the financial screen is mostly unreliable, the answer is probably "ask a dev or reverse-engineer the code to find out". Anyway, it's true that only certain techs and what government you have influence your bureaucracy. And it will steadily go up throughout the game. So basically this means after running through every tech related to HFG, you're on a timer. To total ruin or minor inconvenience? Well, if you're immortal, you're free to try it out. Chances are the game goes into total breakdown before you run up 100% HFG, though. If anyone wants to do this, please tell me what you find out. I'm especially keen to hear if your bloating save file reaches 1 GB before or after you achieve 100% HFG. (Ours is at ~100 MB already, by the way.)
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Jul 23, 2017 13:33
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Libluini posted:
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Jul 23, 2017 17:21
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NHO posted:
Obviously, our little Silicoids eat the pans and throw the omelettes away. They're just garnish to make the metal taste better.
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Jul 23, 2017 18:57
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IIRC HFG starts at 100% and goes up from there. All it does is multiply the cost of everything you build by that number.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:41
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IceMole posted:IIRC HFG starts at 100% and goes up from there. All it does is multiply the cost of everything you build by that number. So if the number shown in-game reaches 100%, everything costs twice, right? Not as impressive as I feared, then. Anyway, that's nice to know, thanks!
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Jul 23, 2017 21:00
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There are victory conditions that probably kick in short of exterminating everyone else in the galaxy, right?
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Jul 23, 2017 22:12
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Glazius posted:There are victory conditions that probably kick in short of exterminating everyone else in the galaxy, right? Yes, and in update 3 you can see I switched them all off except extermination victory. I wanted to make sure we can keep the game running until we have seen every race and the entire tech tree, you see.
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Jul 24, 2017 06:14
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By the way, are people generally satisfied with the level of information density in this LP? Are there enough screenshots to understand what is going on, or should I make more? Or maybe less, to speed through the game faster? What are you thinking about the little stories I'm sometimes hiding in the updates? Give me your thoughts!
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Jul 24, 2017 17:24
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I like the little stories, they do a lot to spice things up and make it more than just numbers. If I'm not responding as much as early on, it's kind of because it's hard to express any more amazement at the terrible design decisions involved in making this game(or the poor programming skills that made those traits come to the fore despite good intentions). Considering the grinding pace of stuff like the war against the Raas, however, maybe cover each turn in less detail, and include more turns in each post?
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Jul 24, 2017 20:11
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I like the little stories as well, they add a pinch of salt in the bad design decisions the game has. It's really like it was Sword of the Stars II before its time. Maybe muffle the Raas genocide a little, I'm sure it won't really be discussed in history books after the war. The mechanics descriptions are always interesting though.
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Jul 24, 2017 20:43
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Yeah some of these LP's the endgame is like 5 lines of plot, some invasions, then 75 screenshots of planets. At this point I am interested in: - new ship designs and technologies - fights with interesting mechanics or meaningful outcomes - changes in the balance of power Also hosed up things happening with the game engine. In particular, the ongoing and complete atrocity that is the spying/espionage system. For example, when tanks come into play I would love to see the effects. I think it will also have an emotional charge as well at hopefully seeing the rockboys finally get to kick some rear end in ground combat.
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Jul 24, 2017 21:10
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