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I thought an uncondtional surrender basically just made them have to give a proportion of thier income/production to you each round. And if war was declared again it would stop coming so always seemed kinda pointless. MoO 2's surrender mechanics were a bit better (surrendering empire gives up totally to winning one) but always seemed to fire at the totally weirdest and most ridiculous moments..
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Dec 21, 2017 07:12
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I never actually had an enemy surrender to me, so I was forced to guess here. In SEV, a surrendered empire just becomes part of the victor's empire, so I kinda hoped it works similar in this case.  Edit: All my wars in MO3 were always bloody, desperate affairs, with enemies so determined and bitter, surrendering never worked. Both ways. Libluini fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Dec 21, 2017 |
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Dec 21, 2017 07:28
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I've never seen it either but I never played the game remotely as extensively or in depthly as you have. I am in awe of your ability to pla it and generally keep the game focused and keep your Empire together. Also glad you've not had to dela wiht the randomly wandering doomstack of New Orion ships
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Dec 21, 2017 08:27
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e;fb
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Dec 21, 2017 18:37
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Hooray, good ground troops!
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Dec 23, 2017 05:52
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 78: Kingdom of Almandin, ca. GC 375 Welcome back, readers! May this new year finally see the end of this LP!  248 turns have passed so far, and the Kingdom of Almandin is now a galactic superpower. A rather lopsided one, since on one side we have been steadily expanding over the Raas’ slowly rotting Dila Empire’s corpse, while on the other side (see the cursor), the Klackons have been blocking us for ages. Blue lines are the ones we have explored, green ones are wormholes and the white star lanes are ones we have discovered, but not yet flown through. Besides that, confusingly not all of what you see here is part of the Kingdom, thanks to flags and colors switching off if you zoom out too far. But it’s mostly us, trust me.  As we zoom closer, we can see our borders again. As an added bonus, star lanes we only know about thanks to diplomacy now show up, too. I’ve moved the map around to show clearly how close Tali and Cokanuk are to our capital system of Almandin. Too bad this made the purple Human star lanes overlap with ours. Just ignore them for the moment, none of them are actually connected to our lane network.  We are number one! And both the Klackons and the Raas have dropped so low the game doesn’t even consider them anymore for our list of “worst enemies”. Only the Cynoids of XEOL are strong enough to count. And they don’t even want to be at war with us. One day we really have to do something about this irritating conflict between our allies and the Cynoids.  The Klackons are lucky to have several systems with tons of planets, but physically their empire is rather tiny, as it turns out: The light-blue systems seem to be all that is left from the Vchiitri Empire, once strong enough to threaten the Kingdom’s very existence.  The way I rotated the map makes this screenshot a bit confusing (Trourmi isn’t even close to this sector), but this is the same bit of space where the Dila Empire has been flooding our borders with transport fleets since time immemorial. First it was JustGniess, now that Theta Indi is ours, the flood now hits our new border. Which is why I just ordered all our fleet units in JustGniess to join our main fleet in Theta Indi. As soon as they arrive to keep the swarms of transports at bay, the main fleet will travel to Connewa. It’s time we end this. Connewa is one of only four Raas-systems left in this sector.  The other rest part of the Dila Empire only has three systems left. Alahain-B is technically ours, but there’s an empty planet and a growing Raas-colony left. Three colony-ships are on their way from Tannjost to deal with the cleansed planet, but the growing colony is a pain to deal with: Normally we could drop our own colonizers on top of the Raas colonists and take control this way, but that planet is so small the tiny amount of Raas on it already filled all empty regions. Colonization can only happen if there is an empty region for your empire to land in, though. Arcturus is still under blockade by us, and a huge fleet is on its way to Tau Sagittarii. Only Gemma-B is untouched by the war so far. Alahain-B is just a pain in the rear end, though. I’m now considering just waiting until the last planet is back under Raas-control, and then dropping an army on them to end their stupid antics. If I bomb them like last time, there’s again a small chance that auto-colonization fills up all free regions and prevents colonization yet again. Apparently we’ll have to land troops to prevent people by force to commit suicide by fleet. (Considering how bitter this conflict is, I’m now imagining Raas secret police forcing people at gunpoint to try to colonize a planet directly in our frontline.  Fear not! Even after all our victories, the Klackons haven’t given up on Tali yet: Another (now rather small) fleet enters the system and immediately attacks. A far superior fleet. Which causes them to lose dozens of ships before the survivors can jump out. But them’s the breaks. Those brave fools.  The recapping took up far too much space in this update, but we finally made it: The next turn, turn 249 has arrived! Not much that is newsworthy, this time: Tali II and Kindiilar IV (two of our newer acquisitions) report unrest. The Psilons of Tali II are upset enough to stop our production for that planet dead cold, but since we have 90+ planets, this is not exactly a world-changing event. Except for Tali II of course, but you know what I mean. Oh, and almost hidden thanks to my awesome screenshotting-skills: The last free planet of Alahain-B has been colonized by us. Now only the tiny force of rebel colonists on the fifth planet are left.  But the Kingdom of Almandin is a  Space Democracy! And so the rebels aren’t going to get a sequel just to destroy our entire empire, since in this universe, we are the good guys! And it looks like the bad guys on Alahain-B V were stupid enough to re-found their colony already. drat, that was fast! Now we can drop troops on them without having to wait until the Raas lose control again. For a colony this young, tiny and undefended, a single corps of assault troops should be enough. Delicious bonus: While the assault force itself consists of Silicoid storm troopers, two-thirds of its support consists of Raas! The rest are some Imsaies-PsiOps specialists who for some reason ended up on the opposite of the galaxy from home. Just shows how diverse the Almandian military has become.  Speaking of war, the XEOL-ambassador very carefully suggests we should have a temporary cease fire. Sadly, our diplomatic corps isn’t in the mood to deal with the tons of angry calls from the Imsaies this arrangement would probably generate, so we very politely decline.  Next combat phase, the Klackons assault Tali III, still not willing to give up this system. We hose down their lines with our fighters, destroying roughly half their ships before the survivors decide wisely to jump out.  On the other side of our space empire, we force a defending Raas-fleet to jump out.  But only afterwards do I notice something important: Because the Raas assaulted us, we couldn’t get to their planet. You may have noticed from the last screenshot how we fought in deep space, instead of close to the planet: This was because the Raas-defenders intercepted our fleet, causing our assault to fail. As annoying as this is, remember to use the same tactic to defend your own planets! If there is an enemy force in-system with tons of transports, intercepting them with throw-away fleets is one very valid way of keeping them from invading.  GC 375 (or turn 250 for us), sees the Kingdom of Almandin going forward almost exactly as last time, including unrest on two of our planets, with exactly the same effect as last turn. The differences: Our genetics X-tech is in prototyping phase, which means next turn it will be in effect. And our automated mining machinery on Cokanuk I accidentally opens up a cavern many kilometers down under the surfaces, filled with a swarm of monstrous creatures. Those “Scath’lok” then proceed to damage tons of valuable mining equipment before the automated defenses can gun them down. Now annoyed Silicoid-engineers have to go down there to repair what the Scath’lok swarm destroyed. Man, that was some Dwarf Fortress poo poo. “Scath’lok” aren’t mentioned in our Galactopedia, so just imagine it translating to something like “Horrors of the Deep”. Interestingly, the same event-picture is used for multiple “angry animals running amok”-kind of events. The other one we saw long, long ago was a hungry swarm of space locusts reducing agricultural output of a colony. This event just destroys some easily repaired upgrades installed in the affected region. Generally, the damage gets repaired so fast you can’t even tell what got damaged if you haven’t read this message.  gently caress! Thanks to the heroic sacrifice of the Dilarian fleet last combat phase, we lose an entire turn. Still better then waiting a random amount of like 2-5 turns for the dying colony to fall out of Raas-control again, but slowly this loving planet starts to get on my nerves.   Right after, I notice the unrest-problem of the last couple turns has spread to more planets, all of them new. I spend some time raising ground troops, plus making sure the many new AI-controlled planets all have a recreation-DEA together with the obligatory government development area all of them get thanks to our dev spreadsheet. This unrest problem seems to be related to the growing number of Non-Silicoid citizens. While the Imsaies generally live on planets in the core, far away from any war zones, a lot of the planets with troublesome populace seem to be filled with Raas and Psilons and they’re all rather close to the fighting. But I see this affair as a good thing: It reminds me that Non-Silicoids aren’t as stoic as our main race, and tells me I should have more Disneylands and Reichstage ready to help keep them content.  Just look at this! Basically every planet here is either a brand new colony, or a recently liberated world. And the new planets are 90% colonized by Raas-colonizers build on other liberated worlds, so I actually had to sit down and think a bit about this. Still, as impressively menacing as those red fists look, in most cases the unrest was still too minor for anything truly dangerous. Only the Psilon-planets near the Klackon border were a problem, and I took pains to keep them happy so this won’t happen again in the future.   New Orions incoming! Seems like our forever war over Tali isn’t just a private affair between Almandin and Vchiitri anymore: Based on what I’m reading here, roughly 50 New Orion ships are inbound for the Dromos-system, the source of the Klackon menace now that Tali is pacified. But are they here for us, or for the Klackons? At least they didn’t bring any fighters, so in an emergency, we could actually take them! Maybe.   There’s nothing we can do now, though. So let’s move forward! In our next combat phase, our fleet reaches one of the last Raas-systems still holding out. Tau Sagittarii I is heavily fortified, and Tau Sagittarii II has even more orbitals waiting for us. Of course we assault the lesser prepared first planet, but the question remains: What has the AI done here the entire time we were slowly slugging through all those other systems between us?  And here is the answer: Building a shitton of system defense ships! 4K damage is roughly the output of our entire fleet combined. At this point I’m hoping really fiercely that the AI didn’t just build tons of carriers to fill out that task force. That fleet being immobile thanks to AI-carriers having nearly zero speed is only funny if the AI did in fact build other ships.  This time, the Raas strike back: That entire task force is at least 99% carriers, and since carriers don’t need ammunition, it just shits out one fighter cloud after another, slowly overwhelming both our direct-fire ships and our own carriers. As a reminder, those ships I brought are mostly light units, but still at least two generations beyond everything the Raas could have in place here. Fighter supremacy is an ugly thing and this battle is a nasty reminder why I’m effectively handicapping myself by building anything else except more carriers. Being a role-player is sometimes not an easy thing. Also, holy loving poo poo we need more carriers.  Thanks to the Raas having too goddamn many fighters, the battle turns against us hard: That giant system defense task force is strong enough our own fighters couldn’t break through, and our direct-fire ships kept being paralyzed by new Raas-fighters taking off and attacking them. In the end, four fighter clouds of overwhelming strength took off of those carriers. One cloud was over time completely eliminated thanks to our own fighters and anti-fighter defense. As the 2nd Red Fleet collapses in a storm of explosions, there are still three murder-clouds left. Since soon a fourth one will launch to replace Raas-losses, the surviving Fleet Admiral of 1st Fleet orders the retreat, to preserve our own carrier strength.  Two fighter swarms turn around from the cloud of debris left by the cruisers of 2nd Red Fleet and menacingly join the third one already closing in on our carriers. Luckily our carriers can jump out long before the enemy fighters can reach them. In a stunning amount of dramatic irony, the battle ends with us having to watch the last of our fighters die in cold, deep space. The same way we did this to the Klackons and Raas multiple times. Payback is a bitch, after all. Looks like the Raas did indeed prepare this system for us. Now we will have to come back with a larger force and slowly siege down the defenders. poo poo happens.  This combat phase isn’t done, however: The largest Raas transport force yet assaults Theta Indi. Swarms of missiles and fighters stand ready to great the helpless victims.  5 out of 9 transport task forces can retreat. Four, which are roughly 30-40 ships, with probably at least 4 full armies between them, can not. Another sudden reversal, as the lost transport ships alone represent a lot more resources lost than our destroyed cruiser fleet. Stuff like this makes me think there must be something really wrong with how the Raas fleet command routs their ships. It’s like the AI can’t comprehend that there are enemy ships in the way. Then again, something war ships do attack, just very few and far inbetween. In my opinion, the AI may simply assign too high a priority to transport ships and ground troops. Hilariously, vanilla tended to be even worse, with the AI either only building transports and armies, or non at all, or not invading, even when having tons of transports. Over time, many of those bugs have been dealt with by patches both official and fan made, but considering how bad the AI can be with using their assets, there is only so and so much which can be done with AI behavior in MO3. Especially since a lot of stuff is hard-coded and couldn’t be changed by fans at all.  The combat phase ends with another victory for the good guys: With no new ships in the way, we easily assault Alahain-B V and put down our assault troops. The Almandian strike force drops in from orbit and takes over every important colonial facility in less then a day of fighting. The entire system is finally, finally in our hand! Would be fun if every ground battle could be this easy. Anyway, that’s 2:1 for us in this newest round of Raas-Silicoid fighting. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Expedition Completed Expedition 2: Partial discoveries made (4) Expedition 3: Expedition Completed Next: Diplomacy Rising
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Jan 2, 2018 23:06
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Man, it feels like a lot more than 250 turns have passed.
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Jan 3, 2018 01:08
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PurpleXVI posted:Man, it feels like a lot more than 250 turns have passed. I don't want to spoil anything, but the next update will feel like we jumped 100+ turns into the future
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Jan 3, 2018 07:45
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Libluini posted:I don't want to spoil anything, but the next update will feel like we jumped 100+ turns into the future Is this because that genetics X tech becomes active? 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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Jan 3, 2018 19:22
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Stephen9001 posted:Is this because that genetics X tech becomes active? Let me give you a hint: A sign and portent of what to come is hidden in this update.
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Jan 3, 2018 20:09
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Libluini posted:Let me give you a hint: A sign and portent of what to come is hidden in this update. Oh right, the New Orions. 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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Jan 3, 2018 20:12
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Stephen9001 posted:Oh right, the New Orions. So what do you call it when the NOs bomb you into the Stone Age for Silicoids? The Rock Age?
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Jan 4, 2018 10:29
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Rick_Hunter posted:So what do you call it when the NOs bomb you into the Stone Age for Silicoids? The Rock Age? We're Silicoids, every age is the Stone Age!
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Jan 4, 2018 10:31
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Friend Commuter posted:We're Silicoids, every age is the Stone Age! Which means being bombed into the Stone Age is hardly a setback! Genius! 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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Jan 4, 2018 13:54
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Poor, poor New Orions. Pray to the Old Orions that if they are in the same system as you they merely slaughter your fleet, spend a round or two bombarding a colony, and wander off. Also you at a point in the game where it's feasible to engage the nearby Guardians or not? not sure but putting this in spoiler tags to be safe. The worst I ever had at this game was when I was seiging the New Orion system. It had the default number of Armadas. And system defense ships. I sent endless waves of advances at them. To total slaughter. I had thousands of ships blockading the system. Each sent in waves. None getting through. I spent a century blockading the system and went through three generations of ship designs if not more before I was able to start to attrite themain defense fleet. I was nearly through ti when thier wandering stack of ships that went around bombarding everyone's colonies showed up and I lost another few battle fleets. So, a hundred or so odd turns of dispatching maximum strength armadas to the system, attacking with NO RETREAT ordes given, with ship losses in the thousands, I broke thier back. I slowly began the process of invading one of their worlds touse as a staging ground for further armies. Dozens of Battloid Armies sent to the meatgrinder. Another half century was spent slowly taking the planet region by region, fighting off fresh ships the Orions sent in to hit my fleet, and sending in constnat swamrs of reinforcements togrind forwards. One century? Two? Of warfare over a single system. To take a single planet. Millions dead in the fleet. Countless millions more of the ground armies that took the planet meter by meter over decades sent in by the legion. Was it worth it? When I invaded the second planet in the New Orion system, I made sure it was spearheaded by corps made up of locally recruited units from New Orion. In the end, having the Antarans fight in the first wave against their own kind whom had been eqipped, trained, and rallied to fight them made it. God I miss this game.
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Jan 4, 2018 14:35
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wedgekree posted:Also you at a point in the game where it's feasible to engage the nearby Guardians or not? To answer your question: Yes, we are already strong enough. I just had to wait until that huge Klackon-fleet was destroyed before I could do anything. And now there are new strategic problems raising their ugly heads: 1. One Guardian separates us from the Cynoids. We are at war with them and they are large enough to actually be a threat. Not really a good idea to go there before at least the Raas are eliminated. 2. Even though the Raas are now mostly gone, some systems are still putting up a fight, essentially forcing us to use our reserve to crush their last resistance. Obviously this means we can't use those ships for the Guardian close to their ex-territory. What I'm planning now is to wait until I've liberated the last couple systems in the sector with the Raas-Guardian before I attempt to take it, while the Cynoid-Guardian sadly has to wait until I'm satisfied with the Klackon-situation. (There's a huge complication coming up.) I mean even though we are Number 1 in the galaxy, it's a close call with the Cynoids and there are multiple races we haven't seen yet. Especially the Humans could surprise us with some sort of massive alliance, those diplomatic fuckers... Anyway, turning our two-front war into a three-front war is not something I want to be doing, so like you, I'm forced to sit there frustrated that I can't get the Guardians yet. Edit: By the way, based on past experiences we need at least 128 ships or 4 armadas, half of them carriers, to have a chance at victory at our current tech level. Thanks to our multiple fronts, that's a lot of warships we can't spare yet. But on the other hand, in a tech generation or two, we could cut that in half and still win. A lot of waiting around, though. Which we will probably have to do, if that complication I mentioned turns ugly. Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:00 on Jan 6, 2018 |
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Jan 6, 2018 11:57
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Yeah, Guardians make rather nice bottlenecks. Totally get the 'not wanting to have three front war'. And probably better to play this game cautiously, particularly when you have a limited reserve and you're engaged acrsos multiple borders. You going to be going defensive on the Klackon border now that you've secured Tavi or going to keep on going on the offensive? I don't think I ever took out a Guardian until the point of the game where I could logistically spam full strength ten task force Armadas with no strategic issues. Then again I'd lose most ofthem.. (Good at this game I was not) And that 'complication' is the doomstack of randomly wandering New Orion fleets with endgame tech that are bombarding you right?
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Jan 6, 2018 12:15
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wedgekree posted:Yeah, Guardians make rather nice bottlenecks. Totally get the 'not wanting to have three front war'. And probably better to play this game cautiously, particularly when you have a limited reserve and you're engaged acrsos multiple borders. You going to be going defensive on the Klackon border now that you've secured Tavi or going to keep on going on the offensive? The end goal against the Klackons is still to push them back to Dromos (the system right next to Tali), which elegantly will cut off one more system they took from the Psilons. We will liberate that one, too. Then we'll fortify Dromos to hell and back and call it a day, which should free up enough ships to deal with the Cynoids (and the Guardian on that front). The same way how meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy, eliminating the last Raas colonies will hopefully free up enough ships to deal with their Guardian. The complication is still a secret.
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Jan 6, 2018 13:49
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Yay for slow grinding down of systems to bottlenecks so that we can start to get a strategic reserve again! Only a few decades down the line to it, maybe! Good luck with the attrition freeing up enough places to make a few fortress systems and then start building up forces again. Or is the complication we find we have an infestation of Harvesters?
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Jan 8, 2018 06:59
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Recently I tried one of the stupider options of Master of Orion III for your amusement, just to see what would happen. And it turned out to work even dumber then I thought! Let's just say there'll be a short and very special update on Sunday, to tide you over while I continue writing the main update
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Jan 12, 2018 23:33
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Libluini posted:Recently I tried one of the stupider options of Master of Orion III for your amusement, just to see what would happen. I remember one game of MOO3 where someone managed to get the New Orions to go civil war. Back on the old Atari forums I think Normally they're stuck in their home system and can't colonize anywhere, but having them breakup to multiple 'empires' suddenly made it so that htey could colonize, expand fleet, etc. So they began sending out doomstacks of uber ships, genociding colonies, then landing on them.
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Jan 13, 2018 08:15
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wedgekree posted:I remember one game of MOO3 where someone managed to get the New Orions to go civil war. Back on the old Atari forums I think Textbook case of "gone horribly wrong" that
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Jan 13, 2018 09:32
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Cimbri posted:Textbook case of "gone horribly wrong" that On the upside if I recall right EVERYONE was killed, not just them technically
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Jan 13, 2018 10:04
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OK, poo poo this is taking longer then expected: I'm still testing something for the chaos-update, but it could be I will have to let my laptop run MO3 until tomorrow, or even Tuesday if I'm really unlucky. My feelings right now:  / 5
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Jan 14, 2018 13:16
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It is the ultimate game, the game to end all games.
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Jan 14, 2018 13:22
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Meister von Orion III: Angriff der ULTIMATEN Kapitel -22: Error There’s one weird thing we haven’t talked about much until now. See, at one point the developers asked themselves the question (probably while getting stoned) “Building space empires in a game about space empires? Maaaaan, that sound’s so lame! Totally bogus!” and then implemented a feature to allow you to skip all that boring empire building stuff. Today we will test this unwanted and unloved feature!  For our first test, enter the Meklar: Our in this game 100% robotic friends will be thrown into a medium-sized map with five other empires. The difficulty will be set to impossible and as value for the Start in Turn X option, we will let them start in turn 25, skipping all that boring scouting and colonizing of the first 25 turns!Since no-one of us has ever talked about it in this thread, let me start by pointing out for the third time how incredibly weird and stupid it is to take a game were building up your empire is the entire thing and then include an option to skip all this. But well, people are weird, too. So what if someone wanted to try this out, maybe to take over a late-game empire and see how it goes?  And… complete failure! The game starts like normal. Or does it? What the game doesn’t tell you, just putting in a number at game start isn’t enough to actually use the skip-feature. This is something which made me stumble more than once, as I am not very smart. Generally over the last 10+ years of playing this game, I was always a prisoner of a strange cycle where I tried this feature out, was confused by how it worked and when I finally remembered how to do this I realized it was completely stupid and never used it again. Until I had forgotten all about it and then fired the game up the next time after that. And wondered what that option in the lower right corner of the start-up screen actually does. Then the cycle repeated.  The map we used for this maybe called Wirbel (“Swirl”), but for some reason the stars look really evenly space out at our starting point. But wait, something is not right here. Can you spot it? Hint: You have to know the basic game mechanics to notice something here. Also, I have not done anything except moving the map around at this point.  OK, did you see it? The starting ships already had move orders. Yes, even though everything looks normal when you use the time skip, the AI is actually already in control! So now let’s hit End Turn and see what happens next!  So far, so good. The game turns. Everything nominal.  Uh, what?! That’s not nominal, abort, abort! The game just skipped your turn and continued processing! And there you have it. What, did you expect some kind of simulation running and you just starting at the specified turn directly? Get out, the devs have no time for your weird ideas. Or to properly implement features they came up with in a drug-hazed dream. Also in case you're wondering what "Verbleibende Computerimperien/Remaining Computer Empires: 0" refers to, no idea. Maybe the game counts down every AI player as it receives orders, but if that's the case, the numbers flash down to zero too fast for the human eye to notice.  25 skipped turns later, here we are. The game abruptly gives the player control during the space combat phase. Seems some other space nation is already bombarding one of our colonies. Not really an auspicious beginning.  Looks lively for turn 25. One empire is bombarding us, and we and a third empire are busy stealing each others techs.  The new map: Our AI has dutifully explored and colonized some systems, ironically out of all things our main LP guys (Silicoids) are bombarding us and we met some guys down there on the right.  Next, let’s see what the AI has done with our research. It doesn’t look too bad, actually: Economy, Biology and Sociology are all higher than I would have liked, and the AI gave not enough to Physics and Energy. Mathematics is right where it should be, though! Honestly, I’ve expected the AI to do a lot worse with our science investments.  So our spy war is with Humans? Funny to see two of the best spy empires of the game duking it out like this. Well, that is all for this test run. Our AI held up well in those 25 turns. But of course skipping 25 turns is nothing, at this level you should ask yourself if it was really worth it. Time to do this again!  This round goes to the Cynoids: Cyborgoid brethren of the robotic Meklar! Settings are almost the same as last time, just with Easy and 200 turns. Can the game deal with skipping that many turns? Let’s find out! There was another short Meklar-test with Easy and 25 turns I did before this one. I decided to skip it for this LP since there wasn’t any difference to the Impossible-run. Either the AI doesn’t care and works at whatever level is set for the game (which would make all players equal to each other obviously), or 25 turns are not enough to show a difference in performance. Later in this update we will answer this question, of course!  Now the waiting game begins. Skipping 25 turns just took a couple minutes. 200 turns… take a lot more. At least with Ultima Orion, you have a greater diversity of nice waiting screen images like this one to look at. Still, I suggest to go and do something else if you try this out at home. This can take about 30-45 minutes of letting MO3 play itself. Edit: Ha ha, I just noticed I accidentally screenshotted the screen while it was still counting down empires. Looks my guess was right, it's indeed the game counting down received orders super-fast.  Another great fan picture I liked to share. The game is still busy “simulating” turns by playing them out directly. As a funny aside, since you (the player) watch all this happen in real time, it would be interesting to see if you could record the skipping and then slow the recording down to see what the AI is doing. From my use of normal eye balls it looks like the AI really does play the game like you would, just super-fast enough to give you less then a second of a glimpse before the game turns again. It’s actually kind of unnerving to watch at the beginning. Then, as every turns takes longer and longer to process, you tend to stop noticing those short blips inbetween the waiting. Welp, too late now for this update but if there’s interest, I’ll probably try this at a later date.  THANK GOD FINALLY er, I mean, looks like the game has finished playing for us. Time to take back control!  I don’t know what’s funnier: That we just skipped 4/5/ths of this entire LP’s content in about 40 minutes, or that the first thing greeting us in turn 200 is enemy spy action. Kind of fitting, I think. Edit: Avid reader DTurtle noticed something important: The spy action greeting us here is actually ours! Apparently I was already getting tired of this poo poo when writing this up, because I sure as hell didn't notice this. I'm sorry guys, I just blindly assumed for some reason everything spy-related would end badly for our side!  The first thing I wanted to look up was research: How did our Meklars do those last 200 turns? Answer: Mixed. Some of this is reasonable, but the AI for some reason decided to put nearly a quarter of our entire research effort into Sociology. How strange. There wasn’t even any kind of important tech in the Sociology-tree as far as I could see, so the AI apparently just decided this on a whim?  Holy poo poo, the galaxy is blue! The AI was kind of busy, but as this map is only medium-sized, instead of loving gigantic like ours, the Meklar are already brushing against everyone in this version of the Orion Sector. It’s really hard to see on the screenshot, but there is another empire to the right with almost, but not quite, the same shade of blue as ours. Not at all confusing. Since we have the same problem in our main LP with the Cynoids being almost the same shade of red as us, I think this may just some kind of artifact of empire-placement. I’m guessing what happens here is the game has a check to prevent it from putting down races with the same color as yours, and it just lazily selects the next best shade and calls it a day when it accidentally does roll the same color.  Humans, Ithkul, Eoladi, Silicoids. And our Cynoids are at war with all of them, how precious. I’m not sure you still remember this, so let me bring this up again: The Cynoids (when unchanged from the standard settings in race creation), are really good at being merchants. Their economy is outstanding and when you can get them into trade pacts with your neighbors, you can get filthy rich fast. Now of course this is only interesting for you if you In fact, as you can remember from our main LP, the Cynoids are at constant war with our gas giant allies and if we weren’t controlled by a real human, our Silicoids would gladly be at war with them, too! (Instead of just out of necessity.) When you want to play them, your Cynoids need to be retooled into replacement-Meklar, essentially. Or you just have to suck it up and enjoy having turbo capitalism in a galaxy filled with space communists, I guess.  Some graphs from the same auto-run: As this is Easy, even the AI had no problems colonizing 106 planets and getting us to 2nd best empire. Looking closely, it seems the Ithkul have just bypassed us and the Silicoids (now No. 3), probably thanks to those two nose-diving graphs telling me they’ve been busy eating people. Welp, this galaxy is doomed. Next!  Now that was hopefully interesting for you. One question remains: What happens if we send in a race under Impossible-difficulty for that long? The Psilons are willing to volunteer, so we’ll send them into the breach!  About 45 minutes later, here we are: The Psilons are in the process of getting schooled, all rough-house like. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  This time around, turn 200 greats us with a dying colony. Kind of apt for the Psilons, as they are one of the worst races in Master of Orion III. If you want a challenge, take either them or the Trilarians. Those are also the worst, and I will bitch about them at length at some later date. Combine them with Impossible and you’ll unlock the secret Are You Nuts?-difficulty.  Case in point: Dark blue is Psilons, light greenish-blue is Ithkul. Yeah, the eggheads are hosed.  Turbo-hosed. The Ithkul are the only race the Psilons are in contact with, and they are hungry.   Make this mega-hosed: The Ithkul have three times as much planets, are a full tech generation ahead and are in the process of turning the Psilons into a fancy new brand of brain food.The rest of this tragedy was as expected: Counter-productive research investments, lots of useless transports filling up the reserves. The kind of poo poo we’ve seen from our enemies in the main LP already.  Oh, of course!  This explains everything! The Psilons are losing so hard because they are lead by a Raas! Poor bastards. Let’s leave them to their doom and try something else.So, to summarize: Either the player-AI is a lot shittier and skipping turns on higher difficulties is an invitation for pain, or the RNG can gently caress you over royally, causing you to lose nearly an hour of our lifetime before MO3 tells you to restart. But, you know. If you want to, you can try to skip to the endgame right away. Just put in 500 turns to skip, wait a couple hours, start with one planet left and see your enemies bomb you into extinction in turn 501. Game Over.  One last attempt! This time, we’ll try to make the AI win! How? We give this run to one of the gas giant races and switch on the alternate winning conditions. Also we dial down the difficulty somewhat to merely Difficult. We also give our testing victims some more races to be diplomats with: This run starts with 8. Same medium-sized map. And now max skip run is GO! Theoretically, this should play to the Imsaies’ strengths: More races (so in case a couple of them are hostile, the Imsaies hopefully have some allies to help out) and with diplomatic victory on, their giant planets filled with billions of them should give them enough votes for an easy election. The time of the New Orions is over! The next age will be an Age of Gas! 9999 turns is the maximum amount you can type in and normally I wouldn’t do this, but I fully expect our AI to win. If you see this update later then Sunday, I hosed up and had to leave my laptop running for a couple days longer then expected.  The situation just before I end the turn to get this crazy train rolling: Our diplomats are already part of the Orion Senate, and at least one of their neighbors are Trilarians. Hopefully our Imsaies steamroll those fish fuckers.  Welp, looks like I was in error. No Trilarians here. Instead, Trilar (homeworld of the Trilarians), was taken over by Meklar? The RNG in this game is asylum-level insane sometimes. Yeah, the orange flag reveals Trilar is the starting planet for the Meklar this time around. Are you loving kidding me, game?  At least Eoladi and Evons are here, too. OK, this looks doable. Power on! … …  Three hours later, the experiment seems to have failed: By my count we should be way past turn 400 now and on a medium map and with alternate victory conditions on the game should have been over long ago. I'm aborting the run. Well, in all honesty I did entertain the possibility of letting the game run until all 9999 turns are processed or the game ended, but then I suddenly regained my sanity. I guess we have to try this again with an actually reasonable turn number. gently caress.  OK, another try: The same as last time, and 500 turns to skip now. Last time we overdid this, but this time we should either win, or at least get to take a look at where our test subjects are staying.  This time, the map is even emptier: The Orion Senate starts with one race less.  Humans and Eoladi are our new Senate-buddies! Looks like we got some easy allies. With this, our test subjects should win even faster! … … …  gently caress poo poo what?! OK that’s it, I’m out of here. See you next real update! Of course now the RNG declares we lose. Turn 176 was the last one, then the Eoladi got elected to the Orion Senate and achieved diplomatic victory, dumpstering this auto-run. But still, this is a nice opportunity to show off how giant races are ideal for going for the diplomatic victory, thanks to having tons of voting subjects on their many giant planets. If you play with a non-gas giant race and still want to be peacefully elected, you better get your poo poo in gear, or Imsaies and Eoladi will outpace you fast Also, to close this update off, let’s summarize: Master or Orion III's time skip indeed will dutifully execute even the stupidest order and essentially play until the bitter end if you let it. Though at best, a couple hundred turns can be skipped this way, or the waiting time for the player to regain control becomes ridiculous. Of course in case you actually want to play the game, nothing of this is helpful: For every awesome endgame empire this option gives you, you end up with a desperate last stand or an insta-loss. (The waiting time before each attempt doesn’t help either.) My verdict: Only usable if you want to skip a part of the early game, everything after turn 50 is a high-stakes gamble with a twist: Regardless of if you win or lose, the bank gets an hour of your life. And now we can safely ignore this feature for ever Libluini fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Jan 15, 2018 |
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Jan 14, 2018 18:02
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Libluini posted:And now we can safely ignore this feature for ever Or for three months, until you forget about what it does, fire up the game, and ponder 'what does that thing do again?'
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Jan 14, 2018 20:00
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Thotimx posted:Or for three months, until you forget about what it does, fire up the game, and ponder 'what does that thing do again?' I'm seriously hoping spending nearly two days on fiddling with this option has cured me.
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Jan 14, 2018 21:22
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We'll have to give you something else to fiddle with. I'll vote Sword of the Stars ][ and then Aurora (which is a far superior game with a far better UI).
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Jan 14, 2018 22:37
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Libluini posted:
 I recently found my MoO3 CDs when cleaning up the cellar. I can vaguely recall playing it once or so, but I don't recall the seemingly endless torture of this game, so I must have quickly recognized that it was a waste of my money. Kudos for keeping at it for so long. How long does an average game take to finish? It really seems to take forever.
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Jan 14, 2018 23:22
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DTurtle posted:Actually your spy just killed an enemy leader. Thanks for finding that error! Somehow I completely missed that was us. To answer your question: Like the testing in this update shows, about three quarters of an hour if you let the AI play for you otherwise, rather long, I think. I remember one game on a small map ending just before the game hit turn 300 (because like in a certain auto-run above, a gas giant race elected themselves to the top of the Orion Senate) and another one were I got close to the end was a death march on a giant map, slowly exterminating the last enemy empires left. That one got to something ridiculous like turn 483 before I gave up. That was with vanilla and completely unpatched, so the game turned unplayable thanks to the memory leak slowing down my machine. When I noticed a single turn taking almost an hour to process I decided it was time to stop. Apart from that, I never actually won a game, or got to the end before burning out. (Half the reason I made this LP was motivating myself to finally do finish a run to the bitter end.) Fake edit: For every main update, I spend something between 1-2 hours playing. Let's say some of the earlier updates went faster and we arrive at a educated guess of 1 update = 1 hour play time. This means, excluding stuff like writing or doing dumb poo poo like this update, I've spend 80 hours on this one run so far, and we're far from the end. On a small map you can expect to be far into the endgame at the point we are at. A medium-sized map is harder to evaluate: As this auto-run update shows, sometimes the game is over long before turn 200, sometimes it runs hundreds of turns longer. Based on this, a reasonable set of assumptions for average game length would be: 40-80 hours on a small map 60-120 hours on a medium map 100+ hours on everything larger Mind you, this is when going for a total victory, like we do. A pure science or diplomatic victory can go by incredibly fast if you use race creations to min-max your way to the goal.
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Jan 15, 2018 00:04
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SIGSEGV posted:We'll have to give you something else to fiddle with. I'll vote Sword of the Stars ][ and then Aurora (which is a far superior game with a far better UI). Please don't suggest people play Sword of the Stars 2. Its been LPed enough.
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Jan 15, 2018 05:04
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Veloxyll posted:Please don't suggest people play Sword of the Stars 2. Its been LPed enough. Just twice. And perhaps MOO3 will be a primer on the SOTS2 UI and automation. I'm being unfair to MOO3. (My favorite is the goop modules, it's armour repair that can be automated, the only option being at 50% armor damage, a condition that generally happens about 20 minutes after the ship blows up.)
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Jan 15, 2018 14:10
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SIGSEGV posted:Just twice. And perhaps MOO3 will be a primer on the SOTS2 UI and automation. I'm being unfair to MOO3. (My favorite is the goop modules, it's armour repair that can be automated, the only option being at 50% armor damage, a condition that generally happens about 20 minutes after the ship blows up.) Like I said. Enough.
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Jan 16, 2018 09:35
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Veloxyll posted:Like I said. Enough. I actually tried to see if they had improved it since then and during my first battle it spawned me inside the sun. So yeah, you were right. Combat still looks loving gorgeous though.
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Jan 16, 2018 15:42
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As large and complex as MOO3 is, I have a tough time working out how it would benefit you to get 25 turns into the game with no idea how you got there.
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Jan 20, 2018 11:37
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Glazius posted:As large and complex as MOO3 is, I have a tough time working out how it would benefit you to get 25 turns into the game with no idea how you got there. Probably a bit more then starting at turn 200 You have to give it to the game for efficiency, though: The ability to just let the computer play for you protects the player from agonizing decisions, like how to play Also, the way MO3 doesn't even let you watch what it is doing in this mode is really a masterful troll: The game takes hours of your time and there's a good chance you'll never even get to play because the game ends before your starting turn is reached.
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Jan 20, 2018 11:47
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For all the grief it gets, I actually don't think the feature was a bad idea, at least in theory. I can't believe I'm standing up for the unholy POS that is MOO3, but I am here. There's something to be said for not having to start from scratch, dealing with a more mature empire for a starting situation that isn't 'same old, same old'. Think of it as a setting that adds to more robust initial conditions.
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Jan 20, 2018 18:16
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Thotimx posted:For all the grief it gets, I actually don't think the feature was a bad idea, at least in theory. And I actually agree with that! It's mostly the execution that is atrocious, because who in their right mind wants to wait hours to start playing? Plus the whole "game could be over before you start"-thing. Space Empires V solved this problem better, because instead of trying to simulate the entire game universe from turn one, you can use the start-settings to set up a mature empire: You can have up to 10 starting planets and give everyone large amounts of tech points, for example. It has also other exotic options, like setting a maximum cap on your ships and units, forcing you to strategically think about what you're doing, instead of just spamming your best stuff countless times. (Of course if you don't like designing your own ships and units, those options not giving you some pre-made stuff will feel like the agony of a thousand hells to you, so consider yourself warned.) Overall, I've played SEV more and had more fun with it than with MO3. It's just MO3's oddly charming races which make me come back for punishment again and again. For example, I'm now thinking of doing a Cynoid-run on a higher difficulty after the LP is over, just for fun.
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Jan 20, 2018 18:39
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A short thread update: The game is about to become a lot more convoluted, but I also have some good things to say about Master of Orion III, our ultimate space 4x. Tomorrow. When I have finished writing the next part. Which will be tomorrow.
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Feb 10, 2018 18:59
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