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Good luck with the next Guardian! Glad cat is sorta doing better. Make sure you have colonies to drop in fast. And you going to priortize going after Dromos as soon as you have sufficient fleets present to go on the offensive?
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Apr 29, 2019 02:54
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wedgekree posted:Good luck with the next Guardian! Glad cat is sorta doing better. Make sure you have colonies to drop in fast. And you going to priortize going after Dromos as soon as you have sufficient fleets present to go on the offensive? Colony drop already done, see update. Of course, the next Guardian will be harder since there will be actual enemies nearby. And Dromos, welp. There is already enough force over there to crack Dromos two times over. The wild card here is the New Orion fleet hovering in-system. If they stay out, we're lucky. If they rush in after we enter Dromos, there'll be trouble ahead. Let's see how this goes. Oh, and this would have been today but I got sidetracked by doing preliminary work for my next LP and I wrote 12 pages today and now my hand hurts. But tomorrow: Guaranteed update!
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Apr 30, 2019 21:13
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Is the tech difference genuinely enough to make the New Orions still a threat at this late stage of the game? It's a long time since I played, but I seem to remember them not really spreading outside of their initial holdings, meaning that it was limited how well they could oppose a late-game empire just because of the disparity in production capability.
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Apr 30, 2019 21:36
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Remember, Ultima Orion boosted shield regen by an insane amount to make it more Perry Rhodan-like. Know this, and you'll have your answer. More would be spoilers!
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Apr 30, 2019 21:57
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New Orions are brutal. I kept a seige up of the Orion system in one game for nearly five hundred years against roughly 100 ships and system defenses losing thousands and thousands of ships doing so - I would attack every turn with a maximum number of Armadas, and they would be slaughtered. I literally went through five or so generations of complete redesigns of ships and tech ups if not more before I slowly cracked the system open.
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May 1, 2019 03:07
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 97: Guardians are Forever, Part II  Another day, another update: Turn 327 awaits us today. A new agent, Advanced Polymerization will be used from now on and our engineers testing our new miniaturized FTL-engine right the gently caress now: Next turn, it’ll be available for designs.  Agent Ohrschuss (“Ear Shot”) is a terrorist. He is unusually unlucky (only 40) and his defense is rather bad for this late in the game (4). His offense is at a suitable 7 but what good is that if he is detected on turn 1 and immediately killed? He can join terrorist Ivan on defense, though.  A short look at Dromos, our next strategical target: Most of the population is Klackons. There are a lot of them. The planets are mostly unsuitable for Silicoids, but at least there are some mineral rich ones among them. Nice, considering all the terraforming techs we can use on them to make them better.  There are a shitton of Klackons living on Dromos II. I think this isn’t even a gas giant, this look more like one of those exotic “super-earths” astronomers are talking about.  And that was it already. Onwards to turn 328! Our colonizers have reached Thok, the next system behind Ursa and we raise new ground troops to keep unrest in our Ex-Raas systems under control. The Eoladi tell us that our enforced peace will end in three turns. Something they’ll continue to tell us until we actually have contact with them again!  Our fleets form up in Tristan, to strike at the second Guardian-system in the near future.  Meanwhile, I notice our allies have developed a method to stagger multiple Quantum-Field shields over another, resulting in a massively improved shield strength. This 5th shield tech was something we jumped over, since our tree didn’t roll it. This is me baiting the Imsaies with our strong Neutronium armor, hoping the AI will give in. I’m not holding my breath, since the Imsaies simply ignored my last few requests. But on the other hand, I don’t like ignoring gameplay elements just because they turn out to be useless.  Turn 329 seems to be mostly same old, same old. After nearly 500 cycles (which is something like 750 years), our space civilization of sapient minerals finally researched a method to make industrial robots to help out in our industry! Technology in the Orion Sector sure is wonky sometimes. Also we kill another Human spy. Stealthy fuckers.  Aaaaaaand that was all for that turn, so we immediately continue to turn 330. XEOL ends our foreverwar again, and our allies refuse to give us their fancy shield tech. Boooooooooooooo Seriously guys??? We’re supposed to wage war on your account, but you don’t want to give us your fancy schmancy defensive tech? You absolute fuckers! But the joke is on them, we’ll soon get an even better tech and we won’t give it to them, either!!!  The Imsaies tell us “circumstances force us to refuse”. What, do they think their shield tech would be immediately stolen from us or something? Well, poo poo. Maybe that’s exactly what happens here.   At least on the Guardian-front everything works well: We already put colonies in all of our new systems and our fleet is ready for the strike into the second Guardian-system.  The odd mish-mash of ships in Tristan begins moving. The slowest task force starts first. Four more turns, and the second Guardian-system will be ours!  Wait what, what is this?! Turn 331 throws us a curveball: Our colony in Tristan allowed us to make contact across the Guardian-system: Another pocket of isolated empires has been found! The new empires are the PIUM Union and the Esanania Federation (I refuse to use that long alphanumerical code the PIUM send us). Our diplomats are not sure they translated those names correctly, but for now the Kingdom of Almandin is using them. By the way, if we’re lucky, we may at a later date swipe through them and around to meet the Orion Senate from the other side. But at first we need to find out more about our new neighbors.  OK, this is our newest AIA agent. Atlas has max defense and near max offense. It’s a shame that the AI doesn’t have fancy council leaders for us to kill, so for now he’ll instead help protecting our fancy council leaders. Only three more spies left from our current recruitment effort. Then we should be good until the first of our stalwart defenders of the crown start dying again. So we have about 20-30 turns, taking their slowly degrading luck stats into account, before we need to recruit more.  And of course our “friends” want us to continue the senseless war against XEOL. We of course say yes, but now we’re up three fronts again, depending on how our new neighbors react to our presence.  Our first look at the Esanania Federation. It’s the Nommo! Now we only need the Trilarians, and we have met all the Ichtythosians! The Nommo tend to be the aggressive, war-mongering sisters of the Trilarian peaceful autocrats. As a player, you’ll generally take the Trilarians if you want a science or diplomatic victory, and the Nommo if you want to blow up poo poo. Doing it the other way around will be quite the challenge. The Esananians have a nice count of 74 planets and a good sized military. Depending on their tech level, they could be a nice ally or a headache-inducing problem for us. Note to self: Take a closer look at the Nommo as soon as possible. We ask them for a non-aggression treaty, because why not?  And here are the Meklar! See the link to their lore post below if you want to remember why they’re 100% robotic now instead of cyborgs like the new race, the Cynoids. But because the devs are weird, the Meklar use the same 50/50 Food/Mineral-system for sustenance as the Cynoids. Either the game was hardcoded in a way to make it impossible to just make the Meklar full lithovores, or the devs didn’t want to make their neat spreadsheets dirty. There’s really no reason for the Meklar to have the same basic supply system as the Cynoids, considering their internal differences, but here we are. I guess the Meklar are really into biotech, huh? The PIUM Union only has 30 planets, but nearly twice as much fleet strength as the Nommo. But for all we know that could be 400 transports mixed in there. We need to go to the tech and victory screens to get more detailed info. In a better game, we would do this by spying. In Master of Orion III, for some reason the devs thought it would be cool to just give you everything you need to know about your enemies. How nice of them! We also ask them for peace. Considering the Cynoids are kind of cool with us and only at war because of the Imsaies, we may indeed luck out and get another ally on this side of the Orion Sector! Refresher: Cybernetiks  A short look at the relations screen shows us the Meklar are kind of indifferent towards us. Our own population is slightly interested, but mostly just shrugs, too. Our actual relations are at a slightly positive 45. Ironically, somewhat like 40 positive at first contact is what you can get as a starting empire if you really pull out all the stops to make awesome space diplomats. Here, we just barely reached this lofty goal after piling up diplomatic techs for hundreds of turns! We have come a long way from our first diplomatic contacts, which probably involved a lot of messages from our side sounding like “WE COME IN PEACE, SHOOT TO KILL!”  The Nommo however, take badly to talking rocks. While our populations just kind of dislike each other, the government of the Nommo nation just freaked out like Silicoid-like creatures have been in all their horror-movies or something. A negative 107 is ludicrously bad for first contact, even for us. I guess there will be no peace in our time, bummer.  While our diplomatic corps eagerly awaits the surely only positive responses from our new space friends, the Almandian fleet pounces on Dromos. Our strong fleet in Foman uses the short star lane to Dromos for a sudden liberation attempt. Next turn, we’ll see how scary the New Orions truly are! Yeah, the Klackons are too far behind in tech by now to do anything besides dying, the strong New Orions fleet however could stop us dead cold if they decide to attack our fleet.  Another tech creeps in: After our scientists and engineers grasped the complex concept of “robots, but for industry”, they’re on a roll and are now closing in on the concept of “robots, but for fun”. Entertainment Robots make our recreation zones 33% more effective, which is a lot. A nice thing to have! 750 years to make industrial robots, but now that we have them, it’ll take only ca. 13-14 more years to make robot entertainers! Science is awesome, sometimes!  Multiple parties are bothering poor Dromos: Our planned assault on the Klackons has to wait, as we’re have to deal with the New Orions first. I order our fleet to hold position and take personal command to prevent the AI from loving us over.  Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit nearly 100k offensive power, that’s a lot! Even if we have enough fire power to eventually break through their shields, with that amount of DPS the New Orions would atomize an even larger fleet then ours long before that could happen. As our admiral sees the New Orions’ ships energy signatures flare up as their weapons come online, she immediately orders a full retreat. It seems the Klackons remain safe in the Dromos-system. For now.   Welp, that could have gone better. The military disaster in Dromos is one of the main stories of our Kingdom’s media for GC 498. Unrest on Iras II follows, and XEOL decided to not wait on our war declaration and send theirs last turn already.  The Nommo demand we stop our actions immediately. Our diplomats carefully ask back “PLEASE SPECIFY WHICH ACTIONS YOU WANT US TO STOP”.  Yeah, yeah. You know the drill by now. The Cynoids of XEOL are at war with us. I sure hope 90 planets is enough to maintain those nearly 6000 ships, or I foresee an economic collapse in their near future.  Because I’m dumb I forgot to look up stats for our new friends, and instead looked up the Tachidi (another insectoid race, generally a bit friendlier than the Klackons). As we have no contact with them, their info is blanked out but I do learn that as long as we did have contact, they were still expanding. Our new friends too seem rather active, so hopefully only the Cynoids and Imsaies are infected by the stalemate plague.  Turn 333. In an interesting upturn of events, the Meklar refuse peace for no reason, while the Nommo agree to a non-aggression pact, even though we revolt them. Strange, but strategically even better, considering the Nommo have the larger empire.  Oh, the Meklar refused peace because they declared war. Makes sense!   New neighbors of course means new spies. Oh, and the Meklar are really good at spying, so industrial robots exploding on Almandin IV and the sudden wave of fake news is probably all their doing.  Well, at the very least our new front-line will be super-secure for a while, considering our 300-ships strong Anti-Guardian armada is here. Next update: Another Guardian-battle.  The Meklar are kind of miffed about our horrific atrocities. So they decided to take on an empire nearly four times their size. I’m getting the feeling our status as 1st Empire in the Orion Sector causes the AI to be more aggressive as normal, as this kind of reaction is kind of suicidal and dumb for an empire that much smaller than us. It would make sense if all empires everywhere are forced to act this way. Or it’s just that most people hate the Silicoids anyway.  For some reason the Nommo are really grateful for our offer. They’re at war with the Meklar. That’s 100% the reason. I haven’t even looked at their relations to other races and I know this must be true. System Message Received I forgot to record the Meklar and Nommo talking for this session, but the missing videos will be in the next update! Also, since with the Nommo we finally met one of the two Ichtythosian races, it's time again for another lore post! Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Expedition Completed Expedition 2: Partial discoveries made (4) + 5 ships lost Expedition 3: Expedition Completed Next: Guardians are Forever, Part III + More Lore
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May 1, 2019 22:39
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Shame the "you attacked an empire I'm at war with" bonus is so low. I'm tempted to say we should abort the guardian run but the sooner we start bringing enlightenment and democracy to the poor oppressed Meklar, the sooner we'll be done.
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May 2, 2019 00:40
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Oh poo poo there are still actual lore posts to go.
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May 2, 2019 00:52
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Yay! Good luck with the Guardian and huh, nice to be in contact again (or not) with other stellar empires
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May 2, 2019 02:23
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terrenblade posted:Shame the "you attacked an empire I'm at war with" bonus is so low. I'm tempted to say we should abort the guardian run but the sooner we start bringing enlightenment and democracy to the poor oppressed Meklar, the sooner we'll be done. Well, the New Orions are blocking advancing into the Klackons, so what else is he going to use all his battleships for?
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May 2, 2019 07:45
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 Lore 39: Fish and Squids So, I was just checking my notes for the next lore-update when I found out I already had posted about the Ichtythosians, because they and the Saurians have the same backstory. I must have suppressed that knowledge because the Nommo represent somewhat of a headache. First, as a refresher here some links to the Ichtythosian background: Part I: Civil War in the Depths Part II: Rebels turning into Dinosaurs Part III: What the gently caress are the Nommo? Part IV: Fish today, Saurian tomorrow To summarize this mess: 1. Ichtythosians fight among themselves, the losers are exiled to the surface of Trilar. 2. Ichtythosians divided into "Young Spawn" and normal faction. The "Young Spawn" leave Trilar to realize their dreams of founding the Space Reich 3. Loser rebels mutate/change into dinosaurs and leave Trilar. 4. Antarans are behind everything 5. Dinosaurs accidentally create the Darlock 6. Antarans are behind everything 7. Apparently another sapient species, the Nommo, are also from Trilar. Maybe? The way the different lore entries are written in the game's galactopedia makes it sound like the Nommo are the "Young Spawn" who left Trilar after the war and the losers of the war became the Saurians. But why then, are the Nommo clearly cephalopodic creatures with shells, and the normal Trilarian clearly look like they're descended from fish (pescoids)? And why are the Nommo suddenly off-handedly mentioned as their own thing but still part of the Trilarian line when at no point before the Nommo were clearly identified? After thinking far harder than the devs about this, I came to the following conclusions: 1. The Nommo are indead the "Young Spawn" 2. They changed themselves to be better adapted to the deep sea 3. It is absolutely not true that the devs of Master of Orion III had no idea that fish and squids are not the same thing, like at all. Fish turning into dinosaurs makes more sense. But ultimately, I'll leave the choice to you: Are the Nommo an independent species, or are they the "Young Spawn"-faction of the Trilarians, who changed themselves to be space squids? Depending on your answers, I'll change how the Kingdom of Almandin addresses their factions in-game.
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May 3, 2019 17:33
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Clearly the 'young-spawn' found the Nommo home planet, attacked it, and were defeated.
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May 3, 2019 17:45
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terrenblade posted:Clearly the 'young-spawn' found the Nommo home planet, attacked it, and were defeated. Man, I really like this, but sadly the Nommo themselves claim they came from Trilar. They just aren't saying if they are/were Trilarians themselves. They're basically the squid version of the old guy from Pulse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpC-rFZrYz4&t=452s
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May 3, 2019 18:58
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The Nommo are Raas in disguise!
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May 3, 2019 23:48
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Come on, guys! I need some more votes! I'll give you until wednesday, then I want to start writing the next update. Libluini fucked around with this message at 11:01 on May 6, 2019 |
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May 6, 2019 10:01
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The Nommo are an independent species, but also the only independent species, as all species are actually just sinister Nommo in disguise, and the species lore has been written by them to deceive anyone who happens to stumble by. But really, the way I remember reading it was that the Nommo were their own species.
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May 6, 2019 10:29
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I'd prefer if they weren't an independent species since I prefer my SF with relatively rare sapient life occurrences unless we go in straight up camp space opera.
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May 6, 2019 11:45
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Nommo are actually evil parasitic space worms that take over their hosts and transform them to suit their environment. So the fish parts are from Trilar but the brain parasites are aliens from another planet that invaded and then left Trilar
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May 6, 2019 12:14
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I´ll take 3) because they definitely thought this through 
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May 6, 2019 13:21
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Definitely 3, just imagine that a bunch of eels evolved into some sort of colony organism hermit crab type thing.
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May 6, 2019 15:08
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OK, tomorrow the voting gets closed, so this is the last chance for every remaining lurker to make my life a living hell by coming up with some truly bat-poo poo answers to the voting question I then have to somehow weave into something resembling Human speech. For the Nommo! Let's get Kraken
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May 7, 2019 17:33
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Welp, thanks for the votes. I want to officially close voting, but if someone still wants to vote, go ahead. I don't know when I can next post, IRL is sapping my energy somewhat fierce lately. Cat update: Today I found one of her fangs in her food bowl. It apparently just fell off. Now her flesh up there is oddly grayish, kind of? Not a good sign. Also my local animal clinic made an ultrasound recently and thinks she might have pancreatic cancer. Together with my normal vet thinking she might have bone cancer in her jaw, I'm fast running out of hope here. So, please don't be disappointed if this thread slows down again, I'll try to write as much as I can. 
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May 9, 2019 20:40
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Libluini posted:Welp, thanks for the votes. I want to officially close voting, but if someone still wants to vote, go ahead. I don't know when I can next post, IRL is sapping my energy somewhat fierce lately. Poor poor kitty. We understand, real life comes first.
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May 9, 2019 20:43
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Best wishes for the kitty, and for you. Just let us know if you need help
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May 10, 2019 02:32
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Hey there sorry for you and your cat. Take care, life comes first over LP's.
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May 10, 2019 03:11
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I took a bike ride through lower austria/south moravia today and Uh oh I fled the place immediately but not before recording the many crimes of these holdouts  "Here in Alerklast in turn 1809 the sylexian army, under the command of gen. Vein-a-rockte met its tombstone". Dawncloack fucked around with this message at 00:02 on May 11, 2019 |
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May 10, 2019 23:58
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Thread update: My ailing cat's health has slowly stabilized, so I can allot the time I've been playing cat nurse to this LP instead. The next update should be ready on Sunday. (It could have been earlier, but I also broke down and spend some time proof-reading my 16-page script for my planned next LP instead of working on this one. I am the worst) Dawncloack posted:I took a bike ride through lower austria/south moravia today and As fascinating as your post was, your links are broken and so I have no idea what you're talking about
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May 31, 2019 15:39
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drat! They work for me on my phone, not on my computer bc of restrictions Try a different device? what a pity, I had so much fun with that one. To make a long story short, I stumbled upon Raasdorf. The rest is puns on a historical memorial, also pictured. If I hosted them in something other than tinypic, would that help?
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May 31, 2019 15:42
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Dawncloack posted:drat! They work for me on my phone, not on my computer bc of restrictions No idea, it's the first time I'm encountering this problem! Normally I can't see something on my phone, this is the first time it happens to be the other way around! (And now I just looked at my smartphone and the pics aren't showing up there, either. Welp.) Edit: The pics show up if your manually take the links and put them into a browser. Seems like Radium just doesn't like this kind of linking, odd. Libluini fucked around with this message at 15:58 on May 31, 2019 |
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May 31, 2019 15:55
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it's because they're http://. we aren't allowed to host images from internet sites that use http:// because they're not secure or something. if you host on imgur or anywhere else that's an https://, the pictures will show up.
oystertoadfish fucked around with this message at 16:35 on May 31, 2019 |
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May 31, 2019 16:32
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Good to see you again! Looking forwards to this thread continuing.
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Jun 1, 2019 02:08
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Short update: I've been finally back in the mood to play a lot of MO3, so the future of this thread is safe again. The bad news is however, since I have to go back to work tomorrow I've decided to postpone my planned Sunday-update so I can play more of the game. The good news is I've already collected enough material for four more updates, and I'll probably be at something like 8-10 when I'm finally running out of time to play today. So I hope you're willing to wait a couple more days, but after that posts should be coming a lot more regularly! (The funny thing is I would have probably been able to keep my promise if I hadn't spend most of Saturday playing Eve Online oh wait poo poo did I type this out loud gently caress
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Jun 2, 2019 12:03
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That checks out, both are space game spreadsheet simulators. All you need to do more is to play X3 or X4 to complete the triumvirate.
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Jun 2, 2019 14:15
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Hey, you're forgiven. I'm sure EVE is far more taxing of your brain than figuring out the update and image hosting issues of the LP
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Jun 3, 2019 03:32
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HiKaizer posted:That checks out, both are space game spreadsheet simulators. All you need to do more is to play X3 or X4 to complete the triumvirate. Then play Aurora 4x to get S-Rank!
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Jun 3, 2019 20:32
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Neophyte posted:Then play Aurora 4x to get S-Rank! I actually tried several times! I always bounced of during the "set up the game"-phase. Well, except the first time, where I learned that Aurora (that old version at least) didn't like German computers and I had to manually change my language settings to English or something dumb like that. The second and third time I always got stuck preparing the perfect little world for the alien race I made up and I could never really decide on what kind of planet or system they should get. Cue a couple hours of generating new planets until I burned out Aurora's problem is that it does too much at once, which married to that atrociously complicated interface means it's like a dumbass trap made to confound me. Aurora will stay forever the game I really want to play, but can't
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Jun 3, 2019 21:03
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The best part of Aurora 4X is when you have to change some system wide decimal separator setting if you aren't a merkin.
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Jun 3, 2019 22:35
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How about some Sword of the Stars after this?
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Jun 8, 2019 07:19
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NHO posted:How about some Sword of the Stars after this? I'm still trying to stay close to the poll I made years ago in this thread, which means the next game is going to be a totally unknown German 4x. (Also sadly, I could never really get into Sword of the Stars. Besides that, I have the complete collection from Paradox, but it adamantly refuses to run on my PC and I really don't want to invest the time or money to solve this problem with a game I don't even like that much.) Libluini fucked around with this message at 10:28 on Jun 8, 2019 |
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Jun 8, 2019 10:14
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If you wanted to continue the theme of "terrible badly-designed sequels", there's always Sword of the Stars II
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Jun 8, 2019 10:16
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