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Jabor posted:If you wanted to continue the theme of "terrible badly-designed sequels", there's always Sword of the Stars II Imperium (for the Atari ST) taught me it's a bad idea to play a game you hate so much you start feeling physically ill, so that's out, too
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Jun 8, 2019 10:30
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Jabor posted:If you wanted to continue the theme of "terrible badly-designed sequels", there's always Sword of the Stars II To be fair, there have already been two SOTS2 LPs
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Jun 8, 2019 10:40
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Besides, I don't want to make "lovely Sequels" my theme. None of the games (one isn't a 4x, it just plays in the same world as one) planned after MO3 are sequels, anyway. I just hope I can get them all to run -most of the other games are old, not fresh and new like Master of Orion III
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Jun 8, 2019 10:44
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Libluini posted:Aurora's problem is that it does too much at once I am endlessly fascinated by your perspective on games. I would never have conceived of someone who likes MOO3 saying this. I like the fact that you have an eye for - whatever it is you have an eye for, and are staying focused on it. That is to be commended.
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Jun 8, 2019 11:17
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To be fair to Libluini, I don't think you need an engineer's mindset to play MO3, whereas Aurora...
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Jun 8, 2019 11:59
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terrenblade posted:Clearly the 'young-spawn' found the Nommo home planet, attacked it, and were defeated. +1 vote for Nommo: Their own drat species Veloxyll posted:The Nommo are Raas in disguise! +1 wildcard PurpleXVI posted: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. +1 vote for Nommo: Independence Day SIGSEGV posted: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. +1 vote for Nommo: Trilarian Trials Slaan posted: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 +1 vote for Nommo: Stargate Edition Mr.Misfit posted:I´ll take 3) because they definitely thought this through +1 vote for Nommo: We were Trilarians all along Decoy Badger posted:Definitely 3, just imagine that a bunch of eels evolved into some sort of colony organism hermit crab type thing. +1 vote for Nommo: Reasonably Trilarian End count 3 votes for Nommo as a really weird Trilarian offshoot 2 votes for Nommo as their own, totally independent species 1 wildcard for the new series: Nommo: Raas in Disguise. Featuring our most beloved hero, Optimus Saur! 1 vote for Stargate Orion, the new spinoff featuring the SG1-team reaching Orion via Stargate and trying to explore it while being hunted by Antaran patrols. This gives the following new background for the Nommo: The Nommo are an aquatic species. While today they see themselves as an independent species and don't like thinking back to the time they still lived in the deep seas of Trilar, they share the same ancestors with the more outwardly pescioid Trilarians. The other Trilarians were significantly altered by secret Antaran genetics experiments and additionally drifted apart from the ancient Nommo, who were better adapted to life in the deep sea of Trilar and for a long time, never really ventured outside their home environment. At the same time, most of the other Trilarians never went back to the deep sea they all came from after adaptation to the higher waters reached a certain threshold. When the Great War tore Trilar apart, the Nommo refused to take sides and therefore suffered heavily from both warring factions. From this point forward, the Nommo began to see the other Trilarians as something utterly alien, a threat from above. In the end, the Nommo used the confusion when, one after another, large parts of the surviving Trilarians left the planet. First the exiles on the surface, then the aggressive faction calling themselves the "Young Spawn" both decided to seek their destiny in space. With the added confusion by the ongoing re-construction of the old Trilarian society, no-one really noticed the Nommo leaving, too. After the Trilarians had finally weathered the wounds left by the civil war, they remembered the Nommo, and went back into the deep sea to make amends. But their sister-folk was long gone. My idea was to combine the different backgrounds into something which could be reasonably expected to be found in the game's Galactopedia, if someone had remembered to actually include one. Now onward to writing the same thing from the perspective of the Kingdom of Almandin!
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Jun 11, 2019 11:06
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Thotimx posted:I am endlessly fascinated by your perspective on games. I would never have conceived of someone who likes MOO3 saying this. I like the fact that you have an eye for - whatever it is you have an eye for, and are staying focused on it. That is to be commended. I can imagine why one would think so. MOO3 has some level of automation that you can double check on every now and then, Aurora doesn't allow that, you will micromanage your empire of 100 systems. Also, resource exhaustion is a real thing in Aurora and, goodness, it's not joking around when it happens, I downright cheat and reset resources on my worlds when it happens because shipping away my population or shipping in new resources to maintain everything is just too loving annoying. I wish that mass drivers could use jump points and that there was an automated resource allocation system.
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Jun 11, 2019 15:03
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 98: Guardians are Forever, Part III  Turn 333 sees some mixed bag arriving at our diplomatic doorstep: The Meklar refuse our wish for a non-aggression treaty, while the Nommo eagerly accept. The rest of the messages for this turn are just more terrorist acts and other espionage poo poo.  Well, that’s more messages than I expected.  Before we rush in, let’s see what we think of each other. First, the Nommo. They hate us. Our relations are lovely, and our population just dislikes them slightly. OK, good.  Our relations with the Meklar are all slightly positive. Maybe a new ally has entered the arena? We dislike them a little bit, though. Probably because they’re robots and they want to eat Silicoids.  Oh, oh! PIUM, the Meklar empire, is at place 12, so not very strong. They do count us, the Cynoids and the Nommo as their “worst” enemies. Now that’s the kind of suicidal belligerence I can get behind! Now let’s listen to those guys! Meklar! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ5XYYVlJTc Nommo! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7L60wtBVyM Xenobiological File: Nommo WARNING: Access only for security level SODIUM-CHLORIDE or higher! This preliminary report was mineralized from reports made by Xenobiologists and Xenohistorians active in the area and includes additional advisement made by the AIA Advisory-Board for Xenology. The Nommo are, even though their phenotype suggests something different, of pescoid descent. At some point in their evolutionary history, the Nommo adapted to a deep sea environment and changed significantly. Part of this adaptation was the change of their back-fins into a remarkable shell-like leathery protective surface. The modern day Nommo therefore resembles more a molluscuid form, even though reproduction still works like in most pescoid lifeforms. Also, they have a spine. As an aside, in modern Nommo-culture the form and strength of a pseudo-shell is supposed to be mirrored by an individual’s social standing. To achieve this, the normally rather soft “shell” made from keratin secreted from the pescoidic body is reinforced by iron and other more resilient materials being added to it. In the ancient past, materials were simply painted or glued to the pseudo-shell, but nowadays the Nommo prefer a more permanent chemical adhesive process, literally injecting new molecules into their “shell”. The new and old material then is hold together by a fascinating manipulation of the van der Waals force*, essentially creating a new composite material. This also explain the astonishingly resilient look of the pseudo-shells so many Nommo-diplomats love to show off, while many of the Nommo of lesser social standing have to make do with shells looking more like the soft, leathery skins they really are. Analysis of public history sources supplied by the Nommo detected several major inconsistencies, making our scientists believe the Nommo must have aggressively revisioned their own history at some point in the distant past. Based on this un-solid behavior, this department officially recommends to crystalize all future dealings with Nommo-governments on the basis of a very carefully assembled mineral base fluid. -Department for Foreign Relations, AIA *Obviously the Silicoids call this force by another name, but I didn’t want to make this text unnecessarily confusing, so consider this a very free translation from the term used by them.  The Nommo are actually rather strong: Placed 4th, so not that far behind us and XEOL, the Cynoid empire. Also, they hate us with the bitterness of a thousand dying suns. That’s uh, that’s not good.  To compare, our allies. The Imsaies really like us, and only dislike their enemies, dreaded XEOL. No surprises here.  The Cynoids are our main rivals for now. Placed 2nd, only we are in their way to total domination of the Orion Sector. Interestingly, they consider the Farat Empire (we haven’t met yet) as bad as us. Maybe a recent connection? They’re also allied to the Duriaror Empire, which came out of loving nowhere. Apparently the Cynoids are only sleeping on our side of the front, and have been making more connections somewhere else. I really should look more often into these stat menus.  A blast from the past: The Tachidi-empire Dzazatar has grown to be 3rd place in strength, and the Klackons have fallen so far they’re not even their worst enemies anymore. Instead, two empires we don’t know are now their worst enemies. Fascinating!  Still 14 empires to got before we can claim victory. I’m very slowly beginning to regret switching the other two victory conditions off.   Oh, I almost forgot: The entry for the New Orions. Their species is “ancients”, and they get the special government “Union” no one else gets. It gives even more bonuses then hive and swarm-type governments. They love slaves and are at holy war with everyone. Typical Antarans. At least the game considers them “weak” because they only have Orion and the other planets of the Orion-system. Considering we got to be the strongest with the just plain average “Constitutional Monarchy”, it’s not really necessary to even think about government bonuses. Just remember, as long as you aren’t able to get hive mind or swarm, democracy is always better. For example, Constitutional Monarchy is the best government type from the Monarchy-line. Everything else has more drawbacks! Democracy is truly the best. And what is more democratic then everyone speaking with one voice, say the Klackons, Meklar and New Orions...  We’re number one! We’re number one! Also slavery is forbidden, as we are the best.   Meanwhile, tons of old ships flood back into our reserves. Our scrapyards are running 24/7.  Ugh, they’re still hanging around? Welp, one thing after another. Guardians and helping our allies first, beating up New Orions later.  Speaking of Guardians: Our armada will reach this unknown system next turn to assault our second Antaran Guardian.  Combat phase! The Klackons aren’t keen on giving up. This time, the enemy fleet holds its course. No retreats here! Does this mean the Klackons have upgraded their ships high enough to be a danger to us?  Nope. Dying like chumps. Welp  And the second Guardian attacks! Well, technically we attack it, but you get what I mean  A full ten armada task forces (320 ships) open fire. We already know a smaller and weaker fleet was enough, but I’m still at the edge of my seat for this one. Theory is one thing, application another. Don’t get fooled by the interface having two more free spaces for more task forces. The free spaces are for stuff like planets, orbitals and the system defense force. Of course, while planets and orbitals don’t count towards the 10-TF-max rule, the system defense task forces do count, so one side can end up with less than their full 10-TF fleet if they have mobile defenders in-system. Now that I’m writing all this up however, I think I never actually tried to select more than ten objects at once. Note to self: Try and see what happens.  Theoretically, the defensive weapons of a Guardian can kill fighters tremendously fast, but by the time a Guardian has buzzsawed its way through all of them, the five carrier task forces I brought can send out 1-2 more swarms, so the fun will never end for this mighty piece of Antaran technology.  Our experimental missile battlecruisers are doing their thing. Also shown: We still have a salvo out of three left. Not that this means much by the amount of firepower thrown around here. The missiles probably disintegrate in the inferno before they even reach their target.  Less then two minutes in, the shields suddenly collapse. The Guardian explodes so fast I can barely screenshot in time to get the expanding cloud of debris on screen. This encapsulates most fights between ships in Perry Rhodan almost perfectly! Impressive how just changing shield behavior results in this near-perfect replication. I feel like Perry Rhodan’s publisher should take notes here in case they ever want to make a second PR space 4x.  And this is Nazin I. Controlled by the Darlok-Guardian. Which we destroyed, so the system now belongs to the Kingdom of Almandin! Interestingly, the game always gives us the option to assault the assigned Guardian-planet if we are the ones starting the fight. Probably because the game can’t differentiate between an enemy colony and an empty planet only flagged as hostile so the game can start a fight between us. We of course don’t attack. There isn’t even anything on Nazin I we could destroy, anyway.  GC 501: News of another victory against the Antaran Guardians sweeps through the Kingdom. Shortly after, another piece of news follows: A surviving Darlok-colony is detected in the Nazin-system! It seems the Antarans missed several groups of survivors on the second planet and later on the Antaran Guardian simply wasn’t programmed to attack anything not in space, so they could rebuild their society in peace. It’s a bit too late, but having a Darlok-colony means having access to good ground fighters and really good spies. By now our population is too large to give us a high percentage on rolling Darlok-spies, but every little bit helps! Also hey, we rescued some victims from the Antaran’s greedy maw!  But not all is rose quartz in Almandin: Our last Antaran Expedition loses yet another ship. Yeah, this was definitive the lovely one. The expedition we send out without a lab, via misclick. 6 ships lost by now and nothing to show for it! The only thing worse for the poor bastards would be if they happen to explore the third Guardian we will soon attack. (In case you were wondering, yes the second Guardian gave us no Antaran tech. This is because obviously, one of our expeditions was already here and grabbed it. You may now place bets on if: A) The third Guardian will be another one of those we already explored with an expedition; or: B) The third Guardian will yield another X-tech, but in turn we’ll steal the tech from our last expedition, making their entire ordeal pointless.) Oh and also, another dead spy and so on, blah blah blah  Nazin is a fascinating system: Two super-earths with some moons, with one of the moons of the second planet looking like the tiniest gas giant ever. I’m not sure if this reversal is astronomically sound, but I’ll take it! Nazin I had the Darlok-Guardian hanging around in orbit, which makes me deduce that this planet was the original Darlok-homeworld.  Nazin II has a sizable Darlok-colony plus archaeological ruins on it. The game doesn’t state if those ruins are Darlok-ones left from the original bombardments, but for extra hilarity/sadness, let’s assume they are. Xenosociologists traveling to Nazin II from the Kingdom of Almandin would soon learn the truth of why and how the Darlok survived under the watchful mechanoid eyes of the Antaran Guardian: According to interviews with the survivors and corroborated by evidence from excavations of the local ruins, the Darlok on Nazin II used their shapeshifting-ability to pretend to be a local society of primitives. Essentially, after the Antarans bombed both Nazin I and Nazin II back into the pre-crystal age, the survivors of Nazin hid successfully by switching off all energy sources in their system of deep bunkers. Apparently, some Darlok survived in extensive networks of underground population shelters on Nazin I, too. But they didn’t think of how detectable their power plants would be and either the Antarans or their Guardian detected and destroyed all shelters on Nazin I over time. The Darlok on Nazin II meanwhile had another problem: Deep shelters without any source of energy to supply them are essentially huge underground cemeteries, so the Darlok had to either leave them, or turn their power plants back on and risk detection. They choose to leave their bunkers behind. Back on the surface, the survivors used their shapeshifting ability to mimic being larger, more intelligent relatives to a local class of Lapinoid species. The Antarans probably wouldn’t have been duped this easily, but they had already left the system at this point and the Antaran Guardian in orbit around Nazin I either didn’t notice or didn’t care about a new, unknown sapient pre-warp species suddenly appearing on the neighboring planet. From that point onward, the Darlok of Nazin II tried their best to make a living, only surviving because their shapeshifting into something resembling local life made it possible for them to persist on a planet considered sterile for most oxygen-breathing lifeforms. (Indeed only most of the surface of the planet is sterile -higher forms of life on Nazin II cling to the insides of deep canyons, caves and hidden mountain valleys. There’s a lot of speculation among Almandian xenobiologists how this kind of limited ecosystem came to be. The most sensible theory proposed so far assumes the Antaran bombardment must have caused a destabilization of the local environment, causing massdeath until only tiny parts of the old ecosphere survived.) After their survival seemed secure, the Darlok then slowly began collecting important relics and usable low-scale technology like data readers and inert data collection devices from the ruins of their cities. This process took several hundred cycles, sometimes interrupted by the Guardian taking the occasional potshot from space whenever it detected something technological still running in one of the old Darlok cities. When the long work of preserving their heritage was finally done, the Darlok left their old cities alone. By then, the last device of their old empire had expired and even the Guardian stopped taking an interest in them. Another hundreds of galactic cycles later, the cities had slowly deteriorated until they reached the state that they were found in when the Almandian Fleet finally liberated the Nazin-system.  Marked for colonization, done.  Nazin sits exactly between Nommo and Meklar. But I’m forced to assume they are sharing borders somewhere else, considering neither of them was strong enough to push through the Guardian-system in their midst, yet still they are at war with each other.  Beta Scuti here is a Nommo-system being invaded by a sizable Meklar-fleet.  And on the other side, we have a Meklar-system being invaded by a rather tiny Nommo-fleet. How odd. Maybe it’s basically scouting fleet, or whatever is left after a battle we missed?  Since the Nommo were Who knows? Maybe the Meklar generate enough threat to push the Nommo over to our side?  After this little bit of diplomancy, I went back to look over our research. Two new weapon techs are being prototyped right now: The Dunkelenergiestrahler/Dark Energy Beam uses the infamous “Dark Energy” to shoot you. It is generally heavier and has slightly less range than the Quantum-Field Beam, but it’s ability to penetrate shields is nice. They are also doing more raw damage in comparison, so that's nice, too. This weapon has a 10% modifier against shields. Thanks to shields working so differently in Ultima Orion, we aren’t gonna get actual penetrating shots, but considering how beefy shields are slowly getting, reducing their strength by 10% is equaling more and more damage as time goes on. Generally, I like to use them because I like the sound of the word “Dunkelenergie”   The other tech is the obligatory auto fire mod, this time for our Quantum-Field Beams. Fires three times as fast, is twice as large. I’d need to pull out a calculator to determine what would be the actual better weapon here. I guess if a ship uses only armor a modded QF-gun would be better than the DE-beam, but then again even in vanilla I found this strategy a bit wonky. In Ultima Orion with its super-strong shields, that would be suicide, which means you’d need to calculate how much every shield hit by a DE-weapon loses HP and add this to the actual damage done, while comparing it to the average damage done by three hits of a QF-weapon. I’m not really good at math, so I’ll probably go with the weapon I like more when our next fleet upgrade rolls around. Unless you can convince me otherwise! Just make a good argument which weapon you’d like to see! If neither quantums nor dark energy sounds good enough, you’d even be able to argue in favor of the still not entirely obsolete Gauss Cannon! (The Gauss Cannon comes from our line of mass driver weapons. As a reminder, mass driver type weapons hit less often, but do the same damage on all ranges, in contrast to energy beams, which hit more often, but lose damage on extreme ranges.) Anyway, let’s do this mini-vote! (Even though I can only implement any change in like, 9+ updates from here, when I’ve run through my current stash of screenshots! )What main weapon should our shooty ships use next? 1. Dark Energy Beam / Dunkelenergiestrahler 2. Quantum-Field Beam with improvements 3. Gauss Cannon with improvements I’m honestly interested in what you will choose!  Oh, piss off you drat space ants! Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Expedition Completed Expedition 2: Partial discoveries made (4) + 6 ships lost Expedition 3: Expedition Completed Next: Guardians are Forever, Part IV
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Jun 14, 2019 15:14
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Equip the new class of B-Ball Cruisers with Dunk Energy weapons.
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Jun 14, 2019 20:06
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SIGSEGV posted:MOO3 has some level of automation that you can double check on every now and then Not if you expect it to work. In my experience, a great deal of 'playing' MOO3 consists of constantly overriding the decisions of said macromanagement because you can't make it do most things you'd want it to, and you can't just turn it off either, without getting into the ways in which the game just flat-out lies to you making it impossible to get the information you need to even make an intelligent decision about your empire. SIGSEGV posted:I downright cheat and reset resources on my worlds when it happens because shipping away my population or shipping in new resources to maintain everything is just too loving annoying. Like I said, everyone has their own preferences - but as for me, this basically misses the point of Aurora. Dealing with these kinds of issues, and being forced to plan for them ahead of time, with the multiple types of supporting infrastructure such as fuel supply, shipyard development, etc. is a big part of the enjoyment. I like the fact that Aurora will do whatever you tell it to, no matter how stupid it is, and then you have to deal with the consequences. On subject of this thread, I find the Nommo discussions pretty amusing along with other nuggets such as 'security level SODIUM-CHLORIDE'. Keep up the fight!
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Jun 14, 2019 20:56
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2 Q with autofire. Also you could just stop playing and say, "Hooray I won," when you collect all 5 Antaran X techs.
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Jun 14, 2019 21:22
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Question, would the Mary Sue parasitic race consumed a few empires by now? I would assume with how long this game has gone and with how AI doesn't seem to be able to handle things at times means that the parasites have had time to prosper. Any evidence of that so far?
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Jun 14, 2019 21:38
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Go Dunkel on some Meklar
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Jun 14, 2019 21:46
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Dunkle Weapons are the FUTURE Actual shield piercing weapons wouyld make the guardians a lot easier to handle.
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Jun 15, 2019 02:40
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Dunkel! Is t worth it to send another Antaran Expedition or two out? They might not be min maxed at all, but you have tons of ships in the scrapyards that could be deployed. Just send out 2-3 armadas and presume you may hear from them in a century or two!
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Jun 15, 2019 05:15
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habituallyred posted:Also you could just stop playing and say, "Hooray I won," when you collect all 5 Antaran X techs. Nah, too easy! Besides, I'm planning to more, shorter runs on smaller maps after this magnum opus, one for science, one for diplomatic victory. And to show off what changes on higher difficulties (not much) plus two more interesting races from our side. But don't worry, I got this! I'm certainly not planning to liberate every little backwater out there, that would be a race to see what would happen first: Us reaching turn 1000 or me going insane. Instead, I'll defeat the New Orions directly. After we secured Orion, there is really not much where we can go, really. Besides, what would be more appropriate then declaring conquest-victory by defeating the Donkringel posted:Question, would the Mary Sue parasitic race consumed a few empires by now? I would assume with how long this game has gone and with how AI doesn't seem to be able to handle things at times means that the parasites have had time to prosper. Any evidence of that so far? It's a bit odd they're not stronger, yes. By looking over the available info from our stat menu it seems like they're only placed 5th. Since we're not in contact, that's only speculation, though! Of course even the alien-aliens are hampered by bad AI, so there's a real possibility they've stopped expanding at some point. But this would mean by now a lot of empires will have them inside their borders, thanks to the automatic migration calculations going on in the background. And every planetary zone with parasites mixed in with normal folks will slowly turn into a 100% parasite zone, thanks to them eating and replacing the original population. If we make contact with the rest of the races and it turns out many of them are now 50% parasites, we'll know for sure! wedgekree posted:Is t worth it to send another Antaran Expedition or two out? They might not be min maxed at all, but you have tons of ships in the scrapyards that could be deployed. Just send out 2-3 armadas and presume you may hear from them in a century or two! Probably not. At least not right now. If we have cleared the available Guardians nearby and it turns out the rest are far away behind some backwaters it would take many hundreds of turns to get to, I'll change my mind, of course. (Also, "scrapyards" work automatically and scrapped ships are gone the next turn, so there aren't any ships I could send out now!)
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Jun 15, 2019 10:00
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Oh how I hate the parasites. So near impossible to stop, so dumb mechanics, nothing you can actually do on thier end to functionally deal with them as a player. Also amazing to see you playing so far and kepe on going! Been great to see someone actually getting through this game and.. Well, getting through Master of Orion 3.
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Jun 15, 2019 10:10
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Well, one method is to either play as Meklar, Cynoid or Silicoids (as those races are immune to this mechanic), then wage a genocidal war against every empire that harbors the parasites. As it is impossible to bombard your own planets, this method has some drawbacks though: You can only get rid of infected zones on your own planets by making them rebel somehow, then glass them. If there is somehow a tiny sub-one unit population surviving, you're only delaying the problem of course. After re-colonization, they will sometimes show up again after a while! (To clarify, the Ithkul won't eat immune populations, but they can still migrate around like every other population!) And just in case we never get to really see what they can do in this run, I've changed the spawn order of my mod starter, so in our "epilogue" runs, the Ithkul will most likely spawn close to us. Edit: I forgot to mention the real clunker here: The Ithkul can only use fascist governments, which ironically makes their own population more likely to flee their own realms, as the Ithkul pops aren't exempt from this mechanic. So regardless of how much total war the Ithkul are applying to a player, there will still be a constant stream of infectious parasites crossing the border each turn. Libluini fucked around with this message at 13:03 on Jun 15, 2019 |
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Jun 15, 2019 12:58
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Dunkle them, imo.Thotimx posted:Like I said, everyone has their own preferences - but as for me, this basically misses the point of Aurora. Dealing with these kinds of issues, and being forced to plan for them ahead of time, with the multiple types of supporting infrastructure such as fuel supply, shipyard development, etc. is a big part of the enjoyment. I like the fact that Aurora will do whatever you tell it to, no matter how stupid it is, and then you have to deal with the consequences. That's understandable, and I get the Dwarf Fortress attraction of it, it's just that, like resource exhaustion becomes a problem after a while in DF, it becomes a problem in Aurora. I had planned some really cool solutions to it, like abandoning blue sky living as a whole and putting all my population in worldships and just taking my time eating the entire galaxy, but the game makes things a little complex for that. at least when I tried, maybe it's better now. (It does have a number of really good functions, though, I particularly appreciate the fact that diplomacy is only worth a drat if both parties are willing to play by the rules, because you can break them, and the ability to set purely administrative colonies. Just deciding that this forlorn rock belongs to us now, and sending cargos away at it with minimal effort is a powerful time saver, and that it doesn't ask for some mana, like in a paradox game, feels drat good.)
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Jun 16, 2019 21:43
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 99: Guardians are Forever, Part IV  New post, new turn: Not much happening in this one. Some protests against the development of automated quantum-field guns and some spy related shenanigans. For some reason there are multiple crack pots around in the Kingdom of Almandin spinning tall tales about how dangerous everything related to quantum-fields is, but dark energy is accepted as just utilizing some harmless cosmological phenomenon. So quantum-poo poo can distort your growth soup, causing the mineralization process of your offspring to become misaligned, but blasting the same pool with dark energy is perfectly fine? Conspiracy theories make no goddamn sense.  At least we’re close to finishing the recruitment drive we started ages ago. After AIA Agent Asimov, the mediocre saboteur, we’re only missing the two new spy hackers. 8 more turns to go!  Maximum scrapping! So many ships we don’t need, so many maintenance costs we don’t want. This looks easier then it is. With the game not giving details on what a ship class does without going to the shipyard menu and looking it up, combined with the necessary pre-emptive obsoleting of ship classes to manipulate the building AI, remembering what class does what can get kind of hard. Especially if masses of old classes suddenly flood back into the reserves after a mass demobilization. I live in constant fear of accidentally deleting new ships I’ve just built.  Seeing our surplus of recon cruisers, the admiralty decides to launch a couple efforts to explore beyond our borders.  Our first little triplet is send out to explore Meklar-space. Since there’s still no new mobilization center anywhere in our new systems, this will take some time. The 1st New Recon Squadron will cross the border in 11 turns.  And since I don’t want to build more heavy ships with new upgrades slowly getting closer, I take this occasion to demobilize one of our carrier task forces out here in Nazin. In this case, I want the still modern carriers back in our reserves. This is more related to me noticing a strange AI-build up of dreadnoughts in our reserves, which I did not take into account so now there’s only a couple carriers available and tons of direct-fire dreadnoughts. Instead of trying to repair our fleetbalance with new ships, I thought it would make more sense to just use some already existing ships from our overkill fleet stationed in the Darlok-homesystem.  Our second new recon triplet gets to cross empty space towards this neutron star near our capital system. I want to know what’s there! At this point I remembered I never seem to do anything with the random neutron stars and black holes on the map, so I looked at our still large number of recons and was like “OK, why the hell not?”. Luckily by now our FTL-drives are developed enough crossing that  This screenshot got kind of messed up for some reason, but I think that’s the Meklar of PIUM sending a scout.  The scout doesn’t stay very long.  Turn 336, still there are entire seasons worth of spy dramas unfolding inside the Kingdom, but the more important thing is our colonizers getting closer and closer to Nazin. I can’t wait for our new colonies to finally develop enough they can create mobilization centers! Waiting for every task force to slowly travel through the entire chain is getting old already. On one hand, our ships are a lot speedier then at the beginning, on the other hand, the star lanes in this part of the Orion Sector are obnoxiously long. The eleven turns it takes to cross the three star lanes to Nazin would equal to almost 30 with our first FTL-drives (if I got the math right).  Sadly, I can’t just ignore the onslaught of foreign spies. As always, as soon as an enemy spy whispers a conspiracy theory somewhere, the Raas take note and start rioting. I’d make some bad joke about conspiracy crack pots and Reptiloids, but man, this poo poo gets exhausting. At least after making sure to lower taxes on the worst worlds and recruiting ground troops on every planet with unrest, I can mostly forget about this until the spies causing this poo poo are caught. After that, unrest will fall back to zero or almost zero on all of these planets.  Meanwhile, both the Nommo and Meklar are scouting Nazin. Now that the Antaran Guardian is gone, a new front has opened. Or it would have, if it weren’t for us.  Some bits from my anti-unrest recruiting spree: This is the picture for Etherean mobile infantry. Looks a bit spindly, doesn’t it? Also shows the preferred battlefield for Ethereans: Crushing gravity, atmospheric battlefield, broken terrain. Like a gas giant, in other words.  This ugly green motherfucker was recruited from our Raas-population and represents all Sauroid mobile infantry. And if you compare stats, it’s straight up better in everything than Etherean mobile infantry. Since the Raas aren’t that much different from standard Humans (from a Silicoid view point), they prefer the same values for gravity, battlefield and terrain: Medium, surface and plain.  I forgot if I ever showed you this in detail, so here’s the Geodic mobile infantry again. It’s not as spindly as the Etherean version, but clearly our crystal spider is closer in design philosophy then the green tank/jet hybrid Saurians prefer. It’s the slowest and it’s attack power is rather low. On the other hand, it has better armor than the Raas-version and has better accuracy. Silicoid units prefer to fight on the ground, but in mountains. Their preferred battlefield gravity is high. At this point you already know, but in this ground combat system, low initiative really hurts since a unit which goes first can shoot first. Better armor doesn’t really help if the other side can use their multiple attack on you. (Look a bit closer, mobile infantry has 6 attacks. That’s 6 attacks our spider has to survive from another mobile infantry unit before it can even shoot back!) Overall, initiative and number of attacks are the most important attributes, followed by attack strength and armor, with accuracy second-to-last and Weichen/evasion dead last. The importance of the first two values are obvious, and attack strength calculates how much damage a unit can do, while armor strength reduces incoming damage. Also important! Accuracy is less important since with progressing technology, number of attacks are becoming more important. If even a simple mobile infantry unit gets to roll six attacks, evading once or twice doesn’t help the defending unit much. This makes the evasion stat the worst one, and consequently all units with inherent bonus to it, like the Trilarians, the worst ground troops. If it were possible to boost accuracy or evasion to really high numbers this could be different (and possible really obnoxious to deal with), but so the statistical difference between even the worst shots and the most agile bastards is too minor. Units with good evasion tend to have bad stats overall, which means they evade a couple shots and then get just plain hosed up. Units with good accuracy on the other hand tend to be good units on average, which means their better accuracy neutralizes the one good thing most bad units have and then gently caress them up with their better stats. The world of Orion is an unfair one. Terrain and technology can do a lot to equalize this, but with their baseline stats being so different, many races need a lot of numbers to compensate: This is why we had so much trouble on so many Raas-planets, by the way. Even when fighting on high-gravity planets and in mountains, the Raas being faster meant our troops got just pelted with tons of attacks before they could even do anything. If our troops were Trilarian, they’d probably also taken more damage (bad armor) even with them evading a lot of those shots. Then they’d shoot back with less accuracy and less attack power and you can already imagine how that would have gone. A good Trilarian ground force is a fleet bombarding the planet.  Thanks to the Psilons, we have some Humanoid troops, like this one (a PsyOps unit). The way the game was rushed shows again here, as clearly all unit pictures were cut down to just the species groups, as no species has individual pics. Humanoid troops are all Human, Saurian troops are all Sakkra, and so on. Not so bad with the machines like tanks and APCs, but it’s really annoying with basic troops like infantry. Ironically my favorite species don’t have this specific problem, as the Silicoids are the only Geodic species and the Meklar/Cynoid schism wasn’t so long ago so both people having the same basic poo poo and even looking similar is plausible enough. But then you get to poo poo like the Evon, complete newcomers to the Orion Sector, having the exact same ships and ground troops as Humans and Psilons, who at least have lived together in the same part of the galaxy for thousands of years. Oh well, what’s a little bit more content cut for time and budget reasons?  Some playing around with the sorting functions later and I discover a second source of unrest: Populations not being Silicoids! Well, time to recruit some more troops! Of course there is always the chance that at least some of this unrest is the result of still more spies. Or too high taxes. I discovered by accident that the AI loving loves high taxes. As we’re already rich as gently caress, I always try to dial this down a bit. Which obviously only works if I switch the AI-control off, so this just results in more micro down the line. Luckily a well-tended planet can run pretty much indefinitely even without AI-control, you just have to go back occasionally if you want to change settings or build non-auto buildings. Oh, and of course the Imperial AI-settings go crazier and crazier the more planets you control directly, as the settings only influence the AI-controlled planets. Obviously if you directly control, say 66 out of 100 planets and then demand the AI to push science with an amount of money calculated as a percentage of all 100 planets, this can go very wrong. As in, the AI overcharging the research-sliders of the 34 AI-controlled planets deep into the red, wasting tons of money and effort while simultaneously crippling production kind of wrong. One of the first things I learned was never, ever touching Imperial controls, except for the direst of emergencies.  Let’s do a quick example. Here is Iras VI, AI controlled. Civilian production is quite high and the deep, dark red tells us the AI is wasting tons of money trying to get that one turn faster production. At the same time, the AI thinks this planet is too unimportant for any research grants (0% boost), but pumps a lot of extra money into normal economy boost (cleverly hidden by my cursor, but it looks reddish, so yes, we’re wasting money for no good reason here, too). And 25% taxes, while low for the AI, is still too high for my taste. Especially since it helps boosting unrest, which we really don’t want. As the population is mostly Raas, the unrest remains steadily at level 2, which is one step from completely silenced build queues. Not good!  One quick clean up attempt later: Taxes are a tick down, we put down some defense buildings the AI “forgot”, both normal economic boost and civilian build queue are way down and research boost is up to 5% since our population generates at least some research points even without specialized research DEAs. Having zero science boosts on our planets is just plain dumb. And to prevent the AI from undoing all of this next turn, the AI is now switched off. By the way, don’t worry about the 41 turn time for building civilian poo poo, this planet is still rather empty and will grow a lot. With growing population, that timer will go down a lot and later buildings will be build rather more speedily. The 2% boost to the planetary economy is fast enough to build new DEAs or DEA-buildings every couple of turns anyway, so the production capacity will shoot up in short order. Even on this backwater.  Then I did the same thing with another planet, but I think you’re already bored enough, so here are the Imperial Finance Controls! Finance! Controlling a vast bureaucratic machine! Isn’t that exciting???????? To explain what I’m showing here: The block on the upper left of the screen shows the Imperial Finance Boost controls. From up to down, it’s Research Boost, Military Boost, Unrest Boost and Planetary Grants. If you pull the sliders to the right, all planets under AI control have their related sliders pushed to the right, too. Push them to the left, all planets under AI control reduce their related boosts. Right makes you poor, left makes you rich. Basic stuff. We’ve already talked about this. If all planets in your empire are under direct control, this entire block of controls does nothing. If you have lots of both, pulling these levers can have hilarious up to catastrophic results. I suggest staying the hell away from this. The only thing you should ever think about is maybe putting some more money into fighting unrest, especially as the red and green fists dutifully tell you at what point even the meekest will get mad / the wildest will be calmed down. The block on the right is more interesting, but for now let’s only look at the active rider Steuersätze/tax rates. You can set system and imperial tax rates here (sadly no default planetary tax rate, that would be too advanced for MO3) and manipulating them is governed by the same rules as planetary taxes: Make them higher makes people angrier, making them lower makes them happier. Correspondingly, your money will go up or down. To understand how much tax a single citizen has to pay, you have to add all three taxes (planetary, system and imperial) together, since that’s the way this poo poo works: A planet levies a tax for its own treasury, the system tax is paid into the system’s treasury and the imperial tax is the only one directly paying into our imperial treasury. So this means a planet with 24% tax rate (our average right now), levies 24+4+9=37% taxes on its citizen. Obviously, playing around with this is a good way to incite uprisings. As far as I can remember, I never had to change the default tax settings, ever. You shouldn’t either.  Mostly the same nonsense going on here on our account books. The only things worth mentioning: Our inter-civilization trade is kind of poo poo, ‘cause we’re at war with most of our neighbors, some of which are even actively sanctioning us. Trade is basically an Imsaies-only show. The second thing is on the left, down: Planetary gifts. This happens if planets make too much money, at which point they’re starting to offload the surplus to our imperial account. Neat! This is happening because some of the planets we assumed direct control over have been running idle for ages, building neither civilian nor military crap, only some occasional auto-buildings. This also means they pulled tons of money in taxes, with no way to spend it all.  Back to this poo poo here. The second rider is “Budget Directives”. You can have three settings, which I will translate real fast here, from the top down: 1. Bankruptcy 2. Reasonable 3. Crippling. There, done. Ordering your empire to spend more money than it takes in maybe works in real world economies, MO3 is a lot harsher. Don’t do this. And saving money (the third option) is only necessary if you’ve already screwed up somewhere. Don’t do this, either. The middle option let’s your empire spend as much as it gets income per turn and really, that’s the only option you’ll ever need. You won’t overspend, and your empire will have enough cash on hand to terraform the terrible hellworlds you colonized on a whim ten turns ago. Everyone wins!  After our finances, in comes the research: Law Formalism makes it so new laws are designed like spaceships or buildings, like with law blueprints and such. Highly formalized, highly structured laws are the result. Somehow this new precision in lawmaking reduces our bureaucracy. A lawyer told me this is true.  After I wasted all our time by talking about money in space games for so long, back to the real game here: It’s turn 337 and our last Antaran Expedition loses another ship, again. Also there’s more terrorism going on in the background.  The result of our anti-unrest campaign. Unrest down across the board! Or the spy creating the unrest failed this turn. Or maybe both? gently caress it, I declare us the winner of this turn!  Combat phase: Not much happening this time. Why the hell do I make those screenshots anyway? Oh, I forgot, as filler so you don’t just see massive blocks of text everywhere.  Turn 338: We slowly crawl closer to the end of our new Ex-Guardian space street. Keter and Koth, two star systems not in our Kingdom get a new lane connecting them. And one of our new neighbors declares war. Welp, and it’s the Nommo. That didn’t take long. The rest of our news items for this turn is just more spy poo poo. Let’s skip that.  So, the Nommo declare war because of our “atrocities”, but the ambassador is whining like a little bitch while doing so. I guess this is just some kind of cultural thing I’m not getting? Kind of funny, it’s like the ambassador already knows how powerful we are and how this war thing will go for his people, but he is forced to do this anyway. The atrocities are probably recordings of what we did during the Raas Wars. Welp, at least I think our dirty deeds coming back to haunt us is more amusing then the truth: The AI sees how powerful the player has become, and all diplomacy is now heavily skewed towards war.  Some more maps, to round out the trifecta of boring finance talk and boring diplomacy talk with boring map talk. What we’re seeing here is me cursing because the New Orions are still hanging around in Dromos, accidentally protecting the system from our assault. Mostly thanks to their habit of mindlessly attacking our fleets with their super-ships. As annoying as this situation is, if it weren’t for our shield techs having awkwardly skipped the level 5 tech, we probably could have already taken them. But as it is now, our shields are far too weak for their massive fire power. But soon we will get larger ships and level 6 shields. After that, a strong fleet with the new poo poo should be finally strong enough to fight and win against a New Orion fleet.  The Cynoids are apparently attempting to make me give up. But joke’s on them, as long as they are stuck like this there’s not really a reason to ever fight this 5k armada. After all, the Cynoids of XEOL have to pay maintenance for all those ships, so as long as this fleet never moves, we’re winning by attrition without firing a single shot.  Nodus. I have plans for this system. Plans. The remaining Antaran Guardian we know of is just next to it. But before we’re attacking an empire capable of suddenly jerking alive and re-deploying 5k ships against us, we’ll have to fortify the border a bit. In a reasonably programmed game, XEOL would have already taken the Guardian-system. In this one though, not a chance, apparently. As we’ll learn in the far future of this thread, a higher difficulty would have meant just more ships stuck over there.  2nd New Recon: Still 15 turns from that Neutron Star.  Nazin: Well, this system is basically perfect as a border point out here. As long as we have trouble on other fronts, there isn’t really a reason to go on the offensive here. So while more Guardians and XEOL and the New Orions are all vying for our attention, my plans for Nazin is basically: 1. Colonize 2. Fortify 3. Defend and that’s it. Simple, and to the point. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Expedition Completed Expedition 2: Partial discoveries made (4) + 7 ships lost Expedition 3: Expedition Completed Next: Guardians are Forever, Part V (Yes, this will continue counting up until we’ve dealt with all three Guardians we’ve been in contact with.)
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Jul 13, 2019 23:18
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As an experiment, I used timg for this update, so the page can load faster. Good/bad idea? Edit: Also neat fact, the post I'm using to link updates is now up to 32k/50k characters. Ha ha, oh man I hope I can finish this LP before I've filled that post up to the brink. Any bets on how close we will get before the LP is over? Libluini fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Jul 13, 2019 |
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Jul 13, 2019 23:20
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That's a lot of useless ships the robots have just sitting around. So would you have already won if other victory settings were on?
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Jul 14, 2019 00:09
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With science victory, hell yes (because I would have not stopped sending out expeditions until we got all the X-techs). Diplomacy, not so much. We have the population, but for a diplomatic victory we would have needed to stay in the Orion Senate, instead of getting thrown out. Conquest victory is kind of harsh, as it demands us to control literally every goddamn rock in the universe, so what I'll do instead in the main run is stopping after we've taken Orion, 'cause everything after that is just a victory lap. I've decided to show off diplomatic and science victory on two more runs with other species. And on a smaller map with less enemies, so we can actually finish those add-on runs in a timely fashion.
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Jul 14, 2019 00:17
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Libluini posted:Also neat fact, the post I'm using to link updates is now up to 32k/50k characters. Ha ha, oh man I hope I can finish this LP before I've filled that post up to the brink. 64k and you'll need to start a second post. Hahahah, wait, wait, main run? You intend to take more than one shot at this? You absolute madman.
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Jul 14, 2019 00:27
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Man, the UI for this is just as clunky as I remembered. Yay for you for plowing through wiht it!
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Jul 14, 2019 04:04
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Libluini posted:As an experiment, I used timg for this update, so the page can load faster. Good/bad idea?
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Jul 14, 2019 08:41
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Oh poo poo, already nearly a month gone by, time to post or I'll be officially worse than all webcomic artists, even the worst ones Anyway, the next update is almost ready and will go up sometime today!
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Aug 11, 2019 09:31
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Libluini posted:Oh poo poo, already nearly a month gone by, time to post or I'll be officially worse than all webcomic artists, even the worst ones You still won't be worse than the Dresden Codak guy.
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Aug 11, 2019 11:01
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 100: Guardians are Forever, Part V You know, I’m only still doing this because mass uploaders exist. My first attempt of a screenshot LP (back then just called “AAR” for “After Action Report”) failed gloriously after just 3-4 updates, thanks to the incredible tediousness of uploading pictures one-by-one. So, if you like reading this poo poo, thank all those programmers who made uploading of more than one picture simultaneously possible.  Turn 339 gives us a new agent, some more unrest and espionage hitting us, and that’s about it. There’s also a rare occurrence of our scientists being faster as advertised: Our Automatic Quantum Field Beam mod got finished early. Otherwise though, nothing happens this turn.  Wait poo poo what is this  Welp, looks some Nommo-ships managed to slip through our lines a couple turns ago. Time to send one of our task forces back to tell them they aren’t welcome here! This kind of surprised me! I think they must have gotten through Nazin during a turn I just used AI-control without looking. Other than the AI deciding to not engage these ships when passing through the system I have no idea how… oh wait a minute, didn’t we have like, for one turn a non-aggression treaty going? Welp, I guess they could have gotten through during that one turn, too.   Anyway, that was more annoying than dangerous. So I decide to gently caress with the Cynoids in Theta Gru. My idea is that maybe some scouts showing up will force the AI to do something besides waiting around.  Just to show I haven’t forgotten, this is our new spy. Pandora is one of our new spy hackers and after her colleague arrives in 4 turns, that’s it until our current spies start dropping dead. We have enough for now and the AIA’s budget got slashed last turn anyway, so they had to stop recruiting for the next couple fiscal cycles.  On the way to the next turn, we’re waylaid by some battles.  First, we blow up some more Klackons in Tali.  Oh, are you going already? Bye!  The “battle” in Nazin is just some enemy colony ships dropping by. Whatever controls enemy colonization often doesn’t get the memo when new wars are declared. Which is twice as sad when you remember that “non-combatant” is not really a term in Orion Sector Warfare Protocol.  Following the accepted protocol in OSWP, we blow them up, killing countless civilians in the process. War is Hell  And that’s it for today. Wait, I don’t remember any fighting in Tristan?  Oh, you absolute fuckers! In GC 510, the Nommo bastards who slipped through at Nazin bombard our colony on Tristan II, killing countless civilians. This vile act causes unrest on Tristan III to rise. War is Hell  Of course this means I go immediately to our fleet screen and take a look at our reserves. And notice we are up to 92 missile battlecruisers. Apparently the AI had a lot of additional Cubic II cruisers queued up. Wow.  Anyway, since there’s no such thing as overkill, the Almandian Fleet forms up a full armada of missile battlecruisers complete with support ships.  And then immediately sends the new task force forward to plug the hole in our defenses.  Meanwhile, our fleet at the border scans Beta Scuti from afar and locates approximately 223 Nommo fleet units. This made me curious how the war between Meklar and Nommo is going, since it’s a rather strong fleet sitting around here.  The Nommo are the icy blue graph going straight down. OK, so apparently they aren’t winning. Or is that the Raas? poo poo, there are three shades of red here and I know the one going up is us… Ah yes, there’s another light blue shade at the very right, that must be the Nommo! Seriously though, why is this so hard for 4x games? Stellaris had the same thing going until they introduced border lines with alternative colors to prevent this kind of confusion. I feel like I am going color blind!  Another thing I was doing this turn: Comparing weapons. This is our standard Quantum Field Beam. It’s small enough two spinal mounts are still smaller than a single Dark Energy Cannon. (Mostly thanks to the miniaturization tech we got earlier, though.) Our humble main weapon on many ships takes 33,59 units of space, does 192 damage on optimal range and has a range of 26,38k galactic meters. It also fires every 5,49 seconds, but that’s the same for all spinal mount weapons. Technically speaking, two main weapons, so there’s the additional chance of sometimes whiffing one shot and doing half damage.  To compare, a single Dark Energy Cannon spinal mounts needs a whopping 49,5 units of space, though its damage is slightly higher at 214 damage at optimal range. The range is slightly lower with 25,57k Gm. But the difference is marginal enough to not matter. Sadly, the damage isn’t high enough to obsolete our QFBs quite yet. Though remember, DECs reduce shield strength by 10%, which makes them stronger than they look on paper. If we can get a miniaturization tech for our DECs, this calculation will change: Our QFBs will then fall down the tech chute into the oblivion of yesteryear.  Another tech check I made: This are our main missile/fighter-defense-batteries. QFBs, of course. 111,99 space, 530 damage every 1,74 seconds and a range of 13,19k Gm. Not bad for a purely defensive weapon! These numbers are for the full complement of 10 batteries for our Andradite-carriers, by the way. So a single weapon only takes 1/10 of the space and does 1/10th of the damage. Just FYI.  We recently got the Hyperfield, the PerryRodanidized version of the Master of Orion Lightning Field. How does it compare to what we’re using right now? Answer: Astonishingly poorly. In raw numbers, at least. Sure, 100 space is less for our full 10 batteries per carrier, but the damage is painfully lower (400) and the range is just 4,77k Gm, almost down to a third from our QFB-defense batteries. Hyperfields have special targeting, which means everything reaching that short range is dead shortly after, be it missile or fighter. Not being able to shoot at incoming ordnance from a greater distance hurts its usefulness pretty badly, though. At this point I decide against any design upgrades for now.  And then I randomly notice we have Crystaline Friction Reactors already, a planetary building vastly improving industrial DEAs and also upgrading agricultural and mining areas a bit. Of course since I took so many planets off their AI-control, this means there are dozens of planets who could really use this thing, but don’t have it.  While going through my planets and upgrading queues, I notice that in fact there are multiple other new buildings I forgot to build, so in the end it takes me a full hour to update everything.  Next combat phase, we can see one of our new missile armadas in action against the war criminals who bombed one of our worlds. At least I think they are. This is happening in Nazin again, so the wrong direction from last time. Though it’s four ships like before and it could very well be that the AI for some reason decided to turn back. Or there are more than one little 4-ship squads moving around...  Turns out 14,6k damage per salvo is a bit much for a squadron of only four ships. This incursion is officially over. Or is it???  Yeah, not much action this turn. The Klackons probed Tali and we testfired an ungodly amount of missiles in the Nazin-system. That’s about it.  Turn 341 has some minor news happening: A Human and a Meklar spy both walk into a bar. The Silicoid bartender immediately shoots them. What? Did you think I was making a joke? The AIA has no time for jokes, citizen!  We colonize Thok IV, on the way to the Nazin-border. But apparently the colony ship was carrying Imsaies, not Silicoids. Welp, not a problem at this point. Just kind of funny that this colonizer, build by our AI half a century ago, happened to just have the right kind of colonists for what is essentially a tiny gas giant. Silicoids would have been even better, but what can you do? Zero Time Deformators are sadly, one Perryverse technology that didn’t make it into this mod, so travelling back in time to 20-30 turns ago and ordering the AI to not build this colonizer is impossible.  Colony ships and even more missile cruisers make their way to the Nazin-border. This time, the border seems to hold and no new enemy ships cross over.  A lonely ship gets turned to space dust in Nazin.  Next up, some enemy colony ships show up. Apparently their captains didn’t get the memo that the 4-5 armed ships before them didn’t succeed in clearing our armadas from the system. Sucks to be the uh, ...  ...Nommo!  The first two ships fall to our missiles, the third colony ship lives long enough to be blown up by our fighters instead. War is assuredly not Heaven!  Expect this kind of thing more often in the future: More than one enemy faction attacking the same system means multiple battles in sequence. Though if one of the follow-up battles needs one of the factions blown up in an earlier one, the follow-up battle will start and then immediately end in an auto-victory. Apparently those battles still have to happen and can’t be removed from the queue. I’d really like to know why this was programmed this way.  Turn 342 sees buildings blow up on Vela III and a Klackon spy dying in an aircar accident. The spy was wearing a clown costume and nothing else at the time. Apparently enemy spies have been using birthday parties and circuses as secret meet-ups. The AIA is already arming up with anti-clown weaponry as we speak. The coroners were pretty drat surprised to find a Klackon inside that clown costume. The AIA is now hunting down all clowns everywhere. The media is reacting in typical subdued fashion with headlines like “Apocalypse Clown”, “The Clown Conundrum” and “End of Clown World”.  For the end of this update, some good news from our outer borders: The first colony ships (ours, to be clear) have reached Nazin. Soon this second Guardian-system will be 100% secured. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Expedition Completed Expedition 2: Partial discoveries made (4) + 7 ships lost Expedition 3: Expedition Completed Next: Guardians are Forever, Part VI
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Aug 11, 2019 13:58
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Time to hellwar the Nommo into the same position as the Rass. How dare they bomb planet whatever that one time!
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Aug 11, 2019 15:04
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So just as a rough percentage, how much of the galaxy is currently Silicoid?
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Aug 11, 2019 21:02
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Good going! Soon Nazin wlil be secure and then the.. Next whatever in line!
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Aug 12, 2019 01:10
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PurpleXVI posted:So just as a rough percentage, how much of the galaxy is currently Silicoid? It's the 7-most abundant element in the universe, so once we eliminate those pesky Carbon-based life forms we'll be that much better off!
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Aug 12, 2019 16:50
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Decoy Badger posted:It's the 7-most abundant element in the universe, so once we enlighten those pesky Carbon-based life forms we'll be that much better off! Fixed this for you.
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Aug 12, 2019 19:49
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 101: Guardians are Forever, Part VI  So yeah, new turn. Agent “Seigfried” joins the AIA. A Regional Cultural Office on Roch II just suddenly explodes. The Kingdom’s official terror warning system goes to level Yellow immediately. Also another loving spy is flooding the Kingdom with large amounts of fake money. Ten years ago I never questioned this, but how the hell does that work in a space empire, where presumably every monetary transaction is electronic? Well OK, maybe the banks got hacked or something. Also, “Seigfried”,  As this mod was translated by German fans, I suppose this isn’t a typo but fully on purpose for some reason. Seigfried is a new Silicoid spy and our latest espionage hacker. His stats are also completely average at 5/5, meaning this spy will never leave his defense post, ever. Ah, now I get it! “Seigfried” is Silicoidese for “Siegfried”!  Surprise diplomacy! As a masochist, I decide it is time to try and exchange some techs with our Imsaies-allies again. This time, some random techs plus a FTL-tech they don’t have, against some useful, but not to important techs we don’t have I’m kind of hoping here the techs I’ve chosen are valued higher by the AI than the techs I want. I’m 90% sure this trade will fail. Agricultural Robots: This one makes Agricultural DEAs 33% more effective. Not much with our bad agri stats, but it would help feeding the growing Non-Silicoid portion of our empire. It’s also level 53, so I won’t held my breath if the Imsaies refuse to trade this tech. Standard-Fear-Indoctrination: This weird tech “allows” us to remove all negative reaction to fear (like panic) and replace them with positive ones (like James-Bond-like moxie). This makes the results of torture and interrogation less likely to result in anything besides death or escape. I’m not even sure why I took this nebulously useful tech, it’s another level 53 and probably valued way to high by all AI-nations. Fake Edit: Scrolling a bit down in my tech screen revealed it’s just a flat +5 bonus to loyalty/moral. Good enough, I guess?  Abtast-Resonanzkollektoren/Resonance Scan Collectors: Another mining tech and the most useful of this bunch for us. The mineral usage of our industry gets reduced by another hefty 20%. If we don’t get this by trade, I’ll have to use masses of espionage agents on non-allies with that poo poo and hope for the best. So let’s hope this trade succeeds! (It won’t)  To my utter bewilderment at this coincidence, the Imsaies have send us a trade attempt of their own. It’s some inconsequential bullshit against some outdated techs we don’t even care about anymore, so I just hit yes and send. This poo poo was so unimportant I didn’t even make a screenshot of what this tech trade was about, so it’s sadly lost to the ages.  Thinking about tech trades made me curious about the tech level of our most beloved friends, the New Orions: They hang at level 42, about 10-11 levels behind us. Sweet! Seeing how far back they’ve fallen, I then immediately begin plotting their demise.  GC 516. Inbetween turns there were some battles. A bit one-sided, so I didn’t even bother with screenshots this time. In other news this turn, XEOL ended their war again and...  ...our trade went through! 100% success! Kind of unexpected, but I take this win. Our allies are the best. Always ally with gas giant dwellers! Oh, and one of our leaders died. Welp, old age catches up with everyone, I suppose. No messages about assassins or anything, he just rolled badly on his age roll or something. By the way, I’m not bothering with showing the screenshot for starting the XEOL-war again from now on. Just assume I always declare war again until I tell you otherwise, OK?  So, huh. A free spot again. I can’t even remember what Fahosohe Nadada even did. Something spy-related, I think? Anyway, let’s see if the next guy is more memorable.  Tech-time! A fighter-version of our dark energy beams has entered prototyping. Neat! And uh, what’s this?  A placeholder? Well, uh… I hope this does nothing bad? It’s 10+ loving years and I swear I have never seen this before. This must be a placeholder left over from the modders. I mean, Ultima Orion only got to like 80-90% completion before the modders abandoned the project, so I should be more amazed this didn’t happen until now.  Anyway, let’s scroll past this… thing and forget about it for now. A new sublight drive tech is incoming: Gravojets! Gravojets are not only faster, but they’re also the first sublight drive that isn’t just rockets, but better. Gravojets use artificial fields of gravity to propel a ship. Instead of huge nozzles, our next generation of ships will have huge energy projectors instead, and confusingly for our pilots, they’ll work by projecting gravitic fields towards we want to go so they can drag our ships behind them. Mechanically, nothing changes of course because how would that even work in this engine??? Another Perry Rhodan technology. Imagine this a bit like EVE Online’s thing with engines not having exhaust (everything you see is part of the cooling system of the ship instead) just in PR proper ships don’t even have glowing stuff coming out of them like in EVE. They’re just creepily moving by some invisible force. Sci-Fi!  This tech is kind of funny. Apparently we never thought of unifying planetary customs into a single office before. I’m now imagining some poor space trader having to contact a dozen different bureaus on his target planet to properly settle all his deals and it’s a doozy.  Customs must have been a total, confusing mess until someone got the idea of maybe not creating dozens of regional customs offices with overlapping duties on every loving planet we own.  Gauss Cannons get a new update! After this prototype is finished, we’ll be able to make armor 25% more useless! With Gauss Cannons, that is. Yeah, as in this mod shields are 333% more awesome than armor, all armor-piercing mods are highly situational. And this is no different. Still, 25% is kind of a huge bonus. Even if I’m kind of only assuming armor mods work like shield mods (weakening both HP and damage absorption), as generally as soon as you leave the very early game shields are strong enough everything almost instantly dies as soon as they collapse. So it’s hard to really see armor-piercing mods in action, is what I’m getting at.  Turn 345! And another leader dies! Oops! Also another new star lane connection. This time I think it’s relevant because Theta Indi sounds like one of our systems. But then I forget to make screenshots or even look at the map myself this turn. Double-oops!  XEOL acts on its own this time and declares war before they can even read my own war declaration. Also this war is by now so normalized, the message about war declaration only comes in after a couple of pages with messages about riveting and clearly more important stuff like what our astronomers are doing today.  We’re kind of burning through those guys recently, but on the other hand, we also got them kind of one after another. Makes sense they’re all dropping dead the same way, too.  Kind of funny: Since messages always need a full turn to reach their recipient, this turn also has our allies demanding we declare war on XEOL again. Dudes, we got this. Also XEOL already declared war so it’s kind of… Oh gently caress it, I just hit yes in case a “no” overrides the multiple war declarations or something.  More recon stuff! I want to see what is up here on the other side of our new border.  Oh wait! I did remember to take a look at Theta Indi!  Time for more space exploration then.  GC 519 sees some spy events. We also kill another Meklar-spy. Which is hilarious, as Meklar and Humans are the most dangerous at spying when unchanged, so I take this as proof that the AIA has come a long way since their bad beginnings.  Meanwhile, 2nd New Recon is still 7 turns from reaching that neutron star.  In military news, some demobilized task forces reached our reserves and this time, it’s modern ships! Together with the new ships we built, it’s time for massively mobilizing another fleet!  First, new dreadnought armadas.  Second, new dreadnought-sized carrier armadas.  All told, when the massive mobilization is over, a new fleet of 300+ ships is in position in the Nodus-system.  Why, you ask? Officially, now that the other borders seem safe, the Kingdom of Almandin has decided to finally push the war the XEOL and our allies so dearly want. And for this the Guardian near Nodus must be defeated first. Inofficially, we of course only want to clear the Guardian. Pursuing this dumb unwanted war is just an additional bonus. Well, and it should make our allies happy.  After our massive build-up, our reserves are kind of empty. Most of it is our transport ships for future ground operations and some leftover PD-ships and scouts. Hopefully nothing bad happens to our other fleets!  Next combat phase, our scouts move into the Mirror-system. They manage to observe the Meklar-fleet hanging around. Over 8000 damage is kind of beefy, good god. At least it’s only missiles, and this task force in particular would run out after six salvos.  A Meklar carrier task force. 2,2k damage sounds more normal for their tech stage. Though of course fighters can be respawned indefinitely, so the carriers are actually more dangerous than the missile ships. Look at that speed: Yes that’s a whopping 24 Gm/s! AI-designs are made as simple and efficient as possible and since artillery ships and carriers have insane ranges, the modders opted for basically zero speed and massive DPS. A good choice, since the player can still make their own designs if they want and the AI is mostly prevented from endangering their carriers and missile ships. In vanilla, luring AI-carriers to their doom was sometimes embarrassingly easy. It just sounds odd from the perspective of a real Human without brain damage, but trust me, the AI really needs this help.  And then we save our recons from obliteration by moving around the edges of the system. To explain why this happened, the AI for some reason didn’t launch any missiles or fighters against my recon task force, but the in-system direct fire ships eventually started to move. And thanks to their range, just jumping out would have ended with my recons all dead. So instead I used my higher sublight speed to evade them for over seven minutes until the battle ended in a Remis. Tactics! Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Expedition Completed Expedition 2: Partial discoveries made (4) + 7 ships lost Expedition 3: Expedition Completed Next: Guardians are Forever, Part VII Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:53 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 18, 2019 12:45
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drat, is there any chance of that last Antaran Expedition turning up anything at this point?
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Aug 18, 2019 20:44
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PurpleXVI posted:drat, is there any chance of that last Antaran Expedition turning up anything at this point? A tiny one. A tiny one that shrinks as of the next update. But there's still that really, really tiny chance they can get that X-Tech before we do it the normal way.
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Sep 17, 2019 13:52
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 102: Guardians are Forever, Part VII Also, new update!   Let’s get on with this. We explore a new system this turn, kill/maim some spies and we also learn that it’s not good to force space truckers to travel to 1000 different custom offices spread all over the planet Though let’s be nice and assume that they weren’t physically traveling and just got swamped with thousands of different processing forms and maybe they just let their computer deal with that poo poo in nanoseconds. It’s still both weird and strangely inefficient. I’d make a joke about alien minds, but ha ha, Humans have to re-learn this tech too  I did not expect this. To recap, our new neighbors in this far-away region are the Meklar (red) and the squidoid Nommo (light blue). Last update we wondered which one of them is winning their little war, but if you look at this screenshot, the Nommo have already taken over Meklar-planets in this system, so it doesn’t look like they are losing.  In fact, the Nommo-invasion is still ongoing. Welp, question loving answered, I guess.  To look at the other side of the border, our scout is ordered to move into Nommo-space next.  Next up: The Meklar sanction us. Which is a little bit like the Republic of Nauru sanctioning the USA, but OK. It’s certainly less suicidal then declaring war… wait poo poo, they did that too. Welp.  You all have waited for this: Our main fleet starts moving towards the next Antaran Guardian, and the beginning of our liberation of Cynoid-space. XEOL, we’re coming!  And with this, we’re of to turn 348. We’re slowly finishing our grip on the new territories beyond the two Guardians we fought, and some new guy shows up to replace our two dead leaders.  And it’s this guy, a famous Grendarl politician and diplomat. He was kind of in the background in the opening cutscene, as he was there when the Antarans declared themselves to be the “New Orions” and that they were now independent from the bad old Antarans*. He gives a bonus to diplomacy and makes trade treaties a little easier to get, which is why he stays for now instead of getting the boot immediately for daring to make our system taxes 2% lower. *Which was easy because they thought they were all dead anyway, thanks to the virulent Harvester-parasite wiping almost everyone out.  And now the Nommo place us under embargo. Seems both Nommo and Meklar want us out of their edge of space. Too bad guys, see how you like forever war with the biggest empire around.  The Meklar thought this was a really good idea by their arch-nemesis, so they too expand their sanctions to a full embargo. And both achieve nothing, besides reducing the zero trade between our empires further… down to zero, in fact.  The oddities of this game, part 999: For some reason both us and the Meklar are kind of feeling neutral to each other. Also, the Meklar are fighting for their lives with their neighbors, the Nommo. So what does the AI (ha ha) behind those robots decide to do? War with a potential new ally. WTF? Though to be fair, thanks to being hardcoded as our “enemies”, they have no choice. In vanilla, with diplomacy being broken thanks to all those natural enmities not working, we would be best friends by now. Probably! (With this game you never know.)  As a contrast, the Nommo have a deep, seething hatred of our people. And our people hate them right back. Zero chance of peace here. Seriously, Silicoids and Nommo have nothing in common at all, there must be some kind of instinctive revulsion at work here. Though it is funny to imagine all the Raas and Psilons we picked up among others taking one look at a Nommo-hologram and going “UGH, we hate those things make them go away  ” And for the finisher, here are our relations to the Cynoids. Dreaded XEOL has finally succumbed to hatred, and the propaganda on our side has done the same for us: This war will now go to the bitter end. By which I mean the Cynoids hate us now enough to renew the war on their own if it auto-ends. Of course with our fleets inbound, that won’t ever happen again until the war is over now.  Meanwhile, your sole allies: Everything is hovering around +100 out of a possible maximum of +200. Good relations, but they saw better days. Considering how intertwined our borders are, something I have to keep an eye on for the future. We are probably seeing the effect of the game slowly giving negative modifiers to our diplomacy on account of us being loving huge.  To smoothen things out between our realms, the Kingdom of Almandin prepares a diplomatic gift. We send entertainment robots over to make them literally happier. Also I spared you the relations between Klackons and us, they’re all at negative maximum, no need for more screenshots.  And then our combined armada reaches the third Guardian, watching over the ruins of Mrrshan civilization.  I pick one planet at random for our assault. And definitely not because I have no idea which one of the planets is the Mrrshan homeworld. Definitely not.  And then it is on.  The Mrrshan Guardian.  The Mrrshan Guardian after our fighters and missiles reach it.  By now our fleets have a terrifying amount of fire power and range: Both around 25k with a maxed out armada.  Still, even alone against 320 enemy ships, the Guardian’s regenerating shields are also terrifying in their own right.  The battle goes on, with the Guardian occasionally one-shotting a random ship from our task forces and our combined bombardment continuing without pause.  And then, after almost two minutes of holding, the Mrrshan Guardian suffers a lethal shield collapse. The energies breaking through are enough to turn the Guardian into literally spacedust, armor and all.  Third Guardian: Done.  The Kingdom immediately prepares the Fieras-system for colonization. Also thanks to the automatic immigration system running in the background, some of our Klackon-citizens managed to arrive in the same turn. There are also some archaeological ruins on Fieras III, which makes me think this may be the original Mrrshan-homeworld. Though it could be coincidence, of course.  On the other hand, the Mrrshan Guardian was orbiting the fourth planet, a true hellhole. If this is because of the original bombardment by the Antarans, a solemn memorial to the power of weapons an interstellar civilization can wield.  A new surprise: The star lane layout is a lot more complicated then I thought: We have another still unknown system over here, and the connections to Cynoid-space are of to the north/side. Weird. Well, more space to colonize for us! By the way, just in case you’re wondering, no we did not get a new X-tech out of that third Guardian. Apparently it’s one of the other ones we send an expedition to. That now makes two Guardians we got nothing from, thanks to the expeditions we send out!  At least I think the other side leads to the Cynoids: There is still more untouched interstellar real estate even here. Our fleet is ordered to explore in force.  After that, I decide to scrap some of our older ships to save on maintenance.  Technology-time! Uh wait, this wasn’t supposed to happen This is a placeholder for a tech the modders apparently couldn’t add anymore before they abandoned Ultima Orion. Hopefully researching this non-tech won’t break anything!  Next combat phase, we’re trying something different. Our aggressive scouting in Theta Gru means we’re accidentally put in command of a joint task force of Almandian and Annalonian warships. My secret goal is to see if we can wake up the AI by attacking them, breaking the eternal stalemate.  The Cynoids indeed saunter over and open fire. Immediately, our Imsaies-allies are taking the brunt of our stupid idea. So op success. If we attack, the Cynoids are willing to shoot back. Fun is saved!  A closer look at one of the Cynoid task forces in Theta Gru: Same range as our ships, with ca. 21k damage a lot less (but not that much less really) than ours. Though to put this into perspective, we are mixing our fleet ships with point defense ships and recon ships and still have nearly 4k more damage potential. But then again, we could be looking at an outdated design here.  Welp, our scouts are dead. No reason to let our allies suffer. The order for a general retreat is given.  Not that many of our joint fleet survive, the Cynoids really gave us a pasting there. Welp, I guess with three Guardians down we can move on. I think there’s only one more Antaran Guardian, but at this point the only way to win against us would be to make the game crash on purpose every time we attack, so let’s close this chapter of the LP finally. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Expedition Completed Expedition 2: Partial discoveries made (4) + 7 ships lost Expedition 3: Expedition Completed Next: Placeholders and Missing Pictures, the Game
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Sep 17, 2019 13:56
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That Cynoid fleet just looks like an endless circle of Conga dancers... which explains a lot about their diplomacy skills.
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Sep 17, 2019 14:06
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Well that guardian result is a kick in the knickers.
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Sep 17, 2019 14:13
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