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Evolving Towards Perfection The Sakkra have hilariously blockaded the Wolf system, but I can't be bothered to make the long journey to remove them. They'll move on their own eventually ... one way or the other.  There's a fungus among us! Sorry, not sorry. Transwarp fields, as Biology is also done. ** Displacement Device - Flat 30% chance of evading any enemy shot before anything else is considered. ** Inertial Nullifer - +100 beam defense, and turning costs no movement points. ** Sub-Space Teleporter - Can teleport 20 squares whenever you feel like it in combat. I'm not actually sure if I'll use any of these, but they are definitely up there in the space magic department.  I'm then taken directly to this screen.  With no more negative points allowed, the actual choices are fairly limited. Only +1 Research, though it will have minimal impact at this stage, is really in keeping with the theme here. I could make our ships even more OP with a boost to ship attack, or Warlord, remove our food malus, etc. but nothing is going to make much of a difference so I just stick with the program. We'll get the hyper-advanced techs that little bit faster this way. And then I'm forced to set build queues for another handful of new colonies, like pretty much every turn these days. The work of a megalomaniacal galactic despot is never done. Battle of Paladia (1:16) The Sakkra have Battlestations. We don't care - a single ship is enough and there's a lot more coming.  Displacement Device looked more interesting. We also built cloning centers in an absurd amount of locations across the galaxy this turn.  I find this naming unusual. We have been building planets for a while now. ** Artemis System Net - A system of mines that damages energy ships as they enter; 100-500 points each minus shields. Smaller ships can evade most of them, but the big ones are out of luck. ** Doom Star Construction - Ah yes. The description ingame is rather understated, but basically this is the biggest ship we can build. Clearly a Death Star reference as has been referred to, they are of 'planetoid' size only they can fly around and blow things up.  SD 3520.0 - And here they are. Yay. Interphased Fission for a mere 10k. ** Interphased Drives - Upgrade to Warp 7 capability. ** Neutronium Bomb - 10-60 damage on surface targets. Our Plasma Cannons are doing just fine for that. ** Plasma Torpedoes - 120 damage, losing 5 per square (24 range). All of these are basically straight ports from MOO1 versions. Having ships move around faster is somewhat useful to me; the weapons will be ignored. So next step up is to equalize population on my planets as much as possible - time to step up the shipping of citizens around. New systems need fresh labor to develop and get to the point where they can build artificial planets. Established ones have no need of being maxed out just yet - there's nothing I need to build on them. SD 3532.1 - The Antarans are back, and ticking me off. Our capture fleet is in the center of the galaxy, so it can get anywhere in four turns, their usual ETA. Instead, they are headed to Polaris. In two turns. We have nothing in range. Even weirder, it is but a single cruiser. So it WOULD have been an easy capture. I'll try to rush ships out at a couple of nearby systems, but it's doubtful. New plan: every industrial-capable world will do a stupid amount of stockpiling, so that they can build ships on location at a moment's notice. I'm still annoyed, but we have scanning coverage over the entire galaxy at this point. As we continue developing the frontiers, there will eventually be nowhere left for their raiders to hide ... Also, we finished a Dimensional Portal at Mentar the same time, just to do it. Coincidence?  Keeping with the candlestick theme, is this the best one we can make?  Indeed it is. Range will no longer be an issue once we get our next target. Thorium Fuel Cells serve the same function as in the first game, giving unlimited capabilities there.  The Antarans are a turn away from Polaris, entering the galaxy two turns away - our capture fleet is at Pund. All that stuff headed towards Unuk is colony ships. Tatiana and Klackon didn't have enough stockpiled to get even a single ship (which against a lone cruiser might have been enough) in the fight. In terms of the delay, it probably doesn't really matter all that much. We still have a bunch of systems to clear and recolonize, and when that's done build them up so we can fill out all the potential planet slots in them with handcrafted ones ... so I've got to wait around for that anyway. I've also developed a little better way to go through microing each turn. There's not that many slots within the settler limit each time out, and I'm heavily abusing the Food, Population, and Producing filters on the Colonies screen to find stuff quickly. So that pain is mitigated considerably, esp. with an increasing number of systems at the extremes - either fully developed or just starting out. We have 'only' about 5k research every cycle right now, a temporary decrease. Battle of Polaris(1:16) We can't capture it, but we can sure as heck blow it out of near orbit. Featuring the Mauler, our new missiles, the Star Fortress ... a single cruiser, even an Antaran one, is no threat.  Meanwhile here's how the offensive goes. Weg is our first occupied system in former Sakkra space, and now the colony ships are fanning out there. The bulk of the fleet is further west. A single Obscenity can level any opposing system while yawning and holding a euchre tournament for all but a skeleton crew, so we're working on crushing all resistance on the galactic rim, then will move downwards. We're about to bring TechnoGeek 'justice' to those frontier systems the Darloks seized long ago and have held for so long. None will be suffered to live, of course. Nazin and Thuban remain out of range, but that's a very temporary situation. One side 'benefit' of the fungus amongus is that the AI Governors now think it's a really good idea for newly grown population to be farmers on developing worlds. One of the more annoying regular activities is reminding them that no, we're going to ship all that stuff in. Battle of Zaoth (3:03) Our first Darlok fight. They have a bunch of different ships. With good armor. Even one of our older active designs shows disrespect to their rag-tag fleet, though they did do significant damage  We would also have gotten Adamantium Armor here, if we didn't already have it. Range is no longer a problem.  Only two choices left to get new stuff from. Temporal Physics here: ** Star Gate - Movement is instantaneous between any two colonies of ours. That really should virtually eliminate the problem with intercepting Antaran fleets - I can position close to the frontier in case they go there and then be able to head anywhere that we have settled before they arrive. ** Stellar Converter - Can be mounted on ship or planet, automatically does 400 damage to all four shields of a ship, and when used to bombard a planet ... destroys it. ** Time Warp Facilitator - A ship equipped with these slips in and out of the time-space continuum ... how that works is anybody's guess ... which appears to allow it to have double combat turns? We're definitely into the 'stupidly overpowered' segment here at the top of the tech tree. So we definitely need to get one of them thar Stellar Converters in place. I've recently selected the planet to use it on.  Even as we methodically rampage through their systems, the Sakkra have destroyed Meklon with a group of three battleships. This will of course not really matter, but I was hoping to leave that as the only hostile system. All fighting is restricted to a narrow strip along the left of the galaxy. Soon not even that will be in dispute. We don't just speak for the Council ... we ARE the Council (2:48) Of course this is not the 'real' or 'canon' ending to this game, but it's the first opportunity to show it. I particularly like the total hogwash arse-kissing by the other races. A couple new cutscenes, and I am congratulated on my 'magnificent' score. Such pleasantries dispensed with, I now have no use for other races to continue to exist other than prolonging the game.  That's .... not what I was expecting. What I think they're saying here is that they've hated us for a long time, but knew we were too strong to oppose directly.  Intriuiging, and she'd make a fine leader for Alaozar and help it feed the empire. I don't think she's worth getting rid of any of my current governors though. REJECTED.  Perfect. I moved most of my spies on to the attack to sabotage, for the sole purpose of hoping they get killed as I wrap this up to save money. Darloks gotta Darlok, but they won't be alive long to enjoy it. Only Nazin remains, and warships are making their way in it's general direction so not for long.
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Jun 29, 2019 21:24
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I don't recall offhand, can you "save" some racial picks in the beginning and add them to the +4 Evolutionary Mutation picks later to get higher cost perks?
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Jun 29, 2019 22:18
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The time warp facilitator is indeed stupidly overpowered, since it is one of two special systems needed to build literally invincible ships.
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Jun 30, 2019 00:17
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Neophyte posted:I don't recall offhand, can you "save" some racial picks in the beginning and add them to the +4 Evolutionary Mutation picks later to get higher cost perks? I think so but that's a super bad idea. The game is typically over by this point.
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Jun 30, 2019 00:39
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Warlord is usually the default pick if the game isn't already over at that point
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Jun 30, 2019 00:49
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Neophyte posted:I don't recall offhand, can you "save" some racial picks in the beginning and add them to the +4 Evolutionary Mutation picks later to get higher cost perks? You can. If you have 2 unspent points, you could grab telepathic for example.
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Jun 30, 2019 06:26
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Martian posted:The time warp facilitator is indeed stupidly overpowered, since it is one of two special systems needed to build literally invincible ships. I remember reading of a build to beat them, but it's only useful in a multiplayer game as the AI wouldn't couple those systems (or use them right even if it had them).
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Jun 30, 2019 08:54
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Here's how The Invincible Bullshittium Ship works. You need a Time Warp Facilitator and Phasing Cloak. Hyper-X Capacitors are highly suggested. Then you load up on the rest of the beam boosting techs and as many guns as you can fit. First, you pass your turn. This is because of the way the Time Warp Facilitator works. The enemy can't do poo poo because you're invisible. Then, you attack! Blow up as many motherfuckers as you can. Then the Time Warp Facilitator gives you a second turn. Don't attack, which allows your capacitors to recharge and your ship to recloak. Repeat until everybody is dead. For best results, bring another ship that also has a Phasing Cloak, but also has a Warp Dissipater so they can't run away. Otherwise you're going to be chasing these fucks all over the galaxy. This is mostly a party trick, though, because the only situation I can think of where this would be useful is if you somehow manage to get the required techs, but the AI is enormously ahead in terms of fleet size and strength, and you don't think you can handle any losses you might incur from a slugging match. Being able to take out fifteen of their ships for every one you lose is great, but if you have three ships and they have three hundred, that'll leave you up poo poo creek. The counter to the Invincible Bullshittium Ship is "use a Phasing Cloak but do not use a Time Warp Facilitator, then just wait out their cloak because they're burning through it at twice the rate, then blow them up."
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Jun 30, 2019 15:16
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I swear they patched that out in the version being sold now. But it was a fun party trick. I seem to remember failing to design a doomstar capable of single handedly wiping out the Antarans even with that.
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Jun 30, 2019 23:03
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As far as the Council goes in MoO2, the galaxy voting in a leader is not actually an instant game over. Even if that leader is you! You always get the choice as to whether or not you abide by the council's decision, and you can say no. Even if it's you they're voting for. In either case, the entire rest of the galaxy instantly confederates under a single banner - whichever AI won the vote if an AI won, or whomever was running against you if you yourself win the vote but tell the council to pound sand.
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Jul 2, 2019 09:42
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A Billion Strong ... And Growing Uh, we could have a problem. I don't really have that many colony ships. I wonder if I've hit some sort of fleet overlow bug like in the first game? Hoping not. Gonna keep a save around from a turn or two earlier though just in case. ** Note: I eventually was able to just get rid of the remaining ships when they weren't needed anymore, with no apparent further issues. So I have not, at least yet, broken the game. Also worth noting that I'm now caught up on everything in terms of stockpiling, building up freighters, etc. We're using about 600 each turn as you can see and are constantly at the settler limit. Research is almost 10k per cycle. Darlok Genocide (0:14) Since everyone was clamoring for it, here it is. The Darloks are no more.   And now only Temporal Fields is even a choice. ** Class X Shield - Again, does what it says. ** Phasing Cloak - Allows a ship to not just disappear, but literally enter another dimension temporarily *cough hogwash cough* 10-turn limit; ships can't be attacked or detected, period, during this time. ** Planetary Barrier Shield - Does what Radiation/Flux shields do, ups damage absorption to 20 points. Also totally prevents bioweapons and ground troops from attacking while it is up. I actually won't be building the Barrier Shields, just because there's no point - with Jump Gates we should be able to get the fleet anywhere it needs to go to intercept. But still, all this stuff is quite kewl. After I've eliminated them, I am notified that 'Darlok spy steals Gauss Cannon'. AFTER.  That there is one big gun. It won't fit on anything short of a Titan. There won't be many places I need to use it - only one or two - but anywhere that has a Toxic non-Rich planet will get the treatment for demonstration sake. I'll only need one Overkill for that purpose. Even with all the empty space, it's still somewhat more expensive than our most modern Obscenity ... which isn't that modern anymore, really.  How deluded you are. There was long since no such hope.  And now its time to plow through the Hyper-Advanced techs and get more miniaturization. Right now, at 11.6k RP per turn, we're estimating three turns for each of these. So at least we'll be able to do it quickly. Planet Destruction (0:41) I learned the hard way that I can't use the Stellar Converter on an unoccupied planet. Still there were a couple of others deserving the treatment. Here we get the bonus of Sakkra genocide, and a Meklar world will soon receive the attentions of our ultimate weapon as well.  Here's what the game thinks if you just eliminate everyone and get a 'conquest' victory. The ending video is the same - you just get the second half of it, without the diplomatic part tacked on at the beginning. Of course, I'm leaving the Meklar with one crappy small desert poor planet, so that I can finish the proper objectives here.  SD 3533.8 - This is a repeated scene on many worlds and systems in the galaxy. We no longer have any use for such structures which serve only as fixed defenses, with the fleet able to literally cover anywhere it is needed. All they do now is suck up taxes that would be better used building stuff faster. Partly due to the citizen transfers keeping all planets at 20M or below in population, we now have four dedicated agricultural worlds as well. And still yet more remains to be done.  They've killed a couple of our spies, and a third this turn, but now this. Either there was no choice of available targets, or you don't get to choose and it just picks something. SD 3534.4 - The TechnoGeek Empire hits 1 Billion citizens. I suppose that's as good a place as any to cut off this mini-update. Right now I'm plowing through a few turns at a time as regularly as time permits, it's just that not much is happening in a short time scale. In research, we're over halfway through the Hyper-Advanced I projects at one every three turns. Next tier the price goes up from 25k to 35k, which is faster than our investment is proceeding. We're waiting for the Antarans to return to hit Orion still, and in the meantime the galaxy is basically in stasis. The Meklar aren't even trying to do anything on their one wimpy planet. You might say we've boxed them in and there's only one Wei II survival for them. Roughly four freighter fleets are produced every turn to keep pace, with total freighters in operation nearing a full thousand. Still overall galactic population is definitely well under half of the maximum. Rush job investment is a little over a thousand BCs per, and most of the bootstrapping of growing colonies is done with since there aren't that many of them left. The biggest chunk are now roughly in the terraforming stage. There are still a number of systems with more planets to build as well. Nir is a particularly bad example, with two small radiated-poor planets from which I need to eventually construct a trio of rocks from the other orbits. So that'll take a bit. With research, population growth, and planetary infrastructure all needing major investment at the moment, I can't hit any one of them with maximum force and there's still considerable waiting to be done.
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Jul 10, 2019 17:53
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A Valiant - and Ill-Advised - Raid SD 3534.8 - I don't really have a good representative visual, but over the last few turns we started to achieve critical mass on some things. More planets started becoming self-sufficient financially and agriculturally, leading to more cashflow and less new freighters required. Only the few new planets that were trickling in had minimal population, allowing for more focused transfers and automated factories were able to to be purchased immediately at the full price. All of this ultimately meant more momentum gradually being shifted into accelerating research a little more.  SD 3535.4 This seemed a useful time to dump some mostly-final facts and figures. These days it is the checking of dozens of planets after each turn's production that takes the lion's share of the time - labor adjustments are relatively minor by comparison. And even that is starting to reduce. I chose this point in time for a couple of reasons. First, we've just finished Klackon repatriations. Almost all of the the bug-occupied industrial centers are at least at half their maximum populations, and our most populous several worlds at present are occupied by them. Nothing is above 19M right now due to the shifting around. Secondly, over the last couple of turns seven new TechnoGeek-occupied planets have reached agricultural self-sufficiency, so the need to ship around food is starting to reduce. While there are still a number of new planets to be built, that isn't happening nearly as fast as we are now completing development on the other end of the scale, so we've definitely reached a tipping point here. There was a point at which there were dozens of planets with a single citizen - now there's almost none and all those recently colonized or housing worlds. The median number is about 7-8M, and some planets don't have a maximum much higher than that so a great deal of progress has been made. ** We have plenty of surplus freighters, and recently stopped building them at least for now (and perhaps for good). 1050 in all so we are using 923. ** The empire spans 137 planets in 56 systems, approximately - I may have messed up the count somewhere but it's quite close to that. I think we're down to somewhere around 10 more planets to build, and of course the Orion system itself will be added eventually. I'll make that move once all the other planets are built if the Antarans don't return before then. I fear the moment previously spoken of has come - they may well not be coming, having determined that we are strong enough to repel any raiding force. ** Only 9.32% (114M) of the population is required for farming. That includes a few android farmers and a couple of natives that were captured from the Klackons. At this point I'd estimate that our final population will be roughly 30% bugs, but there's much left to be done. What Are All Those Planets Doing? ** We still have the three small incubator worlds, though I'll be adding population to those and building them up as normal before long. ** 35 planets, or just over a quarter of the empire, are now fully-developed. All citizens not needed for food busily research on those worlds, while the automated industrial facilities crank out Trade Goods to fuel quicker development elsewhere. Much of that funding goes to accelerating the construction of Artificial Planets. The rest of the order here is simply the order in which the game likes to list the improvements. ** 14 planets are about to wrap up, working on the last major project for each world, construction of a Star Fortess. ** 7 are in the midst of Gaia Transformation, a big project midway through the development cycle before moving on to financial and research structures. ** Terraforming occupies the efforts of another 10 planets - of course some of them will require several rounds of it before the work is done. ** Another dozen are building Pleasure Domes, which come near the end of the initial production-boosting phase of development. ** Two are wrapping up Galactic Cybernets, the final research improvement before moving on to either agricultural focus or, for rich worlds, going straight to the star fortress. ** 11 Deep Core Mines, the last big factory-boosting construction, are underway. ** 2 Recyclotrons, which add a final tidbit of production before moving on usually into terraforming. ** 2 Colony Bases for deployment on recently constructed worlds. ** 11 Astro Universities, another end-of-industrial-boosting project. ** 3 Planetary Supercomputers, second of the four research improvements. ** 4 Robo-Miner Plants, second improvement to go up and still a target for aggressive rush-job investment. ** 7 Atmosphere Renewers, the final pollution-reducing add-on (I haven't been building the Core Waste Dumps at all, still being of the opinion that they aren't worth it with the other available earlier options all on the table). ** 1 Soil Enrichment, first of the two farming boosters. ** 3 Holo Simulators, coming in the middle of the industrial push as the first morale booster. ** 1 Gravity Generator, which are needed on a number of worlds and generally get thrown in after the first few industrial buildings get put up. I'm good at forgetting these. ** 3 Cloning Centers, which come shortly after terraforming to start everyone breeding faster. ** 1 Spaceport, first of the financial add-ons. ** 2 Pollution Processors, first pollution reducer after I get a couple of factory buildings up. ** 3 Research Labs, first research building of course. ** 2 Biospheres, first thing that goes up after terraforming in preparation for boosting population growth - since higher max population ceiling boosts that on its own. ** 1 Automated Factory on a just-colonized planet. These are always bought immediately at this point. That's ... a lot of stuff. The distribution changes around as colonization and development rates evolve. Right now we've got a big bunch, the last group that were settled at the end of the last war, that are nearing the end of the industrial phase and/or terraforming. After that we just have more stuff trickling in, and the overall balance is tilting more towards increased numbers of fully-developed systems shunting more and more resources into research and throwing ever-more cashola at the relatively fewer developing systems. It does look to me that research and population growth are going to be the last things to finish up. Because of that, I'm not particulary worried about anything else. Stalled at 12-13k for an extended period, research efforts are now nearly at 17k and moving upwards consistently each turn. So too does the required amount; 35k as mentioned for the current second hyper-advanced tier, and 45k for the upcoming third tier. SD 3535.9 - We break the 20k RP barrier. On the other hand, there are more planets needing to be fashioned than I thought. So the work continues, and reduced freighter fleet production has resumed.  Didn't think we'd get any more military offers at this point, but sure. SD 3536.5 - They're Back! Turns out that the Antarans still come no matter how ready you are, which is great news for me.  It's been SOOO LONG since we had any action. They're headed for Sagan with a pair of Cruisers ... with any luck we'll get to the quantam detonator on one of them in time and get a new toy or two. Battle of Sagan (3:27) Both ships were captured with ease. The fleet was of course overkill, but as we've seen you don't get a lot of chances at this.  The much-ballyhooed Xentronium Armor is ours!  And more crap. I don't remember specific discussion of the Spatial Compressor; it's a weapon system that damages everything in a two-square radius around the ship. There is no reason to delay further - it is time to smash the Guardian and take Orion. We're presently wrapping up the last of the artificial planet colonizing, so the timing in terms of that is good. The Guardian, Finally (1:13) Defeating the Guardian was even more anticlimactic than expected, in terms of the battle itself. Of course we get a bit of a video.  Admiral Loknar the Last Orion is a true badass.  His ship has some nice toys as well, though it follows the whole kitchen-sink approach. We'll keep it around as a favor to him - it'll serve as our (decidedly wimpy by comparison) command ship for the attack on Antares.  The crown jewel of the galaxy is at last ours. Many Klackon 'citizens' will be shipped here forthwith. I'm basically going to buy everything that can't be built in a single turn immediately, so that we can get planets made out of those asteroid belts and play a bit of catch-up in this system. Those will be the last planets to max out down the road. The Nir system spoken of earlier is about as late as any to finish up - might be one or two a bit after, but they'll be close. All orbits constructed and the last couple of colony bases will be sent out soon. Other than Orion, that final land-grab push is about to complete. All of this brings us to the final chapter of this struggle. The only matters which remains are to finish fully exploiting the galaxy and miniaturize everything we can. We will be acquiring no new components, equipment, or weapons of war. There is nothing more to learn. And so it is time to decide what to do with it all.  Hyper-advanced tier II is completed; third tier efforts have just begun, literally this turn.
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Jul 14, 2019 09:37
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Any last redesigns with the new stolen tech and Orion tech before having a go at Antares?
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Jul 14, 2019 10:12
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Okay. So there's a few details about exotic techs. Capturing Orion, at least in the PC version, guarantees you Death Ray. You also get three additional "bonus" exotic technologies, randomly selected from the ones you don't have. Since Thotimx only gained three techs total, this serves as adequate confirmation that every technology in the game has been acquired. As far as Death Ray goes, though, there's a reason it's guaranteed - Antaran raider fleets will never have them; capturing Orion is the only way to acquire Death Ray. Which is a shame, because Death Ray is kind of terrible. It looks good in comparison to, say, the Mauler Device (which is 100 damage at 50 size without miniaturization) but the Mauler Device has no damage falloff, never misses, and can be miniaturized. Internally, the Death Ray is considered the "best" beam weapon, which means the moment you take Orion, all of your star bases and ground batteries will immediately switch over to using it. If you take Orion early, (say, with missile frigate spam) this is good, and if you've been relying on, say, Plasma cannons, this is bad. Xentronium Armor is the "best" Antaran tech because it's simply the best armor in the game. It provides 25% more HP than the best researchable armor, costs nothing to use, and even negates armor piercing weapons. If you manage to claim Orion early enough, you have effectively won the game - the Avenger (especially with Admiral Loknar piloting) should be capable of soloing the entire rest of the galaxy more or less by itself, so unless the AI gets a lucky sabotage, the game is over and everything else is just mop up. Compared to Thotimx's ships now, sure, it doesn't look that impressive, but you can claim Orion much much earlier, and the AI really doesn't have any way to deal with the ship unless you faff about and let it tech up.
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Jul 14, 2019 11:43
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Did you shoot the guardian once and destroy it.
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Jul 14, 2019 12:44
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sebmojo posted:Did you shoot the guardian once and destroy it. Yea, surprise! The Guardian is actually not that durable. It is roughly a Titan class ship, but it is fairly lethal with its Achilles Targeting Unit and other support equipment. You can break through that thing with enough ships early on with Phasors, Gauss Cannons or such, but Plasma weapons will quickly shred that things shields/armor and give you the victory.
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Jul 14, 2019 13:53
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IIRC, the real trick to to knock down the shields and use emissions guidance missiles.
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Jul 14, 2019 14:15
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If you're some kind of weird min/maxer you colonize and "gift" crappy planets to the enemy as tribute and THEN blow them up to reform them into something better.
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Jul 15, 2019 03:41
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PurpleXVI posted:Any last redesigns with the new stolen tech and Orion tech before having a go at Antares? Oh, definitely! I'll be very disappointed if the sheer size and scale of the fleet I'm going to build doesn't break the game at some point. GuavaMoment posted:If you're some kind of weird min/maxer you colonize and "gift" crappy planets to the enemy as tribute and THEN blow them up to reform them into something better. I resemble this remark, but even I'm not going that extreme. I'll suffer with the 6-8 Toxic worlds I have and so forth. KrumbsThumbs posted:The Guardian is actually not that durable. It is roughly a Titan class ship, but it is fairly lethal with its Achilles Targeting Unit and other support equipment. Unlike the first game, in which it is either really difficult or downright impossible to make a ship that can solo the Guardian. You definitely can't get close to its HP.
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Jul 15, 2019 06:28
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With What Shall We Blat Them, Dear Liza, Dear Liza While we all wait for me to plow through the post-game blahs, we now have researched every possible weapon and special to put on the ships. I am going to build an even number of all suggested Doomstar design types, so that we can see them in action in one glorious, absurdly OP battle. After which we will FINALLY move on to the next run. Feast your eyes on the toys. ALL of them.     Them's the weapons. For the special equipment below, the class is set to Doom Star.     Ship Ideas Here's what I've got so far: ** Beams - Just load up on HV Plasma Cannons and all specials that help them. ** Missiles - MIRV Zeons, I presume? 2-shot racks of course for maximum alpha strike effectiveness. Perhaps Fast Missile Racks? ** Assault - Fast engines and as many Assault Shuttles as will fit. They can't shoot at us if all their crew are dead. ** Invincible Bullshittium - As described by MechaCrash, if you like. Might be of limited use since this will be an AUTO battle (so that it doesn't last for several literal hours) ** Carrier - Heavy Fighters (?). Another alpha-strike option. ** Artillery - Stellar Converters, Death Rays, etc. for maximum 'my gun is bigger than yours' impact. ** Tank - Maximum armor, hull plating, ECM, inertial stuff, hard shields, etc. Meant to take a beating with at least a little space reserve for standard mount plasmas to deal with fighters/missiles/etc. I won't start building until I've got enough tech to have everything miniaturized, so there's time. Still, vote away for those of the above list or other ideas that you want or don't want to see. If there's any weird/bizarre/exotic designs you would like to see in action, this is the time for it. I'm only doing this once  .
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Jul 15, 2019 06:39
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Future Games Update We had a few votes a while back on what to do with the two remaining runs. As it stands, Game Three has a close vote, with custom Elerians (max. combat) leading narrowly over custom Darloks (max. espionage). For Game Four the initial stock Klackons idea has had no detractors and would seem to be in a strong position. Gonna have to decide on the third (next) game soon as I hope to be wrapping this one up in about a week or so … if you haven't held forth on that - or have and want to change your mind - ya best squeak up soon.
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Jul 15, 2019 06:54
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For the ship, I propose a modified Beam ship. If you plan on fielding just one of these things, give it two Stellar Converters in separate mounts, and then fill the rest with heavy plasma cannons. Maybe with a forward extended range, or at least some with a forward extended range, in case you dive into the enemy a little too hard and shoot down everything in front of you. If you're fielding a bunch of dudes, then you just need the one Stellar Converter per ship, because two Stellar Converter shots is enough to destroy all of a planet's defenses, no matter what. Especially because Stellar Converters can also benefit from most, if not all, of the beam boosting technology. Or at least the "ignore armor" and "double damage that penetrates the shield" bits. Like I said, the invincible bullshit ship is purely a party trick (or for use in multiplayer), because if you have the tech to make it, you can just load up on good non-gimmick ships and just vaporize everyone with brute strength. The bullshit ship is only useful if you can make one ship and have one shot. Also, don't forget to include a ship with an ECCM jammer, phase cloak, warp dissipator, and maybe a scout lab. You can cram all of this into a single frigate with no problem, I think (you may need battle pods), and while you won't have room for much else of note, you don't need to. This thing's job is to just sit in the back, passively providing jamming coverage and keeping the enemy locked down so you can wipe them out. I think that with all the space boosting tech and maximum miniaturization, you can fit a Stellar Converter into a cruiser, so instead of devoting space to a Stellar Converter in your main combat ships, you can just bring a pair of cruisers with Stellar Conveters. Or a single ship of whatever size can carry two of them in independent mounts.
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Jul 15, 2019 07:31
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I vote ASSAULT ships, because that was always my personal favourite gimmick.
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Jul 15, 2019 08:42
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So... can you use the Stellar Converter on Orion when you fight the Guardian?
Randalor fucked around with this message at 14:56 on Jul 15, 2019 |
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Jul 15, 2019 14:53
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Randalor posted:So... can you use the Stellar Converter on Orion when you fight the Guardian? Orion is an uninhabited world (  ), so no.
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Jul 15, 2019 15:01
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Following along with your MOO1 LP got me much better at the game and I couldn't wait to watch your LPs of MOO2. Having played a few games again, I'm finding Uncreative is easier than Creative, even though Creative is OP. For me, with Creative I fall into the trap of building everything everywhere and then getting steamrolled because I never build military (a Civ problem as well for me). But being Uncreative is causing me to focus more on population growth and defensive ships because I just don't have that many things to build. Being more focused is actually helping me survive the early game, and once I do that I can snowball just fine.
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Jul 16, 2019 00:58
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Fhqwhgads posted:Following along with your MOO1 LP got me much better at the game and I couldn't wait to watch your LPs of MOO2. Hope it hasn't been a disappointment; I'm not nearly as good at this one. As a general progress update, I'm through the worst of the micro now and steadily plodding along, turns are going faster than they were. It is taking somewhat longer than expected, partly because I ran into a game engine limitation that has slowed things down a bit. But the end of this drudgery will soon (relatively) be here, and then the planned path of this thread can resume.
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Jul 22, 2019 08:25
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Thotimx posted:Hope it hasn't been a disappointment; I'm not nearly as good at this one. Not at all, I'm loving this one, too.
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Jul 22, 2019 15:45
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Thotimx posted:It is taking somewhat longer than expected, partly because I ran into a game engine limitation that has slowed things down a bit. I'm curious what the engine limitation will turn out to be.
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Jul 22, 2019 21:53
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Too Many Beakers I began by scrapping most of the fleet, acquiring almost 15k BCs in the process. And a game limit of some type was reached in the turn summary, as there were a few planets that didn't have their production show up in the listing. I think I've been running into that for a while actually, just didn't realize it before. With more money than I know what to do with I thought about abusing Scout Labs to increase our research, but it just doesn't seem to worth it given how much our population can produce. My calculations were that even maxing out our current command points would result in about 2k extra research per turn - we're about to break 30k as it is, so rather than build a bunch of ships I'll just hammer the Turn button a while more at the end of this if need be, and just have a bigger cashflow for buying the combat ships early later or something. It just doesn't seem to be worth the trouble. SD 3537.5 - I've hit another hard limit, actually the turn before I think but this is where it became obvious. Total RP per turn is hard-capped to 32,767; this is of course a well-known data type storage amount. This kind of sucks because it means I can't keep escalating research with the increase in costs for the hyper-advanced items. I was going to blow up the research structures eventually to free up maintenance BCs for use elsewhere when the time came; turns out it is just coming sooner than expected. So no Klackon-occupied worlds will build any more research buildings, and those that exist will begin getting the demolition treatment.  Never stop learning.  Now we have officially colonized every rock that can be found or assembled. Aside from the stupid amounts of everything, a couple other things that strike me. Savings in the treasury are not limited at the level that annual research is, because ?? Also, while I understand how it works from a game mechanics standpoint, how do you build a Colony Base on a planet with only Klackons on it and they build a colony with 1M TechnoGeeks and no Klackons? Where did they come from?? And if we can create a million citizens out of thin air, why don't we do that more often elsewhere??? The final count is 55 occupied systems; almost a full quarter of the galaxy's 72 were useless except to take up space. 167 planets contribute to the empire, just about exactly three per system. Right now we're a little over 2.1 billion citizens, but many more need to be bred before we reach our maximum.  LOL. My fleet is almost totally scrapped at the moment. We'll see I guess whether I have to divert and build more ships or whether my souped-up Star Fortresses can fend this off. SD 3538.8 - I've reached the point where cash flow is sufficient to purchase all needed planetary improvements short of Star Fortresses. Partly because profit is about 13k per turn (LOL!) and partly because there aren't, relatively speaking, nearly as many planets still working. Probably need roughly 20 turns before getting everything completely built, but we're closing in on it. Research is plowing through the early stages of Hyper-Advanced IV. It seems the cost increases by 10k each tier, so it's 55k now and 65k for tier V. I need 2-3 turns for each one here, and it'll probably be 3-4 each for the next level. It would appear the research part is going to take as long as anything, simply due to the costs and the hard cap on how much I can do at once. Farming adjustments has become by far the most annoying and time-consuming element of the micro, with a majority of the planets now self-sufficient in terms of feeding themselves. SD 3538.9 - Nearly all research by assimilated populatons - i.e., Klackons & Mrrshan - has been discontinued. TechnoGeek efforts alone have us at the cap. All additional queued research structures have had their construction orders revoked, and we'll begin Housing investment instead starting with the smallest populations. Demolition efforts will be expanded to those planets as well.  ROFL. The experts were right?!? Bring it on puny lizard! Dragon Battle (1:15) I'm somewhat impressed that it managed - barely - to survive an entire round of our attacks. Loknar proves himself worthy, and the 'threat' is removed  SD 3539.3 - There's a housing boom going on across the empire. Orion has basically been at 2M more citizens per turn thanks to the optimal environment; a number of other planets are at better than 1M. You can also see here that the other planets in the system have begun terraforming, and those are the ones bringing up the rear. Most of the empire is now fully-developed. Fully-populated? Not so much, hence the housing investment. It does look like we'll get the population issue sorted by the time research is finished if not before though. That continues to plod along, and the demolition crews are kept quite busy, but we are closing in.  And still there are more wishing to join us. I was also told that 'a spy sent against the Meklar was lost'. Not killed or assassinated, but lost. That's a new one. SD 3539.9 - I run out of stuff to buy for the first time. The two add-on Orion planets aren't quite finished yet, but everywhere else either has completed development already or just got their star fortress bought this turn to finish the task. Spent almost 40k on those rush jobs this turn alone. Go-go Gadjet Moneybags! Meanwhile we're about to break the three billion mark in total population, with the current growth rate about 85M citizens per turn. That's a lot of breeding, folks.  Hilariously pointless. GNN also notes, for the second time, that we control a majority of the galaxy. Glad they got that out of the way. SD 3540.4 - The last planet in Orion has finished infrastructure. All that remains now is maxing out population and research. All planets have at least 10M citizens, and most of them below the 15-20M range are only there because that's the planetary maximum. Work continues on housing to boost population faster, and demolition of structures that are being phased out (research buildings and, for maxed-out planets, cloning centers). I'm no longer bothering with freighter transfers of population, it's a lot less painful to just grow them in place at this point. SD 3540.5 - Several planets max out every year, usually to have their population do research so that the citizens of other planets can be freed up to work on housing. Meanwhile we have now started Hyper-Advanced V research. SD 3541.5 - The Antarans have returned again. This time we'll see a Battleship of theirs for the first time. Also, we break the four billion mark in population. Growth has slowed significantly though, and I don't think it'll push much higher. Antaran Battleship Encounter (1:33) Well, that actually got a bit more interesting than I was hoping for. Might be a good idea to get a couple ships up to help if they return before I'm finished. SD 3541.7 - Maximum research can be maintained while putting maximum industrial effort into housing on all planets that aren't yet full. That means I can have demolition crews working non-stop everywhere they need to be until everything that needs to go poof, has.  Oh, just go away.  SD 3542.5 - We have now reached our maximum population, coming in at 4.159 billion. Only one farming world, Proctor IV, is required ... and even that one isn't fully dedicated with several citizens not needed in agriculture. This is enough to feed every single Klackon and also all the TechnoGeeks on Toxic worlds. Of course, a few units of food here on there come from all the other non-Rich worlds, which is most of the galaxy. We're almost there. Two more Hyper-Advanced 5 techs to research, and the last of the demolitions to go through. All Rich worlds that don't already have them will build Space Academies in preparation. Amoeba Battle The Space Amoeba attacked. Briefly. SD 3542.7 - At the same time, the last round of construction was completed, with the final demolition work having been done the previous turn. Waiting for research was the only thing left. Right now we cannot make LESS than 17,330 BC per turn. That's with every planet putting everybody who isn't needed as a farmer in scientist duty.  I suppose this proves there's almost always a reason to go further. I could just keep spamming the Turn button until I max out the leaders - except I don't know what the limit is, even if there is one. The next turn we hit our last Hyper-Advanced 5 tech. There is still more to be potentially researched, except that we'd get nothing from it. Literally the only benefit from further teching up appears to be increased score at the end of the game, and even in that case I've read conflicting information on whether that bonus maxes out at a certain point. It's time to kill us some extra-galactic aliens. The empire is not *perfect* - for example, some radiated planets have Barrier or Flux shields instead of the cheaper Radiated ones - but it's awfully darned close.
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Jul 27, 2019 06:05
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So, I've been playing this one run for almost three months now. Egads. Anyway, there having been no more contributions, we're going Modified Elerians for the next one and Stock Klackons on Impossible for the finale.  This was the originally suggested configuration and I can't think of a way to improve upon it. I considered going Telepathic instead of Trans Dimensional but I'd need to find another point somewhere for that and negatives are already maxed out. And then there's the fact that with Feudal and Repulsive we're already pretty much taking Klingons and removing all the potentially redeeming qualities. Telepathic didn't seem as 'in character' for me as Trans Dimensional does for a bunch of violent, xenophobic morons. Spartans in Space or whatever. I'd like any intelligent - or otherwhise - suggestions for Race & Homeworld Names for this abomination I'm about to use. One way or the other, their adventure will be short and not exactly subtle. Meanwhile, the for-sure final update of the TechnoGeeks shouldn't take too long to put together.
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Jul 27, 2019 06:27
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I think Klingons is a more than sufficient name. Always interesting to see someone play a race that is outside their comfort zone.
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Jul 27, 2019 07:24
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The Punchnoids from Planet Fist
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Jul 27, 2019 08:17
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I'd recommend you install the 1.50 mod for the next run, and show off some of its features.
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Jul 27, 2019 11:40
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As a note: I know a Radiated planet becomes Barren once you install a shield, and I assume it goes back to Radiated if something happens to the shield. But I think that once you start terraforming it, you don't need the shield to keep it from being radiated anymore.
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Jul 27, 2019 13:14
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The AI really can be ruthless in this game (you got me playing again!) I had an enemy fleet unexpectedly amass on one of my systems, and in the next turn they accused me of spying and declared war.
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Jul 27, 2019 14:25
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@ TheMost French: it sure can! @ MechaCrash - thanks, that makes sense. For reasons to be revealed soon, that actually doesn't matter now. I broke more stuff :P. HannibalRex posted:I'd recommend you install the 1.50 mod for the next run, and show off some of its features. I'm going to decline this, though I appreciate all suggestions. Going vanilla here, just as I did without the unofficial patch for the MOO1 as well. I don't want to spend the time to learn a bunch of new things, my aim here is to just show a decent range of the possibilities in the official version.
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Jul 28, 2019 09:20
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Palpatine Was A Child Playing With Toys Just to see the flip side of the coin - minimum profits were up to 17,360 BCs after Necron's promotion. If, on the other hand, we put everyone on trade goods - there's no point in research now - we get this. It's not much higher. And the reason it's not much higher is that I've broken the MOO2 economy for the second time.  Basically, I'd need to blow up some buildings to make more profit. I have a theoretical capability of getting something like 70k or thereabouts in income, but it remains theoretical because the magic 32,767 BC limit. Returning to that first shot, let's see how many more ways we can break things! Next up is fleet size. 1022 Command Points, 4 of which are used for the Avenger. 1018 left, and each Doom Star consumes six of them, so that's 169 of the behemoths. Then we can support addition ships at 60 BCs each in extra maintenance costs at the 10x rate. That's another 443. So the theoretical - within the previously established economic limitations of the engine - maximum size is 612 or 613 Doom Stars. Now I'm quite sure I'll shatter something else well before we get to that point. For sake of simplicity, I'm limiting myself to the five available ship slots.  The Artillery class combines my original concept with the suggestions of MechaCrash to lock down the enemy with these specials. Added the BHGs and Gyro Destabilizers just because.  The LotsOfGuns class will have an obscenely strong first strike. Even with a handful of PD Phasors added, if 134 heavy-mount Plasma Cannons can't solve a problem ... well, it's probably not getting solved.  The MyShipNow class is the spiritual successor to the Confiscator, boasting 71 Assault Shuttle teams.  Good luck to the PD commander on any opposing ship. Capable of targeting up to eight ships at once (the maximum there in number of weapon slots), each ShootThis will be capable of launching 292 Zeon Missiles immediately, which will then MIRV into over a thousand warheads. It's a one-shot, alpha-strike deal, but we may well blot out the star field of view with this much ordnance.  Finally, our 'carrier' representative, is Too Many of Them. Each of these ferries 25 squads of Heavy Fighters, for a total of 100 strike craft added to the fray at the start of battle. Each of these designs will have as close to an even number of planets assigned as possible from the Rich/Ultra Rich pool. From this point forward, there will be 26 Doom Stars, at least five of each type, under construction at all times until we commence our attack. Antaran Threat (0:16) I ... do not think so.  Yay!  Stop interrupting me with your pointless goings-on.  First 'anomaly' event type we've seen. I'm not a fan of them. They just seem arbitrary, and largely pointless. It lasts for several hammerings of the Turn button.   Figures. It's SD 3550.1, and we've now exhausted our command points. I admit to being simultaneously disappointed and impressed that nothing has obviously broken yet. I say obviously, because it had broken, I just didn't realize it.  Freeing up more farmers to ... do nothing, because there's nothing useful for them to do. More Antaran Words (0:07) Would you just shut up? Kthxbye. They are sending two Battleships at a time now. *Yawn*. That's basically a match for one of our Star Fortresses, so I have to bother moving ships in.   By the time I realized that I'd hit the effective combat limit, this was the earliest save I had that I could use to commence the attack. Dozens of turns past the actual point of usefulness here. We can ignore the impending Antaran attack on Wolf. Also as you can see, there appears to be no upper limit on how much you can have in the treasury. All ships are converging on Mentar, our home system where the Dimensional Hogwash Space Magic Device is.  I must click 'Attack Antares' to send them through, on the following turn.  And then I have to make sure I really want to do that. The fleet popup then says "Destination: Antares". Note: this next video ends the game and includes the cinematic for it. Antaran Victory! (4:18) So the limitation here is that the combat screen will only load in 99 ships, no matter how many you send. Basically two-thirds of my ships were irrelevant, and I could have stopped building well before using up my command points for all the good it did me. 99 Doom Stars is 594 points. We get to see the Stellar Converter, capture the most powerful Antaran ship (Harbinger-class Titan), and note that they have no planetary defenses - clearly they weren't expecting us. And I particularly like doing thousands of points of damage through Damper Fields with a blast from one of the Plasma Cannon ships. My memory was clearly off here - I thought the Antaran fleet would be a LOT bigger and that it increased throughout the game. But I'd only done it once before, and years ago. Now that we've bombed the malignant spider threat into oblivion, we have I think seen all the possible endings. It's time for a new adventure.
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Jul 28, 2019 21:14
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First, a nitpick: that support ship I outlined? Putting guns on it defeats the purpose of the phasing cloak. The way it's supposed to work is that it just sits in the back, invisible and undetectable, while providing bonuses to the rest of your fleet. If it's going to shoot, it may as well not have the phasing cloak. Plus Black Hole Generators are a "one per slot" kind of deal and kind of poo poo anyway, because they just hold a ship in place for two turns and then it explodes, and by the time you have those you can probably just blow up whatever's being a problem. I don't think putting four in one mount helps them any, and in the space you could put one, that could also hold about eleven and a half heavy plasma cannons, and eleven heavy plasma cannons can probably deal with the problem in two turns. And if it can't deal with the problem in two turns with eleven heavy plasma cannons, it's not going to live for two turns anyway. Of course, the point is "let's try these neat guns" and not crushing efficiency, but hey there you go. As for the Antaran fleet, what happened there is that the Antarans have to build ships just like anybody else. Their fleet was depleted because they'd just sent out an attack force, and you rolled in and stomped on their poo poo before the attackers could get back (not that they would). This is part of why the Antaran threat ramps up and then drops off really fast: their fleet keeps growing, but once you can start shooting down their stuff, they suddenly have to deal with attrition, and they don't do that very well.
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Jul 28, 2019 22:59
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| # ? Jun 8, 2024 16:00 |
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Huh, I didn't even know the Antarans used the same mechanics as players, in that sense. I thought the game just randomly generated them a fleet when you attacked or had some hard-coded presets.
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Jul 29, 2019 00:17
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