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RIP ugly crystals, you were too gross for this universe
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Apr 9, 2020 01:08
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SIGSEGV posted:What a turn-around! Given the slog it's been so far, this is only a setback. Because this game
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Apr 9, 2020 01:53
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SIGSEGV posted:What a turn-around! It's a mixed situation. Travel times are a lot better, but the map is large enough every major war involves slow, multiple-turns of travel and battle to get anywhere. Basically the tedium of long travel has been mostly replaced by the tedium of multiple battles. On the production front, you should remember Silicoids (us) have a hidden penalty to production while our current enemies (Cynoids) belong to the two Cybernetic races and come with a hidden bonus to production. Also the standard races the AI uses are already geared towards high production. This means high losses on our side are bad, because the Cynoids of XEOL not only have thousands of ships, they can build them faster than we can! The next update should cover our own production somewhat, as at this point I was frantically building more ships to replace our lost fleets.
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Apr 9, 2020 08:58
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 111: The War against XEOL VIII  And on and on it goes: It’s GC 591 according to the calendar used in the Orion Sector and again lots of wacky spy hijinks are happening. Also Agent Seigfried is dead. I assume shot to death by our many, many enemies, but the game does not say.  That was, by the way, the literally only thing of interest happening in that turn. Next turn: The Cynoids at Neaux attack! As no defenders are available, the attack ends with no losses on both sides. No bombardment follows. It’s all very civil and gentleman-like. Excuse me, gentlebot-like. In case you’re wondering why there are 5 normal plus 2 shadow task forces in that screenshot, without any of our ships with advanced sensors available, enemy task forces are continuously phasing in and out of existence. There are actually 10 here, the other three were just in their invisible phase when I made this shot.  Same combat phase, next battle: Our escaping task forces end up in the Cynoids-system neighboring Neaux. But oops, looks like XEOL moved all their ships too fast, there’s not much resistance here! I’d like to laugh at the AI for this, but I did the same thing more than once myself.  The ancient, centuries-old defenses go down in a string of explosions.  Our missiles bring down the system ships, followed by our fighters blowing up all orbital stations hanging around.  Finally, the planetary defenses go down, too.  Turn 395 brings us some actual news, you know, besides the endless messages about unrest, riots, revolts and spy-related shenannigans. One of our Antares Expeditions has been completely wiped out! What? At least it’s news! Also the game doesn’t tell us which one, but I suspect it’s the one which had been slowly losing all their ships.  Apparently, some of our newer expeditions have already arrived, we just didn’t get an update for some reason. Welp. Also, the expedition we lost, after comparing ship counts for a while, was indeed the old one we had, continously bleeding ships without ever getting beyond 4 partial discoveres. For those counting at home, five expeditions are still up and running, and expedition A2 has been wiped out. Progress!  With that settled for the moment, time to look up what the AIA is doing. Looks like Agent Surma joins Agent Kuh in the very important “lower unrest by killing unrest-causing agents” department. Agent Surma is also, coincidentally, another mantle 10 agent. Even with mediocre attack stat, that makes a perfectly fine offensive agent. This makes it kind of funny that those two agents are forced to stay at home to help combat the waves of enemy schemers upsetting our citizens with Fake News™. Maybe another time.  Wasn’t there something I should be doing? Ah, yes! We’re at war. Let’s get a bit more proactive. Most importantly, how many ships are in our reserves right now? Answer: Hundreds, but only if you count our recons and point defense escorts. It’s not all bad, though. If we wanted to, we could spit out two carrier, three long-range and 1-2 missile task forces. That’s 7/10 slots filled! And this is a rough calculations with fiercely rounding down. If you take into account this and then the fact that every armada of ours also has 2-3 recons and 6-8 escorts out of 32 ships total, we could probably squeeze out enough for a full 10 task force fleet. Hmmm. Why the hell not?  And so it begins! Thanks to the tons of lighter ships the AI built without our input, we get astonishingly close to the ideal. Also, I change our fleet composition to 6 PD-escorts and 3 recons, as we slowly reach the point were losing the ships with all the advanced sensors and electronics would really hurt. Especially for lighter task forces like this one: I’m pretty sure all the lighter knock-off versions of our superdreadnoughts don’t come with all the important sensors and ECM equipped. The obvious joke here is I’ve already forgotten those details because I haven’t played for so long.   Almost! When making the 10th task force, I ran out of ships and only got enough leftovers for a fleet (24 ships in this mod). 312 total, and all new ships. With now several generations more advanced ships, this should be enough to clear Neaux and counter-attack. It’s also kind of risky, since while the lighters ships are easy to replace, they’re also easy to explode and if we gently caress up, we lose 100% of our superdreadnoughts, which will hurt. Hurt as in we have to wait at least a dozen turns before we’re even getting close to the same number again. So better hope we win!  The total list of fleet units for our counter-offensive: 4 long-range direct fire armadas (mixed superdreadnoughts and battlecruisers) 2 missile task force armadas (for support, battlecruisers) 4 carrier task force armadas (mixed superdreadnoughts with our heavy fighters and battlecruisers with our tiny swarmers for the numbers) With escorts and recons, in total 312 ships. Almost maximum allowed. Well, let’s get crack’n!!! Especially the enormous number of Inferno-class battlecruisers were responsible to fill up all of these fleet units for us. Thanks, friendly AI! And of course one of the carrier “armadas” is in truth just fleet-sized. Still, with 6 of our 10 slots filled with indirect fire units, we’re close to the perfect ideal of MO3 fleet composition. Now let’s see how good this works in real combat!  Hopefully very good, considering the strategical situation: Currently, the Kingdom of Almandin has 976 ships mobilized and in the field, and XEOL has loving 8256 ships. That’s a lot of ships. The real situation of course is slightly different: Only our 312 most modern ships are capable of fighting the most modern Cynoid-equivalents without facing serious attrition (and roughly 1/3rd of our oldest ships can only die), while on the other hand it’s completely unknown to us how many modern ships the Cynoids have in their reserves. Probably another couple thousands, looking at those numbers. Though obviously, thousands of those ships are also old junk and we will never face them, because the Cynoids of XEOL will start scrapping them in their hundreds when our counter-offensive starts hurting them enough to cause a new wave of ship building programs. (And if we face them, they also can only die, so win-win here.) Really, the most dangerous threat is to our stamina, since the maximum amount of ships we can destroy at once is of course, 320! And I can’t even complain, because if XEOL could use all those ships it has at once, we would be steamrolled. MO3’s engine really pulls through for us here!  Our reserves after the mass-mobilization. We still have enough battlecruisers for another armada and enough missile battlecruisers for yet another (albeit smaller) fleet unit. And still an insane number of escorts and recons. We could easily field two more 300+ monster fleets before running out of support ships. You hopefully see now why I’m always setting escort and recon designs obsolete first in every new ship generation.  The next combat phase sees two major battles: Our massed refugee fleet faces a fast response force in the Yed-system, while our own counter-fleet faces of with a huge chunk of the XEOL-force sitting in Neaux. And suddenly, the game remembers it’s supposed to be an rear end in a top hat, and not actively helpful. So of course the system defense ships built in Neaux take one of the spots of our carefully designed new fleet, plummeting our fleet strength down from 312 to only 282 for this battle. Welp, a great start.  But then the battle in Neaux turns around again before it even starts: MO3 is merciful enough to only take one of our direct-fire task forces, and the enemy spawns far enough away we can launch our own fighters and missiles before the enemy forces arrive.  And sure enough, it turns out we need every single fighter and missile we can put into space, because the Cynoids brought almost exclusively carrier and missile task forces. Only one lonely long-range fleet unit came with them. Suddenly I’m very happy I decided to use a second, cheaper carrier design and filled it up with lots of tiny swarmers, because I’m fairly sure our ship-killer monster fighters would have been drowned by sheer numbers if facing this onslaught alone.  And while titanic clouds of fighters face off everywhere, one cheeky little XEOL-armada tries to visit our carriers. Our own three direct-fire armadas decide to escort them out of the battle for good. Case in point for why you should have at least some direct-fire ships in your fleets: If this was the over way around, our new counter-offensive would have died right here.  With the masses of fighters involved, every task force sitting on the wrong end is just gone, no questions asked. Here my direct-fire fleets use their ample amount of advanced PD-turrets to shoot some Cynoid-fighters, while everyone involved in this part of the battle maneuvers around and recharges the main weapons.  The second pass. Again our shields hold, even against the combined firepower of a full, modern armada. The XEOL-armada however takes a pasting. Even though we’re fighting with 3:1 superiority, some shots get through and cause damage in one of our fleets. A small reminder that even one against three, a full armada can dish out a lot of damage. And the fact that this enemy armada survived two full passes of our three own armadas shows how much damage ships at this stage of the game can soak up when no fighters or missiles are involved.  Still, inevitably the enemy task force draws closer to our carriers. But another pass blows up yet more ships and it’s slowly becoming clear that the combined defense batteries of that many ships could deal with the enemy on their own now.  Case in point. The fighter-swarm that just arrived a couple seconds ago is just overkill. Ironically, another fighter-swarm arrives from the other side and now one of our own task forces is in trouble. The Cynoids really want to win this battle!  So many carriers are a force all on their own. Two XEOL-task forces are dead, two more are dying right now, but the six left simply launch more fighters and missiles in an attempt to overwhelm us.  But then our own carriers send out a new swarm of fighters, and now that so many of their ships are dead, the Cynoids have enough. The XEOL-fleet retreats. You’d never see this in vanilla MO3. The Cynoids would have fought to the bitter end, with zero (OK, very low) chances to inflict any more damage. In Ultima Orion however, the AI sometimes remembers it’s supposed to be not that stupid and pulls poo poo like this. Most of the retreating ships are carriers, so the following battles will stay interesting for us.  Of course the battle doesn’t just end here. We have to clean up the leftover-fighters first!  Seeing this light show clearing off attacking fighters makes me very glad I’ve invested so much in point defenses.  Since fighters are infinite as long as carriers are there, the clearing process accelerates when our carriers launch another wave.  And then, finally, the last Cynoid-fighters die.  Aftermath: The fast response force in Yed refused to intercept our fleet, so the stalemate continues. In Neaux, 1/3rd of the XEOL-fleet was forced out of the system. We lost one ship, the Cynoids lost 120+ before they pulled out. A great victory for the Kingdom of Almandin! My relief about our fleet composition working comes more from the fact the Cynoids can’t just conjure up new fleets out of thin air, since Neaux is in our hands now. This means we actually do get a chance to clear out the system in just 2-3 more battles, instead of having to watch while the Cynoids mobilize thousands more ships right on top of us. Like they can do in Yed, for example.  With that many ships to destroy, we can’t just lean back and enjoy the fireworks. So crystal death beam ray guns. The next step in Silicoid weapon technologies. Were are they? Wrong question! How are they, should you ask. And so I started a little comparison experiment before blindly putting our crystallization beams on all ship designs. What you’re seeing here is six Fighter-/Missile-Defense Batteries. They take 198 units of space, do 708 damage per shot and reload in 1,74 seconds. Their range is 12,78k Galactic meters. Or more precisely, they have almost 1/3rd the range of our most hugest direct-fire spinal mounts. (Our dark energy cannons can over over 34k Gm if we go all-out.) I’ve forgotten if I ever told you, but those weird rectangles you see on the real-time battle map help you visualizing the range: Very roughly, one rectangle has a side length of 10k Gm. So a ship with a range of 30k Gm would be able to shoot along around 3 of those rectangles at maximum range. 12,78k range is not much, but still a nasty surprise for missiles and fighters, who have to get a whole lot closer. Now you probably don’t remember, but we upgraded all our ships’ PD from the older F-/M-D Batteries to the newer Hermes-Phalanx, even though I wasn’t sure if the Phalanx was a mod-addition, or an original part left in. So I never really looked at the numbers to see if the Hermes-Phalanx was an upgrade, a sidegrade or (as I suspected) a downgrade. Well then, let’s do this looking thing!  And this is 198 units of space for the Hermes-Phalanx: Only 556 damage with the same space but wait, the range is somewhat higher: 14,45k Gm, so just about 1,5 rectangles. More importantly though, the Hermes-Phalanx fires slightly faster, with a reload-time of 1,49 seconds. Huh. Since the Phalanx takes so much more space to do the same damage, still more of a sidegrade. And this answers the question. Considering how close the Phalanx is to a trap-option, I can only conclude the Hermes-Phalanx is a Master of Orion 3 original, do not steal technology, since the far older F-/M-D Batteries come very close to still being better overall, even with lower range and lower firing rate. And we know those were indeed a mod-addition, so this explains why they’re so OP. We’re still continuing to use the Hermes Phalanx, of course. But only because I have the meta-knowledge to understand that slightly faster firing and more range is more useful for point defense weapons then just more damage. Even with edgecases like maybe an enemy fighter surviving a hit from a Hermes-Phalanx, but not from the FMD Batteries (I abbreviated the abbreviation so it looks more readable), there’s also the counter-edgecase of the Hermes-Phalanx maybe getting another salvo out, thanks to the higher range and faster firing times. And then (in this example) it would be 8 shots of the Phalanx against only 6 shots of the FMD-Batteries before the incoming fighters can open fire: Suddenly, the Phalanx does more damage in total and the last good point of the older FMD-Batteries is countered. And of course if we ignore edgecases, the Hermes-Phalanx is slightly better anyway.  My next experiment was comparing the numbers of our three best main weapon systems: Plasma Cannons, Dark Energy Beam Cannons and Crystal Beams. This poor, unnamed superdreadnought design was abused by putting the full weapon complement in three times, each time for a different weapon, just so I could easily compare them. All three weapons are using the improved spinal mount to give the absolute best range/damage and the absolute worst reload time/space usage possible with our current tech level. The first system I looked at are our old plasma guns. When investing 934,87 units of space, you gain a colossal 5112 damage per ship, with a still impressive range of 26,2k Gm. Still, with a reload-time of 8,75 seconds, chances are your first shot is wasted thanks to extreme range penalties, while every weapon with higher range has a good chance to get at least one good shot in. Theoretically (thanks to the many upgrades we’ve researched over time) still good on smaller, faster ships. Because those are the only ones capable of reaching the enemy before a mix of long-range guns, fighters and missiles blows them up. In theory. Also losing smaller ships hurts less. Conclusion: Yeah, no. Plasma cannons had their time, but that time is in the past now. With so many slots in our fleets filled with carriers and missile-flinging artillery ships, the use-case for a short-range direct-fire fleet has died of old age. We’ve reached the point were a short-range ship is basically just a really expensive, really huge and really slow fighter. And we’d have to pay for every one of these ungainly fuckers, instead of just infinitely spawning them from our carriers.  The second main weapon system I looked up. The Dark Energy Beam Cannons are still in use in our current designs, and they’re our 2nd most recent weapon system. The DEB-Cannons are smaller than the plasma guns, a lot. For the same space (roughly 924 units, another gun would have put us over the limit I set with plasma cannons), we get 14 instead of 8. The damage is “only” 4494 for a full broadside (or maybe we should call that “coneside”, since all spinal mounts fire in a 60° cone forward), but the range is a tremendous 34k Gm. With ca. 50% more range, there’s a good chance a ship armed with DEB-guns can fire a second time before the first salvo of a plasma ship even reaches them. And of course DEB-guns come with bonuses against shields in-baked, while the plasma cannons need their upgrades for that. A smaller difference comes from the gun sizes itself. Generally, having fewer, heavier guns is worse than having lots of tiny guns -every time a plasma cannon misses, a huge chunk of your damage is just gone, while multiple dark energy beams need to miss before a DEB-ship loses the same amount of damage. Conclusion: You really notice that plasma cannon tech is hundreds of galactic cycles older if you compare those two weapon systems with each other. DEBs are clearly superior.  Finally, our newest weapon: We just got those and boy, it shows. Crystal Beam Cannons are even smaller than our DEB-guns, so we get a whopping 18 for the same space usage. (936 units is slightly more than even the plasma guns, but the difference falls out to something like making your ship 5 Gm/sec slower to account for the higher space usage, so nothing really) The pure damage is a good chunk above even the plasma guns, with 6372 damage per ship. The range again is a good improvement over the DEB-guns, with 39k Gm -basically four full rectangles on the real time map. Then there are the special bonuses: DEBs have heir bonus to shield penetration, while the Crystal Beams have a slightly more situational bonus to armor penetration. Still, if we account for the extra damage to shields, Crystal Beams are still putting out over 1k+ more damage than DEB-guns. Plus the armor penetration bonus is strong enough to really hurt, so the Crystal Beams gain an extra kick the DEBs don’t have. Conclusion: We take this. This is our weapon now.  Enter the Very Heavy Long Range Union II, the improved version of our current superdreadnought design. I essentially just replaced all weapon systems with crystal beams. Except for hyperfields. Their insane accuracy more than makes up for their poo poo range. They can stay to back-up our new Crystal Beam Hermes-Phalanxes. Too bad MO3 has no refit-mechanics, so it will take some time before we see those monsters in action. And then I upgraded our other designs the same way, but didn’t make any more screenshots. Just look at this one, the other shots would have looked almost exactly the same.  Suddenly, a new combat phase! Our new fleet meets the next 1/3rd of the Cynoid-fleet in Neaux. This time, all our units arrive on the battlefield. Apparently the one ship we lost last battle was our sole system defense ship. Funny, this means the few penetrating damage shots I had witnessed last time didn’t actually kill any of our fleet ships.  Both sides have impressive anti-fighter capabilities. But it doesn’t help this Cynoid-armada from getting destroyed.  One of the enemy task forces manages to get into perfect firing position for three of our own task forces: Two pour mostly PD-turrets into the fray, but one can get their main weapons to fire. Also, there are fighters. All that overkill just deletes the enemy armada.  Meanwhile, an impressively brazen assault on our carriers falters in the combined fire of so many of our ships. Some enemy fighters decide to hang around at the same time, but they’re have an even worse time of it.  Thanks to the enemy fighters conveniently suiciding into our carriers, a massive counter-strike can launch from our own side without any trouble and another enemy task force goes down. On the northern side of the battle field I’m trying to sneak some of our own forces towards the enemy carriers, now that nearly all Cynoid direct-fire ships are destroyed. The incoming beams are coming from there.  Oops, spoke too soon! That’s still the same dying task force as above, it just took a lot more red damage numbers then expected to finish them off. But on the other hand, sitting around in the middle of our fleet has nearly halved the second surviving Cynoid armada, too. They’ll not survive for much longer. And then our northern forces drift southwards again, having to fight off another enemy fighter cloud. Luckily they die fast, but our chances to get the enemy carriers before our fleet triggers the retreat are getting slim.  Yet another enemy task force swings around to hit our carriers.  The Cynoid admiral severely underestimated the defenses of our carrier fleets. Their forces are paying a heavy price for the bad judgement.  Sadly, after defeating six different task forces all over the map, we come just too late to finish off the carriers. Four Cynoid-task forces jump out just as our fighters arrive. Not that I’m complaining about dumpstering 180+ enemy ships, but sooner or later we’ll have to re-fight all those escaping carriers. If that happens, battles will get even more chaotic.  After the battle I decide to upgrade our battlecruisers a bit. I’m not sure a plasma-design can still hold its ground, but I’m hoping the anti-shield upgrades of plasma cannons and the anti-armor effects of crystal guns will synergize well on the battlefield.  The silent death of that lone system defense ship in Neaux reminds me to update our sublight designs. The first new system design is the Light Attack Craft Spike II. A simple update with a (non-improved, due to space deficits) crystal ray spinal mount. The little Lancer-type hull even has space for two hyperfield-PD weapons! It’s Gravo Jets give it 3300 Gm/sec, which means a full space rectangle can be crossed in just about 3 seconds. Hopefully their insane speed will allow them to fire 1-2 times before being destroyed.  Last time I forgot to update our missile battlecruiser design, so here it is. Two modern Crystal Ray Hermes-Phalanxes replace the older Dark Energy Beams. Afterwards I make sure to kickstart production by manually lying down a couple dozen keels of the forgotten designs.  The fight for Neaux rages on: XEOL still has 568 ship against our 312. That’s at least two more battles before the front is secured! Kind of funny, those are our most modern ships and yet, they’re already obsolete because we can’t retrofit them with our newest weapons.   While it’s cute that a new star lane forms to connect two star systems outside of our borders, our citizens are more concerned with the organic factory on Almandin VII blowing up, simultaneously with another terrorist strike destroying the main mine on Nodus I. Gruesome! The organic factory is just some building that will be rebuilt, but the second message is a bit more mysterious, as “the largest mine” could refer to any number of extraction-oriented buildings we’ve researched. I’m guessing I could look, but at this point it has been months since my last playsession and I want to be finally done with working myself through this particular mountain of screenshots!  Another battle in Neaux.  Both sides do their best to shoot themselves to bits.  The fighting isn’t one-sided: One of our modern direct-fire armadas goes down during the battle. 32 ships are toast.  Soon another enemy armada turns to space dust.  Two task forces of our own side start getting hammered, but thanks to our fighters keeping the Cynoid-fighters at bay, they don’t immediately die to fighter strikes. On the other side of the battle field, the fleet admiral leading the XEOL-fleet is nice enough to park two of their armada task forces right at the best spot for withering cross fire from like half a dozen of ours. Also, they’re in exactly the right spot to receive our next wave of fighters. Their ships don’t like this development.  Barely twenty seconds later: Only the enemy carriers are left, but the enemy fighters have died in all the confused fighting earlier. Our combined fighter waves ominously charge towards the Cynoid-carriers.  And they hit the carriers! Due to a lucky strike, the enemy fighters aren’t ready to launch yet, so the Cynoid-carriers can only sit there and take it.  Two enemy task forces lose a lot of ships, but some survive and leave the system together with the two untouched ones.  OK, that was brutal, but we still won! Something like 84 out of 312 enemy ships survived, and we lost 32 plus a couple of random ships from other task forces. 218 Cynoid ships lost to 34 of ours. And that’s it for my old stash. Now I can actually play again! Also I should probably change my workflow a bit in the future so I can push updates out faster. Having to recap those massive battles reminded me of Space Empires V a bit. SEV, by all its own faults, avoids the issue we're facing in MO3 by setting hard caps to the number of ships and units you can have at the same time. So no relentless build-up of more ships then the engine can handle. Though to be fair, SEV's 3D-engine can handle a lot less ships than MO3's engine can: The playability goes way down even in the lower hundreds of ships. And the slowdown affects other areas of SEV, too: If you have hundreds of colonies, the relevant menus will open so slowly you'll think more than once the game must have crashed. Anyway, MO3 spares us the agony of out-of-control waiting times, but on the other hand you have to face this kind of poo poo, fighting the same battles over and over because maintenance costs are too low to incentivize the AI to not just stockpile ships in their thousands. A hardcap would have helped out immensely, or raising maintenance costs to make fielding a huge fleet actually take an effort. An additional thought about retrofitting: MO3's flaws come back to save our asses this time around, because at least the way things are going, our own fleets will be slowly replaced by ever better ones, thanks to attrition, while the Cynoid ones, thanks to their insane stockpiles, will slowly become more and more of a liability. Think about the problem we would have if the Cynoids could just retrofit all their slowly aging ships to better designs! Instead, the AI is forced to waste tons of time and effort by scrapping ships and then build completely new ones to replace them.  Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + WIPED OUT (TF1) Expedition B1: 16 ships have arrived (TF2) Expedition B2: 8 ships have arrived (TF3) Expedition B3: 16 ships have arrived (TF4) Expedition B4: 32 ships en route (TF5) Expedition B5: 24 ships en route (TF6) Next: The War against XEOL IX
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May 6, 2020 12:47
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Maybe by 2022 you'll finally have defeated XEOL. Also remind me, can we win a tech victory with sufficient Antaran X techs? Because if you have to conquer the whole galactic playfield, oy. And are the New Orions even still relevant as a threat? Far as I remember vanilla MoO3 they basically start real far up the tech tree and have a good-sized starting fleet, but never really expand from their one or two starting systems and never really tech up, so some point halfway through the game they get permanently surpassed and become irrelevant.
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May 6, 2020 14:28
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PurpleXVI posted:Maybe by 2022 you'll finally have defeated XEOL. To answer your questions, no I switched all other victory conditions off. No easy victory for us!  And only the space spirits know if the New Orions are still dangerous. Last time we met, they could have easily torn us apart. In their case it's a good thing they only have one system and are constantly fighting, so at least we'll be spared slowly grinding our way through thousands of ships when we meet again. We aren't even in contact, thanks to political antics throwing us out of the Senate shortly after we joined. But we'll see them again, be assured. And oh, as a reminder, for this run I was forced to set some alternative victory conditions, or we'll still sit here by 3022! -Taking Orion itself -Eliminating all the runners up to remove all questions about our power -Collecting all the five Xs -Electing ourselves to lead the Orion Senate After that point, crushing what is left would be utterly pointless anyway. The second and third runs will show of tech and diplomatic victory and also play on a reasonably sized map with a reasonable number of enemies. That will go through a lot faster, believe me. And then we're done!
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May 6, 2020 14:48
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Libluini posted:The second and third runs 
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May 6, 2020 18:30
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so, what's the project after Moo3 is done? Space empires sounds fun, althought you could continue the current flavour of Ultimate Orion and play Perry Rhodan: Operation Eastside.
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May 6, 2020 18:33
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SEV comes with the trouble that it's great fun when you start your run, but after a while the game slows down so much it becomes unbearable. I never managed to finish a run, I just design ships and grow those elaborate systems of industry with mobile spaceyards moving around to build resource extraction stations and station-based yards covering all my worlds, while I just colonize everything I can find. Eventually, in theory one of my "end game" ships could enslave, immobilize, disarm and explode an enemy ship all at the same time, but every time I reach that point I could brew, drink and brew and drink a second cup of tea in the time SEV takes to open up the fleet window. There's something seriously wrong with that game, I still can't understand how a game that old started working better when I switched from a single-core XP computer to a multicore Windows 7 PC. Even another PC-generation later, that mystifies me. No, Space Empires V is basically a game you can play for a while, but it's not really good for a full Let's Play, I think. The next project will be Operation: Eastside. Especially now that I got it working (and patched) on my current PC. I've already written the OP and everything! The only thing missing is me getting off my lazy rear end and push this one to conclusion. However, my lazyness is strong and true: I've been on paid furlough for half the month and instead of working on my LP, I've been doing dumb poo poo like putting Lego-monstrosities together or like today, just shitposting while running on the one can of peaches I've eaten as breakfast. (I've been too lazy to make lunch, is the joke.) So please don't be disappointed if my great push in updates ends up something lame like 2 updates per month instead of 1.
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May 6, 2020 18:55
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That's a first. A fleet that's actively retreating from a system and not just waiting until it's wiped out? poo poo, the AI has finally started acting smart even on the strategic map. Also, I guess the next update will be a bit faster then "in a month" this time.
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May 8, 2020 18:48
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Are carriers + support groups the ultimate endgame composition? I guess there aren't stealthy planet killers that supercede them?
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May 10, 2020 04:34
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So Libluini, question. Did you think, "Yea, I'm going to LP a game that will take several years of my life" or did it just kind of happen? Or what was your original time estimate of this LP? I'm not knocking it mind you, I'm just very impressed with it.
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May 10, 2020 06:19
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Look on the bright side, you should be able to put this LP on your resume now for future jobs.wedgekree posted:Wow, this is still going on! The upside is that you're only having to do 4-5 battles to break the seige. Not like you're facing off with several thousand ships on each side! Not yet he is. I think the new orions have like 2 fleets of 15k ships or something at least? SugarAddict fucked around with this message at 08:46 on May 10, 2020 |
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May 10, 2020 06:27
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Wow, this is still going on! The upside is that you're only having to do 4-5 battles to break the seige. Not like you're facing off iwth several thousand ships on each side!
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May 10, 2020 08:28
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Decoy Badger posted:Are carriers + support groups the ultimate endgame composition? I guess there aren't stealthy planet killers that supercede them? "Stealth" in this game works by making your TFs harder to target. On some screenshots when you see enemy task forces phase in and out of existence, that's what cloaking does. All our ships have highly advanced cloaking techs, but all it does for us is delaying enemy targeting a bit. Obviously our ships won't ever phase out like this, because then we couldn't target them to give them orders. Which you know, would be infuriating instead of helpful. Cloaking also helps prevent detection on the strategic map, but it helps the AI more than us, since we get zero feedback about how the AI reacts and a well-defended system can conjure reinforcements from the reserves in a single turn, anyway. The cases where a system is close enough you can surprise it (or get surprised yourself) are rare. Just make sure border systems have a modern military DEA with some sensors in it and you should be safe! This coincidentally means that while planet killers are a thing, trying to sneak them past the enemy is kind of hard. But if the game continues to drag on, I'll probably have to rescind my "no genocide" rule, just to finish this. Let's see if some AI-nations are actually dumb enough to let fleets with planet killers travel through their border without attacking them. Planet killers have the drawback that they ruin planets completely, but at least they're very good at orbital bombardment! For normal battles, it's basically fighters and some missiles. As the game progresses, all other types of warships fall behind. (In vanilla, you can still do whatever you want, but in Ultima Orion, the AI sadly has some actually good designs, which means plenty of carriers. This will become relevant soon.) Donkringel posted:So Libluini, question. My original estimate was something like 1-2 years, with at least one update each week. But work, lazyness and my other hobbies combined forces to make that untenable. I had to either give up or dial everything back down. Also, I had to abandon my earlier screenshot LP because trying to keep up both of them turned out to be a bit much. (Also also, I started to feel revulsion when playing that other game, which didn't feel healthy.) Originally, I had planned to conquer everything, one by one, but when I slowly realized how much work that would be, I decided to reorganize with two additional, shorter runs instead of brute forcing this one to completion. Right now I still plan to take Orion and make us the leaders of the Orion Senate, but then the main run will be mercifully over. Also, right now we have 180+ planets with the next contender stuck at below 100, so we've already snowballed past the point where we could lose. Well, except for... Ah poo poo, that would be spoilers.  SugarAddict posted:Not yet he is. I think the new orions have like 2 fleets of 15k ships or something at least? Nah, the New Orions have super tech, but they're also sitting in just one system, so they didn't have the chance to build that much. However, right now I'm concentrating on taking out the Cynoid's 8k ships while hoping the Nommo and their 2k ship fleets stay out of our border, so there could be something going on in the part of the Orion Sector I still can't see yet.
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May 10, 2020 11:54
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 112: The War against XEOL IX Super Mother's Day Sunday Surprise Update!  GC 597 starts mild. A new agent joins the AIA. We’re also 1 turn away from finishing Weather Control technology, which will make terraforming slightly cheaper and allows to go up one “ring” of terraforming more. OK, because everyone probably has forgotten this, if it ever came up: Normally your population will prefer “optimal” worlds with environmental conditions called “Kleinod/Paradise”. A step down from this optimum are the Green rings 1 and 2, which are slightly worse but still good. The next step are Yellow rings 1 and. Yellow 1 is basically a slightly worse Green 2, but Yellow is bad enough you don’t really want a colony there in the early game, if you can possibly avoid it. Yellow 2 is basically like Mars, while Paradise is like Earth (for Humans, obviously). The last rings are Red 1 and Red 2. Red 1 means it’s not instant death if your colonists step on this hellhole’s surface, but it’s not good, either. You need a really good reason if you colonize red worlds in the early game. Red 2s are often tempting with high minerals, but need at least a couple “normal” colonies, or they will kill their colonists faster than new ones can arrive (their natural growth is negative for most species, in addition to the bad conditions killing people outright). If you have at least two green worlds, the natural growth will be pushed into positive thanks to immigration, but you can very easily strangle your early game growth if you immediately go for red worlds, so I don’t recommend it. In addition to all of this, different species are adapted to different gravity, and you get penalties for planets with the wrong gravity. Like for example, our Silicoids are adapted to high gravity worlds and get slight penalties on both normal and very high gravity worlds. Planets with weak gravity are extra-painful and of course the penalties add up with the ones from a planet having the wrong surface conditions. For Silicoids, Red 2 small planets are the absolute worst, while our allies the Imsaies, both small and normal-sized planets with Red 2 conditions are the worst, since Imsaies prefer very high gravity to begin with. Edit: I haven’t tested this, but I think the gravity penalties only go to level 2, so for very high gravity adapted species, there’s no functional difference between normal or low gravity. Conversely, this means species adapted to high or normal gravity have the best number of planets available, while for species like Meklar (low gravity) and Imsaies (very high gravity), the galaxy is filled with the wrong kind of planets. Now, I’m telling you all of this because over the course of the game, this changes and here is where terraforming comes in. Every time you research a certain terraforming tech like Weather Control, it will tell you “bla blah less costs, blah blah blah, one ring more terraforming allowed” or something like that. Essentially, what this means is that terraforming is rather limited at the beginning of the game: You can barely move a Red 2 planet out of the red zone and it’ll cost a lot of time and money. But as your empire grows both in population and technology, you soon reach the point where even Red planets are suddenly desirable, because over time you can now drag them into the Green rings and the costs involved shrink with every new terraforming tech you get. Eventually, you unlock the ability to terraform planets up to “Kleinod/Paradise”, the absolute maximum and eventually you get so good at terraforming, even Red 2 Hellworlds end up as paradise planets. As a sidegrade, you also get technologies to reduce the gravity penalty from a different part of the tree, like the Mass Synthesizer. Those are, as a little “FU” from MO3, terribly confusing because they don’t work as described. It would indeed be nice if a Mass Synthesizer changed only the gravity on small and tiny planets to be higher, but what it actually does is reducing the gravity penalty by 1, same as similar technologies. For the longest time I did not know this, until I read the description a little closer and saw what the thing actually did, instead of reading the fluff part and skipping the boring numbers. This means it doesn’t matter if you’re Meklar trying to make a living on normal sized worlds (gravity too high) or Silicoids trying to live on small worlds (gravity too low), the Mass Synthesizer will help out in both cases. Mind you, from a game balance view point this makes sense, as the technology for making gravity weaker comes far later in the tech tree, and races with problems on high gravity worlds would just be hosed if the Mass Synthesizer actually worked exactly like its description indicates it should. Logically, it makes no sense, but of course people would probably complain even more if a Mass Synthesizer build on a high gravity world made the gravity somehow higher, loving over the entire population in the process. OK, now this is explained. Weather Control tech: Good and important.  The front lines: Neaux still has hundreds of enemy ships. Time to change this!  Strategically, the Kingdom of Almandin tries to push past Yed towards Theta Gru, so we can finally start cleaning up this approx. 6k ship-sized mess. I’m almost convinced by now the true problem for the Cynoids is not enough transports, so the RNG keeps rolling pure warship-fleets, causing the invasion of the last planet to keep stalling. No, I’m not speaking from experience, why are you asking?  The next battle in Neaux ends as another clear victory for us, thanks to our direct-fire ships stalling the enemy fighters, while our own go to town on the enemy fleet. Meanwhile, an enemy task force after another strays into perfect condition for concentrated, coordinate fire.  Things look good so far: Neaux is almost cleared, and our second-rate ships in Yed avoid another battle.  Turn 399 sees another swarm of spies going to town on our population. All on our new colonies of course. Our older ones have enough bullshit built to sink the worst an enemy spy could do. Our new planets, not so much.  Now that fighting with our allies’ arch-enemies continues, the Imsaies congratulate us and our relations improve.  Rather strange for a species made from anorganic crystal, we stumble over the technology to replace machines with biomass. Even stranger, it only makes agricultural zones better by a factor of +1 (so, +1 food point per zone, when no other conditions apply), which makes sense for us, as we can’t really replace our crystal-based tech with organic poo poo, but not so much for other races, who could probably do that. The Imsaies for example. But eh, it would be spoilers to talk about that wonky part of the game now. Let’s just say they were a disappointment to me when I first played MO3.  Next combat phase is quiet. In fact, too quiet! The reason for this is: The Cynoids actually retreated the around 60+ ships they had left, instead of wasting them by throwing them at us. Unusually smart! Also, the Klackons showed up in Tali with some ships. A short probe of our defenses. Their modern ships got wrung out to dry. They should have brought more than just eight, but I’m not complaining.  Turn 400! I feel like I should say something special, but nothing comes to mind.  And in a funny bit, the New Orions get a new star lane to a neighboring system! For us this means a possible new angle of attack in the future. I think this is only the second time a new star lane actually had some strategic importance for us. (The other case was the star lane suddenly connecting us with XEOL centuries ago.) Oh, and “a” ship from “an” Antares Expedition was lost during an excavation attempt. Well, that narrows it down real good, thanks game.  Speaking of them, the New Orions are still creepily hanging around in Dromos, next to our border. They’re still insane, but by now our most modern task forces have similar firepower. This means after we dealt with XEOL, we should be able to just overwhelm this weird little wayward task force.  Our other border, on the opposite end of the Orion Sector: The blue guys are the Nommo, and with 2281 ships against 96, I think they’re still winning the war against the Meklar. Which doesn’t keep both of them from being simultaneously at war with us, of course.  Welp, time to keep on fighting! Neaux is cleared from the enemy, time to form up a bunch of brand-new task forces to replace our losses and move on to Yed.  At the same time, I’m sending our older ships back. No reason to give the RNG a chance to gently caress us over, after all.  After comparing my list to the actual stats of our many expeditions, I deduce TF3 (see list at the end) was the expedition which lost a ship. I’m feeling glad now that I bothered with that list, or I’d be soon totally lost here. Also, I keep forgetting we only have 2/5 X-techs. Here's to hopefully nabbing a couple more from our expeditions!  Meanwhile, our scouts are continuing their survey of Nommo-space. Luckily so far, the defenders continue to just let us pass. Which is weird, considering how bitter the Nommo hate us. I’ve looked it up, all their markers are at the absolute bottom: They hate us, we hate them, our relations are at -200, it’s not good. Basically, if I ever stop being nice, nothing would change if I start blowing up squid planets, as all those stats can’t possibly fall even further.  Turn 401 has some truly good news for us: Two enemy spies get an early retirement! Both the Meklar and the Humans lose a spy. But there are still more running around, setting warehouses on fire… At least I think it’s a Human spy. I keep mixing up the Evon and Human empires in my head and since we don’t have contact, I can’t just look them up.  The AIA bruteforced their recent successes by having a shitton of the relevant spies available on defense: Those four Verschwörer/Schemer aren’t the only ones, we still have two more at the bottom of the list (even though one is just a couple turns from “retirement”). Agent Äsir is astonishingly terrible, considering all the bonuses we’ve collected over the course of the game. Mantle 3 is like the worst possible roll with our current techs.  Combat phase! Our main fleet reaches Yed (again). Will it go better this time?  Well, the beginning starts promising. But I’m now worrying we have too many normal ships and not enough carriers.  But the Cynoids were nice enough to bring tons of direct-fire ships themselves, so all is good.  The Cynoids are nice enough to keep dragging their task forces farther and farther away from each other, with predictable results.  Eventually, all direct-fire ships are dead and the carriers escape. Well, at least we’re here. But the way enemy carriers keep running away unscathed makes me worry.  GC 603: One of our leaders dies, just as a replacement arrives. Odd, but acceptable. Only old age this time, as enemy spies are dealing out mainly unrest and sabotage this turn.  Anyway, time to get on with it! As we only had one transport TF left over from our last attempt, the Kingdom raises a new army, this time with our new Silicoid battlemechs.  It will take 3 turns until both armies are in position, which gives us ample time to clear out additional defenders.  Our new replacement leader turns out to be a sapient recon drone. Well, OK then that's cool They (I think that’s the appropriate pronoun) spend most of his life doing atmospheric recon, hanging around in the stratosphere and looking at enemy terrain. At some point they got addicted to collecting information and went solo. Now they want to work for us, which gives our ground troops +20% in battle and their insane obsession with collecting information boosts our industry by another 20%. However, there’s also a 10% higher chance for Aralig Vasov sucking bandwidth from our research institutes just the moment they want us to tell about delays in our projects. Eh, I take the chance, the penalty is basically nothing compared to the huge bonuses. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + WIPED OUT (TF1) Expedition B1: 16 ships in position (TF2) Expedition B2: 7/8 ships in position (TF3) Expedition B3: 16 ships in position (TF4) Expedition B4: 32 ships in position (TF5) Expedition B5: 24 ships in position (TF6) Next: The War against XEOL X
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May 10, 2020 18:32
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Is there a limited number of leaders in the game, as in, once all of them die of old age or "accidents" there are no more, or do the old dead ones get recycled into the rota eventually?
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May 11, 2020 00:43
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PurpleXVI posted:Is there a limited number of leaders in the game, as in, once all of them die of old age or "accidents" there are no more, or do the old dead ones get recycled into the rota eventually? According to the data files, leaders are algorithmically created out of a list of values like consonants, vowels, hyphens and so on. Some types of leaders (called "races 90-96" in the files) are hardcoded and are an exception. But apparently you can also insert your own, pre-made leaders, which is probably where all the Ultima Orion special leaders come in. It's also interesting just scrolling through the modded files like "wsLeaderNames", because the modders left comments sometimes. There's for example a function to censor words and you can add titles, nick names and monikers. The comments for these four parts are "not found" and "not in game", in that order. Then there are long lists of first and last names for all races and minors, which presumably can be connected with the vowels and other poo poo when generated to get longer names. The mod also contains copies of the main wsLeaderNames-file that have been renamed with comments as to why they aren't used in the final mod. "New Prefixes don't work", "No Special Tags = Crashing", "Instable", "Changing Suffix doesn't work" and so on. Seems like the modders experimented a lot while trying to figure this out. Kind of a fascinating insight into the work of the modders. And also, leaders are a bitch to mod.
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May 11, 2020 11:19
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OK, it finally happened. 20 turns from now, battles will become uncontrollable. I just barely avoided the game crashing on me, the game engine chocked so bad on its infinite fighters the battle turned into a slideshow. On the other hand, the game can calculate a battle in 2-3 minutes, which is way faster then directly controlling a battle if you know it will take the full 7,5 minutes each time. This means I'm making far more progress suddenly. Though it's kind of depressive seeing the game automatically getting the exact same battle results as the player meticulously (trying) to control every single task force. I fought so hard for those stale mates, you dumb game!  The main drawback is of course, this LP has turned into even more of a spreadsheet show now.
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May 11, 2020 17:17
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Include some Aurora 4X screenshots to check if we are paying attention. Also I guess it's time for you to start using those almost engineless designs to save on industrial output and taskforce hull space budget.
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May 11, 2020 17:40
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Orion in the streets, Master in the spreadsheets
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May 11, 2020 17:52
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Nice to hear that the autocombat gives sensible results. Was that in the original orion or is it a mod thing?SIGSEGV posted:Include some Aurora 4X screenshots to check if we are paying attention.
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May 11, 2020 19:33
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Well, the C# version isn't out yet, so it still doesn't, but you can change the decimal separator in windows if your version uses something else and play it on your machine anyway. Yeah, it's sort of worrying when you do that to get space grog fix.
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May 11, 2020 19:55
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SIGSEGV posted:Well, the C# version isn't out yet, so it still doesn't, but you can change the decimal separator in windows if your version uses something else and play it on your machine anyway. Actually Aurora C# has been out for a month now. Yep, it finally happened.
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May 11, 2020 20:09
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Ah, the end draws near, the meteor is close, I can feel it.
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May 11, 2020 20:14
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VictualSquid posted:Nice to hear that the autocombat gives sensible results. Was that in the original orion or is it a mod thing? No idea, the last time I played vanilla MO3 for long enough to need autocombat was in 2003. Edit: Oh gently caress it, our allies are such huge assholes, it's unbelievable Libluini fucked around with this message at 20:34 on May 11, 2020 |
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May 11, 2020 20:25
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Libluini posted:
... We have allies? Also congrats! 400 or so game updates in! Sweet Gas Giants this is still giong on! Rock on man. Rock on.
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May 13, 2020 09:24
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Libluini posted:No idea, the last time I played vanilla MO3 for long enough to need autocombat was in 2003. They declared war/let an enemy power go through their systems and attack your limestone underbelly?
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May 13, 2020 16:55
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Nah, nothing so boring. It's more like a hail of tiny cuts. Every tiny cut is a minor annoyance, but they never turn on us! Which makes their antics even funnier/more frustrating, at least for me. But right now I've build up enough screenshots for like, 7 more updates, so you'll have to wait for the slow reveal over the next weeks.
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May 13, 2020 17:59
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 113: The War against XEOL X  The battles continue. Some surprise guests show up in Neaux (probably reinforcements that came too late) and the Cynoids rolled really badly from their remaining fleets in Yed and will now probably get wiped out.  I didn’t really want to waste time this turn, so I autobattled them. But poo poo, our ships are old enough they can’t deal with a fleet a fraction their size. Looks like I have to do some more work than just pressing a button to solve this issue, huh.  Meanwhile, in Yed: This enemy fleet has lots of missile ships, but not many carriers. Easy work for us!  They try their best, but we can spawn over triple the amount of fighters every minute or so. The result is obvious.  Not much new in turn 403: Some unrest, the Meklar end their war again.  A new spy tech! The Xeno Evasion Doctrine means training our spies in almost supernatural avoidance technique. Remember that old yarn about people not noticing a gorilla walking through a video as long as their attention is somewhere else? That is the same thing, but weaponized by spies.  The Victory Overview Screen reveals that we currently have almost a thousand ships operating in the field. XEOL has 7,2k ships. Right now, that is. Soon both sides in this eternal war will really start to gear up and all manners of poo poo will hit the space fans.  We use our strength to gain a foothold in Yed. Next turn the first half of our ground troops will arrive.  Next combat phase, I try again to eject the Cynoid-reinforcements from Neaux, but the auto-combat fails again. The Cynoids lose a couple ships, but refuse to go away. Yeah, poo poo. Our fleet in Neaux needs some new ships to crack those shields. Now I realize how the Terrans must have felt the first time they encountered the bio-mechanical horrors known as Dolans.  The Cynoids clearly under-estimated our counter-offensive. The remnant of their fleet in Yed seems a bit confused. Then they get blown up, the end.  Turn 404, GC 606: Another of our leaders bites the dust. Some more dumb spy related nonsense.  We’re down to 2 now. But after looking up some files, it seems while the background lore is finite, the game can just endlessly generate new leaders, even if certain auto-details may eventually be recycled. I dunno. Hopefully we can end this poo poo before the leaders get too weird.  Turn 404 has some new techs for us: Intelligent Fighter Plasma Bombs is an additional upgrade to our current main fighter weapon. It makes them 20% more expensive, but all that fancy new electronics crap also gives them a 20% bonus to accuracy. Neat! The TTNR Logistics System (The abbreviation stands for Truppentransporter und Nachschubreplikator) allows a military DEA to just replicate supplies, including food, weapons, ammunition etc. Instead of having any influence on ground troops operating on that planet, it strengthens its ability to reduce unrest and also upgrade its range, so the anti-unrest effect extends to more nearby planets. Thanks to the constant enemy spy visits, the TTNR is somewhat of a relief. Now I just have to remember to add at least one military development area to every new planet we get! The plasma bomb upgrade is also nice, but considering the costs and time involved in retooling our main battle fleets, I will hold off on immediately redesigning our carriers. There are some more nice upgrades in our tree, and I want to collect a couple important techs more before re-doing all our ships yet again.  Even though I try my best to keep our berserk AI under control with strategically obsoleting designs, our immense industrial capacity has already filled up our reserves with 570 more ships. Time to make some more task forces in the near future, to keep up the pressure, I think.  Just recently the Meklar ended their war against us, but one turn later, they immediately renew this nonsense. The ambassador is also really happy about this. Aren’t they busy losing their other war with the Nommo? Shoo, get on with it!  Speaking of wars, I’m forced to send some additional forces back to Neaux, to clear out those weirdos hanging around.  Next combat phase we get lucky enough to roll both transport task forces for the planned planetary assault in Yed.  And while the Cynoids got reinforcements, it’s not enough to keep our (now slightly weaker, thanks to the two slots taken over by our transports) fleet away.  As a last “gently caress you”, the Cynoid fighters manage to bulldoze one of our direct-fire armadas, even though their carrier had already jumped out at this point.  Finally, even the system defense of XEOL is cleared out and the battle ends.  The same combat phase sees our lonely deep space scouting squadron reach their target system, after having traveled among black holes and neutron stars for so long. The inhabitants seem to be an insectoid race, based on their ship designs.  Of course the people living in this far away place are one of the few space nations in this game aggressive enough to immediately attack, so our scouts are forced back the way they came. I tried drawing the battle out by using our faster speed, but the unknown empire had carriers and missile ships mixed in, so they could hit our scouts the entire time. When our shields went down, I ordered the full retreat. They still managed to destroy three out of four scouts. Man, these guys are relentlessly hostile.  The situation at the end of the combat phase: Neaux-fleet destroyed 3 ships and lost 2. Still a stale mate. And it looks like I didn’t count right in our Yed-battle, somewhere in those dense clouds of fighters, a second direct-fire armada of ours went down. Our scouts keep hanging around in Yaddith, a Nommo system and of course, our very far recon force in Nimbus got a swift kick to the nuts for turning up unexpected. So the latest battle in Yed saw something like 150 Cynoid ships destroyed, but we also lost 64 ships ourselves. Not a good ratio, considering just how many ship they have… Oh, but at least we know now that his random system in the middle of nowhere is called NIMBUS and the empire loving up our poo poo is called Haararr. From looking at their ships, an insectoid race. We already met Klackons and Tachidi, though. A duplicate empire? Could be, though I hope not. If it is, it probably spawned from a rebellion or something. Anyway, since our survey was so rudely interrupted, the information I typed down right now will be the only thing left, as with the next turn the system will revert back to be unknown.  That poo poo has to wait for more important matters however, time to assault a planet! Yed IV, the outermost planet, is our target. Two armies make planetfall. Battlemechs and shocktroops rain down on Yed IV. Can you see the slightly darker red on the left? That’s us. We win easily, thanks to numerical superiority and our current +20% bonus from our new leader.  Turn 405! Finally, finally we manage to wrest another XEOL-planet from their ugly, mechanoid appendages. On the homefront, more uprisings destroy our poo poo, and diplomacy waits to be done.  Oh yeah, also one of our two current leaders got poisoned. Well poo poo, I liked that insect dude!  At least we also kill a spy. And it’s even a Cynoid-spy, so we’re actively harming our current enemy, instead of just slightly inconveniencing some empire on the other side of the Orion Sector!  Confusingly, taking a Cynoid-world nearly intact makes our allies mad. What is up with those weirdos?! Stop making dumb, senseless threats to your allies! From now on, I'll add a counter to take a count of every dumb rear end decision by our allies. Allied Dumbass-Decisions: 1  Yed IV turns out to be a pure mining world. Well, with our colossal mineral surplus, I take the time to change some mining DEAs on the planet to useful things like military, government and research DEAs. As always when fully changing a build-up DEA, this will take multiple turns and we get zero feedback, so I’ll have totally forgotten about this in a few turns from now.  At the end of the turn, I’m clicking through some reports to see if I haven’t forgotten anything important. So in case you wanted to know, our other recon TF is sitting in this Nommo-system right now. That’s Yaddith right here.  Ugh, 18 turns until our surviving scout gets back to its starting point. The really sad thing is that with better engines, we could cut that down to something like 10 or eventually, 5-6 turns. But at that point in the tech tree we’ll probably have arrived in that unknown system the normal way, so sending a larger “scouting” force in the future is pretty much pointless now. The mystery behind NIMBUS has to wait for the near future.  Hey, insect dude survived, sweet! Wait a minute, this must mean… ...the recon drone got poisoned??! I don’t know why this surprised me so, it’s not like the game can differentiate between different orders of life for leaders. Though it’s still funny that the robot got poisoned first. Allied Dumbass-Decisions Counter Getting mad at us for beating their worst enemies: 1 Total: 1 Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + WIPED OUT (TF1) Expedition B1: 16 ships in position (TF2) Expedition B2: 7 ships in position (TF3) Expedition B3: 16 ships in position (TF4) Expedition B4: 32 ships in position (TF5) Expedition B5: 24 ships in position (TF6) Next: The War against XEOL XI
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May 14, 2020 16:15
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Clearly, the poison was actually some form of electronic virus. A dastardly example of electronic biological warfare!
I can have moments of... eccentricity and sometimes be quite curious about things. Please forgive me if I do something foolish or rude.
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May 15, 2020 17:05
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Or maybe they just doused him in enough poison that it shortcircuited him.
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May 15, 2020 19:56
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OK, I'm just posting this so the thread moves closer to the next page. The next update is already written and ready to go, but a cat-related emergency forces me to put off posting it until that's dealt with. There's just a finite amount of time available to me and feeding my dying, incontinent cat (also cleaning) just pushed this LP into slowdown mode again, sorry! In a week from now my cat will either be dead or somewhat healthy again, which means no updates until that is dealt with. Or if she dies/recovers faster, the update will go up earlier. Whatever happens and poo poo.
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May 17, 2020 15:48
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drat spies trying to kill off your cat leadership! here's hoping for a speedy and full recovery for the poor thing
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May 17, 2020 18:55
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RedMagus posted:drat spies trying to kill off your cat leadership! here's hoping for a speedy and full recovery for the poor thing Thanks! Right now the main problem seems to be that her teeth are like 90% scale and she refuses to eat and drink since last week. But even before then, she stealthily ate and drank each progressing day less and less, so the problem kind of crept up on me. Saturday night was critical, but on Sunday she stabilized a bit. She's too weak to stand up properly and can't use her litterbox anymore. In a couple hours I'm supposed to call my vet and talk about what comes next. I'm kind of a mess because of this. If my vet decides to mechanically break off as much scale as she can and if my cat survives the shock (general anesthesia for ultra sound cleaning is already out, due to her age) and if she starts eating again, she'll recover. If that chain of conditions can't be fulfilled, old age will have finally caught up with her
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May 17, 2020 19:32
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Sorry to hear about your cat man. Hope she recovers. I'll help with getting to the next page.
I can have moments of... eccentricity and sometimes be quite curious about things. Please forgive me if I do something foolish or rude.
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May 18, 2020 00:48
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Man, my commiserations. 
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May 18, 2020 07:51
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That sounds rough, poor thing. All my cat-erson sympathy.
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May 18, 2020 08:37
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Take care of yourself, dude. I've been in a similar situation and it can take a real toll on your physical and mental health, especially if it's a pet you've had for a long time. Please don't feel like you need to update this at all. If you need anyone to talk to anyone you can DM me or probably a dozen other people on this thread. Plaque/calculus is really painful, it's a shame that cats are so adept at hiding their injuries. You're doing a fine and admirable thing going the extra mile for your friend. Hoping for luck and a good outcome for you guys.
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May 18, 2020 17:05
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Thanks guys, I really appreciate this. Also, gently caress. When I came back from work, she had collapsed completely. No recovery. I just came back from my vet, who luckily agreed to store her body while I make contact with a local animal burial service. I'm keeping myself busy right now with shitposts like this and the tediously boring bureaucratic nonsense every death causes, like formally ending the health insurance and all that poo poo. 8 years, after we recovered her old rear end from the streets in 2012. Not really enough. My ancient little stray.   That was her, in better times. gently caress this poo poo. Araganzar posted:Take care of yourself, dude. I've been in a similar situation and it can take a real toll on your physical and mental health, especially if it's a pet you've had for a long time. Please don't feel like you need to update this at all. If you need anyone to talk to anyone you can DM me or probably a dozen other people on this thread. Thank you.
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May 18, 2020 17:24
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