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AJ_Impy posted:Is it too early to sign up for the laser treatment for the next game? The full laser-treatment has to wait until Run 2 actually starts (since it doesn't make sense to enter a game which doesn't exist yet), but I've put you down on my list. Since I'm planning to revive/rescue the three goons hanging around in Run 1, this means we're up to 4 goons total now!  Edit: Also, gratulations Cimbri! You're the only survivor of Run 1. This means you'll get to be the Emperor next time, since ChiefGune is uh ...unavailable. Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 19:13
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If you want more goons in your game, feel free to put me somewhere, this LP is as fantastic as the game is incomprehensible.
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Sep 30, 2015 19:54
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Feel free to recruit me as well if you need another name.
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Sep 30, 2015 20:05
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Ghostvernor's Log, supplemental gently caress I'm a ghost now. On the bright side, so is the rest of Saturn, so nothing has really changed.
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Sep 30, 2015 22:03
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This is an amazing trainwreck of a game and I am looking forward to you finding more bizarre game mechanics. And yeah, feel free to add me as a subordinate, too.
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Oct 1, 2015 07:20
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Put me on a ship, next time of course.
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Oct 1, 2015 07:31
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Libluini posted:The full laser-treatment has to wait until Run 2 actually starts (since it doesn't make sense to enter a game which doesn't exist yet), but I've put you down on my list. Since I'm planning to revive/rescue the three goons hanging around in Run 1, this means we're up to 4 goons total now! Clearly I organized a resistance movement in the now conquered empire and led our (remaining) people to freedom and escape to a new galaxy! All rumors of simply draining the remaining Nostrum and waiting for someone -else- to get killed setting all that up are baseless.
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Oct 1, 2015 09:03
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I'm also down to be a part of the game. This game, man. I'm glad that I'm not the only one make heads nor tails out of this mess.
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Oct 2, 2015 08:57
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Put me in next game too, coach! It's hard to believe this game retailed for $50 back in 1990, or about $90 today. I wonder how many units EA actually sold.
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Oct 3, 2015 19:07
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I'm absolutely fascinated by this game. Put me in for the next run!
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Oct 4, 2015 02:55
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Looks like we're gonna need a LOT of Nostrum.
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Oct 4, 2015 03:52
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 Update incoming! Thanks for the sudden surge of interest! I'm putting you all on my waiting list and it looks like you don't even have to wait that long: I've finished writing the last post of Run 1 and will update the thread after lunch.
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Oct 4, 2015 12:42
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Year 2059 – 2062: Endgame II Welcome back! This update sees the end of Run 1 and showcases more silly things from Imperium: A Game for Serious Gameplayers. Let’s get on with this, shall we? Year: 2059  Tratsys is still getting invaded.  A lot of good people die, as always in war.  And our two new destroyers have been finished!  The amount of enemy troops has gone down again, but those ships are a serious problem if we want to win this siege.  We’re now above the 5:1 superiority we need to crush the invaders completely. Sadly, the 50% strength from the enemy fleet firing into the ground battle pushes the numbers down again so we have to fight the hard way again. Welp, maybe next turn!  Since we’re dead anyway, I’m going completely crazy and order 10 new destroyers build. If we survive until they’re finished, we could actually win both in space and on the ground!  We’re deep in the negative zone money wise, but gently caress it. Let’s drive our economy deep into the hadal zone! 112k money units, or 11,2 billion Imperial Zongs are needed to pay for those ships. Also bonus points for everyone who knows what a hadal zone is.  As always, our treasury displays random numbers only loosely connected to what we’re doing. This is the final test of the economy. Considering our best planet is blockaded, there’s no way in hell the treasury should show something above -10 billion IZ next turn. If the treasury neither this or next turn shows something sensible, I know something is seriously wrong in the background simulation. Year: 2060  Anyway, battle rages on planet Tratsys. If you define “battle” as one side huddling in their landing zones while their ships bomb everything outside into rubble.  Again, we suffer just enough losses to prevent us from utterly crushing the minor rest of the invasion force. This LP really is cursed, nothing seems to go our way even a little bit.   Still, only 117 divisions left! Sooner or later those Hierarchy-bastards will break and we will have finally defeated the weakest of the 6-7 Hierarchy-fleets!  This happened because I accidentally clicked on the weird gray background pattern instead of “next turn”. Welp, luckily I learned from my errors and had 3 back-ups ready to go. The crashes are one of many things Imperium uses to fight a devious psychological battle against the player: Half the time the game works normally, half the time moving windows or even clicking in loving empty space makes the game crash. You never know beforehand what will happen. Now imagine playing this wreck on the original Atari ST, with having to save on actual physical discs and having to slowly restart and reload everything every time a crash happens.  Anyway, after redoing the turn, I go and check our treasury. And what do you know? Even though we’re completely broke, our economic AI somehow conjured 75k monetary units from thin air, considering the number shown here. What the hell is happening here? My first guess would be there is probably a limit to how deep you can go into debt, but apparently reaching this unknown limit has no repercussions whatsoever. Since parts come from planets and planets can’t go into debt, we’re never truly crippled and can just spend forever. Fancy that. To find out what really happened someone would probably need to check the source code to see what went wrong here. gently caress that, though. Let’s get on with the game!  Ten years until the next election has to happen and we’re still in the lead! Even alien death rays vaporizing all your loved ones has not really undermined Emperor ChiefGune’s popularity! Man, that’s some charisma.  The giant amount of money did get payed and our planets have started to buy the commodities needed to build our ships. Sweet!  Time to raise more troops for our war! Thanks to our population getting murdered by aliens, we can only raise 2/3rds of what we could before the invasion started, though. Large-scale combat wreaks havoc on a populated world. It’s eerily realistic in a disturbing kind of way, considering the rest of this game.  The infrastructure on Tratsys is basically finely grained sand by now. Moral infrastructure is still surprisingly high, but integrity and stability are reaching critical numbers now. Worse is our reinforcements are slowly falling behind our losses. Hopefully the Hierarchy-army collapses before ours does! Year: 2061  This year we’re getting a new message: UNREST is happening. Also hey, we’re suddenly getting advanced warning on a impeding disaster? Has Imperium gone soft on us?  Still fighting. By now this is getting ridiculous. Only hideous starfish-aliens would fight fanatically down to the last tentacle like this.  Thanks to our mounting fatigue and disorganization, our losses skyrocket. As a remainder, after the first turn of an invasion, every division in battle loses 5% efficiency per turn. Since the fighting on Tratsys has gone on for multiple years now, this means both sides are pretty much exhausted. Luckily efficiency can’t drop below 20%, or we would end up in a neverending stalemate after a certain point. Also I forget to mention: We have a militia. After invasion begins, the defending planet automatically raises a (for us) invisible militia. 1% of the population is counted as super-weak special units. The militia gets a small 0,1% boost on combat efficiency for every unit of the commodity “militia arms” you have lying around on that planet. I forgot to mention this because the militia is generally so weak you’d never notice them. In fact, if you don’t read the manual, you never will, since their existence is never mentioned in-game.   Looks like government has broken down on Tratsys. Great, now we have Mad Max-style anarchy to content with while fighting hostile aliens.  Still 78 alien divisions left. Great, our own losses accelerate and the enemy losses slow down. That’s not good. But we’re now at roughly 10:1 superiority, so even with the constant bombardment we should be finally crushing them next turn.  Our broken empire is still trying to get the giant pile of stuff needed to build our ships.  I’m determined to at least take this one army down with me, so Emperor ChiefGune drafts another bunch of poor bastards for the meat grinder.  Background trading has actually raised our infrastructure, even though we lost 5 points more this turn. (And will continue to lose 5 points every turn as long as combat lasts.) Stability and Integrity really doesn’t look good now. But Moral Infrastructure is at maximum now. What? Our people are itching for a fight, it seems. Apparently the roughly 150 million people who died since last turn were exclusively people who started to think total war isn’t a good idea.  The anarchy on our capital has slightly reduced Emperor ChiefGune’s popularity. I guess the 57% all come from people not living on Tratsys now.  Our debt is stable. Really high, but stable.  Now this makes no loving goddamn sense. How can we build ships from negative numbers? I’m seriously hoping the programmers thought this was an “intuitive” way of showing demand, because the alternative would be our shipyards literally creating matter and entire persons from thin air now. After being unsatisfied with mere financial debt, the Aurora Empire has now reached Peak Debt and created a debt to the physical universe itself by using commodities it doesn’t have yet. Hopefully the game doesn’t poo poo itself before our planets can buy enough commodities to fill those voids.  We had a lot of imports, but enough exports to not lose much money. Strangely enough, the Hierarchy seems happy with supplying us with vital goods while simultaneously invading us.  I finally remember the two ships we build earlier and decide to throw them at the Hierarchy-fleet in orbit. Then I have to go back and find the one extra window I had left open (the others all have to be open to appoint a fleet leader).  I’m not evil, so I pay Julius a little bit before sending him off to die.  But then we run into trouble: Our two ships have disappeared from the pool.  See this? Back in 2059, this number was 2: The number of freshly build ships. Because of the crash I forgot to check this again, but apparently our new ships, not attached to any fleet, were destroyed the very next turn without us ever getting a message about it. Now after checking the status screen for Tratsys on all my screenshots it’s kind of obvious, but while playing I never noticed anything wrong until I wanted to place our new ships into a fleet. Welp, now we know we have to immediately place ships into a fleet if we want to avoid them just evaporating into thin air without explanation. Was it the ground combat, was it the alien fleet in orbit? Who knows, the game never told us and just deleted the ships silently! This is so stupid my brain apparently rejected this information for several turns, because why the hell would I assume the game I’m playing will secretly delete stuff behind my back? This is making me so mad, you can’t believe it.  Year: 2062  One of our scouts reaches his target. Not much left to say here.  Yawn, we know. I’m thinking of skipping these messages in the future after the first one for a particular invasion. No reason to have countless screenshots all telling the same thing over and over again.  Again, heavy losses among our exhausted troops.  The second year after the collapse of government. There are rumors Emperor ChiefGune is confined to the palace by rioters, but that’s silly. The Imperial Palace has been a smoking ruin for several years now. No-one knows where the Emperor actually is at this point. Everyone just kind of fights on because it seems the right thing to do.  Our troops are falling apart. For several turns now, the damage they’ve been doing to the enemy has steadily declined by about 50% every year. Still, our numerical superiority is now something like 6:1. The 65 strength counting from the ships surely can’t be enough anymore to prevent a total collapse of enemy forces, right? The problem here is, I think, "strength" is an incredibly vague term here. The game doesn't exactly tell you if that number you see under garrison means the number of units or raw strength. If I understand the mechanic of conscripting troops correctly, I'm inclined to say "garrison" is the number of troop units we have. Since some of them are infantry with a "strength" of one and most of them tank units with a "strength" of 3, the actual strength of an army wildly differs from what we see. The same goes for enemy troops. We have no idea what the invasion army was made of. We can just roughly guess most of those divisions must be tank units, since we haven't completely murderized them. Similarly, 50% of the "strength" of an allied fleet counts on the side of the ground forces. But is 1 point of fleet strength equivalent to 1 point of troop strength (which would be a single infantry division, by the way)? Nothing ever tells us this. I'm just guessing here. But if a point of fleet strength counts higher than a point of troop strength, this would explain why the small rest of the invasion force continues to fight instead of getting stomped in one turn, like our own armies in the Lowtax-system earlier. I guess we have to come back to the combat mechanics in Run 2, when we hopefully finally do some invading of our own.  The ongoing orbital bombardment has killed off hundreds of millions again. Our troops are still valiantly fighting on and for some dumb reason Moral Infrastructure can go over 255? Would have been nice to know this earlier. High Moral Infrastructure is supposed to be good, so I have no idea why it stopped falling and is now rising again. Apparently the aliens really do just kill the people not wanting to fight them! And yes, the other three moral systems (Stability, Integrity and Loyalty) have a maximum of 255 I’ve never seen them cross. Moral Infrastructure doesn’t play by the same rules, though. Years and years of vicious fighting seem to have no effect on our people’s loyalty, too. I seriously don’t understand how Loyalty and Moral Infrastructure actually works at this point. I’m guessing there are maybe some programming errors in the source code responsible for this.  Our economy is baffling me, too: Sure, 27k debt is pretty drat high, but we just spend more than four times that number a couple turns ago. What is happening here? Year: 2062, 31st December Radio-Broadcast Intercepted from the Surface of Tratsys posted:People of Tratsys! In the name of the Revolutionary Front of Tratsys I bring you good news: The traitor to the people, ChiefGune, has been brought low!  And with Emperor ChiefGune’s death in the glorious revolution sweeping Tratsys, we’ve achieved Game Over. And now you know what happens if you get a revolt on your capital.  Up next: Writeup: What went wrong? Libluini fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Oct 4, 2015 |
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Oct 4, 2015 16:00
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quote:We had a lot of imports, but enough exports to not lose much money. Strangely enough, the Hierarchy seems happy with supplying us with vital goods while simultaneously invading us. Maybe it wasn't actually an invasion fleet, but instead a trade fleet with some very, very aggressive bargaining tactics?
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Oct 4, 2015 17:23
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Things that went wrong: I wasn't declared Super Emperor for Life
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Oct 4, 2015 22:06
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If this is what its like to be Space Emperor, I don't think anyone would want to be one
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Oct 5, 2015 22:46
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Imperium Run One Writeup: What Went Wrong? A lot of things went wrong in our first attempt to win at Imperium. You should all know by now about 33% of what went wrong was me: I’m a bad player. But what with the rest? Well, 67% of our failure was grounded in the game being a lovely mess, programmed by two absolute bastards. Here is my attempt to condense everything bad about Run 1 into one single post. Economy My very first bad assumption was thinking the economy made sense. Back when I started, I spend many, many turns trying to wrestle with the economic system until I gave up. At that point the AI had already an insurmountable head start on us. Money: I noticed far too late we don’t actually need money in our treasury to pay for things. The game freely allows us to dive deep into debt. Because of this, I spend a lot of turns wailing about crippling debt instead of building the ships which could have saved us. Trade: By trying to juggle taxes and poo poo to entice the inscrutable AI to do what we want, I again wasted a lot of effort, since only the AI truly knows what’s going on. The player has a lot of pointless numbers, but sometimes the AI refuses to trade with your empire even if you pay them for it, other times an AI-empire will gladly waste tons of money to buy stuff from you even though you put stupidly high taxes on exports. In essence, logic and reason don’t work and making plans based on the info Imperium gives the player is an exercise in futility. Commodities: Even if you take full control of the economy for yourself, the planets are the ones producing and trading commodities, which generates your money. You have zero influence on what planets are doing, though. Which makes trying to metagame with taxes even more futile, since your own AI will gladly ignore your input if it’s arcane programming comes to the conclusion you’re full of poo poo. Conclusion: The only thing you have any feasible control over in your economy is trying to overproduce certain things, but even that is an illusion, since we learned at the very end your shipyards can use up more commodities than you actually own. So steering production isn’t really necessary. In the future, I will switch on our economic AI and let it deal with this dumb bullshit. We’ll concentrate on military matters. Diplomacy In the beginning I wasted some effort on trying to ally with some of our enemies. This didn’t work out and later we were too busy with survival to go back to this. Alliances: Even if we had successfully made some sort of alliance, only an information alliance is actually sort of useful: Everything else just influences the chance of the enemy empire attacking one of your worlds. By how much? The manual doesn’t say. An information alliance just tells both empires everything with 0% distortion of facts, which of course cuts both ways. We just have no way of knowing if the AI can profit from this better than we could. Alliances are a huge gamble in Imperium. Ambassadors: Our ambassadors are useless fuckers. In terms of game mechanics, their only purpose is in which name is on the news report send out if an empire sends out ships. Problem: Imperium can’t differentiate between harmless scouts exploring and colonizing worlds and invasion fleets aimed at us directly. So our ambassadors can’t even warn us in case of impending invasion. Fuckers. That’s it? Yes, that’s basically it. Instead of trying to bribe opaque alien intelligences to be slightly less violent, I’ll just switch on our own diplomatic AI, too. It’s not like our AI can gently caress this up more than I could, after all. Planets We need planets to produce parts and to trade those parts away to create money. Also our armies are recruited from them. And our immortality-drug Nostrum is found on planets. We kind of need that, too. And that’s it. Your population won’t create taxes (taxes are actually tariffs in this game) and after a certain point, more people will actively hamper your production, so they will actually cost you money. Productivity: In the beginning, I seriously underestimated how bad a lovely planet can drag us down. lovely planets need to buy so many commodities to fulfill their population’s needs they’ll be a constant drain of money. Which as we learned later isn’t that bad actually, thanks to debt, but planets producing less commodities means less parts for our shipyards, which means building time goes up. Also it could always turn out too much debt for too long is also fatal somehow, so it’s better to cut lovely planets lose and not colonize any more of them. Treasuries: Planetary treasuries aren’t allowed to go into debt. The Imperial Treasury isn’t allowed to draw money from a planet unless the planet is filthy rich. Together with production and taxes centered solely on planets, this means our empire will not suffer much from our wild military spending. If I had known this earlier, we would have built a lot more ships. Tech levels: Technology and technological advancement in Imperium are all bound to planets. The tech level of an empire is the average tech level of all your planets combined. If you start new however, you’ll see the player is saddled with some unproductive shitholes, dragging down productivity, finances and especially your tech level. Sever. Recolonization: This is what happens if you decolonize a poo poo world and one of your fleets accidentally passes the planet again. It’s annoying as gently caress, since too many decolonizations make your people angry at you. This means you have to be extra-careful if you colonize more worlds, because every poo poo planet you have to decolonize later becomes a colonist-killing landmine forcing you into unpopular choices. Ship building Ship building, like everything in Imperium, has some unique quirks we learned the hard way. Now we know how that poo poo works, we can abuse the hell out of it. Like the AI did to dumpster us. Ship design: How large and powerful we can make our ships depends on our tech level. The manual says our average tech level directly relates to maximum ship gross weight, but this is actually wrong: In the actual game, ship design depends on your minimum level. Luckily we can just decolonize every starting world except our capital, thus gaining a large boost. Which by the way will only about get us on par with the AI. Another strange thing about designing ships is the engine cost. Putting more engines on your ships costs exponentially more money. This leads to the silly case of our starting ships being vastly less expensive than every comparable ship we could design ourselves. If we want faster ships, we’ll have to pay for it. At last my favorite: If our tech level drops after designing ships to were your tech level is too low to design them, you’re only unable to design more ships like them. Your already finished designs work fine, though. This means if we start with decolonizing our non-capital worlds, we can make some fine designs for later and immediately stop worrying about tech levels. Good game design, guys! Shipyards: Shipyards in Imperium are abstracted away. Even if only one little backwater-planet is left over, your shipyards can still build giant death ships. Every design you make has a fixed cost you have to pay per ship, but it’s important to know your shipyards also need certain commodities like computers and ship parts to build ships. The way this works is: Your planets in the background supply and buy the necessary parts for your shipyards and if the fixed cost is payed, they begin construction as soon as all parts are there. This pre-building phase can take multiple turns itself, so the time shown in-game for your building order is off by a high margin. The greater the ship and the greater the number of ships you want, the longer it takes your planets to collect the necessary parts. Luckily debt isn’t really a problem, so you can just pay insane sums without thinking about your economy, which is probably what the Hierarchy did to create multiple death fleets. We’re in luck you can only have one build order at a time, or the Hierarchy would have been able to drown us in hundreds of ships, instead of just dozens. Another important point I had to learn first, which seriously hampered the military side of things: Building more ships doesn’t actually take more time (except for the buying parts stuff of course). One scout or ten scouts, both orders take the exact same amount of turns after construction actually begins. Had we known this beforehand, we would have had at least enough ships to stop at least one enemy fleet, even after the monumental gently caress-ups in economy and technology. Military Here I hosed up even more. While the enemy spend the entire time recruiting soldiers and building ships, I kept thinking I need money for that. I also took some embarrassing losses by forgetting the 5:1 and 10:1 rules: Some of our armies got stomped in the very first turn because they were literally too weak to resist. We learned the hard way: Never not build ships. And recruit as often as possible. poo poo, the way population keeps growing even when actively hindered by your policies, you can in effect recruit on every planet every turn without losing more than a paltry amount of money. And too much population is bad, while your garrison has zero effect outside of combat, so recruiting more only helps us. Ship combat: The way space combat in this game works means having not enough ships and having too heavy ships are both bad things. In combat, fleet strengths are compared, modified by whatever stupid combat maneuver your subordinate and the enemy leader pulled (No of course you can’t choose the maneuver for yourself. This is Imperium, remember?) and then damage is randomly attributed across the fleets. Both sides take damage, even if both sides are really, really unequal. Sure, a small fleet will probably be wiped out in one turn and only scratch some paint of the enemies’ behemoths, but the only way you can't do damage is if one side has ships with 0 offensive strength. Normally, larger and heavier ships get an innate defense bonus, which makes them harder to destroy. But in Imperium, defense doesn’t mitigate damage, it’s literally your ship’s hit points. So if a mega hyper dreadnought gets a defense bonus of +15 this sounds impressive, until you remember a little frigate 1/4th it’s size could do more damage than that. This translates to armor and weapon values being vastly more important than what size a ship is. Even endgame ships with absurd 100+ defense bonus can be ground down because of this: 100 defense means 100 extra hit points and that's it. Since it’s mechanically impossible to concentrate fire, this translates to the weird situation were a middle-sized ship with high fire power and a lot of them are the ideal ship. Too heavy ships are bad because they take too long to build and a large enough fleet of smaller ships can burn through them fast since you won’t have as many of them. So when we start Run 2, I’ll design some nice middle-class ships after decolonizing our dead weight, then I’ll just build 10 of them over and over again and make a couple really large fleets. Since I hosed up so bad in understanding ship construction, we haven’t seen yet how many ships a single fleet can take, so this will be interesting. Best case: We can put enough ships in a fleet we never have to build heavier ships again and can just rampage across the map like Space Genghis Khan. Invasions: Invasions gently caress with your planet’s stats pretty drat badly. Since we don’t want lovely planets, we better plan ahead and drop large enough armies to immediately destroy the opposition, or we end up getting blasted hellholes after too many turns of total war has ravaged them. Planetary combat: It works essentially the same as fleet combat, just with both sides having really simple units instead of ships. Infantry units have a strength of 1 and 0,5 during the turn they land while assaulting a planet, tank units have a strength of 3 and 1,5 during the landing turn. Then there are drop commandos. They have a strength of 1 always, which means they’re almost as effective as tanks during a landing, but become normal infantry afterwards. The wording of the manual is a bit vague at times, so nothing of this is written in stone. Anyway, there are other weird stuff I forgot to mention until now: Infantry takes up 3 points of space when transported, Armor only 1 point. Per strength. Thanks to playing Imperium for a while, I think I can get behind the strange logic of this: 3 Strength of Armor are equal to 1 unit of Armor, while 3 Strength of Infantry are supposed to be three Infantry divisions. So if we pack one full unit of tanks into spaceships, it would take 3 units of space and fight with 3 units of strength. A full unit of infantry on the other hand takes the same amount of space but can only fight with 1 unit of strength. Drop commandos have their own special rules: They can’t be part of a garrison, they travel around with automatically generated invisible transport ships after recruitment and you can only attach them to a fleet with at least one warship in it. While normal infantry seems worthless on all accounts, not needing space in your fleet and fighting at full strength during landing makes them good enough to recruit a lot of them when planning an invasion. Just remember they won’t be adding to a garrison, so don’t recruit them when trying to defend a planet. The manual claims drop commandos won’t lose any efficiency during the first turns, even after turn 1 they’ll still outperform regular infantry. Militia: This is my favorite bullshit mechanic concerning armies and poo poo. You’d never know without reading the manual, but 1% of a planets population automatically converts into extremely weak infantry units called “militia” if that planet is invaded. If you have tons of the commodity “militia arms” lying around, your plucky rebels get a 0,1% boost in efficiency per unit of militia arms. Efficiency: This is something I first ignored completely, then misunderstood. Ground units all have an efficiency-rating modelling how well-trained and organized a unit is. If you recruit a unit, it gets an efficiency rating depending on what kind of unit it is. Militia-units start with 25% (which is 1/4th of normal infantry strength at peak efficiency) and can’t get any stronger, since they only exist during combat and combat only lets your efficiency drop. So after turn one, militia divisions will reach 20%, the lowest possible efficiency, and stay there. Normal infantry starts at 40% and tank divisions start at 50% efficiency. Every turn at peace they get slowly stronger, every turn in combat drops efficiency by 5%. Drop commandos start at incredible 75% and reach peak efficiency a lot earlier then every other type of unit. Another reason why they make good assault units. As an example of efficiency, a tank division at 50% efficiency would have a strength of 1,5 when attacked on the ground and 25% efficiency or 0,75 strength when making an assault landing. The very next turn the same tank unit would be at 45% -it's former normal efficiency minus the 5% from combat. It's strength would be 1,25 now. In comparison, an infantry unit starting at the same point would translate into 0,25 combat strength during landing and 0,45 strength the next turn. This neatly explains why our defense of Tratsys turned into a giant WWI-reenactment: All the last-minute recruitments I made were only at half-strength due to being green, while the invaders started presumably with 100% efficiency. And all units recruited after the first turn of the invasion never got a chance to get better, since the never-ending combat prevented that. Our actual garrison strength was, if I account for our lower efficiency, probably something like 4:1 instead of 6:1 like I thought. It would have taken several more turns to crush the invaders. In the future I’ll probably need to take notes which units were recruited when, to prevent costly mistakes. (Because the game of course doesn't tell you about efficiency. It never shows up, instead you need the manual and a calculator to understand combat. I think a player trying Imperium without having the manual would have the most frustrating experience of his/her lifetime.) The Game Imperium itself fought us on every step, which resulted in me spending a lot of effort on just wrestling with the UI instead of playing. Game start: Starting a game is pretty drat straightforward. There are a number of things neither the manual nor the game tells you, though. We had to learn those things the hard way. On game start, we can do the following things: Name our emperor, empire, all alien empires and later even rename every single solar system and planet. We can also determine enemy starting money, technology, army and empire size. With what we have learned during Run 1, not all categories are equal. Giving alien empires more money makes it easier for them to make even more money, so this makes them outpace us fast enough they probably won’t even need to go into debt. We’ll do some drastic cuts here when we restart. Tech-level is already higher than ours if we just do a normal start and some alien empires either start with just one planet regardless of settings anyway, so some alien empires will immediately abuse the game’s wonky ship construction module and start to pump out super-ships if we let them. Let’s don’t. Army size determines size of alien armies and fleets both. As we have seen during Run 1, giving them normal sizes still doesn’t prevent them from creating huge fleets in short order, so they obviously don’t need a huge starting military. Besides, we can’t adjust our own forces, so this setting is only for masochists anyway. We always start with 0 troops and 2 scouts, regardless of how many ships the enemy empires have. Empire size is the last and weirdest setting. We know giving the enemy a lot of planets can actually hurt them. We don’t know this for sure, though. If the AI gives alien empires only high-value planets and a capital-level technology, we’re hosed. Besides this, we learned the AI isn’t above abusing it’s knowledge about game mechanics. We had several empires “start” with just one planet when given a normal start size. Some testing revealed even setting “empire size” to maximum lets some empires start with just one planet. This is either because they indeed just get one planet, or because the AI can decolonize at game initialization. We can’t possible now, so we’ll be nice this time and put this slider on the lowest position anyway. No need to decolonize anymore! We’ll all start as small as possible now! Testing also revealed alien empires start with something like 10-40 ships and a ton of troops even on the lowest settings. No need to play this game honest, it seems. Take this with a grain of salt, though. Thanks to the distortion-mechanic lying into our faces, I see something like 20 ships on an alien planet and have to carefully guess what could be there in truth. It could very well be just 2 scouts at the lowest settings, like with us. Or it could be anything in between the range of 0 and 40+ ships. If we want to know more we have to visit them personally. The UI: The UI is your greatest enemy. Everything you do involves multiple sub-menus and you can’t even have that many of them open at the same time, so many menus you will have to open, close and immediately open up again. And nothing is done with just one click: Instead you have to acknowledge something with a click, close the window with another click and then open it again with a third click to see if your change worked. This gets old fast and the game immediately fucks you over as soon as you get sloppy with this. The UI gives you some great tools for immediate suicide. You can switch off all your messages and make turn length ten times as long, for example. Nothing of this influences the AI, though. This means you can play the game blind and only wake up from your slumber every ten enemy turns, if you want to. It makes the game refreshingly short at least. You can also call for elections any time you want to. If you do this during a time where your popularity is below 50%, congratulation: You get an immediate Game Over. Even if you have all news reports switched on, there’s some stuff you have to look up for yourself, or you’re hosed. Alien fleets for example, can only be tracked through the map, which means assessing multiple submenus to get the information you want. The UI fights you on practically every step of the way. First you notice all alien fleets are named the same: “Alien Fleet”, so you have to be extra-careful not to send the wrong fleet to the clipboard. Then you have to send everything you want to look at to the clipboard, a separate menu. You have to leave the map, look at your item in the clipboard, and then go back and do this over and over again for everything. You’ll also learn pretty fast it’s hard to remember were each planet is since solar systems can’t be looked at like this. You can look at them in the map just fine, you can’t look at the planet in them, though. Instead you have to send planets to your clipboard-menu and look at them over there. Do this a couple dozen times and you probably have forgotten half the solar systems the planets belong to. Creating fleets, ordering fleets, changing a subordinate’s job, everything needs you to juggle multiple menus. And if you get stressed out and click into empty space or try to move windows around for a better overview, the game crashes. Not every time, though! That would be boring and Imperium is many things, but not boring. The UI’s stupidity cost me a lot of wasted turns. The best part was back when I was trying to find out how to colonize worlds and it took me a couple turns to find out you have to order a scout to “invade” a new planet to colonize it. Counter-intuitive poo poo like this you can find at every corner. The king of stupid bullshit is the case of the self-deleting warships, though. That’s incredible. Sure, destroying ships if the planet they were built on is under siege makes sort of sense, but Imperium adds its own brand of stupidity on top by not telling you anything. If you build ships while under siege, you get one turn to make a fleet out of them, or the game quietly deletes them without ever telling you. Conclusion I´m pretty sure there’s still other stuff I have missed, but I don’t want you to drown in never-ending rants about how evil Imperium is. Let’s just say we’re taking our kid gloves off and start punching until Imperium is beaten. The beatings will begin in a couple of days. Next: The Aurora Empire Strikes Back Libluini fucked around with this message at 13:38 on Oct 6, 2015 |
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Oct 6, 2015 13:32
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Does ANYTHING in this game work entirely as intended, in an intuitive fashion AND exactly as described in the manual?
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Oct 6, 2015 17:35
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PurpleXVI posted:Does ANYTHING in this game work entirely as intended, in an intuitive fashion AND exactly as described in the manual? It turns on.
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Oct 6, 2015 17:51
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Short update from my preparations: Looks like we have to be careful during Run 2, we can't just cheese it. Decolonizing everything except Earth let my popularity drop extremely deep. And as it turns out, if your popularity drops below 20%, you get a "vote of no confidence" and are forced to hold an election immediately. Which you of course can't win due to being hated by every single voter. The Game Over screen for the "voted out of office"-ending sadly crashed first the game, then the emulator, so I can't show it to you. The game probably didn't expect me to commit suicide in less than five turns. OK, next test game should give us a moderate approach, then we can start properly! The horribly amusing thing is: We didn't even lose the vote, our political rivals Cato and Pompeii both ended up with the same amount of votes, causing a "Hung Vote"-non victory. So I guess in that timeline the Aurora Empire ended with a civil war on turn 5. Edit: Restarted with another test game, it turns out we can avoid the drop in popularity by letting the game run a turn and carefully decolonizing a planet a turn: This way the game lets our popularity skyrocket first and we don't drop into a political death spiral. Some other things happening: - While debt isn't that great of a problem, too much debt means even unhappier people. We just never knew because when we were at that point in Run 1, we already had a problem with an ongoing invasion. - Boosting tech and building better ships faster works. The AI can build new ships even faster, though. - Faster is kind of a misnomer: Building ten 50k ton-ships from our starting boost took so long to complete our Emperor died of old age inbetween. 8 turns for building the ships, 55 turns to collect the parts to start building. This means during our new run we will have to start carefully, then build some smaller ships first, to prevent our building queue from being blocked for 60+ years. On the other hand, after a couple years we will have all the designs we ever need so we can ignore tech levels from then on and start expanding again. Libluini fucked around with this message at 10:39 on Oct 12, 2015 |
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Oct 12, 2015 09:55
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Imperium 2: The Aurora Empire Strikes Back Prologue I Encrypted Broadcast, intercepted and decrypted by the Hierarchy Military Forces posted:“We have everything, my lord.” UNKNOWN posted:HUNT THEM
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Oct 17, 2015 15:22
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Imperium II: The Aurora Empire Strikes Back Prologue II: A New Dawn Cimbri looked at the glaring flashes of the countless rescue ships landing. Already a new Imperial Palace was being build. They had survived. But billions had died and all the old worlds in their home cluster had to be abandoned. They had survived the relentless pursuit of the enigmatic Hierarchy and the alien species in command of it: Giant starfish armed with lasers. Silly but deadly. He clasped his hands behind his back and sighed. Was the price paid too high? Others had claimed insurgency should be the answer to the alien aggression. Mostly fools who hadn’t seen the transmissions of alien warships bombarding every center of resistance into rubble. Entire planets had been rendered inhospitable, just to avoid fighting insurgents on the ground. No, he sincerely thought they had to flee. At least for now. But he had sworn one solemn oath: The Hierarchy would be made to suffer for their crimes. As Emperor Cimbri looked on the last free remnant of human civilization rebuild, the sky slowly turned crimson above him. The first dawn of the new Aurora Empire had turned into the first sunset. And with this, we start our new try at beating Imperium, the game for serious game players! We also have some personal issues to deal with: Cimbri, as lone survivor of the last run, is now Emperor of the Aurora Empire! Hyperman1992, in the game as HypermanX thanks to the Imperial Bureaucracy being to incompetent to have more than 9 letters worth of free space for names in their documents. He died on the bridge of his destroyer, scraping some armor from the Hierarchy-dreadnoughts his fleet faced. Luckily he got of the ship in an escape-capsule and was recovered, so he is back now! Pyroi got his palace on Saturn bombed away under his feet and was assumed dead. But now it turns out he survived and joined the resistance until the Hierarchy just bombed Saturn and his moons a bit too much. A daring escape from the new asteroid belt later and he successfully reached the evacuation fleet! We also got some new recruits who want to enter this game! And so they will! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyV2gdvKm60 AJ_Impy joined Son Ryo joined PurpleXVI joined AecTalek joined habituallyred joined (wants fleet command and his name on official documents will be habitred, thanks to the 9-letters thing) Cosmic Afro joined (on official documents as CosmicFro) ButtDoktor joined (on official documents as ButtDr.) KirbyKhan joined Next time: Game Start
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Oct 18, 2015 13:13
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Pyroi's Log, Stardate...unknown. No one has noticed my great secret, the way I managed to escape from the bombing alive. I activated Project Phoenix, the plan outlined in the Log on Stardate 98.Thursday. I managed to lead a Resistance, but then some poo poo went down and, to make a long story short, I abandoned Saturn and the Resistance as it was being pummeled into a asteroid belt with a large amount of gasses. I met up with the fleeing fleet and write this log from there. I can safely say that we are probably screwed.
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Oct 18, 2015 20:12
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Thread not dead yet Sorry guys, I had other stuff to do and was generally lazy. But the new game is set up now and I've started amassing screenshots for new updates. Expect the first new update to arrive on Sunday.
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Oct 31, 2015 16:17
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Imperium II: The Aurora Empire Strikes Back Year 2020: The Set-Up  We’re back for round 2! With what we now know thanks to round 1, I’ve configured this game a lot more fair then last time. Wealth, technology and army size should now be roughly the same as ours. The Empire Size Slider doesn’t really work as far as my tests revealed, but just in case I’ve also set the position very low. As we know, making enemy empires smaller is actually helping them, but gently caress it, this time we won’t flail around like confused babies, so I can at least give our enemies something.  First thing I’m doing is switching on the AI for diplomacy and economics, because gently caress that opaque bullshit. This time around we will fully concentrate on military matters, which is complicated enough already.  In honor of the hero of WWIII, our new capital in exile has been named Lowtax and our system is the Aurora-system, just so we won’t forget our heritage as the Aurora Empire. As always, the capital isn’t perfect (there are better planets out there), but infrastructure, population, wealth and technology are high enough to keep us floating for a while.  The new system we fled to has this little gem. A lovely gem. The refugees on Ares are in for a surprise because of this.  It can always get worse of course, as Acidia shows. And if you look at that technology level, you already guess what will happen to this colony soon.  Orkus is even worse, no one wants to live in an atmosphere described as “acidic”. That doesn’t sound healthy.  When the first refugees passed the fifth planet of this system, some of them said: “See this little ice ball? Looks a lot like Pluto, doesn’t it?” “Wait a moment, Pluto didn’t have rings” “I can’t remember a planet Pluto, are you on drugs?” And so the fifth planet of the Aurora-system got his name.  We’re not alone in this new sector, though! An advance force of the dreaded Hierarchy has already arrived and prepared two systems as a beachhead. I guess we should throw them out before they go after us again. The grey cursor always points at us in those screenshots, by the way.  And this massive sprawling empire spanning three systems and multiple planets is Trumpia, a strange realm founded by the Republicanoids. Friend or foe? Time will tell.  The Standard-nation came to be after the bland people of planet DIN in the Tekom-system unified under a union of like-minded working people. Those aliens are incredibly bland and uninteresting. We’ll probably forget to invade them if they don’t attack us first.  And the last neighbor we have in this sector is the USUR. The United States of Universal Robots. Their capital is the planet Rossum in the Union-system. We don’t know much about them, except they're allegedly a robotic race looking like humans.  This is our system up close. Thanks to the UI being kind of hard to control, I’ll show off the enemy-systems when they get relevant. If you’re looking closely, you’ll see that Pluto is indeed the fifth planet from the sun. Due to the weird opinion of the programmers about how star systems work, the fifth orbit from the sun gives the highest productivity in this category. In the last run we learned being the best in one category offsets lovely tiers in other categories better than just pure mediocrity across the board. Which is why in our old system, Mars, Venus and Jupiter were always a burden on us, while Saturn was astonishingly productive, considering Helium is the second-worst and “Icy” straight-up the worst planet type. Considering the difference between Jupiter (“Orkus”) and Saturn (“Pluto”) in productivity, I would like to guess a bad atmosphere-type is worse for productivity than a bad planet type. But well, as long as I don’t see the source code, guessing is all I can do.  The Proud Leaders of the Aurora Empire  As promised, every goon-volunteer got lasered into the video game world of Imperium. Hyperman1992 is a survivor from the old guard, however. To his annoyance, even in exile the Imperial bureaucrats refuse to write his name down correctly.  Pyroi is another survivor. After a spectacular escape from dying Saturn, he rejoined with the Aurora Empire and is now willing to get another calm desk job! Or so I assume at least.  After ChiefGune’s untimely demise the Imperial Senate (in Exile) demanded new elections for the post of emperor. Since Cimbri was the one leading the exodus to this new sector of the galaxy, most refugees voted for him even though he wasn’t running. The Imperial Senate (in Exile) wisely accepted the popular choice. Especially since the real candidates were some guy who accidentally killed a lot of refugees when leaning on a badly placed override-switch and Pyroi. All hail Emperor Cimbri of the Aurora Empire!  AJ_Impy is one of our new guys. Official Imperial software doesn’t have underlines, so the Imperial Bureaucracy recorded his name wrong. Probably out of spite.  Next on the list of volunteers is Son Ryo. Imperial clerks like him because they can actually record his name without getting error-messages from their computers.  PurpleXVI is older than most of our subordinates. He better hopes we find some drugs asap.  This smooth motherfucker is AecTalek. Loyal and competent? Looks like we have a future fleet commander here.  Habituallyred got shortened to habitred on official documents, but we’re still glad to have him! Both charisma and competence are important for battles. The fuckers programming this pile of crap were to drug-hazed to actually tell us how and why this works, though. Just assume bad sounding stats are bad and hope for the best.  Another volunteer: Cosmic Afro, officially recorded as CosmicFro, eagerly awaits the commands of Emperor Cimbri.  ButtDoktor joined as ButtDr. and already got assigned to planet DIN as an ambassador to the Standard Empire. Since he is somewhat competent at his job, I would really like to leave him where he is, just to see if those attributes do something outside of combat.  KirbyKhan is the last from our latest batch of volunteers. At this point I was running out of competent and loyal folks and had to settle on just competent. That charisma could be a problem in combat, though. KirbyKhan will probably end up as a planetary leader or ambassador somewhere down the line. Or if he really wants to have a space command, I’m willing to stick him into a scout force, since scouts aren’t meant to fight anyway. Preparing for Decolonization  Test games showed me immediately decolonizing all lovely worlds is a bad idea, so we’re spending the first turn preparing for it. Every poo poo tier planet we have sends a part of their population and almost all their commodities over to the capital planet.  And no, I don’t know why the price for the exact same amount of people and goods is slightly different sometimes. This isn’t explained anywhere.  Of course, since I switched on the economic AI before turning, I’ll probably forced those planet to rebuy everything. Since planets can only trade with alien planets and not among each other, this still means we’ll end up with a pile of commodities on our capital for our AI to either sell or turn into warships. And if the first thing happens, we’ll have at least the money to buy missing ship parts pretty drat fast.  To be nice, I decide to save more people from Pluto as I should, considering we also automatically get some part of the population back after decolonization.  I almost forgot: A subsidy to boost (mostly) tech levels on Lowtax. The other planets of course don’t need subsidies since they won’t last a second turn.  Right now, even though they voted for Emperor Cimbri, most people are still ambivalent about his rule. Getting into less than 50%-territory lets you enter a death spiral rather fast, as I learned in a test game. So this is the reason we will spend the first turn stripping our poo poo-colonies from stuff instead of bulldozing them down immediately. Next turn we will already have enough of a popularity-boost we can spend it tearing down our hosed up planets without enraging everyone.  New Lowtax Times posted:In other news, the Imperial Senate (in Exile) voted today in favor of adopting the Velan calendar. The vote was close, but a small majority succeeded in pushing the change through. As Senator Dimitry le’Blanc said in his pre-vote speech: “The old calendar is tainted by failure and death. Abandoning it is pure necessity if we want to have a future.” The Velan year is a bit longer than a Earth-standard year and by sheer coincidence their modern calendar started roughly at the same point as ours, so the first year of our second run is 2020 again. Fancy that. At least I guess this means I don't have to photoshop every single screenshot with a date on it. Next: Planetary Politics
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Nov 1, 2015 16:08
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As a marginally competent ambassador to a bland empire, I promise to phone in non-specific fleet reports every once in a while. Please send space herb! I'm looking forward to what bizarre mechanics this run throws at us when/(if) we don't crash and burn right out of the gate.
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Nov 1, 2015 18:15
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ButtDoktor posted:As a marginally competent ambassador to a bland empire, I promise to phone in non-specific fleet reports every once in a while. Please send space herb! Yeah, this reminds me. I need all goons who joined the Aurora Empire to give me a number. That number will be your yearly salary in Imperial Zongs. Don't get greedy, if your characters ever do something impressive/get assigned a job, I'll give you pay rises anyway. I'm also already thinking about what LP I want to do after this. I have three candidates right now and I probably keep mentioning them once a month while weighing your opinions. 1. An obscure German point + click adventure game. Standard LP without much audience input. 2. Ultimate Master of Orion III: Heavily modded version of MO3 with some limited audience input. We can either go easy mode (monarchist robots) or hard mode (scientist crystals). 3. Space Empires V: Mostly vanilla, with some self-made modifications when it makes sense. Protagonist race is made by me, but the audience can decide what kind of frankensteinian race can be our rival. Ultimately, I want to LP all three of them, you guys just decide which one will be next.
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Nov 1, 2015 18:36
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Ultimate MOO3 I'd love to see the mods that can make this game not a bag of trash. Also gimme... five zongs? I forget what subordinates actually use their zongs for or whether it just keeps them happy.
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Nov 1, 2015 19:02
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Space Empires V I'll take my desk job back, it was going great up until everyone died. I will also take a standard salary of 7 zongs.
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Nov 1, 2015 19:18
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Uh, you guys should maybe rethink those numbers. Remember, 1 unit of money equals 100k Imperial Zongs.
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Nov 1, 2015 21:00
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200,000 IZ sounds about right for my shamming out of real work. Also voting preliminarily voting MOO3 Dong Quixote fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Nov 1, 2015 |
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Nov 1, 2015 22:04
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Start me on a Zong and a prayer: Pay me when I do stuff.
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Nov 1, 2015 22:51
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2 Zongs, and not 1. Nothing wrong with being frugal, but give me a raise when I get put in charge of an actual fleet. Nothing against German point and clicks, but I am more interested in the other two. I know there are lots of crazy mods for Space Empires IV. I tried and tried to make MOO III work back in the day, so seeing how they tried to fix it might be interesting.
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Nov 1, 2015 23:19
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Libluini posted:
Stats don't mean a thing when you're space truckin to unknown worlds and look that good. If mullets are awesome then space mullets are double awesome. 2 Zong if a scout, 2 Zong if planetary leader, 1 Zong if ambassador As far as the next LP goes, I would personally watch the two space games over the german point and click.
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Nov 1, 2015 23:47
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KirbyKhan posted:Stats don't mean a thing when you're space truckin to unknown worlds and look that good. If mullets are awesome then space mullets are double awesome. Your vote has been duly noted. To be fair to the German adventure game though, it's also a space game. Just space adventure instead of space strategy.
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Nov 2, 2015 00:08
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Of course, by 7, I meant 2.
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Nov 2, 2015 03:05
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Ah, right, I got zongs mixed up with the units of money, and thought they were interchangeable.
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Nov 2, 2015 04:27
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I wanna see the German adventure game, I've seen three LPs of those so far and they've all been very entertaining in various ways. As for salary, 1 Zong is fine. I've got pretty high loyalty, after all.
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Nov 2, 2015 04:44
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PurpleXVI posted:Ah, right, I got zongs mixed up with the units of money, and thought they were interchangeable. Imperium is really bad at this, the manual has a lot of stupid explanations like "by the way, unit x is actually an abstraction of thing y". Sometimes this is important, sometimes it's not. Without the manual of course you will never know this and be hosed if something goes wrong because of stuff like army strength and troop number being different things, even if the game doesn't show you.
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Nov 2, 2015 10:08
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| # ? May 6, 2024 02:08 |
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I'll throw in another vote for the German adventure game.
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Nov 2, 2015 10:17
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