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Good news: The next update will contain two dead enemies, because one of the fuckers managed to hold on for just long enough there was not much material left for a second update before a second empire died, too. Bad news: Since I don't want to murder myself and you guys with one post too massive, and one post too short, I decided to crudely cut the update I'm working on into two parts. Good news: This means the next post will be ready tomorrow, since I'm already 2/3rds of the way through all my screenshots from the last session. Bad news: As the first half is just the first half of the next update, no empire actually dies in there. Good news: The second half, ready by Friday for your enjoyment, will have a double-kill. The question remains, which two empires will die, and in which order?
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Nov 28, 2023 20:04
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Humans and Sakkra in that order. I'm actually very interested in the Ithkul and if their particularities are mechanically present in game making them a proper gigantic pain in the rear end. This is something you've probably already answered though.
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Nov 28, 2023 20:36
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Yeah, that feels about right.
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Nov 28, 2023 23:14
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Sakkra and humans in that order
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Nov 28, 2023 23:18
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Nommo and then Sakka.
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Nov 29, 2023 08:07
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OK, update is delayed by a day. Had to work longer today, and my train commute was absolutely destroyed by weird German train stuff. (A train snipped one of the electric lines near my city's main train station, causing total chaos just as I was leaving work.) I am destroyed today, and therefore can't concentrate on serious stuff like trying to wrangle my screenshots. (The update is otherwise already finished, don't worry)
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Nov 29, 2023 21:59
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 146: Age of Rebellion III – The Return of the Ground Combat, Part A For being nearly defeated last time, the Sakkra sure know how to drag things out, the update. GC 1264 – GC 1293  Turn 843: Human rebels agitate among the population, and the OSC-campaign to pacify the Sakkra-revolt are ongoing. Two planets are pacified, permanently.  New ground troops are raised to support the campaign.  The second attempt at taking the rebel world fail. The general commanding the operation, and most of her staff, got shot down by planetary defense forts very early, resulting in a fairly painful and chaotic panic among the troops. After taking horrendous losses, the operation was aborted. Whelp, not even dropping chemical weapons and nuclear bombs everywhere made a difference. The enemy takes some losses, but our own side loses entire divisions while trying in vain to gain a foothold.  At this point I’m rethinking my strategy of just hitting auto-build, and assemble three more armies as a mix of Sauron and Ethereal troops, by hand, with lots of clicking. The first because Sakkra are hilariously OP at ground combat, especially in this mod, the latter because they have extreme gravity as preferred battleground, so hopefully a mix of both works out better than armies created by RNG. And yes, while species groups can have individual differences between member species, you’d need to carefully look at the numbers on individual units to e.g. differentiate a Raas-battlemech unit from a Grendarl or Sakkra version of the same. Good look with that when your inventory of units approaches 4-digit numbers at the end of a run.  While our troops are moving, another front encounters yet another Ithkul-incursion. Deepest sigh and all that, but every time I look too closely at maximum size task forces in Ultima Orion, I cringe. The graphics engine handles 32 ships very poorly. Oh, and yeah, those attacks happen all constantly in dozens of systems, from every enemy still in the game, I just spare you the brunt of them.  And now they’re gone!  Our ground troops are a turn late, so I turn the second planet into ashes. No more loving around here. Each planet goes by a two-strikes rule now. Good job holding off 6 armies, Sakkra. I grant you eternal peace in turn.  Instead, our new armies arrive one turn later on the first planet of the system. And fail. Goddamnit!   One turn later. OK, we’re moving to a 1-strike rule now.  While this other dumb system has soaked up 9 armies so far with nothing to show for, another block of 3 has arrived in the Ishi-system. To my surprise, the armies actually make it to the ground this time, even without abusing weapons of mass destruction.  To my confusion, we then steamroll the defenders immediately. What. Ah, the wonders of wild, swinging RNG. I guess the Sakkra on this planet were just a bit less fanatic than the others, ha ha.   I’m not giving up on Poquannuq! Another army group arrives, this time to take the third planet.  No weird catastrophes this time, our battlemechs just stomp through the Sakkra-tanks as if they’re not even there. Minimal losses on our side. After seeing three different instances of our battlemech-strength rushing down as if the counter was linked to an Earthbound-character taking a massive hit, I genuinely started to believe something there must be broken. But nope, apparently we just rolled very badly three times in a row, and now statistics have declared a short lucky streak to equalize things. Well, I’ll take the win.  GC 1273: Another leader dies (but spoilers: we got a replacement this same turn) and our engagement in ground combat mechanics gave us a rare price: Apparently someone left a research lab unattended during one of our recent invasions and we got to loot the place without any evil rebel researchers peskily deleting data.  The new tech is a level 64-tech we didn’t get, and a fairly important one: Research Robots adds Asimov-style sapient robots to each Research-DEA. The robots, according to the lore blurb, never shut up and doubt everything, but in turn research becomes more reliable, as the robots act like a better version of peer review. All Research DEAs get a 33% boost from them. Our planets have to build them first, of course. At least they’re a DEA-tech, which means even planets I accidentally left without AI-control will build them on their own. As a reminder, most of these production bonuses come in three flavors: A bonus directly to the DEA, which takes effect before any other calculations, and is therefore always fairly strong, a bonus to population production, which is weaker on younger colonies and stronger on bigger ones, and at last percentage-bonuses to output like this one, which take whatever number all the other calculations spit out and adds more on top. With the 33% bonus to everything in our last update, and now this new 33% bonus to research, we’re suddenly able to rush ahead… is what I’d like to say, but after a while it became clear to me the new boost just barely offsets the rate our bureaucracy gets worse with each new planet added, so all our numbers got bigger, but our research pace didn’t, actually.   Our newest council-leader is a giant mushroom from the Phaigur-species. He is loving huge, compared to more normal specimens of his kind, but also fairly placid and nice. This guy became a famous mining director purely through his hard work and ethics. Consequently, we get bonuses to mining (10%) and industry (3%). But since he’s a dirty commy shroom who pays his workers well, our income goes down by 4%. I’m fairly sure you can’t differentiate male and female fungi like that, but the game does not give us more info besides “Phaigur exist, they are sapient shrooms”, so I’ll let it slide.  There’s not much blue anymore in our sea of red.  We’ve swept the Sakkra-rebels back to the very edges of their old domain.  Turn 851: By now we control all four of the star lanes going out from the rebel-capital, Koth.  Orion Sector Command isn’t neglecting other fronts, of course: After our breakthrough in Sukra, enemy fleets in the vicinity have now been neutralized, and multiple fleets are following the outgoing star lanes deeper into territory controlled by Human rebels.  A rare close-up of still intact Humanoid ships and stations.  Our fleets announce their arrival with a fiery funeral pyre in Mu Bootis.  Next turn sees a combined fleet of combat and transport ships move on through the other star lane, towards the Crux-system. This showcases our new standard fleet template: Three long-range task forces with direct-fire weapons, four carrier task forces, and three transport task forces to transport enough armies to crack most planets. Ithkul won’t get to see those, as I’m not bothering with fighting them on the ground. Every intact Ithkul-colony is a painful liability to us and me, personally. And yes, I know so deep into the end-game that’s not exactly important anymore, shut up, I’m thinking about the future of our people here  A couple turns later our fleet group arrives in Crux.  The Human rebels apparently thought to negotiate more autonomy instead of just being huge jackasses like the Sakkra, at least according to our intelligence services. We see the result here, as Crux III is barely defended and our army group sweeps the entire planet in short order.  Getting an alien colony mostly intact also gives you some insight into whatever is going on over there: The severe famine on Crux III tells us the Humans have trouble feeding themselves, and seeing as this is a planet perfect for agriculture and rather mediocre for mining, this screen gives us the source of the famine: Tons and tons of mining DEAs. I’m changing that poo poo to agriculture asap. Technically speaking, the planet will get new food from the entire empire starting next turn, but still, this kind of poo poo annoys the hell out of me whenever I see it. I suspect without our spreadsheet of pre-made plans our own AI-governors would pull similar poo poo behind our back and it irks me somewhat fierce. From observation, it seems it takes multiple turns for the AI to slowly change an already established DEA. Take this as a warning when planning out your own colonies: Changing poo poo later is costly and inefficient. Better make sure you don’t do any major gently caress-ups, like planting mines into plains on ultra-poor planets or something.  Since it worked so well, I’m grabbing more Human planets. Another transport fleet is assembled and send on its way.  Turn 856 sees a new weirdo show up to join our council: This one is a Tachidi, and a specialist for cloaking research. Consequently, they give us +15% research from our DEAs, and +20% bonus to spy infiltration. Hot drat! A rare and strong bonus!  To abuse this rare chance, I sent an espionage hacker into the Nommo-empire, followed by a pair of assassins, one for the Durarlor-Empire of the Ithkul, the other so the Nommo have a second target to shoot at while our real spy works. And since they’ll probably be caught and executed anyway, I also recruit a bunch of new spies to keep our defenses covered.  And then we arrive in Koth. The final days of the Sakkra-rebellion have begun.  After harsh and brutal fighting, our ground troops gain a foothold on Koth III. not much more than that, though. According to reports from the front, the beachhead only still exists because the burning wrecks of our mechs and tanks prevented the enemy from breaking through to the landing zones.  GC 1285: All our spies manage to get their feet/tentacles/other across their respective borders. The first step is made.  It’s become rarer, but two new technologies are incoming: An upgrade for our recreational DEAs (something something holo-suites) and the Matter Transfomer, a neat machine that transforms matter into energy, and then back into matter without much loss. Our industrial DEAs get a +2 to their efficiency, if one is available. Our planets will soon build hundreds of them across the Kingdom.  The Sakkra prove themselves to be a royal pain in the rear end. Despite a reinforcement of two more armies, the defenders push our giant stack off-planet with minor losses. On their side. We take lots of losses, of course!  This time, the scape-rock taking the fall is a Silicoid. They apparently were recently promoted based on nepotism, and it shows. The failure is rated high-treason due to the enormous losses on the ground, and Xxrkraak the Second is smashed to pieces after the show trial inevitably judges them guilty.  The Humans fight a lot worse, and our local troops are less riven with corruption: The campaign to take Crux I goes off without a hitch.  GC 1287: Our assassins plant bombs to blow up Ithkul and Nommo rich fucks, and our hacker manages to take down the stock exchange of a random Nommo-planet. Apparently we send three communists, huh. Guys, stop helping them! Do some actual damage, please!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNEl6IkRPEw  Our troops made it down. Somewhat.  Our spies strike again! A “planetary governor” we never heard of dies slow and painfully. Hurray! Based on the random-rear end looking name, I’m guessing it was a Nommo-governor that died a slow and painful death there. This is the NPC-equivalent of taking someones leader, but while a human player loses their player, the AI doesn’t lose anything, as it does not have council leaders. But at least the message made me feel better about myself. A little bit.  We continue trying to bring the Sakkra-rebellion to an end. By now, only the Koth-system remains. We try to land more troops to sustain our progress on Koth III. Population. Since “population points” or units are a bit unwieldy to think about, I like to translate them into some kind of reality-approaching real number of people. (Some older games, like Imperium for the Atari ST, even outright tell you what the devs think should make sense.) 1000 pop units in Master of Orion 3 equal 1 pop unit in older MO-games. We see this sometimes in screens where there is no space for longer numbers, so those screens will sometimes shorten a population of 69699 pops to 70, for example. I like to think that an average, medium-sized planet should hold about real life Earth numbers of population, since with terraforming, other population-related techs and bigger planets available, you already get large enough numbers without entering full-on Warhammer-sillyness. I like that. Based on this, this planet can have a maximum of roughly 8 billion people, and this makes 1 billion people equal 10k units, or 1 million people equal 10 units. One pop unit equaling 100k people doesn’t sound too bad. Let’s go with this! So, Koth III currently has 7,7 billion people living on it right now. Our blockade and the last few battles already managed to kill something like 179 million people, not including the soldiers. Impressive! But can we do more?  Since I’ve been trying to brute-force things a lot with concentrated and break-through offensives, I change things up this time with the combat group offensive doctrine. We use our massive numbers to our advantage, and attack at multiple points. And it works! Multiple regions fall to our advance, and our armies don’t face imminent destruction anymore. But Koth III still holds.  Turn 860: While I’m not sure how effective weapons of mass destruction are on the actual battlefield, they certainly do a number on the civilian population: Koth III’s population went down by 20k after the last battle, which means our troops killed something like 2 billion people in a cycle, which represents something like 1,5 Earth years. An impressive death toll. Based on the battle we hilariously lost earlier, I’m willing to guess that either the civilian damage is also prone to wild RNG-swings, or the number of regions involved in the fighting influences the kill count somehow: By advancing we certainly wrecked more poo poo than before. But I’m just wildly speculating here, based on observed consequences for our actions.  To make sure the Sakkra won’t manage to escape from their fate, the Kingdom of Almandin drops even more troops on Koth III. The difference in strength is now so ridiculous, OSC decides to ease up on the warcrimeing.  And it works! We take the planet. Only six rebel-held planets left.  Next step: Demobilizing half the armies on Koth III because peacekeeping the still smoking remnants of the planet’s cities doesn’t need millions of soldiers. Not anymore.  GC 1293: Our spies are slowly being removed by enemy spy defense. Looks like our short-lived rampage is almost over. Alien spies keep dying in unprecedented numbers, too. But yeah, our short-lived fun times are almost at an end. Enemy Empires:      DEAD and GONE:            Next: Age of Rebellion 3: Return of the Ground Combat, Part B Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Nov 30, 2023 |
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Nov 30, 2023 21:53
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It's nearly the end of the carbon based life forms as we know it!
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Nov 30, 2023 22:37
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Plenty of carbon based lifeforms are citizens of the kingdom. Human worlds seem to fall to invasion more easily, is it because of species differences or because of tech ones, both or confirmation bias?
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Nov 30, 2023 22:51
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In the basegame Humans were below the average when it comes to ground combat effectiveness (only the psilons and fish races are weaker I think), whilst Sakkra are close to the top. At least in theory... As it was Moo3, naturally all ground combat species traits/picks were completely bugged and had absolutely zero actual impact on ground troop effectiveness in any way. They were basically free species customisation points to spend. The fan-made game patcher fixed this, so its probably working as intended in this mod. Although to be blunt, ground combat is a massive crapshoot and dependent upon unknown RNG mechanics. It used to be perfectly possible to drop 100 Elite Grendarl Battleoid Armies on a planet and lose them all to a few Infantry and Militia, and then drop 5 Green Psilon Marines the next turn and totally overrun the entire planet. Most players didn't bother and just glassed everything.
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Dec 1, 2023 00:01
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I, however, love pain and suffering, because it makes me feel alive
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Dec 1, 2023 01:07
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Thread update! The next post is nearly ready, but it looks not in time for today. Far too many screenshots-links to wrangle with, deepest sigh. Tomorrow everything should be polished and ready.
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Dec 10, 2023 14:48
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 146: Age of Rebellion III – The Return of the Ground Combat, Part B Many dead soldiers later. GC 1293 – GC 1326  The next few cycles see dozens of space battles, followed by dozens of planets being genocided from space.  Oh, and Wolf II follows the small string of Human worlds we don’t turn into burned-out husks.  Meanwhile, a new technology appears and is finished: Anti-matter beams can now be miniaturized, and since the newer Anti-Proton beams are too large to be a better weapon, I gladly re-design our main direct-fire combatant. I also gently caress up, apparently. And then keep wondering when the AI will build those new monsters for my fleet, only realizing my error when looking closely at this screenshot. Ha ha, oh man some of my systems will have some seriously sweet system defense after I correct this poo poo. (For those who don’t understand the joke: I accidentally made the new big capital an STL-design. They will be built by some systems here and there before I can stop them, and then remain there. Forever.)  WHELP THAT HAPPENED. Anyway, we take Koth II with only three armies this time.  We also keep saving a couple billion Humans here and there. Though we are slowly running out of targets on this front, too.  Turn 867: Some planets have been burned to ashes, some have been taken by force. Now only one planet of the Koth-system remains in rebel claws.  While I’m giggling madly about the sweet, sweet revenge I’ll soon drop on Koth IV, I take some time out to depress myself by looking at what the Sakkra-AI did to its planets. All these planets are perfect for agriculture, and mediocre at best for mining. Of course this means a shitton of useless mining DEAs to change. They also put their mines into plains. Plains! The type of region that is best for agriculture, and worst for mining! It’s like someone trained those AIs wrong, on purpose. As a reminder, since I often keep forgetting to mention stuff that’s just obvious to me: Everything red in the UI marks stuff the AI built/is building that you ordered stopped. Ships and troops get discarded after one turn, but DEAs, especially heavily built-up ones, are a headache. By observation I sometimes saw red DEAs still not being wiped after 5+ turns of anxiously waiting.  The final assault on the last Sakkra-colony begins.  The defenders valiantly await our attack.  Did I say valiantly? I meant cowardly. Yes, the last defenders of the last planet run away. I guess they already knew how this would be going and decided to do the whole “joins pirates”-thing a bit early.  Our targets for this bombardment phase: Humans, Humans, Grendarl and finally, our Sakkra. Troops land on one planet, bombs on the others.  No nukes, no tricks, only brutality. The enemy troops are nearly annihilated, but the fighting drags on for so long we only manage to gain two regions. Most of the planet remains in rebel hands.  GC 1302: A new leader appears!  This guy is a Bulrathi, and comes with a long sob story about how the few surviving Bulrathi have to work hard to make the best out of what few industrial capabilities they still have. Mr. Sudikin is one of the best Captains of Industry still remaining, and since we rule all, he decided to apply for our council. He does industry good. And reduces pollution by industry. Boring, but nice. Also one of the rare leaders with zero negative traits.  Another attempt is made.  Koth IV will fall.  Here the game plays a little prank on us: Two of our army task forces get replaced by some of the incoming colonizers. Hilarious!  The enemy luckily has replaced part of their forces with their own colonizers, so all is good. This time they don’t run, and die. See the end of the OP for why the AI is so eager to send colony ships into active war zones. A thread poster dug out a neat explanation of the game’s code and I put it there.  Well, at least another battlemech-army joins the assault force on the planet. That’s the good news.  The bad news: Our combined force then steamrolls the defenders, meaning the two armies still in orbit are now totally useless.  Turn 869: Despite this last gently caress-you by the Sakkra, it is done: Their rebellion is destroyed.  Only four enemies left.  To celebrate the sudden end to the fighting in the core regions, anti-terror laws are getting slowly relaxed. The people of the Orion Sector can now enjoy a little bit more freedom. This is true, technically, as the remaining four empires are all hanging around the outskirts of the Kingdom of Almandin. The Sakkra were the last empire hanging around right in the middle of our various systems, and with them gone, nothing is close enough to Orion to seriously threaten the new capital of the Orion Sector. Also, with only four empires being able to send us spies, and with Grendarl and Nommo only having average spies, I decided hanging around on the upper limit of what our citizens are willing to tolerate was a bit extreme. Our Oppressometer is now set to level 4, and while changing the setting will cause some unrest and weakened spy defense for a couple turns, afterwards everyone will actually be happier than ever. The markers left on right on the Oppressometer, in case you forgot, change position depending on your population-mix, and what settings you additionally used in the custom race creator. Our settings didn’t actually change much, as Silicoids are normally very happy about being oppressed, and for any change made to make them more democratic, and every freedom-loving population absorbed, we also absorbed more hate-filled bastards. For a counter-example, a population of 100% Ithkul would have the markers to demarcate their preferred levels far, far to the right of ours. And yes, despite our Silicoids beings so awesome, we can’t just set everything to level 1, that would actually make them mad, as it’s the equivalent of just dismantling all security services completely and asking all criminals to just please stop doing murders. Basically going from 5 to 4 means we went from US-style oppression to EU-style oppression. (And of course, if you want to really hurt yourself, you start with a more freedom-loving species and try to add more and more modifiers to make them hate oppression even more, until a setting of 1 actually falls into your parameters. A suggestion for a challenge run.)  GC 1305: A few turns ago, a shitload of new colonies joined our Kingdom. Of course this means a gigantic wave of old buildings, left over from our bombardments, that are now getting dismantled because our new colonies are too small to pay upkeep for them. Logically, you should ask yourself the question “who is paying for all this expensive ruin-removal?” but let’s be fair, no space 4x ever asked that question.  The race between Sakkra and Humans was close: By turn 870, only three systems are in Human hands, one of them only by a fine thread.  The Grendarl now get to be the target of all those fleets I used to hammer down the Sakkra. Including the left-over armies. Aren’t they lucky?  You can’t really argue with us winning. The Grendarl and Humans are nearly invisible in this sea of red, and only the Ithkul and Nommo have enough planets to even pretend to be a threat.  A couple turns later: The Grendarl manage to stop our liberation of Schwan VI, but as there are already three more armies incoming, that doesn’t really matter.  GC 1308: Our Tachidi-leader dies of a drug overdose after too much celebrating. ...is the official story since “a Human spy managed to smuggle in advanced Anti-Tachidi gene-poison through our security” was deemed too embarrassing. Ah, yeah. “Weakened spy defense”. Thanks for immediately abusing that against me, AI.  Since I have a lot of free task forces hanging around in the area, the Grendarl now face multiple strikes at once, with a second fleet now targeting Stoffer.  Meanwhile, a similar fleet re-shuffle has completed on the Ithkul-front, and a new burner-fleet is ready to go in.  Then a turn passes with our new armies still in transit. The Grendarl throw some more defenders at our armies on Schwan VI, and consequently, despite our troops killing all of them, there is no progress. Because of course there isn’t.  A turn later, a couple billion Humans die, and...  …three more armies drop on Schwan VI. The Grendarl, despite yet again forming up new armies to fight us, are forced to fall back. Progress!  A similar drama played out in the background, on the Earth-like planet Ganawagus III. The Human colony falls this turn, with the combined remnants of four armies ending the rebellion on another planet. Many billions of Humans are now save and sound inside our borders.  On another front: Operations against the Ithkul-Menace start up again. This time, the single planet of the Luzbok-system is the target.  The defenders and their ancient fortresses are totally and completely surprised after the many cycles our fleets spend on the defensive in this subsector.  Our fighters clear the way.  Then another planet is cleansed of the plague.  Military operations are moving on multiple fronts: Here another Grendarl-planet gets freed from its slavery to the rebels. Playing Master of Orion III, especially end-game on large maps, is mostly about carefully portioning out your attention to not get overwhelmed. And so, not much was happening against Nommo and Ithkul while I was busy with Humans and Sakkra. Now, the attention I put on the Sakkra is facing the Grendarl, and as soon as Humans are gone, I can pivot to beating up some tentacle freaks. The death of the Grendarl, in turn, will spell doom on the Nommo. And yes, if I had the mental fortitude, I could in fact use my insane economic power to fight everyone at the same time, but that would suck huge amounts of rear end and not be fun at all.  Turn 876: The last remnants of the Human rebellion are cornered in the Zirr-system. We freed as many planets as we could, and burned those we couldn’t. …be assed to spend troops on, if we are truthful. But that doesn’t sound as good in a press release.  Since we already have enough fleets and troops to deal with Zirr, I commence the obligatory draw-down in this subsector, and lots of task forces are disbanded to send ships back to the reserves. Soon, the older ships will be scrapped, and the newer ones will turn up on the three remaining fronts.  A short update of where we’re standing in turn 876: Two empires dead or dying, two (Nommo and Ithkul) fairly static since we were busy elsewhere. Also, the Kingdom of Almandin currently consists of 650 planets. I’m kind of interested to see if we can break the 1k-line or if we run out of planets to colonize before the game ends.  With only the enemy planets left, we’d barely make 800, if we’re lucky, but look here: Our scouts still sometimes find systems unconnected to the “official” star lane network. Apparently, this little mini-sector contains Meklon. I guess in this iteration of reality, Meklon was abandoned at some unspecified point after the Cynoids left to escape robotization. A sad fate.  And then our fleets arrive in Zirr. The Human rebellion assembles the last remnants of their fleet to strike back one last time.  But the empire strikes back even harder.  The situation in turn 879: Regrettably, we “forgot” to bring our ground troops, so the Almandian fleet was forced to use orbital bombardment as their main pacification measure.  With the end of multiple hostile empires in such a short amount of time, nearly a thousand ships are currently sailing back to our reserves. I think we can barely use half of them, we are again at the point where we’re looking at multiple centuries worth of ship design. The remaining empires are so far behind us we could use all of them, but space warfare isn’t fair, so in the trash they go.  The fighting in Zirr continues: What are our ships shooting at, you ask?  The enemy, of course! Turns out our insane end-game weapons are already in range of the planet. Also :l o l: at our automatic task force trying to shoot a single old orbital far behind any worthwhile target. If you look even closer on the first picture, you may notice only 1-2 task forces are firing on our site. Some of the others launch their distraction bait missiles, because fighter and missile logic is wonky like that. Sometimes poo poo will launch even if everyone else in your fleet is asleep.  One hasty attack command later, our fleet starts moving and launching fighters. The end for this rebel world is near.  Turn 883: Only one single Human planet is left. Our troops finally arrive for some serious peacekeeping action.  To my own surprise, our four armies encounter no resistance anymore. The fall of Zirr I signalizes the end of the Human rebellion. This part of the Orion Sector is now at peace.  GC 1326: The Human rebellion is officially crushed. Everyone who bet on first Sakkra and then Humans: Congrats! You win. Your space cookies were lost to corruption, though. Sorry! The government issues you an IOU instead.  It starts to look lonely in here. Enemy Empires: DEAD and GONE:   Next: Age of Rebellion 4: The Tale of Grendel, the Grendarl Libluini fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Dec 11, 2023 |
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Dec 11, 2023 15:16
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Oh my God we're so close. Are we actually going to finish the LP this year?
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Dec 11, 2023 16:15
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh my God we're so close. Are we actually going to finish the LP this year? Shhh!!!!11 Don't jinx it 
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Dec 11, 2023 19:21
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I would have gotten my cookie if the oppressometer was still set to 5, lowering corruption 
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Dec 11, 2023 22:59
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So does lowering your Oppressometer mean you might actually not have as many revolts over the endgame and not have to put as many garrisons onto new planets? And yay! So what's your next MoO 3 campaign gonna be?
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Dec 12, 2023 03:45
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wedgekree posted:And yay! So what's your next MoO 3 campaign gonna be? A long time in the future. Seriously, I need a rest from MO3 for now. I have something planned, though. There are like 4 other LPs in the way before I'm willing to touch Master of Orion III again, though. Anyway! I hope you people had a nice Christmas-time or whatever religious festival of your choice. I'm still busy punching my way through the last remaining space assholes. Will we make it before New Year's Eve? Who the gently caress knows at this point. The amount of glitches showing up in battles is now at terrifying levels. I already mused the idea of making another battle video, but honestly? This glitchy mess lets every video look like a bad recording, you simply can't believe the stock motion action going on here. And the battle engine now regularly fails when assaulting planets, so I get to see a lot of those glitches.
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Dec 28, 2023 18:31
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 New Update incoming
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Dec 29, 2023 17:38
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 147: Age of Rebellion IV – The Tale of Grendel, the Grendarl GC 1326 – GC 1353 One after one, the Kingdom of Almandin brings peace back to the war-torn Orion Sector. This is another chapter from the Age of Rebellion.  We’re back where we left last time: From our three remaining enemies, it’s now the turn for the Grendarl, the last of the three Sauroid species in Master of Orion III. At this point, we’ve already pushed them back a fair bit and even taken a couple planets without blowing them up, thus making sure the Grendarl won’t be wiped out completely. Only the rebels will die.  Tautha Lilib joins us just to prove that even after being Ex-slaves for thousands of years, the Raas still can gently caress up with the best of them: This guy is a noble. A snobbish noble. He is really good at swinging the whip, so our production goes up. He also settles us with a whopping 7% penalty to unrest. Because obviously, people don’t like him. I’m now wondering if the Raas nobility is something that was created by the Sakkra and Grendarl during their enslavement, or something that just grew organically after they achieved their freedom? Both cases don’t sound so good. Anyway, this guy stays for now, thanks to his ridiculous bonus, but I’m also kind of hoping the next assassin coming through gets him. Seems like a real headache, this guy.  Anti-rebellion operations continue in the Chondote-system.  Meanwhile, the Nommo fail again to retake one of their ex-systems. Both the Ithkul and Nommo keep sending huge fleets to die into our front systems. Annoying, but not really a threat. Just a drain on my patience, since everything larger than 100 ships I have to sweep out personally, otherwise the auto-battle just stalls out until they can stack thousands of ships into the systems they’re attacking.  GC 1332: Our fleets have reached Nimbus.  And they, they brought some ground troops with them!  As I mentioned last time, my current set up is 3 direct-fire, 4 carrier task forces, with the last 3 slots taken up by our min-maxed transport superdreadnoughts. Which have worked out well so far! By having a really tiny troop bay and being mostly big carriers, the game automatically puts a presentable five of them into its auto-task forces, making my life a lot easier and creating something chunky enough it won’t immediately die if the enemy targets them. Too bad that it by now looks like the last and final techs will come too late to justify another mega-transport, because next time I’d do things even better by reducing troop capacity to its absolute minimum. The auto-builder would make neat little 10-ship squadrons out of that design, and I could cram even more weapons into the “transport” design.  By turn 890, we have enough task forces flying around, Almandian ships are already sieging down the Nu Tucanae system. It’s the second-to-last Grendarl-system.  Ridiculously squeezing out our tech tree to get the final spaceship techs pays off: Two more techs enter the prototyping-phase. The armor-piercing anti-proton cannon is a dud. The anti-proton beams are ludicrously oversized for their damage, and because we got the tech after our current in-use antimatter beams, we lack the miniaturizing technologies to actually make them work. The other tech is just a miniaturized version of our current sublight drive, which is nice if we ever need new ship classes this close to the end. Like the non-miniaturized version, it uses giant grav-projectors to create an artificial black hole that then “drags” the ship after hit. The blurb here tells us that this drive system can now made smaller thanks to better power plants and capacitors. It’s a neat little reminder for Perry Rhodan fans, because the original tech is really tiny, as it’s just some projectors for artificial gravity. Most of the drive’s mass is in the gigantic power plants and capacitors needed to create artificial black holes of a mass big enough to matter. And that’s it for now, the rest of the final techs are locked behind multiple levels and hundreds of turns. (I even started to re-write my planet plans to put “research” in as many spots as possible, but that solution is a slow one. It’ll take a while for the AI-governors to build all those research DEAs. Currently, squeezing nearly 1/3rd of our entire empire’s worth of research into a single category nets us about 3% progress per turn. It’s sloooooooooooooowwww  To remind everyone of how bad I am: Next turn I manage to butter-finger the bombardment-interface. Nimbus II dies because my finger slipped. To a 25% reduced bombardment, even. Talking about adding insult to injury.  Another turn passes, and by now six armies are ready to drop on two Grendarl-planets at once.  Nimbus I is now the sole rebel-planet in the Nimbus-system, out of four originally. Since we accidentally bombed one of the other targets, and bombed another one on purpose, this is the last chance for the local rebels to surrender. And the rebels work hard to make the genocide happen: The equivalent of five tank companies and some militia manages to stop our advance, at the cost of nearly all of them dying.  Nu Tucanae II has more ground troops, and due to a mix-up on my end, our assault force is 2/3rds outdated tanks instead of mechs. Logically, this should go even worse than the battle on Nimbus I.  But Master of Orion III goes “gently caress logic” again and instead we steamroll all opposition with minimal losses.  Turn 892: In the background, the Almandian Fleet is moving more ships around to assault Keid maybe a bit faster than “after everything else is dead”.  Thankfully, by now the Grendarl don’t have enough planets and reserves left to surprise us with big ground armies. Just some corps worth of infantry and tanks show up. In turn, our own troops use nukes to blast their way past enemy fortifications. Just half a cycle later, all enemy forces have surrendered, the planet is ours.  Turn 893: With the Grendarl almost dead, I look over to our final frontiers, especially the Ithkul here. The stalemate in this subsector has been going for what must have been centuries, and the re-colonized Ex-Ithkul system Arawn is now build up enough to their own mobilization center.  Which means a third big force is now under way: Ten brand-new task forces are moving to hit Haraken, down on the left there. 6 Carrier task forces, 4 direct-fire task forces, unimaginable fire power. No ground troops for these fuckers. It’s bad enough I have to endure their survivors infecting my new colonies in this sector, and then eating our people because that’s apparently legal in Master of Orion land. Eventually, all infected regions will become 100% Ithkul, and (even though I’m staying long enough around to confirm this) eventually all planets who don’t manage to fill up regions with Non-Ithkul will revert to 100% Ithkul. Just very, very slowly. (As a reminder: Game mechanics can’t shovel new population into regions the game considers “full”, so our core worlds are all safe, but new border planets will get “refugees” fleeing from the Ithkul-empire, plus additional Ithkul surviving thanks to game mechanics moving some pops on a planet the same turn it dies from bombardment, dead planets lying around for too long so the migration-stream puts some more Ithkul on there before our colony ships can land, etc. etc. And over time, any regions with Ithkul in them will have the Ithkul try to eat the Non-Ithkul while their numbers grow. Add to this the fact that the Ithkul have a naturally very high growth rate, and you can see where this is going.)  GC 1341: Our new techs will soon be ready! And there is a lot of unrest, despite there not being a lot of enemy spies left… Oh wait false alarm, most of the affected planets are Grendarl-colonies we took over. I guess it’ll take more time for them to calm down.  The current state of the Grendarl Rebellion. Man, trying to pay for 2000+ ships with just seven planets left must be bonkers for their economy. I hope we can end the rebellion before too many Grendarl starve to death.  Let’s take a look at our Harvester-friends, the Ithkul: Probably thanks to having thrown thousands of ships into our border security over the centuries, they only have roughly 600 ships in space right now, compared to our approximately 8000. But another reason could be this dysfunction between rebels, as revealed by their list of allies and enemies: No allies, and us and the Nommo as anti-friends. You’d think with our giant kingdom of intelligent space rocks at their borders, the Nommo and Ithkul would be willing to work together, but nope. Until we force them to, they’ll gladly attack each other even as we overwhelm their fleets with ours. Space Empires V did this better: Triggering the Mega-Evil-Empire threshold in SEV game forced all alien empires to work together, including forcing alliances and free exchange of technology. Effectively, any surviving enemies would be welded together in one, big blob of nasty hostility. In Master of Orion III, the devs apparently just forced every AI-empire to be at war with you, without changing anything else. And so you get cases like this, or like our allies, who struggled hard trying to escape into peace with us since the Mega-Evil-Empire Function of MO3 didn’t make them hate us, the MEEF just forced the war state and then did nothing else, apparently.   Back to the Grendarl: Only two planets in Nu Tucanae left. Another assault begins.  And immediately succeeds, as the defenders retreat without firing a shot.  Well then.  Can you see what is off here? 320 ships against 31, who would win? Obviously not us. Yeah, so in planetary assaults, I’m from now on basically forced to always fight the battles manually, as the AI can’t even be trusted with 10:1 odds. At least in pure space battles, auto-battle still somewhat works as long as the numbers are lopsided enough in your favor, as all those green victories show. Another attempt by MO3 to force me into giving up, but by now I’m driven mostly by sheer spite. You lose again, Master of Orion III.  Next turn: Now the Grendarl-rebels only hold one system. Our fleets advance into the Keid-system.  By turn 896, our fleets at the Ithkul-front have reached Karaken, and exploring this system revealed three different routes going out from here. If it weren’t for our insane industry, this would be an even slower burn as you’d expect, with the need to cover my rear end at each point to prevent the Ithkul from counter-attacking. As it is, our Kingdom can churn out hundreds of moon-sized capitals fast enough I can, in fact, just drop a full fleet on each system. As we also have the Nommo to suppress, I’m opting for re-routing the hundreds of ships from the Grendarl-front instead. Nothing is more embarrassing than getting hosed because you don’t have the ships handy to stop an unexpected flaw in your grand strategy.  Karaken has eight planets. That’s eight turns minimum, to clear this cesspit of tentacle monsters. And we’re already heading for overtime, thanks to me loving up the first turn we arrived.  One turn later, and a first advance force of just approx. 200 ships arrives in Keid. The Grendarl don’t really have a response, and the planetary defenses are hammered down.  The same combat phase sees a massive battle against the Ithkul. A glitchy, laggy mess that only looks impressive in static images.  Despite many glitches, massive system-crossing energy beams and fighters carry the day. The Ithkul don’t retreat, as they prefer to instead lose hundreds of ships. Seems the Ithkul want this to end, too.  Turn 897: The Grendarl have only four planets left.  The last of our pesky rioting neighbors: The Nommo were once just sitting outside Nazin, but despite many distractions, we slowly pushed them further out. A lot of those systems are constantly being swarmed by them, so any new push has to come from new ships, as all fleets here are committed to hold the line.  Our fleets assault Keid V. The Grendarl commit to its defense, mostly thanks to our under-sized fleet accidentally tricking the AI into thinking they can take us. Narrator’s voice: They couldn’t.  Keid V dies. Also, when reviewing my screenshots I realized this planet was artificial. Lucky that Keid V only had that one special, or the UI could have randomly selected one of the others, then I would have never known because I’m so done with this game by now  Someone, potentially the Orions, the Antarans or even older space assholes, once came here and constructed an entire planet from scratch. Neat!  A bit late, but we manage to finally get one of the Ithkul-planets in Karaken. I’m kind of slain again by how out of whack orbital bombardment calculations are: Our fleet not only wiped an entire planet clean in one turn, the sizable army sitting on the planet only suffered 50% casualties. Once upon a time, I thought I could showcase planet-killer designs. But they’re right here: Just look at them in action! Planet-killers are one of many ideas the devs had and then couldn’t really deliver on. (If you want to get technical, the only difference between one of our giant Leviathans with its spinal-mounted monster cannons and a planet-killer is that one isn’t labeled “planet-killer” in our empire’s bureaucracy. But mechanically, they are the same.)  Unexpectedly, turn 898 has more science news: We notice that the miniaturized sublight vortex drive has hit a rather nasty overdraw and will still take 7 turns more to complete, while the planetary supercomputer decided to drop by. A Planetary Supercomputer is a military building, so it can only be built with an AI-governor is switched on or if you do the deed yourself. No regional auto-build here. It gives a +6 output bonus to each research DEA on the same planet, which can be a lot if it’s a planet dedicated to research. If it isn’t, not so much. It took thousands of years, but the old 1980s’ idea of the giant supercomputer is made new again. This thing is city-sized and coordinates the research efforts of an entire planet, taking up the hardest tasks by itself so the normal computers can be put to more mundane uses, presumably so the scientists can play Elite: Dangerous on them or something.  Our fleet in Karaken assaults the next target. I’ll never get tired of seeing our ships automatically firing at targets off-screen on the other side of the map from the moment they spawn. Sadly, the next MO3-mod I want to showcase in the far future doesn’t have Ultima Orion’s insane tech bloat, so you won’t get scenes like this anymore.  Th Ithkul wisely remove themselves, unwisely abandoning billions of intelligent, sapient creatures to our mercy.  Another Grendarl-planet dies off-screen.  It’s hard to empathize with brain parasites. At least Harvester Gamma is nice enough to kill the entire population in days and then die off, leaving a nice and silent planet for you to find. Harvester Alphas are constantly whining while we burn them from space. So annoying!  By turn 899, a big wave of colonizers arrives over ex-rebel planets and a batch of new colonies re-enter galactic civilization. Peace wins!  The Grendarl manage one last fiendish strike: By having two planets left in turn 899, thus making it mechanically impossible to be wiped out in turn 900! Oh no! Our Turn 900 Anniversary is doomed! Seriously though, this rebellion is nearing its end, too. And I even managed to save enough planetary populations to secure the future of their species! I think I only saved more Humans because their planets were denser in population.  Our reserves allow it, and Ithkul-system Seki is far enough away I don’t want to wait, so another full 320-ship fleet is on the move out from Arawn.  It’s hard to see in this brutalizing going on, but we’re beating up more Grendarl here.  The penultimate Grendarl-planet falls. To death.  GC 1350: This particular run has now been going for 900 turns. In other news, one of our unrecoverable and by now totally useless Antaran Expeditions hits zero ships and is now gone entirely. More importantly, an unexpected huge wave of unrest is hitting the Ahafera-system, even crossing over into strikes and open revolt. What is this in the news about “Raas Noble Out of Control in Adhafera”. Wait a minute is that…? Is he pissing on that library wall?   OK, that was weird. Almandin Fleet Command makes more sense: The AFC informs me that the plans for the final assault on rebel planet Keid III are ready.  Our fleet launches fighters and bait missiles into the enemy.  The valiant Grendarl defenders await them.  Except for that lone squadron of starships. Their commander suddenly gets cold claws and decides to become a pirate instead. They jump out and leave everyone else to their deaths.  They die.  The defenders curse the Almandian Fleet until their last transmitter is obliterated by antimatter-beams from orbit. They valiantly refuse to surrender to the last man, woman and child. The idiots. Later it is confirmed that the lone commander going rogue was only playing for time until he got as many civilians who didn’t want to die together with their terrorist government on board as possible. Everyone in the Orion Sector is surprised when he later shows up in the Nimbus-system, his ships filled with thousands of Grendarl-civilians. He becomes a Hero of the Kingdom for his actions.  GC 1351, turn 901: The Orion Sector breaths slightly easier, as another rebel group is eliminated. But already more trouble brews, as more and more planets report massive unrest. And suddenly it is confirmed: Enemy spies have crossed over from rebel-held territory in what the news are now dubbing “the Fascist Rim” and are engaged in helping local fascist groups rise up to terrorize innocent civilians. OK, so maybe it’s not just our snobbish councilor responsible, though his +7% annoyance is probably not helping.  The Chinese government told me the best way to deal with public unrest is lots of tanks. And so it is in MO3, too. Technically, we could just out-wait the unrest. One planet out of 700 (by now) is a lot less disrupting than one out of 100, or 20. But that wouldn’t be very funny.  Every planet where the situation is bad enough they show up in my sit-rep as being in open revolt gets an army, or at least a corps of tanks to sit on them, then I move on to more important things. Like demobilizing hundreds of active ships in the now pacified Grendarl subsector.  Nommo and Ithkul, you are the last ones.  With my attention now only divided between two fronts, it’s time to push deeper into Nommo-territory. A massive fleet group carrying three armies is about to hit Duven, neatly side-stepping the thousands of Nommo-ships hanging around our borders.  Even our combat phases are more relaxing now, as half a dozen strings of tiny counter-attacks by the Grendarl now don’t happen anymore.  GC 1353: The game decides to be cheeky. Since two enemy empires can’t generate enough spies to really hurt us anymore, the game instead fucks our spy defenses for a while. gently caress you too, game. gently caress you too. Enemy Empires: DEAD and GONE:  Next: Age of Rebellion V: The Final Final Frontier
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Dec 29, 2023 17:40
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Ding, Dong, the Ithkul Witch, the Ithkul Witch is (nearly) dead! The game is starting to come to a close! You might even finish it bfeore 2025 now! Go you. It's been one heck of a ride.
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Dec 29, 2023 17:50
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Can you imagine, a game of MOOO finished? And it might have taken....only about oh, 8 years? A-MAZING. I'm sure not even games like "Grigsbys War in the East" and similar Wargames can content with such beasts of gameplay.... 
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Dec 29, 2023 22:52
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I think it's kind of strange that they put a race like the Ithkul in the game and then don't really give them any sort of novel mechanics.
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Dec 30, 2023 00:19
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Well, they do have their weird people eating mechanic. If you're playing Ithkul, them getting mad at not being at war and not having enough aliens to eat can be a headache in the early-to-mid-game, when your resources aren't overwhelming enough yet to combat the constant unrest from your space assholes. Using slavery is further disincentivized by this, as working foreign pops to death just maximizes the amount of unrest an Ithkul-player has to deal with. On top of reducing your own pop growth by strangling one of your food sources. Though mercifully, it's not the 1:1 dual mode of Cybernetiks. (Other races eat either 1,0 food/mineral or 0,5 food+mineral, the amount of alien population the Ithkul need to eat on the other hand, is small enough you won't get nasty famines from not having aliens to eat. Though I'm mostly speculating here, as the effects on morale and pop growth are fairly minor when compared to the fast track to ruin you get with famines on other species!) Having a special mechanic that's just strong enough to annoy everyone involved, but not strong enough to be game changing, seems to be on brand for Orion 3: Game of Masters.
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Dec 30, 2023 00:38
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Libluini posted:Space Empires V did this better: Triggering the Mega-Evil-Empire threshold in SEV game forced all alien empires to work together, including forcing alliances and free exchange of technology. Effectively, any surviving enemies would be welded together in one, big blob of nasty hostility. In Master of Orion III, the devs apparently just forced every AI-empire to be at war with you, without changing anything else. And so you get cases like this, or like our allies, who struggled hard trying to escape into peace with us since the Mega-Evil-Empire Function of MO3 didn’t make them hate us, the MEEF just forced the war state and then did nothing else, apparently. Even the original Master of Orion did this better, although there the only way to trigger the threshold was to reject the council vote for who won the game.
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Dec 30, 2023 01:32
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So do the parasites just farm a nondescript population the rest of the time? How do they eat as citizens of your empire on a planet that's now devoid of other species?
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Dec 30, 2023 14:55
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SIGSEGV posted:So do the parasites just farm a nondescript population the rest of the time? How do they eat as citizens of your empire on a planet that's now devoid of other species? Mechanically, they just eat nondescript "food" that is grown in "agricultural DEAs", like every normal person, but they get slight depression from not being able to eat people, so you get more unrest. I can't remember where I read it, exactly (guide or galactopedia, most likely), but your pop growth goes down a bit, too. Not that the latter matters, Ithkul have the highest everything, so their population still grows faster than most others, even with the no-people eater penalty. One of the Ithkul-leaders you can get comes with a little lore blurb that explains that the Ithkul eventually switched from slowly draining people to slowly draining empty clones grown for this exact purpose. But since MO3 is too old to have some kind of trait switch system, that only matters after the game is over. If you want to, imagine the current Ithkul-government being too conservative and autocratic to allow the necessary social changes for all the population to switch over. (This only works from the viewpoint of the Ithkul, of course: the only way we can force them to not eat people is to quietly wait until all planets are settled, and all regions on said planets are full. At which point all pop growth and migration grinds to a halt, with nowhere to go.) Yes, this exactly. VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV Libluini fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Dec 30, 2023 |
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Dec 30, 2023 15:37
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I think it was hinted at in the flavor text for one or more vanilla Ithkul leaders, that if they can't find free range aliens to hunt they flash clone host bodies so they don't starve. But clearly they get pissy about it, probably due to the lack of cruelty or something. EDIT: Beaten ... I looked up the text string for the flavor text for that leader we both mentioned:LeaderName oversees the Harvester's host body manufacturing program, making sure that all Harvesters can be provided with a body to feed on when the Need is upon them. Her projects focus heavily on bioharvesting technologies, which often include mass cloning, cryogenic storage, steroidal enhancement, and radical genetic modifications. These projects are feared and reviled by most organic races; nonetheless, the improvements that she brings makes her valuable to those daring enough to stomach her presence. Yes, this is a leader that will work for other non-Ithkul Empires, apparently providing them 'host bodies' to feed on. No, don't ask questions about how this is supposed to make sense.
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Dec 30, 2023 15:38
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I'm always assuming that leader got thrown out by the conservative dickheads back home and is now switching to mass-cloning carrots or whatever to pay the bills. It's just having a huge brain parasite working for you and knowing they provided other Ithkul with look-alikes of your species as food is really, really creepy. Just imagine working for General Foods in Boston and one day at the water cooler you have a talk with your middle manager, a talking brain bug, and she's like "Oh yeah, in my last job I was cloning Human bodies for my people to feast on. But don't worry, they were just mindless clones genetically modified to be extra-tasty, not real Humans!" Your reaction would probably be a lot like this:
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Dec 30, 2023 15:44
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6+ hours into what I thought would be my final play session. For some reason, the negative events and strange behaviors are piling up now. If I were superstitious, I'd think the game is now actively fighting against being completed, ha ha ha ha ha
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Dec 30, 2023 23:00
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The game is so bugged it has evolved into self awareness 
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Dec 30, 2023 23:02
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you know what's really fun? looking at a static image for a full minute only for the battle timer to tick down by one second it's also really fun to not be able to do anything because my controls have long since given up it's really great I'm not lying I'm not lying
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Dec 31, 2023 00:09
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OK, huh. Apparently 7 hours is the limit for the game's engine in this state. The game just crashed after 20+ minutes of excruciatingly slow resolving battles Oh, well, time for another try. You know, making a game that only allows you to save after all of a turn's battles have resolved is kind of a genius move, if you want your players to hunt you down like an animal, the rage I'm currently feeling could wake the dead at this point
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Dec 31, 2023 00:20
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Joining Club Jade Star where your LP literally sets your computer on fire? 
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Dec 31, 2023 01:01
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Rappaport posted:Joining Club Jade Star where your LP literally sets your computer on fire? Eh, it would suck, but I've been playing Ultima Orion on my aging laptop. Though I'm hoping this little machine survives the next two days, because as soon as this shitshow is finished, MO3 gets purged from the harddrive so my mom can get an uncursed laptop. I certainly don't want to touch this thing again after the ordeal of the last, what? 8 years or so?
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Dec 31, 2023 01:14
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You're close to the end! Accept that the game will try to break you more than it ever has!
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Dec 31, 2023 03:33
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The game achieved a minor victory over my sanity: This LP won't end in 2023, which loving sucks. One last update for this year incoming.
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Dec 31, 2023 21:57
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 148: Age of Rebellion V – The Final Final Frontier GC 1353 – GC 1382 This update is given to you by my exhaustion after 8+ hours of constant playing.  When I last ended, I had just started throwing huge death fleets on any Ithkul-system in range and I was still hopeful to get this done in one go.  We also reached the point where our aging agents are getting more of a liability then anything, yet again. The constant red events loving over our spy defenses are just the icing on the top. A whole load of replacements are ordered, so they can finish training before the old ones are all dead. Sorry, Hole-in-the-Wall, you have to go. In two turns your luck-ticker would have killed you anyway. Now you can enjoy a nice “retirement”! The other agents weren’t this bad, so I at least can have them stand around being useless a bit longer.  Turn 903: The first enemy spies are abusing our spy defense being event-hacked. For some reason the AI seems to have noticed that our empire is just too loving gigantic to notice any attempts at military sabotage, and is only sending unrest-causing assholes for now.  Operation Pest Control hits a first snag: Karaken had so many goddamn planets, our colonizers now start interfering before all planets are clear.  This could have been painful, but the Ithkul oblige us by putting even more colony ships into their battle-line.  OPC-fleets approach yet another nest of brain parasites that needs cleaning.  The space brooms are deployed.  Surveying Seki revealed three more star lanes going further outwards. More targets are added to the OPC-llist.  Down in Karaken, more planets die to OPC-fleets.  The game joins the fight on the Ithkul-side: A full six task forces on our side are replaced by single colony ships. The Ithkul get a full ten combat task forces. Yeah, the game really does not want us to succeed. I made things worse by marking dead planets for colonization immediately, and cutting through eight planets one at a time took longer than anticipated, and now the colonizers are already here. The Ithkul do the same, but they don’t have our insane level of industry and population pressure throwing out colonizers in their dozens each turn, so they get to have less trouble on this front. And yes, one of the colony ships already died in the crossfire before I could make that screenshot.  Incredibly, our superiority is so big by now, we still win without serious losses. Too be fair, the orbitals are so old it’s not even funny, and the Ithkul were nice enough to send mostly smaller formations than full armadas. The full ship count was something like 160 Ithkul-ships against 120 Almandian ships. Our constantly re-spawning fighters just go to town on everything in sight and nothing can stop them.  Down on the other side of the map, our troops make groundfall on Duven IV, showing the Nommo-rebels they haven’t been forgotten.  Despite our troops cleaning their landing zones with nukes, only two planetary regions are secured after a long, dreary cycle of fighting. Both sides have roughly lost half their soldiers in casualties. A short calm descends as both armies gear up for another go. Considering how much larger our army was, this is one of those Pyrrhic victories. The sad thing? The combat engine can’t actually go higher than 2 regions lost or gained, anything else is either total victory or total defeat. And well, we didn’t clear the threshold for total victory, so despite heavily maiming the enemy, two regions are all we get. Another small change to MO3 that could make the game far better: Upping the number of regions lost/gained in a battle to something like 5, to make ground battles less of a slog.  In turn 905, our spy defense is still utterly hosed. Our own spies do their and shoot an Ithkul-spy, but another unrest-causer shows up to replace him, followed by a second spy: Luckily the second one is just an Intriguer, sabotaging our “diplomatic relations”. Hah! We still do have to care a little bit about Captain Diplomacy Destroyer there, since they’re still walking ablative armor protecting the other spy.  To my great annoyance, after that last bloody battle I looked closer at the “Nommo-planets” here and had to learn they’re mostly Darlok in population. No wonder that lop-sided battle turned into a bloody slog! Nommo, like all the fish people from Trilar, don’t have the greatest ground troops, while the Darlok are one of the best sources of ground troops you can have. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean all the ground troops here are home-grown, but it does mean all the local militia are probably harder to crack than our battlemechs. It doesn’t bode well for future ground invasion though, as I counted 8 more Darlok-colonies across nearby Nommo-space. That’s a lot of places to recruit troops from.  Another big battle follows, just to burn down another planet in the Duven-system, because gently caress it, I aint gonna take all of them with troops. We already have Darlok of our own, so it’s not even about preserving the species anymore. In truth, we reached a phase where there are 3-4 big battles to fight each turn, and I’m only counting the planetary assaults I have to do manually. I’m sparing you a lot of ugly, glitchy-looking screenshots.  GC 1359: Our troops push the Nommo back on Duven II. We control four regions now. Again, a lot of people on both sides died, with a lot of our own deaths caused by Darlok-militia shape-shifting into Almandian officers and then giving our troops stupid, contradictory orders.  Another combat phase, another battle across Duven II. Nearly every single enemy soldiers dies, and all the Nommo command centers are obliterated by deep strike nukes, but the fighting exhausts itself due to mundane logistical reasons. Our troops advance yet another two regions, but the planet refuses to surrender.  With turn 907 rolling around, about a dozen Ex-Grendarl colonies reach the point where they go bankrupt trying to pay for left-over structures that survived the bombardment. A huge wave of auto-scrapped buildings follows.  Pressing forward, the fighting on Duven II looked to me like it was going fine, albeit slowly. The ground defense on Duven IV gets completely surprised by the three armies suddenly changing course and dropping on them instead of on Duven II. After a short fight, the capital falls to the advancing Almandian troops, and the planet surrenders. But uh oh, the defenders on Duven II have raised a completely new army. It’s a fraction of our own surviving armies’ size, but if they used Darlok-troops to field that formation, we’re in trouble...  Oops nope, they suck major rear end and fail so hard the entire rest of the planet surrenders at the end. Note for everyone who wants to play as the deep sea squids: While it’s true that your troops are better than the Trilarians’, “better than a sack full of poo poo” does not actually mean that much. Try to replace them with better troops from conquered populations asap.  The situation on the Nommo-front in turn 908: Most of one additional system has fallen, but not much movement anywhere else. Of course I keep smashing new super-fleets into the Ithkul while all of this was going on, so the situation will change rapidly after the last Ithkul die in hellfire.  Turn 909 sees multiple dying planets now, most of them of course Ithkul-colonies, but a lone Nommo-planet squeezes in to finish off the Duven-system. Most of my turn are by now 15-20 minutes watching the game struggle through 5-10 minutes of laggy, glitchy real-time battles, and then 3-5 minutes actual playing. Just look at one of my static screenshots until you get headaches, and add some pew-pew noises in your head while doing so. That’s basically how the battles run this deep into the end-game.  Curiously, there’s a lot of rioting and revolting going on, but only on a couple new systems. Probably spies, but let’s take a look.  One revolting planet at random: Too high unemployment, pirates, Imsaies being Imsaies, and “leader effect”. Welp, unemployment is because the game shovels new immigrants onto the colony faster than new DEAs can be built to house and employ them, that will naturally go down over time. Pirates is just the game deciding you’re not defending the planet hard enough, and the AI will eventually construct enough system ships to satisfy that. Not much can be done about alien populations being stroppy, that’s what government, recreation and military DEAs are there for. Spies can only be inferred, by the way: If there is a planetary revolt but not actually any real problems to cause them, it’s a spy. Otherwise, try to solve the problems! But “leader effect” comes only from one source. And I know that source.  gently caress off, dude. We don’t need your 7% unrest on top of everything else gong on. We also have 700+ planets to build poo poo, we can deal without your bonus. It’s this guy! That fucker! He’s rear end in a top hat enough our planets will show “leader effect” as long as he’s there, raising our unrest. He annoys me so much with this poo poo I immediately fire him to lower empire-wide unrest down again.  I nearly forgot, but most of the demobilized ships in transit crash into our reserves this turn. Apart from some of the newest carriers and combat Leviathans, they’re all too old, though. I dutifully click my way through the designs to scrap them all.  By turn 910 I pull back and concentrate on the Ithkul again. All around Seki, new OPC-fleets arrive to end the threat of Harvester Alpha.  Back down by Karaken, we’ve finally cleared the system and have pushed beyond. The next few turns will be a brutal butchery of Ithkul.  And while that’s true, the game decides we have had it too easy again, and our spy defense comes crashing down. Turn 911 gives me mental whiplash with half a dozen planets dying at once, and then this spy fuckery making me mad again.  Two turns later, we still fight a losing battle against hostile spies: A Nommo-spy dies, but we now have three active spies. One more than before!  But at least the Ithkul-cleansing goes on uninterrupted, and we even have some time harassing the Nommo: More ground troops rain down, mostly because the planets taken so far had near zero Nommo-population. It’s a bit hard to save a species if they’re not actually living on their planets! We went full-on genocide with this landing, and still lost most of three armies just getting down. I’m getting headaches again.  GC 1371: Finally, another spy goes down. Another one got caught, and so there’s currently only one hostile spy plaguing us.  Since we still have ground troops to lose, I decide to assault another planet in the Barnard-system. At least two planets with billions of Nommo each should be enough to safeguard their survival.  First though we stomp the defenders on Barnard V. Turns out our initial attack spraying NBC-weapons all over the place poisoned the planet so badly the Nommo are pulling out. Victory!  Barnard IV, our target for this turn, only faces a completely mundane, normal attack. The defenders, weight down by all their heavy NBC-gear, don’t stand a chance.  Turn 915! Even the systems nearby Karaken have now fallen to the OPC-advance and now we’re heading into what once was the outermost edge of the Ithkul’s evil empire of doom.  Progress against the Nommo is a lot slower, thanks to my irrational choice of using ground troops. We have taken four planets now, and two of them have actual Nommo-populations. Therefore I’ve decided to just scrap the rest of my transports. Time to end this farce.  GC 1374: A new event! (Or at least one I don’t remember.) The game just unilaterally decides that the people of planet place name here are now in revolt. Why are the people of (in this case) Chara IV in revolt? Because gently caress you, that’s why.  The combat phases have turned into some kind of bizarro work you do for no pay: First, your long list of battles. Planetary assaults all manually, of course. Then, a long list of orbital bombardments to do. All manually, as the game otherwise flips a coin and randomly decides to spare the planets you want to kill. Then there’s a final list for your ground combats. Only afterwards gets the rest of the turn processed. If anything goes wrong in this long list of tasks, gently caress you, you start back at the beginning of the last turn -and only if you are smart and save every turn. Another MO3-tip: Save. Every. loving. Turn.  Turn 917: The “unknown reasons”-hits Mirror III, causing a really stupid nonsensical revolt that will go nowhere with the amount of unrest-sinking on our core worlds. It is, however, very, very annoying to get these events constantly, like it is happening now.  The anti-proton cannons on our modern fighters give this weird, yellowish-light that destroys anything it touches. Kind of neat!  Another battle in the same combat phase had me guess my own sanity again: I really thought I had sent a mix of carriers and direct-fire ships to the next couple of Ithkul-systems, but apparently not. This one got a bunch of long-range task forces and that’s it. But since no fighters on our side means less lag, I was able to manually direct those terrifying monsters to insta-kill any target in range. Which, as you can see, is a lot. Also in case you have really good eyes, the groups of weird pink clouds are our bait missiles launching from our Leviathans, not our fighters.  Half a dozen dead planets later, and we’re in turn 918. More and more Ithkul-systems turn from green to white, and more and more behind get touched by our death fleets coming for a visit. Our campaign against the Ithkul is going incredibly fast, it’s just the longer and longer times the turns take that make this seem like an ordeal. Back in our Raas War, 20 turns could be done in a couple hours. Now, well, just about 20 turns took me a little bit over 8 hours this session. That’s not a good ration.  Die Die Die Die Die DIE  Just to punch this into your faces, I tried auto-battle again for assaulting a planet in the Croth-system. The result? A fleet of 320 couldn’t beat a fleet of 15! Just look at this poo poo!  And so, for the rest of this game, all planetary assaults have to be done manual. Which is, of course, you carefully wrangling with the lagging, unresponsive interface until you can select all your task forces and then give at least one valid attack command, otherwise only your fighters and missiles will do anything. Case in point: I had 7:30 minutes put down as battle length, 8 years ago when I started this LP, and the timer for this battle shows you how long it took me to do the very simple task of selecting my ships and giving them an order. And this battle, in which inputting a single order took 1 minute and 15 seconds, was one of the smoother ones. I had battles where the timer was so slow I legit thought the game had hang up on me.  It was genuinely hard work, but another turn of genocide is done: One Nommo-planet, four Ithkul-planets, just died in the combat phase before turn 920 started. We now have GC 1380, and the last two rebellions are slowly being extinguished. Hard work I had to do twice, because the game crashed after processing the final battle in the combat phase.  Turn 921: This is my life now, killing billions of intelligent, sapient beings, against my will, over and over again just to defeat this game.  Our insanity at least made the Ithkul fold in like a wet house of cards: There are a couple systems just out of sight in the south, but what you see is basically it now.  The Nommo have far more poo poo left to destroy.  I’m so done with this, even the Nommo feel the pain of fast mode now: Only death fleets, no ground troops.  This gave me a nice little chuckle at the end of a long night: Throwing out that rear end in a top hat Raas noble a couple turns ago suddenly results in us getting the communist version: A working-class industrialist Raas that needs more money to pay the workers better, and in turn we get a huge production bonus. Nice! And then I had to stop just before destroying the Ithkul, because no-one should be forced to play end-game Master of Orion for eight hours straight. My exhaustion and headaches got the better of me. Let’s see if we can kill both those fuckers at the same time, or if the game manages to grind me down one final time before things mercifully end. Enemy Empires: DEAD and GONE: Next: Age of Rebellion VI: The Undiscovered Country
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Dec 31, 2023 23:26
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Well at least we'll probably be done before the end of 2024, right? Right?
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Dec 31, 2023 23:37
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PurpleXVI posted:Well at least we'll probably be done before the end of 2024, right? Right?
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Jan 1, 2024 00:19
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