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You poor crazed man playing rocks. A saner man would have stopped ten years ago.
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Jan 1, 2024 01:04
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Huh. So, apparently there is a maximum threshold of messages the SitRep in Master of Orion III can display before things start going sideways. Around 750 planets reporting all at once seems the point where the UI starts getting funky. Luckily, the game allows you to switch off messages from planetary construction, so we're still not defeated!
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Jan 3, 2024 18:37
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Its now become a question of what will break first You or the game.
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Jan 3, 2024 19:22
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don' worry, it doesn't look good for the game right now I'm just loving around to take revenge on MO3 for my own amusement, doing RP poo poo like slashing the military budget "because we're at peace now" and sending terrorists into our lone surviving space rival but it's coming down to the final line now, probably tomorrow I'll be done, and then I'll write the last 1-2 updates
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Jan 3, 2024 21:34
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The game broke before your sanity did.
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Jan 4, 2024 02:05
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You have to consider that he did start this LP with full knowledge of what it implied.
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Jan 4, 2024 02:06
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Finally! FInally the mental breakdown shall end (along with the computer that has all the backup saves)
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Jan 4, 2024 06:50
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wedgekree posted:Finally! FInally the mental breakdown shall end (along with the computer that has all the backup saves) Don't worry, I switched to the Cloud a long time ago. The amount of servers that have to die to kill my data is staggering. Like, at the point all my data is dead, the world would be, too. Also, it's done. Last screenshots, some last goodbye videos of the final moments. And of course, I immediately deinstalled MO3 from my notebook. If I ever go back, I have a less insane mod and GOG, thank you very much. That old CD is getting retired.
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Jan 4, 2024 15:55
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Libluini posted:If I ever go back, I have a less insane mod and GOG, thank you very much. That old CD is getting retired.  
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Jan 4, 2024 16:04
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Libluini posted:
Whoo! You finally did it. You crazed lunatic that decided to do this in the first place! ... There should be some sort of forum reward for this for keeping this going nearly a decade from start to finish.
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Jan 5, 2024 00:58
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I'm still writing! No new health problems! But our city got hit by a train strike at the same time the streets were filled with angry farmers for dumb, local political reasons, and so I had multiple 13-hour work days, on account of my work place being in a town outside my city, and therefore in prime target range for this stuff. Until now I was too exhausted to do more than shitpost, but you can expect a new update on the weekend.
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Jan 12, 2024 20:59
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Yay! I twouldn't be this game if there were more holdups between the game and RL! I'm glad that tradition keeps up to the very end!
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Jan 13, 2024 00:05
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I'm frankly surprised the laptop didn't melt into a flaming puddle the instant you hit "quit" for the final time.
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Jan 14, 2024 17:50
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 149: Age of Rebellion VI – The Undiscovered Sector GC 1384 – GC 1425 The final final final stretch begins. This time, it’s for real because I finished the game! Hallelujah! Now It’s just down to me writing a lot.  It’s action time! A couple of turns of annoying unrest follows.  GC 1386: Some of our agents have “retired”, some enemy spies are getting interrogated. A situation any player of MO3, vanilla or otherwise, will find themselves in a lot of time.  It’s time for the Ithkul to die. Most of their remaining systems are gone now, and I move up some of my fleets to get this done faster.  Which then immediately bites me in the rear end, as in the single turn I leave Croth uncovered, some Ithkul-colonizers drop down and re-colonize the wastelands I left behind. I wasn’t joking about needing cover fleets on all cleared systems to prevent this exact sort of thing. Two task forces are carefully split from one of my main fleets to go and bomb those colonies back down before they can recover too much. Since the AI gets bonuses even on normal difficulty, there’s a good chance that in a couple more turns, those planets will have a mobilization center, at which point the Ithkul can throw annoying pest fleets into our backyard, slowing everything down even more. No thank you.  Turn 925: Our execution fleets haven’t arrived back here yet and just look at this mess: Two planets recolonized, population already growing at disturbingly high speeds. Next turn, they’ll need to die again, or we soon have an actual problem here. The reason they’re growing so fast has nothing to do with population growth, at least not alone: The Ithkul only have a few planets left, but we’re in the end-game, so they’re all pretty much filled up. As the migration mechanics need population to function, we now encounter another neat side-effect: As your core-worlds fill up, the excess pop growth is instead fed into the migration mechanic and moves around to planets with still some place left for new people. One of the reason we keep having unrest-problems on outer planets, beside spies and noble assholes in our council, is that this mechanic boosts our pop growth by extreme amounts: As long as there is empty space available, the pop growth of multiple core-worlds with their many billions of people is shunted to any new colonies and of course they will then grow faster than the game can actually build new stuff. Ironically, the massive pop boost will also boost local production, just not fast enough. But I can let this slide, and even begrudgingly accept our enemies profiting from this system. I will even willfully ignore that this accidental pop boost system makes it even harder to argue in favor of ground invasions: Killing a planet, re-colonizing it and then waiting 2-3 turns is enough to have billions of new people created and crammed into the new colony at high speeds. The only drawback left to senseless killing is that most of the buildings will be gone. We’ve actually been eating into Ithkul- and Nommo-territory at absurd speeds all this time: Many of the planets cleared in the first wave are now already close to full, despite having only a small number of development areas built. The system works well, but in a better balanced game the devs should maybe consider slowing down this frictionless population transport a little. At this time, hundreds of full planets are capable of generating a population pressure that is both impressive and obscene. I guess it’s fine as long as you also don’t think about what happens to all those billions of people generated each turn when you don’t colonize people, and there is no place for them to go: Mechanically, pop growth just stops. Just please, don’t think what this means for the actual people being born who have no place to go.  Just one turn before our revenge fleets arrive, and Croth is back up to four planets now.  The tech tree still sometimes gives out new candy, just not always prime-quality: The improved dark energy beam tech makes our dark energy beams better. As always with this new and improved modded tech tree, this new improvement is several hundred years too late.  The Ithkul are aggressive enough to put down new ground troops on every planet, even if it’s just a newborn colony. Our answer: Orbital bombardment.  Turn 927: We receive a message that one of our still running Antaran Expeditions has failed, with the last ship lost. Well, OK. I keep forgetting we still have them hanging around. There really should be a re-call option for after you’ve found all the secret X-techs. Is no-one telling those guys their work is done? Or is the government just seamlessly switching to archaeology done for the good of science? I sure hope it’s the latter.  Let’s go back a moment to my rant about excessive pop growth boosts. This is Hokhma II, one of our newest colonies. You can easily tell it’s a new colony because 11 regions allow the construction of 22 DEAs, but currently only two exists on the planets surface. This means this colony is something like 4-8 turns old, depending on how the planet was before colonizing, and a look in the lower right reveals that the planet must have been near perfection for the population, as even our end-game terraforming can’t work quite that fast. The population however, is at 128k from 163k possible population units. That’s insane.  A look at the regions reveals what has happened: The lone region colonized by Silicoids is probably the region where the colony ship hit, while the entire rest of the planet has filled up with Phaigur and some Imsaies, species who are well-adapted to planets with crushing high gravity and Phaigur can deal perfectly fine with Earth-like climates, this makes Silicoids, who need slightly less gravity and a lot more temperature, oddly at odds with this colony. But our empire has tons and tons of filled-up core-worlds with trillions of Imsaies and Phaigur on them, and they all gladly shunted their excess pop growth into planets like Hokhma II. Even Humans would fit better here than our native Silicoid-population. Ironically, I burned down so many Earth-like planets over there in Human Land, their own population is busy getting shoveled into the new colonies right next to their surviving core planets. Anyway, there you have it: MO3 end-game does one thing right, it doesn’t let you wait for ages until new colonies are ready, it instead dumps an entire empire’s worth of pop growth onto every new planet you colonize, speedrunning their development with almost indecent haste.  Other parts of the game however continue their slow breakdown: Here I’m forced to snipe single orbitals because my task forces just grind to a halt after executing any order now. Fighters and missiles still launch on their own, sometimes, but direct-fire ships will need to be forced along. If the enemy is too weak to attack them, they’ll just sit there all battle. I suspect stuff like this is the main reason auto-battles keep failing when the enemy is too weak. The other reason is planets: Planets have orbitals, and if they’re not in range and can’t attack your fleet, both the orbitals and your ships will just sit quietly until the timer has been run down.  But then the game presents more evidence that undermines my theories: This screen tells me my auto-assault on Nitzer ended in a draw after what must have been the local orbitals being destroyed. But if the fleet was capable of attacking the orbitals and the planet, why did a fleet of 320 against 7 targets not win in time? Could be there were no orbitals, just some dumb system ships rushing in and getting destroyed, then the failing AI didn’t manage to re-target the planet. But who knows? With programming this crappy, goblins and gremlins are also valid possibilities.  Turn 927 has me tackling another end-game problem: After a while, you will start to notice your AI getting awfully stingy in targeting new planets for colonization. Your forces will clear plenty of new planets for your empire, but your hundreds of planets will only once in a blue moon decide to actually build new colonizers. And so you have to take one of your industry worlds and put down a couple dozen ships by hand, otherwise those new systems will just remain mostly blank forever. At least in Ultima Orion, forcing the AI’s hand like this results into it suddenly remembering how things work and throwing around a massive colonization wave at the targets in range of the system. Which is anything connected by visible star lanes, by the way. Any time you discover systems in deep space, only connected by the “invisible” star lanes the game isn’t showing you, the game’s colony system will just ignore them. Every time you want to colonize one of those disconnected systems, you’ll have to built colony ships and assign task forces manually.  It took us a while, but our engineers found out how to scan ships trying to pass into our borders with really fine scanners. This makes it easier to find enemy spies trying to hide inside them. I imagine our custom controls until this day only politely asked any infiltrators if they had spies on board. Also, this tech gives us +5 to spy discovery. Is it +5% chance, or +5 to the relevant skills, which would be more like 0,5% improvement? The answer is yes.  Now that the Kingdom of Almandin is running out of enemies capable of recruiting spies, we get a tech to better find them. Remarkable timing. Anyway, Croth and now Nitzer are cleared, the Operation Pest Control ships are moving into the final part of the Parasite Quarantine Zone.  GC 1398: A Nommo-spy gets shot,and our Anti-Ithkul fleet hits Scorpio, one of the last systems remaining.  One down, six more to go.  Down below the Ithkul screaming for mercy, our progress against the Nommo also picks up, especially now that I’ve abandoned my idea of using ground troops. We have liberated some planets, that’s enough. Now it’s killing time.  The Ithkul have only 12 planets left.  Turn 933 tells us we get Bio-Regenerators soon, a tech that reduces the effect of pollution by rising the ecology level on a planet by 1. The description is :l o l: : Your people plant biomass and advanced microbes underground, to generate new fossil fuels at high speed. I guess we use a lot more plastic in our space society then I assumed. It’s not like spaceships use gasoline. Another tech that was obviously just put there otherwise the Biology-category would have had even more empty levels here. Seriously, we’re getting into mod parts that were unfinished now. Abandon all your ideas of balance, all of ye who enter here.  Turn 934 sees another weirdo show up, this time a Klackon: Good at production and money, but also irritating to our population. I don’t really need more production or money at this point, but… money!  The final three Ithkul-systems.  Slow but steadily, we move towards the end.  GC 1404: Three more dead planets to the pile.  Currently, we’re sieging down four different systems, two Nommo and two Ithkul. This allows me to speed things up a bit by killing four planetary populations a turn at once.  By turn 938, the Ithkul only have two planets remaining.  All the Ithkul who would be willing to surrender, have surrendered. Cloning and medical facilities have been put up on some of the destroyed planets to tend to the survivors. Remnants of the old rebel government, the Purple People Eater Party and the Galactic League of Brain Parasites, have fled to Zeta Cygni. Government forces are moving in for the kill.  Turn 942: On another frontline, government troops are busy suppressing the FFF. The Nommo-founded Fascists Forever Front is losing on ground, but the fighting is fierce.  Dunraven has become the gate to the final six rebel-held systems.  OPC-troops have arrived in the last Ithkul-system. Zeta Cygni III burns to illuminate their arrival.  Turn 943: OPC-troops prepare for the final assault. The PPEP-members try to surrender, but are slaughtered by the fanatics of the GLBP. After the battle for control is over, the GLBP kills all Non-Ithkul on the planet. The OPC Fleet Commander, Shultak Kickrockson, contemplates for a while to just let them starve, but the government overrules them: It is time to end this for good.  The final fleet thrown together to destroy the Ithkul-threat slowly glides into assault range of the planet.  The defenders try their best, but morale is low, and most of them are starving. The massacre is mercifully swift.  The final remnant of the old Ithkul-regime dies on Zeta Cygni II. The rebellion is over, the threat of Harvester Alpha ends with it. The only survivors are the few civilians who escaped the horrid nightmare of their empire before the fall.  GC 1416: The Orion Sector rejoices, this time less because another grim, long war finally burned itself out, and instead they celebrate the death of the Ithkul-menace. Surviving Ithkul agree to be genetically modified to only be compatible with artificially grown clone-bodies, and are forbidden from traveling to the core worlds of the Kingdom of Almandin, for their own safety: Feelings about the Ithkul-regime are still running strong, atrocities would be unavoidable. The survivors instead settle down out in the border-regions, including their own devastated planets. And so I can explain away any remaining Ithkul-pops surfacing on new colonies, thanks to the migration-mechanic. The bit about the core worlds is of course, because of the limitations of the system: Full regions can’t take on any more immigration, so all of our already filled planets are save from getting a tentacly little visitor at night. (The genetically modified to be harmless idea was the only thing I could think of to make peaceful coexistence possible, it’s sadly not part of the game otherwise. Lore only, and not even official lore, just my personal fanfic. Sorry.)  Welp, it took us 944 turns, but now we’ve ground down the competition to only own empire: The Nommo.  To celebrate, the emergency laws face another round of repeals: Our now far safer society goes down from 5 to 4 on the Oppressometer. Suddenly, freedom!  As technically speaking, there’s nothing the Nommo could do to us that would be considered a threat, I’m also going through our old building plans and put “research” into a couple more spots, one of my many attempts to defeat our hulking bureaucracy and maybe get some more tech levels out before the game ends.  Our first turn after the end of the Ithkul: Nommo-spies are now dying every single turn, as there no other spies left to take those fancy space bullets for them.  By turn 946, every single one of the old Ithkul-systems has our colonies growing out of the ashes, like some kind of fast-growing crystal.  GC 1420: I wasn’t joking. The Nommo aren’t giving up, and despite lowering our anti-terror laws again, our spies have no trouble at all catching them. Each turn, one dead enemy spy. Kind of refreshing, really. I’ll take it as long as this streak holds.  Turn 949: Dunraven is cleared, the front is now this single chokepoint.  By turn 953, we’ve reached a stupefying 772 planets in our kingdom. A deathly silence has descended on the Orion Sector, as the Nommo-rebels have been trapped in their tiny sub-sector, and public opinion demands further military cutbacks, now that the dreaded Ithkul are gone. The Kingdom of Almandin, exhausted from never-ending, centuries-lasting war, agrees. Almandian fleets concentrate in Dunraven, and remnants of the once mighty Nommo-fleets are cleared behind the lines, but all major military operations grind to a halt. Of course, this is the explanation inside the game. Outside of it, I’m doing this in a last ditch attempt to force march us through the last tech levels. Will we actually manage to defeat our greatest enemy yet: Exponential numbers? Stay tuned! Enemy Empires:  DEAD and GONE:                Next: Age of Rebellion VII: Orion Generations
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Jan 14, 2024 18:09
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It's (nearly) over. Nearly, nearly over. Just one more post to go! ... Presuming the game doesn't fail again, or something else comes up! Congratulations on finishing the game nearly short of a decade! Those who wagered he'd be done by 2030 have to pay up! Congratulations you madman. The rocks are done. There's peace throughout the galaxy (nearly).
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Jan 14, 2024 20:27
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Libluini posted:I'm still writing! No new health problems! Looks like the Nommo spies have taken a different approach, and are now formenting unrest on Actual Earth!
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Jan 14, 2024 22:12
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It's going to happen! It's going to happen! The LP will finish!
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Jan 14, 2024 22:28
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No it won't. It won't finish. It is LP eternal stop jinxing him you bastards
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Jan 14, 2024 23:01
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The end is in sight, which is a perfect time for your car to break down.
SIGSEGV fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Jan 15, 2024 |
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Jan 15, 2024 23:02
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SIGSEGV posted:The end is in sight, which is a perfect time for your car to break down. Ha, ha! You fool! I don't own a car! Or a driving license! Or enough working eyes to get one! 
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Jan 16, 2024 17:10
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Ah, it's going to be the water heater then, or central heating.
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Jan 16, 2024 17:38
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SIGSEGV posted:Ah, it's going to be the water heater then, or central heating. How soon we forget (both water heater and heating broke down already, though to be fair, the water heater burned out years before I started this LP but yeah, my old gas burner had to be replaced, something my landlord turned into a nearly year-long ordeal, which of course wasn't easy to deal with during a time of regular hospital visits)
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Jan 16, 2024 17:48
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He's warming himself by burning hundreds of planets and trillions of aliens to ash.
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Jan 16, 2024 18:03
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Tigey posted:He's warming himself FTFY
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Jan 16, 2024 21:38
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 150: Age of Rebellion VII – Orion Generations GC 1425 – GC 1497 This is the real penultimate update. And it only exists because of the futile wish for peace, fancy that.  Surprise! There’s a maximum number of messages the SitRep-screen can digest, and above that the screen gets hosed. Is this run doomed now?  GC 1431: The Orion Sector is mostly at peace. Only few rebels remain. And here is the answer: Nope, as long as you switch off just enough messages to drop below the maximum, things will return to normal. But seriously, I was very glad that this was my last and final play session.  GC 1434: Negotiations with the last rebel faction continue, but the Nommo don’t make things easy. Another round of talks fails with no result. In this case I poked them demanding three more planets from them. But by now the hidden modifier making sure there’s no peace are at rage zombie levels of reason, and so they very politely tell us to go gently caress ourselves.  A new council member appears! She is a hard-core militarist and ground troop general, though thankfully, she comes with a 10% reduction to fleet maintenance costs, so I’ll overlook the useless bonuses (and the hidden unrest penalty).  GC 1437: Without the needs of constant warfare, technological development in the Kingdom of Almandin has slowed down considerably. My plan to just hit end turn until we get all the final techs hits a first little snag: Our gigantic empire has amassed so much bureaucracy, this plus the multipliers from higher tech levels have moved the goal posts so far they’re out of range for basic ocular sensors. Even with nearly everything concentrated on the three main categories we want to squeeze dry, we’re at 2-3% progress per turn. This may take a while.  Turn 961: Nothing much to report, except the Nommo managed to steal our energy armor tech. Luckily we don’t use ground troops anymore, so them getting better armor for their troops is irrelevant to the Nth degree at this point.  Turn 965: The fuckers steal the ECCM V technology, allowing them to slightly degrade the effectiveness of our own ECM and stealth techs. Still more annoying than dangerous.  The game pranks us again: The next tech arriving at our doors is also just better ground combat equipment. The Plasma Engulfer, a weapon we won’t ever see in action. But it makes a fine museums piece. Well, still better than another empty level, I suppose.  GC 1449: While the Orion Sector is at peace, the rebels keep sending in spies to taunt us back into action. Now it’s one of our modern stealth techs that walks out of the lab. More concerning, but with the ridiculous difference in scale, the Nommo slowly achieving technological parity only means slightly higher losses on our end. Wait, strike that: With how uneven our forces are, it still doesn’t make a difference.  GC 1449 also sees the Kingdom caving to popular demands to demobilize the economy. The financial setting droops from total war back to peace and prosperity. Ironically, this barely influences the amount of ships the AI will built, but reduces the amount of useless ground troops being built massively.  GC 1452: The economy slowly returns to peacetime mode, standard of living all across the Orion Sector begins to rise. Talks with the rebels continue, but constant subterfuge undermines them: When a Nommo-spy is revealed and killed in a shoot-out, public opinion turns.  Not enough for a return to military action: A plan that was voted into action by the Bimineralic Chamber of Almandin a couple cycles ago takes effect, and the military budget is slashed by several million Antaran Units. It’s something I only notice now, but earlier I slashed the military budget and put some more money into research, but it had not much effect because the large number of new colonies siphoned off money towards planetary subsidies. And the AI was “smart” enough to not weaken our military and took the needed money out of the research budget, negating my earlier changes. Now the research budget is back to its former height, and I’m really hoping the AI can now resist the urge to cut it again behind my back.  It’s still 1452: Time to massively reduce our fleet strength. Primarily in the old Ithkul-subsector, but there are tons of fleets all over the empire that get the cut. With the AI automatically building system fleets, we don’t need all these ships draining our wallets. They have to go. And the more ships we scrap, the more we prevent incentivizing the AI to keep the military budget up!  In GC 1453, my dumb attempt at forcing research completion sees some first success: Several new prototyping projects enter the queue. Kristallfestung/Crystal Fortress: The mod-only, even bigger ship hull after Leviathan. Needs a special yard to be built, and is another little hint that the mod was never finished: The modders were attentive enough to give every species their own fancy big capital “flagship”, and made sure you can only build them with the other tech giving you the ultimate shipyard. But. They miscounted. “Hyperschlachtschiff/Hyperbattleship” is what I renamed the “Flagship”-hullsize because I thought that sounded dumb as MO3 will churn those monsters out in big numbers, not just give you a “flagship”, as the name implies. Anyway, thanks to the miscount, the game already allows us to build those “Hyperbattleships”, but then again, the species-specific hyperbattleships are only allowed if you also have your final mod shipyard tech. In a way, you could argue that this is a minor thing, and needing two yard upgrades instead of one is a balance-thing, but really, that’s just me being generous. Königswerft/King’s Yard: As a translation explanation, this is not actually a royal yard, but “King” in the meaning of the best, a premium shipyard. This mod-only tech is necessary to build your flagships. As we get both at the same time, we actually can design and construct some of those “Crystal Fortresses”.  And so we do! The Extreme Ultra-Heavy Long-Range Democracy Crystal Fortress. The ultra-spinal mounted main guns alone do over 34k damage per shot. And since we don’t want to slow ourselves down with designing more escorts, the things also carry a truly insane amount of different point defense turrets, including multiple Phalanx-class turrets that can shoot multiple times per second. A full 32-ship armada could actually breach 1 million points of damage. Too bad there’s no enemy left to appreciate this overkill. Can you believe there are even stronger weapons still left in the tech tree? The modders apparently went very off the rails near the end.  GC 1470: Even with the fleet massively reduced in scope, some of the new “Crystal Fortress”-class giants slipped through, with the excuse being that each ship can replace ten Leviathans. As always in politics, superlatives defeat reality. Even with the AI lowering the military spending down to an average of 2% per planet, the genuinely largest ships in the game can be built in 4-6 turns. And we have over a hundred planets with that kind of massive industrial capacity. Scale: It’s terrifying.  Turn 981: Since waiting around for research to finish is boring, I start playing around with our spies. Spies Mediator and Swordfish are going in to make trouble in rebel land.  GC 1473: Swordfish, a Silicoid spy, actually makes it through. Big strong Grendarl Mediator however is forced to commit suicide to escape capture. 50% success rate, even after all the insane spy techs we developed during the game, against an enemy that is weak as poo poo. (Though to be fair, with our superiority we could simply recruit a dozen new spies and then send everyone we currently have in. I didn’t do that though, seemed excessive.  Turn 983: Swordfish the Terrorist blows up a building. I put this down as: Huge success.  Something I forgot in my excitement: Designing a fat carrier to go with our fat hyperbattleship. The Extreme Ultra-Heavy Carrier Freedom carries 134 of our tiny battlewarmers, who I remind you have identical stats to all types of space-superiority fighters. They’re just harder to hit and smaller. The obligatory mass of PD-turrets to avoid having to deal with escorts is of course, included. The AI-designer still tries to create carriers with the biggest, baddest, and therefore worst, giant bombers it can get. I think you can only fit something like 1/3rd of those into our new carriers. The modders tried really hard with the new fighter types, but hell, with mostly identical stats size becomes everything, and here this means the smaller, the better. And at least battlewarmers use the better fighter AI and have some in-built ECM to “simulate” the tiny things being hard to hit.  GC 1476: Our spy detonates a military building deep behind rebel lines.  Next turn, our terrorist plays Captain Planet Villain and destroys the environment on a Nommo-planet. Too bad the Nommo don’t have five teenagers handy to summon this guy, ha ha  GC 1479: After many cycles of terrorizing the terrorists, our hero Swordfish got captured. His torture begins.  GC 1480: News are leaking form rebel territory: The “interrogation” of Swordfish went wrong somehow, and he died during torture. The people are quite upset! Doing some environmental damage and blowing up a valid military target makes him worthy of being tortured to death??! Those bastards! Now I wish I could bring their spies back to live to have them shot again!   gently caress waiting for tech! Swordfish was a hero! Time for some payback, fishies!  The negotiations with the last rebel faction have broken down. The Almandian fleets lurch into movement yet again. Vengeance for Swordfish!  The fleet is ready, despite the many cutbacks. Even the gigantic crystal fortresses have been built in their hundreds. If I had thought of this, I probably would have gone into the text files and given our “hyperbattleships” a valid class short-hand, but even back then and being ten trillion times more optimistic, I didn’t really expect to ever build those things. So empty space it is. Looks a bit silly next to our proud Leviathans.  Another battle, another massacre.  GC 1494: The final campaign drags on. Despite constant successes, the population already starts to pity the rebels again.  GC 1497: An alien group of comedians tours through the Orion Sector, distracting the people from what is going on at the front. Oh, remember this one? It came up a couple times. It’s a rare good event, reducing unrest empire-wide.  The situation at turn 999: The Nommo have three systems left. Kind of funny, if I had given up on waiting around for research immediately, I could have finished this game before turn 1000. Is that good or bad? Enemy Empires: DEAD and GONE: Next: Age of Rebellion VIII: Orion Contacts
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Jan 19, 2024 12:53
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sometimes I wish I could just retract accidental misposts like this one anyway, since this post is already here: yes, the next update will be the last one, no more surprises, the game is really finished, it didn't re-install itself and force me to play more turns, it's not that cursed Libluini fucked around with this message at 13:00 on Jan 19, 2024 |
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Jan 19, 2024 12:56
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As far as you know.
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Jan 19, 2024 16:15
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It's all fun and games until a goat drunk on fermented ground apples slips it's way into a crucial data center and unknowingly presses the exact buttons needed to cause the release of a quarantined research virus into the Internet to sow havoc, including causing the meltdown of three nuclear reactors in Russia leading to the exchange of thermonuclear weaponry between India, Israel, China, Russia and Pakistan that kills 3 billion people and, incidentally, causes just enough radiation to fry your laptop seconds before you hit the post button for the last update
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Jan 19, 2024 16:20
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man I hate the positivity/forced optimism poo poo VVVV that's the joke Dawncloack fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Jan 20, 2024 |
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Jan 19, 2024 17:56
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I don't know, I didn't think that post was very positive at all!
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Jan 19, 2024 20:28
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Dammit, something else needs to break/go wrong! This thread is on schedule as it nears the end!
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Jan 20, 2024 01:28
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 151: Age of Rebellion VIII – Orion Contact GC 1497 – GC 1512 The end. The final update. There can be only one MASTER of ORION.  It is turn 999 and I’m so done with this. But 807 planets, not bad.  GC 1500, also known as turn motherfucking 1000! Nothing of note happens, we just get this weirdo who is the opposite of the production-leaders we had last update. Now they’re dead and we have those Raas boosting food production instead. Oragr Elr was behind a famous plan to turn food into money, to finance guerrilla-operations against their oppressors. Consequently, he know does the same thing here. We get more money and more food, but lose 10% production, a rather hefty penalty. If this game wasn’t already a rotting mummy at this point, I’d immediately fire him, but so, I just don’t care. Whatever man, here’s your highly-paid government post.  Turn 1001: Only two systems left. The space-clock is space-ticking, Nommo!  GC 1503: A freak accident causes interstellar communications in the rebel subsector to be disrupted. Apparently several relay stations maintained by Interstellar ComniCon Ltd. had been “sabotaged” by “extreme neglect”. The CEO has already resigned, after taking their retirement bonus, and several mid-level managers have been scapegoated. The company has issued an official apology for the disruption in service. All interstellar communication services in the Solocka Subsector will be restored “soon”. Ah, weird MO3 behavior 101. See, we killed all colonies connecting us with the Nommo, therefore the game thinks we are not in contact anymore. Our AI will now behave as if we are bombarding mysterious aliens from the great beyond, while the enemy AI just continues their war as usual. Including of course things like being allowed to send spies, while we aren’t.  An extremely silly situation: Two systems before the end, the game considers us “alone”. Alas, no mercy ending for us! We have to actually put in the work.  Another rebel planet falls.  GC 1506: Some more techs reach the prototyping phase. Probably the last ones, because this game sure as hell won’t drag on for the 200-300 turns necessary to unlock the last batch of techs. Overkill-Projektor Miniaturisierung II / Overkill-Projector Miniaturisation II Exactly what is says. Fire-power wise, this weapon is almost viable again. Sadly, it’s range is now far behind the power curve. And ships that just exploded because you hit first lose in this game. Durchdringene Jäger Anti-Protonenkanone / Piercing Fighter Anti-Proton Cannon An option for our ultimate fighter weapon. It makes fighters 50% bigger, in return both armor and shields of the target ships are reduced. Shields by 20%, armor by 25%. And as we found out by extensively playing the game, “shield efficiency reduction” can actually cause damage to bleed through. So while taking this upgrade massively reduces the numbers of fighters a carrier can carry, it also makes a large portion of their damage just phase through everything directly to the hull. Almost good! In fact, if you get to this point and have trouble dealing with Ultima Orions super-regen shields, it could be worthwhile to take. If it weren’t for this tech coming in so ultra-late. Seriously, our massive fighter deathballs can drop so much DPS it often results in immediate enemy fleet death anyway. Therefore, the massive reduction in DPS is not worth it, imho. Nanozertrümmerer / Nano Crusher Another tech too late to do much good: It’s also one of the harder to understand techs. Lore-wise, it’s easier: Nanobots are sprayed into the environment to seek out and destroy pollution. A bit extreme, but it’s also one of the highest techs you can get, so presumably (hopefully) self-replicating nanotech is now safe and reliable. With this, of each Antaran Unit spend on cleaning up worlds, the game calculates as if you paid 1,5 AU instead of 1. I think. The “0,5” could also refer to some other value. As always with MO3, you have to make a cautious guess and hope for the best.  Communication Infrastructure Exactly what says. Another auto-build tech, your DEAs will now build this to get +0,25 infrastructure. It’s good, I believe. I don’t really know what this does, to be honest. This is the first time I remember seeing something in MO3 talking about “infrastructure points”. I chose to believe it’s good and that 0,25 more of it is a very high amount of “infrastructure points” to have. It may be related to how much population a single region can have? Maybe? Regardless, if I can go through seven years and a thousand turns without knowing about this, it’s obviously not exactly among the most important things to know.  The same turn still: Only Narn is left, and the final assault launches.  Turn 1007: We made contact with a strange, alien race! Yeah, by now we have established new colonies in the devastated rebel systems, and of course this silly game treats this like it’s first contact. Our diplomats seem to be astonishingly risk-averse if they don’t even want to travel through a measly 1-2 empty systems between borders.  At least now that we are back into contact, I can do this: Look at this fucker! They know they only have one planet left, then it’s over.  The Hyper Vortex Emitter will probably be the final tech our fleet can feasibly use. Remember the Transition Drive from one of my many, many Perry Rhodan German SF tangents? Probably not. The most advanced the series got before the modders were unleashed on Master of Orion III was a creepy shadow FTL-drive that did millions of tiny transition drive jumps each second to move a ship at FTL-speeds. Like the descriptions says, it isn’t technically faster than other drives, but it makes a ship essentially invisible to all sensors. It is in fact, a creepy shadow ship as soon as this thing turns on. This tech fell prey to “wait a moment, what if all this Perry-crap was at least named like it could fit into the same reality as Master of Orion???"-syndrome, a curse I have to bear. The original sounded more like “Paros Shadow Field” or something like this. Sorry, I’m trying to get this over the finish line. Any PR-related questions are to be diverted and posted in my Operation Eastside thread. Thanks. Anyway, as all that super-creepy bullshit is not possible in the confines of this game engine, this thing instead is just the fastest sublight drive you can have. So fast in fact, that you are traveling at low FTL-speeds! Does this make sense? Well no, this tech would have worked better as an upgrade to stealth-tech. But eh, apparently even the modders burned out a little bit near the end. Also  , I suddenly remembered I never designed another ship again. So make this the final tech we never got to use instead. Also wowza, we actally did get the Transform Cannon! As to why this is unbelievable, here is a link to my other thread, where I go over the basic weapons of the Perryverse-setting. I did not expect the modders to even try this! And they didn’t, not really: In the Master of Orion universe, the “transform cannon” is just a vastly more refined version of the best plasma cannon you can get in the game (we didn’t get it, it’s the “Magnetar Plasma Cannon”), with more range, damage and a 100% base precision. This motherfucker is technically shorter-ranged than our current super-beams, but with that precision and with an additional 50% shield reduction this weapon just destroys everything and everyone. Especially since I’ve long since learned that any shield debuff technically counts as bleed-through mechanically. So half of this weapon’s damage would just go straight through our super-generating shields. Now that’s probably as close as you can get to the OP-insanity of the true transform cannon. I’m impressed. This is actually a weapon that, like our new flagship (the “Crystal Fortress”) is a tech that does belong down here, at the very end of the tech tree. It’s not even just a bigger ship, it is an I-win-button if you get this far. It’s like being rewarded for doing research. It may even be a little bit too powerful, but that’s what you get if you mix something Star-Trek derived like Master of Orion with the utter insanity that is the universe-crossing, universe-destroying powers of the Perryverse.  And then I realized we’re just literally one planet away from winning, and got sad. So here are the final techs we will never get: Energy, levels 89-92 Taking rising tech costs into account, it would take us something like 500 turns to research those last tech levels. So gently caress that, here’s what that poo poo would have done: Ultra-Combo Shield IX: It combines all shield techs researched into one big package, but with each shield being a multi-layered version of its old version. Somehow, this makes our shields even bigger and better. Improved Anti-Matter Beam: Makes the Anti-Matter weapons just straight up better. A bit close this time, but still too late since the transform cannons may have shorter range, but they also make shields not matter, and so win instantly. Dämpferfeld / Dampening Field: A technology that only works on ships that have working shield generators. It is also insane. It adds 100k shield points to the ship it’s equipped to, and then ups the regen-rate to an unbelievable 50k shield points every 5 secnds. There are a lot of even end-game weapons who wouldn’t be able to just punch through a constant 10k damage regen per second. And suddenly, transform cannon stats make sense: You probably need them and their 50% bleed-through or you’ll be at risk of dying of old age before you see an enemy ship with this thing exploding. Improved Disruptor-Cannon: A sad joke compared to what I just typed. It’s even later than the far more useful AM-Beam improvement! Singularity Field Launcher: It launches black holes at the enemy. A bit more impressive than the transform cannon just teleporting bombs into your ship’s bridge, but also shields at least have a chance at taking that hit, so the modders didn’t gave this one massive anti-shield properties. But on the other tentacle, this thing is a kinetic weapon mechanically, not a beam weapon. This means instead of slowly losing damage and accuracy at high ranges, you get a static 100% accuracy at all ranges. Also this weapon has the absolute highest range of all weapons. It also does enough damage that, in a hypothetical fight ship-to-ship, your singularity field launchers can easily outdamage a dampening field, so if you prefer kinetic throwers, this is your final weapon. At level 92, you also need almost infinity research points, so better get crack’n that science rock. Improved Overkill Projector: After all this OP-poo poo, even this nice boost is far too late. It’s pretty drat : lol : that the modders put all those German SF-derived super-techs before the classic vanilla techs. The curse of the unfinished mod strikes again, as balance this ain’t.  Biology, level 89 The last visible Biology-tech. If there is even more, I don’t care. Mineral-Transforming Bacteria: It’s like nanites, but bio. Agricultural DEAs get a +2 to their efficiency. A boring tech that really shouldn’t be this late. I’m a bit too mean here to the modders, since the MO3 tech tree puts techs into a range of possible levels, so pin-point accurate placement of modded techs is not something a modder can even do. But still, look at all those empty levels! For a completely boring +2 stuff tech! It boggles the mind. I can only guess the modders would have eventually re-balanced this poo poo, as the tech tree could have basically stopped at level 80, instead of dragging this dead horse out so much.  Physics, level 88-89 Despite putting nearly half of our entire empire’s science output into this category, we’re lagging behind on Physics-techs. The power of exponential numbers. “Executor”-Missiles: It’s finally over. The last dumb “the better, mod-only tech drops first just to spite you”-missile. Like all other mod-missiles, it’s slightly less accurate, but does so much more damage you won’t care. It’s based on the ultimate missile warhead you get at level 89. Omega-Warhead: In Vanilla, the ultimate missile warhead. It does damage by causing artificial black holes to pop into existence at the target point, only to violently explode into gravity and hyperspace shock-waves. The ultimate gently caress you in missile-form. The lore may have been rewritten to fit the mod better. Ultra-Heavy Armor: Exactly what it says on the tin. It’s ultra-everything: Ultra-strong, ultra-expensive. Ultra. Hyper Impulse Cannon: This weapon uses hyper energy to compress matter and then propels at near light speed towards the enemy. I completely forgot if this thing is vanilla or not, but my guess would be it’s vanilla, as it is a very strong mass-driver type weapon, but not quite as bonkers as the singularity field launchers.  Mathematics, levels 87-89 It starts slow here, with the first two final techs just being more miniaturization for the anti-proton cannons (not to be confused with the anti-matter beams we’re currently using) and crystal ray cannons. As we get those after the transform cannon in our tech tree, they’re only there to cause funny misunderstandings where the AI researches them later and switches from the OP-weapons back to the lovely ones. Shadow Cloak Field: Now we’re talking! This baby is the cloak-component the final “sublight” drive was missing. Mechanically, even the best ECCM in the game can’t do much if you have this one. Same thing for the enemy, though. Luckily we never got to see what kind of mayhem this interaction would have caused in the real time battle engine. I’m imagining two invisible fleets skulking around, waiting for the other to get close enough to show up on the scanners. Also clearly the modders tried and failed to wrangle the Paros Shadow Field into the engine, and so had to break this Perryverse-abomination up into two different technologies. Schwarzschild Projector: The ultimate FTL-drive, despite its vaguely shield-tech sounding name. It’s named after Karl Schwarzschild, a German physicist. The Schwarzschild-radius, which defines a black hole’s event horizon, was named after him. Lore-wise, this thing projects two black holes, one right in front of the ship, another one linked through hyperspace to whatever point the ship wants to go. Then it protects the ship while it slips through this artificial wormhole. Technically speaking, the main thing that makes this special is that the other black hole can be really loving far away, while the old Transition Drive would crumple your ship like wet tissue paper even on shorter jumps. As always, it does not really fit, like many Perryverse-FTL technologies who can either reach entire galaxies really fast, or are, like this one, point-to-point drives who wouldn’t need any star lanes to function. But eh, it’s a nice bit of SF. It’s of course a re-name of the ultimate FTL drive in Master of Orion III.  Sorry for the tech-spam. Too bad we’ll never see them in action. By now, one tiny step away from winning, the Kingdom of Almandin consists of 824 planets. For a second, I imagined trying to wrangle that many planets in Stellaris, and had to shudder.  GC 1512: The so-called “Esanania-Empire” declares open war on the Kingdom of Orion. A bit redundant, if you ask me. We would have bombarded and destroyed them, anyway.  To give our final ship designs their time in the sun, the final fleet of the game includes all the crystal fortresses we have managed to built so far.  The end  is  here.  Of what happens next, I even made a video! It took me three tries, because the old recording software on my notebook tried crashing and throwing out weird error messages. It also turned out the interaction between extreme game lag and ancient recording software made the end result suck even more, but if you want a good laugh at how bad I am at making videos, here it is: The Final Moment of Victory.  OK, so, the thing is: The game gave me one last heartfelt “gently caress-you” and made recording the final cutscene a chore. After three attempts gave me a poo poo load of absolute gently caress, to quote the AVGN, I gave up. And since the video linked above is like eye cancer, here is the screenshot version for you, dear readers. The conquest victory video starts with this ominous fleet ominously getting closer to this planet.  Then we see close-ups of weird, blocky designs that to my knowledge, do not correspond to any of the shipsets in-game. Honestly, for a moment I thought I had launched up Battlefleet Gothic II my mistake. Seriously, is that just me or are those things looking a lot like Necron-ships? At least the easily missable massive space battle in the background is nice.  Then we get this nice text. A text which is just part of the video, and therefore hardcoded to stay English, despite the German translation I’m running. OTHER CIVILIZATIONS ARE SHATTERED BEFORE THE MIGHT OF YOUR FORCES YOU ALONE RULE ORION Buddy, we’ve been ruling Orion for centuries now, or is this supposed to be a poetic way of saying “the entire Orion Sector”? Anyway, thanks a lot. Very nostalgic for people who remember the static, text-only winning screens of many old NES-games.  And then we jump to the sole survivor screen, happily back in translation land. The screen is a lot of black, since there are no other empires left we could look at.  We can look at our final stats, but everything else is just zero, since we killed them all. And of course there are no graphs anymore. Even the game wants this to be over. The End, no Moral And with almost exactly seven and a half years after I started this project, the LP is finally over. I had this big rant planned where I recounted all the game's flaws and talked about possible things you could change if you had a time machine and re-did the entire game, but eventually the text ballooned into a lot of repetition. It also started to fill up with errors, because it turns out my memory is not good enough to keep everything I talked about in over 7 years straight. As that big rant was essentially just me repeating the entire thread, but without pictures, I abandoned it after the second attempt to correct the most glaring errors. At the end just let me say, I still like Master of Orion III. When patched, fixed and with some nice conversion mod like Ultima Orion, it’s a good time waster with some good ideas and some very bad execution. Particular to Ultima Orion: This mod really does not work with too high numbers. If you play a big map, any chance of winning depends on you taking on as many of the alternate victory conditions as possible. Do not repeat my ordeal. But if you aren’t attempting to win, no matter what, do what you want. Like many 4x-players, you’re restarting after a couple hundred turns of light fun anyway. Let's Playing Master of Orion III started out as a fun little idea, and like the game itself, I made a lot of bad choices, like taking on the largest map possibly ever made for the game, simply because this fan map of an alien galaxy “looked nice as gently caress”. It also was possibly not really the best choice to cram absolutely everyone into the game to show off everything at once. Add to that the years lost due to diverse problems at work, at home, and later, even with my failing health, and you get this atrocity, a pure monument to everything a Let’s Play shouldn’t be. But it was also fun, and helped me keep writing when I was too depressed for anything else. Will I play this game again? Heck yes, but maybe in 2-3 years, I need a long vacation from the Masters of Orion. Even the good games make me shudder in revulsion right now. This was clearly too much Master of Orion for everyone. Next up, I’ll finish my other wayward LPs, as I now have some extra time to make Duck videos, and time to play Operation Eastside, now that MO3 isn’t eating so much of my free time. I also feel relieved that I’m done with this. Even a little bit satisfied I got this done properly. Thank you for reading, and please come back for more punishment, when I realize my next dire thread upon the world of Let’s Playing: Ascendancy. Enemy Empires: None! They’re all dead, Jim! They are all dead, JIM!!!! DEAD and GONE:  The End, No Moral.
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Jan 31, 2024 19:32
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Goongrats on your monumental LP  I hope you archive this baby.
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Jan 31, 2024 20:08
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Thanks for this massive undertaking. I saw a bunch of Perry Rhodan books at the used book store a week ago and contemplated buying one of them.
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Jan 31, 2024 20:15
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It's been a very, very long road. Congratulations, and thank you for taking us on this crazy rear end ride.
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Jan 31, 2024 21:04
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 He did it. The son of a bitch did it!
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Jan 31, 2024 21:09
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Congratulations! Happy to have my ship design known for all time as part of this thread.
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Jan 31, 2024 21:40
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Holy crap. It's actually finished. All that's happened from when I frist started reading this thread until now... Props to you for enduring this gauntlet of a game from beginning to end. Thank you so, so much for making this LP, and I can't wait to see your others!
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Jan 31, 2024 23:14
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The Great Orion Relief. Congratulations. This was a journey.
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Jan 31, 2024 23:15
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Congratulations on finally finishing the quest. Goddamn.
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Jan 31, 2024 23:43
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