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nweismuller posted:E: On a totally unrelated and basically irrelevant note: it's bothered me how 'malus' has recently been adopted commonly in English, when there's a perfectly good English word in common use from before that, 'penalty'. Not that it matters and it's basically just me being a crotchety sourpuss. I've always felt that one of the charms of English is how "uncouth" and "anonymous" have such different meanings despite being ultimately the same word. "Penalty" carries overtones of punishment that "malus" does not.  Fighter Bays and Research Labs. The first because apparently our fighters are already big on drone combat, and the second because hey, why not have even more preposterous research output?
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Sep 30, 2016 03:56
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Joining on the my dad bandwagon: Delay hiring and Scout for better worlds. Sedal is a radiation-baked wasteland.
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Oct 2, 2016 00:07
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my dad posted:Hire Sparky This, but I will add on Head over to Tritanium armor afterwards - do not continue on the Spaceports line to robo miner plant. We should have a way of dumping pollution more efficiently before we start generating enormous automated industries.
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Oct 2, 2016 07:54
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Great, now I'm going to have "Music From the Hearts of Space Bears" as a phrase stuck in my head for weeks. As for the Mrrshan on the street's opinion of Narestans, hrm. The primary interaction for an average citizen would be via imported manufactured goods, which I'm given to understand is manufactured both to great precision and with a goodly amount of ornamentation and aesthetic design. Meanwhile, Narestan culture is a lot more free-wheeling and individualistic than the other star nations seem to be, and this probably impacts the Research Agreements. So my guess is that the general impression of Narestans is some kind of mix between Santa's Elves and Mad Scientists. The first human fictional analog that came to mind for me was actually Dr. Scratchundsniff from Animaniacs
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Dec 1, 2016 06:27
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I've now flipped through the LP again quickly to see what tech trades we did explicitly. There's some food for thought there, too. Meklar civilization advanced as its technology did, and the way this was done was by amplifying the power of organic beings by merging them into machines. The Meklar concept of "cyborg" is like everyone else's concept of "tool use", and in Meklar thought, their current state is just the natural progression of mechanical augmentation that started back when they first started carving blades and shields out of stone and wood to give themselves the claws and armor that their flesh lacked. The Narestans challenge a huge number of these assumptions. At first glance, the Narestans are strictly more primitive - they're using the old medieval notion of wielding one's mechanical enhancements rather than making them part of you. But as contact deepened, it became clear that traditional Meklar notions of civilizational progress were direly insufficient. Prior to alien contact, the Meklar lacked a notion of autonomous machines, which could act and react in sophisticated ways without being directed by an organic will. The first tech trade was Automated Repair Systems, not because they actually accomplished anything for the Meklar, but because they needed to see for themselves that this model of civilizational development could produce equivalent results. So to the Meklar, the Narestans were deeply, deeply discomfiting, but with the more recent trade of Robo-Miner technology they may be starting to accept the notion of autonomous machines as a useful technique in their own right. An average citizen is starting to shift their view from "terrifyingly alien" to "fascinatingly alien". The Mrrshan, meanwhile, don't have such a cultural gulf in their technological worlds, which may explain why the trades they've done have been both more eclectic and more common. That said, the most recent set of trades are a bit interesting. The Narestans shared ways to do common things (build armor, organize corporations) better and at larger scales. To get these practical and down-to-Fieras things, the Mrrshan brought mind-reading and hyperwave to the table. I suspect in the popular fiction of both cultures, it's the Mrrshan that get to be the Jedi.
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Dec 1, 2016 07:55
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I think it's completely reasonable that we'd have heard of other races second-hand, especially if they're allies or there are active hostilities. If they're allies, the Narestans might even have met a few of them at summits or high society events. I also think that absent that level of tie, we wouldn't have heard about it. If you only know about it through GNN, that's still cheating. Mixed vote on distant races, as outlined above. The Mrrshan idea of a Narestan "war hero" has been bouncing around in my brain for awhile but it turns out I'm really bad at patter songs.
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Dec 5, 2016 00:35
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my dad posted:Eh. More like Narestan Major General. Looking over it a bit more, it seems I was actually going for more like Richard Dauntless from Ruddigore, with a side of Horatio Hornblower and the Cargo of Rice. The big incident would be the pirates coming up and attacking him with water cannons to prevent him from setting his ship on fire and damaging the cargo they wanted to steal, but then, since the ships he was protecting were shipping grain, the ships were all now in danger of bursting. Cue a mad scramble as our hero saves the day by forcing 2/3s of the grain onto the pirates, followed by a happy ending as they all realize the contract was for a volume of grain. The pirates join the merchant fleet to sell their now-swollen cargo to a grateful citizenry. In the final triumphant scene, our hero and the pirate lord alike are decorated for Business Valor by the local authorities. (Heck, Dauntless's big song was even called "I shipp'd, d'ye see, in a revenue sloop")
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Dec 6, 2016 06:21
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What kinds of deals were you cutting with other star nations to keep them liking you? It seems like you're more aggressive with diplomatic options than I am used to seeing in MoO2 playthroughs, and the nuMoO options have been interesting to me in that regard as well.
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Feb 2, 2017 06:19
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Indeed. This may have been a somewhat "gimmicky" run, but I've never seen that gimmick before, so it's great to see what kind of stuff is possible in the game.
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Mar 28, 2017 22:00
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nweismuller posted:Out of modest curiousity, what did you think of this particular gimmick and the race concept? Coming to it as I did out of the SMAC thread, the race concept was... not surprising. Previous MoO2 playthroughs I'd seen tended towards tech-industrial, and it wasn't until shortly before this LP started that I really began reading about how the game "should" be played if one is to have any reasonable degree of effectiveness. I won my first Easy-difficulty game of MoO2 either shortly before or shortly after the thread started. (As the Psilons, which I had previously had trouble with because I hadn't realized that Creative races work better if you don't tech-turtle and instead exploit your breadth of options in an early-midgame assault!) quote:For people in general, I was mildly concerned about whether the government I described for the Great Commonwealth of Gnol when we met them, fit best as a Dictatorship- do people think it was a good fit for a Gnolam Dictatorship? I definitely got a "Doge" vibe from it (the leaders of the city states, not the one with the cryptocurrency named for it) which could be spun as Dictatorship or Feudalism depending on how tight-knit the inner circle was. We didn't see enough of them for it to gain any serious contradictions.
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Mar 29, 2017 08:57
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The key insight is that (a) Creative costs points, (b) by endgame, a race that was designed to specialize will be outperforming you on raw numbers in whatever they specialized in, and (c) you can make that up with all the generic bonuses they had to skip to exploit their specialty properly. So you start out at a bit of a disadvantage, then gradually gain a crushing advantage that starts evaporating unless you hold a tech lead... and eventually tech caps. A lot of the things I was not grasping was how to get colonies productive in any reasonable way - and I don't mean with housing/colony transport exploits, just the sense of "what to build, where, when, and why". One of the fun things about this is that races with Democracy basically start with a 20% bonus for not needing a Marine Barracks to keep order. Leveraging that stuff into place was the work I most needed to do. Reading through the strategy wikis it was very entertaining to see players evolve from the original attitude of "Creative is basically mandatory for any play style" to "Creative is a very finicky double-edged sword" to "these three or four builds consistently outperform creatives in head-to-head deathmatch play". Meanwhile, Uncreative remains and has always been a death sentence.
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Mar 30, 2017 09:20
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