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 Master of Orion was published a generation ago in the early days of PC gaming(3.5" floppy disks and all, though I have the GOG version) by Microprose in 1993, and developed by Simtex Software. It essentially founded a genre, and is generally known as the 'father of the 4Xs'. While I have no aim to throw shade at other games, I will say that I find myself bemused at the fact that others such as it's successor three years later, Master of Orion 2: Battle of Antares, are considered superior. I am of the opinion that the opposite is the case. MOO2 is a solid game, but I think it's considerably more flawed. I count myself among those who think the original is not only the best in the series, but in fact still one of the finest strategy games ever produced. I was stunned to discover that I could not find any LPs of this true pioneering classic here, though there are a few for newer versions. I intend to rectify this situation. Master of Orion may look dated(and it does, and is), and I don't intend to gloss over those areas where it falls short. On the other hand, it boasts surprisingly robust replayability, flawed but ahead-of- it's-time AI that is still superior to many modern offerings, and quite well-balanced yet assymetrical gameplay. Many have borrowed from it, but as a total package I am not convinced it has been surpassed -- certainly not by many. LP Style This thread will showcase the above and much more, for better or worse. Mastery will be demonstrated(attempted is probably more accurate) by winning on the toughest difficulty with each MOO race, from overall best to most challenging. In this way we will also see the variety of situations the game presents, within familiar patterns. Community voting will be rare; at these settings there isn't much room for suboptimal play. Each game will be played out to it's end, and losses will occur; in fact, I expect to lose at least as many as I win. Only the very best MOO experts, which I do not count myself among, can win consistently and there are some possible galaxies which are truly impossible. This will almost exclusively be an SSLP, with the occasional video for particularly noteworthy battles. LP Pacing For a variety of reasons, Master of Orion lends itself to 25-year segments. Games can last anywhere from less than a century to several centuries depending on various factors. Community Participation If someone really wants to see a particular race or something like that I may consider moving them a bit up or down the list. Taking a vote on actions at the difficulty I'll be playing would be an exercise in futility. But aside from that anything goes. I'm always looking for honest feedback of all varieties, as well as any other thoughts you may have on the goings-on. Lurk, comment, whatever suits your fancy. There's not much to spoil but have at it if you wish there as well. What's this whole MOO thing about anyway? Per the manual, have some lore:  As we'll see, the second sentence there is unmitigated horse manure. There is no shortage of room for new people or resources on our homeworld at the start of the game. The date is wrong also, since the story begins in 2300 ... which is the beginning of the 24th century, not the 23rd. So not a real great start to our backstory there, but the rest of it and the broad strokes are pretty good. Intro If you must, take a gander at the intro video bearing only topical resemblance to actual gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg_dnfOg7B8 The Races All the galaxy is a stage, and these are the actors, in order of appearance from best to worst. There is no 'race customization' such as you would see in a modern 4X; they are what they are, and the weaknesses and strengths must be dealt with. This is one of those aspects that some would consider a flaw, but I'm inclined to disagree inasmuch as I've yet to discover a race customization feature that is both robust and and reasonably balanced. In any event, this is the order in which the races of MOO will be featured here: 1. PSILONS  These braniacs are far and away the best researchers in the galaxy, gaining their edge through superior technology which tends to become a more and more pronounced advantage as the game progresses. They don't have any natural rivalries and will tend to stay out of galactic conflicts until they have an overwhelming advantage. If they are allowed to reach that point, the galaxy almost always belongs to them -- everyone else just hasn't received the requisite paperwork yet. 2. KLACKONS  Your basic hive-mind insects, the Klackons get double the normal production from population. This allows them to build up new colonies more quickly than any other race. They will tend to get off to a quick start which they can leverage throughout the game. Klackon opponents typically are difficult to get along with, and focus sensibly on developing their industrial base. Construction tech is their forte, but they are among the worst in propulsion, a key weakness. 3. HUMANS/SILICOIDS   Most players consider the humans to be better, but I've put them together here because I find them to be roughly equal in the hands of a strong player. As opponents, I'd say the Silicoids are even better. Taking homo sapiens first, they are masters of trade and diplomacy. Often this will manifest itself in convincing other races to support their leadership, winning without bloodshed. Other races tend to trust them more than they really should. If they are present and not particularly weak, political maneuvering will be crucial. As their advantage lies in dealing with other races, it is a mid and late-game plus. Humans are also better than most at research; they are the best there is when it comes to force fields, and are strong in planetology and propulsion as well with no major weaknesses. The Silicoids are the most unique race, space rocks essentially. Diplomatically they are pretty good, tending to side with the Klackons and Meklar. They can live on any rock, ignore pollution, but have terrible population growth and can't research some key ecological technologies. In fact the Silicoid overall are the worst-researching race in the galaxy; good in computing but subpar everywhere else. The ability to settle anywhere allows them free reign on some planets early in the game, allowing them often unrivaled early expansion. If they fail to press this edge though, they can wind up in a world of trouble. 5. SAKKRA/MEKLAR   Another case of two different races that are, at least in theory, roughly equal. The amphibious Sakkra breed at an incredibly high rate, and aim to expand quickly. They will generally attack whenever an opportunity presents itself. Diplomacy ... is not their strong suit, to put it mildly. They've got a blood feud with the Mrrshan and aren't real big fans of the Alkari, Klackon, or Meklar either. Their planetology research is the class of the galaxy, and they have no major weakenesses in tech. If they can avoid pissing off the universe, they are a foe to be reckoned with. The Meklar are cybernetic life forms, adept at automation which allows them to squeeze considerably more industrial capacity out of their planets than any other race. Somewhat similarly to the Psilon tech advantage, this allows them to compensate to a degree for limited territory if need be. This manufacturing edge diminishes over time, but never completely disappears. The facility with automation also brings with it preeminence in matters of computing and espionage, but ecological matters largely escape them. The approach to foreign policy is often unpredictable to organic life; they find most in common with the Silicoids, and don't trust the nature-loving Sakkra. 7. ALKARI  Masters of flight, these bird-beings are the top military-focused race. They have plenty of natural enemies, including the Mrrshan, Klackons, and Sakkra, all of whom provoke a predatory response. The aerodynamic focus yields excellence in evasive maneuvers; their ships are notoriously hard to hit, particularly early on in the struggle. Propulsion is naturally their top field and they have no equals in that discipline; force field research is poor on the other hand. 8. MRRSHAN  This is another example where I differ from the conventional wisdom. Most, though not all, would rate these felines as the weakest overall race in the galaxy. Their main ability is the opposite of the Alkari; their weapons will miss less often and cause more damage due to superior skill in matters of gunnery, and their scientists are preeminent in weaponry advances as well. Balancing this are struggles in construction tech and major diplomatic issues. The Alkari and Sakkra relations are usually on the level of a blood feud, and they don't get on well with Klackons or Bulrathi either. Fewer powers like them compared to those that do, and the kitties don't do themselves any favors by proving reckless on the attack more often than not. 9. BULRATHI  This is a race of bear-like creatures that are immensely strong. Don't be fooled by the relatively cutesy appearance; they are not to be trifled with in ground combat, either on the attack or defense, where they are formidable foes. They've got more than their share of aggression, sometimes attacking without a clear purpose. They have pretty neutral relations, with the Mrrshan their only notable distrust. Research is a little above-average with skill in weapons and construction, balanced by a weakness in computing. The biggest flaw is the lack of a major strength; the Bulrathi are generally behind the 8-ball economically or in fleet action against almost everyone. Too often their fearsome shock troops can only be employed in forestalling their eventual demise. 10. DARLOCK  Never trust a shape-shifter. The shadowy Darlock are literally cloaked in mystery. Nobody likes them, and only humanity can be counted on to regularly make deals ... once which will benefit them the most, of course. In terms of technology they are good at computing, average everywhere else. Their lone ace in the hole is having a massive edge in all matters relating to the dark arts of spycraft. Lacking any military or economic pluses, they will usually start slowly and, marginalized by the galactic community, struggle to have a major impact on the larger stage. They are usually a disruptive force, skilled even at blaming their subversive actions on others, but it is rare indeed to have them as a major power. CONTENTS Note: Episode XI and on are worth looking at just for the reader art alone. As an example:  Episode I: Psilons, Small Galaxy Episode I: Psilons, 1st Attempt Opening, Part II Phase II: Expansion Part I(2323 - 2337) 2337 - 2350 Episode I, Part V (2350 - 2370) Episode I, Part VI (2370-2375) 2375 - 2380 High Council: Beginning of the End, or Merely the End of our Beginning? Episode 1: 2380 - 2400 Episode 1: 2400 - 2425 Episode 1: 2425 - 2450 Episode 1: 2450 - 2475 Episode 1: 2475 - 2487 Episode 1: 2487 - 2500 Episode II: Klackons, Medium Episode II Preview Episode II: Klackons, 1st Attempt, Opening Episode II: 2322 - 2350 Episode II: 2350 - 2363 Episode II: 2363 - 2375 Episode III: Klackons, Large Episode III: Opening Episode III: 2323 - 2349 Episode III: 2350 - 2366 Episode III: 2366 - 2375 Episode III: 2375 - 2399 Episode III: 2400 - 2425 Episode III: 2425 - 2443 Episode III: 2443 - 2449 Episode III: 2450 - 2474 Episode III: 2475 - 2499 Episode III: 2500 - 2515 Episode III: 2515 - 2524 Episode III: 2525 - 2549 Episode III: 2550 - 2579 Episode IV: Silicoids, Huge Silicoid Preview Episode IV: Silicoid Start, 2300 - 2328 Episode IV: 2328 - 2349 Episode IV: 2350 - 2361ish Episode IV: 2361 - 2374 Episode IV: 2375 - 2399 Episode IV: 2400 - 24?? Episode IV: 2408 - 2424 Episode IV: 2425 - 2449 Episode IV: 2450 - 2474 Episode IV: 2475 - 2499 Episode IV: 2500 - 2524 Episode IV: 2525 - 2549 Episode IV: Conclusion Episode V: Silicoids, Medium Episode V: Revenge of the Rocks(hopefully) Poll Episode V: 2322 - 2339 Episode V: 2339 - 2349 Episode V: 2350 - 2362 Episode V: 2362 - 2374 Episode V: 2375 - 2399 Epsiode V: 2400 - 2424 Episode VI: Humans, Large Human Preview Episode VI: Human Opening Episode VI: 2329 - 2349 Episode VI: 2350 - 2374 Episode VI: 2375 - 2399 Episode VI: 2400 - 2424 Episode VI: 2425 - 2450 Episode VI: 2450 - 2475 Episode VI: 2475 - 2500 Episode VI: 2500 - 2525 Episode VI: 2525 - 2550 Episode VI: 2550 - 2575 Episode VI: 2575 - 2600 Episode VI: 2600 - 2625 Episode VI: 2625 - 2650 Episode VI: 2650 - 2675 Episode VI: 2675 - 2700 Episode VII: Meklar, Medium Meklar Preview Meklar Opening Episode VII: 2325 - 2350 Episode VII: 2350 - 2375 Episode VII: 2375 - 2400 Episode VII: 2400 - 2425 Episode VII: 2425 - 2450 Episode VII: 2450 - 2475 Episode VII: 2475 - 2500 Episode VII: 2500 - 2525 Episode VII: 2525 - 2550 Episode VII: 2550 - 2575 Episode VII: 2575 - 2600 Episode VIII: Meklar, Large Episode VIII: Opening Episode VIII: 2325 - 2350 Episode VIII: 2350 - 2375 Episode VIII: 2375 - 2400 Episode VIII: 2400 - 2425 Episode VIII: 2425 - 2450 Episode VIII: 2450 - 2475 Episode IX: Sakkra, Medium Sakkra Preview Episode IX: Sakkra Opening Episode IX: 2322 - 2350 Episode IX: 2350 - 2375 Episode IX: 2375 - 2400 Episode IX: 2400 - 2425 Episode IX: 2425 - 2450 Episode IX: 2450 - 2475 Episode X: Sakkra, Large Episode X: Opening Episode X: 2325 - 2350 Episode X: 2350 - 2375 Episode X: 2375 - 2400 Episode X: 2400 - 2425 Episode X: 2425 - 2450 Episode X: 2446 - 2475 Episode X: 2475 - 2500 Episode X: 2500 - 2525 Episode X: 2525 - 2550 Episode X: 2550 - 2575 Episode X: 2575 - 2600 Episode X: 2600 - 2625 Episode X: 2625 - 2650 Episode X: 2650 - 2675 Episode X: 2675 - 2700 Episode X: 2700 - 2725 Episode X: 2725 - 2750(I) Episode X: 2725 - 2750(II) Episode X: 2750 - 2775(I) Episode X: 2750 - 2775(II) Episode X: 2775 - 2800 Episode X: 2800 - 2825 Episode X: Multi-Part Conclusion. Sauron Presents: Maximum Evil Overkill Episode X: Conclusion Episode XI: Alkari, Medium Alkari Preview Alkari Opening Episode XI: 2322 - 2350 Episode XI: 2350 - 2373 Episode XII: Alkari, Large Episode XII: Opening Plus Episode XII: 2350 Episode XII: 2375 - Episode XII: 2400 - Episode XII: 2425 - Episode XII: 2450 - Episode XII: 2475 - Episode XII: 2500 - Episode XII: 2525 - Episode XIII: Mrrshan, Medium Mrrshan Preview Episode XIII: Opening Episode XIII: 2317 - Episode XIII: 2350 - Episode XIII: 2375 - Episode XIII: 2400 - Episode XIII: 2425 - Episode XIII: 2450 - Episode XIII: 2475 - Episode XIII: 2500 - Episode XIII: 2525 - Episode XIII: 2550 - Episode XIII: 2575 - Episode XIV: Bulrathi, Medium Bulrathi Preview Episode XIV: Opening Episode XIV: 2325 - Episode XIV: 2350 - Episode XV: Bulrathi, Medium Episode XV: Opening Episode XV: 2325 - Episode XV: 2350 - Episode XV: 2375 - Episode XV: 2400 - Episode XV: 2425 - Episode XV: 2450 - Episode XVI: Bulrathi, Medium Episode XVI: Opening Episode XVI: 2325 - Episode XVI: 2350 - Episode XVI: 2375 - Episode XVI: 2400 - Episode XVI: 2425 - Episode XVI: 2450 - Episode XVI: 2475 - Episode XVII: Darlok, Huge Darlok Preview Episode XVII: Opening Episode XVII: 2324 - Episode XVII: 2350 - Episode XVII: 2375 - Episode XVII: 2400 - Episode XVII: 2425 - Episode XVII: 2450 - Episode XVII: 2475 - Episode XVII: 2500 - Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Mar 9, 2019 |
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EPISODE I Psilons, 1st Attempt I'll go through various game screens and aspects to explain how everything works in this first game; in later games/episodes I'll be a lot quicker to get to the action, and individual updates will tend to be shorter.  Here we have the ubiquitous title screen. What you can't see here is that there is some basic animation; the engines spin and the purplish particles are continuously being sucked into the vortex in the background. 'Quit to DOS' tells you exactly how ancient this game is.  Upon beginning a new game, we are taken here, an options screen which is simplicity itself. One thing I appreciate here is that it defaults to the last settings you used; we'll see this in other places as well. So very many games made after this didn't do this. ** Galaxy Size: Small(24 stars), Medium(48 stars), Large(70 stars), or Huge(108 stars). Pacing is quite different between them, so to show them off I'll start out on Small and work my way up. Large is my preferred setting as a balance between pacing and getting to most of the technology in the course of a game, so once we've seen them all once the rest of the games will be played at that size. The manual says small is the hardest size; there's an argument to made for that but I don't happen to necessarily agree; I'd say rather that the the smaller sizes are more double-edged in my experience. ** Difficulty: Simple/Easy/Average/Hard/Impossible. The AI gets major production and technology handicaps on the lower difficulties and bonuses on the higher ones: 20% for Easy/Hard and 40% for Simple/Impossible IIRC. Their starting fleet size, aggressiveness, etc. are also impacted. Choosing Hard or Impossible also gives the player a 20% penalty in starting population, which has a bigger impact than you might think. I'll be playing exclusively on Impossible. ** Opponents: One through Five here. Five will always be our setting. The game is a lot less interesting with a low number of opponents. Even at the max, almost half of the races will be unrepresented in any given game. So our initial foray here is set at Small/Impossible/Five.  Then we choose our race from the ten options, Psilons as mentioned. The small pixellated portraits here are rather unimpressive. After picking the Psilons, we choose the color of our banner/flag:  Not at all obvious, though it is mentioned in the manual, is the fact that this choice will also determine our ship models for the game. The Psilons are yellowish in appearance, so yellow it is. We'll see all of them at least once before this (mis)adventure is completed.  Finally, there's prompt to select a name for ourselves as Emperor, and our homeworld, or to leave them at the default. Homeworld always defaults to the same name for each race, and there are a few rotating emperor names. I leave them at the suggested names, and hereby will be referred to for all antiquity as Emperor Zygot of the planet Mentar. And with that, our journey begins. OPENING, PART I A properly played game of Master of Orion has a clearly definable opening stage. Normally I'd put all of it into one update, but with the amount of necessary exposition here I'm going to break it up. Our goals here are as follows: ** Scout as far as possible ** Establish a second planet/first colony. ** Build up our homeworld's industrial base ASAP. The core concept of maximizing the growth curve will be quite familiar to any fan of 4X-style games. When it comes to this, the compounding effect of decisions means that the first ones are the most important; they will impact everything that comes after. Doing the first few turns 'correctly' provides for the maximum amount of resources being available later on, etc.  This is the first view to greet us, known as the Control Screen. The majority of it is just the galaxy view, and is quite self-explanatory; click on a planet or fleet for more information. That info is displayed on the panel on the right, with the menu button row on the bottom. Star Colors: We can see a few different-colored stars right now, and there are more. The colors don't matter once a system has been explored, but before that they gives us a general indicator of what we are most likely to find there. They come in six varieties, as follows: Yellow -- "offers the best chance of finding terran and sub-terran planets". By terran and sub-terran, this means simply standard, i.e. habitable at game start without specialized abilities or technology, planets. Green -- "moderately bright and have a wide range of planet types" Red -- "Old, dull stars that commonly have poor planets". Poor meaning mineral poor, which we will get to in a moment. Blue -- "Relatively young stars with mineral rich lifeless planets". White -- "Burn incredibly hot and generally have hostile planets" Purple -- "Neutron stars are rare and offer the greatest chance of finding rich planets." I'll explain in a bit what the heck all this rich/poor/lifeless/hostile/terran/standard etc. stuff really means, but first let's take a long at the details for our homeworld on the right-side panel. From top to bottom, we can see that it is Terran with a 100-max population; that's the best class of planet there is, and your homeworld always starts out as 100 max. The possible range of planetary populations ranges from 10 to 120 initially, so it's very good but not perfect. Below that we have current population of 40(50 on Average difficulty or below), 0 bases(missile bases, to be discussed more at a later time), and then production says 38(51). The first number is actual production after all current costs are taken out; second number is total production. The five sliders below that control planetary spending, the 38 available to us, as we see fit. Production in MOO is equal to one-half of the current population plus the current number of factories. You always start with 30 factories, so 40 population divided by 2 = 20, +30 factories = 50 production. The five spending categories are fairly self-explanatory. Ship = Shipbuilding Defense = Planetary Shields and Missile Bases; i.e. static planetary defenses Industry = Building factories increases the industrial base Ecology = Factories also produce waste; that's cleaned up here at an initial rate of 2 waste removed per BC. Any extra goes to terraforming if we have the tech(we don't right now), or to increasing population growth Tech = Researching new technologies Below that we can select what ship to build by clicking the image or the Ship button. RELOC is a rally-point concept; any ships built at one system can be re-routed automatically somewhere else. This is of course pointless at the moment with only one planet, since we have to send them somewhere that is under our control. TRANS allows sending up to half the population per year to another system, for bolstering other colonies or ground invasions. Next we need to understand that star/planet type stuff, so we'll head to the Map menu button in the bottom row.  At the top of the right-side panel you can see three buttons, defaulting to 'Colonies'. These are basically map modes long before map modes became a thing. The Map Key below tells us who we are up against, which is important information although you never know how things are going to shake out. I'm not sad to see there are no Klackons, but the Silicoids and Humans aren't likely to be fun. Darlok, Sakkra, Alkari -- the draw could be worse and it could be better. Only one system has a flag; our homeworld, since we know nothing about the rest of the galaxy. We can guess at the location of the other empires though; they will always start at yellow stars. The one above and to the right of us right by the 'hand cursor' is too close I think; one advantage the player has is a 'safe zone' around their homeworld. If the upper-left is an AI they'll be screwed with no other nearby stars, probably one or two in the upper-right. That one in the lower left and the one right smack dab in the middle are almost certainly homeworld locations. But we can't really know for sure yet. One thing to keep in mind with a small galaxy is that along with being smaller, it's the least dense; stars are more closely packed together in the bigger ones. The other two views bring up the stuff I was talking about relating to different star types. Each star system's potential is represented by a single planet, or none at all; there's no moons or multiple planets to be concerned with here. Behold the Environments display:  Now the Map Key displays the varying types of planets in the game. If you look closely, you'll see a corresponding green T by our homeworld of Mentar on the starmap. The two columns represent the two basic types, in terms of habitability: standard and hostile. As you go down each list(i.e, terran through minimal on the left, barren through none on the right), the maximum population of each planet type decreases. There is some randomness; a big jungle planet is better than a small terran, for example, but in general most terrans will be larger. Larger is always better in this case, and in most things in Master of Orion. The hostile planets are nthose more likely to appear in the blue, white, and purple stars we talked about earlier, and for our purposes at the moment there are two important facts about them. First, we can't colonize them with researching the appropriate technologies. Secondly, population growth is halved on those worlds once we can. This means that half of the planet types can only be settled by Silicoids to start things off, allowing them to develop worlds the rest of us can only gaze at. Hostile planets do tend to be smaller as well.  Finally, the Minerals view shows anything special about a planet's production. Again from the map key, Ultra Poor, Poor, Rich, and Ultra Rich have the effect of negative or positive multipliers on a planet's production. Note that these apply to industry, ships, and defense; ecology and technology are unaffected. In other words, you can't build crap without mineral resources, which these specials modify. The two types listed in green also require explanation. Artifacts planets are distinctive for a couple of reasons. They are planets where the mysterious 'Masters' have left remnants of their civilization, and study of those ruins doubles all tech output from these planets. Also, the first empire to scout an artifact planet receives a bonus tech advance from initial survey of these ruins. Orion is unique, as the manual intro I previously quoted indicates. The massive research quadrupling that occurs there is only one part of that unique status. Note that each planet can only have one 'mineral special'; that is, you'll never see a Poor Artifacts planet, or whatever. The assessment of a planet and it's economic value then, comes from a combination of three factors: maximum population, environment, and the speciality or lack thereof. Back at the main Control screen, it's time to take a look at our current fleet, such as it is.  On the left the fleet has been selected, and the right panel again shows us what's there. We'll get into more detail on ships and fleets and whatnot later, but for now we can easily see a pair of scouts and a single colony ship. These do pretty much what you'd expect them to do. Any ship can serve as a scout; what makes these special is they have reserve fuel tanks, which allow an extra 3 parsecs of range. Default game-start technology provides a 3-parsec range, so our scouts have double the range of our colony ship. They all also have retro engines, allowing basic warp travel; 1 parsec per year. We won't get anywhere in a hurry. There's one final thing to understand before we decide what actions to take. The Planets button is our next place to visit.  Most of this is your basic ledger/spreadsheet with important info on all of our planets, but right now we're most concerned with some very important stuff at the bottom. Remember what I said about actual versus total production? This is where you find out what the 'missing' amount is going to. On the bottom we've got ships, bases, spying, security, trade income, etc. Now spying and security aren't a thing because we haven't met the other races yet of course, but that 23.5% in the ships category really sticks out like a sore thumb. We're spending almost a quarter of our production maintaining the fleet -- and it's all going to that monstrosity of a colony ship, which(we'll see where to find this information later) costs 591 BC to produce, or almost a dozen years of production. Yikes. ProTip: Due to this maintenance cost for the colony ship, getting that first colony going ASAP is huge in terms of maximizing the growth curve. Getting rid of that much overhead at this point in the game is absolutely vital. So, let's take a look at what's within range. It turns out that, as happens fairly often in small galaxies, the decision was made quite simple for us. There is only one, the green star directly above us, three parsecs away. The yellow one to the right of it is four parsecs, the green one to our left is five, and everything else is further out. If that system isn't habitable, we're really in a bind -- but while it is possible to have no systems at all within colonizable range, though quite rare, when there is one they are hardcoded to be habitable AFAIK(at least one at any rate). I've never found a contrary example. One potentially tough choice is made self-evident and off the colony ship goes. The two scouts will head to the green and red stars beyond that one(above and above/left). Their goal is to push as far into the galaxy as possible. ProTip: AI Races are much less likely to try and settle a system that they have to fight for. Stationing a mere scout in a system can dissuade them, at least for a time. If they really want/need it they are coming anyway, but 'picketing' by stationing scouts everywhere within their travel range can slow their advance, sometimes significantly. It's crucial to restrict them at the same time you are expanding your own holdings. So we've got the glorious Psilon Fleet dispatched, which collectively has not a single weapon, shield, or electronics system beyond the basics onboard. They have what they need to complete their missions, and nothing else. Our final decision before we can actually advance to the next year: what do we invest in on Mentar? Defense is out, as we have no need for it prior to first contact. Technology is always vital but right now we have what we need to expand which is the top priority. Ecology requires 16 of our available 38 production(that's 42% for those of you scoring at home) just to keep things clean; putting more could help increase population but that would be highly inefficient. With starting technology, it requires a 20 BC investment to grow another 1M population; factories cost half as much(10 BC) and provide double the benefit. Each million(pop represents 1 million workers) can operate two factories each, so there is a limit; but we currently only have 30 factories for 40M pop, so we are not even halfway to that limit. And of course population will grow on it's own, factories don't. The choice comes down to two: factories or more scouts. There's no way to be absolutely certain which one will be better. The growth curve being all-important suggests building that industry with maximum haste, but that means delaying scouting some star systems -- systems our rivals could reach before we do as a result. Even among players capable of competing with the AI on Impossible there is not a clear consensus here, which is one of the things I love about this game; right from the start there is nuance and decision-making with no self-evident choice. My approach is to basically split the difference here; invest in factories for a few turns, typically until the first colony is established, then with the slightly improved economic base and less overhead, I'll pump out the needed scouts, after which I'll return to factory investment. Our remaining 22 BC(not bitcoin, that's Billion Credits, our currency) will allow for 2.2 factories this year(the game does track to one decimal place). There's not much else to say really. For Mentar!! When you click 'Next Turn' to advance the game, the Galaxy Map will display briefly and you can see ship movement within sensor range. Right now we can see nothing but our own ships, as our sensor range is ... lacking. I think it starts at 3 parsecs from colonies, 1 from ships. Might not even be that good.  Here's how things look after our orders are resolved. We've advanced to turn 2, aka 2301, one year per turn in Master of Orion. Population has grown a couple to 42M, we've built factories and are up to 2.4/year, production up from 38(51) to 41(54). Also, the ships have moved off in their various directions. They all appear to be 'pointing' to the left; you can get an idea on where a fleet is heading this way as well, although it'll only indicate left/right. The between-turn method is the only way to know more(unless it's our ships, in which case just selecting it will tell you where and how long). Also worth noting is that we can't change our minds now on where to send them. Until technology allows it, we can only communicate with them at star systems. That means you want to be sure before you send ships somewhere, esp. if they are going to take a long time to get there. Not much to do at this point but wait for them to arrive and keep building factories on Mentar.  A couple of years later, we have news of the not-great variety. Our target system above Mentar is named Tyr, and Minimal(35 max.) is pretty crappy. It's not terrible news; no enemies and we can colonize it, but at only a third the size of Mentar it sucks. There being no alternatives in range though it's not even a decision. After selecting YES to the colonization prompt, we're treated to a landing video which can be skipped but plays every time you colonize a system. This is our sole opportunity to rename the system if we choose; I tend to stick with the default names. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMJcp8vzpag There is some blurriness there compared to the ingame, as you'll notice if you compare to the screenshots. I think that's due to the DOSBOX video capture feature, which as far as I know is my only option. If anyone has any suggestions on improving it though let me know. Let's take a look at Tyr now and see what we have to work with.  This display is accessible in two ways; clicking on the star itself a second time, or on the red box at the top of the right-side panel that has the name, class, population etc. I prefer the Planets screen since it has information on all of them at once for comparison, and doesn't take any more work to get to, but it was worth showing. You can't interact with anything on this screen, but it does have icons in the lower left for those who prefer a visual representation. The one right now is for population(1 per 10), and there are others for factories and bases if appropriate. All new colonies start out with no factories at all, and a population of a whopping 2M. If you remember our production calculations earlier, that means 1BC is all we'll produce here; at that rate it would take a decade just to build a factory. We'll want to transfer in some population from Mentar to speed things up. Let's see how the homeworld is faring ...  Production is now set free here, at 61(61). That's because we are no longer paying for that colony ship. The two scouts continue on their way, but their maintenance is negligible. In the last three years seven factories have been built on the homeworld, but we can now build them much faster. ProTip: Whenever you have a major change in your automatic spending(i.e., the amount that comes out of your production due to ship maintenance, etc.) it's always a good idea to revisit your planetary sliders. They will remain at the same ratio, but since the amount you have to spend will have changed, you'll still end up with different results and will probably want to make adjustments. Ecology is what I look at first since often you want the minimum amount to clean up all the waste and you'll either end up with not enough to do that, or too much which isn't efficient. In this case, we don't need this much going into ecology anymore; part of our production increase is just going to be wasted that way.  There, that's better. 20 of the 61 is now going into waste cleanup: our 37 factories are producting about 40 units of waste. But there's more to do here. I want to transfer some population to Tyr to boost that planet, without hamstringing Mentar too much. Transports move at one parsec slower than your best engine tech typically, although right now both are at one parsec since that's the minimum. It'll take everyone we send three years to reach Tyr, and in the meantime they won't produce anything. The maximum allowable transfer is half of the current population on the source planet, but we aren't going to send anywhere near that much. ProTip: When making these kinds of decisions it's important to keep in mind how population growth works. It's basically a bell curve; planets grow fastest at half of their max population. Below a third or above two-thirds it slows down considerably, so keeping things in that 'middle third' is optimal where growth is concerned. Mentar isn't anywhere close to the amount of factories it's population needs to operate yet, so losing a little population isn't going to hurt it. At 47 out of 100M max, it's not to the 'sweet spot' of halfway yet either though. To keep overall growth as high as possible, I'll send as many new colonists as Tyr needs, keeping Mentar at least at 50M. For now, we'll only send 1M per year until it reaches that halfway point; that way we'll aid the growth of Tyr a bit, but Mentar will still be growing.  After selecting TRANS and clicking on the destination system, we get a line showing the path to be followed, and an ETA. The path will be similarly shown for any RELOC operations, which we will certainly be using at some point. That's everything we can do right now to boost Tyr, which will put it's miniscule production into factory-building as well. This seemed as good a place as any to put in a break. Next time I'll conclude the opening with a lot more game-years being covered and somewhat less exposition. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Apr 22, 2017 |
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Apr 22, 2017 03:36
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Bloodly posted:The Youtube video link wants correcting. It's not taking me to the video you want me to see. Thanks for the heads up. Link corrected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMJcp8vzpag
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Apr 22, 2017 23:05
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Opening, Part II WARNING: This update ended being rather longer than I expected. That'll probably happen for a couple more after this as well, and then they'll get smaller once all of the game-concepts explaining crap is out of the way.  This is the map screen again, to show a couple things. After clicking around on the various stars, we determine our next course of action in terms of scouting. It's time to get some more of them out there, but that won't do any good until we decide where. The only system within our 3-parsec colonization range is the green one above Tyr; the yellow one to the right is still 4 parsecs out. So we're really hoping right now that green one can be colonized. The range is calculated from the closest planet we own or are allied with, so we've extended our reach by settling Tyr; we can refuel there. The badly-drawn lavender line masquerading as a circle here is my fault. I put that in to show our current sphere of influence. Everything inside it can be reached by our 6-parsec range scouts. A total of ten systems, over a third of the galaxy, and we'll want scouts out to these planets ASAP. ProTip: This brings us to our first bug. Supposedly because of the way tech levels are calculated in Master of Orion, the starting ships are actually too expensive. Redesigning the exact same ship will give us an identical, but cheaper version.  This is the Fleet screen, accessed by another of the bottom menu buttons. Here we can see where our various ships are headed, and the list can get very long indeed later in the game. Also note the ship maintenance in the lower left, currently at 0. We can scrap any of our designs, which is necessary from time to time as we are limited to six active; to make a seventh you have to get rid of one of the current ones. For our purposes right now though, we'll select the Specs button on the bottom.  The Specs screen you'll be seeing a fair amount of in this LP. This is where we see all the details for all of our ships, at once. We'll revisit this later to explain what all of this stuff means, when it's time to build serious warships. Right now it's enough to know that it's here, and can tells us all of the combat characteristics, special systems, costs, and on the left by each ship's portrait, current # of ships in each class. Right now we want to scrap everything we aren't using; fighter, destroyer, and bomber, since even if we wanted those designs(we don't), because of the previously mentioned bug it's better to re-design them. I'd scrap the colony ship too, but I'm leaving it for comparison purposes at the moment. All we have right now in service are the two scouts; that's a total of 20 BC build cost, * 2% gives us 0.4 BC maintenance. So basically nothing, as mentioned. Then I threw together a couple of basic designs, a new scout(which I named simply the 'recon' class as is my custom) and a new colony ship 'colonizer'. Designing these is trivial, and we'll look at the ship design screen in more detail later. The new designs were made with exactly the same specifications as our existing ones, leading to the Specs display looking like this:  The Recon is 8 BC compared to the Scout at 10; Colonizer costs 570 BC instead of 591. No reason to pay more than we absolutely have to. The ship models are different because you can't have more than one design using the same model at a time. I'll scrap the original colony ship design now, and we'll be able to use that one again any time we wish. We need to build some Recons now, but we don't want more than we absolutely need. We'll want them at all planets eventually, but the less we can divert Mentar from factory-building, the better off our growth curve will be. We need at least four more to cover the six systems on the 'outer edge' of our sphere of influence, and one more to scout a couple planets close by. That's the minimum here, five Recons. That # will obviously vary from game to game. There is just enough production to do that in one year if we divert everything not needed for waste cleanup to the job.  Here the spending has been changed to do precisely that. Note how Eco and it's spending bar are now red. By clicking on the word Eco, Tech, or whatever category, you can 'lock' them in place, so that the amount will stay constant no matter what changes you make to the other ones. That makes it a lot easier to make the desired adjustments at times. Below that, we can see the Recon ship portrait and the 5 there indicates how many will be built this year. Changing from one ship class to another is done by the SHIPS button or by clicking the image. Being able to get more ships out on scout/picket duty for just one year's delay in factory-building is a much better trade than if we'd done so before; can't afford to wait any longer, because as mentioned, each turn we wait means more chances for our rivals to get there first.  As the next year arrives, we're greeted with the Fleet Production Report for the first time. This shows up anytime you build a ship, and is quite useful. If you've screwed up and built something you didn't want to, quite easy to do with a large empire, you'll probably notice it here and then have a chance to rectify the situation. In this case it's obviously just telling us that our five recons are finished.  Here we can see our lone colony transport on it's way to Tyr. The scouts are also nearing their destinations. The five new Recons are dispatched, and will take as much as nine years to arrive at the furthest star systems we can reach. Mentar also goes back to industrial spending, and sends another 1M people on to Tyr. The next few years we will be focused on building up our two systems and watching for the reports from our scouts. What they tell us will determine much.  The next year, 2305, the system of Willow is scouted and the report is not good. Toxic is second-hardest class of planet to settle. We won't have any chance of getting anything done here for quite some time. You can also see our recon ships fanning out from Mentar to their various destinations. Also, if you look near our uppermost scout, you'll see something else ...  That didn't take long! Things move quickly in small galaxies. An Alkari scout. I'd bet dollars to donuts based on the distance and timing that the yellow star midway up the right edge of the galaxy is Altair, the Alkari homeworld. That means we're going to be pretty hemmed in here out that way. It looks like both their scout and ours will arrive at the green star next year. This will serve as a good example of the importance of getting scout ships out early -- even a year later would have been too late. Also shows how close they have to be to us before we can spot them at starting tech. That green star is our only chance at another planet within our current range, so what happens next year in that encounter is absolutely vital. Short video shows what happened next: explanation to follow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCqYhJJPpAw Unless there is a treaty preventing it, whenever ships from two different races are at the same planet, an engagement of some kind will occur. Battles can occur only at planets; you won't run into ships halfway between or whatever. Every fleet battle begins with the players ships on the left edge, AI ships on the right. There's no planet visible here because nobody controls this system. If they did, the planet would be shown near their ships. Also note the red crossed-out circle as I moved the cursor around; that means I can't move to that location. The arrow/ship icon seen later appears when you move it close enough to be in range. Starting retro engines can only move one space per turn in combat, aka they are slow as dirt. The buttons along the bottom of the screen will matter in real battles, but for a meeting of two scouts it's not real important to go into those. As soon as we move, it's the Alkari's turn and they warp out. Enemy ships will always retreat if they have no weapons. This is an important advantage early in the game, because the winner gets to scout the planet here; the loser does not.  A tiny radiated planet. It's rich, and could be quite a good planet ... at least a century from now. But that's the absolute worst class of planet, the only one worse than toxic. With the Alkari scout retreating, we got there just in the nick of time. They weren't able to scout Arietis, and their scout has wasted valuable time. They can afford it more than us, and it's only a small victory but it's an important one nonethless. However we now have a bigger problem. We have to improve our range before we can expand further. It is possible to build a colony ship with reserve fuel tanks like the scouts have ... but it's not worth it. It would require a bigger hull and would be prohibitively expensive. Being stuck with only two planets right now, one colony and not a very good one at that, is a poor start. The Psilon Empire appears to be up against it here. This is an instructive moment in game design theory IMO. Modern games ensure fairly equivalent starts, but MOO has a bigger box when it comes to that. The preeminence of multiplayer concerns is the main reason for the change, and from that perspective it's quite sensible: I like the old way shown here when you can have a pretty crappy start(and so can other races, they aren't even protected as much as the player is in galaxy generation) because of variability and degree of unpredictability it adds to the experience. It's inefficient to try to do anything about that yet though; once we've got Mentar up to full capacity we can deal with that situation.  2308, two years later, and we get some good news: Imra is a terran planet able to support nearly as many Psilons as Mentar itself! We could fit every currently living Psilon on this planet. It's four parsecs away, so any range increase would bring it within our grasp. And look who is coming to check it out also; if you look closely, you'll see another Alkari fleet, another scout. The fact that they can make it this far means they have almost certainly colonized that blue planet a few parsecs directly above this. We'll have to disappoint them again; oh what a shame! Imra is definitely a very strong candidate for our next colony. Meanwhile, Mentar has shipped it's last colonists off to Tyr. There are 7M there already and 5M more on the way: that'll get them to the desired one-third level, 12M or more by the time they all arrive. Mentar has 54M and that will climb steadily now; 55 factories is nearly double the initial level with 5+ being added annually.  The next year we chase the incoming Alkari scout away from Imra as expected. ProTip: Notice that I've selected Arietis here. We have a scout in orbit, and another incoming. I'm going to send on the orbiting scout to the yellow system above and to the left, and since the new scout will replace it next year, we won't lose picket coverage at Arietis. In this case that yellow star is at enough of an angle from the vector of the incoming scout that we would have done just as well, no better and no worse, to have it simply head straight there initially. When stars are 'lined up' though you can often save a little time; and as we've seen already that time can be invaluable. I call this the Relay Technique. Just make sure the incoming scout is only one turn away when doing this.  2311, two years later. Let's say hello to another rival. Didn't see them coming. They just brought a scout, and they retreat as well. Also ...  Spica is a fairly good planet. Unless you are looking for it, you probably won't notice right away the bluish dome in the graphic there, indicating there's already a colony here.  Spica belongs to the Darloks, so that's where the came from. They are white in this game. It's worth noting at this point how first contact works: we will automatically establish relations once either side has the range to reach one of the other empire's planets. From this we can conclude that neither side has range tech as high as six parsecs right now(reserve fuel tanks are not factored in for this purpose). We'll reroute our recon ship at this point, as it's considered bad form to just hang out with your ships in orbit of another empire's planets and it will antagonize them. Don't need that. Retreating to Tyr in case somebody tries to scout that seems the best option here. We'll build one more recon at Mentar now as well. Spica is close enough that Darlok scouts could reach our homeworld, and we don't want them getting any such ideas. A 'defensive' scout ship over even our own occupied planets is a good idea, because if they do scout it, they might decide it's a ripe target and send troops here. We don't want them getting any such ideas.  It takes only a fraction of our production to accomplish this. Tyr only has a couple of factories right now and needs a lot more work before it can contribute, otherwhise we'd do the construction there.  Well this is a surprise. I expected to find an Alkari colony in Ukko ... but instead we have nothing. They must have advanced range tech already. Jerks.  It appears the Alkari have sent another scout to Arietis. Perhaps they think we've left? Looks like they are quite interested in the system. They'll probably eventually send armed ships to chase us away, but the more time and effort they waste in the meantime the better. 2313 has three encounters for us. Two of them involve chasing scouts away again, one Darlok and one Alkari. The third was different though ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEm_ZrM2ReY Our first run-in with warships. This is of course the Alkari homeworld of Altair, as I expected it would be. Should have used the Planet button on the bottom to show population and factories, but it didn't occur to me at the time. As our scout is not armed though, there's nothing for it here but to retreat.  This is the planet we chased a Darlok scout away from. Barren is the easiest type of hostile system to colonize, but still well beyond our capabilities, and Kronos is too distant anyway. Still, I don't mind chasing the Darloks away, though I don't know if they got there before we did or at the same time. Going to guess the former based on the location, but who knows. The ship that went to Altair will now retreat all the way to the red star in the extreme lower right of the map. That's the only system left in range that we haven't scouted. It's clear that Imra is not only our best bet; it's our only way to expand further.  Here we see our Recon ship heading back to Tyr. That's because the pathfinding attempts to find the closest system to go to whenever you retreat. As default behaviors go, that's not at all a bad thing. But until it actually leaves, which it can't do until a turn has passed, we can redirect anywhere within range ...  Better. So in 7 years, at the beginning of the next decade, we'll have the last piece of our scouting puzzle. The next year is 2314, and we receive the news bulletin in the following super-short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNszIHlV93c Good old GNN, aka the Galactic News Network. One wonders where they get their info ... and why a droid/robot serves as the anchor. Didn't manage to activate the video recording in time to catch the intro beat, but you are always informed this way once an empire reaches a certain threshold in terms of planets. GNN will have other things to say from time to time as well. The threshold is based on the galaxy size: 1/8th, 1/4th, 3/8ths, and 1/2 of total stars colonized. I've seen the 3 planets in a small galaxy notification as quickly as 2305(!!), so it's actually a mild surprise that it took this long. And the Darloks potentially being a power is a real shocker. It seems fairly probable that the Silicoids had a poor starting situation. If so, that would be good news as they are the best bet to run away with a bunch of systems early. The too-soon, quite dubious projection right now is that the Humans or ... can't believe I'm saying this ... Darloks figure to be the best competition.  Planets screen, same year. Best one-stop shopping spot to see what's going on with our systems, and we've reached a new phase in the buildup. Tyr has passed the halfway point in population(19 out of 35 max) and has only a few factories. It won't miss a few colonists much, and we'll start shipping them back to Mentar until our homeworld maxes out. There's nothing for us to do at the moment other than wait for that last scout to arrive and get Mentar up to it's capacity as soon as we can. It's the same idea as before; keep Tyr at 50% and send any surplus in transports.  It's 2320, six years later. The gradual movement of Psilons back to Mentar continues from Tyr. There have been no sightings of any other ships, Alkari, Darlock, or otherwhise. It's quiet. Denubius is another unimpressive planet, though a little better than Tyr, but it's something. If we snag Imra, this system will fall within range. Scouting, for the moment, is now complete.  Another three years, now 2323. Here's how the map looks right now as we begin to shift from the opening into the next phase of the game. Hasn't changed; we're still cut off from the rest of the galaxy for the forseeable future by those hostile planets. We'll be isolated for longer than usual, especially for a small galaxy, due to this. That could be good ... or bad. Colonizing Imra and then Denubius in the lower right is an obvious next step.  The homeworld is only 5M away from maxing out, and has a couple more transports incoming from Tyr, which is done sending colonists back now. In less than a quarter-century, production has increased almost 5-fold from 51 to 238. Importantly, the industry slider now reads MAX, meaning that we've reached the maximum number of factories that can be operated by the current population. That defines the ending point of the opening; reaching full productivity on the homeworld. To expand further we must turn our attention to advanced technology. That, along with a profile on our civilization, will be the first subjects of the next update, which will cover the years 2323-2350. It is also likely that the two other remaining support screens, Design(of starships) and Races(interactions with them once first contact is achieved) will be delved into as well. The journey of the Psilon people has begun, but many challenges remain.
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Apr 24, 2017 14:27
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AddedSpace posted:Not cleaning up pollution lowers the maximum population of a planet. Since your home world starts at 40 out of 100 it can be worth it to shortchange cleanup for the first few turns to get more factories running. I must admit this would never have occurred to me. After playing around with a bit, I'm unsure how much it will benefit ... a little I think, though it also lowers population growth a hair as well so I'll have to experiment more. This will probably make an appearance in some form for the second game though; appreciate the contribution.
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Apr 24, 2017 14:31
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That's a good point, and is well-taken. If I ever run into that scenario(I've seen it, but only in the games of the others thankfully) I'll just have to suck it up and take the beating that will almost certainly ensue. The 'safe zone' I was referring to doesn't guarantee no harm; but I do think it does ensure there will be no other AIs within roughly 7 parsecs of our homeworld, so that you won't immediately(but possibly shortly thereafter) see them at your initial in-range star systems.
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Apr 24, 2017 22:00
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I've glanced at them a bit, enough to know that I'm more interested in the first one and would to read all of it eventually. It's fun to read things that are in a much different style from time to time.
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Apr 25, 2017 22:23
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Thanks all! Onwards then ... Phase II: Expansion Part I(2323-2337) Yeah, so basically I'm a liar. No way I'm covering the whole 27 years in this update, what with two more in-depth screen/feature descriptions and lots of other stuff going on. I still think I'll eventually get to doing 25-year updates, but maybe not; there's a point at which I don't think it's helpful to have novellas rivaling the Encyclopedia Brittanica for length. Originally I intended to start off this update by talking doing a more in-depth racial distinctives of the Psilons, and then move into talking about Tech research in Master of Orion. Then I remembered those are the same thing. Psilons straddle the baseline in all other matters. Diplomacy is neutral, as are spying, economics, and warfare. Technology is their lone distinctive. At the end of our last discussion I mentioned that it was time to shift Mentar from building up industry, and tech is what to shift it TO in this situation. We'd prefer to just send out more colony ships, but we need more range first. So off we go to the Tech screen.  This will take a bit of a text wall. Technology is the most complicated system in Master of Orion, and also ultimately this most important. To start with, there are six fields as seen in the upper left; selecting one lists all the advances researched in each one, along with the current project. There are no current projects at game start however. On the right we can see our current level in each field, a couple basic facts about fundamental abilities related to them, and set our spending for each. This works just like planetary sliders; they can be locked, increased or decreased. The pool of RP(research points) at the lower right is at nothing right now but that will soon change. That's our currency here. Back to those six fields of study: here's how the manual describes them. Computers "deals with the development of specialized electronic devices and computer systems. Computer tech produces such devices as battle computers, ECM jammers, robotic controls, space scanners ... " Mostly this is stuff you put on ships, but sensor range from planets and some economic techs as well. Construction "is a generalized form of engineering primarily dealing with advanced structures and materials. Construction tech can be used to develop advanced armors, reduce industrial waste emissions, and decrease the cost of building new factories." Basically stuff gets built cheaper and more efficiently, including ship components, along with more effective materials. Force Fields "involve the practical application of advanced fields physics such as deflector shields, replusor beams, stasis fields, damage shields ... " Pretty self-explanatory. Planetology "involves the analysis and development of alien worlds. Planetology can be used to develop technology that will eliminate waste more efficiently, expand the livable terrain of planets, and allow colonists to land on planets with hostile environments." Getting the most out of the physical matter of the star systems in our galaxy. Propulsion "develop new and more powerful ship engines, extend ship ranges, and construct special power systems" Those power systems take various forms, but almost everything in this field is put on a ship, and even those that aren't are related to fleet movement. Navigating the galactic space-time continuum, you might say. Weapons "deals exclusively with the development of advanced weapon systems." This includes the armaments of our ground troops, but will focus mostly on weapons for use in space. Every race in the galaxy has certain affinities for these fields and certain weaknesses: every race except one. That's us, the Psilons. In each technological field there are four possible ratings: ** Excellent -- One race is the best at each category, and they require only 60% of the normal investment to research new advances in that field. ** Good -- Better than average with 80% investment required. ** Neutral -- The standard amount. ** Poor -- 125% of the normal investment is required. Additionally, the better rating a race has in a particular field, the more choices they will have to choose from. A weak field limits the options, requiring a race to either go without or find other ways to acquire the knowledge. Psilons are rated Good in all categories. This is part of their research advantage. They also are much more efficient, with a 50% bonus to all research efforts. Usually 1 BC invested in tech equals 1 RP: for us it equals 1.5. Combined, these give the Psilon a huge, huge 75% edge against an 'average' race. There are several more rules or concepts that are important when it comes to technology in Master of Orion: ** Steady, long-term investment is favored over a 'crash' program. The mechanism for this is 'interest' awarded for research on a particular project. The amount is the lowest of two options: the amount invested this year or 15% of the total to date. Furthermore, you lose 10% of your investment in that project annually if funding is cut off completely. ** The current tech level, or TL, is calculated as 80% of the highest-level advance plus the total number of devices in that field. This makes the higher-level advances the most valuable while ensuring that all new studies, no matter how mundane, will have at least some minimal value. TL is not merely a score or an abstratction, because ... ** As the TL increases, previously discovered advances are made cheaper and miniatuarized. Generally the cost is reduced by 5% per TL, and size by 2.5%. Therefore you can cram a lot more on a ship as time goes on, for example, as basic components can be used far more efficiently. ** There is some variety baked into the completion date, eliminating total predictability. Once the 'cost' of a project has been satisfied, there will be a % chance of finishing each year, increasing as long as funding continues until discovery is made. ** Not nearly as well known, and not documented in the manual(though implied by the tech chart) is the fact that the 50 TLs of advancements are divided in 10 'tiers'. To have access to a tier's advances, you must research one in a previous tier. For example, in the first tier of Weapons there are the following advances: L1 -- Lasers and Nukes. The basic weapons you start the game with already researched. L2 -- Hand Lasers. L4 -- Hyper-V Rockets. L5 -- Gatling Laser. When starting up Weapons research, we will have at least one of these available as a choice(one advance from each tier is guaranteed at a minimum) and possible as many as all three of them. Our Tier II choices will be unlocked as possibilities after finishing whatever we choose here. This provides an incentive for pushing up the tech tree for new, groundbreaking technologies ... but in doing so, you may find yourself bypassing items that won't unlock a new tier, but could more quickly provide a benefit now. It's another short-term vs. long-term concept. This is one of those areas that turns me into a real fanboi, I admit without shame. There may be games that do something that I haven't seen, but I flat-out think this is the best overall research system I've ever seen in any game. Others have done parts of it but nobody carries it off as well on the whole. Really the only two criticisms I can even level here are that I think the cost/size reductions are overdone and should probably only be half of what they are as well as being limited, and that I'd like to see more variable race-specific tech(i.e., armors, weapons, planetary developments, etc. with some variability from game to game and not always the same each time). That's it though. The way it all fits together and plays out is one of those things I gain more and more appreciation for the more I play. It's really elegantly and brilliantly done IMO. Clearly it really mattered to the design team to get this right. Now that all that blather is over with, what are we to do with this right now? We need to increase our ship range to colonize Imra; that means propulsion tech. We can't research just yet though; our scientists need to take the next year to come up with our initial research possiblities, which they will do if we invest a modest amount. Given that we have equal ability across the board, we'll do best here to hit the = key and equalize spending across all fields. We're only going to focus on propulsion, but we can't actually dump a bunch of effort into that until we have something to dump it into. Might as well see our choices in the other fields while we are at it.  This only requires a minimal investment, a couple of points in each field. 13 RP will give us at least 2 in each, and that's plenty. However, that still leaves us with more than enough left over to max out factories on Mentar, so we'll actually put just a bit into shipbuilding here on a new Colonizer. We're not going to actually build it yet, but getting the work started is the best use of that small fraction of remaining production. Grab every tiny edge you can get.  Accompanied by it's own little musical jingle, this screen comes up whenever you have a new research option. Usually that means you've completed a previous one, but here we are first starting out. Computers is up first, and we get a bigger, better Psilon portrait of a researcher here. We have to choose between 120 RP for ECM Jammer Mk. I, which will make it harder for enemy missiles to hit our ships if they are equipped, or a Deep Space Scanner. I had a picture for each, but I was a dufus and forgot to save the first one. These are more expensive and extend our scanning range to something slightly less inadequate than it currently is. Few of these choices are gimmes. I really like the scanner tech as knowledge is power; having a little more warning of other empires' fleets moving about would be quite useful. The ECM Jammer would give us a quick cheapie and unlock Tier II faster. Even so I normally go with the scanner, but given how we are effectively cut off and isolated right now in our corner of the galaxy, albeit temporarily, I side with the ECM, the idea being we don't need the scanner just yet.  A Psilon researcher is rarely without options, but that's the case here. Reduced Industrial Waste 80% does pretty much exactly what it says. It'll take a bit of work to acquire but reducing our waste cleanup budget is a very worthy goal.  Once again no choice to be made, but that's because there's only one Force-Field tech in this tier so it'll always be the only option. Class II Deflectors are a mid-level cost tech and will give us improved defensive capabilities.  A wealth of riches here, and Planetology is a crucial field early. Terraforming +10M is very cheap and allows us to increase the potential of all planets right away, though we do have to make the investment on each planet once the knowledge is acquired. Since it's a flat-rate increase, smaller planets will benefit the most from this.  We can get started on hostile planet colonization early if we wish. There is that barren system in the middle of the galaxy ... but we aren't close to having enough range to reach it. It's doubtful we'll have a use for this anytime soon, and colonization techs are inclusive. By that I mean that researching, say, inferno colonization also allows you to land on any planet less hostile(barren, dead, etc). For that reason it's often best to skip barren and grab one higher up the ladder so to speak, unless you have nearby barren worlds, which we don't. We'll pass here.  A little pricey, but this is a HUGE early tech. Cleaning up 3 waste/BC is a 50% improvement on our current 2/BC. Put differently, it would allow a one-third cut in our ecology spending immediately. It's a tough call here between terraforming and eco restoration. You could argue it either way, and I almost picked eco restoration here. The thing is, terraforming is so cheap, and the option of taking that, then having planets terraform while we push up to eco restoration or something else ... just knocking that out of the way quickly seems to be the way to go.  Propulsion. This is what we came here to see. The right choice here is very situational, and Imra is four parsecs away so there's no reason to overspend; we're going with the cheaper Hydrogen Fuel Cells.  Deuterium fuel cells will either wait, or be skipped entirely in place of something better.  Weapons is our last field to decide, and there are three more choices. Hand Lasers are the cheap option. We'll get more into how ground combat works later on whenever it comes up. These can be important in border disputes, but it doesn't appear we are going to have them anytime soon. There are times when it's important to get these, but we'll bypass them this time.  Hyper-V Rockets are a significant improvement over our starting nuclear missiles, and are worth serious consideration.  The rapid-firing Gatling Laser is a game-changer for a brief period of time until it becomes obsolete. That narrow window of opportunity means it is fairly often a poor investment. Given our position in the galaxy, the Hyper-V Rockets are definitely going to be the most useful. And that's wraps up our initial research choices.  This notification happens whenever a planet reaches its limit on factories or population. But what's all this about the planetary reserve? Let's take a look, back on the Planets display.  On the lower right, it looks like I've just clicked on the TRANSFER button but I actually haven't; it's depressed like that already because it's inactive. That's because, as you can see directly above, there's no money in the reserve. I was right on the button and didn't have any extra invested in industry to go here. That pop-up message about the 'extra spent going into the reserve' appears whether there was actually any extra or not. Usually there is. Anyway, the planetary reserve is another one of those features that I think is a superior alternative to the idea of 'buying' or 'rush job' production. In most strategy games, a sufficient amount of treasure will allow you to finish building something immediately. In Master of Orion, the most you can do is double the rate of production; one can think of this as threatening the workers or mandatory triple overtime or whatever, or perhaps imagine Vader's visit to the second Death Star("I hope so for your sake, commander. The Emperor is not as ... forgiving ... as I am.") There are multiple ways to get money into the reserve. Overruns like this one are one way; investing in industry when a planet is maxed out on factories will do it as well(but at a 50% discount, only half the credits will actually go into the reserve); when you scrap a ship design, a quarter of their build cost goes into the reserve as well; and on the screen you can clearly see a slider which can be used(at the same 50% discount) to essentially 'tax' all of your planets by a certain amount. When there's something in the reserve, it can be transferred to any planet. I'll show that mechanic when it comes time to take advantage of it. I think the MOO Planetary Reserve is an excellent feature; it's simple and balances the ability to bootstrap production where needed with a realistic limit on that ability. Now that we have our tech choices, Mentar throws all of it's disposable production into research, while Tyr will continue building up.  Back on the technology screen to show a couple things. We've got 214 RP going, and every last drop of it into getting the fuel cells to increase our range and get to Imra. Notice the light-bulb on the right of the full propulsion slider: it's most of the way full. When that fills up all the way, we'll begin to have a chance at this breakthrough. While it is best most of the time as I mentioned to invest a little at a time, right now we just need that range extended and we need it absolutely ASAP. When you've got to have something and don't care about the inefficiency of investment, a crash program still works. You just don't want to make a habit of it.  This is a year later with nothing changed. The light-bulb is replaced by '16%'. There's a bug that causes this to display only half of the actual chance of discovery: we have a 32% chance of getting Hyrogen Fuel Cells if we maintain this level of investment. However that's actually not what we want to do -- because we'd then have to wait for the colony ship to be built. Instead we'll start that right now, and shift Tyr over to research. It'll take 4 years for Mentar to build the ship, and by then we'll be closer. The idea of all this is to have the ship ready and the research finished at the same time, for the purpose of getting under way to Imra as soon as possible. Tyr's industrial buildup will be paused in order to achieve this, but that's an acceptable sacrifice.  Another year, and it's 2325. GNN is back with production rankings. This gives us a sense of who is doing well. For the Psilons to have a poor second planet and be #3 here is surprisingly good. This tells me that the three races below us(Silicoid, Human, and Alkari) are probably stuck in situations where they haven't been able to expand yet. We'll hear periodically from the Galactic News Network on a few different subjects, at seemingly random intervals. I've seen them give the exact same report twice in three years with no new information. The robotic news director is perhaps not the most forward-thinking individual. Meanwhile, with three years left to go on the colony ship, we're up to a 10% chance of finishing our research.  It's 2328 now, and you can see Mentar pulling a little back into research from shipbuilding. The reason for that is we'll still finish the Colonizer this year. Master of Orion does have 'overflow', meaning that if I invest more it'll carry over to the next ship and give partial production. I don't want to do that though, because we still haven't finished the fuel cells project yet. As it happens, with this spending and Tyr's continued minor efforts, we're at an even 50-50 shot at getting it this year. If it was much below that I'd probably pull even more out and wait another year before finishing the ship. 2329 comes and the ship is finished but we still don't have the range we need. The odds are not in the Psilon's favor. Pretty low chances of getting this far and not achieving the breakthrough, but the muse of invention can be fickle(and RNGs as well). At this point Mentar can put enough into job to guarantee completion, so Tyr goes back to building factories.  Here we are. Three decades into our journey and the Psilons have made their first research advancement. With some advances there will be an action to take with a prompt for that, but usually it's just a matter of being notified and then choosing the next project ...  We've got two new choices. You may recall than Deuterium Fuel Cells were at 800 RP. Now we have access to Tier II Propulsion possiblities, and the cost goes up considerably. These are always ordered by tech level, and the price goes up with that so it's lowest to highest every time. The only real reason we'd have to go for Deuterium cells here would be if there was something we really wanted to get to 5 parsecs away. Otherwhise it's either the Irridium Fuel Cells here or the last choice to advance another tier. It's worth noting here that Irridium cells would likely put us in contact with the Darlok and Alkari, who we know possess planets exactly that far away ...  The Inertial Stabilizer is quite useful in combat, adding considerably to our ability to avoid fire. The choice here basically boils down to how happy we are with what will soon be our four planets in this corner of the galaxy. Is it more important for us to stretch our legs so to speak, or should we focus on being able to defend ourselves? In a larger galaxy, range would almost certainly be more important. Here, the chances of being able to reach a planet nobody else has seized yet seem at this point unlikely ... but we can't be sure. I'm not at all sure I'm doing the right thing, but I choose Irridium Fuel Cells and go for the range. Even if I can't do a darned thing about it, I like knowing what's out there. The choice to try and join the galactic community earlier rather than later is a very double-edged one, and we may well find out that the Psilons would have been better served to go for the maneuverability advantage. Time will tell. It's easy to forget that the range of our scouts has also increased to seven now(four plus reserve fuel tanks). That brings only one more system within our reach, which I think is not habitable anyway: it's near the Alkari and they'd have colonized by now and be buzzing around us more I think. Regardless, we'd like another Recon ship to go head out there. Our Colonizer heads off to Imra, Mentar focuses on building another one, and Tyr will divert enough resources to get that scout going. We'll want to start up again in a more broad-based effort soon, but all research efforts are suspended for now.  Most of the time I won't show these kind of mundane logistical details, but they are important. There's another Relay situation going on here. Tyr is building a Recon, so I send the one in orbit on right away to Arietis, the green star above. When it's a year away, the ship there will depart and head out, you can see the red-star destination at the top of the screen. It probably won't matter in this case, but this will drop two years off the journey compared to waiting for the ship to finish at Tyr and then sending it directly. These plans are executed and by 2334 we have added Imra to our empire, though with only a minimal 2M population.  Before moving on I just want to highlight this. The Darlok colony Spica, many turns after we left. It shows the last data we know of(Last Reported As ... ) since we don't have scanners that can give us any information that far away and no ships in orbit anymore. I love it when games get these kinds of details right. It's a small thing, but it's exactly as it should be.  It's time now for us to transition into a new phase of the game. It's been an unusual start in that we haven't had a lot of tough choices and have a band of hostile/uninhabitable systems separating us from the rest of the galaxy. Here's what's going on: ** We'll want to send more colonists to Imra to get it up and going faster. Eventually it will be nearly as productive as our homeworld of Mentar. ** Our initial expansion phase is almost complete, as a minimal investment will get another Colonizer finished next year, and then it will head out to Denubius, the desert system to the right of Imra. This will not expand our range at all as it's on the edge of the galaxy. ** The Recon ship headed upwards from Tyr is two years away from its destination. It's pretty rare, and almost unheard-of on some of the bigger galaxy sizes, to have this kind of clearly defined transition point. Usually it's more of a gradual process of realizing it's time to invest in other areas besides grabbing up star systems, and things like research and military buildup at least for self-defense if not for border disputes or even outright war come into play. Being isolated makes things simpler, but we still must make priorities. This is the point in the game that I start to feel less confident in and am sometimes unsure of what to do -- or even royally screw up. Before this LP is over, you'll see that multiple times I'm sure. There's no way to know how soon it might change, but we really don't have a need for a navy yet or building defenses. Nobody's even sniffing around the barren planet we have picketed, much less the radiated or toxic ones. This is very, very rare; I'd expect more activity by now, and that reinforced my impression that others may be off to a rough start. Under those circumstances it seems best to me to focus on getting Imra and Denubius up and running as quickly as possible, accelerating this end of that growth curve, and snag some tech especially some of the economically beneficial early ones. First up, I transfer some population to Imra; 13M from Tyr and 15M from Mentar. That's a lot of people to have just hanging out in space for the four-year journey and not producing anything, but it'll be worth it in the long run. I'd send more from Tyr, but that would put them below the midpoint. Only a smidge is needed to finish the Colonizer at Mentar and the rest goes into research. The question here is what to focus on? It's time to put at least a little into all the fields, but some things are more important than others. Reduced Industrial Waste 80% and Terraforming +10 are the two that will boost our growth and economy. That's Construction and Planetology.  As you can see there's just a hair into the other four fields. This is an extreme split, and we won't keep up anything like this long-term. Next time we'll get to one of the game's biggest surprises, and designing ships, among other events.
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Apr 27, 2017 03:56
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Quite right you are; I wasn't being totally serious on that part, which isn't always obvious on a forum.
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Apr 27, 2017 21:25
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Excellent! Thanks for joining.,
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Apr 29, 2017 06:44
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2337-2350 Next up, we ran into something that generally will freak out a new player the first time they see it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWAwKzKh19M For anyone who isn't familiar with it, that's the Guardian, who always guards Orion. Just how badass it is depends on the difficulty: I think I remember escaping from it on the lower ones before. Just to put those 10k hitpoints into perspective, the largest ships we can build right now would have 900 HP, or just under 1/11th of that. And that's with sacrificing a significant amount of cost and space for extra armor. Other aspects of the Guardian are pretty equally advanced as well. In the early stages of the game, that makes Orion a no-fly zone for any ship that isn't suicidal. It's far from invincible, but it might as well be a deity at this point. In 2337, we snagged another tech advance, Terraforming +10M. The video here is a bit longer, but still well under a minute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSeRFuLCe2k The purpose of this was to show off a couple of things: the 'research music' at the beginning, and then also the post-discovery dialog about changing planetary spending. Whenever prompted to increase to buy something new in this way, I always decline. The decision of when to invest, and we'll definitely want to terraform all planets, is best made on an individual rather than one-size-fits-all basis like this. Then we hit Tier II of Planetology and are given some useful new options: Improved Terraforming +20, Controlled Dead Enivironment, and Death Spores. The first two we've already seen earlier versions of, while the last is a biological weapon that we will discuss when getting into warships. As shown though, this is a case where we are going to take another Tier-I option, because Eco Restoration will have a huge benefit to our economy by slashing our required waste-cleanup budget. That's more important here than pushing up the tech ladder. Now we've got a new question to decide: where and how much to invest in terraforming? ProTip: There's no point in investing in terraforming before the population of a planet hits the half-full mark. It won't benefit at all before that. I usually do it when the population is between half and two-thirds; after that growth will start slowing down. Hopefully by that point the industry can handle it in a reasonable time-frame. Right now that means Mentar is the only planet that really is worth the investment.  Here's our homeworld before investing: the Eco line does say T-FORM but that's a very small amount, one click left and it reads WASTE. We don't want that. The granularity doesn't allow for perfect control; you can't put exactly X amount in a category. Planetary spending is split up into 25 sections of 4% each, tech spending into 50 sections of 2%. Also notice the population display is 100+, not just 100. the '+' indicates that it can be increased with currently available technology. The description noted that the price is 5 BC per million, so we need to invest 50 BC here.  A little math and a few adjustments later, and voila! We should have the process complete next year with this investment, and we're still doing plenty of research to keep things moving. I also sent another 5M population from Tyr to Imra. Imra itself doesn't need it, but once our colony ship reaches the red star Denubius in four turns I'm going to want to balance those three systems in a line left-to-right proportionally. In other words, I'll want to balance them out with a third or half or whatever I can get of their population max on each so that all can be growing well at about the same rate. I don't want to send any more citizens from Mentar; the homeworld's job is to do research and otherwhise support the colonies.  All of that went well, Mentar's max population is up to 110M, and it'll grow towards that: when it starts getting close we'll need to build more factories there. Our initial push of colonists to Imra is finished so the factory buildup can start there as well. The purpose of this shot though is to highlight the fact that we have some uninvited guests; the Darloks are coming back to Arietis. Four scouts won't do them any more good than one did. It seems likely they've run out of places to expand and are making another try here, but we'll just shoo them away once more.  It's 2340, and the Silicoids have shown up. On the galaxy map in-between turns, it looked like they moved further than usual ... meaning they have advanced engines. Because of that, they were out of range last year and we didn't even see them coming. If they brought more than scouts, this could be trouble. As it turns out, it's just a lone scout and we turn it back.  This gives us some new information about the galaxy, and we can now have a pretty good idea where everyone is. The Darloks pretty much have the lower left quadrant on lockdown. They had the best starting position with a sizable portion of the galaxy to themselves with no competition(no other yellow stars in that area). In the lower right, we had the second-best though, so we're not exactly roughing it ... and if you have to pick a race to start off behind, you can't do better than the Darlok. The Alkaris(A) are totally screwed with just about as bad a starting position as is possible. Stuck between an uninhabitable system and the Guardian(G). The Silicoids(S) have to have come from the white star in the middle-center; there's just nowhere else they could have gotten to Arietis(yellow oval) from. That means they came from one of the yellow stars in the upper right. The two ?s, one of which doesn't even really look like one but that's just my hideous Paint skills, are in the upper corners. By process of elimination, that's where the Human and Sakkra, who aren't likely much happier than the Alkari, must be. The three green stars in the upper left will be fought over by probably the Darlok and Silicoid, as they look too far away for whoever is in that corner to reach soon. The point of all this is that Arietis looks like it's becoming Ground Zero, the focal point for a border dispute. We're not at war with anybody, haven't even met anybody, but the appearance of the Silicoids there takes this to a new level because they can colonize it, ignoring hostile environments as they do. Sooner or later they or the Darlok or both WILL come back with escorts and chase our Recon ship away. The question is when, not if. With the Darloks it's no big deal, because they can't do anything with the system. A size-15 planet, even being rich, isn't that great -- but terraform it a bit and it could easily become a 35 or more, and that's just for starters; that means the equivalent of a size-70 in terms of shipbuilding, and getting better as the game goes on. It would also of course extend their range so they could go after even more targets. All of this leaves me with a choice to make. The Silicoids are potentially making a bid here to make this a 3-way competition for supremacy, whereas right now it's pretty clear Darloks #1, Psilons #2. We've got a strong interest in stopping them from doing that. One might say 'what about Kronos', the star above and left of Arietis? That's a barren and the rocks could seize that to -- but we've got basically no chance of doing anything about that. Also, we haven't seen anyone challenging our scout there(yet), though they'll probably get to it eventually. Somebody's going to research barren environment soon if they haven't already. The one thing we might be able to do is send some armed ships to Arietis and at least delay the Silicoids taking it. To do that, we've got to head over to one of the two main screens we haven't looked at yet, Design.  As far as I know, Master of Orion was the first game to do this whole ship-designing thing. It was certainly the earliest one I've already seen it in. Instead of churning out pre-defined, pre-fabricated units, there is a great deal of strategy to be found in just what kind of ships to build. A quick note here, I didn't change anything once entering the screen. You can see it's started out with the configuration of a colony ship: that's because it's the last ship I designed. Another one of those places where the game saves your last settings in case you want to tweak something. Not everything in Master of Orion is user-friendly by a long shot, but we've all played games where they didn't make the effort to do things like this, resulting in extra work for the player to make stuff happen that should be automatic. I'm somebody who appreciates this kind of thing. For now let's just look at the three buttons in the lower right. CANCEL exits without adding the design to our fleet, CLEAR erases everything and lets you start from scratch, and BUILD accepts the design as it is and adds it to your fleet. If you already have the maximum of six, you'll be prompted to scrap one of the existing ones to make room.  After clicking CLEAR and changing the ship size, the view changes to this. And here's where I have to go into Exposition Overdrive(TM). Ships and space combat aren't overly complex, but the amount of options is. From the player point of view this is the most complex part of the game simply due to the number of different possible configurations. Let's get started on this monstrosity then. I think it'll work best to combine the explanations for the design and combat systems elements. There's three basic sections in terms of equiment from top to bottom: Basics, Weapons, and Specials. Starting at the upper-left box, there are three Basics systems there: Computer, Shield, and ECM. ECM is dark while the other ones are light because there is nothing you can add to that category. In this case that's because we don't have any ECM devices at all; other times it will be because we've already got the best one in the design, or because the design is out of space. That makes it easy to tell at a glance whether a particular aspect can improve things. The Basics systems are: Computers -- improve a ship's attack level(i.e., weapon accuracy) and initiative. More on initiative later as it's not an obvious concept, and not directly displayed anywhere. Definitely gotta call that a UI fail. Default accuracy is 50%, and increasing accuracy by merely +1 makes that 60%, so it is quite important. The Mrrshan and Alkari combat bonuses are considerable when you factor this in. Shield -- absorbs damage. These are not Star Trek shields; you can't knock them out. They work on a principle of simple subtraction, not a fixed absorption strength. The starting Class I shield absorbs 1 point of damage from all weapons on a per-attack basis. A Class IV shield absorbs 4 points, and so on. ECM -- These add to missile defense, increasing the chance an incoming missile weapon will simply miss. You might ask why missile defense is already 3 here. That's because smaller ships are inherently harder to hit. Larger ships get -1 to their defense with each successive size. Armor -- Determines the amount of hit points(HP), or damage a ship can survive before being destroyed. We only know of Titanium, but it's still an option to be selected here because double hulls are a thing. They allow for a 50% HP increase, but at a significant cost in terms of space. Engine -- Determines warp speed(speed on the galactic map) and maxiumum combat speed. Maximum because you can build a fast-warp ship that is still a turtle in combat; combat speed can't be higher than warp speed but it can be lower. Maneuverability -- Thrusters can be added here up to or equal to the warp speed, increasing combat speed and initiative. Better combat speed means better DEF, defense against beam weapons. I mentioned initiative early; that's a fancy way of saying 'who moves first' in fleet combat. There is a racial component with the Mrrshan and Alkari being the best, but aside from that it's a combination of your battle computer and maneuverability. Moving, and therefore firing, first gives you a chance to tilt the odds in your favor. That's it for the Basics. As shown, you can't build a ship without basic armor and an engine. Everything else is optional. Next up are Weapons, of which there can be up to four different types per ship.  Selecting one of the weapons slots brings up this box, where we can select from the various options. We have five different possibilities now and will have many more later. However we can only pick the Laser. The relevant stats are all listed, though you can ignore the Power. There was a mechanic, apparently dropped late in development, that required more engines to power all of the devices on a ship. If you select the engines you'll also see a 'num of engines' listed, but you don't actually pay the cost or space for these since that aspect was removed. You want to look at SPACE, not SIZE here as well. All of the others matter though. Weapons are of three basic types. Bombs -- Can only be used against planets. Each can be fired 10 times. Missiles -- Can be used effectively against both planets and ships, but they are also limited by ammunition. Note the lack of a damage range; if a missile hits, it hits for the same amount of damage each time. Many come in two different types, as with the two different types of Nuclear Missiles shown here. Missiles are the weapon of choice for hit-and-run tactics; launching a big alpha strike and then retreating before the enemy has enough time to react. Beam Weapons -- Basic beam weapons(there are other varieties to come) will always come in a standard and heavy version, aka the Laser and Heavy Laser. The Heavy variety does more damage and has a longer range -- but firing at a longer range comes at a cost of reduced accuracy. Accuracy impacts damage even if the weapon hits the target, but there are times when the longer range is worth the cost. Also, all beam weapons have their damage cut in half due to the atmosphere when attacking planets, so they are not optimal for that role. The main advantage of beam weapons is that they can be fired an infinite number of times; there is no ammunition to deal with. On to Specials, of which three are allowed by class of ship.  They pretty much speak for themselves here, with descriptions for what they do. This is a good place to talk about scaling. Some parts of a ship scale, and others do not. Looking at the three options here, reserve fuel tanks will be larger and more expensive for a larger ship; battle scanners and standard colony bases will be the same size and cost wherever you try to put them. It's 95 space for a Battle Scanner no matter what at our current tech. This is true for other items on the ship as well; computers, armor, shields, etc. all are bigger and more costly for larger ships. As far as ship size itself goes, that's in the lower left. I prefer to refer to the sizes as strike craft, destroyer, cruiser, and capital ships rather than small/medium/large/huge. However you think of them, the difference is that bigger ships take more damage and cost more, while being a little easier to hit. Along the bottom you can select different ship icons with up and down arrows, and then you get all the relevant information on the ship itself(name, cost, total space, and space available). The names are generated based on your race, so I will sometimes use the ones they give you as an immersion thing. You can change them though. Ok, so that's ships and space combat. We'll discover a lot more toys to plug in here; the right designs and military stances is an ever-changing chess game between ourselves and our galactic rivals. Right now though, the question is this: is there a useful ship that we can build to try to ward off interlopers at Arietis, or should we not bother with that and continue working on research and our economy? I'd rather do the second one, but every hunk of rock is crucial in a small galaxy and given the apparent AI focus on Arietis(they do like their rich worlds, and for good reason, even though I don't think they've scouted it yet), I think it's worth making a play for it. This is one of the things that I think is fascinating about Master of Orion. All of this big long-winded discussion and explanation is sort of a powder keg that was lit by a single Silicoid scout showing up and getting chased away. The double-edged decisions you can end up making are really interesting to me. How much we need to send there initially, and then the game-within-the-game of escalating that, when/if to pull back, etc. are things that take a lot of experience, and I haven't played very many Impossible games so I'm far from there yet. I do know that the Psilon Empire, such as it is, can't afford to invest in a bunch of cruiser or larger ships, and we also can't afford to divert funds for very long. We need something that can fight but can't afford to spend a lot of resources on it. So I'll try the most basic warship you could ever build:  A laser mounted on the smallest hull we have; that's a Starfighter. You just don't get any more simple than that. It's less than the price of two recons. The laser takes up 33 of 39 space: there isn't room for anything else. It'll hit half the time if we're lucky, and with a damage range of 1-4, anything that's shielded at all, even with the starting Class I variety, won't be damaged about a quarter of the time. Now the question of how many do we build versus the resources required, how much diversion from research, etc. Mentar can crank out 9 of these per year, and Tyr is on research duty while it mostly just transports people over to Imra. I decide it's worth about three years worth of effort right now, relocating all of these ships to Tyr. That's more time to than I want to spend but also less ships than I'd like to have. It's a compromise, and if it's not enough -- and it might not be -- it'll end up being a complete waste of time. But I just want to try, having ended up on the business end of an early-game Silicoid Stampede(TM) and I'm not interested in repeating the experience if I can avoid it. One might ask what about the maintenance? If we end up with 9 each year, after 3 years that's 27 Starfighters at 14 BC each, 2% of that is 7-8 BC. That's 2-3% of current production, so we're not breaking the bank here. It'll take a bite, but not a very noticeable one. I spend quite a while thinking about this and I'm still nervous about it -- MOO on Impossible has a way of doing that to you. You know you can't afford to screw up or you are just going to get rolled. But it's the best call I can come up with.  Here we've set up a RELOC route to Tyr. This is another time-saving move. When a ship is finished, it will depart immediately ... BEFORE the next turn. It'd take a turn longer if I wait for them to be finished and then send them on. By the way, I'm not cutting off research completely -- Tyr is pouring in it's paltry 35-40 RP per year right now while it stays at half population and sends the rest on to Imra. There's enough factories there for that many people right now. It's not much, but it's not nothing and will keep us gaining some progress; more importantly, we won't get the 'atrophy' penalty and start losing any. I do adjust the tech sliders to be just a bit more even though, ensuring at least some goes into each project.  Our initial expansion phase is now officially complete. Time to work on spreading out the population more as well. It's still good to get that 12 BC maintenance off the books, even though it's not nearly as much of a headache as it was at first. 13M colonists are sent from Imra to Denubius. That'll put things at about a third for both of them, and that's good enough to stop the population shuffling. On to the building-up phase. Then the Humans show up at Arietis. Where did they come from? Then it occurs to me ... they or the Silicoids must be allied with somebody. Probably the Alkaris. They met the Alkaris or Darloks(we'll get to this, but alliances are the top level of diplomatic relations, and can use each other's planets for refueling). I really should have remembered that. We chase the Humans away, but that makes three species interested in the same planet. After three years, we end up with 26 of them. Would have been more, but I had to pull some production on Mentar back to research with Tyr going back to factory-building. We'll see what happens. Time to knock out a couple more of these research projects.  The first construction result comes through: Reduced Industrial Waste 80%! Nice boon to the economy, but a key point here is this dialog option. I used to always say NO and then go adjust things myself. That's the wrong move here. ProTip: The reason is that this change will actually take place before the spending for this year is processed. That means that if you don't reduce it you'll end up with extra ecology spending, going(inefficiently) towards population growth. YES will dump that extra ECO spending into research, the default place for surplus to go ... and of the two, that's a far better option. A couple of Tier-II Construction options are up next, and both are useful.  The current factory price is 10 BC, so this is a 20% reduction. There is also a 9-BC option, but that's one of the advances we are 'missing' in this particular game. These help with the speed of building up industrial base on our worlds.  Armor upgrades are particularly nice, because as it reads here they help with both ground and space combat. I go with the armor, and if we don't get another factory cost-reducing option soon I have the option of coming back for that.  It's been a couple of years since Denubius was colonized, so here's how our planets look right now. Tyr is at the point where I'd like to start the terraforming process there, but right now the factory building is keeping pace evenly with population growth. I'm going to wait a bit longer until the factories get ahead. Imra's knocking out about 3 factories a year but has a long ways to go, while Denubius is just started of course. Mentar is still the source of the lion's share of the economy. In other matters, construction research has mostly been shoehorned into planetology, to get that eco restoration out ASAP. The first group of Starfighters is almost to Arietis and no sign of more visitors. So far so good. Only a year later, 2346, and Tyr reached the point where it had extra production not needed for factories: terraforming commenced there.  Took it's sweet time to come in, but it's finally here. Same question as before, and same answer.  No new choices here because Eco Restoration was from an earlier tier. This really boils down to Dead Environment or Terraforming +20. At this point I'm of the opinion that if we can get to range 6(our current propulsion project) before anyone else takes Kronos(unlikely), then we want to make a play for it. Another +10M pop everywhere is always useful, but why not go for another planet if we can get it? And who knows what might happen if we can take a system in the middle of everything. Really surprised we haven't seen anyone around there, and it'll take a while to get this research done, but why not try. In terms of overall research, it's now time to settle in for the long haul. Usually I'll emphasize the fields a race is best at, because of the ability to gain an advantage there and because they'll have more stuff to research. With the Psilons being equally good at everything, I want to go fairly equal.  Fairly equal, not completely in this case. That's because until proven otherwhise, I consider the Darloks our top rival. Computers is emphasized a bit here since that helps combat their spying prowess; otherwhise I probably would have completely equalized things. We're about to finish our first project in that field, while having some work towards Weapons and Force Fields. With an average tech level of 3, we now suck slightly less than we did originally. Terraforming is finished on Tyr. Given it's location I'll use any extra production not needed for factories, once there is some, to slowly boost up our starfighter flotilla at Arietis. I'd like to get it to 50 I think. The others are progressing and it's time to give them a boost.  On the homeworld, we're going to back off research except for a minimal maintenance amount and throw the bulk of production into industry, for the purpose of getting some surplus into the reserve. It is wasteful in a sense, but it's also the only way of further accelerating the growth of Imra and Denubius. That's better for us in the long-run and there's nothing in the research pipeline that can help us right away here. You can also see how much less Eco spending is required now that we've advanced our waste-related technology. That's a big boon to the economy. With that, we've now made it halfway through the 24th century. Disbursements from the Planetary Reserve will lead off our next step of the journey. There are many other questions to answer. Will the Psilons win the race to Kronos? Will the Humans, Silicoid, or Darloks make a serious play for Arietis, and will our empire be able to repel them if they do? Will the Immortal Emperor Zygot lead the Psilons to glory and domination, or will he trip over his own shoelaces into a vat of Infinitely Epic Fail? All these and more questions will be answered when next our adventure resumes. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Apr 30, 2017 |
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Apr 29, 2017 06:45
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ValiantMan posted:You have one wrong image there, in the ship design part where you are supposed to show the specials. Good catch -- I've corrected that with a new image. Used the same one twice for some reason. As for the Darloks, I've only ever played one serious game with them, but they are definitely a different experience. They make tech-stealing worth it and then some. dsf posted:Sulla wrote a great article that does a great job explaining what makes MOO1 so good and unique from anything else that came after it, including the sequel: http://www.sullla.com/MOO/mooeditorial.html I like Sulla's stuff. Guy knows what he's talking about and I agree with about 90% of that link. Kanthulhu posted:I'm curious to see how our basic pew pew laser fighters will fare against alien vessels if they ever engage in combat out there. Unless we have superior numbers, probably not well :P. This remains to be seen though.
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Apr 30, 2017 01:00
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KnT posted:One trick for calculating how much to put into terraforming a planet I don't think you mentioned: the Tech slider. Since Research Points are typically produced at 1 to 1 production points, you can temporarily set the Tech slider to the desired number (50, in this case), lock everything but the Tech and Eco sliders, and then dump the Tech slider's points into the Eco (refitting back to normal, if needed). Yep. 75, in this case -- it's really easy to forget about that and 'not put enough' in as Psilons. Note: I erased some bad advice I had given here, which will cause you to overspend. If you read it, please erase it from your memory banks. I'm still getting rid of some bad habits  .
Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Apr 30, 2017 |
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Apr 30, 2017 01:42
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Episode I, Part V(2350-2370) When last seen, the Psilon Empire had expanded to four planets and was potentially eyeing a 5th in Kronos on the off-chance nobody beat them to it, though much research needed to be done first. The rest of the galaxy it seems is looking at Arietis, so imperial Starfighters were constructed and sent there as a pre-emptive move to keep the system unoccupied by the bizarre space rocks known as Silicoids. On the home front, we were still secure, too far for any enemy ships to reach, and investments into the Planetary Reserve to bootstrap growth on the most recent colonial acquisitions were just beginning.  Here's the Reserve in action. After clicking on transfer and then the destination planet, this slider comes up to determine how much to send. Imra will get the bulk of it as Denubius is smaller and less developed; we can only double the production of a planet remember. With 80 BC from the first year of reserve investments, there's almost enough to do that; the two planets combine for 97 in annual production. The growth rate will accelerate greatly with this re-routing. And it better, given the sacrifice being made in research potential to make it possible.  Also in 2350, Tyr began building Starfighters at the rate of 3 per year. It shouldn't take long to boost the flotilla at Arietis. Zygot still isn't certain this is actually going to do any good, but the plan is still to boost their numbers there to 50 before going back into research.  Two years pass, and our first Weapons advance is finished. The most important part about this is not the ECM Jammer itself, but access to Tier-II possibilities ...  We can upgrade to the next level of ECM tech ... but we aren't going to. This choice makes itself. The Robotic Controls chain of techs increase the number of factories that can be operated. This will increase that limit from 2 to 3 per 1M population. That works out to a 40% production increase once they are all built(2.5 to 3.5 BC per 1M pop). Gee, let me think .... yeah we want that. It's good enough to probably refocus our research even more in favor of Computing for the time being. Note the refit cost mentioned though; we are still paying 10 BC per factory, which means that just to refit our existing factories on Mentar, without building any new ones, would cost considerably. It's ok for now, but it'll be more expensive the further we go in improving the robotics. Right now we're going after the Duralloy Armor in Construction though, which may or may not have been a mistake. I felt it was a needed military upgrade despite our situation, and it may well have been ... but we're very unlikely to get one of the cheaper factory advances before we get the Robotic Controls. For now I'll keep research where it is. We're at a point now where in every single field, there's something going on that we need; even force fields and weapons, because we don't have a single upgrade there yet and we need better toys.  That, ladies and gentlemen, is what success looks like. In just four short years, Imra has advanced to the point where it has more factories than population, and has completed terraforming. It would have done some of that on it's own, but this kind of investment in growing planets well more than doubles the rate of economic growth there. The exact math is complicated and I've never bothered. Further investment in Imra isn't really worth it now as the system is kicking out 10 factories a turn and can finish up on it's own. Mentar will now dump everything back into research, while Denubius will get a couple more years of assistance as it begins terraforming, the last planet to do so.  Class II Deflectors have come in, and we're on to Tier II of Force Fields. We can apply our basic knowledge to protection for ground troops ...  Or take the more expensive option, which will make our ships all but impervious to baseline laser weapons. The regular and gatling Lasers do a max. of 4 damage, so they'd have to effectively score a 'bullseye' to do even 1 point here. I'm picking this option. One reason I feel safe in doing that is the fact that we are already working on armor that will help our ground troops. It's important to keep in mind the balance and synergy between the different choices as you progress. It's now 2358, and it's been a heck of a decade already. We're up to our pretty arbitrary goal of 50 Starfighters now, so let's check out the fleet.  Technology has its benefits. Look at the Colonizer price; already down more than 100 BC to 466 from the original tag of 570! That's a beautiful thing for the Imperial Treasury of Mentar, let me assure you.  The picture is good on the domestic side as well. Tyr is now able to contribute most of it's output to research, and Imra will be able to begin doing that in a few years also. Even Denubius is well on its way, almost halfway industrialized. At this point we can switch to a Psilons' dream; an almost completely research-focused economy. I never dreamed we'd stay isolated this long. There's a real opportunity here to get some better toys, and we're not going to miss it. Of course we could always come out the other side of it with a rude awakening, but that seems less and less likely with each passing year.  Hyper-V Rockets are here! If we need a missile ship, or more likely missile bases to defend our planets, we can now do better than shooting nuke rockets at the enemy. Now we have some cool new toys to look at. Anti-Missile Rockets are quite nice for the opposite role. Practically speaking, by the time they are deployed we'll be fortunate to get a 30% success rate, but that's still quite significant. At this point we haven't the first foggy notion what kind of ships our enemies will be building, but invading their planets will at some point involve taking out missile bases, and these are a key early tool in those battles.  The Neutron Pellet Gun is a new variant of beam weapon. Particle weapons are notable for their ability to halve the effects of shielding. A nice tool to have if we come up against enemies with good force-fields. Like say, the Humans.  Hyper-X Rockets are a perfectly solid missile improvement. They're faster and do a third more damage than the Hyper-Vs we just researched. Comparatively though, they are not as important as the more revolutionary advances in this tier. Both the pellet gun and the anti-missile rockets are attractive options. I'll almost always take the rockets though, and I'm doing that here.  It's 2361, and research efforts grow by the year. We've made some progress in all of our current projects, and it's time to make an adjustment here. Propulsion is set to finish before Planetology, and that's not what I want. These two are extending range to six parsecs and Dead Colonization. We need the colonization tech first, so we can design and build a ship and get it headed toward Kronos. I'm starting to think that plan might actually happen given how unaccountably quiet things are. The optimal situation would be having it reach Arietis, three parsecs away, when we get the range boost. To do that, we need about a decade head-start, so planetology needs to get ahead here. I didn't take any funding from other departments, just shifted the balance between the two. By 2365, it's still quiet. Haven't seen an enemy ship in almost two decades. That's just crazy. I've literally never seen a game like this on a small galaxy, though I don't usually play at this size so maybe it's not that rare. Tyr has maxed out and even Denubius is getting close and contributing to the tech push. So far as that growth curve is concerned, we're at the business end of it now, and another round of tech is approaching.  The very next year, and this is spectacular news. That's a big RP hit for this point in the game, more than 4x our annual output for all fields combined! Couldn't happen to a better race either. For whatever reason, this is really looking to be an Easy Mode game so far.  Another year, and we've got our first hostile environment breakthrough.  The list is growing as you can see; we've reached Tier III here. Enhanced Eco Restoration would slash our waste-cleanup spending by another 40%. Of course, everything here is a lot more expensive as well. We're researching quickly right now but even under optimal conditions it'll start slowing down. That's why it's rare to reach the top-level techs in a small galaxy.  More terraforming to get more out of our planets. Always a quality option.  Toxic colonization would leave only radiated worlds beyond our grasp. And there is that toxic world over by the Darloks, goes without saying we want to get that before they can. Really can't go wrong here. Any of these would have a big, immediate positive impact on our empire. I can't turn down the improved efficiency with Enchanced Eco Restoration though, esp. when it's the quickest option to unlock yet another tier. Until we get the range upgraded, we'll switch around the research balance to favor propulsion over planetology. And of course we need a new ship design ...  Using a different ship icon just to show off different ones. And check out the price: this is the most expensive ship so far. The Dead Colony Base is more than twice as costly as the standard one at this point. Get what you pay for, as they say. Mentar has a new job now; get this thing to Kronos on the double. Even at this price, it's only a 3-year task. Still not done though. When we get the new range tech, we're going to expand our travel abilities by two parsecs in all directions. If we do get Kronos, we'll be able to reach further in that direction -- combined that would bring a majority of the galaxy within reach of our Recon ships. We're going to need more, and it's time to get them in position now. Might even be a little late. This is a job for Tyr.  Our worst planet, and it can knock them out at a rate of a dozen per year! That's how far we've come. Honestly that's about the right amount. Maybe a bit high, but not much -- and we can afford a couple extra floating around if need be.  Well now. 2370, and it would seem it's time for research to take a back seat. There's the good old option to increase industry ratios by 25/50/75/etc. % but we refuse for reasons previously stated.  Significantly longer range, and determining enemy course and speed? Very nice.  On the other hand, that'd be really nice too. We haven't been able to upgrade our combat computers yet, proof that even Psilons get holes in the tech tree from time to time. Honestly we need both. I'm a sucker for better intelligence though, knowledge is power and all that. We're getting the Improved Space Scanner, but if we don't get a better Battle Computer soon we may well come back for this.  And there's our new product, headed for Kronos by way of Tyr. The new Recons are already outbound. So a priority shift here with all this going on: ** Get the Colonizer D to Kronos. ** Get the new range tech by the time it reaches Arietis so it isn't delayed. ** Shift most of our resources into industry, with just a basic skeleton investment staying in research, to upgrade all our factories with the new robotic controls and build new ones. The last two there are in conflict a bit, but fortunately the new fuel cells could finish up at any time and we have five years yet on the clock for those, so we should do both. Timing working out great for us again.  Could have used any planet, but here's Tyr, showing that it's working on the REFIT process. Also, notice the max. pop; this year, somehow, I screwed up the spending the previous turn and Imra and Tyr both have a bunch of waste to clean up, and some people are going to die while I do it. Could well be my first notable screw-up of this game. I don't know how I did it, but it's totally avoidable if you are paying attention -- must have not had eco high enough previously. Don't do this, it's not good. In terms of research, having my planets at this minimal level knocks us down to just over 100 RP total; it was at over 800 before. But we need the factory work in the long-term. Putting a break in here as some stuff really hits the fan in the next update. No, I'm not going to say anything more about that since I'm a bastard who likes cliffhangers.
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Apr 30, 2017 20:27
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PurpleXVI posted:Is it "safe" to spend this long not building any missile bases? I know I'd have beelined for them right away, but then again my instinct in 4X games is always to first have some sort of static defense against an initial rush/accident, then focus outwards. The right time to build them is very situational. When the enemy can't reach you there's no risk of an initial rush, so building them right away really just sabotages your growth curve. Usually it wouldn't be safe to wait this long, but being as isolated as I've been here I decided that it was ok. that might have been a little risky. It's one of those things that you just get a sense of when it can potentially start to become dangerous, but the best rule of thumb is when you are in range of their ships, you need some protection. QuickSilver6 posted:I love this game so much but am just so, so bad at it. It'll be nice to see what a win looks like. It looks a lot better than losing :P ... although you'll see that plenty in this LP I'm sure too!
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May 1, 2017 18:28
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Episode I, Part VI(2370-2375) A short hop in terms of in-game years, but there's a lot that happens and even more exposition  Next year. You freaking BASTARDS! I swear they read my mind. Our Colonizer is on on its way ... but they probably are armed by this point.  Only a colony ship ... but it's armed. I know that because it instantly moves towards me. By the way, this is initiative in action; I've been able to move first in the past; they've got something, most likely a basic battle computer, giving them the edge. They have the planet unless they only have missiles and I can outrun their supply and have them all miss. Unlikely. This is one of two videos that I screwed up and deleted before uploading somehow, but basically I tried to figure out what was going on and got the Recon blown up by a laser from their colony ship. Crap on a stick. Welp, post-mortem time; what could I have done differently? I could have built some destroyers with reserve fuel tanks and some kind of weapon to guard Kronos. The Starfighters wouldn't have done it because they don't have the range, so destroyer-class would be the minimum size for that job. I couldn't afford such an expense back when I built the Starfighters, but during the research kick the last 15 or so years I could have. I didn't even know the Silicoids had already scouted Kronos; I put all my eggs in the Arietis basket. Also worth noting that if I did that, it would have taken longer to get the colony ship going due to the resource diversion and maybe I would have fought off the colony ship, but they could have returned with escorts in that time. So no guarantee at all I could have prevented them taking it. Sometimes there's just nothing you can do about things. I'm not sure if that's the case here. Beat me by four years. drat YOU, MYSTERIOUS SPACE ROCKS!! Ok. Emperor Zygot must compose himself. What to do now? Well, we'll soon get that propulsion tech but we aren't in a hot hurry for it anymore. Might eventually scrap the Colonizer D but not just yet. A lot is going to happen once we get the fuel cells; should put us contact with three races including these ... these ... these maddening purple crystals, these interlopers!! It was a three-eyed, rock-faced, flying purple Psilon Eater! Three-eyed, rock-faced .... I digress. We need more information and we'll get it, but for now we need to keep working on the factories so that we are in the best possible position to respond. But we are pissed. Oh how pissed we are. If we can justify it, war with the Silicoids is very much on the table. All that work setting up ... destroyed. At least we only lost a few million citizens from the waste snafu, all on Imra. Could have been worse.  A year later. In plenty of time, in fact ahead of time, for a plan that is no longer relevant. I'd already shifted the tech ratios back to their normal even propulsion/planetology distribution.  Ok, those too. Cool. I'm still pissed, but slightly less now.  Huge upgrade over our starting Retro engines obviously. If conflict is headed our way, getting a move on will be vital.  More range is always good. One parsec further is no match for going 3x as fast though. Sub-light Drives here, no contest.  Lots more choices. The Mass Driver here is definitely worth considering, another particle weapon but packs almost twice the punch of the pellet gun we bypassed.  Another missile upgrade chance; these are almost twice as strong as our Hyper-Vs, along with being faster and more accurate.  Oh yes. Basically triple the damage of the laser, a third-generation weapon of the same type(we didn't get a shot at the second-gen ion cannon). Honestly the answer here is 'it depends'. Does our military need to be offensive? Defensive? Invade? Hold key positions? Wear down a superior opponent? I tend towards beam weapons all other factors being equal, but I'd rather wait a bit to decide. I think we're about to find out what's what in the galaxy. And I can actually do just that. I choose none of the above and go back to the beginning with Hand Lasers. A boost for our ground troops as we haven't come across a better weapon for them yet, and a quick project as a delay tactic. Win. Then came the expected first contact wave. This would have been shown with associated musical effects in another short video, which was lost the same way. Not the end of the world; that kind of thing can be shown at a different time. First contact always goes the same way; an initial greeting anywhere from friendly to highly aggressive. The tone of the statements will indicate what type of leadership they have. More on that soon. Now we have a whole bunch more crapola to do. Time to go see that Races screen and deal with foreign policy, the final unseen column in this Master of Orion expose.  The Races display gives an overview of our relations with other empires we are in contact with. That just went from zero to three; we still have not met the Humans or Sakkra. Looking at the Darlok in the upper left, here's the list of things we can discover: ** Treaty Status -- This can be some form of War, No Treaty like now, Non-Aggression Pact, or Alliance. The first two are exactly what they sound like. Non-Aggression Pacts prevent conflict in unowned systems, allowing both races' ships to co-exist peacefully in orbit. Sending a fleet to their colonies will still result in a battle. An Alliance is the most cooperative form of relations. Allied empires will never fight, and can use each others systems for refueling. They are also expected to go to war with each others' enemies. ** Trade Agreements -- Trade requires an initial investment on the part of both empires, but can be very profitable eventually. They start at -30% of the pact amount, which can be as high as a set percentage of the smaller economy of the two empries involved, and increase over time to +100%. Trade Agreements, Non-Aggression Pacts, and Alliances require increasingly high levels of relations to start, and also increase relations over time. ** Relations Bar -- Red bad, Green good basically. The pointer underneath and also the one-word description provide an evaluation of what they think of us. Psilons are a neutral race overall diplomatically, and that's where we start with the Silicoid and Alkari, though the Darloks are set to Unease because nobody with a pair of brain cells to rub together trusts them. These are not just starting states; various actions will improve or degrade these, but they will always tend to drift back towards these levels over time. So for now, we know that we'll have a solid chance at decent relations with the Silicoids and Alkaris, while having a harder time of it with the Darloks, all other things being equal. All other things are never equal of course, but this is the baseline. ** Spying Slider -- If we choose, we can invest on spying now ... and they can do so with us. This costs money which is taken directly out of our production. I think I mentioned this before but it's always proportional: that is, a planet with 200 production will get 4x as much taken out as a planet with 50 production. Spies that HIDE are just gathering information on what tech a race currently has and/or waiting for the right time to strike; ESPIONAGE and SABOTAGE are more likely to get them caught but will also offer opportunities for stealing tech or being directly subversive(specifically, they can incite revolts, blow up factories, or blow up missile bases with the latter option). Hiding doubles the base chance(from 30 to 60%) that a spy will not be discovered -- the nail that doesn't stick up doesn't get hammered and all that. If you choose ESPIONAGE or SABOTAGE and are caught -- well, the game doesn't go into detail but the spy is always gone when they are caught. It is assumed they are eliminated in a rather 'uncivilized' manner with what one might call an 'intense and unpleasant' final debriefing by their captors before their execution by various grotesque means. There's another type of being caught, and that's when you actually steal something or blow something up and they know who did it. This will generally hurt relations considerably, so you take a risk of pissing them off if you do this. There's also a chance of framing another race, and it can be really unpleasant to have a long-time decent relationship spoiled because you got framed and put in a war because of it. This will happen. The cost of a spy network is 25 BC + twice the Computers TL of the target empire. That's the first one; it's doubled for each additional spy. Computers are the relevant tech level when it comes to spying; hacking and whatnot. The side with better Computer tech will find it easier to both spy on others and catch enemy spies. And our Darlok friends here to massive bonuses to everything in this part of the game. We can pretty much bet that they are going to steal most of what we have that they don't, blow up poo poo if we're not on good terms with them, and trying to steal from them is a colossal waste of time. That's pretty much that for each individual race here. In the lower right we can set additional spending to boost internal security to catch more enemy spies. The manual recommends to set this to the maximum once in a while to catch a bunch of them: I've found this to be ineffective in limited testing but one of the things I'm going to do in this LP is check into that more. The maximum you can spend on internal security is 20% of empire production, which boosts security 40%. How much you should spend really depends: it'll be nothing for the next few years because it would take them some time to set up their networks if they are even going to bother. After that it's sort of a thing that you don't need to worry about until they really start using it. You can also spend up to 10% of empire production on setting up spy networks for each race, so you could ultimately spend almost everything you make if you chose -- but that would be a really, really bad idea in almost any imaginable situation. From here we can also do three other things: STATUS, REPORT, and AUDIENCE from the lower right. Ok takes you back to the main Control screen.  This is the Report screen, which gives us more detail on a specific race. There's the tech fields covering most of the screen on the right ... but it says just starting tech in all fields. If there were any in white, they would be things they have that we don't. That's valuable information to know -- but that's the stuff it's talking about when it says on the left that this report is "72 years old". In other words, this is what they had when the game started. And we already knew that, because it's exactly what we had in 2300 as well. All that's required to get a fully accurate update here is a single active spy, who can be doing anything, even hiding. One spy giving us a full technological readout of an entire empire on an annual basis is pretty darned efficient if you ask me. It's usually a good idea to invest in spying at some level just to get this information. Everything else on the left side is 'public knowledge'. This includes details on the empire's Emperor, Alliances, and Wars. There are no secret campaigns in Master of Orion. If you are going to ally with somebody or fight them, others will find out about it. The Darloks have no alliances or wars, so that's useful to know. Also quite important is the emperor description at the top, "Xenophobic Ecologist". This will always be two words; a personality followed by an objective. Xenophobic tells us that the Darloks will react twice as strongly to negative diplomatic actions and half as much to positive ones. In other words, not only do we start on subpar terms with them but it'll take a lot more work to change that. Ecologists means they want large worlds and will focus on construction and planetology in their research. Ecologists can tend to be less warmongering in general, so that could be a positive thing. Awesome. To save what would be relatively pointless shots at the moment, neither the Silicoid or Alkaris have any active Alliances or Wars either. This is very rare at this point in the game. The Silicoids are Aggressive Expansionists: they want as much territory as possible and will attack whenever they have the advantage. Alkaris are Xenophobic Expansionists, so they are pretty much going to be pissed off at the galaxy given how they started. Not that we really care because they are going to be pretty irrelevant it would seem. All of these Personality/Objective combos have a racial preference that they gravitate toward, but they can be different from game to game. Alkaris are usually Militarists for example, which means they like to maintain a large fleet and focus on weapons tech. But not in this game. It's a weighted distribution; the further away a personality or objective is from a race's default, the less likely you are to see it. From a replayability and predictability standpoint, I really like the way this was designed as well. Next up, we'll go back and look at the STATUS screen.  This is the best one-stop-shopping, how-are-we-doing display. It's also the only place in the game that you can always go to see what year it is, which I think is a definite oversight. Our empire will always be here and always listed on top; the others will be filled in as we gain or lose contact with them. Before this year it was a pretty boring screen. Now we have a lot more info. Fleet Strength is based on the cost of all your ships. You can build a bunch of colony ships or whatever and it'll add to the value here, even if they have no weapons to fire whatsoever. As you can see, we're not looking real hot here. We're competitive in technology(total number of advances IIRC) and production, though behind the Darloks and just behind the Silicoids in both. By the way, the current status of those is great with a capital G for an Impossible game 70 years or so in. It means we've almost equalized for the bonuses the get, which usually takes a lot longer to do. It's always better to be ahead, but things could be and often will be a lot worse at this stage of the game. We've got a solid Population lead, and are equal for that in Planets. Running a competitive third in Total Power, which is just an amalgamation of the other five. This is mostly encouraging; we're doing pretty well economically but definitely aren't ready for a war. That's the takeaway here. Before we do any talking, let's look at the map because there is more info there as well.  Now we can see for sure what these three empires have instead of guessing at it. The Darloks haven't expanded as far as I'd feared; the Silicoids are basically where I thought they'd be though I was wrong about that white star, which they'd probably have grabbed if it was habitable. They've got 5-parsec range or they wouldn't have been able to reach Kronos from where their other planets were(if they had 6 like us, they'd have made contact when they got the planet, not a year later when we got the range tech). As far as the Humans and Sakkra, they're in the uppper corners for sure; no other yellow stars to even be possible. Since we saw that one Human scout, it would seem Sol has to be in the upper right and based on the map I don't see how they'll ever even leave it. The Sakkra are probably stuck in the corner too but they might have managed to reach one of those green stars by now. Probably not. That quartet of stars in the upper left though(2 green, 1 blue, 1 white) is the only real frontier of the galaxy though. It's hard to avoid the what-ifs surrounding Kronos here. If we'd managed to snag it and hold it, the Silicoids would be stuck at 3 and wouldn't be able to expand much. We'd have 5 and would basically be in a good position to overtake the Darloks as the top dogs. Still can't get over the fact that in the first game the Darloks are the #1 power in the galaxy. That's just all kinds of bizarre. As it is, it's a three-way competition and right now we're trailing the pack. It will get better for us as we have a good shot at taking the production lead or at least equalizing once we get our current run of factories finished. That should be enough to let us gradually take the lead on technology with our skill there. We will need to mobilize now, and whether we can do that in time to form a competitive fleet is up for debate. Shield tech is ok, we're about to boost it again and get better armor, but we haven't advanced our engines or battle computers and only have very basic improvements in ECM and weaponry with the Hyper-V missiles. We'd love to take back Kronos; in a ground war of attrition we've got the population to stomp the slow-growing Silicoids. We can't compete with their fleet though. It's got to be more defensive, at least for now. Stopping them here is an absolute must though, we can't afford to lose more ground. That makes Arietis the key. Still have those 50 Starfighters there, but they are either obsolete or will be before long. That's in range of the Silicoid's colony ships, and if they take it then Imra and Tyr will be. It won't be long before the Darloks and Silicoids develop the range to reach at least Tyr anyway. We need to prepare to defend ourselves, including getting missile bases up there as it's our point planet in both directions. The bottom line here is we appear to have a decent chance at becoming the supreme power in the galaxy, but we're definitely in a fight and we must choose our direction wisely. Mistakes are very easy to make at this stage of the game and will prove costly if we make them. So, how to handle our various possiblities on the Races screen? ** Security -- No investment at least for now. ** Spying -- A minimal amount for the Alkari, a hair more for the Silicoid and Darlok. That adds up to 2% of income spent here. I think it's worthwhile to see what they have. Looking at their tech will give us an idea how to best design ships to counter it, how effective our missile bases might be, whether we want to try to trade for something they have, etc. You can't effective counteract something if you don't know what it is. Knowledge is Power. ** Trade -- Despite the initial hit, it's pretty much always a good idea to trade with anyone you expect to be able to maintain peace with. They'll get the same hit as well, so it tends to equalize things. You can offer tribute(BC or tech), esp. if relations get too low for a trade deal, but as long as we're on reasonably good terms it both offers the promise of long-term profit and the best way to improve relations. Right now we don't want to be in a war anytime soon, so all signs point that way. Here's how the negotiations went ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-C1nSzadhVY That first one was basically to show off some of the submenus like threatening and tribute etc., but also makes another point; don't even poke around in something you don't plan on using. It annoys rival empires(slightly) to propose something and then change your mind. At the end where they said 'We go now' -- that's their way of saying 'we're sick of talking to you; come back when you're serious'. Note that I couldn't even get a trade agreement here. On reloading, here's how it turned out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha5e5Uh03Kk A couple points of interest: I gave the Silicoids ECM Jammer I because it's a very basic technology and I wanted to butter them up for the Non-Aggression Pact. I didn't expect them to take me up on it, and they didn't, but it was a fairly small price to pay in order to try. They shouldn't either by the way; they are acting intelligently in their own self-interest. The diplomatic AI is usually quite good at doing that, though some weird things do happen. Also, I took the minimal trade agreement with the Alkari because I don't care as much whether they like us. We can up the amount with them later. Note that their high limit was 125 BC while both of the other empires gave us 225 BC; that's because of how much wimpier the Alkari are -- their economy can't support a larger deal.  Did a couple of other things before this, scrapping our scout which we have covered by one of the Recons now(the second one was blown up by the Guardian), and also getting rid of the Colonizer D. Kronos is the only planet we could reach with it and that won't be happening anytime soon, so it's basically so much space scrap. No point in continuing to maintain it. Throwing good money after bad is never a good plan. So now we've got some minimal expenses in ship maintenance and spying, a small amount in the reserve from the scrapped ships, and look at that trade number. Do the math and over 15%, almost a sixth, of our production is going to set up trade routes. That's steep ... but quite possibly necessary. We'll want to re-up over time but we'll definitely wait until that balance improves, which it gradually will. Made a few adjustments to the planets in spending; Tyr will not be doing any research for now, focusing soley on factories and then I'll want to get a few missile bases up there just in case. The others are doing mostly factories as well with a token research effort; growing the economy with the new factory controls will be the foundation of everything that comes afterwards. If you look closely, you'll see a bit of bad news as we hit the 2375 mark ...  Maybe the Silicoids got new robotic controls or something, but they've increased their production and fleet strength, taking the overall lead from the Darloks and putting us further behind. Over these three years, our trade balance improved from -141 to -122. So it still sucks, but it's going in the right direction. Slowly. As I said, long-term investment. Relations are already up to Neutral across the board, and 'high Neutral' for the rocks. So the trade is helping there. So what's up next for the Psilon Empire? Can they halt the Silicoid Surge at Kronos, or will the Purple Psilon Eaters prevail? Will we ever see another Human ship, or any evidence of the Sakkra? Who will take those stars in the frontier on the opposite side of the galaxy? And what in the world does a shape-shifting ecologist really know about galactic domination anyway? These and other equally irrelevant questions abound as these misadventures continue.
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May 3, 2017 03:03
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Kanthulhu posted:Will the AI break trade agreements to declare war on you? As everyone else said, they sure will. By boosting your relations, they give you a buffer of goodwill though. One wrong move is much less likely to trigger war rather than a warning, but there's no way to just sit around the galactic campfire and sing Kumbaya for centuries on end. War is eventually coming, one way or another. Delaying it until you are ready for it, or being able to manipulate the timing and circumstances, is the best that can really be hoped for. Being too strong is a negative factor as mentioned and eventually you can get big enough that no amount of positive diplomatic actions will maintain peace. OAquinas posted:There are so many reasons the AI will declare war on you, from expanding too close to their borders, to you being framed for espionage, to you being too strong(!), it being a tuesday. Seriously--I might be thinking of a different game but I think the AI spends the start of each turn spinning a RNG to decide how it will regard you. I don't think the AI is quite that capricious except for the Erratic personalities, which can be both frustrating and hilarious. Suffice to say that when going up against an Erratic, you don't want to invest anything in in relying up on them in any fashion. I generally do the minimum 25 BC trade agreements to get some chance of peace for a bit longer but that's it. They don't need a reason even as good as it being a Tuesday . One of my favorite messages from them will basically say that they are so very sorry, but one of their goddesses appeared in a vision and declared that your empire must be destroyed -- followed by an immediate declaration of war. You literally get the idea that every day is a new experience for these empires; they wake up in the morning with no idea how they are going to behave, until they figure out if there is a cosmic convergence or their coffee was slightly too strong or they just feel like wiping somebody out and decided you're the one that gets the privilege. The other personalities generally behave more or less sensibly though. In this game the two Xenophobes(Alkari and Darloks) will probably be the first to go off the rails. The good thing is that the Silicoids will probably stay at least neutral for longer if we can do well enough to avoid them considering us an easy target. Aggressive Expansionists are among the best AI personalities, arguably the best period: they'll go after whoever the weakest link is most of the time. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 23:58 on May 3, 2017 |
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May 3, 2017 23:56
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2375-80 The High Council: Beginning of the End, or Merely the End of our Beginning? Last time out, the Psilon Empire joined the galactic community, meeting the Silicoids, Alkaris, and Darloks officially. We discovered that our fleet sucks but the economy and research are hanging in there. Better than expected really. Now the Darloks show up at Willow with a Destroyer-class ship they call a Scorpion. It chases off our Recons, but I doubt they are ready to colonize toxic worlds(green star in the lower middle of the galaxy near their territory). Still, they've got it scouted now at least.  Another system we can safely ignore.  What's all this? The High Council is basically the Galactic UN, so to speak. The first meeting is as good a time as any to mark the start of the intensified struggle. You could call it the beginning of the mid-game, but it also means the game could end at any time. Succeeding in the High Council vote wins the game. Usually it will not happen when the Council first convenes though. This body follows very specific rules: ** The first meeting occurs when two-thirds of all planets have been colonized; at that point there are very little left. ** Assuming that a 'High Master', aka Emperor, is not appointed, new votes will occur every quarter-century(2400, 2425, etc.) until one is named. ** Votes in the High Council are determined by population. This is a democratic system. The leader of each race votes, and the player has a big edge here in always voting last. The candidates are also determined by population; the top two empires are always up for the spot and nobody else qualifies. ** Empires will tend to vote for the candidate they like the most(or, dislike the least). First time I ever won on Impossible it was pretty much cheese; the Bulrathi had pissed off the whole galaxy and it was me vs. them. Everyone else voted for me because they didn't like the bears. I literally laughed at the screen. ** A two-thirds majority is required. This means that anyone with more than a third of the total galactic population essentially has veto power; anyone with more than two-thirds can vote themselves in regardless of what anyone else has to say. If you don't have that 'one-third +1' level of population though, you are always in danger of losing the vote here. ** If another empire is chosen as Emperor, you can accept the Council's decision; if so, you've just lost. Try again next time. You can also choose to Defy. That puts the galaxy in a state of Final War. It's like having the everyone in an alliance against you, only worse. Peace is totally impossible from then on, and they all share technology with each other as well. It is possible to win a Final War, but only under pretty rare circumstances. When the High Council goes against you, it's pretty much sayonara. ** The only other way to win is the 'Tyrant' path; wiping everyone else out completely. ** The High Council vote both depends on and significantly affects diplomatic relations. Empires that like you will be more likely to vote for you; voting against a candidate will upset them.  We're the top population empire, so we at least have been nominated.  Ahh, the time-honored strategy of voting for yourself. But who really doesn't want to be Emperor? Also, we can see that there are 14 total votes, meaning 10 are required to win and 5 to 'veto'.  Abstaining is the third option, after choosing one of the two nominees obviously. The Sakkra are basically saying neither candidate has proven themselves worthy. This happens more often early in the game when there isn't even official contact; it can also happen later on less frequently, and I think that occurs when the two nominees are very close.  So far 'abstain' is tied with Nazgur for the lead.  I'd hoped to get the support of the Silicoids here. As a general rule, the Darlok are a good(if rare) High Council opponent to have as a bad diplomatic race. But the rocks are not sold that we're any better, at least not yet. This guarantees that nobody will win this time.  Looking like a pattern.  And now it's down to us. Even when the ultimate outcome is already determined, our vote is still important. ProTip: There's no point, in game terms, of voting for yourself if you can't win. Voting for the opponent will improve relations. If voting for them would put them over the top, it's best to abstain. Of course if you can win, claim your throne!  After casting our votes for Nazgur, this session ends inconclusively. This is one of the more gamey things Master of Orion allows you to do.  Here's our first spy report. Ironically it's on the Darloks. As we can see here(the white are things they have but we don't; stuff we have and they don't isn't listed) they have better computers and scanners than we do; our terraforming and range are better. The big difference though are in the weapons; they could take down any of our ships pretty easily if they have even the pellet gun, much less that neutron blaster in the field. The range limitation, so long as it lasts, will keep them from expanding any further probably though. We've almost caught up to the power pair here in production, but are fading a bit in tech the last few years; we'll get a few more done soon though, as this is the last year of our factory buildup. Since we've got our first report in, our spying budget will go down to the minimum. That'll be enough to give us an update once in a while which is plenty.  Next year, the Silicoids show up at Arietis with a colony ship. Guess it's time to find out if those Starfighters were worth it ... or not, as they retreat immediately. Well that's an answer in a sense, as they weren't even willing to test us. They certainly think so at least; they weren't even willing to test us. They may come back with more, and we need to decide how to handle that possibility. But first ...  That will help.  New options. Battle Suits are an improvement over our protective equipment for our ground troops.  This wouldn't come in time to help with the current buildup, but we definitely need to cut factory costs eventually.  And more waste reduction as well. This would be a 25% reduction. Our ecology spending is fairly under control by now, but every little bit helps. I may regret not getting the factory-reduction, but I opt for Reduced Industrial Waste 60%.  Selia's a decent planet, and unclaimed. It's eight parsecs away though, too far for us to consider right now. The factory buildup is now finished; we've got a couple more research projects about to wrap up, and then we'll have some big choices to make.  Both of our new choices come in right away. We've got Class III Deflector Shields and Hand Lasers. In terms of Force Fields, we can keep right on going or come back for the personal shields. I don't think think they're worth it; Class IV.  We've seen all the weapons options before but that was a few years ago; now we know what we are up against. The Darloks definitely have a firepower advantage, but I think going for the mass driver here can cut into that. They've got the neutron blaster, but it's not enough better, at least not yet, to make it worth the extra cost.  Overall this looks pretty scary. The Silicoids have really boosted their fleet and population, and all we really did with our industrial buildup was keep pace. Maybe a bit more than that but not much, we're still third. It is encouraging that we've taken, quite possibly temporarily, a tiny tech lead -- but that's about it and we're nowhere close to any more breakthroughs right now. However, things are not as bad as they seem ...  We've managed to get a spy in with them now, not the Alkaris yet but we really don't care on that front. They've allied with the Humans which isn't good news. Surprised that they don't have better engines yet which I was sure they did. No waste reduction techs, but why would they -- they don't need them. No new factory controls and they're still outproducing us -- that's not good at all. They haven't advanced past lasers in their weaponry yet though. This gives us a bit of an opportunity. If they outfit nuclear missiles or regular/gatling lasers, our new Class III shields will absorb almost all of the damage. The only thing they can use against us(and vice versa, since they've also got the same shield techs) are the heavy lasers that hit harder(7 damage vs. 4 for the others). Our Starfighters will soon be obsolete. If we upgrade to a ship based around utilizing a heavy laser, we can hold them off longer. Zygot's goal then is to hold Arietis with a fairly minimal investment in these ships. The rest of the economy will focus on research and not the military, specifically planetology. The reason for that is if we can get to the point of landing on Radiated worlds, we can take Arietis ourselves ... and Willow ... and maybe even Selia. That's a plan worth pursuing.  Introducing the new Star Blazer! Strike craft are too small to fit a heavy laser on so this is our first destroyer-size design. I'd like to put a battle computer, better armor, etc. on -- but to do that I'd have to reduce it to one weapon instead of a pair. It'd also be more expensive. I think this is the best bang for the buck(in retrospect I think having one more accurate weapon might have been better, but it's definitely a judgement call here). It'll miss a lot but most of the weapons available to the Silicoids will just bounce off of it. Like the Starfighter, this is a stop-gap; it's not the start of a permanent starfleet or anything like that, but I'm hoping it's enough to handle the next round of escalation.
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May 5, 2017 00:44
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Mzbundifund posted:Are the Silicoids likely to deploy those Inertial Stabilizers they have? Because wouldn't that make your ship design miss even more? Yes they are, and yes it will. AI ship design isn't great, but it's not terrible either; anything that gives them that much of an edge will be used. It is a big advantage they have right now because nothing we have can counteract it; even putting the Mk I Battle Computer on would only get us partway there. Building relatively small, cheap ships seems to be our only real option at the moment(at least from my POV). PurpleXVI posted:Do missile bases count for "fleet strength" reports? No it doesn't. It is possible to destroy missile bases if you've built too many -- I need to remember to eventually show how. This will have no effect on your Fleet Strength display. Scrap ships though and you'll see that immediately.
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May 6, 2017 00:15
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rchandra posted:Do techs that you choose to put off ever go away, or can you always get them later? I assume that when you have two versions of the same thing (like Improved Industrial Tech above), you don't need to get both of them. You can always get them later. You don't need the lesser versions of stuff like Industrial Tech; the only benefit they would give is the small boost to your tech level(and the miniaturization/cost bonus that goes with it). PurpleXVI posted:In this case I kind of prefer MoO2 since it makes each choice much more hard-set. You can't just put something off until later, unless you know there's someone you can get it from, and your choices affect your tech layout much more drastically. Different strokes for different folks, but in Moo2 the differences I would point out are: ** You can always trade for pretty much anything, with almost anything, which makes this quite trivial IMO and ** You can always choose the same techs every time, there's never anything 'randomly missing'. I would say your choices in Moo2 affect your tech layout less and I don't think it's close -- but that's why some people think it was a great sequel and upgrade and others like myself give it a decided 'meh'.
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May 7, 2017 00:08
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Episode I: 2380-2400 Last time we were nominated in the initial High Council, which ended inconclusively as most empires chose not to pick a side. We also discovered, unsurprisingly, that we are way behind the curve in fleet strength: the new Star Blazer was designed to try to keep us from getting overrun, packing a bigger punch with the Heavy Laser. Onwards now:  I've mentioned missile bases in passing; as our 'point planet', Tyr is going to build up just a few of them here(DEF category). Already we have 1 in position. They're quite a bit cheaper than ships for planetary defense, but of course cannot be moved. Each base comes with a supply of your best available missiles, have 50 HP to start(that's between destroyer and cruiser size on the ships) and uses your best available shielding. I hope we don't need to use them, but it's best to be prepared. This will be very short-term spending, as nobody can reach Tyr quite yet. Meanwhile Mentar is able to knock out nearly three Star Blazers a year, so in a few years a decent force to replace the Starfighters should be on it's way.  Definitely taking a risk here by pushing planetology at the expense of the other fields. I don't even know if we're going to have Radiated as an option, but from this vantage point it looks like our best chance at a decisive advantage. A couple of years later, the Silicoids take Selia, that distant Tundra planet. They now have five. It's even more vital now for us to match them ... I also notice that their on-again, off-again alliance with the Humans is over. Another option is to take Kronos while it is off and try to tip the scales that way. It's risky though: I don't think we have the fleet to do it without a bunch of Star Blazers. We'll push for this first. By 2385 we've got 14 of the new ships, and I call it good. All in on the research now.  Just two years later. Jackasses aren't screwing around, and they're really putting the Psilons to a tough decision here. Essentially this is a 'fight-or-flight' situation; we can try to fight them now, or we can turtle and try to fight them later, hopefully with friends.  Here's our latest empire comparison. Our fleet sucks; even the Alkaris are building up. Clearly we remain #3 overall, with the Silicoids taking the lead in almost everything. They're threatening to stampede the galaxy and basically daring us to do anything about it. Going for a Non-Aggression Pact at this point would just make things easier; they won't even have to fight us for control of Arietis, they'd just colonize it.  There's nowhere else really for them to go other than Arietis, so I'm expecting them to come and come hard, soon. The two planets in the upper left are Sakkras, and the only other options are all either taken/uninhabitable as well. So we can either try to fight them now, or turtle up and wait for them to send enough ships to take Arietis from us, hoping to strike back at them later, presumably with friends. I don't particularly like either option, but I don't see a door #3 here. Turtling can work, particularly as Psilons, but in this case they'd have at least 7 planets to our 4. That's too much of an edge to give up in my opinion, particularly to an Aggressive opponent who is likely to just decide to attack us once it has built up. Fighting them doesn't have to mean a hot war though, continuing our 'cold war' is an option. Either way we need to keep shipbuilding. Mentar goes back into Star Blazer production; research continues everywhere else. Hopefully we can knock out enough to keep them from taking Arietis ... but it will also slow down us getting there ourselves. We've got to get a competitive fleet though. 2390, and the Silicoids are back!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZy1F2Urw8A Well that was our first real fight. They went after our Starfighters which was fine by me. Took out the Colony Ship first because they tend to have weaker defenses(due to packing on the colony base). Wasn't doing much damage to the Whale compared to the number of weapons firing, probably due to shielding and I think it's got an Inertial Stabilizer which makes it harder to hit. On the other hand we've got numbers. Could be a battle of attrition if they send more of them next time. Even so, losing two cruiser-size ships is much worse for them compared to what we lost(eight strike craft). Definitely a victory. Meanwhile our trade balance is almost up to break-even, so I decide to re-up. It probably will seem weird to many that we are increasing trade even as we are blowing up each others' ships, and anticipate blowing up even more of them -- but it actually makes sense in game terms. Essentially it helps balance out things, we'll take a relations hit for the combat losses but the more trade we do, the more positivity we'll get. New amounts are 275 each for the Darloks and Silicoids(up from 225) and 125 for the Alkaris(up from 25).  Haven't showed the planets/ledger in a while. With the new deals we have a sizable trade deficit again(-11 or 12%), but it'll recover once more. Also, our ship maintenance is creeping up as you can see, and we are paying a small amount for the 3 missile bases on Tyr and our minimal spying efforts. Our fleet strength is growing compared to everyone except the Silicoids: they are building ships like it's going out of style, which forces us to keep going as well. I don't want or need a fleet as big as theirs; it just needs to be vaguely competitive, and we aren't there yet.  The new eco restoration tech is here ... but that's not the best news. Bio Toxin Antidote protects against biological attacks, essentially neutralizing Death Spores; terraforming is always good; but all that can wait until we snag Controlled Radiated Environment. We've got it!! It'll take a while to research ... I also start build a new ship, with identical specs to the Star Blazer, called the Star Wing. Another 'strange' decision but it has a purpose in the game mechanics. Individual ships can't be scrapped; only designs. If I only want to get rid of some of them, but not all of them, at a point in the future, having duplicates allows for that. With only six designs, sometimes you can't afford to do this though -- it's a situational thing.  Here they come again ... but just the lone Colony Ship this time. We'll handle it easily. Actually didn't even have to, since they retreated immediately. I keep a sharp eye on the Status screen, hoping to see our fleet strength get close enough to the Silicoids for us to stop building. The goal here is to have a fleet big enough to win the border disputes, but not an overall better or even that close to equal one to fight a war with. That'd be a waste of resources right now. But they keep on building, and so the arms race continues. The biggest beneficiary of it are the Darloks. The Silicoids return to Arietis in 2398 ... again with just a colony ship, and they retreat. We seem to be almost maintaining the status quo -- but not quite. Slowly, sometimes almost imperceptibly, slipping further behind in tech and production. That's not sustainable indefinitely of course, but we don't need it to be; it just needs to last until we can add a couple planets. 2399, and it looks like we're good to suspend shipbuilding at least for now. Even one year of Mentar researching could produce dividends.  This is a big one information-wise.  Definitely going to snag the Battle Computer Mk. V here. That's a big hole to be filled.  The 24th century is over, and the High Council meets a second time. The Silicoids have replaced the Darloks as our opposition. I messed up taking the shots of the voting here: the Darloks started things off by abstaining(3 votes), and the Sakkras did the same(2 votes).  Humanity does the same with it's single vote, failing to buck the trend. Once again we've locked in no Emperor being chosen. Note there are 16 votes here instead of 14; the number of votes isn't limited, but will grow with population. Huge galaxies can result in the total reaching around 100. Everybody's guaranteed at least 1 vote, but that's it.  Of course.  All hail Emperor Nobody, the clear choice of the High Council!!  We once again cast our four votes for the opponent. It's really looking like it's going to come down, assuming our current plans succeed, to a Psilons vs. Silicoids situation. The Darloks were off to the early lead, but relatively crappy planets(as can be seen by their stable and fairly low population) and limited range stunted their growth. They'll still be a factor, but it's the brainiacs against the rocks basically here. So far nobody else has chosen a side. If either we or the Silicoids can get the smaller races to come our way, it could be a decisive factor.
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May 7, 2017 20:25
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Good questions. I don't think it's actually any more difficult to get alliances per se; it's harder to have an empire they would want to ally with due to the bonuses they get though, if that makes sense. Get yourself in the right position and they'll do it just as easily though. On all difficulty levels the AI allies with other empires much more quickly than it will with the player, for reasons unknown. That's one of the bigger flaws in the game in my opinion. They are mostly just better at managing their empires. There isn't a 'gang up on the player' approach: even on the harder difficulties you can get into situations where you are basically just sitting back and building up while a couple of them slug it out. They act in their own self-interest and you're just another opponent to them.
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May 8, 2017 18:42
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This was right on the borderline between one big or two small updates: I decided to just cram it into one, so it's pretty long. Episode I: 2400-2425  At the start of a new century, we appear to be holding in there ... mostly. Fleet is about what I want it to be or a bit high, definitely competitive. We're staying close in technology, but the Silicoids are starting to run away production-wise, mostly because they just have more territory. The Darloks have dipped recently and I'm not sure why. We've almost caught them for the #2 spot but there's an increasing threat that the rocks are just going to run away with this.  As can be seen we managed to get a small increase in trade to 300 BC with the Darloks and Silicoids; also a Non-Aggression pact with the former. Tried to get one of those with the Alkaris but they refused. Basically just doing everything I can to get them potentially on my side against the Silicoids. The Darlok relations are pretty stagnant, due to them naturally gravitating towards Unease and the fact that they are Xenophobic. Still a little above the middle, but boy is it a slow process. The latest reports we have are all within the last decade, most more recent. The Alkaris have developed the Fusion Bomb, which is a lot more powerful than the starting Nuclear variety. Other than that they don't have much. The Darloks and Silicoids both surprisingly have limited range still. The Darloks have added Class IV Deflector Shields and Robotic Controls IV. That last one could get them back in the game, at least for a while. They never got level III so they were behind in the production game but now they should see a major boost. The Silioids have notably gotten Automated Repair System, which could make it quite hard to take down their large ships. They also have acquired Sublight Drives, which we are currently almost to as well.  The Map shows a couple things here; the latest Silicoid planet is the red one on the far left. They are up to seven planets now. That's dangerous territory. Also, we can see fleets all over the place which is the main reason for showing this. That's courtesy of our new and improved scanners.  Here we can see the other new feature of these scanners; we know where they are headed, and how long they will take to get there. Also note that this Kraken is the first capital, or Huge-sized ship, that we have seen. If they've put automated repair on this thing that could be trouble, though it's pretty unlikely they've gotten a ship that big built since they picked up repair capability. Even with basic armor, that means we'd need to do 90 damage/turn just to equalize with the repair capability(15% per turn, times 600 HP). I have no idea what they have on the ship, but ... Kronos has a couple Colony Ships, 6 Whales, this is headed there, and there's another cruiser-size ship called the Polaris going there as well. They seem to be massing there, and it's either for defense or, more likely, to make a bigger push at Arietis.  We'll need some more bases soon but the cost there is minimal; the fleet is taking a bit of a bite now though. Much higher and I'd start getting a little more worried. The trade deficit's still there and healthy but it is trending upwards and we're maxed out on all the deals.  The Psilon Fleet, such as it is. I'd scrap the Starfighters but we're paying very little for them and they still make for good targets to soak up damage. One way or another though they are eventually going away.  We're closing in on a few more advances. Looks like Sublight Drives will be first, Weapons is the Mass Driver, and Force Fields the Class IV Deflectors. I definitely won't be building any more ships until those come in; they'll take our combat abilities considerably. Construction is another reduced-waste tech, and we've got a while to go on the vital Radiated Colonization but making progress there.  2404, and the new engines come in.  The last three here are new. Fusion drives would increase our speed from Warp 3 to Warp 4; range is always beneficial but I'm ok with where we are at range 6; and the Warp Dissipator is a special that decreases the speed of enemy ships, eventually rendering them immobile. Good, but generally not worth it in my opinion. Also worth considering is backpedaling for the Inertial Stabilizer at a fraction of the cost. Fusion Drives are good enough, and the cheapest option that pushes us up the ladder. We've also got the Mass Driver now, got lucky as we had a pretty low shot at it this early.  The bottom three are all new. The most interesting is the Graviton Beam, first we've seen of its type. This is a 'streaming' weapon, described as a tractor-repulsor beam that literally rips ships apart. The streaming part is what matters though; it carries 'extra' damage over from one ship to the next. Most weapons can only kill one target; no matter how powerful a weapon is, it can only take out one ship, no matter how small. Not so with streaming weapons, making them quite good against smaller ships. Since we're mostly going up against the Silicoids here and they are going big, that's not a real major concern. The Alkaris and Darloks have mostly small ships though, so it'd be more useful against them ... or us. If the Silicoids get a weapon like this? That'd be real bad for us. The others are pretty straightforward upgrades, the Stinger Missile and the Fusion Beam. I'm taking the missiles here: it's going to be important to have better missile bases soon. Also, we've now got a small chance(6% this year) of popping the Radiated tech ... and the Silicoids have moved most of their ships away from us. Looks like we are going to win this round of brinksmanship. The Darloks are building a lot of ships, and with good reason: a Human-Silicoid-Alkari alliance has formed. Sigh. We've got to get the Darloks on our side eventually or this could go bad for us anyway. Solve one problem, and another takes its place. But first things first.  What's all this? The Alkari have sortied basically their whole bloody fleet ... to Tyr. Guess they've improved their range. The red line is how the game indicates a rival fleet incoming. The function keys can cycle through planets and fleets, etc; F8 and F9 cycle forwards or backwards through planets that have incoming fleets, which can be quite useful. We're not at war with the Alkari, but a non-aggression pact wouldn't even help here(since it's one of our colonies). Pretty sure they haven't even scouted it yet. They're just getting desperate I think what with nowhere to expand and can finally reach other systems now ... but they are allied with the Silicoids still. Maybe I can get them to break that off. I ask the Silicoids first but they 'do not consider my offer a fair one'. The Alkaris say that they 'have considered our offer, and rejected it'. Super. They've got 125 strike craft, 3 large ships, and a colony ship. Moving the fleet there is a waste of time I think: we'll take heavy losses at best. I should be able to crank out another couple of missile bases before they get here. This looks like an invasion but they'll usually declare those beforehand. Here it seems to just be a desperate colonization effort ... and we're in the way. Superb.  Reduced Industrial Waste 60% has come in. Zortrium Armor boosts protection by 100%, another 50% on top of what we get from Duralloy. That'd be good ... but we're about to hopefully get a couple new planets before long and our factories are still very expensive. Reducing those costs will accelerate growth there tremendously. Improved Industrial Tech 6 is the choice here. It's now 2407. Two years after the Silicoids refused to abolish their alliance with the Alkaris, they did it of their own accord, grabbing one with the Sakkras. One thing that is not great about the Master of Orion diplomatic AI is the way they switch around alliances faster than most people change socks, esp. before things really heat up. In this case it's in our favor, but it still makes you scratch your head.  Sweet!! Although there are still things that could blow it up, as happened with the Kronos Plan, it's great to see a plan come to fruition.  Last three are all new. Cloning cuts the cost of growing extra population in half(10 BC from 20 BC per); Atmospheric Terraforming turns hostile planets into standard ones, increasing both size and population growth; and Advanced Eco Restoration slashes the waste cleanup to 10/BC, which is half what we are currently paying. The last two are both very good, but I elect to take a step back instead and get Terraforming +40M. Since our initial 10M we haven't grabbed any of these. The waste budget is pretty small right now so we can afford to wait on the Eco Restoration. Probably Atmospheric Terraforming comes next, but the flat-rate increase will boost all of our planets, not just the hostile ones we want to grab.  Now we've got a new ship for this last land grab, the Colonizer R. Notice it's got Warp 3 due to Sublight Drives. Warp Engines are pretty cheap to build, a strange design decision if you ask me. It would cost only 11 BC less, 674 BC, to build a slow Retro version. So why not get there faster? We'll build one of these each at Imra and Mentar. Also, our research spending will go back to being mostly equalized with a bit extra in computers, like it was before this push for radiated base. Meanwhile we've got the weakest fleet in the known galaxy as everyone seems to be on another shipbuilding kick, but we've taken the lead in technology. Lots going on, and the Alkari fleet is just two years away ... A year later, a second fleet is following it now. What the heck are birdbrains(literally) doing?!? The answer better not be 'kicking our arse' ... Here they come. It's 2410.  Planets come with their own Battle Scanners, so we can see what they have here. Nothing special except for those Wareagles. Given that we still have weak Hyper-V missiles, they are probably going to tear us a new one. Could have brought the fleet here to take them out ... but that would have meant leaving Arietis. Six missile bases isn't bad, but almost certainly not enough here. Let's see what transpires. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns5fTIgRdYU&feature=youtu.be That was ... shocking. I thought their bombs would do a lot more damage. The lasers couldn't do a darned thing, which is why the smaller ships retreated ... they were useless. Two cruisers for two missile bases. More ships incoming so we'll keep building them, but I'm quite pleasantly surprised at that outcome. In retrospect, one reason is probably the computer tech; they don't have any battle computers developed, so their aim sucks(even when bombing). That must have been what saved us, because those fusion bombs can cause ... problems. Still surprised they didn't do more damage than that however. Didn't stop me from giving the Alkari ambassador a piece of my mind though. In response to my threats, they deliver this message from Emperor Skylord:  That'll do. Let's just toss that right in our fund for building up the new planets we're about to acquire. Also, if they can hit Tyr they can hit Imra, so I get going on some bases there as well. The Silicoids are back at Arietis ... with another lone colony ship. Srsly? GTFO. Also, we pick up our latest shields.  Two new ones here. The Class V shields are self-evident, but I love me some Repulsor Beam and that's where we are going. Basically anything that only has a range of 1 is useless against a ship that has one; it'll just push them away before they can fire. That can make them incredibly annoying to go up against. The Alkari fleet that just showed up would have been nearly useless if we had these; their Gatling and standard Lasers would have been completely nullified, though the Heavy ones still can reach you. Of course if your enemy relies on missiles or something then it doesn't matter, so a lot depends on the enemy.  We made it!! First new planet in over half a century.  And then I discover that they've done it to us again. A Silicoid ship is headed to Willow, and they're going to get there before any of my ships can. It's far enough that they must have strapped reserve tanks on the thing. Damnit. It isn't a great planet ... but still. We transfer a few million from Tyr to Arietis to boost stuff there. The Alkari bribe will be used to accelerate development, and it's time for a new stage of things.  We've got a solid tech lead but nothing new coming soon. I like where we are sitting except for the Silicoids, but I still think we have a decent shot at taking them. Eventually. The main thing right now, aside from building up Arietis, is to balance research and a military buildup. It's time to get serious about adding missile bases. We also need a new general-purpose defensive ship with our new toys. Oh, and the Darloks have the freaking Graviton Beam. Jerks. Time for a new ship: the Star Streak. I stick with the Destroyer size because we don't really have a reason to go bigger from what I can see. No need for Anti-Missile Rockets unless we are attacking bases which this isn't for; nobody has advanced missile tech at all right now. Darloks and us are the best with the Hyper-Vs which we've had forever; it's really sad frankly. We could have a huge edge there once we get our Stingers. Compared to our last design, it's faster, has more armor, better at pretty much everything. The Mass Driver should do at least as much damage as a pair of Heavy Lasers, if not more. Only a Mk. I Battle Computer on there, since that's all we have right now. Also has our best duralloy armor and new sublight engines of course, with Class II shields. Which I forgot to screencap, but anyway this figures to be the workhorse for the next while. Time to get rid of the Starfighters finally. Also check out the trade agreements again but I can't increase those right now as they are still maxed. Believe it or not we have a surplus in trade! 37 BC and rising. They pay off ... it just takes a long time.  For the time being, Tyr is still cranking out the missile bases. Denubius is research-focused, and Mentar/Imra will split like this between the two. Once each has a few bases, they'll alternate with one building Star Streaks to get some out there and the other doing bases. There are lots of ways to deal with a situation like this; I'm just trying to find a balance. Need to make sure we aren't defenseless and that we start to gear up, but I'm not building an invasion fleet just yet. Gotta keep investing enough in research to at least maintain equality if not better at the same time. Roffle. The Silicoid colony ship shows up at Willow ... unarmed. They sacrificed the weapons for the tanks I guess ... so it turns around and runs away from our Recons. Hmm. I guess we get to go colonize it anyway. I just had myself in the mindset of assuming they are armed; I don't think I've seen this before where they had armed them, then went for the distance and took off the guns. Learning a lot of new things this game. In 2414 the second Alkari fleet reaches Tyr ... and turns around immediately without attacking. This is a function of our successful threat. They'll lay low for a while. Spies as well. That wasn't the goal really, but I'll take it. Tyr will hold where it is for the moment -- 8 bases -- and switch to research. Another year, and first-in colonists reach Willow.  We've got the foundation for success here. Gotta build up our defenses, continue working on the fleet which must constantly be modernized, along with pushing the progress of Willow & Arietis forward constantly. Every planet in the galaxy that can be colonized has been, and war of the hot variety is coming before long whether we would choose it or not. Tyr and Mentar combine to send a starter-pack of 8M colonists to Willow. The lion's share of the fleet will remain at Arietis, but 8 destroyers make their way there as well. Neither colony will be able to produce bases anytime soon, so the fleet must protect them. ProTip: The AI tends to ignore planets it can't land on though -- if you can't colonize a planet type, neither can you send troops there. They could destroy them from orbit, but usually they won't. That makes Willow a lot safer than Arietis which could be under threat if the Silicoids get frisky. A couple years later GNN updates empire production, but I didn't show that since it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know.  Here come the Alkaris again, this time to Imra. They'll find it better-defended than Tyr was when they show up in four years.  In 2420, exactly a decade after it was founded, the Arietis colony is set to terraform! That's a perfect storm of it being a Rich planet, small, trade income boosting it, and of course regular transfer payments from the Planetary Reserve. Willow on the other hand has just three factories; things will take a lot longer there. Trade deals are upped to 325 BC with both of the other major powers. That almost knocks us down to even, but not quite; still a small surplus. In recent tech news, the Darloks have added Automated Repair, while the Silicoids are the first to get Class V Shielding. We're not to the halfway point on anything new yet. 2422; the Alkaris arrive at Imra, then turn around and go back. Apparently our boisterous rhetoric still carries weight with them.  High Council III convenes to end the next quarter-century, and once again it's us and the Silicoids. Could well stay that way to the end here. Once again the Darloks don't register an opinion. With 18 total votes the veto threshold is up to 7.  Lizards either. We've seen this movie before; I figured some of these might break one way or the other by now, but that could well wait until open war breaks out.  The Silicoids get the support of the Humans, which is enough for a veto block even if everyone else had sided with us.  Birds as well. This could be a result of threatening them having tipped the balance over to the other side. Regardless, the politics of this are not favorable. They have half the galaxy on their side.  We have four votes again, and abstain; if we voted for the Silicoids they would have won. It also would only have taken the Darloks' support to give them the crown, and there would have been nothing we could have done about it. This is a dangerous time. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 22:20 on May 8, 2017 |
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May 8, 2017 22:18
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OAquinas is correct once again. Only thing I'd add in terms of the bases(I don't know what the max is either), is that it's sort of a moot point since they become gradually less effective over time. As a whole, largely due to speed, defense rules in the early game and slowly gives way to offense. At first when you can only move one parsec/space per turn, you have to deal with several missile salvos to just get to the planet to attack it. Well before reaching the top tech levels that will become only two turns required to get there, so there just isn't as much time, your weapons other than bombs have longer range, etc. ulmont posted:Can you break down the trade again? I had always thought that if you upped a 300 BC deal to a 325 BC deal that you started over in terms of making a profit, so that you should never increase a deal unless you could basically double the amount of trade. Sure. Trade starts at -30% of the deal amount and increases by 0-5% per year. That means on average it will take about 50 years or a little more to max out with no changes being made. When you re-up a deal though, you do not start over. The % return is the average of -30% and what your current return is. So for a specific example; say there's 100 BC on the deal and you are at 50% return(50 BC per year). If you add 25BC to it, the new deal with 125BC at a 10% return(50% + -30% divided by 2). So you're down to 13BC but still maintaining a profit -- you don't go back down to -30% on the full amount. . Of course in this case my primary goal wasn't profit anyway, though it certainly helps; the bigger a deal is, the more positive effect it has on relations, and that was more important to me. It still might have been better to wait until I could increase it a little more once our relations were reasonably positive though.
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May 9, 2017 14:38
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Makes sense ulmont: that's something else to add in to my thought process, though mostly for future games as I don't see trade increasing much more in this one. Kanthulu posted:I think you should be considering an offensive against the rocks soon. This was the point where I started first seriously considering it, but we didn't really have any ships that could do anything against missile bases, so it wasn't an option quite yet. It was also complicated by them constantly having allies.
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May 9, 2017 21:30
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Episode I: 2425-2450 Still definitely trailing in fleet and production, but population is the biggest concern at the moment. There's way too many rocks out there, they clearly have some good planets.  Even the Darloks are in a more friendly mood. They're not quite ready for an alliance yet, but I'm still hoping to get there eventually.  Slowly but surely getting our latest Star Streaks built up. Once we have defenses built up on all the planets, we'll get rid of the obsolete Recons. They've seen a full century of service at this point.  Generally speaking the military maintenance(ships + bases) I like to keep at about a third in wartime and as low as I can manage in peacetime. 20+% ships, 10% bases. Just a general rule, but definitely want to keep gradually improving and modernizing the fleet from here on out. Can't afford not to. And Arietis/Willow will be adding bases before we put any more on the established worlds.  Roughly midway through the latest round of research, with new battle computers a little closer than the others to finishing. Two years later, we got the 'industrial accident' event. On Arietis. That's hilariously good bad news. It irradiates the entire planet ... but Arietis is already radiated. Anywhere else the max. population would have been permanently reduced. As it was, a minimal amount of cleanup(2 waste was generated and that's it, I think a random factor plus planet size is used). This might be the best negative event I've ever endured. The rival fleets are blowing up. We're at about half of the Darloks now with the Silicoids close behind. I've got little choice but to accelerate shipbuilding on Mentar and Imra. It'll slow down our research, but we're going to get overrun here otherwhise. I decide to risk holding off until we get our next round of research finished ... then we can catch up with more modern toys.  2 million were still killed, and the max. population cut in half. Basically we have to re-terraform the thing now. Willow's ready to terraform also.  2430, and here's Arietis fully terraformed. Previously the max. was 25M, so it did still take a hit. I guess it went from Radiated to "Even More Radiated"? That kind of sucks but doesn't matter much in the grand scheme.  We got quite lucky and finished Battle Computer V very early, in 2432. A few more choices; more computers and jammers and another scanner. I think we need the jammer more(Mk. V), having just learned that the Silicoids have discovered Merculite missiles. We'll definitely want the scanner eventually, but don't need it quite yet.  This is the big one I've been waiting for. I don't think anyone else has it yet, and it will give us a big edge against anyone without heavy weapons or missiles.  New options here, but the Planetary Shield is the only choice. We were missing the first one, Class V, which is one of the most important early options. They are pricey, but well worth it, absorbing a lot of damage from all attacks. They also combine with the regular shields on missile bases. Once we get this, we'll absorb 14 from all attacks, which at this point of the game means only bombs are going to get through. Everything else just bounces off. It's been an even playing field so far with nobody else having planetary shields either ... so this could be a real game-changer. Improved Industrial Tech 6 was next; we take Armored Exoskeleton, another toy for our ground troops who haven't gotten all that much yet. Darlok and Silicoid trade deals are bumped up to 350 each as well.  Another year, and we snag both Fusion Drives and Stinger Missiles. Had an 8% shot at each, so a very small chance of getting both. But I'm not arguing. Our high-level options are things we don't really need; range and the Warp Dissipator. The Reajax II Fuel Cells would move us to the next level, but I think it's time to go backwards and grab that Inertial Stabilizer. Past time, perhaps.  This right here is a wealth of riches. The Ion Stream Projector is great at damaging enemy ships ... but can't kill them outright. It's really good for wearing down large enemies. The Omega-V will decimate any bases at this tech level, and torpedoes do a lot of damage(30 each in this case) but can only be fired every other turn. Unlike missiles, they don't have limited ammunition. I go with the torpedoes; once we get them, they should be a versatile solution to a variety of combat problems for a while. I was planning on a ship redesign here, but I'm going to wait a bit longer. Shipbuilding will go on pause while we arrange a crash-course for the stabilizer. That'll make our efforts a lot more effective, and remove one of our weaknesses.  This should do the job; raided most of the other fields by half, and we ought to be able to get this done within a decade or less. I left Planetology alone because that terraforming will be huge as well. Took four years -- even less than I hoped. We hop on the fuel cells to move things forward after that, and restore the usual ratios. Ahead of the ship design, I did a quick comparison of the best combat tech the three powers have: ** Battle Computers: Mk V. Darloks are at III, the Silicoids, astonishingly, have none. Sucks to be them. Advantage Psilons. ** Shields: Mk. IV. Darloks have the same, Silicoids have V so they get a slight edge here. Nobody has planetarys yet as mentioned. ** ECM: Mk. I. Same all the way around. Missiles figure to be an effective tool right now. ** Armor: Duralloy. Darloks are still stuck with Titanium, but the Silicoids recently acquired Zortrium, the next step up. Advantage Rocks. ** Engines: Sublight(Warp 3). Darloks are STILL stuck on warp 1 retros, while the Silicoids have sublight as well. ** Beams: Mass Driver. Darloks have the Graviton Beam and Neutron Blaster; Silicoids hilariously have nothing better than the Gatling Laser. Big edge to the shapeshifters here. ** Missiles: Stingers. Darloks are in the stone age with the Hyper-V, Silicoids have Merculite. We're top dogs in this. ** Bombs: Nuclear. Darloks are still there as well. Silicoids have the Fusion Bomb. The absence of planetary shields makes this less of an issue, but it's still a definite plus for the Silicoids. ** Specials: Everyone has stabilizers now. Darloks got the Repulsor Beam at the same time we did(probably stole it), both of them have Automated Repair. Edge to the Darloks but it's not a big one. On the attack I think we'll do best with hit-and-run missile ships; the lack of ECM and our Stingers should be a strong combo. Those don't do well for system defense. Will have to rely on missile bases there. Any darlok ship will probably crush our mass drivers, and we don't have any weapon worth having with the range to use with a repulsor beam. We'll probably want some bombers also. I've already sent a single mass driver destroyer, the Star Streaks, to any planets that need a picket. It's time to say goodbye to the Recons. And hello to this:  The Sting Raid will be built in relatively obscene quantities, the better to be effective. I don't normally do missile boats, but making it a Destroyer was really the only option. Cruiser-size was just less efficient no matter the design. The idea is to get as 2-pack shots off(they also come in 5-pack launchers) as possible, then get out. Reload the missiles, lather-rinse-repeat. One hit from a Stinger will do 10 damage against the best shields anyone has. No shields, ECM, or armor because we aren't planning on hanging around long enough to get hit. The six worlds of the Psilon Empire are now divided into three categories. Imra/Mentar are on Sting Raid construction, Denubius/Tyr will ensure that we continue doing some research, though at less than half our previous investment, and Arietis/Willow are working towards having a decent level of missile-base protection. The Silicoid and Darlok worlds I can see have about 20-25 bases each, so they are well ahead of us when it comes to that. Ours are better with the Stingers but we'll also have to rely on them more; I'm thinking at least 12-15 on the border planets is where I'd like to be(each has three missile launchers so that's a lot of Stingers). With this approach we can build about 6 ships a year. As the numbers increase, I'll eventually want to scrap our Heavy Laser Destroyers, which are quite obsolete now.  This is another positive event; the Humans will receive multiple tech advances from this. If they weren't stuck on Sol that'd be a real problem for us. After a few years of building, I try some more diplomacy. A Non-Aggression Pact is signed with the Alkari, but my attempt at getting an Alliance with the Darloks is met with a blank stare. They 'do not consider your offer a fair one.' I haven't seen them at war or in an alliance yet. Still, if I can get the birds back on the fence potentially with the new agreement there, I'll take it. Tension is definitely rising; even the maxed-out agreements with the Silicoids and Darloks are only able to keep things where they are. Pleasant, but not enough to forge stronger ties. The next yeaer, 2444, GNN informs us our fleet is dead last. Thanks for the reminder, although we are closing the gap; about 80% of the three races we know. We're in an arms race.  I happened to notice the Alkari had a big fleet headed for Kronos. They lost ... badly, though I think they took out some Silicoid ships at the same time. Fine by me. Their fleet is almost down to nothing though. Not sure what prompted this, and they aren't officially at war, but it could well tilt them away from the rocks with a vote coming up soon.  Well, this is something -- they are off the fence, at least for now.  The Silicoids maintain allies, the lizards stay with them.  Same thing with these dorks.  After the Silicoids predictably choose themselves, the Alkaris at least were neutral this time around.  We abstain and are safe again. Granid was two votes away from winning, but if we keep the Darlok on our side we've got a veto bloc.
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May 11, 2017 04:05
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Yep. Plus if the Silicoids take them out everyone will be pissed at them: Altair is basically a 'poisoned pawn' because of the diplomatic penalty for genocide if somebody wipes them out.
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May 11, 2017 21:25
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The weekend was a bit crazy, but I should have the next update up later today. GeneralRevil posted:Genociding one race gives you a diplomacy penalty, but if you genocide every other race, it fixes all your diplomacy penalties. Heh ... I guess that's one way to look at it  . Races getting stuck can happen -- last time I played on Average I ended up with 25 planets at one point, nobody else had more than three. But those kinds of things do tend to be the exception.
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May 17, 2017 12:48
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General Revil posted:It's Wednesday. I think your weekend was much crazier than you give it credit for. LOL. Monday was a family day and part of the weekend for me. Sun/Mon the way my schedule works. Anyway, that kind of thing happens a lot more on smaller galaxies; see the Humans and Sakkra in this first LP game. Looks like you had a real nice setup there, aside from the poor planets. This kind of thing is why I think the larger galaxies are generally harder, not easier as the manual indicates -- although there are some easier aspects to them as well. You don't get as much of this with more systems around. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 20:46 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 20:44
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Episode I: 2450-2475 A completely empty threat ... and what about the Silicoids Mr. Birdface? Again though, tensions brewing. As was alluded to before, why not just attack the Silicoids now? Well, they've got allies.  We're maintaining a small tech lead, but with the amount of effort going into the fleet that won't last. Otherwhise nobody seems to be getting the upper hand.  Holding steady at best now.  The rest of the laser-based destroyers will go away soon.  The fleet is starting to get expensive.  It's all about the terraforming. Nothing else is close and that will give us a much-needed boost. For better or worse the Psilon Empire is almost ready for war. Not quite there yet; that'll wait until after High Council V convenes. The goal for now is to get the next round of terraforming done and modernize the fleet some more, get some more bases built, get a little more ready. The patient, long game is usually the best option but we can't really hope for more than a stalemate here. Galactic politics are against us as well. Of the three empires we can attack: ** Alkaris would be easy pickings but we'd then be dead meat in the Council. Genocide ticks everyone off. ** The Darloks are our only sort-of friend now; if we fail, they'll vote against us. ** The Silicoids always have one or two allies. Fighting them means taking on almost half the galaxy. So there aren't a lot of great options here. If we wait longer, our carefully designed Stingers could become obsolete. The rate of tech advances really slows at this point. Hopefully something happens in the next couple decades to shake up this deadlock. A year later the last remaining laser ships are scrapped, and the money used to fund increased studies on the research planets. I want that terraforming, and I want it now.  Takes a few more years, but we get there. Same choices as before; this was a previous tier tech. The atmospheric terraforming would really boost border worlds of Arietis and Willow; Advanced Eco Restoration has a smaller effect, but would still cut our ecology spending in half everywhere. It's pretty small right now and there's a non-trivial difference in the research cost, so I choose the Atmospheric option. We won't be seeing this anytime soon regardless. Now we have the possibility of 30M more per planet, 180M total. The Silicoids got this about 15-20 years ago; the Darloks haven't gotten anything like it. The rich get richer. Total empire max. pop right now is 372M, so we're talking about almost increasing it by half. This is HUGE, esp. when you consider it's probably worth two extra Council votes. Per-planet cost is 120 BC, so it's an investment but not a huge one; about half of our income for a year and then waiting for the growth.  At the same time(2454), I notice this. Look who decided to come say hello. It's our good buddies the space rocks. Arietis has 10 bases and most of the fleet; still, let's put off that terraforming and build a few more while they come in. You must properly greet a Silicoid when it comes to visit, and it's been so very long since we had them over for tea ... Bunch of cruisers there along with the one capital ship. At the very least we should have a chance to scan them and see what we'd be up against in the event of a war. Everywhere else, it's terraforming time.  They're here ... and they suck, for the most part. Lots of death spores. Bombs on a colony ship?? Umm, ok. Due to the combination of speed and biologicals, we want to take out the Makos first, then Colony Ships because of the bombs, then Polaris. Whatever that big Monitor wants to do is pretty much fine. They should do limited damage if any with those lasers. Here goes nothing ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap_IKj883rg Victory! But not without cost. We did lose some ships ... and learned those mass drivers don't do a whole lot in the numbers I have. Stinger missiles? Two volleys from the dozen bases took out a huge ship, and they tore those cruisers apart well. Them I like. Those lasers are going away before too long though ... spies report they have developed the fusion beam. Honestly Zygot doesn't really care though, since we aren't going to be going toe-to-toe with them. The environmental damage was significant; Arietis is down to 5M citizens with a max of 10: 17M were killed by the death spores. The rocks are willing to risk the ire of the galaxy(biologicals upset all races) to take us out. We'll remember this. And if they'd gotten off a couple more salvos of them, the colony would have been destroyed. It was closer than it appeared. So we will terraform for a third time, with the planetary reserve featuring in the funding. And perhaps many more times to go -- as many as are necessary. Our estimates are that this was about a third, at least a quarter, of the Silicoid fleet. I think our Sting Raids can wreak havoc on them ... and their allies are not likely to have enough tech to worry us. The drums of war are beating louder, but first we must grow our other worlds after the terraforming. Having proven themselves of little use, the first batch of Star Streaks are scrapped. They never served a purpose much greater than deterrence.  Good luck with that. Ours aren't for sale.  When it rains it pours.  And speaking of pouring .... We can only fight this war on the defensive unless we want to risk ticking everyone off by eliminating them. Between these two items, our trade income is slashed from about 300BC to 52BC per year. The Alkari part of it we aren't getting back, but we already had some more Sting Raids en route to Willow. We'll wait and see if they can make a difference against the pirates, along with the ships already there. The Alkari have 12 cruisers(Condors) along with three more colony ships headed to Tyr. We have 8 bases there, which I'm confident can handle the situation. Aside from Fusion Bombs, their tech is ... not great. After considering this for a year or two, in 2460, the year before we were to arrive, I decide to send the fleet to Altair. Punching them in the mouth is a good way to get peace -- and otherwhise we can just bombard them from orbit and see how their ability to wage war survives that. Of course if we accidentally destroy the colony entirely we'll be screwed, but I don't think our fleet is big enough to do that. Hopefully. It doesn't all go; 40 Sting Raids which is maybe a quarter of the total. Let's see how many ships and bases they want to lose before they decide fighting us isn't a good idea. Factories and people after that, if they persist. That set up two battles the following year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCrONkPF93g Hmm. Gatling Lasers. An invasion fleet with Gatling Lasers. A single missile base could hold them off indefinitely. And our strike knocked out 10 missile bases along with the cruisers. Let's just hang around there and give them some more punishment ... The next year almost all of the rest of Altair's bases were destroyed, but Willow's pirate problems continued. More ships were sent there as well, with only a token amount remaining at Arietis.  Another year, and we've got superiority over the Alkari homeworld. It's a simple yes/no decision as you can see here, with the population and factories listed. There is no indication of how much damage you'll cause; it would be a lot better if there was an 'estimated casualties' listed or somesuch. You just have to estimate it based on experience, something you get better at throughout the game. Bombs are the best weapons for this, beam weapons pretty much suck ... let's see how several dozen stingers do.  Not very well. They'll grow population and produce factories faster than this. All this will do is annoy them. We'll send more ships when we can.  Sooner rather than later, with this bit of concurrent good news. We've kept up the pounding of Altair, gradually whittling away their industrial base and keeping the population around the same. They are still loathe to sign a peace agreement, calling Emperor Zygot 'dishonorable'. I'm not sure why, since that usually happens when you break an agreement and they were the ones to break one with us.  This was quite the interesting bit of news; four years before the next Council vote, we find the Silicoids without allies for the first time. They are also racking up the weapons tech, but it seems the galaxy is turning against them. It seemed to start shortly after they used the death spores against us. That might have been the match that lit the powder keg, as it were. If it wasn't so close to a vote we'd attack now -- but they probably won't find so many supporters as before, and it looks like our moment will come afterwards.  More bad news for the rocks, which is quite fine with us. As the bulletin implies, this is just a matter of moving enough ships into the system. If the comet hits, the planet is destroyed and the star marked as uninhabitable. That'd just be a shame, but I doubt they'll screw this up.  For the fourth straight time, it's Zygot and Granid doing the honors. The Darloks are neutral this time, but that's fine; we just need them to not take the other side.  Sakkras persist on the wrong side of history.  The Humans have flipped. This is about hating the Silicoids, not liking us Psilons. But whatever works; we'll take it.  The Silicoids are up to 7 votes this time, still at a full third exactly. I thought the birdbrains would stay neutral what with being at war with both parties, but apparently they really, really hate us.  We're up to 6 votes, and abstain again. As before all we need is for everyone to not be against us, and we easily met that. It's an evenly split Council.
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May 19, 2017 04:44
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StarFyter posted:Pretty sure being attacked by bio-weapons only gives you the warm fuzzy feeling that the other guy is now disliked pretty universally for what they just did. Yep, that's it. As far as war goes, I think the next period gets into this, but you don't actually declare war. The other races decide when they are at war with you, which is kind of weird. Breaking agreements is bad, but not as bad as attacking without breaking them; espionage/sabotage really ticks them off, and obviously blowing up their ships, bombing their planets, and other manner of warlike activities are real good ways to tick them off also.
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May 19, 2017 22:44
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Episode I: 2475-2487 Still the same story more or less: we're holding about even with the Darloks, and can't catch up in production(they appear to have put their Robotic Controls IV into use now).   Over 200 stinger-bearing destroyers now, and we aren't going to do much better than that.  Right about at a third of our income going to the military. That's basically full mobilization in practical terms; you can go a lot higher but it gets really difficult to have a competitive economy. Most of the new spending will go into missile bases, not ships. Willow and Arietis still have a little room to grow, but the other four planets have all been maxed out for a few years with the new population.  We're closest to getting the ECM Jammer here; that's not going to matter right now. After that probably the planetary shield is next and that'll be a bigger deal, but it'll be a while. We're in the mid-level range now in terms of advancement, and for the most part will be operating with what we have, for better or worse.  The rocks have managed to get an alliance back with the Sakkra, but they're at war with the other two small races. Darloks remain totally on the sidelines. They've added the Graviton Beam and Cloning to leap ahead of us in overall tech, but neither of those figure to matter much. Cloning will help their economy a bit if they use it. More worrying is the Armored Exoskeleton, which will make them tougher than us in ground combat. We'll really have to send a lot of troops to dislodge them. However, we will be able to out-grow them. First things first though. It's clearly the time for war here -- we aren't going to have a better opportunity and it's the only forseeable way to change our 'losing stalemate' situation. We don't even have a choice of targets; only Kronos is within range.  We inform the Silicoids that we are breaking our trade agreement; they are less than pleased. I have no idea what a denebian sewer crawler is, but the comparison rather obviously isn't a compliment. This is better than attacking without breaking the agreements first however -- other empires, and not just them, will consider that twice as bad in a dastardly, backstabbing way. They still consider our relations 'Amiable', but we get the Diplomat Gone thing -- this indicates they aren't willing to speak with us for a few years. Well we don't want to speak with them. Instead, we'll send several dozen Sting Raids to do the communication. It's time to release the dogs of war!! It takes only a year to get there. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOt6WuWZK10 That strike from the missile bases hurt. Their Merculite missiles are fast enough to hit us; we'll have to remember that and only stick around for the first volley anywhere they have a lot of bases. 35 Destroyers perished for that miscalculation. Took almost all of them out though which is nice. This also shows, by the way, how this 'hit-and-run' tactic becomes less effective over time.  Yeah, they aren't amused. Leading to war is the whole point. We can't actually declare war on them, because reasons; the AI empires only are allowed to declare one. That's a weird game design bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh8BsSf1DgU Now the bases are gone, and their ships aren't fast enough to reach us in time to do any damage. We can pound them like this until we control the space above Kronos; then it will be time to invade.  They're sending reinforcements, because why wouldn't they? This is the bulk of them. It'll take some time to knock them all out. Their fleet is still much bigger than ours, but a few years from now that shouldn't be the case. After a couple more years, we achieve space superiority at Kronos in 2479. Most of their ships choose to run away rather than fight. Either way is fine with me. Time for our first planetary invasion. Kronos presently holds 92M population. We need enough transports to defeat that many and have extra left over to man the colony. Given the current state of tech I'm going to estimate at least 150M will be needed; I'll explain why once I'm able to show the first ground invasion battle. That is a crapton of people, and most of them are going to die. Invasions are expensive, but worthwhile. Arietis is still regrowing and doesn't have any extra people to send. Tyr/Denubius/Willow all send half of their max. population, and Imra/Mentar a sizable amount each, reducing them to 100M remaining. All told, 179M Psilons are loaded into transports and shipped off, about a third of the empire. That might be overkill, but if so it is not by much. It's crucial that we remain in control of the space above Kronos until they arrive. All planets will also go into max ecology spending for at least a year; the economy is going to tank until we get the population back up. As an example:  Denubius will get an extra 7M in population growth this year due to this; still keeping a fairly small amount in research to avoid any 'atrophy' penalty. ProTip: You can grow up to a quarter of a planet's current population this way. I didn't actually hit that limit with any planets due to the cost; 20 BC per million, and we don't have any techs that reduce that cost(such as Cloning) yet.  This is the first time we've actually caught someone stealing, though I suspect we've been hit by the Darloks and didn't discover it. You're only told if you catch them. This is a big 'so what', since they already have a better armor than this it won't help them that much. Usually when at war though I tend to up the internal security to +10% and I forgot, so I'll do that now. Also a good time to show off a little-known feature that is not documented anywhere and was clearly added late in development; the Caught Spies report. The only way you can get to it is by the 'C' hotkey.  We caught one Alkari spy last year. If you suspect a lot of enemy activity, this is a good thing to check. The manual recommends raising internal security to maximum in order to catch a lot of spies even if they are hiding; I've not found this to be particularly effective but if I run into a game where they are stealing and blowing up a lot of stuff, I will try it and see if I have any better luck. It's expensive. Just doing the +10%(one-quarter of the max) on internal security costs 5% of income as I mentioned previously; I don't think it's usually worth going higher than that. In 2481, the first of our armies arrive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXIV_lLaQl4 And then there's also this:  They take out the comet just in time. That will free up their fleet to come after us, but I'm not at all concerned. The kill ratio in that ground invasion is more concerning. About 3:1 in the Silicoids favor. That means we didn't send nearly enough! We'll send more ... and bomb them to at least nullify the growth rate. However, that will also destroy a lot of factories which is why I haven't been doing it up to this point. The invasion video background is just like landing on a planet to colonize it as you probably noticed, with the exception of course of the existing colony on the right and the troops display. The key thing to notice is the tech at the bottom. We had Duralloy Combat Armor and Hand Lasers; they had no weapon but Zortrium Armored Exoskeletons. Each of these give a bonus to ground combat rolls. The way it works is that size of force is irrelevant; you get nothing for outnumbering them. Each 'round' will result in 1 trooper, i.e. 1M population, dying off from one side or the other until one side has none left. Whoever has troops remaining controls the planet. It's a random roll of 1-100, with the default odds being 55-45 in favor of the defender. The more tech you have, the more you shift this in your favor. Bulrathi get a +25 so that would start them out at 70-30 attacking, 80-20 defending; if you don't have better tech than them don't even try basically. It would appear it's about a 75-25 proposition here in favor of the Silicoids, which is about right; the Hand Laser only gives us +5, Zortrium is better than Duralloy armor and Armored Exoskeleton is much better than Combat Armor(the starting option). You can also have personal shields, those have come up but we've bypassed them. It is kind of amusing to consider the possibility of marching every able-bodied adult into combat as your 'army', but overall I like the system used here. It'd be nice if size of force mattered, but the fact that it doesn't ensures the tech wins out and maybe that's better. Makes it simpler also, but it definitely could have been expanded/refined. Quite important is the fact that if you win an invasion, you keep the factories intact(though you have to refit them) and you have a chance of discovering tech(up to six advances per planet!) that they have but your empire doesn't. How many you discover is based on a random factor and the amount of factories you capture -- that makes it much better to preserve them. In this case we almost have to bomb them though -- we could eventually wear them down with numbers, but that would take a very long time and a ton of people. In this case I'm choosing a middle path; some bombing but we're still going to try to leave some infrastructure intact.  A little dense, but they are starting to get the point. We'd officially be at war already if relations hadn't started off so well. Also, this is one of those diplomatic messages that really wasn't proofread apparently, which I find a bit aggravating.  Here's a nice little bit of work by the AI; they clearly put some cloning effort in. Grew from 80 to 90M in a single year -- that doesn't happen naturally. We couldn't even bomb it all away, and took out 25 factories in the process. I don't think there's going to be much left to salvage once we take it .... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5dhI70yUh4 Lost 100M, killed 37M. Them there are bad odds. And they finally declare war. Still have 92M on the way, but another few dozen are sent as I'm thinking that's not going to be enough. As you can see this can be a real undertaking.  By the way, check out our improving relations with the Alkari here. This is because of the key dynamic of MOO Diplomacy: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We're still at war with the birds, but may well get a peace out of this. Every time we attack the Silicoids, we get a boost to our Alkari relations because they are at war with them as well. ProTip: If you are in a situation where you can't quite get an AI empire to do something you want them to do, attacking an enemy of theirs can often push them over the edge. After another round of bombardment and troop combat, resulting in 29 factories and a couple dozen more dead population, they register their approval ... sort of. And with the same bad grammar.  And we also discover the Silicoids have developed Class X Planetary Shields. CRAP.ON.A.STICK. That's a game-changer, because when they get those built, our Stingers will do nothing against their bases. Literally nothing. We've got to take what we can, as quickly as we can within reason. The Alkari agree to a peace treaty, but aren't interested in a trade deal. We'll try that again later. The next year we incinerate 7 cruisers that decided to show up, and get their population down to 14M. That'll be enough bombing now; they won't be able to grow much from there. Still destroyed 79 factories in three years of bombardment; they had over 200 so some is still intact, but it's costly nonetheless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kcba9_9v3wE Finally we achieve victory! Hundreds of millions of Psilons died to make it happen, but a new solid planet in the middle of the galaxy is ours. And so is improved armor, which will immediately improve our odds against the Silicoids in future engagements. That gives me a perfect chance to make everyone wait another day to find out how the next decade of the war proceeded ...
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May 22, 2017 03:19
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That's true ... partially. The first was just a demo attack for LP purposes -- I wasn't expecting to win it. Second one was more sizable with 100M. Why not just bring at least 250M if not 350-400? Don't have enough population to do that, and coordinating all the transports would also give them several years in between to rebuild since it takes that long to get there from some of the planets. It is better to time them up when you can and I don't do that enough, but at the same time I don't think there was much opportunity for that here.
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May 22, 2017 22:07
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Episode I: 2487-2500 Last time, we eventually managed to overcome the Silicoids on Kronos, but discovered that we need to be in a hurry about this war since they've improved their planetary shields. It isn't over yet though, even there. They've got transports and a sizable fleet incoming ... and if they recapture the planet, they'll probably end up stealing tech from us. We have a portion of the fleet stationed at Willow, and they'll head to Kronos to help deal with this counterattack. That could leave Willow a little bare if the Darlok invade, but we'll have more problems than we know how to count if that happens anyway and there's no sign of it. We also get a small trade deal with the Alkari, and will work on building relations there again. We take a bite out of their fleet but the numbers are just too much for what we have. All of our transports are destroyed by their fleet. We'll have to keep at this and wear them down ... hopefully. The next year(2486), they are back with even more. I don't think we have a chance here ... ProTip: Don't screw up with the screen capture hotkey. I did, which is why you don't see a video here of the Silicoids retaking Kronos and stealing a tech of their own. Well that blows. We basically traded them Fusion Drives for Zortrium Armor there -- the Mass Driver really doesn't matter much. Looks like we'll need to keep us this routine for a while ... I think taking out those Makos, the missile ships, is our priority.  Or not. This is one of those virtually inexplicable things. I think the way they move their ships around is the worst aspect of the AI. They just take off from Kronos and head elsewhere because ... why?? Well let's not look a gift horse in the mouth -- time to take it back!  Sometimes war is quick and decisive ... and sometimes it's a grind. We've got the latter. A dozen years after our first attack, here's how things stand. We've pulled even in population, but fallen behind in tech. Fleet strength and production actually look a little better than before now that our worlds have recovered -- we'll have to send in more troops now of course but not a huge amount since they don't have many there either. If we can eventually take Kronos back and keep it, we can make something out of this. If not, we could be in trouble. In 2491, I thought we had more than enough to retake the planet, but it didn't work out that way. The plot stinkeneth: they have fusion rifles now. And soon their fleet returned. Round and round the mulberry bush we go here. No decisive resolution in sight. With the fleet already a little too big as it was, at least we were able to dump a lot of resources back into research.  ECM Jammer V eventually came in, and while a new computer or that Advanced scanner would be nice, the new Robotic Controls beckoned my attention. We're at 3 factories per million right now; moving up to five would be a 57% increase in productivity. Hard to imagine anything rivaling that. In 2497 we recaptured Kronos, as their fleet seemed to find more interesting things elsewhere again. Also this happened:  Another random event. It actually doesn't matter much in this case anyway, since Tyr is small enough to be a research planet. Whenever we do upgrade to better factory controls though, it will take a lot longer to finish.  We weren't far from getting it ourselves anyway, but I'm not throwing this back. We also got the first-tier Deep Space Scanner, FWIW.  The Cloaking device is nice, but not really a huge advantage. Eventually you are going to want to de-cloak to attack, and then it's not useful anymore. Good to get in a first strike, or to get bombers to a planet, but often I find it's not worth putting on. The best shields we have are Class IV; Class VII would be a big upgrade, so we'll take that. I'd like to get one of those ground combat shields eventually ...  Here's something strange, and it appears to have tipped the balance enough in our favor to let us hang onto Kronos now. Much of the Silicoid fleet is gone; things are pretty even in that regard. This is Selia, which the Silicoids have had destroyed and recolonized several times over in the past few decades. At first I didn't think it was the Darloks because those two are never at war: but I think when they destroy the colony, it could be taking them out of contact. The Silicoids have range 8 though, so that doesn't really make sense. Something is happening over there though, this is about the 4th time or more in the past half-century. but either the rocks scrapped a bunch of ships or, more likely, they were destroyed by the Darloks and their fearsome beam weapons. Either way, they don't appear to be in any position to threaten Kronos for the moment. And that's just fine by me. I'll consolidate and let them keep fighting over it. Scouting expeditions, a few destroyers each, are sent to the three reachable Silicoid systems to see about the possibility of expanding more if we can hold on here.  And what's this? The humans are being heard from, attempting to invade Altair. That's an interesting play. In 2499, the ships report back that Seidon is about a size 50-60 planet, Rotan 80, and Mu Delphi 160(!!). However, they all have planetary shields up. We're just building ours, and that will help a lot, but there's no way we can mount an attack with Sting Raids. They will now be relegated to defensive duties. For now at least, we'll have to satisfy ourselves with Kronos. It's not nothing though. In time, it could prove to be the beginning of a decisive edge. With all this chaos going on, it's time to see what High Council VI has to say.  This is quite a prelude. There are now only five empires, four rivals, in the galaxy.  We get the support of the Darloks. And note the total votes; there's been enough carnage to reduce from 21 to 16!! The galaxy hasn't been a friendly place the past quarter-century.  The lizards join us as well, as their on-again, off-again allies the Silicoids have been at war with them lately.  The Humans cast us their single vote. Granid votes for himself of course ... but he doesn't have enough to veto. With everyone else throwing their support behind us ...  Our six votes are just enough to put us over the top! 11-5, Emperor Zygot of the Psilons is deemed the new ruler of the galaxy!!
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May 24, 2017 04:38
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PurpleXVI posted:I think diplomatic victories were always one of my less favourite parts of MoO and MoO2, because, comparatively, they always feel like such an anticlimax. And, as seen here, it's almost never the result of some sort of major diplomatic campaign intended to win you the throne, but usually more of a surprise as your major remaining enemy makes themselves super unpopular somehow. I definitely agree that this game ended quite anticlimactically. I don't think this is representative though. We'll see through the course of the other games if this ends up being more typical or not, but I've definitely seen situations where you have to decide which side of a galactic struggle to be on -- and choosing wisely can determine the fate. wedgekree posted:Congrats on the win! Thanks! Only nine more(and harder) games to go! :P GuavaMoment posted:It's not a real victory until everyone is dead. AddedSpace posted:Diplomatic victory is usually just a way of pulling the ripcord and avoiding a grinding war. I should say here that you might be disappointed then. I'll go the killing everyone route, but probably only once; at most, twice. I don't think it adds much the LP to show the grind of having dozens of planets and going around wiping out an outmatched enemy. ManxomeBromide posted:In this case, I choose to interpret it as the Galaxy being so terrified by the potential devastation of a full-scale Psilon-Silicoid war that they hand the Galaxy to the more populous empire I like the way you think here! OAquinas posted:I usually use the diplomatic victory to make Impossible+ by unifying my enemies. They don't work in concert, but they also don't fight each other and they share techs. Can make for a very interesting fight. We'll go this route eventually as well. Didn't explore the mysteries of Orion this time either. There's much to do that hasn't yet been done. Just gotten properly started, really. I should also add here that another virtue of the 'diplomatic victory', in my opinion, is that it makes you look at more than just uber-tech-fleet stuff. You have to be concerned with relations for reasons other than 'I don't want them to wipe me out'. For me personally at least, the game is better for having the mechanic.
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May 26, 2017 02:38
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Ok then. Here's your ending cinematic for the standard/election victory, complete with the least profound statement ever from GNN. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OkVYlRjHAg I find it amusing that even when you win in the Council, it still gives you the choice to say NO when asked if you accept the ruling. You can actually go to war with the rest of the Council that just voted you in as High Master. It would be incredibly stupid, but you can do it. So ends Episode I. It was an unusual game, and at a few points we weren't far from losing. In the end, it was the fairly cheesy hit-and-run Sting Raids along with the border skirmishes between the Silicoids and the Darlok, and the rocks general pattern of pissing off the rest of the galaxy with their betrayals and biologicals that was the difference. Had a nice 3-way race going on there for a while. And the Darloks played their usual role of spoiler. Only made it halfway up the tech tree, but that's par for the course on a small galaxy. Episode II Preview It's time for the Klackons next, and we'll be moving up to a medium-sized galaxy, with 48 stars. This is usually enough to see some of more advanced elements in the tech tree, but not all of them. The bad news is that we won't be the Psilons this time; the worse news is that we have a 56% chance(5 of 9) every time out of going up against them. There are some who think the Klackons actually better than the Psilons. They are wrong, but this is the only race that has an argument. You could call them 1B to the eggheads' 1A. Diplomacy: Substandard. They get on ok with the Meklars, Psilons, and Bulrathi, but tend to have issues with Alkari/Mrrshan/Sakkra/Silicoids. Nobody, aside from the peace-loving Humans, particularly likes them. Economics: This is where the Klackons shine. They have doubled worker production(1 BC instead of 0.5), which gives them a 20% production edge even on fully developed colonies early in the game. On a planet with no factories, that's a 100% boost. This gives them the biggest head start of any race; the bugs are capable of the fastest growth curve. This edge dwindles to less than 7% on a fully-developed planet with maxed-out robotics. That's not nothing, but it's definitely a strength that is best at the start and declines in importance later. Military: No bonii or penalties. Research: Solid, but with a major asterisk attached. The Klackons are the Construction experts, so they'll be able to speed up their buildup even more with cheaper factories, get better armors early, etc. However they are Poor in Propulsion, which can cause them some problems. Often the Klackons are either a very tough enemy or a pushover. If they don't have close options for colonization, they won't soon get over the hump because it's more work for them to get the crucial range-extending advancements. This is the top challenge to watch out for. If we start off having to get into research early in order to get our colony ships to habitable planets, it could go badly. If not, the galaxy could prove a land of great wealth and opportunities. Up next: Episode II begins with the Klackon Opening! Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 02:45 on May 26, 2017 |
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May 26, 2017 02:43
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Episode II: Klackons, 1st Attempt, Opening Homeworld: Kholdan Color Theme: Red Emperor: Ixitixl  We've got three of the same enemies as last time: Humans, Silicoids, Sakkra. The first two there figure to most likely be the top competition. Perhaps humanity won't be locked out of things as much. Bulrathi and Mrrshan replace Darlok and Alkari this time around. That's pretty much a wash, another decent draw. No Psilons or even Meklars. It looks like we've got a shot at controlling the upper right of the galaxy. That yellow star directly above us either won't be a homeworld, or it won't matter given how far it is away from anything else. The yellow star to the right of us is the only one within our 3-parsec range, so once again there's no choice where to colonize. Looks like the closest competition is likely to come from those two yellow stars roughly in the middle, with probably multiple empires crowding together in the lower right. That's fine with me. The green and red stars directly below us are the ones I want to secure with scouts first. A couple of features to note here. One, medium galaxies are interesting, and larges to a somewhat lesser extent, because there are clumps of stars in places and then open spaces that form natural 'borders', especially early in the game. There's a real organic feel to the terrain. Secondly, note the purple splotches; those are nebulas. Shields of all kinds don't work in nebulas, and travel is limited to 1 parsec/year regardless of engine tech. It's rare that a strategically important system like +Kronos or Arietis in the Psilon game will be in a nebula, but if it happens things can get very interesting as the usual combat balance gets thrown off.  Ok a couple things to notice here. Last time our starting production was 51 BC; it's 72 now. That's a 40% boost due to the worker bonus. Time to see that savage growth curve in action! With the diplomatic weaknesses and no other real strengths, we've got to make the most of it. Also, it was pointed out that you can accelerate a bit the first few years by actually not cleaning up all of the waste at first. After some experimentation, I discovered you can gain an extra factory three years in, and a little more as Klackons, by doing this. The key is to only leave enough not cleaned up to basically keep your population at half of the maximum. After those first 2-3 years, that means you'll want it all cleaned, so it's just a bit of an extra jump-start. Every little bit helps though; normally we'd get only 4.3 factories here instead of 5, and of course it's less than 4 for other races. Kind of depressing to see ships move off slowly after having Warp 4 Fusion Drives at the end of the last game. But we're back to square one.  As hoped for with a yellow star, we've got quite a good second planet. This is much better than the 35-max Tyr we had to deal with last game. Of course it won't extend our range much either, but two good planets can form a strong core. Now it's time to draw the circle or sphere of influence. We need six more scouts to cover everything for the moment; less if that yellow star above us is uninhabited, but we can't bank on that. Kholdan will be cleaning up the rest of the remaining waste this year, and also can easily handle that many Recons. Naturally I've gotten rid of all the starting designs here per usual.  The red and white stars above and to the right of our starting colonies are both now within range, three parsecs out. So we will be able to expand further if either is livable. Here's hoping.  Middling planet at best, but our first picket is in place with no sign yet of competition. The Recons fan out, and colonist transfers to Primodius begin.  Another 'meh' planet, but more importantly an unoccupied one.  Unsurprising, as white stars are often hostile environs. It's all down to the red one now to determine our path.  Good planet here, and pointing directly to the middle of the galaxy to extend our range. It'll be a while until we can reach it though. Too early to tell, but Escalon could well become a future battleground.  2309 brings us news both good and bad. It's habitable ... but crappy. As an ultra poor planet will take forever to build up. Population incubator and research center eventually. Might be a bridge to that other nearby red star though ... worth colonizing in any case, but definitely could have been better.  So we do have this quadrant to ourselves for now ... and a potential second homeworld-quality planet! That would be very nice indeed.  That's about as crappy as it gets, and settles things. We'll get a colony ship out ASAP to Endoria, Ultra-Poor or no, and then it'll be on to research for range with nothing else available to colonize.  Our final Recon reaches it's destination, which is also hostile for good measure. It is 2312, and transfers to Primodius have completed.  This is the following year. Factory production blossoms so much beyond population growth for Klackons that Kholdan is already starting to build the colony ship with the excess not needed in industry. Could just grow more population as well, but I think it's probably better to get the ship out there a bit sooner.  2319. The colonizer was almost finished for this year, but needs a hair more work. Primodius has just reached the population midpoint; there wasn't even time to send any colonists back, what with how much the process is accelerated here. Time to see what our initial tech choices are. The big question to asks is whether we want range 4 or 5. The three planets we could get to are all towards the middle of the galaxy where we'd like to expand anyway; two including the best(Escalon) are range 4. No reason to go for the more expensive option here, but of course we may well not have a choice.  No ECM Jammer this time. The Deep Space Scanner is cheaper and definitely a more immediate benefit than the computer.  Gotta go with the Reduced Industrial Waste here. Force Fields was Class II Shields as always, and Barren landings was the only Planetology option -- no terraforming or eco restoration is not good for us. Had both choices in Propulsion though strangely enough, so Hydrogen Fuel Cells(range 4) is happily gobbled. Weapons gave three options(Hand Lasers, Hyper-V Rockets, Gatling Lasers). We snag the Hand Lasers this time to get things moving. It's the usual drill here; dump all research effort into propulsion, stop building factories on the second colony(Primodius) to research as fast as possible, etc. And then ...  It's 2322, mind. SEVEN planets already. We'll have three soon. If they don't stop soon, this could get ugly.
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May 27, 2017 01:09
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm counting... 48 stars? So the humans have grabbed something like 1/7th of the playing field already. Yep, 48 stars in medium galaxy setting. I might not have been obvious enough about stating that. Clarste posted:That's the name of my old WoW character. I named him after MOO2, where it was just one of several default Klackon leader names. Is it one of several here too, or the only one? Interesting. One of several -- there are I think three for each race by default. General Revil posted:Is it safe to assume that they got planet 6 and 7 the same year? Yep. 6 would get them to the 1/8th threshold.
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May 28, 2017 01:58
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Episode II: 2322-2350 Having discovered that the Humans are trying to run away with the galaxy, the Klackons attempt to counter this ...  6-10 years faster than we'd have been able to do it with other races. Primodius sends 16M colonists, which takes it down to the midway point and will just about exactly get Endoria to the one-third sweet spot. That worked out almost perfectly. We're about to wrap up research and get the next colony ship out; we can reach at least two new worlds assuming we get there first, and will need to scout beyond them afterwards. Time to start stretching our legs a little more. One thing's for sure; Earth isn't sitting this one out.  Ok this is bizarre. Playing the Klackons, and we're getting all the propulsion options! Apparently we forgot that we are supposed to suck at this, though the costs are still increased of course. I like the Nuclear Engines here because they are the cheapest and will help with both any combat ships we might want to design and also getting places quickly for scouting. Kholdan has another colony ship to build, and research will be canceled temporarily while we get the Recons we need out there from Primodius. 8 more of them according to my calculations. That can just barely be handled in one year. It's mostly back to building up after that, but Primodius will put a bit into research, with everything now headed towards the waste-reduction option.  Immediately the new colonists spot a human scout nearby. Oh good, they are neighbors. Primodius will send 14M right away and more gradually ... we can't afford the full amount Escalon would like to take on.  Wow. Gaze upon that and be amazed. Size-90 Rich planet ... that is a great treasure. Whoever gets this system will have a big advantage, if they can keep it.  This was the last one we were sure we could reach, our 5th system. It did bring Rana(mid-sized Arid) within reach, and a just-finished Colonizer headed there next as we pushed further into the central and center-right of the galaxy.  We've got enough citizens to set up an Endoria to Primodius to Aquilae transport chain, which will help speed up things a bit. It was also time for a few more Recons to keep the scouting push going.  We're a long way from reaching this. Also had our first scout encounter, as the humans came buzzing around Aquilae. Go run over the rest of the galaxy fellas, we got here first.  Boo.  Very nice ... and also probably in range once we get control of Rana. Based on where I've seen the human scouts, I think Sol is probably that yellow star right in the middle, with nobody at the other one to the right shockingly. We may be able to make a good run down the side here and pick up a lot of territory. Fingers crossed. You can also see around this point the horde of ships we have flying every which way, Recons and transports. Transit time becomes a much bigger issue the larger the map is, and it quickly gets exceedingly complex to scout things efficiently. Already made a couple minor errors in that. I'm also transferring extra pop from Endoria, our Ultra Poor, to Primodius, because it can use them a heck of a lot better and is our research center, such as it is, for right now. They'll also be closer for shipping out to Rana and wherever else we go.  2339. We chase off our first Silicoid scout here(green). It's in range, but we'd need to get that Barren tech first and we haven't even started it yet.  This is a nice human colony. That's close to Vox, and they may well win the race there. This is the farthest to the right I've seen them, but it's got 20M pop already so they've been there for a bit. Looks like we'll be meeting them soon. I can feel the land grab just starting to wind down here.  Three scout encounters with humans the next year. One is here, another nice planet of theirs. The other confirms that Sol is that yellow star in the middle of the galaxy map. It has 18 missile bases, if you care to know.  Wow. Two good-sized fertile planets right next to each other. We're headed there at maximum speed with our next couple of colony ships.  Six now. If we get those two fertiles we'll have a decent base to operate from. IF.  And there we go, first contact. A lot sooner than last time, but I was expecting this. We may not be meeting anyone else for a long time ...  Could be a lot worse. They have only added two more planets in the last 19 years, for a total of nine. They also almost completely seal us off from the rest of the galaxy. Between us we basically control half of it, if not more. A great deal will depend on our relations. In terms of scouting, we've got a couple more green stars in the lower right, and a couple of 'nebula' stars in the upper middle left to visit. Everything in between there has an established boundary.  Interesting. I didn't expect us to be matching them in production. We're not as far behind as I anticipated being. No alliances or wars, they are Honorable Technologists -- meaning they'll react twice as strongly to any treaties being broken, won't attack as long as we are in their good graces, and will focus on research. We sign an immediate max trade deal, 125BC. It'll help them more than us, but we'll do far better with them as friends than enemies.  Best we can hope for here is probably delay the Silicoids a bit.  The humans or others will come here eventually. Also far too distant for us to try and defend for now. 2344, a couple years later: Kholdan is done building Colonizers for now. We've got a couple headed to the fertile planets and one more in case we find something else. It's time to seriously ramp up research. Excess population in being funneled to Rana now in preparation for those two being settled. Human scouts have been seen in the area ...  Took literally till the last possible year, 2346, to nab this. With all of the colonies we are building up, I think Industrial Tech 8 is the best option to get em moving faster. I was planning at splitting up research here, but I decided to rush another one. Here's why:  Controlled Barren Environment is often not worth a darn. Couldn't have cared less about it last game. Here though there is a potential windfall. We've got two in the upper-right, and the cursor here points at a third, Misha. That would also give us the range to probably get Reticuli, the green star above and to the left of it. Getting Barren right away could potentially land us up to four more planets, and at least two that nobody else can reach. That's worth a push. Taking a big risk by doing this though. We have a chance to end up with a big empire, but one that won't be able to defend itself for a while. We're essentially banking on the goodwill of the Humans, and them staying honorable. I think it's a good bet -- but we're in trouble if it's not. We've also spotted some Mrrshan ships, but haven't seen any colonies yet, them or the Silicoids.  Unbelievable. That lower right corner is really a treasure trove!  Well, we can't just ignore Tundra landings when Vulcan(Tundra, 90, Rich) is beckoning. We'll rush that as well; Barren only took a few years. Next one will be a lot longer, but we've got to go for it. Meanwhile, Kholdan will start cranking out colony ships again, heading for Misha first. We're in at Vox, one of th4 fertiles! Starting to see a few human military ships in the area, so hopefully we can knock out the other two down here before they decide to interfere. We probably don't have long now before the Council meets. There are some encouraging signs though with these new acquisitions midway through the opening century.
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May 29, 2017 05:42
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wedgekree posted:
Impossible with Klackons is as fast as it gets, but yeah you can't afford to screw around. RedMagus posted:It's fascinating watching how complex this early game is, considering the programming and computational limitations. There's so much going on, and so many options! I'm really appreciating the write-ups as well. Thanks! RedMagus posted:how could the humans afford to expand so fast without taking the economy? Would a player be able to expand just as fast, or is it the AI bonuses in effect? There's no way for a player to expand that fast, even if they found an ultra rich like was suggested. They start with an extra colony ship, and combine that with the bonuses they get and that's where the snowball comes from. They still have to start in a good position to blow up like that though -- decent worlds within range to get moving quickly. @TheLoquid: Very well put. The balance between making all races viable and having competing imbalances for replayability etc. is pretty much right on the nose, and one of my favorite aspects of the game. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 03:44 on May 31, 2017 |
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May 31, 2017 03:33
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