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Gothsheep posted:My guess for the patrol fleet: Master of Orion III has this hidden bit of mechanics where you can find out a destroyed empire's remaining fleets will all "turn to piracy", which is supposed to strengthen the influence of piracy in nearby systems. As the piracy-system is completely hands-off with no actual ships involved, it's hard to confirm if this is actually working as advertised, though.
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Mar 15, 2021 12:43
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| # ? May 2, 2024 00:57 |
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Gothsheep posted:My guess for the patrol fleet: I like to think that the highest-ranking captain on the ships sat down, realized that they just lost a 30-year war in the span of a few weeks to a bunch of primitive (technology-wise) hairless apes, complete with losing their homeworld right out from under their noses, and said "I'm the highest-ranking leader now? You know what, let's just call it a day and go home". There has to come a point where you just go "You know what, gently caress it. It's not worth dealing with anymore."
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Mar 15, 2021 16:25
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 Certified Public Admiral (37:29) Dante's 'backstory' is now complete. This has ... implications. Also props to inscrutable_horse for I think not knowing what was coming by prior knowledge of the game, but calling this shot a while back anyway. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 16:16 on Mar 21, 2021 |
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Mar 21, 2021 15:57
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Considering that the great AI overlord's first commands as de facto supreme commander of Humanity were "disarm the fleet", "disband the military" and "build more police stations on Earth", I think certain people are starting to poo poo their pants a bit too late. 
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Mar 21, 2021 16:45
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The Cyber-Conversions will continue until morale improves?
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Mar 24, 2021 15:18
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Happiness is Mandatory! Oh wait ... wrong game ...
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Mar 24, 2021 16:09
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When the intro movie went "oh yeah, AIs were developed and then halted" you could practically hear the Shyamalan-esque twist form when the story continued on to say that humans had their backs to the wall and were feeling pretty desperate. Hmm, what could a desperate humanity do in such dire straits? Surely not revive a research project that you just said was abandoned. Nope that point was made for no reason, never mind.
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Mar 25, 2021 13:35
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It was a bit of a surprise to me, but that's more because I thought it was either a line added in during translation or just a quick handwave for why there were no human-made robots in the setting. That being said, its also a plot twist that doesn't change anything, so is it really a twist?
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Mar 25, 2021 13:46
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Grab Your Abacus (24:08) The Colonization race begins, as we see why Admiral rank can more aptly be named Accountant rank; by use of Maximum Cheese we are able to delay enemy attacks indefinitely. We actually got one a lot sooner than expected, but are unfazed. Also the glory of Trade Centers and general research strategy for the rank is revealed.
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Mar 27, 2021 16:23
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So I was sitting down to watch what I believed to be the latest update. Then I see update 20 on the next-to-play list. Welp. So I'll begin by talking about my thoughts on the previous update for a bit. Video 19 Three interesting things I noticed in the research screen. First is that there is a listing for the Leviathan class flagship, even though it's been explicitly said that you can't build more Thorins. Second, the heavy tank makes me think of the German monster-tank that never got built. The Maus, Ratte? One of those two. Third, the Hyperdrive V2.0 mentions that it has 15% less fuel consumption. On ships that seem to have infinite fuel to begin with. Just flavor text, or another dropped mechanic? Going by the doc's uniform, I'd say he's a crash dummy. And that top-secret security code is barely more secure than the one on my luggage! Shifting to the meat of the plot. I called the twist the instant Dante got Terminator vision. That was a bit too on the nose. In contrast the later dream with "HIS ROBOT HAND!!" I could have been willing to write off if it hadn't been for that earlier dream. It's the future. Why wouldn't they have prosthetics? Hell, Dante being injured in battle against the Garthogs and brought back from the dead ala Robocop or Shepard when his escape pod got picked up a few years later would have been a great twist as well. A few questions remain. Wife and son? Probably actors yeah. Alternatively, they're also robots. The professor never said he got it perfect on his first run after all. But what's the haps with Kelly? Remember him, Dante's college buddy? Is he in on it? Or is there perhaps a real (original) Dante, who was used as the template for Robo-Dante's memories and personality? The reveal also recontextualizes a lot of things the Colonel said and did earlier. It feels to me that plan Robo-Jesus has very little support at the top. Especially because the end goal is to make Robo-Jesus emperor. I can see people being less than happy about that. So Dante getting recalled after even the slightest failure? Not enough supporters of the plan left, let's hide our tracks. And yeah, it does make all the "Get back here so I can demote you in person" scenes a lot more sinister. The Colonel going "I'm disappointed in you. You could have been a good leader" is another part where he slipped up and almost revealed too much. The shuffling of governors in the early game could be business as usual, or inserting governors who are in on and willing to cooperate with the plan. It still feels weird to me that Dante can't confront the Colonel about it but instead talks random people into giving him security codes and then phones up Reinhardt who says little beyond "Yeah, I built you. It was tough.". In any case, I think the plot pretty much ends here with a shrug. Dante realizes he's a robot, and that's that. No further hooks to develop come to mind anyway. But then I also drifted away from the game pretty early into Admiral rank. Without the story elements like the little events with the pirates, bio-attacks etc. the game just started to lose its personality and feel generic. The Garthog campaign had also made me annoyed with the clunky pathfinding (especially planetside) and so I wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea of dealing with that part of the game over and over and over again. Video 20 Could the invasion fleet have been programmed to turn around as a way of accounting for the possibility that a player would blitz the flagship(s) as a priority target before withdrawing? Without those they can't invade after all. (assuming the AI plays by the same rules and can't conjure tanks out of thin air.)
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Mar 27, 2021 20:21
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I'm curious. I assume that the aliens have to colonize planets using ships the same way you do. If that's the case, can you 'guard' planets you want to colonize with a single destroyer with a radar or something, and use it to chase away any colony ships like you do with fleets?
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Mar 28, 2021 12:27
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I wasn't paying attention enough to notice the heavy tank, but the German tank which was never built was the Ratte: A thousand-ton monster that was supposed to carry the same type of guns as the battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Both it and the even more insane 1500 ton "Monster" projects were killed during planning stages by Albrecht Speer in 1943. The Maus was at least half-built, and two prototypes were taken by the Red Army. The completed tank was supposed to have a mass of approx. 188 tons. (What is left of the prototypes can be visited in the tank museum Kubinka near Moscow)
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Mar 28, 2021 13:35
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Gothsheep posted:can you 'guard' planets you want to colonize with a single destroyer with a radar or something, and use it to chase away any colony ships like you do with fleets? I don't know, I've never tried. It's definitely not something you could get widespread use out of just due to the fleet limit though. There's just too many planets and not enough ships. maninthesuit posted:First is that there is a listing for the Leviathan class flagship, even though it's been explicitly said that you can't build more Thorins. There was a point at which you could build additional Leviathans. That was removed as it was considered to be OP to be able to do that, making the late-game too trivial. I think fuel was another removed mechanic at some point, that's the only way I make sense of those descriptions. maninthesuit posted:Without the story elements like the little events with the pirates, bio-attacks etc. the game just started to lose its personality and feel generic. The Garthog campaign had also made me annoyed with the clunky pathfinding (especially planetside) and so I wasn't too enthusiastic about the idea of dealing with that part of the game over and over and over again. Hmm. I can see why it would feel generic *now*, but I don't think that was really the case at the time it was made. But there is also the part where, the longer you take the longer the endgame grind is. That's been a consistent complaint pretty much as long as the game has existed. maninthesuit posted:Could the invasion fleet have been programmed to turn around as a way of accounting for the possibility that a player would blitz the flagship(s) as a priority target before withdrawing? Possibly, but it seems to me a simple 'do you have any flagships left' check would have solved that.
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Mar 30, 2021 21:56
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Strategic Sage posted:
Seems likely to me that it's just a matter of the AI being programmed to 'do space battle', 'do ground battle', and then 'return to nearest military factory to repair'. Probably just a combo of they didn't think about a player sending a lot of little tarpits around to slow down enemy attacks, and how much more difficult it would have been to program an AI that reevaluated its fleet strength after every battle to decide when it needed to return and reinforce.
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Mar 31, 2021 02:24
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Expansion Grind, Part I (16:33) The Colonization push gets well underway, and research continues as well. Eventually we get access to the Hubble 2 satellite, which marks a transition point of sorts in Admiral rank.
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Apr 3, 2021 16:16
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Does the AI have to spend any money colonizing or are they only colonizing because you don't have a fleet to stop them? and can you just send a flagship with a single tank to demolish their colony hub to "unclaim" their planet? I don't think the AI is limited by money. As for "aggression", they're already sending fleets to invade you, you're already at war with them because you have the audacity to exist. Are you going to exterminator their colonies or invade them? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1CQ7Vwz8Eo
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Apr 5, 2021 11:46
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SugarAddict posted:can you just send a flagship with a single tank to demolish their colony hub to "unclaim" their planet? I don't know, I haven't tried. I doubt it would be worth me doing that, as that would just spread the military thinner and we'll have plenty of planets as it is. SugarAddict posted:As for "aggression", they're already sending fleets to invade you, you're already at war with them because you have the audacity to exist. Yes, but they still definitely respond to you expanding closer to their territory. So ... there's both going on. The AI mechanisms/rules are as far as I know not completely understood. They are limited in what they can send out based at least on how many planets they have. Whether it's a full-fledged economy or some simple under-the-hood points system for them being able to field fleets; your guess is as good as mine on that. Exterminate/invade -- neither actually (funny video link though). For the most part I'm just going to ignore them. Only the one enemy really matters. Teaser: we meet them in the next episode.
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Apr 6, 2021 08:50
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Strategic Sage posted:There's also the final morale-boosting building, the Stadium, which is another example of how very 90s this game's flavor is. I know I am three months late, but still, as a Hungarian, I can tell you, it's not so much a 90s thing as a stellar insight into 2010s Hungarian Public Policy™. "What, they are unhappy? Build a stadium!" (Especially after enacting the Special Building Permit, if you know what I mean.)
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Apr 10, 2021 10:40
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'Grand' Diplomacy (25:05) We reach the final rank of the game, though not by choice. This is brought on by the Big Bad (tm) showing up, and they didn't even bring any cookies. Dargslans. Know the name. Diplomacy itself is a rather unimpressive feature IMO, and features in the second half of this episode prominently. Its onset is ... disturbing from a story standpoint. Our new title brings with it access to the all of the remaining possibilities in terms of research, giving us even more to do on that front. There is no longer any shroud between ourselves and the end of this struggle; we have only to prepare for the final conflict, and then to decisively win it. . Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 00:21 on Apr 11, 2021 |
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Apr 10, 2021 17:07
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I actually wonder if it's possible diplomacy is a bad idea. If the Darglans are truly the most powerful enemies and they singularly target the player, the player alone has the burden of dealing with them. But if the weaker AIs are forced to fight the stronger AI, the result seems pretty obvious. In a game where you're forced to deal with the ground combat letting the Big Bad that supposedly has super powerful ground units take over worlds and then defend them with these powerful units it sounds like a good recipe for greatly dragging out the endgame. I bet this could be even worse for someone who didn't rush to the endgame like Sage did. Just imagine a player who has been fighting and losing ships the whole way and hasn't built up near the economic powerhouse, as well as letting more time pass between ranks so the galactic map is more filled out. Then you ally with a few aliens... who have no chance at actually defending themselves and get overrun, empowering the final boss empire further and giving more planets you'll need to eventually wipe out yourself, only against harder enemies than if you just took over the weaker aliens in the first place. I'm not sure if that's how the game would actually play out, but it amuses me to think that getting allies could do more harm than good.
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Apr 10, 2021 18:42
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Does a higher diplomacy rating with a race stop them sending fleets towards your colonies? If so, what happens to fleets en-route?
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Apr 10, 2021 18:59
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Mighty Steed posted:Does a higher diplomacy rating with a race stop them sending fleets towards your colonies? Yes on the first part. I think the cutoff is around 35, basically the one-third line. On the second part, I assume they finish their attack but I don't know. I will keep an eye on that, see what happens to the diplomacy rating, if anything, when we fend off an attack. Lando131 posted:it amuses me to think that getting allies could do more harm than good. I hadn't thought about that, but you could be right. Worth keeping an eye on how many Dargslan invasions we actually see heading the way of the other aliens as time passes.
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Apr 11, 2021 07:02
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I just realized this tile-building system with placing construction sites looks very similar to the one in Operation Eastside. Which in turn reminds me of games like Utopia/SimCity. Now I wonder who exactly was the inspiration which started this, or if it is a case of parallel evolution?
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Apr 11, 2021 12:09
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I would guess SimCity, but I don't know for sure.
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Apr 12, 2021 16:30
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As we are heading towards the business end of the game now, a heads-up on where I'm going after this is done. I put up a poll on my channel of what viewers wanted to see next from projects people have suggested, with one of the nominees being Imperium Galactica 2. That didn't get much support, so I'll be going in a different, even more intimidating direction. The choice of the people was the monster that is Distant Worlds. I'm going to need a sedative. Multiple, in fact. So I'll be trying to tame that beast after the Dargslan get what they deserve.
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Apr 12, 2021 16:35
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Distant Worlds isn't that rough, just let the automation slide you into the game. Also, Distant World 2 got announced.
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Apr 12, 2021 17:09
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Just don't lose your Death Star analog, and accidentally commit genocide.
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Apr 12, 2021 17:45
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SIGSEGV posted:Distant Worlds isn't that rough, just let the automation slide you into the game. I've seen some of the previews of DW2, looks promising overall. On Distant Worlds itself, it appears there's a debate among the players about how to best learn it which sort of fits with my experience. Having a bunch of automation on just put me in a situation where everything I was doing was screwing up the galactic economy but I didn't know why; I had to understand what gets used where and why or else just turn everything on auto and literally let the game play itself. I did a lot better, at least so far, turning a lot of automation off and looking for the answers to questions as they come up.
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Apr 12, 2021 20:51
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Probably for the best really. IG2 is a lot more freeform than its predecessor, while being just as arbitrary about when it decides to provide you with important information.
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Apr 13, 2021 02:33
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inscrutable horse posted:Just don't lose your Death Star analog, and accidentally commit genocide. Ah, the "whoopsie" incident. IIRC it was accidentally placed in a scouting fleet send to an enemy planet, and, well, whoopsie.
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Apr 13, 2021 04:44
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Admit it, Colonel. You just made that rank up to make Dante sound more imposing during negotiations, didn't you? And I've never played Distant Worlds so I've got no idea what it's like. But clumsy Death Star navigators sounds promising.
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Apr 14, 2021 18:45
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Empty Threats? Expansion Grind, Part II (24:58) We gradually gobble up more territory and get to see yet another failure condition - the other races simply won't stop demanding that we give up, and you literally can do that if you choose. But the grind is mostly over by the end of this episode; we're nearing the completion of the colonization push and researching what we'll need; meanwhile the Dargslan have begun throwing their weight around, which isn't good for the rest of the galaxy.
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Apr 17, 2021 18:28
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Thanks for cutting out most of the grind! The financial side was interesting. Do you consider the payback time for building colony improvements or even for the colony ship? Have some tiny tax revenues compared to more established colonies.
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Apr 17, 2021 18:34
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Once you start building a fleet, it'll probably be worth it to take over the hostile human nation. The population is compatable with your infrastructure, and will pay for itself. And as a bonus, one less headache for you.
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Apr 17, 2021 18:42
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my dad, that's a solid idea; hadn't thought about it but I'll look into the possibility when the time comes. Mighty Steed posted:The financial side was interesting. Do you consider the payback time for building colony improvements or even for the colony ship? I do - that's why I don't build all of the buildings at once when I start a new colony. Tax revenue is definitely low for the smaller ones but they still bring in the full trade amount; at this point trade is almost 40% of the economy. I did a bit on that on Admiral rank but I think it's worth revisiting in the next episode - there was another question about still being econ-focused as well. Short version; a colony costs about 175k to get going with the initial set of structures I build when you combine the colony ship into it. Trade alone will pay that back in several weeks; factor in the tax revenue and it's closer to a month. There will be a point where it will no longer be worth it to keep throwing money into the improvements because they won't pay for themselves quickly enough to get any benefit, but we aren't there yet. Part of the why on that is how expensive it is to put together a high-end fleet after everything gets researched. Right now we're gaining something on the order of eight thousand taxpayers a day, and continuing that growth plus adding in more and more trade income will get the Empire in position more quickly.
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Apr 17, 2021 23:36
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Strategic Sage posted:
Wow. I think you were a bit hard on the Empire's previous leaders when you first got Grand Admiral rank. Why do I say that? How long would you invest in a robust diplomacy corps when literally every day you have one or more of the various other races/empires demanding your surrender? I don't think this would be a new thing just because Dante is in control. And if it's this bad now that the Empire is resurgent with Dante in control, just imagine how bad it was when the Garthogs were still a major player rather than under the Empire's control. I think in this case it's less a matter of nobody ever bothering to try diplomacy than a matter of people making a natural assumption that there are no inroads to make with a group of aliens that are demanding the wholesale capitulation and dismantling of your society on a weekly basis!
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Apr 18, 2021 21:25
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I sort of look at that differently. The other races weren't attacking us early on (for gameplay purposes obviously, but still). I rather see the aliens attacks and surrender demands as a rational response to the Empire's power spike, ending a 30-year-war with the Garthogs in weeks and then expanding like mad into the rest of the galaxy. Absent meaningful diplomatic contact during that period, what would they logically think? They'd be naturally concerned about a return to the iron fist of the Old Empire.
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Apr 21, 2021 20:36
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Strategic Sage posted:I sort of look at that differently. The other races weren't attacking us early on (for gameplay purposes obviously, but still). I rather see the aliens attacks and surrender demands as a rational response to the Empire's power spike, ending a 30-year-war with the Garthogs in weeks and then expanding like mad into the rest of the galaxy. Absent meaningful diplomatic contact during that period, what would they logically think? They'd be naturally concerned about a return to the iron fist of the Old Empire. That still explains the lack of diplomatic channels, though. Absent any unifying threat, these various groups had no reason to entertain diplomacy with the sunseting empire that most, if not all viewed as the old oppressors. Its mostly likely that the Empire just gave up on diplomacy when the response they kept getting was 'you are a dying beast and we'd rather feed on your carcass.'
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Apr 22, 2021 00:10
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Gothsheep posted:That still explains the lack of diplomatic channels, though. Absent any unifying threat, these various groups had no reason to entertain diplomacy with the sunseting empire that most, if not all viewed as the old oppressors. Its mostly likely that the Empire just gave up on diplomacy when the response they kept getting was 'you are a dying beast and we'd rather feed on your carcass.' The new response from the empire should be "we are a beast and we are going to eat you alive and you are going to be screaming the entire time."
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Apr 22, 2021 01:09
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| # ? May 2, 2024 00:57 |
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Remind me never to make you mad.
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Apr 22, 2021 05:22
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