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So you're holding out hope that we can finally get our rocks on and they can get their rocks off?
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Jul 25, 2017 04:09
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wedgekree posted:So you're holding out hope that we can finally get our rocks on and they can get their rocks off? Of quartz I am!
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Jul 25, 2017 07:57
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Yeah, more stone puns could be a good thing, they have been gravelly misused up to now, although changing that now might be too metamorphic.
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Jul 25, 2017 09:42
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AJ_Impy posted:Yeah, more stone puns could be a good thing, they have been gravelly misused up to now, although changing that now might be too metamorphic. Stone puns: They rock.
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Jul 25, 2017 12:14
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Rock puns: Not just for stoners!
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Jul 25, 2017 22:56
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I...smoke rocks.
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Jul 26, 2017 21:33
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Libluini posted:By the way, are people generally satisfied with the level of information density in this LP? Are there enough screenshots to understand what is going on, or should I make more? Or maybe less, to speed through the game faster? Your updates are good and convey sufficient information at least to me, though I've actually played this game over 10 years ago and vaguely remember the basics. You can't really help the fact that a good third of the screenshots are an Excel emulation in German because that just is the game being the game 
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Jul 26, 2017 21:42
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 71: Tanks Tanks Tanks HEAVY ARMOR Tanks Tanks Tanks Since I played through this update last Sunday, it’s still old-style: Slow, lots of screenshots, not much happening. But I’m taking your feedback into account and try to move things along faster from the next time onward!  Thanks to poster IceMole, we now know bureaucracy apparently only slowly multiplicates the cost for everything we build, it isn’t secretly leeching our income or something. Here you can see Bürokratische Belastung / Heavy Foot of Government directly: Our empire has a HFG of 1.9. Presumably, that’s a percentage on the 0-100 scale governing extra cost. This means right now, we pay 1.9% extra on every construction. Not really as horrible as I feared! Of course, this also means the economic techs reducing HFG are a lot more useless than I thought. Welp.  Something funny happened right after I made that last screenshot and advanced the game: Our colonies in Tali finished a bunch of system ships and the giant Klackon armada immediately pounced on them. They were dead in seconds. This is basically what we have been doing to the Raas for centuries now, just with us as the victims.  Speaking of our nemesis, a new Raas-fleet has been assembled to fight us in Theta Indi. The fleet assaults our ships and does enough damage to scratch our armor. But in turn, our weapons (graviton beams, since this is still just our raiding fleet) rip them apart. Gravity wins.  After that first Raas task force was ground down to space dust, our fleet tried to replicate their success against the second one, but this screenshot is misleading: After dropping to about half health and losing a single ship, the task force has enough and jumps out.  I don’t even know why I’m showing you this screen anymore, it’s almost the same every time: We lose in Tali (this time even some ships), we win everywhere else.  Turn 215: We’re making the Dila Empire smaller, one orbital bombardment at a time. And while this is happening, colony ships are slowly eating up the old Raas-systems. Progress is made!  During the last half dozen updates, I was steadily increasing our number of espionage hackers. Now we have 5, all poo poo. Wonderful. Number 6 is coming next turn, and hopefully we will have at least one we can use offensively. The problem with all our hackers is their mantle-attribute: One or two look scary enough with their high-dagger attributes I could get tempted to use them, but mantle is so low across our cadre, most of them would be captured before they could even cross the border! Ironically, even though those guys are all duds, at least we should be almost safe from enemies stealing tech from us, with 5-6 hackers on the defensive.  It’s ages ago that I created the 2nd Blue Fleet to invade Theta Indi, and then a new star lane opened up and forced me to stay on the defensive. But then the AI never send ships down this new star lane, and I finally send them out. Now they and the two other task forces I had sitting around uselessly are only 4 turns from reinforcing our fleet in Theta Indi. And as soon as we secure that system, the endless flood of transports traveling to JustGniess should stop. And move to Theta Indi. But you can’t have everything, so oh well!  The southern offensive is going well, too. This part of the Dila Empire is down to five system, one of which is being sieged by us. And another one is blockaded, so the Raas have only three productive systems here. And when we secure this part of the Orion Sector, we gain access to another Antaran Guardian, which will help us immensely! Well, as soon as we can stop the Klackon Armada from wreaking havoc at our border, that is.  In the next combat phase, the Raas again futilely try to contest Theta Indi, but our fleet catches them near the fourth planet and goes to town on them. The first task force, a small squadron numbering four ships, explodes faster than I can make screenshots of them. This screenshot right here wouldn’t even have happened in vanilla: Weaker shields make lop-sided battles like this one even shorter, with even less chance for the inferior party to inflict some damage.  This one ship for some reason decided to stay and fight. Our long-range task force passes by, giving it a chance to charge its jump drives and flee.  But one second later the Vice Admiral leading the 3rd Expeditionary Force loses his patience, and orders its ships to open fire. The Silicoids, Raas and other assorted citizens crewing the Almandian ships obey and the enemy carrier is obliterated instantly.  Galactic Cycle 324 sees no change to our strategic situation. But at least we can now recruit Commandos for our armies to serve as walking bonus to our hit chance. Agent Ishmael is our AIA’s latest try to get a good hacker. Let’s see how this goes later, OK?  And almost hidden under our colonization-messages from Raas-space (the Dila Empire loses more and more ground each turn), is a metaphorical bomb dropping into the royal news agencies: During the ongoing excavations in some far-away and hidden Antaran ruins, one of our ships triggers a sleeping defense-mechanism. The rest of the heavily armed task force blows the hideous thing apart in seconds, but it’s too late for the doomed explorator who got to it first. A new controversy is discussed heavily in the Almandian media, underscored by the last sensor images send by the lost ship AVV Immortal: For a short moment, a strange, spiny asteroid is visible, with the darkness of space as a backdrop behind it. Then suddenly, the science officer of the AVV Immortal is heard, talking about it sending out graviton waves channeling anti-neutrons between it. Shortly after, the images disappear abruptly, as all contact with the AVV Immortal is cut off. The media then shows images from the other ships of the task force, showing the AVV Immortal turning into an expanding cloud of very hot gas. The task force immediately returns fire, and while the spine asteroid holds up for a while, it has no shields and a fighter-run adding to the carnage breaks it up before it can fire again. Most of these images are then followed by scientists explaining that this device was probably a prototype, since the Antarans never used this strange hybridization of graviton, antimatter and neutron weapon ever again. But then, with the secrecy of the Antarans, you can never know. When the cycle draws to a close, public opinion settles on 75% demanding revenge, and 20% demanding a stop to the excavation efforts, with 5% being still undecided. At least, according to official opinion polls conducted all across the Kingdom of Almandin. Normally, this kind of thing happens a lot before you can make any progress. But apparently our goon-designs with their heavy emphasis on tons and tons of laboratories skewed the RNG in our favor. Several partial discoveries so far and only one ship lost! Oh, before I forget, AVV stands for “Almandian Void Vessel”. By GC 324, it has become the official designation for star-faring ships in the Kingdom, like LAC (“Light Attack Craft”), has become the designation for system ships below cruiser-level.  Ishmael was always weird. When he was supposed to write a text in school about what he wanted to become after absorption of knowledge from his parental unit was finished, he wrote KILL PEOPLE and used a rather creepy and absurdly large font. Still, Silicoids are rather tolerant to highly emotional displays like this, so he later successfully completed school, gained recognition as an adult and joined the AIA Academy. But is obsession with killing never really went away, so when he finally graduated and became an official AIA-agent, he ended up having only barely passable grades in every field even only remotely connected to stealth. His abilities to kill were finely honed, however. (Behind his back, his new comrades started to joke Ishmael obviously had confused “agent” with “assassin”. But this was unfair, as assassins are well-known to use stealth on occasion.) Another dud! At least Ishmael has dagger 8, which is rather high. He will probably be the one shooting enemy agents dead from here on out. With mantle 3 I will never let him out of sight: Using one of the garbage-tier hackers in an emergency makes more sense then sacrificing this one. On the defensive we can at least put his kill-skills to good use. Obviously I immediately recruit another hacker. At least one good one should be possible, right RNG?  By now I have played enough turns again to get some new techs entering project stage: Recycling Microbes is a passive tech. We don’t need to build anything, the AI doesn’t need to build anything, and pollution reduction per Antaran Unit spend raises by 25%. Sweet!  Turn 216 sees the rest of our dissolved task forces reaching our reserves. To keep our costs under control and eliminate older ships cluttering up everything, every single obsolete ship is scrapped. Well, except system ships and our scouts, of course. The latter because duuuuuuuuh, and the first ones because I keep forgetting to clean them out.  Our Samarium-class recon cruisers are still losing a couple ships, since the AI is still building some of them somewhere. We have 28 now and I carefully dismantle 3 again. 25 is enough for multiple fleets.  Scrapping so many ships for more cost-efficiency reminds me to look up our finances again. Our income is still rising, even though this screen claims we’re losing 8,8k AU this turn. So business as usual, then. As laughable as our finance screen is, as long as we are running under the “Total War” setting, I will keep looking. My faint hope is, that if something really goes wrong with our economy, it will become visible here in some way.  Was there something I forgot? Ah, yes: More tanks! The good thing about having some older backwaters running on autopilot with the AI switched off: There are always some free spaces for more ground combat units, perfect for some more recruitment without interfering with my other plans.  While the Kingdom of Almandin is building tanks and forming tank divisions like mad, the Vchiitri Empire keeps sending more ships into the Tali-system. 417 now. Man, stuff like this makes me glad game mechanics will prevent them from fighting us with all of them at the same time.  And another combat phase looms. Another Raas fleet, about 8 ships strong, assaults our raiding fleet in Theta Indi. They outmaneuver our fleet and swing around the fourth planet for a surprise attack, but after multiple missile salvos hammer into their shields, the graviton beams of our direct-fire ships do the same and worse: Eight more ships of the Dila Empire are reduced to space dust. If the Raas had put this and the last two fleets together, they would have had enough ships to push us out, or to at least inflict some damage while dying. They didn’t though, and so they don’t. By the way, missiles are working normal again. Instead of all missiles shooting out, only the PD-missiles do it this time, the normal missiles come out like they are supposed to. Also, I’m really glad shields are working again. Back when I was playing with a broken mod, the way shields sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t really scared the poo poo out of me.  My theory about the Raas being able to fight us if their AI wasn’t so stupid gets reinforced: The two doomed task forces put up a good fight. Also take note how my missile task force uses its normal combat missiles after all PD-missiles are gone, instead of somehow shooting out all missiles almost instantly. I wish I had made a video of this phenomenon back when it happened. But of course I didn’t and now all evidence has been paved over five times with random numbers and then sold to someone else. Oh well.   This particular task force is actually rather weak, it turns out: 455 damage to our nearly 1k. Still, their shields hold out for long enough to allow me to make this screenshot of them getting ripped apart by graviton beams.  Again, the Raas avoid fleeing for too long. But this time bad luck and bad positioning conspires together to allow us to beam them down to destruction town before the survivors can jump out. This is what I mean by saying this war is basically won: The AI normally only gets this stupid on easy or if it is really, really desperate. A human player of course would still be a danger, since he/she would react like we do to the Klackon Armada: Waiting and biding their time until their fleet is ready. Too bad no-one in the Dila Empire received a data package from our universe, or we would be in a lot of trouble! With no meta-knowledge available to the Raas to muck things up, we only have to go through the motions now.  If I discount transport ships and recons, all our new ships together are about half that fleet size above. 205 Klackon ships in a single battle, ouch. In vanilla, with its task forces coded for a maximum of 18 ships, the highest amount of ships a side can throw into battle is 180. In Ultima Orion, task forces are modded to roughly twice the number, so the Klackons can theoretically throw up to 320 ships into a single battle. A thing to remember.  Bevölkerung / population is already at zero on these two planets, we’re basically only bombing Theta Indi IV and Tannjost I to prevent auto-migration from repopulating these dead worlds.  Turn 217 sees both our new mobile command centers and heavy armor for our ships completed. The first one is the most impressive thing imaginable: A mobile fortress being able to drive, swim and fly and with enough electronics to command the forces of an entire planet from one spot. Having your military command sitting in a giant, expensive target however is rather bad for actual military operations, so this thing will be only used by local police forces. The second one will be immediately put into all our heavy capital designs. Nothing to be done for our already finished ships and the ones in construction, but the following orders will all have the new armor. A complicated thing to reduce unrest if you have a military DEA on a planet, and 2-3x as effective armor for our ships. Kind of uneven, but eh, less unrest is still good. Too bad the TPC is large enough to easily get taken out by collateral damage, so it will never continue to function for long in actual combat. It’s one of the most counter-intuitive techs in the game.  The bombings you know about, but: One of our expeditions has made another partial discovery! Apparently some kind of hidden underground complex has been found under one of the excavated ruins. Rumors say the complex was found after Doctor Fr’na Enk Stein deciphered the markings on a map etched in stone. It’s not known why the Antarans edged a map leading to one of their hidden bases into a simple lump of minerals, but after that spine asteroid attack everyone kind of expects the Antarans to be weird.  Interestingly, the stone map was one of the things excavated by the first expedition. It pointed to the hidden complex on the planet the third expedition has been excavating. Our second expedition only found swift death so far. The other artifact found by the first expedition? The archaeologists just call it “The weird thing”. No-one is ready to talk about what it is, exactly. Rumors only claim it’s something really odd.  Well, that was weird. Anyway, next turn our first batch of battleships will leave the shipyards. Crews are already training in them, so the ships will be able to leave the reserve immediately for combat, if necessary. Five carriers will follow two turns after that, and then another five battleships and carriers will come out of the yards. Right after, five more of each per turn. The waiting time is longer, but it’s nice to get all of our capitals in batches of five at a time, instead of one by one.  Our Heavy Orbital Fortress Uranium is the first thing I updated to the new armor. Here it is in more detail: Medium armor is 800 points and absorbs 8 points of damage.  And now it’s heavy armor: 1600 points and 12 points absorbed. With this, several more ancient weapons dipped over into “no chance, buddy”-territory. Also I think I claimed earlier heavy armor was 3x as good as medium armor. Well, that was me being bad at math again: “Basic” armor is apparently a step below medium. Heavy armor is “only” two times as good as medium armor. (And damage reduction “only” 50% higher.) Still, at this point in vanilla you could arguably change to an all-armor build since armor starts having similar hit points than shields. And in vanilla, shield regen was so low it didn’t count most of the time. In Ultima Orion, shields are good enough this isn’t really an option we should pursue. Instead, having good armor is more like having an armor saving throw after shields have collapsed. (I apologize for introducing a P&P-strategy term in this here computer game thread.) And with this, the last old style update is done. From next time onward, I’ll try to compress the updates a bit more so we can get more turns done per post. Now let’s see if I can resist making too many screenshots... Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Partial discoveries made (2) Expedition 2: Excavation ongoing Expedition 3: Partial discovery made (1) Next: Engage Boost Mode Libluini fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Jul 30, 2017 |
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Jul 30, 2017 17:41
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How many partial discoveries make for one complete discovery?
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Jul 30, 2017 18:31
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Mr.Misfit posted:How many partial discoveries make for one complete discovery? Honestly, I completely forgot. It will be a surprise for all of us!
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Jul 30, 2017 20:36
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Libluini posted:So if the number shown in-game reaches 100%, everything costs twice, right? Not as impressive as I feared, then. Sorry, I didn't think this through until you mentioned it in the update, but this is not right. 1 HFG corresponds to spending 100% of the base cost when you build a thing, so 1.9 is 190% of base cost, or a 90% increase. You should be able to check that this is happening by looking at the cost of a ship in the design screen (shows base cost) and then looking at the cost to build that ship at a planet (base cost times HFG).
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Jul 30, 2017 21:59
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I don't think I ever ACTUALLY got an Antaran discovery when I played MoO3.
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Jul 31, 2017 00:58
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Congrats on progress! And the war goes forwards! And it's possible to get Antaran discoverie s- just the fact that the ships assigned to a Task Force for it is completely random makes it really ,really hard to setup dedicated ships and designs for them unless you're willing to form TF's with -all- other ships but your specially deisgned ones in order to go and get your non-specific ships for it out. The general thing by mid-game is just randomly send out Armadas as often as you have spare ships and hope some of them survive the 100-200 turns it takes to get back with something. REpeat until you have 9-10 Armadas doing it by the point 1-2 will die every few turns and need more sent out. Rinse, lather, repeat. Antarn X's are hyperuseful, but actually getting an expedition back takes a very, very long time and your ships tend to all die off en route even at maximum size. Also, the Antaran Guardian is a good thing. On one hand, it protects your flank. On the otherhand, you can't go past it either. And if you're near New Orion itself, the Antarans tend to send out random exploratory fleets which kill everything in system, randomly bombard a planet, move on a turn or two later.
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Jul 31, 2017 07:57
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"Some unknown thing" could be anything from a five-blade razor to an antimatter bomb, I guess?
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Aug 1, 2017 06:24
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Glazius posted:"Some unknown thing" could be anything from a five-blade razor to an antimatter bomb, I guess? I know what I know, boy... but I'm not telling it!
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Aug 1, 2017 07:03
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It's weekend! And this means: I have time to update the thread! Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 72: Engage Boost Mode This time around I’m trying to compress things a bit more to boost us through the game faster: And to keep things from being compressed too much, I’ve decided to simply cram what I’d normally use two updates for into one. A compression rate of 2:1 seems to be enough speed, without us losing too much detail at the end. Let’s see how this goes, then!  The combat phase before turn 218 had nothing extraordinary happening: Tali still has a giant bug-infestion, the dinos keep getting pasted everywhere. As you can seen with this cleverly chosen screenshot. The same picture also shows us another partial discovery: One of our Antaran expeditions got lucky again! The other important news of this turn are the AIA retiring Agent Seide, one of the non-hackers we had and Imperial Currency Controls have entered prototyping phase and will be active from the next turn on. This cycle the Almandian government is basically making the first trial run for this new ministry.  Meanwhile, our construction program to overtake the Klackon menace is still going strongly. One major change: I’ve decided crystal-like appearance of viruses isn’t enough to make the name work, so now we have a slightly better armored long-range cruiser with the better working name “Mizar”. The name is a reference to crystalline aliens from a series of books where those buggers really hate getting blasted with radio and summon something called the “Star of Mizar” to go blow up first the ships annoying them with radio emissions, then follow their traces through hyperspace back to their homeworlds, and blow them up real good, too. A fitting name for a fast, armored cruiser with tons of spinal-mounted long range Ion Pulse Cannons, I think. Anyway, we’re still using the tons of lighter armored Virus-cruisers we have, of course. The new Mizar-class will just slowly show up together with them from now on.  Tanks! The 2nd and 1st Armored Armies will soon be tested on one of the poor, helpless Raas-colonies in the Tannjost-system. Here I’m showing of the Saurian-tank unit: Saurians like the Raas will build them. (Hence why our growing collection of Raas-population spit those out for us.) Saurian tanks, like all Saurian troops, fight best on mostly Earth-like planets with medium gravity, plain surfaces, the works. They’re faster then our Silicoid tanks, less heavily armed and for some godawful reason can’t hit for poo poo. They’re actually worse shots than very slowly moving rocks, if you can believe this. Here MO3 reveals why initiative is so important: As long as your are faster, you’ll basically drown the enemy in all your shots before he even has a chance to fire back. We only ever had a chance against the Raas because the combination of better armor and higher evasion made a lot of their shots miss. Also, their other units can’t hit any better, just in case you wondered. For comparison’s sake, normal infantry units generally have 1 attack per turn, assault troops 3, mobile infantry has 5 and tanks have 7 attacks. Now imagine a Silicoid army of about 30 mobile infantry units fighting a roughly same-sized Raas army. Their respective stats mean the Silicoid-force has to endure a whopping 150 attacks before it can fire off its first salvo. No wonder we had so much trouble!  And now two transport squadrons are on their way to the war zone. Hopefully, introducing the ground element again will speed up the liberation of the Dila Empire.  Turn 219: The Klackons kick us, we kick the Raas in turn. Same old, same old. And one of our leader, some guy I forgot literally everything about, has died.  This time the secondary important news are important enough to warrant their own screenshot: Another dastardly trap in one of the Antaran ruins activates and another one of our ships gets blasted apart into space dust. There are also diplomatic news, the Imperial Currency Exchange Control Ministry starts officially working and a saboteur sets factories on Kled I ablaze. Production on that colony suffers for a turn. By the way, the agent who retired last turn was a saboteur, too. To explain the joke, this enemy saboteur was probably active for several turns already, but with our own saboteur protecting us, we never noticed until now.  Since we didn’t get any reinforcements, our High Council is now down to two leaders: Both are coincidentally, weirdos who survived from ancient times thanks to cryostasis and similar shenanigans. This is why our Psilon-leader doesn’t look like a flying baby cripple and why the other one is a Gnolam.  I spare you the picture of me hammering down on the recruitment-button of the spy window to shore up our defenses and jump straight to diplomacy: Our allies from the Annalona Empire want a better research treaty. They’re kind of grumpy about it. They apparently don’t like asking for help like this. Thanks to our min-maxed to hell Silicoids, we’re currently the scientific leader among all races known to us. Only the Imsaies come close, since they’re allied with us and have every kind of treaty under the sun going with us. Even the dreaded cyborgs of XEOL are limping behind us technologically. Not bad for some rocks!  More diplomacy, since our war-oriented playthrough is kind of lacking on that front: Our relations with the Imsaies are so close, we’re basically the same empire at this point. There aren’t even any border controls. Which to be fair, is probably for the best: Our borders are kind of mixed together anyway, like a space version of the Holy Roman Empire.  The Psilons of the Soriane Union on the other hand, are repulsed by us. Our people don’t like them, either. Our high political relations are solely war-based. And with the war going on for so long already without any actual changes, I guess we will hate each other forever. As soon as the Klackon War is over, we can expect our relations to take a dive. The other relations we have are like what you would expect: Klackons despise us, Raas despise us bitterly, and the Cynoids are kind of amused by our ongoing cold war with them.  The combat phase showed nothing new happening, so I skipped it. It’s now GC 330 for the Kingdom of Almandin. XEOL tries to disrupt the Imsaies/Silicoid-alliance by unilaterally making peace with us again and a new agent joins the AIA.  Bombardments went off like always during combat phase, but more importantly: One of our Antaran Expeditions made yet another partial discovery! In other news, a diplomatic message arrives and the enemy saboteur arranges to sabotage an ungodly number of our freighters, tanking trading income. Agent Ohrschuss is found dead in one of them. The AIA speculates that he found out about this grand-scale sabotage scheme and tried to stop it, but failed. Out-of-game-view-point: He failed because he wasn’t a saboteur himself.  The Psilon-ambassador curses like mad. Our own diplomats are taken a back by this strange behavior, but inbetween his foul-mouthed outbursts hides a fascinating message: The Soriane Union wants to expand the research treaty with the Kingdom of Almandin. Regardless of how much the Psilon-ambassador hates it, we agree to the improved treaty!  The Cynoid get a long, rambling message ending with “We declare war” tacked on at the end. It seems our diplomatic corps has entered a strange contest of one-upmanship with the Cynoids in pretending to not care about this war.  Now all three expeditions have found at least something. Our first expedition has made 4 partial discoveries so far, but our archaeologists have real trouble fitting the puzzle parts together into an understandable whole. It doesn’t help that one of the discoveries was a map pointing to one of the other ruins we’re excavating. Expedition 2 took the longest to find something, but when one of the tunnels filled with random Antaran garbage suddenly turned out to be part of a strong, hidden ground battery, things got interesting. The hidden cannon blasted one of the expedition’s ships out of the sky, but the technician second class Vol de Mort (a Psilon refugee and naturalized citizen of the Kingdom) proved exceptionally quick-witted to prevent further disaster: He saw some cables sticking out of the ground near the suddenly very deadly tunnel mouth light up when the giant energy beam erupted from the ground and reacted instantly. He grabbed an automated cable-splicer out of his tool box, ordered it to rip the cables apart, and let it loose. Seconds later, the cables and the splicer both disintegrated when the unknown cables got ruptured. The technician at that point had thrown himself into a nearby crater and escaped without harm. The Antaran weapon fell silent, and a later arriving second excavation team found an entire hidden underground base below the ground battery. Far away from all this excitement, expedition 3 continues to map and excavate the hidden base they found with the help of the first expedition. We’re now up to 6 partial discoveries, at the cost of 2 ships. Not bad!  Just so you see how they look like, this is an Etherean tank, build by one of the Imsaies-populated planets we got thanks to our borders being so fluid. It’s initiative and evasion is slightly lower than our Saurian tanks. Attack strength, armor and to-hit chance are also all lower. The only good thing it brings to the table is it’s ability to fight in the atmospheres of high-gravity worlds. Our tanks are also geared to fighting in high-gravity, the differences here are we prefer mountains and the ground, while the Imsaies prefer broken terrain and the air. Apparently their tanks are less armored ground units and more flying attack helicopters.  This new tank army with its mix of three different types of tanks is send to Theta Indi. With several planets dead or dying, taking even one in ground combat would speed things up immensely.  While going through the map and pointing out some left-over planets for our colonization program, I stumbled over Theta Gru again. You know, the front between the Imsaies and the Cynoids? Apparently the Cynoids doing the same thing here the Klackons are doing in Tali: A giant armada of 481 ships sits around, doing nothing. Baffling, but I’ll take it. To be fair, they did do something in the past: XEOL has taken over most of the planets and only one lonely colony is left holding out.  Another thing I noticed while doing my map search: The AI for some reason completely ignored my orders to colonize more planets in Maia and Vela. Since both systems are not connected to our star lanes I assume it has something to do with that. I put the colony ships I had slowly building up in our reserves in two small fleets (one for Vela, one for Maia) and send them on their way with direct orders. This confused me a bit, I confess. I know the game doesn’t actually model non-star lane travel, it just creates all possible connections at game start and then reveals a random number of them to the player. (And I assume the other, invisible connections have some kind of huge modifier, since lane-less travel is so loving slow.) The star lane event introduced by the mod simply decides to randomly make one of those connections a “real” one. So now it turns out, the AI governing task force creation apparently doesn’t know this, since it absolutely refused to auto-send colony ships into this region. For some reason, auto-migration still works, using the invisible star lanes hidden from the player’s view to propagate population and trade. I’m guessing this is either a programming oversight, or the programmers didn’t want to create situations were the AI sends one of your colony ships on a 100+ turn tour to the other side of the galaxy, just because you “know” this system and had planets over there marked as possible candidates. Anyway, after the initial surprise, I made some custom colonizing fleets to solve this hold-up.  A screenshot from the following combat phase: The Raas re-build some defenses, and I tore them down again. As impressive as this looks, most of the missiles are just our PD-missiles. Their sheer number however does a good job at confusing both enemy fighters and direct-fire weapons, so our actual missiles and our fighters in this short battle got through without getting a single hit from the planet. (The enemy fighters only started to behave responsibly again after the last missiles were gone. After uselessly milling around for a few seconds, of course. They’re still fighters in MO3, after all.)  And after the defenses were destroyed, our fleet killed 85% of the population on Theta Indi II.  Something new happens on Tannjost V, however: Our brand-new tank armies land and establish a beachhead. Time to test our new weapon!  We have twice the number, and four times the fire power. But we know this doesn’t necessarily mean anything: The Raas units always go first, so we easily could get enough casualties in the first turn to fall behind and get grind down in future turns.  And it begins: I foolishly disregard whatever the AI wanted me to choose, and instead order our troops to try and surround the entire enemy army in one giant campaign. Our huge army of tanks, supported by some assault troops and mobile infantry, confronts a mixed hodgepodge of basic infantry, militia and assault units. If most of our soldiers weren’t Silicoids, this would be an easy victory.  The result is inconclusive. We make some progress, losses on both sides are roughly the same. However, our encirclement failed totally. Which is good news, because normally this would mean horrifying losses for us. But we didn’t lose that many troops, and I got a lot of messages telling me “our lines hold against the enemy assault”, which means even though we probably picked the worst possible option for this ground battle, the enemy was too weak to take advantage of it. Now we just need to get lucky once, and this planet is ours. Will the Dila Empire react fast enough and send reinforcements before the colony falls? We’ll see.  Turn 221 showers us with good news: Another partial discovery for our expeditions, we catch at least one spy and kill another (another Raas-spy, of course). We also colonize Vela V, one of the odd planets we have outside of the star lane network. Man, that sector is so weird. Anyway, I watched the news this morning, and the discovery is some kind of underground hallway, filled with rectangular sheets of metal, all polished and highly reflective. The news anchor dubbed it “Hall of Mirrors”. The third expedition has high hopes of finding something nice and shiny soon.  Our reserves are filling up. Strategically, I plan to go up against the Klackons with four full armadas: 128 ships in total. This should give us enough fire and staying power to eliminate this huge thorn in our side. Right now though we can only make two armadas, and only by using our cruisers. But waiting for the next batch of battleships to finish seems to be a bit much, so what could be done?  If you look closely, you’ll notice our carriers and battleships are build in speeds of one every 1-2 turns now. Even Cokanuk III, fourth-placed in industrial output, needs only 8 Runden / turns for a batch of five battleships (which is 1 ship every 1,6 turn). This is roughly twice as fast as it was last time you saw this screen. What happened?  This happened: As an emergency measure, I put 95-100% of all four of our leading colonies output into military expenses. We can’t do this for long without our economy crashing and burning, but it had to be done. With our normal rate of building ships, our Anti-Klackon fleet would have been ready in 14 turns, which even at this point of the game is a lot of time. Now instead, we will be ready in 7-8 turns. Which hopefully means next update, thanks to the new LP-structure.  There was nothing new to see in the combat phase, so instead of typing down the same stuff again, have a picture of our fighters murdering some Raas-fighters.  OK I lied, there was one new thing happening: This turn, when the AI suggested we should try a feint and only fight at low intensity, I shrugged and agreed. And the defenders fell for it! While a couple of our tanks got blown up and some soldiers here and there did indeed die, losses overall where not really that bad. The Raas however ended up in a bad position after repelling our feint: Our main forces had just bypassed them and calmly liberated the entire planet behind them. When the Dilarian troops finally noticed what was happening and stopped trying to reach what they thought was our beachhead, they were surrounded. A last valiant counter-attack was formed, but it was in vain: As the defenders had exactly zero armor units (in fact, they had zero tanks, not just zero units), it took them far too long to move into position. Losses were total. Afterwards, a captured Dilarian officer was recorded commenting on this new Almandian weapon: “To be honest, the moment those giant armored monsters broke out of the beachhead, I knew this battle was lost. These things are not so different from our artillery, but they have mobility. When they finally got moving, we simply couldn’t react fast enough: Our artillery always seemed to target the wrong spot at the worst possible time. I can only hope DHC received our reports, or this war is already over.” OP success. Our tanks, or “Armors” as the Almandian forces call them, have succeeded in their first trial battle. Against a rather small enemy force, though. And it still took two turns. But it’s the first ground battle in a long while ending in fast, overwhelming victory for our side. That’s good, right? No embarrassingly high losses, no sudden reversals. Just straight up victory. Now we just have to hope our ludicrous number of spy hackers is enough to prevent the Raas from stealing this technology from us!  Galactic Cycle 333 sees the people of the Kingdom relaxing a bit: Sure, there’s still a stupifyingly large enemy fleet at our border, but with every cycle our fleet gets closer in numbers and the total victory on Tannjost V has revived hopes that at least one of our long, grueling wars will soon end. The seemingly never ending string of strange discoveries from our Antaran expeditions adds to this new excitement by distracting our people from the less… good news. Like how AIA-agent Stolze suddenly showed up in pieces. In fact, he was not only torn apart, but his pieces were placed in a Soriane stone garden, but in an artistic style recognized as Dilarian. Was his murder a message? Did Psilon or Raas agents murder him? The AIA, as always, is clueless.  We’re up to 8 partial discoveries now. I have to confess, I’m getting excited myself now…  After controlling our finances and construction for this turn, I remember about bureaucracy. How bad is it for us? Let’s test it! In this screenshot, you can see how our Heavy Carrier Battleships of the Gold III class cost 5908 Antaran Units to build. We know the heavy foot of government is supposed to multiply those costs, and a HFG of 2.0 roughly equals to doubling all prices. Edit: OK ha ha , you can't because I deleted that screenshot!  Anyway, re-routing the industrial output to 100% military uses took some toll already: Construction times are up 2-3 turns everywhere. If that doesn't turn around next time, I'll have to consider tooling everything back to sane levels again...  And then I remembered I did this test with some other screenshots (the one with the carrier was an accident). But yes, by comparing design costs of our Iron-class battleships with their actual building costs, I could confirm that a HFG of 2.0 indeed translates to doubled build costs. Welp. Looks like I compressed the wrong screenshots away this time. Anyway, have this nice screenshot of me killing another Raas-colony instead!  The new strategic situation in the Tannjost-system: The fifth planet is ours, two colonies have been wiped out and two Raas-colonies remain. By the next update, Tannjost III will have been bombed into oblivion, and Tannjost IV will have been liberated by our ground troops. At least that’s the plan. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Partial discoveries made (4) Expedition 2: Partial discoveries made (2) Expedition 3: Partial discoveries made (2) Next: A Mighty Fleet
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Aug 12, 2017 16:16
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How many partial Antaran discoveries make an actual discovery?
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Aug 12, 2017 17:14
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PurpleXVI posted:How many partial Antaran discoveries make an actual discovery? I know what I know, boy... but I'm not telling it! Fake edit: But again, I really don't know! I guess we will see soon!
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Aug 12, 2017 17:19
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Libluini posted:I know what I know, boy... but I'm not telling it! That's a piece of weird arcane knowledge I can tolerate in a 4X because once it happens you'll remember it next time and it is meant to surprise you. It's not like it's a surprise mechanic that shouldn't actually be a surprise to a ruler.
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Aug 12, 2017 22:35
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SIGSEGV posted:That's a piece of weird arcane knowledge I can tolerate in a 4X because once it happens you'll remember it next time and it is meant to surprise you. Yeah, I actually like it this time. After all, when digging up ancient ruins of a murderous and dangerous race, you don't expect everything to go smoothly. It's also not like the "Gotcha's!" Imperius was plastered with. "Duh! Of course a rebellion kills you!" "Oh, old age kills everyone. Guess you should have given your emperor some immortality drugs, yes?" - may be all obvious ways to die, but the insta-death implementation with zero recovery chance was the most obnoxious way of implementing this. This here instead is a nice little mechanic where you can get neat stuff, it's a little mystery sprinkled in and the worst case (losing your expedition fleet) hurts enough to demonstrate the danger, without suddenly tearing your face off and switching your PC off. Which is what playing Imperium often felt like. (My favorite way of dying in Imperium will always be the way your head gets instantly chopped off and punted into Game Over Land the second you lose one of your mandatory elections.  )
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Aug 12, 2017 23:05
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By the way, as I'm not planning to do this LP for forever, I've started looking up old or obscure space 4x again. Ironically, the most problems I had were with a game I bought years ago on a download shop which is now defunct. Now that I've changed PCs the old version is gone, all data about my account (including the name of that obscure shop) is gone too, so I now have to find a copy of that game and re-buy it. The best part, it's obscure enough it's neither on Steam or GOG, so I have to buy a honest-to-god physical copy and have it shipped to me from across the world! No wait, the best part is the other obscure space 4x I had: That's on Steam, alright. So that other game was even shittier and more obscure then I feared. "Great". Man, take this as a warning: If you go without physical media, don't use a service that's used by like a dozen people, tops. Other stuff I've learned while compiling my future list: There were space 4x games ten years before Master of Orion! (The original MO is from 1993, but there were space 4x around as early as 1983.) I have to do those weird old ones at some point.
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Aug 13, 2017 16:46
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"Millennia: Altered Destinies" is probably one of the weirdest "4X"-ish sci-fi games I've seen. It was impenetrable enough that I could barely figure out how to play it when I got my hands on it, though the concept is pretty cool.
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Aug 13, 2017 21:11
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PurpleXVI posted:"Millennia: Altered Destinies" is probably one of the weirdest "4X"-ish sci-fi games I've seen. It was impenetrable enough that I could barely figure out how to play it when I got my hands on it, though the concept is pretty cool. Now this sounds exotic, I like it! I put it on my list. Of course, as the 9th 4x on there, it will probably take a decade or two to get that far down.
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Aug 13, 2017 21:25
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Are there any in the same league as Imperium? Cause that was fascinating, if gruesome to watch 
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Aug 13, 2017 22:04
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Mr.Misfit posted:Are there any in the same league as Imperium? Cause that was fascinating, if gruesome to watch I don't know, but one of them is described as being unable to handle numbers above 9999, so I'm hopeful to get some real strange things unearthed! The only thing hampering my efforts seem to be fans, some of those 30+ year old games actually had some people try to patch out the most interesting/horrible stuff.
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Aug 13, 2017 22:16
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Yay, slow grinding war of the offensive!
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Aug 14, 2017 06:09
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Just a head's up: I finally had some time to play MO3 again, so expect a new update soon! Only need some time for writing now.
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Aug 24, 2017 07:13
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Huzzah!
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Aug 24, 2017 17:23
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Hooray, a new strange and confusing mess to look forward to!
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Aug 24, 2017 19:21
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Yeah, this time I crammed about 9-10 turns into a single update, so there's indeed actually something happening. On the other hand, I'm only through sorting 1/7th of my 70+ screenshots for the next update and I've already written two pages of pure text. (Don't worry, if things go like last time, you'll only see about 30-40 of the most interesting ones. Doesn't mean I can just ignore the others, though. The text still has to include everything that happened, after all.)
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Aug 24, 2017 20:20
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12 pages of text! gently caress, that was a lot of writing for a single update. I'm editing the video (yes, there's another video this time) right now, and in a couple of hours rendering, uploading and all that poo poo should be done. Expect the update today. Edit:  Incoming Update! Video is done, new post shortly. Libluini fucked around with this message at 11:43 on Aug 27, 2017 |
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Aug 27, 2017 08:39
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 73: Antaran X  The new chapter starts with a bang.  A couple exploding Raas-bases later, we carefully avoid bombarding Theta Indi V, since we have some tanks ready we want to rain down here.  Tannjost III has no such luck! It’s bombing time for this Raas-colony!  But bad news for our tank army: This time, choosing what the AI suggests turns out to be a trap choice and the Raas-defenders drown our transport shuttles in too heavy fire for a safe landing: The few shuttles who attempt to force a landing are shot down. The army commander orders the Almandian forces to retreat back to the transport ships. When news of the unexpected and shameful defeat reaches AHQ, the commander is dismissed from his post. In fact, the entire army is dismissed and dissolved! All troops are ordered back to their staging points across the Kingdom. The transports dutifully leave the fleet above the planet and transport the ex-commander and his troops back from the frontlines. Of course nothing like this happens. I’m just trying to explain why the army is now back in the reserves, and our transport TF auto-dissolved and send our transports on a long journey back to our ship reserves. MO3’s turn order is a demanding mistress.  And with this dumb battle, combat phase is done and turn 224 starts. GC 336 sees the Kingdom being rocked by swarms of space locusts devastating the agrar-industry on Amoenta I, which at least distracts the population from the very embarrassing defeat on Theta Indi V. We also get recycling microbes, a tech which reduces pollution, and catch another spy.  But the Kingdom’s plans aren’t easily stopped after being set in motion: Two more tank armies and multiple colony ships are launching towards Theta Indi. We already cleansed several planets over there, and thanks to our superior fleet, we can just colonize them while the Raas can only look on helplessly.  And this was everything new for this turn, so I skipped immediately to the next combat phase. Hilariously, I again mindlessly built some system defense ships in Tali, totally forgetting the massive Klackon armada waiting in-system. The screenshot shows what happened next.  The liberation of Theta Indi from the Dilarian Empire continues. In a massive strike, the orbitals protecting Theta Indi I are destroyed.  Welp, turns out there was a fourth orbital hiding at this moon over here. But our fleet deals with this in seconds.  The orbital bombardment afterwards does surprisingly little damage, however. Probably because our fleet in Theta Indi is a mix of small raiders and obsolete ships.  The bombardment of Tannjost III looks a lot more impressive, even if in raw numbers, less people die.  GC 339: One of our expeditions makes another partial discovery! (Not shown, but farther down on the list of messages: Another Dila-spy gets shot.)  Speaking of spies, we have tons of spy hackers now! This should make it almost impossible for our enemies to get our juicy technologies. Coincidentally, all those spies are different shades of bad at hiding, so while we have some really hard hitter like agent Kodiac here with his Dagger of 9, none of them are usable as offensive spies: They’d be found and executed almost immediately.  Surprisingly, the second attempt at Theta Indi V goes far better: Our troops land and overrun the defenders in a single turn. Of course, we had twice the troops (two whole tank armies) this time, and instead of trying something extravagant like complex encirclements, I just chose to concentrate our firepower and steamroll all opposition with a direct assault. After 200+ turns it’s a bit late, but it slowly dawned on me that we may have so much trouble with conducting encirclements because our armies are rather slow, since they’re still mostly filled with Silicoid-units. I’m imagine it must be hard to flank or encircle an enemy of fast-running Dinos if your soldiers are crystals moving by literally growing their way towards the enemy. Also it would be typical of MO3 if it takes our ground units speed into account without showing us this.  After last turn giving us another victory on the ground, turn 227 greets us with shenanigans. Mighty XEOL sends us a short message saying “We don’t care. Stop declaring war on us, you fools.” Too bad next turn our allies will start whining again if we don’t. Agent Madcat joins the AIA! But we don’t actually care, because farther down on our situation report is something far more important:  A wave of colony ships lands on planets in Tannjost and Theta Indi, furthering our claims on those systems and preventing the Raas from ever getting them back. Wait, what’s this? Expedition 1 found something! After breaking down a false rock wall inside of a rather mind-numbingly complex labyrinth, the excavators stumbled into some sort of forgotten laboratory. Seems the Antarans conducted experiments in there. This time however, some unknown cataclysm prevented them from purging their databases: Everything they did is ours! Our xeno-archaeologists are livid with excitement! So now we know: 5 partial discoveries equal one full discovery. This means expedition 3, which has made four partial discoveries so far, is also rather close to finding something. Looks like goon-made, min-maxed science ships were a successful design!  This is how our victory screen now looks like: Two expeditions are still excavating dangerous Antaran ruins somewhere, and one is returning now. Returning/Rückweg still means they can lose some ships, since it generally takes a couple turns before the collected data actually reaches us and generates a science project. Luckily with 7 ships still left this means we’re rather safe. Hilariously, if you have only 1-2 ships left when finding a X-technology, you obviously can still fail if you lose all ships before the expedition data reaches you. To be fair though, this has literally never happened to me and won’t to you either. You should never send ships before you have on-board labs available and you should never send less than about 10 anyway. (I mean this is why we had a design contest and engineered convoluted solutions like expelling all non-exploration ships from our reserves in the first place, but even if you just send out fleets of basic ships, you can still succeed as long as you obey those two rules.)  After the excitement of potentially gaining some game-changing advanced technology died down a bit, I went through the normal stuff I have to do each turn, like looking up what our scientists and engineers are doing. (I also looked at our ship reserves: Amusingly, some backwards colonies are still not done building our now obsolete cruisers, so we have tons of them now. I guess if our main fleets fail against the Klackons, I can still terrorize the Raas with our horde of cruisers. )Three new technologies sneaked in and became running projects while I was dealing with other stuff: Improved Railguns (a huge damage upgrade, but again far too late to do us any good), Miniaturized Graviton Transponder System (an update to our ship sensor suits, which makes this ponderous monster about 1/3rd smaller) and Miniaturized Impuls Drives (this just makes our STL drives a little bit smaller so we have more free space). Everything on this small list is nice-too-have, but nothing important enough to design new ships. The new stuff will be integrated by me in every future design anyway, of course.  Just something funny I nearly forgot to show you: Hidden below that expedition success message was an entire barrage of expedition-related messages. We are told in no real order that an expedition lost a ship during excavation, another one found a partial discovery, one will return home next turn and that we found an Antaran technology. Too bad those messages never tell us which of our expeditions is meant. For all we know, all those messages could refer to the one expedition now on its way back!  The strategic situation is dire. For the Dila Empire. In Theta Indi, we now control 4 out of 6 planets. Soon our fleets can move to Connewa. Which will finally stop the never-ending stream of Raas-transports harassing JustGniess. Just look at this cloud of enemy ships always just arriving/fleeing from there! It seems the Raas are determined to send ships into JustGniess until we have torn down every single colony in Theta Indi.  In Tannjost, on the other side of the warfront, it looks more mixed. On the other hand, those two Raas-colonies are nearly dead and we’re only a couple more turns from being able to push further here.  I nearly forgot: The new agent is a terrorist. Agent Madcat is a Raas who grew up under the constant threat of Dilarian attacks into JustGniess, and he is willing to show the Dila Empire how much he wants them to stop their senseless attacks. With a mantle of 9 he is good enough at hiding we could theoretically use him offensively, but on the other hand his attack-value is only 4 and we need him far more on the defense. Especially since I spend so many turns recruiting espionage hackers, and the AIA is sorely lacking any other kind of spy.  At this point you probably expect me to whine some more about how the Klackons aren’t doing anything. Too bad, the Klackons were secretly building more fleets and now multiple armadas of reinforcements, including two full carrier armadas, are arriving in Tali next turn. I guess I shouldn’t have whined so much about bad AI. With this, the Klackons can theoretically throw up to 96 carriers at us in a single battle. Even with our technological advantage, this is a lot of fighters.  There are already 418 Klackon ships in the Tali-system. Luckily half of them are transports, and many of the older Klackon-formations are small and obsolete enough to be only cannon fodder. Even more important: Since neither AI nor Human players have any control over what task force is allowed into battle, our elite formations will encounter a wild mix of old, new and transport forces. So it’s not like our defeat is inevitable! We still need some luck, though. If we’re really unlucky and face a full ten armadas, including three carrier fleets, we’ll be in a world of pain.  After this I was eager to jump to the next turn, to get another tiny bit closer to the moment our main fleet is ready to engage the Vchiitri Empire in Tali. GC 342 sees the typical wave of news from the warfront, including more bombardments of fanatical Raas-planets. We also got the expected whining message from our Imsaies friends. And another wave of exploration-messages comes in: Our successful expedition from last turn is back in the reserves and another one has found a X-technology! If we can haul in a third one with our last expedition, we’re basically set to get all of them if we follow up with defeating the two Antaran Guardians we know off. If we can do this, we basically don’t ever need to send out another expedition again. An impressive result so far.  And with our expedition returning, we get the data they collected: A new tech project is created and in 15 turns, we will have this Antaran technology available for our empire! Strangely enough, that lab we found must have been one of the biolabs the Antarans used to modify intelligent species across the Orion Sector: We got the Antaran X Genetics technology. This one ominously promises us the ability to easily modify the genes of us and other races. OK, Silicoids theoretically don’t have genes to modify, but the background lore is a bit hazy about what Antaran modifications mean, anyway. There are some Silicoid and Meklar-leaders who got modified by them, even though they don’t have genes to modify (to be fair, those cases don’t mention genetic modification, specifically). I’m guessing there’s a 50/50 chance of this tech not having an effect on cybernetic and silicoid races. Since it’s empire wide however, it should still affect any other race in our Kingdom. Welp, that’s speculation on my part though, since my memories of what this tech does are nearly 15 years old, so this journey of discovery will be done by all of us together!  Not everything is this rosy in turn 228: The Vchiitri Empire has now 633 ships defending their colony in Tali. Hot drat  Our accelerated emergency build program meanwhile faces some difficulties. First off, some other colonies are slowly creeping into our Big 4, so it gets kind of hard to remember which four planets I put on 100% military boost and second: Well, build times are still generally multiple times faster than with normal spending, but every tiny shiver in a planet’s economy throws build times into disarray. Meaning the times for our blocks of 5x ships to finish keeps slipping 1-2 turns further back, followed by suddenly jumping 1-2 turns ahead a turn later. In normal build mode I wouldn’t even notice this, since it would take something like 20 turns to finish five capital ships and I would simply forget all about that particular building project. But with that giant Klackon armada hanging around and with me min-maxing the building process directly, the building queue reordering itself each turn vexes me to no end.  And our liberation of Tannjost III fails. Again, because I wanted to overdo it with a fancy encirclement, and our troops were too slow and couldn’t even create a beachhead. Another of our commanders gets fired off-screen for this disaster.  Then this thing suddenly shows up with ominous music, rotates a bit, and is gone in a couple seconds. This is the way the game shows us we discovered an Antaran X-type technology. This happened last time, too. But I was too slow to make a screenshot. It only shows up long enough for your brain to register, and is generally gone already by the time you hammer down on your screenshot-button. This time only worked because I anticipated it.  Turn 229: A second expedition found something. While great disappointment hangs around because the Almandian Armor-divisions fail to live up to their hype, this bit of news sneaks by without making big waves in the Kingdom’s media. But it will have great consequences for our empire’s future.  The xenoarchaeologists digging out this specific secret are still in ecstasy about their discovery. Well, at least the Psilon, Imsaies and Raas-scientists among the team are. The Silicoid-researchers instead are as close to ecstasy as intelligent minerals can be. Anyway, thanks to Imsaies-sensor technician Aleph Kaath’Tereat, the team identified a hidden compartment deep inside the rock of the world this particular expedition had chosen for their excavations. It turned out the labyrinth of mirrors above it was just a giant red Trilarian, meant to make unwanted visitors run around in circles, chasing something which did not exist. Inside the hidden compartment, there was a tiny metallic globe. Gravitic analysis showed it massing several thousand tons. Obviously, this was not normal. After a lot of effort, the globe was finally lifted off into space. Even on their way back analysis continued and just before the returning fleet reached the border of the Kingdom of Almandin, a major breakthrough was made: The metal first detected was a thin, but incredibly dense alloy, shielding the actual globe inside. This alloy alone is enough to keep our material scientists and engineers working for many cycles to come, but the globe inside the globe-shell turned out to be even stranger. The globe was an almost pure lump of neutronium! No wonder the globe massed thousands of tons! Even better: The neutronium was used as some sort of ultra-dense information storage device – it consisted of countless layers of thin lines of neutronium, coiled around each other like a highly compressed ball of yarn. All those lines worked like neurons inside a brain, or like highly advanced pico-circuits inside a computer. The globe was made of computerized neutronium! This new “Computronium” is so far advanced from everything the Kingdom has seen, even reading what is inside will be a hard, but worthwhile quest on its own! For now, the Kingdom’s scientists only know that the information inside is some kind of Antaran encyclopedia. What we have here is not only the Antaran Hypernet, copied and saved in a condensed form, but also the research-related X-technology. “Nothing is impossible” claims the lore-blurb. Another claim is that the education-level of our population is supposed to rise throughout the empire as soon as the secrets of this technology are unraveled. Like with the other X-techs, I only have some vague memories of what this tech is doing besides just boosting our research. In 15 turns, we will learn what it does together.  Turn 230. Last combat phase, I did my normal bombardments and the Klackons are still sitting around, slowly building up their already immense fleet. And the one expedition we have left made another partial discovery, which means they too are close to finding something now. And the new-star-lane event fired again: Fahd and Chiba, two systems outside our kingdom, are now connected to each other.  This is nuts. The Vchiitri Empire is still sending more ships into Tali. They’re up to 665 ships now.  Theoretically, we could attack with the ships we have now, but our last defeat re-taught me to wait until we are ready. This means several more turns until our next batch of capital ships leaves our yards.  Meanwhile, we press our offensive against the Raas: Tannjost IV is the latest Dilarian colony destroyed by our forces.  This new  That odd diplomatic request was the only thing of note in turn 231, so I jumped ahead to turn 232 here. Improved Railguns and Miniaturized Graviton Transponder Systems are ready for use now. The first one you will never see in action, but the second one will be crammed into our next generation of scouts and capital ships. After the Klackon Menace is dealt with, of course. Oh, and the AIA shot another Raas-spy.  To visualize our progress a little bit: Maps! On the southern front the last bombardments have cleansed everything the Raas had left and the Tannjost-system is 100% secured. Time to move on!  Since it will take some time before our forces can reach the next target, let’s take a look at what our allies are doing up in the north of the Orion Sector. For some reason the Imsaies still have 25 ships here and they still hold their colony in the Theta Gru system, but the situation is dire: XEOL has 1052 ships massed to deal with the Imsaies once and for all. Impressive, even a little bit scary. We will have to deal with the Klackons first, though. While the Raas have ceased to be relevant, we’re still not strong enough to fight the Klackons and the Cynoids at the same time.  Something I forgot to mention: The first of our accelerated 5x battleship and carrier batches left the shipyards this turn. We are so close to re-start our hostilities against the Vchiitri Empire.  The economy of our boosted worlds took a beating, though. 29 turns is not normal, even for building 5 battleships in parallel. It’ll take a couple turns at a more normal 20% military spending rate for building times to normalize. This shows the price of accelerated building. We could probably have gotten the same effect by putting military spending on 70-80% instead of 100% and still gotten the ships finished in roughly the same time, thanks to the diminishing returns of spending money. It would have been less rough on our economy and given us a lot more research points. Something to think about for later.  So, here’s a funny story: Normally I have military construction in our SitRep switched off, to prevent you and me getting flooded with “finished X construction”-type messages from every single planet we have. This is why there was no screenshot of the first accelerated build orders finishing. In fact, I totally forgot this and later thought that other screenshot was of the first accelerated building orders, instead of the second and final ones. Yes! That screenshot just before was the second batch already! This has two immediate consequences: 1. All four boost planets are now back to more sane settings. 2. Our Great Anti-Bug Offensive can start right the gently caress now!  The 1st Guard Fleet consists of 24 of our battleship-sized Gold-class carriers. Here counted in different groups of 17 and 7 because in the middle of building them, better armor-tech came in and forced me to update designs and queues. 6 of our larger Metallic H2O point defense cruisers will be serving as their escorts and just to make sure, I added two of our light recon cruisers as pickets. 32 ships in total, a full Ultima Orion Armada (in Vanilla, maximum TF-size was 18).  It wasn’t exactly planned, but I did expect this to happen: While we were waiting on our capital ship program, the AI and me occasionally looking at backwater-planets combined to spit out massive amounts of cruisers. This means I could put five left-over large carriers and 19 light cruiser-sized carriers into a second massive carrier task force. As this fleet uses mostly lighter ships, I added our point defense destroyers in instead of our more expensive cruisers. Besides, thanks to the AI’s bias in favor of lighter ships, we have tons of those, too. If it were possible, we could vomit forth entire armadas of point defense destroyers.  OK, you get the drift. I made two more massive armadas, just with long-range ships instead of carriers. But then I decided to put our massive reserve of cruisers to better use and formed up two more task forces to fill up the ranks. The 1st Cruiser Group is the larger one, with 18 of our older Virus-class cruisers, supported by 6 of our more modern Mizar-class cruisers. Plus of course a set of PD-destroyers and pickets. The last task force I made still got enough ships to get a (large) squadron of 16 ships. There were even still five more cruisers left after all of this, but for the titanic fleet actions in our future, five ships are not enough to stand up alone, so I left them in the reserve.  After emptying out our reserves, we now have 6 Task Forces in Tali, ready to take the fight back to the Klackons: Two carrier armadas, three long-range armadas and a large squadron. 176 ships total. This means even if we get super-unlucky and the Klackons can throw their best fleets at us all at once, we will still fight at near-parity with 176 against ca. 230-250, depending on what enemy task forces show up. This is because even after our massive build program, our six task forces are still four less than what we would be allowed to bring into battle. The chaotic mix of Klackon task forces doesn't have that choice. For them, battle order will be random.  Alert! Alert! All Rocks to Battlestations! Enemy Fleet Detected! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvuUcxXn-iU  Wow, what a start to turn 233! Hilariously, while the Kingdom celebrates what just happened, we fail on the non-military fronts: Our super-research into Antaran genetics fuckery faces massive protests, which combined with most researchers being Silicoids with just theoretical knowledge of how genes work, means a whopping 20 turns of delay. Ouch. Also, the Raas of course refuse to give us even more of their worlds. If we want the Connewa-system to be free (of Dinos) we will have to go in ourselves.  Now we just have to fight the Klackons 2-3 times more to get all their ships cleared out of Tali! At least we got one of their three carrier task forces already, cutting their military strength by 1/3rd. Even if the next battle has us facing every single one of their stronger task forces, they can’t just beat us in a straight battle anymore. Now it’s just a question of how many ships we have to lose to get them out of here. Final losses seem to be 13 for us, 172 for them. Comes close to my own count, so it sounds plausible. Of course enemy losses are always a bit murky, thanks to enemy TFs jumping out not always being counted as "losses". (I'm fairly sure if I count up enemy ships destroyed and enemy ships in flight, this number should be a lot higher than 172, but the number doesn't work either if I account for the ships I saw fleeing. Then the number would be slightly too high instead. It's quite vexing.) Anyway, we still had a crushing victory, so celebrate! Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 1: Expedition Completed Expedition 2: Partial discoveries made (4) Expedition 3: Expedition Completed Next: Crushing Bugs Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Aug 27, 2017 |
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Aug 27, 2017 12:19
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Thank gently caress that rock finally crushes some bugs and the campaign moves in positive direction.
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Aug 27, 2017 13:37
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2 Xs! Well Done Friend Commuter. We will have the power soon, but will it be the power of a god or a devil? Allegedly ruses are the way to go for ground combat. Apparently they at least break even against every other strategy in the weird matrix the original game had.
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Aug 27, 2017 19:13
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That has been a very nice bunch of turns there, I hope the next few battles go as well as that. Also there's nothing preventing rocks and robots from having something analogous to genes and I guess the Antarans liked to store data on their dear pets.
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Aug 27, 2017 20:42
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Glorious victories over the Klackons, the Raas, the ancient Antarans and our own scientists. A good few turns.
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Aug 27, 2017 21:15
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Is there a "no more spying, ever" tech to get v though? Because we're still losing bigly in that regard 
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Aug 27, 2017 21:22
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Slaan posted:Is there a "no more spying, ever" tech to get v though? Because we're still losing bigly in that regard This has to do with how many people are spying on Libuini, Empires can only have so many spies out at a time, regardless of size, and affected by tech. He's being spied upon by at least 4 civilizations, the Raas are probably just sending all their spies on offensive, so he has four to five times the number of spies he posses that are invading his empire.
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Aug 28, 2017 03:05
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Congrats on one heck of a turn! Two X techs, the slow process of breaking the blockade on the Tali system.. WEll done! (Also more Dino worlds but that goes without saying). Upside is you'll find out what the X's do soon enough! You going to scrap the research ships or if you can send out the same designs again if all the expeditions get back?
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Aug 28, 2017 06:41
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The entire Internet of a long-dead civilization? Their cat memes must be off the chain.
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Aug 28, 2017 12:37
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