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Trying to even imagine a Silicoid spy taxes my imagination to its utmost. I'm just imagining a boulder in a trenchcoat and wearing a false mustache.
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Apr 14, 2016 15:26
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Silicoid spies would actually be great if 1. they were willing to be nudists, 2. the MoO universe worked by cartoon standards e: actually, aren't they already 1.? haven't seen one in a suit yet...
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Apr 14, 2016 15:28
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Cythereal posted:That is far and away the most involved and obtuse race creation/customization menu I've ever seen in a game. There's something to be said for the devs just switching most of this off before release. Especially the redundant options. Of course at the time, the outrage was great and fans spend a lot of effort to bring all those "features" back to live. And here we are.  Edit: To be clear, I always have a lot of fun when creating a new race, but I'm willing to concede this isn't exactly great game play.
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Apr 14, 2016 15:30
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Libluini posted:The secret is, the Ithkul have the developers in their corner. They really have no weaknesses and in character-creation, most bad options are either greyed out or give only a few points so a player is discouraged from taking drawbacks. The thing about Ithkul is you spend the whole time fighting the entire galaxy so if they weren't hilariously overpowered they would never have a chance. Plus they make a good final fight for the player if they start on the opposite side of the galaxy and have time to gobble up a few other empires.
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Apr 14, 2016 15:32
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Libluini posted:The secret is, the Ithkul have the developers in their corner. They really have no weaknesses and in character-creation, most bad options are either greyed out or give only a few points so a player is discouraged from taking drawbacks. I am not a rock i am a just a triliarian with a calcium problem
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Apr 14, 2016 15:43
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Saros posted:The thing about Ithkul is you spend the whole time fighting the entire galaxy so if they weren't hilariously overpowered they would never have a chance. Plus they make a good final fight for the player if they start on the opposite side of the galaxy and have time to gobble up a few other empires. In Ultima Orion, this is true. Vanilla MO3 has a bug making all the special diplomatic reactions not work, though. Sure, the Ithkul still have an uphill battle on the diplomatic field, but it was possible for Ithkul (players and AIs both) to be part of a strong, healthy alliance. The patch was supposed to fix this and other stuff, but only some of the worst things got fixed, like the leaking memory. The AI seeing no problem in allying with aggressive parasites planning their destruction was fairly down on the list of priorities, I think.
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Apr 14, 2016 15:55
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Libluini posted:In Ultima Orion, this is true. Vanilla MO3 has a bug making all the special diplomatic reactions not work, though. Sure, the Ithkul still have an uphill battle on the diplomatic field, but it was possible for Ithkul (players and AIs both) to be part of a strong, healthy alliance. I remember hearing about that bug, it was literally an entire missing/misplaced/misnamed file or something containing all of the special diplomatic reactions, wasn't it?
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Apr 14, 2016 16:01
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PurpleXVI posted:I remember hearing about that bug, it was literally an entire missing/misplaced/misnamed file or something containing all of the special diplomatic reactions, wasn't it? No idea, people had to tell me crap like this. Back when I was playing vanilla, I just took it for granted when I included Meklar in my grand Human Alliance, or that my computer was getting slower and slower thanks to the leaky memory silting up my RAM. This all changed when I installed Ultima Orion and finally sat down to read all that lore crap (my English wasn't that great back then, so I never really bothered much with reading background lore as long as my game was untranslated) and noticed all those weird diplomatic relations between races the game was supposed to have. Then when playing the mod I learned making your hated enemy trust you was suddenly super-hard. On the other hand, things also suddenly made sense, so I just shrugged and accepted the change. Edit: What really irritated me in hindsight was the very similar bug making all ground units effectively the same accross races. I had spend so many hours throwing Meklar-armies against "weak" races and never understood why those super-robots had so much trouble fighting. The Silicoids became my favourite in this time because their lovely units were able to fight on equal grounds with everyone thanks to the bug. Then later my preference changed to Meklar again in UO, since now with the original attributes restored, the Meklar just steamrolled everything until far into the end-game, when everyone had their super-tech gadgets ready. I loved this! But it would have made this LP slightly more boring, I think. Libluini fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Apr 14, 2016 |
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Apr 14, 2016 16:13
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The Silicoids are probably considered Collectivist as a part of a general mineral conglomerate theme.
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Apr 14, 2016 17:30
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Green Intern posted:The Silicoids are probably considered Collectivist as a part of a general mineral conglomerate theme. All crystals resonate with the beat of the universe, they're part of the beautiful cosmic whole. Gosh, don't you know anything? How else would crystal healing work?
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Apr 14, 2016 18:15
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I think Silicoids should be loved by any race interested in new age medicine and chakras and positive auras and all that jargon. So at least the Evon?
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Apr 14, 2016 18:22
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quote:Very slowly walking crystals are obviously not the ideal space marines I don't see why not. It depends just how fragile they are and how they're attacking you. They might not be able to hold a gun, but if they have something other to hit you with? quote:Considering Silicoids can be stubborn assholes like no others, being average at trading is actually kind of good for them. I have this picture in my head. "You tried to haggle with a Silicoid?! Crazy. Take this as a lesson. Don't haggle with a space rock. It doesn't work. Don't try to cheat them either. They have good eyes on quality, given they hold themselves to high standards." quote:The Silicoids are hilariously bad at spying because they're huge, sentient rocks. This makes sense. This depends entirely on how much and how far they can reshape. Also how long it's intended for the agent to 'infiltrate'.
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Apr 14, 2016 19:07
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Silicoid spies could also mean foreign nationals in the employ of rocks.
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Apr 14, 2016 19:12
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Zanzibar Ham posted:I think Silicoids should be loved by any race interested in new age medicine and chakras and positive auras and all that jargon. So at least the Evon? and the Ur-Quan.
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Apr 14, 2016 19:20
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This reminds me, I wanted to start posting bits and pieces of the game's background over time, but I didn't want to bloat my massive posts even more. So, compromise time! These little posts are supposed to tell you about the lore, one step at a time. Lore 01: Center One The native name of this system is lost to time, and now it is remembered only by the cold moniker "Center One". Situated in the Galactic Core near an unstable wormhole nexus, Center One gave rise to a unique civilization, a combination of the system's original inhabitants and numerous visitors from other systems who, trapped by the unpredictable effects of the nexus, chose to stay there rather then gamble with its capricious nature. In this way, Center One's original civilization blossomed into a multi-species culture, diverse in ideas, sciences, beliefs, and language. The wormhole nexus was a curious affair, a single point which orbited Center One's star (often referred to as Solarus, "the first sun") in a highly elliptical orbit. That point served as the endpoint for many other wormholes throughout the galaxy. However, traveling through that point led not to a fixed destination, but rather to ever-changing locations that even the most advanced calculating machines of the time could not predict with any accuracy. All that was known for certain was that nothing that entered or left the nexus ever returned from whence it came. The presence of the nexus accelerated the natural aging process of Solarus, but at such a slow rate as to go unnoticed by local astrophysicists. Only when Center One's ruling factions determined that the best solution to eliminating criminals and undesirable elements from their society was by sending them on a one-way trip through the nexus did the sun's degeneration become evident. Thousands of massive "exile" ships were dispatched in this manner, carrying with them the undesirables of Center One society and enough resources to keep them alive and well until they landed, theoretically. But this increase in usage of the wormhole nexus led to its own increased instability, and through that, the destabilization of Solarus itself to the point where it began its final countdown to nova a few billion years early. With barely a century to spare, Center One's civilization faced total annihilation. The government sponsored several programs to create giant colony ships capable of carrying its people to safety through the wormhole nexus, ironically following the outcasts that they themselves had deemed "undesirable". Other independent factions worked on their own to create similar ships. Dozens were launched before Center One finally vanished in its sun's death cry. Though future historians would often speculate on the precise location of Center One, more pressing events put such studies on hold until they became nothing more than fodder for authors of speculative fiction. Historical Note: One of the unique characteristics of the Center One civilization was the establishment of a calendar based not only on the revolution of its primary planet around Solarus, but on the position of the wormhole nexus as well. As a result of this, Center One "cycles" were of variable length, from one to two Human years in duration. The mathematical formula for calculating the length of these cycles was extremely precise, and allowed for the determination of cyclical lengths thousands of cycles in advance. For the purpose of historical consistency, this record will use 1 GC (Galactic Cycle) as the year that the Center One star went nova. 0 GC is the year prior to that, and years before then are measured in negative GC. Historical Note: One of the many species that inhabited the Center One system was less heterogeneous than most. This group occupied a terraformed moon and interacted little with the rest of Center One society. They were, however, extremely intelligent and equally militant, providing the system with a local defense force and occasionally participating in large-scale research projects, including studies of the wormhole nexus. This species would one day be called Antarans. They themselves were the creation of another, older race that had deliberately sent them to Center One for reasons yet unknown.... Cythereal posted:Silicoid spies could also mean foreign nationals in the employ of rocks. My first thought when seeing you could pump espionage up to max if you were willing to spend the points was: "Ahah, I guess Silicoids infiltrate foreign empires by pretending to be jewels or something." Just imagine some Elerian woman finding a gaudy ring on some backwoods planet, with a large, oversized reddish crystal on it. And then taking the ring back home. Infiltration successful!
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Apr 14, 2016 19:30
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My vision of Sillicoid spies is an entire racket of trying to get enemy agents and diplomats to adopt 'pet rocks' that are, in fact, the sillicoid spies themselves. It's not a very successful racket, where only the dumbest species fall for it.
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Apr 14, 2016 19:39
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Cosmic Afro posted:My vision of Sillicoid spies is an entire racket of trying to get enemy agents and diplomats to adopt 'pet rocks' that are, in fact, the sillicoid spies themselves. Now I'm imagining Clever and Smart, agents of the AIA (Almandin Intelligence Agency) trying just that. 
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Apr 14, 2016 19:45
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Never discuss classified information near a zen garden. 
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Apr 14, 2016 19:49
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Really fat Silicoids just wander onto building sites in the middle of the night and sit there pretending to be the foundations. It isn't the walls that have ears.
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Apr 14, 2016 20:13
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Cosmic Afro posted:My vision of Sillicoid spies is an entire racket of trying to get enemy agents and diplomats to adopt 'pet rocks' that are, in fact, the sillicoid spies themselves. Obviously silicoid infiltration units use air braked meteoric entry to arrive on the target planet. As this method requires launch from a long range to avoid detection and precise timing to cloak the agents within natural occurring meteor showers accuracy is limited. To avoid the accuracy problems, large numbers of agents are required. In short: Rocks fall, everybody spies.
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Apr 14, 2016 20:37
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I'll have you know, Silicoids are the only true masters of espionage. You'll never see them before it's too late.
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Apr 14, 2016 20:38
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I'll never forgive you for failing to make our space rock empire a drug cult.
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Apr 15, 2016 01:18
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terrenblade posted:Obviously silicoid infiltration units use air braked meteoric entry to arrive on the target planet. As this method requires launch from a long range to avoid detection and precise timing to cloak the agents within natural occurring meteor showers accuracy is limited. To avoid the accuracy problems, large numbers of agents are required. I'm not certain whether I should congratulate you for that pun or just punch you in the goddamn face. Also, who says they'd be limited to zen gardens and pet rocks? There's also yard barriers, rock-based pathways, the list goes on. They could be everywhere.
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Apr 15, 2016 01:33
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There's also the question of them simply asking the other rocks things. Although then you get the usual problems of 'what's important to one person isn't what's important to another'. Some detail that the Sphinx remembers ends up advancing Silicoid understanding significantly. Some thing the Cenotaph remembers sends them completely barking up the wrong tree.
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Apr 15, 2016 04:24
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How do we know for sure that all of the Terran planets are not themselves rock person spies in someone else's even bigger 4x game?
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Apr 15, 2016 04:27
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Cathode Raymond posted:How do we know for sure that all of the Terran planets are not themselves rock person spies in someone else's even bigger 4x game? Now that's just silly.
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Apr 15, 2016 08:09
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oh man. I forgot about the race creation customisations. tempted to do the Libertarian Utopia project. but ugh, $14 for this game on GoG ugh. Should wait till the LP is a bit further along before showing the game off in its broken 'glory'
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Apr 15, 2016 09:20
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Dr. Snark posted:They could be everywhere. Except they're hot pink...
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Apr 15, 2016 09:56
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Now that I think of it one of the worst parts of this game was it came on something like 7 CDs. I had both this and Planescape:Torment which was 4 cds, it was pretty crazy for the time.
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Apr 15, 2016 13:37
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Sloober posted:Now that I think of it one of the worst parts of this game was it came on something like 7 CDs. I had both this and Planescape:Torment which was 4 cds, it was pretty crazy for the time. It came on 2 CDs, install and playdisc.
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Apr 15, 2016 14:34
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Disco Infiva posted:It came on 2 CDs, install and playdisc. I still have them on my shelf, just in case my HDD dies or something. It's complete with the old barcode from the video rental where I bought it and a nice card listing all the controls and shortcuts. Huh. I didn't know I could process a turn by pressing shift+enter. Anyway, I wanted to post because I finished typing down another 8k words for your amusement. I have to go out for groceries now, but I'm posting the new update after I come back.
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Apr 15, 2016 16:02
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Critic of the Dawn posted:Once upon a time many years ago in the heady early years of the internet as a useful medium for marketing, I was an enthusiastic follower of this game during its development. They had a very active message board where the developers (led by one Alan Emerich) discussed game ideas with the fans and (over)promised all kinds of things about how the forthcoming game would work. It was actually the first time I can recall a major game design studio interfacing that heavily with its fanbase while a game was still in development, and as the game got closer to release, you could really start to see the flaws in doing so. For one thing, the forums pitched a huge poo poo fit after Emerich was quietly let go with only a few months left until release - it actually got so bad that they got him to come back onto the forum to post an open letter telling people to chill out and that the game was going to be fine without him and that his job was pretty much finished anyway! This pretty much mirrors my experience. I remember before they had the forums up and running they just had a preview page with some concept art for the new alien designs, and I was immediately enraptured. We were all much younger then (I was just finishing high school) and the web was still fairly young too, so it really can't be stressed enough how much of a big deal it was to feel like you were involved in the development of the game, especially if you were a fan of the series (Moo2 was relatively fresh and I was still playing it a ton). I remember when I made a suggestion in some thread and one of the devs told me it was a good idea and they would definitely think about adding it, and it was one of those "omg he spoke to me!" moments for very young and naive me. Even I started losing faith as the development became more and more fraught with problems, though: the fuss over Emerich, the gutting of the Ethos and Imperial Focus Points systems, the accidental release of the alpha to some games magazine, which put it on its cover disk as a demo (whoops), among other issues. If I recall as well, after Emerich was booted they hired one of the forum members (I think he was a mod?) to work for them as a community liaison, and you could tell he was having a hard time towing the company line while trying to be honest with the community about the state of the game's development and what was really happening behind the scenes with Emerich and other matters. When all was said and done, though, I actually didn't mind the final product much. I played it, wrestling with the bugs and the piss-poor AI (though I'd never have the patience for that poo poo these days) to get at least some money's worth out of the game, and I love a lot of the depth to it and the way populations migrate around of their own accord to make the game universe feel more alive and dynamic. Also, the vanilla/strawberry/tropical mods that one guy made genuinely improve a lot about it, so if this mod if anything like those then it shouldn't be half bad.
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Apr 15, 2016 16:31
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 03: The Kingdom and the Stars  Surprise! Thanks to 99,9% of the last update being about race customization, we’re still in turn 1! Today we’re starting with all those menus down at the bottom. You’re probably excited to hear what those are all about, right? Then let’s start! The first menu is you tech tree. Since it’s only turn 1, there’s not much to do here right now, but you can already see the basics: You can move your research around six different categories for general research and sometimes a research project gets started if your empire has progressed enough. We even have one running right now: Interceptors/Abfangjäger. The tech project is listed in the left bottom corner. You can click on a project and get a nice little graphic in the middle of the bottom row and a short fluff text describing what you’re researching. Right now the Kingdom of Almandin is working on a new type of very little ship, more of a shuttle really, which will be able to start from other, larger space ships. The ship will have small and fast firing guns to deal with threats to its mothership, like missiles and other fighters. If you click on one of the categories, like energy research in this example, you can see upcoming research projects and their effects. As a short overview: Economy/Ökonomie: Mostly money and tax related techs, including techs dealing with bureaucracy. Not really a priority, but putting at least some research here helps a lot later. Mathematics/Mathematik: This category deals with hyperspace, some weapons and assorted stuff like better targeting. Very important, so this will be one of our priorities. Energy/Energie: A lot of our weapons, our normal space engines and shields are coming from energy research. Obviously this is another high priority. Biology/Biologie: Genetical manipulation, recycling and other bio-stuff. Like economy, some things are nice to have, but overall not really important, especially in the early game and especially not for us. Physics/Physik: Tons of stuff comes from this category, including all our hull sizes and lots of other ship equipment. The better we understand basic physics, the larger are the ships we can build. Most industrial upgrades will show up here, too. Highest priority! Sociology/Soziologie: Everything influencing our society. New ground units will show up here, spy technologies also come mainly from sociology. For those reasons, Sociology has some small priority, so we won’t dump it as badly as Biology. Over the next turns, we’ll go back to here and explain more.  But for now, onwards to the second bottom-menu, our financial sector! First, take a good look at that nice group of colored bars in the upper left. The only relevant thing in those Imperial Economy Settings is that green thing at Unruhe/Unrest. If you’re empire is in serious trouble, feel free to spend more money here. But never past that green thumbs up, because as with everything involving colored bars in this game, red is basically you setting money on fire. Generally I suggest never touching this part. Later in the game you have to remember, none of the settings here will change anything on manually controlled worlds. So see this more as a method to keep your ever-expanding borders under control. See, the AI in this game is mentally challenged and I mean this in the nicest way possible. If you are too hasty with those bars, you’ll end up overcharging the relevant bars on all your planets by insane margins. The AI only cares for raw numbers and if you tell it to spend a certain sum on something, it will try it’s best to do is, even if it means putting 90% of all planets production into research, wasting an enormous amount of effort on getting 1-2 points more research, while everything else grinds to a halt. Just ignore this part of the menu as much as possible, OK? It’s better for your sanity, trust me. The right sight is more important: You have three different riders to set financial directives for your empire. You have five setting inbetween Peace & Prosperty and Holy War at the bottom. At the highest setting, the AI will not spend more than 10% of your income on military assets and if you manually spend more, you’ll generate lots of unrest. Basically the government is telling everyone peace and love is great while building battlefleets at the same time. This tends to make your politicians look like brazen liars or idiots and even among aliens this doesn’t go over well. We’re at peace through strength, just so our AI actually tries building ships then and when. At this setting, we can build up to 20% of our income for ships and troops, which is plenty in the early game. Only when we’re actually at war or really desperate will it be necessary to go further down. Remember, the setting doesn’t only influence unrest, it also tells your AI how much of their effort they should spend on military strength. Like with every other Imperial setting, going to Holy War straight away just because you want to build unlimited ships on your core worlds will make your AI go full retard and everything non-military tends to get stopped dead on every AI-controlled world. Caution is advised when dealing with this setting. Thanks to the AI-upgrades in UO, at least you can tell your border-worlds to raise ground armies simply by leaving this setting at Peace through Strength or Limited Warfare. Later in the game, you can with some drastic design shuffling manipulate your AI-governors into building your support ships while your directly controlled worlds build what you really need. But we get to that later.  In the next rider, you can tell your empire and by extension all your planets to either try to save money, stay balanced or just plunge into debt like mad. Theoretically, if you play a race bad with money, you’ll be sometimes forced to use Sparsam/Frugal to prevent your bankruptcy, but we’re not that bad and can leave it at Ausgewogen/Balanced. Equally theoretically, if you play a race of greedy traders, there will be a point where you get so much money you can put your spending on “Lavish” without a second thought. I never had that much luck and the AI tends to be rather bad at staying out of debt in the best of times so this is another setting where I can only suggest to keep your hands of it. Let it stay at balanced and forget this even exists.  The last subrider on this rider is about taxes. You can set system taxes to directly get money from your planets and you can raise taxes on entire system outputs at once. If you lower the taxes, people will get happier and you will get less money, higher taxes do the opposite. You will probably never go “Boy, my people are too ecstatic, better raise some taxes to keep them mellow!”, so this another setting you should only change in an emergency. If everything fails, you can try halving all your taxes and hope for your rebellious populace to calm down before your empire suffers economic collapse. Uh and that’s it. The larger your empire grows and the more unruly aliens you adopt, the more important this setting becomes. Just please don’t depend on it. This way lies madness.  The other main rider in your financial menu is your main ledger. It shows all your income and all your costs in two neat, easy to read columns. Right now our only income is taxes. We’re not even trading with our own colony at this time, since this is only turn 1 and no trade has been calculated yet.  The Imperium-menu deals organizing your empire at the macro-level. Colonization-setting can either be on manual (bad you’ll go insane if you try controlling this alone) or you can trust your AI to send colonizers automatically to planets marked by you. UO has made changes to the sometimes wonky colonization-AI so the AI will send ships regardless of what setting is chosen here. This rider is totally pointless for this mod. If you need to, you can delete AI-orders and re-route ships, so this isn’t a total loss. At least you don’t have to manually form colonization squadrons anymore, that was pure rear end.  Here I am jumping ahead because we haven’t chosen our government-type yet. We’re a constitutional monarchy, which is kind of average in everything. No drawbacks, no bonus. Having a parliament and a king at the same time kind of neutralizes everything against each other. I’m going from memory here, but a dictatorship/Despotismus is good for war and bad for trading/research, a pure Monarchy is somewhat good at war and slightly bad at research, an Oligarchy is good at making money but less good in everything else and the Constitutional Monarchy I already mentioned.  Now let’s go back a step: The Oppressometer is a measurement of how many policemen are shooting black people in your empire each day. The higher settings generate more unrest but give more protection against enemy spies. The little triangle-things are the borders of what our people consider the sensible boundaries of freedom and oppression. Going too far to the left will make your people incredibly happy, but even our spies could just walk off with everything. Conversely, going past the boundary on the right side of the spectrum means waging a brutal civil war against your own people. Almost every spy will die before even setting foot (or tentacle) into your domain, but people will be in constant revolt. Since we haven’t met anyone yet, I’m leaving the setting more on the left side. If enemies show up and start sending spies across the border, I’ll move this setting a bit to the right. But not much, because too high unrest will be a larger problem than occasional terrorist strikes by foreign agents.  In the middle of all of this is our imperial construction planning. Spezialisiert/Specialized tells the AI to create worlds specialized on one task (space ship world, holiday world and so on) and nothing else. This will create titanic problems as soon as a hostile force blockades one of your planets. Balanced/Ausgewogen is the opposite. Planets under AI-control will try their best to have everything the planet could need if it is ever cut off. This will also cause problems in case of planets like toxic hellholes you only colonized to mine resources: The AI will get confused because it can’t build food production there, for example. Natürlich/Natural is the setting working best in most cases: It tells the AI to try to get everything the planet needs, but if it fails or if it is satisfied, it will build whatever is suited best to the planet, like more mines on mineral rich planets. This is basically the most AI-friendly setting.  Slavery! Here we can determine how evil we want to be. Since the Kingdom of Almandin is a force for Democracy, the choice is obvious: Slavery is forbidden and if you protest against this, you will be asked to present your case in the nearest titanic Temple of Democratic Combat. As soon as you open your mouth (or nearest analog to mouth your species possesses), a giant rock will fall from the ceiling. It will squash you and then you are dead. If you want to play slave holder, it goes like this: Conquered population counts as enslaved. You can also enslave sentient robots you find. The bar determines how much production you are pressing from them every turn, but the farther to the right the little triangle sits, the faster robots will explode and alien slaves drop dead. For demonstration purposes, I’ve set the setting on max, which translates to infernal boost to production for one turn, then everyone spontaneously combusts, I think. But we don’t want icky slavery, so we go the other route which is integrating foreign population as tax paying citizens. Less production, more money. Also more potential soldiers for our armies.  In the right rider we can make up detailed plans to help the poor dumb AI out when building stuff on planets. You can also load plans you saved in an earlier game, so you don’t have to do this every time. Since most of our planets are either manually controlled or planned out manually by me, we don’t need any development plans right now. But sooner or later we will have so many planets it’ll become impossible to deal with every new colony or even remember where your colony ships are going. Then this window will slowly fill with whatever crap I’m throwing together at the spur of the moment.  Occasionally, hero-units will turn up and join our High Council as leaders. They will give boosts and drawbacks to certain sectors and come with a neat little background-story. If we don’t want one of them we can just boot them out, so if you get a lovely leader, feel free to eject him or her, it doesn’t really matter. Since your leaders aren’t immortal, they’ll will die sometimes, so don’t get too attached to your good ones, either!  The other half of our personnel-menu: The spy interface! We have three windows: One where we recruit spies and look at training cost + time, one to show active spies and one to show agents in more detail. Right now we have zero spies and for a long time, this will be it. The reason for this is, well our spies are poo poo. And throughout the entire game, spy costs for new spies will rise with every new recruit. Recruiting too many spies too fast is an interesting, albite very stupid way to bankrupt your empire. I’m planning on waiting until we have at least one spy tech to help us out and even then we will mostly use our spies defensively. That’s all they’re good for, after all.  The Foreign Ministry/Außenministerium is for diplomacy and interaction with the New Orion Senate. For obvious reasons, this menu is totally empty except for us. We will start using this menu after we actually have met someone else.  The planet-menu will become incredibly important in the future: Dealing with all our planets manually, or even trying to remember what AI-governor is doing what, will become impossible sooner or later. In this menu we can look at all planets we have ever visited and arrange them however we want to. We have drop-down menus to arrange information and checkboxes to determine what planets we want to see. And even better:  We can have a miniature-map and have the game tell us where the planets we’re looking at actually are. A double-click on a planet will jump us right to it. Nice!  This is the shipyard. Even back in vanilla-days, when I didn’t know you could have more than one spinal mounted weapon, I considered this the most fun part of the game right after raining destruction down on hapless Harvesters. The principle is simple: First you select hull-type (the size of the hull), ship-type (space ship, defense ship or space station) and its mission (Auftrag) from drop-down menus. Second, you use the large buttons labeled Weapons/Waffen, Engines/Antriebe, Defense/Schutz and Additions/Zusatz to put parts into your hull. Now you just have to obey some simple rules like not exceeding your hull capacity in the lower right corner and then you can name and save your design. There’s also a button labeled Entfernen/Remove to delete entire stacks of stuff from your design, and two little + and – buttons to change the number of weapon batteries, fighters and assorted crap. Those functions are basically just there so you don’t have to wrangle the main sliding menus all the time. Thanks to some upgrades to designs available to the AI, the AUTOBAU/Autodesign button isn’t as horrible misguided as it is in vanilla, so you can use it to at least give you some idea what the game means by KURTZSTRECKENKAMPF (it’s short range battle). There’s a tiny little checkbox labeled Tarnung/stealth to make the autodesign use stealth-technologies if we have researched them. A nice little function I almost never use because it will take a good long while before we ever see those neat little techs. After you made your design, you can look at it on the next rider labeled Active Designs/Aktuelle Design. That rider also allows you to label designs as obsolete, which will become an incredible important tool in AI-behaviour manipulation later.  Confusingly (probably because there wasn’t enough space to cram another main menu into the bottom row), your fleet window is attached as the second half of the shipyard-menu. Here you can see all your ships and what they’re doing right now. We have currently only Ships in Taskforces, but when we build new ships, they’ll be put into our reserve. Ships from disbanded squadrons are also send there. After a while. The Task Force window on the left includes your System Defense Forces, so this is a neat little way to find weakpoints where you forgot to post any ships. The menu has the obligatory sorting functions and some buttons to recycle ships or stop building programs. If one of your support ships is outdated and you don’t want it anymore, you can decide between scrapping them one ship at a time or all ships of the entire design. Just don’t butterfinger on Verschrotte Alle/Scrap All or your entire reserve gets recycled. And before you do that, you can also preemptively clean out all AI-assembly lines by ordering them to stop either one random construction of the selected design somewhere, to stop an entire design from being build, or you can just stop all ship production everywhere altogether. In vanilla, I spend a lot of time here because I couldn’t trust the AI to send colonizers where they were supposed to be going. We’ll spend a lot of time here, too. But for reasons that actually have something to do with fighting battles, not babysitting colony ships. Also in vanilla, every time you created a new Task Force, the new fleet was only available at the start of the next turn. This always confused the hell out of me and apparently I wasn’t the only one: Ultima Orion changed this to give you a Task Force immediately after you created it. The message for the Situation Report will still be generated the next turn after forming a fleet, though. Apparently that part is hardcoded.   Victory! And by that I mean I’m close to finish up explaining the basic UI. The Victory-menu is even more cramped than the Shipyard-menu: We have a sub-menu dedicated to looking up summaries for every empire we have met (including ourselves), looking up graphs and “Status”, which is mostly for expeditions to find hidden secret techs left by the Antarans. This part is full with neat, but often slightly misleading information. Under Unser Reich/Our Realm you can find the line Unruhe-Stufe/Unrest-Level, for example: It tells us we suffer from an Unrest-Level of 7.0, which seems really high. But this doesn’t actually correspond to our unrest: Every planet is at zero unrest right now. I’m guessing here this is, like the number for bureaucracy, actually a multiplicator telling us how much unrest we could theoretically generate when our people are unhappy. This is a blind guess, though. Interestingly, this menu automatically knows everything about alien empires, even after we just met them. If we see an empire showing us under Schlimmste Feinde/Worst Enemies and it’s policy is set to “Holy War”, we know there’s trouble on the horizon. This sub-menu also compares our fleet strength to every selected empire. The total fleet strength includes every single transport- and colony ship. The AI doesn’t care for that, though: You could theoretically build enough colony ships to scare an AI-empire into submission. Or, uh, into war with you I guess. Because of AI-behaviour, we have to start some throw-away ships as soon as we start meeting aliens: The number of ships is a major factor for the game to determine what power level we have. The AI doesn’t care if we are able to churn out death stars in one turn, it only cares for the ships we have actually available. This will be the most likely reason for our first war: A dismissive enemy thinking us weak until we blow up all their ships.  The trends-sub-menu. We’re the only ones here until we start meeting our neighbors and in the future, we can use this window and the graphs displayed here to measure our progress in comparison with alien empires. There’s a drop down menu to select what you want to compare between empires (I have technology selected on the screenshot) and in addition to that, there’s a small card giving basic info over every selected empire. As with the other sub-menu, we are told info our empire couldn’t possibly have. It’s basically space magic. Of course until we meet someone, this space magic is useless. But we get a neat little overview over ourselves: Controlled Planets/Kontrollierte Planeten: Colonized (Inside our borders) Average Tech Lvl./Durchschnittliche Tech.-Stufe: How far our research has progressed Population/Bevölkerung: Every 1000 pop units gets you 1 point here. Power Scale/Skala der Macht: Population, planets, ships, troops, everything is mashed together to see how much “power” we have. Platzierung/Placing: We’re at 2nd place, thanks to the second planet we immediately got. Still, at turn 1 the placing is mostly at random. It takes a while for this info to make sense. In early game you can just shrug at it and be done.  Status is actually the only part directly involved with our victory conditions. It directly shows you how many secret Antaran techs we have found, how many votes we got in the last election for the New Orion Senate presidency (greyed out because this condition is off) and how many civilizations we still need to destroy to win. Later in the game, we can send off a powerful fleet to try to retrieve one or more of those secret techs. If our tech-level is too low or if we don’t send enough ships, the guardians of those secrets will happily blow them up, though. Late game, we will slowly gain equipment for our ships to raise the chance at finding something during an expedition. The Ithkul have a strong bonus to find them, so they can send us expeditions as soon as they have the weapons to survive clashes with the Antaran guardians and just collect them all before other races get a chance. Interestingly, you can also stumble upon the guarded systems by accident. In this case you can get the secret tech by blowing up the guardian and colonizing the planet hiding it. I have no idea what happens if you send an expedition after all secrets have been found already. Auto-fail? Will the game roll some background-checks to see if the expedition can steal one of the already claimed Antaran techs? Anyway, the third method after expeditions and exploration is using your spies to steal technologies until you get your hand on the Antaran techs. Conquest is also possible: When your ground troops take an enemy world, you sometimes get a random technology from that empire. Important to note is: Even strong spies have trouble with a healthy, large empire. But if you invade someone and crush them until only a small remnant is left, they’ll suddenly be vulnerable to even weak spies. That will be the best point to “milk” an enemy empire until you got everything you wanted.  After our first adventure through the menus, we’re back to our capital planet and some planning. The tiny window in the bottom right shows us what our homeworld actually is in terms of environmental data: Our planet is Venus-like, with high atmosphere pressure and high temperatures. For Humans, this planet would fall somewhere into the large deep red zone (extremely hostile), for Silicoids this planet is very close to perfect. (You can see the preference of the dominant species on the planet in that picture: It’s the small black cross.) Since Silicoids need a lot of forethought thanks to their very slow population growth, I have already filled up the entire planet with planned development areas (DEAs). If a DEA is finished, the population living in the region will start using it and poo poo is produced. You can see that with the two mining-DEAs from the next region over. And if you’re wondering why I put food production into this fertile plain, well the reason is even with other non-sterile planets available, it will take a long time until other planets are developed enough to build something non-essential (for us) like food. Which will be awkward if we stumble upon some alien colony in the early game, we wouldn’t be able to feed them. So these two DEAs on our capital, right now just “planned”, will be built in a couple of turns and then produce food we can’t use yet. But at least we will get some money from it and when we find and integrate aliens, I don’t immediately throw us into a famine. For a very long time, this will be our only food production for obvious reasons. This screenshots also reveals how ludicrous the difference is between bad and good picks at game start: On this mineral rich, but not very lively planet we have a basic production of 11 mineral units per mining DEA to 1 per agricultural DEA. Sehr Fruchtbar/Very Fertile adds +2 to this for a total production of 3 per DEA. On better worlds we could get some additional points, but not much more. On contrast, our mountain mines spew out 24 mineral units per DEA, which is more than twice the basic production we should get on this planet. Just to give you an idea what would await you if you had set both mining and agriculture too Weak at race customization. (Don’t ever do that.)  Our other planet gets tons of research DEAs to make good use of our astronomical good research.  The rest of the planet is industry, some mining and a triple-set of important other crap: A military DEA for a lot of neat stuff we can cram into it later (when our research gets to that), a government DEA and a recreational DEA for better organization and less unrest. Military DEAs and government zones always need to be taken for an enemy to take control of a planet, so especially on larger planets you should always have at least one of both. Government DEAs are better since they do more poo poo in peace times. Recreational DEAs is something we don’t need that much. Occasionally I will drop one on one of our larger colonies, but even with all our negative picks Silicoids aren’t cranky enough to warrant more. On smaller planets you can be a bit less strict with putting down Military and Government DEAs, since small planets often don’t have enough space. Smaller planets also give an enemy a high chance of gaining a foothold right on top of them, which means the planet would be steamrolled regardless. In systems with not much stellar real estate you should put down one of each at least once, though. Governmental and military zones have system-wide influence and there’s no reason to risk unrest if you don’t have to.  Our new colony is so new and fresh, calculations haven’t even started yet. Every new colony you get control of looks like this in the first turn of its existence. Since I can’t do anything interesting at this point, I just put down my new-colony-standard-pack of two shipyard-upgrades and ten army units for later. We start the game with the ability to build ship hulls up to Light Cruiser size, but our capital is the only planet able to actually build the full range of starter hulls. Every new colony can only build ships up to Frigate-size. The first upgrade is an installation to form hulls with energy (instead of brute force, I guess?) and the second is the Orbital Shipyard, which allows us to build ships in space. Of course the function of shipyard-upgrades is rather abstract and the lore is just nice sounding fluff. Building an orbital shipyard won’t actually do anything besides allowing the planet to build +1 hull size. Anyway, Almandin II will become a major research center and a medium-sized industrial power-house over time. To be continued because the update was to loving large for the forum Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 19:39
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Chapter 03a: The Addition And with all those lengthy explanations behind us, I can now actually start playing the game! Turn 2 starts and as planned, our sole colony ship lands on Almandin IV and we get planet number three. Also important: Our first hero has arrived to join our High Council as glorious leader! Let’s see how glorious that guy is, OK?  HP-704-POOJ is a Meklar who got abducted by the evil Antarans. Mad AI-Experts performed gruesome experiments on him and now he is crazy and cruel instead of… well, not. The experiments transformed him into a master of industry and decided to help us out. Our industrial output is a whopping 15% higher as long as we employ him, but his mad cruelty also raises unrest a whopping 10%. Since our Silicoids can deal with a lot of unrest before they can even think about resisting the authorities, I let him stay on. But I will keep an eye on both our new Captain of Industry and unrest-levels in the future.  Almandin IV isn’t as nice as our capital, but it’s still in the green area (which means an absolute hellhole for Humans) and it comes with a nice anomaly: The Adaptive Ecosystem /Anpassendes Ökosystem! This gives research on this planet a 25% bonus and reduced pollution by 50%. This planet will be filled with as much research and industry zones as I can cram in.  Since the planet is even larger than our other planets, I find some free space for a recreational and a government DEA. The rest is industry and research. Oh, and some mining just in case: Mineral abundance here is still average, which for our mining experts translates to “Still a shitload”.  Now we actually see the little 3D-picture of a planet without all those windows in the way! The planet is actually rotating, which gives a nice effect (and makes the occasional texture-errors barely noticeable). There are some other windows I haven’t talked about yet, like Military Info/Militärinfo and Demographics/Demographieinfo. The first one tells us about military forces on the ground and in orbit around the planet, while the second gives us details about the population. Including the reasons for unrest, so you can use this to deal with complaints before they spiral into a major revolt. Planetary Classification/Planetare Klassifikation gets auto-set by the AI. Theoretically, you can set the classification for yourself if you want, but I honestly tend to forget this even exists. The AI uses classifications to decide what they should do with a planet. This is where our development plans come into play.  3 galactic cycles (or two turns) have passed since the Kingdom of Almandin finished their first FTL-capable ships and all of our FTL-ships are still on the move.  Even without the control interface in our way, nothing has happened yet. It’s impossible for fleets to meet each other in a star lane. Later when we’re at war, we will use this fact to our advantage. The AI will do this on accident too and it will always be infuriating to see them slip past your battlefleets.   Three planets in turn 2! Now this is lucky. As you can see, our wayward brethren from Almandin II still have some very minor unrest left from our annexation, but it’s already dealt with basically. The production shown is still out of whack, since we’re building DEAs and pushing research instead of putting anything into our military assembly lines. Our capital Almandin V will be finished with its last DEAs soon however, and we can start using it as our main industrial center for the early game.  And we’re back to research! This is turn two and we now actually have some points to spend! I reorder our priorities to make some goddamn sense. An upcoming tech from the Economy-category is shown here: Modular Grammar is supposed to help out with laws being written by lawyers. A system of easily readable grammatical modules is implemented and new laws are all constructed using those pre-fabricated modules. The tech will reduce the effects of bureaucracy somewhat. This menu also warns us our research points next turn will shrink to about half of what we have now. This is because the AI is still in full control of all our planets and boosting our planetary infrastructure like mad. This is also one of many early warnings not to trust your AI. Halving your research without telling you about it is just one of many cases where your idiot governors try to gently caress you over.  Time to go one step beyond and show you the matrix! Research works like this: You spend your points on categories and if a category gets enough points, it levels up. Some levels are empty levels, some have one or more techs like the four you can see in the screenshot. When your research reaches a level with technologies in it, your scientist start research projects to actually get them. All that stuff in race customization about delays comes into play now. Only when a research project is finished do you actually get the tech belonging to it. Good: Even in the worst case, delays only delay, the can’t actually make a project fail. You will always get that tech. Bad: Only a few important techs are guaranteed, for everything else the game rolls invisible dice to look if we can get them. If we don’t roll a tech, we can only steal it from others. In vanilla, you had 50 levels. And an interesting problem, because the game gave you so much poo poo you were constantly flooded with new technologies. There are probably tons of weapons I never got to use because the game gave me better ones before I could even build a single new ship with them. The modders encountered a serious problem with this matrix-system, since they changed and added a lot of technologies. The old system would be even more cramped with all those new things to research, so they decided to give you 100 levels in Ultima Orion. Now overall research is a bit slower, but at least when you get a fancy new gun, you now have the time to actually try it out before it is obsolete again.  Your basic FTL-drive is one of the guaranteed technologies. In vanilla, it’s just called “Warp Class 1” or something. Bland and boring. The German translation replaced all those “Class This Warpdrives” and “Class That Shields” with references to actual things from Science Fiction. Mostly references to German SF Perry Rhodan. For example, we can get the Paratron-Shield for those of you who know what that is. I like PR, but I wasn’t really liking some parts of the translation, so if you ever play Ultima Orion for yourself, you’ll probably sooner or later see some differences, like here. It has been long enough I have no idea anymore what the original Fan translation named your first FTL-drive, but I renamed it again to Hypermagnetimpulstriebwerk/Hyper Magnet Impuls Drive, after a concept I came up with 14 years ago. Horrible Techno Babble posted:The HMI-Drive is the most basic form of FTL-travel. The ship uses complex EM-magnet fields to allow a violent jump through hyperspace, but only in areas of space where local vacuum-energy fields allow an easier entry than normal. Oh, I just remembered: The original renaming from the bland “Class 1 Drive” was the Transitionsantrieb. The Transition Drive is a PR-concept where a ship violently teleports to a pre-calculated set of 5D-coordinates. The process with the most basic Transition Drive is incredibly painful and while you can jump thousands of light years at once, you also need to take special drugs if you jump too far. Or the pain kills you. The teleports send the ship and its crew as energy through hyperspace and all this dematerializing and rematerializing can over time deform the ship itself, leading to constant maintenance and repairs. Those deformations, while really small, are the reason for the pain you feel when going through a jump: Our brains doesn’t take this slight twisting of matter very well. The necessary calculations for a safe jump can take upwards to two days, depending on how good your computer is. At the end of the 20th century, ships could generally do this in about half an hour for a jump of 5k light years. Of course this was because we Humans got a head-start by using very advanced alien technology instead of developing all this poo poo ourselves. In modern Perry Rhodan, there’s a race called the Jankaron who still use the old, outdated Transition Drives. Instead of thousands of light years, their jump drives can only jump 12,5 ly. And yes, you indeed need to get close to light speed to make a successful hyperspace jump. The slower your ship is, the more energy is needed for the Transition Drive to work. A ship at rest can still jump, but it takes a very high risk. In hindsight, I think I replaced the original translation because it just doesn’t work with star lanes, so I rewrote the lore to make up a drive-system working like the Transition Drive, but compatible to the concept of star lanes. Anyway, this is our first Perry Rhodan reference.  Another 1,5 cycles later, another industrial zone is finished on our capital.  As the last research screen warned us, we don’t have a lot research this turn. 73 points instead of the 145 of turn one. I did some changes behind the scenes and next turn we’ll be back to 125 points. At that point our research will stabilize for a couple turns since our capital planet produces most of them and the AI doesn’t control it anymore. The AI did some automatic adjustments on our percentages, but only small ones. The reason for this is simple: Fractions of points don’t exist, so the AI will change the percentages until every category can get a full integral number. In the late game we will stop noticing those adjustments. We will have so much research the AI shoving some points back and forth will stop registering as full percent changes.  Turn 3 is the moment where I go into our development plans and actually start some basic ones. I have a full spreadsheet of Meklar-plans I could theoretically use, but Meklar still need 50% agriculture, so that collection of plans would generate a stupidly high excess food production. Instead I go with this. Some easy pointers for the AI to set down at least one government DEA on most planets, a reminder to look after morale and defense on sieged worlds, stuff like that. Primary means the AI will try to flood the entire planet with this poo poo, Secondary means the AI will build something in this category if it feels like it and Tertiary translates to one, maybe. As an example, I took the classification Border Zone/Grenzgebiet and set Industry as primary, to get border planets capable of building defense, Planetary Defense as secondary so the AI remembers to actually build defenses and Government as Tertiary, so the border worlds get at least one government DEA. Another example: Mineral Rich planets get mining as primary, infrastructure as secondary (to force the AI to build exotic stuff like recycling plants on its own) and again, government as tertiary because revolts on our main source of minerals would be very bad.  There are still two planets worth colonizing in our system and with the Almandin IV colonized, it’s time to mark them as targets for our colony ships. The AI will, always and without fail, land a colony ship on the last planet marked. So in this case I only marked Almandin IV first and only now, after the colony is established, do I mark our two not-so-nice planets for future colony ships.  Our capital after my adjustments. The AI is switched off, military expenditure is at 10%, which is fast enough for now, DEA-construction is at 10% and research at 5%. And as you can see, all bars are already orange so spending more isn’t actually doing much beyond this. We also see 10 DEAs are active by now. Our capital planet has a size of 7, which means 7 regions with free space for 2 DEAs each. 2 of the empty space are our future agricultural DEAs, the rest is mostly planned research.  Turn five! The development of our home system continues and our first explorer has reached an alien system: Tardig has been explored and mapped. We can now go look at the planets in it. After 7,5 cycles of the new age, the people of Almandin have reached out across the interstellar gap for the first time in eons. A New Dawn has come.  Tardig I one is a Gelb/Yellow 2 planet. The two anomalies listed aren’t looking bad, but livability and only average mineral abundance? Welp, I guess if there’s nothing better available. The planet has very low gravity however and without some future techs to help us deal with that, building anything on it will be painful. The other planets are all bad. Toxic hellholes and the mineral abundancy is different grades of low and poor. If we don’t find a better planet soon, I’ll probably take Tardig I just to have some sort of military outpost here, but the other planets won’t see colonization until probably hundreds of turns have passed by.  Our explorer gets orders to leave this weirdly colored dust cloud and to move along this new star lane to another system. In six turns we’ll know more about this sector of space.  After five turns, everything goes along fine. The AI is boosting the economic development of our two new colonies like mad to get some DEAs build. Even with our new evil robot leader, unrest generation is too low to actually generate any unrest. Sweet!  Just 9 cycles after the Kingdom of Almandin entered this new age of space exploration and already things start happening. A second leader show up, we can build Interceptors now (badly armed ones, but hey baby steps) our capital completes a new research DEA and the star system Kled is finally explored. Also our understanding of Physics levels up, but no new projects yet.  DL-661-WYAL is a Cynoid. A 2000 cycles old Cynoid (which is something like 3000 years, I think). He helped fighting the Humans at the end of the dreaded Pax Humanica and helped to fight the Antarans during the Great War. A venerable hero! Having him in our employ makes us 15% better at diplomacy, which is OK I guess. He also reduced unrest by 5% and eases the pain our evil robot on the left generates. The loss of 4% system taxes makes me a bit wary though. Reducing the unrest of our industry-monster could be important in the future. Again, we get a leader with some good and some bad stuff attached. Since our new leader makes our first leader less painful, we actually have a lot of luck here. Though if we lose too much money, I’ll be forced to boot our hero out of the council. Obviously.  There’s not much to Kled. At least the planets have some minerals on them, so colonizing will not actively hurt us.  For the early game however, Kled is still rather close to being useless. The scout gets orders to move to the one system bordering Almandin we haven’t reached yet. Our little Privateer with his outpost-module will reach it next turn, but since Kled was a dead end, our scout has to travel over there anyway.  Turn seven rolls around and our first ship (a barebones system colonizer) gets finished. Almandin continues building some more DEAs (we now produce food, or more likely, pets and decorative plants) and Mathematics and Energy get a level-up. But what I really want to see is how the exploration of Seginus turned out.  Seginus turns out to have at least one planet I’m satisfied enough with to mark it as a future colony. Yellow/Gelb 1 is close to green and it has lots of minerals. Plus a nice planetary anomaly as a bonus. The planet is a bit small and the gravity a bit too low for Silicoids, but the drawbacks aren’t that bad. For Meklar, a yellow 1 size 5 world would be quite good, too. Just for the opposite reasons. Their preference for small planets and weak gravity tends to be really annoying if you want to build up a good industrial power base. A size five planet is large for Meklar-tastes. The gravity is already a bit too high for them!  Since our people are making new people by very slowly letting crystals grow in a huge mineral bath, waiting for new colony ships to arrive can take too long. I decide to sacrifice my outpost-ship to give this planet an early start. Chances are the outpost won’t grow into a planet until an actual colonizer arrives, but the new colony will have an already build military DEA and some extra population. Also a friendly AI will avoid colonizing your outpost-worlds. Won’t ever happen with Silicoids, but eh, you take what you can get.  After surveying Seginus, our scout in between Kled and Seginus gets updated orders. With the new star lane connecting Seginus and another unknown system, there’s no reason for our scout to spend time waiting around. Depending on ship speed, sometimes a fleet passing by can travel still a bit farther. It will end up in interstellar space again instead of in the bypassed system. In the future we can use this knowledge to shave off a turn or two from longer journeys.  The closer a planet gets to actually building all possible DEAs, the less you need to put into your economic development. I’m reducing the boost to 8% and over the next turns, I’ll be reducing it more and more. On the military front, we’re starting to rush through the first items in our assembly line one after another. The system colony is already finished and gone by this time, our first 10 ground units are finished next turn, too and some rest production will end up in that Explorer next on the list. A colony ship gets put into the list for the new outpost I just created and that’s it for now. Oh, and as you can see, it took us about 2 turns worth of production to build 10 infantry units. This is what I meant with the vanilla AI wasting a shitton of production. 1 infantry unit would be only a fraction of a turn and even smaller worlds will be able to build three slots worth of them at once. But new units are only filled into the assembly line once per turn by the AI. So in vanilla, the AI would often put three 1x ground units into an assembly line and then next turn, you would have three ground units more and every point of production left over after those three was vented into space. This waste could get aggravating over time, with dozens of planets shooting most of their production capability into space while at the same time not creating that many army troops for you. By forcing the AI to build ground troops in stacks of 10, most underdeveloped AI-controlled planets will never have enough capacity to waste your industry. This is also helping the enemy a lot, since in vanilla enemies often didn’t have enough troops to both attack you and defend their worlds at the same time.  Almandin III is bad enough for our health we need multiple of our very basic colony ships to create a colony. The next one is preparing to land already. On green planets, one colony module (which is all our colony ships can carry at the moment) create 1k pop units and instantly found a new colony. Yellow planets need 1-2 and red planets at the very least 3, sometimes even 4. Later in the game we can create larger ships with more than one colony module to just brute force this. Alternatively, like with outposts, we can just sit back and wait until population growth and immigration does their work. Not something we want to do with Silicoids. Go back one sentence and slip the adjective “abysmal” between “until” and “population growth”. Doesn’t look so good now, doesn’t it?  This time you already know what this sitrep means, so I only mention the new thing: A new star lane has formed! These events help make the star map a lot less oppressive. The longer the game goes, the more new star lanes will spontaneously form. In this case, between two star systems we don’t actually know yet! Eh, baby steps.  Our production putters along. We now have some army units and I’m thinking of showing them off next update. Our capital needs some Royal Guards. We can now build a frigate every odd turn and our economic development is basically unneeded now. The weird red exclamation mark tells us we’re trying to give more money into that area then it could possibly use up. A good planet can build the occasional new auto-building in a DEA with just 1-2% just fine, so after the initial rush to get all DEAs build, I can pull out almost everything. At this point I’d like to boost research more, but our capital is the only planet generating us money for the moment, so I’ll have to suck it up and wait until the other planets are ready to share the burden.  Space exploration continues. And look, there’s our first interstellar outpost! (I’m so excited!) Next: Hopefully a lot less text. Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Apr 15, 2016 |
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Apr 15, 2016 19:50
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Man, I don't even remember the game having this many menus. How did I ever figure out half of this poo poo?
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Apr 15, 2016 22:22
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PurpleXVI posted:Man, I don't even remember the game having this many menus. At least everything is readable. Space Empires V needed an entire extra-patch because the game was like the space-version of those weird WWII-simulator games at first. You know the ones, the ones who are only played by something like 1-4 people worldwide.
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Apr 15, 2016 23:07
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At a rate of one turn per day, I know the ones.
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Apr 16, 2016 00:31
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All hail our glorious Robo-Leader: The Poojman. Even when you fools voted for Rocks the great Skynet sends an agent to lead us.
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Apr 16, 2016 01:54
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10 turns in and you can finally start playing the game instead of covering for the AI's fuckups. As much.
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Apr 16, 2016 10:13
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Veloxyll posted:10 turns in and you can finally start playing the game instead of covering for the AI's fuckups. You have seen nothing yet. This LP is a learning experience even for me: Now that I'm documenting everything I'm doing while playing, I'm seeing that an astonishing amount of gameplay is knowing about the AI's shortcomings and dealing with its bullshit. Looks like working around the AI and manipulating its behaviour has just become so ingrained to me I stopped noticing it when playing. 
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Apr 16, 2016 13:21
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