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I actually gave Master of Orion 3 another go (got in in a bundle with the new shiny revamp), after trying to play SOTS 2. It was like, Masochism, but with video games. I find it really hard to say which is worse though. Probably SOTS 2.
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Apr 16, 2016 13:59
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The SOTS 2 patch notes were High Art though.quote:Divide by zero counter: 7 The long archived games thread about it is here and contains many, many more gems.
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Apr 16, 2016 16:13
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SIGSEGV posted:The SOTS 2 patch notes were High Art though. That wasn't a bug, those were Silicoids.
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Apr 16, 2016 16:25
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Zanzibar Ham posted:That wasn't a bug, those were Silicoids. Can't be true, if they were Silicoids they would have missed those admirals by a mile
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Apr 16, 2016 16:32
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Libluini posted:Can't be true, if they were Silicoids they would have missed those admirals by a mile It only said they were allowed to capture admirals, not that they were successful.
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Apr 16, 2016 16:35
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If I remember right, the meteors would just zip about in space like meteors should, until they captured an admiral whereupon they would become remorseless pirate deathmachines.
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Apr 16, 2016 17:41
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King Doom posted:If I remember right, the meteors would just zip about in space like meteors should, until they captured an admiral whereupon they would become remorseless pirate deathmachines. Sounds awesome, and they should have found a way to explain it lore-wise and turn it into a cool feature.
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Apr 16, 2016 17:44
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Drunk in Space posted: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. Heh. The real problem was quite obviously that after they put together all of the fiddly little subsystems they had developed with the best of intentions, they didn't really work together to make an enjoyable gameplay experience. So the team's focus had to quietly shift from "Let's make the best, deepest, richest, most detailed space game ever" to "There are some neat ideas here but the game as a whole is boring, frustrating, and opaque. How can we make it playable before we run out of money in 3 months?" Speaking of fiddly little subsystems, since you brought up Imperial Focus Points, let's talk about them! One of the game's core ideas during development was that in MoO3, governments would be fundamentally limited in what they could directly and efficiently control. Setting aside the political leanings of Emerich's development team that some people thought this implied (I recall a small kerfuffle on the message boards about this), the basic idea was that while an early empire with a planet or two might be able to directly control all of its production, research, exploration, etc, as the empire grew larger more and more of that fine-scale control would have to fall on local bureaucracy (aka the AI) because the King/Dictator/Senate/Space Bug Commune/Etc just didn't have enough hours in the day to deal with all of that administrative bullshit anymore. This was both a flavor-based bit of gameplay design and a way to minimize the micromanagement that is admittedly a valid criticism of late-game turn based strategy games in general. This focus was to be represented by a pool of Imperial Focus Points, or IFPs. Doing anything like changing production, changing research, designing a ship, giving fleet orders, micromanaging your leaders, giving speeches to get temporary bonuses on various things, etc, would all cost IFPs. Once you were out of IFPs, that was all you could do personally on that turn, and you had to hope your bureaucracy didn't gently caress everything else up too badly. As technology advanced, your pool of IFPs would expand as well to represent faster communications, better computers, and the like. Generally the IFP pool would not grow as quickly as your Empire, so by the late game you would be forced to pick your battles. I believe it was also hoped that this system would help smaller empires to remain more competitive with larger ones by allowing them more direct control of their empire. IFPs were supposed to exist in concert with a leader system which randomly generated characters to serve as captains of your ships, admirals of your fleets, planetary or system governors, etc. These characters would have attributes, strengths, flaws, and priorities. For example, if the governor of one of your planets was incompetent and prioritized industry, he would tend to focus building factories and production enhancing buildings if you didn't babysit him, and would take penalties on most of what he was doing to represent his corruption and/or terrible ideas wasting time and resources. If you had a terrible character, you could get rid of them for a certain number of IFPs and roll the dice on getting somebody less terrible, or you could move him to a less important world and replace him with a leader from elsewhere in your empire with traits and priorities that better suited the planet in question. This would also cost IFPs, but at least you could be certain you weren't just getting another waste of oxygen/methane/hydrogen/etc. If you had a really good character, you could put the Imperial Eye on them (I may be recalling the term for this wrong), which would help them to gain experience and boost their stats faster, and would significantly increase their chances of being promoted by the AI without your direct intervention. This also took some IFPs, but was intended to be an investment that would help you to build a more efficient AI bureaucracy around the best leaders that came up. All of this sounds pretty interesting in theory, but unfortunately the AI wasn't even close to up to the task of making the character system work, and apparently being limited in what you could do in a given turn was more fun in theory than it was in practice. So they stripped out the whole character system and replaced it with fixed heroes like MoO2, jettisoned IFPs, and left the ineffectual automation AI in place as an option you could choose if you wanted to. Someone mentioned that the development team's ambitions sound a lot like Distant Worlds a decade early, and really... They're not wrong. The difference between the two is that Distant Worlds has automation that can be added organically as needed, whereas in MoO3 Automation was intended to be the default that you could only stray from in limited ways. Having played DW and finding it to be a delightful 4X, it's pretty clear that their organic model of automation as needed is a better and more elegant way of approaching the same gameplay challenge.
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Apr 16, 2016 17:46
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Surprise update! (I know most of your are probably still dealing with that giant wall of text I created last time, but gently caress it. I want to push this LP until we've at least seen some combat.) Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 04: The First Age of Exploration  A small outpost of the Kingdom has been built on Seginus II. Since I’m impatient and don’t want to wait an eternity, I’m switching on immigration. (The weird blue moon thingy.) Now every turn a small amount of population will move from our highest population planets (in other words, for now only from our capital) to planets you marked as immigration-targets. It’s basically a priority-setting for the background migration simulation.  I’m doing the same for our two lovely, but mineral-rich planets back home.  Turn 9 rolls around and the new settings take effect. All three marked planets get a first wave of additional colonists, about 50 each this cycle. (50 translates to about 5% of the population needed for a full colony, by the way. So yeah, it’ll take a while.)  Our main ledger tells us this turn (and will continue to do so) some bad news: Our income is less than our expenses and we’ve started taking a loss. In truth, we make enough money our credit balance will slowly rise all the time. This is probably because the main ledger has trouble accounting for stuff like you manually doing poo poo to your planets, so the info on display will always be slightly off.  Anyway, Almandin IV has suffered under the AI overboosting the economy for long enough and I’m switching the planet to direct control. I’m boosting military expenses and research and reduce terraforming and economy by a shitload. Now the colony is a bit more productive, infrastructure still gets build blindingly fast and the planet actually starts making money. The main ledger in your financial department doesn’t change though. This means the info displayed on it is now totally wrong.  Almandin II gets the same treatment.  On our capital, I finally fulfill my wish of boosting research with 10% of our economic might. Terraforming and economic development have stopped for now, since we have no infrastructure to build anymore and the planet is already perfect.  Turn 10! All three outposts get another 5% population boost and a Discoverer-class frigate gets build. And all our sciences level up.  Our little empire is now growing fast enough our combined industry and population growth gets disturbingly close to our mineral production. Now I’m feeling glad I prepared those two hostile hellholes for future colonization, because boy will our hungry rocks need those minerals soon.  Most of our tech level ups were empty levels, but our understanding of basic physics has grown enough our scientists believe there’s a way to build small anti-space batteries in our military DEAs. A research project has started to test the feasibility of this. It will take 6-9 galactic cycles to finish. (Or 6 turns.  ) Something I forgot last time: Some techs have this red flask icon inside. This means there’s another category needed at a certain level to make a research project available. In this case we’re lucky, Modular Grammar needs Mathematics at level 3, which we will have literally next turn. Long before we can even get Sociology to level 5 and start the project.  Our capital is close to completing a new colony ship. The ship will go to our outpost on Seginus II to boost it right over the edge into full colony status. To future-proof myself in case of sudden war, I’m squishing two stacks of infantry units in. By the time we’ll need troops even our lovely soldiers should at least be trained professionals.  In the near future, I will start building some Privateers on our two lesser colonies. One of those outpost-ships will be send to Kled to claim the less horrible of the two planets, the other one will be send here.  With turn 11 the migration-mechanics slowly gain tracks and the boosts get higher. Also, one of our explorers surveys Subra-B.  It’s kind of hard to tell from this angle, but this star lane is one of an ultra rare kind: Extra-long, but it only takes 1 turn to get through. It’s an interstellar shortcut! Looking at what’s on the other side takes priority. We’re not the only ones who can take this shortcut, after all.  Time to send out some more explorers! This is the window you see after hitting TF-Creation on the map. You can take ships from your reserve, put them into fleets, name them and then they’ll be available for orders. Certain types of ships will be put into certain parts of your fleet-formation automatically. A recon ship will be put into the periphery, escort ships into escort and core ships into, well the core obviously. Higher mathematics this ain’t. Our Entdecker/Discoverer is the most basic ship: A frigate-sized lump of metal with engines and poo poo attached to it. It has three laser-batteries and a single battery of mass-drivers. Lasers have more range and hit better, mass-drivers do more damage but have shorter ranges and trouble hitting things. Since we don’t even have basic shield technologies at this point, even our lovely starter weapons can wreak havoc. Sadly, so too can enemy weapons. If we meet an enemy with better defenses than our flimsy ultra-light armor we’re in serious trouble.  The new task force will take 15 turns to get to that other unknown star system over there. Welp, Silicoids are long-lived enough for this trip, I think.  Subra-B is another disappointment. Red 1, too small, far too low gravity and toxic. There’s still some minerals to grab at least, so Subra-B I will probably end up as some sort of mining outpost for the Kingdom of Almandin at some point.  In case you were wondering: We get basic shields at level 6 and our first size of shield generators at level 8. We’re at level 3 right now, so we’ll have to wait some more time until I can start talking about shield mechanics. In vanilla, you start with all three generator sizes (small, normal and large) and the flimsiest of shields, the “Class I Shield”. Ultima Orion re-arranged this a bit to give you a better sense of progress. Your starting defense technology is the ability to wrap tinfoil around your space ships and that’s it. Having to fight your first battles without any shields is an interesting experience, but in most cases early game research is fast enough you’ll have shields before any major battle anyway. If you think that's unsafe or if your race isn't as awesome at research then we are, nobody is stopping you from building some more basic starting designs. The shields all got renamed in the Fan-translation. The EM-Shield is a basic electromagnetic shield-sphere stopping some particles from hitting your armor. In vanilla it was pathetic but thanks to the mod changes it actually has some use in Ultima Orion.  Our first colony has reached population 2! (Or 2k, to be precise.) For the Silicoids, this is blindingly fast and shows how ecstatic everyone is in this new space age! Our pessimism explains our military buildup even though we haven’t met any aliens yet. Of course.  This turn sees another rising of our migration. New colonists arrive daily, both on our mining colonies in Almandin and on our first interstellar colony on Seginus II. And the Hughst-system is surveyed. Let’s take a look!  The shortcut between Subra-B and Hughst opens up a completely new sector of space for us to explore. I’m sending our explorer to the red sun because it looks more like our own sun. This probably means the chance of good planets is higher. This also means we now need yet another explorer to continue searching down the other star lane at Subra-B. Annoying, because every ship we build and send off before getting upgrades means we need to send a faster, better ship after them later if we want to ever replace our explorers with better scouts. On the other hand, the old ones are probably long dead by then.   Hughst has only one usable planet, but only barely. Yellow 1 and not sterile. So if we ever need more food, I can at least keep a region open for emergency agriculture. But the low gravity will slow down our industry badly until we finally start getting technologies to deal with this problem.  Turn 13 is more of the same: More mining on Almandin II, more hopeful colonists streaming to our new worlds. Also, our AI created a colony task force with our newly build colony ship and actually send it to where we want it. I’m impressed! Normally the AI just blindly sets course for the last planet you have marked, but this time I either marked the terrible planet in the Hughst-system too late for the AI to take notice, or the AI actually decided on its own to go for the better world. Having the AI work as intended is always a reason to celebrate.  From now on, I’ll have to look into our fleet window more and more. It will get progressively harder to tell if some fleets are idling somewhere by just looking at the map. The window tells us we have three explorers exploring around and our new colony ship is on its way. In the future, this poo poo will get complicated.  Even though it’s still the early game, we’re advanced enough our capital can build 10x infantry stacks in a single turn. After that, I start a new colony ship just in case our explorers find a good planet soon.  Time to explain another part of the interface! Under Military Info we see what ships are hanging around in orbit and what ground troops are on the planet. The orbital view is terribly abstract. It includes all our system defense ships and random interstellar ships passing through even though everything besides space stations can just avoid battle by moving away. Everything except space stations will always be in this view for every single planet. Space stations are the only thing actually “orbital”. But let’s be nice and assume our defense force hangs around our capital. That would make sense, after all.  Another new menu! You can create ground troops on a planet directly from the Military Info window and later on we can create military transport task forces directly in space. But for now, the basics. As I’m showing here, if you don’t have enough units for a military formation, the games just screams a warning in bright red at you.  So, obviously we can’t form an entire army from the few units we have and a corps would be a bit much just for a demonstration. (Even the Silicoids don’t need quite that many guards for their royal palace.) Our first units are all at level “Trained” already, which makes them usable in ground combat. Recruits are too weak and terrible to do much of anything. In the drop down menu you see the ranks a unit can get. It goes all the way up to Elite. Better armies then ours can go up to Veteran-rank simply by training. We’ll be lucky if we ever get to Experienced. In our case, only surviving battles will get our units enough experience to rank up more. But they’ll also lose a ton of experience by sitting around again until they drop back to Trained or Experienced. By which I mean we need a better source of troops then our own people soon. The statistical view gives you a nice graphic of how soldiers of a certain race are supposed to look, some statistics and our equipment. Equipment changes automatic depending on what technologies we have researched. Our units have an evasion of 170, which is terrible (it can go up to something like 300 with some races, like the Trilarians), luckily evasion is a terrible stat so this doesn’t mean as much as it should. The to-hit formula gives more weight to hit-chance, so our terrible hit-chance of 11 is worse than our terrible evasion. In context, would our terrible units fight another race equally terrible at ground combat, let’s say the Trilarians, the fighting would devolve to both side filling the country side with holes, but not much actual death. Silicoids have non-terrible natural armor though. This means the hits of Trilarian units will do almost no damage, while every Trilarian unit hit will get terribly maimed by our rocks with assault guns. Meklar get a third attack, less armor, but higher evasion, initiative and to-hit chance. This means no fighting a ground war with Meklar, a Meklar unit can one-shot our own units in a single turn if the dice rolls are bad enough. At the least our preferences do much to even out our terribleness if we fight on preferred terrain: For most races, both Mountain and High-G are horrible environments. Having to fight on Surfaces means a Meklar-force landing on one of our giant, Venusian hellholes will have so many drawbacks the fight is almost even, while one of our armies landing on a small Meklar-planet with lots of caves will go worse than the landing at the Bay of Pigs.  And that’s that. Our Kingdom now has re-established the ancient tradition of the Royal Guard. Those guys will stand around the Imperial Palace looking fierce.  This is our main infantry weapon right now, I poo poo you not. The sad thing is, without it our units would be so bad actual stones would fight better.  One last problem to deal with this update: On Almandin IV there’s some slight unrest. Let’s do something about this.  The Demographics-window tells us there’s a whopping 18,9 unrest in 5 regions. Which is not a lot, actually. The reasons listed are: Silicoids (our own terribleness, like individualism and pessimism), high taxes (will always be there) and a leader-effect. That last one is our own evil robot overlord at work.  Fun fact: If you’re out of ideas and don’t want to change the entire empire just because of one weird colony, you can just create a ground force to deal with unrest. A single division is generally enough to deal with some minor unrest. Later we will need entire armies to keep occupied enemy planets calm enough until they’re fully integrated.  To close out this update, here is the design for our Discoverer-frigate. The Mass-Driver shown here is a terrible weapon. It does twice the damage of our laser-batteries, takes a lot more space, has terrible range and tends to miss a lot. Reload time is about the same, though. Not for this ship, by the way: The three laser-batteries are light ones, the Mass-Driver is a standard medium-sized one. The lasers will fire more often, do a little bit less damage than normal, but hit a lot. Our first shields will be really good against lasers: Both armor and shields have some hidden absorption values and while a light laser can still do some damage to armor, even our first shields will have enough absorption to make combat between lightly armed ships with shields a terrible slog. But well, it’s still better than vanillas’ shoot-and-die gameplay. Mass Drivers are situational, since they’re good against armor. They’re just so lovely at hitting ships it’s kind of sad. But at the point you can upgrade them to hit more reliably, they’re already outclassed by new weapons. In Vanilla this happened so fast I think I never actually build ships with them in it. No laser-ships either, now that I think about it. Ultima Orion has actually reached its design goal here, since now you get some time to play around with those techs before they’re obsolete.
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Apr 16, 2016 18:33
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The AK-47, so ubiquitous and durable that even 20,000 years in the future, alien rocks are digging them out of ditches on far-flung planets and finding that they work just fine.
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Apr 16, 2016 19:02
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Are you sure though? I mean, we are basically playing sentient rocks. Who is to say, that the AK is just the expression of the fact that we are basically chucking other silicoids at the problem until it stops moving?
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Apr 16, 2016 19:21
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sooo, is the Ultima Orion mod without a English version or something? Are there even any recommended English mods for MOO3 these days?
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Apr 16, 2016 19:40
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Nick Esasky posted:sooo, is the Ultima Orion mod without a English version or something? Are there even any recommended English mods for MOO3 these days? It's the other way around. Master of Orion 3 was in English even in Germany, the mod included a German Fan-translation. I'm talking about this in my Second update in some more detail. In short, you can crudely build your own Ultima Orion-like mod without the German translation if you carefully follow my advice under the header Bad News.
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Apr 16, 2016 20:02
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Someone absolutely HAS to draw rocks with AK-47s now
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Apr 16, 2016 21:56
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In MoO2, the silicoid advisers were all differently colored rocks. The military one was painted camoflauge:
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Apr 16, 2016 22:44
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wiegieman posted:In MoO2, the silicoid advisers were all differently colored rocks. The military one was painted camoflauge: Interesting. I consider this a step up from those weird magma-men MO1 presented. Seriously, the one time I tried playing Master of Orion I couldn't stop laughing after seeing how the Silicoids started out
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Apr 16, 2016 22:50
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All these sub-menus...at least the game doesn't crash if you click the wrong part of the screen, right?
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Apr 17, 2016 00:44
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As a kid, I always thought they looked more like mushrooms that eat rocks.
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Apr 17, 2016 00:44
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elitebuster posted:All these sub-menus...at least the game doesn't crash if you click the wrong part of the screen, right? You can't believe how relieved I am all those menus, everything scrolls smoothly no crashes I don't even have to go through multiple menus to order ships to move I can just, like click at them and then at their target It's a marvel
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Apr 17, 2016 00:49
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I am seriously struck be the similiarities between this and distant worlds. Which is something else that makes MOO3 better then SOTS 2. MOO3 in some ways failed because I think the technology to do turn based distant worlds wasnt there yet. SOTS 2 failed because of "derp".
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Apr 17, 2016 01:09
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I also note that it's trying somehow to be both Master 1 and 2 in terms of building up planets. The controlling production by sliders, and by citizens. The result seems very messy, at least to describe.
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Apr 17, 2016 01:27
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wiegieman posted:In MoO2, the silicoid advisers were all differently colored rocks. The military one was painted camoflauge: The Silicoid leader characters in Moo3 can still be different colours (there's a green one iirc).
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Apr 17, 2016 03:24
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So uh. This happened: 
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Apr 17, 2016 04:08
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Libluini posted:You can't believe how relieved I am We better fix that. Let's start work on the total conversion mod for MoO3 that turns it into Imperium 2.
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Apr 17, 2016 05:07
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wiegieman posted:In MoO2, the silicoid advisers were all differently colored rocks. The military one was painted camoflauge: Silicoids generally got translated pretty well from MoO2, though if anything, they got tuned down and weakened for MoO3. In MoO2 they didn't even have any planetary preference, they just started out able to colonize ANYTHING without any complaints, and with the trait that made them never need food. So all they really needed to consider when colonizing was mineral wealth, special attributes and planet size(since it would define how much space they had for colonists). While other races needed to wait for tech to colonize Toxic and Barren worlds(to either terraform them or permit them to produce a tiny trickle of food to sustain a population), or worse, the Silicoids could just leap out and colonize them right away. The only real change they suffered was to stop being (vaguely) humanoid.
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Apr 17, 2016 06:54
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Nah, everyone could colonize those worlds, they just needed to produce food elsewhere and ship it in with freighters.
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Apr 17, 2016 06:59
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my dad posted:Nah, everyone could colonize those worlds, they just needed to produce food elsewhere and ship it in with freighters. It was usually nothing but a losing proposition to colonize those worlds, though, they'd have to be ABSURDLY mineral-rich to produce anything more than what they cost you to maintain, unless you terraformed them first. Silicoids could actually make a profit off them.
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Apr 17, 2016 08:22
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Critic of the Dawn posted:All of this sounds pretty interesting in theory, but unfortunately the AI wasn't even close to up to the task of making the character system work, and apparently being limited in what you could do in a given turn was more fun in theory than it was in practice. Interestingly enough, there's a game being developed called Imperia that uses this sort of thing as it's central gameplay feature. It looks very interesting and it's been worked on for a while. Edit: It is also literally a god-emperor of mankind simulator. NewMars fucked around with this message at 10:59 on Apr 17, 2016 |
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Apr 17, 2016 10:54
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NewMars posted:Interestingly enough, there's a game being developed called Imperia that uses this sort of thing as it's central gameplay feature. It looks very interesting and it's been worked on for a while. Holy gently caress, someone is actually trying to re-make Imperium as a good game! It'll be interesting to see if they succeed.
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Apr 17, 2016 11:43
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Since there was talk about the Silicoids in earlier games, I prepared a lore-post about the Geodic race in Master of Orion III. Lore 02: The Geodic Race Curiously unique, the Silicoids represent a true divergence from other life and its origins in the Orion Sector. They are believed to have come about from the shards of a giant sentient crystal that was destroyed above their home planet. Each Silicoid begins as an asexually created shard, incubated in a nutrient bath, and eventually grows into an individual with all of the prior knowledge of its "parent." This efficiency comes at a cost of speed, however, so forethought and careful planning are key to any successful Silicoid society. High in orbit above the Geodic Home World, a spacefaring crystalline being was destroyed; its shards falling to the planet's surface. Those shards that did not burn up in the atmosphere landed in the simmering, mineral-rich "primordial soup" that covered much of the planet's surface at that time. It was the story of conception writ large. The planet had been fertilized and the genetic coding contained in those shards acted as the catalyst for the development of the Geodic species. Evolving steadily, the Geodics learned to communicate through sound and vibrations and grow (like the Ethereans) the things they needed. That is, by manipulating the minerals around them, Geodic advancements revolved around asserting their own system of crystalline order toward defined needs. Such was their "traditional method" of technological development. But this crystalline restructuring and growth method of production and research has a huge downside. It requires an environment that is extremely mineral-rich. Worse, those minerals need to be renewed frequently lest the Geodics who live off them become "flawed." Consequently, production costs for the Geodic Species tend to run high. The greatest difficulty for the Geodic species is their near-immobility. Geodic locomotion is conducted by a being growing new appendages from the central body core in the direction it wishes to travel. Once the new appendage is firmly planted in the ground it also spreads out on the ground's surface. It spreads forward for stability and backward to connect with the "base" or "feet" crystals it already has planted in and on the ground. Once its new "footing" is secure, the old supporting appendage(s) are broken off. Those broken crystalline "legs" are then reabsorbed into the body core through the new appendage's connection with them on the ground. Manipulation of objects is managed in a similar way. "Arm" appendages are grown outwards to maneuver an object and, when the task is complete, the appendages are shattered off and reabsorbed. Biological Note: You can tell when a Geodic is in haste because the breaking off of a limb results in a "shattering from within;" picture a thick piece of glass shattering from the inside out to imagine what this looks like. This makes for faster reabsorption of that limb but, like running, it is considerably more stressful and tiring. How slow are Geodics? Where a Humanoid can walk a kilometer in about fifteen minutes, a Geodic moving at the same non-strenuous pace would take several hours to traverse the same distance. This constant growth and shattering of appendages has its costs. Geodics must spend time frequently within their personal base crystals "rooted" in a bath of mineral and nutrient solutions, replenishing themselves in a manner not unlike that of recalcifying teeth. Gatherings around these mineral solution "food sources" serve an important social function within Geodic society. Geodic Political and Social Structures The Geodic species has a very rigid social structure: a place for everyone, and everyone in their place. Individual thought and expression is regarded as an aberration, and as a result it is not uncommon for Geodics who dissent in this culture to be "sheared" (see Key Phrases). This is a process where a Geodic being is shattered by high-frequency sonic waves (which the Geodics feel purify the physical elements). The shards are then crushed down to a powder and used as part of the Nutrient and Mineral mix that the Geodics feed on. Special note: This is why our individualist Silicoids had to flee the original Silicoid-society. Social Note: Other species who barter with the Geodics in specie (i.e., hard coin) often become quite annoyed with the Geodic habit of immediately ingesting the money given to them while touching it. To a Geodic, the gold and other precious metals in standard AU (Antaran Unit) coinage are considered a "bon-bon" or treat. This faux pas of eating the Orion Sector's common currency in front of other species is one which Geodic merchants are constantly trying to stop themselves from doing. Geodic Families and Reproduction The Geodic species reproduces in a fashion that hearkens back to their origins. Reproduction and creation of new Geodic beings is done at a central "crèche." A crèche is a carefully controlled environment that contains the Growth Pools in which the proper amounts of nutrients, minerals, and radiation are maintained for the growing new Geodic beings. The reproduction process starts when an adult Geodic goes to the central crèche and breaks off its reproductive spur from its central body core. That spur is then ceremoniously dropped into a highly concentrated mineral and nutrient solution contained in a controlled pool along with crystals that focus radiation and light onto the Spur. (The few who have seen this process agree that it is an extraordinary spectacle of light.) The spur grows into a new central body core that, as it matures, will develop appendages and eventually move out of the crèche. Once it reaches full maturity, it can reproduce. A Geodic being can only regenerate its reproductive spur two or three times in its relatively long lifetime, which keeps the numbers of Geodics in check. The newly formed Geodic being contains the memory of its "parent," but it's an imperfect memory. Some details are altered while some are missing altogether. Because they have no innate psychic abilities, the effect is similar to that of moving into a house that was once owned by a smoker. The memories still linger there, not active or overwhelming, but faintly noticeable somewhere in the background. Geodic Technical and Engineering The Geodic Species "grows" its tools, housing, and vehicles in a fashion similar to how they themselves are grown. A shard is fed with minerals, nutrients, focused light, radiation and sonic vibrations to shape its crystalline order. The combinations of these elements determine the nature of what the growing crystal forms. The crèche facilities for this type of "production" vary in size from the small pools found in a most Geodic dwellings to vast specialized businesses and state-sponsored complexes. Their personal communication and the capabilities of Geodic tools, weapons, and vehicles are a direct result of how the crystals manipulate vibrations, sonic frequencies, light waves and beams. Although crystalline order is an environmentally friendly method of creation and its progeny are tough, it is not a very rapid technique. And it is a very costly method in term of mineral consumption, both to create and then to maintain Geodic beings and devices. The Geodic technological components bear a resemblance to the living beings themselves, looking like outcroppings of salt crystals, quartz, obsidian or other semi-precious stones. These pieces of technology are not the most resilient or even the most sophisticated in the Orion Sector, but they are easily repaired, since all it takes is time and the proper mineral and nutrient mix to allow the damaged part to grow back. Interestingly, the pre-imperial standard infantry weapon used by most Silicoid societies is a crystal weapon utilizing sonic vibrations to spit out mineralic shards, but painted in a way to resemble an old Human weapon called the AK-47. Historians of the Orion Sector have no idea as to how and why this happened. Silicoids generally don’t answer questions about this. Geodic Key Phrases Sheared - capital punishment for the Geodic Species. The Orwellian equivalent of becoming an "un-person." Resonnor - a situation that is perfect and pure. In diplomatic terms, a treaty may be approved by the high council because it Resonnors. Tono - when Geodic society is functioning as it should. "Our people live in Tono." Vishana - when Geodic society is completely out of sorts, unbalanced and disordered. "Vishana, is upon us..." Soor - a flaw or discoloration due to corruption within a crystal or the crystalline order. Indigotio - the holiest of things in Geodic society, the sacred blue crystal on the Geodic home world. Not for the Kingdom of Almandin, though. Our Silicoids despise the Indigotio because they associate it with the society they had to flee from. Please watch this video for Silicoids in motion.
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Apr 17, 2016 13:16
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 05: First Encounters  After 21 cycles of mad space age action, the first negative random event hits us. Some weird alien bugs are eating our harvests! But we literally can give zero poo poo about this, so this is more funny than annoying. And Almandin IV upgrades their yard-capacity from “Frigate” to “Destroyer”.  This is Almandin II. In the 21 galactic cycles since the planet got annexed by the Kingdom of Almandin, this world has made great progress. Now those guys finally have some resemblance of a space industry –they can now build ship hulls up to Destroyer-size and in 8 more cycles, their orbital shipyard will be completed.  Our capital builds a colony ship, followed by another explorer and a system colony because colony ships create population out of thin air, which I now deem more efficient than waiting around for people to decide relocating to our mining colonies.  Almandin III is so close to being a full colony, I decide to let the immigration program continue. Almandin VI is farther off and now has to wait for the planned system colonizer.  The immigration program for Seginus II also keeps running.  Our growing research allows us to start another research project: Our scientists found out how to redesign our normal space engines to take up less space. Our ships won’t fly faster, but will get some more free space. Interesting fact: Back when I put my own touch on the translation, I thought a “Staustrahltriebwerk” would be a nice term meaning a common reaction drive. Basically just fancy rocket engines. Boy, was I wrong: That’s the German word for a Scramjet. Scramjets don’t work without air and have no place in space. Welp! After you stopped laughing about my stupidity from 12 years ago, please accept my  After telling you my embarrassing secret I’m carefully slinking off to the next turn. Our new regional anti-space defense is entering the prototype phase. Which is good! If no additional delays gunk up our research, this means we should get this tech next turn. Our migration effort finally pays off and Almandin III turns into a full colony.  This planet is described as “mars-like”. The graphic lets it look like a slightly drier version of Earth. But it still has oceans and poo poo, so it isn’t that mars-like, apparently. For our Silicoids this planet is horrible. Too cold, and the atmospheric pressure is insanely low! The gravity however (crushingly hard for Humans), is perfect for us. No production malus to our industry. The environment will make our abysmal population growth even lower, though. But that’s what terraforming is there for. It’ll just take a long, long time and eventually, this planet will be nice and fine.  Almandin III is still large enough to justify a government DEA. (And a recreational DEA, for Silicoid Disneyland.) Some research and industry fills up some more regions, the rest gets stuffed with mining DEAs. That’s what I colonized this planet for, after all: Strip-mining!  Hydroponic farms become available to research. They’re a micro-building like regional anti-space batteries, this time for our agricultural DEAs. All two of them.  But enough of that! The 24th galactic cycle rolls around. Physics levels up again and cruisers and a new type of weapon for our ground troops become visible. (They’re still some way off, though.) And the regional batteries are completed. From now on, military DEAs will build them automatically, as long as there is at least a single lonely percent in your economic development boost bar. (At least that's what I remember from my last play-through.)  Already another research project has replaced it: Silicoid material research has found a way to actually armor our space ships, instead of just pretending hull tanking is a thing. (EVE joke! How topical!) In vanilla, this would be one of the techs we already have. It’s a weaker, but cheaper version of normal standard armor. 34% weaker, to be exact. The difference between that and what we have now is still gigantic. And it’s not about raw hit points alone – the percentage refers to the armor absorption. Ultra Light Armor comes with an absorption so low it doesn’t really register. We’d need multiple material techs researched until ultra light armor can actually protect something. In comparison to that, light armor is a huge step up.  I’m getting a bit impatient. Our colony ship for Seginus II is still 3 turns away. Ugh.  And here’s the point where the AI starts loving up. See, the AI can’t actually remember if it already has send a colony ship to a certain world, so the AI will sometimes continue to send them until the colony is fully founded. Sometimes this is good, like in the very late game, when only some random hellhole isn’t yet colonized and you really don’t care anymore. The AI will build colony ships on its own long after you stopped caring and brute force every world left. (As long as you remembered to mark all unclaimed worlds, of course.) Other stuff that happened: Innar got explored and both Math and Energy got a level up.  Before looking inside our new surprise, the scout gets ordered right towards the next system. Again I’m preferring a more reddish/orange sun because it looks more like ours.  Jackpot! Innar II is just perfect: Ideal gravity, mineral-rich, still green-level environment and able to support some food production if we really want to. The other planets are all either far too small or too mediocre. Or both. But still, if we need more research or another little industrial dirtball later, we can still reconsider. Innar II is so good I immediately hammer down on my “to colonize”-key!  The second superfluous Seginus expedition gets their AI-orders deleted and the ship re-routed to Innar. The map reminds me it’s still the early game and our colony ship will need 13 turns to arrive.   Not even the first Seginus-expedition has reached their target yet. I’ll be so glad when we finally get our hand-shaped rocks on better FTL-drives.  On the research front, our scientists add another project: This time, it’s the games earliest version of dedicated electronic countermeasures. The Fan translation over-translated that into Elektronische Gegenmaßnahmen or “EGM”. This was something which annoyed me back then to no end. We use “ECM” in German too, there’s no reason to translate something everyone already knows the meaning of!  Besides, the correct German term would have been EloGM anyway.   Oh poo poo! Some alien freaks secretly colonized Hughst behind our backs!  It’s the Imsaies! Remember those guys from my OP? Well, they’re probably friendly. Or not hostile enough to care about us. As long as we aren’t the ones to start shooting. Still, a weird space anomaly isn’t what the game considers a border, so as long as the Annalona Empire doesn’t creep through the short cut, we haven’t officially met yet. This means still no diplomacy, sorry.  We’re still far from my first research goals, but it looks like the Orion Sector doesn’t care. I’m putting down more Discoverer-frigates as a first counter-measure. Badly armed frigates are better than nothing. And no-one should have anything better, anyway. I hope.  To my surprise, the Imsaies aren’t doing anything creepy yet. They’re probably still too far from our borders and we from theirs. Otherwise, this turn is rather calm. Two more DEAs get build and economics levels up. That’s already it.  According to our fleet window, our colonization and space exploration programs are quietly running along. Next turn we can expect to see Seginus II under full control and another system explored.  Prediction equals reality. Also the capital finishes another deep space exploration frigate. The rest is a long list of science level ups, but we hit a group of empty levels all over the categories, so nothing relevant happens.  Mula, while technically still unclaimed, would force us to plough through Hughst first, because neutral space states don’t like foreign colony ships flying through their systems. Also the Imsaies will get blaring warnings about enemy invasions every time our ships pass through, which makes even peaceful exploration kind of risky. I would like to avoid war at least until we have some kind of actual war fleet.  But the decision isn’t mine, as it turns out: All of Mula’s planets are different kinds of poo poo and rear end. No-one would want to live here. Mula I even has a nasty planetary anomaly called “Harmful Minerals”: They make trying to build anything in infected regions a waste of time until they’re cleared out. Our Silicoid explorers are even more bummed out after seeing a planet so dangerous, even the local minerals want to eat them.  Since it doesn’t look like the Imsaies came from this part of the new sector, I’m sending the scout to the other part of this triangle. The crew is glad they can leave the death system of Mula.  Back home, one of our newer ships slowly creeps closer to our border at Subra-B. It’ll still take them an entire cycle to pass through and continue on towards the unknown, though.  Seginus II, my friends! Our first interstellar colony. Thanks to being rather small for our tastes, it’ll be a mixture of mining- and military outpost. A stepping stone for people travelling between Innar II and the capital system. At least that’s what I’m planning.  As I said earlier, an outpost founded by an outpost-ship doesn’t only grow up into a colony, it comes with a fully constructed military zone. This planet gets the Nature’s Wonder anomaly, which gives 20% bonus to trade (only relevant dozens of turns from now) and 100% bonus to recreation. Which means I actually have to put down at least one more Disneyland or this giant bonus is wasted. poo poo. Bah. At least this way my half-assed lore about Seginus II being a stepping stone between other, more important worlds makes even more sense. With lots of travelers coming through, having a dedicated amusement zone on the planet is a good idea. (Also, as a system capital with a government DEA, a military DEA and a recreation DEA, all together on this small planet, this world will be practically unrest-free forever.)  We’re up to five planets now and our planet view can’t even show them all at once anymore. The Silicoid-problem still hampers our efforts at expansion though, as you can see. (The Silicoid-problem is their abysmal low population growth.) Only our capital has any kind of good industrial production capability. Our first larger ships will all come from there by necessity. Almandin II + IV have trouble even building smaller ships, at least for a while still. And our two newest worlds are like babies right now, vulnerable and needy.  Ironically, since building another system colony ship has taken so long, Almandin VI is really close to become a full colony on their own now. To prevent stupidity like our soon ready system colonizer hanging around uselessly because the planet is already colonized, I’m giving Almandin I free for our colonization program. If migration turns out to be faster then I anticipate, Almandin I will soak up the colonizer instead. Almandin VII is still on my shitlist, though. That ugly thing will stay unwanted and uncolonized as long as possible.  Oh gently caress oh gently caress unknown alien ship above Seginus II  We can’t really do anything with our still unarmed baby colony, so we eat an auto-defeat. At least it’s literally just that one ship, even if it’s a dedicated warship, in the early game a single ship can only ineffectually plink at a full colony. And now I’ve run out of space for this update, gently caress. Well, you guys have to wait until next time to see what awaits the Kingdom of Almandin now that two alien races have encountered us.
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Apr 17, 2016 22:49
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I can't get past the AK 47's  More to the point, I can't get past your decisions to not make our rock people a drug cult.We could have had a race of AK 47-wielding drug-addled Astro-Rocks but instead we have a race of AK 47-wielding clean & sober space rocks, which I would argue is a less plausible combination. In other news I am tempted to buy SotS 2 and try and mod it so that I could play as a race of Meteor Privateers, zipping around the galaxy map abducting other races' admirals.
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Apr 18, 2016 00:54
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From what I remember modding sots2 is really piss poor. And the AI is still laughably bad, like can barely not go broke bad. MOO3 may have bad AI but it's not in the realm of how bad sots2 is in bugs and AI issues
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Apr 18, 2016 06:57
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please don't buy SOTS2. Your money doesn't deserve that. Speaking of comedy drug cult trainwreck. I have a willpower of 3 so it is going to happen at some point (part of my delay is making sure that most major mechanics have at least come up.) So what, besides drug cult and anarchy, do people want to see in Libertarian drug cult? (I won't play Ikthul either as diplomacy needs to be part of a Libertarian paradise/hellscape) Veloxyll fucked around with this message at 07:56 on Apr 18, 2016 |
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Apr 18, 2016 07:44
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Buying and modding MOO3 to have a SOTS2 skin would be a more effective use of your time and money.
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Apr 18, 2016 07:57
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Veloxyll posted:So what, besides drug cult and anarchy, do people want to see in Libertarian drug cult? (I won't play Ikthul either as diplomacy needs to be part of a Libertarian paradise/hellscape) Bright colours and big guns? Also lots of gold.
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Apr 18, 2016 08:48
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Cathode Raymond posted:I can't get past the AK 47's To be fair, every empire in Ultima Orion gets the AK-47 as a starter tech. The modders simply replaced the old toy-gun looking thing with the picture of what I assume was the first result after googling "Sturmgewehr".
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Apr 18, 2016 09:36
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So, looking through. to make an Anarcho-drug cult the only option basically is humans. or maybe Evons, I haven't looked at them. All the other good capitalist options could not take anarchy or drug cult.  Also pondering RP choices when you don't understand the words on the screen is hard work!
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Apr 18, 2016 11:19
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Veloxyll posted:So, looking through. to make an Anarcho-drug cult the only option basically is humans. (Hahaha is German for "malevolent laughter", fyi)
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Apr 18, 2016 15:15
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Don't worry, if something is important, I'll translate it! Like that dumb poo poo I'm doing with translating all the Perry Rhodan-references, for example. Though I'm not sure the original writers would like my impromptu translation of "Transitionsantrieb" with "Transition Drive". I just liked the sound of the word "Transition" and a short check of the English meaning made it seem like a good fit.
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Apr 18, 2016 15:38
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