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turns out a fresh colony is super vulnerable. Who knew! While I get the final stages of it organised (and maybe play some of MOO3 in english so I can remember how diplomacy works. And the Senate. And figure out why 2 of the 6 senate races vanished. on turn 4 in my test game. Also for our libertarian utopia: Humans or Blue Spacehumans(Evon) Since basically no-one else can go for Anarchy + The Cult of Weed Monotheism (Worshiping the great Ayn Rand) or Atheism (there is no god, only money) and Libluini once I figure out the basics are youi okay with me slightly hijacking your thread to do a mini-LP here?
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May 2, 2016 11:41
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Veloxyll posted:turns out a fresh colony is super vulnerable. Who knew! Why not? The more posts, the better. And since I don't know when we'll encounter Humans or Evons in the main game, it'll be a good way to show them off without overlong waiting. Just tell me beforehand if you start the game as a senate member, OK? For reasons
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May 2, 2016 12:22
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Wait a second! How can atheist space rocks that live for centuries and reproduce by budding, produce a monarchy? Where's the divine right? Where's the succession of blood? How was the first King made?
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May 2, 2016 12:26
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Veloxyll posted:Also for our libertarian utopia: Evons because libertarians agree that modern medicine is a scam and so make sure to always keep a healthy supply of Colloidal Silver nearby. Atheism because as all True Economists know, the Invisible Hand of the Free Market is a force of nature, rather than a supernatural deity. And thanks for doing this, I look forward to seeing the Space Libertarians in action! If you ever manage to produce some kind of big flagship-type vessel please call it the Sword of Truth.
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May 2, 2016 12:44
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 14: Counter-Strike  Galactic cycle 78: The war against dinosaurian aggression continues. We get a nice message telling us we crushed the Raas-troops invading Innar II utterly and the survivors fled from the planet like the cowards they are. We also got some diplomatic messages and we can now build missile bases as additional protection for our planets.  The Imsaies this time want to exchange some techs. They want to give us titanium weave (a troop armor tech) and the Zersetzungszentrum/Decomposition Center. The first gives us a non-guaranteed tier 1 tech we didn’t roll and a slight upgrade to armor for our troops, the second helps a little bit with pollution. The Imsaies want our cruiser-tech in exchange. Now the Decomposition Center and the titanium weave alone were a no-brainer: A clear nope. But both at the same time? It’s still uneven, but the Imsaies are our friends and allies. To keep them happy, I agree with the exchange. From next turn on, the Imsaies will be able to build cruisers. Interestingly, these two techs were the only ones they could give us anyway, we literally have everything else they have. Superior research can have its drawbacks!  On Almandin V, our new Rammstein-class cruiser enters the queue. With the orbital yard complex finishing next turn, our capital can build Heavy Cruisers already. It’ll take some time until we reach that hull size, though. The game won’t always be so nice to give the next shipyard-tech before the next hull size. Generally, we will have to wait until our shipyards have built the new upgrades before we can build our newly designed ships.  In turn 53, the situation is still dire. The Raas have bombarded Innar II again.  A situation check on the map tells me the Raas will try to invade our colony next turn again. That weird rectangular symbol with the two circles on each side symbolizes transport fleets.  Invasions and bombardment have done visible damage to the planet. As an answer to the aggression, I raise a new corps to defend the planet. Also, when I mentioned mobilization centers last time I forgot to mention they’re only needed for fleets and if you want to make invasion armies. If you just want to raise a garrison, you can do that from your reserves everywhere at any time. Good to know if you want to slow down an unexpected invasion by forcing the enemy to slog it out on every goddamn dirtball he flings ground units at.  Our colony ship for Plastrum arrives at the Innar system and I immediately sound the general retreat to get it out again before the enemy fleet can get to it.  The Raas are slow enough our colony ship can get back into hyperspace. Of course now it will waste tons of time flying back through the star lane before I can give it new orders. Just another thing I’ll have to punish the Raas for, I guess.   “Our colonization-task force couldn’t land on Cokanuk III. The planet is already controlled by the Kingdom of Almandin” This is the message you will see when you forgot about what your colony ships were doing because of the war you’re fighting. And the Dila Empire is again bombing our planet. No invasion this turn, the Raas want to soften the planet up first!  We’re still early enough in the game this is just wasting time and weakening a planet you want to use. You need a lot of firepower to even harm ground troops from orbit and after you have that kind of firepower, it’s easy to accidentally wipe out the planet you want to conquer. Really just drop your troops and rely on overwhelming numerical superiority.  On the other side of our Kingdom, I’m giving new orders to our wayward colony ship. Cokanuk IV is the new target.  Since the Psilons didn’t want to trade, I’m trying something else now: The Information Treaty exchanges information on espionage activity. It helps both empires to defend against enemy spies. Of course it also fucks over every empire dumb enough to make this sort of treaty with the ones sending them spies in the first place. The AI will be unwilling to agree if they suspect you’re the one spying on them. The player should be too.  Cycle 81: The Raas are still bombing and we still have enemy spies running around. The good news: One of the Raas-spies got killed to death and another of our colony ships finally reached that planet they launched towards ages ago.  Status of our construction programs throughout the Kingdom: Some warships are close to completion, our first assault troops are almost ready and Seginus II has only 7 turns left before the new mobilization center will be finished.  The most annoying thing is seeing this DEFEAT-message over and over again while your fleets are very slowly crawling to relief a planet.  Turn 55 starts extra-bad: The enemy schemer is still alive and well and just rolled a critical success, so we get this red message telling us fake invasion plans are turning up in the galactic cybernet. It’s like WikiLeaks, just with space internet and the leaks are fake. All our diplomatic relations suffer a bit.  The only actual invasion plan we have is of course the punitive expedition to kick some dinosaurs. Two carriers are available now and this means the 2nd Royal Fleet is ready to rumble. They get protection by two of our custom-designed slow escorts. This fleet has almost four times the firepower of 1st Fleet and no range limitations. Even if the Raas counter our first fleet with better reinforcements, we can just counter-counter them with this.  The building time of the mobilization center in Seginus is still more than the travel time between Almandin and Seginus, so I have to swallow this bitter pill and send our carrier-squadron the long way. 11 turns before it can reach the Innar system. For future reference: Four black squares on red ground symbolize carrier task forces. And this is the last update before I’ve run through my last batch of screenshots, so the promised overview over everything comes next time. It’ll literally be the first thing I do when making the new screenshots, so don’t worry!  It’s kind of funny how our diplomatically challenged Silicoids got good relations with two out of three neighbors. The Raas with their raging belligerence do a lot to balance this out, of course.   The Soriane Democracy has warmed up to us somewhat, we’re now at level indifference. Our political relations are still somewhat instable though. Luckily the Psilons are still caught in a conflict between their and another alliance. The Dzazatar have dropped from the list of their worst enemies (they could still be normal enemies of course) and got replaced by the Farat Empire. On the other hand, the Eadinel Empire joined the Kairenieo as their strongest allies. The Psilons continue to be our buffer to whatever the hell is going on over there. Hopefully we don’t need to find out before we have successfully eaten the Raas.  It’s a long shot, but I’m curious about the unexplored systems beyond the Cokanuk-sector, so I’m sending a new explorer to take a look. Even with upgraded FTL-engine, it’ll take 19 turns for the ship to arrive.   Cycle 84 sees us flailing ineffectively at diplomacy and the Dila Empire are still bombing like mad. Since a cycle is about 1,5 Earth years, the Raas have now been firing their weapons constantly at Innar II for almost a decade. That’s some dedication to being assholes.  The Psilons have discussed our suggestion at working together to defeat spies, but they couldn’t get their parliament to ratify the treaty. At least they don’t sound angry about this failure.  Our allies have noticed how badly they lag behind in research and they don’t like it. Of course we accept since an improvement to our research treaty helps us, too. Imsaies (with adoring voice): “We can both profit if we share the fruits of our research. We beg Your Majesty to offer a unification of our research efforts and we plead with You to answer our prayers!” The Imsaies are laying it on thick, aren’t they?  There are so many ships now bearing down on Innar to give the Raas the rear end whupping of a decamillenium, but the waiting is tearing me apart inside.  Innar II has suffered a lot after all those bombardments. The population is halved and literally everything we ever build on the planet has been destroyed. The constant blockade has the population starving and the economy has collapsed. If it weren’t for the ineffectiveness of early game weapons, this planet would be already lost.  Things start to look up in turn 57: While the Raas are still angrily shooting at Innar II, our diplomatic efforts have born fruits.  The Psilons are annoyed by our constant messages, but they still agree to a research treaty just to make us stop talking.  As it sometimes happens when interstellar communication takes a full turn to process, the Imsaies-offer overlapped with our own. Obviously they agreed to a research treaty improvement, since that’s what they wanted in the first place. I have no idea how the game solves the problem of double-agreements like this. Is the game overwriting the first decision with the second, or is the game counting both and giving us two improvements at once? Since the game isn’t that great at giving feedback, only the source code knows.  While I was dealing with diplomacy, our planets continued to roll out new ships. And as you may guess after seeing this picture, some new techs rolled in too and forced me to upgrade most of my designs. We got Duran steel armor, for example. Duran is twice as durable as Titanium, which with our weak shields is a really important update. Retrofits would be really nice to have in cases like this.  Turn 58. We know have 8 and soon 12 ships rushing down the star lanes to the Innar system, but the Raas aren’t willing to give up. Innar II suffers some more bombardment and the economic situation is so critical, some surviving DEA-improvements are torn down since the planet can’t pay for upkeep anymore. Some minor protests against miniaturization in FTL-drives delays the entire project for five turns. What do you think is the cause of this? Our intellectual factions getting cranky, or enemy spies?  This next screenshot is probably the answer. A conspirator is causing unrest, a schemer is trying to sabotage our diplomatic relations again and our Agent Petra just died. Welp.  Agent Petra was a saboteur, so I’m forced to replace her. Wouldn’t it be funny if in the five turns until her replacement becomes available, enemy saboteurs blow up something important?  The last bombardment was the last bombardment. Next turn, our revenge fleet will arrive!  More good news: 3rd Fleet will be ready just as Seginus II completes the construction of a new mobilization center.   2nd Battle of Innar We win! Next: How to Assemble a Punitive Expedition CheeseThief posted:Wait a second! How can atheist space rocks that live for centuries and reproduce by budding, produce a monarchy? Where's the divine right? Where's the succession of blood? How was the first King made? The backstory, complete with a portrait of the first King of Almandin is here. The third update. Libluini fucked around with this message at 13:06 on May 2, 2016 |
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May 2, 2016 13:01
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We're about to hit those dinosaurs like a million tons of rocks and the only thing they can do is hope we're more merciful than they've been.
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May 2, 2016 19:23
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Well, I can already say there will be a lot more battles in future updates. It's like the Raas have learned they're part of a Let's Play and want to go down in a blaze of glory as bright as possible.
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May 2, 2016 19:50
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Zanzibar Ham posted:Evons because libertarians agree that modern medicine is a scam and so make sure to always keep a healthy supply of Colloidal Silver nearby. Reasonable answers! I was going to start in the senate for free starting contacts. but leaving it off DOES mean one less thing to translate
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May 3, 2016 04:32
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Were the Raas trying to stall us with spy manipulation rather than reinforcing their fleet? Or are we potentially getting spy-hammered by someone else entirely?
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May 4, 2016 02:23
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Glazius posted:Were the Raas trying to stall us with spy manipulation rather than reinforcing their fleet? Or are we potentially getting spy-hammered by someone else entirely? Yes Also played vanilla far too long last night. I am so bad at this game (though after first reinstall it was still in german, so I may have had some elements making things harder/more balanced on myself) Also man, wait till I show you how garbage spying is! oh man. I have OPINIONS. Edit: Okay. took first pass. Starved. HILLARITY ENSUED. things were learnt. Veloxyll fucked around with this message at 11:07 on May 4, 2016 |
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May 4, 2016 09:04
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Thanks to this LP, I reinstalled MoO2 after getting home from work yesterday. When I finally stopped playing it was 1:00 am  EDIT: I remember that Quicksilver tried to be super-secretive about what the Ithkul were. The ultimate lesson I learned from that was no matter what the reveal is it's impossible for it to ever match the speculation, but what I do remember was the placeholder art they used for them was a thumb with an angry face drawn on it. I used it as an Avatar on a couple other sites I was on at the time. SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 15:51 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 15:03
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SirPhoebos posted:Thanks to this LP, I reinstalled MoO2 after getting home from work yesterday. I played Moo2 yesterday for about 5 hours straight. I just wish they would actually fix up Moo2 for modern systems instead of inventing new poo poo and telling us it's not poo poo.
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May 5, 2016 20:01
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Speaking of other 4X games, I watched a couple of LP episodes of Stellaris. Is it just me, or did Paradox borrow (and de-grog) quite a few game mechanics from Aurora4X?
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May 6, 2016 01:11
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Degrogging is something most 4X games desperately need. At least the UI The Market will Fix It - Evon playthrough #1 If you are looking for competent playthroughs, stick with the OP's. I am not quite so good at this as he is. There will be mistakes. Big, hillarious mistakes. Laziness meaning I don't translate every notification or planetary anomaly. That said! Adventure awaits!  Character creation highlights - The one screen not previously shown! obviously the market demands Konsumguter! Best guess, it's 10% efficiency to entertainment DEAs. Or something.Whatever that means. I also considered Chemical Industries to support the Drug Cult. And ended up trimming mining and agriculture back to normal with no bonuses. Also took Lazy, individualistic, pacifist and perverted. The market will take whatever people can afford!  The start of every game!  Turn 1 actoins include taking a troop transport off the build queue, and switching to Corporate government in the representative tree. At least I assume that's what it is. That's what is there in vanilla and I couldn't find a translate last time I looked.  Thanks AI. My capital REALLY needs two sectors of government.  I also went for turn 1 spies. But quickly revised my policy after violating the holy positive cash balance. WHOOPS.  Planetary anomalies. Rare useful plants in region 1. So yay agriculture. On the flatlands. And Huge plants in region 2. But despite the plantlife, the world is dead. WELP.  First system we hit, all red planets. I'll just throw an outpost down.  This game and government. The capital is already in system drat it!  hey look. a changling to make our spies better for only 4% of our takings. Data wants to be free!  Then the scientist bug shows up 5 turns later.  Such leadership.And he makes us better at diplomacy. (I am going to feel like such a goose when these get translated)  Our capital suffers maybe a little mineral shortage. eh. These things happen. The market will provide  29 turns in and we meet our first aliens!  This is our space. Mirror and Alsafi are the only servicable systems with green and yellow worlds. everywhere else is red.  Our only jump lane leads straight to the human homeworld...  Mirror 4 you have perfect climate! Why have you got no food. production!  We've not opened channels with the humans.  Further exploration locates the Psilons  People get a little bit hungry. And still no minerals.  Hey look! we get contact with the humans finally. Guess what I'm doing! We must free their data!  It's super effective!  Hydroponic farms! Maybe we'll survive our food problems. Yes. We missed out on Hydroponic farms because I turned down discovery The third message - that I didn't translate at the time, is that my colony died because it had no food.  Aaaand we lose contact with humanity since my colony died of dysentry.  Suddenly. Everywhere is dying and awful. Being cut off from teh galaxy and starving, I decide to end my first adventures into space. Note for future: Turn off skype notifications.
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May 6, 2016 08:20
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Your market must not have been free enough. Maybe those government DEAs screwed things up.
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May 6, 2016 08:27
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Zanzibar Ham posted:Your market must not have been free enough. Maybe those government DEAs screwed things up. drat big government. if they'd stopped meddling, we could've made Liberty Great Again. Also never got diplocontact with the psilons to liberate their data. I think it's a mod thing making food so rare. I haven't starved by the stopping point of my other attempt. And it's a much more interesting galactic location. Many neighbours, rather than having my one lane of expansion cut off. (Interestingly I had the same in my vanilla test game. Except then it was the Ikthul who had me boxed in. And they had enough missiles and fighters to break my spaceboats.)
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May 6, 2016 10:25
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my dad posted:Speaking of other 4X games, I watched a couple of LP episodes of Stellaris. Is it just me, or did Paradox borrow (and de-grog) quite a few game mechanics from Aurora4X? They borrowed lots of elements from lots of games. The three-section design comes from SOTS, and the genuine late-game threats come from there too (Locusts!). Antarans don't really count. The multi-species worlds hark back to MOO2, while Pops are from Vicky and the planet grid is from Ascendency. Difficult to spot particular Aurora influences though - what did you have in mind?
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May 6, 2016 10:42
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please tell me they didn't include the economy from Viccy 2 as well!
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May 6, 2016 10:48
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Thankfully the economic model looks totally transparent and quite simple. May 9th cannot come soon enough! Apologies for Stellaris chat in your thread Lib, although I assume you're as excited as everyone else.
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May 6, 2016 11:01
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Aethernet posted:They borrowed lots of elements from lots of games. The three-section design comes from SOTS, and the genuine late-game threats come from there too (Locusts!). Antarans don't really count. The multi-species worlds hark back to MOO2, while Pops are from Vicky and the planet grid is from Ascendency. Something about their whole surveying system reminds me a lot of it, and also some of the mechanics of species modifications. There's also a bunch of tiny details that remind me of de-grogged versions of Aurora mechanics that didn't show up in other 4X games I played (but quite possibly showed up in ones I didn't )Veloxyll posted:drat big government. if they'd stopped meddling, we could've made Liberty Great Again. OK, your mini-LP was hilarious.
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May 6, 2016 11:11
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Aethernet posted:Thankfully the economic model looks totally transparent and quite simple. May 9th cannot come soon enough! Oh yes, I've already pre-ordered and now I'm in waiting hell for Stellaris, so I don't mind it! Some notes I made from Veloxyll's Evon-post: Timocracy -gently caress the Poors- old greek type of government, people are divided into money-based classes. It's like a caste-system plutocracy! +10% entertainment DEAs, makes them better at making people happy. Nileintr is a secret Darlok agent, part of a secret Darlok organization XX-513-LUOW -Sex maniac-, makes it really, really likely to get info about delays, is a SHE Dxii' Achtadta -Science Wizard- combined the power of all the sciency thoughts in his swarm, got some kind of mental damage from that. His brain damage makes delays more likely, but less lengthy. At one point you got the -Event-: Translationsoftware fucks up. Comedy ensues Also that mini-LP was great fun and I think I'll add it to the OP so it won't get lost in time. Fake Edit: I'm sitting on two finished updates right now, I just was too lazy to post. I think I'll post the first update today, just to reduce my backlog a bit. Edit: gently caress, every time I see this post I find another typo. Must be the sunny weather distracting me. Libluini fucked around with this message at 14:21 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 11:24
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Libluini posted:Oh yes, I've already pre-ordered and now I'm in waiting hell for Stellaris, so I don't mind it! quote:Nileintr is a secret Darlok agent, part of a secret Darlok organization Somehow, I can see her fitting in with the rest of the perverts in the League. quote:Dxii' Achtadta -Science Wizard- combined the power of all the sciency thoughts in his swarm, got some kind of mental damage from that. His brain damage makes delays more likely, but less lengthy. I wasn't paying that much attention to the diplo events since I guess you need a colony within 2 or 3 jumps or an outpost chain between homeworlds or something to open diplomatic channels. When the channels closed and everyone started dying I decided to rethink things. There are some improvements (I found the points for higher science, minerals, and agri production, for one!) Still feels like usable land is harder to come by. but maybe I've just been rolling a lot of near barren worlds.
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May 6, 2016 14:15
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Veloxyll posted:Fits the character then! And I guess stacks with consumer goods. Oh, sorry I made that needlessly confusing. I have no idea what Timocracy does in the game, I just took an explanation from Wikipedia. That second line was just an explanation to your pick of Consumer Goods (since it looked like you weren't entirely sure what +10% entertainment DEAs does.)
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May 6, 2016 14:20
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 15: Punitive Expedition Well, last update ended with our nemesis finally getting their comeuppance. Let’s take this opportunity to see how far the Kingdom of Almandin has come.  This is the entirety of Silicoid-explored space. Zoomed out to see everything and rotated around to see all connections. To put this into perspective, with our simple tier 2 FTL-engines it takes about 30 turns to move a ship from one edge of explored space to the other.  This is the leftmost sector from that screenshot above. It’s the core of our Imsaies-friends territory. They’re friends enough to tolerate us colonizing empty systems in this sector, but we could get into trouble if we blindly move into already colonized systems. This sector is connected to our space with this huge green shortcut through hyperspace (you see it leaving the screenshot from Hughst) and until we reach Matar-B and explore it, we have no idea how far the star lanes stretch beyond this edge of the Orion Sector. In hindsight, maybe I should start calling a cluster of nearby star systems “subsector” or something, to differentiate between sectors and the Sector.  Thanks to the way our star lanes are twisted, a little bit of rotating around later and I can press the entire rest of our space into a single screenshot. Cokanuk is our border to the Psilons and their coalition war, Innar to the Raas. The Imsaies still have their colony in Tardig, but after they became our allies they stopped expanding beyond the interstellar shortcut (seen here arriving at Subra-B). To get a ship to the border of our space beyond Cokanuk I have to launch from Almandin and then wait 19 turns. This is so obnoxiously frustrating, you are free to imagine me looking at the building queue of Cokanuk III every turn while sighing sadly. The mobilization center is coming, but right now it looks like even bombed-out Innar II will be a couple turns faster. In both cases, it’s still something like 10-20 turns, depending on how fast the planets will grow. The other side looks better, since Seginus II now has a mobilization center, allowing to cut down travel time for our forces from 11 to 6 turns. And that’s it for a first overview. Our strategic goals for the future: 1. Help the Psilons fight their war, since they’re losing badly and we really don’t want someone stronger replacing them. 2. Explore the far away spaces beyond our more peaceful borders. 3. CRUSH THE DILA EMPIRE and free the Raas from their mad, crazed rulers.  While our space ships are moving around with their type molasses FTL drives, the espionage part of the war continues: Our security services kill another Dila-agent. And a terrorist attack destroys our regional anti-space batteries on Seginus II. gently caress! This is slowly looking like the plot to a new, SF-based Clever & Smart series, with enemy agents wreaking havoc and sometimes accidentally taking themselves out while our own AIA-agents are being dumb.  Our old Saboteur is dead, so a new one is running through training. And to combat a terrorist, you need a terrorist! So we queue up one.  Our capital is building a Saphire-class orbital defense base. Another transport follows and I found time for a new colony ship in-between our warship building programs.  On Seginus II, I order the planet to re-build the regional batteries. Highlighted by me is a nasty trap: Every system government you create can theoretically take over the empire. You just have to build an Imperial Seat of Government, a building which only shows up on planets featuring a completed system seat. In the past, I’ve accidentally switched my Imperial Government multiple times between planets because I stupidly kept building imperial seats until the truth dawned on me. If you aren’t a colossal braindead idiot like me, it’s nice to know you can switch your government to another planet if you need to.  Innar II got badly mauled. Terraforming and economic investments are high to repair the damage. Until we can get some more DEAs rebuild, investing more into anything else on the planet is a losing proposition.  Now that we can get to the frontlines faster, it’s time to create some more fleets. The 3rd Royal Fleet consists of two Rammstein-cruisers to bath enemies in fusion plasma, protected by two frigates with loads of light particle guns.  At this time, I feel confident two squadrons with eight ships total are more than enough to break through the Raas-defense at Deanton, so I start loading our ground troops into transports. Two armies, the 1st and 2nd Royal Armies, are created. They’re mostly infantry with some assault troops and Psy-Ops to stiffen them up.  When you raise ground armies through the system interface, you’re automatically transported to the task force screen and your available transport ships are drawn from the reserve until every ground unit is safely stored. Then, if you want to, you can add escorts and change the name. Two light Jaspet-class transports are enough to store one of our armies. I add a slow Zylo-class escort frigate to every transport squadron and then they’re ready.  6 turns until our three new task forces reach the frontline at Innar. (And coincidentally, our carrier squadron is also 6 turns from Innar. All 15 ships will reach the system at the same time.)  On the technology-front, we’re reaching another batch of important techs. This is the planetary fighter garrison. When build on a planet, 100 fighters equipped with the latest researched weapon technology will launch periodically from a planet to support the defenders. This is the most important defensive installation on a planet, as long as the auto-equip for the fighters doesn’t gently caress you over. Soon we’ll be able to build star bases who can launch almost as many, or even more fighters, but until then this is basically the avatar of death, harvesting the souls of any attacker. And a lot less costly then huge space stations. Dealing with that many fighters in the early game can be tricky. 100 fighters with fusion bombs can deal something like 2500 – 3000 points of damage per hit. This is the combined firepower of 10 of our carriers right now.  Catalytic Production/Kalaysatorentwicklung is a technology using adapted and highly customized catalysts for chemical processes. With this, our Silicoids are basically using their advanced knowledge about minerals and crystallization processes to use less energy and raw materials in manufacturing processes. The minerals our industry consumes are reduced by 1/3rd. This is one tech so incredibly strong, you need to have it. If you play this game and notice you didn’t roll this tech, send out your spies, everything! This thing is overpowered enough you should seriously consider a restart if you don’t have it.  Continuous Fusion Cannon: A straight upgrade making the already rather precise weapon hit even better: 50% for your to-hit chance. The weapon also gets 25% larger, but one of the other techs in this long list of running research projects is the first miniaturization tech. Both combined gets you a normal sized fusion cannon which still can hit 50% more often. Lore-wise this upgrade allows a fusion cannon to fire a continuous stream of fusion plasma, instead of single shots. This makes it easier to aim.  Biosphere Domes! Perfect for living on really lovely planets, like Earth (oh sorry, “Sol III”) for example. They work incredibly simple: The game builds them in a region, the region gets +1 population. (By which the game actually means +1k population.)  Next up on our ground-troop techs: The Mobile Infantry. Infantry using armored troop carriers to get around faster. They can’t do airdrop assaults. (That’s the special gimmick for assault troops.) “True, I said mobilize everything with wheels, but what the hell am I supposed to do with armed wheelchairs?”  The Duran-weave gives double the armor bonus as the old Titanium-weave. The miniaturized improved HMI Drive is just the same FTL-drive we already have, but smaller.  In turn 61, we are joined by Reticuli III, our so far farthest colony.  Reticuli III has useful underground lifeforms. Those give a 100% bonus to agriculture. On a planet with Silicoids. A sterile planet. In a toxic region. So yeah, this double-bonus is wasted on us.  This colony will mostly be a mining colony. Since it’s so far away, I give the planet government and recreation zones to keep the people happy. Some basic industry and research DEAs round out the planet’s needs, then I fill up every region left with mining DEAs. Since I have enough free space and that one obscure reference makes me curious still, I retry the experiment with reversed mining DEAs: I’ve put mining DEAs in both mountains and plains, to see which ones produce more. My bet is on mountain zones, but hey maybe the game will surprise us?  Two more techs are coming: Nachschub/Logistics is a type of unit supplying isolated troops. If you have those in an army, it won’t get penalties when fighting on planets under blockade. Useful to have in a longer campaign, but still sometime away. The Astrouniversität/Astro University is another important one: Every planet who has one gets 40% bonus on loving everything done on a planet. Everything. Production, research, mining, agriculture –everything is boosted by 40%.  The Raas have stepped up their game: The ships we can see in Deanton have doubled. Of course, we still have not explored that drat system, so this number could hide twice as many system defense ships for all we know.  Turn 62 brings somewhat mixed news: Catalyst Processing is finished and our industry will now use 33% less minerals. On the other hand, the Vchiitri Empire, one of the arch-enemies of the Psilons, has made contact with us. Since they’re on the other side of the Psilons, this basically means they have conquered enough Psilon-planets to get into contact. This is bad. We need to help the Psilons! But wait, what if the new neighbors are better?  A Raas-terrorist destroys one of our new automated factories on Almandin III literally the same turn it is completed. Welp.  Back to our new neighbors: The Vchiitri Empire is a realm full of insects. The Klackons control 15 planets, are way below us in technology and have almost twice the population. They’re on place 1, and are doing to the Psilons what we are planning to do to the Raas. Irony!  The Klichéons went full on swarm hive this time around. They’re spending all their money on their holy war to crush all their neighbors, which doesn’t bode well for our future. At least they have two enemies fighting them, so we have some time before we have to deal with them. The Psilons are so weak at this point, like the Raas for us they don’t even show up under “worst enemies”. The Eadinel, one of the Psilon-allies does however. So not all is lost!  Until the Raas are dealt with permanently, we need to keep the Klackons quiet. I’m trying to convince them a non-aggression treaty would be swell right now.  Wow, -56 on first contact? That’s the worst I had so far. Even the Raas had only like -40. Again we’re probably only safe from fighting someone because of them fighting other wars at the same time.  To give this some perspective, we have 12 planets so far, a rather high tech advantage and low population. This is of course misleading, since I’m boosting three of our six research categories far above the others, so in military terms we’re several levels stronger than our average suggests. We are also waiting on multiple outposts and freshly colonized second-rate worlds to become full colonies, so we’re still on par with the Klichéons in that area. And seriously, slow growing crystals were never going to overcome insectoid population growth. Conclusion: As long as we can hold our technological advantage, we’re safe.  To tease the Raas a bit, I send a brazen demand for Xeno Survival School, a tech giving +5 luck to new spies. We’re not that far from researching this tech ourselves and anyway, we’re not going to get it from those clowns. I’m literally just doing this to annoy them.  One last overview for this update: Two point-defense frigates in our reserves, two explorers and one colony ship are still moving around. Multiple fleets are inbound to reinforce 1st Fleet at Innar. Next: Preparations continue?
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May 6, 2016 14:38
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Man, that's kinda tense. Any chance of sending some help to the psilons, in the form of uhh, maybe fighter tech?
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May 6, 2016 15:40
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SugarAddict posted:I played Moo2 yesterday for about 5 hours straight. I actually picked up the MoO reboot last night and was really getting into it, up until I got my first combat and discovered it was real time  EDIT: I feel the need to effortpost, and this feels like a saner place than the Steam forums. I don't have a problem with real-time in and of itself. When an Empire-building game has a tactical-level combat, my big question is "Does this give me more opportunity to influence the outcome than just going to auto-resolve?" In MoO2, you definitely can. The perfect example I can give is finding a monster protecting a system near your homeworld. What I'd do is research Fighter Bays, Battle Pods, Fusion Beams and Fusion Drives, then build a bunch of frigates carrying a single interceptor each and have them do their best Benny Hill impression while the fighters slowly whittle the monster down. It's true that by end-game combat becomes a clusterfuck that frequently comes down to who gets to shoot first, but I feel that that is an issue that can be fixed rather than something that's so insurmountable it requires fundamentally changing a core aspect of a series. And I would have thought that the success of XCOM and XCOM 2 would have shown that modern audiences aren't turned off by turned based combat. In MoO3 I never got that feeling that my input ever mattered, but there are enough problems with that game that I don't know if going real-time was to blame. I'm open to the possibility that that real-time tactical combat can be as varied as what you get in MoO2, but I haven't really played a game where that was the case. SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 16:25 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 15:52
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Man, that's kinda tense. Any chance of sending some help to the psilons, in the form of uhh, maybe fighter tech? Find out tomorrow! (I'm always like 1-2 posts backlogged, so this issue was already dealt with a couple days ago, when I wrote the next update.)
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May 6, 2016 16:30
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SirPhoebos posted:I actually picked up the MoO reboot last night and was really getting into it, up until I got my first combat and discovered it was real time Spoilers- even my base game efforts I had absolutely no idea how to build MOO3 spaceships.I will be shamelessly copying designs for the second mini-lp.
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May 6, 2016 17:52
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Libluini posted:This is slowly looking like the plot to a new, SF-based Clever & Smart series, with enemy agents wreaking havoc and sometimes accidentally taking themselves out while our own AIA-agents are being dumb. 
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May 6, 2016 19:02
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I'm still sad nobody found the other silicoid in the pic I posted. 
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May 6, 2016 19:07
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SirPhoebos posted:When an Empire-building game has a tactical-level combat, my big question is "Does this give me more opportunity to influence the outcome than just going to auto-resolve?" In MoO2, you definitely can. The perfect example I can give is finding a monster protecting a system near your homeworld. What I'd do is research Fighter Bays, Battle Pods, Fusion Beams and Fusion Drives, then build a bunch of frigates carrying a single interceptor each and have them do their best Benny Hill impression while the fighters slowly whittle the monster down. I think the biggest things I know is getting fusion beam because later on you can research it to be enveloping (great for killing fighters and missiles), graviton beams wreak everything, and achillies targeting unit gives a small chance to basically instakill even Antarian ships, Also tractor beams are very useful for boarding. Being cybernetic is a huge boon for 3/4ths of the game because your ships auto-repair during battle, this means even if systems are destroyed from boarding or during combat they can be repaired. IE: an immoblized ship with half it's systems destroyed, all it's weapons gone, shields gone, and computer gone, will eventually repair all those systems to full. This also means that Antarians become a joke early game as long as you have good enough armor because you can out-repair their attacks. I always pick repulsive because if you trade technologies with someone they're just gonna give it to everyone else within 5 turns. Also the AI loving cheats with spy rolls all the loving time because a single spy can be on you for 3 turns and get a technology and your spys can be on them for 50 turns and get only one.
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May 6, 2016 20:36
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I actually tend to aggressively trade techs in moo2. I know I can use them better than the AI can, after all. Best to do it in batches, though - sell tech X to several enemy factions on the same turn. That way, they won't get to make trades, and you get several techs at the price of one. The way you deal with overwhelming numbers of enemy spies is that you place a couple of your own in their empire and set them to hide. That way, the enemy pulls back all of their spies to take care of your own spies (who are doing their drat best to avoid being spotted, and don't actually piss off the enemy because they aren't really doing anything). Or you can just ask them not to spy on you. If they aren't planning to invade you soon, they'll agree, and stick to the agreement for a very long time. Which, uh, you can't do with repulsive. My personal cheese is telepathic + rushing assault craft tech. Doesn't matter how much of a tech advantage the enemy has. As long as you have enough boarding ships to take over a couple of their ships, you can turn these against them in the middle of the battle, and mind control the planet below with them, no troop transports needed.
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May 6, 2016 21:26
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The more I hear about MO2, the more I wonder why people where so down on MO3, since it sounds equally bad in parts.
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May 6, 2016 21:56
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It was really good for its day. Its improved and updated successor is probably SotS 1, it does away wit the tedious planet and population micromanagement and gives you a pretty deep and broad combat system and a research tree that is perfectly capable of loving you over until you cry. It also gives you a trading system that is kinda painful and a few other decisions that could have been revised. Also Psychic and Perfect Space Dolphins.
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May 6, 2016 22:03
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SIGSEGV posted:It was really good for its day. Its improved and updated successor is probably SotS 1, it does away wit the tedious planet and population micromanagement and gives you a pretty deep and broad combat system and a research tree that is perfectly capable of loving you over until you cry. It also gives you a trading system that is kinda painful and a few other decisions that could have been revised. "It's an improvement and does away with tedious poo poo, but it also has some new poo poo to torture you with." Sometimes I love the 4x-genre. 
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May 6, 2016 22:31
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It actually had a very useful system to warn you when it needed looking at, and fixing it was as simple as ordering a bunch of new boats, you just had to learn to use the shortcuts on your own because the tutorials were literal youtube videos shoved into the last patch.
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May 6, 2016 22:57
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SIGSEGV posted:It was really good for its day. Its improved and updated successor is probably SotS 1, it does away wit the tedious planet and population micromanagement and gives you a pretty deep and broad combat system and a research tree that is perfectly capable of loving you over until you cry. It also gives you a trading system that is kinda painful and a few other decisions that could have been revised. Space dolphins can go screw themselves, space crows with drone spam and beam spam and AI is better (especially when you get the AI enslavement and everyone else is getting AI rebellions).
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May 6, 2016 23:45
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Space dolphins get to have the entire setting revolve around them. (I'm pretty much a space crows and space humans fan. Space crows because they hands down completely own and have absolutely great design, space humans because I want to kill more dolphins with my space monkeys.)
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May 6, 2016 23:50
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Space-bugs and space-crows are my favorite. Slowly creep out and annihilate everything with a single uber-fleet of space bugs or drone-spam everything to death. Plus, both ships look great. The hiver hyperspace gates look like giant insects and they love rotating parts and the crows just have an incredibly unique look by being very vertically oriented.
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May 7, 2016 00:04
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Slaan posted:Space-bugs and space-crows are my favorite. Slowly creep out and annihilate everything with a single uber-fleet of space bugs or drone-spam everything to death. Plus, both ships look great. The hiver hyperspace gates look like giant insects and they love rotating parts and the crows just have an incredibly unique look by being very vertically oriented. That and the vertical dreads have a majority of their weapons forward and overlapping, meaning you can slice up cruisers and frigates very very quickly. Despite phasor beams being bugged they are probably the best weapon for space crows simply because of perfect accuracy and good range. Also, don't try putting missiles and other slow projectile weapons on drones, it turns out very terrible for the drones.
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May 7, 2016 01:00
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