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PurpleXVI posted:Perry Rhodan sounds completely insane, I can't imagine actually reading it, but I love your synopses. We've only started to touch the insanity, we haven't even gone in on the onion model of intelligence evolution.
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Nov 19, 2020 12:09
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| # ? Apr 18, 2024 17:18 |
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OK, explanation time: I'm a bit busy during the next week and while there are definitely more updates coming, they won't be coming until after Christmas. Sorry.
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Dec 20, 2020 14:01
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War crimes after Christmas, got it. Have a good Christmas Libluini! (Weird note but my auto spell checker immediately capitalizes your screen name.)
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Dec 20, 2020 15:57
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OK, thread update: I was forced to deal with some private financial issues, and it's eating up a lot of my time currently. So, it's not exactly a hiatus, as I'm still working on this poo poo, but, uh yeah. It's ugly. I'm trying to get this back on track, but between time to deal with poo poo, and time to relax so poo poo isn't drowning me, there's not much left. If things start up again, I'll post another update. 
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Jan 25, 2021 18:30
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Take care Libluini.
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Jan 25, 2021 18:35
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I hope you get out of that without too much trouble.
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Jan 25, 2021 18:56
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Hey so sorry. Life comes first. This thread will always be here, grinding along! ... Actually at rate you're going it could very well always be here!
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Jan 26, 2021 03:20
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 123: Stars at War II GC 693 – GC 718  Dying can be good: Our last leader dying means we got a free spot for a replacement, and here the replacement is: Bony Vokyr, a Tor-Air. The Tor-Air are like the Ajadar visitors from another galaxy. They are also proto-plasmic (essentially, their bodies are just one, huge cell), just in a different way: The Ajadar are more like the Blob, while the Tor-Air resemble more amoebas, including tons of tentacles perfect for tool-use. Their bodies are described as “more structured” then the Ajadar, and I’m guessing here this means they have an easier time making lots and lots of very fine extremities if they need to. Obviously, this makes them perfect engineers and craftsmen by their very nature, and their technology tends to have the same elegance and efficiency as the technology of cybernetic races. Bony Vokyr openly states that they are a scout tasked with collecting information about the people living in the Orion Sector. They are perfectly willing to work for your empire while they’re compiling their spy reports, though. This results in a hefty 10% bonus for our industry, thanks to us profiting from their knowledge about the highly advanced technology of the Tor-Air. Our spies get +3% luck just by learning from Boni Vokyr’s example. Too bad that as an extra-galactic spy openly talking about collecting info on us for inscrutable means makes our people think they’re creepy, so our unrest gets +1%, too. The Tor-Air are another minor race and while the funky-looking graphic points to being an mod-addon, I’m willing to assume that they’re another case of a forgotten MO3-race getting some spice from the modders. If I find something more about them (for example, if there are minor colonies of them that could spawn), I’ll make another Lore-post.  Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on. The rest of GC 693 was like you should expect by now: Our Antaran Expeditions lost a ship, one of our neighbors declared war on us (Klackons this time), enemy spies harrowing us. By the way, I’ve recovered the lost footage of the 2nd Battle of Hera.  2nd Battle of Hera Trilarians!   The promised test: I’ve made two types of dreadnoughts. One, the Test Carrier Loellingit Plasma, is armed with battle swarmers carrying the multi-mod of the plasmabomb. This gives us 2140 DPS, and if it works, it should give us 2x the damage of the conventional version. 2x instead of 4x, because the battle swarmers with this mod are already twice the size, which halves their on-paper DPS. Theoretically, the TC1 Loellingit (yes that’s a mineral, too) P should have its fighters shoot every 0,25 seconds. Let’s see how that works out in practice.  Thanks to battle swarmers being the size of interceptors, the “normal” version of our test carriers is capable of carrying 40 fighters doing 4280 DPS. Giving the enemy twice as many targets to shoot at is an often overlooked bonus. OK, I just remembered I never really talked about in detail about the swarmer-type fighters added in by the Ultima Orion mod. So let’s rectify that real fast! As we’ve learned doing this LP, making your fighters bigger and stronger is kind of a dead end, as it results in nonsense like our superdreadnought carrying less than 10 fighters and then losing them all when enemy PD shoots once or twice. A smart player could think when playing vanilla to just use the smaller interceptors instead of the larger space superiority fighters, but the normal interceptors are cursed: They use special AI which lets them primarily missiles, and won’t want to attack enemy ships if not explicitly told to do, or if enemy ships are too far away for their taste. So while swamping enemy PD with tons of tiny fighters is a legit tactic, in vanilla MO3 it ends being a huge headache thanks to interceptors using a more limited AI. And you’ve seen how much of a big baby our chunky fighter/bombers already are: Imagine the same targeting problems, times 10. The modders therefore added a separate line of fighters after the huge fighter/bomber obsoletes your old space fighters: The swarmers. In game mechanical terms, a “swarmer” is a space superiority fighter with “bonuses” that are just huge penalties to damage, combined with a bonus to size and baked-in ECM I to make them harder to hit. The penalties essentially style them back to being interceptors, but using the improved AI of their larger versions. If you assume mid- and late-game PD will almost always do enough damage to destroy a fighter in one hit anyway, having more fighters suddenly becomes more important than having more damage per fighter. (Which is why I often used old, sub-optimal direct-fire fighter weapons in vanilla MO3, to make my space fighters artificially smaller. This way, I avoided going nuts trying to deal with interceptor-AI and still got to swamp enemy PD.) To summarize, a swarmer is just an interceptor that has a bonus to evasion and better AI. Now, we’re already up to the next upgrade: The battle swarmer. This improved swarmer is still the same size as an interceptor, but has its penalties styled back: Only the penalty to long-range damage remains, the damage in close combat is as high as when using a normal space superiority fighter. They still have the ECM-bonus, of course. So, the story here is, when going through my fighter-classes I realized the swarmers were just normal fighters with some bonuses and penalties to make them behave like their description. It then dawned on me that our fighter/bombers are the same. Basically, fighter/bombers taking up twice as much space doesn’t actually matter, because the game engine still treats them like normal fighters. They’re not actually easier to hit, like you would assume from their description. But taking up twice as much size is actually a huge problem in and itself, as you may have noticed! All that damage does not do much good if enemy PD just has to get lucky a couple times to completely destroy an incoming fighter wave. I also realized that their bonus to not getting destroyed is a simple +2 to their fighter armor absorption. At this point please remember that most of our anti-fighter PD do something like 100+ damage per hit. Yeah, that was bitter. I seriously hosed up just by this fighter type and its awesome (in German) name: “Jagdbomber”. But as soon as you have swarmers, they’re obsolete! Especially with battle swarmers, which combine the damage of a space superiority fighter with the size of an interceptor. Suddenly, enemy PD has a lot of work to do. So in conclusion, from now on all of our carriers will carry battle swarmers instead of our old chunky bois. Now let’s see if the multi-fire mod actually works as advertised! Based on how the TC1 Loellingit Ps and P-s perform in an actual battle, I’ll decide if we go conventional or high-tech on our next generation of carriers.  And since I don’t want to build all those ships manually, I’m setting our imperial finances to “total war” now! This should make our AI smart enough to actually build those things. Edit: And then it took so long building all those test ships I completely forgot later why I put our finances to total war. Luckily I only put them back to a saner setting after I had built enough ships for the planned tests. Oh, and to prevent you from getting too disappointed: This update ran so long I didn’t even get to run those tests. The testing screenshots all ended up mixed in with the next update. Oops! I promise the next one will get here a bit faster, before the waiting time gets too agonizing.  The Trilarian front. Despite our losses, it doesn’t look too bad. Still, we’re obviously not strong enough to actually storm a planet, so the incoming army transports are completely hosed now!  The last combat phase was just a whole lot of nothing and stalemates (the Trilarians avoided our fleet, some more Cynoid-ships died in Yed, and we couldn’t attack ourselves in Kakari because I forgot to send transports). But in this turn I finally remember that the mobilization center in Nu Hydrae is finished now, and send some armies to the front lines in Kakari!  Seriously, what are you doing, Imsaies?  Next up on my to-do list: As the 2nd Battle of Hera proved, our light carriers and missile ships can’t really dish out enough damage to defeat a modern fleet. Since I refuse to pay for useless ships I can’t refit, 700+ ships are scrapped all at once.  Our fleet at Kakari wins and we can drop some troops down on the Cynoid-planets here. Meanwhile, nothing much happens everywhere else. The most note-worthy thing was a short intrusion into Nazin from our border with the Nommo. The squids immediately retreated, though. If you play MO3 for long enough, you realize some patterns, however. If the AI is willing to attack a place, they ain’t gonna stop, ever. So this was just the first probe of our defenses, most likely. (The Klackons would do something on their front, but the New Orions are beating them up. Their fleets keep dying right at my border. It’s kind of amazing. Wish I could watch those battles   Some tank forces try to stop us on Kakari II, but it wasn’t enough. Our battlemechs stomp them easily.  GC 696: Having to actually fight us annoys the Trilarians to no end. The Iserequi Nation extends their trade sanctions to a full embargo. Our trade volume falls from zero 0 to uh… still zero. I’m not complaining. I’m imaging this could really hurt you if you played a peaceful race of traders or something.   The Kingdom of Almandin prepares an official answer to the embargo: A huge fleet of warships forms up in Vela and jumps towards the Hera-system. I’ve basically emptied out our old stock of SD-carriers. There where also some of our missile-dreadnoughts hanging around and some more direct-fire SDs. With so many dreadnoughts and superdreadnoughts, this fleet should do better than our first hasty attempt.  Strategically, the Cynoids and Trilarians have switched places: The Trilarians have proven very annoying to defeat, while the Cynoids are just caving in. Case in point: They’re not even trying to mobilize a force to defend Kakari III.  Two stalemates now: In Yed against the Cynoids, in Hera against Trilarians. In Yed it’s still the slow struggle of slowly destroying Cynoid ships with zero losses, in Hera the situation is more volatile: Both them and us take high casualties. I think at the current rate, Hera will need some serious reinforcements. Our 2nd tier ships over there won’t make it much longer.  Almost as an afterthought, Kakari III is taken. Also lots of spy poo poo, like always. Turn 465 now. Will we make it to turn 1000 before this is over? I seriously hope not.  Further ongoing modernization efforts: As carriers are better than missile ships, I’m trying to find and demobilize older artillery task forces like the 3rd Aqua Fleet here. Especially our older missile designs are suffering heavily in Hera right now. They’re definitely only a burden now.  Next combat phase! More stalemates! But at least both of our main enemies take heavy losses, with us only losing 5 ships total to 53 total enemy ships lost. I’m guessing last turn we lost a bunch of older ships in Hera. Or enemy fighter AI hosed up this time. You never know with this game.  GC 699 sees us taking Kakari IV, with an added bonus: We lay some of our crystal appendages on some unscrubbed XEOL-computers and successfully claim a new spy tech. We also gain another star lane connecting two already connected system even more. Well at least this time it’s not connecting us to more enemies, I suppose!  Spy Dragnet Database is exactly what is says on the tin: We adopt ancient 21st century Human technology to better catch spies. We now scan all passersby of our secure installations constantly and let AI-algorithms compare their face-analogues to a database of known criminals. And this works so good our chance of capturing enemy spies goes up by +5! The description doesn’t tell, but I have to assume it’s something like +5% to capture chance.  This unexpected boon isn’t alone this turn: We start some more tech prototype-projects and have nearly finished multiple others. This one here is the Ultra High Construction Style (Arcology). It comes with a short description describing what an Arcology is and it allows +2 maximum population for the region it was build in. For those who want to now, an Arcology is a huge, domed city-like structure with perfectly controlled environment inside. Ideal to pile tons of people inside without just utterly destroying the environment. Think of the great hive cities of Warhammer 40k fame. This is the exact opposite. Oh, and 2 here means 2000 population points. It’s about 2 colony ships (with standard colony modules) worth of people. Not bad! We also get another pop expansion tech on top of this one: The City Planning Module for Biospheres adds 0,67 pop units to each region it is build in. Not as good as the Arcology-tech, but we get both and they’re auto-techs so we don’t even have to think about them anyway, which means I’m not complaining.  The stalemating continues. In Yed, we smash a full armada worth of ships and only lose 2 ships, in Hera we smash two armadas but also lose one. Remarkable fight our fishy friends are putting up here. Yeah, that fleet in Hera is toast. With the latest losses, that fleet is now beyond the threshold where even superior technology could help them survive. Enough Trilarian carriers, and it’s over in a single battle.  While the Trilarians continue to be unexpectedly strong, the Cynoids continues to not even make an effort. Another planet in the Kakari-system is liberated, and yet another tech is left in some forgotten planetary database. The Armor Piercing Warhead tech we “found” is surprisingly useful: It’s an add-on to all missile designs, reducing enemy armor efficiency by 25%. A huge boost to future missile ships! As long as I don’t forget to include this mod! Also, a ton of other techs finished prototyping just this turn, including the Paratron Shield. Time for new ship designs!  Meanwhile, Kakari is now 100% secured and the campaign moves on. Next target: The Tegaoke?-system! Goddamnit, what is it with me and leaving the mouse cursor in the dumbest positions?  The Fish Front. Even after recent losses, the Iserequi-fleet is strong enough to keep blocking us. And considering we need 8 turns to send reinforcements, and the Trilarians need 0, yeah. That fight is not going well.  “New ship designs” was maybe a bit too early on my side. There’s still some important techs left for our next generation and I’m not a fan of constantly updating designs, so I just do some marginal updating by giving our ships the new Paratron Shields. Even without Perry Rhodan super-lore helping them, they’re flat-out 1,5x as strong, including their regen-rate. A sobering thought for our enemies: A Loellingit-class dreadnought can eat 668 damage points every 5 seconds without noticing. The shield can regenerate from zero to full strength in less than a minute. This is one scary shield! During the same upgrade-round I took the time to compare our Silicoid-only crystal ray cannons to the new disruptors. Disruptors dish out obscene damage, but also take so much loving space our crystal rays win again. They even still have the superior range! The one thing disruptors have is the fact that due to counting as projectile weapons, they do maximum damage at every range. If they hit. Our crystal rays are beam weapons and suffer their typical damage reduction at high ranges. But then again, they hit way more often. If we ever get to my “bonus rounds” we may yet see them in action on our side, as crystal rays won’t be an option then.  Another miniature-update I’m doing this turn is updating our missile-ships, like this tiny LAC here. Armor-piercing warheads are simply too good to be ignored! Also, thanks to using Vortex-Drives, all our ships are now way faster. Completely forgot about that one.  Nothing new in Yed, but the Trilarians finally destroy our fleet in Hera. Ironically, enough of our fighters survive to drag the battle into overtime, so it doesn’t count as a victory. For a human player, this would be just a funny little thing, but the AI can’t see that there’s no need to stay after destroying 100% of the opposition. This means this dumb edge case of not winning gives us another turn while the AI patiently tries to attack our 0 ships left in the Hera-system.   GC 702 doesn’t have much going on. Except for spies, of course! Despite our mounting number of spy techs and our absurdly high number of recruited spies, someone still manages to steal one of our techs, gently caress you, guys! It’s annoying, but at least whoever did this got only the old multiple-fighter inferno bomb tech, not one of our newer ones. And later I did a weapon test and learned something amazingly stupid, so the unknown AI here just crippled itself. The spoilery thing plus the fact the AI unthinkingly uses the last tech received as the “newest”, even if it is a step back (or a hundred, in this case), means the unknown spies unwittingly sabotaged their own side massively here.  Some lucky news: Two of our armadas from the Hera-expedition survived, and are fleeing back across the border. Though by now they’re not exactly up to front standard anymore. I’m torn between leaving them as added defense and just scrapping them.  Something else I just now remember to do: Setting the financial directives back to “peace through strength”, reducing the number of trash the AI builds for me while we’re waiting on the missing techs. To help the AI build more expensive ships, I’ll have to also remember to go back later and change the settings gain. Anyone willing to take a bet over if I actually manage to do this?  Turn 469: Nice, but aside from the typical spy poo poo and our new Arcology-tech being finished, the only other newsworthy item is the loss of yet another Antaran explorer ship. Those expeditions are cursed! Or more likely, as we accidentally learned earlier, all other X-techs have been collected by our competitors already, and are therefore not reachable anymore.  And then, our next wave of reinforcements reaches Hera and absolutely crushes the defenders. 3rd Battle of Hera The Cynoids in Yed lose about 80 ships, too. So kind of a double-victory for us this phase. Still, the Cynoids have more than enough ships left in Yed, while Hera is now uncovered until the Trilarians can mobilize more fleets.  A short look at our Antaran Expeditions: Seems like we’ll soon lose a second expedition to those wily traps left by the Antarans!  Fighting continues. The Trilarians couldn’t mobilize enough ships to defeat our second wave and are subsequently wiped out again.  It’s turn 471 now and our slow destruction of the less crazily over-prepared Cynoid systems continues. Our fleet in this region has reached Tegasoke, and the campaign of liberation begins. Ah, Tegasoke! That’s the name I was covering in that earlier screenshot.  Another clash in Hera follows.  Alas, 120 ships still weren’t enough and we win with zero losses. We also crush the defenders in Tegasoke, so both Cynoids and Trilarians aren’t exactly looking like winners this time.  GC 708. Tegasoke I has fallen to the Kingdom of Almandin. And we’re advancing so fast, we manage to snatch our third conquered tech in a row! After this point, I will cut down on even more superfluous writing by only mentioning new star lanes opening if they actually affect us. In this case, not really. The new tech is Biomorphic Fungus, an artificial lifeform that grows nearly entirely unaffected by temperature, pressure, gravity and other environmental influences. Agricultural DEAs can use this thing as the base for all manner of foods, which straight-up makes all DEAs everywhere in the Kingdom better by +1. It also opens up more worlds to agriculture, as the usable habitability for agriculture is changed by 2. The last thing is ironically not that much helpful, as we some terraforming solves that problem by now. But I guess if you want to plan your colony setup in advance, it can be nice if you now can set agri DEAs on planets you couldn’t before. The greatest joke of all is of course that as Silicoids, we only need techs like this to feed the growing mass of Non-Silicoid citizens in our kingdom. Only the best for our squishy ones!  Then it gets even sillier, as our Imsaies-friends want to trade techs and Biomorphic Fungus is one of the three techs they want to give us. But they’re our friends, so we still go ahead! The Center for Environmental Protection is not exactly a war-winning tech and if they want to give me multiple techs for it, why not? Fighter-Torpedo-Launchers fill up another unrolled spot in our tech tree, while the Phasing Cloak is another upgrade that makes it harder to get discovered in battle. (And on the strategic map, but that’s less helpful as we can’t see what the AI is seeing, so we don’t know if it even works.) I guess it’s, based on usefulness, about 1,5 techs exchanged for approx. 0,25 of our techs, so we still come out ahead on this trade.  Surprise! Some of our scouts found Gnolam-populations living inside XEOL. For some reason it’s funny to me to see the old MO trading race and the new MO trading race unified under the same banner like this.  Victories all around! We keep beating up fish in Hera, still waiting on our ground troops to arrive through that one long-rear end star lane and we effortlessly crush the Cynoids in Tegasoke. Yed is still stalemated, though recently we’ve been destroying Cynoid-ships by entire armadas each battle. The Cynoids have too much industry and stockpiled ships to feel those losses, but that’s why we’re attacking on other places, like in Tegasoke! Undermining the titanic Cynoid fleets one system at a time.  Turn 473 sees our traded techs arriving, and some spy poo poo happening in the background, where I’m not thinking about them. Also oops, the Cynoids must have heard me bad mouthing them, because they’ve suddenly found a backbone! Tegasoke V saw a successful landing, but after taking the region our armies landed in, the offensive lost momentum and the Cynoid defenders mounted a honest-to-good defense.  On the other hand, in 5 turns our new units will gain the Armored Exoskeleton (yes, even tanks and mechs, this is this kind of game), with large bonuses to Attack, Armor and Evasion. It also gives some unknown amount of extra-protection against ABC-attacks, so if we want to go full-on super-villain, here we go! Less impressive if you remember this tech just replaces the old battlesuit tech, but it’s a vastly improved upgrade. Especially the ABC-protection. (Though some of the older armor techs claimed to had this, too. I guess this one has just more of it? Hopefully.)  And then a wild Guardian appears! Looks like one of our scouts suddenly stumbled into another one.  It’s the Draconis Guardian. Well, a good opportunity after we cleared out enemy systems around this sector. The other battles are just us punching our hapless enemies over and over, like in some sort of Master of Orion cartoon.  GC 711 sees a dumb event causing a minor scandal as several of our scientists realize they’ve been vibrating up the wrong rock formation, and our research output suffers empire wide as a result. On Tegasoke V, our latest offensive manages to push the Cynoid armies back another region, but then the mounting losses stop our advance yet again. Tegasoke II gets steamrolled in one turn, however. If we weren’t still advancing, I’d dropped the armies meant for the 2nd planet on the 5th one instead. Let’s see if we can manage to finally force a surrender next turn. This is giving me flashbacks to all those WWI-style planet sieges we had to do against the Raas way back then.  The current situation in Tegasoke: Several planets have been liberated, but there are five here in total, so we still have some work to do. Two armies are still fighting on Tegasoke V.l  And then the game gets weird again: 35 Cynoid ships manage to keep a fleet of 168 of our ships from winning, despite nearly all dying. I’m guessing the fighter AI crapped out in this battle, like it sometimes does.  Turn 475 rolls around and our advance on Tegasoke V is stopped. Trench warfare commences and I’m cursing even more than our soldiers on the ground. Also, one of our leaders is dead. Old age this time. gently caress you spies, this one cyborg dude is a leader you won’t assassinate!  Our Trilarian frontline. Next turn our first ground troops will arrive, and as long as we have the upper hand here, I’m planning to fully abuse our current superiority. That’s why four more transport fleets are under way, and I’ll keep mobilizing more each turn until we have gained a foothold in Hera. The same thing happens in Tegasoke, thanks to the ongoing resistance of the Cynoid armies, just off-screen.  Next combat phase, we’re up to fighting three different ground battles at the same time. If you look closely, you can already see which battle we’ll probably lose, because I seriously underestimated one of our enemies.  GC 714: After heavy fighting, Tegasoke V and III both fall to the Kingdom of Almandin. But the victory is soured, because our armies on Hera V ran into a trap as it turned out the Iserequi Empire had three times more troops on the ground as reported. The difference in combat power is so high, our troops couldn’t even land. The losses are appalling and several generals and one AIA-official have to resign in response.  Also important: We can miniaturize our centuries-old Ion Impuls Cannons a second time! Yay? And of course our cursed expedition fleets lose another ship to zero effect. The poor bastards.  Next combat phase, we try again. Luckily I send a never-ending stream of transports instead just the one wave. One way or another, this will end in dead fish.  But our second attempt at dynamite fishing goes like the first one. Well, gently caress. At least Cynoid-resistance seems to falter, and we take Tegasoke IV without problems. That should be all of them now. The Klackons suddenly remember we exist, but I still have no idea how they’re gonna reach us since their fleets are all getting chewed up by the New Orions lounging around near our borders. Good luck to them, I suppose!  GC 717: Our third attempt finally gets some troops on the ground, and we can secure the landing zone and the surrounding region. Next turn we can just land the next wave straight on Hera VII without opposition. There’s still an insane amount of Trilarian ground troops on the planet, but now that we have a foothold, I can just land two fresh armies each turn. Even without our troops being straight-up better, in about 2-3 turns we will gain the numerical advantage and then it’ll be over.  While there’s still not much happening in Yed, our other front moves again. The Almandian Fleet Command scratches some surplus ships together to cover Tegasoke from counter-attacks, allowing our main fleet there to move forward into Inak. Just to make extra sure, I’m only moving the main fleet next turn, so our reinforcements can arrive before the inevitable sneaky counter-attack. I’m learning!  Then an unexpected surprise: Two more armies did it, and the defenders on Hera VII run out of luck. Their still numerically superior army is steamrolled with just minor losses on our side. Still, we end with about two armies worth of units, out of the four in total which landed. And of course there were the four armies of the two failed landings that got shredded. So, eight armies reduced to two. Yikes. The Trilarian defenders had roughly 5 armies to begin with, so while it is funny that we eventually steamrolled like 3 of them in one go, that’s still a nasty string of bad luck we had there.  OK, this update ballooned a bit out of control and the next one will be equally hefty, I fear. So let us stop on the string of good news arriving with turn 479: Hera VII liberated, and two more spies shot to death with guns. Filovinkhal means Human empire, and the other one is a new one: A Trilarian spy! Yes, new enemies also means more enemy spies. Have fun, player.  Allied Dumbass-Decisions Counter Getting mad at us for beating their worst enemies: 2 Being unnaturally happy that billions of intelligent lifeforms are being atomized: 2 Trying to colonize planets in the middle of a war zone, and failing: 2 Moving huge amounts of transports around our backwater for no good reason: 2 Exchanging techs at a 3:1 ratio to our benefit: 1 (this is dumb, but I can live with it) Total: 9 Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + WIPED OUT (TF1) Expedition B1: 10 ships in position (TF2) Expedition B2: 2 ships in position (TF3) Expedition B3: 15 ships in position (TF4) Expedition B4: 30 ships in position (TF5) Expedition B5: 20 ships in position (TF6) Next: The Stars at War III
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Jan 31, 2021 17:59
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By the way, my other thread will be updated tomorrow. The next update was almost ready, but then I spend so much time getting this one out the door (I didn't even had the videos ready!) I ran out of time.
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Jan 31, 2021 18:04
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War. War never changes.
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Jan 31, 2021 22:57
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Libluini posted:Will we make it to turn 1000 before this is over? I seriously hope not What first, LP completion or heat death of the universe? Don't answer that.
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Jan 31, 2021 23:33
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Looking forward to the ten-year anniversary. (also good to have you back!)
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Feb 1, 2021 06:18
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Good to have this going on! Hope RL is easing up and you're doing better. And yay, trench warfare! At least your rocks have things going slow even by thier standards!
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Feb 3, 2021 00:27
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OK, I know things have been slow, but the next update should drop around Sunday.
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Mar 17, 2021 20:06
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Looking forwards to it!
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Mar 17, 2021 23:01
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From the Stellaris-thread:Tigey posted:On MOO3 - what you want should be an option in the 'TechTags' setting in Bhruic's MOO3 (fan) patcher. It lets you add flags to each tech in the techtables file, giving you the ability to prevent them from being stolen, traded, captured or given in a random event. For those of you who want to still try the game themselves. If you do this, you can limit the ability of the AI-nations to just steal all your techs. I've also added this protip to the OP.
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Mar 19, 2021 20:01
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It has always amazed me how you can make a 4X far better by massively limiting what spies can do and yet I keep seeing spies in them.
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Mar 19, 2021 23:17
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SIGSEGV posted:It has always amazed me how you can make a 4X far better by massively limiting what spies can do and yet I keep seeing spies in them. Simulating Espionage is really hard, usually underwhelming and nowhere even close to being as interesting as it looked like in real life and implementing it in strategy games usually sucks rear end because their effects need to be something the player can feel or else its ignored entirely... Unfortunately the MOOO-way is the worst of all worlds...
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Mar 19, 2021 23:33
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Mr.Misfit posted:Simulating Espionage is really hard, usually underwhelming and nowhere even close to being as interesting as it looked like in real life and implementing it in strategy games usually sucks rear end because their effects need to be something the player can feel or else its ignored entirely... Or something you can protect against. Which can make it pointless and ineffective instead! Yay!
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Mar 19, 2021 23:43
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*After contemplating something seen in two screenshots of the last update* You know, sometimes I'm wondering. *After looking up some game data text files* 
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Mar 20, 2021 15:53
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Libluini posted:*After contemplating something seen in two screenshots of the last update* Share theeeee paaaaaiiiiinnnnn..... 
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Mar 20, 2021 16:31
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Mr.Misfit posted:Share theeeee paaaaaiiiiinnnnn..... Soon (tm) I've just finished writing the next update, I just need a couple hours for my hands to stop hurting, then I'll deal with uploading and posting. (Originally I said Sunday, but welp, finished is finished I guess.) Also: Never believe a video game. They're all lying.
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Mar 20, 2021 16:36
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Libluini posted:Soon (tm) Also 2.0: I can't believe I just wrote 10+ pages in a single day about Master of loving Orion III. And most of that deals with the issues caused by a single tech. I guess my secret is revealed: I'm actually a huge idiot
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Mar 20, 2021 16:38
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Libluini posted:Also 2.0: I can't believe I just wrote 10+ pages in a single day about Master of loving Orion III. And most of that deals with the issues caused by a single tech. Or master of orion III is a much worse game than we imagined. There is still Master of Orion 2 modding putting more life into it.
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Mar 20, 2021 21:53
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 124: Stars at War III OK, let me think a moment. Where were we? Ah yes, at war. GC 718 – GC 727  To recap, in our war against the Trilarians (Fish, but In Space), we eventually managed to strike across our 11 turn connection hard enough to gain a foothold. Now every turn additional troops arrive so we hopefully can gain control of more of the many, many planets in this system, and the many, many troops the Trilarians raised to protect them.  On the main front against XEOL, the empire of the Cynoids (capitalist cyborgs), we’ve left our two stalemates alone since gently caress fighting through thousands of ships and are continuing our strategy of eroding their economy by taking/destroying every planet we can get our mineralized hands on. It’s hard to tell because our shades of red are so close, but we gained another full system and are now on course to liberate the Inak-system in 3 turns.  GC 720: Our Antaran Expeditions send us another update: Yet another ship bites the dust. Troops have been landing and fighting on another fish planet in Hera, but the Trilarians have so many goddamn soldiers even our endgame troops have trouble doing more than taking some regions each turn. And the Nommo and their Esanania Empire join the galactic war against us. The fun and definitely not tedious mechanic of turning everyone against us, and gently caress all those carefully balanced individual diplomatic attitudes. That player empire is big, genocide time.  Turn 481 is another turn for spy action: An enemy spy gets closer to our important techs by stealing the outdated (but terrifyingly, less outdated then the last steals) Graviton Cannon Miniaturization II tech. Whoever this was, can now make their obsolete weapons a good deal smaller! Clearly, we are doomed. Then there are less lucky enemy spies getting shot and interrogated all over the goddamned place. Watch a random spy movie, and just replace the good guys with shiny crystals and the bad guys with everything from inside D&Ds monster manual, and this is what is happening here. By now we’re also fighting on multiple planets in the Hera-system, since thanks to the rear end-long star lane there are still tons of troops slowly making their way from our borders, with two new armies arriving each turn. I can’t wait for our local mobilization center to finish so we can just instantly teleport ships and troops over here.  The turn ends and more fighting in Hera! The Trilarians try to prevent more landings on Hera VI, but fail miserably.  The survivors turn tail and run.  And this is why the Trilarians didn’t want more of our troops on the planet: They managed to degrade the two Almandian armies on the planet to the point where a single army raised as reinforcement for the defenders could break them. Ironically, our expected troops aren’t due to arrive until next turn, so the Trilarians just wasted a bunch of their ships for no reason! And then we advanced another region on both contested planets, the end. No moral.  On our main front, new troops are ordered towards Inak, now that the space defenses are shattered.  Our endless stalemates are still endless stalemates. 2228 Cynoid ships would take 8 battles to clear, even if we win each time and no reinforcements arrive. And they would, the Cynoids still have thousands of ships in their reserves.  The only thing of note during turn 482: Grenzüberwachungsradar/Border Control Radar: After by now more than a thousand Terran standard years, we finally have noticed that spies use small private ships to stealthily cross the border sometimes, so now we’ve started to secure our border by putting automated beacons with long-range scanners in our border systems. Ships trying to infiltrate our borders will now be remote scanned by automated beacons as soon as they exit a star lane. If a ship can’t answer correctly to their automated status requests, the beacons immediately call for help. I let this slide, because building a huge interstellar network of automated drones isn’t exactly trivial, but  at taking hundreds of years to come up with a way to stop small ships from just moonwalking across our bordersby the way, this tech makes it 5% more likely to catch infiltrating spies, I guess next we need better drones  Back in the Hera-system, we’re still fighting on both Hera V and VI, and the fishheads aren’t making things easily. Each turn they raise new armies to replace the ones we’re dumpstering. It’s really annoying!  And in turn 483 we see the results: While the Cynoids are bulldozed with no effort, the fighting on Trilarian planets goes sideways: We advance 1 region on Hera V, but get pushed back 1 region on Hera VI. Overall, nothing changes.  After staring at this screenshot with this look of total incomprehension for a full minute, I move my mouse to delete it and just before clicking, remember why I made it: It shows the dumb test carriers I made for this dumb test I’ve been talking about for months now. You remember the planned weapons test, right? Well don’t worry, I didn’t remember, either! Thank the goddess for notes.  As you remember, some of the modded fighter techs of Ultima Orion add this gimmick of “same weapon, but shoots 4x times”. It so happens that our currently most advanced fighter weapon has this mod available: To recap, it makes a fighter double in size but also makes it shoot four times faster (to simulate a MIRV-style weapon breaking apart into four different warheads) so you gain a ton of firepower. In theory. I wasn’t sure about this since extra obese fighters also mean you can launch only half your number of fighters from each carrier, due to space issues. And only having half the targets to concentrate on is a godsend for point defense. To see if the drawback of dying 2x times faster can be offset by doing 2x more DPS, I made two different carrier designs, one with our normal fighter weapons, and one with the MIRV-variants. Now the first test fleet is ready, and to make sure we can properly compare damage output, I’ve chosen the Dromos-system. Because yes, the New Orions are still hanging around there and will definitely not be beaten by our half-assed test fleets, so we can just walk them in, record damage as they blow up, and then have a comparable set of date! Nothing can go wrong! This fleet here is made up of Test Carrier 1 Loellingit Plasma Minus ships. They’re dreadnought-sized and carry 40 battle swarmers with standard plasma bombs. In theory, they should be far less effective than fighters with the multi-mod. Let’s see how they’re doing next turn. The other fleet will be launched next turn and consist of TC1 LoellingitP ships. Those ships carry only 20 battle swarmers with MIRV plasma bombs. Yes, this weapon tech makes fighters loving huge.  The first test battle! The New Orions rock on with a short-range armada of nearly 100k DPS plus a range that’s more than comparable to even some long-rage weapons. Still, this allows our fighters to launch and attack without their carriers being immediately turned to space dust, so I won’t complain.  Huh. The weapon does a lot of shield damage, but it’s not as impressive as I thought it would be. Eventually, our test fleet is overwhelmed as the New Orions manage to clear our fighters away and then blow up our carriers. We do not do a single point of hull damage. My first impression: Well, until our carriers got scrapped, I hoped we’d eventually crack those shields, but apparently New Orions have really, really strong shields! On to test fight 2 next.  GC 726 is weird: There’s a media uproar about the Almandian Fleet wasting tons of lives in an unprovoked attack on enemies currently not attacking us, just to test an experimental new weapon system, but on the other hand the defenses on Hera VI finally crack and the defenders surrender. We also get a new tech: The miniaturized version of the weakest and earliest FTL-tech. Guess we never had that one, huh? Oh, and we’re getting pushed back on Hera V again. And we lose another explorer from our Antaran Expeditions. But overall the news about millions of soldiers dying as their units are overrun makes more news than yet another ship violently exploding after their crew underestimates Antaran traps. Fancy that.  Also: Time for the 2nd Test Fleet! And just now I notice that differentiating my test ships with a clever suffix also makes it rather hard to recognize them on screenshots like this one. I guess you just have to believe me that this is the fleet with multibombs this time, as the “-” of the other type would be hidden from view here.  By the way, the Nommo have arrived at our borders in Nazin. There’s no fighting yet, as both sides aren’t sure they have the force necessary to win a battle.  And then: Test Fight 2! Yes, that’s the New Orions shooting at our off-screen carriers. “Short-range” my rear end  And then something weird happens: Instead of tons of shield damage, the weapon does a piddling amount of shield damage, but part of the damage breaks straight through Wait whatYeah, for some reason and totally undocumented, instead of doing more damage, the multiple plasma bomb do a lot less damage, but apply most of that to the hull. And while I was contemplating if that unexpected turn of events would make plasma MIRVs worth using, the New Orion ships cleared out all our fighters and then hosed up the carriers. So on the pro side: This time, we did do some hull damage (Yay!) But on the contra side: But we lost all our fighters in record time (Booh, Hiss!) So this happened. After this test, I spend some time studying what the game tells me about those techs, and eventually got reminded that most fighter-weapons have 1 sec reload times, which seems to be a hardcoded lower limit for how fast a weapon is allowed to fire. Apparently, making a weapon fire 4x faster than the hardcoded limit doesn’t work, so the modders must have done something differently to work around that. And the result is our damage going way down, but turning into mostly pure hull damage. Did the modders accidentally make a very weak penetrator-weapon capable of avoiding both shields and armor? Maybe. This left me no sleep, so I went into the files of the games. Turn out fighters all have different behavior, depending on weapons. If I interpret the fighter weapon tables correctly, there’s a variable called “multfire”, which is set to “1” for most fighter weapons, and to “2” for the mechanically very weird Zecken/Tick fighters (they do very low damage, but have the second highest shield penetration of the table, which means nearly 2/3rds of their damage bypasses shields). According to this table, plasma bombs fire after a delay of 4 seconds and then the fighters reload and fire every 1 second after the initial attack. Since none of the reload timers are fractions of 1, I can only make the educated guess that fractional fighter reload times are not possible in this engine. But it would be possible to reduce the initial delay! And presto: A closer look reveals that all bomb-type fighter weapons with MIRV-versions available (Fusion bombs, Inferno bombs, Mine launchers and Plasma bombs) have the same pre-fire delay of 4 seconds. Which instantly reveals that this is the timer which must be targeted for reduction by MIRV-techs. It also means the modders must have noticed that you can’t actually make fighter weapons reload faster than 1 second, so they instead made this line of weapon upgrades just reduce the delay for the first salvo from 4 seconds down to 1. Welp, this would neatly explain why 20 fighters with this weapon didn’t magically do more damage then 40 fighters with the same weapon but without the multifire upgrade. At least this is my interpretation after looking over this table. Other interesting observations from the fighter weapons table: “Gimmick” weapons like the ticks or the mines do poo poo damage but indeed bypass a lot of shields (mine launchers pretend enemy shields are only half strength, for example). Also, beam type fighter weapons do reduced damage if the game calculates a hit at their “far damage” range, with most bomb-type weapons having their far damage reduced to a flat 1, which ouch. Mine launchers do the same damage at far range than at their near range (because I guess the weapon simulates mines floating around) and plasma bombs have the only far range bomb damage that’s not just a flat 1 (it’s 5 instead ), which comes close to the reduced damage of some direct fire weapons. Plasma bombs are fairly good!They’re also have the second highest max damage per shot, at 107 (the best fighter weapon does 120 max damage at optimal range). But ironically, they’re also the second chunkiest: Only the fighter weapon with the highest damage makes your fighters balloon more in size! Interesting is also the “visual” column, as apparently there are only the following graphics a weapon can have, depending on its type: Plasma, Beam, Particle, Mass (Driver). So you get graphical effects for four different weapon types and that’s it. (Also now you know why I never bothered trying to identify weapons by what visual effect the battle map shows. Because that’s a forlorn hope with dozens of weapon techs and only four different effects.) What’s most important for us: While the table revealed that MIRV-style fighter weapons are actually poo poo, as they only make their first hit come 4x faster, instead of firing 4x faster, there’s no explanation for the shield penetration we observed in test battle 2. Plasma bombs have no shield penetration. So is this an effect added by this upgrade tech, like the reduction in initial fire delay? And yes, by looking into the multiple fighter plasma bomb tech description again, I notice that it adds a 20% shield penetration modifier. Which with other anti-shield weapons explanations made me think enemy shields would be reduced in strength, but apparently the really weak 10% penetration of our other anti-shield weapons before makes the penetrating damage disappear under the giant numbers of conventional shield damage and I just never noticed? If this is true, and I think it’s likely, then the piddling shield damage we observed came simply from the combination of only having half the amount of fighters, and New Orion PD killing the fighters in huge numbers, and not from some sort of weird bugged behavior. Conclusion: Too bad, but with fighters twice the size and only the first shot arriving 300% instead of all shots, like the description claims, the 20% shield penetration doesn’t cut it alone. Both armor and hull damage are repaired back to full between battles, so sacrificing all our fighters and carriers wouldn’t even leave some lasting damage. It’s essentially like this: If your first strike is massive enough to outright destroy the enemy, multibomb techs work fine, since 1/5th of their damage will just go right through the shields and ships will start exploding before they can even fire back. But if you get caught by an enemy fleet with lots of carriers themselves, you risk getting overwhelmed by sheer numbers, since even battle swarmers (the improved version of the tiny fighter line of techs) with this monstrosity are fat bastards taking all the space in your carriers. To summarize, our first test fleet with conventional plasma bombs did huge amounts of shield damage, but eventually failed to break through and got destroyed. But the New Orions had real trouble keeping all those fighters away, so it took them a long time to grind our fighters down to the point where they could annihilate our test fleet with their main weapons. Then our second test fleet applied a lot of damage straight to their hulls, but because our carriers could only carry half the number of fighters, the New Orions cleared them up real fast and then blew up our carriers before they took any losses. And after the battle, all hulls were repaired back to 100%. And since we have entered the Age of the Fightercloud, I can only conclude 20% shield penetration is still not good enough in exchange for getting fighters which are easier to hit, easier to kill, and apply a magic -50% carrying capacity to our carriers thanks to having really fat asses. Both those things hurt our fighting strength far too much. Too bad, but the +300% DPS bonus not being real really kills this entire line of techs for us. (Not that we get anymore, I think the plasma bomb is the last fighter bomb tech in the tech tree anyway. The rest is all guns.) And now that I’ve spend all this time ranting about plasma bombs, as a reminder: All of this started when I looked at fighter weapon loadouts in the ship designer and started noticing the fighter weapons would apparently always show 1 second reload times, regardless of what time the related weapon tech claimed it should have. And now we know that’s because the game internally makes a difference between your first shot and reloading times, and the second one is hardcoded to stay the same no matter what.  Only 16 shield damage? Man, shield penetration does weird things to the non-penetrating part of your damage.  The effect of losing tons of fighters really fast: Now the penetrating hull damage is down to 1,3k per hit. Which is poo poo as gently caress, because that damage is spread out over the entire task force. We’d need to be extremely lucky or like 100x this to actually start blowing up huge ships.  Even the direct-fire weapons of our carriers do more shield damage then our fighters. MIRV-bombs are really not the way to go, it seems.  And then our shields collapse and I trigger the retreat. Most of our ships still die, of course. Welp, THIS EXPERIMENT IS OVER NOTHING TO SEE HERE PLEASE MOVE ALONG  This battle wasn’t the only one this combat phase, but by far the stupidest one. Though the Battle of Theta Gru, where a single one of our scouts wandering through accidentally triggers a battle leading to the loss of the small Imsaies-defense fleet comes close. What did they do, send insults to the XEOL-fleets besieging the system?  Of course now that I have delved into forbidden knowledge about Master of Orion III’s inner workings, the game punishes me for it: Turn 485 sees an unprecedented number of enemy spies attacking at once. One of them causes a short-lived uprising on Nobi I, and another one kills one of our leaders. *“another one bites the dust” starts playing* Also we lost another expeditionary ship. Too bad.  Oh, it’s our friends. We improve our research treaty a bit. They’re incredibly rude about it, however.  Afterwards, I found some screenshots showing the second test battle from our side. If I calculate correctly, 20% shield penetration should transform ca. 17k raw damage into 3,5k hull damage. Even with the rest shield damage added in, that totals to only roughly 20k total damage. Compared with our first test fleet easily topping 55k damage, this is rather odd. It’s like the multi bomb mod is not only not really working, but also heavily glitched. But then I remember: Those loving fighters are twice the size of normal plasma bomb fighters and therefore there are only 50% of the first fleet's fighters in this shot. If the firepower upgrade isn’t working, this would mean the 2nd test fleet is doing exactly the damage it should do. (20k total damage x2 would be 40k raw damage, and there’s a lot of variance in the damage our fighters do: 2nd fleet did 2-5k hull damage and the 1st fleet 30-60k raw damage as far as I could see, so 40k damage would be totally normal to see.)  Welp, I guess thanks to my handy calculator it’s confirmed: Multiple plasma bombs indeed have zero influence on fire rate, at best they’ll just make your first shot hit faster, that’s it. At least this entire affair lead me to have a better understanding of how shield penetration works in Master of Orion III, so not all is lost. But for everyone reading this: Learn a valuable lesson from my ordeal and never believe anything the game tells you, always test and confirm. And with that this entire dumb test thing is behind us and next update we can concentrate on winning the game again! Allied Dumbass-Decisions Counter Getting mad at us for beating their worst enemies: 2 Being unnaturally happy that billions of intelligent lifeforms are being atomized: 2 Trying to colonize planets in the middle of a war zone, and failing: 2 Moving huge amounts of transports around our backwater for no good reason: 2 Exchanging techs at a 3:1 ratio to our benefit: 1 (this is dumb, but I can live with it) Total: 9 Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + WIPED OUT (TF1) Expedition B1: 9 ships in position (TF2) Expedition B2: 2 ships in position (TF3) Expedition B3: 15 ships in position (TF4) Expedition B4: 30 ships in position (TF5) Expedition B5: 20 ships in position (TF6) (-1 still not accounted for) Next: The Stars at War IV
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Mar 21, 2021 02:23
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MOO3 - don't believe anything the game tells you.
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Mar 21, 2021 03:02
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Libluini posted:Also: Never believe a video game. They're all lying. Veloxyll posted:MOO3 - don't believe anything the game tells you. There are a number of games that generally give you reliable information. This is not one of them.
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Mar 21, 2021 03:09
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The best part of this LP is that it confirms all of my hatred of this game from when I played it myself.
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Mar 21, 2021 11:19
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PurpleXVI posted:The best part of this LP is that it confirms all of my hatred of this game from when I played it myself. Oh boy. I already have the screenshots for another update. It's a prime example of why I never liked playing peaceful, diplomatic races in MO3.
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Mar 21, 2021 13:31
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Also funny: Some of the files you get when installing the Ultima Orion mod is a bunch of textfiles which are commented out experiments of the modders trying to do "something" and failing. Considering those experiments, I can totally see them trying to change fighter weapon reload, encountering some kind of massive problem and then falling back on "let's just reduce initial firing delay and move on, deepest sigh"
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Mar 21, 2021 13:35
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You poor, poor mad thing trying to look into the mod files itself to see how things work. Also congratulations for another update of 'more of the same'?
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Mar 21, 2021 20:42
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New update incoming later today! This one is basically the second half of that play session. Which is why there's now actual progress, instead of me doing mad science experiments with warships.
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Apr 8, 2021 16:06
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 125: Stars at War IV GC 727 – GC 739  Our relentless forces have grind forward to Tau Scorpii, a deeply established Cynoid-system. But considering we now have yet another front to hold, things have to change.  Integrating the results of many cycles of testing and research, the new Very Heavy Carrier Galenit is introduced: This superdreadnought carries 64 battle swarmers armed with fighter-plasma bombs, and equipped with shields, armor and specialized battle computers. Hard to hit and not really that much more vulnerable than their larger sisters, these tiny monsters will hopefully help break the current stalemates on the battlefield. The Galenit-carriers also carry a supplement of crystal beam cannons for defense, plus an additional four batteries of hyperfields, as those may have less range and pure damage, but will always hit anything in range. The rest of the design is simply upgrades like the new Paratron shield generators. The Almandian Fleet Command has great hopes for this new ship. As soon as it can be build in reasonable numbers, that is.  As direct-fire ships are entering the phase of “not really that useful anymore” of a game run, the big companion ship to our standard-superdreadnought is now the Very Heavy Missile (SD) Cubanit. It has a similar, but slightly heavier defensive armament, mostly due to me not being able to squeeze more huge missiles in. If enemy PD can’t stop these in time, bad things will happen. The four torpedo-launchers of a Cubanit-class superdreadnought can do more damage then the entire swarm of a carrier combined, but it comes with one obvious drawback: Every single missile shot down in flight represents 25% of the entire ships DPS. At least extensive experience with missile ships has allowed the Almandian Fleet to finally push through a design which should have enough internal ammunition to survive a full battle. This is mostly due to a change in doctrine after the extensive combat tests of the last cycles: Endurance is now seen more important by AFC than simple brute force. I’m still not entirely satisfied, due to missile ships being so extremely vulnerable to enemy PD. If it turns out our fighters can’t draw enough fire to allow our missile strikes to get through, I may have go back to the design board and replace some of the PD-weaponry with smaller missiles, just to add some “ablative” shots. The ammunition load out is min-maxed to gently caress this time: 5 missiles per launcher plus the 1 shot you already automatically get per launcher means our Cubanit-ships can fire 6x times per battle. There’s very roughly about a full minute reload time inbetween each shot, and our real time battles are set to run 7-8 minutes. Theoretically, this means our ships will end up dead in the water again if a battle grinds into a long stalemate. But I wasn’t willing to reduce the damage further: More ammo would have meant taking out one full launcher, basically crippling the ship. But in the future, I’ll probably try to keep on trying to get a missile ship with good firepower and endurance enough to last a full battle. An idea I got weeks after this session was using only 3 big launchers with 6 reserve missiles each and trying to use the leftover space for smaller launchers too add some direly needed decoys for our salvos. For now though, this big thing here has to be it.  Improvements for our sensors means the smallest sensible size for our recons is now the heavy cruiser: The REcon Cruiser Wurtzit has the most modern ECM, ECCM and sensor suite we can give, but in turn its armament is really anemic. The poor thing is purely a fleet ship and wouldn’t survive encounters with real warships on its own. While we’re near the end of the tech tree, there’s still 1-2 new generations of electronic poo poo left and of course it’ll be even bigger yet again. We’ll probably end the game with battleship-sized scouts the way it looks now.  And good scouts become ever more important, as the huge space costs of our more advanced electronics means there probably isn’t enough space on our main ships anymore, and even our PD-ships will have to tread carefully: Our new Point Defense Cruiser Kunzit for example, can only carry ECM IV to make enemies hitting badder, while the ECCM-suite (to neutralize enemy ECM) is only first generation. Otherwise, the PD-batteries of this battlecruiser would be simply too small to let the ship do its job! After thinking things through, I believe both missiles and fighters can only have rather limited ECM when compared to actual ships, so logically a PD-ship needs only ECCM to defeat fighter-level ECM, since it’s not supposed to shoot at big ships in the first place. Now if real time battles weren’t so chaotic, and if the game would give actual feedback about what your weapons are doing in a battle, this would actually be testable...  With ever more space freaks showing up on our doorstep, the Crown Council of the Kingdom of Almandin has decided to finally put our economy on warfooting. With enemies on all fronts trying to destroy our democray and trying to replace it with weird, alien forms of democracy, hard vibrations have to be made. All members of the CC are oscillating in harmony about this issue. Welp, we’re back in Total War mode. Mostly because it ups the chance our AI-governors will actually attempt to build our big ships. I don’t want to go to holy war because it looks weird, but it may very well turn out we need to, if our AI keeps being childish about our military expenditure.  GC 729: The AIA keeps shooting spies, but on the battlefield things are more mixed: There were four major battles, at our borders against the Nommo, and on our three stalemates. In all three cases tons of enemy ships were destroyed, but there was no real progress. We need those new ships! Back on Ursa IV a major corruption scandal is uncovered. This event lowers our taxes from that planet for a couple turns. This would be bad if it happens e.g. on your capital at the very beginning of your game, but in our case we won’t even notice the effect until it’s gone. I think we have like 200+ planets now, we can deal with this while the local bureaucracy gets purged.  The situation at Nazin: Both fleets are roughly the same size, but our own ships are positively ancient at this point. We are only holding because the Nommo, dumb space squids that they are, only brought comparable ships to the table.  I’m getting the feeling this happens to the AI because they have the same problems as me to keep their reserves from filling up with bullshit because their governors decided that PD-ship is cheaper than a combat ship, and therefore only built PD-ships exclusively. Also I have no idea at which point the AI decides to scrap older ship types, if ever. If they don’t, it would explain why sometimes seemingly too old fleets keep getting trashed by us. Add in the weird AI behavior of always using the most recently developed missile/fighter/weapon tech, regardless of how effective said weapon is, and it’s a real crapshoot as to how effective a particular AI fleet will be. Remember all those weapon upgrades arriving a century too late to be useful? The AI eagerly will throw out all their current weapons and replace them with improved version of the old, obsolete weapons. In a way, the couple times our allies gifted us old weapon techs could be described as attempts to cripple us! This behavior influences planetary defenses, too: This makes mod-techs like those weird PD-warheads for missiles extremely awkward, because the first time you research them, you probably haven’t realized yet that all your planetary missile bases are now worthless until you develop your next warhead tech. Beams and fighters likewise get replaced by whatever is “newer” on the tech tree. If that tech is something like tick fighters you would never, ever use because they suck, gently caress you! Now all your planet-based fighters are tick fighters.  Tons of battles, we utterly smash the Fish Fiends at Hera (still a stalemate of course, because MO3), and achieve a costly stalemate against the Squiddies at Nazin. The stalemates against the Cynoids at Yed and Nin Hursag continue, but their losses at Nin Hursag were staggering. Good! We may have hit a motherlode of transports or older ships at Nin Hursag, either way there are still thousands more to churn through after that, so let’s not hope too much. At Nazin the news are troubling: The losses are about equal, even though the odds were 1,7:1 in our favor. There must be a bunch of smaller task forces clogging the interface up on the Nommo-side, too: They only send part of their forces against us. Still, that front sooner or later needs reinforcements. Ye olde rust buckets won’t hold out forever.  Turn 487: One of the ships of our Antaran Expeditions suddenly explodes, just after contact was lost. No-one knows anything, except that it may be related to an ancient transmission tower on the world they were investigating. Also in the news: A Klackon-spy gets shot.  A short look into my reserves tells me even Total War isn’t cutting it: Our AI has built 41 heavy recon cruisers and 2 PD-battlecruisers, but isn’t really attempting to build new superdreadnoughts, even though we’re swimming in money. Uuuggggghhh the building AI is so dumb it hurts. I swear I will never play on a huge map ever again, gently caress drat poo poo  Some real progress for a chance: XEOL-resistance in the Nin Hursag system is slowly collapsing: Cynoid-forces are barely stronger then our own. A couple more battles and we should be able to clear this system out. I’m 100% sure this is only because the Cynoids don’t have any mobilization centers left here, so they can’t instantly teleport reinforcements in.  The Cynoid-fleet at Yed is at 1725 ships to our 300. Not good, but also not bad. XEOL has been losing ships consistently for a while now, and they have a mobilization center here, so we may see the beginning of their economical collapse in action. Still a lot of work left, though.  And then there’s this mess. Dromos. Even after our two wild experiments killing thousands of our own spacers, the New Orions are determined to gently caress up the Klackons instead. Welp. Nothing to be done here right now. I love how the New Orions with their super-ships completely derailed my strategic plan of simply pushing through to Orion and then declaring the game to be finished, simply by squatting at my borders until the entire rest of the universe declared war on my Silicoids, and now I can do nothing until all the other threats are cleaned up.  Stalemates still stalemating. But looking at loss curves for us and our enemies, I can predict that we’ll be clearing Nin Hursag pretty soon, and the Nommo will do the same to us in Nazin. Though of course in Nin Hursag we’ll be done after the enemy fleets are destroyed, while it seems both fleets in Nazin will reach zero ships around the same time. So in the end, Nazin’s fate will be determined by how fast we can send reinforcements. And here it doesn’t look good: I’ve manually ordered a ton of superdreadnoughts, but building them will take time. Support ships of course we’re drowning in. And finally, Hera. The Fishpeople managed to scrounge up another 96 ships as reinforcements, but this time they die/retreat fast enough it’s not a stalemate anymore.  GC 732: But this time there are no new ground armies coming from us, so the victory in Hera doesn’t actually help us for now. Oops! At least we can take another planet from the Cynoids. Soon Inak will be joining our chain of pacified systems. Inak is one jump from the next target, Tau Scorpii, featuring prominently in my first screenshot up there  The next combat phase sees some unexpected upsets. Not our stalemates against XEOL-forces, both battles end exactly like they should have, but the other two: In Hera, the Ichthytosians send another 130-ships strong fleet in, and the battle ends even more one-sided. Quite the massacre! And in Nazin, the Nommo-fleet suddenly gets chopped in half. Still a stalemate, but now it suddenly looks like our defense fleet can hold on for now.  Turn 489 sees the Tachidi showing up again. Last time, we only knew they didn’t like Klackons before we got unceremoniously booted from the Orion Senate. Interesting. They must have grind their way across the Vchiitri Empire and started touching our borders again.  By now the Tachidi are just another medium-sized empire. But no-one in the Kingdom of Almandin wants to add another 86-planet grind to the pile, so we’ll be asking carefully polite for an economic treaty.  It takes me a while, but I finally find our common border: The Brachium-system. This isn’t actually a sign of Tachidi-progress against the Klackons, it’s simply that a new star lane now connects Munic (Ex-Psylon) and this Tachidi system. Huh. Well, at least this lane-spawning part of the mod keeps things fresh and dynamic, even if it is annoying sometimes! There’s also a huge New Orion fleet here and suddenly I remember: The New Orions hated both Klackons and Tachidi for some reason. At least they’re occupied so far with beating up two other empires, as I remember them also not really liking us, too.  GC 735 sees lots of dead enemy spies, and another expedition ship blowing up deep in space. Ah, and I see the Tachidi declared war on us. This is fine. The New Orions should help us by keeping the fleet AI of the Tachidi busy. But just in case, I should maybe reinforce the system defenders of the Munic-system...  “Greetings, oh stubborn Kingdom of Almandin. Your ongoing provocations require punishment. We declare, that from now on, our civilizations are at war.”, says the Dzazatar-ambassador with indignation. I’m feeling like the AI is sending me a secret message here.  The Annalona-ambassador is brooding. “Greetings, Kingdom of Almandin. It is apparent, that you are taking us for fools. We declare that our civilizations are at war from now on.” You know, slowly I’m taking this “all AI are programmed to attack the player, if player too strong” bullshit personally. Imagine you’re playing a diplomatic run, and suddenly and without warning, all your allies are mind-controlled into breaking off relations and start attacking you. Sounds dumb, yes? One way to achieve a diplomatic victory is using your military strength to destroy the New Orions and then voting yourself into Orion Senate leadership. It’s like the devs at some level understood how stupid this is. Yet they did it anyway. And it seems to crop up in other games from around this time, too: Space Empires V does this, too. Fascinating.  At least our stupendously huge economy has come through, and our AI actually started building some of our superdreadnoughts: Only the missile-variant, because it is far cheaper, of course. Still, baby steps! And this means I can now move a superdreadnought-armada into Munic. Hopefully our modern ships plus New Orion intervention keeps this front stable while I deal with our other bullshit.  The inevitable fate of every MO3-run: Everyone is at war with the player. You made some lasting allies? gently caress you, they’re enemies now. Enjoy your hellwar, sucker. Relations and trust in both direction? Still vastly positive. This is basically intervention by GM-fiat. A really nasty intrusion of bad programming into your enjoyment. I wasn’t joking about mind control, this is what happened to our allies, the Imsaies! I seriously hope you’re only here to fight battles if you reach this point, or you’re hosed.  The result is immediate: Several of our systems shared colonies, so now every single one shows up in out battle list, with system defense forces of both sides uneasily observing each other. In Bungula-B, a visiting Annalona-fleet opens fire without warning, destroying several of the oldest ships still in operation in the Kingdom of Almandin. Almandian forces return fire, destroying half of the attacking force. The surviving seven ships break off and flee back to the Imsaies-colony in the system. After the surprise battle is over, the defenders move to establish a blockade around the Imsaies-colony. The thing is, if a weak nation has been your ally that long, chances are they’re both super-weak and deeply integrated into your territory. So after a couple turns of confusion, those poor bastards will be crushed without much effort on the side of the player. Considering you can probably set up invasion and landing forces right inside all of their systems immediately. It’s all so pointless it hurts!  And to add insult to injury, a new army I forgot about arrived for another go at Hera V, but the Trilarians manage to overwhelm the landing operations and put everyone to flight. Again. My feelings for turn 491 were basically this:  Our own build AI tries its best to sabotage us, too: We have hundreds of recon and PD-ships, but the AI gladly build about 70 missile superdreadnoughts in the time it took for my first order of 5 carrier superdreadnoughts to finish. Just in case you wonder why nearly all designs are set to “obsolete” again. Also, while this was really annoying, at least I now have some missile ships leftover for our 3rd and 4th rate fronts. A bitter ray of sunshine falling through this mess.  Another fine spread sheet of battles to look at. Please look at our “allies” trying to take a run at us again in Bungula-B. Please note that even against ships centuries old, they took a pasting. I think I begin to understand why the Imsaies did so badly against the Cynoids.  Threatened by invading enemies on all sides, the AFC panics. An orbital strike is ordered on planet Hera I to speed up securing the system before the enemy can overwhelm the defenders with constant on-demand mobilizations. The attack wipes out everything except some lonely Trilarian soldiers. I regret doing this but if the AI wants to play dumb, I can too!  Good news! The Imsaies are fighting against their mental enslavement, and give us a cease-fire. The constant useless fighting and blockading ends, for now. I’m guessing this happens because a) with our territories so mixed, we effectively blockaded nearly all of their worlds, crippling them economically, b) they can’t be at peace with us anymore because the AI-GM doesn’t want them to and c) our good relations force the Imsaies-AI to attempt the next best thing to peace. I’m also betting good money on that the AI of the Imsaies, now that they’ve found this one weird trick to defeat mind control, will continue this cease-fire indefinitely until the end of the game. Anyway, our military alliance is still gone forever, of course.  More good news! We’ve now reached the Titan-class hull. Normally, there would be still two more to go (Behemoth and Leviathan), and the modders liked those special names enough they didn’t get a “German” name, but uh oh: I didn’t like all of them! This means back then when I reshuffled and renamed hull sizes to fit my tastes better, I deleted Behemoths completely to make room for my dumb Light Cruiser – Normal Cruiser- Heavy Cruiser – Battle Cruiser -line of naming conventions. Because of this, this “Titan” is actually the renamed “Behemoth”-class from vanilla and “vanilla” Ultima Orion. This also means this is the penultimate hull size. There’s only the Leviathan-class left (and a special surprise from the UO-modders after that). The lore blurb for Titan-class ships is more boasting about the ship easily being able to defeat multiple ships of the class just before it and the obligatory dire warning to look out for enemy fighters. The only interesting things about it are the claim that we actually had plans for this kind of oversized monster ship for a long time, but the government at the time they were drawn up couldn’t actually build them. But now our knowledge of Physics has advanced to the point where we can! Yay us! The new ship will be again 50% larger then our current superdreadnoughts, and even more expensive. I added a dumb joke about smaller governments destroying themselves economically over the attempt of building one, and that’s it.  Just one turn earlier, we will get better missile warheads: The “Ion-Lightning” tech continues the theme of a mod-variant showing up earlier than the actual tech it is derived from. We don’t have the vanilla Ionpulsar-warheads yet, and I forgot to check if we even get them. One weakness of this mod doubling all missile techs with -range/+damage variants is that the way the tech tree is populated, it makes it really hard to miss a certain missile tech completely, as you get two chances to roll for that tech each time. So with some regularity, you'll miss a vanilla missile tech, but still get the mod-variant, and vice versa. Again, this is the penultimate tech of this line. A normal-sized missile alone does 627 damage, and our monster-torpedos can probably one-shoot most ships in the game right now. If they hit.  Two leftover-techs which also showed up in turn 492: Humidity Regulators, which help restore damaged ecosystems or just plain make the old one better, and Micro Lightweight Construction. The first one is a weird hybrid tech which affects both planet terraforming and ecosystems damaged by bombardment and pollution. The second one is a fluffy upgrade for our industry: Nanomachines have now advanced to the point where even large-scale construction is possible everywhere: Just sprinkle some nanites. This reduces the need for actual factories and in gameplay terms, our industrial DEAs can now “eat” 50% more minerals and 25% more organics to turn into industrial production each turn. Ironically, if that industry-tech does what it sounds like it does, it would be incredibly crippling if we had gotten it earlier, as our industry would suddenly need 50% more minerals to function and also take out a large chunk of our agricultural output. Which is bad for us because only Silicoids can eat rocks, every other citizen population in our empire would start to suffer if our food production drops into the reds. But now, at endgame, this tech simply reduces our titanic surplus somewhat, while gifting us another huge boost to production: On planets with enough industrial capacity, this translates to a direct 50% boost in construction speed. The other tech is so-so. I’m not even sure if there are planets left that would be below the maximum “paradise”-level of ecology if all our terraforming-techs are added up together. But maybe I’m just missing something here, as the game sometimes talks about “hability bands” instead for terraforming techs and “ecology” sometimes relates to techs for cleaning-up pollution instead. I personally think this is terrible vague and the description could relate to one of both, or both at the same time? If people want to know, I can try to look this tech up in the text files to see what it actually does. Honestly, the last time I got this far up the tech tree, I didn’t even get Humidity Regulators, so I have no experience with them. I don’t even know if I have to build them, or if they are one of those auto-build facilities the AI will construct on its own inside a DEA.  The following combat phase is a lot calmer, now that all those potential battles with our ex-allies aren’t showing up anymore. And I think around this time the fleet liberating Inak was on its way to the next Cynoid-system, and Nin Hursag was finally cleared of opposition, so there’s now a real battle shortage happening. At least the Trilarians keep losing. There’s that. That one Nommo-armada tanking my entire fleet in Nazin is worrying, though. I wonder how long I’m allowed to build ships in peace before I have to form up emergency fleets?  Remember that Trilarian planet which effortlessly blasted army after army? Yeah, it’s dead now. They resisted for entire decades worth of Human years, only to all die in a single day of sustained bombardment. If it weren’t for the entire game forcing me into a hellwar, I may have attempted sending troops again, but I don’t want to be pushed back out of Hera, so all the developed enemy planets with their potential to construct a mobilization center and instantly teleport in new ships have to go.  And this update ends with a milquetoast turn 493. Another ship in our Antaran Expeditions meets its end, and there are enough spies walking around one of them actually manages to do something: Warehouses on Connewa III burn, reducing our production on that planet. Oh, no. Next time we will find out if the Imsaies can keep on fighting the Game Master dominating them, or if we’ll be forced to liberate their planets before something bad happens to them. Allied Dumbass-Decisions Counter Getting mad at us for beating their worst enemies: 2 Being unnaturally happy that billions of intelligent lifeforms are being atomized: 2 Trying to colonize planets in the middle of a war zone, and failing: 2 Moving huge amounts of transports around our backwater for no good reason: 2 Exchanging techs at a 3:1 ratio to our benefit: 1 (this is dumb, but I can live with it) Breaking all their treaties with the huge, galaxy-spanning empire they have most of their planets in: 1 Declaring war on the leading super-power: 1 Fighting GM mind-control to achieve a cease-fire after one turn of crippling fighting: -1 Total: 10 (This entire thing of our ally turning against us was so stupid I’m counting it twice, but the AI unexpectedly circumventing their mental domination to reduce the forced war back to a cease-fire counts as an actually smart decision, so I’m also reducing the counter by 1 just for that.) Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + WIPED OUT (TF1) Expedition B1: 9 ships in position (TF2) Expedition B2: 2 ships in position (TF3) Expedition B3: 15 ships in position (TF4) Expedition B4: 30 ships in position (TF5) Expedition B5: 20 ships in position (TF6) (-2 still not accounted for) Next: The Stars at War V
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Apr 8, 2021 16:45
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OK guys, while you're enjoying reading the latest update, a short thread update: From here on out, things will be rather simple. I've already excised most of the spy events whenever possible, and we're about 80-90% through the tech tree, so the ongoing tech and ship design updates will sooner or later also cease to be. I'm also excising more and more battles, except for the most important ones. We're really going to do this! And the bonus rounds I've planned will go fast and smooth, since by then I've already shown you almost everything. The bonus rounds will be mostly go Set Up -> Play -> End, with only the first and last post taking up a lot of space. I'm gunning to finish this thread before the end of the year! My other thread will be wrapped up by then, too (as Operation Eastside isn't really that deep or complex of a game, a couple more updates and we're already halfway to winning) and my next target is an old, old 4x game that was reputedly infamous for its complex space logistics. I can't wait!
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Apr 8, 2021 17:45
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Yay! The grind shall go on with less of a grind to post things! Good luck on hte whole avenue of things. And how are you going to win here presuming you can't take the entire galaxy?
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Apr 8, 2021 22:33
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In the last battle screenshot at Yes, you somehow gained an extra ship after the battle. What happened?
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Apr 8, 2021 23:28
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wedgekree posted:Yay! The grind shall go on with less of a grind to post things! Good luck on hte whole avenue of things. And how are you going to win here presuming you can't take the entire galaxy? After a certain point, I'll only start screenshotting like, every other star system I take, and then it should be over fast. I mean, letting you watch while I agonizingly slowly take every single planet would be just cruel, but since my current rate of 1 month writing time = 3-6 hours of play time is vastly inefficient anyway, I'm guessing no-one has a problem when I take the hand off my screenshot-shortcut more often Right now my workflow produces 200+ images per session, which I then slowly weed down while writing, until <100 are left, which then results in 1-2 updates. Luckily while working on this newest update I realized I needed less and less images as long as nothing weird like our allies getting mind controlled happens. I'll try to reduce the amounts of images I'm taking in the future, by switching to a system where I play, screenshot and write a little bit each day, instead of this current mess of doing everything in large chunks, but weeks apart Donkringel posted:In the last battle screenshot at Yes, you somehow gained an extra ship after the battle. What happened? Stuff like that happens sometimes. My first guess would be that some of our fighters survived until the end and their fighter clouds got counted as a new "ship". It could also be some wonkyness involving planets. The space combat UI normally starts in a "neutral" position since the game can't know if you want to assault a planet, defend a planet or intercept a fleet in deep space. Without other orders, it "assumes" both fleets are and will meet in deep space. My flailing speculation is that after the decision is made +1 "unit" is added by the engine for whoever owns the planet the fight is going to happen around. So in this case, after I hit auto-resolve the enemy decided to assault a planet, so my "intercept fleet" order fell back to add my planet to the fleet. And because we didn't take any losses, we ended with one ship too many. If you put a gun to my head, I would take the second option. Otherwise, let's say it's 25% for option 1 and 75% for option 2. To know more I'd need to reverse engineer the code governing the real time combat engine and I really don't want to (The second guess is based on my observation that the space combat UI includes both orbitals and planets as additional "units" if space combat involves planets. If there are a lot of orbitals involved in a fight, fleet strengths can fluctuate wildly and before this LP happened, I tended to just try to not think too hard about what caused this behavior.)
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Apr 8, 2021 23:43
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Thanks Gamedevs for making longstanding allies and the entire diplomacy system useless.
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Apr 9, 2021 04:27
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How many in-game years old is the war with XEOL at this point? Has it run longer than the war against the Sakkra?
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Apr 9, 2021 08:24
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Man, remember when in Civ 4 long time allies could remain long time allies from the bronze age to the nuclear age? I also loved it when they removed that from Civ 5 and then patched it in again (but wonky and unreliable) because people where complaining.
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Apr 9, 2021 12:51
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