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PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
So, MoO2 had, if I remember right, a sort of "global" food system, where if you had food surpluses in one place, and spare transports, it'd be instantly shuttled to planets with a food deficit. Does MoO3 have a system similar to that? I genuinely forget.

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wedgekree
Feb 20, 2013

PurpleXVI posted:

So, MoO2 had, if I remember right, a sort of "global" food system, where if you had food surpluses in one place, and spare transports, it'd be instantly shuttled to planets with a food deficit. Does MoO3 have a system similar to that? I genuinely forget.

It mostly does. So long as you're producing enough food to satisfy your Empire's needs, all your planets not under blockade are considered fed, and if you make a surplus it's sold to generate income. You just don't have to build freighters in order to ship things. Just in the case that if you have a planet that's not producing food that ends up under blockade, it's more dangerous as you have fewer options onsite to be able to make food on it.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

PurpleXVI posted:

So, MoO2 had, if I remember right, a sort of "global" food system, where if you had food surpluses in one place, and spare transports, it'd be instantly shuttled to planets with a food deficit. Does MoO3 have a system similar to that? I genuinely forget.

With a system like that and me pampered by zero-effort global systems like in Space Empires V and MO3 I would find this incredibly annoying. On the other hand, it's kind of funny how everyone hates MO3 and loves MO2, but every time I hear something about the second game it sounds like it would be rear end to play! :v:

HiKaizer
Feb 2, 2012

Yes!
I finally understand everything there is to know about axes!

Libluini posted:

With a system like that and me pampered by zero-effort global systems like in Space Empires V and MO3 I would find this incredibly annoying. On the other hand, it's kind of funny how everyone hates MO3 and loves MO2, but every time I hear something about the second game it sounds like it would be rear end to play! :v:

2 is much more accessible compared to 3, and there is a strong sense of nostalgia. When I tried to play 3 it was sometimes hard to understand what things really did or what was effective and what not. This was kind of hampered by a bunch of broken AI in the base game as well.

If you were used to Civ2 or other turn based 4x games of that era you could generally figure out how 2 played with only a bit of effort. This is part of why I like that you're playing through the game (even if I can't read the screenshots themselves). I get a better idea of how some stuff really worked.

The one thing I really liked about MoO 3 was the diplomacy interactions. The animations and different stances were fun after so much static or barely animated images.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

HiKaizer posted:

2 is much more accessible compared to 3, and there is a strong sense of nostalgia. When I tried to play 3 it was sometimes hard to understand what things really did or what was effective and what not. This was kind of hampered by a bunch of broken AI in the base game as well.

If you were used to Civ2 or other turn based 4x games of that era you could generally figure out how 2 played with only a bit of effort. This is part of why I like that you're playing through the game (even if I can't read the screenshots themselves). I get a better idea of how some stuff really worked.

The one thing I really liked about MoO 3 was the diplomacy interactions. The animations and different stances were fun after so much static or barely animated images.

In my case, nostalgia starts with MO3, which is why I'm so unforgiving to the earlier games (they're still not bad, mind you, just not my taste). I started out with playing Civilization (the very first game) on my old Amiga, and Sim City on my C64.

Later I played both Civ II (on PC) and Sim City for SNES to death. I'm still inappropriately proud of getting the Mario Statue for 920k+ citizens in Sim City. :shepface:

A random Master of Orion-mod for Civ II then lead me to discover space strategy games. Later a friend showed me Homeworld and I was blown away at how interesting space strategy could be. Cue me one day walking into our local video rental store and seeing Master of Orion III when rifling through the on-sale bin for discarded video games. I immediately remembered playing the MO-mod and just had to know how Civilization in Space would feel.

So my very first space 4x was Master of Orion III. And since I was a blank state, I just took all the quirks and flaws as something completely normal. So I had a lot of fun, and later even more fun with Space Empires V, a game less flawed but so baroque and impenetrable it didn't make a difference.

Now that you know this about me and go back to my LP of Imperium for the Atari ST (now on hiatus), you probably will become scared when you see me raging about that game. It's that bad. :suicide:

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
You know, Libluini, when you eventually kill this goddamn dragon and move on, I suggest you give MoO2 a shot, maybe even as an LP. It'd be interesting to get your opinion on the differences. :v:

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

PurpleXVI posted:

You know, Libluini, when you eventually kill this goddamn dragon and move on, I suggest you give MoO2 a shot, maybe even as an LP. It'd be interesting to get your opinion on the differences. :v:

I'm really not sure on that, there are at least two other games I want to LP before I'd consider one of the earlier Master of Orion games. Hell, there's a third game I've been trying to find for ages, but it vanished from existence. Also it has a dumb 16bit-architecture and doesn't run on a modern computer. The last system I ran that game on was Windows 98. Then I spilled milk on my CD and that was it.

Operation Eastside theoretically should also run on Windows XP, so I'm considering trying out installing XP as a virtual machine on my notebook. If I ever get another copy, that is.

Anyway, this game, Imperium, that adventure game people voted second place and a really stupid space 4x afterwards will probably take up the entirety of 2017. Let's say I consider Master of Orion II and I for LPs in 2018. And only if I can't find Operation Eastside before then. Which is a shame, OE is a simple, fun game from a franchise people outside Germany seldom come into contact with. It also has a badly thought out battlesystem, allowing you to win every single battle as soon as you learn a certain trick.

Glazius
Jul 22, 2007

Hail all those who are able,
any mouse can,
any mouse will,
but the Guard prevail.

Clapping Larry
So if you wipe out an empire, do its spies still stick around and run ops on you out of spite or do they just immediately vanish for another more hopeful universe?

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

Glazius posted:

So if you wipe out an empire, do its spies still stick around and run ops on you out of spite or do they just immediately vanish for another more hopeful universe?

I can't remember, but even if they hang around, every turn their luck keeps ticking down. So sooner or later we'd kill them all anyway.

Veloxyll
May 3, 2011

Fuck you say?!

Glazius posted:

So if you wipe out an empire, do its spies still stick around and run ops on you out of spite or do they just immediately vanish for another more hopeful universe?

Given thiis is MOO3, I'd believe either.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

Libluini posted:

I'm really not sure on that, there are at least two other games I want to LP before I'd consider one of the earlier Master of Orion games. Hell, there's a third game I've been trying to find for ages, but it vanished from existence. Also it has a dumb 16bit-architecture and doesn't run on a modern computer. The last system I ran that game on was Windows 98. Then I spilled milk on my CD and that was it.

Operation Eastside theoretically should also run on Windows XP, so I'm considering trying out installing XP as a virtual machine on my notebook. If I ever get another copy, that is.

Anyway, this game, Imperium, that adventure game people voted second place and a really stupid space 4x afterwards will probably take up the entirety of 2017. Let's say I consider Master of Orion II and I for LPs in 2018. And only if I can't find Operation Eastside before then. Which is a shame, OE is a simple, fun game from a franchise people outside Germany seldom come into contact with. It also has a badly thought out battlesystem, allowing you to win every single battle as soon as you learn a certain trick.

Welp, I just found Operation Eastside on eBay, so hopefully I'll have a copy soon. Not that this matters much for this LP or for this year. :v:

Fake Edit:

I'm writing the next update now, should be finished in a couple days.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer
Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition



Chapter 52: Errors, Stats and More





How cute! :allears: Spies steal one of the oldest techs we have: Now they can improve their centuries old lasers! Man, I hope the AI isn't suckered by this into using lasers again. It would be funny, though.




Our newest planets are still a bit unruly, but the unrest is steadily decreasing. We also caught at least one other spy. And hey, Plasma Cannons are ready!




This turn, Toliman-B has been surveyed and our scout can continue along to Mensa, hopefully the last Raas-system out there.




Toliman-B has only two planets, one of them nearly ideal for Raas. Too bad it’s red for us, but at least it isn’t a very strong colony. We will just drop an army while driving by on our way to Mensa, I guess. The planet has archaeological ruins and I very much like to find out what they do.

Probably research related, but I’m always curious about stuff like this.




Since the combination of a rather sloppy first expedition and not much happening to it is rather boring, I’ve decided to spice things up: Enter the “Pyerite”-class explorer. It’s a down-scaled, cheaper version of the real thing and even though it can only launch two tiny tick particle interceptors (tick particles are one of the tiniest possible fighter weapons), it is a carrier. Well, a “carrier”. A single lab makes sure this ship will always be chosen for an expedition fleet.

This new design should speed up the launch of our second Antaran Expedition. I'm mixing these fakes in with the real thing to boost task force size up a bit, this should force the AI to take more escorts and maybe even some pickets.




The new ship is cheap enough our best industrial center can construct one each turn. Spread around a bit among our other shipyards, this means we will soon have enough for our plans.




You probably already glimpsed this ship on the other screenshot: The Silence-class cruiser is basically just a bunch of engines and a giant Plasma Gun. It is fast and even a single Plasma Cannon can do horrific 426 damage. Three light Neutron Blasters as point-defense and a cloaking field round out the design.

The Silence-class light cruisers and the light cruiser carriers I made earlier will be our new fast infiltration forces, meant to hunt down Raas-colonizers and making a nuisance of themselves.




Energized by the new designs layed down in our shipyards, the Admiralty decides to finally use our Saphire-class battlecruisers! The 1st Blue Fleet is formed.




As always, a direct-fire fleet will be joined by a carrier task force for protection: The 2nd Blue Fleet will be the shield for our Saphire-class ships.

And oops, only now do I realize “Saphir” has two “p” in English! Welp, “Sapphire” looks weird, anyway!




But loving up translations isn’t the only thing I can do: By accident I put in slow PD-ships with my fast assault ships. This would slow them down to the speed of carriers, which is suicide. And so the 2nd Blue Fleet is forced to sit around doing nothing for a good, long while. :shepface:

This error is so stupid I’m still kicking myself about this, nearly a week after this session is over: Now all five long-range battlecruisers will get stuck into transit for up to 9 turns. So I can either let my carrier sit around uselessly until I get my ships back, or send them in unsupported. This is like a decision between poo poo and piss for breakfast: You don’t want either. :mad:




At least something works out: Our troops on Trourmi IV slowly advance. 24 of our units against 26 of them is the newest count.

This turn the Raas took quite a beating, so maybe our army can pull this off without needing reinforcements.




Turn 175 brings science: Our FTL-engines can now be build smaller (not faster, though), Inferno Guns get an upgrade (great, just in time to be obsolete) and our spies get a new toy. The Cyber-Security Connection allows spies to directly interface with computers, which makes it easier to wreak havoc.

And we kill another Raas-spy. Of course we still have another hacker rampaging around, since the banking system on Vela II just collapsed. Again. Looks like the espionage war continues.




News from the frontlines: With Amoenta now completely in our hands and our ships bombing Alphecc to rubble, it’s time for more ground forces. In three turns we will take whatever is left of this system.




And right after we hit another bottleneck: We have enough transport ships for four full armies, but sadly all those transports are still in transit. We will have to wait.




But the Kingdom of Almandin surprises me: Somehow those wily fuckers min-max a 12-unit reserve corps together, just barely below the limit of the one single transport we still have available.




Literally just that one ship, hot drat.

It took me some fiddling before I got the corps down to a size small enough to fit on that ship and still be a self-contained, effective fighting force.




Speaking of effective, even though there’s still fighting on one planet, effective resistance in Trourmi has ceased. The Kingdom of Almandin already launched colonizers to revitalize the worlds scourged by the war. Our lone military transport is joining them.

Though I’m not entirely sure the 9th Reserve Corps will get to the planet before combat is over. 5 turns is a lot for ground battles.




Now it’s time for stats: First, our own empire. The Kingdom of Almandin now controls 55 planets. Our average tech level is 36 and our population is now 1039 kilo-units. The scale of power sees us at 40815 points, which places us 6th among the empires of the Orion Sector.

If we're only the 6th largest empire, I'm kind of scared to think of how large the 1st and 2nd empires must be.




Next is our nemesis since the early game, the Dila Empire, founded by the Raas. It controls 46 planets and even after stealing most of what they use nowadays from us, they’re still three tech levels behind us. Their population is now about 20% lower then ours, thanks to our war efforts slowly grinding them down. Their power points have slipped a bit, with 28264 points even the game acknowledges now that we’re vastly more powerful than them. They’re now at 9th place, far behind us.

It took a while, but we’re now well on the way to winning this war. The Raas have run out of new planets to colonize and we have started to block the few colonizers they’re still sending out. They’re now on their way out, soon all their planets will be liberated from their evil government!




The Vchiitri Empire, our newest enemy, turned out to be a paper tiger: They’ve started the war with more ships, more planets and more population. Now only the last part is left and it isn’t enough. The Klackons control 48 planets, they have 20% more population then our Kingdom and 36923 power points. Definitely closer to us then the poor Raas, but their technology is at level 29. That’s a full generation behind us. They may be placing 7th right behind us, but there’s a mile between 6th and 7th place right now.

A smart player could still reverse the course of the war by vomiting out carriers as fast as possible. Sadly, instead the Klackons have to make do with the MO3-AI. They are hosed.




In contrast, our allies from the Annalona Empire have chosen to go tall, not wide: They barely have any planets (only 20), but their tech level is 34, very close to our own average. Population is, thanks to them preferring gas giants with plenty of free space, nearly the same than that of the Dila Empire, even though the Raas have more than twice the planets. The arbitrary scale of measurement frowns on making allies though and places them at 13th, near the bottom of the 16 races in this game.

Important to note though is this one fact: We’re min-maxing our research because we know most of the stuff we need in wars (ground units, shooty bits, hulls etc.) are all concentrated in three of the six schools. This means the AI actually has to be a couple level above us to fight on the same footing. In truth, both the Raas and the Imsaies are nearly a generation of tech behind us and the Klackons are by now several generations behind us.

I’m now really interested to see how the races on the places 1-5 are doing. I’m guessing after we slaughtered our way through the Klackons and Raas we will finally meet them. Oh, and in case you were wondering: I left out the Psilon's Soriane Union because in terms of power it's completely irrelevant. The SU is dead last in everything. The Klackons really did a number on them.





After that little bit of contemplation, onwards to combat! We bombard Alphecc III some more. In hindsight, this tiny little rock should have been liberated with ground troops. Setting up a Silicoid-colony on a tiny world like this will be painful.




Well, too late. The colony is close to being wiped out already.




On Trourmi, our troops decide to slow down their advance, while reacting flexibly to what the defenders are doing. The Silicoid General coordinating the campaign decides separate from this to take out this weird, large clock-like thing Silicoids use for this kind of thing and dials it down from “Russia” back to “US”. Apparently this will order all combat units to be a bit more careful with collateral damage. 21 units acknowledge the new orders.

After this turn’s combat is over, the defenders have only 15 units left. Looks like we’re winning this even without reinforcements!

Which hilariously, means now I have no idea what to do with that one single corps I send out. I guess I could drop it on some tiny back-water and see what happens, or hold it back as reinforcement for another fight? Oh and all terms above have been translated from the Almandian language.

Next: A Wave of Technology

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
How far do we need to get up the military tech tree before we can entirely dispense with planet capturing and skip right to planet demolishing? It feels like being able to bomb colonies to rubble in short order and then recolonize would make things a lot faster and easier, after of course taking a few planets in less destructive ways just in case the local species is useful for fighting or building stuff.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

PurpleXVI posted:

How far do we need to get up the military tech tree before we can entirely dispense with planet capturing and skip right to planet demolishing? It feels like being able to bomb colonies to rubble in short order and then recolonize would make things a lot faster and easier, after of course taking a few planets in less destructive ways just in case the local species is useful for fighting or building stuff.

We're getting close now, most major defenses for planets are in, while weapons will continue to get better and better from now on. Besides that, recolonizing is often the way to go, just sometimes you don't want to throw your poor colonists on a world they're absolutely not suited for. (That's the other reason to let other species live. :v: )

Of course, sooner or later we'll either automatically or accidentally start building colonizer with non-main races in them and then this problem mostly solves itself.

Colonisation mechanics in Master of Orion III still has some curve balls left for us of course, but we'll not going to see those until we've finally met a certain race...

Oh, and something I keep forgetting to mention (hopefully I remember to put it in one of the next updates), the migration calculations going on in the background can slowly auto-colonize planets if the following conditions are met:

1. You have already colonized other planets in the same system.
2. You have races suited for at least one of the empty planets in your empire.
3. Population pressure threshold is reached.*

If all this comes together, planets will suddenly start collecting population even though they never saw a colony ship landing, not even a system colonizer! It's kind of neat if you can pull it off.

* From observation it seems it only really works when population on the colonized planets in the same system is high enough. At least I've never seen auto-colonization happening in the early game, when population overall is still low.

Edit:

Also I think auto-colonization can be triggered if enough of your colonized systems are nearby, since population can also move along star lanes.**

**In fact, the game seems to use the "invisible" star lanes connecting everything, even the planets seemingly unconnected. What, you didn't know free movement in MO3 was fake and is made from invisible star lanes? Well, now you know! :v:

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer
I'm slowly working myself through the next update, should be ready on Saturday.

Some "highlights":

-Raas being Raas again
-So many warcrimes
-Friend Commuter's ships finally see some real use, thanks to BRUTE FORCE (TM)

habituallyred
Feb 6, 2015
I am pretty sure BRUTE FORCE is what people saw in Friend Commuter's ships.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

habituallyred posted:

I am pretty sure BRUTE FORCE is what people saw in Friend Commuter's ships.

Yeah, but then the game said "gently caress you" to this, this is me working around the game yet again

Friend Commuter
Nov 3, 2009
SO CLEVER I WANT TO FUCK MY OWN BRAIN.
Smellrose

Libluini posted:

Yeah, but then the game said "gently caress you" to this, this is me working around the game yet again

Ah, you solved the brute force not working problem by using more brute force. A masterful strategy.

(also thanks for making it work somehow!)

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer
Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition



Chapter 53: A Wave of Technology

OK folks, I'll be pretty busy next week, so I made this update as massive as possible to cram two updates worth into it. Let's get cracken




Galactic Cycle 264 rolls around with some minor news: Still some unrest of our new planets Tali V and Trourmi VII and evil hackers cracked one of our research projects. So some minor delays and some minor loss of production due to unrest, nothing we can’t stomach!




The entire rest of this turn is a wave of new technologies reaching the prototyping stage: The Köder-Gefechtskopf / Bait-Warhead is the first. The Bait-Warhead is meant to confuse enemy point defense. You’re essentially giving up free space for the chance that the enemy PD will hit your bait instead of a real missiles and fighters.

I always found this tech to be of dubious use, but for the sake of the LP I’m willing to put it on some of our carriers. Hopefully we see this thing in action some day.




Next up: The Quantenfeldverzerrungsschirm / Quantum Field Distortion Shield. Instead of using gravity to repel weapon fire, they’re using weird space-time-distortions to prevent weapon fire from even reaching the shield.

QFD-Shields are considerably stronger then Graviton-Shields. Even as a simple layer without staggering they can absorb more energy than the Staggered Graviton Shields. Like the name hints at, this kind of shield consist of a row of quantum-fields set against each other, causing space-time distortion effects. Those effects work remarkably well at withstanding enemy fire.

Originally, this tech was just the boringly named “Class IV Shield” and its lore in vanilla Master of Orion III was “slightly better than Class III Shields”. In this mod, it’s not only a beefy buffer of HP, a normal sized generator regenerates over a hundred HP per second, so older weapons are kind of hosed here. The original German translation called it a HÜ-Schirm (Hochenergie-Überladungsschirm / High Energy-Overloading Shield).

In my lore-rewrite, I tried to stay close to the original Perry Rhodan-technology, I just wanted it to be more its own thing instead of a pure transplant from PR. A real HÜ-Shield is a technology derived from the Linear Drive: Instead of hurtling through the so-called Libration Zone at high FTL-speeds, the HÜ-Shield generator creates a barrier made from that stuff. The shield is basically a part of the Libration Zone and if you hit it with something, said something gets violently torn apart and transferred into that weird zone in-between Hyperspace and normal space.

The name comes from the shield being able to get heavily overloaded without collapsing. However, if it collapses, the collapse is generally instant and fatal for the ship protected by it.

Since I rewrote the FTL-drive this shield tech is based on to better fit into the Master of Orion universe, I was forced to rewrite this tech, too. It’s now about quantum and space-time distortions instead of quasi-magical Hyperspace related stuff. Quantum!




The Impulse Engine has actually nothing to do with Star Trek, in Perry Rhodan it’s a super-strong sublight drive invented by aliens who turned out to be related to our ancestors. Luckily it being a sublight drive means it’s not connected to the baroque and overwhelming FTL-theories of the PR-universe. This meant I just could leave the lore description as it is.

This reminds me, after all those years I have no idea anymore which vanilla tech the Impulse Engines replaced, woops.

Impulse Engines use gravitic accelerators and better energy compression fields to accelerate the stream medium to nearly light speed. This results in higher maximum speeds then before.




But not only are we getting better shields and sublight-drives soon, our researchers haven’t forgotten weapon technologies: In eight turns we will get the Graviton Cannon.

Graviton Cannons create a stream of Gravitons between muzzle and target, which creates heavy gravity waves at the target point. The target is torn apart. The gravity waves interfere with the shield spheres generate by most shield technologies, causing them to be weakened. Because of this, Graviton Cannons get a 10% penetration bonus against shields. (Shields are calculated 10% weaker against hits from them.)

Graviton Cannons are the long-range weapon of this tier, even though hilariously, the range difference between them and our fancy Plasma Guns isn’t that great. The difference lies in the details: Beam weapons lose fire power less fast than plasma weapons, which means at longer ranges Graviton Cannons will work better. Compared with the giant monsters that are our Plasma Cannons, this weapon is positively tiny to boot, so it makes a very good point defense. As awesome as our plasma weapons are, having ten chances at shooting down missiles and fighters is better than one chance at utterly obliterating one missile or fighter.

This is another case where I didn’t change much. Because back then I was fascinated with Gravitons (the hypothetical particles causing gravity, like Photons cause light), I rewrote all gravity-based technologies in the game to use Gravitons directly instead. This tech was one of the victims and I had to rewrite how the weapon works a bit to make everything fit together plausibly. The old vanilla/original German translation version just worked like a mixture of a tractor- and pressure beam, alternating between tearing and pushing at an enemy ship. Describing this and describing the weapon as this beam of Gravitons and how it interacted with a targeted ship resulted in a rather unwieldy text, so things had to change.

The idea of causing massive gravity waves to hit a ship made more sense to me, so this is now how it works. It also allowed me to shorten my first bad attempt at writing the weapon lore by half.





Finally! I’ve waited far too long for this one. It’s the Raketen-Jäger Abwehrlafette / Missile-Fighter Defense Mount.

To recapitulate, most of our ships use light mounts as “point defense”, because the actual point defense mount isn’t very good: It shortens range and has a flat penalty to damage, while having the same size as a light mount. It’s also 50% more accurate, but that’s more than offset by all the drawbacks. Hilariously, even though point defense mounts fire faster than the light mounts they are based on, they don’t actually fire much faster. This is because light mounts are already rather fast-firing weapons and the bonus on point defense mounts gets them close to what the game engine can realistically deal with. The end result is something odd like 1 extra shot every 4th shot. Not good enough in practice. Our light mounts so far have worked out well, but their time has come now.

The MFD-Mount is an invention of the Ultima Orion Mod and an attempt to reign in fighter supremacy a bit: It’s a normal-sized mount with +100% accuracy and higher damage than normal. Like the point-defense mount it shoots faster (+30% speed of fire), but thanks to being a slower, heavier weapon we actually get a visible difference from the faster firing this time. Of course the MFD-Mount still has some drawbacks: The maximum range is reduced and the DPS drops off 40% faster than normal at higher ranges. On the other hand, damage at close range gets a +10% bonus to compensate. Everything taken together, we get a mount capable of hitting nearly everything with total precision, utterly wrecking everything it hits and almost as fast as a standard light mount. Especially fighters, who like to hang around close while bombarding ships, will get their poo poo kicked in something fierce. To top this off, even with the reduction in range and long-range damage, the MFD-Mount has a longer reach than a light mount and a lot more range than our old point defense mounts. If we put something like Graviton Cannons into a MFD-Mount, we’ll create what is basically a huge death zone around our task forces.

So with this tech we’ll need to finally dumpster our smaller fighters. As soon as an enemy steals this tech, they’ll be able to shoot down our old fighters with terrifying ease. Hell, even our fighter-bombers probably won’t survive long, but at least they’ll get a chance to deal some damage before being mowed down.




Meanwhile, the AIA has done some serious thinking and has come up with a radical concept: Cloaked Freighters! In the future, the AIA will start acquiring and remodeling old civilian freighters to create hidden spaces, shielded against detection. This will allow our spies to use those hide-outs to cross enemy borders. This is a new paradigm: Instead of directly travelling to our embassies as official spies and starting work from there, in the future AIA-agents will use modified civilian freighters and cross over in long-forgotten backwaters!

The chance of a successful infiltration gets a +5% boost.




There also was a minor fighter-weapon good against armor, but we got the Welding Mines too late to be of any use to us, so I didn’t want to waste space on it. Instead let’s waste time by looking up our old point defense!

Our old point defense mounts were actually 20% smaller than light mounts (I keep forgetting this, probably because I don’t use this mount much. My bad.) and have the +50% bonus to accuracy I’ve told you about. Damage at short ranges is halved and longer ranges reduced to 1/3rd of normal. And let me tell you, 1/3rd of light mount damage isn’t very much. The rest (hidden on the screenshot thanks to my awesome screenshot taking skills. :shepface: ) is less total range and a speed bonus to firing. And as I said, light mounts are at that awkward space where faster firing speed results in the game engine reacting rather oddly to it. I’m fairly sure the point defense mounts should fire faster, but observation and math point to this only mattering in longer space battles.

In most cases, point defense mounts aren’t really good enough to replace light mounts for anti-fighter and anti-missile duties.

That said, I sometimes observed task forces without actual point defense mounts refusing to fire on missiles. I have no idea if that was the AI loving up or the task force deciding the missiles were too harmless. Luckily in the future we will have our super-point defense and whatever this was should not show up again.




After this tidal wave of technology, let’s take a look at our reserves. We have tons of Friendly Commuter’s “point defense” and “scout” ships cluttering up our reserves and only six of the Pyrite-carriers meant to be the core of exploration missions. But we also have built four fake “Pyerite”-class cruisers to pad out the numbers a bit. 10 core ships should be enough for a reasonably sized expedition.




Of course now we know that the interface will try to gently caress us over, so in preparation I form up tons of new task forces to clear out our reserves. This time, only the ships we want will join the expedition!




Now there are a shitload of weird task forces hanging around in our capital system. (I even had to throw two armies together to clear out our transports.)




Ah, far better! 10 core ships, and only Friend Commuter’s PD- and scout ships are left. Now we can try again with 0% chance of failure!




I select “Fleet”, one size larger than “Squadron (large)”, the size we want. This may look overly cautious to you, but I want to make sure to force the game AI to take as many ships as possible. If everything works out like expected, the AI will take our 10 core ships, and fill out the rest with Friend Commuter’s support ships.




Well, so far, so good: A large squadron with 16 ships launched.




Or not. :mad: What the hell?! The game took only Friend Commuter’s scout ships and then put three of his point defense ships in it. All the actual explorers are still in the reserves!

Turns out the game doesn’t actually prioritize ships with labs on them (Friend Commuter’s Gypsum-class scouts don’t have any), instead it prioritizes whatever ship class they can use to make the largest possible task force up to the one you selected. The game apparently only makes sure at least one of the ships will have labs on it.

So in this case the game apparently saw that there were more scouts than carriers and decided for some odd reason to take the scouts instead to form the exploration fleet. Even though the scouts had no labs and there weren’t even enough to make a fleet larger than a squadron anyway.

This game’s decision making is helluva confusing sometimes. :confused:





gently caress you, game. You will use our goddamn explorers and you will like it! :argh:

So now we’ve learned Master of Orion III prioritizes recon ships before ships with labs and ships with labs before anything else. Odd. Now why did the game then decide to use carriers before? Well, I went through my old screenshots and noticed we had like 1 single Gypsum-class scout less than we had carriers.

I can only conclude from this that if we have had just two more scouts back when I launched the first expedition, the game would have made a recon-task force and put 1-2 of ships with labs on it as escort. We dodged that bullet just by sheer luck.





Finally, it works: A small, lopsided expedition without any real point defense, a large stack of scouts and two explorer-point defense ships as a back-up and an actual honest-to-god expedition with a sane distribution of classes.

1. Expedition: 4 Pyrite-class explorers, 1 Freedom-class carrier, 3 Feldspar-class “point-defense” ships.
2. Expedition: 13 Gypsum-class scouts, 3 Feldspar-class “point-defense” ships.
3. Expedition: 6 Pyrite-class explorers, 4 “Pyerite”-class fake explorers, 6 Feldspar-class “point-defense” ships.

Almandian News Network posted:

GC 264 saw a momentous moment for our star nation: Two massive exploration fleets launched to solve the mystery of the Antarans.

As our viewers know, some cycles have passed since many of our xeno-archaeologists eagerly departed on board the first Antaran Expedition. Even though the four main explorers of this fleet were escorted by a full-sized carrier and three more heavily armed exploration cruisers, there were voices that the expedition was badly planned and doomed to failure.

These few voices became more vocal when the first expedition continued to not find anything for subcycle after subcycle. Arguments that every long-range expedition like this one would need a lot of time fell on unresonant rock.

Another problem became soon apparent: Too many archaeologists felt left out and demanded another chance at glory. All these interferences caused painful vibrations among politicians tasked with regulating Antaran archaeology. When accidents and unlawful science activity started raising again, the Kingdom was finally forced to act.

A second Antaran Expedition was announced, with the officials involved clearly assuming every problem could be resolved by just shipping out the last of the uppity xeno-archaeologists to their certain doom.

Dr. Kieselstein, the Chief Archaeologist of Almandin University, argued the new expedition should deviate from the standard set by the first expedition: A school of fast, heavily armed scouts should protect several small and nimble explorers. In short, he argued for mobility instead of the heavy ships of the past, who resembled more actual battlecruisers then exploration ships.

But Dr. Kobaltsalz from the newly established School of Universal Knowledge in the JustGniess-system send in a counter-proposal from his excavation in Vela: He instead argued for a brute-force approach. As many of the Pyrite-class explorers and their heavily armed escorts as possible should be joined together.

Both archaeologists soon found themselves drawn into an academic battle between two factions forming around their arguments: The Fishishists, who preferred Dr. Kieselstein's mobility argument and who wanted to concentrate on finding Antaran relicts as fast as possible and the Morbrocks around Dr. Kobaltsalz, who preferred a defensive approach, to keep the expedition alive.

The Fishishists argued the Morbrocks were mad because their large, slow ships would never find Antaran artefacts in the first place, while the Morbrocks argue the Fishishists were mad because their fleet would die to a stiff breeze so finding Antaran relicts would be irrelevant, they'd never succeed in bringing them home.

After doing some hard thinking, the AHC decided to simply do both. Soon a fleet of fast scouts under the command of Dr. Kieselstein and Admiral Saltmine was moving out in one direction and just yesterday, another massive fleet of large, heavily armed explorers launched under the command of Dr. Kobaltsalz and Admiral Sugarpine launched in the other. Remarkably, Admiral Sugarpine is the first Raas in the Almandian Fleet to reach the rank of full Admiral.

The two expeditions will explore as much of the Orion Sector as they can, even far away from our borders. Will they achieve success, or will they all die horribly in some terrible Antaran trap? Only time will tell. Our souls vibrate with you, great explorers! Make Democracy proud!




Our reserves are now empty. And after wrangling with the expedition interface for so long and sending out multiple fleets, I finally decide to retire the four left-over Feldspar-cruisers. (Sorry, Friend Commuter!)




The final step: All those superfluous task forces are getting disbanded again. In the next 1-9 turns, those ships will slowly filter back into the reserves.




With three large expeditions running, we really don’t need to build anymore explorers for now. This means obsoleting every exploration design and then going through my nearly 60 planets to scrap every instance of either me or the AI building them. :suicide:




With this, we have dealt with both science and exploration this turn (yes I know there’s some overlap). Time for war! Surprisingly, our allies have created multiple modern flotillas (there are three more in another fleet besides these two) and send them to our frontline with the Klackons.

This is a lucky break, considering our reserves are empty right now, which makes us very vulnerable to even a single defeat in battle.




We don’t have any transports available to deal with the two enemy planets left in Tali, but at least the naval balance is in our favour, with 32:0 ships. And in case the Vchiitri Empire sends more ships, well the Annalona Empire has send ships to reinforce us. :smugbird:




This combat phase nothing much happens. Raas transports at JustGniess, we block Raas colony ships at Arcturus, and we assault Raas colonies in Trourmi and Alphecc.




But the ground phase has a surprise: The Dila Empire has raised a massive army of 50 units. Surprised and dismayed by this titanic effort by the Raas, our army digs in and prepares for the coming assault. A minor offensive is conducted to mislead the Raas about the amount of fortification being done in our rear.




And the assault comes: After heavy artillery bombardment, armed transports and assault troops with jump jets attack the Almandian defensive lines in overwhelming numbers. At first, the attackers die in ludicrous numbers to the Almandian defenses, but soon the Raas’ artillery combined with continuous deep strikes from their assault units crack the front lines in several places. Raas stream through the breaches and massacre the Silicoids and Raas of the Kingdom's army from the flanks and the rear.

At the last moment, Royal Assault troops throw themselves into the breaches and keep them sealed, allowing other reserve units to surround and destroy the Dilarian units now caught behind the lines. When the fighting dies down at the end of cycle 264, both sides have taken enormous losses. But the defensive lines are wrecked and Almandian ground forces are barely capable of manning them in the first place. AHQ decides to prepare for the worst: Even though reinforcements are underway, all wounded and POWs are evacuated from the planet.




Well, that wasn’t good. Turn 177 starts with the odd message that people are protesting against the development of bait-warheads. I could understand this from the Meklar, because robot rights and all that, but Silicoids? Those weirdos cause the project do be delayed by five turns.




In other news, Kled I sees a total collapse of its stock exchange, thanks to a foreign hacker. Business as usual. Our unrest is reduced further and only Tali V has still some Psilons being angry of not being enslaved to Klackons.




Some now outdated ships are built (looks like I missed some, oops) and some old transports are back from transit. I scrap all obsolete ships.




While the Raas are really determined to make me kill them all, we still have one large army left to try not killing them. Next turn it will reach Alphecc and with two colonies dead and one (hopefully) soon taken over, we will finally be able to move on to Daegwin.




Trourmi IV is literally the only barrier to our fleet just moving on through the wormhole-shortcut in front of them. As long as the planet is here, we risk the Raas using it to send raiding fleets into our rear. But now look at Trourmi II: 100% Raas, but the planet is contested by us. How? Well, this is auto-colonization in action. Over time, Raas from the Kingdom of Almandin have arrived and added themselves to the few survivors from our bombing campaigns.

From now on, this tiny population will continue to rise. Even if there weren’t tons of colony ships on their way to this system right now, in the far future we would gain control of this planet automatically anyway, just very, very slowly. Also, from the migration mechanic slowly shoveling Raas onto this planet, we can assume that the planet probably isn’t Red 2 (megadeathworld) to them, just to us!




The Raas are getting more desperate: Colony ships appear even in systems with heavy Almandian fleet presence. In this case, the ship tries to hide in orbit around Trourmi IV, but our fleet moves out and scares them off.




And that’s the highlight of this combat phase. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same as last turn.




Tali I is cleaned from defenses, but very carefully not bombarded. Then I slipped up and forgot the UI resets your picks every time you personally lead something. So I set both Tali I and Trourmi IV to “lead battle”, dealt with Tali I and then immediately clicked on “execute” for the other orbital battle and only then remembered about this important fact when I saw a large chunk of enemy troops and population suddenly vanishing.

Also gently caress, I forgot about the troops in Alphecc. Now they’re trapped because I already assaulted the wrong planet.




At least I didn’t make things worse by dropping my army into the burning hellscape of Alphecc III. Only a couple sad survivors remain after the bombardment by our 30+ ships.




On Trourmi IV, the massive Raas-army relentlessly counter-attacks our last feint and then keeps on steamrolling our troops all the way back to our old landing zones. Enraged and embittered, the Dilarian troops ignore their losses and just keep on breaking through defensive line after defensive line. In the end, only very few survivors make it off planet. The victorious Raas lose no time and start raping and massacring the civilian population, citing “collaboration” with the Kingdom’s forces as reason.

I’m not even angry anymore, at least this way there’s some challenge. Now if you remember way back I said to speed this war up I would give every planet only one chance to fall to our ground troops before taking off the kid’s gloves. Trourmi IV is now sentenced to death.




Turn 178 sees two important new developments: Agent Seide is ready for work and enemy spies steal Modern Law Theories.

This tech only reduces bureaucracy a bit, this is annoying but not really influencing how our wars are going.




There’s also at least one more spy, spreading unrest. Oh, and another colony joins the Kingdom.




The following combat phase sees me correcting my error in Alphecc and finally assaulting the first planet, like I planned. We hammer down all resistance in seconds and then hammer down the planetary shield in less then a minute.




During orbital phase, our armada in Trourmi blasts the surface of the fourth planet with everything they have. Over half the population dies and the ground units are a little bit scratched.




In contrast to the bloody mess in Trourmi, the liberation of Alphecc I goes swimmingly. Our troops land, concentrate all their forces on what few defending positions there are and in less then a cycle, all of the planet is occupied. Wait poo poo I mean liberated.




Turn 179 gives us a nice summary of what we just did, including a sensation: During integration of Alphecc I into the Kingdom of Almandin, a new, unknown technology is discovered. When cleaning rubble of the streets, a random team of workers encounter and collect some still working computers. A later analysis of them shows they were owned by a Dilarian recycling company. Apparently they belonged to a subsidiary of this company operating on Alphecc I.

The data remaining in them reveals this company, a Cretaceous Incorporated, was selling a revolutionary new way of recycling. Researchers of the Kingdom immediately pounced on this data and after following the clues, revealed one of the still smoking ruins of the war as a so-called “Pollution Processor”, installed and operated by Cretaceous Incorporated. The Almandian military forces had marked the ruin as “alien structure, possible destroyed power plant” and then simply allotted time for future clean-up.

Thanks to the data found by the researchers, the Almandian military finally accepted the evidence and access was opened to the civilian authorities. Multiple subcycles of hard work later a laboratory back in the capital system completed a working prototype. Based on their work, Pollution Processors were soon developed all over the Kingdom.




Pollution Processors can break down nearly everything, and by “breaking down” I mean they rip your garbage apart down to their loving individual molecules! This way garbage can be turned back into useful raw materials. Every planet with a working Pollution Processor has its pollution reduced by a whopping 33%, since it’s really hard to ruin something so badly a PP can’t work with it anymore.

Not as flashy as new weapons, but still goddamn useful. Take that, you scaled fuckers!




Of course now there are even more enemy spies operating: We caught one spy, but two more are wreaking havoc. One is causing unrest (yawn) the other one sabotages military production on Innar V. An entire cycle worth of production is lost.

We also survey Mensa, thanks to the Raas living there having nothing to stop us from doing it.




Mensa is boring. Most of the population here aren’t even Raas. The other planet has something like 70+% Phaigur. A lot of mushrooms, not many dinosaurs.




Well, Mensa is done. Time to visit Iras, the last solar system left in this subsector.




Now to the most annoying thing of MO3: Manually skipping through all our directly controlled planets to order them to build pollution processors.

Luckily most building types you research are the ones being built automatically in your planetary DEAs, or even I would go mad trying to get everything useful ordered. In case you want to know, from the ~60 planets we now control, I have left roughly the half under AI-control and about 10 from the other 30 are just sitting there with custom slider settings I wanted, so they’re basically on auto-pilot, too.




Next bombardment phase (nothing interesting happened in space combat, so I skipped it): Our reserve battalion has arrived over Trourmi IV, but since it’s too weak to fight the still large Raas army below it, I instead send down another orbital bombardment.

Alphecc III gets glassed and the Raas-colony there is wiped out. With this, the entire Alphecc-system is secured.




Some maps: The entire part behind Innar and Plastrum was once part of the mighty Dila Empire. A full third of it is now liberated and voted to join the Kingdom of Almandin.




Our core worlds. It’s kind of funny, but with all this beating up dinosaurs thing I completely forgot how close the Klackons are to our capital system. The frontline is just four jumps from Almandin!

Also awwwww, our allies have reached Cokanuk and flying towards Tali to help us! Isn’t that cute? :allears:




And finally, after we scroll up past our Imsaies-allies, we reach the Vela Subsector, with most of its systems without any (visible) star lanes.

Considering all star lanes are generated at game start, I’m now wondering what a mess the map would be if all of them were switched on at the same time. Remember, the “new star lane”-events are part of a functionality the devs dummied out of vanilla MO3, the modders just restored it. Without it, we would never see any of the secret invisible star lanes. The event basically just makes an invisible star lane visible and removes the hidden FTL-speed modifier to make travel through it faster.


Next: The Great Waitening

Edit:

I'm seriously fed up with the Raas by now. If it weren't for their relentless hostility, I'd have ended this war long ago. But if I ask for peace, they spit in our faces. If I stop "liberating" them, they'll relentlessly sabotage us while building up their fleet again. So we have no choice to continue this dumb dance until their last dumb planet is gone.

In the beginning I made up this picture of the Raas being fashistic assholes as a joke, but goddamn the AI really plays them like Nazi Germany. :mad:

Libluini fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Jan 28, 2017

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
What's the word on maybe trying to tackle one of the Guardians we've discovered so far?

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

PurpleXVI posted:

What's the word on maybe trying to tackle one of the Guardians we've discovered so far?

It's already in the planning stages. From experience I know an assault is reasonable as soon as we have the next hullsize, then I can just build and assemble at least four large squadrons (64 ships) and we should be able to take one on. The weapons and shields we have when the next hullsize hits (it's right around the corner, by the way) will be enough to crack a Guardian.

Just be glad I did all my painful experiments 10+ years ago, or we would have a lot of setbacks around now. :v:

wedgekree
Feb 20, 2013
Yay! Good luck killing the Guardians. Also remember that Guardians make nice stopgaps of other species using that to flank you through the system, so might be worth it to leave it in place if you want to keep that star lane blocked off.

Glazius
Jul 22, 2007

Hail all those who are able,
any mouse can,
any mouse will,
but the Guard prevail.

Clapping Larry
I'm curious about how these Guardians will fare in actual space combat.

wedgekree
Feb 20, 2013

Glazius posted:

I'm curious about how these Guardians will fare in actual space combat.

They tend to either relentlessly slaughter you by the hundreds or you outgun/outtech them so ludicrously that they die real easy. Admittedly it's viable to take them out fairly easily if you know what you're doing in the game (not that I ever did mind). In vanilla they tended to die real easy to carriers or missile fleets. But that was as point defense was really, really, really bad and you could just stay at long range and swarm them with ten fleets dumping warheads into them.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

wedgekree posted:

They tend to either relentlessly slaughter you by the hundreds or you outgun/outtech them so ludicrously that they die real easy. Admittedly it's viable to take them out fairly easily if you know what you're doing in the game (not that I ever did mind). In vanilla they tended to die real easy to carriers or missile fleets. But that was as point defense was really, really, really bad and you could just stay at long range and swarm them with ten fleets dumping warheads into them.

My favourite failed experiment was when I send in a "balanced" fleet of four task forces. Long-range, short-range, carrier and missile. Basically one of everything. 12 ships each. The Guardian mowed them down relentlessly. 48 ships lost. This was with a tech-level compared to what we have now. Still, in vanilla MO3 it would have been a near thing. In Ultima Orion however the Guardian basically became unbeatable after only the carriers were left: It's shields regenerated faster then I could apply damage.

Nuramor
Dec 13, 2012

Most Amewsing Prinny Ever!
So, the Class IV shields are the HÜ. Does this game still go to class X like MoO2? I wonder what PR equivalent you chose for the higher level stuff.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

Nuramor posted:

So, the Class IV shields are the HÜ. Does this game still go to class X like MoO2? I wonder what PR equivalent you chose for the higher level stuff.

It's a bit the opposite, I've rewritten less of the higher-level stuff. Mostly because I was unsure where to go after all this quantum-poo poo here and there. So the higher we go from here, the more it looks like PR again, like the modders intended. :v:

And yeah, I think I saw X-class shields in the text files when I butchered the modders' writing. I forgot what or if they were renamed though. This means it will be a complete and total surprise for us!

Anyway, update-time:

Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition



Chapter 54: A Song of Diplomacy and Espionage




Galactic Cycle 270 rolls around with awesome news (for a foreign spy agency): The secret of Improved Fusion Drives gets stolen! Whoever got this technology can now make their ships potentially as fast as ours!

Hotdamn, this is actually a bad thing. I guess I shouldn’t have mocked our enemies for stealing the wrong thing so often :v:




Turn 180 has more bad news: Unrest-causing enemy agents harm our production on some of our newer planets. Even worse, they make our citizens unhappy! :mad:

This can’t stand. The Kingdom of Almandin will have to finally do something about our spy-problems.




On the diplomatic front however, everything works great: The Psilons even tell us how ecstatic they are about us kicking Klackon rear end. Apparently we gained some cheerleaders. Rock on, Almandin!




While neither our nor their population really trust each other, the relations between our nations skyrocket from +10 to +85! What a little war against a common enemy can do, eh?




At this point I decide to unleash the hounds: Our Silence-class light cruisers will form the first of many raiding task forces to finally stop the Dila Empire from expanding.




And just so you don’t see only carriers in action, the Silence-class ships will be escorted by a flotilla of light missiles cruisers.

Against light forces and civilian ships, this should be plenty. Real combat fleets may crumple our light squadrons like wet paper, though.




The two new task forces immediately jump towards Theta Indi, to begin a long trek across this upper part of Raas space, until we reach their borders.

Of course they’ll fire on targets of opportunity along the way.




The unexpectedly positive reaction of the Psilons to our ongoing liberation war in the Tali-subsector leads to our own military getting ahead of themselves: More armies are put together to free the rest of the Tali-system.




In the following combat phase, the Klackons send some feeble system defense ships against our armada in Tali. This turns out to be a rather unwise decision.




The end of the combat phase: The Vchiitri Empire (Klackons) lose, the Raas lose again in JustGniess and yet again in Trourmi. In Arcturus our two scouts block the Raas’ attempt at colonizing for another turn.




Bombardment phase is the same old, same old. Tali gets carefully exempted, Trourmi IV suffers horribly. Also, the Klackons have an absurd number of troops on that Talian planet above, well gently caress. That's easily 4-5 armies worth of troops.




Case in point. When the explosions finally stop, more than half of the remaining population is gone.




Turn 181 floods us with important messages: Cloaked Freighters gets finished, which makes infiltration of enemy empires a bit easier. Spies steal another technology (this time the Rail Gun Miniaturization II -tech, another good one :argh: ) and we finally get another leader.




We still have trouble with spies causing unrest in some places. 21 unrest is not dangerous for Silicoids, but it is a reminder we should do something soon.

The numbers basically allow you to prevent planets going into strike or open revolt, because if they go up you know you have to do something. Waiting until green hands turn into yellow ones is a trap: If you wait that long something awful is bound to happen. Especially if you're not playing Silicoids.


http://lpix.org/2694295/Aaster015.jpg

According to a secret memo going from AIA-Command to the office of the Democratic Chancellor of Democracy (DCD), there’s a serious problem because “Foreign spies are kicking our crystalline behinds harder than a rock worm”.

I have no idea what a “rock worm” is, but this doesn’t sound good. The DCD decides to pull his freedom-lever a bit back. Oppression in the Kingdom of Almandin rises by approximately 20%. People react badly to the suddenly appearing checkpoints and the obnoxiously polite suggestions by the state media to “not openly sell government secrets”.

The oppressometer is a great tool to combat spies more effectively. Too bad it also combats happiness effectively, so you have to be careful with this. As a constitutional monarchy we can only go up to level 6 (Great Britain), but that would be a bit harsh. On the other hand, level 4 (Sweden) didn’t work out too well, so I very carefully move the oppressometer up to level 5 (Germany) and hope for the best.




And now let’s take a look at our new councilor: Vore der Intronik. He is a Psilon. An “old” Psilon, which means he is some kind of genetic throwback to the days before the Antarans transformed the Psilons into big-brained floating cripples.




He is one of the most powerful men of the entire galaxy and manipulates everyone towards his (sinister) goals.




He is great, awesome and immortal. He is an addition to the game by the modders. Vore der Intronik comes without drawbacks and just makes our spies plain better: +15% mantle, +15% luck and +15% “more offensive spies”.

I’m guessing that last bit means spies are more likely to do real damage when in enemy territory. Also wow, we now have 3 out of 4 leaders powering up our spies. I think we should finally take the hint.




We’ve raised security, we’ve gotten another spy-powerup, what else can we do to fight the flood of enemy spies walking all over us? Oh, yeah: We can actually use our own spies! Verminaard, only 10 turns away from “retirement”, is a really good espionage hacker, so off he goes to cause trouble in the Dila Empire.




While Verminaard is entering some stripped-down fake freighter to sneak over the borders to the Raas, we go through our planets with the highest unrest and put down additional ground troops to stem the tide a bit. Generally, planets with unrest in the double-digits get a small corps, planets with lower unrest a single division.




The combined efforts of what we’re doing should start working over the cause of the next couple turns. We can only sit back and wait now.




After the AIA and our government went into overdrive to combat the spy-threat more effectively, it’s time for our fleets to do their work, too. Since Alphecc is nearly done, I’ve decided to send this motley crew of aging wrecks to Daegwin to get this over with.




The next combat phase is unremarkable. Trourmi IV gets bombed some more. (Yawn.)




Galactic Cycle 273 turns into a roller coaster of good news / bad news. Bait-warheads are completed and we get a new spy, but spies steal our Missile-Fighter Defense Mount-technology. And our allies refuse to improve our economic treaties further. The Imsaies have enough for now.

Goddamnit! I knew this would happen. Couldn’t the game just wait until I actually had built some sturdier fighters? Now we have to hope the enemy can’t bring ships with this tech online before we have better fighters.




Most of the rest is good: The QFD-shields are completed and can be used in our designs from now on. Agent Verminaard crossed into the Dila Empire without trouble and will give the Raas something of their own medicine. And one of the enemy spies got caught. But don’t fear, he wasn’t alone and the free one causes even more unrest than the first one! :shepface:




This poo poo annoys me so much I order our new terrorist, Beowulf, to immediately fly to our enemies and start blowing things up. With a mantle of 6 he has good chances to survive a couple turns and with a dagger-attribute of 8, he will do tons of damage before he is brought down.




The AIA isn’t proud of this, but the way the Raas have been hoisting our petards with impunity has to be answered somehow and blowing up their planets isn’t working.




Imsaies-ambassador: “We’ve just decided TTIP is poo poo and we won’t ratify it. gently caress you and good bye”




The Psilons gush some more about our awesomeness. This is getting embarrassing.




Political relationship is up to +123, almost as good as our relationship to the Imsaies. Still, while their population sees us very slightly better then before, our own populace is still trying to slowly grasp their heads around the fact that the Psilons did a 180° turn and are now our friends.

We’re not really trusting this new peace, is what I’m getting at. It’s exactly what we wanted, but so fast?




The government of the Kingdom of Almandin decides to test this new behavior: Silicoid diplomats are carefully carving up a way to include the Psilons into our alliance-network. An offer to join us in a defensive alliance is made. Will the Psilons stay the course and accept, or recoil in horror as they did before?




Class III ECM sneaks into our prototype-window. In seven turns we will get ECM so awesome, it can even jam hyperspace waves. Fancy!




Then I start updating my designs, only to get rudely reminded that my old designs are all invalid now.

poo poo, I totally forgot about that! Ultima Orion’s miniaturization techs for standard equipment are both incredibly useful and an incredible headache for our poor ship designer.




After that disaster I decide two wait two more turns so we have Graviton Cannons. Then I can just flat-out replace all our designs in one fell swoop. In the meantime, I stuff our slowly emptying build queues with new military units and form up more armies from our reserves.

Ground troops can by now be build so fast, some of our planets can churn out 30 units (the maximum allowed) per turn and still waste some industry. This means two turns of production will give us a shitload of new troops and still leave all build queues empty when it's time to construct the new ships.




Remember the giant Klackon ground army doom stack I noticed in Tali? I decided to add three more armies to the one already waiting in Tali to prevent another ground disaster. Four full armies should at the very least gain a foothold and survive for long enough that I can throw reinforcements into the mix.




This combat phase, something new happens in Tali: Eight ships from the Annalonian Fleet join our armada. The single Klackon-ship challenging us gets vaporized in about 25 seconds.




The Klackons are hosed: The Imsaies are nearly at the same tech level we are and now the Klackons have to fight both them and us. Their outdated ships have zero chance.

Meanwhile, JustGniess and Trourmi see some minor skirmishes and in Arcturus another ship joins the Dila Empire’s defenses. But as long as they don’t actually attack our scouts, they won’t be able to colonize planets in that system!




Good god, by the time our reinforcements arrive, our troops in Tali will have spend nearly a full decade inside their transportships, that can’t be healthy. Our troops in Trourmi have it even worse, that reserve corps won’t see action anytime soon. Especially not with Trourmi IV being wiped out now.


Next: I’m getting the feeling this LPer likes designing ships a little bit too much


Edit: From here on out I’ll add a counter to my updates to show how far along our expeditions are.

Antaran Expedition Status Report

Expedition 1: Nothing happened so far
Expedition 2: Nothing happened so far
Expedition 3: Nothing happened so far

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

Libluini posted:

Good god, by the time our reinforcements arrive, our troops in Tali will have spend nearly a full decade inside their transportships, that can’t be healthy.

They'll have had time to have, and raise, an entire generation of kids to late childhood. "What, a world outside these ships? You're just making stuff up, dad!"

wedgekree
Feb 20, 2013
Given Sillicoids, wouldn't they be more likely to grow the next generation?

SugarAddict
Oct 11, 2012
One thing I forgot about MoO3, you can view your enemies technologies, this means that you can see who specifically stole from you, and you can see what technologies they have because you might want to steal it. If the bug people stole your drive technology, they're just going to trade with everyone and everyone will have it, if the lizard people have it, I don't think they have contact with anyone besides you so they can't trade with anyone.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

SugarAddict posted:

One thing I forgot about MoO3, you can view your enemies technologies, this means that you can see who specifically stole from you, and you can see what technologies they have because you might want to steal it. If the bug people stole your drive technology, they're just going to trade with everyone and everyone will have it, if the lizard people have it, I don't think they have contact with anyone besides you so they can't trade with anyone.

Yes, I mentioned this multiple times in earlier updates. The Klackons could trade, if they can find someone in the sea of enemies they have created for themselves. Otherwise, it's not that big of a deal, that tech is already obsolete for us. Now, losing the Missile-Fighter-Defense Mount, that was painful. Luckily next update we will start to prepare our fleets for facing that particular problem.

Glazius
Jul 22, 2007

Hail all those who are able,
any mouse can,
any mouse will,
but the Guard prevail.

Clapping Larry
Yeah, I'm kind of curious about that. You've got techs that are counters, and counters to counters, and suchlike. How deep does it go, and can you just build a generalist task force and forget about it?

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

Glazius posted:

Yeah, I'm kind of curious about that. You've got techs that are counters, and counters to counters, and suchlike. How deep does it go, and can you just build a generalist task force and forget about it?

Theoretically, we could just build balanced carriers with good point defense and then steamroll everything, but that would be boring.

Even the modders couldn't nerf fighters enough (especially since they couldn't resist introducing even more goodies to neutralize all the new anti-fighter crap again). The end result is this dark secret of Master of Orion III: Only carriers matter.

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer
Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition



Chapter 55: Old Fleet Out, New Fleet In

This update is mostly the result of the technological revolution rolling through the Kingdom of Almandin over the last few turns.





Revolutionary breakthroughs have been arriving in the Kingdom of Almandin for some time now. Because of this, the engineers and designers of this star nation have spent countless crystal-hours on designing the future in fleet combat. This update will reflect the shining surface of the work of these fine minerals.

Two more technologies sneak into prototyping-stage before we lock in what we have for our new designs: Merculite Warheads are antimatter-warheads for our missiles. Ironically, they’re still weaker than our “Big Bang”-warheads, despite being a generation better. (“Big Bang”-warheads are a mod-variation of the standard HE-Warheads.)

For some reason the modders made their variation-warheads not only more destructive, but also more precise, which means our old ones are still superior to the Merculite Warheads in everything except range. Peculiar. Especially since we apparently didn’t get the Merculite-Variant this time. Well, we can’t have luck all the time, right?

Anyway, the other tech are Robot Factories. They are (thank god) automatically build in every industrial DEA. Every industrial DEA gets +1 in effectiveness if they have a robot factory. And since production effectiveness, like research, is linked to population density, this means all our major production centers will get a large boost.

High-Energy Warheads work basically like in David Weber’s novels. Fusion-bombs, grav-lenses, giant death rays cutting ships apart. You know the drill.

The boost from robot factories is sorely needed by now, the production time for our main warships has been slowly increasing for some time, thanks to newer techs being more and more expensive. When we get the next hull size, this problem will be amplified.







Turn 183 sees protests causing a delay for ECM III, but another leader drops by, hoping to get employment from our government.




Graviton Cannon prototypes are being tested right now, but more importantly: Spies are getting caught, another Raas-spy gets shot. We also successfully send in Beowulf into the Dila Empire, while Verminaard has used his time well: He has created an entire hacker-ring and used it to collapse the stock exchange on one of the Raas-planets.

How do you like them apples, Dila Empire? :smug:




Our newest leader is another mod-only leader: Ptuuo’ Otaktal is a Tachidi and we have no idea if that’s true, since he likes hiding. His portrait is just a messed-up security camera screenshot.

We haven't met them yet, they are Insectoids like the Klackons.




This guy is so secretive, he only talks to us by talking to machines, who in turn talk to mediators, who then talk to us. Now that’s what I call paranoid! Spies will get another +20% mantle bonus to make them better at hiding and +20% luck to give them better chances at everything they do. (Also it makes them longer-lived, like all luck bonuses.)

The only drawback is empire-wide +7% unrest. Thanks to being a super-shady information trader, there’s a sector-wide bounty on his head. A very large bounty. And as soon as people notice him working for us, tons of bounty hunters flock to the Kingdom of Almandin, causing wide-spread unrest.

By the way, we now have 4 out of 4 leaders giving spy-related bonuses. I have no idea if that is just dumb luck or if some background-algorithm noticed us getting kicked in the head by spies turn after turn. :shrug:




The Robot Factories in more detail: They are self-regulating constructions. You just feed them energy and raw materials, and they build everything you want them to. 100% automated. The drawback for their large production boost is: They use up a little bit of extra minerals.

Not a drawback if you got every single mineral-usage reducing technology so far, like we did. In fact, this tech will help us reign in our obscene mineral over-production a bit.




Just to make sure, I raise another army for Tali. I really don’t want to lose to the Klackons.




The Klackons throw some more system defense ships at our fleet in Tali. Since we get reinforcements by the Imsaies almost every turn, this Klackon idea gets dumber and dumber over time.




This happens in Daegwin, when our fleets arrive: A single system ship tries to defend the Raas-colonies. A rather odd ship. It does zero damage, has no range, no missiles and no fighters, so apparently the AI designed a ship without weapons? :confused:

The modders are really trying, but sometimes auto-designs are still giving you crap like this. And the AI can only use those, so they’re hosed when this happens.




Battle overview: In Tali, the Imsaies have almost as many ships then we have, while the Vchiitri have given up for now. JustGniess sees another fleet of transports of, Theta Indi sees our raiders pass by and nothing happened in Trourmi.




The rest of the space battles: The odd encounter in Daegwin, we are still blocking Arcturus and another clean-up in Alphecc.




Tali III is the only planet in this list not suffering horrible war crimes.




Galactic Cycle 276 sees the completion of Graviton Cannon technology. Our terrorist blows up a building on a Raas-planet, like they did to us many, many times. Our hackers slow down Raas-research. Also like they did to us many times. Revenge is sweet. :getin:




There’s still some unrest, but without spies causing trouble, it’s actually calmer then before we tightened security. Reticuli II, a planet so far away from our crisis point I have no idea where that is, gets colonized. And Trourmi is already so far in our hand we could colonize (well, re-colonize) the first planet without the Raas being able to stop us.




And now it begins. Since we can’t update our old designs anymore, I just obsolete everything. Zero designs are ready. A fresh start. Now let’s go and see what our Kingdom’s designers have come up with.




First new design is the Long-Range BattleCruiser Rammstein IV. Here I decided to abuse the fact our new plasma cannons have almost the same range than our new long-range weapons: The Rammstein IV is the modern successor of both the long-range Saphire and the short-range Rammstein line of ships. It’s medium Zortrium-armor gives 800 armor points enemies have to chew through before reaching the soft internals. Zortrium has a damage reduction of 8.




The ship also gets the brand-new Quantum Field Distortion Shields. Of course with large shield generators. Large generators create an even beefier version of this already very good shield: 1500 shield points total and 158 SP will get regenerated per second. For comparison, this makes the Rammstein IV basically invulnerable to entire fleets of early game ships.




Our new Impulse Drives allow a theoretical maximum of 2,7k Galactic meters per second. The Rammstein IV keeps a couple hundred Gm below that maximum, which allows me to fit an ECCM II suite in addition to the defensive ECM II. (It also means I had space for more point defense.)




To defend the ship against missiles and fighters, the battlecruiser can use four Missile-Fighter-Defense Mounts. Those batteries will put out withering fire to a range higher than some spinal mounts from the early game. At the very end there was still some free space left, so I put in five Interceptor-missile launch tubes. Those will inevitably run dry in longer battles, but when an entire fleet of Rammstein IVs shoots them out at the beginning of a battle, whatever opening salvo/fighter strike is coming in will get a nasty surprise.




The main weapons of this monster are four giant spinal mounted plasma cannons. Together they do 1704 maximum damage and reach out to nearly 20k Gm.

Graviton Cannons with spinal mounts reach only about 500 Gm farther, by the way. They also have lower DPS, like almost half of what this ship can do. Theoretically, plasma weapons being the worst at high ranges should offset this, but half damage? That’s far too low to be useful in large fleet battles. Graviton Cannons may lose less damage at maximum range and have an additional shield penetration effect, but plasma cannons are just too god drat good. I will still use Graviton Cannons in some smaller ships, but for a main line ship meant to trade heavy fire? Nope. Plasma all the way.

As a welcome side-effect, short-range ships of the same tech level are even more hosed then normal: As they will be faster then our ships, they will get closer and closer, all the while getting wrecked by plasma cannons. Thanks to the plasma guns' high range, long-range ships will get 1-2 extra shots off before short-range ships will open fire. All thanks to short-range AI only firing at, well, short-range. And if enemy short-range ships aren't using plasma guns, they will get even more kicks to the head before they can crawl into range! :v:





Now I think I have gushed enough about our new battlecruiser, let’s move on. The PointDefenseCruiser Fast Amaranth is meant to keep up with our fast-moving battlecruisers. Its main armament are 6 Missile-Fighter-Defense batteries and two interceptor-launchtubes. One of these babies alone is bad news for every fighter squadron, two or more in a task force will be able to neutralize entire fighter swarms given enough time.

As a new design philosophy I’ve decided to give our non-main ships the older, cheaper Thrizium armor. If we get heavy armor later on, I’ll upgrade smaller ships to the new Zortrium, but let it sit at medium. While armor can get quite good, it can make even small ships obnoxiously expensive. I’m basically future-proofing our medium-sized designs.




In addition to that, I’ve noticed that by reducing the shield generator size back to normal, I can get shields still stronger than the old class III ones, but get enough free space for an additional PD-battery. The Amaranth-class cruiser also gets the Graviton-Transponder System to neutralize enemy cloaking and ECM more effectively. This allows me to avoid putting recon ships in as pickets, since we need point defense more than we need a pure recon ship.

Point defense ships are all generally smaller than our main ships and there are generally less escorts than core ships in a task force. And remember, targeting is based on task forces, not individual ships. Incoming fire will be randomly distributed to the ships of the task force. This means escorts will be targeted less often. Everything taken together means we can take weaker shields for our escorts if it means one gun more firing at incoming missiles and fighters.




Now, in a good 4x, having tons of point defense should be enough to make our fleets at least a viable choice against fighter- and missile based strategies. But this is still Master of Orion III, so we absolutely need our own fighters, or even the AI will be able to crush us! Enter the CarrierBattleCruiser Kobalt. Oddly enough, fighter-neutron blasters are still the best weapon we can give to our fighters. Space math can be a cruel mistress.

I decided on a loadout of 23 fighter-bombers equipped with shields, armor, a battle computer for better targeting and rapid-fire fighter neutron blasters. The damage on paper is nearly the half of our direct-fire ships and barely more than our old carriers. (I think it may be even less than our older carriers.) On the other hand, both battle computers and rapid-fire makes them hit with higher accuracy and rapid-fire gives them 20% more damage that are not accounted for here.

As all carriers, this ship is slow as gently caress, but this meant plenty of space for some basic point defense: Four Missile-Fighter-Defense batteries and some interceptor-launchers. The carriers also absolutely need to see enemy task forces from far away to be good at their job, so just in case a task force loses their escorts, I gave the Kobalt-class carrier its own graviton-transponder sensor system.

Nothing is more infuriating than seeing your fighters amble uselessly around because your enemy just went back into cloak. Our direct-fire ships at least can move closer until they stumble over them, our carriers cannot. (And even if they could, don’t. Just don’t.




As always, I couldn’t resist min-maxing, so I made a dedicated PD-ship for slow ships. The (light) PointDefenseCruiser Slow Sand is this ship. It’s a hull size smaller than the Amaranth and offsets this by being loving slow, so we can cram stuff into the place normally taken over by engines.

Still, the smaller hull size came with a prize: The Sand-class PD-cruiser has one graviton cannon battery less than its larger counterpart. It also has only 3 instead of 5 interceptor-launchers. And the ship has the same armor- and shield generator downgrade the Amaranth has!

But this madness has a method: Carriers come with their own point defense already. In an emergency you can (sometimes) depend on your own fighters to help you out. Attacking fighter swarms and missiles often get cleared out by your own fighter swarms on their way, so your carrier and their escorts don’t need as strong a defense than direct-fire ships. Those have to wade through everything the enemy can throw at them, after all. They truly need as much point defense as possible.

This explains why I went this way, with cheaper, smaller escorts and more fighters instead of more point defense.





With this, our future main fleets are ready. Time for our future raiders! To give our raiders some teeth, the LongRangeCruiser Virus has four spinal mounted graviton cannons and three point-defense batteries. Virus-class cruisers can move at our maximum possible speed and have the same electronic suites our larger battlecruisers have.

Since our raiders are primarily meant to shoot down civilian ships like colonizers and transports, I went with maximum speed and range, to minimize flight chances. Hopefully this means less enemies jumping out at the last second. And the oversized shield generators and Zortrium-armor means these ships are still nearly as hard to crack as our battlecruisers.

Of course, without the DPS of plasma guns they’re not really a threat to larger enemy warships. And without the stronger point defense of their larger brethren, this ship will explode like a zit hit by a battleaxe if missiles or fighters reach them. But that’s OK, they’re cheap, fast and expendable. :v:





That said, the MissileCruiser Infection is my answer to give the Virus-class a bit of an edge: Infection-class cruisers are armed with two huge class II missile-tubes and enough ammunition to shoot three times. (Which in a real time battle is something like 1-2 minutes.) An entire task force of them will teach all non-carriers to explode properly into nice space explosions.

Too bad the main weapons took up so much space, though. This cruiser has only a single point defense battery and utterly depends on its escorts.




At this point I decided against making yet again two more PD-designs and instead made this all-rounder to defend both slow and fast ships: The PointDefenseCruiser Missile Wave is primarily for the support of our missile ships, this is why this light cruiser has not only 3 Missile-Fighter-Defense batteries and interceptor-launchers, but also 9 bait-warhead launch tubes.

I had this idea when it dawned on me that both Virus and Infection-class ships are meant to work together, so there’s no reason to not do this. A Wave-class PD-ship vomiting out bait will help our missile ships regardless of them being in the same task force or in another one close by.

Ironically, this exotic design turned out to be more expensive than the actual raider-ships. But it was necessary, at our current tech-level it’s simply not feasible anymore to put everything you need into a smaller ship. Light cruiser is basically the smallest size we can use for an escort. Smaller ships won’t be able to carry enough weapons or electronics to do much good. We have invented too much crap for our smaller hulls to carry. (It especially doesn’t help that stuff like ECM and sensors gets larger and larger with each generation, while our smaller hulls are set in stone.)




Now that’s all of our combat ships done. Next up: Our transports. The new MilitaryTransport Liberator has three transport capsules, enough for 12 units. Like our old Liberation-class transports, it can therefore carry an entire small corps on its own.

But this new ship has improved point defense, better shields and armor and thanks to miniaturization-advances, and also some additional electronics the older ships had no free space for.

Theoretically we could go batshit with huge super-transporters, capable of carrying an entire army, but that also means a single ship lost means an entire army lost. Thoughts like this have made me hesitant to create larger transports than this one. Maybe in late game I will go up a hull size and put 1-2 more capsules in, but don’t expect this to happen for a very long time.




We’re nearly done! Our new colony ship, the ColonyShip Iridium, is cruiser-sized like the old one. It’s basically just an upgrade with all our improved poo poo packed in. The only difference is in its armor: The Iridium only has light armor and outdated Thrizium to boot, mostly to make it cheaper.




And that’s all for our FTL-ships, it’s time for our STL-defense forces. The first design on that front is the tiny LightAttackCraft PointDefense Baryon. A tiny, tiny fast striker with a single interceptor-launcher and a single missile-fighter-defense mount. Not much on its own, but have enough of them mixed in with your other system-defense ships and the enemy will take notice.

This ship is all about being tiny, it even has small shield generators and only light armor, all to make it small and cheap. Of course, the technology is top notch, it still has modern Zortrium and QFD-shields. Obviously this ship is not meant to operate alone.




The LightAttackCraft Reaver will be our primary system defense in the future. After giving it strong shields and nearly maximum speed, there was only space for a single spinal-mounted Graviton Cannon. Still, enough of them will pin-prick even large ships to death.

I still love Lancer as a name for a hull class so much I will make designs for them as often as possible. Which is not often, since they’re so tiny! Only Strikers are smaller and finding work for them is even worse. Anyway, at this point I’ve observed that the AI will still try to just mix slow and fast STL-ships into their system defense task forces without rhyme nor reason. This is a problem.

Some of our system task forces are already paralyzed by the AI deciding to add some of our slow-escorts into task forces made up of fast attack ships like this one. Another one is this: I’ve started several huge battlecruiser-sized system ships with missiles and fighters and now that they’re obsolete, the first ones are nearing completion.

So obviously our attempt at having both small and fast assault fleets and large and slow system carriers is doomed. Instead, all of our future STL-ships will be small and fast. This way the AI won’t be able to inevitably vomit a single speed 500 Gm ship into a speed 2500 Gm fleet and make it worthless.

(This way we will have more production capacity left over for our main FTL-fleets, too. Oh, and the AI is more inclined to build tiny ships, so our forgotten backwaters will slowly create defense forces without us needing to babysit them! That’s the best part here.)





We still need something real to protect our planets. But since the AI is too dumb to deal with more than one type of system defense ship, we instead have to go back to orbitals. After mulling things over, I went back to the tested-and-true method of having two basic orbital stations: A smaller one with direct-fire weapons and a larger one for fighters. (I’d like to use missiles in an orbital one day, but fighters are so much better it’s a painful waste of resources.)

The LongRangeOrbitalStation Refractor is basically just a huge satellite armed with eight huge Graviton Cannons along its axial spine. It has some point defense and the by now almost necessary batch of electronics, like ECM and cloak, but it’s not meant to hold off entire fleets alone, it’s only a support-station for our system fleets to fall back on.

It also costs not much more than a cruiser, so if we have trouble with enemy raiders at some point, this or something similar but updated, will be a nice wall to blast nasty little trolls apart before they can bomb our planets.

Something nice about orbitals: Thanks to them being able to basically spin in place, the 60° firing cone for spinal mounted weapons works out identical to the 360° firing arc of turrets. So again spinal mounts are vastly superior to all types of turrets. The only exception is of course point defense like missile-fighter-defense batteries.

Seriously, I’ve never seen a difference between orbitals with turrets and orbitals with spinal mounts. Both can always target and shoot on enemy task forces in range. The only difference is spinal mounts doing more damage and having more range, so do the math.





After our silly little cruiser-sized space cannon, let’s close this ship designing madness with a true space fortress: The CarrierOrbitalFortress Carbon has an incredible 80 fighter-bombers as main armament. It could have been over 90, but instead I loaded the fortress down with tons and tons of point defense: Graviton Cannons, Plasma Cannons, 10 bait-warhead launchers and 11 interceptor-launchers.

To visualize this, imagine one of our carriers launching all its fighters. Now imagine this space monster blasting them all apart with one shot. That’s what this point defense can do.

A single COF Carbon can launch nearly a full squadron of carriers worth of fighters. The only weak point is that it’s still just one hull, so it has the same shield- and armor strength than one of our carriers. (At least it has more hull points, so it won’t be instantly dead when the shields go down. Just very shortly after.)

This fortress has the firepower of an entire squadron of battlecruisers and can defend itself against all the fighters said squadron can launch. And it better should have, considering it also costs as much as an entire squadron of battlecruisers.

I just hope I can find some place to at least build one of them, they’re loving impressive, even if they are a waste of money and time. Building one with our best industrial center right now would take about 15-16 turns. This means it will be obsolete before we can finish construction. :shepface:





Designing this giant boondoggle of a space castle made me nearly forget we also need a STL-version of a colony ship. There’s no reason to force our colonies to build the more expensive FTL-version for planets in the same system, after all.

Ironically, the SlowerThanLight Colony III ended up being more heavily armed than the FTL-variant even though it is a hull size smaller. On the other hand, I succeeded in making it cheaper, so I left it at that.

The AI would never bother with putting weapons and defensive systems on a system colony ship. Normally the AI is right, hitting a system colony ship is nearly impossible, an enemy would need to be already in the system when it is build, or they would never even see it. On the other hand, if a system colonizer is caught, I’d liked to pretend it can survive somehow to fall back behind the armed forces defending the system. AI system colonizers are just plain dead.




OK, new fleet designs are done. All done. For now. Time to build. Our two best industrial centers are tasked with building our new carriers/battlecruisers, respectively. The planets lower on the totem pole are tasked with constructing escorts, transports and raiders.

All older ships can now be relegated to defensive roles, our new designs will take over frontline-duties.

This is our newest generation of ships. If you take into account the recon ship I will design as soon as we get ECM III, that's three ship designs less then in our last generation. Streamlining: Successful!


Next: The fleet of Almandin, ca. GC 277

Antaran Expedition Status

Expedition1: Nothing
Expedition2: Nothing
Expedition3: Nothing

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
Slow and grinding as this is, at least it's still better than Imperium. :v:

Deadmeat5150
Nov 21, 2005

OLD MAN YELLS AT CLAN
I love the new ship designs.

Ive been trying hard to remember how far into the game I played before I gave up. I think it was when I was about as large as you are now. I never used automation or spreadsheets.

wedgekree
Feb 20, 2013
That's some beauts of ships there. I suppose the question is now are the Sillicoid Armed Forces capable of holding thier own in general on th efield without extreme superiority in numbers thanks to our tech advantage and Dino 'volunteer' units or do we stil have to presume 2-3 times superior numbers/force ratio in order to presume to make headway?

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer

wedgekree posted:

That's some beauts of ships there. I suppose the question is now are the Sillicoid Armed Forces capable of holding thier own in general on th efield without extreme superiority in numbers thanks to our tech advantage and Dino 'volunteer' units or do we stil have to presume 2-3 times superior numbers/force ratio in order to presume to make headway?

Interestingly, most of our problems on the ground seem to stem from the fact that mostly, we've only been fighting Raas. And Raas are beastly on the ground (they fought and won a civil war against the Sakkra in the background lore, for example). I didn't really think too much about this, since the Silicoids truly aren't the best ground fighters, but next update will show what happens if we fight something that isn't dinosaurs on steroids.

The fact we won against the Klackons even though our liberation effort in Tali started out rather unlucky should have been a sign, but I'm not terribly observant so I missed it. :v:

Libluini
May 18, 2012

I gravitated towards the Greens, eventually even joining the party itself.

The Linke is a party I grudgingly accept exists, but I've learned enough about DDR-history I can't bring myself to trust a party that was once the SED, a party leading the corrupt state apparatus ...
Grimey Drawer
Meister des Orions 3



Kapitel Liegende Acht A: La Historia


Recently I've been looking at our lore-entries and noticed there aren't that many entries about the people living in the Orion Sector. Most of it was the (now finished) history of the Sector and only a few entries are about the sapient species who created that history. I think it's time to change this!

In the past, I was a bit hesitant to do this, because well, most of the races we have met so far are part of convoluted chains/groups of races with interacting histories. I had decided that posting about the races we have met would be premature when half their backstory is about other races we haven't yet.

Things have changed a bit, though: We are at war with the Klackons and a Tachidi suddenly showed up to become one of our leaders, so that pair of races can be done now! And then I remembered I "cheated" by giving you the Cybernetiks backstory even though we only stumbled over the Cynoids after travelling through Imsaies-space and the Meklar we only knew about because they were one of the choices for playable races at the start of the LP.

So I "cheated" again: The Imsaies are our best friends and at one time one of our scouts stumbled over a far-away Eoladi-empire. Good enough, that lore-entry can now be released, too!

The Raas are the most annoying thing still, even when thinking about lore entries: Their backstory is extra-chaotic and involves five races in total and we haven't met one of the other four races so far. So the Raas (Saurian/Ichtythosian) background has to wait a little bit longer. I simply don't want to force you to remember that lore entry in 4-5 months, when it will suddenly be relevant.

Psilons are kind of a mixed bag, their backstory is more self-contained, but they're also the only Humanoid race out of three we have met so far.

Right now the plan is to take my extract of the Encyclopedia Galactica, churn out lore for Insectoids and Gasbags, follow up with a short post to cover the Psilons and hope that by then I have finally a reason to post the Saurian lore.

Except of course, if you absolutely want to hear about our arch-enemy Right the gently caress now! (In that case, I would simply post their background now-ish and then later a link to the relevant lore entries, so newer readers can get up to speed when we meet the other races belonging to that background. Hell, I fully expect that to happen so far in the future, even older readers will need a short head's up again in this case.)

If you decide that Naw, they can wait, the Raas and all those other species in that messy lump of lore the writers of MO3 "created" will be shoved back until at least all other races around us are dealt with. (Lore-wise, I mean.)

Next up, I'm posting the Insectoid-lore, followed by another main update on Saturday. I'll give you until the next main update to decide on this incredible important issue! :v:

Libluini fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Feb 8, 2017

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SIGSEGV
Nov 4, 2010


Might as well get it done now.

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