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Even in the middle of a war there are still these pauses to redeploy and resupply, huh?
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Apr 9, 2017 18:09
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 63: Operation Pest Control I Originally, Operation Pest Control was supposed to be just one update, but then MO3 happened and now it spans three updates. Well, at least things are moving now…  A short look back to turn 198 (because the game doesn’t save any changes made to a saved turn, regardless of how often you overwrite your save, so we're still here): Everything is still calm. Welp, except for that minor explosion in Raas-territory.   With the exception of our battlefield-defeat, the Kingdom of Almandin is a power to behold: The game now sees us at place 3/16. Impressive! That short red line suddenly appearing in mid-air above us is the Cynoids entering the calculation. They’re a serious threat, but we keep getting closer to their level.  But let’s get on with this: The following combat phase, we kick the Raas around. Also, 137 Klackon ships assault the Psilon-planets in Tali. Business as usual.  Bizarrely, the Klackons abstain from bombarding us, so the only atrocities of turn 199 are committed by us.  Our terrorist is still busy blowing stuff up inside Raas-territory and we kill another Raas-spy yet again. On the other hand, Agent Löwe is captured without doing much damage. Why do I have this weird sense of déjà vu now?  Joke’s on us, the 137 ships you saw were only those from the 10 task forces the Klackons are allowed to bring in a single fight! They have still more waiting: A total of 217 ships, against our zero. If the AI wasn’t so loving incompetent, the Klackons could easily drive us back to Cokanuk before we can strike back. It’s coincidentally driving me nuts that even the upgraded AI from this mod can’t really fight well and is wasting time like this. They have probably more troop transports in this fleet than we have army units, but they’re still not doing anything!   AI against AI tends to be more clear-cut, which is why the slowly building up Xeol-force in Theta Gru doesn’t bode well for our allies’ future.  Luckily our actual position is not as threatened as this diplomatic relations screenshot shows (red is war): Xeol can’t actually hurt us yet, and the Raas (represented by the ugly dinosaur whose empire has a bug for a flag) are just hosed now. The only way the Raas can win now is if I one day get hit by a truck when walking on the street. Me not finishing this game is their only hope now.  A diplomatic novelty happens: The Psilons suddenly decide to exchange military secrets with us. Took them long enough. This should give us a map of whatever part of Klackon-space we didn’t explore. Of course, seeing as the Psilons have been the red-headed stepchild of this playthrough, it could turn out they know nothing new.  Our friends and allies want a better research treaty this turn. Imsaies-ambassador: “We can profit both if we share the fruits of our research. We would think it fitting of you, to offer us a treaty to unify our research efforts. We know, a wise leader like you will agree!”  After that little thing, I decide to annoy the Cynoids by demanding the Imsaies-planets they have occupied. Well, minus one because you can only ask for up to three things in the diplomacy-window.  And then the next combat phase rolls in: Everything is basically the same as last turn, except that our raiding fleet has reached Alahain-B, deep behind the Raas-frontline!  Since this is a raid, not a serious attack, the fleet targets the weakest and most harmless planet. The defenders will hopefully show up to defend it and get wrecked.  And it works! Too bad only one enemy ship is here. But we eliminate it with some missiles and take the win. Winning is better than losing, after all.  Our other, much, much older raiding force has finally made it all the way to Iras, on the other side of the Dilarian Empire. Again, the weakest link is picked and the raid begins.  This time it’s an actual battle! The enemy outnumbers us, but his forces are made up from even older ships, so sooner or later we should win. The Raas have carriers, though: This means we’re on a timer until the never-ending stream of new fighters will slowly wear us down.  My missile ships run out of ammunition pretty drat fast and are relegated to mobile decoy status for the rest of the battle. Our long-range cruisers are doing their thing, but lovely pathfinding makes this more of a slog than it really should be. Do you guys see that small planet between the upper enemy task forces and our ships? For some reason our task force tries to swing around it as far to the right as it thinks it can get away with it. So I had to manually move it back across the enemy forces, order it to attack and then redo this several times. Because after every attack order, the task force immediately swung away and around the planet and after 3-4 shots it was gliding out of range. This happens because long-range ships always try to stay at their upper range limit, but every large object in their way, like planets or other task forces, tends to confuse the poor, overworked pathfinding massively. This poo poo always gives me nightmares when I have to use the auto-battle function. And why the “watch” function is basically self-torture. Looking at what the MO3-AI can do without your help isn’t fun, except maybe for a masochist.  Anyway, some dumb maneuvering later our guns render the pesky Raas-ships down to finely grained space dust.  Some enemy ships still survive: Thanks to their age, the enemy carriers were the weakest force in this battle, so I ignored them until now.  Ironically, the weakest and oldest enemy ships use this as an excuse to  before we can blast them apart. And after our raiders defeated the defenders, the planet they assaulted joins our slowly growing line of bombardment victims. First up is Kindiilar IV.  Second is our easy raid victim, Alahain-B I: Not bad for a surprise-visit: 30% of the population dies, 100% of development is aggressively disassembled. One Raas-soldier stubs his toes.  And Daegwin II sees its final turn of cleansing: The Raas-colony here is destroyed.  The last orbital bombardment hits Iras IV. The still young colony is immediately wiped out. The success of our raiders is a great proof-of-concept. There’s at least one other enemy I will be forced to use this strategy against.  Double-anniversary! It’s turn 200 and Galactic Cycle 300, all at once! To celebrate this important time with us, Xeol ends the war against us. As you probably not remember at all, in the early game some of our wars petered out this way. Every time a war goes on for too long without any fights, the war auto-ends to prevent empires to get stuck in useless forever wars.  The most important news is this, though: One of our three Antaran Expeditions has  found something ! Excavation has begun.And Agent Beowulf got caught, tortured and died. Luckily before he could talk. drat, that terrorist was worth like ten Bin-Ladens. His antics will be missed.  Some news from our Raas-front: Our raiders in Iras used the time after defeating the local defenders well. The system is explored and yes, it’s indeed the outer border of Raas-space. There’s also nothing else out here. There will be no expansion to block here, in other words. But still, a large blockade force sitting here should annoy the Raas to no end.  It’s not as flashy as the battle in Iras, but our scouts in the Arcturus-system are having a strong effect: There are now a full six colony ships blocked by them. The Raas must be livid! But not, apparently, enough to actually send a clearing force.  Our victory-screen now shows one of our expeditions has entered the excavation-phase. Now we will find out if all those labs Friendly Commuter put on our explorers are enough to bruteforce a good result! If you remember, the first Antaran Expedition was the really badly hosed one which started by randomly hijacking some of our carriers and didn’t bother to take any of our explorer-escorts. I sure hope nothing goes wrong here.  Since the AI really loves building cheap ships, we now face the absurd problem of having tons of light forces to grind down the Raas with massive raids, but having to wait on our heavy forces. A while ago it seemed like I never had enough light ships, but then the AI flooded my reserves with them. Obviously this means two more strong task forces for raiding. Next target is Theta Indi. My secret hope here is to end the constant annoying attacks on JustGniess by forcing the Raas to defend Theta Indi.  Even after creating another massive raiding force, we still have 18 or our Infection-class missile cruisers left over. And we’re still missing one single battlecruiser to get the force for Operation Pest Control together.  Understandably, all this waiting can get to you after a while. I decide I have had enough waiting and just to do something this turn, I vomit all our missile cruisers into a single large task force: The 1st Support Fleet will have two easy tasks: 1. Making the enemy waste point defense shots on their huge, but impractical missile salvoes and 2. Take hits for our more important ships.  Around this point I noticed that it would be nice to know in greater detail what the Klackon-ships could be capable off. Luckily two ancient task forces, the 2nd Defense Fleet and the 1st Border Guard, are just one turn away from re-entering the Tali-system. Obviously they won’t survive this attack, but I’m planning to use their pro-active self-scrapping to take a good, long look at what kind of fleet awaits our future counter-offensive.  And wow, they die even faster then I had anticipated: Klackon missiles and fighters blow them up in seconds.  Our carriers only survive a bit longer because the enemy pathfinding has the same problems ours has. Their fighters don’t, though. In the time it took me to look closer at the largest enemy formations, they chewed through our carrier’s shields and then blew them up. At least I feel a little bit better know. 3k is the highest DPS among the Klackon-fleet and they seriously lack carriers. They have tons of missile task forces, though. But missiles don’t scare me, they only have one shot and there isn’t an infinite dark dimension spewing them out in a never-ending wave. That’s only for fighters. And as soon as an artillery task force has spent its ammunition, it transforms into a useless meatshield.  Just in case this is confusing: This is obviously another battle. We’re again with our raiding forces, and the game stutters and gives us an auto-win, which normally only can happen if there were other forces besides you and your enemy in-system, which wiped each other out before you could fight either. In this case there is just nothing, weird. Master of Orion III can be a strange game.  The last important fight of this combat phase begins: Our fleet in the Amoenta-sector assaults the last Raas-colony left: Daegwin II.  The planet also had an orbital station as protection, but it went down before I could make a screenshot.  As you may have guessed from that last screenshot, that battle didn’t exactly go very well for the defenders. Daegwin II’s defenses are wiped out, the colony is now at our mercy.  Tali of course was the brazen defeat we blundered into earlier and JustGniess was just transports again. Kindiilar was another effortless victory. Daegwin you also just saw and our blocking forces in Arcturus, Mensa and Iras continue to blockade. Next time we hopefully can get our poo poo together and throw the Klackons out of Tali for good. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 2-3: Nothing new. Expedition 1: Excavation has started. To Be Continued Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:15 on Apr 15, 2017 |
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Apr 15, 2017 12:10
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I can't wait to see our brave expedition return with a haul of ancient Antaran tea kettles.
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Apr 15, 2017 15:25
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If by tea kettles you mean bouncing betties, then I will join you in that anticipation.
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Apr 15, 2017 23:07
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Wow! Congrats on an expedition finding something! By turn 200 even. Now another 50 turns to see i they complete the exvacation, survive the trip home intact, then actually researching what they dug up!
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Apr 16, 2017 04:58
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And he also has to defend that research as well, because when it's being researched it can be stolen by spies.
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Apr 16, 2017 05:42
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 64: Operation Pest Control II I hope your Easter holidays are nice and stuff, here's my own Easter gift for you:  A new agent, Agent Herr Krabben, joins the AIA. We also get smaller cloaking devices.  The other stuff is mixed good and bad: Figher missile launchers are ready for action and Ion Impulse Cannons can now be used, but on the other side Agent Löwe gets tortured by dinosaurs and an enemy saboteur detonates a mine on Trourmi VII. (By which I mean he destroys one of our mining facilities, but of course he could have used a mine to destroy the mine. The game doesn't tell.)  Something interesting hides in our fleet reserves: We now have enough carriers and battlecruisers to create the large task forces we need to clean out Tali. We even got an 11th ship for each task force. (We only need 10 mission ships for the task force sizes I wanted. Bonus!)  Task Force Tali A is a large squadron with eleven Rammstein IV battlecruisers and five of our fast Amaranth-cruisers as escorts. This fleet is powerful enough to scare even me, and I’m the player!  Task Force Tali B consists of eleven Kobalt-class carriers and five Sand-class PD cruisers. Thanks to not being armed with huge gently caress-off plasma guns it’s not as scary as TF Tali A, but even with less firepower the amount of infinite fighter-bombers those 11 carriers can spawn is arguably even creepier. It will leave an impact on the more missile-based Klackon fleets, I’m sure.  And now that construction, training and supplying is done, the Kingdom can finally start the active phase of Operation Pest Control: A fleet even larger than the armada assaulting the Raas-system Kindiilar sets course to Tali and jumps into hyperspace. TF Tali A and B with a combined strength of 32 ships, the 1st Support Fleet with another 18 ships and the only surviving formation from the old liberation fleet, the 1st New Border Squadron. It contains five light carriers and three point-defense ships. 58 ships, 50 of them the most modern we can field.  By the way, you may have noticed all this new color-crap in formerly empty space: Turns out the Psilons were a lot more active than I thought, and gave us useful information on not only Klackon-space, but also several other empires they had contact with.  It’s hard to see since the game doesn’t zoom back enough to let me show everything at once, but the new star lanes cover a zone approximately 50% of the size of the space we know. This means with one strike, the Psilons extended our knowledge of the map by 50%! For some reason, exchanging information not only means working together in espionage, but also exchanging star maps. This happens so rarely, I totally forgot this!  This ugly looking empire next to our weird lane-less Vela-sector remains a mystery, though. The Psilons may know all those weird details about their lane network, but the name doesn’t show up under the contacts they have right now. They probably lost contact to these guys when the Klackons pushed them back.  Diplomatic relations from the viewpoint of the Psilon’s Soriane Union. Dzazatar and Kairenieo are nations we already saw back when we had scouts active in the region behind the Klackons, the Eadinel also showed up at some points. The New Orions are of course there, too. The Filovinkhal Empire is completely new to me, though. But that weird purple color looks familiar, somehow…  Ah yes, this dark purple color is this weird empire right next to us physically, but unconnected with us. Kind of strange how those clowns were that close to us all the time, but due to the way star lanes are randomly connected, we never noticed them. We’re not in contact yet, but we found Humans! This is one species we will definitely try to get into our empire without any atrocities.  With our new grand armada on its way to exterminate insects with extreme prejudice, I feel confident enough to ask the Psilons for a full alliance. I mean they love us and poo poo, shouldn’t be hard at this point, right?  Even more overconfidence leads me to commit a grave sin: Trying to exchange technologies. The Annalona Empire has some neat techs we never got, like the Framework Simulator (diplomatic upgrade), the Flexible Administration Structure (less bureaucracy/less money wasted) and the Psi-Signature Damper (our spies are less easy to capture). The Kingdom of Almandin is willing to exchange one of our anti-bureaucracy techs, the highly valuable robotic factories and our modern ground weapons for this. The diplomatic tech we don’t really need and the spytech we can research ourselves in a couple turns, but the new government tech would be nice to have. Even if this doesn’t work, I hope the Imsaies at least send a counter-offer. Due to certain problems with the AI, trying to exchange technologies can be a cruel, nightmarish test of your mental endurance. The AI occasionally will send trade requests on its own, but in 9 out of 10 cases, it will request stuff you don’t need in exchange for something important you don’t want to give. And if you try to ask for something yourself, the non-existent feedback means a lot of poking with whatever you think the AI may want, often in vain. Sometimes though you get close enough the AI decides to send a counter-offer with what they really want. If the counter-offer isn’t too bad, that’s your chance to get a peaceful exchange running. Obviously this only works with allies or at least friendly AI nations. In every other case, your chances are so bad you should rather recruit a couple spy hackers and go to town on them.  A remainder the Klackons aren’t just fighting us: Whatever the Dzazatar are doing, it means the Vchiitri Empire is now at place 6, far below us. With our newly commissioned fleet, even our fleet balance has changed for the better: 286 of our ships against 241 Klackon ships. Now we only have to actually win some battles!  Daegwin III is the last Raas-colony of the Amoenta-sector and we work speedily at its total destruction: Again 57% of the population dies. We also destroy 23% of the remaining military units, which is astonishingly high. One of our missiles must have accidentally hit some barracks.  Herr Krabben was recruited from our growing Psilon-population. You can really see the hate for everything Klackon seething in his eyes. His offensive power is a good 7, but his mantle is a very bad, no good 3. At least Mr. Crabs / Herr Krabben will execute any Klackon spies trying to hack us with extreme prejudice.  Time to mention something: We had a new, better FTL-drive for some time now. But upgrading our ships with a faster drive doesn’t actually help if there isn’t anything new, either. If I put slower and faster ships in the same task force, the actual speed will be calculated with the slowest ship in it, so to simplify things I waited until we got something more. Ion Impulse Cannons are really good: They have longer range than our graviton cannons and take a lot less space. Good for point defense, but also good to laser down someone from far away. Our old frigate-sizes orbitals get updated with tons of the new stuff. More range, more DPS and a slightly better defense. Not bad, considering the only new thing I put in there are the new weapons. (A station obviously doesn't need FTL.)  While we are doing this, I take the time to upgrade all our designs with the new HyperFlux-engine. Faster FTL, here we come! I forgot to show this, but of course all our system defense ship designs get upgraded with the new weapons, too.  The HyperFlux-engine is a bit larger than our old miniaturized FTL-drives, so sometimes some additional fiddling is necessary. The Ion Impulse guns being smaller is a god send for those cases.  Our Virus-class cruisers need the most fiddling: Firepower goes up, defence stays with four anti-fighter/missile batteries roughly the same, but they have to get a bit slower to accommodate the larger FTL-engine. Their speed goes down from 2,7k to 2,5k galactic meters per second. Still blindingly fast, just not as awesome.  After upgrading our old ships, there are some new ones, as well. I decided to eject all our old PD-designs to the scrap heap of history, for example. For all lighter ships we get the Point Defense Destroyer Ionised Gems instead: There was still enough space in the tiny hull for 4 missile/fighter-defense batteries, but also for modern ECM, ECCM and a cloak. The shields are a bit weaker than normal, but for that the tiny destroyer can achieve maximum speed. Instead of min-maxing, this time around I just made sure no fleet is gonna be slowed down by its escorts.  Since all lighter fleet units now have their own, small dedicated escort, I could lay down a unified design for battleship (and heavier) escorts: The Point Defense Cruiser Metallic H2O is the first dedicated fleet escort using a heavy cruiser hull. This means all the electronics we could wish for, an active sensor suite so we can save space on our main capital ships and a whopping 14 weapon batteries. This baby has the firepower and range of some of our earlier game main combat ships, just with the added anti-fighter bonuses from their specialized mounts. Those ships will effectively neuter many, many carrier strikes. And missile strikes will be a joke. Also I just now noticed the name should have been Metallic H2, ha ha. Well, there’s always a new design later, I suppose.  The Long-Range Battleship Iron will be our new main capital vessel. Its six spinal mounted plasma cannons have more firepower than an entire raider squadron combined, the five defense batteries easily push the maximum damage to around 3k. To put this into perspective, our best armor plus best shields are around 2,3k points right now. Only another battleship could survive a full hit from one of those monsters. A smaller vessel, even with the same technology level, will just be vaporized instantly. To turn this ship up to eleven, it also has ECM, a cloak and maximum speed (2,7k Gm/second). The only drawback this space horror has is its inability to fight Klackons and Raas, because the wars against those two are probably over long before our shipyards can get a sizable fleet of Iron-class battleships out.  Our second battleship-design is the Heavy Carrier Battleship Gold. It can launch twelve hard-to-kill fighter-bombers armed with fighter-missile launchers. The firepower is “only” 1,38k maximum damage, but on the other hand, those little birds will deliver this damage over and over without dying. And in longer battles, the multiple fighter launches will add to that damage: If an enemy fleet can somehow survive for 7+ minutes of real-time battle without putting a dent into the incoming swarms, the end-DPS can easily reach something ludicrous like 10k DPS. And of course like the Iron-class battleships, tons of electronics have been crammed into the hull. This carrier has to drawbacks: It only has three defense-batteries and utterly depends on escorts for protection and it is slow as gently caress. (But to be fair, carriers don’t need speed.) Something else I’ve missed while playing: The firepower for ships is never the true DPS. The enormous damage-output for the Iron-class only happens every 5,49 seconds, for example. Only the defense batteries are firing faster. The carrier-damage however, is displayed in fighter-numbers. Theoretically, this could mean our carriers start at about 3-4 times the nominal strength of our direct-fire ships. As you have learned in this LP however, there's a problem: This particular fighter involves missiles. The question here is: Is the display of reload times as hosed for fighter-missiles as it is for ship-based ones? Or is the game cheeky and counts fighter-weapons as its own thing? Only the future can answer this question.  Something funny: A fighter-bomber armed with fighter-missiles is actually larger than some of our smaller starships. And generally does more damage, due to the tiny amount of weapons you can pack into the smaller ship hulls. Hey, here's a thought: Maybe we should use fighter technology to upgrade our small hulls?  After seeing our missile-raiders in action, I’ve decided to shelf the idea of missile-ships for the moment. Maybe we’ll see them again in the future, when we’re not fighting a three-front war. Instead I’m trying out another weapon system: Swarmers! Our next wave of raiders will have Lead-class light carriers instead of missile ships. Because carriers need at least some electronics to actually see and detect targets for their fighters, there wasn’t a lot of free space left. It took some tinkering to combine three defense batteries and six swarmers like this. A swarmer is a teeny tiny, but very hard to hit fighter. I never used this tech, but considering a light cruiser could only launch something ridiculous like 1-2 fighter-bombers, using swarmers on smaller carriers is actually a quite good idea!  When experimenting on our new raider-carrier, I learned it was absolutely loving not possible to give them a dedicated sensor-suite. The things are just too huge for a small ship. Ironically, this meant the smallest possible scout is now also a light cruiser: If nearly all weapons are ripped out, a light cruiser is just about right for detection duties. Our new ReCon Samarium-class light cruisers will be our new scouts in the future. Also, two of them will join every raid task force from now on. (Two of course in case one of them bites it.)  Better weapons and a larger hull meant the death-sentence for our old star fortress. We still have one of those things in construction somewhere, but in the future, we will try our best to build at least one Heavy Orbital Fortress Uranium: 47 fighter-bombers, 10 spinal-mounted Ion Impuls Cannons and 40 fighter/missile-defense batteries. The fighters alone have four times the firepower of one of our new carriers! The guns are more nice-to-have, but this truly is an orbital station capable of holding off an attack on its own. If that attack isn’t too strong, that is. At least the enormous amount of defense batteries means even a strong attack better not use missiles, because this thing won’t let any get close.  After this new modernization of our fleet design database, it’s time to actually build our murder toys: Our two top industry powerhouses will construct both carriers and normal battleships in alternating order. This is mostly because I have observed that sometimes, our two top production planets tend to exchange places: Fluctuations based on new techs, new population and other factors are the cause. This sometimes leads to 1-2 turn deviations in my production queue if I let them build exclusively one type of capital ship. In my endless quest for min-maxing, I’ve decided to try mixing our capital ships like this instead. Hopefully, this will reduce or eliminate the awkward 1-2 turn waiting period for fleet formation at the end of a production run. Or maybe I’m overthinking this and there will always be some kind of irregularity in space ship production.  Below our main production centers, there are some still impressive up-and comers. They will construct our main fleet escorts. And from the fourth place on downward, I went through and put down our future raiders and their escorts and finally transports and scouts. When there was space, I filled it up with some extra colony ships. And that’s it. After that initial run the AI will gladly build our raiders for us and we can concentrate on the three top colonies to create our main fleets. The queues of planets I took off the AI-control will run empty, of course. But that’s an additional help, because that means A) emergency free spots for additional troops/light forces and B) more money during the times I totally forget about them.* *This will be most of the time.  Our proud reserve is now totally obsolete. Not for long, though: I’m already planning on using the older ships for the final push against the Raas. The transports of course are kind of useful for our planned liberation of Tali, Dromos and that other planet flanking the Dromos-front. Next: Operation Pest Control draws to a close. Or does it? Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 2-3: Nothing new. Expedition 1: Excavation continues. To Be Continued
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Apr 17, 2017 11:51
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Yeah, too much of a free-form ship design and lack of refitting of anything really, really hurts...
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Apr 17, 2017 14:11
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Wow, You'd think by now you'd have unlocked some kind of cosmic who's who, but I guess there are a few races who'll be a mystery to you for a while longer.
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Apr 18, 2017 05:11
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Yay! New designs for shooties! And hopefully the liberation of the Klackon front shall continue as planned. Also will you be building up the fleet reserve for the ineviable conflictw ith SKYNET?
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Apr 18, 2017 07:45
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Glazius posted:Wow, You'd think by now you'd have unlocked some kind of cosmic who's who, but I guess there are a few races who'll be a mystery to you for a while longer. Eh, I could probably take some educated guesses by looking up wich races we have met/seen and which ones we didn't, but that would just inevitably end in me guessing wrong. Besides, I'm as always a bit hesitant of showing you people we will have zero contact with for ages. With the exception of the New Orions and the Ithkul (because those two were baked into the history lore of the Orion Sector), I only told you stuff about races that are actually relevant. Well, again with some exceptions because of the way MO3 combines several races under one umbrella quite often. Omitting them would have turned their species lore into unreadable garbage, so I have to just life with this and try to remember to give out links back to the relevant texts when we finally meet those guys.
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Apr 18, 2017 09:57
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 65: Operation Pest Control III To recap: In part I we finished building the ships for Operation Pest Control and in part II we send the ships out. So, what is left? Right, the actual execution.  And boy, will it be an execution: 249 ships are waiting for us in Tali. Even with game mechanics preventing the Klackons from using them all at once, the question of whom will get executed by this execution is still not easy to answer.  In every other game, seeing four more task forces join up with the enemy next turn would be a cause for concern. In MO3 however, seeing three flotillas and a tiny squadron show up to join a massive enemy fleet is actually good news: Four more chances that important task forces will be replaced by one of those small reinforcement fleets. As soon as I noticed those four task forces where all the smaller versions (flotillas instead of fleets and a squadron instead of a fleet squadron), I was honestly relieved. The AI has no meta-knowledge of the game and can’t possibly know that cramming four more tiny fleets into Tali is an act of sabotage against itself.  But for this turn, we still have to eat another defeat, since our mighty new armada isn’t quite there yet.  At least we can pass the time by bombing some Raas-planets.  And now Bevölkerung/population is down another step on the staircase to destruction.  Turn 203! Both our allies refused our offers. Well, poo poo.  At least several more important technologies have entered the prototyping phase: First up is another spy tech: Psi-Signature-Dampers project some kind of “I’m just a loyal citizen”-field, just in case telepathic machines, telepaths, electromagnetic thought-scanners and whatever else come into play. Obviously there is no such thing, it’s all just lore. In game mechanic terms, an agent’s chance to prevent capture is raised by 5. Percent? Probably, but the game never tells.  Panzer/tanks were thought to be outdated for the longest time: With basic infantry capable of using a myriad of heavy weaponry to blast apart every type of armored vehicle, there was just no use for them in the space age. Mobility was often replaced by dropping infantry from space to where they were supposed to go, and later on assault troops with specialized drop equipment made tanks even more superfluous. However, during the many wars of the Kingdom of Almandin (most of them against the Dila Empire), something slowly crystalized on the minds of the Almandian generals: All of this didn’t really address the issue of moving troops when they already were on the ground. When this problem arose for the first time, during the vicious fighting on the planets of the Verdune-system, the Almandian generals improvised by transporting infantry and assault troops back into orbit and then dropping them back down in new places. This process worked fine at first, but soon the Raas of the Dila Empire adapted and the Almandian troops faced withering fire every time they tried this “orbital repositioning” as it was called in the Almandian Army’s service regulations. In the face of mounting losses, military thinking went back to the idea of vehicles. Building on the already existing support vehicles for transport and supply, a new type of formation was created: The mobile infantry. While assault troops were still needed for surprise attacks and storming enemy fortifications, mobile infantry used large, fast and very mobile armored troop carriers to both protect infantry from light fire and to bring it where it was supposed to go. No orbital repositioning needed. This new generation of tank-like vehicles barely resembled the old, vulnerable crystal hovertanks of the Almandian pre-space era. The new ATCs instead looked like giant, crystalline spiders. While still vulnerable to heavy weapons, they were able to travers every possible terrain with ease. But soon after their first success on planetary battlefields, the Dila Empire developed their own ATCs, trained their own mobile infantry and the battles became huge stalemates again. Only with brute force could the Almandian Army continue to push forward. In many cases, losses became so ridiculously high, the Almandian Fleet was forced to resort to orbital bombardment. As sad and tragic as it sounds, the necessary military forces to take a planet from the Dila Empire was now judged too high for a reasonable result: The wide scale destruction on a planet would inevitable kill most of the population and most of the troops, with added suffering from the oft multiple cycles long fighting. With swift annihilation from above, at least the civilians wouldn’t suffer as much and no Almandian soldier had to die. At least, this was the idea behind this strategy. And it worked: The stalemate was broken, and the Dila Empire was pushed back relentlessly. At this point, the Raas-population of the Kingdom is probably nearly as high as the 100% pure Raas-empire of Dila. But now, military strategy is changing yet again. Both Raas and Silicoids are deeply unsatisfied with how the relentless hostility of the fanatic Dila Empire forces the Kingdom to commit atrocity after atrocity, with no end to the slaughter in sight. By combining military ideas from both Raas and Silicoid ways of thinking, a new type of weapon has entered development. A weapon with the codename “Armor”. This new weapon combines the mobility of a modern ATC with the firepower of a small starship. Advances in material and energy technology made it finally possible to create a mobile weapon capable of withstanding all possible anti-vehicle weapons an infantry unit could bring to bear. A new age of war has dawned. Will this new weapon mean the end of the long, harrowing atrocity-campaign? Or will the Dila Empire be able to create their own version of this secret weapon and force the Kingdom of Almandin back into a stalemate? Panzer/tank: Armored vehicles for the control of vast areas with minimal personnel. The way they lumber their way free from the underbrush looks very impressive. A tank unit has the strength of 10 infantry units. Tanks can’t conduct air assaults. “Sir, the enemy is coming with armor-piercing weapons!” “All men out and remove the armor plates!”  The last tech is short and sweet: Zortrium Weave is simply better combat armor for our troops. The lore describes the trouble Almandian engineers faced when trying to use heavy and rigid Zortrium as a material for new infantry armor. But nanotechnology rode to the rescue and in five turns, new units will get this as standard equipment. Zortrium Weave adds +40 armor to every ground unit.  The ambassador of the Soriane Union thanks nicely, but has to refuse. The Psilons are fully satisfied with a defensive alliance and really don’t want to commit to a full alliance at this point. As annoying as this is, I can’t really fault a tiny 7-planet empire for not wanting to commit to all our wars everywhere. So we’ll deal with the Klackons first and think about the Psilons a bit more on a later date.  Teasingly, the Imsaies are wording their answer in a way which seems to imply they would be willing to exchange techs if we just find the right tech to give them. Too bad the AI isn’t always willing to just ask. In this case, it just plain rejected our triple-exchange offer. Looks like we have to poke blind some more to find out what the Imsaies want from us.   We had some peace turns with the Xeol, but we all know our allies will start pestering us soon about that whole alliance duties thing. So I sigh and declare war again to keep the Imsaies happy. At least the Cynoids are still far away. The only result for now is slightly lower chances for both Silicoid and Cynoid spies to cross the border. Also slightly higher chances for everyone else to send spies to both of us: You can’t be equally strong on all fronts, normally this works by making your other borders slightly weaker and gives the war border a high boost against spy penetration. But multiple wars interact by every war border basically making every other border slightly weaker. Or to word it differently, with each war you start your war front bonus to keeping spies out gets lower. You can imagine how happy this will make the Raas.  Alert! Alert! Major Fleet Action in Progress! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5pIUv14djo  Well, that was certainly something. Our other battles are a lot more boring, like the one over Theta Indi III: Our third raiding force is going into action against the Raas-defenders.  A medium-sized missile fleet shows up to defend the planet. Bad choice. That huge red-green mess on the left is the system defense force, by the way. They have carriers, which makes them ten times more dangerous than the missile fleet with its four ships just chilling out there.  Our raiders aren’t that strong, and there are enough ships in the defense force to make fighting it an endurance run. Our raiding force has to take some damage, but finally, after five minutes of combat, the Raas ships suffer from collapsing shields.  And then the combat grinds to a halt: Turns out we just destroyed the old rubbish, and the surviving ships can take a lot of damage. To speed things up, our (now empty) missile ships arrive to play target for the enemy fighters. Our long-range cruisers take the chance and swing around for the last run.  Half a minute later, the fight is over: The last system ships explode.  The four surviving enemy ships jump out. The end.  Victories all around! And just look at that victory in the Tali-system: 100+ enemy ships destroyed, zero losses.   Of course, since the Klackons have so many ships, we’ll have to massacre some more before we’re allowed to assault anything in Tali. Instead, all our raiders and the armada in Kindiilar have to take up the slack.  Galactic Cycle 306 sees the Kingdom celebrate our great success against the vile Vchiitri forces. Still, technically it was just us defending the planet Tali III, which is why we had no chance to attack a planet ourselves.  The Klackons are now changing strategy: They want to bore us to death, since killing us directly didn’t work out so well. You can see this because aver annihilating over a hundred and forty ships, the Klackons still have 235 left. I foresee lots of annoying fights in our future.   By some dumb stroke of luck, the Klackons nearly got all their combat task forces into that one battle. It didn’t help them, though. Now they have only a couple ones left. At least they’re strong ones. This short-range armada for example contains up to 32 ships, nearly as strong as our entire fleet put together.  At least we’re now the 3rd strongest empire of the entire Orion Sector! Also for some reason I keep forgetting the game doesn’t count the player when determining how many races belong into a game. When I chose “16 empires” at game start, the game actually created 17! 16 plus us. And it took me only 60+ updates to remember this.  The Imsaies are a little bit cranky about how lazy we were with that whole “fighting together”-thing. Of course I already declared war on Xeol, but there’s nothing wrong with agreeing to something you already did, is there?  Interestingly, it seems nearly all of what the Klackons have left is concentrated in Tali. Whatever the Dzazatar are doing on their end, it apparently lead to the hilarious situation of every surviving Klackon ship being stuck in Tali. And after we punch them into their mandibles a couple more times, their once mighty fleet will be literally zeroed out. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 2-3: Nothing new. Expedition 1: Excavation continues. Next: Back in Business
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Apr 24, 2017 19:24
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Are you going to put more Science spies in the pipeline to defend your antarian tech when you are trying to research it? (and hopefully steal some rare techs from the enemies before they die out)
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Apr 24, 2017 20:05
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Operation Pest Control is going well. Excellent! I hope that Operation Cretaceous–Tertiary Extinction Event finishes up soon though.
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Apr 25, 2017 01:40
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Libluini posted:Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition The true MOO3 experience.
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Apr 25, 2017 04:54
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Yay! So only 3-4 turns of brutal slugging over Tali before you thin the herd completely! Presuming the Klackons are so nice as to otherwise not rotate thier fleets in and out and retreat and come back. Otherwise good luck with cracking the Dino front open.
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Apr 25, 2017 06:36
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How are the Raas able to get such good tech? Have they got a patron feeding them technology to keep harassing you?
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Apr 26, 2017 02:41
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Glazius posted:How are the Raas able to get such good tech? Have they got a patron feeding them technology to keep harassing you? They're stealing alot of tech from Libluini. I'm pretty sure there are alot of theft events that aren't reported, the other tech they research.
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Apr 26, 2017 02:51
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Yep. They only report the tech theft if you catch them.
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Apr 26, 2017 03:32
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I think he needs more research spies than anything else because if the raas are stealing that much research from him, they are going to take the antarian research when the research team brings it back.
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Apr 26, 2017 03:41
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Everything going ok Libluini?
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May 30, 2017 03:29
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Donkringel posted:Everything going ok Libluini? Ah, sorry, my entire free time since my last post was eaten by Stellaris. I'm now up to 317+ hours, according to Steam. But I'm trying to fight off my addiction to get another update out soon. Probably not until the weekend though, because work.
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May 30, 2017 12:13
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Libluini posted:Ah, sorry, my entire free time since my last post was eaten by Stellaris. The perils of a decent 4x space game!
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Jun 1, 2017 07:35
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OK, so a little update to what is going on here: I've been preparing for changing to a new computer, which will probably arrive around next Saturday. For a lot of reasons, most of them relating to my stupidity, my old PC has become clogged by tons of poo poo I want to trash, so I've started to slowly make sure that everything I want to hold on to will be on my external "archive"-hdd. Luckily most of my private data and stuff is already online, and has been for years. (Thank the spirits for cloud-services) Only video games and tons of tools/programs, most of which I haven't used in years, have to be moved. To the garbage bin of history, mostly. No way in hell will I make an image of my harddiscs, considering they're 90% filled with dumb gunk thanks to my habit of just installing whatever the hell I thought I would need at the moment. Instead I'll move the few things I don't want to lose, then I'll shred my hdds with some anti-restoration programs I've kept around for that reason. This and dealing with my other LP (the one I'm doing with How Are U, about Dominions 4) has taken most of my time this weekend. But now the good news: I'm still recording screenshots today and I'll try to post what I can over this week. Until installing my new computer and preparing my old one for selling will take up all of my free time again. So new updates are definitely still coming! Just a bit rockier than I had planned... Sorry! Edit: Just as an example for the incomprehensible mess that I've created over the years, did you know I had Master of Orion III, with mods and everything, installed two times on different hdds? I honestly had forgotten about that and had to untangle the mess, or I would have had a nasty surprise after connecting my external drive to my new PC and learning all my save games had been on the internal drive of my old PC. It's all good now though! Save games have been moved, the unneeded second install is gone and I've tested the archive-install to make sure everything still works. Edit: More good news! My CPU has started overheating like mad when under stress, so I can't play most of my modern games, like Stellaris, anymore. At least not without my mainboard making an emergency shutdown after about half an hour. So until I have time for some cleaning and other measures (not until the weekend, yet again), I have ample time to play MO3 instead! 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Jun 5, 2017 |
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Jun 5, 2017 18:02
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Yay! More MoO3! Why is it melting anyway? Another heatwave in Sachsen?
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Jun 5, 2017 19:43
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Deceitful Penguin posted:Yay! More MoO3! Nah, during the last heatwave my computer was remarkably stable. Only now that the temperatures are down to comparatively mild, the CPU has started to overheat with extreme prejudice. With some minor load, like an ancient video game or watching some videos, the temperature of all four cores scrapes just below 100 °C. If I try to play something more CPU-intensive, like Stellaris, the temperature shoots above that fast and then the shutdown comes. During the week I'll try cleaning the drat thing, maybe the casing is just clogged with dust and cat hairs. (Of course if it helps, it's only good for the next owner, since I'll have a new PC soon. )
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Jun 5, 2017 20:35
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Try making sure that the heatsink is on properly. I know the crappy intel heatsink that came with the processor in my current computer has gotten loose a few times and the symptoms I got were similar.
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Jun 6, 2017 00:45
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Libluini posted:So new updates are definitely still coming! Just a bit rockier than I had planned... Sorry! 
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Jun 6, 2017 07:27
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Why is one of your priorities in getting a new coputer setup -playing- Master of Orion 3? good luck!
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Jun 6, 2017 08:06
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That priority died today. After spending an hour cleaning my CPU-fan from tons and tons of dust and cat hairs clogging it up, my CPU now runs worse then before! Everything else runs smooth and cool, but the CPU-cooler seems to be utterly wrecked by my cleaning attempts. Welp, nothing I can do today, computer shops around here are closing now. Tomorrow after work I'll buy a new cooler and try again. This means for today my PC is barely stable enough to write dumb posts in an online forum, but everything more seems to catapult all core temperatures immediately into the red. If a new cooler can't solve this problem, this means no new screenshots until my new computer is there. Well, gently caress Edit: Something weird I've just noticed: While one of the two programs (Core Temp 1.7) I've been using to gauge CPU-temperature is claiming all my cores are running at 110 °C, the other one (Speed Fan 4.52) alternates between ca. 100 °C and something absurd like -23 °C. After looking up reasons for this, apparently some programs have problems with older CPUs like mine? Is there some simple, reliable program which will work with older CPUs out there, or am I just hosed until I have a newer machine? Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Jun 6, 2017 |
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Jun 6, 2017 18:53
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I use HWMonitor, and never had any problems with it. Last time I did some maintenance on my own PC (and it's about due for more, heh) I added a new fan and fan controller, and it picked up on them perfectly. As for your project, did you remove the fan and heatsink first, and re-set it last? I wouldn't be surprised if the thermal paste on the chip dried out, especially if you haven't cleaned it off and re-done it yet since you got it. Good luck with everything and hope you're back in business soon, this is like the one presentation of MOO3 that's been engaging enough to stick with (that despite the fact I can't read most of it  ).
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Jun 7, 2017 06:43
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Wayne posted:I use HWMonitor, and never had any problems with it. Last time I did some maintenance on my own PC (and it's about due for more, heh) I added a new fan and fan controller, and it picked up on them perfectly. As for your project, did you remove the fan and heatsink first, and re-set it last? I wouldn't be surprised if the thermal paste on the chip dried out, especially if you haven't cleaned it off and re-done it yet since you got it. Thanks, but it turned out what had my programs going apeshit was some dust bunnies who somehow got inbetween the cooler and the CPU. This was also what caused the insane heatspikes, so after carefully cleaning everything a second time and applying new paste everything works a lot cooler now. (And the heat measurements now finally make sense.) And now the bad news: I had a fresh, new cooler ready, but it turns out to install it I have to rip out the entire mainboard and get the old screw fittings out to make place for the nuts of my new cooler. Also it turns out all the screws holding my mainboard in place are of a type none of my screwdrivers can fit in. So instead of installing my brand new CPU cooler, I instead had to clean and re-install my old own again. Also, the old one is a broken piece of poo poo and I have no idea how long it will hold. On the other hand, my CPU-temperature average is down from 110 °C to a refreshing 60 °C! Man, back when I was a student I never had this kind of trouble, since I could just walk out of the door and go buy whatever I was missing. Having to do this in the evening after work really brings out the stupid in me.
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Jun 7, 2017 20:46
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99% sure the Klackons are responsible. Man, they sure don't gently caress around with the espionage events in this game, do they?
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Jun 7, 2017 22:20
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Araganzar posted:99% sure the Klackons are responsible. They managed to sabotage his real life computer! Doesn't get much more impressive than that. Other than assassinating his real life self I guess. I can have moments of... eccentricity and sometimes be quite curious about things. Please forgive me if I do something foolish or rude.
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Jun 7, 2017 22:35
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Just you watch, he's gonna find a nest of dried up bugs in his computer case soldered to the backside of his mobo.
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Jun 8, 2017 01:28
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Rick_Hunter posted:Just you watch, he's gonna find a nest of dried up bugs in his computer case soldered to the backside of his mobo. Finding large clumps of burned dust glued to my CPU was bad enough, thanks. Update incoming! Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 66: Back in Business Welp, that took a lot longer then I’ve had originally planned. And then my computer started melting and all that poo poo. But now the worst has passed. Sure, my new computer’s delivery has been delayed for a week and my new CPU cooler turned out to be impossible to actually install, but hey. After three repair attempts my PC can now run things again without sudden shutdowns. And at least even if my PC immediately catches fire and explodes right the gently caress now, you will get a week worth of posts until my burning carcass runs out of updates. Anyway, let’s bring this derailed truck back onto its ocean!  It’s Galactic Cycle 306 and the Kingdom of Almandin is already doing what it does best: Bombarding civilians! For some reason all those burning planets make me uneasy, let’s scroll past really fast, OK?  Some peaceful crap also happens this turn: Two more colonies in our distant Vela-sector are founded, while Daegwin II got freshly cleaned up and after removing all those smoldering dinosaur-corpses, the cleaning crew decided to stay around. After all, now the planet doesn’t look too bad anymore!  And enemy spies abducted/murdered some of our researchers! Son of a bitch Also, we have diplomatic messages to content with.  But first let’s take a quick look at our new colonies: The Vela-planets are small and irrelevant, so I let the AI do its thing. Daegwin II however is large enough to make me decide to be a little bit more pro-active. Since this system is a bit remote, the planet gets a full set of necessities: A recreational DEA, a military DEA and a governmental development area. Sprinkled in are some research zones and some mining areas (the planet is also mineral rich), but about half the zones are industrial DEAs, since we are already overproducing minerals like mad. What we need is more production. And while our spreadsheet makes the AI develop planets according to our plans anyway, the AI has a sometimes rather “creative” interpretation of our orders, so even this late in the game, I’ll sometimes spend a couple minutes manually planning a planet’s loadout like this.  The diplomatic message is boring and useless: It’s just our allies telling us to do our duty as alliance-partner. Which we already did last turn! Ah, the vagaries of interstellar long-distance communication.  And that’s one reassurance send.  Since there was a lot of downtime between updates, let’s look up our enemies again. In this case, dreaded XEOL, the cyborg-empire we and the Imsaies are at war with. The Cynoids of XEOL have a rather impressive fleet of 643 active warships. Even including the obligatory AI-defect of building tons of transports, that’s a lot. At least our political relations are rather apathetic, meaning XEOL probably won’t attack us as long as we keep not making an effort ourselves.  The Klackons of the Vchiitri Empire are a real threat, however: They’re bitter and hostile. Also, they’ve already replaced most of their losses. I fear with that kind of industry against us, a lot hangs on how the next battles go. And about what the wildcard in this case, the Dzazatar Empire, is doing on the other side of Klackon-space.  Our old nemesis, the Raas of the Dila Empire. Even though we are slowly grinding them down, they keep on trying. Already their fleet is back to almost 50% strength of ours. By now our empire is large enough we’re constantly out-producing them and they’re only surviving because of our other wars slowing us down. They’re on borrowed time, though.  A graphical representation of our strategic situation: The Raas (light blue), are far below our own dark red line, and the light blue is very slowly going down now instead of just stagnating. It seems our strategy of using light forces to blockade enemy systems, while our main forces are slowly marching forward, is working. The Raas can’t colonize faster than we are destroying them anymore! Interestingly, our slaughtering march through Raas-space allowed us to almost close the gap to (slightly lighter red) XEOL. The Cynoids are stagnating a bit, hopefully giving us enough time to shrink the gap even more.  And this is the full map of the Orion Sector, with our known star lanes colored blue, known shortcuts colored green and unknown border star lanes colored white. I took some time to rotate and zoom the map enough to get everything on one screen like this. Mostly thanks to the map I’m using, which is loving huge.  Rotated to give you a better look at the chaos behind Klackon-space: Our border region to the Vchiitri Empire. It seems the Klackons have given up all pretenses and are concentrating nearly all of their forces on our front. Man, that’s a lot of battles we will need to keep on winning.  Behind Tali and the Klackon-front are most of our core worlds, including that bit at Nodus where a guardian is preventing us and the Cynoids from clashing. I’m guessing we should keep that guardian alive and try to clown on one of the two others we know first.  And that’s Theta Gru, the frontline of the war between Imsaies and Cynoids. The Annalona Empire is down to a single planet here. Doesn’t look good. The rest of this sector is a clusterfuck of mixed Imsaies and Silicoid-colonies. Even more important, this sector links the rest of the Kingdom with our colonies in the far away Vela-sector, so we have to do something at some point, or we are in danger of getting cut in half.  This is a demonstration of what could be in our future: This wildly rotated and zoomed map shows perfectly how we basically hacked our way through the middle of the Dila Empire, leaving two broken halves in our wake. We don’t want XEOL to do the same thing to us. Technically speaking, there were three parts, but the third part is by now reduced to a single dying colony in Daegwin and not even the map is believing that the Dila Empire could reverse that situation.  Now that you’re all back up to speed, let’s continue with the important bits: First, three new espionage hackers are recruited. Mostly because one of our three current hackers will be My plan here is to essentially always keep 2-3 hackers as anti-spy defense, and to use 1-2 good ones offensively. As one of the most advanced powers, we won’t be able to steal as much, but we can still wreak havoc. And in the worst case, we of course want a lot of defense to keep our super secret special techs safe.  Speaking of which, our archaeologists are trying. One excavation has started, but found nothing so far, and the other two expeditions haven’t reached a suitable Antaran ruin yet. It’s slow going, but we’re getting closer with each turn.  With that, everything is done with the current turn and it’s time to move to the next one. The combat phase begins: Our main fleet in Tali tries to intercept the enemy force, but the Klackons are smart enough and keep away. JustGniess sees off another force of enemy transports. Like always. Our blockade force successfully assaults a Raas-planet in Theta Indi, our Kindiilar force does the same and the rest of the space battles is more of the same. That gently caress-up in Tali was dumb, I should have assaulted a Klackon-held planet to force them into action. Welp, that has to wait for another turn now.  With the help of our multiple blockade fleets fighting the Raas, there are a total of four bombardment targets this turn.  Four bombing runs later: Population/Bevölkerung is down to 2, 1 and 0 units. We’re close! Until we remember the population units in this screen are rounded up and that 1 unit = 1k units of actual population. So even on Daegwin III, there’s still work left to do.  Still, seeing four Raas-planets burning in the endless night of space like this is truly heartwarming! A nice start for turn 205.  Aaaaaand the nice start is already over: Agent Löwe is captured again and now faces some more torture. Didi Hallervorden’s 99th clone is assassinated and our people are aghast! Also, agent Noah drops dead. Not the best cycle for our spy agency.  Our reserves see the arrival of our first Gold- and Iron-class battleships. Also, some of the smaller new classes are beginning to show up. But I’m seriously contemplating removing some of the 50+ obsolete ships from our reserves. In the end, I decide against it for the moment. With multiple warfronts to deal with, even old ships can be useful. Remember, scrapping only gives back a tiny fraction of the cost and removes upkeep. Since the last thing can also be done by blowing up in battle, sending them into the breach seems to be the better choice for now.  Annoying game mechanics moment: If you immediately send a new fleet out, a blocking force can’t stop them. And while the AI is too stupid to move colony ships to another target if you keep blocking it, the Raas-AI seems to have learned to abuse this trick with their warships: Even with our ships blowing up real estate in Theta Indi, there are still more transport ships being send from there to JustGniess! The day we will finally capture the last planet in the Theta Indi system, will be a happy day for me indeed.  The other Raas-front is going smoothly, too: Our fleet in Kindiilar is slowly mowing down what is left of the Dila-planets here, while another light force is blowing up stuff in Alahain-B. There’s also our tiny scouts blocking a growing fleet of colony ships in Arcturus.  And now it’s time to deal with Tali again. I decide to use our older ships as  16 missile cruisers may sound impressive, but against the sort of giant fleet the Klackons prefer, they won’t be doing much. Most of the missiles probably won’t even reach their targets. Hopefully the enemy fleet will shoot them first, instead of my more useful carriers. In the future, I’ll be concentrating our resources on carriers and some direct-fire ships. Missiles simply aren’t good enough, either they don’t have enough ammunition to do more than shock-and-awe against inferior forces, or they don’t have enough DPS to punch through enemy defenses.  The new situation in Tali: The Klackon-forces have gotten about 50% reinforcements. There are now 372 ships waiting for our 98 ones. Even with the tech gap between us, that’s a steep order. It looks a little bitter if you consider that due to how the task force system works, only about half of those ships will face us in battle. If that fleet is all transports, it’ll be easy. If the RNG fucks us over and sends in all the warships though, welp. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen.  Another battle in Tali. The Klackons again have tons of missile ships, but the few missiles reaching our line just evaporate into our shields. Giant clouds of fighters pass each other in the void. An ominous sign.  Thanks to that planet in the middle of the battlefield, the battle immediately goes awry. A huge enemy armada swings around below the planet, completely unmolested thanks to our fighters ignoring orders and either attacking some random task force on the other side of the battlefield, or by joining that giant fighter melee in the middle there.  But things go even more wrong: While our fighters finally remember their orders and start shooting the enemy ships, our own direct-fire ships swing around the planet instead of heading straight to the dangerous enemy task forces. Which makes them get into range of nearly the entire enemy fleet at once, with predictable results. During this time, I tried to send the fleets a step back and then tried to target the two giant armadas of direct-fire ships the Klackons tried to get to our carriers, but this lead to our own two task forces moving in circles around the planet. After the second round around the planet, our shields collapsed and all ships went down.  Our missile ships at this point where completely emptied out long ago. At least this part of the plan worked: The enemy ships immediately targeted them instead of our carriers. Too bad they all went down embarrassingly fast. The enemy tore through their shields like angry bears through papier-mâché. Our carriers, completely on their own, only lasted half a minute longer.  And this is why our carriers were alone: All of our fighters were paralyzed by fighting the hordes of Klackon-fighters to a standstill. We simply did not have enough carriers to do more than just neutralizing the enemy fighter force. The Klackons only brought a single carrier task force, but it was an armada, compared to our fleet*. With nearly a dozen carriers more than us, the Klackons essentially neutralized our tech advantage. Both carrier fleets were totally even. But still, I keep wondering why our ships, with their stronger shields, died so fast. *OK technically we had a second carrier task force, but our Opal-class light carriers are so small and so old, I can't really count them in a major battle like this one.  After that apocalyptic nightmare of nearly losing a hundred ships, it’s time to see what happens on our other fronts: I saw that Kindiilar I is already nearly dead, so I decided to bomb Kindiilar IV for a change. Is it just me or is there something a bit slightly odd here? Nah, it’s probably just me.  The casualties for that battle in Tali: The Kingdom of Almandin lost 98 ships, The Vchiitri Empire lost 20. Most of which were transports, thanks to our fighters ignoring orders again. Even with our never-ending list of victories over the Raas, this really stings. Now we will have to change things up a bit. Or the Klackons could reach our homeworld before we have enough ships to stop them.  Even seeing four Raas-planets slowly dropping to zero population can’t cheer me up anymore. We need to do something! Antaran Expedition Status Expedition 2-3: Nothing new. Expedition 1: Excavation continues. Next: TOTAL WAR
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Jun 10, 2017 17:55
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Rick_Hunter posted:Just you watch, he's gonna find a nest of dried up bugs in his computer case soldered to the backside of his mobo. You joke but I've actually had something like this actually happen. To get on topic though, ouch! That's a stinging loss in ship numbers there. Also do you think the Imsaises "Hey, do your job" messages might actually be the AI recognizing that you aren't in fact engaged in any hostile actions against the Cynoids yet?
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Jun 10, 2017 18:41
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Glad to see this back on track.
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Jun 10, 2017 19:12
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Welcome back, and thankfully your computer hasn't exploded or destroyed much personal data, it sounds like? So are the XEOL the same slightly-lighter-red-than-us color on the galactic map. That sounds like it could get really confusing in case of war.
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Jun 10, 2017 19:48
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Yay, this is back! OTOH. OW. That's a lot of death.
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Jun 11, 2017 07:52
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