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I guess this game sold so poorly and was so under the radar that even Harmony Gold didn't sue over the Not!Marauder 
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Nov 4, 2019 22:44
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Slaan posted:I guess this game sold so poorly and was so under the radar that even Harmony Gold didn't sue over the Not!Marauder Let's put it this way: MoO 2 sold 200,000+ units. Which in 1996 was pretty good - Quake did about 375k and Civilization 2 did 500k in about the same time frame. (Diablo obliterated them all, but that's a whole different story.) MoO 3 did poorly enough that as best I can tell they never released any sales data at all.
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Nov 5, 2019 07:04
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This game was bad when it came out, it never got the major patches it needed.. Yeah. Also, what type of spy helps deal with unrest/morale? I think.. Political? Or is that assassinations?
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Nov 5, 2019 07:22
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Sounds like round two of the design contest goes to me, labs on every ship in the fleet.
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Nov 5, 2019 09:27
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Do partial discoveries from one expedition add up so that if you send out another expedition, they've got a head start, or is every new expedition starting from scratch?
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Nov 5, 2019 10:05
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PurpleXVI posted:Do partial discoveries from one expedition add up so that if you send out another expedition, they've got a head start, or is every new expedition starting from scratch? reasonably sure they don't. Unless the mod tweaks them. On the upside, if the new expedition finds anything it should in another three or four years as the LP goes on!
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Nov 5, 2019 10:29
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 106: The War against XEOL III  Battle time! Our fleet in Neaux is milling around. But where’s the enemy?  There it is! But no ships. The orbitals and planetary defenses fall fast.  This time, we assault a second planet in the same combat phase! Yed IV and its 6 orbitals is the target for our secondary fleet.  Uh, that’s a lot of cyborgs.   And a lot of carriers. poo poo. Two of our direct-fire task forces are paralyzed by fighter attack while the enemy task forces focus fire the first one down.  Our wild mix of second-rate fleet units can’t put out enough fighters to put a dent into the cyborg-swarm. While I’m looking stupefied at how fast the battle went against us, the second task force is reduced to space dust, too.  Enemy fighters, missiles and energy beams are bearing down on our mixed force of transports, carriers and artillery ships. I wake up from my stupor and hit the emergency retreat button with enough force to reduce my mouse to space dust, too. Some long-range cruisers also survived. Up until this point, that is.  While our ships are loading their FTL-drives, the first of our missile task forces is blasted apart. Welp, at least it’s not our carriers.  The portal drive engages and the survivors flee back into hyperspace. Only debris and floating crystals remain. The enemy fighters were numerically superior by an entire order of magnitude, so none of our own fighters survived the first phase of the battle. Mercifully, this means the battle ends now, instead of a couple minutes later after a grueling fighter massacre.  That could have gone better. At least our forces in the Neaux-system were more on the ball and took the last planet there. We even got a new technology by right of liberation! The media tries to concentrate on the good news, but the fact of the matter is that the Battle of Yed was the greatest military disaster in the entire history of the Kingdom of Almandin. Even for the most patriotic citizens, this is kind of hard to stomach. Enemy spies seize the initiative, and on Fieras V and several other colonies, unrest spirals out of control into open revolt. Almandian tanks open fire on Almandian civilians. Almandian cities burn. GC 558 will forever be marred as “The Dark Time” in Almandian history.  Yeah, people everywhere are angry. Not good. But as always only planets to unimportant to matter are affected. Still, I’m kind of impressed. This is the first time I’m seeing the status effect “Open Revolt” / “Aufstand” on a planet. The great new Dismay Park planned for the local recreation DEA won’t do it, we have to pull out the big guns here. Edit: I forgot to mention what tech exactly we got. Database Standards, another research-related technology. It makes research better, but situationally: The costs for boosting research with money goes down. Which coincidentally, helps us a lot since our AI-controlled planets always try to match imperial financial settings, so they’re boosting research more the more we put planets on direct control. This tech will make this behavior slightly more reasonable.  Step one, another conspirator for the queue.  Step two, as long as the Kingdom is threatened by this serious crisis, civil liberties have to be curtailed. Some new laws are pushed through and  our oppressometer rises from 4 to 5. And thanks to our min-maxed citizens seeing every oppressometer level of 5 or above as 125% fascism, this will generate a lot of extra unrest. And for the first couple turns, massive unrest as the new laws are implemented and enforced for the first time. But a higher oppressometer levels raises the chance to capture enemy spies, and our most vulnerable planets are hosed either way, while most of our planets can deal with the extra unrest. Especially if all enemy spies are loving dead. Still, it pains my heart that I had to lower ourselves from “Like the EU, but in space”, down to “USA, but with rocks”. A sad day for freedom.  So, meanwhile our survivors are send back to Neaux. Including the transports. Which are now pretty drat useless, considering our weakened fleet will probably not be able to break through to Yed for a good, long while now.  Turn 373 is a lot less wild than the last turn: Spies ambush freighters in Achiba, but we also captured one spy and killed another. The revolt on Fieras V has been put down, but a massive wave of mild unrest is now rolling through the Kingdom. The military front is calm. Because ships of both sides are still in transit between systems of course. Next turn will be a lot more “interesting” for us.  We’re still building our Lithoid-class exploration battlecruisers so we can’t really fill up our reserves with new warships instantly, but don’t worry, I got this  And this is our unrest right now. Ouch. About a dozen planet at 100+ unrest and at least half the rest at 50+. Not good, even if most of the unrest will disappear again in a couple turns.  GC 561 indeed gets interesting, but not as I feared: No combat happened. Instead our dumb bad last expedition loses another ship. By now they’re down to about 6 out of 16. They’re probably really not gonna find anything anymore. Oh, and a new uprising, this time on Fieras II. How cute. The fighting is less fierce though, and only one building blows up in the fighting. (Last time it was two.) Hidden on the same screen are of course, more spy events. Another enemy spy killed and we’re still interrogating the one we captured. But don’t worry, reading the other event messages shows me plenty of other spies still hanging around in the Kingdom.   A new agent joins the AIA: Agent Iguana, top spy and a conspirator. Agent Iguana and their max stats makes me think it’s time to maybe bring some unrest to the other guy soon  A short comparison of fleet strength: XEOL has an unbelievable 7444 ships on the field, while we’re “just” up to 813. And as Cynoids, the XEOL-monarchy (absolutist though, not freedom-loving like ours) can outproduce us quite handily. Especially since the AI just loves setting everything to “Holy WAR!!!!” as soon as the first shot is fired. XEOL is basically a warship-based economy at this point. We may need to take this war a bit more seriously from now on.  The situation on the front lines: Our fleet has regrouped back in Neaux, and a small XEOL-fleet is tailing them. There’s nothing stopping the mega-fleet in Yed to just follow us, though. I guess the Goddess of 4x-Games heard all my gripes about the AI in MO3 getting stuck so much and finally responded. Oh well, at least the game is now more fun to read about, I hope.  Our military misadventures came at the worst possible time, too: My original plan was holding back on designing new ships until the next line of hull sizes, FTL- and sublight drives was researched. Too far for us though, only the next hull size has become available now. At least we’re also getting a new PD-toy to play around with. Thanks to my hosed-up renaming of a mod renaming every hull size in the game, the Superdreadnought is actually the vanilla Titan. Only two more hull sizes to get (plus a mod addition, if we ever get that far before the game ends)! As always, Superdreadnoughts have 1,5 times the space available than the previous hull and cost more. I’ll spare you the semi-funny lore description this time. It’s enough to know that Superdreadnoughts are Big Huge Ships. And if you’re wondering about the renaming thing, back then I found the name “Superdreadnought” for a class of ships both incredibly awesome and exotic, so I was bitterly disappointed when the German translation just bulldozed it over with another, boring name. (The German translation doesn’t even use proper German naval terms, which as an avid reader of history books annoyed me even more) Though you may have noticed when looking at screenshots from the shipyard-interface, that I missed the part where the reserves show the class name next to the ships, when “correcting” the translation. Either I couldn’t find where those names were stored in the appropriate text file, or I was too lazy. Most of the time it didn’t matter because the German names were too long anyway and abbreviated into unreadable monstrosities like “S. Schw. Krgs.”, but now I fear you will notice that our “Superdreadnoughts” will be called “Titans” in our reserves and nowhere else. Since I don’t want to risk breaking the mod, we’ll just have to live with that. But I’m now considering putting in the correct class designations for our two “bonus rounds” later.  The next new tech is more civilian in nature: The “Energieversorgungsnetz” / “Power Grid” is kind of misnamed, as quite obviously our planets had power grids for good long time now. What this actually means is that when planning new power plants, the planners involved will try to calculate and take into account future power needs, instead of just supplying the demand right now. In game mechanic terms, this improved future planning adds a new building every DEA can auto-construct and which will add 0,25 “infrastructure points” for that region. And this means… Huh, to be fair, I think I can’t remember ever hearing about so-called “infrastructure points” so there’s a 50/50 chance this was either never mentioned before or it’s just me being stupid again. Anyway, it’s not like we can do anything about this anyway, the game will handle this thing for us.   As a complete surprise from left field comes the Hermes Phalanx: Another new point defense system. Like the other PD-mounts, it’s the same thing, but larger: More damage at short range, less damage at far range and a lot less range then normal in addition to that. It also shoots a lot faster than mounts of corresponding size, obviously. I faintly remember vanilla MO3 having at least one PD-mount upgrade and if that’s right, it’s probably this thing right here. And like a proper idiot I completely forgot this and made (spoilers for a later update) our new ships with this thing instead of the mod-added Missile-/Fighter-Defense Battery. I really should go back to my designs and compare numbers for our heavy PD-batteries. Just in case the Hermes Phalanx turns out to be mechanically worse.  Finally, the last tech for this turn: Nanofactories. Industry DEAs will auto-build them and the power of nanomachines will then rise the industrial output of that region by a factor of 1,5. Strong stuff.  OK, enough tech talk, back to the game. The Kingdom of Almandin is forced to react after the true extent of the military disaster in the Yed-system becomes wildly known. For “Wild and Irresponsible Shooting at Royal Ships”, the Kingdom officially sanctions XEOL. The Cynoid government refuses to respond. Probably won’t do anything noticeable, but it’s there so why don’t we use it and see what happens?  Following that, it’s time to deal with our space friends. Since our relations have been dropping, I’m forced to make another huge tech gift to keep them happy: Soon there will be organic battlemechs build by gas giant dwellers. Also they’ll be able to use very heavy mounts and fighter cloaks. With the exception of mechs, all stuff we had for a long time. Hopefully it will help their ships survive 0.2 seconds longer when being atomized by Cynoid fighter squadrons.  There’s of course still a shitton of old garbage working itself through our automated queues, but from now on, our old designs won’t be used anymore for new constructions. Only our two old system defense designs are left, and only for a couple more turns. Here’s the plan: Since we need new ships sooner then anticipated, and lots of them, I will start our new fleet as soon as Superdreadnoughts and the Hermes Phalanx are available. And I still remember that poll about weapon types, don’t you worry: The primary weapon of most ships will be the Dark Matter Beam. The drawback of this is that as soon as we research new drives at a later date, all the ships we’re building in the near future will be strategically slower then the newest ones and cause the typical headache in coordinating large fleets. But we will deal with that when the time comes. What really smarts is that we’re even closer to a cool new weapon that’s Silicoids-only, and we will get that weapon just a little bit too late if we want to have ships to fight XEOL with. What was that old saying again? “You fight the war with the ships you have, not the ships you want.”  On towards exploration! By now we have enough Lithoid-class explorers to send our first new fleet. The first of the new generation of Antharan Expeditions has left the Kingdom, with 16 ships. With two labs each, that’s 32x40 points towards finding stuff. As that is more than the 0 points the still running expedition gets, I’m hopeful this time we’ll have more luck.  Unrest. Still at 100+ or similarly high on many worlds, and two ongoing revolts.  As I never had unrest quite this bad, I decide to put down more troops, just in case it helps. I’m not sure if I’m not past the point of diminishing returns here, but the Chinese government used tanks to stop unrest, so making some new tank corps should do the same for us, right?   GC 561: Another massive wave of mobilization sweeps the Kingdom. poo poo just got real. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + 10 ships lost / 6 ships left Expedition B1: 16 ships en route Next: The War against XEOL IV Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Nov 9, 2019 |
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Nov 9, 2019 21:33
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Spies, spies everywhere. You can't get out of bed without tripping over spies now. Open the fridge, spy. Pour the cereal out, spy. Mailbox, spy in there. Your pet rock? murdered and replaced by a spy.
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Nov 10, 2019 02:48
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Spies! Spies spies spies!
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Nov 10, 2019 03:06
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One, two, spies coming for you! Three, four, encrypt your door! Also rough turn. It's.. Nice to see that the AI is now putting up more of a fight (messy as that is). Be sure and fortify up the edge system before the Cybernetix can start to blockade. Anything you can do to rush planetary defense stations in or not worth it?
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Nov 10, 2019 03:28
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Kind of surprised we're having our first actual setback since the very first battles against the lizards. It adds some EXCITEMENT.
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Nov 10, 2019 08:16
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wedgekree posted:Be sure and fortify up the edge system before the Cybernetix can start to blockade. Anything you can do to rush planetary defense stations in or not worth it? There's no way in hell a single system is capable of putting up enough defense in time to stop 320 ships (the maximum the engine can support). We're long past that part of the game. No, I fear as always it's our mobilization center and its magic ability to teleport ships produced by our 100+ planets that'll have to save the day
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Nov 10, 2019 11:07
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Come to think of it, I'm not sure having anything other than science spies are capable of doing anything. Considering the AI usually has infinite money and usually spawns ships as needed. At least with a science spy he can bring back some technologies you missed, although with the way the game works, it might take 200+ turns for that to happen.
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Nov 10, 2019 18:09
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SugarAddict posted:Come to think of it, I'm not sure having anything other than science spies are capable of doing anything. Considering the AI usually has infinite money and usually spawns ships as needed. At least with a science spy he can bring back some technologies you missed, although with the way the game works, it might take 200+ turns for that to happen. The trouble is, while the AI does suffer from poo poo like unrest and rebellions, you can't really see it. And even if you believe all those messages your spies send you, a strong empire will shrug off all those sabotage events like nothing (like we're doing, in fact). Espionage hackers are therefore the most useful, since walking off with a tech is a clear, and visible result. On the other end of the spectrum are the assassins: In vanilla literally all they can do is help preventing enemy assassins from killing all your leaders, since the player has no way to see or interact with AI leader, and so has no way of knowing if an enemy leader dying even does anything. (And if there are no leaders, obviously they won't do anything, at all.) In Ultima Orion, at least you can cause some unrest if there are no enemy leaders around, thanks to added spy events. And the player knows that unrest is a thing that exists and affects AI like the player. The other spies tend to fall somewhere inbetween the two extremes, with odd sidesteps like diplomatic spies only being useful against huge enemy alliances (as sabotaging diplomacy of someone everyone hates is totally pointless) and conspirators only being useful against dumbasses like us with like -40% to peaceful serenity thanks to min-maxing their people or enemy AI weighted down with alien races suffering from dumbass rules (like Ithkul being angry when at peace, I imagine that's a headache that could hit an inexperienced player out of nowhere). By the way, Spy Hackers got a nerf in Ultima Orion that's actually a hidden improvement: Several new spy events were added so a hacker can do more besides steal techs and fail horribly. This means while stealing techs can take the player longer, it also prevents strong AI enemies from immediately walking off with all your cool poo poo. (In fact, we have a hacker hanging around in the Kingdom right now. I keep ignoring the messages since losing a couple research points isn't as bad as unrest stun locking planets, but until we eliminate him, he'll always be there, trying to get one of our techs each turn. In vanilla, he'd be either dead by now or would have taken half a dozen technologies.) Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Nov 10, 2019 |
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Nov 10, 2019 18:33
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... Huh, it actually sounds like it made spying kind of interesting!
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Nov 11, 2019 07:46
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wedgekree posted:... Huh, it actually sounds like it made spying kind of interesting! Yeah, the Ultima-mod really improved upon MO3's wonky spy-system. The only main drawback is the way multiple enemies mean a flood of spies bearing down on the player, with the improvements now generating even more event messages. Of course I could argue that annoying the player into submission when military actions can't even slow down the inexorible advance of the player empire anymore is actually a good thing for balance reasons, but this is not an opinion many would agree on, I feel. 
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Nov 11, 2019 13:46
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All this only serves to reinforce my perception that spies in 4X games are a painful and terrible design element that is best removed.
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Nov 12, 2019 05:51
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Libluini posted:Yeah, the Ultima-mod really improved upon MO3's wonky spy-system. The only main drawback is the way multiple enemies mean a flood of spies bearing down on the player, with the improvements now generating even more event messages. In fairness the original MoO3 also had that issue with spies so its' just improving on the base game! Which probably helps with the annoying.
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Nov 12, 2019 06:50
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OK, you're probably wondering where the next update is, and since this is a funny story, I like to share this with you. On Sunday, I was busy typing on the next update, as suddenly, the batteries in my wireless keyboard went dead. Not really surprising, they've been busy working for about two years by now, but it still loving blindsided me. Now the point where this anecdote becomes funny is the point where this loving happened the very moment I was pressing down "3" on the keyboard. Something went sideways and my PC immediately started printing the number 3 indefinitely. All my attempts to stop this made it worse, in the end even ripping the dead batteries out of my keyboard didn't make this stop. I couldn't research this topic on Google, because of course every input mask immediately filled up with "33333333333...". This didn't even stop after I attached a backup-keyboard, the new inputs just slowed the old one down. In my panicky attempts to combat my own PC, I accidentally deleted everything I wrote. But the file then of course filled up with more 3s, just to spite me more. Then I forced a restart and this loving nonsense stopped. And now, a day later I have bought new batteries so this shouldn't happen again for the next two years. Of course, now I've just barely restored the minimum of what I was working on, and only because I had started to make a "new post template" to streamline work a bit a couple weeks ago. I was able to bulldoze my file of endless 3s with the template and begin fresh. As of now, that template is empty and I'm just now starting the work on the next update again. So yeah, Sunday/Monday was supposed to be an update-day, but now the next update is delayed until next Sunday.
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Nov 25, 2019 20:30
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The curse of MOOO strikes again! All 3s! ALL 3S!
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Nov 25, 2019 20:57
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Oh poo poo, I didn't even think of that! 
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Nov 25, 2019 21:24
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That's a really amazing way for an update to be delayed.
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Nov 25, 2019 21:28
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I'm sure this is all my fault for just having finished up my own MOO adventures. That left this thread as the only active one, which is why the Curse settled all of it's rage on the number 3.
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Nov 25, 2019 22:21
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I'm now scared of what will happen when I launch my next two LPs, as (checks notes) the next one is a game prone to random crashes, and the one after that to chocking on its own engine. I mean, at least MO3 (when modded and patched) runs stable!
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Nov 25, 2019 22:36
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[the STNG episode where data keeps doing threes]
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Nov 25, 2019 23:44
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Somehow this sort of thing seems extremely appropriate for this cursed game
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Nov 26, 2019 05:58
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I know I haven't really kept up working on this thread, so I think I should apologize. You know the thing, personal reasons, the holidays, plus stress at work. Though now I'm on our yearly paid furlough, since our company doesn't work over the holidays, which means now that Christmas is behind me, you can expect the loving next update finally at some point next week.
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Dec 29, 2019 21:49
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Libluini posted:you can expect the loving next enemy spy sabotage report finally at some point next week. Fixed.
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Dec 29, 2019 22:35
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Yay! Hope you got some rocks in your stocking from our friendly neighborhood sillicoids!
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Dec 30, 2019 05:50
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 107: The War against XEOL IV OK, writing this update was hell for a certain reason, but let’s leave that behind. Edit: Also, Happy New Year! Because it took me so long to write this mess, 2019 ended during my work on this update!  Back into the game! It’s turn 375 our citizens are revolting. Oh wait, I already made that joke. Well, moving on  Just look at all those violent uprisings! Buildings are destroyed left and right. At least we also kill an enemy spy. This time, it’s our (not) friends, the Tachidi! For those that don’t remember, Tachidi are the more individualist, bug-like insectoids, Klackons are the hive-mind ant-like ones. Though according to lore, both species come from the same homeworld.  Time to teach our enemies some harsh lessons! And as we don’t have contact to many of them, it’s the Cynoids who will have to feel our wrath! Agent Iguana gets tasked with causing unrest in XEOL. With max stats, this should be a breeze!  According to my notes, at this point I send a couple more Antaran Expeditions out. Well, OK then  Another gift package for our allies. This time they get stuff to make them fight better (missile cloak, fighter shield generator) and something to help their economy (that really long word in the middle, it makes mining better).  GC 564 sees the galaxy burning, but with no fighting during the combat phase. It’s the kind of burning that doesn’t involve space ships firing. Revolts, uprisings and the Meklar coming in for another war. It’s a madhouse in this galaxy!  In further news, we catch some spies and Agent Ohrschuss catches some bullets trying to catch some more spies. Also happening: Agent Iguana fails trying to cross the borders. Seems our Cyborg-neighbors are a lot faster on the uptake then our stupid rocks Goddamnit!   But don’t worry, Agent Iguana will try again next turn! While confirming this, I noticed some more of our agents were close to dying (this one will drop dead in five turns, for example), so I filled up the recruiting roster some more.  This screenshot I only added so you could see some more colors this update. I got scared when I noticed this update so far was just messages and slightly different looking spreadsheets, essentially. This robot here isn’t telling us anything interesting, by the way. We’re apparently evil and did something wrong, so now there’s war.  At least something good is happening: Our allies like us a little bit more! Relations saved.   We still got some more old ships arriving in our reserves this turn. The scrapyards gladly take them.  Meanwhile, a lot of Antaran Expeditions are on their way. Theoretically, if only three out of these five succeed, we could have won the game already. Not in this run, though! This run is the stupid run, after all.  Meanwhile meanwhile, new tanks for unrest suppression. Also a chance to show off the Humanoid tanks. Kind of weird how when all Humanoids shared their designs everyone decided to just use the ugliest ones. Personally, I think the Psilons are at fault for this.  Turn 377: More unrest! At least it’s mostly the same planets, just with different levels of unrest each turn, depending on how many spies are making the people there upset. There must be some hidden defense stat on planets, otherwise it’d be a really weird coincidence how most of our spy-related unrest problems all hit our new colonies in the Fieras-system. If a huge, build-up old colony can more easily repel enemy spies, funneling them all eventually to our weakest, newest colonies, this would explain so much. So probably just a huge coincidence, huh?  Finally, some spy-related good news! Agent Iguana infiltrates XEOL. And some other dude manages to escape. I haven’t opened my notebook in ages, but I think Eadinel are the purple new Humanoids invented for this game (Evon), in which case I force myself to believe this spy was Prames Plond, the 007 of the Purple People Empire. (For those not in on the joke, Evon are basially purple Humans with spiky dreadlocks.) Edit: This leads me to the “funny” meta-joke hidden in the Galactopedia, as both Humans and Evons were genetically engineered by different contemporaries of the Orions and Antarans to be their super-weapon against the Antarans. As Humans are the failed experiment, this essentially means to get the perfect warriors, just paint your skin purple and weave your hair into dreadlocks.  At some point we also got this rocker here: Agent Taras is good at making new conspiracies (Dagger: 8), but bad at hiding them (Mantle: 4), so counter-intuitively he is best used as defense against spies better at their jobs.  Oh, and thanks to our automated queues still churning out explorers long after I obsoleted them, I managed to send out a sixth Antaran Expeditions. The reason XEOL has so many goddamn ships reveals itself hidden in those stats: A good, stable economy can churn out every dumb design you can come up with in their hundreds in just a few turns. Luckily for us, the game’s lack of a refit-system and the AI’s lack of common sense means our enemies are stuck using most of the ships they construct, even if they’re poo poo tier and they’d be better of scrapping the lot of them.  There are still a lot of planets with low population, low development and therefore tons of unrest. The red fist showing on a planet with Silicoids and armed troops on it and less unrest then the rest is a sure-fire way of telling me that a spy sits there and is causing this. But since I can’t exactly dial up the AIA and tell them my suspicions, I can only quietly fume in annoyance until the game rolls enough defense successes to get this particular dipshit hiding here.  To vent my frustration, I demand the planets of a system near the front lines. As XEOL is just a string of programming lines and not a real person I could pester with dumb requests like this, it does nothing except make me feel a bit better.  As a reminder to myself, I put this screenshot here. Still 4 turns until we have superdreadnoughts and can turn on XEOL for real.   GC 567 sees some mixed news: “An” Antaran Expedition loses a ship, there’s the obligatory unrest messages I’ve skipped this time and Agent Iguana apparently failed in his mission, as the game tells me he is successful again in reaching XEOL-space. Luckily for us, all those other Antaran missions are still in transit, so there’s only one expedition which could lose ships, even though the message doesn’t tell us which one!  Our allies are being weird again: I remember trying to get an improved research treaty and failing for some reason, but now the Imsaies remembered that oh yeah, improving our research treaty with the number 1 power in the Orion Sector would actually help us, let’s ask for it. Sadly I’m not really into hurting myself out of spite, so the Kingdom of Almandin gracefully accepts, even though at this point only the Imsaies really profit from this treaty and we are only doing this to keep them happy.  The even more recently colonized Alchiba-system just boils over with anti-government feelings. This screen tells me three enemy agents are active on those four planets. It also tells me the new colonists must have been all people who deeply hated the political system on the core worlds, because yikes  Turn 379: Everyone is happy. No wait, that’s the next game I’m Let’s Playing (the next one doesn’t really simulate unrest (it also doesn’t really simulate espionage)) this one is still powering up the unrest-beams. We get our Hermes-Phalanx, which is another upgrade to our line of PD-mounts. Also Agent Iguana got caught, imprisoned and killed himself after a failed escape attempt. Welp, that’s a 10/10 agent wasted. This loving game…  Just look at this! There are multiple pages of spy news every turn. The only difference after temporarily suspending some more rights is that now occasionally, we kill enemy spies. This turn, a Klackon-spy gets it.  The Cynoids get back to us. They very politely, I might add, refuse to hand over the planets I demanded. With 7k+ ships they probably think they can win this war easily.  Still two turns until it’s superdreadnought-time! But also important, a new type of warhead sneaks in and begins prototyping: The Scatter Warhead is a version of the Hercularite-warhead which shoots multiple warheads, all targeting different sections of a hull/shield to do more damage. Nothing of this is modeled in-game, it just means “more damage” in lore-speak.  A short look at our finances. Several important things to note here: Since we’re not actively expanding our fleet at the moment, our surplus is huge enough it starts showing up even on this faulty excuse for a screen. Also the amount of money we’re paying for spies is tiny, so we really have no excuse for not recruiting new agents all the time. The last thing I’ve noticed is the line Verschrottete Gegenstände / Scrapped Items always showing a resounding zero, even though I’ve been scrapping ships for ages now. Every turn at least some. But apparently we’re not getting anything back from scrapping them?! No idea what the bug here is, is the display just not showing what we get back, or is the game not giving back anything at all? I don’t really feel like using a calculator to see how much the display should show, but I really hope I just accidentally didn’t scrap ships last turn. I’ll keep an eye on this for the future.  Back to normal problems, like unrest. Alchiba IV is showing a healthy 160 unrest and is in open revolt right now. I think this is a new record. poo poo like this basically stun-locks a colony, as all that crap that would help reducing unrest besides troops is getting randomly destroyed by revolts and the planet isn’t developing infrastructure either while the unrest is so high. Essentially, the unrest is blocking colony development (except for population growth) until the spy residing here is finally taken out, at which point imperial unrest reduction and local troops will slowly deplete the unrest down until the situation normalizes. Or a new spy arrives, whatever happens first!  At this point, I check our imperial finance settings. Nothing really to do here, I just boosted anti-unrest expenses a little bit. The money we’re spending on stuff like research, the military and so on is of course the money spend by automated planets. And as we don’t want our colonies to go nuts with stupid, our directive for military expenses stays at Begrenzter Krieg / Limited War as the range of 15-30% of our income that sets for the AI is plenty. Hell, even I go seldom above 20% when ordering ships, as more just tends to crash into the wall of diminishing returns too hard to remain feasible. MO3’s economic system is strangely realistic in the way you can utterly destroy your economy if you actually try to spend more than that on military bullshit. The AI of course loves to go to Holy War / 100% military expenses at the slightest provocation. In fact, this medium setting is the best setting in general, as you tend to stay below 30% expenses in your military queues even in emergencies, thanks to diminishing returns hitting so hard. The use cases where you need even more production boosts are incredibly rare and it often means you hosed up so bad you should consider a restart instead. Seriously, boosting research or military production too much are two of the fastest ways to gently caress up your economy so much your empire stops functioning in a reasonable manner. You can boost your civilian sector all day long (it’s even necessary for early colony development), but research boosts are a dangerous money drain after a certain point and military boosts waste tons of money and generate tons of unrest on top of that. Excess is all bad in this game. And if you think to work around the unrest-problem by setting your imperial budget to Holy War, watch as Master of Orion 3 laughs darkly and uses all your resources to build a billion useless transports.  Economically, we can’t really lose anymore, as long as we aren’t making too many stupid errors. The Kingdom of Almandin has a whopping 178 planets, the highest tech level and the highest population. In fact, our closest contenders, the Cynoids, have less than half of our population and planets. At this point, the game is mostly an endurance run. We just have to smash down our most annoying neighbors, take Orion and then we’re done. Our line is barely visible in the upper left corner of this diagram. We’re so far ahead, the game struggles with showing us together with all those losers below us. Also amazingly, the Meklar and Nommo according to this diagram immediately stopped their war and turned on us together as soon as we made contact. Now I’m realizing all those static lines aren’t always caused by the AI stumbling, it must be some kind of anti-player containment protocol forcing them into conflict with us because we’re too strong. We have to test this theory in a later run with more peaceful, diplomatic people to see if it still ends in a war of us against everyone after we get too strong.  More stats! The Nommo have almost as many planets, population and tech levels as the Cynoids, but they’re placed fourth. This tells us that there must be another power of similar strength out there but not in contact with us, placed between Cynoids and Nommo.  The Cynoids of XEOL are basically the same as the Nommo, just with vastly more “power points”, probably because they have been building and deploying warships for ages now in their stalemate with the Imsaies, but not actually using them so there were no losses.  For comparison’s sake, here are our allies: The Imsaies of the Annalona Empire have less then 10% of our planets, a tiny population compared with us but a rather high tech level. Probably thanks to us propping them up. The other powers on our contact list are so weak I deleted their screenshots in disgust. They’re totally irrelevant at this point. Which is by the way why I haven’t bothered to report what the Klackons are doing in ages: Their military is too weak to really bother us anymore, they can only hurt us with their spies. Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + 11 ships lost / 5 ships left (TF1) Expedition B1: 16 ships en route (TF2) Expedition B2: 8 ships en route (TF3) Expedition B3: 16 ships en route (TF4) Expedition B4: 32 ships en route (TF5) Expedition B5: 24 ships en route (TF6) Next: The War against XEOL V
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Jan 1, 2020 16:10
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Wait. Wait wait wait. THIS run? THIS run? You can't be planning another mad run at this game after this one.
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Jan 1, 2020 16:21
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To show off things that get drowned out by bullshit in the main run, I've been preparing two runs to show you guys some other game mechanics. But in both cases, they're using medium-sized maps instead of a huge one like the main run and I'm racking up the difficulty, so the chance of failure gets to be higher too (there will be no repeated attempts, if I lose a bonus run, it just ends, mercifully). Also, one run will be with tech victory ON and the other will be with diplomatic victory ON so they'll be over a lot faster. A lot faster Edit: Basically, the main run will show how to take Orion and the entirety of the tech tree, the bonus runs how non-rocks and actually winning works. After all, what's the point of having three different kinds of population mechanics if we never get to see them in action?
Libluini fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Jan 1, 2020 |
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Jan 1, 2020 16:31
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Libluini posted:To show off things that get drowned out by bullshit in the main run, I've been preparing two runs to show you guys some other game mechanics. But in both cases, they're using medium-sized maps instead of a huge one like the main run and I'm racking up the difficulty, so the chance of failure gets to be higher too (there will be no repeated attempts, if I lose a bonus run, it just ends, mercifully). Also, one run will be with tech victory ON and the other will be with diplomatic victory ON so they'll be over a lot faster. A lot faster Oh god he's going a population victory with the Ikthul!
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Jan 2, 2020 01:18
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poo poo, I forgot about that special snowflake species. I guess now I'm obligated to show them off, too 3 Bonus runs!
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Jan 2, 2020 10:51
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You are a hero, and I hereby crown you Lord Commander of the Order of the LP.
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Jan 2, 2020 11:40
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Are you coming up on longest running lp? You're about to hit 4 years. I know Grey's WW2 lps followed the timelines roughly, but if you are doing 3 more runs we should surpass that.
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Jan 2, 2020 13:54
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Donkringel posted:Are you coming up on longest running lp? You're about to hit 4 years. I know Grey's WW2 lps followed the timelines roughly, but if you are doing 3 more runs we should surpass that. Would be funny if I set this record just because I was too lazy to keep to my original update schedule. (I think originally I wanted to make 1-2 updates per week, which would mean we would be in year 2 still if I had kept up.) Though to be fair, I will make that last Ithkul-run on a small map and with only 2-3 enemies so we can rush through it really, really fast. Of course on highest difficulty, just out of the faint hope that the AI will manage to kill them. (Won't happen, which is why I call it a hope)
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Jan 2, 2020 17:25
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Man, I forgot even with this LP how /bad/ spies were. You have my complete and total and utter sympathy. This game is still whack a spy, make them cry.
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Jan 3, 2020 06:18
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wedgekree posted:Spies of Orion III: Let's Play the STUPIDEST SPY GAME!!! I'm pretty sure at this point in the game, the beginning of turn report is just 99% spies doing things.
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Jan 3, 2020 23:25
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SugarAddict posted:I'm pretty sure at this point in the game, the beginning of turn report is just 99% spies doing things. Normally, 90% of the turn report at this point is construction messages informing you that yes, planet No. 178 in your empire has built two things this turn. As even reading the hundreds of messages this poo poo creates would take forever, I switched those message off. Sadly, spy messages are actually important, as otherwise we'd have no idea what makes our spies disappear or that there is trouble brewing on some spy-infested backwater colony. So I'm forced to keep spy messages on and actually have to read them, which makes our turn reports look like spies are now almost everything that is happening. To be fair, reading about spies duking it out is probably more interesting for the thread then several hundred messages telling us that planet X has now built an automated factory!
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Jan 3, 2020 23:49
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