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I'll say 'keep going, this is interesting'. Also 'I appreciate your efforts'.
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Sep 5, 2015 19:24
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Year 2024 - 2027: Black Friday in Space or The Economic Disaster Movie Compiling this update cost me some headaches, I'll tell you. To get this over with and to celebrate this LP hitting page 2, we'll go through several turns at once this time. Year: 2024  Time for a pay rise! But since the Aurora Empire needs every Zong it can scrape together, only true goons get more money! Hyperman1992 now earns 400k Imperial Zongs every year, which is more appropriate to the leader of Home Fleet, I think.  Cimbri, long traveling through space, gets his last request processed. Sadly, there’s not much the empire can do about the interior of a ship light years away in deep space, but at least the imperial bureaucracy can send him more money.  Our last true goon gets a 50% pay rise, too. Saturn is one of our more important planets, after all.  Right after this I’m setting the import tax to 2%. This should lead planet to automatically pay the treasury some money while importing stuff, while at the same time not really impeding trade too much. At this point please remember: Our entire money comes from trade. There’s no such thing as income tax in the Aurora Empire. Or any taxes, really. Better hope education is privately organized, or I see a deep black future for our empire. Also this of course means every empire “winning” the game by conquest will immediately collapse, since there’s no outside trade anymore.   With the exception of the DarkSyde Empire, everyone gets the new treatment.  Again, our fancy super-expensive new scout led to another sharp dip in wealth. If you’re following this LP attentively, you may have noticed our wealth is dipping far sharper than it should be, even with all our expensive planetary subsidies taken into account. I’ve not noticed our death spiral yet at this point.   Prices are sinking again. Man, I wish I had a background in economics so I could actually understand what this means.   We have everything we need. We could sell some religious items, since we have far more than we need of those. Sadly, we have zero control over what our planets sell. Since we have no idea what planet from what empire could want more of that crap, we can’t even try to steer trade with taxes.  Saturn’s subsidy ran out, so I made a new one. Mostly geared towards research.  For some reason we still trade somewhat with DarkSyde, even though I’ve embargoed them and raised taxes on import and export phenomenally high. This will become important later.   Later I noticed all our planets are dirt poor now and even after stripping them almost bare the imperial treasury is at an all-time low. I decided to lower export taxes to stimulate trade. Translation: I decided to commit slow suicide.  Even Reddit gets lowered export taxes, so hopefully they’ll buy more from us.  Nothing else of note happens in 2024, so I click on NEXT TURN. See you next year! Year: 2025  We get some news again!   As expected, Cimbri finally arrives in orbit over Stoius. Also I forget to make a recording of the horrible music I'm forced to sit through every time I look at a report. Again. Libluini: Master-Class LPer  And our new Lightning-courier has been finished! Time for our third scouting fleet to move out and… scout, I guess.  Lewis? Who the hell is… Oh yeah, Cimbri was commanding Recon 01. Recon 02 is the other fleet. Anyway, this “Lewis” guy now hangs around Stoius. We should be able to get accurate data of the planet now!  Cato gets his little ship (remember, the Lightning-class is only 2k tons to the 10k tons of our other scouts) and is ready to move out.  Meanwhile, I take a look at Stoius. Lewis hasn’t found anything of note, but at least “distortion” dropped to 0%. If there was anything to report here, we could actually believe it! At this point I was kind getting anxious since I couldn’t send Arks ships, even though our scout was in orbit around this world now. I had to do some blind guessing to solve this puzzle.  Since Lewis hasn’t done anything except admiring the view, I order him to INVADE the empty planet. Hopefully this is what the game expects me to do. If not, we’re hosed. And right here it gets weird. So we have Ark ships, which are meant to make new colonies. But what the manual doesn't tell us: Ark ships can't be send to planets outside our empire. So we had Lewis sitting around for a year doing nothing, since I wasn't aware he should be doing something. In desperation, I tell him to  invade this empty world, hoping it will lay claim to it somehow and I'll be able to send an Ark ship soon. At the same time, I’m upgrading Cimbri’s orders so he can take control of Smoias right after arrival. Hopefully.  Back to the map asap! I want to send out a new scout force. The Emperor needs more planets! The grey arrow points at Smaysys, the system I want to look at. It’s farther away than the three right next to the blue ball of Lowtax I’ve surveyed so far, but it’s also farther away from our enemies, so hopefully expansion into that sector will be peaceful.  A click on the stylized star system on the control panel takes me into the system. Three planets! Time to take a closer look. That blue gem is Tratsys, by the way.  The green lump of goo on the right is planet Phaison. Like the blue one, I send it to the clipboard so we can look at it later in the report screen.  Bloims, the small planet wedged in between Tratsys and the sun, is the last item I send flying to the clipboard.  From the clipboard, we’re surveying the planets directly. Tratsys is practically perfect. Second best type, second best atmosphere and best star type. This planet is definitely a major target for us.  Bloims is a mixed bag. Star type and planet type is the best, but atmosphere is the worst. Not exactly first-tier, but not bad either. Maybe later? Since the manual doesn’t say how much all this stuff influences a planet’s worth, I can only guess everything has the same kind of influence on average. In this case, it means Bloims is actually a good planet, even though acid rain probably isn’t healthy for future colonists. Luckily their suffering is abstracted away for our purpose. Emperor ChiefGune can rest soundly.  Phaison is another prime target for colonization: Best star type, best planet type, still quite good atmosphere type. Based on what I know (not much), Phaison and Tratsys are both equally good targets.  So I guess Cato can go out and “invade” all three planets of the Smaysys-system. Two are good, one is not that bad either.  Meanwhile I’m sucking cash from all our planets, dropping all their wealth below what I've considered safe until now. But we need the money!  Because we finally can build a space antenna! One of the systems in our neighborhood is finally in range and as soon as the antenna is finished, we can get not only perfect reports if an enemy empire settles down there, we get several turns advance warning if a hostile fleet draws near. This also tells us accidentally the nearest system from Earth is 5 turns away for our scouts, since the scout-class has 7 points of speed so can travel 29 points of distance in 5 years time. Considering how prohibitively expensive it is to cram lots of engines into our ships, most of our future ships can be lucky to get there in 10 years. I guess this also tells us FTL-travel doesn't exist in this universe. Also don't you love this abstract nonsense system of measuring speed and distances? As a crutch, we'll assume in the future 10 points of speed equals near light speed. Why? Well, you get about 7 points by filling up a design with 75% engines. To get 10 points of speed, you need a design consisting of 100% engines. Building faster ships is impossible, and travelling at light speed is also impossible, so 10 points of speed translates probably to something like 99% light speed. 10 points of distance therefore are roughly a light year. The nearest system in our small galaxy is about 2,9 light years away with this math. Seems legit.  In my excitement I accidentally click again, but instead of loving us over by building a second antenna or not doing anything, I get some feedback. Nice. This error-message is the only way to know a space antenna is in construction, by the way. We still have no luck with our ship classes, though. At least this means technological advancement works, albeit slowly.  The antenna and the imperial subsidies drop our cash level dangerously low. Even if I could send an Ark ship right now, we don’t have the money anymore! At this point I finally noticed something was seriously wrong with our economy.  Prices are stable this year, I think?  Another subsidy ends. Another one is thrown in for good measure. Since we’re low on cash, I decide to set the infrastructure and defense upgrades as low as possible. Or more likely, we didn't have enough cash. This is something I only noticed when editing in the screenshots into this update, which probably tells you something about how good I am with money.  Our trade basically collapsed, even though I lowered export taxes with most of them. This is not good.  Again I ineffectually change around our tariffs. The DarkSyde may be our enemy, but that’s not a reason to punish our own planets. Import taxes are lowered by 10%.  Our non-enemies (with the exception of the GOP because gently caress the GOP) are all set to MAXIMUM STIMULATION. Now we’re paying our planets to import poo poo from them and we pay the alien empires for buying our exports. Basically, our total income is now negative. The implications of this are essentially:  I only notice this when playing some turns ahead in a test game later. Setting the sliders the correct way is hard, even with the dpi-switch on my mouse dialed down a lot. So 0% import taxes it is. My patience was running pretty thin after minutes of trying to not glide inbetween -8 and +8% without hitting the right number.  Apparently we need allies to survive this adventure in space. I try my hand on my first “alliance-construction”. We pay the Reddit-Federation a small amount of money every year for them to help us against the DarkSyde Empire. Emperor ChiefGune also wants a 25% trade-barrier against the DarkSyde. The treaty will run for 10 years. Now we just have to wait and see if it gets accepted!  If you try to accept or reject your own offer, you get feedback-messages. If another empire offers us a treaty, then we can use those buttons. Not now, though.  And that’s everything Emperor ChiefGune can do in 2025. Year: 2026  Cimbri finally arrives in orbit around Smoias, after 6 years of travel through deep space.  Our invasion-order actually worked! Lewis not only claimed the planet, but organized an entire colonization effort! Stoius is now our first colony world! Yes, as counter-intuitive as it sounds, we can’t actually use our “Ark-ships” to colonize worlds. To use them we first have to “invade” an empty planet with one of our ships. Even a single scout works, as you see. Now we can send Ark-ships to supply our new world with more people! If we had the money for one, that is. I'm kind of torn on this. One one hand, gently caress having Ark-ships being useless until after you colonize something and gently caress the manual for not even telling me how to do is, on the other hand everyone of our three scouts is now a reusable colonizer. Which is kind of neat, if we had known this beforehand.   The Reddit Federation rejects our treaty. Why? The game doesn’t tell you. According to the manual, a defensive treaty only lightly sways an empire away from your worlds when choosing which one to invade, so it's not that useful. Trade barriers are suggested at 80%, so the percentage I've chosen wasn't really that high, either. Also I wanted to give money to Reddit for this lovely treaty, so as far as I know it looked pretty tasty. But the Reddit-ambassador apparently doesn't give a gently caress. Rejected. Not even a counter-offer! rear end in a top hat.  Maybe the Hierarchy will be more open to our attempts at stopping the evil DarkSyde Empire?  Our volume of trade has recovered somewhat. Good! Actually, this is really bad. Not only are we only getting money from our DarkSyde-exports, we actively pay money to Reddit and Hierarchy for our meager exports. We’re also losing money because our planets are importing more goods than they sell as exports. At this point we’re basically dead, economically.  Since our production of technology goods isn’t that important if we can’t build any ships, I normalize our production balance somewhat. Now our technology-production only gets a tiny sliver of a boost, just in case.  Even though his government is a total gently caress-up in dealing with the economy, Emperor ChiefGune is beloved by the people! Let’s hope it’s still like this when the election year comes around.  The Aurora Empire is in dire straits: Our population has skyrocketed and we have negative money to feed all those new people. What actually happens: Population needs commodities produced on planets. Generally, planets can support their own population and they’ll buy goods they lack and try to sell overproduction of goods they don’t need. If the population grows too fast, the demand for commodities rises exponentially. Obviously this is even worse for planets like Mars or Venus, which don’t produce much in the first place. Money comes only into this insofar our planets need money to pay for goods. If a planet doesn’t have overproduction to sell, it works at a net loss for the empire. In this case the planet basically gets subsidies from the empire so it can buy food to feed its populace. We have several planets like this right now. Only Earth is really healthy.  Our population doesn't care much about economics, it seems. Maybe it would be different if our people payed taxes? Right now only corporations involved in interstellar trade are paying anything to the state. From an economical standpoint, empires in Imperium are less empires and more like some sort of weird trade associations with their own troops and warfleets. And total political control.  Disloyal fucker Cato is finally in deep space, far away from any danger zone he could exploit.  Cimbri is still in orbit around Smoias. I’m thinking maybe I should do something with him?  I almost forgot: Our new colony, Stoius! 7,9 million colonists arrived just after the “conquest” of Stoius, followed by imperial noble Cassius to take over the government. Luckily the tech level is the same as the second highest of our empire, so Stoius won’t be able to drag down our average tech level too much. I have no idea how the empire determines the tech level of a new world. The manual doesn’t mention this anywhere. Our average tech level is somewhat around 23-24 right now. So I guess new worlds get our imperial tech level?   Cassius is a brand new subordinate fresh from the Imperial University on Earth. He also answers our fears of running out of subordinates after a while: The game simply spawns new ones if needed. It may shock you to hear the manual doesn’t mention this, either. This is evidently a game for hopeful people. Cynics probably would get a heart attack from all the things you’re not told and just kind of have to hope they’ll work out in the end.  The Aurora Empire has now spread to a second system! The DarkSyde Empire isn’t the sole multi-system superpower anymore! Year: 2027 A lot of weird fuckery happens this year.  The Hierarchy also immediately rejects our treaty. I get the feeling ambassadors are kind of dicks.  The GOP is aggressive! Shocking, I know.  And they send out an invasion fleet, too!!! But I’ve learned my lesson, and refuse to panic. I just quietly fume about our assholish ambassadors. Maybe I should cut their salaries, since they’re apparently taking a vacation instead of working? Remember when we had to “invade” planets to colonize them? And remember how our great enemy, the DarkSyde Empire, send out two invasion fleets? And how some turns later, two new planets were colonized by them? I may be dense, but not that dense. Our ambassadors were talking about alien empires colonizing. There never was an invasion targeting us. In fact, there’s either another message for actual invasions of our planets, or the game is incapable of differentiating between colonizing unused worlds and attacking planets of other empires. If this is true, our ambassadors are basically too dumb to understand a single scout travelling to a uninhabited planet isn’t, in fact, an invasion force. Now thanks to our ambassadors being useless fuckers, we can play the neat game “Is this the real invasion?” in the future. We also wasted a lot of time antagonizing the DarkSyde Empire. The people of the Phil-system were probably really confused about our angry efforts, since they never actually planned on attacking us. Next time: Economic Fixing So, at this point I was kind of glad we aren’t actually facing down massive invasions, the other empires are just colonizing planets, like we do. On the other hand, our economy is still dead and we’re bleeding money faster and faster every year. Our ship designer refuses to upgrade to the ship classes we should be able to build but can’t and our Ark ships aren’t actually colonizers like the manual implied. We also learned building smaller ships than maximum size in a weight class is a waste of money ( a 1.000t ship and a 10.000t ship cost the same, one of it can carry a lot more weapons and armor, though; hint it’s not the smaller one). At this point I played some years ahead without saving, just to see if the ship designer actually works as intended and to see if our economy would recover on its own. Spoiler: The ship designer does work, it just takes more time as I expected because the game apparently uses it’s own strange math to calculate averages. Our economy crashed even harder, I re-read the manual a few times and I finally found out two important points after I switched on AI-control in desperation and looked at what the economy-AI was doing. 1. Setting export-taxes up to 10% is apparently perfectly fine and not a small-scale trade barrier as I assumed. AI empires apparently need some really high taxes before they stop trading with you. This means not taking positive export taxes is a deadly error: Not only is trading with other empires the only money source we have, if our export taxes aren’t positive, we’re actively losing money. Stimulating trade doesn’t mean much if we’re going broke, so negative taxes = bad things happen. 2. I totally, completely misunderstood how import taxes work: Negative import taxes not only shuffle money from the treasury to the planets, they’re the only way on preventing bad planets like Mars and Venus from going broke, since their production is poo poo and they have to buy comparatively more commodities. Positive import taxes actively hurt our poo poo-tier planets, so those are a bad idea right now, too. Over the next few years, I’ll colonize more planets and try to revitalize our dead economy. Hopefully alien empires won’t stop trading with us after the clusterfuck in the early years of Emperor ChiefGune’s reign. Interesting to note is: Even though I punished the DarkSyde Empire with high export taxes and an embargo for “invading” us, most of the money made during this dark age of stupidity came from them, since they never stopped trading with us. The rest of our money came from the GOP, which continues to buy our exports like crazy. Of course we can’t go on like this. Especially now that we know the DarkSyde Empire doesn’t actually has it in for us. So I’m normalizing trade relations before we go bankrupt. Libluini fucked around with this message at 15:47 on Sep 6, 2015 |
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Sep 6, 2015 15:44
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This game would drive me insane, I think, with how vague it is and how impossible it looks to have any sort of decent overview of things.
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Sep 6, 2015 17:38
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Governor's Log, Spacedate: Snake Day It has been...how many weeks since I last saw the light of day? I managed to finally get my package from Space Amazon, and then began playing the game of the century, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. As such, I have decided to rename Saturn to Mother Base, and designate each and every one of its moons an FOB. Truly, I am a great, powerful, and wise leader.
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Sep 7, 2015 02:57
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Reading all this makes me very happy that I am not playing this game myself.
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Sep 7, 2015 15:31
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Year: Winter of 2027 Imperial News posted:Imperial Trading Corporations Furious About Erratic Tax Politic Looks like my headaches prevented me from properly finishing year 2027, so I made a short mini-update with the rest of the turn. Enjoy  An old German proverb says: "Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen." So I decided to use turn 2027 for my first try at fixing our economic troubles. First I made a short list using the screenshot above. Economic Notes posted:Exports: I've decided for now we want low import taxes to help out our not-so-productive planets, but we need medium-sized export taxes to have any money, so I started un-loving our taxation levels.  While clutching my calculator like a divine talisman, I also decided to look at some more planets in our vicinity. Thrarnon from the Shersys-system looks like another good candidate for colonization. (Especially now that we now how this works.)  Since Commander Lewis from Recon-fleet II did everything we asked him of, I'll order him to take his scout over there and have a closer look.  Our new colony gets a small short-term subsidy to help get them on their feet.  Then I have to scrape every last bit of cash except a very small reserve from our planets to get the modest positive sum we need to sustain our various subsidies for at least one more year. We'll still go a bit into negatives next turn and have to steal a lot from our planets again, but well... Bankrupt empires can't be choosers.  With this, the interesting bits are done and I finally get around setting taxation levels according to the plan I made.  Even the DarkSyde Empire gets normalized taxes. I forgot about the embargo before clicking on next turn. Because of course I did.  All our import-taxes are getting zero or slightly negative levels to make it easier for our planets to import commodities, while all export-taxes get something around 10% to pump money into our coffers.  And with that it's done. Now let's see next year if this tactic (brazenly stolen from observing the economic AI in a test game) works! Next time:  gently caress, that's a lot of reports! Welp, at least this means ample opportunities to finally record the music, like I wanted. (Next update will include a music-video.)
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Sep 7, 2015 16:34
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Thread, I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is, the imperial economy was finally saved after about ten more turns. The bad news is, in the same time span the game crashed three times and the third crash was so bad it ruined the savestate I was playing on. Luckily I kept three spares because I know this game, those spares were 7 turns older though, which means I can now throw away 60+ screenshots from the turns swallowed up by my emulator. This will probably delay the next update a couple days. And now excuse me, I have to go outside to catch some fresh air. Expect a mini-update tomorrow when I go over the highlights of the lost turns.
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Sep 8, 2015 13:12
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Another short update: I've already replaced the lost turns and tested the waters ahead a little bit. Uh Well Let's just say I learned a few things again about how Imperium approaches logic. It was also nice to see the AI being programmed to actually abuse the way Imperium works. I'm kind of speechless right now. More tomorrow. (As in, an actual update.) At the rate the game is going, expect to see combat at the weekend. A lot of combat. Edit: By the way, what do you guys think about a restart and doing a revenge-run using everything we learned so far to utterly murderize all alien empires? Because believe me, from some time next week on onwards this question will be relevant. Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Sep 8, 2015 |
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Sep 8, 2015 21:10
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It's worth doing...but only after this one, I think. Gives everyone something to look forward to.
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Sep 8, 2015 21:35
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i think we can take two trips through this thing and call it a thread, that sounds fun
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Sep 8, 2015 21:56
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If you're up to two trips through this I certainly don't see a problem.
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Sep 8, 2015 22:10
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Year 2028 – 2031: The Legacy of Zarg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoZGiQtkkFM The map and the short clip playing every time I look at a generic news item. There'll actually some more music clips for other types of news items. You'll hear them in the future at this point of the update. The actual map is dead silence like the rest of the game, by the way. Also I found out a way to stop the clip without crashing the game, so reading news items got a lot less annoying. Imperial News AUDIO ONLY posted:A soft, female voice begins speaking. Year: 2028 So yeah, there’s still a lot to cover, even though I know certain doom is approaching (and a lot of crashes will try to save us from it by making us burn out on the game). Let’s get on with it!  We colonized another planet! Great! No, it really isn’t. You’ll see.  The GOP starts to colonize, too. Good for them!  Even a second planet! Great!!!  The GOP either attacks someone or wants to colonize more worlds. We have no way of knowing.  Reddit starts getting uppity, too.  Our ambassador in the Hierarchy warns us about them wanting to colonize/invade people.  He warns us about a colonization/invasion force flying to god-knows-where.  Our finances are still in free fall.  And I still think we could make some nice Zongs if we could just offload our giant mountain of religious crap and com-equipment. It’s not possible to order the AI around (even your own), so this will remain a sad dream.  Exports are kind of there, but we still import far too much crap. Our poo poo-tier planets are really holding us down it seems. They really are! In more than one way, even! The “decolonize”-button isn’t just for show.  Population is rising, money is falling. As always.  Time to stem the tide with some free condoms. Which doesn’t help that much, I can’t actually make the population shrink or even stop it from expanding, regardless of what setting I take. And new colonies and poo poo planets with lovely growth-rates will just ignore this setting, anyway.  Time to make-up with the DarkSyde. A message is send to their homesystem of Phil to tell them about the end of our embargo. I’m pretty sure the embargo on militia arms really hurt them and they will be our friends from now on.  I try again to manipulate trade for fun and profit. GOP-exports were down, so I make the taxes a bit lower. Hopefully the GOP will come back to buy from us!  I want to stop our planets from importing crap, since that costs a lot of money, so I re-issue a high import tax to try and stop them.  The Reddit Federation gets the same treatment.  And the same. And done.  There are still some stars I’ve haven’t really messed with until know, time to change this!  Thoysys with its only planet is here, by the way. Right next to our triangle of systems.  After this, I went to the clipboard to look at planet Luatax in detail.  Then I remembered I already did this in an earlier update, so gently caress this. Recon 01, commanded by Cimbri, gets orders to fly over there and invade the planet. Sorry, I meant colonize it. My bad.  Mars gets another subsidy, since we still can’t build any ship more advanced than our scout.  At the same I noticed the Jupiter-subsidy had run out/cancelled because of no money, so I re-started it with some adjustment. We need more tech-levels!  And with this, the year 2028 comes to a close. And I’m still blissfully unaware that we’ve been playing this game the wrong way from the very start. Year: 2029  It looks like my fumbling around with math finally worked, our economy recovered a little bit!  But this could be because our high import taxes did their work and we exported a lot more than we imported, which equals more money for us.  Cimbri is in deep space already and travelling to his target. And sabotaging us, but without us or him knowing.  Cato and Recon fleet III are almost there.  And Cato almost reaching that star system was the last thing happening this year. Year: 2030  In January 2030, Commander Cato reaches orbit around Tratsys.  And our spy antenna finishes at the same time! As a reminder, our antenna is kind of lovely and reaches only one other system except ours. On the other hand, it can still get distorted information from way outside its encatchment area, which is up to a point still better than the 100% fake reports we’re getting right now. This antenna is now our early warning system.  Interesting point: Chaining orders together doesn’t work like it should. “Move to” and “invade” clash with each other, for example. In this case Recon 03 moved to Tratsys as ordered, but then Cato kind of forgot to execute the actual invasion/colonization. I had to redo his invasion-order. If I don’t, Cato will just patiently wait for new orders forever. The invasion-order even completely disappeared from the fleet orders window! I really don’t get this. But I learned my lesson: From here on out, I just order to “invade” and it works the same way, minus the extra need for re-issuing orders after arrival. Of course I forget to update orders for fleets already on their way, as growing competent is not something I'm able to do, I fear.  One of the reasons we’re exporting so much to the GOP is probably one of it’s systems relative close proximity to our triangle of systems.  The GOP has a lot of planets, even if it is confined to just two systems. Good planets even. Still, with many planets comes a need for many imports, which gives another explanation for our slow recovery. On the other hand, all those planets are quite good and productive, so our planets should buy like mad from the GOP. Maybe the GOP has set up a high trade barrier to prevent this?  Whatever we did right stopped working. Our cash-flow is falling again. poo poo.  And the reason is: Our import-taxes aren’t working, imports are higher than ever. At least our exports to GOP and the DarkSyde prevent us from crashing too hard. Those imports from the Hierarchy are really bad for us, though.  Our population is still skyrocketing at an unbelievable rate. 3,5 billion people! At this rate we will have replaced all the people who died in WWIII in a couple of years. Also we get no taxes from all those people eating the commodities we produce. Population is needed to properly exploit a planet, but after a certain point it turns into a burden real fast. With some overcrowded poo poo-tier planets and a bunch of new colonies we have the worst of both worlds in the moment.  I have no choice. I’m trying to save our finances the only way I have left: I switch on the economic AI and observe what it is doing. And with this ominous step, 2030 ends. A desperation move. It's kind of obvious at this point I just can't wrap my head around this economic bullshit, so we'll let the AI sort it out for us. quote:Deep down under the imperial palace on Earth, in a secret lab. Dozens of scientists in lab coats are working hard at some kind of giant machine. Twisting knobs, pulling levers. Some are even sitting at desks, moving control-sticks through the air while streams of data flow over the 3D-holos in front of them. Year: 2031 Hopefully the economy will be dealt with, soon. But we have other stuff to do now.  Relics? This is new.  Oh, and we colonized Tratsys. Also good, I suppose. If we had started right and if we had more time, yes it would have been good. Now we’re just loving this up more and more.  Texts of Zarg? How strange! Apparently some long-lost civilization had deposited some important writings on this planet.  The economic AI does better than we did and our finances slowly recover.  Exports are up, imports are down. Reddit and the Hierarchy just don’t want to buy our stuff, it seems. Well, now they won’t get our stuff, too!  Tratsys, our new colony world! And as I expected, the new planet gets our average imperial technology level. Now if you remember how our home planet actually has more than twice the technology-level of our empire and how some alien empires only started out with one planet alone, you probably notice something. I’m still dumb as gently caress at this point, or I’d be sweating drops of blood by now.  Paris, some guy we never met before, turns up to lead Tratsys. He is competent, charming and loyal, so we keep him.  Emperor ChiefGune is getting close to 40 at this point and we still haven’t found the enigmatic drug Nostrum. Another point on our growing list of things to worry about.  Since Phaison is in the same system as Tratsys, I order Cato to colonize that one too.  As a test, I try chaining the same order. Hopefully Cato will indeed colonize two worlds in a row, instead of just forgetting the second order.  And that’s it already for 2031. Not much happening except for that strange relic we found. The Texts of Zarg apparently gave Tratsys a couple more tech levels than it should have naturally (our average is 25 at the moment) and that’s it as far as I can tell. But that’s boring, let me spice it up a bit! August 2031, on Tratsys posted:A lumpy guy in the uniform of the Imperial Fleet suddenly lurched out of the cave entry. Commander Cato nearly toppled back into the deep chasm behind them when the moron started shouting right next to his ears. And to not overload the page with pictures, I'll make a convenient break here and post the rest later. Next time: Approaching Doom.
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Sep 9, 2015 13:07
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Well, that's certainly an unconventional way of handling tech levels... looks like decolonising Mars, Venus and Jupiter at least and pulling out what you feasibly can in the ark ships right off the bat would have been a massive help if I'm reading this right. Maybe even doing the same to Saturn, since it would still drag the average way down from the 55 of Earth. Does the infrastructure remain on the planet after decolonisation?
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Sep 9, 2015 18:56
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StarFyter posted:Well, that's certainly an unconventional way of handling tech levels... looks like decolonising Mars, Venus and Jupiter at least and pulling out what you feasibly can in the ark ships right off the bat would have been a massive help if I'm reading this right. Maybe even doing the same to Saturn, since it would still drag the average way down from the 55 of Earth. No, that's all gone. The only thing which changes: After recolonisation, the ridiculous low tech level of Mars and Venus is suddenly replaced by the new average. So yeah, if we had started out the "correct" way like a bunch of dirty cheaters, we could have boosted our tech level from an average of under 20 to 55. Or even higher, if we waited a couple years for the recolonisation. (When your only planet has level 50+, the new "average" for every new colony will be level 50+. ) And again, some alien empires started out just with their main world and the result of this will be seen in a couple posts. Also I forgot to mention it, but our ship building capacity isn't bound to our average tech level like the manual claims. You see, right under that text in the manual is a table showing the same information, but the column showing average tech levels is ominously labeled "Min. tech-levels" instead. The text is wrong, but the table is right. This means Mars and Venus with tech levels under goddamn 5 at game start were like a giant cement block hanging from our necks. We just didn't know this. It gets even better: Saving population and commodities is prohibitively expensive, so the best we can do in a re-start is scrapping all money and commodities from our planets but only a small portion of the population -everything else costs too much. Decolonising transports 5% of the population back to Earth, by the way. Since too much population is also an active obstacle in loving Imperium, the Game of the Year, this means we'll have to kill off most of our population across our home system or we'll end up just crippled in another way. The only good thing in all of this: Since population doesn't give much advantage, genociding ourselves like that only gives us another boost -our home world will be incredibly productive and all those commodities we stole from our now dead colonies will be exported to give us a huge money boost in the early years. This loving game. Anyway, we still have some updates to go through until we're forced to restart. The next update will be the last peaceful one, though.
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Sep 9, 2015 20:04
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Those are some incredibly stupid mechanics. You can kind of see the underlying logic, but the loopholes are big enough to fly a scout ship through and since the AI starts out hugely benefiting from them, it almost feels like you're supposed to abuse them, too.
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Sep 9, 2015 23:10
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PurpleXVI posted:Those are some incredibly stupid mechanics. You can kind of see the underlying logic, but the loopholes are big enough to fly a scout ship through and since the AI starts out hugely benefiting from them, it almost feels like you're supposed to abuse them, too. It's even stupider, since on "normal", all alien empires are actually stronger than we are -they don't need this kind of cheating. We're seeing the evidence for this on Saturday. The last update from my current batch ends just before the poo poo hits the fan. And the poo poo is antimatter. Right, so I was actually posting to warn you guys: The last update of peace is incoming.
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Sep 10, 2015 11:37
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Year 2032 – 2035: The Chaos of Peace This update is a bit chaotic, since some old screenshots from the 7 turns that never happened are mixed in. Turn out it’s a bit hard to weed out screenshots if everything looks exactly the same! Year: 2032  Another planet gets colonized, making our empire even weaker.  Our AI seems to struggle this year, but this is more because I stripped all my planets of wealth to balance out the imperial accounts. Our wealth is apparently calculated from the wealth of our planets. The new value after stripping them comes closer to reality, since I used most of the money to make our huge debt disappear.  Even though, this year the GOP didn’t buy much and our imports are at an all-time high.  And yes, that’s it already. There’s one thing I could do, but I’ll continue to forget to check it for four more years. Year: 2033  The year begins with Cato executing his second “colonization”-order. Well, at least no more fuckery by the UI, it seems.  Bloims immediately spawns another not-too-bad guy as planetary leader. Since we have still this backlog of untrustworthy guys, he and our three goons are right next after the Emperor on our list to receive drugs. If we ever find them.  Again, a slow recovery.  Nothing else happens and 2033 ends peacefully. Year: 2034  The economic AI continues to work and our finances are growing again.  We’re pretty much paralyzed without money and waiting on our scouts to reach places, so the turn ends again. Year: 2035  Cato was left unattended for a while, thanks to me being stupid, so I send him of to another planet to colonize it for the Aurora Empire.  Good news, at last! We’ve finally some money to use again!  So finally I can make my earlier promise good and send colonists from Saturn to our colonies. Or to be precise, thanks to money still being tight, I’ll send colonists to our best colony planet. And only that one.  All our scouts are still moving and an Ark ship slowly travels to Tratsys. With that, our options are used up and I end the turn. Year: 2036  Lewis arrives in orbit over Thrarnon. Another planet I can colonize. And I have to, since we need Nostrum badly at this point. I just have to remember decolonizing it later.  By the way, this happened the first time I played the turns of 2031-2037. This screenshot is from the ghostly realm of Never, thanks to a later, even worse crash.  This screenshot is also a left-over from just before the fatal crash. I’m kind of interested to see if the magnetic storm event happens again when I play farther. My re-do ended just a turn short. But we’ll see the conclusion of this mystery next update!  This screenshot, intermixed with ghostly left-overs thanks to my emulator being stupid, is from the real game again. In 2036 it looks like our finances are finally back from the dead.  And this was the fatal crash erasing the years 2031 – 2037 the first go around. No amount of reset brought the game back after that, my emulator somehow automatically overwrote the save slot. I was thrown back to my last series of backups in 2031. From this moment on, I started to make several backups every loving turn. A second time Imperium won’t catch me off guard, I swear! Next time: Oh Mein loving Gott Libluini fucked around with this message at 16:34 on Sep 10, 2015 |
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Sep 10, 2015 14:29
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This game is a goddamn travesty...
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Sep 10, 2015 15:16
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inscrutable horse posted:This game is a goddamn travesty... And by travesty, you mean GOTY?
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Sep 10, 2015 15:34
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Game of the millennium, if we can find enough nostrum.
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Sep 10, 2015 15:52
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inscrutable horse posted:Game of the millennium, if we can find enough nostrum. Good news on that front! (And bad news on everything else, ever.) There's a lot of stuff happening over the next turns and I'll try to hammer out a new update over the weekend. The new post will be up late today or tomorrow morning at the latest. Which will be noon to late evening in Northern America, if I got the time difference right. Also I'm so sorry Pyroi. Do you have family I can notify? Emperor ChiefGune has to write them a sad message.
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Sep 12, 2015 12:40
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Oh no Things really got bad if
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Sep 12, 2015 18:39
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Year 2037 - 2039 : Oh Mein loving GottImperial News posted:Background: A holo-sphere of space, with some hard-to-see points slowly moving through the inky blackness. Year: 2037, Winter  You know, we had our spy antenna for a while now. So I suddenly remembered to take a closer look at enemy fleets. This are the fleets of the GOP. The little dots in the middle are closing in on us, it seems. Also thanks to bad programming, all alien fleets everywhere have the same name. Thanks guys, another headache! It’s not like I had enough of them already!   After looking at the first fleet, yes. Looks like an invasion fleet. On average, the 6 ships have each 46k tons of weight. Our three ships in Home Fleet have a combined strength of 12 and a tonnage of 30k tons total. If we try to fight this fleet, we’ll be wiped out without inflicting losses. The fleet also carries 650 divisions with it. That’s a lot.  The second GOP-fleet travelling alongside the first one has some troops less, but is also an invincible death fleet compared to our forces.  Just to take things into context, this are our systems. The GOP-fleets are hanging in the empty void between the triangle on the left and our blue systems. I’m hoping like mad they’re actually travelling to some other target…  The DarkSyde has also send out a bunch of fleets, but they’re too far away to decide which empire they target.  I’m moving the map around to make sure and it turns out the DarkSyde is sending ships into the opposite direction from us. Good! (We’re roughly where the grey cursor is hanging around.)  Reddit has some fleets hanging around in the darkness of space. No idea where those are going.  The first DarkSyde-fleet is loving gigantic compared with us. 5 battleships with about 76k tons weight each. That’s almost endgame-size! The fleet has ten times the firepower and fifteen times the armor. If that fleet gets close to Home Fleet, we’re toast!  Reddit has two smaller fleets, at least in measures of firepower and armor. Those two fleets can wipe us out several times over regardless. I start to feel really unsafe now.  And this is the Hierarchy. Just one system and just one planet. What could they do? They’re harmless.  Well, poo poo. One of those alien fleets is still covering the Hierarchy-home system Militaire, but the other three are almost on top of us. (See that little blue dot? That’s the position of three enemy fleets right next to the Lowtax-system. Next to us.)  This is the first fleet. Based on the tonnage, (78.700t per ship) the Hierarchy’s sole planet has a tech level of about 79. Which means since the AI would have needed the entire game up until now to build those six ships, the AI must have started out with this stupidly high level. Of course the Militaire-system is too far away for us to do more than guess-work, so take this with a grain of salt.  The second fleet is a carbon-copy of the first, with just one exception: It carries “only” 912 instead of 1000+ divisions. By the way, now we would need 78 of our most powerful warships to fight the Hierarchy. We have 3. Also my guesswork goes to poo poo. In a testgame building a ship half the size of these murderwhales took 8 turns. The entire game is less then 20 turns old! If the Hierarchy started building immediately, they should have two instead of 12 of those ships! Is the AI cheating or did they start out with more than just some scouts?  The third fleet. One ship less and half the troops loaded up, but the same giant death cruisers. Unbeatable for us, even alone.  And the fourth and last fleet targeting us. Like the third, but with half again the troops. Four Hierarchy-fleets, probably not more than a single turn away. Every single one could defeat ten times as many ships as we have. I did some math and we need 143 of our combat-corvettes to even have a chance at fighting them. 3 aren’t enough, I think.  This is the single planet responsible for the multiple fleets of battleships bearing down on us. The single planet! See now how hosed up Imperium is? Not only did this AI-empire get a huge boost over us thanks to only having one planet, the AI must have started with a lot more in tech, ships and whatever else to build so many super-ships this fast. Either that or the AI can cheat and build a lot faster than we can. A lot faster.  gently caress it, the Lowtax-system is lost. I’m moving the Imperial Palace to Tratsys to buy time. All of Earth’s commodities and 20% of the citizens come with ChiefGune. And our finances are crushed again. But it’s not like we have an alternative.  Only ~58 million colonists are living on Tratsys right now. Boy, those poor bastards will be pretty surprised in a few years.  To preserve our fleet strength, I’m ordering Hyperman1992 to protect our new capital.  The Imperial Treasury literally can’t stem the costs for this retreat, but at least having negative money seems to be one of the few ways not to earn a game over in Imperium.  A fifth of Earth’s population is gone. The Emperor decides to stay, though. He will go down with Earth! I have no idea why, though. Either the Emperor stays on the original capital until the Ark ship arrives at the new capital, or you have to move the Emperor personally, or the planet leader on the new capital becomes the new Emperor… The longer I play this game, the more infuriated I become. Let’s find out by experimenting. Mars got reset and is now a newly colonized world. Why? Beats me.  Venus is still normal, though. It even has a sizable defense and a garrison. A garrison outnumbered 10:1 by the smallest of the four Hierarchy-invasion armies. Welp, goodbye Venus.  Jupiter is equally hosed.  Pyroi is preparing the moons of Saturn for a fight. It’ll probably be a really short fight, but fighting there will be! After one turn of battle for honor’s sake I’ll pull him out and replace him with a non-goon, though.  To help us consolidate and to upgrade our tech faster, Stoius gets eliminated. All colonists get send to our new capital. Which hopefully isn’t Earth anymore.  Smoias gets decolonized, too. We simply don’t have the resources to support so much dead weight.  Phaison is good enough I decide to let the colony live. Maybe we’re lucky and we can build up the planet before the Hierarchy comes for a visit?  Our new capital. As good as Earth, at least in potential. Everything else is still incredibly low-tier, thanks to being colonized only a couple years ago.  Bloims gets decolonized. We simply don’t need it right now.  Next up: Reducing all subsidies for planets in the Lowtax-system to a bare minimum of defense spending. Spending money for planets soon in the enemy’s hands seems stupid. Let’s not do that.  Another round of mobilization throughout the system! Hundreds of divisions are raised all other the Lowtax-system are conscripted. And if I had thought to combine all those armies into a single one, we’d have had a good chance at defeating at least one invasion army. On the other hand, we don’t have ships to transport them with. I’ve send our three combat ships away already. And even if we had enough ships to transport them, the Hierarchy-fleets would wipe them out in transit.  After ending the turn, I accidentally try to move the window and the game crashes. Last time to my shock, it actually worked and the game didn’t crash! As I said in the beginning, the game only crashes 90% of the time you move a window.  Welp, let's redo this. After reloading my save, our running turn has generated new reports for some reason. We’re somewhat lucky, the enemy is close enough to shoot at Home Fleet in passing, but not close enough yet to invade. We're even twice as lucky, since Home Fleet started moving during the same turn already. Normally fleet movement is inbetween turns, not in a turn. I know this because invading a planet generates a lot more messages, even from a single fleet. Also what the gently caress is happening with the movement? Until now, no other fleet ever moved before I ended the turn I gave the order in. Maybe the crash and reload hosed something up in the game's code? Welp, this time poo poo programming worked in our favour: Home Fleet gains an extra turn of movement.  For some reason Mars got reset a third time. I’ve no idea how or why this happens.  The second reset gave us a higher tech-level and doubled the population on our “new” colony. Weird. Maybe this behavior has something to do with our high debts? Is the AI selling off entire colonies worth of people or something if your debt grows high enough? I’ve no idea, since neither the game nor the manual mentions anything about this. It’s probably just shoddy programming. There was a crash after this turn, after all. Maybe some variable somewhere got corrupted.  While passing through the Lowtax-system, Home Fleet comes in range of one or more of the invasion fleets. Both sides fire upon each other. In space combat damage is spread out through a fleet. So this means our strength 12 attack was spread out around multiple ships with each having 30 defense on average. And in deep space combat like this, damage is lowered by distance. So this means if our fleet engages one enemy ship, this ship alone could take everything we dish out three times over while wiping us out in turn 1. This time we ineffectually scratch some space paint while enough firepower to erase Home Fleet roughly 21 times is pouring back. Let’s hope for Hyperman1992’s sake Home Fleet is far enough away from the alien fleets to survive this encounter.  OK, bring it on: Tell me the bad news, game! Home Fleet takes 25% losses. Which is less than one ship, so if Hyperman1992 can leave the system without getting shot at again, we won’t lose a single ship! If our goon admiral can make it to Tratsys like this, he deserves a medal!  Not all news are bad, it seems. Hyperman1992 (renamed to fit into the game) is still near Mars. For some reason. I guess Mars is on the way out from Earth? Hopefully he can now escape without trouble. All three corvettes are still in good shape.  Just to make sure I take a look at his orders. Nope, nothing about colonizing Mars here. He should travel to Tratsys without trouble now. Year: 2038  While you’re digesting this, here our economy: Raising more troops and sending out Ark ships was something we couldn’t possibly pay, but our economic AI somehow still moves us back a step from the Abyss of bankruptcy.  I’m a bit anxious, so I go back into the Ark-UI and look at how many Ark ships out of five we can still send. This is the only way to find out if you’re having Ark ships flying through space, since they don’t count as fleets and can’t be made visible on the map.  And Cimbri finally finds some Nostrum! Kind of weird how only the three real goons who joined the game end up doing the important poo poo. If you’re wondering about the disappearing messages, I’ve started to make a habit to delete reports after reading and screenshotting them. Opening up a screenshot is a lot faster than using the in-game UI. In the game itself old reports are just another burden on you, especially since Imperium orders the reports from oldest year to newest just to annoy you a little bit more.  To add to the confusion, in a given year messages are ordered new -> old. The top message will always be the newest from the latest year, which confuses me every goddamn time I forget to delete old messages for a while. Case in point: The message about Cimbri arriving at Luatax comes first and the message of him finding Nostrum comes last, since that happens afterwards. But if I don’t delete his reports, they’ll stay on top and every new year will start dropping messages below. With every passing turn your new messages will be buried deeper and deeper. And if you accidentally click on delete all, they’re all gone! I think it’s ironic that a game is more playable if you’re making screenshots of the UI than when you’re using it.  By the way, after pumping money into every single planet for the entire game, we’ve finally reached the point where we can build one ship class heavier than before. I hold off on planning new designs until we have some money left over, though. So we can actually build them. Year: 2039  See what I mean? Lots of messages. Looks like the invasion is there!  To prepare myself mentally for the coming onslaught of bad news, I’m taking a look at Luatax first. The first planet with drugs we have found!  Of course nothing in Imperium is ever easy, so you’d better hope you didn’t accidentally delete that message about sensors finding Nostrum, or you’ll never know it’s there without colonizing the planet in question!  Cimbri gets orders to “invade” Luatax. We need drugs and we need them fast!  Also I’m hoping he never gets close to one of those many, many fleets a hundred times stronger than his single scout.  Thanks to our enemies trading freely with us, our finances are still climbing upwards. We’re still broke, though.  OK, let’s get on with this. The very last thing which happened this turn was the Hierarchy’s invasion of Saturn. Please hold the planet, Pyroi!  From the game’s viewpoint, planets and fleets are the same thing, so both planet and fleet leaders can use maneuvers in combat. Pyroi uses a blocking maneuver and the alien fleet above Saturn counters with a patrol maneuver. According to my table in the manual, this means the Hierarchy gains a slight combat advantage. Welp, looks like we get even more hosed than I thought possible.  Earlier in 2039, another alien fleet reached Venus and immediately commenced with the invasion.  The planetary leader of Venus tried to directly assault the overwhelming fleet with his static defenses. The Hierarchy blocked this attempt. The table says both sides are getting hosed over with this. I guess face tanking a direct assault is a bad idea comparable to assaulting a blockading force head on?  And just days before an alien fleet assaulted Venus, another Hierarchy-fleet attacked Mars!  The leader of Mars (after the mess of multiple recolonisations, it's some guy named Achilles) also assaults the invasion fleet with everything he has. The Hierarchy-commander uses an elegant, but ineffectual sweep-maneuver to avoid the attack. This time the Hierarchy-fleet makes a bad choice. The Assault by missiles doesn’t get any modification, but the Hierarchy-strength is dialed down for this turn.  One of the first things an invading fleet does is bombarding a planet to destroy the defenses. Since I’ve worked my way down the list of reports I’ve finally reached the part where the invasion began.  No wait, Venus got bombed even earlier.  Wrong again, Mars was the first planet to get hit by the invasion fleet.  At this point I start laughing because this message tells me all I’ve known about the game ordering messages was wrong. Yes, while all other messages are ordered with the newest on top, bombardment messages add your losses below. If other message types change up their order like this too, the entire news report will turn into an unholy mess I’ll have to straighten out first. To reiterate, the news messages are apparently ordered like this (left is up and right is down): 1. The turns are ordered oldest -> newest. 2. Inside a turn, the messages are ordered newest -> oldest. 3. But reports with follow-up reports are ordered oldest –> newest again. Every single step seems logical, but all three together create a huge mess as soon as a lot of messages are generated. So instead of just reading and finding out what happens, a player is forced to first make some sort of mental map of causality in his head, to make sense of the great picture. Or take a lot of notes/screenshots.  The last message this year, finally: The bombardment of Saturn destroys 1% of Pyroi’s troops. 5200 dead or wounded, after a bit of applied math.  Our emergency-mobilization has raised the army on Earth up to 192 divisions. 1,92 million soldiers are ready to defend our late capital!  Mars is hosed. hosed.  Venus looks better, but is also toast.  I have no idea how to defend Jupiter. gently caress, I have no idea how to defend anything.  Saturn has lost two divisions, but the siege of Saturn still rages on. Wait a minute, we had 52 divisions before the bombardment! One percent of 52 isn’t 2, you stupid game! Next time: Disaster, again.  Next time we’ll finally have drugs. And it looks like we’ll need them. Since I'm writing this LP and already knew the invasion was coming, the nastiest surprise for me was the fact Imperium uses three different ways of ordering reports and mixes them freely, for maximum confusion. At least the ordering makes sense, after a while of thinking it through. It's still incredibly backwards and non-intuitive, though. Imperium: For the Serious Game Player.
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Sep 12, 2015 23:00
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Year 2040 – 2041: Imperium: Total War Yeah, we’re in deep poo poo and the Hierarchy is beating us pretty badly. Let’s see if we can survive this somehow. Year: 2040  After everyone of our dudes has grown 20 years older, we finally colonize a planet with the life-prolonging drug Nostrum. Now some us can live forever! Well, up to 1000 years at least, which is a lot. Nostrum also runs on Perry Rhodan-rules, which means if you take the drug for some time and then stop, you’ll turn to dust in a couple of days. (This gives us also a way to “customize” our subordinates by murderizing them with Nostrum if they aren’t loyal enough. Or too incompetent.)  After a year of heavy fighting, Saturn’s defenses are destroyed and the Hierarchy can land their invasion army. Pyroi’s capital on Triton sees heavy fighting practically immediately.  Venus has still some missile batteries left, so the Hierarchy is forced to bomb them some more. I’ve forgotten if I mentioned this, but just in case: Troops can’t land as long as a planet has some defenses left. The invading fleet has to bomb everything to rubble before the army is allowed to land.  In this case this is hilarious, since Mars has so incredibly low defenses after being automatically recolonized two times over. But Mars still doesn’t give up and pumps out abstract invisible missiles until on 31st December 2040 finally the last defense base is destroyed by space lasers. Which are also abstract and invisible, so don’t wait for pictures.  Pyroi’s troops try to defend Saturn and his moons, but it’s hopeless. Incredible destruction is taking place and countless lives are lost. The population takes damage every time combat takes place on a planet. The damage depends on the size of both armies. So Saturn’s population will take a heavy beating, even if the fighting stops right this turn.  The bombardment of Venus has destroyed some troops, but left most of the army intact.  Well, gently caress. This is a capital gently caress, I misjudged how much damage the death fleet hanging over Saturn was aiding to the invading troops, or just the number of enemy troops, or both: If one side is too superior, the losing side gets stomped without doing more than a scratch to the victor. Pyroi’s army got crushed in less then a year without inflicting much losses. Maybe some of the Hierarchy’s soldiers stubbed their tentacles or something, but that’s it. Also Pyroi is dead and gone, no chance to save him now.  Saturn is now part of the Hierarchy. Military Transmission To Secondary Imperial HQ on Tratsys posted:Background: Icy tunnels deep underground. The picture occasionally suffers from heavy static. Heavily armed humans are slaughtered by what looks like giant starfish with laser guns. An agitated looking officer is looking at the holo-camera. He starts speaking in a hushed, angry voice.  Our first refugee-convoy reaches Tratsys. Not the one carrying the Imperial Palace, though. That one is still in deep space. ”Ark-ships are slower than your fleets”-my rear end. The loving manual is just so goddamn useless sometimes. The Ark-ships travel a lot faster than even our scouts.  The moons of Jupiter suffer some disaster unrelated to the ongoing invasion of the Lowtax-system. Or maybe our capital system got space bombed so hard it starts to disrupt gravity across the system? I couldn’t really make out what this one does. Apparently some minor damage of some kind, but since using the UI is so cumbersome, I conveniently “forgot” to take enough screenshots of Jupiter in different turns just to find out how much damage, exactly. The numbers change all the time for different reasons, anyway. Slight damage like this is pretty much irrelevant.  Thanks to our spy antenna, the Hierarchy is close enough for us to get a report without distortion: And holy gently caress is the Hierarchy rich. And that population minus the recently conquered Saturn is pretty much Naygon alone. With that much population the capital must have been on the verge of getting into trouble. Or not. Nothing says the AI plays with the same rules as the player, after all. Food for thought: The Hierarchy built a lot of super-expensive ships and still has a lot of money left over. If the other empires are equally wealthy, my decision at the start to give alien empires a little bit more money may have been a very wrong one.  Our first planet with Nostrum produces enough to make one guy immortal and slow down aging on a couple more, with a small reserve left over. At least 50 units of Nostrum have to be allocated to a subordinate a year to fully stop aging. Less just slows the process down. And remember: If you give someone Nostrum and then stop later, they will die. Because of this, I decide to stockpile Nostrum for 1-2 years more, followed by giving Emperor ChiefGune enough to make him immortal and our surviving goons most of the rest of the yearly production. This way we have some turns to find a new Nostrum-source if our only planetary source is captured. And testing ahead showed me we really dodged a bullet here: The death point for aging starts after turning 60. I had several subordinates die the same turn after getting older than 60 years. This point is now only a couple turns away for some of them. There’s apparently also some random chance applied, so giving someone older than 60 years Nostrum may be a costly risk. Of course now that I think of it, there isn't actually enough Nostrum to save non-goons, so expect some death reports in a couple updates.  Luatax just started out and I’m hoping after some time the Nostrum-growth will also go up, together with productivity. Again, “hoping” is the only practically thing we can do here, since the game can’t tell us anything related to production anyway. We just notice colony growth by getting more commodities and more money from selling them. To find out the real numbers on a per planet basis, I would have to spend a lot of time doing some math. Also the best I could do would be some kind of weird weighted average unless I do something insane like decolonizing every planet except the one I want concrete numbers for and then re-loading my save state to do this all over again for every other planet in the Aurora Empire, and gently caress that.  After sending out two Ark-ships with 20% of the population each, natural growth and refugees from our demolished colonies (and Saturn, maybe –the game never tells) have already replaced most of it.  Home Fleet is safe in deep space right now. Hyperman1992, we’re hoping you’ll make it! Year: 2041  One of our ships automatically colonizes Smatas again just to annoy me. This seems to happen every time one of our ships is in orbit around a world I’ve decolonized earlier. It forces me to de-colonize Smatas again.  Yes. And gently caress you game, this is not an error.  Cato is at fault for this waste of time. I’ve left him in orbit around Smatas, so like the dumb gently caress he is he will mindlessly recolonize Smatas every turn as long as he is here. He has to go.  Time’s up for Venus. Another army is dropping.  Mars gets another round of space death applied to it.  The vastly superior invasion army battles the garrison of Venus. Venus rains acid down on both sides.  Most of our army is destroyed the same year, but the alien army wasn’t strong enough to win automatically. This year at least.  Mars still has some missile bases left, which is quite impressive for a new colony. The population is also still rising. The people of Mars don’t give a gently caress about the ongoing alien invasion, it seems.  Venus has still 49 divisions left, spread out across the Venusian surface. But that’s not enough anymore against the vastly superior enemy, so the conflict got downgraded to “Insurgency”. Thanks to the way game mechanics work, this insurgency will neatly end not in our favor as soon as I hit end turn.  I think the earthquakes reduced the population somewhat, but that’s it.  Losing a war isn’t good for the economy, evidence shown here. Having alien fleets hanging around Mars and Venus blockades both planets, which means they can't trade. This is actually helping us, since both planets are rather unproductive and would just buy stuff anyway. Sadly, the loss of Saturn actually hurts us -it was the fifth planet of the Lowtax-system, which in the programmer's insane mind means it was at the best possible orbit around the sun. Orbit is of course the one stat you have to look up on the map, it isn't shown in the planet report window. Without a manual, you would never know about this. This explains by the way why Saturn was weirdly productive, compared with Jupiter, Mars and Venus. All planets except Earth had various arrangements of lovely stats, but Saturn was the fifth planet, so they are actually worth it to hold onto when we restart.  Even though it’s probably a waste of time, I’m searching for some more planets to move our scouts to, since fresh new planets aren’t automatically colonized.  Cato gets send to Drider. Have a nice vacation over there, Cato!  Some other scouts are hanging uselessly around, too. Time to move them!  Good bye, Lewis! Hope you can get there before the Aurora Empire collapses!  Cimbri, one of our true goons, also needs a new target to stop pestering me.  Done and done. And hey, maybe we find a second source of Nostrum this way?  Kind of useful for sending scouts around: This button shows all colonized planets of all empires. Nice to avoid sending scouts to their doom. Next time: The war continues.  I'm starting to dread the word "hostilities".
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Sep 16, 2015 11:59
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Well, that's not good. Not surprising, but not good.
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Sep 16, 2015 21:39
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this is the best lp i mean the theory behind lp's is that we watch people play games we don't want to right? and this is the game that is least wantable to play that i have ever heard of. therefore this is the best lp
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Sep 16, 2015 22:16
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New updates incoming! I've spend some time in massing enough screenshots for some new posts, so the LP can continue again. We're also building some new ships, even though they'll probably be finished too late and are too few to change our fate. At least next time I know I can build ships while in debt as long as I manually assign the money I don't have!
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Sep 20, 2015 15:08
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Good news! I've got one of the Game Over-screens to work! (Until now all my test games ended in a black screen and I thought that's it. But nope, the game has a proper end, it just sometimes apparently crashes instead of showing them.) If our current run ends up getting ChiefGune killed by something else, I'll show off this thing, it's remarkably colorful for this 99% monochrome game.
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Sep 20, 2015 17:47
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Libluini posted:Good news! I've got one of the Game Over-screens to work! (Until now all my test games ended in a black screen and I thought that's it. But nope, the game has a proper end, it just sometimes apparently crashes instead of showing them.) That's neat, looking forward to it if it happens.
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Sep 21, 2015 10:05
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Year 2042 –2045: Lowtax Lost We’re back and the Aurora Empire is still fighting for its very survival against the dread Hierarchy.  2042 opens up with an alien fleet bombarding Mars. Again.  The defenders of Venus spend a second year desperately fighting a guerrilla war against the alien invaders of the Hierarchy.  The aliens are a lot better at suppressing an insurgency than Bush, though. Iraq this ain’t.  And so Venus is occupied by the Hierarchy. Good riddens, you acid-infested hellhole!  Based on experience, I’m guessing this one is definitively a true invasion force.  The only good news this year: Emperor ChiefGune and the Imperial Palace arrive with the second refugee convoy from Earth.  Tratsys gets a huge boost thanks to the commodities, including defenses and infrastructure, our convoy brought. Also planet leader Paris and Emperor ChiefGune switched places. I’m guessing ChiefGune and Paris travelled on fast secret couriers to their new posts while the Imperial Secret Service pretended they were still there. In a parallel universe where ChiefGune was still on his way to Tratsys when Earth fell and pretend ChiefGune died, the ISS took their work so seriously they murdered the real Emperor mid-flight so hard the game crashed with a black screen. All just to keep up the deception. Dedicated guys.  Earth is now in command of the planet leader from Tratsys. The defenses could take on Home Fleet easily, but are no match for the Hierarchy. The garrison is sizable, but still not even large enough to inflict many losses.  Losing the war so badly means our treasury suffers all the time now. Even the AI struggles to keep our debt from crushing us.  Our popularity has taken a beating, but is still rather high. Probably because Emperor ChiefGune’s opposition lost as many people as we have or something.  We now have a small stock of Nostrum, so I start assigning the drug to our most important guys.  As the Emperor, ChiefGune needs at least 50 units of Nostrum to stop his aging process. Since he is 47 already and people in Imperium have an average lifespan of 60 years, we’re cutting it kind of close already.  Cimbri, while far away, still gets his drug dose thanks to those secret fast couriers I’ve told you about. 13 is just above the threshold of 10 to slow down his aging process by 90%. It’ll take ten turns now for him to reach age 54. 10 or below only slows down aging by 50% and is not that great. It’s good to remember this option though in case of a Nostrum-shortage: Giving a subordinate 1 Nostrum is a good method of keeping them alive while you desperately search for a new Nostrum-planet.  Our trusted commander of Home Fleet gets the third and last dose of Nostrum.  This means we’re eating 77 from our yearly production of 87 units of Nostrum. As long as we don’t have a second source, I’ll keep it this way. The emergency-stockpile will keep growing. Year: 2043  After taking over most of the Lowtax-system, the Hierarchy finally decides to take the late capital of the Aurora Empire: Earth itself.  Paris and the alien admiral try to outwit each other. Patrolling against a defense missile sweep does nothing for us, but it makes the patrolling ships look like they are crewed by idiots, which is great for our morale. Patrol against sweep means the Hierarchy gets a slight malus on attack and defense strength, while sweep against patrol (from our viewpoint), changes nothing.  The aliens are so angry by their harmless gently caress up, they start bombing every missile silo they can find to rubble.  Mars is already lost the moment the first starfish-looking alien lands on it. No garrison is waiting for them, only an incredibly weak ad-hoc militia tries to stop the landings. In vain.  They died in their boots, though.  Meanwhile back on Earth, the bombardment kills thousands of soldiers.  In just a couple months the Hierarchy’s army crushed the small militia of Mars utterly.  In this case we don’t know what actually happens. Based on experience with the DarkSyde, I suppose it’s just another colonizing fleet.  The Hierarchy sends out another fleet to gently caress us over. Or maybe not, this time. Who knows? Imperium isn’t telling.  The bombardment wasn’t really effective this year, but the Hierarchy has enough fleets hanging around to speed up the process next year.  Our economy slightly recovers.  Nostrum report is OK, I guess.  In my despair, I went back to the manual and found a paragraph in the beginning saying the Imperial Treasury can go into debt. So now I’m trying to build a last ditch warship to see if we can go even farther into debt. The ship costs more than our three corvettes combined. 30.000t destroyer, here we come!  Now our dying empire has to buy materials before building can start. I also need to assign money to pay the yards. Year: 2044  This year the defenses of Earth have been degraded enough to allow landings on the planet itself. Alien armies rain down over China, West Europe and South America. Giant space lasers pulverize Moscow to help aid landings in West China.  The entire year 2044 is an orgy of death and destruction for people on Earth. You could say it’s Hell on Earth.  60% of Earth’s armies don’t survive the year. quote:…Our armies suffered heavy losses practically everywhere, your majesty. South America is one giant crater, Tokyo and Moscow are ruins and Neowashington only has some rednecks left defending it. I think we can at best hope to fight on for a couple of months more, then we’re probably all dead. Those alien bastards really hit us good and…  76 divisions are left on the ruins of Earth. Barely enough to keep an insurgency running against the invaders. Also ouch, no bumbling around like over Mars, the aliens have destroyed all defenses inbetween turns.  Buying the necessary materials for our new destroyer is hammering our treasury down, but welp it’s not like the Aurora Empire needs the money after it’s destroyed, right? Year: 2045  The DarkSyde really did just harmlessly colonize a new world. Huh. Well, good for them I guess.  The Hierarchy is so enraged at the stupid humans resisting even after an entire year of heavy fighting, they drop another giant army on Earth to finally conquer the planet.  Again entire cities are torched, as the last arsenals of WWIII meet the vast alien hordes.  Since this isn’t a military SF-novel, we lose. All our plucky heroes are incinerated by purple laser beams.  Earth is lost.  Again? Come on, we’re already beaten! At this point the Hierarchy is just extra mean.  Tratsys, our best planet now after Earth is gone, is incredibly wealthy after selling off the huge surplus of commodities gained by transporting everything on Earth to here.  The leader of the invading army, StarLord Trims, is now the governor of Earth. Sadly, he is still working for the Hierarchy. 521 alien divisions stand ready to fight off every attempt at retaking it. We still could, probably. We would just lose our entire army on their way to Earth, thanks to the Hierarchy’s supremacy in space. Also it’s kind of funny the insurgency on Earth is still going, even after two years of humiliating defeats. Go plucky little Earth resistance! We’re behind you! (And running fast into the other direction.)  Saturn is administered by StarLord Kroorg. The technology levels of alien Earth and alien Saturn are truly astounding. 83 and 97 to our maximum of 65. As I feared, “normal” difficulty means giving the AI huge bonuses we can’t hope to overcome. As a contrast, I’ve been raising tech levels on our planets like mad since the very first turn, but our average was around 30 at it’s highest. Next time: The Unquiet Interim of Waiting.
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Sep 21, 2015 18:32
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Year 2046 – 2052: The Unquiet Interim of Waiting Year 2046  This year not much happens. After losing 4 out of 5 planets in our capital system, the Hierarchy apparently got bored and stopped attacking. Or after getting Mars and Venus, they decided a third lovely planet was too much and so we’re get to keep the Jovian System for now.  Also Empire DarkSyde does a thing.  The same dumb guessing game again.  The invasion cost us about a third of our total population. Year 2047  DarkSyde continues to colonize like mad. Hopefully it works out better for them than for us.  Two for two, I see.  And the dance never stops. In desperation, I say “gently caress it” and allocate money for our ship building program. If this works, we’ll have the new ship in four years. Year 2048  Again, not much happens. Cato arrives over Drider, that’s pretty much it.  Our mad gamble worked! Ship construction has begun, even though we practically paid with large IOUs.  For some reason our treasury has less debt than before. After looking up some numbers, I come to the conclusion Tratsys must have made some mad money by selling off more commodities. This conclusion is based on wild mass guessing though: Everything else just makes less sense. Just one more reason why it’s probably good the AI deals with this poo poo, I have no idea anymore how the economic background simulation works.  We exported a lot more than we imported, but was that really enough for 11k+ units of Imperial Zongs?  Since the end is near and debt is apparently less a problem than I thought, I give our goons pay-rises. And awards, of course. Hyperman1992 is awarded the medal of “Colonel” for his rescue of Home Fleet.  Cimbri gets awarded the rank of “Centurian” for dutifully exploring this mad star cluster for the Aurora Empire.  Lewis has done the same thing, but he isn’t a goon, so he gets only the rank, but neither the money nor the Nostrum of a real goon.  The same goes for Cato.  After an emergency session of the Imperial Parliament, Emperor ChiefGune declares himself to be the Supreme Commander of the armed forces. Changes nothing, but sounds neat. Year 2049  Nothing happens at all this year. So I’m just checking the map and stuff, wait for our ship to finish and silently despair about what’s coming to us.  Still two years for our new warship.  Population is rising like mad again. Did I use the word “mad” too often this update? Be honest, guys.  Thanks to losing Earth and still having Jupiter, we lost our capability to design 30k ton warships and are back to square one.  The game is stupid enough to still allow us to build our larger ships, though. Apparently our shipyards aren’t affected by this strange empire-wide amnesia. They have the blueprints, so they can still build the design. This dumb bullshit doesn’t surprise me anymore. Like, at all. This game is broken poo poo. Imperium is a dire warning to not take drugs before programming something.  I decide to test this and am rudely reminded we can only have one ship build order active at a time. Year: 2050  Hyperman1992 arrives over Tratsys. The question is, how much time do we have left before the Hierarchy decides to drop the hammer? The Hierachy is now openly hostile to us and will continue to hound us until we or them are dead. You could bet on who that will be but no-one will take your bet.  Our second recon fleet arrives at their waiting point. Theoretically, I could use them to move around and search for more Nostrum, but what’s the point? The game is almost over for us.  At least from next year onwards our fleet will be more than twice as strong. And if we had 400 turns more time, I guess I could build enough ships to actually turn the tide.  This reminds me, what the hell is the enemy AI doing? I force myself to use the map screen again. I select the Hierarchy from the empire-submenu, than I click on the fleet-button to show their fleets, click through their fleets until I find the fleet closest to Tratsys and finally click on SEND ITEM TO CLIPBOARD so I can go to the clipboard and read a report about the Hierarchy fleet. Easy! I forgot to screenshot my visit to the clipboard, but the fleet coming to Tratsys is as strong as expected: Five death ships, every single one more than twice as heavy as our new warship. The army on board is strangely weak, though. I guess as a final “gently caress You!” I could raise another army on Tratsys to let them run into a meat grinder… Year: 2051  The ship build with debt is finished.  We still have Jupiter holding out with max integrity and loyalty. It doesn’t bring us jack and poo poo, though. If we had the time and funds, we could abuse this by sending all our new ships to Jupiter, form a new fleet and go to town on the Hierarchy. As a reminder, we have neither ships nor funds. Every time I order a new build order I practically take a gamble the haphazardly programmed game won’t just crash because our debt grows to high or go into instant game over.  Population is rising so high, we already are close to making good the loss of Earth, at the same time our treasury is recovering again. It’s weird.  This is our only battlefleet, in orbit around Tratsys. Week as a kitten, so let’s change that.  Our Last Resort-class destroyer gets added to our three little corvettes. Defense skyrockets and strength doubles. Sweet! Now if we just had the time to build enough of them… If you’re wondering about the math involved, larger ships have an inherent defense bonus. The larger a ship is, the better its defense is. So even I essentially made the Last Resort-class exactly the same as our little corvettes, just three times larger, we got some extra points of defense just for the larger hull. Combat in Imperium is basically a numbers game in which defense is depleted like hit points until defense hits zero and the ship explodes. Having more ships is good because damage is dispersed across a fleet, but it’s also bad to have weaker ships because you don’t want your fleet strength to degrade too fast. In the end, since concentration of fire power is impossible, the most effective strategy seems to be medium sized ships and a lot of them. Strong enough to survive a couple stray hits and enough of them to reduce enemy fire power a lot by sheer numbers. When we start again, we will take this in mind. A single comically oversized fleet can probably rampage across the galaxy since every damage will be ineffective damage if spread out randomly over too many ships.  I take another round of travelling the map menu. This fleet (the white point near the orange ball) is definitively moving in on us.  Just in case, I take a closer look at the system the Hierarchy-fleet is moving to. Yep, that’s us.  This time, I remember to make the screenshot. Five ships, with an average gross weight of 78,8k tons. My calculator tells me even with our new class, we’d need at least ten more of them to have a chance at beating this one fleet. The number of troops is about what we can raise in two turns on Tratsys, so at least we can kill a lot of alien soldiers before we go down.  Since it worked last time, I carefully order two more ships build. They’ll take 10+ turns to be finished, though. We’re probably all finished long before that.  This is a lot of money for poor space beggars like us. Let’s try to and hope for the best!  If it weren’t for the low tech level, you’d confuse Tratsys with Earth. Good planets are scarily productive. As productive as lovely planets are poo poo, in fact.  We successfully paid for the ships, now we just have to wait for the background AI to buy materials and build them.  Somehow our economic AI saved us from total collapse this turn. I have no idea how, but I’ve learned not to care. I’ve learned the hard way Imperium likes to give you a lot of numbers, but not actually control over them.  Seriously, I don’t get this. Tratsys is super-rich now even though we just spend more money than we had debt. How does this work? Any ideas? Planets can’t go into debt, ever. So we’re now at the strange position where our planets don’t have trouble buying and selling commodities, but we can’t ever draw on their money without crashing the economy, since our imperial debt is huge enough to swallow everything and leaving them broke. Still not an explanation as to why we can pay absurdly high amounts of money for new ships while being deep in debt and have our debt seemingly randomly fluctuate in response, never actually going deep enough to account for it. Sometimes we even have more money after I order a new build! Year: 2052 Absolutely nothing happens, so I just stare anxiously at the map.  The Hierarchy is almost there. Next time: Endgame.
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Sep 22, 2015 19:30
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quote:I’ve learned the hard way Imperium likes to give you a lot of numbers, but not actually control over them. Must be programmed by the same guys behind Victoria 2.
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Sep 22, 2015 21:44
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PurpleXVI posted:Must be programmed by the same guys behind Victoria 2. Every time I'm playing this game, I'm forcefully remembered it was programmed by two college students. This time I learned, by studying my screenshots for the last update, that the time for ship building orders doesn't change if you change the number of ships you want to build. The time only changes based on class. This means you can for example build 10 (maximum number you can build in one order) superdreadnoughts in the same time it takes to just build 1. Only the price and the time your empire needs to buy parts changes. Since you can apparently just say "gently caress it" and dive deep into debt, this is just amazing. And on restart we will abuse this as much as possible. It took me this long to notice because of course this makes your shipyards even more into Schroedinger's Shipyards: Your ship building orders are like the cat in a box, with your tech levels and money taking the role of the poison. Can you build something? How long does it take? Nothing Imperium tells you really matters you have to look into the box for yourself and build something to find out. Is the cat alive? Only as long as you don't look too closely. Open the box too far and your game crashes: The cat is dead. Using logic and reason to understand Imperium is counter-productive is what I'm getting at here
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Sep 22, 2015 23:49
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A new genre beyond Grand Strategy games: Quantum Strategy games, where classical logic breaks down.
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Sep 23, 2015 04:17
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New updates this week! And Imperium still has some surprises left. I'm preparing the last 2-3 updates of the first run now and boy, you're in for a treat. Yes, the game has a couple sucker punches left for the player. On the other hand, first run complete! Next week we'll start with our second run, were we will apply everything we have learned to teach the AI an important lesson: The player can cheat, too! 
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Sep 28, 2015 13:51
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Year 2053 – 2058: Endgame I Finally we’re in the home stretch of our first run. Mostly because I botched our “first” run quite remarkably, so we need a second run now. ( )Year: 2053  In 2053, the Hierarchy fleet targeting our Ersatzcapital gets close enough for some opportunity fire against us. Hyperman1992 opens fire, too.  But there’s an upper limit to how much damage a fleet consisting of three corvettes and a destroyer can do against five battleships. Some Hierarchy-paint is furiously scratched, while the incoming fire blasts off a couple of tons of armor from our own ships.  This means our defense sunk a bit. Strength is still at maximum, since we didn’t lose any ships.  In preparation for the coming invasion, I draft millions of people into the army sitting on Tratsys. 129 tank divisions are formed from them.  359 divisions total now. We’re about 50% stronger now than the incoming army. Let’s see if that’s enough to offset the bombardment-strength of five battleships helping the invaders out. Year: 2054  This year, the Hierarchy fleet finally enters the solar system of Tratsys. Hyperman1992 orders his fleet to engage the invaders before they can reach the planet itself.  After months of trying to get some strike in against the heavy battleships, most of his ships are heavily damaged.  Our defense cratered due to some heavy hits, but by some incredible stroke of luck all four ships of Home Fleet survive the year. The weakness of Imperium’s game mechanics rear their ugly head again, this time in favor of us: Even though we’re weaker by a ludicrous margin, the Hierarchy fleet has some trouble killing our fleet since the damage is randomly distributed among all ships in a fleet. Also the message we got is half wrong: Yes, we’re fighting inside the solar system right now, so “Solar System Combat” is technically right, but we’re still fighting with deep space interdiction rules here. Only a fraction of the enemy’s firepower was reaching us this turn and no combat maneuvers happened. It‘s still opportunity fire at this point.  A strength of 130 should be enough to destroy all our ships, even when randomly spread across all four of them. Still, it didn’t happen and we can still fight in space. Lucky chance, I guess.  Our economy is still in bad shape, but getting up even though a war is happening at the moment. But of course we can’t let this stand and Emperor ChiefGune is already searching for ways to make our debt bigger.  The two new destroyers I’ve ordered are still in the “buying materials”-phase. Hopefully we get everything we need this turn, or we’ll get into trouble when the Hierarchy-fleet arrives in orbit around Tratsys and starts blockading our strongest planet. Planets can't trade when blockaded, remember?  Just to see how lopsided I can make the fight on the ground, I continue to raise new tank divisions on Tratsys.  496 divisions are now waiting for the aliens. Year: 2055  2055 is the beginning of the end, the Hierarchy is invading our new capital, too. I still could evade to another planet, but this game is a losing game. Every time I move the capital, we can only save a fraction of our population and need time to build up planetary wealth and infrastructure again on the new planet. While the Hierarchy is building ships like mad, I assume. So even if we can continue to move our capital out of harm’s way, sooner or later we either run out of planets or lose our source of Nostrum, which would be an instant game over the moment our stores run dry.  So this is it. We stand and fight. I’ll try my best to destroy the invading army and resist against the fleet until we can build enough ships to slowly grind them down.  Thanks to practically winning constantly, the Hierarchy commander gets overeager and fucks up: Sweep against Blocking negates most of the strength the alien fleet can bring to bear, while Hyperman1992’s Block against Sweep gives Home Fleet a slight advantage.  Still, some weapon fire slips through and hits Tratsys.  “Some weapon fire” translates to a gently caress ton of damage, considering the fire came from five battleships in orbit.  Again, our fleet gets hammered. But again Home Fleet survives. This time thanks to the alien commander being an idiot.  Still, the end draws near for us. All three corvettes are destroyed, only our Last Resort-class destroyer hangs on.  Tratsys itself suffered some damage: A couple dozen missile batteries are destroyed and a few divisions of troops were wiped out. Still, 640 against 270 divisions looks like a foregone conclusion. If it weren’t for the enemy space fleet hanging above us, we’d have an easy victory.  And just in time our shipyards finished buying materials: Building has begun. Hopefully we’re still fighting when our two new destroyers are completed!  The blockade and buying crap to start building two 30k ton warships has cratered our economy yet again. The debt is rising like the tides.  Home Fleet did some measurable damage this time: In return for losing 3 out of 4 ships, we’ve reduced the fleet defense by 5 points of damage. 5 points randomly distributed across five battleships. But at least it’s more than just scratching paint. After the invasion is over, the Hierarchy will have to replace tons of armor to repair that damage. Take that, alien evil-doers! Year: 2056  Hyperman1992 tries on last, futile time to stop the Hierarchy fleet. The Aurora Empire’s last destroyer heroically throws itself against the five alien battleships.  The heroic defense is so ineffective, the next message in the pipeline tells us the Hierarchy still had time to bombard Tratsys this turn. This doesn’t bode well for Hyperman1992.  The bombardment destroys some divisions and continues to degrade the space defense batteries.  Our last ship is reduced to space dust. Hyperman1992 is instantly vaporized after five dozen super-beams hit his bridge at the same time.  Home Fleet is wiped out.  We still have to resist three more years to get new ships.  Half our planetary defenses are gone by now. Still, we have 783 divisions ready for the 270 still waiting inside the alien ships. Year: 2057  The bad news continue: The Hierarchy-fleet prepares Tratsys for the coming invasion.  With no Imperial ships left to irritate them, the Hierarchy doubles their efficiency in killing us.  In other news, some guy I don’t care about died far away. He never got any Nostrum, so old age finally caught up with him.  Sophocles, another of our human Pokémon, replaces him automatically. He also doesn’t get any Nostrum or money, because let’s face it, it wouldn’t exactly change our fate for the better anyway.  Two years before we can try to attack our invaders again!  Hyperman1992 really did a number on the enemy fleet: His ship alone did twice as much damage than our combined fleet earlier. 3 corvettes and 1 destroyer reduced the enemy defense by 15 points before the overwhelming firepower destroyed them. Considering the price for one of those uber-ships the Hierarchy is attacking us with, the plan is clear: We’ll try to hold out until more ships are finished and throw them at the fleet in orbit. With a bit of luck, we should be able to destroy all five alien battleships with the sacrifice of 3-4 more destroyers.  The planetary defense system is practically gone now, but we raised our garrison strength again by a massive amount. The 270 alien divisions can expect a warm welcome next year. Year: 2058  It took some time for the Hierarchy to chew through our massive defenses, but the time’s up. Alien soldiers are raining down on Tratsys.  The Imperial army on Tratsys converges at the enemy’s landing zones and battle is joined. Every unit not a drop commando fights at half strength during landing and rises to normal combat efficiency the following turns. This means the first year of an invasion is the best one to cripple the invading army.  Of course, the Hierarchy also has five massive battleships in orbit to help out the landing troops. For every alien division we surprise and destroy after landing, one of ours is pulverized by orbital bombardment.  Still, not bad: We destroyed 66 alien divisions during the landing phase.  Even better: Next turn our new destroyers will be finished.  Tratsys at the end of 2058: The troops we raised this turn replaced our losses, but the planet’s infrastructure is basically rubble at this point. Also 7 million people died, even though the fighting only took place around the landing zones. And yeah, goon Nr. 2 has died. Only Cimbri remains to see the end (from far away). And our stability is rising, which is bad. Our integrity is falling, which is also bad. The planet is still loyal overall and the people of Tratsys are a hardy bunch, not flinching away from hardship: Moral infrastructure only dropped a couple points from the maximum of 255. Yes, there are four different systems measuring our people’s happiness. And one of the scales works the opposite from the other ones. Are you really surprised about this?
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Sep 30, 2015 12:08
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You know, I really hope before you start the next one, we get an overview of what everything does and what went wrong. Because I'm ashamed to admit I'm kinda lost on the nature of how you 'hosed up', only that you apparently have, if that makes sense.
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Sep 30, 2015 12:51
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Basically it seems that the winning strategy involves first uncolonizing all but your very best planet at the start, because new planets get your civilization's AVERAGE tech level(I think) and also "bad" planets are easily more of a drain than a gain, so you don't want anything notably sub-par. So attempting to repair "bad" planets at the start, and colonizing while having any sub-standard tech levels in your empire at all, are a bad combination that result in wasted resources. I think. Also FOUR systems for measuring happiness? Aside from the reversed scale on one, do any of them actually have notably different mechanics from the others?
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Sep 30, 2015 13:23
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Bloodly posted:You know, I really hope before you start the next one, we get an overview of what everything does and what went wrong. Because I'm ashamed to admit I'm kinda lost on the nature of how you 'hosed up', only that you apparently have, if that makes sense. Don't worry, after the last update for Run 1, I plan a short write-up of everything I did wrong and why it is wrong, just to wrap the run up properly. PurpleXVI posted:Basically it seems that the winning strategy involves first uncolonizing all but your very best planet at the start, because new planets get your civilization's AVERAGE tech level(I think) and also "bad" planets are easily more of a drain than a gain, so you don't want anything notably sub-par. So attempting to repair "bad" planets at the start, and colonizing while having any sub-standard tech levels in your empire at all, are a bad combination that result in wasted resources. This. Also add to this every fleet moving around will automatically re-colonize every planet you already had colonized at some point. So the lovely planets you cut loose in the beginning will attempt to rejoin your empire every time a fleet moves through the system. And if you de-colonize planets too often, you make people hate you which is also bad. There is more, like me not noticing you can build ships even while deep in debt, or that you can stop caring about your tech level after you got some blueprints designed for large enough warships. I'll try to talk about this in some coherent manner in the write-up. quote:Also FOUR systems for measuring happiness? Aside from the reversed scale on one, do any of them actually have notably different mechanics from the others? With the help of observation and the manual, it goes like this: Integrity measures how stable the planet's society is and how upset the people on it are. Generally the stat rises slowly to maximum (255) as long as no combat happens on the planet and the world can satisfy all commodity-demands. Outside of combat, Integrity only sinks when one of the very rare random events happen or if the planet is too overcrowded or too lovely to get enough commodities. Too low integrity could lead to revolt or anarchy, but all four happyness-stats generally all change at the same time, so it's hard to track what stat does what, exactly. Stability measures how stable the planet's society is and how upset the people on it are. Generally the stat slowly sinks if left alone. Bad events, overcrowding and combat seem to raise Stability, which is bad. If Stability becomes high enough, you get either revolt or anarchy, which comically both ends the same way after a few turns if the revolting/anarchic planet is your capital. Loyalty measures how loyal people are to your empire. It sinks if the planet is ravaged by combat or if the leader is unloyal himself (last point is guesswork by me, after all the loyalty-stat of planetary leaders should do something, right? ). I guess the planet could break lose from your empire or something, but since loyalty moves in tandem with the other three stats, it's again really hard to find out what happens with low loyalty, since you don't get low loyalty on a planet without society itself literally collapsing.I guess maybe unloyal scum governing the planet could change this stat alone over time and extra loyal planetary leaders could boost it, but I've never seen it happen so it either doesn't happen at all or just really, really slowly. Anyway, the last stat governing people's reaction to what you are doing is Moral Infrastructure. This measures people's resolve to resist invasions. A planet at peace has this stat slowly rising until it hits 255. Invasion, bombardment and combat on the planet very slowly lowers the moral infrastructure. Very slowly. Since the other three stats move a lot faster, I have no idea what happens if this gets too low. Will the planet surrender if this stat gets low enough? Who knows! People in Imperium are apparently hardy fuckers and rather revolt during an ongoing invasion to add to the devastation instead of meakly giving up.
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Sep 30, 2015 16:13
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Is it too early to sign up for the laser treatment for the next game?
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Sep 30, 2015 18:11
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