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voting for Master of Orion III ULTIMATE EDITION
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Jan 11, 2016 21:04
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Man, this ride really never ends, huh? I wonder how many other terrible simulation/4x games quietly disappeared into the aether never to be seen again. I wonder how many of them crash the game when you click outside a sub-window.
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Jan 12, 2016 02:49
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The people shouldn't complain, debt is healthy for the economy!  We're basically a space banana republic now.
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Jan 12, 2016 03:48
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 Update incoming! Head's up! I've finally stolen enough time to continue working on this. I'm writing the next post right now, the update will drop sometime today. Also I found another way Imperium allows a player to commit suicide by assuming the game works on logic.  (But don't worry, I already avoided killing us this time.)
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Jan 27, 2016 15:12
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I never doubted for a moment, neither in the coming update nor the game having even more stupid failure states.
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Jan 27, 2016 16:18
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The Aurora Empire Strikes Back Years 2042 –2047: Crisis in Infinite Lowtax Welp, after a long pause doing other poo poo, I’m back. So what happened to the Aurora Empire in the meantime? Let’s take a look. Year: 2042  And by that I mean let’s look at the map, since we’re kind of graphics deprived in this game and I’m sure you finally want to see other colors besides grey and darker grey again. Here are all systems currently with colonies of all empires in it. As it is custom in Imperium, all empires are colored the same for maximum confusion. You want to know which system belongs to what empire? Just hit that weird icon looking like a Roman building and you can switch between the empires. Though they’ll be all blue still so I hope you have good eyes!  This is the Aurora Empire alone. We’re kind of stretched thin, but if we can survive just a bit longer, the influx of production from our newer worlds should give us the ability to build more fleets and maybe a small chance at actually winning. The cursor points at a system I want to colonize to make a connection between both halves of our empire. Right now one part of the Aurora Empire is kind of left hanging on the outside.  Funny story, this map screen just looked like the last one so you could easily see this weird lump of star systems in the lower left corner of the map and I would now have explained how Emperor Cimbri is planning to send some scouts over there, but then I went into a solar system screen to look at planets, moved them around a bit and learned a new thing: Both map screens are interconnected, if you use the arrow-icons to move one map around, the other one is moved, too. Interesting. Bug or lazy programming? You decide! Anyway, I noticed this too late so now you have this messed up screenshot but please believe me, the stars in the lower right corner are the same as the ugly lump in the lower left corner oft the picture before.  As you may remember, just one of the planets per system is enough to find Nostrum, as our ships are advanced enough to sniff drugs from the entire system when they arrive. So our modus operandi right now is: Travel to the best planet in the system (in most cases the most Earth-like looking one), colonize it, colonize any Nostrum-planets nearby, continue onwards.  This is Therte. Good atmosphere, average planet type, bad star type. Average, overall.  Cosmic Afro will take a closer look and sniff around for drugs.  AJ_Impy on the other hand, will be send to explore Sharmus, a planet I just can’t bring myself to care about for some reason. But he is on my list of to exploring planets, so off you go, little scout! Year: 2043  gently caress.  Mad Max style roving gangs on Kepler! This can’t be good. The uniforms are stylish, though. Nice touch.  The same on the planet of human/spider hybrids.  The people of Walter don’t want to be left out and join in on the fun.  Emperor Donald makes himself felt. Trumpia sends out an exploration/colonization/invasion force. Thanks Ambassador Linus. You’re a fountain of useful information.  Bob doesn’t suffer from unrest, but welp. Apparently the Nostromo passed through the system recently.  First things first, I’m looking up how our popularity looks. Something is causing a lot of unrest, after all. And it doesn’t look good. Take notice: If your leader isn’t universally beloved, instant anarchy. This means I have to do something or we face instant game over in 27 turns. But OK, I can deal with this. Last time I got kind of surprised by how fast a moody population can end you, but this time I know I have to stop this with all my might! (By this I mean lingering unrest kills you faster then your political enemies when they win the election in 27 years.)  My first obvious task is switching on our economic AI again. Apparently everything I do when trying to help our economy only ends in abysmal failure. Since I don’t have Obama’s fancy levers to manipulate the markets directly, I have to hope the AI will cheat for me for a change.  Just look at that! Several turns of fighting our debt and I just made everything worse somehow.   I’m guessing here Trumpia just supplied a shitload of materials for our warships, but since our income comes solely from export tariffs, having almost no export is obviously very, very bad for us.  Space ship equipment, raw materials and personnel are still zero, but other space ship components like heavy plants are slowly recovering. I guess this means construction of our cruisers will soon begin.  Planet Bob seems to hold up well under the completely invisible Xenomorph-attack. As with most “relics” and “disasters”, the effect was so small even by comparing with my last screenshot a couple turns back I couldn’t find out what happened. Apparently the Xenomorphs got all killed by Ripley already.   Anyway, to be on the safe side I raise some troops on Bob.  Empire report: Population rising like mad, debt still titanic. Interesting fact: All other empires are strangely friendly to us right now. Whatever our diplomatic AI is doing, it works so far.  Nostrum level: Still slowly rising. By now we could survive almost five full turns before the loss of our source planet instantly kills Emperor Cimbri and ends the game. Things are looking up.  Even though objectively it’s a bad choice, I have to gift condoms to our population so they can have more sex, which will make them happier. Hopefully I can keep shoveling off population from our capital, or this will turn around and bite us in the rear end soon. Year: 2044  Well poo poo, Emperor Cimbri’s popularity dropped even farther.  The anarchy spreads and even Pyroi can’t do much but keep hiding while strangely uniformed anarchists are out in the streets, rioting.  The other rioting planets are still suffering from anarchy, same as last turn.  I stand corrected. Planet Phaison joins the ranks of planets in trouble.  One of our Ark-Ships arrives on Drider and the mass of new colonists and goods rushing in help ending the anarchy here. For now. Outside of the story I'm inventing in my head, this influence probably doesn't exist, since Drider will keep rioting for a while. Essentially, I'm grasping at straws because the game is slowly breaking me.  I try raising some troops on all troubled planets in the hope military might can help protect against anarchy. I have no idea if this will work, since the manual claims the opposite: Drafting more troops makes people hate you more, but I wouldn’t put it past the game to have some sort of hidden modifier taking your garrisons into account.  Just when I finish raising troops, I misclick while closing the menu and the game crashes. So of course I have to go back to my second save state, make some hard resets so the second save state actually works and do everything again. Luckily I’m now well-conditioned by Imperium to save every time I make a screenshot, or I probably would have needed to redo the entire turn!  Our helpless flailing around already did something: Population growth exploded and our economic AI has started regaining control of our finances. For the first time in this decade, our debt is shrinking again.  Lowtax is creeping closer to the point where the population will get annoyed at us for stuffing too many people into not enough skyscrapers. Remember: At some point beyond 22k population units (or 2,2 billion people), the population will start getting cranky. Also the commodities needed to keep people happy are rising exponentially with population level, while at the same time production will level out in what I assume is some sort of logarithmic curve. You can probably guess what happens if we let population rise too high. It ain’t pretty.  Our popularity-graph isn’t looking pretty, either. Five years ago I paid for our new fleet of cruisers and since then our crippling debt has slowly crushed our people’s spirits. Year: 2045  gently caress. Emperor Cimbri lost even more future votes.  This message scared me for a moment, but then I remembered one of our scouts is travelling to Sharmus, not Shumus. Crisis averted. No goon scout is travelling to his doom yet. Brutally similar names strike again!  Four of our planets are still upset.  A single ray of hope shines through the rain of bullshit: Our empire has grown enough so that ship building has already started, even though last time we needed more than twice the time for less ships. (Which were also half the size of our cruisers, so this difference is huge.)  Popularity has finally stabilized. Now we have 24 turns left to climb back to 50+%! Year: 2046  Donald, the leader of Trumpia, is still expanding his empire.  This calls for immediate evasive action, since this time Trumpia actually did colonize a world one of our scouts was targeting. KirbyKhan gets rerouted to Thite instead.  5 years until our five new cruisers are finished. The rest of this year was just more senseless rioting on the same planets as last time, so I skipped the unrest messages for this year. Just imagine a bad drawing of anarchists in uniform here and you get the gist of it.  Trumpia is still on an expansion trip, colonizing/invading planets left and right.  Another Ark-Ship arrives with dearly needed supplies and colonists.  Our economic AI cheats like mad to get us out of trouble. Or I’m really just that bad at being a space accountant, I haven’t decided yet.  Of course, it could also be the influence of not having to buy a ton of expensive commodities each turn to build warships with. Exports are up, which means income is up. Year: 2047  In 2047, the endless rioting finally stops and law and order are restored.  For some reason 2047 sees a sudden, but welcome surge in popularity. I don’t know why, but I’m not complaining. I guess the population slider has a larger effect on morale than I thought?  To prevent our population from spiraling out of control, I draw the slider back to normal. Of course, at the time that I’m writing this, I suddenly remembered planets ignore this slider when it would be unhealthy for them anyway, so what I’m doing here is essentially loving up royally. Planets with low population ignore negative settings, planets with high population like our capital ignore high settings. Leaving the setting on high doesn’t actually have any bad repercussions, except for boosting planets faster to the we-hate-you-know threshold. And yes, this means this slider is more of a popularity control than a population control. And yes, letting the slider sit on a negative setting for too long will have not much impact besides boosting everyone’s hatred like some sort of hate ray. This menu is one of many instant game over traps. Just to be clear on this: Planets who would be negatively affected by your choices in this menu will straight-up ignore your policies. But this isn’t the case for the effect on your popularity . Positive slider positions will still give you a rating boost even if all your planets are too overpopulated already, because those will set their own, lower growth rate anyway. And considering how strong the positive boost turned out to be, trying to slow down population growth with this slider is basically suicide. The game will arbitrarily decide if a planet has enough people on it to obey your order and the planets who need a slowdown the most won’t gain much from it. What they will gain though is a strong hatred of the idiot emperor who forbid them to have sex. A couple turns later, this will happen:  Imperium.txt Ugh. Anyway, let’s continue this mess. And hopefully protect Cimbri from ChiefGune's fate.  I can’t even remember Thronon and the name isn’t in my notes, so I’m taking the educated guess that we don’t need to care about this yet.  I looked at Thete and even send someone to planet Therte and later to Thite, but Thecte I can’t remember, so this is still safe, probably.  Holy loving poo poo, this looks like Trumpia spend the entire time we were building warships with building scouts to colonize faster.  Kepler’s Ark Ship arrives for a nice little boost.  In the meantime, our five cruisers are coming along fine. And next time, they’ll even be finished! Next: The Fight for Popularity Libluini fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Jan 27, 2016 |
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Jan 27, 2016 20:01
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Beautiful. I too love features that serve no purpose other than being unintuitive gotchas! I do have to wonder, with the strange nuances of the helper AIs, whether they have access to abilities and features that the player doesn't. That was occasionally a 'thing' with older 4x/Strategy games, and considering how the game handles the 'years per turn' option, I would fully expect that there's things going on under the hood that the player can't touch but that the 'helper' AIs can, like being able to accurately read enemy empire dispositions or respond to economic problems with greater nuance than the controls actually allow.
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Jan 27, 2016 21:53
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You know, that is something I too have thought about for a while. I'm thinking I should do a test game on the weekend, with some weak AI-enemies and all my own AIs switched on. Then I'll just make those absurd 10-year turns, switch most/all messages off and just click on end turn. Would our AI actually play the game by itself, including making fleets called "Alien Fleet"?
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Jan 27, 2016 22:04
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That'd be interesting to see. Also for some reason the picture of the "Anarchists" just reminds me of the Dune movie, not sure why, but it just reminds me of the costuming in that for some reason.
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Jan 27, 2016 22:32
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PurpleXVI posted:That'd be interesting to see. The picture reminds me of Akira, to be honest. They look like they're wearing those strange black school uniforms you sometimes see in 80s Japanese animation. Anyway, I have another update half-written and will post it on Friday. On Sunday I'll post my record of how well the game can play itself. Hopefully I can then follow up with some regular posts next week without submitting to the really unhealthy revulsion I feel every time I even think about playing Imperium.
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Jan 28, 2016 11:33
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Hey, if it doesn't work for you, don't do it, but I'm happy to have gotten a glimpse at this weird forgotten miracle of bad game design.
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Jan 28, 2016 11:59
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To be honest you've suffered a lot for us at this point. I too am thankful to even have gotten to see what you've provided. I really think this is an interesting type of game with all the right ideas to make a good game, so its painful to see the UI and actual mechanics to continously fall short of playable. Even for a game this old. Truely a must try for serious gamers though.
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Jan 29, 2016 00:56
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i also love this thread and yeah as always you call the shots, do what you want when you want btw you should do moo3 next  but id read your deutchegame thread too
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Jan 29, 2016 02:57
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Likewise, I'm also glad to get a chance to see how this relic of a game plays, even though it seems like it's your own personal LP purgatory Libluini.
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Jan 29, 2016 03:09
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That strange half-modded game you mentioned sounds interesting. Though it looks like Master of Orion 3 will win, please consider getting to it in the end.
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Jan 29, 2016 09:52
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Don't worry, eventually we'll get there. I don't remember if I mentioned this yet, but it turned out my new graphics card from a couple months ago and switching some graphics settings neutralized the ugliness in Immortal. Now the game's UI is in nice shades of green. Also, in terms of future plans, I'm already occasionally working on preparing the MO3-LP, so as soon as this one ends, I can start the next one up immediately. And since the MO3-LP will take a lot of time (showcasing 16 races and what I think is the best map will take half an eternity), I'm thinking of going through the adventure game on the side. I'll probably make that one a video-LP so we can get through it faster. If Imperium doesn't force me to commit suicide, we'll probably end both new LPs in 2016-2017 and replace them with Space Empire V/Immortal-LPs respectively. At least, that's the plan for now.  Fake Edit: Next update in a couple hours!
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Jan 29, 2016 14:40
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The Aurora Empire Strikes Back Years 2048 –2051: The Fight for Popularity Year: 2048  2048 turns out to be one of those annoying years where the game just kind of shrugs and doesn’t tell you anything. Welp, time to click through all these menus to find out how we’re doing this turn, I suppose.  Ship construction continues.  Our popularity is dropping yet again and I try to reverse this by spending money on our election campaign. Of course if I had understood how huge the impact of the population slider truly is, I wouldn’t have needed to panic, but C’est la vie.  Luckily I wasn’t totally dense when I made the screenshots and you can see me at least trying to apply logic to what I’m doing. Year: 2049  Again Imperium pretends nothing happens.  Emperor Cimbri is still dropping in popularity, poo poo. At least his ratings are dropping slower now? Baby steps.  During this turn I finally take some time again to look over our planets more closely. As you can see, even young colonies like Kepler have max WEALTH. Tech levels are high overall, but material infrastructure isn’t as high as I would want on some worlds. Material infrastructure influences production, so I’m planning to send some small Ark-Ships with commodities, hoping the AI will be smart enough to pack some infrastructure in with them. The high WEALTH-value comes probably from our economic AI trying to hide as much money as it can from our giant debt hole. The more money our debt-immune planets have, the more our AI can trade to make even more money to pay back our debt faster.  Phaison is slightly worse off than Kepler, but like all our planets, the wealth is at maximum capacity. I’m trying really hard not to think about why an entire planet can only have 500 million bucks, max. That’s a really weird deflation economy the Aurora Empire is pulling here.  After looking everything over, only Kepler and Phaison seem to be too low on infrastructure for my taste. I send small Ark-Ships to both of them. Boosts for both planet’s production while at the same time relieving population pressure from our capital. That’s what I call killing two space birds with one asteroid! Year: 2050  The game finally decides to give me a message this year, probably out of pity.  Son Ryo reaches Therte, but sadly there are no drugs here.  Our popularity finally stops descending and I pump some more money into propaganda.  The last ten years have been kind of rough. Emperor Cimbri’s popularity went up and down like a rollercoaster. Now we have to push the broken rollercoaster up again and nail that fucker down.   Our Imperial debt is at a healthy -8,4 billion Imperial Zongs. Our actual debt is a lot smaller though: This menu doesn’t take into account the reserve of 500 million Zongs sitting on every planet by now. The historical wealth menu does, however. It adds in our planets wealth before displaying our debt. Something I noticed by accident, because the Imperial Treasury showed a different amount of debt than the similar menu in our economy menu and I had to take out a calculator to investigate this.  After the boring financial crap is done, I go back to the map. Son Ryo needs a new target. The really small blue dots forming a triangle at the bottom are our other scouts. The larger blue dots are the systems we have colonized. The empty spot where the cursor is hovering over is Son Ryo’s ship. His blue dot blinked out of existence just as I made the screenshot.  I totally forgot what the deal with Therte was in the time it took Son Ryo to get here, so I send a report to the clipboard-menu, looked the planet over and decided to fill in this awkward empty spot between our colonies.  So Son Ryo will now colonize Therte, more or less an average planet, then move on to Blaims, a planet on the list of targets I made back when I was surveying this weird blob of stars at the edge of the map. Year: 2051  Wow, this year shapes up to be rather interesting. Relics, unrest and attacks all over the place!  Therte joins the Aurora Empire as its newest colony.  For some reason, I order Cosmic Afro to move towards our new colony, wasting everyone’s time in the process. (I was tired, OK?)  After I notice my error, I curse a lot and then give Cosmic Afro the correct orders.  This relic sounds like it will boost technology levels.  84 is a lot higher than our average tech level (I think only our cap gets that high otherwise), so it seems my guess was right. And now I suddenly notice the planet has a ship in its ship pool. Weird. Next time I have to look if that’s our scout or another ship.  The dreaded Hierarchy is back! Our starfish-looking friends are invading someone else this time around, though. (Shumus belongs to Trumpia.) You may notice the absence of any information about what empire the Hierarchy is invading. If Shumus were our planet, this message would look exactly the same. This is basically Imperium.txt  Krayk is another planet from Donald’s Trumpia. As glad as I am to see someone else punched in the face, we need to be wary: If one AI becomes too strong, we’re in serious trouble. The game is opaque enough you never know how much a particular AI is cheating until it drops multiple death fleets on you.  This is remarkably both strange and mean-spirited by Imperium: The anarchy on the outer planets has ended, but our capital is now in open revolt. This screenshot is a rusty, but sharp knife pressed into Emperor Cimbri’s neck. Let’s hope I can save him in time.  One would think 46% popularity wouldn’t be bad enough to lead people into armed revolt, but apparently in Imperium people only have two moods: Undying Love and Murderous Hate.  Since this is still before I noticed how badly I need the population control slider to control our people’s moods, I try to solve this problem with money instead.  Now I finally do something right. Still not out of knowledge, but desperation. At least you can relax a bit in the knowledge this will make everyone love Cimbri again. As long as I send out enough Ark-Ships to redistribute our growing population, of course.  A panicked look at Lowtax reveals nothing yet. Stability and loyalty aren’t in critical levels yet, nothing else changed for the negative, either. When nothing bad happens next turn, I’m forced to conclude this “revolt” must have been so weak our garrison immediately crushed it. A closer look will reveal to you some good news already. Can you guess what it is? (Scrolling down is cheating!)  Anyway, time to offload population from our capital again. Our newest colony prepares for the ~200 million people I’m sending to them.  As I hoped, some material infrastructure gets packed in, too. (Which is good news for the two other colonies waiting for their miniature Ark-Ships.) Don’t worry about the drop in population, the growth will catapult this to higher levels then before in 1-2 turns, max.  The good news for this turn: Our five cruisers are finished!  Finally, one of our goons waiting for fleet assignments gets pulled out of halfpay. Admiral AecTalek becomes the leader of our brand-new 1st Fleet. In terms of combat power, our five cruisers are roughly twice as effective as the four destroyers in Home Fleet. Now the question is: What should I do with our new fleet of five McHammer-class cruisers? Attack someone? Let it sit on our capital together with Home Fleet? Should I send 1st Fleet to protect our Nostrum-source? Or should I take an aggressive stance minus idiocy and use them like a heavily armed colonization force? You decide!  If we want to use our new fleet aggressively, you need to know how many troops we can carry around. This is our army strength when I fill the fleet up with infantry. “Efficiency” shows us how effective the infantry will be during the first few turns.  If I fill 1st Fleet’s cargo holds with tanks instead, our strength is almost twice as high. Tanks are also slightly more effective during landing operations. Drop Troops are a special case. We don’t have any right now, but when I draft people into the army as drop troops, we can essentially have as many as we want, since they come with their own, invisible ships. Ideally, when we decide to use our fleet to attack/explore, I’ll draft drop troops a couple of turns and stuff our cargos with tanks. Normal infantry is totally useless in this, since drop troops already are infantry, just better for planetary assaults and with their own transports.  Our debt is still shrinking. Good! Our population has exploded enormously. Not good!  And with this, I’m finally done with this year. gently caress, this was a lot of work.  The Aurora Empire in 2051.  After the latest colonization-waves, more than half of the map belongs to somebody. This is the only reason I’m still playing: The map is rather small and with every passing turn the chance grows for some idiotic AI-attack drawing us into war. And then our preparations will either allow us to steamroll all opposition for an easy victory, or we will get steamrolled. Either way, this LP will finally end and we can move on to a game which won’t feel like Plan 9 from Outer Space in 70s 3D. Also you can now bet on Emperor Cimbri's chances of survival. Was the "revolt" really just a dud, or is next turn the last? You have until Monday for your bets. We're going under Imperium-rules. This means you can't win.
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Jan 29, 2016 19:26
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Maximum aggression. Let's get some lasers and pew pew all up in this. I like the idea that the AI is basically "improving" your economy via tax fraud, though.
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Jan 29, 2016 20:13
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Let's go invade someone.
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Jan 29, 2016 21:12
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Libluini posted:Also you can now bet on Emperor Cimbri's chances of survival. Was the "revolt" really just a dud, or is next turn the last? You have until Monday for your bets. We're going under Imperium-rules. Also voting for invading someone. So far we've only seen Imperium reports of space-combat and planetary bombardment from the defender's side, and we need to know if it is any more thrilling and inspiring when we are on the offense.
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Jan 30, 2016 00:02
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I just discovered and marathoned this descent into madness. If you need another Afro to command a deathfleet or sit on a planet, I'm your man. Also protect the spice.
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Jan 30, 2016 04:50
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I too am placing my bets that the Emperor will be deposed via revolt. Mostly because Imperium seems like the kinda game that enjoys screwing you arbitrarily.
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Jan 30, 2016 05:50
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Move the ships to a central colony, to act as a reserve force.
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Jan 30, 2016 20:11
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Trumpia has been agressive for too long! We need to strike back, sir!
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Jan 31, 2016 15:08
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While you're all thinking what we should do with our small fleet, a short update on what I'm doing with the AI-test. 1. The AI is a bit dumb. 2. Enemy AI is also dumb, so both sides are balanced. 3. Some things are still there to do for players, even if they automate everything. That last point means blazing through 300+ turns of AI-controlled Imperium still took several hours. Even simple things like watching the 10-year-turns slowly pass by became agonizing, so I stopped for today. On the other hand, our AI is actually slowly winning, while the (enemy) AI shoots itself in the foot all the time. Now I have some hope for the main game! Of course, watching the AI play made me realize one thing: As long as we don't gently caress up and as long as we avoid the many, many pitfalls of Imperium, this LP could theoretically go on for years until a definitive victory is achieved. This game is slow. This is of course retarded, so we won't do that. At least not like we do this now. As soon as the AI-test is through and posted, the normal LP restarts, but slower then before (stop laughing you bastards I mean even slower). Since I don't have the time to work on video games 24/7, I'll have to do this or we probably won't see the next LP start before loving 2020. Right now MO3 ULTIMATE is winning in the polls, but I leave the voting open until the slowdown starts in a couple weeks and I can free up some time to invest into a second LP.
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Jan 31, 2016 17:20
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Libluini posted:Also you can now bet on Emperor Cimbri's chances of survival. Was the "revolt" really just a dud, or is next turn the last? You have until Monday for your bets. We're going under Imperium-rules. Clearly my reign based on completely true facts about my totally successful attem-er plans to save humankind will not be challenged by a group of street thugs in weird leather and rusted metal get-ups. Who would ever think such a thing! Prepare my old ship for departure, what do you mean it's broken down? It's only been...oh.
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Feb 5, 2016 12:51
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Today I told a friend of mine about Imperium. Halfway through explaining what you have to do to look something up in the game's map, she started laughing. It was just too absurd for her. So this farce of a game made her feel better about the notebook she plans to buy. She's glad Windows is a lot more accessible than this hideous thing pretending to be a game. That's an impressive reaction from someone who has never owned a computer and doesn't even have a smartphone. Imperium may be a failure as a game, but it's a good tool to show technophobes how far we have come today. Also, I've been writing the first post of our AI-test, trying to cover at least a full century of the AI playing itself and it's going slowly, sorry about that. Next update is Friday, at the latest. Edit: But after ranting like a madman to my friend, I now feel relaxed enough to continue writing a bit earlier then I planned for, so maybe Thursday? Libluini fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Feb 16, 2016 |
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Feb 16, 2016 23:07
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Today is the day of the next update! But I also wanted to post about all the different votings and poo poo we have done in the past, so you don't have to manually count votes or whatever. So this post gets posted right now, so you can "enjoy" the real update in a couple hours without distractions. Bacon in a Wok and Ysengrin actually tried to take the bet under special Imperium-rules and therefore automatically lost. Sorry! Thanks to my stupid idea of recording what the AI can do on its own for hours we have to wait until Sunday to see what actually happened, though. At least they can enjoy episode 1 of Imperium: AI Wars until then. What should we do with the Aurora Empire's new fleet? INVADE: 3 PROTECT THE DRUGS: 1 PROTECT THE COLONIES: 1 ATTACK TRUMPIA: 1 Well poo poo, looks like I have to go through the map screen and try to select an invasion target. Thanks, guys!  Voting for the next LP (closes 22nd February 2016) Master of Orion III ULTIMATE EDITION: 6,5 Space Empires V: Vanilla or Mods, depending on my mood: 3 German Space Adventure Game (name witheld so you don't go and google it): 6 Lost Empire: Ugly Immortals: 0 OK, you have until the 22nd February to vote on this, then I'll prepare the second LP to start. And, in all fairness I should point out I can't and won't invest the time to have more than two LPs running at the same time, so you better be aware that whatever game loses this vote won't be seen until one of the LPs is over for good. Now I'll go back to
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Feb 19, 2016 15:34
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Imperium: AI Wars Century 1 What do you think would happen if we automate the player in Imperium totally, like the game actually gives us the options for? This little series of posts will take a good look at that. And since every post covers an entire century of in-game time, I'll use AI-Wars posts very sparingly. After this one we'll be back to the normal Let's Play for at least half a dozen posts, for example. Also spoilers: The AI survives the first century.  What I did was essentially starting a new game like I normally would. The only difference to our running play-through is me giving out a bit more money to the other AIs right now.     Of course I named all enemy empires appropriately.  Since this Science Fiction, Chris Roberts ends up with “acceptable” competence. He also gets 106 million Imperial Zongs as his yearly salary.  Earth gets renamed to S. Citizen. Star Citizen is Chris Robert's masterpiece, after all.  Now the most important thing happens: All three AIs are switched on. The game should now play itself.  Next up, the News Control. All stops are taken out, so the game won’t stop when one of the conditions on the left is flagged and a message is generated. We want to know poo poo, but we don’t want the game come to a grinding halt every time since we don’t even play it.  I’m sure it does, badly drawn anchorman.  The last step before we can start our grand experiment: Turn length gets set to 10 years, so the game will run through ten turns before it allows us input again. Since the AIs are running, this won’t actually have any drawbacks for us this time. I hope.  And it worked! The AI played ten turns for us! Please remember, if we had our AIs switched off, only the enemy would have played ten turns. The player would have had no chance to do anything.  I think you have enough of these messages in the normal game, so let’s jump ahead a bit.  Another good thing: Like the manual promises, our military AI is capable of building ships on its own.  Uh oh the dreaded Stimpire moves to invade/colonize. I don’t know which would be worse!  2030 ends/starts with the AI finishing another build order.  The player-AI has some differences to the alien AI. Instead of all fleets being named “Alien Fleet”, our fleets are just “FleetX”. Thanks to the manual I know we can have a maximum of ten fleets and eighty ships. Let’s see how far the AI goes in filling that limit out.  For some reason the AI tends to fill up scout forces with some really small invasion forces. I guess whoever wrote the AI-script wanted to make sure the player-AI can attack and take over really new and unprotected alien colonies?  AI Shrapnell even has some tanks loaded into his scout ship. This is getting silly.  AI Pluto has done the same thing. I have no idea how those guys put multiple divisions into a small, 10k ton scout. Space compression technology?  The economic AI is doing well. Multiple ships build and still without debt.  During the next ten years, nothing interesting happens.  Then I remember to manually look at the news and it turns out a lot has happened, the game just chose not to tell us. Sometimes the messages don't show up automatically, like they always do. You have to go inside the message-menu to make sure you really didn't get any message in that case.  Not all the news are bad: Our AI made a beeline straight to the closest Nostrum-source. Early Game Over: Averted!    Other stuff that happened: CIG colonized a new planet, another scout was build and Oh yeah, a second meteorite hit. Star Marine is Delayed was hit.   But apparently both meteorites hit empty wasteland and no-one was harmed. Chris Roberts takes the double impacts as an excuse to declare Star Marine already integrated into Star Citizen.  Our first real problem: The AIs aren’t capable of allocating Nostrum. Drug use seems to fall outside of the three realms of economy, military and diplomacy, so the AI just ignores it.  To prevent Chris Roberts from a sudden and very sad death, I have to manually assign an appropriate share of the immortality coke.  Then I misclick and crash the game just after reaching 2050. Not only that, but after going back to the emulator to switch to another save state, I accidentally overwrite it and erase everything you just read.  Stubborn as I am, I painstakingly reconstruct all my renamings and settings for the do-over.  OK, let’s try this again.     Not much changes, compared to AI Run 1: The two disaster are exchanged with a minor disaster and a bunch of colonizations happen. This time, the Whales and S. Awful started with being expansive and aggressive, while the Stimpire lags behind. Last time it was the opposite.   Interestingly, the AI finds Nostrum on Luatax two times in a row. I have to write down a note somewhere to see if we already found this planet and if not, if it has Nostrum on it. If we can get a second Nostrum-source in our main game, we could get a serious advantage.  Empire report for CIG, 2040: Population of delusional idiots is rising, 450,1 million Imperial Zongs scammed.  And again the AI is too dumb to not commit suicide by old age.   Problem solved, NEXT!  For some reason the AI decides to fill up Home Fleet with scouts. To protect our homeworld?  The player AI doesn’t know about the sweet, sweet trick we and the alien empires pulled. It only knows the scout and will only build the scout. Looks like we found serious problem No. 2!   This time we reach 2050 without trouble. Well, almost. There’s an automatic stop because of a treaty. Our diplomatic AI at work!  Our AI hasn’t stopped building scouts. And instead of abusing the fact you can build up to 10 ships of a class for the same time (buying parts time not included), it just builds one at a time, which I think is strangely inefficient.  The Whales want a trade alliance with CIG. Chris Roberts is laughing in glee. So, if I read this right we would pay 50 million Zongs a year to have our tax rates set in stone for 107 years. Doesn’t sound too appealing. I refuse to do anything. Mostly just to see if the diplomatic AI can handle this by themselves, or if we have to manually accept treaties.  I accidentally click on the wrong thing. But don’t worry, I got this!  Redoing the last couple minutes has made me vary and I chose to accept the trade alliance this time. gently caress the AI. Later I learn that we have to manually accept anyway, so me not accepting would have just wasted time.  We’re on the run to 2060 and people start fighting all over! Thanks to the way messages are sorted, the fights are actually already over and it is 2060. We can’t see that before scrolling down through all the old messages first, though!  Somehow I make the game crash again in 2057. I have no idea what I did wrong this time! I did learn just before the crash that the game stopped three years short this time for no reason.  At this point, a long series of skirmishes using scouts starts and floods my message board with tons of this poo poo.  The really annoying thing is: Sometimes one of our scouts flies into the cross fire and gets turbo scrapped. This is annoying.  None of the fights seems to have lasting consequences. The AI is just really retarded during this run. The other empires attack each other over the same couple of planets over and over again. Probably using scouts and the 1-2 divisions crammed inside of them.  The end of the first in a long line of battles over this planet. We also lose two ambassadors and Xenomorphs attack somewhere.  Oh I’m sorry, this time the Xenomorph attack is “catastrophic” instead of minor, so it’s actually important. No it isn’t.  At least our drug reserves are full, even though Chris Roberts is drawing most of our yearly production for himself, the greedy fucker.  Our AI empire is still doing well.  Home Fleet now consists of four mighty scouts.  This is getting dumber and dumber. I decide to intervene and design a true combat ship for CIG. Maybe the AI will start building the actual combat ship over the scout?  Since only Roberts himself is immortal, we lose a couple more subordinates. Also we finally reach 2060. Ten turns my rear end.  Among a flood of messages about dumb AI fighting each other with butter knifes, some more deaths and an occasional reminder for finished scouts, we get this. Kind of funny. Rubik’s Cube or that weird thing the Cenobites found so important? You decide!  The Stimpire strikes again! And the turn stops in 2064, not 2060. OK, so sometimes this works and ten turns will go by until the timer stops, but sometimes the game arbitrarily decides to stop a couple turns short. Sometimes it’s because the game demands some input from you, like accepting treaties, but sometimes it just does. It drives me crazy.  The AI now starts to add more scouts to our fleets. Apparently only so it can ineffectually move more troops around.  Home Fleet’s strength is kind of low, mostly because the game just ignores the new class I made and continues to build scouts.  I try again to help our AI, this time by making a class with the name the AI gives me for it. I even try manually building some of the ships! I also try making a combat ship just named SCOUT, but since I can’t delete classes, the AI just ignores everything I do and continues building normal scouts.  But nothing works. The AI even times its build orders so I can’t order ships myself, because there’s already one running and stopping build orders is also impossible in this dumb game!  At least our empire is still growing.  How is this “minor”? Just a little bit more skin cancer, I suppose?  Then the game stops automatically to remind me of the coming elections. Something we haven't seen yet in the original LP and the point where I decided to dial down the AI Wars posts before I even started posting them -you probably don't want to wait months for us to reach the same point in the main LP.  We have nothing to fear!      Some more dumb fights with no clear victor. The rest is earthquakes on Luatax, a fleet commander dies midflight and another scout is finished. I spare you the screenshot of that last thing.  The commander is already replaced.   I try again to build some more viable ships, but the military AI outsmarts me again!  Oops! Totally forgot about the election.  Chris Roberts throws all the money in the world into his re-election. With that kind of approval-rating, it’s kind of wasteful, though.  Obviously Star Citizen reelects Roberts. Marius and Minus both lose (their jobs at CIG).  In 2072, another fleet leader dies and is immediately replaced by another faceless employee.  One of the AI-fleets reaches some planet in 2073. Since the AI deals with everything, I have no context for this whatsoever.  Another scout joins CIG’s forces. This screenshot is just in case you have forgotten how this message looks.  CIG’s planet of dreams gets a visit by nightmares.  The minor fights between CIG’s enemies result in a destroyed Something Awful fleet in 2074.  Fleet Fleet2 wants to get in on the action and fires on some SA-ships in passing.  Sadly, this time Something Awful wins and Chris Roberts loses. C’est la vie.  The same year sees another scout destroyed. Our AI is kinda hapless in sending scouts into weird meatgrinders, it seems.  2075 is a bad year for CIG. Three scouts destroyed. Roberts must be livid!  CIG’s enemies don’t care. In 2077 everyone is already invading everyone else again.  Oh wait, that planet must be one of ours. Somehow I completely missed this!  Something Awful is bombarding Troysys, which at some point was colonized by CIG, apparently?  Apparently our AI was smart enough to station some troops over there, so CIG doesn’t immediately roll over dead.  When the timer stops to allow me some input in 2077, the last message left is another alien-attack, this time on Phoison. (I looked it up, it’s also one of our colonies.)  At this point, CIG (we) has spread through three solar systems. Not that much, really.  Something Awful somehow did even worse and only holds two star systems at this point. SA has three fleets and if experience taught me anything, they’re probably mostly scouts.  This is Troysys, just so you visualize better what is happening.  Robert’s viceroy on Troysys is Vulcan and it doesn’t look like he can survive this. “Vulcan Lives!” screams a drugged-out Chris Roberts in defiance after hearing the news.  OK, I stand corrected. Something Awful has some actual combat-capable ships. The enemy AI is a lot better at war than ours is.  Our own fleets look like this.  Being peaceful at least is good for morale, Chris Roberts ratings are skyrocketing.  At this point I decide to unflag some of our message-types just to get through this mess faster. Messages I can’t see are message I won’t feel compelled to talk about.  In 2079 Troysys is still holding out against SA.  But in just two years, SA-troops destroy most of the defenders. The situation is dire.   The rest of the galaxy is doing this, over and over. If our AI would actually build some loving warships and start exploiting this, the game would be over fast. And in our favor for once.  The AI raises new troops to defend Troysys, then immediately loses them again.  See? Those idiots are destroying each other yet again! If this were our game, this would be great. Instead it’s our bumbling AI profiting from the other AIs stupidity. And by profiting, I mean barely surviving. Since our AI hasn't actually build any combat ships yet, we would be crushed in a couple turns if the other AIs ever choose to attack us.  The end of the century draws near, but CIG has still some money left. Will Star Citizen finally be released?  2086 sees some more fighting on our third-rate colony and then the turn timer stops dead in its track. It’s time for some human input! Those treaties won’t accept themselves, after all!  The Shoik of Smartzia offers us a trade alliance.  Nah, this is bad and self-defeating. Instead of just letting our AI ignore it, I go through the motions and reject it. Hopefully this will prevent Smartzia from stopping my timer again with another version of this rubbish in a couple years. Seriously? Derek Smart wants us to pay a shitload of money each year to economically hurt ourselves? Chris Roberts doesn't need any help in destroying himself.  In 2093 Something Awful gives up and retreats from the smoking ruins of Troysys. CIG "wins"!  They’re not the only ones. Most of the hostilities-messages in this decade deal with retreats from various planets. And with the 2101 retreat of the Whales from Traisys I end Century 1 of Imperium: AI Wars. Man, this was a lot more work for a stupid idea than I thought. Next: Back to the real LP. Also: WAR!!! Libluini fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Feb 20, 2016 |
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Feb 19, 2016 22:40
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This image just cracked me up. A SMALL CUBE THAT UPSETS PEOPLE. A box full of lovely alien memes or whatever. Also, I wonder if enemy empires' Nostrum consumption is simulated as well, whether their leaders would "die" if you block them from accessing Nostrum for long enough, assuming you knew where their sources were. I imagine that they probably don't, that would be too interesting a mechanic for Imperium.
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Feb 19, 2016 23:04
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I just really don't know what to make of this game sometimes. And I'm willing to bet that Nostrum is tracked for enemy empires, but that it either can't result in their leaders' death or they get silently replaced and the game continues as normal. I give this game no credit and fully expect it to waste time with extra pointless busy-work under the hood that has no actual effect.
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Feb 19, 2016 23:21
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I imagine the small upsetting box as a jerk AI trapped in a box that insults people.  "Hey jackass, your hair looks stupid and you should lose some weight!"
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Feb 20, 2016 00:44
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This game is alternatingly horrific and wonderful. Mission accomplished? Also, are you shure that trade deal is not offering a 1% tax from that empire? Most likely not, as that would make sense. Mathwyn posted:I imagine the small upsetting box as a jerk AI trapped in a box that insults people. fake edit: this was my first thought.
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Feb 20, 2016 01:21
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My first thought was some sort of alien Rubik's Cube. With angles and colors which don't make sense to humans.terrenblade posted:This game is alternatingly horrific and wonderful. Mission accomplished? No, the way treaties work is like this: Trade Barriers are setting all allied empires' export tariffs against a third empire. Generally you want this tax setting incredibly high to discourage the third AI (the victim) from actually trading with you and your allies. Economic Treaties, like this one, deal with setting export taxes between allied empires. In this case this would mean we would pay only 1% tax when buying from them (good), but they would also only pay 1% on goods imported from us (very bad). I remind you money from export taxes is our only source of money. And in this case the AI is brazen enough to not only try to damage our economy, it also wants to be paid for the privilege of reducing our income! About Trade and Taxation Theoretically, you can set negative values for taxes, both in alliance construction (as the menu for treaties is called) and in the tax menu directly. In the case of import taxes, everything is internal: A planet pays (or gets paid with negative values) the tax into the treasury. Export taxes take money from foreign empires (if they sell something to you) or give it to foreign empires (when your planets buy something from them). Of course, negative values reverse this. Theoretically, this means you can steer planets to buy goods from certain empires and not others, it's not very practical though. The AI is perfectly willing to pay your taxes as long as you aren't milking them with ludicrously high rates like 50%, but I've never seen them actually using negative values themselves. Probably because the AI would bankrupt itself pretty drat fast if it were allowed to destroy its own income source. Now I think what the programmers wanted was to give the player the ability to wage fierce trade wars, with hapless victims unable to sell their crap / import important goods. Unluckily trying to play the game as an economic simulator is rather risky, since you never directly interact with the markets, you just pull levers labelled "taxes" and hope for the best. Since you have no real influence on trade, you can't really tell if the empire buying all your crap is taking stuff you need for your warships, or just some left-over dirt or whatever. Likewise, you aren't able to see if the empire selling crap to your planets is sending tons of weapons and space computers, or just a shitload of crucifixes to make the people happy. And since you can never know what is sold, all your efforts in looking at in-game graphs and dealing with tax rates is effectively wasted. The best you can do is not running your empire into the ground and the AI can do this perfectly well. To be honest, looking at production graphs and trying to set up taxes in just the perfect way to get optimal results was what I was doing in run 1 and it resulted in economic collapse. Today I could probably do better. The net result would be 100% more boring posts, 100% more time I'd spend on writing them and if everything works out well, the empire would work like the economic AI was switched on. Now this is what I'd call a complete waste of effort. Libluini fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Feb 20, 2016 |
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Feb 20, 2016 02:06
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Just so you know, I haven't forgotten this thread, I was just busy with other stuff. I'm writing the next update now, it should drop Monday at the latest.
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Apr 3, 2016 15:59
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Don't worry about it, I imagine it's a bit of a chore to run this LP, so take the breaks you need.
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Apr 3, 2016 16:46
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The Aurora Empire Strikes Back Years 2051 – 2054: Let’s Prepare a War Wow, this took a lot longer then I planned for, but that’s life for you! At least I’m back now, so let’s do this thing! Year: 2051  Our empire is actually not doing that badly. We even have a fleet we can use offensively now! According to my notes, you dudes voted to attack, so invasion it is. We’ll need to plan this carefully, though. Let’s start with what forces we have available for this conflict.  GoonAdmiral AecTalek is commanding our 1st Fleet. His fleet consists of five destroyers of the McHammer-class. The McHammer-class has medium speed, heavy armor for its weight and medium weapons. They’re better than the Shield-class ships in our HomeFleet, but not by that much. Which is good, since HomeFleet will stay back at home, defending us. AecTalek isn’t that bad of a commander either, which is important since we have zero control over battles. GoonAdmiral AecTalek will have to do everything for us.  As a first step towards war, I’m starting to recruit drop troops. Those guys have their own invisible ships, so there’s no limit to how many space marines we can stuff inside a fleet. Also after the initial drop they start working like infantry, so we don’t have to carry any infantry ourselves. The free space inside our ships will be filled with tanks instead. It’s important to start recruitment long before you will need the troops because remember: Freshly recruited troops are actually counted at half strength, since they’re green. With every year at peace, they’ll gain some strength. Hopefully this means when things heat up we’ll have a nice elite army to take care of our troubles.  Next, I raise some tank divisions on Pluto, because my thought here was I could just move my finished fleet over and gobble up the tanks later. Later I remembered all those armored divisions standing around uselessly on Lowtax itself, so I instead recruited some more tanks on Lowtax to leave some reserve when the fleet leaves and called it a day. Now Pluto enjoys a massively reinforced garrison! Who says stupidity can’t help you out?  Our popularity is still bad, but slowly recovering.  Since we’ll be at war soon, I decided gently caress debt and commissioned a Retribution-class battlecruiser. This baby is our second-best ship and sadly also our second most expensive, so I felt only safe with building one. For now. This ship will be added to 1st Fleet. As a flagship, basically. It’s fast enough to keep up with our McHammer-destroyers and has nearly three times the firepower. The armor is only about 20% stronger though. The Retribution is basically a flying gun with some engines strapped to it.  The cost looks harsh, but it’s no comparison to what building 5 destroyers at once cost us, so we can deal with it. Waiting 8 years for the ship to be finished sounds a lot worse, honestly. Hopefully we won’t have to wait an eternity for the build to start. As large as the Retribution is, it’s just one single ship, after all.  Ah, sweet old debt how have I missed you  I’m guessing our way upwards stops for a couple years now, but a single ship shouldn’t hurt our recovery too much. I hope.  Since I let our shipyards run empty for a couple years, we have now a nice supply to build more ships from. I’m planning to commission a second large ship to reinforce HomeFleet. Then (if everything goes right), it’s time to start a second fleet, so we can be a bit more mobile in our actions.  One of my panicked attempts at making our people happier. Of course I totally forgot we have the economic AI running, so our production balance gets zeroed out to normal next turn.  Exports are up, which is good. Since the Hierarchy and Trumpia are supplying us with lots of money, I really don’t like the idea of attacking them right now. The Standard Empire and the Universal State of Universal Robots can get hosed, though.  Since our AIs don’t gently caress up, I decide to let them keep running the show. We’ll be in charge with military things, which in this game translates to literally everything not included under dealing with alliances/trading. Year: 2052  Last year we laid down the foundation for the coming war, this year is all about planning. Trumpia and Hierarchy are interesting: They’re both HOSTILE to each other, but FRIENDLY to us. This means if we attack one of them, they’ll be caught in a two-front war. The strategic AI is rather basic, though. This means bad luck could result in us accidentally clashing with fleets from the other empire, leading to a drop in relations and war with us. Also relations and alliances between empires only influences the chance of being chosen for an attack, it doesn’t actually mean they’ll avoid shooting at us if they can. At the moment, I’d rather not attack one of the two strongest AI empires. Especially if it could easily end in us fighting both.  The Hierarchy is rather condensed: Multiple planets, but only two star systems. Still, based on the giant amounts of goods they buy from us, they must have a rather strong economy and probably tons of space ships, too.  Trumpia has four star systems and is spread out across the map. If we had enough military strength, we could probably isolate and crush their colonies one by one. That’s something for later, though.  USUR looks better. It’s one of the two lame duck empires which seem to struggle far behind Trumpia and the Hierarchy and only has one single star system. Since we have only one fleet to attack them right now, USUR looks like a juicy target.  Even better, they only have one planet! This means if we can take their capital planet Rossum, we have eliminated one of our three enemies from the game! Of course this won't happen in a game where everyone needs decades to move around. They'll probably have some colonies at the time we're prepared to strike.  Rossum has, as capital planet, a stupidly large garrison and high defenses. If we attack here, we’re having a fight on our hands. Especially since we can’t just assume continuous fighting will make the planet rebel and execute their leader, like it would happen to us. A distortion of 100% is bad of course, but from our earlier try I know there are some borders here. To be careful, I will assume the garrison and the planetary defense is twice as high as shown here.  Now to the tedious part: Awkwardly sending all USUR-fleets to the clipboard, so I can look at their strength.  The first fleet is in space right now. And we’re lucky, the fleet is crossing the influence of one of our spy antennas –the distortion is zero. From what is shown here, we can tell that every ship weighs 60k tons (or 600 “units”) and has strangely, the same firepower and far less armor then our McHammer-ships who are something like 40k tons. The ships are rather fast, though: Max speed is 10, so 4 means about 40% of the enemy ships’ mass must be engines. We could take this fleet right now, but would probably take heavy losses. Let’s look at the other fleets first.  The second USUR-fleet has one ship less and is significantly weaker. With five ships firing at three ships, this fleet is the easiest for us to destroy.  Third fleet is the same, just with slightly less troops.  Fourth fleet is also in space and has even less troops. Basically this means their capital is undefended right now. The problem is, we can deal with all those separate fleets easily, but not if they all combine into one large force. Which even the AI will do, purely on accident, when all those fleets race back to defend the capital. Our strategical plan therefore must start at another point: We have to fight and destroy the fleets in space before we can deal with Rossum itself.  The Aurora Empire. The cursor points at one of the enemy fleets, far away from Rossum (that planet is somewhere in the lower right corner in this view) so if we send a fleet over there, we could fight and destroy them, literally decades of travel time away from help. It also showcases the reason why I went with USUR over Standard, the other weak empire: Standard is almost on the other side of the galaxy from us, while USUR is right next to us (and still refuses to trade with us, fancy that) and an easy target. At the same time, they are the most dangerous threat simply because with every passing year, the chance of them attacking us grows stronger.  For the curious: This is what 1st Fleet looks like in the map fleet report. We have more firepower, more armor and more ships then every USUR-fleet. On the other hand, we’re only half as fast.  After some searching, I find out where another USUR-fleet is hanging out and take a look at the planet farthest out.  Planet Smooas isn’t that bad! And it’s uncontrolled, so if we send our fleet here, they’re probably only confronting USUR alone. We have to remember the time scales involved in this conflict: By the time our fleet has finished preparations and crossed the void of space to here, USUR will probably have founded new colonies here and the fleet will have left. The weak colonies will then fall to us and the AI will send their fleets to us, which hopefully means we can destroy them one after another. Also since Rossum is so close to us, it’s probably good that I’m planning to reinforce HomeFleet after 1st Fleet leaves.  This is the other planet I was looking at. Looks like that other USUR-fleet is heading for a warzone –Trumpia is fighting the Hierarchy here. Good god we don’t want to enter this mess, if USUR loses one of their fleets in this meat grinder, better for us.  Just for completion’s sake: Our HomeFleet. The ships aren’t much in terms of firepower, but they can take some hits. For their size. With a Retribution-class battlecruiser added in, we can hold our own against at least one of the four USUR-fleets. And when we start the war, we’ll already have neutralized one fleet and another one is off to commit suicide for us. If the AI decides to throw the other two fleets (and reinforcements of course) directly at us, we’ll probably lose Home Fleet but do enough damage for 1st Fleet to mop up after they come back home. This is the worst case, of course. We’ll have more ships by then, too. While USUR just threw away one of their fleets for a confusing three-sided battle where their ships have a good chance of being blown apart in deep space. Other fleets will automatically attack even friendly and allied forces, after all.  And with this, my first war planning session is over. We now have our target and are building up our invasion force. Of course, after everything is ready, I’ll have to do this over again to make sure USUR hasn’t mutated into a strong superpower in the meantime.  Good news, though: Our stockpile was large enough building of our battlecruiser has started immediately. The ship will be finished in 8 years.  And it looks like we had enough materials leftover for 2-3 more ships! This is good, because it means when our battlecruiser is finished, I can move up to our heaviest ship or start building multiple Retribution-battlecruisers without having to fear cratering our economy. (Even more I mean.) This is the point where the economic system of this game actually helps us out: Since every cost (parts, money) is front-loaded and paid immediately when needed, our economy can recover while the ships are build. You just need to be careful not to accidentally collapse everything like a house of cards just because you wanted 10 superdreadnoughts build at the same time.  Before I end this turn, I (for the last time before changing my plans) recruit some more tanks on Pluto.  Also more drop troops for 1st Fleet. Year: 2053  The Standard Empire makes some minor progress.  Emperor Cimbri’s low popularity makes itself felt again, luckily only on the far away colony of Therte.  To test out the fleet troop interface, I move some units into 1st Fleet. Interestingly, it works as advertised: While the tanks have filled up the fleet and I can’t push a single infantry unit into it anymore, the drop troops are counted separately and can just grow and grow in number.  In this year, I decide to supply 1st Fleet from Lowtax only. Since Lowtax will lose a lot of armored divisions, I decide to mix recruitment a bit. Half of what the capital can raise in a single turn will be drop troops, half of it will be tank divisions. Later on I plan on supplying 2nd Fleet from Pluto, thanks to the large amount of tanks waiting around now. By the time 2nd Fleet takes form, those tank divisions should be elite forces.  Next on the agenda: Dealing with uppity colonials. People on Therte are dissatisfied with Cimbri's rule. Let's change that. First problem I see here: Therte has no garrison, apparently.  12 armored divisions should be enough to prevent an uprising. Problem solved, the Soviet way!  Astonishingly enough, our treasury is already almost back at the point before I ordered a new super-warship build. Man, our economic AI is good.  17 years until Emperor Cimbri faces his first re-election. 45% means we face instant game over. poo poo, I hope my counter-measures start working soon. Year: 2054  This year starts with some more unrest on Therte. Hopefully our new tanks can drive this unrest down before Therte succumbs to Mad Max-style levels.  An ark-ship I had completely forgotten about arrives at our colony Phaison. Overall, this turn shapes out to be not that bad as I first thought.  And the popularity-rating is slowly creeping upwards again. 16 years until the next election. Will we make it?  Our battlecruiser is still 6 years from being finished.  Something I learned today: When you put all your space marines into a fleet but then recruit more of them on the planet, the slider in your fleet will automatically move to the left, since you suddenly don’t have all your troops in the fleet anymore. Afterwards I pull out all the units just in case the game stops simulating training after I put them into their ships. I wouldn’t put it past this game. The ground force will now slowly sit on Lowtax and get stronger, until our new flagship is finished and we can finally set off.  More drop troops! Since Lowtax is already filled with experienced tanks, I’ll recruit more drop troops until our battlecruiser is finished, then fly and collect it from Pluto, which should give us two more turns for training them. Then our invasion can finally begin!  Next: The Election Looms Closer. Also more war preparations. Libluini fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Apr 3, 2016 |
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Apr 3, 2016 20:50
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I can't wait to see what new and exciting bugs and clusterfucks we'll encounter once we're actually on the offensive.
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Apr 3, 2016 22:24
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That would be such a buzz-kill if we lose from a 49% popularity in the election.
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Apr 3, 2016 23:36
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That would sting, but it would seem appropriate enough for this game. Man, you might have wrangled something almost resembling gameplay out of this heap.
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Apr 3, 2016 23:48
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