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That's kind of how the Antarans worked in MoO2, with the aside that kicking their poo poo in meant you won the game.
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Oct 2, 2016 00:10
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 38: More Dinosaurs on Even More Fire  The dumbest thing about Raas-spies stealing all our poo poo is the fact we’re the only ones with stuff worth stealing. Even if the Raas were willing to send some hackers to other empires, it would be a bad decision for them. The “Neutronshock”-tech is our newest and best warhead technology for missiles, by the way. This really hurt. At least the Kingdom of Almandin gets a new leader for its Council of Alien Thought.  Enemy spies got captured, but another one is still running around making trouble among the populace. Annoying! Also, our scout has surveyed the Raas-system of Tannjost.  Our new leader, Yonulled Quela, is an Eoladi. The Eoladi are that other gas giant species besides the Imsaies. We haven’t met them yet. Consul Quela knows every strength and weakness of every race in the Orion Sector. He loves to use intimidation, power and general assholishness to make our trade treaties more profitable. Too bad the 20% on just trade isn’t worth it combined with the -15% hit to diplomatic relations. Since we’re bad at both trading and diplomacy, this leader won’t give us much and in turn will hurt us really bad. It’s already a wonder that our stupid rocks made an ally, we really don’t want to run the risk of losing them. This leader gets ejected from the council.  Tannjost is less well established as the two systems hugging the shortcut: Tannjost IV is the largest developed colony here, the rest is two teenage colonies and a baby colony.  Onwards to… that one system with the really long name I partially blocked out. Oops!  Super mega important diplomacy happens this turn: The Imsaies are asking us to upgrade their defensive alliance into a full-blown 100% complete military alliance. The ambassador is whining about this like a little baby though. Buddy, it’s not our problem your star nation hasn’t thought of building warships of their own, a strength of 3 is a bit weak for your 20 planets. This essentially means from now on we can freely move through their territory, colonize everything we see (they can do the same of course) and their ships and other military forces will fight alongside ours. They will from now on even send forces to help us even if we’re the attackers! Too bad this doesn’t actually change anything from the defensive alliance we had since our only enemies both declared war first.  I guess they now like us more at least.  This diplomatic success motivates me to talk some more to our other neighbors: I ask the Psilons to upgrade our research treaty. They should trip over themselves to agree, considering the constantly growing insectoid menace hunting them down.  The dreaded surrender-option. I never was sure about this part, to be honest. The German translation makes it sound as if you can reverse your offer into a demand by taking the most forceful tone option. I’m not trying this because I’m fairly sure you can’t actually demand surrender and instead you’ll just order your ambassador to scream into the other sides faces “I SURRENDER!!!” at the top of your lungs, maybe while adding a few punches to make really sure the other side grasps the correct meaning. I did some testing and it turns out the system works like it should, in defiance of the confusing tone options. Essentially, if you beg for surrender, you're not begging the other side to accept your surrender, you're still just demanding surrender yourself, just in the weirdest Please-Don't-Force-Us-To-Kill-You-All-way. Somehow I interpreted this option totally wrong! After testing and thinking this never-before-used-by-me option through, I made the following conclusion: You can only surrender if someone else sends you a demand first. Which probably explains why the Psilons decided to go down with their last planets: To be able to surrender to the Klackons, the vily insects have to send them the offer first. I don't know if this was intended or an oversight, but there's no option to offer surrender from the losing side. If the winning side never offers terms, the losers will just walk quietly into extinction without a second thought. The losers can still demand the winners to surrender, though! This option makes no sense but it's possible! The winning AI will always refuse, of course.  So after confusing myself and you a lot by brooding about surrender, let’s not do something hasty and continue instead. One of our scouts explores Nin Hursag, or at least tries to: The Cynoids in Nin Hursag want a say in the matter. Kaff and Amoenta are pretty drat normal with us preparing to bomb some dinos, but holy poo poo what the hell 49 Raas-ships are attacking Deanton!  The bad news continue: The Cynoids don’t like us scouting them, so they shoot our scout into tiny little bits of space dust. But what about Deanton?  Are you kidding me?! Yes, the Raas indeed have doubled down on sending their transport fleets into Deanton. Our single modern carrier task force is apparently not enough to force the AI into retreat. An incredibly one-sided massacre begins.   This battle would have made a nice video if it hadn’t come as a total surprise. I seriously thought the AI would just warp back out straight away, so I didn’t prepare my recording software before starting the battle. Instead by this screenshot, 14 out of 49 ships are already dead.  Only after the third transport task force bites it does the AI notice something is wrong and triggers the retreat. Too bad our fighters still have enough time to murder a fourth task force before the rest can jump out. 4 out of 7 task forces destroyed, 28 of 49 ships killed. Our losses are of course zero. Just think about this: The AI thought the 4 combat ships it send in before the transports would be enough to dislodge us. Can you believe vanilla MO3-AI was even worse? Anyway, it’s still a nice little victory for us.   Our ground offensive on Kaff II continues: Both sides are about equally matched in numbers. This time we don’t give any poo poo about collateral damage and divide our army in separate combat groups to outmaneuver the enemy. I forgot to screenshot the end of the battle, but it was a minor advance. No heavy losses, no real battle.  Our troops on Amoenta IV are massing for a breakthrough-offensive. After some heavy fighting the defenders are nearly wiped out. But we only advanced a single region, so the Raas would probably consider this still a victory.  Turn 142 greets us with news about how our enemy spies are doing: Again we suffer unrest thanks to malicious propaganda whispered by evil dinosaur spies. And the Raas hacker is trying to be cute by sabotaging one of our research projects directly. This means instead of slowing down our entire research, only one project is directly affected. Still bad, but I’ll take it over the entire Kingdom suffering.  Looks like our wishes overlap with those of our neighbours again: The Psilons had the same thought we had. Of course we agree to a better research treaty, you silly gnomes! Now hopefully the Psilons will agree to our offer too! (Because if not the treaty won't be upgraded.) Psilon ambassador (cantankerously): “We would see it as rude if you refuse to offer us an agreement to unify our research efforts.”  Our relationship with the Imsaies from the Annalona Empire is still rising. We’re up to 143 out of a possible maximum of 200 points! We have trade and research treaties going, we implemented Space EU light, we have a Non-Aggression Pact and a Defensive Alliance. We’re basically unified by now! The diplomatic upgrade to our alliance-status hasn't shown up yet, though. I have to remember to take another look in the future to see if something went wrong there.  By the way, one of our non-lane travelling scouts has successfully crossed the endless void and reached the system of Vela: The planets are kind of average, but there’s a lot of minerals lying around. Luckily Silicoids don’t need to eat anything besides rocks, so I can safely order colonization for almost every planet. Vela V turned out to be too lovely even for us, sadly.  Another surprise! Turns out Vela has zero star lanes connecting to it! Our scout has to travel through hyperspace the hard way again. 21 turns until our explorer can reach the nearest system.  The situation in Kaff continues to develop: Our constant bombardments have pushed Kaff VII below the control-threshold and even if we don’t wipe out the rest of the colony, the Raas will soon lose control. The small colony on Kaff III is too weak to be of relevance and our liberation of Kaff II continues. Soon the system will be secured and our fleet can move on.  Finally I remember to screenshot our growing number of Saurian troops: This green armored thing is a Saurian assault unit. Generally speaking they’re better at fighting on Earth-like planets and are better at fighting in general. They’re also faster, but less heavily armored. This is presumably because they are heavy armor over squishy flesh bodies and not just hard-to-break minerals all the way through. Sadly Master of Orion 3 goes the easy route and like with ship graphics, all ground units of a certain line of species all look the same. So the Raas troops, like their ships, are exactly the same as those of the other two Saurian species (we haven’t met them yet, they’re the Sakkra and the Grendarl). Only Silicoids and Harvesters have truly unique ships and troops, since there’s only one species in their respective categories. And yes, sometimes this can look rather silly, especially with humanoid troops: From the game’s standpoint, there’s no visible difference between Psilon and Human soldiers. Think about that for a moment.  Anyway, time to send another army into Amoenta. To keep up our fast speed of advance, I’m planning to restrict myself to only about two armies per system. If I’m lucky, this means upwards to two mostly intact Raas-colonies for us. If I’m unlucky, the Raas will be too.  Our Klackon border is still calm. Disturbingly, the Soriane are still in the process of losing one of their last planets forever.  In battle limbo, the Raas strike back. First, transport task forces assault Deanton. This time however they remember what a “retreat” is and jump out before we can reach them.  At the same time, a short-range flotilla (5-8 ships) attacks our fleets in Kaff. Sadly this time the AI correctly calculates zero chance of success against our modern task forces and retreats before we can do more than melt some armor with neutron blasts.  Again our troops on Kaff II advance (very slowly). And again both sides lose about the same amount of troops. Both sides are now hilariously weak when compared to their initial strengths but there is one problem: Our troops have to wait multiple turns until reinforcements can reach them, the Raas can theoretically raise a new army every turn. I don’t know why, considering my own AI loves building new troop units the AI nations must have tons of them, too. If the AI wanted to, they could concentrate obnoxiously large forces on every planet we assault. I’m guessing here someone during the development process thought through what would happen if the AI would just stonewall the player like that: No-one would do any invasions anymore and instead glass every planet. And because of this the AI often waits a couple turns before raising new defenders and they’ll never just dump multiple armies into a single division's face or other silly nonsense. Only the player is allowed to be a total rear end in a top hat like that.  Not everything is sunshine and rose quartz, however: Our liberation of Amoenta IV fails. When our army tries to rotate our advancing troops into the defender’s rear, the defenders leave their lines and charge into our landing zone instead. A total disaster can only be avoided because one of the Silicoid-generals thinks fast and lets the entire army fall back immediately. Still, a lot of confused fighting among the landing zones follows and AAC (Almandin Army Command) decides to pull back and try this again at a later date. After some months of bitter fighting the Raas fall back from the landing zones to reorganize and the royal troops take the chance and leave the planet. The first campaign for Amoenta IV ends. The general who saved the landing zones with its good judgement is promoted in the aftermath and send to join the new army in transit to Kaff II. Hopefully General Cairngorm is up to the task! Next: Peace, Research and War
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Oct 4, 2016 12:45
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Yay for slow and steady progress! Even if just on the 'slaughtering Dinos while getting slaughtered by them' route. And hopefully some good colonies down the line. Good luck wtih the assault!
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Oct 5, 2016 05:43
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Meanwhile, the lore makes some progress, too: Lore 22: The Collapse of the Antaran Hegemony Around 19090 GC, the Antaran Hegemony suffered what seemed to be a massive population implosion that effectively collapsed its governmental structure. Within scant cycles, over 95% of the Antaran population vanished into nothingness. It did not appear to be an attack by an outside force, nor did it seem like an extremely virulent plague. And though the Orion races did not immediately see the sudden depopulation of the Hegemony, they soon noticed its effects, heard rumors from beyond, and started to wonder: What happened to the Antarans? A popular tale among the Orion races is that the Antarans were finally defeated by their own methods of genetic manipulation and modification. Supposedly a method was discovered to transform Antarans into beings of pure energy that transcended physical limitations. What began as yet another "black hole" governmental evolution and genetics research project leaked out to Antaran society at large when a clique of scientists defected from their secretive traditions and established cults of followers who desired to submit themselves to this "cleansing" transformation. These rogue scientists were quickly denounced by Antaran officials and, even more quickly, went underground where they were soon sought out by Antarans from every level of society. This process gained popularity through notoriety, and the slow trickle of Antarans who wished to be "cleansed" soon grew in intensity, as the cults spread to every world in the Hegemony, and more and more Antarans volunteered to be transformed. High born and low, old and young, the smartest, the bravest, and the "common man" -- all vanished into energy. By the time the cultists vanished, destroying their transformers in the process, barely one Antaran in fifty remained behind. In a cosmos filled with irony, and after playing dice with the universe through their experiments for so long, the Antarans' own number finally came up, and their own civilization was brought to ruin by it. But this tale is merely conjecture. The real reason for the rapid disappearance of the Antaran population is thought to be the greatest of the Antarans' innumerable secrets. It has become the talk of the sector. And in a time and place where knowledge is power, learning the mysteries of the Antarans has set many planet-bound eyes to gaze once again at the stars. Historical Note: The Antarans were indeed done in by one of their research projects, but nothing as poetic as what the rumors pictured. The Harvester Project was the Antarans' quest for a biological agent that would infect most life forms and either kill them or render them mentally docile and obedient. It was a major endeavor, with dozens of research labs working on various facets of the project. And, in the end, the Antarans succeeded in breeding a parasite that did exactly what they wanted it to. The Harvester Parasite Several versions of the Harvester parasite existed, but the most notable one was the smaller, virulent horror known as Harvester Gamma that killed all life forms indiscriminately, Antarans included. Somehow this Harvester was released from its containment into several Antaran colonies, and it spread like wildfire. Billions of Antarans died in madness and agony as the parasites devoured their brains and sought new hosts to consume. The Hegemony restricted TDP travel in an effort to protect their territories outside the dimensional barrier, but not soon enough. The only silver lining was the fact that, lacking fresh hosts, the Harvesters quickly starved to death. This, unfortunately, happened only after ninety-eight percent of the population of the Antaran Sector had been slaughtered. Those few who survived the scourge banded together and left the Antaran Sector. Where they went is as yet unknown. The Harvester plague devastated several other Antaran colonies outside of the Dark Zone, but the Orion Sector remained mostly unscathed. This would soon change, however. The question of who released Harvester Gamma into the wild would also never be answered. Some suspected a disgruntled Antaran scientist; others suspect an accident at the lab; and some believe that Loknar returned to bring down the Antarans once and for all... The only thing the writers of this crap loved more than the Antarans were the Harvesters. Too bad the Antarans didn't know this and so got completely blindsided by this development. If we ever find a colony of surviving Elerians, we should probably tell them about this. They can use a laugh.
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Oct 5, 2016 16:22
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Even an apocalyptic end can't hold the Antarans down forever! Lore 23: The End of Antaran Rule One of the Hegemony's last mandates was the establishment of a new policy throughout Antaran territory: destroy every vestige of their civilization among its abandoned colonies and outposts so that no others could follow them or learn their secrets. True to their nature, the Antarans maintained their "black hole" philosophy right up the very end of its days as many enclaves of stored Antaran knowledge were destroyed, colonies abandoned and pulverized, and populations withdrawn to places unknown. But not all of the Antaran population was gone. Although the depopulation effect completely emptied the Antaran Sector and several neighboring sectors, it was far less drastic in the more outlying areas of the Hegemony, including the Orion Sector. The Antarans in command at Orion, now suddenly cut off from any supplies and reinforcements from their home sector, had enough foresight to see the writing on the wall. They had just spent a thousand cycles in brutal domination of the Orion races, exploiting, torturing, experimenting on, and slaughtering them. Now their positions were reversed: they themselves were severely weakened, and perhaps vulnerable to a resurgence by the Orion races. They needed to change their policies in order to maintain control over the sector. Transforming themselves from tyrannical dictators to "enlightened" believers in representative rule, the Antarans in the Orion Sector rebuilt and reconvened the Orion Senate. Inviting those races whose homeworlds were fairly close to Orion itself (several jump lanes distant at most) and ignoring those on the outskirts of the sector (and beyond the now weakened range of the Antaran military forces in the sector), the Antarans announced the establishment of a new government in the Orion Sector. For the first time in a millennium the lights in the ancient Senate chamber burned brightly, and the voices of Orion and Antaran representatives filled the halls. Many of the Orion races were optimistic of such an event, willing to forget the horrors and atrocities of the Dark Age and focus instead on a newer and brighter future. But not everyone was willing to forget the Antarans' deplorable past.
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Oct 6, 2016 10:57
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I can see the 'WTF!'. But dealing with the aftermath of all this; this galatic hegemon simply dying completely out and leaving it's ruins about does seem interesting to read about, make stories in and so on. It's just a shame it came at such a cost.
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Oct 6, 2016 11:02
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It seems like I'm running out of time for posting the next update. Just in case my planned Sunday-post doesn't happen, here's the next Lore-post just so you have at least something: Lore 24: The First Meeting of the Orion Senate It was a very delicate occasion when the invited representatives of all of the local Orion races convened once more in the Senate in 19097 GC. The Antaran presence was unmistakable -- among the guards, packed in numerous seats among the delegates, and most noticeably occupying the highest seat of all, that of the President of the Orion Senate. Their pitiless features provided sharp contrast to the palpable optimism in the air that exuded from almost all the other members. The long oppressed indigenous Orion races brought their hopes to the Well of the Senate, and when the first session had ended, they had left them there in tatters. The occasion began with enthusiasm among the Orion races. After centuries of Antaran-imposed isolationism, the Ambassadors from the local Orion races met each other with wide-eyed amazement: the stories their elders had told about the cosmopolitan nature of the Orion Sector were all true! The reunion of former allies and adversaries became a recounting of ancient history, of the 17000's, of something called the Pax Humanica, and of the horror stories of the Dark Age. While this reunion played out in the Senate's Imperial Lounge, the Antaran representatives interacted little and seemed to be bored by the whole event. Finally, the speeches warranted by the occasion began. Negotiations beforehand had decided that the Antarans would speak last to close the first session of the Senate. Canny negotiators to the end, the Humans arranged to open the meeting, with Ambassador Shain Alegna delivering a stirring oration on the "beginning of a bright new age for all Orions." Her speech was applauded by all the delegates (with the notable exception of the Antarans), and was followed by several other salutatory addresses from the Ambassadors. That is, until the leader of the Mrrshan delegation stood in the Well.
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Oct 9, 2016 15:40
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and then the intro cinematic happened
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Oct 9, 2016 16:05
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Yes, this and the next few lore-bits are essentially a retelling of the intro-movie.
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Oct 9, 2016 16:08
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Wait, so the Antarans spend centuries first subjugating and then eradicating the races of the Orion sector, then they suffer nearly complete societal collapse with 95% of their population dying, and instead of wiping them out, the Orion races are optimistic about cooperating with their former tyrants?  Just what kind of  were the writers taking here?
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Oct 9, 2016 18:00
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sheep-dodger posted:Wait, so the Antarans spend centuries first subjugating and then eradicating the races of the Orion sector, then they suffer nearly complete societal collapse with 95% of their population dying, and instead of wiping them out, the Orion races are optimistic about cooperating with their former tyrants? You're not the only one disagreeing with the Antaran's plan! Here's how the Mrrshan reacted: Lore 25: Mrrshan Diplomacy Ambassador Rrlenn looked resplendent in her meticulously pressed Mrrshan fleet officer's uniform (a fleet only recently commissioned by the Mrrshan to patrol against pirates under the new Antaran policy of replacing their own dwindling manpower with skilled local inhabitants). Her scarred face, partially hidden behind an eyepatch, was upheld in an aura of nobility. When she spoke, she bared fangs of utter contempt. Passionately, forcefully, and with a patrician's rhetorical skill, she denounced the Antarans and their past deeds. Here was a warrior who had chosen the Senate to be today's battleground, and her devastating verbal surprise attack on the Antarans had its impact. The Antaran delegation remained expressionless as they listened to the entirety of her haranguing. As she closed, there was a long moment of silence, and then a Bulrathi officer demanded to be heard next. His blunt soldier's berating of the Antarans underscored the fact that the Bulrathi stood united with the Mrrshan in their contempt of their treatment by the Antarans for the past millennium. The Elerian Senator, when she finally spoke, was clearly moved by the Mrrshan speech, and added her thoughts on the matter of Antaran atrocities committed against the local Orion races, citing their influence in the Elerian Gender Riots and the atrocious Mind Worm plague the Antarans had inflicted on their population during the Antaran War. Though these three speeches were the most direct in their assault on past Antaran actions, other negative notes were heard in the speeches of the Gnolam, Alkari, and Darlok representatives. Throughout it all, the Antaran delegation sat unmoved, unflinching and, apparently, uncaring.
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Oct 9, 2016 18:15
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 39: Peace, Research and War Regular update time!  The Klackons are too busy for us right now, there are Psilons to kill. The war with us ends. Turn 143 also brings a diplomatic message from the Psilons and some new guy for our Council of Interstellar Management.  Espionage update: Another dinosaur spy gets shot, but we still have a saboteur running around. Otherwise, with the Raas slowly crumbling below us, our colonization program comes online again: Bungula B II and Seginus I are targeted. Two colony ships are underway!  The new guy is Shee’Dvepterii, a Klackon spy master, complete with his own team of spies. They are using a stolen Antaran technology to hide their spies and are priding themselves on being able to spy on everyone everywhere. He gives a whopping +20% for luck and mantle. Our spies are now a lot harder to detect and have easier success if we use them offensively. The drawback is +5% unrest, but since most of our population are Silicoids, that’s nothing. I put a lot of unrest-generating drawbacks on them at race creation and our kingdom wide unrest is still at a resounding average of zero.  Now let’s leave the Psilon ambassador waiting some more for a quick tally of our spy techs: Umgehungsnavigation / Backwater Navigation is getting researched right now. It’s a need little lore-tech describing how we suddenly learn to use less travelled routes through enemy backwaters to evade their patrols and other sneaky poo poo. The chance of successful infiltration of enemy empires goes up by 5. Apparently before getting this spy tech spies just blindly fly to the nearest border crossing and hope for the best.  The Cyber-Security Connection is still a long way off: This tech will allow our spies to connect with computer networks without having to drag around detectable tools like USB-sticks and poo poo. The “dagger”-ability of our spies will get a +1 bonus. Not much, but every little bit helps.  Genetic Mutagens is a tech we got recently: Both “dagger” and “mantle” attributes go up by 1, additionally “luck” (and therefore lifetime) gets the same bonus. Lore-wise out Silicoids can now transform into dinosaurs and other stupid poo poo. This technology clearly wasn’t really thought through very well. I like to assume Silicoids and the mechanoid races are simply using this tech to construct flesh-suits to wear and then walk around enemy races undectable. Like a sillier version of the Terminator.  Resistance Reduction Training / Widerstandsabbautraining is tech we will get in the near future. This training helps reducing scruples in new recruits faster, which reduces training time by 1 turn. The Kingdom of Almandin uses holographic simulations for this kind of “evilization training”. Other empires often prefer other, more revolting methods. There are for example rumors in our border regions of citizens being abducted over night by forces of the Dila Empire. I'm sure those rumors are wrong, but if not, this counts a troubling picture.  Getarnte Frachter / Cloaked Freighters: Another spy tech we will get in the future. Modified freighters with hidden spaces, cloaked freighters, spies hiding in secretly modified freighters without the crew’s knowledge: All neat things for a spy who wants to infiltrate an enemy empire. Too bad until now this was completely unknown. And as soon as this tech drops, someone in our spy agency opens a drawer somewhere and all those complicated plans about freighter modification will be found. The Spy-infiltration chance goes up by another 5 points.  This tech is a little bit older, we had it for a while: Agenten-Trainingsvoraussetzung / Agent Training Qualification. This tech is the use of specialized training programs to carefully pre-select possible candidates for our spy training programs. This simple thing was completely incomprehensible to the AIA until 16 levels of sociology-research had been completed. Training costs went down by 25% after we got this tech.  Xeno-Überlebensschule / Xeno-Survival Training: Ranger training in space and in this case with space rocks. Learning how to survive in hostile territory made our spies’ luck go up by 5. Up to five turns longer lives are not too bad. The success-chances going up are also a neat side-effect of this.  And our last spy-tech: Just a couple turns ago we got Tiefe Loyalität-Indoktrination / Deep Loyalty Indoctrination: Our spies are now conditioned to withstand torture and interrogation. The Loyalty-attribute went up by 5. A new spy’s loyalty normally starts at 95 and goes down with torture if he is captured. If he gets repeatedly captured and escapes, his loyalty will sooner or later fall enough and he will break. And since the game can’t model agents switching sides, this means your spy will phase out of existence. After this technology is researched, loyalty of new agents will be a round 100. This will give them 1-2 extra chances of escape before being erased from life. Most of the spy-techs are like this: Small upgrades over time turning even our idiots into worthwhile additions. Too bad our enemies with their better spies will still have better spies since they’re getting the same upgrades, but it still means we’re slowly getting to the point where I can risk using spies offensively.  After this round-up of our espionage capabilities, let’s continue with the normal techs we’re getting soon. The first one up is the Expanded Fighter Garrison. It’s basically the incredibly good idea of building a second fighter base, doubling the number of fighters a planet can launch. I know! I’m flummoxed myself I never thought of this! It’s such a simple idea: Just… build… more… garrisons  Like the Expanded Fighter Garrison, the Jäger-Zeckenpartikel / Fighter Tick-Particles are new additions from the mod. The Tick-Particles are small machines spit out by fighters to infiltrate ships and slowly cut their way through enemy armor. They can easily slip through shields, too. A nasty surprise. In gameplay terms they count as plasma weapons with the 2x multi fire add on. Enemy armor only counts half against them and shields are reduced by an incredible 66%. Their damage isn’t great, but thanks to the way they let enemy defenses look like chumps, they’re worth a thought. Apparently one of the authors of the Ultima Orion mod really liked Homeworld: Cataclysm. Mechanoid ticks to stealthily shred ships are one of the weapons you can research in that RTS and they are a great way to gently caress over enemies strong enough to make you vary of conventional attacks. These tiny transportable ticks are clearly meant to be a homage to that.  Our Linear Vector Drive gets an upgrade! A new generation of Quantum-Vacuum-Field Generators and better computers allow our ships to enter hyperspace easier and faster, which results in overall faster travel times. The Improved Linear Vector Drive without the lore is simply a faster drive. The original German translation had some gunk about “better converters” in it which I had to rewrite after totally changing the other techs before it. The Linear Vector Drive in Perry Rhodan was all about creating a so-called “Libration-Field” to transport a ship into the strange Libration-Zone, an only mathematically describable realm between normal space and hyper space. Its main difference to the older Translocation Drives was now you could actually see where you’re going. The LVD was actually slower than the TDs, since with those you just instantly jumped to your target coordinates. But getting “translocated” meant getting violently transformed into energy by the field created by the drive and then punted across hyper space. This was incredibly stress- and painful. Together with your ship slowly turning to poo poo because of matter getting twisted by repeated jumps, this made Translocation Drives rather awkward to use. It also was impossible to turn around or change course in mid-jump, since technically neither the ship nor the crew existed in mid-jump. Many years ago, when I reworked the translation to better fit my tastes and because I found all those homages to Perry Rhodan rather inappropriate, I rewrote most of the techs referencing German SF to make them sound more like its own thing. Vanilla wasn’t really better in my opinion, most of the FTL- and shield techs were just “Class” plus a number. That wasn’t very interesting and made it look like the devs just copied from Star Trek. (I have nothing against Star Trek, but just putting it into your game because you can’t think of anything interesting is a really lazy way of writing lore. What happened, guys? Did you run out of steam after writing all those fanfics about the Awesome Antarans?) Anyway, if you can read German and download the mod (see the OP for a link), you get the original translation un-maimed by me, which is like Perry and friends just walked into the Orion-verse and gifted everyone their technologies. It’s probably either exotic or jarring for you if you didn’t grew up in Germany. And if you can’t and have to awkwardly stitch a dozen different mods and patches together, you’re spared all this crap and get your standard bland vanilla English. Have fun with your Class IV Shields and Class III Hyperdrives. They allow you to have better shields and to fly at Warp III respectively. Hey! No yawning!  Until now no shipyard had this: The Project-Planning Bureau. Now engineers can actually plan and design new ships from within the shipyard, instead of sitting on their lazy asses down on the planet! As always, a shipyard tech means +1 hullsize for your planetary shipyards when build on a planet. Also how cute, this tech is the one which got sabotaged earlier. The other techs visible (also please ignore the techs in the upper half, the upper half of this screen is a teaser for future inventions, we’re not even close to getting them) are miniaturized life-support (more space in our ships) and transport infrastructure to make life a little bit easier for our citizens. That tech is just a +1 somewhere in the data of our planetary regions when build and therefore totally uninteresting.  Now we’re talking! Finally we’re getting an upgrade to our missile-launchers. Right now we only have missile chassis class I (the basic one) and an even smaller class of missiles for point defense. Class II Missile Chassis can carry warheads with twice the damage of class I missiles. They’re also twice as expensive. But they only need 25% more space, so they’re a clear upgrade. As soon as we have this tech, we’re finally at the point where I can justify building missile ships. They’re still suboptimal compared to carriers, but building only carriers would make for a very boring game. Let’s at least give the AI a chance. OK?  Underground Farms allow a civilization to stack farms vertically. Every agricultural zone gets +1 food production. Not that important for us, but our growing Raas-population likes to eat stuff that isn’t hewn from rock, those pansies. Of course, there are races who already start with doing underground agriculture, but I assume this means they put farms below/above their underground farms to create under-underground or over-underground farms. Please don’t think too hard about this.  And with this, the deluge of research screens is over for now! Time to listen to our beloved Psilon-ambassador: “We honor your newest recommendations and we give our consent.”, says the ambassador of the Soriane deferringly. And with this, our research treaty with the Psilons is now a couple percent better.  No wonder the Psilons are willing to deal with us even though they don’t like us: The Klackons crushed the last Psilon out of that Psilon-colony in Tali and now it belongs to the Vchiitri Empire. The Klackon fleet has started growing again. Looks like the intervention by the New Orions didn’t last. A shame.  Only Tali III and Tali IV are still held by the Psilons of the Soriane Empire. Their time will come soon, I fear.  While we’re looking at planets, please remember we can rename any star system we fully control. If you want to rename Deanton to celebrate our liberation of this system, I’m open for your suggestions. If you want more goon names on things, just give me something and I throw it on my pile of notes so I can use it later! FYI, if it’s a mineral pun it has higher chances of being used.  After reviewing the war front I noticed we never actually looked at Theta Indi. The upper third of the Dila Empire is a total mystery to us! So in goes the 42nd Recon SQDRN to explore this edge of Raas-space.  You have been wondering about the Klackons and their technology and here is the answer: Our magic research screen shows now the tech levels of the Vchiitri Empire. Turns out they lag even further behind then I thought. All this crap we already have. We’re at 31 in energy, they are at 25. That’s dangerously low. If you want to play as Klackons you have to look out for their terrible, terrible research. Try to make them as smart as possible in race creation and try to put down at least two research DEAs on every planet. Don’t do this and you will regret it. Like this AI will in the future.  The Raas from the Dila Empire are actually looking a lot better: 1-2 levels more overall and thanks to targeting us with their spies, they have lots of techs they aren’t supposed to have, like the Neutronshock warhead. Compared to us, they’re still lagging terribly behind. The AI really doesn’t seem to get that most war-related technologies are in Math, Energy and Physics. Instead the AI always tries to research “balanced” and fucks itself over. If the Raas were controlled by an actual human player, I would be really concerned.  By now enough escorts and heavy capital ships are available to form a new long-range task force. Five of our heavy Extinction II cruisers and three fast point-defense escorts form up into the 12th Royal Fleet. With the carrier task force we formed earlier, we have another fleet ready to liberate the Raas!  Just a short while later, our fleet in the Amoenta-system moves to eradicate some more planetary defenses, this time the first planet is the victim. Our fleet also demonstrates why you should build planetary shields as soon as possible. Ouch.  We met the elusive Dzazatar in Woronock, one of the systems we travelled to by crossing the endless void far from any star lanes. The computer here declares us victor completely undeserved: The New Orions attacked first and blasted whatever was supposed to meet us apart, so we get an auto-win. In cases like this you even get the typical real-time combat, but instead of enemies showing up you just wait a while and then bamm, instant-victory. The large NO fleet here luckily doesn’t engage us, so our scout can survey the Woronock-system in peace. In Deanton there are still annoying little attacks to swap away. Kaff was another auto-win thanks to local defenses being non-existent now and the battle in Amoenta is off-screen but you know how that went.  One bombardment later the colony on Kaff VII is nearly wiped out.  At the same time, our other fleet in Amoenta baths the first planet in fire.  Riled up by our ongoing atrocities, the Raas have raised another corps to shore up the defense of Kaff II. Will our five mobile infantry units be enough?  Nope! Our exhausted troops can’t continue the offensive. Again our local commanders show better judgement than Almandin Central Command (ACC): On their own initiative they break off the planned offensive and instead retreat from the endangered regions. Normally this kind of thing would end with them blasted apart with high explosives (the traditional Silicoid method of execution for cowardice in the face of the enemy), but our unknown commanders are in luck: When stumbling after them, the Raas take heavy losses and look like chumps, so the ACC accepts their commanders' decision as valid. Instead General Grimrock, the commander overseeing the Kaff II liberation effort, is reprimanded for “mindlessly following obviously outdated orders”. However, General Grimrock takes this, as he sees it, “unlawful punishment”, very badly. As someone who was often called “the most prideful Silicoid ever grown”, this should maybe have been foreseen. But it is now too late. Only days after receiving his reprimand, he deserts his post and defects to the defenders. A vaguely threatening message is found in his personal computers: “If it is disobedience you want, I can give you that.” Weeks later, Raas-propaganda floods the Silicoid lines, promising lenience for those who desert to them. After all, resistance is futile now with the Silicoids’ greatest hero fighting for the Dila Empire, right? The Silicoid- and Raas-soldiers of the Kingdom react in amused confusion to this ignorant boasting. Still, the situation on Kaff II is dire. Next: The Great Kaff Campaign
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Oct 9, 2016 18:48
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Is there a limit to the number of character a system name can have? Because I want to submit a very famous bit of poetry, "IF I should die, think only this of me; That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;" as an addition to Deanton's name.
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Oct 9, 2016 20:01
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"Painite so close to Pleasure" "Gallite in the Darkness" "Righteous Igneousnation" "Hung, Drawn and Quartzered" "Deep Schist" "In Space, No-one Can Hear You Scree" "Moraines from Outer Space" AJ_Impy fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Oct 9, 2016 |
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Oct 9, 2016 20:51
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You have 20 characters. I just tested this.quote:"IF I should die, think only this of me; Is sadly far too long, even if I abbreviate it to initials: IisdtotomttscoafftifeStsbitreardc Still more than 20 characters.  Also AJ Impy, if I take any of your suggestions, I will have to abbreviate most of them.
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Oct 9, 2016 20:58
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The Systems of
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Oct 9, 2016 21:12
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Chocolate Chunk posted:The Systems of
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Oct 9, 2016 22:28
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Rename the system Crocodiles Rocked and the planets after Elton John songs
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Oct 10, 2016 04:45
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prsoilrichinsilicoid Take that Hemmingway. Giantscauseway is way better as seen by his latest planet name/story: Frslebabyshoesnvrwrn
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Oct 10, 2016 08:35
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Lordy. How long could the Raas keep this whole ground warfare/flee deeper into space combo up?
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Oct 10, 2016 13:04
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It would actually be a really cool thing if the player was able to be the one that does this.
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Oct 10, 2016 13:41
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my dad posted:It would actually be a really cool thing if the player was able to be the one that does this. The player theoretically can. It's more viable in early game, but given you have unlimited range with ships if you keep up scouting and find some good, unclaimed systems halfway acrsos the galaxy and send colony ships to them and don't mind starting planets mostly from scratch it's doable. I've not done it viably (you get slaughtered on points and by endgame ar eso far behind on technology you won't remotely win) but you definitely can fight a holding action while the enemy grinds down your main territory planet yb planet and you send colony ships fleeing to deep space to establish your empire elsewhere. Makes for awesome RP (I think back in the day some of the old MoO3 forums had some stuff set around this).
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Oct 11, 2016 06:41
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 40: The Great Kaff Campaign Ironically, Kaff will soon be renamed to something completely different and from then on this chapter will be confusing everyone coming here from a later update.  Turn 144! Not a great beginning, since we get bamboozled again by fancy spy antics, but this time our technological advantage actually helps us: The enemy steals a positively ancient upgrade to our lasers. Lasers we stopped using about 30 updates ago. One of the perks of having the technological advantage: It often means your tech tree is littered with garbage someone else doesn’t have and since spies steal tech completely randomized, they sometimes steal garbage tech instead of something useful.  The news from the war front are mixed: Two Raas-colonies got thrashed, but on Kaff II we suffered a small setback. Oh and our local general defected to the enemy. General Grimrock!   Spy news continue: The Raas-saboteur got captured, but the Raas already send another spy: This time someone agitating among the civilian population. To top this, one of our own agents retires. At least we explored two more systems this turn, let’s take a look.  Avoiding the local star lanes worked out for our scout: Woronok is a Dzazatar-system on the other side of Klackon-space. Some New Orions are also here, presumably to kill people.  Woronock was so boring I didn’t bother screenshotting the system. Instead I send our scout forward to one of the neighboring systems.  Back in Raas-space, the system I accidentally blocked out last time was Alahain-B. I’m curious as to why that system to the left is still uncolonized by the Raas, so the orders come down for the explorer to jump towards it.  Alahain-B is indeed a border system. Only one middling Raas-colony, the other four planets are still untouched. Sure, the other planets are bad for both Raas and Silicoid, but we’re deep into the midgame, leaving so many planets unused screams for trouble. For us, the first planet looks interesting. With its multiple moons we can put up an incredible 9 orbital bases for defense and with the additional space the giant planet gets from the moons, even a bad planet is worth some trouble. Besides, we slowly get more and more technologies to make terraforming easier, so by the time we arrive here we can easily colonize everything here anyway.  Meanwhile, our scout in the Gryphon-subsector reached another dead-end-system: Ohrekionni I is one of these dirtballs we can only be happy about because we are Silicoid: Red 1 is the second-worst classification, mineral abundance is only average and the planet is toxic, which means zero food production. Our Silicoids love the high gravity however, and 11 regions is a lot of space to put down crap. Since our research gap to the rest of the Orion Sectos is still growing and our mineral output is still about three times the amount we actually use, I decide to make this planet a major industrial center in the future. With some regions dedicated to keep the population happy and almost everything else filled up with industry DEAs, this planet will have a truly fearsome output.  The work is done and our scout needs a new target. Since everything else nearby is already surveyed and the northern region of Raas-space even farther away, the scout gets re-routed down here to Arcturus. 25 turns however means it will take a long while until we hear from this scout again. Normally, disbanding the task force and re-sending the scout from somewhere closer would be the way to go, but Arcturus is just far enough away from our closest mobilization center in Deanton to negate the time we would save after the time spend in transit is accounted for. Building a complete new scout would probably be faster, but stopping our main production just to cut 1-2 turns of travel time from some scouting? gently caress that noise.  A new message from the Vchiitri-ambassador reaches us. Apparently the Klackons have reconsidered the sudden peace and want to make war great again. Vchiitri-ambassador (earnestly): “The hate of our people for you is too strong. We declare that our civilizations are now at war.” I can’t remember anymore if I mentioned this in an earlier update already, but wars which go on for too long without anything happening end automatically. Sometimes this means a costly forever war during the early game can be avoided when the AI suddenly comes to their senses, but sometimes it ends like this instead. If the AI hates you enough, they are pushed to declare war again and again, even if the AI can’t actually do anything because you’re no threat and too far away. As soon as the Klackons aren’t distracted, they will start to do something, of course. Which is why one of our scouts is now taking a look at their neighbors to see if we can notice early enough when those distractions end.  Combat-limbo rolls around and some more transports drop by in Deanton. This time the Raas immediately retreat, but one ship is still hosed: The three transports got caught deep in our engagement envelope and one of the ships couldn’t jump out fast enough.  On Kaff II General Cairngorm finally arrives together with his fresh new army to take control of the Almandian ground forces. The Raas have spent most of the last cycle trying to convince the liberators to give up and desert. Only when new intelligence arrives on the ground via a secret imperial hypershunt does this inactivity change: A new Silicoid-army is due to arrive soon. After learning of the new army coming to Kaff II, Traitor-Silicoid General Grimrock convinces his captors to prepare new defensive lines. He knows the time is too short to prepare an all-out attack before the reinforcements arrive. And trying to stop the brunt of the attack at the old lines, well-known by Silicoid reconnaissance, means inviting disaster. But the Raas defenders are unwilling to trust a Silicoid too far, so most of the defending forces are still digging in at the old lines. The local commanders are suspecting a trap. General Cairngorm meanwhile lands together with his mixed army of Raas and Silicoid soldiers and starts to organize a general offensive to take the fight back to the enemy. Just as the defenders finish extending their defensive lines, all preparations for the attack are complete. When multiple divisions of mobile infantry rush towards their lines, the Raas man their lines and open fire. But the attack turns out to be a feint: As soon as the massive fire tears into the Almandian lines, the ponderously slow Silicoid crystal spiders turn around and walk out of range. There are losses, but not as high as the Raas expected. While the feint is executed, the catastrophe foreseen by General Grimrock strikes: During the last months, Almandian troops have used the old ruins of a mining installation destroyed by the war to slowly transfer troops and material deep into the planetary crust under the defensive lines. Only weeks before the offensive was launched, General Cairngorm ordered the hidden units to slowly work their way upwards, using mining equipment repaired and retooled for stealth. Helped by the still extensive network of mining tunnels, the hidden units succeeded in reaching the surface without detection. The very moment the soldiers of the Dila Empire cheer because they think the Almandian assault has faltered, infantry and crystal spiders carrying even more of their enemy show up from seemingly nowhere. The Raas-commanders act fast and the Dilarian soldiers throw themselves at the threat in their backs. Fierce fighting rages for hours and for a moment it looks like Cairngorm’s gambit has failed: The Silicoid troops are slowly thrown back to the entrances of the mining tunnels they came from. But the main army has used the distraction well: After the hidden force signaled the start of their attack, the massive force of Silicoid infantry immediately turned back and marched to the Raas’ defensive lines. Caught between both forces, the Raas can not bring enough firepower to bear to stop either of them. In desperation, some commanders remember the new defensive lines further back and attempt to break out of the trap forming around them. Most of them don’t make it. The later so-called Battle of the Mines ends as one of the greatest military disasters in the entire history of the Dila Empire. The mangled survivors finally reach the new defensive lines and dig in. But for everyone one fact is clear: Without more reinforcements, the planet will be lost to the Kingdom of Almandin soon. Traitor-General Grimrock, now exonerated, is freed and instated as commander of the Raas-defenders by order of the Dilarian government. New, fresh troops are promised to relieve the colony.  Turn 145 brings mostly good news again: Our colonization program results in one of our empty backwater planets being colonized and our fresh troops on Kaff II kicked the Raas back to where dinosaurs belong: A large coffin labeled extinction. The campaign isn’t over yet, though!  Even the spies of our two empires are fighting with the utmost dedication: Our agents kill a Raas-spy, but another one is already at work undermining our research computers, leading to a loss of research points.  It’s getting to the point where I don’t want to control planets directly, but to not give the braindead AI any chances to gently caress up, I like to prepare a colony by planning all DEAs and the first batch of civilian and military projects in advance. Sooner or later there will be enough planets I’ll forget even this, but for that there’s the spreadsheet of suggestions for the AI I made. (See the first updates of the LP) Anyway, Seginus I’s future is now secured. The spreadsheet isn’t idiot-proof, but it will give the AI at least a guideline to prevent it from loving up too badly. I can only suggest to everyone wanting to play this game to start with making this spreadsheet instead of waiting for too long. Just put down some reasonable things like FOOD PLANETS SHOULD BUILD FOOD and you’re safe. The tertiary priority in that sheet forces the AI to build at least one DEA like that, so if you want a planet to have a working government or at least one recreation zone and things like that, the tertiary priority helps you out. Secondary and Primary are the things you actually want, like industry on an industrial center or defenses on a border world. Just make sure you don’t gently caress this up, the AI will read and execute orders like MINERAL POOR DEATH WORLD PRIMARY: MINING quite literally.  Verminaard, a new assassin! And a good one! Hopefully he will help protect our leaders from enemy assassinations. He is also our first Raas-spy. And with our growing non-Raas population, he won’t be the last. He is also better than almost all of our Silicoid-spies. I’m now speculating the AI may have put some extra points into espionage at race creation to get better spies than the Raas normally have. There’s no way to look up race stats other than ourselves in a running game, though. So this question will never be answered.  I’m not satisfied with the number of ships deployed right now and the king isn’t either, so it’s decided by ACC to create another fast response force. Five of our fast long-range light cruisers and three of our Rock -> Flesh PD frigates are called upon and begin training. A new task force is soon created.  Thanks to looking up our neighbors’ research, I found out our allies still have a useful tech we don’t have: Verschmutzungsprozessor / Pollution Processing Facility. It helps reduce pollution and our tech tree didn’t roll it. Here I’m trying to trick the AI into giving it to me in exchange for some random garbage of similar tech levels.  The combat phase this time ends predictable. Our scout on the other side of Klackon space runs into a new people, but no combat takes place. The Raas have lost enough times in a row now the combat against their planets in Kaff and Amoenta are all auto-wins. There’s nothing left to defend their worlds for now.  With most of the population either dead or evacuated, our bombardment tries to hit the remaining combat units. Sadly Silicoid aim is as bad as Russian aim. Somehow every weapon firing at a military target hits a hospital instead.  Something similar happens to Amoenta V, with the difference that our slightly older units here are doing slightly less damage every time.  On Kaff II, the promised reinforcements have arrived: Now the defenders have almost numerical parity to General Cairngorm’s forces. General Cairngorm loses no time and tries to use his still superior forces to encircle the Dilarian army to end the war. But Traitor-General Grimrock moves his Raas assault-troops strategically to stymie the advance of the Silicoid forces. Heavy fighting follows.  Several times Silicoid mobile infantry tries to avoid the nimble Raas assault units to move behind enemy lines, but every time the assault soldiers change their positions and stop their advance again. When both sides start to run out of supplies, the Silicoid offensive comes to a grinding halt. The losses on both side are heavy, but the morale situation has reversed itself: The royal army is still in high spirits thanks to General Cairngorm’s reorganization efforts and the earlier easy victories after the last landing. The Raas of the imperial army however are dismayed: They’re exhausted by the long fighting, and the soldiers still feel overwhelmed from barely turning away the last Silicoid-offensive. Even worse, they have been promised easy victories, thanks to the defector general leading them. But there are no easy victories. The Raas in their trenches now trade dark rumors over General Grimrock’s true goals…  Galactic cycle 219 starts with good news for the Kingdom: A spy of the Dila Empire gets shot.  Meanwhile, our scouting efforts on the other side of the Orion Sector continue: The Fahd-system has only one planet, colonized by the Kairenieo Empire. This star nation was founded by the Eoladi, the second gas giant dweller race. They tend to be peaceful, so they’re not a threat. Except in games where you want to achieve a diplomatic victory. But Silicoids trying for a diplomatic victory is a ludicrous enough idea I switched this victory condition off before we even started, so we can stay friendly to the Eoladi for a while.  Bad news from our Klackon-border: The ships of the Vchiitri Empire grow ever more numerous and the Soriane have lost another planet. Now only a single Psilon-planet is left before the Klackons can concentrate on us.  Our allies have ignored my half-assed exchange offer and instead they offer a new, improved trade treaty of their own. I shrug and accept. More money is always good.  Back to military matters: This turn the last ships for my planned light carrier task force have rolled into our reserves and the 7th Fast Response Force is ready for action. The small frigate-sized Opal carriers at the core are protected by three Kiesel-class corvettes escorting them.  The other force I made last time is already moving to Nilus, so I’m sending the light carrier TF after them.  After the endless fighting over Deanton I don’t trust our soldiers to this the quick and easy way, so I threw together yet another army and launch their transports towards Kaff. This is the last army Kaff will get. If the Raas somehow destroy all ground forces in Kaff, I’ll just bomb all their planets there to rubble and be done with it.  Either way, I can’t wait for the moment the Kaff-system is secured, because this will mean those stupid little suicide runs against Deanton will stop.  After wasting those unlucky troop transports, my fighters move in towards the honest-to-god warship squadron the Raas somehow remembered to bring with them. The enemy squadron shows up so far away from the transports I'm speculating some Raas officer in the fleet must have messed up jump egress somehow.  But just after we blow up two of their four ships, the survivors jump out. Boo! Battles like this one are a constant reminder to make sure your transports will only arrive after enemy space craft are cleared out. Still, seeing the transports drop into our laps while the enemy combat ships entered from god-knows-where was kind of funny.  When the news from another catastrophic defeat in space reaches Kaff II, the morale of the Raas troops falls even further. General Grimrock does his best, but it is an uphill battle. As a traitor he isn’t trusted very well by his soldiers and to make matters worse, he never was a particular good general in the first place. General Cairngorm renews the offensive right after resupply is finished. The Dilarian fleet on the other hand has not been able to send the amount of supply needed for continued fighting through the royal blockade. The effect is painfully obvious: As soon as the Silicoid army makes its first break-through attempt, the defenders crumple like wet paper. After a couple months of heavy fighting, the Raas are thrown back to a group of small mining towns close to the planetary north pole. Nearly a third of their number have become casualties. The constant fighting killed a lot of Silicoids, too. But Cairngorm’s army is still in good order, while the distraught Raas are surrendering in their thousands. The royal army takes one Dilarian stronghold after another without firing a shot. Finally, the last troops lay down their arms and surrender. Kaff II has fallen. Days after the capitulation some random soldiers stumble over a small pile of glowing rocks. Their environment suits warn them of heavy radiation and they step back and call for help immediately. The investigation reveals the pile of rocks to be all what is left of General Grimrock. After the final surrender, Grimrock silently left the surrendering Raas behind and decided to end his life. As old, proud Silicoid he committed suicide in the most traditional way possible: By chiseling open his body and depositing a micro-nuke into it. No-one noticed another random explosion during a time when the defenders were busy destroying all their ammunition and weapons before the surrender could take effect. Next: Obsolete All Ships
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Oct 15, 2016 15:57
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So wait, I'm forgetting. The Raas are better soldiers than us, one for one. And they're better spies than us, one for one. What are we actually better at than them? Ignoring unhappiness and not needing organic food?
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Oct 15, 2016 17:37
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PurpleXVI posted:So wait, I'm forgetting. The Raas are better soldiers than us, one for one. And they're better spies than us, one for one. What are we actually better at than them? Ignoring unhappiness and not needing organic food? Thanks to what I did at race creation our Silicoids are awesome at research. And I made sure to amass enough bonuses to give them the most robot- and automatization techs possible in their tech tree. They're also incredibly good at mining and good at industry (not incredibly good because at some point my min-maxing ran out of points, but it's still quite good. Especially with the additional automatization techs to boost industry.). Having better soldiers isn't that great in a game were you can a) take over other races to make them fight for you and b) just bomb everything. The devs and modders both realized this, so the amount of points you can get by making your ground troops worse is not that much, actually. In this case Silicoids are already bad at ground fighting so I didn't waste points on making them slightly less bad. We're also bad at diplomacy and only mediocre at trading and economy. Our population is by nature a pessimistic, gloomy bunch of highly individualistic utopians by the way. They just love seeing everything in the worst possible way, but they still have hope things may get better in the future! An Utopian society gives mostly bonuses to research, since people in an utopian society always strive to make things better, read and write a lot of science fiction and so on. The rest makes it slightly easier to find spies since people always expects the worst from their neighbours and unrest racks up incredibly fast. (Basically I was abusing the fact Silicoids are kind of hard to force into open revolt. I once tried a similar setup with humans and I was well into yellow unrest levels pretty drat fast: Strikes and unrest everywhere.)
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Oct 15, 2016 17:53
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For those who can't remember what our Silicoids are good at, here's the link to the update we spend on race creation.
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Oct 15, 2016 18:05
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So presumably we can just make a bunch of farming-heavy Raas planets that do nothing but provide us with soldiers, while our Silicoid planets do all the sciencing and shipbuilding. But is it possible to replace our diplomatic corps with Raas? Or is that the one racial bonus we can't find a way to steal?
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Oct 15, 2016 20:12
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PurpleXVI posted:So presumably we can just make a bunch of farming-heavy Raas planets that do nothing but provide us with soldiers, while our Silicoid planets do all the sciencing and shipbuilding. But is it possible to replace our diplomatic corps with Raas? Or is that the one racial bonus we can't find a way to steal? Diplomacy is strictly empire-based, sadly. Foreign population generates nothing tied to diplomacy, so diplomacy can only be made better with technologies we research. Otherwise it will forever be what was chosen at race creation, even if we somehow end up replacing everyone in our empire with Imsaies or Humans. Spy generation however is tied to imperial population, this is why we got our first Non-Silicoid spy. Besides, recently I've noticed when using one of our own spies offensively, he immediately got similar results then the Raas have gotten, so maybe spy results are just heavily skewed towards attacking? Ironically, in vanilla Master of Orion 3 you won't get as many spy-related events, so espionage is a lot more boring. Most likely that's the result of a simple fact: It's easier to defend against spies if spies have more results ending in nothing happening! As if vanilla wasn't easy enough already...
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Oct 15, 2016 20:27
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Basically ground strength doesn't matter because you tend to end up bombing them into dust anyway, and if you don't you can just build 3 times as many armies.
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Oct 15, 2016 20:52
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Yay for the successful conquest of another planet! Good luck with the slow meatgrinder of the dinos and pillaging them system by system. Good luck wiht establishing forward lines and grinding them out. How much of the Raas industrial core do you think is left? As they don't seem to be sending out thier fleet in force which could mean they have a ton of ships and are just sending out small transport detatchments or havea huge reserve because AI.
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Oct 16, 2016 05:49
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I think Deaton should be renamed something... Extinctiony. Igneous perhapse? Fire, volcanoes. All great!
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Oct 16, 2016 06:45
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wedgekree posted:Yay for the successful conquest of another planet! Good luck with the slow meatgrinder of the dinos and pillaging them system by system. Good luck wiht establishing forward lines and grinding them out. How much of the Raas industrial core do you think is left? As they don't seem to be sending out thier fleet in force which could mean they have a ton of ships and are just sending out small transport detatchments or havea huge reserve because AI. In an earlier update I talked about this, essentially I'm gaming the AI here because I know how it reacts: The Raas AI will only start making larger fleets again if I leave it alone. As long as I press ahead and threaten their worlds directly, they'll throw their ships at me as fast as they can, without rhyme or reason. Industry of enemies is hard to gauge in this game. When scouting I can see population levels and defenses, but not what is actually built on the planet. At best you can make educated guesses, like when you look at a small mineral rich world you can probably tell it's not a huge center of ship production. So far the Raas seem to replace every highly advanced planet we take/reduce to rubble with 1-2 new colonies. This is of course not sustainable. This strategy is perfect to annoy a player, but also perfect to lose while giving your enemy planet after planet after planet. Anyway, the Raas are now pretty much contained and new fleets will probably be deployed to push the Klackons back in a couple updates. The Vchiitri Empire has reduced the Psilons in Tali to a single planet and they indeed have a tons of ships.
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Oct 16, 2016 11:15
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Oh, I forgot to mention I'm still one update behind before I can include naming suggestions, so expect one last massive post today! After that I'm playing a new session so I can be multiple updates behind again. 
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Oct 16, 2016 14:01
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 41: Obsolete All Ships Yeah, it’s this time of the year again: We have collected enough upgrades for our designs to make it necessary to throw everything out and make some new designs. Also, I’ve noted all your naming suggestions so far, great work! With this update ends the current session and I’ll start to integrate some of your names next time. For now it looks like “JustGniess” and “DinoBores” will be the new names of the Deanton- and Kaff-systems. Simply because those two suggestions got more than one vote!  In the last combat phase we bombed Kaff VII and Amoenta V and General Cairngorm liberated Kaff II. Surprisingly fast, even! There’s rumors going through the ranks about a promotion for out plucky little rock commander, but only time will tell if the rumors are true!  As always, losing massively means the Raas resort to atrocities. A terrorist-strike destroys an automated factory on Beta Caeli II! At least this time there is no loss of life, but production on the planet will suffer until the factory is rebuild.  Welp, Kaff II is ours now. Since we captured it during combat phase, the planet has spent zero turns as a part of the Kingdom and it shows: The Raas are still uppity and the planet is still unconnected to our trading network. Next turn the famine will end with the arrival of more food and ironically around the same time the Raas will have mellowed out a bit and start producing more food on planet anyway. One side effect of people refusing to work is starvation, since they are also refusing to work in agricultural DEAs, which means nothing to eat for them. Luckily even the worst fascists are forced by game mechanics to supply the population, even enslaved people get food as long as a planet isn’t blockaded.  With this, the Kaff-system is (mostly) ours! Two bombed-out colonies are left, but will soon be visited by our colony-ships and will turn to our side without any more need for armies. Even better: Now the Dila Empire can’t send ships to Deanton anymore, since the mobilization center in Kaff fell into our hands when we took Kaff II (it also got automatically destroyed so we have built our own instead, no shortcuts for us). This means all ships waiting in Deanton (soon to be renamed) can now move forward. Finally Deanton has stopped being a frontline system. From now on, the Raas will mindlessly assault Kaff instead.  There are also some more light units on their way to Nilus, so we can move the units in Nilus one step further to reinforce the squadrons in Gryphon. Soon Amoenta will be dealt with and the entire line of star lanes between Kaffa and Gryphon will be safe from sudden attacks.  With the 3 colonies in Kaff and the other ones falling in Amoenta, we have cut a sizable part out of the Dila Empire and this success comes just in time: The Klackons have taken another Psilon-planet. Only one is left in the Tali-system. After that, us.  Oops! Likes one of our scouts found another one of the dreaded Antaran Guardians. Good to know, but we’re still not ready to face one yet. At least it explains why the Raas never colonized this system.  So, the guardian was the Guardian of the Bulrathi. Interesting. I think the other one we found earlier was the Mrrshan-guardian.  And in the Kaff-system, one of our remaining problems solves itself: The colony on Kaff VII is wiped out. The remaining Raas-ground troops will now commit ritual suicide, as all troops trapped on a dead colony will do.  Gryphon is colonized! The Raas-territory is now effectively split into multiple parts and we will reduce them one by one.  Another army has landed on Amoenta IV! Hopefully this liberation effort goes better then the last one. For the Raas’ sake  Turn 149 sees some more enemy spy activity: A cultural district exchange building on Seginus II has been destroyed. A vile act killing many innocent citizens. Another spy is spreading false information and rumors across the empire.  gently caress it, now the Raas are really getting on my nerves. Time to use one of our spies on them, just to see what happens. Agent Heimta has a dagger-attribute of 7 (high) and a mantle-attribute of 10 (even higher). This should make him good at hiding and still make him do some damage. I played with the idea of sending Verminaard, our Raas-spy instead, but he is better at attacking than at hiding, so he stays behind in defense mode instead. Also I'm not sure assassination attempts against computer enemies will even do anything besides making them angrier.  Some more old ships come out of transit and get scrapped.  Magnetfeldmodifikation / Magnetic Field Modification is one of those weird words which are almost the same in both German and English. It’s also a new tech to make terraforming easier: Costs are reduced and we can terraform another class upwards. All thanks to manipulating planetary magnetic fields to control the flow of the solar wind! Aren’t we awesome?  The Wohnungsmetroplex / Apartment Metro Plex is a tech allowing our planets to install giant apartment complexes in every DEA. This raises the regional population by 1. Not much, but with similar upgrades it slowly makes it possible to stuff more and more rocks into our planets. Err, living rocks, I mean.  Kampfcomputer / Battle Computer: An upgrade to our fighters. With new and updated computers our fighters gain a 50% accuracy bonus and enemy ECM is 25% less effective. The lore text basically describes fighter computers with things like HUDs and other completely standard things. Since I don’t think space fighters will be flown like WWII-fighters, this is another technology which raises certain questions here. I'm fairly sure our fighters had battle computers already, just less advanced ones. Just think “upgrades” and try to ignore how the lore text implies our fighters were flown on instincts and eyesight, since that would be terrible. (Especially with Silicoids, who don’t even have eyes!) More important, Battle Computers fucks up my planned re-design because it’s an incredible important technology for carriers. If we don’t want to spend 9 turns producing immediately obsolete carriers, this means we have to wait 9 more turns before we can redesign everything using fighters. poo poo like this is normally the reason why I tend to wait and “collect” multiple new technologies and then blanket-redesign instead of trying to keep everything up to date manually. That’s another way that Master of Orion III can introduce madness. There’ll always be one or more techs in the pipeline forcing an update somewhere. Playing this game means learning which techs should make you update designs immediately and which ones aren’t important enough and can be pushed back until you can include them organically with the next wave of important tech.  Our colonization-program has been revived with great success: New colonies are growing in Bungula-B. Sadly the AI has trouble targeting Vela (possibly because there is no star lane leading to it), so I had to manually target colony ships to get them there.  A single division of the Dilarian fleet visits us in Kaff and blows up. Business as usual.  Something I haven’t mentioned yet, every time the game calculates a turn it shows nice pictures. The vanilla game has a set of waiting pictures so bland I can’t for the life of me remember any of them. The Ultima Orion mod includes a bunch of nice fan art however, which makes the inevitable waiting time during endgame a lot easier to swallow. At the moment a player has to wait generally less then 30 seconds before the game turns, but late in the game it can easily get long enough to go out the door and buy some ice cream nearby or something. Vanilla MO3 had a bug which slowly filled up your RAM due to a leak, which meant truly atrocious turn times after a while. You could either play MO3 1-2 hours and suffer through normal waiting time, or play it for longer and reach truly obnoxious levels of wasting your time: Once I timed one calculation period after the 400th turn out of sheer boredom and it was nearly 40 minutes. This was without the nice pictures, by the way. This bug is fixed in this version though. So less suffering for me!  Our combined Raas/Silicoid-force on Amoenta IV slowly trudges onwards, gaining another region. Both sides have some losses, but not high enough to decide the ground war. The fighting continues.  Turn 150! And it looks like I was wrong, our army took two regions, not one! Determining progress by looking at an abstract graphic doesn’t always work out.  Terrorists are still busy exploding our civilian buildings, but we have started to strike back: Agent Heimta has breached the Dilarian border and will soon make trouble among the Raas. Kaff II meanwhile is down to some slight unrest and will start working like a normal colony soon.  The new spy-messages remind me to look up how our other spies are doing. And boy, it’s good we’re not using more of our guys offensively: Some like Agent Drescher have glaring problems. Agent Drescher for example has a mantle-attribute of 1. This probably means if he ever tries to infiltrate another nation, he’ll just openly walk into the border control and answer to the question of what he’s doing here: “I’m a spy. I’m here to conduct espionage.” He’ll also sign everywhere with “Agent Drescher of the AIA. AIA stands for Almandin Information Agency.  The AI keeps trying to send colony ships to Bungula-B, but the planets in Vela are slightly better. Solution: Easy in this case, since Vela is a little bit further away and the ships have to take the route to Bungula-B anyway.  In preparation of the next great redesign I’m scrapping some more old ships. Otherwise I’d sooner or later start confusing which ones of our old designs are flying garbage and which ones are just “obsolete” thanks to a redesign-cleanup.  Total Deletion! Now we can start fresh. In case you’re asking, we’re close to getting miniaturized bridges, which would make it impossible to update older designs anyway, thanks to the way some new mod additions clash with the hardcoded programming. So keeping our old designs up to date would have ended in me having to do the same work twice.  Oh yeah, one of our new techs we haven’t used yet: Battlecruisers / Schlachtkreuzer! Originally battleships /Schlachtschiffe, but thanks to me messing with the game years ago, this hull size ended up being battlecruisers again. It made sense to me at the time. Anyway, this is the ShortRange BattleCruiser Rammstein! 8 spinal mounted inferno cannons with 1072 damage per salvo are a horrible threat to every ship they can get close to. Like battlecruisers in real life, this meant giving them nearly max engines for maximum speed. They also have cloaking fields to make it harder for the AI to target them. The Rammstein-class is a bit light on the point defense: There was only enough space left for 2 light neutron blaster turrets. Welp, that’s what escorts are there for.  A more sensible design is the LongRange BattleCruiser Saphire: This class has ten spinal mounted neutron blasters and twice the amount of point defense (still not much). This ships only does around 60% of the damage the Rammstein can do, but has 5000 galactic meters more range. In combat, that’s several precious seconds. Neutron blasters also still have their minor shield penetration ability, inferno cannons don't. I’ve added in a sensor system to aid in finding targets. Nothing is more annoying than situations where your long-range ship can only fire on short ranges because enemy task forces farther away keep disappearing under cloak.  Now here is an experiment: With the latest tech in missile warheads (already stolen by the Raas), we can now do comparative damage to our direct-fire ships. Still far below carrier-efficiency, but from now on our missile ships have stopped being dead weight. The Missile BattleCruiser Granite shoots out 5 class II missiles every salvo. When every (armored) missile hits, that’s 900 damage per ship. The Granite-class has only 3 refills for its launch tubes, since generally if something is still alive after three reloads, you’ve done something wrong. The armament is rounded up by four light neutron blaster mounts for fast and accurate fire against enemy missiles and fighters. There are also three light inferno cannon mounts for some added weight in an emergency. According to a secret report to Crystal Admiral Itacolumite, supreme commander of the Almandian Fleet during the Raas War, the Granite-class was a boondoggle created by several competing design bureaus trying to prove the validity of missile designs. The report stated that somehow, the planned light missile-based defense LAC has turned into two different types of massive battlecruisers. One of which wasn’t even a STL-design! Later historians called this design process “rather strange”.  Large, heavy ships also need good escorts: The Point Defense Cruiser Topaz III is basically just an updated version of our old Topaz-class cruisers. It’s just faster, has a cloaking field and some additional point defense missiles. Two launch tubes doesn’t sound like much, but every little bit helps. And there just wasn’t enough space left over for anything else. The Topaz III is blindingly fast, though: Perfect to protect our fast direct-fire ships.  Liberty isn’t dead yet! The Point Defense Destroyer Liberty gets a fourth version: Again basically the same, just with a cloak and better engines. It’s a size smaller and therefore cheaper than our Topaz III cruisers, but thanks to being the escort for our carriers and missile ships, it has not much in terms of engines. The additional space was used to give it nearly the same fire power than the Topaz III, minus the two additional launch tubes.  The Military Transport Ship Liberatio (should have been “Liberator”, but eh, typo) is our new modern way of transporting ground troops to the battlefield: Again I notice in hindsight it’s basically just an upgrade of our last design: Cloaked, faster FTL, slightly faster STL. IT also has the obligatory layered point defense: 4 light neutron blasters with higher range / accuracy and lower DPS, followed by 3 light inferno cannons with lower range / accuracy and higher DPS.  There are still empty planets to be colonized, so another colony ship had to be made: The Colony Ship Zyrcon is a little bit more min-maxed then our old design. Less fire power, a little bit faster. Also of course it has the new, improved Linear Vector Drive. Zyrcon-class ships will take a couple turns less to move around the galaxy.  This ship is just the STL-version of the Zyrcon. A hull size smaller, same amount of colonists thanks to more hull space and thanks to how the difference in hull sizes worked out I had some space left over to throw random junk in. So the SystemColonyShip Limestone has ECM, a cloak and two neutron blasters. None of which will ever be used. In hindsight all that poo poo would have been more sensible on the FTL-design, but I just wasn’t prepared to make our colony ships even larger than they already are. And going back from the large colony crystal to a standard-sized colony module would mean halving the initial population of a colony. Also not really a good thing.  The competing design bureaus of the Kingdom of Almandin created two massive battlecruisers armed with missiles to test out this weapon. This is the second one: The Light Attack Craft Mobile Base. This thing doesn’t even have a real name yet, since the design is untested. Basically, when I was thinking up on ways to use missiles, I thought back on my orbitals: Orbitals have even more space to cram poo poo in, but they have two major drawbacks. The first being restricted to a certain number of orbitals per planet /moon, which makes it possible to just overpower every stationary defense by bringing more ships. The second is their inability to move outside of real time combat. While you can give your space fortresses engines to move around a bit during combat, they can’t actually move between planets strategically. Only ships can. So if you want to engage a large invasion fleet, you either have to fall back to a heavily fortified planet and hope the enemy will attack you there, or you will have to assault him without your massive forts in the back. Then there’s the thing where space forts are generally really expensive and remember: You can’t refit them. Ever. So if they’re outdated, you have to recycle them and build completely new ones. Sure, the same applies to ships, but for orbitals it’s just another kick in the nuts. Another point is, right now none of our enemies seems capable of actually invading us, so building huge star forts is an enormous waste of resources. Leaving our defense solely to starships is a thing I want to avoid too, though. What’s left? Mobile bases! This concept revolves around building a couple massive slower-than-light capital ships in central systems and aiding them with a swarm of smaller STL-vessels. This way we won’t spend money on forts obsoleted into oblivion before they ever see combat, but will still have a defensive force capable of slaughtering every invader. The LAC Mobile Base is the first design for this new defense concept: It can move in-between turns to always defend whichever planet is attacked, it can intercept enemy fleets even if they stay away from the planets and it has a firepower almost as massive as our forts: 8 class II launch tubes for neutron shock missiles can do tons of damage. Since I had more space to work with, I added some more ammunition, so this time around the ship can spew out five salvoes before running out of steam. It also has tons of electronic: Sensors, cloaks, ECM. All because the ships is basically the command center for solar system defense. Oh and it was still enough free space left over for 8 light mounts for point defense. The sad thing is, before this monster sees combat we first need an enemy who can fight. Since the war against the Raas will take a while, I plan on setting some of them up in Cokanuk and hope for the Klackons to invade. Otherwise, they would be total overkill.  In times when more and more fighter- and missile defense like armor and shields become commonplace in the Orion Sector, even the eight point defense guns of the LAC MB may not be enough, so here is the LAC Katzengold, a system defense frigate to serve as an escort. It’s basically a smaller Topaz III without FTL-drive. Which only shows how much space is freed up if you don’t have to design a ship with the stresses of FTL-travel in mind. Not having to cram giant hyperspace-generators and poo poo into the hull helps too, of course. So we can get a ship two hull sizes smaller and fill it up with the same poo poo. Well, almost: Since the frigate doesn’t have to be fast, I exchanged engine space with space for ECCM.  Now it’s getting complicated. See, after designing that monster missile ship a while ago I thought to myself: “And what should I do to defend less important systems?” After all, even when reduced from a titanic orbital to a giant battlecruiser, that’s still a lot of resources being spend. And our LAC escorts aren’t worth much without the heavy guys sitting around with them. So I designed another series of truly “light” attack craft. The LAC Dirt is a fast scout to help a system task force find targets. It’s an intermediate design, meant to work with both “mobile base”-type task forces and lighter forces for less important systems. The thing is, the AI likes to mix fast and slow system ships with wild abandon. Sometimes the AI thinks of making a new task force for wildly different ships, sometimes they don’t and you get this huge blob of ships, only half of which are meant to be in the same task force. My way of trying to solve this problem is by making two different line of ships, not meant to be in the same system together. The AI will of course try to gently caress me over with this with its love of building the cheapest ships available, but I’ll try my best to keep to this basic plan: Important systems will get some battlecruiser-sized system ships as a backbone and a swarm of escorts to help keeping them alive. Less important backwaters will get swarms of cheap, fast ships to keep enemy raiders out. Bonus: Light, cheap ships are what the AI prefers so I don’t even have to think about AI-controlled planets away from the frontlines anymore. Double-bonus: More ships reduce the unrest-effect from piracy, which is great news to our new, less unrest-resistant dinosaur people. Triple-bonus: All the small ships are really small and really cheap!  Based on this new defense plan, the new light system ship for defense is the LAC Silver, a Lancer hull sized little space needle. It has some defense and a single spinal mounted neutron blaster. In our less important systems, little swarms of these ships will close with enemy raiders and then blow holes into them. Everything capable of dealing with those little sharks would be a full-grown invasion and if tiny Lancers are the only thing standing in their way I would have done something terribly wrong anyway. Otherwise, they’re a nice defense boost for systems I don’t care about. Also if you can read German, you’ll notice I accidentally made this ship a point defense design and had to start over since you can’t change a ship’s job after the design is complete.  After redoing my tiny ship design, I went ahead and actually made a tiny point defense vessel on purpose this time: The LAC Copper is a Silver-class Lancer with its spinal mount ripped out and replaced by two light mounts. Less range and damage, but the faster firing makes the ship good as point defense. If all works well, the AI will build both Silver and Copper LACs in huge amounts while I’m not looking and every dumb scout or enemy colonizer trying to sneak through our borders will get a nasty little surprise.  After this massive effort our entire reserve now looks worthless. A troubling sight for everyone not intimately familiar with how the game works. Also, in 8 turns from this point on I have to remember not to forget our carrier-designs. Oh, and when writing this I suddenly remembered I completely forgot to make fast, light FTL-designs. All our new FTL-combat ships are heavy capital ships and escorts. I leave the decision to you: Should I also make smaller, lighter versions of our capital ships? And if you want me to build some mobile light forces, should I design additional tiny escorts for them or just use our normal sized ones? Bonus question for avid readers: In this update I made a grave error leading to a lot of headache later in one of the following updates. Can you identify it? Next: Oddly Layered Research
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Oct 16, 2016 16:16
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Was your mistake to leave anything to the AI at all? Speaking of terraforming, is that something the AI automatically does? Or do you have to pester it to de-hellhole your various planets?
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Oct 16, 2016 17:37
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PurpleXVI posted:Was your mistake to leave anything to the AI at all? I'm hoping it involves making more and more of those adorable little defense ships, which I suggest we refer to in aggregate as "the calculi".
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Oct 16, 2016 17:41
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Im trying to remember why I loved this game so much when it came out. All I can think of is "fighter swarms"
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Oct 16, 2016 19:06
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It was in the previous update so I can't be bothered to go up and quote but with regards to the theft of useless lovely tech; are there any examples in games where you generate negative research techs? Stuff that is a pure or maybe conditional negative to have? The nearest example I can think of is in Civ II where Communism was a total bust in that it negatively affects some of your happiness buildings just by researching it (I think).
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Oct 16, 2016 20:31
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PurpleXVI posted:Was your mistake to leave anything to the AI at all? Doing everything yourself is the path to madness. The planetary budget automatically assigns some % of output to terraforming. Which pushes the planet towards the centre. No idea how it works for planets with multiple species though. Given this is MOO3 - POORLY is probably the answer.
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Oct 16, 2016 22:54
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Considering the experience of capturing them, please name either the Kaff or Deanton System Verdune. (It's actually a sand pun, but what is sand if not billions of tiny rocks?)
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Oct 17, 2016 00:44
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