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I'm so sorry Libliuni. Take all the time you need to recover. Losing a pet is bad enough without having to do the lovely work of burial, insurance etc. Stay safe and happy 
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May 18, 2020 17:26
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I'm sorry, It's hard to say goodbye to a beloved pet.
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May 18, 2020 17:44
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RIP cat.
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May 18, 2020 21:46
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Mein Beileid. Especially losing some moral support in times like these must really suck. Take care of yourself.
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May 18, 2020 22:39
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I'm sorry to hear it, Lib, when you've had a pet for any amount of time they soon become a part of your family and losing them is never easy. Take the time you need.
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May 18, 2020 22:50
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Losing a pet is never easy; I'm sorry that you have to go through this.
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May 18, 2020 23:39
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Take care Libluini. The time the two of you had was precious, for both you and her. You were there for her in the beginning and the end, and both lives were the better for it.
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May 19, 2020 20:55
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I'm so sorry for your loss. You had her her entire life. And she had you.
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May 20, 2020 04:48
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For whatever it may be worth, you have my condolences as well. Take all the time you need.
I can have moments of... eccentricity and sometimes be quite curious about things. Please forgive me if I do something foolish or rude.
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May 27, 2020 12:29
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 114: The War against XEOL XI OK, losing my cat hurt like mad, but now I've been feeling better. Mostly by distracting myself with being productive and poo poo, to prevent me being a sad sack lying around in bed all day. Which wasn't easy, thanks to the ongoing Corona-furlough of our company forcing me to only work 50% of the month! But now enough of this oversharing, the gist of this means I finally felt good enough to try and fail at being funny again, so here's the next update:  This update starts with another battle between Almandin and XEOL in Neaux. The Cynoids manage to destroy our last-minute long-range task force. All those plasma battlecruisers, gone. Like dust in space.  The enemy is formidable: Not only lots of carriers, but artillery ships worthy of the name: 87k damage per task force is a lot, even for us. Our plasma cruiser task force had about half of that. And while this one will shortly run out of ammo, it still lasted 6 out of 7,5 minutes. We’ll have to rethink our own designs in the future to match this raw output.  Our own in-direct fire ships easily deal with the enemy fighters and missiles.  The rest of the battle derails into fighters of both sides endlessly dueling each other. A stalemate. If this poo poo continues, we may have a problem here. The Cynoid Siege of Neaux continues.  Yeah, I think I need to approach MO3 more like a David Weber novel. In this game, the power of the task force is God and smaller ships may be faster and cheaper to built, but as you saw that doesn’t matter if a hail of missiles and fighters blows them up before they can even do anything. At this point, PD and recon ships are basically the only ships besides exotics like transports and colonizers you should build smaller than your maximum designs. As I’m slowly re-learning now.  The same combat phase sees another battle for the control of Yed. Again, we learn the lesson that direct-fire ships are basically obsolete now. First, enemy direct-fire task forces blow up.  Or not? Some cheeky bastards swing around to our carriers.  Never mind, they blow up too. On the left, our own direct-fire ships follow the enemy’s example.  A bit of bad luck: While our own fighters are caught in multiple fighter clouds duking it out, another strike reaches our carriers. Our carriers don’t like it.  Eventually, we deal with it and do the same to an enemy task force. Irritatingly, I just now notice I had one of my own carrier tfs selected the entire time. I think the enemy task force was missile-based?  Uh oh, looks like the enemy task force survived somehow.  We try again.  I finally remember to click on the enemy task force. It was a carrier force. And about half as strong as one of ours. And yet they still survived two strikes! Looks like by just bringing an awful lot of carriers, the Cynoids managed to negate their tech-disadvantage.  Seeing all those fighters bearing down on the Silicoid-fleet almost makes me panic, but I keep the fight running. After a few tense seconds, the timer running out saves us. The Cynoids couldn’t buzz-saw their way through our own defenses fast enough.  The end results for this phase: 32 Almandian ships against 1 XEOL ships in Neaux, 31 Almandian ships against 99 XEOL ships in Yed. Not bad. For a clown, at the circus. Well, poo poo.  GC 609. Due to some kind of comedic string of misunderstandings, a Tachidi-espionage hacker from the Dzazatar Empire is misidentified as a Klackon terrorist and shot, while at the same time a Human spy is captured and interrogated because they were caught trying to infiltrate government computers on the capital. But it turns out the Human spy had nothing to do with that, and the leads of the Tachidi-spy also turn up empty. When the AIA finally realizes that there had been an unknown third spy, it’s too late to stop them. A bomb detonates during an important economic conference on Alchiba III, killing hundreds of sapient beings.  And while all this important Silicoid history (definitely not fan fiction!) is going down, we’re raising another bunch of armadas and send them over to Yed. Yed still has no mobilization center, so we’re just have to hope our fleet over there survives another turn.  At least the Cynoids have to raise more task forces, too. Wait a minute, that means more modern enemy ships! That’s not good! Not good at all!  Funny story: So, while I was mobilizing all those new fleet units, I kept slowly using up our stash of point defense ships. And while there were a lot of those, eventually our AI finished all the ones they had been building when I made our last design obsolete, and then we used up all of them. The newer design, the Point Defense Cruiser Shatter, is basically identical (just slightly more powerful) to the old design. Just you know, not obsolete so the AI will start building them in huge numbers.  A good time to clean up the mess in our reserves: As both our older and newer Inferno-class battlecruisers have been falling far behind the expectations of Almandin Fleet Command, all the ships left in our reserves are scrapped. All 56 of them. Likewise the older 75 missile battlecruisers. Our newer Zircon II battlecruisers are still modern enough to escape the clean-up. This time.  Next combat phase. I’m not in the mood for lengthy battles this time, so I try auto-combat.  Filled up with multiple new carrier and missile task forces, even the AI can’t do much wrong in Neaux, the Cynoids are defeated. In Yed, the battle ends in a stalemate with zero losses. Basically just fighters dunking on each other, I guess.  Turn 407. What happened last cycle lead to a re-organization of the AIA. And it helped! First a Meklar-spy is gunned down with special anti-AI ion weapons when trying to lay a bomb, then later in the same cycle a bumbling assassin gets caught just after killing a Dismay-Droid 500 DHV that was impersonating an ancient Silicoid entertainer. Under interrogation the AIA learns of a vile plot to collect Raas-children and feed them to giant insects. The plot is stopped, the Klackon-agent from the Vchiitri Empire who was responsible rather commits suicide than surrendering.  The Modern Education Institution is a unification of several different education practices and technologies. Education is power! And it truly is! Educating your citizens better gives every planet building a MEI +30% to food production, research, mining and industry. Considering we have 180+ planets right now, that adds up fast.  The front lines! In Neaux, a small force still pretends they’re attacking us. Small fry. Nothing at all changed in Yed. Both fleets are silently glowering at each other.  Our reserves get another round of cuts. By the way, you’re probably wondering what we got back from all those ships we scrapped last time?  Our current finances. It’s interesting to see how cheap our spies are (just 213 Antaran Units, even with all those spies cluttering up our dear AIA). Or to see that we keep making losses while getting slowly richer all the time. Trading with our allies nets us a nice 79k AU at least. And some of our planets (probably those I’ve took off AI-control and then forgot) got so rich they started sending money into the empire budget. Nice! Nothing. Nothing at all! But I have no idea if that’s even true! Please direct your eyes to Verlust/Losses diese Runde/this turn: 131k lost. But the money line at the very top claims our losses are actually 256k. And we have 2,9 million AU according to our budget sheet, and 2,7 million AU according to the overview-line at the top. Why? Who the gently caress knows!  Mr. Undermountain/German name of Bilbo’s undercover name is obviously a fan of ancient Human wordsmith Tolkien, but they’re also good at hiding (10) and rather competent at doing their thing (7). They’ll join our line of defense against enemy spies!  Next combat phase it’s time for some more waiting while the computer fights for me! Our new fleet units arrived, but the Cynoids also got reinforcements. The battle must be intense.  The AI at least isn’t worse than I am: Auto-battle loses two of our armadas, but also destroys almost, but not quite two of the Cynoid-fleet. Also, we scouted something somewhere, but who cares. We’re caught in a costly stalemate again! Against someone with eight times the number of ships we have! And can build ships faster than us! gently caress! If we can’t come up with a smarter way, we’ll have to bruteforce this by manually ordering ships on all of our 180+ planets to overwhelm the Cynoids with sheer numbers. After all, the Cynoids may be able to build ships faster, but not 2,25 times faster, so the brain-numbing manual control approach may work if nothing else will. Allied Dumbass-Decisions Counter Getting mad at us for beating their worst enemies: 1 Total: 1 Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + WIPED OUT (TF1) Expedition B1: 16 ships in position (TF2) Expedition B2: 7 ships in position (TF3) Expedition B3: 16 ships in position (TF4) Expedition B4: 32 ships in position (TF5) Expedition B5: 24 ships in position (TF6) Next: The War against XEOL XII
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Jun 8, 2020 19:24
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It's Underhill, and it was Frodo.  But seriously I'm enjoying this LP and your commitment to seeing this through is mind-boggling. 
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Jun 8, 2020 19:49
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So we discovered, once again, that carriers are the best choice. Were they ever not? Are there even any niches for other options? Or were we just playing with the other options for a while until carriers completely dominated the battlefield?
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Jun 8, 2020 20:07
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Mathwyn posted:It's Underhill, and it was Frodo. In German it is in fact Undermountain. Presumably because Unterhügel sounds dumber than Unterberg.
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Jun 9, 2020 04:58
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PurpleXVI posted:So we discovered, once again, that carriers are the best choice. Were they ever not? Are there even any niches for other options? Or were we just playing with the other options for a while until carriers completely dominated the battlefield? Carriers are on a curve: At the start of the game it's really hard to get strong enough carriers to compete with everything else (and missiles are even worse, thanks to limited ammo), then they slowly creep forward. Around the midgame you'll reach the point where direct-fire weapons are only good for PD or as limited support for your fleets. And then, eventually, you have reached the point we have now, with carrier task forces becoming so strong it's getting hard to even defend missiles as a good weapon, normal ships are essentially obsolete. The main reasons for this are simple: -Fighters infinitely respawn -The game eventually runs hard into the task force limit of ten: After a certain point, you can't add more carriers to keep up and then sneakily add some normal task forces as support, because after the enemy gets to 10 carrier TFs, there's nowhere left to go. -Fighters infinitely respawn The one drawback fighters have is their terminal uncontrollability: The larger your fighter clouds, the harder it gets to make the drat things do what you want. Sometimes they ignore huge fighter clouds coming your way for a suicide run on the enemy ships, then later they immediately stop everything they're doing to turn around and duel the enemy fighters. One thing they'll never do: Reliably obey orders. Missiles will always go to the task force you're targeting (except for anti-fighter/missile-missiles, of course) and your direct-fire weapon will always work reliably (either targeting the selected enemy task force, or pouring everything into enemy missiles and fighters closing in). Missiles can still work if you make sure the enemy is dead or the battle over by the time you run out of ammunition. The first thing is a gamble, the second thing may make your missile ships too weak to do enough damage. Enjoy your choice! One last thing: Even with just ten task forces per side, the game engine visibly starts choking after a while, since the carriers on each side spew a completely new wave of fighters into the ether every couple minutes. My personal theory is now that the modders experimented with task force sizes beyond 32 and it wasn't the ugly graphics stopping them, but the game engine croaking from all the fighters flooding the battlefields. 
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Jun 9, 2020 10:37
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Munin posted:In German it is in fact Undermountain. Presumably because Unterhügel sounds dumber than Unterberg. That I did not know, cheers! All hail the hobbit under the mountain. And in regards to carriers, they just seem straight broken. Is it possible to make the engine limit the number fighters a carrier can make? Or is hardcoded to be infinite?
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Jun 9, 2020 22:37
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Welcome to the eternal stalemate! ... Wait you've played MOO3 for ages, you know the pain all too well.
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Jun 10, 2020 04:19
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Mathwyn posted:That I did not know, cheers! All hail the hobbit under the mountain. The modders tried, but yeah, the fighters in MO3 just straight-up use a different system than the missiles, so an ammunition-like system is not possible. You can't even change the time between launches! What the modders could have done (and what I could do, right now) is using the patcher to reduce fighter-speed so they'll take longer to get anywhere. But that wouldn't remove their firepower and if you don't use carriers yourself, you still need to go where the enemy is. And their fighters. I suspect even if you make fighters super-slow, they'll just clump all over your carriers like an invincible cloud of doom and the game stalemates even harder.
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Jun 10, 2020 19:25
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ANd you can't use the modder to make the spawn times of fighters take longer? And just set it so they'd only get 3-4 waves by the max period a battle can take?
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Jun 14, 2020 05:31
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wedgekree posted:ANd you can't use the modder to make the spawn times of fighters take longer? And just set it so they'd only get 3-4 waves by the max period a battle can take? No, but I could make the battles shorter ("could have", as you can only do this at game set up), which comes with its own set of problems, like even more stalemates because battles can't be resolved in time. After thinking about this some more, I suddenly realized that both missiles and fighters actually seem to be using very similar code to do their thing, it's just that when missiles go through their possible states (launching - reloading - ready), they're using up ammunition. Carriers go through the same three states, just renamed (launching - refueling - ready). It seems like it was planned to add some kind of ammunition-factor later, but the programmers ran out of time. I'm not a programmer, but I'll bet in the source code the fighter code is just copy+pasted from the missile code, with the ammunition-parts commented out. But god knows how this works in detail, for all I know even if I somehow reverse-engineered the code, re-compiled the game after changing this poo poo, it could turn out both fighters and missiles reference the same code and changing fighter spawn timers could also influence missile spawn timers. Anyway, for some reason the modders found a way to change ship, fighter and missile speeds, because that is obviously not hard coded. But the time a carrier needs to go through all three states? That's something that can't be changed! Hell, I'm not entirely sure it should be changed: The game's code already sometimes feels like it's held together by duct tape, I'm always amazed at how much the modders changed the base game, and how much is hardcoded to just stay the gently caress the same.
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Jun 14, 2020 08:51
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Just a short update: Just in case the Lord of Low Taxes decides to spite-delete the forums, I've been scraping both my LP-threads and I still have all the screenshots and text files on my hard drives, anyway. Also after losing all my RPG-Maker XP poo poo, including an almost finished game many years ago thanks to a dying drive, I've moved all my important poo poo into the cloud to be extra-safe. I did the same thing with all my LP-crap, so regardless of what happens, I'll can probably restore the Let's Plays I made. Anyway, due to my company moving back and forth on how to organize our paid furlough, thinks have been exhausting at work. But I'm still writing new updates! Just very slowly. The next LP-update should be up Sunday/Monday.
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Jun 27, 2020 20:04
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Libluini, are you in the Lp discord or the Dominions discords? In case I need to hunt you down if there is a spite delete.
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Jun 27, 2020 21:29
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Donkringel posted:Libluini, are you in the Lp discord or the Dominions discords? In case I need to hunt you down if there is a spite delete. I'm on our "very official discord server", playing Dom5 with goons. Also I went overboard and joined like a bazillion other goon discords last week, so you'll probably see me sooner or later. One of the channels I joined was called the "LP Beach something something", if that's our LP-discord, I'm on there!
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Jun 27, 2020 21:42
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Libluini posted:I'm on our "very official discord server", playing Dom5 with goons. Also I went overboard and joined like a bazillion other goon discords last week, so you'll probably see me sooner or later. Sweet, yea I joined the Lp Beach discord, The Dark Id's and the Dominions discords. I'm on as Sponk though.
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Jun 27, 2020 21:51
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Welp, looks like the forum-crisis is averted for know. Time to torture myself some more! Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 115: The War against XEOL XII OK, we’re in a stalemate now. This time, we’ll need to start breaking it up or this run will only end the time the sun goes out.  First attempt: The Almandian fleet sends two new carrier formations into Yed, to replace our losses.  But we can’t forget the entire rest of the Orion Sector just for one war! So here we are, sending scouts into Klackon-space. The New Orions are still sitting in Dromos though. There’s a good chance they’ll immediately intercept our scouts. But hope springs eternal!  The AIA has enough spies for the time. Another assassin and another terrorist are in training, but we’re good otherwise. Until the next round of agents gets “retired”, of course.  Then I suddenly remember why I recruited assassins in the first place and some more. And another spy hacker for good measure. Now it would be hilarious if every new leader we get in the near future gets stabbed immediately before any of those new agents can finish training and help out in our defense, so this is exactly what I expect will happen.  Our scouts reach Dromos! And the New Orions attack. Welp. I don’t care that the tech tree is claiming we’re pulling ahead of the Antarans, that speed is endgame territory. I suspect the New Orions get some special techs to play around. Their damage and range are almost normal, but still not exactly easy to deal with besides flooding everything with fighters. Also our scouts can’t escape.  The battles for this phase: First the Klackons do nothing, then the New Orions launch themselves into the way of our scouts and paste them. Then another lengthy auto-battle in Yed ends with a single XEOL-armada destroyed. Baby steps. But this is going too slow!  Turn 409: A new leader has arrived!  CT-184-VUUD is a Cynoid. Yes, one of our enemies! This one is an information mercenary. CT-184-VUUD is a firm believer in the theory of exchange of information against money. They love free trade, open borders and giving everyone what they want -for a price. A high price, because they use their trading connections to steal information from their trading partners. To resell them, of course. This makes CT-184-VUUD more of a spy hacker than anything else and his many enemies call him pirate. +11% space port income gives both more money from inter-imperial trade and just common intra-imperial trade. So it’s good. Amazing for a trading-oriented empire, but I won’t complain either. As long as this leader is here, our spies are 10% harder to uncover. I’m not entirely sure at which point of the rolls this bonus comes in, as at maximum (10), that bonus would translate to +1 additional point. Hopefully the 10% are added at some point in the equation were it can be a bit more effective, but I wouldn’t bank on it. And as a dirty, lying software pirate, CT-184-VUUD causes +5% unrest in our empire. Because of course. Even in the Kingdom of Almandin, software piracy has a bad reputation.  Surprise diplomacy! Our gas bag allies want to trade some techs. They want the improved fusion cannon for some reason, the Maxi-Fighter Garrison (good) and automatic UV-lasers. By sheer coincidence, the three techs they want to give us are also 2/3rds trash. Hilariously, both the Neutronblaster Miniaturization II and Improved Inferno Cannon techs are vastly superior to what our allies want to have! So of course we agree, just to grab the Class III Missile Chassis. Now our missiles are better! We have had class II missiles for so long, I almost forgot there were still larger missile hulls in the tech tree. Our next missile ships will use this tech immediately, as class III missiles are a huge step up in size, cost and most importantly, damage.  At the end of the turn, a look at Yed reveals more XEOL-reinforcement coming in.  But in the following combat phase, things are looking up! Our reinforcements have arrived, too -but a TF-based mix-up causes only 290 Cynoid ships to show up to contest our 312!  Another massive battle erupts!  The enemy fleet mirrors ours somewhat: Tons of carriers and artillery ships, some token direct-fire ships.  This isn’t actually our fleet doom firing a super laser at the Cynoids, but the Cynoid-ships desperately firing all their main weapons into the empty void, trying to get our fighters off.  As always, system defenders and direct-fire ships commit the obligatory suicide-by-fighters, which at the very least makes our numbers for this battle look nicer.  Then the battle degenerates to WWI in Space: First we send our fighters to kill the enemy, but they all die. Infuriatingly, the fighters, thanks to the positioning of their carriers, all arrive in small groups and get killed by the Cynoid PD before achieving much. As nuts as it sounds, even having 5 full carrier armadas isn’t enough anymore to achieve critical mass.  Second, the enemy does the same. At least I think it’s fighters. If you don’t remember the exact position of carriers and artillery ships, it’s sometimes hard to tell what exactly is traveling towards your battle line until it’s there.  The fighters and/or missiles die in droves as soon as they cross the nearby gas giant. Even zoomed in all the way it’s hard to tell what does tiny bits are. Based on how fast they die I finally decide they must have been missiles.  Turns out that was the last of the ineffectual strikes! Both sides continue to spawn fighters, but they all join this huge fighter cloud hanging out in the middle of the battlefield and duke it out among themselves. Inevitably, the battle ends in a stalemate.  Turn 410: I’m fully concentrated on breaking the stalemate this turn, so no new messages about spy events. Instead, I form up another carrier task force and send them to join our fleet in Yed.  I’m also re-evaluating the usability of missiles, and make this new dreadnought-sized artillery design as a consequence. The Heavy Missile Dreadnought Pyroxeres uses the new, larger missile chassis size we’ve got from our allies and so we can now shoot missiles the size of starships. This dreadnought can only shoot 4 missiles at the same time, but every ship hit by one will really feel it. The launchers can reload 4x times before running out of ammunition. Still just enough for half a battle (around 3-4 minutes), but every enemy who can deal with four salvos of our monster missiles plus our fighters, we probably couldn’t have beaten anyway. Hopefully this massive damage upgrade from our old missile battlecruisers can make our artillery ships relevant again. By the way, if we assume the launchers having roughly the size of our missiles, then we get something like 5x4 (launchers + magazines) / 700 = 35 units per missile. Considering our smallest starship hullsize starts at around 45, yeah. I wasn’t joking, our class 3 missiles are the size of small starships.  Speaking of allies, the Imsaies want to improve our trade treaty again. I’m amazed we can still improve our trade, after the dozens of times we have done so. Maybe trade treaties start degrading again if left alone for too long?  Another turn, another battle.  So, yeah. Heavy fighting in Yed.  Fighter clouds! Fighter clouds for everyone!  For every armada we take down, Cynoid-fighters take down one of ours. Rough seas here on space battle ocean.  Total losses for this combat phase: The Cynoids lose a full armada and their single system defense ship (33), the Kingdom of Almandin loses a whopping 3 full armadas (96). The front has held, but I think in no book ever written was this battle a victory. Well, except for the Cynoids, of course.  And now we’re in turn 411. The war isn’t going well, and the game gives us another kick while we’re down: One of our expeditions loses a ship. Whelp.  And suddenly, our incoming reinforcements are barely enough to hold the line, while XEOL has already piled another load of ships into Yed. Now we need multiple victories in a row to clear this up. Ugh. Stalemated. This could take a while.  Next combat phase, I’m using autobattle and it suddenly ends with XEOL losing an entire armada to our single ship. Considering the fighter-related madness going on in battles, my thought here is that the calculations being run in autobattle are coming closer to how the battle should go then the chaotic mess of a directly controlled one. Let’s see how the next few autobattles will go to test this theory.  Emergency mobilization! Two artillery task forces with our newest missile ships are send towards the front. Together with our other reinforcements we’re back to maximum (10 task forces) strength and should be able to slowly grind the Cynoids down.  Besides organizing our war, I spend some seconds in turn 412 on our espionage agency, the AIA: Agent Drache (Dragon) has joined! With maximum stats, Agent Drache is good at everything (involving assassinations), but to protect our own leaders, they’ll be staying on the defensive.  Next combat phase, next autobattle: The Cynoids lose another full armada, we lose nothing. Progress! Now we just have to repeat this 9 more times!  Not directly war-related, but just in time for us giving up Plasma Cannons as obsolete, the game throws us the Improved Plasma Cannon in the way: This weapon mod straight up gives more damage: At short range, +50%, at long range, +10%. Not bad! But with this game degenerating into the great Fighter and Missile Show, generally we want maximum range on the few direct-fire ships we’ll still be fielding. And for PD, other weapons are still better. Pity, but this new tech is already obsoleted eight turns before it is finished.  But then the military-industrial complex turns around and actually shows up with something worthwhile! We get the Torpedo Chassis soon, dwarfing even our just traded new missile hull size.  Looks like our design bureaus can go back to the cyber desk and start designing new artillery ships, as those things are too awesome to not use. By the way, the missile hull sizes are Class I – Class IV, followed by the Torpedo Chassis. We researched up to Class II normally, but then our tech tree didn’t roll Class III, which we just recently got from our allies, the Imsaies.Now it turns out we didn’t roll Class IV missiles either, but instead we jumped straight ahead to the maximum size! I’m not complaining.  Another great victory for autobattle! The Cynoids lose 80 ships to 0 of ours. The massive fighter carnage still makes the battle a stalemate, of course. Meanwhile, our scouts annoy the Nommo (space squids with shells) on the other side of the Kingdom of Almandin. Luckily they’re busy with their own nemesis, the fully-robotic Meklar, brethren of the Cynoids. As a reminder, they’re both declared war on us despite being weak-as-gently caress, because MO3-AI loves making no goddamn sense  Turn 414! And another ship bites the dust. Our Antaran Expeditions continue to not find anything, it seems. Except death. They seem to be finding loads of that.  Turn 414 / GC 621 is exceptionally painful with spy nonsense, but at least we sometimes kill some of the idiots invading us.  This turn I also finally remember that I’m scouting Nommo-territory during all this XEOL-war bullshit. Mystreena is mostly Darloks, the rest Nommo. Boring. Next!  Next is Solocka. Our little scouting force will take two turns to reach it.  So, now that that is down, back to war. And oh poo poo. Welp, while I was making sure a full 10x32 fleet of ships assembles in Yed, the Cynoids simply doubled the number of ships they have here. I foresee a long, long string of battles. Ugh.  I’m just glad the AI can’t just bulldoze everything by attacking with all those ships at once. Instead, we continue to slowly grind them down. This combat phase’s tally: 42 dead Cynoid ships to 1 dead Silicoid ship.  Oops, turn 415 reveals the Cynoids have reinforced again. Turns out we made negative progress!   At this point I’m willing to desperately grasp at straws to break this stalemate, and thus I design the Heavy Recon Cruiser Scandium as replacement for our Indium-class cruisers: Armed with crystal rays and a shitton of bait warheads to confuse enemy PD. Will it work even in autobattle? I’m not really sure this works at all, but considering we’re slowly reaching the maximum amount of fighters and missiles our task forces could theoretically put into space, every little bit of extra bullshit could be a game changer. Also scouts the size of battlecruisers. How far this game has come.  In other news, in turn 415 a new star lane opens somewhere and a third ship gets toasted by ancient Antaran defenses.  Next combat phase: Our scouts reach Solocka to annoy some squids, while the slow, ugly grind in Yed continues. At least at over 40:1 loss rate, we’re still “winning”. Though at this rate I may die of old age before the front finally collapses.  GC 624 sees multiple enemy spies die and/or succeed in annoying us. A Nommo and a Meklar spy get to star as the villains in the next Almandian action movies, while an unknown third agent evades all detection and gets another clone of Didi Hallervorden. Luckily that clone was the bodyguard of one of our leaders, so apparently this assassination had higher aspirations than just another third-rate clone of a second-rate entertainer. So in a way, that was another failure of enemy spy agencies.  Solocka also has a lot of Darloks living there. For a species not even playable in MO3, they’ve managed to spread to a disturbing number of planets.  XEOL still has send more reinforcements than we have blown up, so their ship number in Yed continues to rise. OK, obviously continuing this stalemate isn’t working. Time to use our growing reserve of ships in some other way.  While I was planning the surprise, I got a chuckle out of MO3 yet again giving me another improved version of a weapon I’ve stopped using ages ago. Though to be fair, back then the Ion Impuls Cannons were good weapons, high range, high damage. The improved version works exactly like the plasma-version: +50% damage at close range and +10% at high range. Not really enticing. If it were reversed, maybe! But so our new weapons are all vastly better.  In the next combat phase, XEOL sends a fleet (task force size is 24 ships) into Neaux, but oops, we expected bullshit like this basically since turn 1 and kept a strong fleet back there. Suckers!  And so this update ends: The fleets in Yed stalemate even harder, but XEOL sacrifices some ships in Neaux to keep us from being disheartened. This can't go on like this. I'll have to do something. Something extreme. Allied Dumbass-Decisions Counter Getting mad at us for beating their worst enemies: 1 Total: 1 Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + WIPED OUT (TF1) Expedition B1: 16 ships in position (TF2) Expedition B2: 7 ships in position (TF3) Expedition B3: 16 ships in position (TF4) Expedition B4: 32 ships in position (TF5) Expedition B5: 24 ships in position (TF6) -3 of the ships above are destroyed, but I forgot to compare task forces, so this line will have to stay until I remember to do this- Next: Hellwar I
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Jul 14, 2020 18:54
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With the limit on number of battles per turn per system it feels like the only way to grind down XEOL faster would be to open multiple fronts of battle with them to accelerate the rate of their destruction, assuming you have the fleet resources for it.
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Jul 14, 2020 23:59
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The lizard forever war is over. Long live the machine forever war!
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Jul 15, 2020 05:11
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Slaan posted:The lizard forever war is over. Long live the machine forever war! FUEL FOR THE OIL GOD! And obviously the solution to XEOL is to just keep spamming armadas at tha tpoint, autoresolve battles and presume it's a semi permanent chokepoint. Find another way you can attack their lines. Just keep throwing ships in, autoresolve, presume at some point your fingers will break from clicking buttons.
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Jul 15, 2020 06:25
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While almost every 4x game seems to devolve into nonsense hellwars, MOO3 seems to be taking the cake right now. I respect that you're going to finish this game immensely.
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Jul 15, 2020 10:08
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I don't suppose there is a genocider device that just deletes systems that can be researched? Some sort of technology that is incredibly powerful, which is balanced by the fact that everyone hates you if you use it...
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Jul 15, 2020 16:41
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We would never use that though. Who do you think we are, space dolphins?
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Jul 15, 2020 17:34
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Donkringel posted:I don't suppose there is a genocider device that just deletes systems that can be researched? MO3 doesn't even have a weapon to delete planets permanently. Systems are far out of reach, sadly. But I'll come back to the hilarious hoax of MO3-planet destroyers in a future update.
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Jul 15, 2020 18:29
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This was my first 4x game when I first got the ability to buy games for myself in the late 90s. it has colored my expectations in what a game should be like, where there is no resolution, there is no easy war. I am damaged people.
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Jul 29, 2020 06:27
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition Chapter 116: Hellwar I Stalemating isn’t fun, so from this update on forward, we’ll turn to the dark side.  Turn 417 sees the Meklar giving up their own hellwar yet again. Welp, at least this means good news for our spy defense for the 1-2 turns before the Meklar declare war again.  Ignoring the usual spy and unrest shenanigans, I turn to our ship reserves. Some of our new ships are there in force, just not strong enough for more than a couple task forces yet. My plans have to wait a couple more turns. Also, some old ships have crept in from earlier demobilization efforts and now have to be scrapped.  Always a bunch of optimists, the diplomatic corps of the Kingdom of Almandin tries to negotiate a trade treaty with our robot neighbors. Considering the hate the Meklar (robots) have for their Cynoid-brethren (cyborgs), there’s a tiny chance they may agree. If you’re the gambler-type, I would suggest betting on them declaring war again soon, though.  Speaking of Cynoids, the Yed-front is still frozen. This combat phase, only 4 enemy ships die.  GC 627 sees more unrest, more revolts and another ship is lost by one of our Antaran Expeditions. poo poo. And this is another marker for down at the end of the update, until I’m finally through with this old stack of screenshots and have time to start playing again. So I can finally look at the different Antaran task forces and see which ones have taken losses, as the dumbass sitrep screen of course doesn’t think this information important.  Strategically, the situation gets worse each turn: It’s now 850 Cynoid ships against our 309. Good grief!  A short interlude from our scientists: One of the newest techs floating into prototyping is the Planning and Design Center, which is another module to add to our shipyards. Same story as always: +1 hull size for every planet who builds this thing. And a planet which collects all the Pokemon can now build up to a size we don’t even have yet!  It’s kind of funny, but after upgrading our new artillery-dreadnoughts with better missiles, we can now do the same thing, all over: Our new torpedo chassis is finished, which means yes, even larger missiles and even more insane firepower -as long as our ammunition holds out, that is. And now that’s it, the torpedo is the largest hull size missiles can get in MO3. From now on, only a couple more warhead-technologies await and this weapon system is finished. Those things are truly gigantic: 4 launchers with magazines for 3 additional shots almost fill up 50% of this dreadnought all by themselves. After adding all that other poo poo, like shields, engines, FTL-drive and PD, the hull is already used up completely. Hopefully the Heavy Missile Dreadnought Pyroxeres II will show some use! (I’m always scared at this point in a game that everything not a carrier is basically just wasting time and effort.)  Next combat phase: In Yed, nothing moves. Helios is another Nommo-system we scouted.  Turn 419 rolls around: A new agent is ready, enemy agents steal the extremely important Very Heavy Mount tech and ah yes, the Meklar refuse to trade with us. At least they didn’t immediately declare war again! The tech-stealing is annoying, but strictly speaking I only used the very heavy mounts this time to show them off, but when I’m on my own, I only every use a combination of spinal mounts and PD-mounts. Or fighters and missiles. Because you see, I’m an min-maxing rear end in a top hat  Still not enough new ships for more offensive operations, so instead another huge battle erupts in Yed. This time, taking control of the battle doesn’t immediately end in disaster: An enemy short-range task force leaves their formation and gets dogpiled by our fighters. That’s at least one enemy armada down. A nice start!  After that, the obligatory wild mess of clashing missiles and fighters begins.  As always, both sides exchange massive fighter clouds, with the occasional doomed strike against the mother ships.  This screenshot demonstrates the main problem: When fighters get too close to the main ship formations, the PD of all those ships combines to atomize them, but as long as that doesn’t happen, both sides fighters just continue wailing on each other to no real effect. Stretch this behavior out for an entire battle, and you get stalemates with zero ships actually dying, as both fighters and missiles are automatically resupplied between turns. And well, fighters are just transdimensional visitors from the Infinite Fighter Dimension, anyway! I’m not sure they even need resupply.  Then, a stroke of luck happens: While enemy missiles and fighters are all bound by either our PD or our fighters, we and the Cynoids both spawn new fighter squadrons, but this time the Cynoids have the bad luck of their squadrons spawning slightly offset, while our own new spawn appears close together in time. The result: All our fighters manage a combined strike to delete another enemy task force before the PD brings them down.  After that second success, the stalemate resumes. Until in another stroke of luck, enemy PD for some reason targets the very last fighter squadron in our newest strike, leaving the other 5 almost unhurt before they hit their line.  Inevitably, another enemy task force is hit and goes down. I think what we’re seeing here is the result from the Cynoids losing more and more PD-capability with every ship lost, and therefore every new fighter strike does more and more damage. Too bad the collapse took most of the battle to happen.  Yep, definitely a collapse. Seems the Cynoids, after the first unfortunate losses, can’t keep up with our infinite fighters anymore. A fourth Cynoid task force gets space massacred. Kind of funny how, after taking some losses, the entire XEOL-fleet just tumbles down like a house of cards being hit by the world slowest bowling ball.  And that’s it for now, folks. 114 ships of dreaded XEOL went down, zero of ours. Three armadas completely destroyed and a fourth one decimated. The fourth one survived somehow and “only” lost a third of its ship before the timer ran out. But I’m not complaining! We need more battles like this one.  But this only scratches at the symptoms covering our problems. No, the main problem is the huge industrial capacity of XEOL making GBS threads out all those ships in the first place. I fear we have to go one step beyond. AFC, the Almandian Fleet Command, is planning a new strategy. A strategy that hails back from the worst days of the Raas War. But this new war has dragged on for too long already and the Antarans are still out there. Who knows if the Kingdom can survive when more enemies attack while this never-ending stalemate continues? Even the population is concerned, as it seems that after many generations of war, the Kingdom of Almandin has just slipped into yet another non-ending hellwar. If it weren’t for the sheer normality that war represents after so long without a lasting peace, the Kingdom would have already crumbled. But with the colonies closest to the front lines facing more and more unrest because of the war, a timer has been set. Peace seems far away, since XEOL adamantly refuses to stop its genocidal war against the peaceful Annalona Empire. The Annalona Empire and its ruling Imsaies have been facing XEOL for as long as the old Kingdom faced the fascist Raas, maybe even longer, so both population and government inside the Kingdom of Almandin understand the nature of the threat the Imsaies face. Secret meetings are being held, and fateful and disturbing decisions are being made. Eventually, new formations are mobilized to bring the fight back to the enemy, before XEOL can grind down both the Kingdom and the Empire.  In preparation for the new strategy, a new recon command is send deeper into Cynoid-space, to survey XEOL-systems for future strikes.  The Nin Hursag-system, already surveyed by earlier scouting operations, is chosen as the first target of the new strategy. Grim-stoned Silicoid admirals take their newly formed fleets towards Nin Hursag, while behind them, the unending battle for Yed continues.  The Cynoids lose another bunch of ships, but strategically, nothing changes. Yet.  Surprisingly, a new leader joins our circle of dolts in turn 421. And the Klackons time out their war. Again. Considering how often our leaders tend to get stabbed/poisoned, it’s amazing that there are still sapient beings out there willing to join us.  Ogathani Nijalu is a Sakkra, who hate the Raas for rebelling against them, and for some reason decided to go join a nation filled with Raas, who also hate Sakkra, for enslaving them. You’d think this means he is on a mission to make good on the atrocities of his species, but instead he’s an ultra-corrupt ex-infantry officer who joined a civilian company to get filthy rich. Capitalism! Ogathania gives us +15% industry, which is good news for our ship building programs. Until we’ve beaten the Cynoids, we’ll just have to live with the -4% imperial taxes and additional unrest he’s causing. Man, I hope that unrest is just part of his flavor text.  More scouting! The end of the misadventures of the 1st Void Recon is near, after bumbling around black holes, neutron stars and creepy far-away alien systems, the fleet is coming home. Well, the one surviving ship at least. The 1st Void Recon is now tasked with scouting Nobi.  Strategically, not much has changed. Our ongoing efforts to build our new ships has raised our fleet total to respectable 1077 ships, while dreaded XEOL hovers around roughly 8k ships. Ugh. Lots of work for us. Ironically, the Cynoids like us, even though our political relations are hanging at “blood feud”. In a different time line, we could have been allies, with the Imsaies our victims. Welp, paths not taken and all that.  Surprise battle! Our new fleet has arrived in Nin Hursag, and XEOL is not prepared.  After some heated discussions, the system defense force is vaporized.  The half a dozen orbitals follow, one by one. Holy gently caress, this one must have been here since the early game. Someone should have really taught the AI how to scrap old ships. On the other hand, we too have tons of old poo poo hanging around stars I never looked at again after the front moved away from them, so it’s not like I’m playing better.   End of the space part of the battle phase: Scouting all over the place, another big hit against the enemy fleet in Yed, and a total victory in Nin Hursag. Also  I only now realize there must have been FTL-ships backing up the defense force in Nin Hursag, but they apparently jumped out so fast I missed them.   Our terrible, horrible, unavoidable new strategy is implemented for the first time: Our strike force bombards Nin Hursag IV from orbit.  Everything is wiped out. A developed planet with billions of people, reduced to dust. Only so we can end this war faster. We are now truly despicable. All over the Kingdom, the people are in mourning for the citizens of XEOL who have been sacrificed.  Will the sacrifices be worth it, in the end? So many more planets to depopulate… War truly is hell.  For the first time, the Klackons are right in decrying our atrocities. They formally declare war again.  In other news, a new universal translator is in development, according to our engineers. Uh, good? This tech makes our diplomacy slightly less bad. A bit late though for more diplomacy, game. Currently we’re basically 100% war all the time with everyone. I guess it’ll help keep our lone allies happy for a bit longer??? Allied Dumbass-Decisions Counter Getting mad at us for beating their worst enemies: 1 Total: 1 Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + WIPED OUT (TF1) Expedition B1: 16 ships in position (TF2) Expedition B2: 7 ships in position (TF3) Expedition B3: 16 ships in position (TF4) Expedition B4: 32 ships in position (TF5) Expedition B5: 24 ships in position (TF6) -4 of the ships above are destroyed, but I forgot to compare task forces, so this line will have to stay until I remember to do this- Next: Hellwar II
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Aug 11, 2020 16:47
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Can you make a stab at their capital from the depths of uncharted space? Having their capital glasses will probably put a damper on production.
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Aug 11, 2020 18:08
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Sadly their cap is probably more likely to have up-to-date defenses. But if Lib can harness enough raiding fleets while the Yed stalemate keeps XEOL from pressing deeper into his own territory, he could grind down their industrial capabity.
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Aug 11, 2020 19:42
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PurpleXVI posted:Sadly their cap is probably more likely to have up-to-date defenses. But if Lib can harness enough raiding fleets while the Yed stalemate keeps XEOL from pressing deeper into his own territory, he could grind down their industrial capabity. Which, one assumes, is the plan. Just depends how many mobilisation centres they have in the neighbourhood. And how much of their 8000 ships aren't deployed.
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Aug 11, 2020 23:47
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OK, there are some questions, I see. Time to answer!Donkringel posted:Can you make a stab at their capital from the depths of uncharted space? If by "uncharted space" you mean the normal star lanes, sure. Uncharted space takes so long that by the time we've pin-pointed their capital system and send over a fleet large enough to kill everything in one turn, the war will be over, one way or other (either victory, or madness, an asylum, a LP-thread burned to the ground) The capital itself is by now completely secondary. It's just one planet among many. And not even the most productive, since the capital planet tends to have a little bit of everything (food production, science, government and so on). In early and mid-game, your capital tends to be your most productive industrial world, but sooner or later, they will fall behind as your larger planets get bigger and stronger with each tech giving better terraforming or better industry. As soon as your first major colonies gain similar population than your cap, they'll bump it off from the top of your top ten industrial centers. We're long past that point and all of the major powers of the Orion Sector have dozens of planets with higher industrial capacity than their caps. If the capital is lost, there's a lot of unrest for a couple turns and as soon as another capital planet is designated, the people will calm down again. How long does it take to get another capital? Well, you simply order a planet with at least a system government to build a new imperial government. And that's it. In end-game land, most well-developed planets will be able to replace your capital in 1 turn PurpleXVI posted:Sadly their cap is probably more likely to have up-to-date defenses. But if Lib can harness enough raiding fleets while the Yed stalemate keeps XEOL from pressing deeper into his own territory, he could grind down their industrial capabity. On the other hand, their cap is probably also filled to the brim with obsolete system defense and ancient orbitals, clogging everything up. The AI in MO3... is not good with scrapping old stuff. But yeah, that's the plan. Striking multiple systems, destroying as many planets as we can until the Cynoids can stalemate us, then moving on to the next targets. Eventually, our industry will be so much stronger in comparison, the enemy fleets in the stalemate-systems will collapse on their own. Veloxyll posted:Which, one assumes, is the plan. Well, we know two things: The AI, like any player with a working brain, will always spam mob centers like mad, so every single system will have one. And we know about 4k ships hang around in that one dumb Imsaies-system they've been sieging for centuries. So with the approx. 1k ships in Yed, that means that approx. 3k ships are still waiting for us!
Libluini fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Aug 12, 2020 |
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Aug 12, 2020 19:59
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In the grim reality that is the future there is only war between the ROCK and the HARD PLACE
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Aug 13, 2020 07:25
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Okay, makes sense. What are the negatives to mass genocide? That the rock people would actually care about?
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Aug 13, 2020 22:05
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Donkringel posted:Okay, makes sense. It takes a lot longer and a lot more resources to build it up into something useful. Also the AI has an annoying habit of sneaking colony ships in while your back is turned to rebuild, meaning you have to keep a fleet overwatching the system until you colonize everything to keep it out of their hands. Because if you don't - they colonize one planet, build a Mobilization Center and they can deploy infinite fleets behind your front line. Basically, you can move the battle lines forward faster but you end up with a lot of resource-draining planets that won't contribute to your economy/war efforts/etc for a really long time.
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Aug 15, 2020 05:22
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