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SIGSEGV posted:In terms of numbers, how many star systems out of how many in the galaxy do you control at this point? I don't really have an idea of how big which empires are. Our empire kind of swerves wildly across the map, but since we're basically slowly encircling the center of the Orion Sector, I haphazard a guess that we own roughly 1/3 up to half the systems by now. I'll try to make a count next time. (And  yes, the only information the game gives you is number is planets, which considering a system can have 0-9 planets this is not particularly helpful. It even anti-helps you by making space nation colors disappear if you zoom out the map too much, which makes counting your systems interesting.)
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Nov 3, 2020 16:07
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On the one mineral, ganging up on you is the only real option the other races have at this point. On the other mineral, it's a fishy death sentence
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Nov 3, 2020 16:18
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Now we just have to hope that your enemies don't steal the antarian X from you while you're researching it. Because gently caress you that is apparently a thing that can happen, and you can steal it back, but you have to be very very lucky to do so. As for antarian Xs in the hands of other empires, I think once they're researched you can't steal them? I'm not sure.
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Nov 3, 2020 18:00
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If you get a tech by conquest, you just immediately own it. No additional research necessary. Look closely at the screenshots. The moment we hacked those Cynoid government computers, we got the X-tech. Edit: Every time you successfully liberate an enemy planet with ground troops, the game rolls a dice to see if you get one of their techs. In this case I assume our insane tech lead helps us out, because if the roll wins us a free tech, we can obviously only get one we don't have yet. And since thanks to trading with our ally a lot of random holes in our tech tree are already filled in, the missing X-techs are one of the very few techs we can still get. This means if an alien empire has X-techs, we get a good chance at one of them each time we take a planet.  This is a strategy I didn't even expect to work, since I blindly assumed the AI would be too dumb to start collecting their own X-techs. 
Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Nov 3, 2020 |
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Nov 3, 2020 18:05
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We're a peaceful people. We wish you nothing but peace... Peace to your ashes! /burn
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Nov 3, 2020 19:33
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loving idiot fish, gotta love it.
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Nov 4, 2020 20:39
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Anyone know where to download the mod used in this let's play? The link in these instructions leads to http://www.ultima-orion.de/main.php which returns a 500 error to my browser. I tried to google it but I couldn't seem to find a copy of ultima orion anywhere. As all the posts I found elsewhere on the internet just linked back to https://www.ultima-orion.de the site that won't load for me. Bhruic's mods are still up at his website, but I've modded moo3 before and I know that a lot of Bhruic's patches/fixes/mods open up variables rather than just fixing bugs. If I just applied all of Bhruic's patches, I'd fix the bugs but wouldn't benefit from the exact vision of balance enjoyed in this thread. Although, if someone has it here, they could probably just mirror it? Unless that's against some rule? Sorry to beg like this, but I'm a big master of orion fan, and I want to try and get it running on my new pc. The original instructions by the author are quoted below: Libluini posted:How to get Ultima Orion namad fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Nov 5, 2020 |
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Nov 5, 2020 00:35
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You can use the Internet Wayback machine: The site: https://web.archive.org/web/20180604160812/http://www.ultima-orion.de/main.php The mod (version 0.87?): https://web.archive.org/web/20160310034452/http://ultima-orion.de/downloads/uo_versionen/uobeta0.87.zip
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Nov 5, 2020 01:02
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DTurtle posted:You can use the Internet Wayback machine: Sweet thanks! Now that I have the mod, I'm realizing that it's in german. The fan translation translates into more german? I guess that's why this mod isn't more popular, since you can't play it in english? Hmm. I guess I can try running the english game, with the german mod, without the translation for the base game... which... should maybe... work? Wish me luck!
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Nov 5, 2020 04:29
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... Wow you got an X Tech! And one that's actually useful for the spy problem! And you're slowly making static progress along one front while two more have opened up! ... I suppose you're still making progress? Also yay for the combo of Battloids + Tanks. Suddenly Silicoid ground armies can RUN
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Nov 7, 2020 01:50
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wedgekree posted:... Wow you got an X Tech! And one that's actually useful for the spy problem! And you're slowly making static progress along one front while two more have opened up! ... I suppose you're still making progress? Now you can crush your enemies between two rocks faster! Also more death to enemy spies by stoning.
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Nov 7, 2020 02:01
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namad posted:Sweet thanks! Now that I have the mod, I'm realizing that it's in german. The fan translation translates into more german? I guess that's why this mod isn't more popular, since you can't play it in english? Hmm. I guess I can try running the english game, with the german mod, without the translation for the base game... which... should maybe... work? Wish me luck! Great to see someone jumping on this great (but flawed) old game! I'm not so sure about running the mod without translation, since everything the modders added is in German. You could try not running the translation patch when using the patcher, but be aware this could get you a wild mix of German and English texts, or just garbage, depending on how the modders added their stuff in. Or everything could be fine, I don't know! Also for the love of the goddess, remember to set missile and fighter speeds like in what you quoted from me above, or Bad Things will happen. Also heh, I guess the website finally died or something. The mod development suddenly stopped at something like 0.83 completion back then, and work just never seemed to continue. I guess the modders eventually moved on with their life? Fake edit: I'll add the wayback links into the OP, so future seekers can find the mod again. Edit: Added to the OP, at the very end of the updates-post posted:Even more additional info for English-speaking game players Libluini fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Nov 7, 2020 |
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Nov 7, 2020 02:20
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Master of Orion III: ULTIMATE Edition  Chapter 122: Stars at War I GC 687 – GC 692  It’s turn 458, spies kill each other. Basically just Tuesday in the Kingdom of Almandin. But we also surveyed the Uxmai-system we talked about last time!  The Uxmai-system once belonged to the Meklar, but is now besieged by a large Cynoid-force.  This is a Meklar-planet already taken over by the Cynoids. Also loving hell, this is the third really close red shade in the game. If you put us, Cynoids and Meklar close together, it basically looks like one, huge empire to everyone without perfect eyesight.  Short correction from my last update: We don’t have 100+ planets, we’re at 200+ planets now!  Our tech average of 65 is far beyond even the Iserequi Nation. The Trilarians only have a quarter of our planets, but somehow managed to tech up to an average of 60, which is impressive. It also shows that even with all of my min-maxing, keeping up with research is not a done thing in this game: At a higher difficulty level, even our min-maxed to hell Silicoids would be struggling behind instead of leading!  Turn 459 rolls around, a Meklar-spy dies and non of our battles were of any consequence.  But soon this will change again, as this new strike force is ready to wormhole-jump all the way across the map from Nu Hydrae into Kakari. One system after another, the XEOL-menace will be dealt with!  While going through the map, I notice the two colonizers I’ve send manually earlier hanging around in Nobi, doing nothing. Slightly irritated, I order them manually to goddamn colonize their motherfucking targets!  Something not seen since the early game, but important to remember: While ships auto-send by the AI will generally colonize their targets in the same turn they arrive in, manually send ships will waste a full turn waiting before the AI notices the colony-flags during turn-over and belatedly gives colonization orders.  Something funny is going on with our allies: Some of the fleets they move around are just these large stacks of transports. Pathing issue? Betrayal? Who knows?  This had me going through our diplomatic relations to see if there’s a problem with our friends, but no: The relations to the Imsaies even grew slightly during the last few turns. Maybe the AI is trying to get those ships to one of our fronts and somehow fails to find the right path?  Since there were people wondering, this is the map fully zoomed out. A slightly sombrero-shape in 3D, styled after a particular style of RL galaxy with an active inner core. There’s roughly 230 systems, +/- a couple dozen, by my rough estimate.  Seen from above. It certainly looks less confusing, but remember: The map-shape is in 3D, which means all those lines are going in sometimes unexpected directions and have unexpected lengths. Also, thanks to trading and exploring, not all of those lines connect parts of our own empire: The chunk of blue lines in the center is a completely different empire for example. We just got their own map during our short stint in the Orion Senate through trading. White lines: Star lanes we know about due to scouting nearby systems, but haven’t traveled through ourselves. Blue lines: Star lanes we have traveled through to survey systems on both ends. With some caveats, nominally the star lanes we control. Minus the large chunk in the middle and some additional scout lines at the very tips, this rough C-shape of blue lines encircling the Orion Sector is us. Green lines: Wormhole-connections. Take only one turn to travel through, regardless of distance. Very useful!  For completion’s sake, this is how far you have to zoom in before empire colors and system names show up. The purple systems around the black hole in the middle where the blue chunk I was talking about : They’re definitely not us, but Master of Orion 3 doesn’t care about details like this. It’s been explored and the data has been transferred to us, so as far as the game is concerned, those systems are practically ours, anyway!  And then I run into the “the AI is loving stupid”-problem again. Last time I had to obsolete nearly all of our ships to prevent the AI flooding our reserves with tons of missiles ships and light carriers instead of our main superdreadnought-sized carriers. But while many of my planets can build a superdreadnought in a single turn now, even at just 8% construction boost, the AI prefers to pout and builds mainly ground troops now. I shudder to think at how many armies we are uselessly paying upkeep now thanks to this. Other weird things going on here: The taxes are at 28%, far higher then I would be comfortable with, and research is boosted deep into the red with 27%, which is a bit much considering this planet only has 3 research DEAs. But since the alternative would be dealing with over 200 planets manually, I can only sigh deeply and leave the AI-governor to its suboptimal work.   Still, at least our most industrialized planets get some manual superdreadnought-placement, otherwise they would be building exclusively ground troops until we designed a new light ship type. Around this time I start contemplating upping our finance AI from “restricted warfare” at least one notch up to “total war”, as that gives the AI more leeway in financing ship-building. At the very least I hope that’s enough to see some of our heavy hitters being build. Though considering 1 turn build times wasn’t fast enough for the AI, I’m not holding out hope here.  GC 690: Fleets are underway, the Cynoid-system of Kakari is now under siege and we solved the colonization-holdup in Nobi. Two more planets for us. Also, one of our expedition ships is destroyed when it turns out the asteroid giving of strange signals was a trap by the ancient Antarans. The asteroid conceals strong antimatter-beams. Our hapless explorer is carved in half and then violently explodes. Thousands sapient beings die.  More silliness from the war front: Not only did I forgot that I can’t raise transport forces yet in Nu Hydrae, I also got hit by XEOL-forces immediately showing up from Kakari the moment I left the system uncovered. Luckily the ships were only transports, and double luckily the AI refused to land even though they “won” the battle against our non-existent defenders. Next turn, reinforcements from Niphla will arrive to throw those bastards out again. Our offensive in Kakari meanwhile, is stalled until our mobilization center in Nu Hydrae is finished. At least our  First Battle of Kakari was a resounding victory! Meanwhile meanwhile, on the opposite end of our empire, our mixed fleet of rejects from our reserves is also poised to strike at Hera next turn. It’ll be interesting to see what the Trilarians can bring to the table, considering they have the 2nd highest tech in the sector, right after us. Before I forget, let’s recap how we managed to get into war with our fish friends so fast: Fish Friend Communications Sanctions!!! Die, you dirty rocks!!!! OK, so after declaring war, the Trilarians grew concerned of us actually raising a fleet to attack them. Diplomacy seems to be failing here. No, gently caress You! In response, our diplomatic corps innocently asked for all planets in the Hera-system as a prerequisite for a lasting peace. This uhhh, didn’t go other well. End of Communications And because of this, next turn we strike!  But before things get interesting, let’s talk about numbers! This is our current main capital, the Very Heavy Carrier Hammer II. It’s main weapons is the ability to spit out 18 fighter/bombers the size of small starships and then use them to bombard enemy fleets with a hail of plasma bombs. For 1080 units of space, we get 4824 damage per second. (In this case, it’s real DPS, because fighter weapon reload times are exactly 1 second.) The fighters itself are quite hefty normally, and equipped with armor, shield generators and special targeting computers, turn into terrible little monsters. They’re also cloaked, because of course. Now, we’ve been getting a new range of upgrades that double the size of fighters, but also quadruple the DPS. Let’s do some tests to see how this looks when designing new ships. Test 1 Test 1 replaced our normal 18 fighters with 9 double-sized ones, using our new multiple plasma bomb tech. DPS as written is now halfed to 2412 DPS, but if the tech description holds true, the actual damage in battle should be 4x that. So, 9648 DPS. Drawbacks: With just 9 fighters, this load-out is hilariously vulnerable against enemy point defense. We may need to switch to our exotic, mod-only battle swarmers to prevent our fighters from being eliminated too early in a real fight! Also of course, the tech needs to work, too. I guess the next phase is designing a carrier using multiple plasma bombs, then one using normal plasma bombs, and then see how both do in battle. Test 2 Next up, comparing to fighters with direct-fire weapons. Since we don’t have fighter-sized crystal ray beams, I had to go down the list to the older dark energy beam cannons. For those, we do have fighter-sized weapons! Using roughly the same space (1k units), we get 40 fighters spitting out 3120 DPS. Better then (on paper) the 9 mammoth fighters hurling oversized plasma bombs and even at fighter/bomber size, that’s a lot of fighters to shoot down. But in a real battle, our new fighters are supposed to dish out nearly 3x the DPS, so clearly, our old weapons are straight out. Test 3 For the 3rd test, I compared our humongous fighter/bombers to our more delicate, but also more compact, battle swarmers: Using multiple plasma bombs, I got 2675 DPS and 25 fighters when using the same space (still 1k units). Slightly better than 9 fighter bombers and it’s not as easy to just completely neuter our carriers. Same caveat though: Until a test under life fire is conducted, we don’t actually know if the real DPS as advertised will be the promised 10700 DPS! For the record, I scoffed a lot at swarmer-type fighters since they have less HP then the “normal” range of ever bigger fighters, but since they’re also less likely to get hit and a big fighter is still pretty flimsy when compared to real starships, I’m slowly tending more and more to just replace all our fighter/bombers with battle swarmers. Especially since our best fighter weapons tend to balloon fighter sizes to absurd degrees. I mean, come on game? A superdreadnought with only 9 fighter launch bays? Test 4 Finally, the last test. This time, I replaced the double-sized multi swarmer with our conventional plasma bomb version. This (of course) gives us a whopping 50 battle swarmers per SD, all harder to hit and still harder to kill then our old standard interceptors. At 1k space usage, this gives us 5350 DPS, which is even more than our regular plasma bombers give us right now! This means two things: 1st, our big, ugly fighter/bombers have reached the point where they’re severely outclassed by their tiny brethren. 2nd, all our current heavy designs are completely wrong, as even with normal plasma bombs, we’re losing 20% DPS while being hamstrung by our comparatively small amount of fighters going up against massed enemy PD. Conclusion: For next time, I’ll design two test designs, one with normal plasma bombs, one with quadruple plasma bombs. Then I’ll send them against our enemies to see how they fare. If quadruple bombs work like advertised, that’ll be our new standard fighter weapon for the future! In the meantime, since building and testing the new designs will take time (I could do this in a separate save of course, but I really don’t want to. We have all this huge industrial capacity, why not make it work for us?), we will retool our Hammer-class superdreadnoughts to use battle swarmers instead of fighter/bombers. Because I have this growing suspicion most of our stalemate struggles come from our fighter/bombers being a bit too easy to shoot down by PD. But let’s see. Even the workaround-ships need to be built first. And since the difference between 18 and 50 (or 9 and 25 on our potential future designs) fighters is quite a lot, I’ll be forced to somehow dumpster all our old heavy carriers first, so they won’t accidentally enter a carrier task force and weaken them like a strange 4x debuff.  But right now, our old designs are facing off against the old designs of the Trilarians! May the most mineralized be victorious! The Battle of Hera  Turn 461! Spies steal our Lateral Thinking Spy Tech! Oh no! Not our ability to think laterally! Why was this a tech again? In other news, Agent Drachenritter joins up with the AIA and the Klackons managed to do nothing again for long enough to time out our newest war.  As Multiple Torpedo Launchers are now available for fighters, I attempt to test this new weapon, like I did with the Multiple Plasma Bombs, but uh oh… ...turns out we never researched the original Torpedo Launcher tech! So all the upgrades we’ve gotten for the fighter torpedo launchers are actually unusable! Oops! Welp, that was a short test. The fighter torpedoes will remain not on the list of available fighter weapons until we can trade or steal the tech, as it wasn’t part of our own tech tree.  And then the first wave of our next gen techs arrive! Let’s get Kraken! Armor-Piercing Fighter Dark Energy Beam Exactly what it says. Enemy armor gets a 25% debuff when this weapon upgrade is active. It also makes fighters 25% larger, but considering how tiny DEB-fighters are, that’s not a real problem. (What is a real problem is that DEB-fighters are already outpaced by other fighter-weapons.) In 8 turns of testing prototypes, this tech will be ready for mass production -and then never used again. Paratron Shield VII Oh boy, oh boy! This tech has some history. In vanilla MO3, it’s just “Class VII”, but thanks to the Ultima Orion mod dialing up shield regen up to 11, flavor-full names actually have some punch behind them, as the shields all feel vastly different from each other, simply on strength alone. Like all Ultima-shields, absorption is set to 100%. (I hope I mentioned this at one point: There’s a value to determine how much of the incoming damage gets applied to the shields in the first place. I think this was only used by some of the early vanilla shields, all other MO3-shields tend to block all damage until they collapse.) Also important: A normal Paratron shield generator has 4250 SP and regenerates 445 SP every 5 seconds. A huge upgrade even above our old class VI shields. To put those numbers into perspective: Since incoming damage is distributed randomly around the ships of a task force (with core, escort and recon rings having different target weights, of course), it could happen that up to 14k damage is simply wasted if the damage distribution turns out unlucky. (445x 32 ships is basically the maximum damage sink allowed with this.) With large shield generators this gets even more absurd! Having consistent sources of high damage gets more and more important the higher we climb the tech tree. Also if you don’t get a better shield tech, you’re even more ultra-hosed than in vanilla MO3. Paratron Lore I love this tech! It’s one of the things I left unchanged from the original mod translation. So, by now you know that in the Perryverse, which much of Ultima Orion is based on, shields work differently from Star Trek, Star Wars and other Non-German SF you may know of. Even very basic shields tend to be ridiculously strong, as the first energy shields Humans encountered in the Perryverse were the product of an empire ten thousands of years old. The basic shield comes in two (often conflated by authors) tastes: The main gravitic shields which create a huge bubble of manipulated gravity around your ship, no-selling all conventional weapons, and the “Prallfeld” or “Shock Field”, which is an energy shield used often in civilian applications, like protecting someone from falling off the side of a building. It’s main description is “weaker than real shields”. We went through those with our Class I and II shields, which basically were just “Orionified” by me, but in the original Ultima Orion mod, they’re just those two basic Perry Rhodan shield systems. To actually damage a starship with active shields, a Perryverse-ship needs to hammer it with everything it has, hoping to occasionally hit the armor beneath when parts of the shield bubble can’t keep up with the strain and open up rifts. Most of the time only stray energy can penetrate through those rifts, but in a full fleet battle, actual break-through hits can occur. Though when capital ships fight, it also quite often happens that enough poo poo breaks through the shields in the final moments of a ship to just obliterate it instantly. As Perry Rhodan started in the early 60s, sooner or later mankind found enemies with better weapons, and in turn better shields were needed. That was the next big group of shield techs we encountered in this mod: Class III-VI are all a mix of this next big tech upgrade and just staggering multiple shield bubbles. Another thing that’s different from most other SF: In the Perryverse, below the strongest main shield bubble there are often multiple bubbles of other shields using old tech, as better shields tend to use obscene amounts of energy and even the nutso super-tech of the Perryverse has some limits. (Eventually this got to the point where ships had multiple bubbles of even Paratron-shields and even more super-tech stapled on top of that, but then the authors panicked and pressed the reset button. The kind labeled “the space gods will pull a huge lever and gently caress you, the laws of physics work differently know”. There’s still super-tech advanced beyond any reason, but it’s less extreme nowadays.)  Random internet picture time: The Ras Tschubai, a gigantic capital carrier ship from modern Perry Rhodan. It's mainly an explorer, but also ludicrously well armed. OK, then Humans re-discovered a way to travel through something called the Libration Zone, a border region keeping normal space and hyperspace apart. This lead to all kinds of fun things relevant to my next LP, so I’ll skip it for now. Just before mankind encountered the Paratron-technology, Libration Drive FTL lead to the development of a new shield tech based on the same physical principles: Instead of gravitic manipulation, the new generators created a bubble of exotic energy from the Libration Zone, meaning the new shields could also block weapons that would normally skip right through normal shields. The Hochenergie-Überladungsschirme got put into this mod as Class IV shields, as they’re so much better than the old shields, the modders were forced to make Class III shields an entire bunch of staggered Class II shield bubbles, just to underscore the difference in power. We encountered them as Quantum-Field Distortion Shields, as part of my past attempts to make the mod feel more like Master of Orion, and less like Perry Rhodan In: The Orion Adventure. Class V then was again just making multiple QFD (or QFV in German, for “Quantenfeldverzerrungsschirm”)-bubbles, but then the modders had a problem: The Paratron is so far beyond even the HighEnergy-Overload Shields, it’s not even funny anymore. So the Class VI shields were abused as additional workaround to push the problem further down the line: Class VI shields are just the same, but now everything mixed together. A Class VI shield is multiple staggered bubbles of all 3 major shield techs so far encountered, all at once. Now that we’re almost at the end of the tech tree, and thanks to the modders altering the game mechanics behind shields, we’re slowly approaching the point where a Paratron-shield can enter the game without being a huge disappointment. To put this in perspective: The difference between QFD (and HEO) tech and Paratron tech is so huge, the modders felt compelled to make at least two, instead of just one, like before, shield techs to demonstrate this difference.  These guys here are the reason why Paratron-technology is hugely important to every German SF-fan, like the modders or myself. They’re called “Dolans” and are bio-mechanical horrors. There’s one four-armed and brainwashed alien clone piloting that thing on-board. And thanks to being alive, the ship doesn’t need more crew than that one monster. Mind you, those pilots, so-called Second Conditioned, were perfectly capable of just strolling into capital ships and murdering all their crew by themselves. That they preferred shooting Human ships with their advanced super-weapons was a good thing. That way, you at least died fast. They showed up in the second most-liked story arc of early Perry Rhodan, originally happening in the late 60s, and just before the story started taking a nose-dive in the early 70s, causing most SF-fans to hold the “M87 cycle” in especially high regards. Those things had special hyperspace vibration weapons, which of course could break through all Human shields of the time and the Paratron was basically just a child going “Nu-uh, I’m invincible!”, but in real life. Functionally, it all goes down to the completely alternate physics model the Perryverse operates on. The “Paratron” is actually the name of a particle which only exists in Hyperspace. Most intelligent species never encounter it, because it is naturally repelled by normal space and essentially skips out of the universe if brought into it somehow. A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, the Okefenokees found a way to create a machine which could generate a stream of Paratrons and keep them semi-stable in normal space. Thousands of years later, and you get the Paratron Shield: It’s highly complex generators guzzle energy by the shitload and eat oscillating crystals (the foundation of all FTL-tech in the Perryverse) for breakfast, but as long as your power plants can hold out, your ships are now surrounded by a stable bubble of Paratron particles. But uh-oh, those particles still want to go home! Luckily, one of the characteristics of Paratron particles is also some kind of reverse-nucleonic field: Instead of keeping larger particles together, Paratron particles actively repel everything from the normal universe. But if enough force is applied, this relatively weak repel effect can be overcome, in which case the Paratron-particles in direct contact with your incoming weapon fire will teleport back into Hyperspace, taking your expensive ordnance with them. In normal space, this effect can be directly seen (and felt, if you’re unlucky) as a huge dimensional rift that leads nowhere. Nowhere, because it’s not a gate or anything, it’s just an opening into a completely alien, hostile zone of physics. Everything sucked into that rift is “dematerialized” into pure energy and then smeared over a volume comparative to approximately half the universe in normal space. Luckily for everyone involved, those dimensional rifts have no reason to exist after the Paratron-particles have left the standard universe, so they just close automatically. So, this means as long as your generators keep running, you’re pretty much invincible, as everything shot against you just disappears forever the moment it touches the field bubble. It also means an active Paratron shield is hilariously dangerous, lethal and destructive to everything nearby. Imagine leaning slightly too hard against a bulkhead and then suddenly being sucked into the Warp of WH40K, this here is the energy shield version of that. After the Dolans beat up Humanity and took our lunch money, a weird offshoot of the artificial species the Second Conditioned were modeled after, called the Halutians (they’re also four-armed space monsters, but nice), saved our asses and felt kind of bad about our billions of dead. So they decided to slowly teach us about Paratrons, which together with us having all this burning Dolan-crap left all over the galaxy, allowed us to reverse-engineer this technology. And, again to put this into perspective, the basic shield tech took mankind a couple hours of hypnotic schooling to understand, the HEO-shields took a couple centuries of research after the basic principles were known and the Paratron-shields? Even after the Halutians basically gifting us everything for free, it took nearly a thousand years until it became the new galactic standard. And by which I mean that mostly Humans used that stuff, it took even longer until the rest of the galaxy managed to replicate Paratron-technology.  This is a Halutian, by the way. The evil versions just have different colors. (Blue and Green, if you need to know)  The Giants of Halut in color. So that’s all very interesting, you’ll agree, but what about the shield in the game we’re seeing here, in this very Let’s Play? Well, it’s strong. There are also only 3 shield techs left, and the next one is just the same “Shield X, but now there’s multiple of them”-gimmick. The very last techs are of course insanely advanced, but this technology right here is the only one that got famous enough to not get hit by the great, big reset button a couple decades ago. It’s fitting that apart from space god magic, this is basically it. Of course, the game mechanics used by MO3 come to the aid of verisimilitude here, as the original Paratron as used by the Dolans needed 1-2 dozen Human capital ships to concentrate all their fire on one Dolan to even have a chance. Which means the way regen and damage distribution works in large task forces replicates this effect somewhat: A tiny task force of just a couple ships, even with modern weapons, will never break through those things, while a full armada can still wear them down eventually. Of course, verisimilitude starts creaking around the edges when you know that most weapons we have should just not do anything against a Paratron-shield, due to Perryverse-physics, but to keep a working game I’m willing to overlook that. Vortex Drives OK, before you start screaming, I’m nearly done, I promise! Vortex Drives are an upgrade to our GravoJet-technology: Instead of just using artificial gravity to move our ships, we’re now projecting an artificial black hole into whatever direction we want to go. This is of course an awesome idea, and nothing could ever go wrong with a ship using this kind of propulsion method. Thanks to all the necessary bullshit (generators, capacitors, power plants, etc.), this fancy new tech “only” gets our ships up to 3600 Gm/s top speed, while still taking up to 18,5% of our finite free space. A short lore-dump: In the Perryverse, this tech and our penultimate FTL-tech are actually one and the same, but I’ll talk about that when we actually get it. No need to have more than one massive lore dump per update!  To not scare you, here is another screenshot before I describe the last tech that arrived during turn 461. (Believe me, my hands have already started to hurt, so it’s not just you suffering.) Disruptor Cannon An improved weapon using the same principles as the Graviton Cannon. The Graviton projectors have been improved to send gravitic waves longer ways and with far higher density, essentially “disrupting” everything they hit catastrophically. But since it’s just basic gravity deployed as a weapon, modern shield systems just laugh about it, therefore it lost the old shield penetration bonus. Though a smartass would point out the old weapon still has that bonus, and it still works even on our most modern shields! The limitations of the game engine strike again. This weapon can reach out to 26k Gm (or even longer when using spinal mounts) and dish out a good amount of damage. But since it’s not a beam weapon, it has a rather lovely 50% accuracy. Half your shots missing? Hell yeah!  However, since it’s not a beam, disruptors don’t suffer the obligatory loss of DPS at long ranges. As always, it’s your decision of what you prefer: Reliable damage, or high-risk, high-reward damage. That said, our current crystal beams have 29k+ range and 70% accuracy, which is still superior, even if they’re doing slightly less damage. Crystal beams will stay our main weapon besides fighters, especially since they come with a 30% bonus against armor inbaked. Oh, but don’t worry: Crystal beams are Silicoid-specific, so we will need to take another weapon when playing through our bonus rounds! Eventually, we may see disruptor-cannons in action yet.  In preparation for our next fleet: Everything except out dumb system craft is obsoleted into the dust bin of history. Next up: The test designs.  Of course then I forgot to actually make the new designs, so this has to wait for another time! Most likely I got distracted by the Trilarians suddenly putting up a fight. They dumped their reserves straight into our faces! [Footage deleted]  Man, this was brutal. Looks like I better unfuck our carrier-situation asap gently caress, for some reason my battle footage wasn't recorded. I'll have to look into this. If I can recover the 2nd Battle of Hera, I'll add the video at the beginning of the next update. Allied Dumbass-Decisions Counter Getting mad at us for beating their worst enemies: 2 Being unnaturally happy that billions of intelligent lifeforms are being atomized: 2 Trying to colonize planets in the middle of a war zone, and failing: 2 Moving huge amounts of transports around our backwater for no good reason: 1 Total: 7 Antaran Expedition Status Expedition A2: Partial discoveries made (4) + WIPED OUT (TF1) Expedition B1: 13 ships in position (TF2) Expedition B2: 3 ships in position (TF3) Expedition B3: 15 ships in position (TF4) Expedition B4: 30 ships in position (TF5) Expedition B5: 21 ships in position (TF6) (-2 when I finally remember to update the status) Next: The Stars at War II Libluini fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 14:54
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Meh, since our colors are so similar you might as well as cheat in an alliance with all three empires. Non organic beings, unite!
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Nov 15, 2020 16:13
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The paratron technology is interesting. Will we eventually be seeing a paratron bomb/missile? It seems like a fast moving object that drags the things it collides with to space-hell could be useful. Also it would drag things into it, vs antimatter bombs pushing things away.
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Nov 15, 2020 16:43
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Donkringel posted:The paratron technology is interesting. Will we eventually be seeing a paratron bomb/missile? It seems like a fast moving object that drags the things it collides with to space-hell could be useful. Also it would drag things into it, vs antimatter bombs pushing things away. Not as far as I know, but until this LP motivated me, I never actually got up to 100% tech tree completion, so who knows what crazy ideas the modders have kept hidden on the last levels? Though similar weapons like you describe have been invented in Perry Rhodan. You just need to read thousands of books to find out about this. Mostly not as missiles, though. Some weapons can open rifts to Hyperspace, but they're all direct-fire weapons. Well, for various values of "direct-fire". Some examples from my memories: -Transform Cannons: Beam high-yield fusion bombs directly onto your bridge. What, your shields don't exist in Hyperspace? Sorry, you're dead now. Later improved for shenanigans like letting the bombs explode in Hyperspace, which causes eruptions, intrusions and rifts in normal space. Range: Millions of kilometers, works instantly. -Interval Cannons: The companion to the original Paratron. The Dolans used those first. Imagine a really strong sound blaster, but instead of sonic waves, it's hyper-energy traveling at nearly infinite speed towards you. Interval Cannons bypass all not-hyper shields by their very nature, and they make no sound when the waves hit you and turn you into dust. You also don't see anything. Except your ship silently disintegrating, of course. Range: Millions of kilometers, works instantly. -Vacuum Lightning: Fires a chunk of hyper-energy through Hyperspace. Causes a huge, destructive rift in normal space when the lightning hits. Range: Up to light months range, works instantly. Never reverse-engineered by Humans, but similar weapons show up then and when. -Mirror shields: Can even snatch things in Hyperspace, and throw them back to where they came from. You shoot and get killed. Range: Whatever the weapon shooting at them has. Works instantly. The authors invented this tech to counter-attack Transform Cannons, after it slowly dawned on them what a monster they had created and armed the protagonists with. -Graviton bombs: Cause massive gravity quakes. Put enough of them together, and you can destroy an entire star system, because physics! (In Perry Rhodan, the structure of normal space and Hyperspace are interwoven and can interact with each other. Shake the universe too much, and a giant rift to Hyperspace opens.) These weapons were simple, older and are kind of clunky. Since they can't easily be fed into Transform Cannons and letting your ordnance explode in Hyperspace works even better, they're kind of obsolete in modern PR. Range: Theoretically, up to a full star system. Works at light-speed. (It's only gravity, after all.) There are tons of other poo poo, but you may notice that thanks to Hyperspace, most of that stuff works instantly, over insane ranges. So not much reason to build a missile, which by definition has to travel to its target first. Of course, the masters of the Dolans could have used your idea, because they were so far beyond us, they could have done a lot of bullshit and still handily beat us. But the Uleb (green, evil Halutians), were apart from their paranoid fears about time travel, very cold and logical beings, and would have simply pointed to their batteries of Interval Cannons, before smashing your head like an egg for daring to question their superiority. For obvious reasons, I don't expect any of these weapons to show up in Ultima Orion. Though if crazy poo poo like the above, or Tsunami-class time travel shields show up as techs in MO3, I'm perfectly willing to explain what the gently caress this poo poo is supposed to be. Edit: I nearly forget, there's actually a weapon that literally shoots blobs of Paratron particles at you, like a Reverse-Paratron Shield. They're called "Paratron Werfer"/"Paratron Launchers". The blobs in question travel invisibly and silently through Hyperspace, and of course have a range of many millions of kilometers. Seen from normal space, they also hit you instantly, because Hyperspace. Libluini fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 17:14
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Perry Rhodan-verse sounds incredibly terrifying to live in, to be honest
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Nov 15, 2020 17:44
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Why were the Dolan's such dicks? Since they were clones did it just end up on of those "let's clone an army with preprogrammed instructions that will reclone themselves and let them loose! Nothing bad can come of this" sort of decisions?
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Nov 15, 2020 19:14
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Donkringel posted:Why were the Dolan's such dicks? Huh boy. OK, this will turn convoluted very fast. Let's try to answer your question! "Humans" First, you have to know that "Humans" in the Perryverse is a very wide concept, encompassing a wide range of related species. Us Terrans are only the latest offshoot of the original. There's tons of dumb lore that just kind of spiraled out of control in a series going strong for nearly 60 years now, I could spend days just talking about that part. But to keep things relatively simple and on point for your question, the origin species of Earth called themselves Lemurians, after the continent that was the center of their civilization before they became spacefarers. Approximately 50 thousand years ago, their empire collapsed under the relentless attacks of an enemy known as the "Beasts", four-armed, nearly invincible monsters with three eyes. Earth was heavily bombarded from space, most of its population died, and the continent Lemuria sunk into the sea. It turns out that experiments with time travel had drawn the ire of someone, and the Beasts were send to lead an anti-time-travel crusade. After all known colonies of the Great Tamanium, as the first Human empire was called, had been destroyed, the Beasts left. Now let's jump across time and space to look for the "Why???" for this. Gnomes in Space An even longer time ago, in the far away galaxy we know under the name M87, a weird humanoid species calling themselves the Okefenokees was keeping order. Originally a Psilon-like species who loved to tinker with technology, they eventually became the main power of the galaxy. Basically the Space USA of M87. They found a way to improve themselves beyond any reason by using the very strongly hyper-active core of their homegalaxy: This ultimately ended up giving them a weird double life-cycle, whereas an original Okefenokee lead his normal life as a very small and ugly gnome, and eventually died. Then his corpse would be put into a special sarcophagus and send into the center of M87, where the corpse would undergo a strange transformation under the influence of the rampant hyper-energy breaking through from Hyperspace and become a more Eloi-like gnome. Smarter, healthier, with a longer lifespan and easier on the eye of eventual Human visitors. The Engineers of the Center (I'm shortening that to EoC from now on), as they became known, also started tinkering with life itself. Since even in their hyper-mutated form, the typical EoC is not exactly well-adapted for fighting, the EoCs ran into the problem that while their ships and tech reigned supreme, other and more aggressive races, where just one fast grab of advanced tech away from taking control and then, as the EoCs assumed, this aggressive race would gently caress poo poo up and everyone would have a bad day. So the EoCs used highly advanced bio-engineering to create a series of more and more advanced artificial races, hoping to get this nice little compromise between reliability and absolutely loving terrifying. The EoCs were really, really good though, and they eventually created the Beasts: Huge, four-armed, nearly indestructible, can procreate alone, thanks to carrying a double set of genitals inside their bodies and immortal. They gave them a metabolism capable of digesting literally anything, including rocks, to keep their insane bodies supplied with enough energy. In fact, they resembled more a very advanced machine than anything you'd think of when hearing "Bio-engineered". They weren't really reliable, though. The EoCs also made them as smart as highly advanced computers, just because they could. They rebelled. Beast Wars It was bad. Thousands of planets burned, and the Okefenokees had to mobilize their full might just to avoid extinction. After countless years of war and trillions, if not quadrillions dead, the EoCs managed to gain the upper hand, mainly by making even more battle races to aid them. Just this time weaker and not as smart. The Beasts realized where this was going, and when the war turned, prepared a huge exodus to flee M87. Huge waves of Beasts left the galaxy, and actually most of them became plot-relevant eventually. For the history of the Dolans, we now turn to the wave of super-weapons who just happened to target the Magellanic Clouds right next to us. Let's leave the EoCs alone with rebuilding, OK? They have suffered enough. They also became traumatized by those events and made sure to always have an absurdly strong fleet of super-ships handy, just in case the Beasts came back. Lemuria Burns The Beasts arriving in the Magellanic Clouds were also traumatized: They had been made to become super-soldiers with their bodies forcing them to be insanely aggressive and violent, and had been taught that the wish for freedom was met with death. They had assumed at first that with them being superior to the EoCs, this would mean that they should be the rulers. After all, the EoCs had argued that they should lead because they were so awesome, so clearly this meant the Beasts, who were even more awesome, should be even better leaders? Also they didn't like being slaves. Their incredibly violent nature however made their uprising a horrific mess for everyone that was not them, which eventually lead to their downfall when the tiny, harmless looking Okefenokees proved they could turn their fear into spite and rage very well. So now this group of survivors decided to turn from supremacy to survival. Eventually, to self-improvement. As the EoCs had taught them by example, bio-engineering of intelligent, sapient life forms was just cool and good. Their combination of high intelligence and utter ruthlessness lead to the creation of the Uleb: They look kind of green and are slightly bigger than the original, black-skinned Beasts. In an incredibly dangerous and inefficient process, Beasts turned themselves into Uleb. Like the Meklar turned themselves into true machines, just without the purging flesh part. For every Uleb who made it, dozens of Beasts died. This lead to a massive population crash. While all this poo poo was slowly happening, their defensive sensor network detected something disturbing: From somewhere in the neighboring spiral galaxy, time was being distorted. The Beasts were scared: If time travel was possible, it would inevitably lead to enemies traveling back in time and to M87 to convince the EoCs to not make them in the first place. They became obsessed with this weird idea that everyone was just planning to kill them via time travel, and they acted. All the normal beasts where thrown into the Milky Way galaxy, and the destruction of the Lemurians began. The Uleb were sure: Those Okefenokee-looking bastards had been planning to build an army of time machines to wipe them out. And they made them pay. OK, but what about Dolans? Nearly 50 thousand years later: Perry Rhodan stumbles across a power in Andromeda using time travel to prop themselves up. He and his companions learn about Ancient Lemuria, the Solar Empire defeats those creepy Masters of the Isle, not knowing it was the time experiments of those creeps that made the original Beasts so mad, causing the destruction of the very empire they needed destroyed to get the species which did the most work keeping their dictatorship going: Tefrods. From Tefrod in Andromeda. But once upon a time, they had been refugees from our galaxy, and had called themselves "Lemurians". That's right, by traveling to another loving galaxy, Perry Rhodan ran into fascist Humans, helping dictators which unknowingly to them, had probably a lot to do with the reason why they ended up in Andromeda in the first place. And then Perry Rhodan enjoyed some decades of peace. Terran scientist started reverse-engineering the time travel technology the Solar Empire had captured from Andromeda and tests were done. And the Uleb detected them. Dolans????!! OK, OK, I'm getting to it, yeesh! By then, the Uleb had become the 1st Oscillation Power (it sounds better in German), ruling in secret in both Magellanic Clouds. They had continued their self-improvement experiments, as the first attempt at getting better Beasts had just turned them Green and slightly bigger. They wanted more than just a nicer looking skin and +10% to their stats, damnit! But they also remembered how those experiments ended the first time around and took a good look at themselves: Did they really want to end up like the original Beasts, used up in their billions to create a master race, only to be discarded in the end? So they created the Second Conditioned: Even bigger Beasts, this time in blue. But this time they were conditioned from birth to be utterly loyal to the Uleb. That was the first conditioning. The Uleb than added a mind control symbiont, which would be directly connected to a Second Conditioned's neck for easy control. And if the control ever failed, the symbiont was programmed to inject a special Anti-Beast poison to kill the rebel. The symbiont and its mind control power represented the second conditioning. And now we turn around and shriek like little girls, as we see the second obsession of the Uleb towering above us: Evil, time traveling aliens. Everywhere. Everywhere. The Uleb then began developing this obsessive control system of slave races controlled either by hypnotic crystals or by creepily possessing the bodies of individuals like evil space ghosts. But that was not enough, as slaves could theoretically rebel, and then develop time travel!!!! Time, travel!!!!!!! Ahem. The next step for the Uleb was giving their new Slave Beasts proper equipment: Using the same principles they had learned from the EoCs, they constructed a very adaptable, living space ship to supplement the Second Conditioned: The Dolan. Every Dolan could join their minds to their Second Conditioned to become a single unit. The Uleb made sure to give every Dolan very good, but not the best versions of their own technology, making a single Dolan the equivalent of multiple battle fleets of lesser races. And then they spend tens of thousands of years building Dolans, creating Second Conditioned to pilot them, and then piling them into huge arsenals hidden deep in Hyperspace, until around the time Perry Rhodan failed to keep his scientists under control there were tens of thousands of those things. They called this fleet the Time Police, and the Second Conditioned were their Time Cops. The End Result First, the Uleb underestimated the Terrans and send some weirdos called the Perlians. They also had Paratrons and were therefore invincible, but they were also too dependent on instantly winning by using hypnotic crystals, and also hampered by being a slave race in a deeply dictatorial system designed to keep them intellectually stifled and pliant. Perry and his friends beat them soundly, and then Humans were back to congratulate themselves for their awesomeness. The Uleb decided that if Humans were fighting so hard to not be enslaved, this could only mean one thing: All Humans were Evil Time Travelers and WERE PLANNING TO USE TIME TRAVEL TO KILL ALL BEASTS EVERYWHERE!!!!!!! There simply was no other possible conclusion. The Dolan-arsenals were opened, and the Time Police was send to deal with us, forever. Then a lot of bullshit involving time travel and intergalactic travel happened. Also super-weapons that turned out to be a huge disappointment when the Uleb just send a new software patch to their servants and instantly made them invincible again. Then the entire fleet of a single (out of ten) arsenal was tasked with the eradication of the Human race, starting with Earth: Perry Rhodan was just warned in time, and the Solar Fleet was fully mobilized in sector Morning Dawn. Every ship with weapons on it, from all the holdings of a galaxy-spanning empire was called back and the fleet finally formed up to protect Earth. The Dolans showed up, and an excruciatingly painful battle ensued, that nearly destroyed a hundred thousand ships, a lot of them the size of entire mountain ranges. In a wild, moving battle across the Sol system, several thousand Dolans were destroyed, but the Time Police in turn destroyed nearly everything except some harrowed survivors hiding in hidden bunkers here and there across the system. Finally, there were still thousands of those monsters left. The Solar Fleet was pushed back to Earth-Luna, and Earth only held out because it was revealed the Solar Empire had in secret prepared a global HighEnergy-Overload Shield covering the entire planet. Occasionally, Interval Cannon shots broke through and wreaked havoc on the surface, but mankind still hang on by a thread. Salvation Some time ago, Humans had made contact with the exiled original Beasts. Those had, as it turns out, become philosophical after the giant massacres of the Beast War, and when the Uleb discarded them, they had settled on a planet they called Halut. There, they started to experiment on themselves (of course they did, creepy bio-experiments were all they knew, after all) but with a twist: Instead of wanting to become stronger and crazier, they wanted to dial down the crazy a bit. Eventually, they became peaceful scientists after they found a way to curtail their natural violent urges a bit. Just you know, loving huge ones. Remember? When the Halutians learned about what the Uleb were doing, they were kind of torn: They didn't want the Beast War to happen again, but they also didn't want to confront the traumatic specter of their past. When the final Dolan attack fell on Earth, Perry Rhodan had send them a request for aid, not really thinking much about it. Most of Human's allies had been send those requests, but most of those allies had fled when the cohesion of the Solar Fleet broke between Earth and Luna. As the shield around Earth started cracking, a fleet of 5000 Halutian ships arrived. Like with all Beast technology, each Halutian ship was a marvel of automation: Barely the size of a medium-sized Human capital ship, a group of three Halutians was all that was needed to control it. And they had the same technologies as the Dolans. Then the Halutians reminded the Dolans that they too, had computers for brains: They had spend a lot of time developing a weapon system just for breaking up Paratron shields, just in case a scenario like this would happen. While the survivors looked on, the Halutian fleet completely, with nearly zero losses, wiped out the remaining Dolans. And that's the story of the Dolans, and why they were doing this. Their makers were crazy-pants insane, that's why! Also later the Okefenokees turned up with their super-fleet because they had followed Perry Rhodan home when he returned from his trip to M87 and destroyed all Dolan-arsenals. And the Uleb. With genocide. But that part of the story is not relevant, except for one funny bit: Thousands of years later, Perry Rhodan managed to stumble face-first into a crashed Dolan and managed to wake up the still-living pilot. The Time Cop however was in better shape than his mind-control symbiont, and ripped it out before it could poison him. The Time Cop than let Perry Rhodan graciously live (probably one of the authors had given him a memo about this) and walked out of the story. Now we all wait to see if that guy ever shows up again to do something, but it also means that in the Perryverse, nothing is really gone forever. The End, no Moral Welp, I think this should answer your question! Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 20:53
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Was there some kind of apology from EoC to Halutians?
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Nov 15, 2020 21:15
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NHO posted:Was there some kind of apology from EoC to Halutians? Yes, it was something like: "We deeply apologize for ever making you, you filth! Now die." Perry Rhodan, considering he only had some semi-mobile wreckage left under his command, then had to turn back to his past as trickster pranking aliens and lied and bluffed his way into making the EoCs leave the galaxy without wiping out the Halutians. It was a near thing, as at one point the Dumfrie-commander of the expeditionary fleet ordered to open fire on the Terran flagship, killing a good percentage of the crew as a warning. (The Dumfries being the one slave race that actually worked out. They also live semi-independently and have a lot of say in the political structure of M87. The EoCs learned a lot from their misadventures, it seems. They look like Battletoads. Four-armed Battletoads.) Edit:  The Dumfries. Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Nov 15, 2020 |
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Nov 15, 2020 21:24
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Perry Rhodan sounds completely insane, I can't imagine actually reading it, but I love your synopses.
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Nov 15, 2020 21:29
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Having watched a lot of Anime, it suddenly dawns on me why Perry Rhodan was so successful in Japan.
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Nov 15, 2020 21:34
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This brings up the question: Why was this immortal amazing race of space two-life gnomes named after a swamp in Georgia?
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Nov 15, 2020 21:47
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Slaan posted:This brings up the question: Why was this immortal amazing race of space two-life gnomes named after a swamp in Georgia? Thank you! I meant to ask this question but got distracted...
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Nov 15, 2020 22:10
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Man, just be glad I massively simplified everything and threw out a ton of stuff to get this done before my fingers could fall off. According to the Perrypedia, the mutating space gnomes were named after a word from a American Native language. It appears to translate to "Trembling Earth". And yes, the "Trembling Earth" in question means the Okefenokee Swamps in Georgia and Florida. As to why that name was chosen, the author of the first novella introducing them was William Voltz, a first-generation author of the Author Collective writing Perry Rhodan. Sadly, we can't ask him because he died in 1984.
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Nov 15, 2020 22:19
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The Perryverse is insane. Simply take your average STARDUST-class battleship. This is among smallest capital-ship used by the Terrans as used during the Dolan-crisis. They are huge-rear end spheres with a diameter of 800 meters (2600 ft). They accellerate at 600 km per second squared, so they go from standstill to almost lightspeeed in less than nine minutes. If you look at them wrong, they greet you with a salvo of ten 1000Gt-fusionbombs (yes, gigatons) beamed into you ship. They have more guns, but half of them can't be pointed at your ship. And they carry an rear end-load of smaller ships, corvettes, fighters, destroyers (heavy fighters like the Me-110) and flying submarine tanks. Did I mention, that this ships regular take off and land on planets? Imagine a mountain landing on your nearest spaceport. Bigger capital ships are aptly named super-battleships and ultra-battleships, they are even larger.
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Nov 15, 2020 23:50
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And yet, a Dolan-class ship, which is barely 100 m in diameter, can gut even ultrabattleships like fish. (The things can change sizes, but 100 m diameter is near the maximum it can extend to) It can take on a dozen 2500 m ultrabattleships and win. Edit: I'm now really motivated to rush this LP towards completion, because the next game is actually set in the Perryverse. Sadly, without the most crazy poo poo, but as it's kind of hard to balance a space 4x around pure-strain Perry, that's to be expected. (Also that game we're doing next was done on a shoestring-budget, which we will hopefully see for ourselves in 2021.) Libluini fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Nov 16, 2020 |
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Nov 16, 2020 00:01
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Thanks for the detailed breakdown Libluini! I am excited to see that in one of the Dominions Pretender war Lemuria was able to win and ascend their pretender to godhood, allowing Lemuria to become an interesting Perry Rhodan footnote! Also Omfg. This entire time you were talking about Perry Rhodan I thought it was the AUTHOR that was on this crazy 60 year write-a-thon, not the central plot character of the series. You've been filling us in on this stuff for years and I just never got it until now!
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Nov 16, 2020 00:05
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Yeah, I thought it was an author insert situation for a long time.
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Nov 16, 2020 04:57
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 No, Perry Rhodan is written by an Author Collective. Several times a year, a conference happens where the authors meet up and discuss and plan future arcs. The current arc is divided up into shorter storylines, which are then partitioned out to the individual authors. One of the reasons the series has been going for 60 years, is that with this collective-system, authors can be assigned stuff they're good with, resulting in higher quality stories then if every author would attempt to write everything themselves. E. g. from the first generation, some where really into space battles, others really liked James Bond and wanted to write spy agent stories in space. During the conference, necessary plot events would be assigned to make the most use of the individual author's specialities. Also of course, if one author dies or gets ill, the others can just cover for them without having to stop the series. This way it was possible for PR to, without fail, publish a new novella each week for now 60 years. I have this huge, humongous fan book in my shelves that covers how the series came to be and how all this poo poo behind the scenes worked. It's full of fascinating info like how early German SF after the war was mostly translation from American sources, as no publisher wanted to be caught publishing German authors. This resulted in aspiring German authors taking on American sounding pseudonyms like "Clark Darlton" -another important German author of early PR. This is also the reason why Perry Rhodan is 100% American and starts the series as a Major in the US Space Force. It was already a huge publishing risk at the time to offhandedly mention that Perry Rhodan's grandparents had been immigrants from Germany. Closer then that was not allowed! In a later SF "biography" covering Perry Rhodan's early life, we also learn that his father fought against the "great evil" of Germany in the 2nd World War, being already 100% americanized and all that. We also learn that the FBI warned Perry's superior that he was a security risk for beating up the police chief of Paris in a student uprising when he was taking a holiday there.
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Nov 16, 2020 10:39
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Perry Rhodan 99% 
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Nov 16, 2020 11:03
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Slaan posted:This brings up the question: Why was this immortal amazing race of space two-life gnomes named after a swamp in Georgia? I'm more intrigued as to why the four-armed frogs are named after a town in Scotland.
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Nov 16, 2020 15:20
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AJ_Impy posted:I'm more intrigued as to why the four-armed frogs are named after a town in Scotland. Atlan, Perry Rhodan's best friend, visited the Scottish poet Robert Burns once in Dumfries. That was in 1795. Though hilariously, the Dumfries aren't named after that Scottish city, it's just a coincidence. The name is purely M87ish, with no connection to our history. If you think that's confusing, just call the Battletoadians "Kurlux", that's what they call themselves. Also, Important Update To prevent burn-out after realizing how long finishing this thread will still take, I finally took the plunge and launched my next Let's Play. If you want to join Operation: Eastside, please click on the link! I need some votes from you. From now on, whenever working on the same thing over and over becomes too much, I'll just switch and work on the other thread more! It is a plan which literally can not fail!
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Nov 17, 2020 23:18
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Holy crap, we're not even halfway through conquering known space? No wonder Earth hasn't been conquered by an alien civilization yet. Look how much hell it is just trying to take a couple hundred star systems...
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Nov 18, 2020 20:26
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Araganzar posted:Holy crap, we're not even halfway through conquering known space? Let's say in hindsight, this exercise taught me a lot of lessons. Like, even if tooling around in a huge map is fun to do on your own, it's not optimal for a Let's Play like this. Also, starting with the conquest-victory was just plain dumb. If I had the chance to travel back in time and start again, I would've started on medium-sized maps (which are still like 130 systems) and with the other, more normal victory-routes. And the pure conquest play would have been on a small map to speed things up. Alas, time travel not being possible, I'm now forced to eat this poo poo sandwich. (At least I actually like playing MO3. It's not pure torture like playing Imperium was.)
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Nov 18, 2020 20:59
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Yep. Libluini has solved the Fermi Paradox. Aliens haven't contacted humanity because it would take roughly until heat death of the universe to conquer even a small portion of a galaxy, and that's just boring.
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Nov 18, 2020 21:05
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Especially since we're not allowed to attack more than one planet per system. It's the law of the universe, if you attack a star system, you can only conduct one singular attack every 1,5 Earth-years. Also if you have more than 10 fleet units, everyone else has to wait patiently in limbo.
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Nov 18, 2020 21:43
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So how do I make my boys not jobbers?
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Nov 18, 2020 23:49
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Perry Rhodan sounds like some amazing bullshit. I appreciate the (partial) lore dump.
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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Nov 19, 2020 00:56
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