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I wonder if you have figured out the fact they told you when you first got the microtank: that they have some tiny 'guppies' or whatever on board that go pick up energy if you move them completely out of range of your fields or other tanker ship. It's not nearly as good as having a direct connection but it does allow you to power up something way out of range. I don't know if it ever has any practical use at all though. Edit: Update on last page.
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Nov 19, 2019 20:46
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I can't believe CEO Ticon was a particulate all along
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Nov 19, 2019 21:17
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Omni Reactor + Omni Cannon is incredibly useful, since the reactor means the omni can power itself even outside a power field.They can generally mire under themselves and start spreading out a bit of mire unless there's incredibly levels of mire production they're facing, and can easily go lathe power zones into working that you couldn't otherwise get to and get powered. Also, the rock burner could have been used to carve a path to be able to aim particles through, which is so useful many user maps will disable the ability to use it.
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Nov 20, 2019 17:33
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Good ideas Faylone, I'll have to try and remember those possibilities. carbon dioxide posted:I wonder if you have figured out the fact they told you when you first got the microtank: that they have some tiny 'guppies' or whatever on board that go pick up energy if you move them completely out of range of your fields or other tanker ship. I think I've used it a couple times on accident by moving it out too far, but nope never really penetrated my cranium.
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Nov 20, 2019 22:35
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 Pictured: Me at these plot twists.
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Nov 29, 2019 05:25
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lol
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Nov 29, 2019 05:30
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Thotimx, you do realise that you can build Omni's directly *on* land, right? Also, don't underestimate the effectiveness of the Omni cannon upgrade, to turn your omnis into defensive turrets and improve their de-miring rate.
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Nov 29, 2019 20:50
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Synthbuttrange posted:Pictured: Me at these plot twists. You're not wrong - the pain is real. Fangz posted:Thotimx, you do realise that you can build Omni's directly *on* land, right? I've actually had the opposite problem - I initially built *all* of them on land and it took a while for me to get it into my head that I could build them in 'mid-air' or wherever. On the Omni Cannons … maybe their guns are better than I think they are or whatever but it just seems to me the energy-boosters, benign emergent (which cost nothing), and key ships are so much more needed for AmpGem investment. I definitely want to give it a whirl though at some point.
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Nov 30, 2019 02:08
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Omni reactors are mainly for letting you use (though not build) omnis outside of the range of your energy mines. Omni cannons seem initially puny, but consider this: Omnis cannot be attacked (directly) by particulate, and you can run a dozen of them. A patch of land covered with omnis can often hold an entire flank on their own, and do it for free.
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Nov 30, 2019 02:37
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NHO posted:Creeper World 4 looks kinda like Perimeter to me. (That quote's from way up the thread in 2018, but I just discovered Perimeter since I'd picked it up super-cheap or free a while back and got to it now.) I was playing Perimeter and noticed that since enemy spawn points frequently don't go away, you end up having to force your way in with your mobile units, then build a stable system of static defenses so that you can move on and push the boundary of your base. "Kind of like Creeper World 1," I thought. Then I realized that I was extending a base network by building energy towers, or by building long-range transmitters that could go farther, but not make more energy. And they all had to be connected back to a very large unit (the 'Frame') that could land on the ground, or hover, or move slowly around. And the point of the level was to connect to specific points on the map with energy, in order to finally build a 'portal' that, once charged, would let the Frame fly up and escape the planet. The buildings are actually 'built' by energy packets that fly across the map and you have to wait for. You can turn on a big shield that protects your units but consumes a lot of energy. And a rather important part of the game is terraforming the terrain to be a certain level, by painting the map so the terraformers know where to work. There's even this overwrought plot about humans exploring the stars but encountering some unknown enemy called 'the Scourge' that keeps showing up and there's a whole lot of philosophizing going on. There is a definite resemblance, but they are also quite different, so maybe CW4 is kind of exploring some of the other ideas and heading more in the direction Perimeter actually did go. I think it has a very clear influence on Creeper World, but Creeper World also does a lot of other things and the whole fluid dynamics and enemy flow isn't there in Perimeter. Perimeter is also very nearly a terrible game due to a few serious design flaws and very unclear objectives in the missions. I don't know that I'd recommend it. But it is one of those games that does something quite different and you look at it and say, "There's some good ideas here. Someone should use them." And then it turns out, someone has. So I guess check out Perimeter if you want to see where CW came from and may be going. Just be prepared for something that isn't even nearly as refined as CW 1 was.
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Nov 30, 2019 07:21
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Secrets (40:25)  Initially I pegged Ana as the crown dufus. Was I wrong?  At least we're getting a bit more mileage out of the way the last mission ended.    Prediction; the rest of the Story - as of this writing I have not progressed past this mission - will not contain one single solitary episode without the mention of Abraxis or some derivative of that word.      I protest! What kind of neanderthal names their son 'Dagr' anything!! At least they gave this no-longer-surprising reveal a proper buildup, instead of casually dropping galaxy-shattering conspiracy reveals in the middle of innocuous conversations.  Not buying it, unless Skarsgard/Platius is doing the whole redneck/inbred 'you are your own grandpa' routine. If what Chairman/CEO Dagr Ticon/Abraxis is doing out here is so all-fired important, there's no way it gets entrusted to someone projecting a finite existence. Wouldn't just give it to his grandson, he'd want to oversee it personally.  That's more like it - another random legend just thrown in there like everyone knows about it ... except that we've talked about the fall of Abraxis Corp before with nary a mention.     Knowing what we know about GalCorp, are we really certain that wouldn't have been a better course of action?  I've never been a fan of 'I had to lie to you for your sake' as a plot device. Or as a real-life excuse, for that matter.    'I'm speechless' says Amicus ... who then goes on to speak more. I don't think that word means what you think it means ...   We've got a variety of choices, but clearly we need to bash through that fortified area of struc in the middle at some point.  I made a number of dumb mistakes on this mission. Here's the first one, though it's not super-obvious. I try to start in the upper-left corner, away from danger ... but the lathe doesn't have enough room to actually activate this energy source. That other nearby island is actually better, and I eventually move there but the particulate is already swarming. Fortunately the HQ can take some punishment.  I use the existing amp gems to boost our initial energy, which so far seems to be a good general strategy. There are already a number of hostile emergent out there and pushing 2k enemy particles less than three minutes in, so we'll need all the help we can get.  Once it was sufficiently de-mired, we discover the Marauder blueprint, our new ship for this mission.   I push forward a bit after building the Marauder, the tri-prong shaped ship on the upper-right of this formation. It's got cannons, missile launchers, serves well in a plasma repair or attack mode ... it's good-but-not-best at any significant combat role. There's still a lot of emergent out there, we're a bit underwater yet in the Mire comparison, and that emitter straight ahead will soon be targeted. Nearly 1900 particulate are about, making clear there will be a lot of fighting ahead.  I decided to make a downward push my next objective, via a tanker relay approach.  Another amp gem along with this are the eventual reapings from that effort. I'm impressed that another opportunity to be absurdly over-verbose is not capitalized on.  Some more intense fighting is ahead as press in towards the particulate's more fortified positions, aiming for that island just below and left of the structure.  It's Hammer Time. I spend quite a while rather pointlessly plugging away down here while letting resources elsewhere on the map go untapped. Not exactly my finest hour. You can see a truly stupid amount of particulate here, and we have flipped the mire comparison nearly two-to-one in our favor. On the other hand, that cannon just fires through the struc at us, because of course it does.  I decide it's time to try this out. It wasn't immediately obvious to me why this is even a thing; it essentially is grabber functionality without the grabber but consuming an amp gem for the tech instead.  After more futile pounding away at the center, I at least make some progress on this front. In the lower-right of the map, the benign particulate liberates another island. This is when it occurs to me I'm going to want at least that amp gem, so I really should win the outside of the map first. Looping around to the top, I make my way through those excursions.  A massed Omni-suicide landing clears the way to activate this cannon, and they begin establishing a safe zone and eating into more struc.  A shocker there. Progress has accelerated, as we've now got enough momentum that only the primary stronghold can hope to resist us.  At the end, almost everything including that benign emitter joins in the attack. With no external reinforcements, the stronghold crumbles before us.  I don't think it was as distressing to you as it was to me.    Casually dropped in with all the subtlety of an anvil. I don't know how much of this I can take.  Yes, Doppelgangers. Because the whole nothing-is-what-it-seems hasn't been played out to death enough yet.
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Dec 3, 2019 12:43
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This is less dropping anvils and more an intergalactic mass driver barrage, really.
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Dec 3, 2019 13:06
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I can't wait for all these intriguing plot threads to be conclusively resolved
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Dec 4, 2019 04:22
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I've come to hate the plot of these games as much as the gameplay is kinda neat.
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Dec 5, 2019 01:02
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Hwurump posted:I can't wait for all these intriguing plot threads to be conclusively resolved I haven't yet seen the ending myself, but I feel confident in saying you're going to be waiting a while …. might want to grab a Snickers.
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Dec 5, 2019 12:44
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Creeper World/Particle Fleet making sense before the end would make me think somebody had kidnapped Virgil and taken his place.
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Dec 5, 2019 13:33
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Its quite ... interesting watching you play this in comparison AI War and the Master of Orion games. In those games you (almost) always had clear goals you were working towards. In this game, IMO, you very frequently do not. I don't know if it is because you are playing in real time without pausing, or if you simply don't play often enough, but I think it would really help to think about what useful short and medium term goals are. Here are some that I can think of by watching you play: - If you are at 100 Energy storage, build a ship. Ships only use Energy when shooting. Ships simply existing don't appear to hurt your income. Sitting at 100 energy is simply wasting energy. The actual production and usage numbers don't really matter. - Kill emitters with extreme prejudice. Quite often you sit with your fleet on an emitter shooting down all the Particulate instead of simply killing the emitter. The Doppelganger Mission has several extreme cases of this. - Claim Energy mines to extend your range. Your Lathes appear to have enough internal energy storage to claim an energy mine even if they aren't in range of existing energy supplies. Quite often you move the range extenders around a lot trying to move your Lathes forward an additional inch, instead of just claiming the mine. Everything will then be instantly resupplied. - Empty space is worthless. Just moving forward if you aren't moving toward something doesn't help. Obviously there is more, but I think you get the idea. I think that just taking a few minutes to really think about how you achieve progress in a mission (which is what you do all the time in your excellent AI War videos!) would really help here.
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Dec 6, 2019 16:22
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Doppelgangers (1:00:41)     Didn't they just get done saying there was no way to tell from the scans? Also good to see you Thoth, we don't get to hear from you much these days.    Clearly the upper-right is bad news, and just as clear is where we'll start.  We're under attack almost immediately, and it's not subtle. That's our initial energy mine blowing up which is super-great. So I don't really welcome Danu's additional bad news.  'Unbelievable' in the sense that it doesn't sound in any way novel with what we've already seen.  You know, as powerful as the Particulate is, you'd think they'd have better ideas.    Everything is their fault. Everything, without exception.   We get a decent defense up fairly soon and start getting the military together. You can see there's a lot of hostile activity of various types. Two of the Doppels are visible, one looks like a lathe and the other a destroyer. Also note the bottom-left corner. For reasons that I have no justification for whatsoever, I never moved the omnis quite close enough to get that ship schematic. And didn't notice it for an embarassingly long time. Early tech investment was of course in energy-enhancements per usual, and soon after this shot I started focusing on miring the group of islands surrounding our initial area to improve the situation. Emitter Control also helped with utilizing that far-off benign emitter usefully. It was able to combat and draw off the doppels themselves.   Utilizing that resource, we move off in that direction for our next expansion while the stream of particulate heads almost directly into a similar hostile one coming at us the other way. It's sort of a standoff. As you might well have guessed, I next use Omnis to claim the nearby land, but we're still outnumbered 61-39 in mire after that, with over 1.8k hostile particulate on the map and nearly maxed-out hostile emergent.  Next I ran into a situation where we could defend our territory effectively, but multiple attempts at pushing back the enemy failed. This is along the left side of the map, and attempting to clean out this emitter was met with a sizable response. We were pushed back in failure once more, much of our fleet destroyed.  Here's what I was using on the tech side of things; I felt I needed the rest of the amp gems for some of our key ships. I probably could have gotten by with using more tankers to attack with and dispensing with the energy range increase ... maybe. There was enough energy to run a full fleet, but not a bunch extra. And of course still that ship blueprint that I had totally forgotten about.  This veritable light show was my next try, right smack dab in the center of the crossroads of constant conflict on this map. I wanted to flip that energy mine and work on the plasma here, though frankly I hadn't even much taken the plasma into consideration.  Didn't take too long to secure the area, and the Hammer was turned into that impressive stream of particulate coming in. And hey look ... a nearby cannon, if we could secure it. Gradually our fleet and improving plasma gained tenuous control over the area, and a Grabber was deployed followed by omnis to gain that emplacement. The battle in this area started to turn more in our direction after that. Better late than never, I took an amp gem from one of the ships and put it into Benign Emergent. Mire was now a 50-50 split.  The Doppels kept coming, and they can take a rather absurd amount of punishment. Still, it wasn't enough to prevent a gradual push towards that prodigious emitter in the upper-left. A few minutes later, we took it down. Hostile particulate was now at 'only' 1300. We'd dealt the enemy a significant blow.  Of course, all of this yet remained just in case you thought I was almost done here. It was already well over half an hour into the fight. And then I finally noticed the ship that I was supposed to get at the start of the mission ...     Apparently so-named because GalCorp ran out of better words to use. Definitely shouldn't have prioritized getting this deployed sooner at all.   *sigh*  The time-honored military maneuver of the pincer was enacted, most of our ships coming from the left while a steady stream of particulate aided the attack from the bottom. Not everything could be safely committed here yet, because the doppels kept circling around both below and above this attack vector on their at-least predictable predetermined runs.  Pushing through their initial strongpoint, we started to turn things more decisively when this landing was achieved. That's a hostile Mire Spawner going boom. The Big Nose's prominent cannon can be seen in the bottom left. As you might surmise, it's particularly effective against doppel formations though they still require combined firepower to take down in a reasonable timeframe.  I'm not a big fan of the Doppel structures themselves. Look too much like some of the others. But I was happy to see this first one get taken down.  This was really the final piece of significant resistance, in the upper-right corner of the map. Almost a thousand particulate remained but it didn't take too long to power through it, and the longest battle of the campaign to date was soon over afterwards.    Nah. More time was needed to make the Story last a reasonable length, add in Abraxian 'intrigue', and reveal more game mechanics.   We're now entering the home stretch, with four more missions remaining. Bit of a spoiler here; next time up I actually am forced to restart for the first time in this game.
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Dec 7, 2019 00:16
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DTurtle posted:I think that just taking a few minutes to really think about how you achieve progress in a mission (which is what you do all the time in your excellent AI War videos!) would really help here. There's no question it would help me play better. I'm not all convinced though that it would make for a better LP. Thanks for the compliment on the other series btw. You may not be aware that I approach this game much differently on purpose, and that's just because it's a fundamentally different kind of game. I don't think the strategic decisions in a predefined-scenario type of RTS are all that interesting usually, and that's goes double or triple for the Creeper World series. That's on purpose of course because of the way the games are designed, but I view this type of game as more of a one-sitting, stream-of-consciousness endeavor instead of the turn-based offerings of Master of Orion or the complexity and challenge of AI War. That's why I play it the way I do, for better or worse - it's more about the experience than the challenge of it, if that makes any sense. Having said that … ** I definitely should build ships when energy is maxed out. I find it impossible for someone of my particular skill level to keep a good eye on energy in real-time in this game though. Much harder than it was for the other CW games. So you're right about this, but I'm just not good enough to do it *shrug* ** Killing emitters - the thing is, I've found that if I don't clear out most of the particulate around an emitter, it just swarms the lathe even if I have two of them on site. This has happened repeatedly so it's taught me that I need to knock out the resistance in most cases first. ** Energy Mines - I honestly don't know what you're talking about here, to my mind I've already been doing this. I'd need an example to comment on what I was thinking there. ** Empty Space - I usually have an objective with this. Sometimes it's repairing plasma which I don't think is worthless as it helps defend. Other times it's positioning for 'aggressive defense' if you will against a particular enemy attack vector. One could definitely argue that I should focus down on more on one type of strategy game, which would probably end up with me doing more tutorialish-type of stuff like MOO, AIW, etc. instead of CW types. Personally I enjoy the change of pace, but I can see how it appears to be quite different than some of my other LPs. I'm currently undecided about whether it's a good idea or not, partly because the analytical side of my brain likes to take a rest every now and then and this affords an opportunity for that. *shrug*
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Dec 7, 2019 00:32
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While it defintitely a suboptimal 2ay of playing, I am certainly enjoying Thotimx's real-time LP. It's an interesting self-imposed challenge run (Not how I played the game, so it's fun to see how they work through levels). The only problem may be that that isn't written in bold in the thread title.
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Dec 7, 2019 02:04
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Just before everything else: The sound of the first half of the newest Particle Fleet video (Intent) is screwed up. Now for the rest: It seems I didn‘t express myself clearly, so I‘ll try that again. I didn‘t mean that you should change the play style and start pausing the game and play more „optimally.“ I like the real time style and the stuff (including the mistakes and suboptimal play) that follows from that. I definitely don‘t want to come here and tell you how you should play and do a minute by minute disection of what you did and tell you what you should have done in that exact situation. My advice to think about how to achieve progress was meant to be done either completely before the video, or at the very beginning of the video (maybe after seeing the map) - not to pause during the game. I decided to post after seeing the Doppelgangers video, which I thought was took unnecessarily long because of some stuff I had noticed in previous videos. Those were the things I posted in the short list, and could be summarized as „things to keep in the back of the head as to how to achieve progress during a mission.“ Again (and I realize that this is usually a bad sign if you have to say this), I don‘t want to tell you that you are doing this LP wrong and that you should be doing it the following way, or anything like that. That being said (treading carefully here ...), one example about the energy mine would be at the beginning of the Doppelganger video. At around the 6 minute mark you‘ve cleared the mine and have control of the area around it using you‘re emitter control. Despite this you take almost another 6 minutes to claim it, first building a range extender, moving several other ships towards it, before finally taking it, when you could have claimed it without resistance the whole time. Of course, right after I posted the previous post, I saw you had posted the newest video, in which you were a lot more aggressive and focused and pretty much disproved most of my criticisms. One additional thing: there seem to be two types of emitters. One type that basically produces a constant amount of particulate. And another type that has a specific amount of particulate that it has out there at any one time and pumps it out extremely quickly as soon as you destroy some of it. The second one is the type that you had lots of trouble with several times.
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Dec 8, 2019 15:52
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I thought it's just stuff that is on a proximity trigger?
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Dec 8, 2019 15:59
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DTurtle posted:The sound of the first half of the newest Particle Fleet video (Intent) is screwed up. How so? I've checked both the YouTube video and the original I still have on my computer to do the forum write-up on, and I don't know what you're referring to. Unless it's the sped-up stuff, which I talked about during the video and would actually be worse in the second half of it because it was done more there. DTurtle posted:My advice to think about how to achieve progress was meant to be done either completely before the video, or at the very beginning of the video (maybe after seeing the map) - not to pause during the game. Understood. I don't think this is something I can act on practically though. Until I get into the mission I don't know what the patterns of enemy flow are going to be, where the particles/doppels etc. are going to go, etc. And once I'm far enough in to see that I've just sort of got to react to things as they come. So other than getting better at doing that … I don't know what I can really do here. DTurtle posted:I don‘t want to tell you that you are doing this LP wrong and that you should be doing it the following way, or anything like that. Please don't hold back on stuff if that's what you really think. I'd rather have unvarnished, authentic feedback about what people's real reaction is to my material than anything else - it's essential for me to improve at the craft. Examples are carbon dioxide pointing out that I was missing obvious instructions in CW2 & 3, Regallion's explanations of various CW3 bonus stuff, stryth repeatedly pointing out how bad the audio balance was in a lot of the CW3 Story area until I finally made enough changes there … a lot of times I don't know what I don't know, and that can improve a lot faster if someone points it out. Naturally I prefer tact to a verbal 2x4, but I'll take the 2x4 happily over not knowing. I won't always take the advice - had a guy just yesterday on one of the other series comparing my style to Quill18 and they didn't mean it as a compliment (I should be so blessed), and I ended up rejecting that particular bit of advice, but still by saying it he gave me the valuable gift of learning more about how my content is perceived and a chance to evaluate. That's always a win. Regarding the Doppleganger example: I understand what you're saying there, but it would have done me no good to capture that energy mine IMO without sending in ships to defend it. Even after I DID capture it, I still lost it repeatedly, and I've paid badly for trying to overextend myself like that relatively early in a mission before in this campaign. It just strikes me as the kind of thing that I'd have a lot better sense of whether or not it's a good idea if I'd played the mission a few times and was going explicitly for a fast time or whatever, but when looking at it the first time it's hard for me to know in the moment how dangerous it is.
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Dec 9, 2019 07:14
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guns on omnis make defending your own land p. easy in this map, just land a bunch of them on the nice little islands you are provided.
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Dec 9, 2019 13:28
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Thotimx posted:How so? I've checked both the YouTube video and the original I still have on my computer to do the forum write-up on, and I don't know what you're referring to. Unless it's the sped-up stuff, which I talked about during the video and would actually be worse in the second half of it because it was done more there.
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Dec 9, 2019 18:33
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Thanks a lot for that info. I've spent some time messing around with it, and I don't see any way that I can fix it at this point unfortunately - I don't have the raw recording files anymore. What bothers me more is how it happened in the first place. I didn't do anything that I haven't done a bazillion times before with no such issues - if I knew the why then I could at least be confident of not having it happen again. I guess I'll just have to watch for it more closely, dunno.
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Dec 10, 2019 01:11
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Ok so update then - my last post was in error. Thankfully, in this case, I slacked on clearing out my Recycle Bin and the source video was still there. I've removed the original video and will put up a new one (yay for doing the editing stuff all over again!). What happened is that at the start of the offending section, a chunk of audio got removed. The thing is, that shouldn't be possible. With the editor I use you have to purposefully de-link the audio and video tracks and do some shifting around if you want to cut out part of one without the other, unless there's some feature I don't know about and used accidentally? I'm 100% sure I didn't split them, so … I know what happened, but I'm more confused than ever on the how. I couldn't make it happen again if I wanted to. But I am very grateful for the heads-up and explanation. Gold star to DTurtle, and I'll be mentioning this at the start of the next video to sort of explain the why and apologize for it, but also to give credit where credit is due because I never would have known otherwhise.
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Dec 10, 2019 03:11
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Thotimx posted:I know what happened, but I'm more confused than ever on the how. I think Platius did it.
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Dec 10, 2019 07:46
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"Platius did it" or "The Loki Hive did it" covers essentially all the weird poo poo ever, probably.
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Dec 10, 2019 09:26
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Carbon dioxide posted:I think Platius did it.
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Dec 13, 2019 04:45
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Intent (37:19) Ok, let's dive into the first official fail of this campaign! With no gaps in the corrected audio AFAIK.  We start off this mission by looking at the Help screen for the first time. I could have done this one mission earlier, but that's really it without spoilering. This makes me sad, because we're most of the way through the Story by now. Still, we have Game Play and Advanced Game Play ... the final two categories are still spoilerish at this stage.  Stored energy more importantly. And how is the novice supposed to be sure which is the energy pod, since they may not know what ship schematics are?  I'm guessing the Marauder was an earlier unlock at some point, but still this is egregious. It can't have been that hard just to grab a new shot that only had like the Lathe and Destroyer or whatever.  Always useful to remember.   Overall advice sound and appropriately basic. On to the advanced section ...  I still manage to forget some of the rotation specifics from time to time.     Good coverage of the essentials I think. So back to our regularly scheduled mission ...  'Becomes' very dangerous? That's ominous, I rather thought it already was.  Because Abraxis must be mentioned in EVERY.SINGLE.MISSON. I honestly miss the first part of the story when it looked like they might not go there.    I believe the completion to this statement is 'nothing blown to smithereens in a massive supernova explosion'. The degree to which these characters are totally ok with the 'just push the button and see what it does' approach is staggering.   Right and top are clearly our prospective starting zones, with the lower-left a defensive ring of plasma for the hostile particulate.  1:17 in. I focus on energy which is usually a good idea ... but here we clearly need more combat power. A cruisers has already been destroyed, destroyer and joven are building but clearly not fast enough.  This happens when the Corporate HQ gets destroyed ... it doesn't actually get destroyed but 'jumps to safety'. We have a counter in the lower-left telling me I can redeploy in 15 seconds, but that wouldn't do me any good given how overrun we are. It's the classic CW tale of build more defenses faster, and I'm sent to restart. I don't know whether to applaud the game or be ashamed of myself. At least it was quick ... 1:31 here.  This time I go with only one omni and a bit more efficient order at the start. A Destroyer is up quickly, and here comes the first doppel but we also have a Cruiser ready with a Joven soon to meet it. I've already had to tank a sizable amount of attacks with the HQ, but we've got enough firepower in place to start fighting back a bit soon. I add another cruiser but frankly that was probably a mistake ... we just don't have the energy for it. Stunners start showing up and we can't do anything about that yet either. I'm just really trying to buy time at this point while the land gradually mires so that we can have a more tenable economy.  One of the two islands above our starting spot. I send an Omni there before it is overrun to get any little bit I can. Benign Emergent to help with the main defense, various energy boosters and the omni reactors are my early tech investments. Also we have benign particulate coming from this area, mixing in with hostile and I'm not sure how that all is going to work out.  Slowly we build up, and this is my first real offensive - we've grabbed the other island as you can see. This is one of the 'modified' emitters, and their gimmick is that they can be converted. It isn't destroyed, but rather switches from hostile to friendly. That's quite useful. We're pushing eight minutes in by the time I accomplish this, so there was still an extended period of tense survival to start things off.  I did a save-and-reload because the game was running quite slow ... had to boost the process priority which appears it will be necessary from time to time, and also sped up the video some after the fact. My CPU just isn't quite up to the task when throwing close to a max fleet out there. I do like being able to go straight to loading from this screen though.  Thanks is no small part to the good advice by Fangz, I give this a try with Omni Cannons enabled. Enough of them eventually grabs the second good spot along the top of the map, taking down a hostile energy mine and grabbing a few pods. Now we're in business from an energy standpoint.  Before pressing an attack though, I take some time to grab a couple of toys in the upper-right corner.   Then we press in on this smallish but fortified central island from above and the right, as well as directing benign particulate here via Emitter Control.  Then it's time for the Grabber, redirecting our increasing supply towards the next target.  This fairly impressive nest of enemy activity will eventually need our attention.  But first ...       All together now ... Platius did it.    The rest of this battle, although there was a bit of cleanup to do elsewhere, was mostly just forming a massive line of ships at the edge of the enemy plasma. An edge that was rapidly pushed back with our combined firepower.    The 145th of what? What are we counting here? My initial guess was some sort of military unit, aka the 145th Infantry Regiment or whatever. Perhaps I've just read too much military history, but I was in error.
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Dec 14, 2019 00:12
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Really, that barely counted as a fail, but it is interesting to know they aren't going to all be pushovers. I know it's silly, but I find the sped-up audio unreasonably unlistenable. If you end up having to speed up a video, could you throw up a warning at the start of the post?
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Dec 17, 2019 08:01
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I think that's as much of a fail as you can get in this game, since you can always spawn the HQ back in you technically never 'lose'. I figured we'd have a lot more missions where I'd need to use the fast-forwarding, due to having larger fleets in play. Doesn't look like that'll be the case though, might have just been something with that one map. Either way I'll try to remember to note it if it happens again. I don't find it silly, just amusing - just how different people react to this kind of thing. There was somebody a while back who was glad I talk slow enough to be understood running the videos at 2x speed, which is a lot faster than this is, and they preferred it that way. *shrug*.
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Dec 18, 2019 11:29
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The 145th (57:46) FYI, viewer beware audio issues of a different sort here, as my voice fluctuates far too wildly. That's due to me not having the mic positioned quite where it needed to be  .    Everything is Abraxian. EVERYTHING.      I don't want to even think about the energy and precision required to do that.   Why??!?? We're attacking a fortress. There's no rush here that I can discern. Nobody's said anything about 'we have to do this now because particulate's building up or ... '. Why is Ticon in such a hot hurry at this particular moment? What if theories on the last info cache affect our strategy here or going forward?  The Info Cache is in the upper-left. The metallic-grey 'unmireable terrain' can be seen, a little harder to see here is that it is lined with gun placements. This will become sadly more important later. Then there are strange tendrils reaching out to emitters from there. Meanwhile we've been gifted probably the most-fortified starting position to date in the lower-right. There are hostile emitters but they are encased in terrain so we can keep them bottled up.  The start isn't as difficult as last time. A key thing is getting omnis on the two side islands like the one on the left here before they are overwhelmed by the emitters inside them. Fortunately I saw that soon enough to get it done. We're under a moderate early attack here, but the metallic land provides a good if incomplete barrier to hold them off while we build up. In general this seems to be a mission that is throwing us a bone in terms of getting going.  Moving out past the metallic barrier and into this friendly plasma band is actually a little more challenging - Doppels like to path through here. I want to try out the Rock Burner to free the benign particulate from our recently-converted emitters ... and notice anything familiar about that ship schematic?    'We have found the unfindable'. I don't think those words mean what you think they mean, Ana. And yes, literally the stuff of fairy tales, in this case the completely obvious representation of the USS Enterprise-C of Star Trek TNG fame.  That's not *exactly* the backstory that the Trekkie in me recalls, but of course it's a small matter to change history to fit the moment once you've realized you no longer need project a finite existence. Or, as others have said . .. Carbon dioxide posted:I think Platius did it.  Yes 'polarize the hull plating'. And while you're at it, make sure to reconfigure a coherent scrambled ionic pulse wave through the deflector dish array using modulating frequencies to cut through the subatomic radioactive interference while creating a simultaneous precisely timed shockwave with vented warp core plasma to escape the effects of the localized space-time singularity. Might as well activate the Photonic Cannon and run a few thousand pointless holodeck simulations while we're just being ridiculous here.     Rock-burning in operation. The lathes are cutting through the rock (green part is what I've marked for removal), and the particulate escapes its prison. This would have worked at least somewhat better if I hadn't forgotten the third emitter back in the corner, which I never made an escape valve for.  Attacks continue, but we've now got a sufficient force to push forward. A nearby energy mine is claimed as well as emitters - though some of them appear to be inactive, perhaps they were never finished or are just super-weak? - removed. And there's the C-Class having been finished. It has lots of toys including a shield that has multiple settings.  It appears to have those same green 'guppies'?? that the tankers do to supply other ships with energy. I'm not entirely sure what Cargo, Tanks, etc. do. A little disappointed that it doesn't say 'phasers' and 'photon torpedoes' but I think we get the point.  Mistakes were made in getting too close to the fortress, leaving weaker ships in the path of doppels, and so on. In general though I made a push along the right side towards the top of the map, taking more land and knocking out more emitters to increase our control of the territory.  That's when I made what I think was my key mistake in prolonging this mission. Attacking the top here is one of the worst things I could do - I'm pushing towards that energy mine but the ring of enemy cannons can't be completely avoided here. Also, there is more room to expand at the bottom of the map. Going after flipping the cannons on the fortress perimeter really should have been my next move, so they could annoy the enemy and support any further offensives. Instead, I spent a good long while flailing away here ... Nearly but not quite succeeding, I end up retreating towards the bottom option, a better-but-not-best decision. The loss of time was now compounded with the loss of three amp gems on destroyed ships that now floated in space in enemy-controlled territory.  More fail occasioned this push for a bit, but eventually I learned to keep my ships out of the Doppel's travel paths, attack between them so they didn't interrupt an offensive, and the hostile plasma, emitter, and mine resistance in this area was pacified.  Having done so, I did finally start flipping the cannons. Two of them here at this bottom area, and I entered the 'main chamber' to eliminate one one of the Doppel Spawners. Then it was time to reverse my field again, heading back round to the top so I could reclaim my Gems and be at full strength.  The fighting was fierce once again, and there were more casualties. The Hammer would be destroyed shortly after this, but not before doing enough for us to knock out the emitter. Soon a cannon just below this was flipped next, and the area secured. The perimeter was ours.  While benign particulate - though not nearly as much as there should have been - flowed in through the wormhole connection to attack the enemy's supply lines as it were, the fleet continued to work on destroying or capturing the wall defenses. Adapting quickly, the Particulate sent a C-Class Doppel our way. It took a veritable pounding, but by now we had enough energy for a decisive firepower advantage.  Having spent nearly an hour in the fight already, we massed towards the back where the info cache was held. Significant particulate resistance here, and we started wearing away at it with everything I could get in range.  The particulate continued to pour out of the remaining emitters, maintaining a slowly reducing concentration of over 500 despite the firepower. But it was strictly patterned because reasons, and I was able to have a Lathe penetrate the defenses and eliminate one of the source emitters ... though it took significant damage in the process. After mopping up, it was time to see what this highly protected Info Cache had for us ..  Aside from being irrelevant, this is also not provable - since Ticon forbid you to take the time to spill your theory.   And yet we've never come upon any duplicates. Care to explain that?   Updated by who, and how? (yes I know the answer)  Survived the great disaster, or caused it?  And so drops the other shoe.  The endless cycle cannot be stopped. It will always be repeated. Everything is nothing. All is Everything. Platius is Skarsguard is Loki is Life. The Reapers/Particulate/Creeper/Loki/what-the-heck ever is here to purge from the galaxy the taint of organic life for no apparent reason.  Or it was never there in the first place? And why just them? What is so doggone special about the Precursors?     'Done' functions exactly like 'Next' in this case, because Ticon keeps talking. I think that's because we didn't capture the info cache until the end ... but the way the mission is designed, it's hard NOT to do that.   This is bizarre. Ticon doesn't actually command the corporation to jump to the origin world. He leaves that (obvious) call to Amicus and appears to be shaken up about something.  Our theoretically-but-not-really final destination is up next. There are more things in the Story beyond this, is how we know that. Still, since we are finally headed to the Origin World, will all our questions be answered there ... or will we simply wind up with more? Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 20:28 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 21, 2019 03:04
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Announcement time to all of my much-appreciated viewers & readers; I'll be taking a break from spamming the forums with my content just before the end of the year. I'm hoping to make it short, but the reason is it's becoming increasingly apparent I need a new PC. I was planning on waiting another year to make this happen a bit more comfortably, but there's too many things I can't do that I want to at this point. It's time, or perhaps even past time. From the comparative tests I've seen in my research on this, the new components I'll be using should occasion a major performance boost. The current venerable, rock-solid-reliable system that I'm kinda sad about putting out to pasture has the best motherboard I've ever used, but it's 8 years old, a 7-year-old CPU, and a 4-year-old GPU. The new budget build will have on average 2-year-old or somewhat less components and room for the CPU & GPU to be upgraded more in the future. Plan is to get it built on December 30th, followed by however long to get everything reinstalled, configured, tested, etc. I'll get as many updates as I can done between now and then, and hopefully be back with a vengeance sometime shortly after the first of the new year. For this thread specifically, I should be able to say goodbye to the slowdowns seen at times in CW3 & PF, and have more capability to handle whatever the custom missions throw at me. Also, when CW4 comes I will hopefully not have cause to fear whatever that requires.
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Dec 21, 2019 07:40
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Maaaaan, one of the reasons I've cut back on my LPs is because my PC is hella dated. I have been shopping around as well. I absolutely sympathize and look forward to future Particle Fleet posts.
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Dec 21, 2019 08:50
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At this rate I'm betting on 'no mysteries solved at all.'
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Dec 21, 2019 09:46
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Gonna be honest, when I did that level, I never thought to use the Rock Burner to crack open those trapped emitters. This level'd've probably been much easier if I had.
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Dec 21, 2019 10:30
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It's the "C. Class" which would mean it's probably referencing the Constitution Class of the original series Enterprise
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Dec 22, 2019 00:43
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Origin (1:11:28)  Unthinkable is a really strong word. Esp. in this franchise. And look at the size of the landmass in that preview!       Hyperbole is getting the best of Ticon here. Not countless, not even all that many, as we'll see shortly.  Umm ... what? How many intact worlds have we seen on our way here? Based on literally everything that has led up to this, I'm more shocked at how much of it is left - not how much has been destroyed.   In other words, some serious 'physics' happened here.    'cross helheim'.   Okey-dokey. It seemed obvious to me that we're talking about Earth here. Light will be shed on that assumption later but let's not get ahead of ourselves. A sizable grey moon in orbit, origin world etc., it's all so very convenient. This is also another example of there being one and only one reasonable starting location, so we'll just head off to the lower-left where there's some defensive plasma, some land for miring, multiple energy sources, and so on.  Here's our target ... and it's clear conventional measures won't suffice to reach it. No ship is ever going to get there, nevermind the new stuff here we haven't seen before. Although that big thing looks an awful lot like a Bertha ... anyway it wouldn't take too long for me to figure out that the only way we'd ever reach that Info Cache is by using Omnis. But we have bigger problems first.  Luna. A 'bomb factory' of CSM fame, and ore deposits scattered about. Am I playing Particle Fleet, or did I boot up Creeper World 3 by mistake?  This pops up 30 seconds into the mission. I'm still building our first Lathe.   As we already noticed. No 'refining' of the sensors was the least bit required to find this.      13 seconds later, as I'm just starting to deploy omnis to expand our energy supply. The  are strong with this one ...      Bravado quotient satisfied, Ogun. One thing they are doing a really good job of here is hammering home the point that you need to deal with the moon before the planet. It's so obvious that even I figured it out.  I'm actually allowed to play for a while now. This is a minute and a half in - a couple omnis up and I'm starting to expand while getting some ships up. Try to expand anyway - as you can see the Particulate is already voicing its displeasure at our existence. Almost 2k strong it is.  We're pushed back just before getting this, which we can't use yet but certainly will. I also do the usual early-mission energy amp gem investments.  Going upwards instead of right gets us further away from the worst of the particulate spam. It's not free from attack, but it certainly works a lot better. Note the big island absorbing a lot of the punishment and buying us time - the omni I have there helps with that as well, which is why I'm getting a second one in place.     This is extremely good advice, which I attempted to follow and succeeded more often than not.  For the record, the 'grace period' here appears to be that it takes the cannon about four and a half minutes to charge for the first time, 30 seconds after this message I think it accelerates that later.  The first salvo. It fires a concentrated 'line' of particulate. A Cruiser is targeted and destroyed, while the particulate hangs out and eliminates the Energy Mine for good measure. My thought process at first here was to focus on the smaller, cheaper combat vessels to avoid anything particularly major getting destroyed by the incoming artillery and hopefully minimize losses.  Thirty seconds later, our HQ is vaporized! Fortunately, in PF you simply are able to 'jump to safety'. There's no such thing as actually losing it. Good news is we just have to warp it back in once the timer (lower-left) expires. Bad news is ... we produce no energy whatsoever in the interim. This is not the only time I lost the HQ in this mission, not by a long shot. I rapidly learned to keep a healthy energy store and be conservative on usage, to have a buffer for such eventualities. I think it's fair to say that's more important in this mission than ever.  The next shot was aimed at the next ship I built ... the Marauder. However, it seems the plasma served enough of a defensive purpose, because the stream of particles didn't actually quite reach the ship ... or else it barely did. There were no casualties from this shot, which was a welcome thing indeed. Also visible is the enemy ship/orbital battlestation around the moon. It has significant weaponry, and the missiles from there would eventually form an extended, amusing standoff with our missiles from the Marauder and Wolf. Generally I tried to keep a safe distance from that thing for a while, and it does serve well the purpose of making invading the moon it protects a major undertaking. By now I had Benign Emergent and Mine Dischargers on. Both seem essential with how many spread out mines there are, and the amount of enemy emergent (capped at 30 instead of 25 on this map) and mire that is available. Particulate is 2.2k to 0; Mire 77 to 18. The good guys aren't winning.  The push to the right resumed. That emitter could be flipped eventually, we were running quite short on energy here as we grabbed this mine back, but converting as much land to our cause as possible was clearly going to be key in gaining critical mass - both for economic and defensive purposes. And than another shot from that Bertha took out a Discharger and our HQ again, both in the same blow. Ouch. No sooner had I warped it back in, than it got zapped to rift space once more. This was now officially getting annoying. Persistence did eventually pay off though. I positioned the Shield ... aka the Hammer used for defensive purpose ... in the most heavily used approach and continued pushing along the bottom of the map, taking more land, that emitter, and another energy mine.  A lot of gradual plasma work remained - enemy plasma had penetrated well behind that initial defensive perimeter, which was all but destroyed. Still, the trend was positive. Particulate was a few hundred lower than before, mire was up to a quarter ... a long way to go but heading in the right direction. I eventually realized that the land, when mired, could shield us from the Bertha Blasts. Once I realized that, I did nothing useful with the information and continued to allow my HQ to get vaporized. Because I'm just that awesome.  I used the Grabber in a bit different way than before, burning through the land once again to release the particulate, then sending it on a vector coinciding with our defensive plasma. Essentially the idea was to strengthen that barrier and push up into the hostile plasma, defending against incoming particulate and perhaps eventually reaching the moon itself. I rather like this particular tactical choice. It's also quite clear here that our plasma barrier is healing well.  I felt it was time for a more serious offensive. Shifting the Hammer and one Cruiser to the Moon Front, we eliminated the defensive ship and starting pushing into more of the outlying defenses, such as this energy mine. The Big Nose Doppel proved the most stubborn of the resistance.  Progress was steady until I started landing on the moon surface itself. Notice how the particulate from the central emitter there is flowing to the left into that section of land where I've got a couple of omnis failing to get a foothold? Well good for you - I didn't notice for quite a long time and lost many omnis uselessly. That's literally the worst place on the moon to try to land IMO.  I eventually figured out that it was best to just ignore that section and instead working on taking everything else, cutting off its support. Also, I grabbed the schematic that had been just out of reach before     Finally, someone has stopped being surprised by these kinds of eventualities. We can't put it in service right away - we still don't have enough energy to support our full fleet.  This was the turning point on the Moon. Once that emitter went down, resistance was greatly reduced. Our Omnis swept over the surface, destroying the base and even the ore deposits themselves ... missed opportunity to allow us to commandeer them for own use, perhaps in producing additional Amp Gems or something? In any case, it didn't take long after this to secure it.  Oh. We do get to use them after all. This I didn't see coming. Each ore deposit became a minimal-yield energy source. With our tech enhancement, they upgraded to six each or 24 additional energy. Before landing on the moon we'd had just over 40 so this plus the additional mire space meant we were now flush with power.  The bottom of the map was our closest point of approach to the planet. Its defenses were now compromised, and that Bertha was nothing more than an oversized paper-weight with its energy supply cut off. The Benign particulate helped to cut a path there, and the new Carrier was deployed. It's probably a little hard to see here, but at the top of the screen there's a targeting reticle. That moves on its own. There's a couple of the 'stealth fighters' nearby it, which I don't think can be hit by the enemy. They fly around and shoot down particulate until they run out of energy and have to return to rearm. My conclusion is that this ship isn't super-powerful, but effectively has long range and is almost impossible to counter.  Deploying tankers, I added the C-Class into the mix as our point ship on this assault. We, uh, needed it. The Particulate was none too pleased and wasn't about to just let us stroll into the Origin World proper. So I built the Big Nose as well, and redeployed the Hammer and Wolf to this attack. The other fronts were drying up anyway - this is where things were being decided. After knocking out the nearby emitter, the hammer crashed through the protective struc and we made landfall. But not before realizing that Omnis can't fly over struc ... which should have been obvious. Several of them were blown up trying. Don't know why I thought they could avoid it when ships can't, but I did.  Our initial landing, while the fleet was very much necessary in holding off more particulate coming in from above. But nevermind that - it was time for the Omnis to get to work. The Reactor/Cannon combo was once again very much essential.  Enemy emergent remained a problem for quite a while, knocking out our omnis. As our mire grew though, that plus the benign emergent concentrating on the planet eventually turned the tide. By the time the total mire comparision was about 2:1 in our favor, their numbers started to decline significantly and we were closing in on the Bertha and Info Cache.   From Liana's lips to Kami's ears.   At risk from what? And how do we jump without a destination?? Whatever.  My initial plan was to view the Codex and also do the next actual mission, Duty, which appears to be the final one of the Story, together. However, my computer had other ideas. Less than two minutes into Duty I was already getting significant slowdowns. So in the interests of acceptable LP quality, just Codex will be a brief update in hopefully a few days, and then the conclusion of the story will wait until the new system is up and running. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 20:24 on Dec 27, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 12:29
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