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Thotimx posted:Thanks - I'll keep this in mind. I'm a couple updates ahead but I'm not going to go any further than that so I can try to utilize some of these good points. On the missile bases, I know they're good early-game when fleets are smaller, but my recollection is that by even mid-game planetary defenses were nearly irrelevant. I may need to revisit that. The problem with missile bases is flight time. Sure, a missile base can help make sure a few harassing bombers can't catch you with your pants down, and early in the game when two Cruisers backed up with a trio of Destroyers is considered a massive fleet the extra firepower helps, but it quickly gets to the point where a missile base by itself will not protect your planet, and if you've got a fleet stationed there, by the time the missiles arrive, the fight is already over one way or the other. It's weird that "300 space of infinite missiles" is not that great, seeing as missiles are kings of the early game. The short version for those who may get to see that in action soon: missiles hit harder than equivalent beams this early and have 100% accuracy. The only way to not get hit by a missile is to shoot it down (good loving luck with the targeting computers available) or use technology that comes further down the tree. Sure, missiles have limited ammo, but a few five-shot racks should be able to shoot down most of what you encounter, with a backup laser or two just in case.
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Mar 16, 2019 01:17
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I saw a Let's Play on YouTube where a guy took a penalty to Food, Industry, and Science and still managed to beat the highest difficulty setting, so it's entirely doable if you've got the chops. Granted, a lot of that was "suck up to people, give them presents, and then pick off the vulnerable with missile-laden ships." But it can be done.
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Mar 17, 2019 06:16
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A brief note about missile rack sizes!  A two shot rack means that missiles are either a very minor part of what your ship does (you had a little space left over after stuffing it with bombs or beams or fighters), or it's the entirety of what your ship does (stuffed to the rafters with missiles, it launches its two salvos and then retreats). That, or you have some kind of trick in mind, such as triggering all the point defense with crappy missiles so the titanic volley of The Good Stuff gets through unscathed. A five shot rack means that missiles are the bulk of what it does, but you need the ship to stick around and not just shoot and scoot. A ten shot rack means that it's going to sit in the back and lob missiles for the entire combat, and if it's within range to get shot at by guns, something has gone terribly wrong. Fifteen and twenty shot racks aren't good because fights should probably not be dragging on that long, and if they are maybe you should invest in beam weapons.
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Mar 17, 2019 16:58
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That first combat ship will be very useful for securing your southern border against the Meklon. And by "securing your southern border" I mean "go crush them now while they're small and weak." That tiny toxic planet is actually an amazing find, because the only way it could be worse would be if it were Ultra Poor instead of regular Poor. There are ways to "rehabilitate" planets like that into useful things, but it requires a lot of end game technology and hoop jumping. It's not actually useful, it's the kind of poo poo that you do just because you can. The procedure is as follows: first, you give the planet to a rival empire, preferably one you already hate anyway. Then, you blow it the gently caress up with a Stellar Converter, which is pretty end-game technology (you did ensure that there's no defensive installations or citizens you mind losing on these planets before doing this poo poo, right?). And finally, you reconquer every other planet in the system (again, you made sure there weren't any defensive facilities on them, right?), and then use Artificial Planet (also end-game tech!) to turn the resulting asteroid belt into a Large Barren Abundant planet, which you can then terraform all the way up to Gaia if you've got the science chops. Like I said, it's a lot of running around for no real benefit, because "upgrade a garbage planet to the specified parameters" is not going to make an appreciable difference to an empire big and powerful enough to pull it off. Which actually reminds me of something that I like about the Master of Orion series: the guns have different effects instead of "bigger numbers." Sure, fusion beams are mechanically the same as laser cannons, but this early a 50% power boost is enough. But later you get stuff that spins ships, or things that can inflict structural damage directly, or things that kill crew, or things that naturally envelop the ship and hit all four sides. It's pretty neat, and while I agree that there's some stuff that was a bit of a downgrade from how MOO1 handled it, I thought the way MOO2 handled fleet management and ship combat was so much better as to give it an edge.
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Mar 21, 2019 21:51
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Biospheres need to be built and maintained, yes. There's another thing you can get later that's a permanent, galaxy-wide increase to population size on all of your planets, but it's the next to last tech level in its field.
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Mar 22, 2019 21:06
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Now that the specifics of the races have been covered, here are some ADVANCED PRO STRATS that can be used (I do not expect to see them used, they're here for curiosity's sake). One of them requires you to know that there's two kinds of advantage/disadvantage, which I have seen called "genetic" or "empire" A genetic modifier is inherent to the colonist, an empire one is inherent to the empire. To use Psilons as a vanilla example, they're Low G, Creative, and get a bonus to science. Low G and the science bonus are genetic, so if you capture some psilons, they're still feeble and need low gravity, but pump out tons of science. Being creative is a social one, so capturing psilons does not allow you to start grabbing every single technology in a tree. So what you do is take some nice Empire advantages (Creative or Warlord, poo poo like that) and offset it with some early survivable Genetic disadvantages (reduced growth, Low-G homeworld, et cetera). Then as soon as you conquer another race, you start replacing all of your citizens with theirs. Did you just capture a planet of Klackons? Well, good work, because you get to keep being Subterranean and Creative and they get to keep their food and industry bonuses! And then you just replace all of your own citizens with the Klackons, usually via shipping your excess weak citizens to lovely (or even already full) planets and trucking in new citizens from your ant farm. It's the same kind of idea as "ugh I get all kinds of bonuses, what am I going to do with these vanilla-rear end humans" and just bombing the poo poo out of them, but in reverse. I do not expect to see this one in a narrative LP because holy poo poo. Another involves decoding some of the jargon that was flying around earlier. "Unitol" is short for "Universal, Tolerant." The idea is that you take the Universal government type for the production bonuses, and the Tolerant trait, and then use your enhanced production to crank out colony ships. Which, thanks to being Tolerant, can land drat near anywhere. This allows for very rapid expansion. It's usually offset by penalties to ground combat (because you can always bomb a planet until the local defenses are lowered enough to capture it) or ship attack (offense grows faster than defense anyway to the point that -20 doesn't matter) or Repulsive (the computer's a bunch of ball-busting backstabbing motherfuckers anyway, especially on higher difficulties, may as well give up the pretense of being able to negotiate). Another bit of jargon that was coming around was Unitele. Similar deal, but because you're Telepathic instead of Tolerant, you don't barf colony ships on every rock around a plasma ball, you find rocks other people have taken and make them work for you. You just need a big enough ship and for the planet to not be occupied by telepaths, which you can mostly ensure by using the Elerian portrait, ensuring that the only race that can be telepathic is under your control. If there's a telepathic governor at the planet, you can't take it over, but if you find a planet like that...well, you did bring cleansing atomic fire to rain from the heavens, right? But they can expand very quickly once they encounter another empire, because they don't need to build troop transports that slowly get used up as you roll over an empire. You just click "mind control" and presto, you now own one fully loyal planet. Most of the other PRO STRATS revolve around "pick a schtick and run with it," and as long as the schtick isn't kind of dumb it should work out. For example, nweismuller's second LP of MOO2 with a custom race called the Narestan took hits to all aspects of combat and an espionage hit too, but with a Democratic government and a bonus to science and money, was capable of researching the dickens out of things and then using their massive cash reserves to buy stuff out in a hurry when needed. As for Creative, while I do think it's a powerful pick, I don't think it gets super good until later in the game. The earlier levels of the tech tree do force you to make choices, that's true, but several of them have an obvious right answer, such as Battle Pods (boarding with shipboard marines is a gimmick you build around that requires several supporting techs; survival pods are just automatically on all ships but only matter if you win the fight in which the Leader-equipped ship was sunk). It's not until much later that you start having to make painful choices, such as "do I want a thing I can install in my ships for +50% beam damage, or do I want the thing that boosts all ship space by 25%, or do I want the weird gimmick system?" As noted, you can just trade for or steal things you didn't choose to research, but also as noted, that assumes that anybody else actually did. If everybody chooses Augmented Engines or Fusion Drives, then the secrets of the Fusion Bomb will be forever unknown (as they will also be if the only people that have them get wiped out before they can be bargained for or stolen). And since I'm thinking of it, an idea for a custom race: Creative Democratic with +1 research (18 picks), paid for by a hit to Ground Combat and being Repulsive (8 points of disadvantage). You should be able to science it up pretty well and get good money flow. Nobody will invite you to sit at their table, but that won't matter once you use your crazy superships to conquer their stupid puny tables. Just make sure you survive until you get to that point...
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Mar 30, 2019 10:56
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That Hera system will, some day, be really good, thanks to the fact that you can use gas giants to make Huge planets, which you can then terraform all the way up to Gaia. That's not going to be super relevant, though. The nice reason is that it's because by the time you can afford to colonize the second worst planet you can roll, being able to forge a couple of gas giants into huge worlds isn't going to really do all that much for you. The more brutal reason is that it's looking like "living long enough to get that tech" is a tall order.  (Also "build planet" is competing with another really good tech, so that's a mark against it.)
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Mar 31, 2019 11:37
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For what it's worth, I don't think tanks are completely without merit, just mostly so. A planet with a tank garrison will require more ground troops to take, which means your opponent will need to have more troop transports to maintain a similar rate of conquest, or their prize won't be as nice because they'll have to bomb longer and harder to get rid of the defenders. The big problems are that ground troops aren't relevant if they just mind control your planet or bomb it clean anyway, and "they have to drop ten bombs instead of five to get a good crack at tacking the planet, meaning they capture less infrastructure and fewer citizens" is really not worth giving up a building that gives a flat 50% money boost to revenue generated there. And that's not getting into the "if they manage to take and hold orbit long enough to land troops or use bombs, you're pretty well boned in that system anyway" issues.
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Apr 1, 2019 13:50
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Missiles also have beam defense, because they can be shot down. A faster missile is harder to hit, but "can go faster" doesn't help against being hit by missiles. Also, for that video in which you attacked the planet, I think turning on "show grid" and "show legal moves" would've helped speed things up quite a bit, because you could've just moused right to the relevant area and clicked instead of creeping about waiting for the cursor to flip between "legal move" and "not legal move."
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Apr 6, 2019 02:26
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A minor thing that I don't remember if it got explained, but clicking on weapons cycles their color, as you saw. And as you figured out, green means "fire if able," yellow means "don't fire this cycle but come back online after this," red means "don't fire at all." The thing that may have been left out: a point defense weapon on "do not fire" will still automatically engage incoming missiles and fighters. Also I think that you're in a pretty deep hole that it might be possible to climb out of, but...well, the good news is you'll be able to show us what the game over screen looks like...
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Apr 17, 2019 07:36
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By the time you have all that technology, missiles are mostly obsolete because of how easy they are to shoot down, but you should have Hyper-X Capacitors, which do the same thing for beams that Fast Missile Racks do for missiles. They rejiggered exactly how the Time Warp Facilitator works, though, so some actual timing is involved in using it properly. I found it's more trouble than it's worth. A Doom Star filled with heavy autofiring disruptor cannons (with a Stellar Converter to clear out planetary defenses) with all the beam-boosting and armor-ignoring and engine-targeting specials that goes first should be able to wipe out a huge chunk of the enemy fleet before they can even get a chance to go. Even if you do lose one of these death balls, you can still win a war of attrition.
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Apr 28, 2019 13:45
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wedgekree posted:Eh, if you dump all the 'boost energy weapon' techs into one Doom star, I've seen.. Calcs that you can do up to 36 times normal damage in salvos if you throw all of them in. (Then there's things like piercing techs you can throw into it..) I know exactly which FAQ you were referring to, and the x36 multiplier relies on what I consider to be some dodgy math, in that it counts "ignore shield" and "ignore armor" as damage doublers. The problem here is that "ignore shield" can be negated entirely, and the value of "ignore armor" as a multiplier depends on if the opponent is running armor-increasing techs, structure-increasing techs, or both. It's also counting the Hyper-X Capacitor as a doubler (it's not, it lets you fire twice on the first turn and then you need a turn of rest to do it again) and autofire as a tripler (arguable; damage is only tripled if all three shots hit and autofire carries an accuracy penalty that, to be fair, is probably not super relevant by the time you can build these things). Which is not to say that applying all this stuff isn't powerful, but "36 times as much damage" is a little misleading.
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Apr 29, 2019 11:08
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Darloks are quite possibly the worst thing you can meet as a Creative Democracy. I am highly in favor of wiping them out as soon as possible, because the only ways to make the Darloks stop stealing your poo poo are "have nothing left for them to steal" or "have no Darloks left to do the stealing."
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May 5, 2019 03:34
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The Mrrshan will make powerful allies or dangerous enemies. They are someone you probably can't afford to piss off. As I recall, "aggressive" means that they will tear you apart at the first sign of weakness, but you can keep them off your rear end by not showing them weakness. The Darloks will steal all your poo poo no matter what because that's what they do, and because they're Repulsive you can't even try asking them to knock that poo poo off. Wipe them out.
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May 6, 2019 15:27
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Step One of any good "take Orion" plan is always "make sure the Darloks can't just steal it all." You can do this by having a beefy security force, but I prefer other methods of ensuring the Darloks are never going to steal anything from you again. 
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May 11, 2019 16:55
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The Fury VI battleship looks impressive at first, but holy poo poo, that loadout is awful. It wastes a shitload of space on bioweapons and bombs, has no specials, and a paper-thin shield. If that thing had ignored you starbase and gone right for the planet, it would've hosed the place up real bad, but I don't think the AI wanted to do bombardment against a target that wasn't shooting at it, while the star base was there and being dangerous. Those two five-shot MIRV Pulsons are dangerous, but you have enough point defense on your station to render those harmless, and your weapons ensured that you would win a slugging match. Which you did. I'm not going to say "pfft don't worry about any Silicoid battleships from here on out," but the Fury VI is a paper tiger.
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Jun 3, 2019 15:33
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I just think that Mass Drivers are pretty far in the tech-tree's rear view mirror by now. Wouldn't graviton beams be getting better performance by now? I'm not sure how they stack up in terms of space used, but the damage has to be better.
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Jun 6, 2019 01:08
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The gun math is not taking the Structural Analyzer for doubling post-shield damage into account. That will make plasma cannons even better. If things were slightly different, I'd push for researching Matter-Energy Conversion. Transporters are a gimmick you have to build around, but Food Replicators are fantastic for trading to your enemies. They're a net negative, but the AI doesn't realize it, so they'll splash those stupid things around and drain their treasuries.
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Jun 9, 2019 00:01
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There are a few tech categories where Creatives just really take the gently caress off, because all the choices are so good. High Energy Distribution, so you can get Megafluxers and High Energy Focus, with bonus Energy Absorber, is one of those categories. Tectonic Engineering is another, and allows your productivity to soar because you're cranking out tons of production per worker and ignoring pollution. As for planetary defenses, I tend to prioritize the tech you don't have yet, then ground batteries, then missile base, and finally fighter garrisons. By the time you have the Ground Batteries, you should have good guns to stick in them and good computers to guide them, so hitting enemy ships and shooting down their missiles shouldn't be a problem. The enemy ships will probably get hung up on your orbital defenses, so they won't be dropping any bombs, so that isn't a threat. The missile base is next because you can fire those every turn, and the AI is mediocre about actually doing something about missiles. Fighters come last because once you launch them, it takes a while for them to get to the target, do their thing, and then come back, and I don't think they do nearly enough damage to justify the delay, and that's if they get to do their damage instead of getting shot down along the way, and it's ten turns to get replacements for anything that got blown up, which is pretty long in this context. To vote, I am going for Crazy Go Nuts. I was originally thinking of just getting on with it, but if we don't go nuts with this poo poo now, when will we? I think you hit max miniaturization at Hyperadvanced 5, so once you get that in the categories with stuff to miniaturize, that's it, you're as powerful as you're going to get. No real opinions on Game Three and Game Four yet.
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Jun 12, 2019 22:17
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I think you should glass the Darloks before you take Orion. You have enough of a tech lead and plenty of spies so you don't have to worry about them robbing you blind, but why take the risk? Also gently caress those guys on general principles. Nazin delenda est.
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Jun 16, 2019 23:46
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The Hyper-X Capacitor doesn't make you hold fire on the next turn. They're like Fast Missile Racks: you can fire twice, but then you can only fire the usual once per turn until you give them a turn to reload. They're useful if your goal is "massive alpha strike capable of deleting most of the enemy fleet before they can move" and have the firepower to pull it off, at least. As for capturing that Antaran ship, you got very lucky. Shooting out a ship's engines so it's immobile is a hell of a crapshoot, and the fact that you were able to capture it without it self destructing means you won the coin toss. If you want to keep capturing, then the real trick is assault shuttles. Tractor beams still require you to get close, and as you saw, you can only send in so many marines at a go (and you get half as many per ship each attempt). Teleporters can work, but there's a 50% chance of any given marine just auto-dying thanks to the dampening field that is standard equipment on Antaran ships. Assault shuttles just let you puke up a huge number of marines, though. Having some dedicated cappers to grab Antaran ships so you can steal their toys and learn their secrets is always nice. Load 'em up with assault shuttles, give them anything that lets them get close faster, and there you go. The use of some marine killing weapons is nice, but not really required at this point because you've got enough ground combat bonuses to make capturing ships worth trying. Also, it is worth noting that Antaran ships cheat. You can't cram as much crap into your ships as they do into theirs, so on paper it might be worth keeping some around, but in practice so much of the space is wasted on bullshit that they aren't worth it. The particle beams are a mixed blessing. They're pretty strong PD weapons, but they're way bulkier than phasors. They're nice if you're slinging fighters and heavy fighters, but less effective in various ground and orbital installations, which are going to load up on the relatively bulky particle beams.
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Jun 18, 2019 07:48
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There's still a coin toss on "ship goes boom when captured," but you're more likely to actually get to that point by flooding it with assault shuttles. You might be able to immobilize the ships, but I still think it's too risky, and there's still the "you can't use as many marines." Assault shuttles are the go-to for capturing. Just remember that unlike the other types of fighters, assault shuttles do not return to the ship. They are one and done. Get in, make the capture attempt, and then get out. If you launch the shuttles at point blank, there won't be a bunch of time to shoot them down, and you can make the attempt immediately.
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Jun 18, 2019 08:30
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The Achilles Targeting System is ludicrously powerful, as to be expected of a late game tech. See, the whole "it ignores armor" thing? The wording on that is important. It's not armor piercing, it just ignores armor. Which means that the "stops armor piercing" effects of Heavy Armor and Xentronium Armor don't work. You may want to refit some of the original Obscenities into the mark-3 version with plasma cannons, too, or at least refit them to have even more guns. Or heck, just replace the Mass Drivers with equivalent masses of Disruptor Cannons.
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Jun 21, 2019 18:38
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Plasma cannons, along with fusion beams and mauler devices, are supposed to suffer double the damage falloff. The idea being, yeah, this thing is brutally powerful and effective, but in order to get that power, you need to knock down all of their shields (which are effectively working at quadruple power, because they all contribute to protection instead of just the one facing you), and you need to be pretty close in order to get the best performance. But double damage falloff isn't really a thing, and "you have to knock down all four shields instead of just one" isn't that big a deal, so here we are.
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Jun 21, 2019 23:46
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Here's how The Invincible Bullshittium Ship works. You need a Time Warp Facilitator and Phasing Cloak. Hyper-X Capacitors are highly suggested. Then you load up on the rest of the beam boosting techs and as many guns as you can fit. First, you pass your turn. This is because of the way the Time Warp Facilitator works. The enemy can't do poo poo because you're invisible. Then, you attack! Blow up as many motherfuckers as you can. Then the Time Warp Facilitator gives you a second turn. Don't attack, which allows your capacitors to recharge and your ship to recloak. Repeat until everybody is dead. For best results, bring another ship that also has a Phasing Cloak, but also has a Warp Dissipater so they can't run away. Otherwise you're going to be chasing these fucks all over the galaxy. This is mostly a party trick, though, because the only situation I can think of where this would be useful is if you somehow manage to get the required techs, but the AI is enormously ahead in terms of fleet size and strength, and you don't think you can handle any losses you might incur from a slugging match. Being able to take out fifteen of their ships for every one you lose is great, but if you have three ships and they have three hundred, that'll leave you up poo poo creek. The counter to the Invincible Bullshittium Ship is "use a Phasing Cloak but do not use a Time Warp Facilitator, then just wait out their cloak because they're burning through it at twice the rate, then blow them up."
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Jun 30, 2019 15:16
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For the ship, I propose a modified Beam ship. If you plan on fielding just one of these things, give it two Stellar Converters in separate mounts, and then fill the rest with heavy plasma cannons. Maybe with a forward extended range, or at least some with a forward extended range, in case you dive into the enemy a little too hard and shoot down everything in front of you. If you're fielding a bunch of dudes, then you just need the one Stellar Converter per ship, because two Stellar Converter shots is enough to destroy all of a planet's defenses, no matter what. Especially because Stellar Converters can also benefit from most, if not all, of the beam boosting technology. Or at least the "ignore armor" and "double damage that penetrates the shield" bits. Like I said, the invincible bullshit ship is purely a party trick (or for use in multiplayer), because if you have the tech to make it, you can just load up on good non-gimmick ships and just vaporize everyone with brute strength. The bullshit ship is only useful if you can make one ship and have one shot. Also, don't forget to include a ship with an ECCM jammer, phase cloak, warp dissipator, and maybe a scout lab. You can cram all of this into a single frigate with no problem, I think (you may need battle pods), and while you won't have room for much else of note, you don't need to. This thing's job is to just sit in the back, passively providing jamming coverage and keeping the enemy locked down so you can wipe them out. I think that with all the space boosting tech and maximum miniaturization, you can fit a Stellar Converter into a cruiser, so instead of devoting space to a Stellar Converter in your main combat ships, you can just bring a pair of cruisers with Stellar Conveters. Or a single ship of whatever size can carry two of them in independent mounts.
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Jul 15, 2019 07:31
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As a note: I know a Radiated planet becomes Barren once you install a shield, and I assume it goes back to Radiated if something happens to the shield. But I think that once you start terraforming it, you don't need the shield to keep it from being radiated anymore.
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Jul 27, 2019 13:14
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First, a nitpick: that support ship I outlined? Putting guns on it defeats the purpose of the phasing cloak. The way it's supposed to work is that it just sits in the back, invisible and undetectable, while providing bonuses to the rest of your fleet. If it's going to shoot, it may as well not have the phasing cloak. Plus Black Hole Generators are a "one per slot" kind of deal and kind of poo poo anyway, because they just hold a ship in place for two turns and then it explodes, and by the time you have those you can probably just blow up whatever's being a problem. I don't think putting four in one mount helps them any, and in the space you could put one, that could also hold about eleven and a half heavy plasma cannons, and eleven heavy plasma cannons can probably deal with the problem in two turns. And if it can't deal with the problem in two turns with eleven heavy plasma cannons, it's not going to live for two turns anyway. Of course, the point is "let's try these neat guns" and not crushing efficiency, but hey there you go. As for the Antaran fleet, what happened there is that the Antarans have to build ships just like anybody else. Their fleet was depleted because they'd just sent out an attack force, and you rolled in and stomped on their poo poo before the attackers could get back (not that they would). This is part of why the Antaran threat ramps up and then drops off really fast: their fleet keeps growing, but once you can start shooting down their stuff, they suddenly have to deal with attrition, and they don't do that very well.
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Jul 28, 2019 22:59
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On the flip side, there are two loss conditions. One is "they hold a Galactic Council vote, someone else wins, you abide by the decision." If someone wins the vote and you do not abide by the decision, the universe unites and declares war on you, and diplomacy is not possible. It's permanent war until someone is dead. (If they vote for you and you say "nah" then they give the crown to the other guy, unite, and declare permawar.) The other, obviously enough, is "your society is wiped out." The AI can't beat you to the Antaran conquest win condition, and I honestly don't know if they can even build the gate, so it's a fantastic bit of technology to trade around for political favor. One of the things various 4X games did as the genre evolved that I really liked was adding more win conditions, and allowing you to turn the drat things off. (Lookin' at you, Spell of Mastery.)
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Jul 29, 2019 11:07
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The major advice I have is "kill the Darloks." Not for any practical reason. You're feudal, there isn't going to be much for them to steal from you. Just because, man, gently caress those guys.
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Aug 9, 2019 03:43
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Awful lot of not-dead Darloks on that map.  Oh, uh, something actually useful then? Then I'd say that while a bunch of heavy beams are pretty cool, your high Beam Attack means that bringing along a few ships with regular guns just to shoot down missiles and fighters would be useful. Especially the fighters, because once you shoot down a planet's fighters, the fighter garrison is useless because you'll probably be able to blow it up before they launch more. And if not, that's at least time where you aren't being harassed by fighters that you can spend shooting at other things. I don't know that I'd give each ship some point defense guns, but I figure at least a few wouldn't go amiss. Nazin delenda est.
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Aug 12, 2019 21:35
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Hm. Given the Benny Hill poo poo you were pulling with your bomber when you attacked Cryslon, maybe a ship dedicated to shooting down fighters and missiles? Just load it with as much accuracy as you can, and fill it to the brim with autofiring lasers. Or enveloping fusion beams if you can do those.
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Aug 15, 2019 04:01
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The Alkari that you misclicked and spared aren't that big a deal, because Klingon and Alkari both make citizens of the same quality. Unless the problem is that you want to ship in citizens, which you can't do without getting a multi-race penalty unless you build a management center. If you just want to be rid of them, you can always load them on a transport and send it to a full planet. If you have such an "accident," then the inbound colonists all die on arrival or in orbit or whatever. The point is they're gone and don't make planetfall.
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Aug 19, 2019 05:35
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Depending on the rules in play, having the computer might help with initiative. I also agree with going after the eel, but that's primarily coming from a place of "if it doesn't work, the eel won't come after you for revenge."
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Aug 29, 2019 20:48
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Putting the crappy missiles first wouldn't matter for these specific fights, because Lightning Field is just a flat 50% chance to destroy incoming missiles, but it's a good thing to know for the future. As for the Eel and Crystal fights, I think you could've taken the Eel the first time with the fleet you had, but you'd have to spread your ships out so the Eel couldn't hit more than one. And you would've lost at least one. The crystal could've been taken out if you'd just stayed in there and accepted that you were going to have some losses. The frigates had two shots, but they were bailing after only firing one.
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Aug 31, 2019 10:23
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Once you've taken Meklon and have a good work force, you can start gearing up to go after the Bulrathi. I suggest this for two reasons: one is that their massive tech lead will let them run away with things so it's better to put the brakes on that now, and you may even "acquire" a few things along the way. The other and much bigger reason is that taking Ecu or Enzu will put you within striking distance of the Darloks, who of course, must be destroyed.
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Sep 1, 2019 02:33
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Thotimx posted:LOL. Is there anyone still reading this who actually likes the Darloks? There were a couple who wanted me to go custom max-espionage Darloks with the third run, but maybe that was just so I didn't have to compete with them. I just think the whole DARLOKSMUSTDIEAMIRITE thing is amusing, it's half taken over the thread and I didn't see it coming when I started this up. I am mostly doing it because I think it's funny, but there is actually a nugget of good strategy under that. Defending against military fuckery requires you to be good at military fuckery, and military fuckery is a conventional thing that you can plan for and route around and, if you have the talent, you can win despite technically being weaker. And if someone starts loving with your poo poo, you know exactly who is doing it and can put a stop to it. There's ways to be sneaky, but once their hand is tipped, it's going to stay tipped, and even if you aren't sure exactly where they are and what they're doing, you know for sure who is doing it. And if nothing else, having a beefy military is good for other things. But spying? Spying is RNG, and the only way to not get your poo poo constantly wrecked by spies is by being better at spying, which requires either shoveling tons of money into spies or being naturally talented, and nobody is better at spying than Darloks. The only ways to make sure they aren't stealing all of your poo poo and then trading it around the galaxy is to not have any poo poo for them to steal, or to crush them in a head to head conflict. Otherwise they'll be shaking your hand while picking your pocket and framing everyone else, sowing strife and discord around the galaxy. So gently caress it, better to nail those shapeshifting bastards to the wall with something they can't pin on someone else. "Being good at spying" is synonymous with "kill these guys first."
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Sep 1, 2019 17:00
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I think that the "ship explodes" thing is just a random event, and not something that sabotage can cause. Better wipe out the Darloks to be safe, though. 
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Sep 6, 2019 04:16
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Somehow, the Darloks are behind this.  May you recover with no complications.
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Sep 21, 2019 03:30
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 22:24 |
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Did they? Did they really? Or were they framed? Only one way to be sure. I have nothing useful to add so I'm just gonna beat the war drums about Darloks for comedy value v  v but seriously Nazin delenda est
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Oct 4, 2019 19:25
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