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 By popular request, I'm playing the second game in the Master of Orion series of venerable-until-it-wasn't 4X games. It's been done a couple times in narrative style by noted bard nweismuller. Over a decade ago, GrandpaPants also did one. This will be more gameplay-focused, similar but much shorter than my adventures with the original here. I'm not nearly as good at this game, so don't expect similar shenanigans. Master of Orion II was produced in 1996 by Simtex Software, published by Microprose. That's the same duo that made the first game a few years earlier, but not the same project lead. Moo2 was very well-received, and there are still many who consider it the finest 4x ever made. For anyone who didn't follow the first LP, I think the original is one of the Top 5 strategy games. However, contrary to popular opinion, I don't hold this one in as high regard. It's an above-average strategy game, better than most -- but I don't consider it a classic and definitely not at the same level of the debut title. I'll explain and hear counterarguments I'm sure as to the why of all that. A lot of this is probably nostalgia-based; i.e., what game you played first is probably the one you like the most. I'll do my best to give more solid reasons for what I think than that. Wasn't there a Master of Orion game more recently? Yeah, but we don't talk about those :P. My working title for a while was going to be At Least It's Actually a Sequel, because frankly I don't think that can be accurately said of the last two entries. Master of Orion III, Libluini's continuing efforts aside, killed the franchise for a while and with good reason. It's one of the great cautionary tales in game development history, up there with Rome: Total War II and a few others in the pantheon of 'what not to do'. The more recent reboot in 2016 is essentially a modernized, dumbed-down version of our subject matter for this thread. Neither of them, especially III, deserve the name printed on the box. Master of Orion II is a legit sequel that generally stays true to the spirit of the original. In that, it stands alone among the other attempts. For the record, Steam says the following: ** Master of Orion 1 - 86% positive ** Master of Orion 2 - 96% ** Master of Orion 3 - 45%. Never let it be said that people are too negative. This isn't nearly negative enough. ** Master of Orion 2016 - 58% This reflects the general consensus again that the first two are considered classics, with II the pinnacle of the series - and that the more recent efforts have been lacking, to put it charitably. Are you going to win with every race on Impossible again? No. This will once again be a hybrid LP in the same style, mostly screenshots but videos for representative combats. I plan to do at least a couple successful games - and hopefully not too many failures - so I'll give a good taste but I won't be exploring every possible eventuality. Also, this may or may not be a dual LP, in the sense that Wayne was at some point going to do some MOO2 videos of his own as a joint effort. I don't know if that's still planned, since he's been quite busy lately - but it may be a thing. If you read this Wayne, you're still invited. I think Moo2 IS the best in the series. Can't you show it a little charity? They tried, they really did. The game is ambitious and improves on the original in many respects. They got many things right, and I think their minds were generally in the right place. My aim here is to be harsh but fair - where it outshines MOO1 in my opinion I'll make a point of saying so. My contention though is that none of those improvements are in the final analysis nearly as important as the things they screwed up. It's hard to make a good sequel. It's REALLY hard when you're following up a good original. So while this game admittedly is being judged, at least by me, in comparison to quite a high bar, they did put 'Master of Orion' not 'Generic Space Strategy X' on it, so I think it's a proper approach. Bottom line: it's a quality game, worth playing. Just not an all-time great. Spoilers? Have at it, just use the tags for anything that gets close to talking about that creature on the box art at the top of this post. If you know enough to spoil it, you know what I'm talking about. No need to tag stuff like talking about tech advances and the like. Most people will probably have played the game before, but I don't want to totally assume that will be the case. I'm also going to come right out here and say that I'll be very interested in hearing strategic advice from the experts on this game, esp. in the first playthrough. So on that spoil, spoil, spoil away. Longhorn Legends Here's what's got us all chasin' circles in the pasture so far. Hard Normal In which I get myself well and truly waxed by a fast-expanding menace. Setting the Stage: First Game Setup Grasping the Very Basics: The First Turn Learning the Essentials Leaving the Cradle Callisto or Bust To Callisto … and Beyond! Something Something Plan Enemy Contact With Ever Survives The No UI Wrap-Up All Cramped Up and Nowhere To Go Between a Rock and a Gang of Wannabes Fighter Details (Olesh) A Dastardly Betrayal Combat Hit Mechanics (Olesh) A Grave Mistake Humanity Strikes Back … or Dies Trying. Probably the Second One Shields & Damage Mechanics (Olesh) The Grim Reaper Cometh TechnoGeeks Custom Psilons, Hard/Huge/Antarans, in which I aim for maximum science and the new ending. TechnoGeek Opening A Quiet Galaxy The End of the Beginning Habitable Area and You: A guide to Maximum Population (and Food) On Planets (Olesh) How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Just Hand Over All My Tech The Antarans are Coming! A Whole Lotta Micro Goin' On This Neighborhood Blows War Is Upon Us Counterattack Mrrshan Squeeze Ship Design & Tactics Effortpost (Olesh) Peace is a Lie, but so is War. And everything else, come to think of it. This Galaxy Blows Klackon Krush Let's Talk About Missiles Some More (Olesh) Back to the Designing Board Tipping Point Micro All The Day Long Bye-Bye Bugs Smashing the Rocks Beam Weapon Scaling (Olesh) Evolving Towards Perfection A Billion Strong … And Growing A Valiant - and Ill-Advised - Raid Too Many Beakers Palpatine Was a Child Playing With Toys Klingons Custom Elerians, Hard/Small, Going for maximum combat What Do I Even Do Here … You Say Federation, I say Faileration Between the Rocks and a Hard Place The Dumbest War An Uneasy Recovery Klackons Stock Klackons because Uncreative, first and only Impossible run, Medium galaxy A Final (Stiff) Challenge Limited Options Expansion Monster-Hunting Antaran Airheads The Peace Ends … In Theory Any Ball of Rock in the Storm The Only Good Meklar Is An Enslaved Meklar Silence Freedom and Mixed Success Gnolam Grind Thot's Thoughts: Post-Mortem Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Dec 5, 2019 |
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Mar 12, 2019 08:08
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Setting the Stage: First Game Setup Prepare yourself for an lot of exposition. I'm going to try to break it up as best I can by saving anything not strictly necessary for later, but there will still be EPIC WALLS OF TEXT before anything actually really happens. It's the nature of this kind of beast. This update will only get us through the process of getting ready to play - the doing of gameplay itself will begin later. Also, if you want to see stock race X or custom trait combo Y, you can go ahead and mention those at any time but I'll be doing a poll on what to use for further games partway through our initial foray. For now, we just need to get some basics out the way and get our feet wet first. Intro Cinematic Full disclosure: that's not mine, it was just easier to use someone else's upload for this purpose due to the 90s-era penchant for skipping in-game video at the touch of a key ... any key. This basically is just a decent-for-its-time cinematic announcing the Antarans. Who the heck are they? Well, the manual has a bit of background:  This tells us a bit more than the original did, but not much. The Orions we knew about, but now we know the Antarans were their rivals in ancient galactic history. And they assuredly weren't too thrilled about this 'prison dimension' they were trapped in, while the ultimate fate of the Orions is still unknown. Both races are clearly intended to still be shrouded in mystery.  The main menu most notably adds a Hall of Fame and and Multiplayer option to the original.  These are the settings we'll begin with. Similarly there are more options here than the original. That's a trend that we'll see continuing throughout. What is here are known as the Eight Serious Decisions. No, really. That's what the manual refers to them as, capital letters and all. I seriously laughed out loud the first time I read that. ** Difficulty -- Five levels again, ranging from Tutor to Impossible. I'll be starting on Hard as a 'warm-up'. Did a few test starts on Average and I wasn't having any trouble keeping up with the AI once I re-figured out what I was doing, but I'll definitely need to improve to have any shot at Impossible. That may or may not happen later, depending on how things go. Similar to the first game, harder levels have rivals who are better in research/production than you are - lower levels result in the player having the advantage. Additionally, custom races are only available on Average or higher, and higher difficulties result in opponents generally not liking you on the general principle of your insistence on existing. ** Galaxy Size -- Five here as well. Small/Medium/Cluster/Large/Huge. Ignoring 'Cluster' for the moment, this corresponds 20/36/54/72 stars, which isn't as many as in the original which had over 100 in the huge setup, but here systems can have multiple planets so that more than makes up for it. I'm hoping to get in one game on each of the 'standard' four sizes. ** Fun Fact: The 'Cluster' option was apparently added via 'fan/unofficial' patch. This may be why selecting New Game from the main menu is the only way to get it. You can also start a new game from within an existing save ... but you'll only get the other four choices. So far as I can tell, Cluster has the same amount of stars as 'Huge' - despite using the 'Large' graphic - but more evenly spaced out. ** Fun Fact: I found a steam poll of MOO2 players on what size galaxy was preferred. Huge was the runaway winner with 58%, 17% wanted Large which I think Wayne has recommended, and the others were all at about 10% each. ** Galaxy Age -- This is new. Average/Organic Rich/Mineral Rich. Organic Rich means more biological resources and less industrial, Mineral Rich means the opposite, Average strikes a balance. ** Players -- Up to 8 opponents, which of course I'll be using the max of. Only five were available in the first game. Why we need a Sesame Street - style graphic of the numbers is beyond me; perhaps consistency with the rest of the screen? ** Tech Level -- We can start Pre-Warp, Average, Post-Warp, or Advanced. The higher levels give you more technology and potentially multiple star systems, etc. at the start. The exploration phase can largely be skipped if you like by taking one of the later options. 'Post-Warp' here is another example of something not originally in the game and added later. Pre-Warp is my preferred setting because it gives you the most choice and control. For immediate purposes it will also let me drip out mechanics explanations more gradually. ** Tactical Combat - All ship combat can be auto-calculated if you just want it to basically be a space empire simulator; I'll definitely be keeping this on instead. If it is off, you also can't design your own ships, but only select the preset ones. ** Random Events - I like having these on for flavor, but some of them have ... issues. I'll get to that. ** Antarans Attack - Having this on adds another possible victory condition, and definitely makes things more difficult/complicated. Off for this first game, but I'll add it down the road.  Demonstrating the graphics for the other choices. I'm not taking the time to display the other opponent numbers, but other than that this should cover everything.  Reusing graphics for the 'unofficial changes' - Average and Post-Warp settings have the same.  And the same here with 'Large' and 'Cluster'.   There's more races this time around. And, if I may say so, the art style is just ... bizarre. It looks like someone took the original MOO races and cross-bred them with a grotesque gargoyle. It really struck me the first time I ever fired this up how dark everything is visually. It's clearly intentional, but the interface, cinematics, etc. just don't have a lot of lighting. The original cast of characters are all here, along with Trilarians, Gnolams, and Elerians. And then we can also choose a Custom race, which means using one of the other race portraits; whatever portrait we choose will then not be represented as an AI in the game. I'm not sure why -- there is a mysterious 'Custom' graphic -- but anywho. Don't worry about the bonii and such listed below each portrait - we'll get to that. Following after our pointy-headed birdbrain here to represent the Alkari, here are the rest in alphabetical order:   So ... why is it spelled differently now? Darlok became Darlock for some reason.  BTW, MOO3 has some interesting canon on the backstory for these races as well as the one it adds further. It's worth reading - just please, please don't play that game itself. Think of your brain cells. Which need enough attention now that I've subjected to you the 'armor' being worn here.    Humans and Klackons in particular look good IMO, although it's clear the homosapien abandons the 'Star Trek, but less innocent' vibe from the original going with a more 'eastern monk' approach.  NO. The wiry skeletons of MOO were much better. Why did they have to do this to the distinctive cybernetics?? This is just some sort of biped in Purple Power Armor. It was a bulge-eyed, ridge-faced, twerking Purple People Eater ... nvm.  Different, but I'm cool with it. This is the only MOO in which the cat-people are not explicitly feminine.  No longer with outsized, bulging craniums, the eggheads have become the ... crystalheads? Another off-beat choice that I can accept.  I'm detecting a purple fetish. I don't recall every hearing anyone tell of purple wetlands, which is probably why the Sakkra were, and should remain, green. Apparently Kermit was right when he sang decades ago that it ain't that easy being green. I don't mind the more aggressive model, but colored like this it seems the avatar is trying to be a combination of Barney and a T-Rex. With entirely too much bling, I might add.  Yep, purplish fetish confirmed. And also - SILICOIDS DON'T HAVE FREAKING ARMS. They are crystalline life forms. I'll take the original cookie monster over this every day of the week, because they are the most unique race in the game. Portrait fail.  Well done here.  The only place this will ever be seen. Not 'used', because again it really isn't. It's just there to remind us that even races customized from non-humanoids, are still humanoid, even though they're not.  Sheesh. Master of Orion 1 didn't even have a custom race option. And look at all this! I've chosen the Humans here and hit Clear. This is known as 'Galactic Normal'. Hence we are the Hard Normal race (I replaced 'Human' at the top with that, you can name yourself whatever you like there). I will go through what all this stuff does at a later time. Right now, it would be sort of trying to explain the finer points of modern fuel injectors to someone who has never heard of an automobile. Let's get some vague clue of game mechanics first, mkay?  Because I forgot to in the original. Also, without the backslash - I couldn't keep that from popping up since it's part of the screenshot hotkey.  Yellow, simply because traditional Humans wore such uniforms in MOO1.  After a few seconds of 'Generating Universe' are so forth. Once we choose our home star's name here, we can actually play. The primary interface is visible behind. And we don't have to worry about remembering to save, since the game will automatically autosave. Yes, autosaves, a newfangled feature nowhere to be found in the first title. Well done. Until next time, when stuff - of a limited nature - actually happens. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Mar 12, 2019 |
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Mar 12, 2019 08:18
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Grasping the Very Basics: The First Turn Huddled in the Situation Room, this is the display on the main wall screen as generals, admirals, high-ranking politicians, and other manner of dignitaries are busy at various tasks and/or doing their best to look it. As Immortal - or at least nearly so - Emperor of your people, this is the nerve center of your galactic empire. That's a shockingly pretentious title for where we actually are to start off pre-warp, but we'll get there, at least for a time. Officially, this is the Galactic Command Interface. Not the most inspiring name, but it's functional. Let's go with GCI for short. Much is familiar, but there is definitely some that is new. For our immediate purposes, we'll just note a couple things. ** The GAME button in the upper-middle escaped my notice for quite a while when I first played. I had no idea how to save/load etc. and there are settings under there that we'll leave at default for now and get to later. It's just kind of strange to me that it blends in as much as it does and is sort of an afterthought. ** In the upper-right, the STAR DATE. That's literally what the game calls it. Small clap for being able to know the current turn from the main screen at all times. But with that we must scratch our head. MOO2 definitely doesn't have a consistent relationship with it's own timescale or storyline. Last time out we began in 2300. Here we are 1200 years into the future. That's not a small jump, and it's the same year regardless of what your starting tech level is. Over a millenium in the future, same races starting out in the galaxy at the same general capabilities beginning from their respective homeworlds? This is not a big deal from a gameplay perspective of course - the current stardate matters only in relative terms. It's just that it is sort of pointless and has no even attempted justification that I'm aware of ... so just why?  Just below the stardate is the Reserve display - the coin picture. We start with 50 BC and a healthy positive balance. Click on that panel, and you get this tax pop-up. It really confused me for a while that you have positive income with no taxes. Like many things, the reserve works differently in this game. It's enough for our purposes to note taxes are currently at 0% and we can increase them if we need more cashola. Other imperial stuff can wait - let's take a look at our homeworld. Unlike MOO1, we can't do that from this screen.  Click on our system, the only one we've explored, and we get this. We have multi-planet systems now! Generally you have another crap planet or two around your own star. We have a Gas Giant, which are all uninhabitable, and ...  Yep, it's crap. Researching hostile landing tech is not a thing. We can land anywhere - the question is whether it's worthwhile to do so. The 'grab everything in sight' protocol from our original MOO adventures is gone. ** Pro-Tip: When in doubt, right-click. This should be in neon capital letters about 500 pixels high in some unavoidable pop-up soon after you start up the game for the first time. Instead it is recommended as an aside deep in the in-game help somewhere. But while it's not obvious, one really really good design choice that was made on this game is that you can get more information about literally almost anything by right-clicking.  Obviously these are very small max populations - we'll get to that, but these are in millions and 10M was the lowest possible in the first game. Food and farming is a thing, we've got maintenance penalties and worker bonuses ... we're not in Kansas anymore. Let's dive into our homeworld finally to understand what some of this means.  There is a slightly faster way to get to this screen, but clicking on the system then the specific planet is the most natural/intuitive way. At the upper-left we can see that every system has up to five potential orbits, and we can switch between/get more info on the local planets that way. So clicking through the system itself really isn't necessary or even useful when you get right down to it. Planetary Resources Right, let's get to know this place we're matriculating from. The label across the top is dynamic, which is a cool touch - it'll change to 'Industrial Colony' or 'Agricultural Colony' or 'Research Colony' if you focus a lot of labor in a specific area. Population in the upper right is given with precise growth that will occur at the current distribution of labor. We get a new 'citizen' for every 1M population. 8M pop gets you the same of everything as 8.999M does. So for the purpose of getting things done, all that matters is how many citizens you have on a planet. ** Money - 1 BC of reserve income is generated automatically by each citizen; unlike MOO1, production and money are entirely separate concepts. This is distinct from the taxes we discussed earlier - it just happens naturally. I imagine some sort of global sales tax or VAT is in place here, a tax on personal income/commerce or what-have-you. You might well wonder about the gap between the coins here:  Main thing there is that we are actually spending the first 3 BCs on stuff, which is why they are separated. The rest is the profit.  The previous desc. was the right-click option, this is left-click. That's how all these screens work - left-click is 'functional' and right-click is 'tutorial/exposition'. We'll get to what trade goods are but main thing here is to see what our financial income is on the planet. The next section across displays the symbol for what type of government we have, and any morale effects. We have a neutral Morale right now, so all we get is the governmental symbol. ** Food - Four farmers doing their thing on the next line down. Each citizen needs one unit of food per turn. If they don't get it, population growth will slow down or even reverse. You can lose citizens this way, though I don't think you can have a colony starve out completely. It is also possible to export excess food eventually, though I can't do it yet here. Surplus is automatically sold off at a base price of 1/2 BC. The amount of food produced by each farmer is dependent on the environment. That's the single biggest problem with our sister planet Sol II - you can't farm on a Radiated world. So we'd have to import food there to make anything happen. ** Industry - As mentioned, production and finances are separate in this game. We have one worker producing three industry at the moment. Pollution is handled here as well - I'll get to that in a bit. Also, if we increase taxes to the Reserve, this is where they come from. Being schooled in Lords of the Realm and other titles, I expected a morale hit from taxes, but it directly takes away from industry. 10 Industry with a 20% tax rate means 2 more BCs in the reserve and only 8 effective Industry going to whatever. The mineral resource level of a planet determines how much base Industry you get per worker. I keep using the term 'base' because all kinds of stuff will modify this later. Fundamentals first. We have 'Abundant', which means 3/worker ... and it's a bit deceptive because that's actually the standard mineral resource amount. In true MOO fashion, we can also have Very Poor (1), Poor (2), Rich(5), and Very Rich (8). So a worker here does 50% better industrial output than one on Sol II would. That's another strike against that planet. ** Research - 3 Scientists presently produce 9 Research, at 3 each. Both planets have a base of 3 - this depends neither on environmental or mineral resources and is more consistent from one planet to another. Therefore, again in classic MOO fashion, Sol II would be relatively better at that than farming or industry, since it sucks at the first two categories. Of course there are still specials that can change research output.  Let's say that, in a fit of stupidity, I decided everyone is needed in Industry. Well, you can see that I'm going to lose a whole lot of people to starvation. Aside from being a royal jackwagon of a despot, this is also going to make a lot of pollution, eating a sizable amount of the extra effort. The calculation for pollution is a bit complicated, but basically each planet has a certain amount of pollution-free Industry it can support. Above that point, some of your Industry will be lost as pollution, simulating the cleanup effort. There is no choice to simply not clean it up in MOO2, it simply gets subtracted from your production. At our starting level of things, once it kicks in we'll lose half of our 'extra' industry to pollution, and even worse the final resulting production is rounded down. So 2 workers are fine (6 Industry produced), but 3 workers will only produce 7 (9 - 1.5 pollution = 7.5, rounded down). 4 gives us 9 production (3 lost to pollution) and so on. Planetary Economy Assessment The citizen system is a definite, fundamental departure from MOO1, which worked on a five-category slider system. A couple of advantages of this change might be considered to be simplicity and limiting micromanagement. If you've played much MOO2 though, you know that neither one of those actually pan out once you get further into the game, and that it's actually harder to keep the 'spending ratios' you want in place long-term without making constant tweaks. Both systems require require regular adjustments for optimal play, while the original sliders give you more fine control over what investment to make where, and also provides a more natural, organic increase over time compared to the plateaus in the worker approach. This is one area where the original game is best. On the other hand, I do really like the idea of exporting food to supply colonies that can't make their own, and the general concept of how the different planetary environments work. There's a lot more variety out there now. The idea of being able to land anywhere, but not necessarily profitably, is one that is attractive to me. Choosing where to colonize is made more important, so MOO2 gets the seal of approval in these aspects.  In MOO1, the only specific things you needed to select to build were ships. Here, the CHANGE button on the right of the previous screen brings up this. Which is mostly empty now, but it won't stay that way. Here is what all that Industry goes towards building. The Colony Base shown can only be used in-system, which is a nice idea as a cheaper alternative to the Colony Ship we can't yet make. Spies are built planetside which is a major difference to get into later, designing/refitting/etc. is all for another time, but it's worth noting you can set things to be built repeatedly or turn this whole mess over to the AI with Auto Build. The two things on the left are 'settings', not actual tangible structures. That is, Trade Goods will produce more income from their sale - that's where that extra 2 BC we noticed earlier was coming from. Housing boosts population growth - switching to that would increase our gain from 73k to 83k per year. These allow a planet to use its industrial output in these areas if we don't need a ship or structure built at the moment. And there will be more. There will be so much more. Looking at the Build List in the bottom middle, the game will warn you if Trade Goods/Housing are above other stuff because they will never 'complete'. They also don't use production overflow - i.e., if you've 'stored' industry by investing in a big project, switching to something else will transfer the effort. Trade Goods/Housing though won't dip into that, but just use the current turn's production. Selecting an item like shown with the Colony Base, I can either click again to delete it or else move it up or down the queue. If I clicked on the 'Spy' line, the Colony Base would move up to second, and everything below it move down a line. Takes a while to get used to using this, but it works well for setting up build orders that you don't have to mess with for some time.  And then there's this. Planetary buildings, ships, spies, etc. can have 'rush jobs' done and just throw money at the problem. How much money depends on how much work has already been put in; it costs twice as much per Industry to rush something that hasn't been started as it has to finish one that's half-done. That part is a good idea, but I hate the idea in the first place of just being able to crack out that checkbook and say 'name your price' absent any semblance of the proper infrastrucure. You wouldn't want to, but you can go to a fresh new colony and demand immediate construction of the latest and greatest, top-of-the-line massive starship and get it done if you have the funds. MOO1 got this part right by limiting it to doubling the current productive capacity of a planet no matter how much you have in the Imperial Reserve. This is a wheel that didn't need to be reinvented and made into a trapezoid.  The soldiers in the lower-left of our main colony screen give us access to this pop-up. MOO2, you see, has this crazy insane idea that assimilation ought to be a thing. That is, that conquering a planet needn't involve murdering EVERY.SINGLE.PERSON on it - though that's still an option if you want to choose it. I'm a fan of this for sure in theory. In practice ... well, we'll get to that. So our guys are armed with Pulse Rifles, which are baseline +0 and merit no bonus whatsoever. Naturally. We haven't invented Armour/Tanks yet, which as you can see can take twice the damage and are also just better at fighting. Those three guys in the middle are considered Marines, and then we also have a Militia. These troops are added to each planet that has a barracks on a gradual basis, one every few turns. That's supposed to continue until you reach the planet's maximum population, but I think it's actually less than that. Anyway, main point being there's a limit, and to invade a planet you need to bring enough to defeat these military defenders. Both Barracks give a +20% morale boost, which we need as we'd have -20% without it. Morale is just a flat penalty on what every worker produces, and once again the remaining production rounds down so it's really important to not have a negative there. The barracks is the building on the right of our planet view. The big one in the middle is the imperial Capitol. You only get one of those and Bad Things(tm) happen if you lose it. The small whitish buildings are Housing, added automatically based on current population. And then in the top middle is a grey needle in space or whatever. That's the Star Base, which allows us to build larger-sized ships, provides extended scanning range, and has defensive weapons. It also serves a to-be-discussed-later administrative function. I think the Star Base is a bit of an anachronism in a Pre-Warp start, but it's there regardless. And we can scrap any of these buildings for a price if we want. The Star Base requires 2 BC maintenance, 1 BC for the Barracks. Building more of any of them has a long-term cost associated with it. Ignore the LEADERS button for now, that's for another time.  For the time being, I put half the population in farming to keep food adequate, and the other half in research. We need that most at the moment. That brings me here, via the green microscope, bottom section of the right-hand panel of the GCI. This is where the first turn will conclude with a long rant. MOO2 fans, reader discretion is advised. Hard hats and an ample supply of sedative are strong encouraged. This isn't going to be pretty. Let's get the positives out of the way first. Some aspects of the technology system in MOO1, which I still consider to be the best ever implemented, remain. I give MOO2 credit for these even though it didn't come up with them, because there's a lot to be said about being handed a good idea and not screwing it up. ** We're keeping a lot of naming conventions; BCs, RPs, and so on. Class I Shields, Mass Driver, Anti-Missile Rockets, Extended Fuel Tanks - familar names of advances being given their new flavoring within the new system. And then there's also new options. ** The tier system remains intact. Something has to be researched from each of the now-eight instead of six fields before you can unlock anything later. ** The whole 'prototyping' period is also back. A particular research project can spend up to as long from an RP standpoint in that X% chance of discovery phase as it did to accumulate the initial minimum amount. Gone is the display bug that halved the discovery chance, but also gone is the cool lightbulb-filling graphic. ** Miniaturization and cost reduction are still a thing. In fact, they have more extensive impacts that will be explained when we get to ship design down the road. Unforunately, many vital to mind parts of the old system were ripped out for no good reason. As a result, the MOO2 tech system is a shadow of it's predecessor. This is literally what kept me from getting into MOO2 for years. I would fire it up, forget what happened the last time, do a setup, start a game - and then literally get angry when I remembered what was going on with technology. It took me a long while to adjust my mindset around what researching in MOO means, and I had a few ragequit - don't play again for months periods. ** You never 'miss out' and have to adjust. There is one exception to this, for which I have to talk about racial traits a bit. Stock Psilons are naturally Creative, meaning they get all techs from any given tier. For the price of one of them. Yes, that's just as insane as it sounds. Stock Klackons are Uncreative, meaning they get only one from any tier - except for a few esp. at the start where everyone gets them all because they are basics. Uncreatives don't get to pick which one they get either - it's chosen for them at random. So this objection doesn't apply to Uncreatives ... but it does apply to everyone else. If you don't have one of those two traits, which we don't and most games shouldn't esp. if you are experimenting with different setups and options, you get one but you get to pick which one it is at each tier. From all the available options. This takes an absolute hacksaw to so much strategic choice. You can't take two from a tier and accept the delay elsewhere (see: Terraforming +10 and Eco Restoration from MOO1). Can't take a missile and come back for a bomb later that's group with it. And you're never surprised. You never just don't have Radiated Landings/Planetary Shield V in your tree and have to figure out how you are going to work around that. Master-planning and defined, rigid research paths are the order of the day. You can choose one and do the exact.same.thing every time if you want. We'll see more of why that's a bad thing before long, but these kinds of considerations are a big part of what made MOO1's system so good. The thing is, there's a pretty easy and staggeringly obvious solution here. Creatives get all techs(usually 3). Uncreatives get a random 1. Why couldn't everybody else just get a choice of two, and have to pick between those? Then you'd have a lot more unpredictability - not enough for my liking, but that would have been a major improvement just by itself. ** No cost differentials. Everything in each tier costs the same thing, which means you don't ever choose between a cheap tech to just move up the tiers and a better one that would help you more but is more costly. It's ALWAYS a choice of which tech is best within a field - you still have the option of comparing different fields of course - which means, like the previous point, there's usually one best option and there isn't often a reason to select anything else. That exacerbates any issues of under-used techs/imbalance. Similarly, there are no TL system and the side effects such as Planetology boosting your worker productivity in MOO1 either compnletely aren't a thing or are much less nuanced at a minimum. ** Only one active project at a time. The whole interest/atrophy dynamic and the tension between crash-course projects that you need NOW and the long-term strategy? Gone. Everything is a crash course. All the research goes to that one thing until it's done. Scientists have lost the ability to walk, talk, and chew gum simultaneously. ** Progress can be switched to another project at any time with no penalty. At least for those of equal or lesser cost, I don't know how it works if you switch to a cheaper one that you've already put in enough effort to complete. Allowing for switching horses in midstream without consequences means you can put off important decisions, lessening the importance of strategic planning. ** No racial distinctives. Obviously some races are better at research in general than others, but here I'm talking about within specific fields. The Klackons being strong but having that propulsion weakness that could help in slowing them down early, or the Darlok facility with computers feeding into their espionage skills, etc. from MOO1 are no longer a thing - not even in the custom traits. These played a big role in giving races a specific general profile. All of this added together means that there are so many more mindless choices that you don't even need to consider. And when you do need to think about it, there's just a ton less to think about. The tech ladder does do some specific cool things with the new MOO2 mechanics, but that's a lipstick on a pig thing given how much the underlying system has been critically weakened. And as the manual writers specifically acknowlege, research is a really big deal in this kind of game. Our current situation actually personifies that. The one best choice is Computers-Electronics-Electronic Computer. Not because I want the Electronic Computer specifically, although it's nice (+25 attack for ship weapons). I want what's behind it. And I know what's behind it. I know I'm going to be able to research it next, that there's exactly zero chance of me not being able to do that, so I don't need to consider odds or plan contingencies. It's a totally brainless choice once I've determined what the optimal possibility is. On the Sid Meier scale - the whole defining a game by a series of interesting decisions thing - this is only interesting up the point where you've discovered the One Right Way(tm). Then it ceases being interesting permanently.  I do like this; clicking on Computers or any of the other field headings brings up a list of all possible technologies. Using right-clicking, I can check out what any of them do in-game, which is very nice.  So here's the GCI with my first turn ready to finish. Profit is down to +5 BC due to the fact that I'm not building trade goods anymore. The Electronic Computer is due to finish in 7 years at 12 RP each. For now, that's all I can usefully do. We'll advance time a lot faster in some of the coming updates, and of course expand into other game systems/mechanics. We've seen here the planetary economy and the tech system, a couple of major ones that we should now have a decent handle on. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Mar 13, 2019 |
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Mar 13, 2019 06:24
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nweismuller posted:Thank you very much! You're welcome! Good to have you along this ride.
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Mar 13, 2019 06:47
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my dad posted:I greatly prefer replayability through customization to replayability through randomness, Good synopsis of a major difference; I'm definitely strongly on the other side of that, which I'll talk more about when I get to delving into the custom traits more. my dad posted:it would probably be a good idea to keep one guy stockpiling production so you can build the lab faster once the tech is researched. If you go from max science to max production while not playing a pollution tolerant race, you suffer pretty badly from diminishing returns on how much you produce. I didn't intend to go to max production once it was done researching, but this is a good point. I don't have a great handle yet on when I want to stockpile and when I don't. That's partly because I really don't like it for reasons already mentioned, and used it only rarely in MOO1 where it was less of a mandatory thing. I definitely need to learn more about the when and why of it here.
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Mar 13, 2019 20:48
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** Note: I'm doing something with the 'spoiler' section that I should have done a long time ago probably. They are meant to be read, but just hide me commenting on what happens in a video so that it's a lot easier to watch the video (if you choose to of course), then read what I have to say about it without accidentally doing that in reverse just because it comes next on the page as you are perusing. There are no actual spoilers in the spoiler tags, it's just the best way I can think of have the video links as part of the update without prematurely giving away what they are about and so forth. Learning the Essentials Time for our empire to get it's feet under it and actually do something. Before that though, there's lots of 'Turn' button hammering to be done. And I do mean lots of it.  Four turns later. Compare this shot carefully to the one in the last update, and you'll notice something - the planets are rotating around the star. Not only that, but the innermost ones rotate more than those in the more distant orbits. This is the kind of small thing that I really appreciate - such attention to detail isn't hard to do, but it's a lot easier not to. Bravo! Turns pass basically instantaneously in this game, at least on any vaguely modern computer, and things happen more slowly on a per-turn basis, especially in an early start like this one. Population growth follows the same basic idea that a half-full colony will grow the most, but the overall gain per-turn is a LOT slower in keeping with the whole 10 turns per year deal. Because of that, I find it requires a lot more discipline to play well. This will actually be the first game I've ever really done 'carefully'. In this case though, we really have nothing whatsoever to do until we get our research done.  So now it's time to talk about Leaders. You can also see that our luck with the research has been quite bad. This is one of the things that we'll spend those BCs we're accumulating on. You always get one approaching you sometime in the first handful of game turns, and then periodically afterwards. Typically there is an initial hire price and then a regular wage to be paid each year, which varies with the quality. That first option is almost always a low-level one. Captain Tyranous says he'll wait, because he's a patient fellow, and we don't have 140 BC yet. Much like MOO1, it is a good idea to maintain a decent Reserve level, though I don't have a great handle on exactly how much that is here. That way you can afford to spend on these opportunities if you like.  This is the Leaders display, one of the bottom row selections in the GCI. On the left, we can have up to four domestic (Colony Leaders) and four military (Ship Officers) leaders active at any one time. Like you, they are immortal - so if you hire one, they will do your bidding until you fire them. Right now Tyranous is giving us a 30-turn countdown until he is no longer available, so we've got to decide what to do in that timeframe or he'll just disappear. He's a proper merc, with bonuses to boarding actions (security), ground combat (commando), and ship attack (helmsman). In this he'll work well to illustrate the possibilities here, as he has skills that are useful both in fleet and army actions. On the right, though it's perhaps not immediately obvious, the top section is for selecting from our fleets and the bottom one for selecting a star system. A leader can be assigned to either of these. They are bound to the specific location they are assigned to, and will not benefit the empire elsewhere so it's important to give them a job where they will do the most good. Once we start hiring some, this screen will begin filling up and it'll be important to cull unwanted candidates. They may or may not return at a later date, so if you want someone it's best to Hire them when you have the chance. In this case, we are far from being concerned about any imminent combat so it's not worth the money. Next turn, this guy shows up to tell us all about what we've just discovered. He'll do that same three-second animation for as long as we let him. When you get done wondering what gravity-defying effect causes that loose-fitting jacket sleeve halfway up his forearm without falling down to his wrist, you can click anywhere and pick a new research option to pursue.  Sticking with computers as noted, we're going Optronics. ** Dauntless Guidance System provides IFF capability to missiles and torpedoes. Not that we, you know, have any. They'll retarget if their current target is destroyed, a helpful thing indeed. ** Optronic Computer does the same thing as the Electronic one we just researched, but twice as well a +50 bonus. ** Research Laboratory is what we're here for. +5 Research at a planet whether we have any active Scientists or not, and also +1 base research for each Scientist at any planet that has one built. We're making a beeline for the research lab because it'll speed up the necessary starting research we need to do in other areas to get our feet under this fledgling civilization and start turning it into a proper empire. This is unfortunately one of those times when the question must be asked: why would anyone do anything else? It's important to have balanced techs under a fixed, exclusionary system, and MOO2 is hit-or-miss on this point. What this means is that getting either of the other two options depends on either a rival AI race being Psilons to acquire it from later, or one of them making a bad decision to get it instead. If neither one of those things happen, the first two options are thrown on the ash-heap, never to be seen or considered again. Sometimes the best option can vary, but you always want research labs because of how much of a difference they make. Naturally things get more expensive as you go up the tiers. There aren't the same amount in each field, but here we've tripled the cost so the estimate is 18 turns. At our homeworld, we're up to almost 8.6M, so it'll be a few more turns there as well until we get a new worker 'grown'. In between, we'll hammer that Turn button and quite possibly not do anything else.  Stardate 3501.3, and Administrator Galis offers his services. He's basic but cheap. We continue to bring in the cashola. As a Financial Leader, he boosts the BCs we produce at any colony by 10% - which basically means right now he will almost pay for himself. It's a close call whether he's worth it - as our population rises he'd eventually be a net positive on a larger colony. At the moment I'm not convinced it's worth parting with even a small amount of our savings though, which I'll be using for other things eventually. Galis is rejected. If you have the money to hire a leader, you have to choose here before doing anything else.  One more turn, and Sol I tips over the 9M mark. We have another citizen! That gives me cause to visit the ledger, aka the Colonies screen - left-most button in the GCI's bottom row. And that means it's time to stand up and applaud MOO2, because this screen is near-perfection. Not only can we click through to any colony faster this way than selecting it's system first, but this screen itself has control functionality. I can move around the workers/farmers/scientists as I see fit, go directly to the build screen by clicking on the 'trade goods' text there, or buy whatever's building by clicking that circular icon on the far right. You want info? Check. At the bottom of the screen we can see the key factors of the planet - I'd like a more detailed current population so I know if a planet is about to grow again, but other than that all the key elements of the environment, production, etc. are there. The galactic minimap and imperial information synopsis ensure I don't have to leave to see the key elements of the big picture. Sortability? Got ya covered there too. Seven different categories to select from so we can quickly identify and fix problem areas or address overall needs. No longer are we restricted to the MOO1 way of 'look, this is the order in which the game stores your planets, so you will view them in this order and only this order until the end of time. It's Galactic Law'. Our new citizen has been put to work as a Farmer. We can either leave him there and have one food go to waste with a 67k growth rate, or go one food short, get more research done, but see that growth drop precipitously to 17k. As important as it is to get research done and I mean now, I think it's better to keep getting more population and leave things how they are. Also note that with the extra citizen, we are up to a +6 annual income. Mo money!!  We're 25 turns into the game by the time we finish the lab research. This'll change things up a bit.  We're now headed to the Construction field of study. Same reason as before - what we really want isn't available till the next tier. ** Anti-Missile Rockets have a range of 15, fire once per turn, and an accuracy rating of 85%, -5% per square of distance. Which means at their maximum range, they aren't hitting much of anything. You can tell by this that we're going to be dealing with a much bigger space combat map than before, since that's like twice the size of the entire thing in MOO1. ** Reinforced Hull triples the amount of damage a ship in general and the drive system specifically can take. ** Fighter Bays equips a ship with four fighters for each bay that is included. Fighters use the best available PD beam weapon - again, we'll deal with more of that at another time - and can fire it 4x before they have to return to reload their power cells or whatever at their 'mothership'. All of these choices are attractive. Missiles are a big deal early-game, more survivable ships are obviously a plus, and I have a big personal soft spot for carriers. MOO1 didn't have them, which makes me want to do it. Objectively Reinforced Hull is too good to pass up, and fits that 'look, this is the best choice period' criteria. Triple HP is a LOT. There are more advanced bays we can have for carrier-type operations, but those don't show up till late in the tree and we may not even get to them in this game. It's wrong, but I'm taking my fighters and you can't stop me. If it costs me the game, well, I did it my way and we'll learn from my mistake. More than anything else though I just bloody want to go with the hull reinforcement and then come back for fighters at my leisure. I need my WAAAAAAMBULANCE!! Ok I'm fine now. Mostly.  Next, back planetside, I need to build a Research Lab now so I'm dividing up our efforts. Two workers is the most we can sustain without incurring pollution penalty. Also, we now have 4 Marines and 1 Militia. It's gone up by one Marine in 25 turns.  Yep, definitely calling BS on this explanation. It is most assuredly NOT how this is working. I'm thinking maybe it goes up to half your current population or something.  Stardate 3502.9, and we have a 10th citizen on Sol I. I didn't adjust them - the game put them in as Scientists automatically. Let's all applaud the fact that it is making a serious effort to deploy new citizens intelligently. Also, population growth isn't down as much as I would expect as we approach the maximum here. The curve for that is clearly a lot flatter than it is in MOO1. I make no adjustments.  The next turn the lab is halfway done, so I'm going to buy it as this is the most efficient time to do so. We've got over 200 BC by this point. Our profit margin will be cut into slightly due to losing another BC annually to maintain the lab. Well worth it of course, and I switch back to maximum scientist employment. When the lab finishes, that pushes us up to 25 RP - 5 for the lab, 4 each for the five scientists. That's a two-thirds jump from the 15 RP before it went up.  Two more turns, and Advanced Engineering - Fighter Bays is a thing.  Automated Factories are the next must-have. They do for Industry what the research lab did for Research - automatic +5 without workers, +1 base for each worker. ** Heavy Armor - negates armor-piercing effects and triples the armor value of a ship. The fact that you pretty much gotta have the factories here is another reason to go with reinforced hull on the previous choice - now I'm bypassing two effective ship-survival techs. ** Planetary Missile Base - 300 'space units' of our best missiles, with unlimited ammo, can be fired. Note the singular - unlike MOO1, one doesn't built dozens of these. We can build one per planet. Missile defense is not even close to enough to fortify a world. Messed up the shot, but at this point we got a new leader app. Howdy there Captain Jarred! He's got quite the range of skills, increasing ship attack and defense, improves diplomacy, and the Navigator skill is a heck of a thing. It improves ship speed by 1, while also allowing normal travel through nebulae and near black holes. Nebulae basically do what they've always done - slower travel and shields don't work - while black holes are new and typically there is an enforced 2-parsec no-fly zone around them. Your antiquated laws of space-time distortion don't apply to Captain Jarred the Explorer though. He's more tempting than the others, but I still have more pressing matters to attend to.  Stardate 3504.0. Factory research is in. Now we need to get some basics for warp travel. Note how in the Power-Nuclear Fission field we have arrows pointing to all three, meaning we get them all. This is what it is like to be a Creative, but there are three starting fields that are similarly mandatory. Chemistry and Physics are the other two. After that, we'll start to be less sure of what the best course of action is. The Nuclear Bomb and Nuclear Drive techs are, as you might expect, basic entry-level versions of those weapon systems just as they were in the first game. Freighters need a bit of talking about though. They are MOO1 transports on steroids, and far superior in implementation. This is one of my favorite MOO2 mechanics, a great example of expanding a feature without ruining it. Any time you need to export or import food or colonists you need to use a Freighter to do it. They are essentially civilian-operated transports. You have to pay to build them, but they only cost maintenance to the degree that they are used. Inactive freighters cost none; any active ones cost 0.5 BC each year. In this way there is both a setup and an operational price tag for moving stuff around, something to consider when deciding whether it's really worth doing. As before, I put a couple of workers into Industry, then buy it at the halfway point so I can max out Scientists once more.  Chemistry is next, providing entry-level missiles as well as the fuel and armor requirement for starships. Also note the newly-revealed Cold Fusion tier. That's another everything-must-go set and we can't expand beyond Sol without it.  By default, this pops up whenever something is built somewhere, or another 'event of note' occurs. There are options, but for now I'll leave it on. Pretty rare occurence right now, but later it'll be a constant drip each turn. Clicking on the message takes us to the surface to make adjustments, and the window will still be there when we return in case there are other notifications requiring our attention.  Forgot to put this in for a turn or two; I've got a Freighter Fleet (50 Industry to build) set up followed by a Spy (100 Industry). That's just to get one of each ready but more to do something useful with the Industry. Since we've got the Automated Factory now, and you can see the landscape getting decidedly more busy than it was initially, you're always building something. Need to make sure it's what I want it to be, or else it will be trade goods by default.  After Chemistry arrives, Cold Fusion is the next step. We have everything we need for warp travel. If we find anything out there in the galaxy, this will be required to exploit it. That means ship design, exploration, etc. are all next on the agenda. We're now almost to the point where an Average tech-level game, or a MOO1 game, would begin. Stardate 3504.8 with 210 BCs in the reserve. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Mar 18, 2019 |
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Mar 15, 2019 06:33
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Torrannor posted:Random tech trees can be a lot of fun (see Sword of the Stars 1), but fixed tech trees like in Civilization can be, too. And it's not as if you research the same techs every game, since what you want and need often depends on what your neighbors do. It's a rude awakening if you've focused on beam defenses and then your enemy comes at you with missile heavy ships. You're right with the last bit here for sure - that's a good bit of design that there are multiple effective weapons systems. Nostalgia does play a role - this stuff would be somewhat less bothersome to me if the box said something other than 'Master of Orion' but was a different space strat series that simply went in a different direction from the one I'd prefer. But given the choice between Civ's tech system (we'll come back to this later but I played that also and enjoyed it) and the one in MOO1, I'd take MOO ever day of the week and twice on Sunday. Using your example, in both games you do need to concern yourself with having effective counters for the ships being fielded by your opponent. Both have effective ways to do that. The difference is, in MOO2 the most effective ways are always available to you, and it's just a matter of whether your economy can keep up and whether you are selecting and deploying the right stuff to give yourself an advantage. In MOO1, maybe those counters aren't available. Maybe you are stuck on warp 1 while everyone else is at warp 3-4 because your researchers just haven't come up with any new engine options to even choose yet. Maybe you don't have the robotics you need to keep up economically, or you didn't have planetary shields to allow yourself sufficient defense and deterrence. Do you have to give away the store to bribe them with tech until you catch up? Hope they don't attack you until you can rectify the situation, thanks to the passive AI (a strength of MOO2 in being more aggressive if they have the edge)? Build a bunch of inferior ships to whittle them away through attrition, costing yourself valuable economic development time? Bribe another neighbor to attack and distract them? A fixed tech system is too rigid, no matter how well-designed, to offer these kinds of questions and challenges to the player. That kind of emergent gameplay, implemented over a decade before the idea of emergent gameplay really even caught on, delivers a much deeper pool of potential strategic outcomes and is a big part of why people who think as I do consider MOO1 brilliant and MOO2 merely solid to good. .02 Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Mar 15, 2019 |
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Mar 15, 2019 06:49
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Thanks for the ideas. I wasn't sure if it was rounding down on the food or if I needed a freighter to export it - just was not showing up as any increased income so that's a nice clarification. my dad posted:having a second planet in your starting system, no matter how lovely it is, is a big deal, because worst case scenario it's still a cheap to colonize population factory. 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. nweismuller posted:beelining Research Labs first isn't quite as good at getting you bootstrapped as beelining Automated Factories first, and using stored production to accelerate future building (including that of your research lab). Noted. A good item for me to test out and if I can confirm this, I'll begin the next game that way.
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Mar 15, 2019 20:42
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SugarAddict posted:Are you ever going to show off a modded Moo2 game? Nope. It's unlikely that I'm going to become good enough at this to take those on. We're doing 3-4 runs here, depending on how things go. I'll be taking feedback on what the others should be once we get deeper into this initial game, but it's going to be all vanilla.
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Mar 16, 2019 02:59
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Libluini posted:Hey, thanks for linking my LP! You're welcome! Consider it payback for me ripping that game you like a new one at every appropriate opportunity, and some where it's probably not appropriate as well. MechaCrash posted: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. I don't have said chops, but that doesn't surprise me. By reputation at least, it's a lot easier to beat this game on Impossible. habituallyred posted:Looking forward to "goons design a world beating custom race," followed by, "goons design the worst race possible." This thread wouldn't do that to me … would they? Yes, I'm sure they probably would. *shudder*
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Mar 17, 2019 07:57
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Leaving the Cradle Our Sol I build screen still looks the same on the left, because we're only researching what we need to build and then immediately getting it done. On the right, the Imperial build options side if you will, we've got more coming though. The middle group is what we are concerned with here at the moment - those are our designable ship classes. One doesn't design noncombat ships in MOO2, and there is no such thing as building a colony ship but with cool new weapons on it. If you thought the six classes of ships in MOO1 wasn't enough - well, get ready to face the pain of only five. But with refit eventually becoming a thing. Also, you don't scrap designs anymore - you just directly replace them.  Selecting Design and then picking a ship class is how that works. This is a part of the UI I don't like, for a couple of primary reasons: ** Designing ships is a pretty common activity in these games. Why do I need to do, at a minimum, four clicks to get into the ship design screen? It should be a bottom-row button on the GCI like it is in MOO1. ** If I change my mind about which ship I want to replace in the middle of the process, I have to exit the ship design screen and lose everything I've been working on. So this whole bit just grates on me, in the clunky-but-functional sort of way.  So here we are, and we can see that MOO2 is going to take suboptimal AI ship design routines from its predecessor and double down on the STUPID ON STEROIDS factor at times, though they aren't all nearly this bad and some are actually suprisingly decent. The general flaw, which I'm told was eventually addressed some by fan patches not to be seen here, is the 'kitchen sink' approach. The AI tries to put some of everything on a lot, and it isn't generally particularly super at designing ships for specific roles within a larger fleet concept. We have a Scout here. With Nuclear Bombs. And a computer that only benefits beam attacks - the manual explicitly states that bombs never miss. There are no beam weapons on this ship. Or even invented yet. So the computer is literally a complete waste of money. Also, who wants a scout that can attack planets - but not defend itself against other ships? Wouldn't that be, I don't know ... a small bomber?? Yeah, don't build these. Ever. For any reason. That good old CLEAR button returns. Let's definitely use that. Now before I get any further, let's note some things about the design options themselves. And these are arguably better news. I'm reserving judgement for now on the whole ship design/combat part of the game, because I need to spend more time kicking the tires on it before I render an intelligent opinion. ** Six ship size options now instead of four. All of them have multiple ship portraits except the massive Doom Star, for which 'blocky blob' is understandably the only possible aesthetic configuration. That whole Death Star, but MOO, idea is obviously in vogue here. ** Larger ships have progressively slower combat speed and therefore beam defense. Very much in keeping with the original. The base ranges from 20 speed/+100 to 13 speed/+65 for an empty ship. ** The basics - drive system, armor, shield, computer - are apparently mounted either externally or in a standard, reserved compartment. They have only a cost, no space requirement. ** We can see that structure and armor points are separated out from each other - basically you have to destroy the armor first before the ship itself takes damage. Unless you have an armor-piercing weapon and so on, so there's another damage dynamic at work here compared to the original 'hull points and that's all' deal. ** Adding weapons or specials does consume space ... and it also slows down the ship. That is a very nice thing indeed. A Frigate with five Nuclear Bombs is completely full right now, and has half it's maximum speed and beam defense - 10 and +50. So there's at least potentially a reason to not fill up a ship beyond mere cost. ** As one would imagine, structure/armor points, space available, and base cost also scale up with the ship class.  As you can see, this is much like before in terms of adding Specials. There's a cost and a size and you choose what you want, with a limited amount of slots per ship even if you have the space for more.  Weapons though - they got a whole new treatment going on. We can filter the list by type. We've got firing arcs now - bombs are inherently 360 Degrees, but beam weapons can be limited to a specific arc. Once we get some I'll get into the specific tradeoffs involved there, and also the various modifications which we obviously don't have either. Missiles can be in racks of 2, 5, 10, 15, or 20 salvos as needs permit. Cost and space scale with those changes, with larger racks being more efficient. I.e., a 20-shot missile launcher has a cost and space of 40 each, while a 2-shot is a quarter of that despite only having 10% of the firepower. And while we can't fit it on a ship smaller than a Destroyer, we have our Interceptor - which is what we got for the Fighter Bay invention. There is of course also the fact that we have no fighter weapons yet. So that's just a taste, we'll be revisiting this - and I am extremely not at all in any way the best or even adequate at MOO2 ship designs. Yet.  Ok so here's a proper Scout design. No computer or bombs and it's faster, harder to hit, and cheaper as a result. Cost is down from 34 to 25. Except of course, as is my tradition, I'm calling it a Recon instead.  I add a couple of these to the top of Sol I's build queue. Because of how combat encounters work, picketing systems with scouts, esp. unarmed ones, is no longer a winning tactic in MOO2 but rather a totally wasteful one AFAIK. A welcome change as I freely declare that was always a gamey thing, even if a necessity to handle MOO1 Impossible. So really I just want to get a couple out there and see what's within range - which isn't much. More on that in a second. I decided to get a Worker going on these, because I'll want to start building an actual Colony Ship as soon as those are ready. I'll have the Recons done in about three turns each, and with this labor division we are seven years out from getting the research done so that syncs up well.  Our standard fuel cells are akin to MOO1 Hydrogen, four parsecs - we have a range of seven with the extended tanks. Except not really, because while the help says four parsecs, we actually get only three out of them. Grrr. So how far will that get us? ** Pro-Tip - I recently discovered the F9 hotkey, which is not in any way necessary but cool and it gets rid of the haziness about how far away something is. Press it once and you get a 'From?' cursor. Picking Sol as that source system, I can then move the 'To?' cursor around and get a specific readout. So this white star is just out of range - the red one diagonally down and left from here is 8 parsecs away, or too far as well. Anything closer we can reach. Without extending our range in some way, we are limited to four additional systems. Being right on the edge of the galaxy like we are is not super-great. Between the edge and the middle would be best for early exploration and securing territory.  This kind of operation, and moving ships around as well, can be made easier by use of the Zoom function. There are two levels of magnification; the default entire galaxy and then a closer one that focuses in on about half of it.  Like so. Right-clicking recenters the galaxy map to move around.  And now ... Command Point Reserve. The relevant panel is the second one down on the right, the starbase picture with 6(+6) on it. This is a good explanation, so I'll not to try to improve on it. Basically, Command Points are a soft cap based on the empire's logistics. More star bases are needed to support a larger fleet, or else you pay through the nose for some of your ships to get the supplies they need through the commercial sector and not a streamlined official pipeline. This is a good, simple, and effective addition IMO. With this in place, nobody's building a bazillion frigates to spam the map with and overflow the fleets table, crashing their game. Not that I know anything about that. As you have probably already figured out, the remaining two GCI panels are net food and available(total) freighters. The interface tour is mostly complete.  Another small thing that really deserves to be applauded. Unlike most games of the time, this notification now tells me what's building next in the queue - that way I have a heads-up in case I want to change it.  We now have a ship - and our command point reserve is down by one. Like MOO1, all ships at a system are automatically joined into a fleet. Those icons get even trickier when zoomed out, as they are smaller. The fleet window pops up when selecting them. Part of a fleet can be moved by clicking on the individual ships; that blue highlight goes away when you do so, removing the ship from the selection. The other three systems in range being red stars, I head for the yellow one in the corner first. The types of stars will mostly be familiar to MOO1 aficianados.  Except they aren't, because 'ours' is white here. Say goodbye to that fourth wall, for it is gone. More importantly though, yellow is the best chance for a suitable colony location.   In other words, red stars suck - and we're surrounded by the things. That doesn't bode well, particularly when the rest of the galaxy is much more diverse.   Accordingly, blue-white stars can be useful for ramping up the economy a little later.  We have one of these, on the opposite side of the galaxy from us. So it won't trouble us, but perhaps it will annoy one or two of our rivals. There's at least one more type, but they are rare and this galaxy doesn't have any.  This kind of thing happens very often, and is one of the rewards for exploration. He's better than Jarred, and we have no recruitment fee.  Well now - five planets! As you can probably spot, Callisto IV is a terran planet. It's a copy of Earth/Sol I actually, max pop of 12, abundant, etc. We're definitely headed there. The others: ** Callisto I - Large, Radiated, 5 max, Abundant. You might wonder why a 'large' planet has such a low population maximum - it's part of the effect of being Radiated. That can eventually be dealt with, which would increase the size. There are other ways to do that as well. ** Callisto II - Large, Radiated, 5 max, Ultra Rich, HeavyG. That last bit means heavy gravity, which means all forms of production are halved. That sucks considering how much potential the system would have otherwhise. We'll still probably develop it eventually anyway. ** Callisto III - Large, Arid, 12 max, Abundant. The only difference between this and the terrans is the arid environment, which means farming only produces half as much. Farmers can produce enough for themselves but that's it - some importing or improvement of the planet in some way will be necessary to do more than just be a population incubator. ** Callisto V - Small, Barren, 3 max, Poor, LowG. A ball of rock with more gravity problems and nothing to recommend it for industry either. There's literally nothing good about this planet, which is right there with your Inferno 10M max type from MOO1. Low gravity isn't as bad as high gravity, but still has a penalty: 25%.  Now we have some stuff to look at under the Planets. Another fine screen if I do say so myself. This is a list of all the planets you've discovered that aren't occupied. Those would be Colonies, and we've already seen that ledger. The difference confused me at first, esp. because of the 'No Enemy Presence' filter. Enemy presence in the same system is being referred to there. It's possible to have split ownership of a system with two races having colonized a planet in it, which I think is completely great. MOO2 was pretty early IIRC in adding in that kind of possibility. Anyway, the sorting and filtering controls here work very effectively and the minimap highlights the system that whatever planet you moused over last is in. The key stats listed are exactly what they should be. And we can even automatically send a colony or outpost there without having to do it manually! I don't use that much because I want to control the order of things, but still a cool option to reduce micro if you want it. As bad as those red stars are, we've been quite fortunate to find a system like Callisto within range. Often it's tough to find a clear first target. Exploiting that target will be up next. Amidst all the blather we only progressed time a little over half a year; it's now Stardate 3505.4. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 08:25 on Mar 17, 2019 |
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Mar 17, 2019 08:22
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MechaCrash posted: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. Perhaps most of them, but there are certain fights which I think take a long time almost no matter what. There is one fight I once had, which I'll not spoiler yet since it relates to the 'new' ending to the game, but … it took almost a full half-hour. On warp-speed Auto-Resolve. Battles take a lot longer than MOO1 from my recollection once you get past the early skirmishes . Torranor posted:perhaps seeing fight in this LP will help you understand Hopefully it'll help the guy actually doing the fights understand as well  . Really good info all around everybody, thanks. If I haven't gotten to you yet, there's a good chance I'm just saving stuff for later.
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Mar 17, 2019 21:44
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** Note: The stuff in the 'spoiler' area is meant to be read, and is not actual spoilers. It's just a new way I'm trying out of putting a video in an update and not giving away stuff about it you happen to accidentally read below the link. Intended usage is to watch the video, if you choose to, then read what it's the not-really-a-spoiler spoiler text. To Callisto ... and beyond!  A tough call to make here on Caern. I like him a lot, but 3 BC a year is half of what our surplus was. Still, I decide to hang onto him and just grow the economy. Recruiting a leader of his caliber later would be quite expensive. And so Jarred gets the ax officially. Immediate afterwards, we get our first look at the space combat screen. Briefly. I don't like space monsters. First thing I did in Stellaris after a couple test games was mod them out. It's not the implementation so much as just the thematic concept of them to begin with. The ones in MOO1 are kinda dumb too, but they aren't overbearing. There's only two and they only attack once you're more than capable of dealing with them. There's a justification for them in terms of them going around randomly devouring stuff until they are defeated. MOO2 can do that also, but then it has these static, wanna-be small-g guardian things as well. They just guard star systems for no good reason, and no bad one either - they are just there. They don't impact the system at all. They don't consume, make it radiated, destroy the environment - they just attack everyone who comes into a system that they never had any intention of doing anything with in the first place. Then there's the fact that you you can be certain they are guarding a fantastic planet of better than homeworld quality. Because they ALWAYS are, and I don't like 100% predictable elements either. In fairness, I'm being harsh on the space monster concept here just because I personally don't like it. By itself, that's not enough justification for trashing a feature. Also, they do serve a gameplay function in forcing the player into earlier development of their combat fleet than in MOO1 - the Farmer's Gambit is much less effective and he who turtles too long will rarely profit from it. That's a debatable but definitely legitimate and probably good goal. You might even say they help equalize starting conditions and smooth out galaxy-generation randomness. I'd prefer they be made space pirates, or hostile small colonies of an inferior race, or somesuch. Mercs hired by a consortium of business leaders who think our growing power is a threat. Whatever. The predictability that great planets will always be guarded by one of these things though is something I can't just wave away. It's a heavy-handed approach that needs more variety thrown into the equation for me to really embrace it. From a tactical POV, what also bothers me is you can't even see them because of them being off-screen here and there being no option I can find to start the battle paused to look around. So I have no clue how far away they shooting at me from, or how fast they are moving - my recon could theoretically communicate that stuff back to the Situation Room on Sol I to warn them. Except all I get to see is my ship being blown up by something. If you look really carefully and quick, there is a minimap to give us a vague idea - but it's just too fast. Anyway, I'll have to get back to that in a bit, because Dr. Buttinski informed me that he simply must report on the latest edition of Cool New Toys(tm). TBF, cold fusion is a rather remarkable achievement.  We certainly know what these do by now. Unfortunately I can't design/rename them as Colonizers.  These are new, and this desc. had me befuddled for so darn long. What in the heck does 'function like a colony but no population' even mean? Almost everything a colony does requires population. What this really means apparently is that it is a refueling station - a means to extend your range when you don't want to colonize any planet but want to explore further. I say 'apparently', because that's what people who know more than I do say it is, and I've never actually used them. If I find a decent chance to use an Outpost I will do so.  We have specific troop transports for invasions, filling the other role that the generic transports held previously.  Physics is next up, the last of the multi-advance starter techs. A first beam weapon for starships, the laser rifle gives us +5 over the starting Pulse Rifle for ground troops, and then a space scanner. Which we don't have yet, although the star base has an improved version of what we don't have any version of. Roger that.  Here's what that Space Crystal was guarding - a third bigger than a homeworld, good environment, and ultra-rich. These things are quite often the maximum possible size of 25M population. I don't understand why population amounts aren't a hundred times larger than they are - MOO1's were small and these are a fraction of that. With each citizen representing proportionally more of course. It's a surface-level thing, but still. This definitely will be an early military goal now - to defeat the Crystal and take Rav. We are now down to three systems outside of Sol, and a single Recon. The other planet is a medium-sized Barren, 4 pop. Not interesting.  This will take a while. Outposts/Transports cost 100 Industry, but a full Colony Ship costs 500. All pollution concerns are shelved for now, and research reduced to minimal levels of what the lab can do on its own. Getting this out ASAP, regardless of cost, is vital to the future of our species.  Our remaining recon gives a report on the final system in range ... only to discover it's not the final system in range. We found a Stable Wormhole - there are no unstable ones by the way. Wormholes connect two systems and are a one-year journey for all fleets, regardless of distance. They don't require any additional range to traverse. So we can now travel to that white star to the right of Rav next. Galileo II, being Toxic, will suck forever. Toxic is the worst planet type in MOO2, not Radiated. No farming, 50% maintenance penalty, if they aren't Rich fuhghedaboudit. And sometimes even then. Galileo I is Medium, Barren, Poor, 4 max. So the wormhole is the only useful thing here.  This is most of our balance, but I can't turn down the Labor Leader bonus, which grants 30% productivity to all factory workers in a system. Director Rash-lki is installed as governor there to hurry along our colony ship, while Captain Caern is informed his services are no longer required. Praxis has but one planet - Medium, Ocean, 4 max, Rich. Not very big, but good. Ocean planets tend to be that way - the idea is that the need for underwater habitats limits the potential population and there just isn't much land period.  Our new Director has her photo up as the Leader on Sol I for all to see, and Industry is up to 21. It'll normally take five years travel time, but the paperwork gets filed at your home star system, so assigning somewhere here skips that delay unless they are coming from an assignment elsewhere in the galaxy. GNN Returns ... and more Things are happening quickly now. GNN reports that the Psilons have suffered a computer virus. That event is still a thing. And then the Silicoids decide to be unpleasant.  They are nearby. Rav and Praxis will be important systems to try to slow their advance. Hopefully the Crystal bothers them. We can surmise they just settled in Rosemund, bringing them within range of us. AFAIK contact works the same as before - diplomatic relations are automatically established once you have colonies that can reach each other.  The Races Screen, which is basically ported over from MOO1 with some adjustments. One is the new spying, which I can't do until I actually have some. We've got a vertical and less detailed relations bar, but with more potential races to deal with that's understandable. And we hilariously have an Ignore function. Does what it says - we can simply block all communication attempts from them after first contact. There's something to be said for trolling the galaxy. Despite the initial hostility, let's talk to Geode. See what the hulking pinkish-purple crystal has to say.  Despite its 'salutations', you can't negotiate with these things. Surrendering literally ends the game - why it's done from this screen I don't know, and it makes no difference who you surrender to. We at least can declare war without waiting for them to do it. But more to the point, Silicoids are Repulsive. This literally means diplomacy cannot occur with anyone. They are in a de facto state of war with the entire galaxy no matter how they feel about them at the moment, and that will remain the case until they are either victors or vanquished. I'm not thrilled about bordering them.  The left side of the Report screen is the same as before. We're dealing with Xenophobic Industrialists. Kind of redundant with repulsive, but I guess they just really hate everyone. The right side, tech area, drives me nuts though. First off, it was gimmicky before that MOO1 allowed you to know everything after getting a single spy into enemy territory, in terms of their technology. Well now we don't even need that. A race that won't negotiate just told us what secrets they've uncovered across the board. Right. Also, they're divided up totally differently from the standard research categories, about a half-dozen things that we don't have right now. You can see 'Laser Rifle' highlighted here - barely. But why couldn't we have something like the tech overview screen, or at least have consistent headings? I have no idea how to go about researching a specific tech I see listed here, because nothing tells me what field it is in. Guh. I also wish that one of the games had at some point made knowing what techs someone has in a field a high-success-rate espionage mission, so that there was some actual investment and risk attached to that knowledge. The implementation here took one of the weakest MOO1 features IMO and managed to make it worse.  There's no Status screen there ... but behold the Info screen. Which is great, to the extent it works. First up here with the History Graph, we have a comparison not just now but over time with every race we've met. That's a pretty big addition, allowing you to see how you are progressing ... or regressing. They got off to a faster start but we mostly closed the gap and are now keeping reasonably close. Note that the game doesn't care about territory - we can turn on/off Population, Building, Fleets, and Tech as part of this calculation. Well territory is kind of taken care of under Population though, right?  Actually, no it isn't - because that part of it is completely broken. All races are stuck at 8M pop for all of eternity according to this. But the other three work. As does the very useful income graphic in the lower-left. Only problem there is it is always a turn behind. Still nice as an overview of where your cash is going. Tech Review has the same breakdown of research that we saw on the Report display, only for ourselves.  Race Statistics gives us the trait breakdown for each race we have met. Turn Summary repeats that info for the current year, in case we closed the window but forgot to check on something.  The in-game help, searchable version. This is quite good and almost-but-not-quite-always accurate, as we've seen with the fuel cells already. Still, I find myself wandering here from time to time to find information. Continuing to crawl along, we will get to Callisto eventually. We must.
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Mar 18, 2019 21:46
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Educating Thotimx In The Ways of the Sequel A new, tongue-in-cheek feature in which I thank the thread for shortening my learning curve. Stuff I didn't know: ** The whole outpost-barracks thing, thanks to multiple posters. ** Higher difficulty AIs get points boosts to their starting abilities (my dad) ** Unstable wormhole random event is a thing - I think I knew this at one point but I'd sure as heck forgotten (Rappaport) ** Initiative boosts from computers is still around (nweismuller) Also … Olesh posted:There are other types of space monsters, and not every good or great planet is guarded by one. However, when the game generates a system with a space monster, it also guarantees a great planet to go with it. I wonder about this because it's contrary to my admittedly limited experience. I've never seen a better-than-homeworld system in the early-game that was unguarded. Ever. I say early-game because later on you don't know if there was one that was already defeated. I think this game so far backs that up - Callisto has two Large/size-12 worlds, and a couple that more that might be that big if they didn't have negative environs dragging them down. That could be just random, but it seems fairly likely that at least one of those would be of size>12 if such worlds weren't limited to space-monster systems. MagusofStars posted:I don't think any of these make much sense in context though. I agree - but I still say they make more sense than static space monsters that do nothing but wait for a chance to blow visitors up. MagusofStars posted:If they guarded planets which were only minimally better than elsewhere, it wouldn't make much sense to spend time and resources building an attack fleet (and then losing several of those ships) when you could get a planet 85% as good for free and/or build an arsenal to crush your enemies and claim their nice planets. That's definitely true, but I don't think it needs to be either/or. If they were mostly guarding great planets(say 75% of the time or so), and only occasionally at lesser systems, then it would add a lot more variety and nuance to the galaxy while still maintaining the general purpose of the feature. Moot point because it is what it is, I just think you can accomplish the goal without ironclad predictability. I also find it weird that in a game with as many options as MOO2 has I can't change the space monsters in any way. But whatevs, I'll roll with it. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Mar 19, 2019 |
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Mar 19, 2019 23:11
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The Sakkra and Human games come the most recommended.
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Mar 21, 2019 21:03
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Callisto or Bust They're really coming out of the woodwork now. Took about 25-30 turns longer on Average, so as expected there's a significant difficulty bump.  I'm feeling a bit better about things now. We're pretty well sandwiched between the two competitors we've met in terms of progress. In MOO1, if you can keep up in the early game victory is assured. We'll see if it's the same here.  Like us, the cybernetics are suffering from the ravages of red stars and have yet to expand. Erratic Industrialists, they have the Fusion Beam and Deuterium Fuel Cells but nothing else of note. No agreements or wars, but I'm on edge with a race of their mindset - and MOO2's more aggressive AI in general - in the vicinity.  Now we can get into actual diplomatic matters. ** Propose Treaty - Trade isn't as important as it was in the original but it's still a significant option. As far as I know diplomatic relations are built on the same system - small bonuses over time for existing agreements, attacks/tributes/demands shift relations on a short-term basis, tendency to drift back towards neutral, etc. Trade deals take five turns to equalize, then provide a positive benefit to the reserve of both empires. That means there's much less of a cost for doing those. A new option, Research treaties, works the same except its benefit is RP, not BC. Non-Aggression Pact and Alliances are still the higher-level cooperative stuff. ** Can't break a treaty when you don't have one, and Exchange Tech is off because we don't have anything they want.  Putting the war declaration, break treaty, etc. options here makes more sense. The annual tribute options are also completely new and also available in the other direction as gifts. The specific demand for tech or to stop espionage, give us a system, etc. are all added. Overall a lot of new choices. I'm curious to see how diplomacy ends up shaking out, esp. with no option to increase trade/research deals - you just have one your don't, and I assume they are just kept at the maximum given the relative economics at play.  A research deal was approved with the comment 'There is wisdom in your words, Emperor Ender'. But even a bribe of Fighter Bays couldn't get them to part with their hard currency for a trade agreement. Still, it's a start. I'm just approaching this in classical MOO fashion, start small and make sure I stay on their good side. With only a five-turn warmup period, I don't feel a need to be as wary of the erratic thing in making these investments. Relations are improved to a little above-average, and we have a -5 BC cost currently for the research deal. In a few turns, Stardate 3506.4, the Meklar expand to the Weg system, towards the lower-left corner away from us. I figure this is a positive development overall.  We're now starting to head into research areas where I'm really not sure what's best yet. Due to the cost difference though I'll head to Astro Biology. Biospheres increase the maximum population of a colony by 2, improving your best systems. Hydroponic Farms allow 2 extra food to be grown on any planet, even those where normal farming is impossible. They're pretty much required to make some of the rougher environments self-sustaining. Preferring to get more planets, I go with the hydroponics. I think this is an example of good choice though where there isn't a super-obvious best selection. I thought about going for more range, but we've still got a couple systems within reach and the ships will take time. SD 3507.0 - Think I'll annotate the game turn this way from now on. Sol reaches maximum population, increasing to 23 Industry for the moment.  Would be nice, but we don't have the money nor will we anytime soon. I go back to the Meklar, and sign a trade agreement. I think they mostly didn't want to go so negative in funds at first. Perhaps.  Despite the slightly higher price, Military Tactics is our last entry-level tech. Training ship crews is a thing, and that will happen automatically when in a system with a Space Academy. They get two points a turn, and it takes hundreds of points to get to the highest levels, so it's something you plan ahead on or it doesn't happen. *ClapClapClap*  Finally. I need to get at least one Freighter group done in order to send anything with it afterwards - I decide to build a couple here. I want at least one more colony ship to send to Praxis, but first things first. Now we can call ourselves a galactic empire. Sort of. In another returning feature, we can change the name of the star when we colonize it - and only then. The landing sequence is much different, with two small landers. That cost 500 Industry? Where's the rest of that ship?? Cause that looks nothing like the thing we built. Anyway, the game does a good job of making sure you don't accidentally pick the wrong planet by mistake.  I thought this would round down, but it didn't. Perhaps it only rounds down when at 0.5 or below?  First experience with a new colony this game, and we need to make sure we set a proper build order. Automated Factories first so we can build other things more quickly, barracks to handle morale, lab for automatic research. I'll hopefully be doing this process many times.  The delay time is dependent on distance and our warp drive tech as far as I know. I want to build up Callisto IV as quickly as I reasonably can. A second citizen was sent shortly afterwards, with the second freighter group being completed.  We were now in range of another system, Iras - which has another wormhole. A gas giant and a small desert planet are here. Desert planets are Mars-likes, 1 food per farmer and 25% maintenance penalty. Unfortunately the other end of the wormhole, Zirkal, just has a pair of gas giants.  SD 3508.8. We have a spy. He's that purple - because what other color would he be in this game? - guy down at the bottom of the screen. If we leave him there, he does internal security stuff and tries to catch enemy spies. Otherwhise, we can drag him up to the similar area by one of our rivals. For example Geode says No Treaty and then there's a line underneath it - below that line is where we'd put our agent. From time to time, both our spies and enemy ones will get killed and I'll need to replace them. This is one of those things where it's cool at first, and then you ask yourself why it couldn't just be done with the slider approach from the first game, since it serves the exact same function. The answer is: because then we wouldn't be adding more time-wasting micromanagement to the planetary build queues, duh. The addition I can see here is that you can move spies between the two (internal security and deep cover with a rival). That part of it is a small but useful add.  This is Hera, last system for us to scout right now. The other two planets are gas giants. Hera sucks, and I don't mean maybe. Also, the Silicoids recently expanded to a fourth system, Anchat. I'm worried about them.  SD 3509.1 - There's still a markup here, but I think it's worth it at this point to jumpstart Callisto IV.  I'm worried about Rav. I have to keep the Silicoids from taking it. I'd like to grab that small Ocean world in Praxis - I can eventually send out more bases locally in Callisto so I don't want to waste a full colony ship on that. But Praxis isn't as important I don't think. So next time, I need to design my first combat ship. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Mar 21, 2019 |
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Mar 21, 2019 21:05
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GuavaMoment posted:You get two food per turn from them, but they cost 1 BC maintenance every turn as well. This is the exact same cost as freighters take when being used to transport 2 food. Even getting into mid game, you might only have one or two really good farming worlds that can feed your entire empire. The extra population you get from biospheres will almost immediately give you more food, more BCs of income, more everything, everywhere than the two food you get from the farms. In fact all techs that allow you to grow food on hostile worlds are not worth it, it's just so much more efficient to have one massive farming world feed your whole empire. This was instantly obvious to me as soon as I read it, while at the same time I didn't have enough experience to know beforehand. Good advice to file away for future runs. .
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Mar 22, 2019 08:28
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Something Something Plan Enemy Contact With Ever Survives The No  It's fitting that this ship has been auto-named the Cheetah, because everyone knows they never prosper. ... Yep, I went there. Anyway, we've had a beam weapon now for a bit, the ubiquitious Laser Cannon. So we need to talk about modifications and firing arcs. It can get rather complicated combining the two. Let's use a standard mount - neither of the two mods are selected - and a Forward firing arc as our baseline. Note the damage, cost, and space required. These will be a-changing. Forward and Back firing arcs work the same on each end of the ship, coving the one-quarter of the ship in those facings. Anything outside of that, you can't hit.  The Heavy Mount increases maximum damage by 50%, while doubling cost and space. In MOO1 these were listed as separate weapon systems - doing it this way cleans up this screen a fair bit. That's important with all the new stuff. Doesn't seem like heavy would be worth it most of the time - before it was an increased range thing. But I'll need to see how combat goes. The full 360-degree Arc adds another 50% to the cost and space requirements.  Personally I'm a fan of these 'extended' firing arcs. They allow covering all but the area directly behind - or in front - of the ship, for only slightly more cost/space - 20% more at least in this setup, dunno how much rounding there is there. The PD modification appears to halve max. damage and space, and about a third of cost. Again I'll need to play with more weapons to get a more clearly defined ratio there. Clearly it's designed to cram more on for anti-missile, anti-fighter, and such duties. Main thing here is that with beam weapons there's a lot of freedom to customize a ship's role with combinations of firing arcs and modifications. Also, additional mods are available - they are unlocked by advancing a tier or two beyond the weapon's tech level. In this way, a fresh-off-the-line weapon system has basic functionality, but won't reach it's maximum effectiveness for a while. That part of it at least I think is fantastic; simple and elegant design. But none of that is what I want.  The book on early-game combat is basically this. At least, that's what I've read - somebody else here said lasers are the best early-game weapon so whatevs, they can tell me why this is wrong or whatever. Anyway, for space monsters, lots of small missile boats. Monsters tend to have one big beam weapon, so the idea is to take them down with massed ballistic firepower. Having said that, there are I think five types of space monsters, some are tougher than others, and I don't even know if I can build enough of these to take down the Space Crystal. I do know that it's my best chance, and I don't think I can afford to wait. So live and learn. 2-shot racks because either way, these battles aren't going to last long enough for a larger one. I'm going to max out the fleet with these, and then go for Rav if nobody else has done so yet. The computer adds only 3 to the cost, so it seems worth it to me to keep it on there.  I notice that the old 'relations descriptors' are still there. On accident, I moused over the gauge. How I played through several games of this before without noticing - well, the less said about that the better. Anyway, their report screens indicate they have not yet deployed any spies against me. So I'll stick with the two here. For several turns closing the first decade of play then, Sol I builds Cheetahs, Callisto IV is on to a Marine Barracks, and everything else just sort of waits.  SD 3509.6. So, budding theorycrafters, what exactly does a Space Academy do with all those silos? Obsessive zero-G training?  Lacking a better approach, I'm going with two points in research strategy: ** Generally go for what's cheaper. ** Focus on Construction and Chemistry, since that's where the research/production upgrades hit. In this case, that means Fusion Physics because it's fast. I don't think weapons for the ground troops is as important as weapons for the ships, so Fusion Beam it is. My fighters need something worth shooting with.  Oh look. He's calling himself a 'Commodore' now. Leaders level up over time, based on beatsmewhattheheck. We don't have the money. More importantly, the fleet is ready. I also send another citizen to Callisto, which has the barracks up and is working on a lab.  The fleet .. ahem, the clinking, clanking, clattering collection of colligenous junk ... is en route. And the rocks have claimed a fifth system in Opus. Crystal Battle Ok, that went horribly. And as you can see, I've got some work to do with the interface, but some things are familiar. The Space Crystal is 'unarmored', but by super-early-game tech it is a tank with 500 SP. Missiles on small ships is the proper approach I think, I just need more of them than I can field at the moment. Like 15-20 of them, or better missiles or something. Three Cheetah frigates are lost to the void of space, but two of them did escape. Near as I can tell, we did only fairly superficial damage to the creature. I don't know if you need any special gear to 'Scan' - it doesn't appear so.  Using advice from the thread, I decide to switch to grabbing the planets in the systems I already have as incubators - a Colony Base is next in Sol and soon we'll start one in Callisto as well. First though, let's plop an Outpost on that rich ocean world in Praxis to try to dissaude the Silicoids there. Right now I don't fancy my odds of winning this struggle much.  Note the 'continuous' and 'enveloping' options that we'll get to. Eventually.  I'm highly tempted to go with Soil Enrichment, which increases food per farmer by 1. Barren, Radiated, and Toxic worlds are excepted. But I go with Battle Pods instead, which increase the space on a ship by 50%. ** Troop Pods allow double the marines on a ship, for boarding actions or defense against them. That's something else I want to try out eventually, the boarding mechanics. ** Survival Pods are for keeping legendary officers - aka leaders - alive if you lose a battle. outpost Well that was anticlimactic. If you click on the planet afterwards, you get a popup informing that 'praxis prime is an Outpost planet'. Yeah I knew that. I thought there'd be a cinematic, but it makes sense to reserve those for colonies. Ok then. Also, outposts apparently count against the command point reserve even after being deployed. Didn't know that either. Or not. I get the point back the following turn. Grr. If I were good at this game, I'd have sent my Recon along to be in position for further scouting. I'm not, so I didn't. But I do get it moving now.  SD 3511.3. I just noticed that outpost systems are not capitalized. As the Meklar take Sulcus. Still, that's a cool way to distinguish.  Passing by Rosemund, the recon spots this. Three destroyers, a frigate, and three transports. So they could take praxis anytime they felt like it. I hope they don't feel like it. marriage? Ignore everything after the first 12 seconds of that video. I don't know why I ran it that long. Also ... Lolwut? And they are headed for Praxis anyway.  Yep. We're all gonna die. This is the whole schtick where the AI tells you how you've screwed up - in this case, a larger military fleet would have prevented the attack. Sol II Colonized But at least there's that.  Nothing too interesting. At the moment, I just want to not be the first empire eliminated.
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Mar 27, 2019 09:20
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We've now seen all the major features of Master of Orion 2, save the one which I left off. I'm going to cover a few remaining interface things in the next update, but that's all, before resuming progress forward. That'll give all of you time to tell me how to get myself out of this mess I've made for myself, if you have any ideas. I figure it's now been established that I know how to play this game - just uh, not all that well. So now the part comes where I hope to get better enough at this to be a credible threat to the higher-level opposition over the balance of the LP.
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Mar 27, 2019 09:25
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Krumbsthumbs posted:Monster battles usually aren't worth it in the early game because they drain resources from building up your current colonies and also might result in large losses to your fleet, which will give a signal to the AI to jump you. The AI will avoid planets with monsters for a fairly long time and Crystals are one of the stronger monsters in the game, so don't worry about not being able to take that system. Hmm. All I can say to this is it doesn't fit with my limited experience. I don't know the various monsters well enough, but I've seen AIs take down monster systems early - definitely by about the point we are at now or not much further in - and I've been able to take down the weaker ones with a trio of missile frigates before. I definitely didn't know what I was getting into with the Space Crystal - that's a lack of monster knowledge issue - but I've started maybe 10 and probably less serious MOO2 games and in at least half of them it was necessary to take down a monster to get a decent start. So one of the very few Things I Know(tm) about this game is how important that is - and now you're telling me I'm wrong about that too. Which is fine, but I really shows how much I have to learn here! Fangz posted:If you've retreated your missiles replenish, while enemy ship damage does not, and you can come back the next turn and do the same thing again. This is very good at cheesing the AI. Enemy ships don't auto-repair between combats? Martian posted:You could try stopping the Silicoids with missile bases on all colonies that they can reach and a few small ships as deterrence. Getting the Meklar involved might also help I could … if I had planetary missile bases. Picked automated factory per usual, so unless I trade for it - Meklar only for that right now - I'm SOL.
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Mar 28, 2019 08:06
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UI Wrap-Up The last bottom-row button in the GCI is Fleet Ops. From here we can scrap/relocate - I think it's the only place in the game to do that from. We can also see details on the ships in the lower-left, and control where they move to in the upper-left. For some reason, when this Recon reached its current system (Phakt) it auto-decided to go back to Sol, 6 turns away. I've tried changing that but I can't - that's not related to this screen but I'm confused and annoyed by it. Anyway, the arrows cycle between the fleets, we can filter by support/combat ships and connect to the leaders screen if we want to move personnel around, etc. Different layout, similar functionality to the MOO fleet screen. It's worth noting that this Recon has a Veteran crew, presumably due to all the places it's been and how long it's been flying around out there.  Our combat group, such as it is. The Cheetahs have much less skilled crews.  The general stuff under the GAME button at the top of the GCI. This here is basic and self-explanatory.  The Settings give more control over game flow. Most are fairly self-explanatory. ** End of Turn Wait being on ensures you are brought back into the game each turn. If it's off, the game will keep processing until something important happens, so you can get skip through sparse periods, esp. in the early-game, this way. I'm always afraid I'll miss something if I do that. ** Auto Select Colony skips the 'system' window and takes you directly to your colony in a system when you click on it. So that's a nice QoL option.  And now let's circle back to race customization since we've gotten through the major game features and systems on at least an introductory level. The left column is all racial economics stuff. Population growth is self-evident, the others are per-citizen production modifiers. Combat and spying is in the middle, and then there are the governments which bear further explanation. You have a basic starting type and then can later research an advanced one - each advanced government is an improved version of what you started with. ** Feudal sucks. 20% morale malus unless you have a Barracks, 8 turns to assimilate any conquered population, populations will on the other hand instantly assimilate if conquered, anarchy which results in a 50% morale penalty will occur if you lose your capital, and ships cost a third less but research points are halved which is a massive penalty ** Dictatorship gains a 10% boost to defensive spies, has the same no-Barracks morale penalty and assimilation time - except that their populations don't auto-assimilate. The anarchy penalty is only 35% as well. ** Democracy has a 10% defensive spy penalty, but gains 50% to research and cash production. Democracies are forbidden the option of exterminating conquered populations, and only take 4 turns to assimilate them. The anarchy penalty for losing a capital is just 20%. ** Unification gives a 15% bonus to defensive spies. They also ignore morale and have 50% bonus to food and industry. Capitals are irrelevant to them so anarchy is not a thing, but they have a long assimilation time - 20 turns after conquering a hostile population. Specials The final column has a whole bunch of stuff, a few of which have come up already. ** Low-G World - -10 ground combat, gravity penalties on even 'normal' worlds. ** High-G World - No gravity penalties, +1 HP for all ground combat units. ** Aquatic - Boosts to food and max. population of 'water worlds'. Effectively this means Tundra/Swamp are treated as Terran, Terran/Ocean are treated as Gaia for those purposes. ** Subterranean - +10 ground combat when on the defensive, significantly increased maximum populations. ** Large/Rich/Poor/Artifacts homeworlds do what it says on the tin. ** Cybernetic - Along with the mentioned autorepair ship ability, they need only half the normal food, sustaining themselves with industry for the other half. ** Lithovore - Consume only industry, requiring no food whatsoever. ** Repulsive - Can't form diplomatic agreements, 50% increased hiring costs for leaders, doubled assimilation time for hostile populations. ** Charismatic - Diplomatic geniuses, doubling the effect of positive actions, halving the impact of negatives, 50% increased chance of any proposal being accepted. Assimilation rates are also doubled, leader hiring is half the normal price - they get a lot of stuff. ** Uncreative/Creative - Already discussed. ** Tolerant - All planets are considered Terran in terms of max. population, and they ignore pollution completely. ** Fantastic Traders - +25% trade income, doubled income from sales of surplus food and trade goods. ** Telepathic - +25% diplomacy, +10% to all spies ... oh, and they can mind control planets. Ethereals have nothing on these guys. ** Lucky - Increased chance of good events, never suffer from negative ones, and the Antarans tend to ignore them even. ** Omniscient - The entire galaxy is instantly explored at game start, and no fleet can avoid their gaze regardless of stealth tech etc. ** Trans Dimensional - These things 'fold the fabric of space with their minds'. Oh, is that all. +2 warp speed, +4 combat speed for their ships results. ** Warlord - More experienced ship crews, doubled amounts of ground troops, and +2 command points from every colony. Yeah, we're not going to see all of these. But this is the menu to choose from. Analysis I was going to go into a final MOO2 rant at this point, but I'll save that for another time. Clearly the race customization option gives a lot of different choices. Unfortunately it's sort of trying to do mutually exclusive things at once. The races were clearly built on their MOO counterparts and then the point values balanced based on that - each stock race has the same default Picks value of 0, 100% Score. The problem with that is it creates an inherently unbalanced system, since the original races are not equal and were never intended to be. I have no issue with unbalanced races in general, but when you make a points system and attach scoring to it then it's kind of important to balance it - and this is not. At all. Lithovore, Subterranean, Creative and Tolerant just to name a few are absurdly OP. I wish MOO2 had picked one side of this or the other - if you want these kind of abilities, you really can't try to balance them. That just isn't going to happen. They've got to come with some inherent, major downside in and of themselves.  If I'm good enough, I'll eventually end up in the Hall of Fame. According to random breathless youtube videos, the Impossible record is 21-22k. The manual says your score is calculated thusly: Manual posted:• The quicker you win, the higher your score; each turn the game takes subtracts from your total score. Also, you get a boost for doing the Antaran ending, which we'll get to later.
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Mar 30, 2019 00:13
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Future Runs Poll Since we will only be sampling a few of the many race customizations possible, I'm going to open things up now to voting on what we should look at. Some people are clearly fans of certain customized possibilities, while others have mentioned they think stock races are the way to go. Here's what I've got in mind: ** Huge Galaxy/Average Tech Start/Hard difficulty/Antaran Ending This is going to be the next game I do. Hard because I want to show off the Antaran stuff and ... well, the odds of me doing that on Impossible successfully are not great. Eventually I will try at least one of these on max difficulty. I also am going Creative on this one, not because I like that, but because I want to do some of the obscenely OP late-game options which means I want to be able to choose from all of them. So the choices here are basically stock Psilons or some custom combo involving Creative and other choices, be they positive or negative. ** Small Galaxy/Advanced Tech The rest is up to you, a MOO2 knifefight here. This will be either the third game or the last one. ** Medium Galaxy/?? Just to do a different size, but aside from that I have no dog in this fight. ** Why Three More Games? Because MOO2 was actually a close second in the poll and I want to get to the game that actually won it before I die of old age. Playing one game on each galaxy size seemed enough to me to give a bit of range of possible game experiences without turning this into the second volume of the Encylopedia Oriona. Ok, so from anyone who wants to vote I need up to three game setting/race custom options here. We can switch up the galaxy age etc., stock races XYZ, use your imagination. This poll closes when the first game ends, so you've got some time. Just let me know what you want, and I'll blunder my way through from there.
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Mar 30, 2019 00:24
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All Cramped Up and Nowhere to Go Takeaways from the thread contributions on this game: ** Aggressive early Silicoids suck. That's familiar. ** I should built a bunch of Plantetary Missile Bases that I don't have access to and have no means to acquire. ** I should follow the mutually exclusive paths of building one big ship and a bunch of small missile ones to try and fend off/deter any further attacks. ** Too early for Space Crystal. With this I definitely concur.  SD 3511.7. Here's what we've got going on as we resume. I want to get a couple more Colony Bases done in Callisto to expand our foothold there. I do think that is out of range for the space rocks, but I still want a Starbase at Callisto IV eventually to expand our maximum fleet capacity. Sol II is our population incubator at the moment, and Sol I is going to finish the Space Academy, then get more Cheetah-class frigates to put up whatever kind of front we can against the Silicoids. I've been dumping all our effort into industry for a while now, but I'm splitting things up more now. I don't want to get too far behind in research, which frankly may have already happened. We don't have anything to trade with the Meklar, but ...  They do agree to join with us against Geode. This could backfire if they lose territory to them, but I'm hoping it just distracts and buys us time. The spy situation is fine - no active spies for either of our rivals at the moment. The next turn I see the fleet that smashed the outpost at Praxis heading back to Cryslon. At least they don't plan on storming us immediately.  I was initially inclined to turn this down. I plan on developing multiple planets in Callisto though - the aggregate benefit across them should be considerable. Director Felina the Naturalist is therefore hired and appointed to that task. 5-turn travel time before this takes effect. Environmentalist reduces pollution by 30%, Farming Leader gives that boost to food output.  It'll need food in the short-term, but this gives us four active colonies. ** SD 3512.4 - Space Academy finished in Sol. Capsule Construction (Battle Pods) research was finished the next turn. *screwed up and forgot to screenshot the next tech screen* I agonized over this one. There are multiple possibilities. We're going to be in trouble if we can't defend ourselves in the short term, and in the long-term the economy is more important. Armor, ship range, soil enrichment, I considered all of these. Trying to blend short and long-term together, I take the Fighter Garrison for planetary defense. Spaceports boosts planetary income by 50% and are a key economic tech; the Armor Barracks basically gives us tanks in addition to infantry for ground combat. I've already started with the fighter theme though, and this will get us closer to our next industry-boosting advance. We've got enough going on now that I'm regularly micro-managing citizen labor allocation to make the most of everything, ensure we have just enough food, etc.  This strikes me as a good deal for both sides. Battle Pods are more expensive research, but we definitely need the protection. It doesn't seem to me to be immediately useful due to the space required, but when we build larger ships I'll want them most likely. SD 3513.3. The Silicoids have taken Praxis, giving them a half-dozen systems. Meklar have three, we have two. We've seen no further aggression and have rebuilt the lost frigates. Callisto's last colony base will be done soon. I need to try to expand further to have any hope of keeping pace, but that's easier said than done.  Here's the current situation, featuring that second zoom level that nweismuller pointed out was a thing. Options for expansion: ** Callisto I (Large, Radiated, 5 max. pop, Abundant) ** Callisto V is the small barren poor useless one. ** Galileo has a Medium Barren Poor and a Small Toxic Abundant. ** Iras - Small Desert Abundant ** Hera - Two Gas Giants and a Tiny Toxic Poor Low-G. ** Rav - Eventually, when we can handle the space crystal. As mentioned, Hera is a good candidate for an outpost - except Silicoids. If I send our ships there to try to bait the rocks into a fight, I'm leaving Sol vulnerable. And I think that only gets us that one red star in terms of range. Callisto I could be a cheap population incubator, except that Sol II and to soon-to-be-colonized Callisto II (Ultra Rich, Radiated) are already in that role. I'll have my two productive planets feeding three others at that point, and be stretching the limits of food - unless I want to just not produce anything and purely expand, but that means research won't go anywhere. A Colony Ship for Iras is a big expense to not get all that much out of it, but extends our range while staying away from conflict, at least hopefully. I really don't see any great options here - we're boxed in and I'm sort of just looking for the least bad way forward.  The last 40 or so turns have not been good to humanity. Most of it is in Fleet, but we're getting beat in the other two categories as well by lesser margins. I'm not at all thrilled with it, but I decide to build an outpost at Hera first and send a couple of frigates with it. Iras will come later. I'm curious what others in the thread would do in this scenario.  We now have five planets. The 'extra' population, when we get it, will now go to building up Callisto III (Large Arid).   Robo-Miners are the next level in production advance, but I don't think I want to go there quite yet due to the expense. Due to our issues with wanting more space, I could go Deuterium Fuel Cells. Soil Enrichment is still out there, the improved drive systems are also a possibility. If I'm going to get the range I need to do it now, so Deuterium it is. Also at SD 3514.1, our new outpost ship is finished and departs with its escorts. Lacking anything better to do, I start putting funds into a colony ship for Iras. And then realize Hera is one parsec too far for the outpost ship to reach. And scrap a frigate to avoid the maintenance penalty. Grrr. All of that is an annoying and costly miscalculation.  Could have done without that. I try a tech trade with the Meklar but it's more difficult than I remember. I'm not sure of the why, but I used to be able to trade for just about anything. The only thing they are willing to part with is Heavy Armor. Good that I'm not able to abuse it, but I've still got to figure out how this works in the sequel.  These days Sol, which has switched over to a Fighter Garrison now, isn't building much. Still, this is good news.  Now we can deploy - and possibly get blown up - that outpost.  I could go Merculite Missiles for that whole MIRV thing, to start getting ready to hit Rav. We are increasingly using labor and freighters to ship food to Callisto III though, and the need for food is straining the galactic economy. I think we need Soil Enrichment next, so Advanced Biology it is. I could use Hydroponic Farms as a stopgap - I did invest the research in them - but I'd rather just have my farmers produce more. Jarred is now a Rear Admiral. This is three times at least now I've turned him down. Dude just won't get the message.  I get a NAP out of the cybernetics, but they stop short of entering a formal Alliance. It's better to have a weak friend than none at all - and they're still stronger than we are.  An asteroid belt. Yuck.  Oh, go away. You bug me.  Great googily moogily. Eight systems. The Silicoids have seven. Looks like those two are the main competitors, as we have to fit four other races into the rest of the map. Silicoids have three destroyers coming to eliminate our outpost on Hera. Which has now proven pointless. Getting anything useful beyond our two systems is probably down to Rav at this point.  Yessireee. K'kalak appears to have this galaxy by the tail, while it ain't looking good for the home team.  I've been saving up to recruit this guy for a while. The Megawealth trait will give us +10BC per year at no cost, which frankly makes it worth it by itself IMO. The land grab is basically over, and we're holding the short straw. Manipulating the diplomatic game and trying to find a way to gradually improve ourselves so we can get a word in edgewise seems to me to be the only play. If the rocks had better range we'd probably already be toast. I get the feeling we're living on borrowed time.
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Mar 31, 2019 10:31
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No apologies necessary. I think mostly we're just having fun with the situation. I for sure am at least. After all, I'm the guy who made a 'Le'ts Play' for the first game, and apparently thinks 'Plantetary' is a thing. So since I can't spell, missing something while reading isn't something I'll get up in arms about. Wax sarcastic about? Sure, absolutely.
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Apr 1, 2019 08:38
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Between a Rock and a Gang of Wannabes Battle at Hera We lose the outpost, but escape and eliminate one frigate. One of their destroyers was damaged. So it seems hit-and-run tactics could work on them for now, the question being whether we could do it well enough to annoy them into leaving us alone and picking on someone else.  Two poor planets here, the Klackons have grabbed the bigger one of the two. Contact is broken anyway as we lose the outpost. Meanwhile our Fighter Garrison is finished.  Here, Sol II has finished the Automated Factory and Marine Barracks. It's ready to start pumping out the population - problem is we aren't going to have many places to send them so it won't help that much. Still, better than a citizen every six years with this focused on housing. Good proof-of-concept for the future anyway. Elsewhere I mostly stockpiled industry and waited for the research to finish.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't that picture look like we are enriching the soil ... with a scorpion? Regardless, I want to build these ASAP everywhere I can.  When done, those will free up more labor for production. So Pollution Processor followed by Robo-Miners would seem to be indicated. Advanced Chemistry it is. Then I think I need to go back for some of the cheaper categories to round out our capabilities. Callisto IV got the Soil Enrichment done right away. Sol I and Callisto III needed a few more turns, but I was able to take a couple of citizens out of farming now that we had more food coming in from elsewhere, so that sped up the process.  This was the big one, two years later. Now Callisto III can support it's own population, with 2 food per farmer (Arid + Enrichment). That means a lot less shipping food around, just minimal amounts to our two incubator planets. Add in Administrator Felina's 30% boost, and we're looking quite good now on the feeding-our-folks front.  I'm now going for Starbases on the big planets to expand our military, and Research Labs on the small ones since our need for more population is minimal. ** SD 3516.7 - Sol I finishes up the enrichment push, and starts work on another colony ship. I want to get to Iras, the only remaining 'safe' system, and then ponder betraying the Meklar as Torrannor suggested. It seems the least hazardous course of action.  We're too late. The Meklar have taken it ahead of us.  Boosting our industry, and also giving us MIRV capability.  Robo-Miners it is next. I see little option here now but to mobilize for war with the Meklar. Things aren't going to get any better for us. They cybernetics have some key defensive techs; Heavy Armor, Reinforced Hull, and Tritanium Armor. They have the next-level research capability with Planetary Supercomputer. Their weapons are the same except that they have Mass Drivers. We really don't have any advantages except in production - they don't have the Pollution Processor yet. Yeah, you read that right. Our only saving grace might be production, against the Meklar. That's an awful thin thing to hang your hat on. I'd like to get our interceptors out there, but the only way I think we might have a chance is to go with maximum cheese:  The Cheeseball here has a half-dozen MIRV 2-shot missile launchers. As recommended, overwhelm enemy PD with hit-and-run tactics. This is as cowardly as all get out. It's destroyer-sized because that was more cost-effective than going frigate or cruiser, and seems the best size right now for building them in a reasonable time-frame. I'll fill our fleet up with these and transports for taking over enemy systems ... and then we'll do this thing. Of course that's after getting pollution processors and starbases in place, so it'll take a bit to prepare. SD 3517.8 - The Klackons and Meklar are at war. That could help us, but on the other hand we need to do this thing before the bugs take it all. Of course, the whole idea in the first place is a desperate venture, backstabbing our only friend who is providing our economy with much-needed boosts. But they are erratic, and it's not like there's a choice here. It's better than waiting for someone to come wipe us out. At least this way we are attempting to do something about it. SD 3518.1 - Alkari and Silicoids are at war too. Apparently everbody else is now deciding that this is indeed the proper time to go set off a galactic conflagration.  Cute. This one I hadn't seen before. The magnanimous K'kalak once again refuses all attempts at negotiation.  Welp, that didn't last long.  Gives us something new to work on just as the invasion force is almost ready.  It's time to talk tachyons. ** Battle Scanner boosts beam attacks to +50%, and adds 2 parsecs to scanning range. ** Tachyon Communications allows any ship within 3 parsecs of a starbase to receive orders, and boosts the command points provided by 1 per base. ** Tachyon Scanners increases the detection range of enemy ships, further for larger ones, and reduces enemy missile evasion by 20%. I'm going with the Communications option - I think I need every last command point I'm going to be able to get. Meanwhile, the Robo-Miner Plant costs 2 maintenance, so I'm only building those on the three big worlds. Hello Again Mr. Talking Robot Anchordude! More bad news all the way around, although the Silicoids have been at 7 for a while.  Just as I'm about to launch my attack. Guh. It would appear the 'fake early wars' from MOO1 are back.  The glorious Meklar Invasion Fleet. Ok, not so glorious. Two transports and a trio of Cheeseballs. I'll be able to get another destroyer or two going soon once we get the tachyon comms in place. For now though, I'm going to strike. You can see that the Klackons took Weg from the cybernetics. All the more important for us to seize what we can before they get frisky again.  Oh heck yes. We'll have the cashola in a few turns.  Looks like somebody combined a radar dish array with a crow's cage.  Fusion now. ** Augmented Engines boost combat speed by 5, a significant percentage - the Cheetah had 12 total for comparison. ** Fusion Bomb - 4-24 damage against ground installations, upgrade over the starting Nuclear naturally. ** Fusion Drives - boosts galactic speed to Warp 3. I'm going with the fusion drives for faster reaction speed to threats. I am not at all confident in this decision.  The caps make me giggle. I like that you can't just misclick and do this though. Our task force is one turn away from Iras, so it is time.  You know, RSW-242 is not wrong about the first part. I am a royal arseface for pulling this crap, and I legit feel sorry for the cybernetics. That doesn't usually happen. But in keeping with the Maximum Space Hitler theme of MOO in general, ethics will not stop me. Also in keeping with the theme of being a royal arseface, I am cutting off this update here on a cliffhanger. But here's the latest on how much we suck:  We're on the comeback trail compared to everyone who isn't a bug. Don't look now, but we could have something here if ... and it's a positively massive IF ... we win this war. On the other hand, K'kalak can probably stomp whoever it wants at will now. And whoever it wants definitely includes us.
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Apr 3, 2019 09:51
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wedgekree posted:how effective do you find Fighter Garrisons? I tended to not use them a ton as they replaced fighters slowly and didn't have 'complete' wings each invasion. At the moment I find them to be the only planetary defense I have access to, and that's about it. Couldn't tell you otherwhise. Torrannor posted:I think the Meklars made peace with the Klackons because they lost a system to the bugs. That doesn't seem like a "fake" war to me. Yeah I noticed that after the fact, but left that comment in there so as to enshire my ignorance. Looking into the Info a little deeper, they destroyed the entirety of the Meklar fleet it seems. Lost some themselves too, but not too much. Torranor posted:the missiles disappeared once the ship that launched them fled combat, you might want to keep that in mind. I assumed that was how it worked in the next battle, but I wasn't sure. Thanks. gently caress off Batman posted:I also like this thread since it tries to examine MOO2 critically, especially because I still think it's probably the best game ever made. I'll get back to destroying such delusions eventually. wedgekree posted:Or just send a spy there and keep it 'hidden' with the understanding it generally shows you the entire Empire 'status' screen. Technology, power, etc. Gives you a pretty good snapshot of them - even with your spy hidden and never doing a thing. FYI this is not necessary in MOO2. You get that information for free just for meeting them, without any spying necessary.
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Apr 3, 2019 21:18
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A Dastardly Betrayal The status of the empire on the eve of the invasion. All three primary worlds are set to optimal labor distribution with the most industry they can handle with minimal pollution. Only Sol Prime has any. The food is negative intentionally - Sol II has very slightly negative (-2k) growth and I don't want any more population right now, it would just suck more food out of the producer planets. So we're basically full-to-bursting right now and the main way to improve is to expand. the Meklar 'buildings' count is down to just a hair above ours and our latest report is that their fleet was annihilated by the Klackons just before they sued for peace. Beats the heck out of me why the bugs didn't just finish the job, but this could be a perfect time for our attack.  This screen happens when you get past any defenses in orbit of a planet. Iras Prime, being a relatively new acquisition, doesn't have any. It looks ripe for the picking, so I Invade, aka send in the transports. Invasion of Iras Prime Their one defender took out half of our troops. Yikes. I don't know exactly how the math works for ground combat, but it looks like they had an 16-10? edge in bonuses. The +1 for AI Bonus is I think purely difficulty-based. I've always found it more difficult to see exactly what is going on here compared to the original. More of a flow to things with the troops rushing at each other, and perhaps it makes more sense than the 'one fights at a time' deal, I've just never gotten a clear handle on why stuff happens the way it does.  This is rather gruesome. Imagine our troops going through the Meklar cities, killing off a million Meklar every few weeks (a year divided by ten turns). Let's see, that's almost 27,400 of them a day - and that's just the work force. Gotta figuire about double that if your factor in the elderly, children, etc. The morgue would be rather ... busy. I go with no. They are likely to be better than our citizens, and in any case I should show the assimilation mechanic.  It'll be more so later, but this is a good example of how this stuff can get complicated. Nice Meklar boost, but then there's pollution, morale, and the general we-hate-you factor for being invaded. Also, they are eating half food and half industry and have built a hydroponics farm here. And they are weird yellowish guys with exosuits or what-have-you.  For now, this is all I'll build and it still means operating Iras Prime at a financial loss. With only 3 max population, not a whole lot we can do with it.  So now what? Obviously it's best if we can keep pushing the attack, but I don't what is at Meklon or Sulcus. At least at their homeworld they'll obviously have a starbase, and who knows what else. Given what happened with our troops this time, I think I need to go with three transports and another destroyer to fill out our remaining fleet openings. Dunno if that's enough, but it is what we can afford.  I don't want to give them our hard-earned. I also know that I don't really have a choice. I'm informed that K'kalak 'is pleased we saw the light' and that 'I/Ender have made a wise decision'. So about that trade proposal . .. "We simply are not interested." We have met three races, are at war with two, and are buying the temporary good graces of the third with much-needed resources.  Here's our glorified candlestick, aka the Fusion Drive.  Advanced Magnetism is the last low-level field to consider. The Mass Driver is better than our Fusion Beam in that it doesn't lose damage with range, but if I was going to go that route I wouldn't have gotten Fusion to begin with. Class I Shield removes 1 damage per attack as you'd expect, though in MOO2 shields don't work forever - they can run out eventually though they do recharge. ECM Jammer increases missile evasion by 70%. I hesistantly take the ECM.  The only thing in Galileo is a Medium Barren Poor. This is the part where I wonder if I should have at least put an outpost on it to keep them from taking it. It's too late now, and if I did I'm sure the Silicoids would have just smashed the outpost anyway.  Magistrate Vott puts his considerable skills to work on Sol, which will be research-focused from here on out. Rash-lki is banished to the hinterlands of Iras. Our annual research has been effectively doubled here. This Just In ... Pirates are back, in a system we've never heard of. Also, the Klackons take Galileo and can now hit any of our systems whenever they feel like it. Super-great.  With this, we can consider possibly building different designs depending on how things go. More urgently, it's time to take a step up to more expensive toys.  It's time to look at some AI. I've neglected Computers for longer than I normally would. Probably too long. ** Neural Scanner - A near-perfect lie detector that improves all spies by +10. ** Scout Labs - These are put on ships, and increase research based on the size of the ship they are put on. They also improve attacks against space monsters and those things that shall not be mentioned because they aren't in this run. ** Security Stations - +20 to combat rolls defending against boarding actions; automated weapons systems for repelling them on board and the like. I like the idea of Scout Labs, but it looks like we'll be needing every last ship for combat and won't have the luxury. So I elect Neural Scanners.  How about that. One citizen there is now working full-steam for us.  Blue good, yellow bad. Icon even has a hammer in his hand to indicate he is working dutifully.  Ignore the starvation message - that happens whenever even a partial population reduction happens. We aren't losing a citizen here. More important is the war here. Enemy of our enemy is our friend and all that, but if the bugs have a significant victory here they will become unstoppable.  The Meklar have a fighter garrison on Meklon III. That's their homeworld. But this would be a very nice planet as well. Let's walk before we run, and see if our destroyer quartet can handle a cybernetic Starbase. The Battle of Meklon II I assumed here that if I left the battle screen, the starbase would not be destroyed. We lost one Cheeseball but it was well worth it. Had to take out about half the planet from orbit to knock it down to size, but still overall a successful operation. Also, some of the troops apparently returned to one of the transports afterwards - I assume because too many survived the battle to remain on the planet? The Neural Scanner I accidentally clicked through, but I'll come back to it at some point. It looks disturbingly like an electric chair.  Positronics is next. ** Holo Simulator is nice, boosting morale by 20% for an across-the-board planetary boost in production. ** Planetary Supercomputer is nicer. It improves on the research lab the way robo-miners did for industry. 10 research automatically, +2 per scientist. ** Positronic Computer is the latest word in beam weapon direction, boosting that bonus to +75%. We're not so worried about that this game. Supercomputer it is.  Gotta hand it to the guy, he just won't give up.  So now what? I don't think we can handle their homeworld just yet. May want to take Sulcus and consolidate before I take the step of wiping them out. The Meklar campaign is going quite well. Whether it ultimately matters all that much though remains to be seen. I like the 'contested system' display here with the colors of both empires. Very cool. And I should also see about starting to put the Meklar to work in more optimal situations, as their abilities do differ from ours. Query for the thread: how does population growth work with a mixed population? Is the new citizen randomly chosen from among the candidate races, or based on proportion, or ... ? Guess I'll find out soon enough, but it would still be cool to know.
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Apr 4, 2019 21:08
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Olesh posted:a factor in the decision is that the Meklar, with whom you're currently at war, have both Mass Drivers and Planetary Supercomputer, which means there's a decent chance you'll end up with one or the other if you successfully invade. So far though I'm 0-for-2 on that front; I don't know how common it is to actually get techs via invasion in MOO2. Olesh posted:The fact that neither the Silicoids nor the Klackons have taken the opportunity to grind you into paste is nothing short of mystifying, but if Sol is the only thing they can reach, they may not feel confident attacking the Star Base. It's actually simpler than that I think. Silicoids never had the range to reach even Sol. Rosemund is 7 parsecs away, and they are at Deuterium (range 6) like we are. The Klackons weren't within range either until the last update. Thankfully they are, at least for now, otherwhise occupied. Thanks for the tech thoughts. nweismuller posted:The game independently tracks population figures for each species on a world, reporting the summed population, and only adding a new population unit when one of the species rolls over the '1,000k' threshhold. Ahh, cool. That's good to know. wedgekree posted:Would suggest if you think that Starbases are gonna be your core defense force to get Class 1 shields. This would imply the existence of a long-term strategic plan … or for that matter, a strategic plan of any length of time. We're in more of the 'Do whatever is least likely to lose the game immediately' stage, and worry about the consequences of that later. I don't have a plan for a core defense force - I simply need the Starbases (and Tach Comms) to get the command point cap up and the destroyer design was the best option I could think of for killing stuff. Didn't go any deeper than that. Narsham posted:you needed at least one ship on the battlefield for the missiles to destroy the starbase, you do not need all of them. SOP is to click the retreat button to jump out whichever ship is the target of the missiles, Another good piece of info for me to conveniently forget the next time it comes up.
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Apr 5, 2019 08:04
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Just a quick note to apologize for my slacking off and say this will resume. . I've been distracted by other, less important shiny things of late. That will soon be remedied.
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Apr 13, 2019 20:07
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Thanks all for your patience. Even those of you who like the game more than me. I do agree with wedgekree's point about the UI - I've seen a lot more recent games that do worse in that aspect. A Grave Mistake  Here's what we know about the three races we have thus encountered. The Klackons being Uncreative is basically our only ray of hope with them right now - hopefully their massive tech lead will be minimized by having suboptimal selections. Meanwhile in terms of building stuff, the Meklar are second to none. Our citizens aren't better than them at anything, and they are FAR better at Industry while also superior in Farming.  At the moment, we have 44M citizens. Only 5M, or basically one out of nine, is Meklar. My goal is to increase that percentage somewhat, and as much as possible, keep the Humans working in research. Science is the only thing we do as well as our new cybernetics do. One of the Meklar is moving to Callisto II as we speak. That and Iras I will be our incubator worlds to grow their numbers. We also have a more clearly defined role for each system now. ** Sol - Under the leadership of Magistrate Vott, their job is to keep the treasury filled and research going. Accordingly, I'm going to slowly fill up Sol II for purposes of research. ** Callisto - Supplies food for the empire from the fourth planet, and the third planet is our primary shipbuilding facility. I shifted labor on Callisto III after this, leaving only one in research and moving a few of them to the factories - gives us 60 Industry per turn there to speed things along. ** Meklon - Magistrate Rash-lki has been transferred here. I'll have two productive planets here, which I would like to make our primary industrial/shipbuilding center down the road. Once the fleet is ready again I want to take down the Meklar homeworld. That'll probably take two attacks to make happen. I thought of designing a new ship, but I don't think we have anything in yet that will aid the hit-and-run tactic.  Nearby Sulcus, the last remaining Meklar system. Two Huge Toxic worlds. They have the Rich one, the other one is standard/abundant. And they've built a cruiser as well, apparently starting to reconstitute their fleet. I just sent in one destroyer to scout it out, and now they'll be returning to Meklon. I don't think either one of these are as valuable as the cybernetic homeworld. 'Battle' at Sulcus We get a look at the Destructor III, then retreat.  I'm saying no this time. That's hazardous, but handing over such a powerful production-boosting tech would be as well. K'kalak responds with a declaration of war. Superb. I thought we could get away with saying no due to our tribute deal and positive relations.  They aren't sending in any transports - but a Battleship is coming. I think our homeworld is in danger, but the fleet is too far away to do anything about this. Sol Battle It was close, but we fought off the Klackon Battleship + Frigate combo with our defenses at the homeworld. Note the amateur screwing around with firing the various weapons and finally figuring out how to do a partial salvo again.  We aren't done yet though. They have a battleship of different configuration heading to Iras. I don't have enough ships to stop them and hold the line in Meklon against the cybernetics, who have moved their cruiser there. Meklon being clearly the more valuable system, I abandon Iras to its fate.  I'd been annoyed by this for a few years. Tried sending the fleet to Meklon II (just told me you can't attack your own colony). I didn't want to attack Meklon III yet, just the enemy ship. Unfortunately, the game won't let me do that. I can't attack their fleet without attacking the colony. But if their ships are staying at their colony, how are they blockading my completely different planet in the system? That just doesn't make sense.  Another destroyer is now headed to the Sol system. With our fleet tied down in Meklon there is nothing I can do to defend our unfortified planets.  And so it continues. Meklon III Perhaps seeing that we have one more frigate incoming, the Meklar decide to strike first. We fight them off, but they still have one cruiser guarding their homeworld. Also, I turn on the grid/legal moves stuff.   So now what? I head for Xeno Relations. Alien Management Center would be nice, halving assimilation time and revolt chance while increasing the productivity of captured pops - not sure by how much though. Xeno Psychology boosts all diplomatic offers by +30. I decide we need that more - I want to get back in the Klackon's good graces ASAP, if possible, and at some point I'm going to want to stop ticking off the entirety of the galaxy.  After another low-level leader applies and is rejected, we meet the felines.  Trapped in the corner, they will have to expand through either us or the bugs. And will probably choose us. The Mrrshan are: * Feudal * +50 pop growth * +0.5 BC tax * +50 ship offense * Rich Home World * Warlord So the usual stuff but it looks like they added pop growth and tax income with their 'extra' points.  They join the group of milling-about, not-Klackon races. I bribe them with a couple of low-level techs, but they still refuse to enter any agreements. Also, I note that the Klackons have deployed four spies against us, the first such activity we've seen. I switch some production from trade goods to building more so that we can match them, or at least come close. It's time to deal with the Meklar homeworld. First things first - this strike will hit their Starbase. Assault on Meklon II Well ... that could have gone better. I think maybe I retreated one turn too late? Should have been able to save some of the ships I think. Now their Starbase is gone, but we're pretty much screwed.  Of course it is. Rash-lki was among the dead.  You don't say. Rebuilding the fleet allows us to destroy an incoming Klackon transport group at Sol and one of their destroyers at Callisto II. The cruiser is more than we can bite off without multiple ships though. The Fighting Continues More are - barely - fought off the next turn. We are hanging on, but not by much. I bribe the Klackons and offer peace. They refuse. Shocker there. We're surviving for now ... but taking a beating.
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Apr 17, 2019 05:09
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Wayne posted:have a really annoying audio bug. There's constant static on the music, and while music is turned on there's some skipping and popping sometimes too (like when I switch menus). It's really frustrating and I've tried every DOSBox configuration and setsound option I can think of and nothing's fixing it. I'm too much of a perfectionist to play without it, so I don't know if I'll be contributing anything this time around. I'm sorry … who are you again?!? *Ahem*. This is probably unrelated and not particularly helpful, but I've had a milder version of this. Basically anytime I'm running my video processing program - with the original MOO I would often edit a video for another project, then play stuff for that LP while waiting for it to do its thing - I get a lot of skipping with the MOO2 audio. This has forced me to not have that running in the background when I MOO, and consequently made it a little more inconvenient/harder to find time for it. At the very least you can still hang out and laugh at how much I'm screwing up relative to MOO1 if you like :P. my dad posted:Aquatic Klackon? Yiiiiiiikes, that's a bad draw. Didn't even notice that. But yeah I agree with the general consensus that my current 'barely holding on' thing is probably not going to last much longer. One positive is that I won't have to do what I did in my first MOO loss - wait like a century or something for them to come for me (and eventually lose via revolt, what an insult that was). Once they are strong enough that my Starbases aren't as much of a threat, stuff is going to go very badly if I'm still in this pickle. MechaCrash posted: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... I actually thought about that. See, I DID plan on showing at least one loss, but I figured that would be upon making the jump to Impossible, which I've never so much as tried on MOO2 since I've been hit-and-miss on Hard in my limited experience. This game was supposed to be a quick diplomatic win. So naturally it's devolved into a series of desperate wars, with me unable to make any friends except the one that I discarded out of necessity in that brief bit of expansion into Meklar territory. In other words, the plan … didn't exactly pan out. At all. In any way.
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Apr 18, 2019 08:07
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Humanity Strikes Back ... or Dies Trying. Probably the Second One Sol Prime Defense This barely fighting off Klackon battleships thing is getting old hat. Prior to this a Meklar destroyer was chased off. We need to rebuild the fighter garrison on the homeworld. Meanwhile the supercomputers are going up to increase our research capacity, and we are trying to counterattack in what limited capacity we may. Can't even reach Meklon so we need a stepping-stone first. Galileo is nearby and is held by the Klackons. Maybe by taking it we can annoy them into peace. Probably not, but whatever. It's something. First try has us losing three Cheeseballs, while they lose two destroyers. They have a Starbase as well that survives the encounter. It appears to be better than the Meklars, which suprises nobody. I'm not sure if we can take it anyway, but it seemed best to clear out the escorts first. 3522.6 - Meklar dorks destroy the minor research world at Sol II. I'm still aggravated. The next year they attack our homeworld, losing three destroyers in the process - but we lose one as well. This is really looking like we are going to be stuck on the defensive.  So Xeno Psychology is symbolized by ... a chrome hubcap? I mean, a cool-looking one, but still.  Oh let's see ... Gravitic Fields. ** Anti-Grav Harness frees ground troops from terra firma. Or as the game says, 'allows them to fly'. +10 ground combat. ** Gyro Destabilizer spins enemy ships from a range of up to 15. Damage is 1-4x the ship's size class, but having it end up facing a random direction is probably more valuable? ** Inertial Stabilizer is a partial warp field that can operate in normal space. In other words, we didn't even try with this description and just went full space magic. +50 beam defense and halves the movement cost for turning. Well I can run away faster with this and not get hit by as many beam weapons. I think the inertial stabilizer is better if I want to keep doing the hit-and-run tactics. Long-term though, I probably don't. Gyro Destabilizer is a new mechanic so I go with that. Who knows, maybe I'll even live long enough to build one.  Trilarians are a thing in this game. We're getting a lot of 2 or 3-turn wars, so I don't take much notice of the actual conflict. It's more just telling me they exist. Personally, I'd prefer not knowing about a war with an enemy we haven't met yet, but that probably goes along with the whole deal of it being super-easy to know info about a rival empire. SD 3523.0 - The Klackons show up and bomb Callisto II, our Meklar-pop world. And damage nothing. But still, the onslaught continues.  Cool. They can go die in a fire. Oh wait, that's our fate. NVM then. 3523.3 - Trading destroyers with the Klackons in Callisto. Efforts at securing peace continue to be rebuffed. Callisto IV How nice. We chased them off, but the Meklar have a Graviton Beam that can hit our planet from the starting position. I hate them even more. Then we chase off a bug cruiser, and blow up another one of their battleships. As the tech gap grows though, I know this can only last for a limited time. I'm not sure I have a viable long-term strategy beyond 'blow up a bunch more ships and make them earn their human genocide'.  Latest toy.  Normally I'd consider Planetary Stock Exchange, which doubles income on a planet. Or combining Shield Capacitors with Class III Shields and actually building a large carrier-type ship. But right now we are in desperation survival mode. So Pulson Missile it is. Iridium Fuel Cells increase range to 8, and the Atmospheric Renewer builds on the pollution processor to quarter the amount of industry that counts towards pollution. All of which is a luxury right now. 3523.7 - The Klackons have some new toys, but three more destroyers go down at Sol Prime. Still, I have a feeling the end is nigh. New Klackon Battleship They ran away this time, but their ships are getting pretty scary. There is literally nothing I can think of to do but keep defending, research to try and up our firepower, and wait to get smashed. We're in a corner, so I can't go another direction - there's no other direction to go.  I did scrap two of our three Transports, because we're not going to be invading anyone anytime soon, and hesitantly designed this. It's a switch from hit-and-run to stay-and-fight tactics. Anything bigger would take a long time to build. I have noticed our fighters from the garrisons do seem to do a good amount of damage to enemy designs though, once they get there. The boringly, purpose-named Fusion Carrier has fusion everything. Fusion beam-powered Interceptors. Fusion drives. Fusion Beams of it's own, PD ones, for handling incoming ordnance or strike craft. Reinforced Hull and ECM Jammer for survivability. It's vulnerable to beam weapons, but we don't really have a good option for that so I'll just hope to out damage the enemy before that becomes too much of an issue. Which may very well not work, but let's at least try out the darned interceptors before we go down in flames? I have nothing better. I think for now, I want to get rid of that last transport and try to field four of these. That would mean paying an extra maintenance cost for the last one, but it's a cost we can afford. Why not go even bigger with Battleships? They would just take too long to build. Which may not be a good enough reason, but it's what I'm going with. That would be on the order of 1200 or more in terms of price. In other words, 20 turns on our best planets. Each carrier has 16 interceptors, compared to 10 for a fighter garrison. So a few of them grouped together gives me a whole bunch of small ships to swarm the enemy and overwhelm their PD. In theory. 3524.0 - Another Klackon battleship goes boom at Callisto IV, but not before doing heavy damage to our Starbase. Without the fighters we would not be winning these battles. I'm sold on them at least as an early-game defensive option - the fighter garrisons at least. Meanwhile Psilons-Klackons are at war. Go fight the eggheads and leave us alone for a bit? Nah. And that fleet had 8 transports with them. We're losing a planet if we lose any of these fights.  It was the only one left. Now we just have the big defended ones; Sol Prime, Callisto III, and Callisto IV. Until we can push out and counterattack - so never, in other words - there's little point in reconstituting the smaller systems. Meanwhile the umpteenth attack by the Meklar at Sol was repulsed. They like to attack with lone cruisers and run away before we can destroy them. Meanwhile I'm constantly having to switch around labor due to this or that blockade being lifted or enacted. Behold - the Fusion Carrier! The first deployment of our carrier. Chasing off a destroyer with a cruiser is no great development. And in this case, the bugs were well-equipped to damage us. But we would have made short work of them with our interceptors, and they knew it.  Once nice thing here is that Sol, Callisto, and Galileo form an isosceles triangle. Each of them are a two-year journey away from the other two for our current ships. That means I can have some defending each system, and they can rendezvous for an attack like this together. I have no intention of capturing the system, I just want to remove the Klackon presence if we can. Push them back away from our territory. The 'Battle' of Galileo That definitely sucked. Try Massacre of Galileo. It would appear Klackon technology is now good enough that attacking them is not a real good idea. Ok then. If we can't attack them, and can't make peace with them, I see my choices as follows: ** Wait to be destroyed. Nah, that's boring. Let's find some way to pointlessly flail about. ** Outpost on Hera, then go for Meklon again. ** Defeat the Crystal on Rav. Rav does not require our fleet to be in two places at once. Meklon does. Now of course there's the possiblity that the Crystal kicks our butt again, and also that we take the system and then get it stole from us, but we're not exactly in a position to be choosy. So I elect to return to Rav, with maximum Cheeseballs.  Yay, the Pulson Missile. Of course we can't MIRV them yet but they will help our Starbases.  Once again it's all about survival here. I'd like to get mods for those new missiles, but I think getting some shielding for less than half the price is more vital. So Magneto Gravitics draws my attention. ** Class III Shield - Absorbs 3 points of damage from any attack. We're getting hits of up to the low 40s, so that won't mean much to the high end. It'll mean more to the low-end though, some is better than nothing, protection against the more equal races, etc. ** Planetary Radiation Shield - Radiated planets are upgraded to Barren, reduces damage to planets by 5 points. ** Warp Dissipator - Misspelled here. Also, prevents any ship in a large radius from retreating. Not important enough in our present situation. So yeah, Class III Shield for a bit of protection it is. The one time I don't record - I'd replay it if this game wasn't pretty hopeless. Next Klackon attack, their battleship blows up a destroyer in the first round. Which blows up a second one in the explosion radius. Which badly damages the Starbase. Which is soon finished off. Our fighters still won the day, but the planet had considerable damage inflicted. In other words, the day of doom has nearly come, and our ships are pretty much irrelevant to them now. 3525.3 - Meklar cruiser knocks out our fighter garrison at Callisto IV before we can take it down. There's a pattern here. A bad one.  Well you better hurry. There's not much time for profit - or anything else. We're about to be incinerated.  Well hello to you too.  Psilon look quality, Alkari have only one system?!  Based on this, they must be sharing at least one with someone else. More notably, the Psilons appear to be a real threat to the bugs. Trade deals are immediately struck with both. If we could gain a powerful friend ... We will almost certainly still lose. But we will know that we tried to find a last desperate way out of it ... or something? Both races are Honorable. Psilons are Technologists because of course they are, Alkari are uncharacteristically Diplomats.
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Apr 23, 2019 08:38
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By the way, I'm still figuring out what battles to show and what ones not to. Probably going to just record them all and weed them out as I go from now on. If I put all the combats up, this would simply become Repetitive Combat: The LP and I don't think that would be of any use to anyone. On the other hand, the one with the explosion damage domino effect would have been worth seeing.
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Apr 23, 2019 10:10
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Olesh posted:the undocumented +25 missile defense Pulls hair out by the roots in large quantities. Olesh posted:let's break down an attack here - I've got a frigate with Class III shields. My opponent fires and hits with 10 Laser Cannons. Without shields, I would expect to take somewhere between 10 and 40 damage. Based on the quote from Thotimx above, you might think that with Class III shields, the incoming damage taken is between 7-37 damage which gets applied to the shield facing. That makes sense. I'd forgotten about the 10 Lasers or whatever being 'bundled' into one combat number. Which is a rather massive thing to forget about/ignore. Olesh posted:Yes, this means that the "x2 range dissipation" property of Fusion Beams doesn't actually exist. Grafts hair back into head so he can rip it out again. Also: thanks for the damage over range explanation thingy. I should have a clearer head about this in future playthroughs. Emphasis on should.
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Apr 23, 2019 11:48
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I don't really see any hope, but I'm still going to play it out. One because that's what I do, and two because I think it's still useful in its own way to get further into the tech tree, be edumacated on stuff I don't know by the thread here, experiment with stuff like I've done with the carrier, etc. That should all help me actually show up and compete for the next run.
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Apr 23, 2019 21:02
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The Grim Reaper Cometh This one is fairly video-heavy, but each one is unique and most of them are short. The High Council This is a thing that's back. I liked the old presentation better personally where the was someone at the 'podium' or whatever putting in their two cents when it was their turn to vote. Here, it can be hard to see who's speaking when it's one of the nominees. Not obvious enough. But otherwhise, this is a cool look graphically. Gameplay-wise it works the same as before from what I can tell.  Note that K'kalak couldn't care less that we voted for them. It seems to be a lot harder to manipulate the diplomatic system, which is weird because I've been able to do it in previous games easier. Maybe we're just in a 'you suck, we're going to kill you, nothing else matters' corner or maybe I'm misremembering things. In any case, we now know that the Triliarians are a major power as well, else it would be the Psilons as the second nominee. Also, two Klackon battleships are en route to Sol, a year apart from each other. Bad things could be about to happen.  Or not. They take out one of our destroyers then retreat on the first approach. And then we get this, which may buy us some time. Pretty cool graphic I think.  So long as I just got the shield, might as well move up to Ion Fission. ** Ion Drive is an upgrade to 4 parsecs per turn speed. I think this would be worth considering if we didn't already have Fusion Drives (3 parsecs). A one-third speed increase on the galaxy map doesn't look like its worth it. ** Ion Pulse Cannon bypasses armor and structure, doing 2-10 points of damage via system overloads. Useless against space monsters and those things that shall not be mentioned which are not part of this game. ** Shield Capacitors are worded confusingly. I THINK they more than double shield recharge from 30% to 70% per turn. Capacitors are supposed to be a good pairing with Class III Shields, or so I read somewhere once. Having the shields last longer in a fight seems useful, and they are among the cheaper tech options we have, so let's do this thing.  The Klackons are swarming. Callisto IV Breakthrough Well, that's that. The whole boarding mechanic thing is shown in action. Our destroyers existed only as something to be shot at and then our defenses overwhelmed. It was only a matter of time. We have two planets left. 3526.0 - The Battleship/Cruiser combo comes to Sol. I concentrate all firepower on the big one, barely managing to destroy it. But they still capture the Starbase - took two attempts this time - and bomb our homeworld, destroying a bunch of stuff but we still control it for now. The next turn they finish the job. Magistrate Vott and all of humanity's most priceless creations are gone. Only Callisto III remains.  Felina begins work on building a Capitol on the sole remaining presence of our species. Note the big morale hit we take for not having one. Mostly though, people alternatively riot and get their affairs in order. They know homo sapiens are not long for this galaxy. 3526.3 - The cruiser attacks on its own. This is a mistake, and we blow it up. A temporary reprieve. It is simply a matter of how long they decide to take to eliminate us.  Another two turns, and we have a Capitol again. Also, this looks scary but isn't. TEN Klackon transports. Unescorted. What is even the point of that? Meanwhile contact was broken with Alkari/Psilon when Sol was lost, so we can't even reach out to them. Meklar Battleshipo The Meklar Tormentor battleship can take a beating, but we eventually took it down. We rebuild the fighter garrison ... just in time for another one to come back and a repeat of the same fight. However, two Klackon destroyers decide to take advantage of our weakened state this time ... One Location/Turn, Two Battles Wouldn't think they'd pose much of a threat, but they shoot down most of our pulson missiles in flight. We do eventually win, but they do significant damage. It won't take much to finish us off ... Klackon Upgrades ... The latest Klackon Batteship, armed with a LOT of Neutron Blasters along with a few of the Thotimx Special(AM Torps). They are almost a match for our starbase/fighter combo by themselves. No Rest for the Weary Another one comes the next turn. I had some industry stockpiled but couldn't get the Starbase nearly ready in time. By themselves, the fighters have no chance.  Here is what's left. How pathetic. Magistrate Felina does not bother even attempting to console the few remaining survivors of this wanton destruction. Gathering together in caves like primitives, or in air pockets within the rubble of the once-great cities of Callisto III, they know they have only weeks to live until the latest supply ships arrive. Then the bug battleship will open fire again, and all life on the surface will be extinguished without mercy. The End Well wasn't that lovely. So I have a mark to beat. It's not a high one, something like 40% of the lowest rung on the starting Hall of Fame. I raise only one objection to that closing video - my people were not 'enslaved'. They were obliterated, genocided, nothing left of them but a memory among the endless eons of the Orion Galaxy. Bonus points though for the ships searching through the wreckage for more people to kill with their floodlights, and the evil laugh at the end. Go pound sand, MOO2, for I shall return with vengeance. And increased knowledge of your trickery. And, most importantly, with a much better race. Post Mortem So a number of mistakes were made here. Got some good luck with the leaders, wasted resources in the early attack on the Space Crystal at Rav and some other places. A few tech choices have been clarified. Going Biosphere would have helped early growth. Not having Silicoids and Aquatic Klackons would have been nice too. And I need to Always Be Stockpiling!, unless there's something more vital to be doing. Despite all that though, I should have given K'kalak his bloody Robo-Miners - he eventually got them anyway, and if I could have continued the Meklar campaign I would have eventually conquered them I think without Klackon interference. That would have put me solidly in 4th position behind the Klackons/Trilarians/Psilons. From there, I would have had a chance for a long comeback victory. The bugs may have come for me anyway, but it would have bought me time to potentially not be such an easy mark for them. So I think that was the fatal error. Clearly I can't treat MOO2 diplomacy the way I treated MOO1 diplomacy, at least not until I understand it better. The MOO2 AI's aggressiveness is shown here - also shown though is the fact that they clearly don't have a great grasp of risk, which means that aggressiveness could be a liability. They kept sending insufficient force and getting blown up more often than they retreated. Had I been more competent, that might even have mattered. Next up, I pick myself up off the canvas, and begin my revenge. Or at least the attempt at it.
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Apr 24, 2019 20:35
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Speaking of racial picks, I'd like some help in designing the next race.  Ok, here's what we're going with this time. ** Staying on Hard difficulty because let's walk before we run and I just got my arse kicked on it. ** Huge galaxy because we're going for endgame stuff this time. ** Organic Rich seemed better for expansion than the alternative; we've seen Average and I wanted to try something new. ** Average TL to show the 'standard' start. ** Antaran Attacks on. Time to meet our exogalactic invader-type threat. We will be doing the Antaran Ending here as mentioned. Which ... takes a while. Everything else is as before. mydad posted:If you're going creative on the first run, then you might as well take democracy and whatever else you want to spend 5 points on and go maximum science. MechaCrash posted: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... These similar but not identical ideas form the basis for our next adventure; Custom Psilons. The theme here is MAXIMUM SCIENCE, complete the tech tree, try out some of the obscene space magic stuff at the high end, conquer most of the galaxy, and then do that thing with the Anatarans once things die in fear of us making the slightest of nods in their direction. One big advantage right off the bat of course is that by playing the Psilons, we don't have to face them as an adversary. Stock Psilons have: ** Creative ** Low-G, Artifacts, Large Homeworld ** + 2 Research ** Dictatorship Thing is we can't afford all that and still go Democracy - which gets +50% research from scientists.  This has Creative, Democratic, Low-G World selected. Creative-Democratic I definitely want to go with on this run for multiple reasons; industry will be harder to come by so I'm going to want the money to buy stuff early, which Democracy will help with. I like the science bonus from it, etc; over time democracy will be better than +2 research, which unfortunately this means we can't get that no matter what. You can only do 10 negative racial picks at the most, and we'd need 11 (6 more) to get the +2. So we're pretty much stuck with +1. That needs 3 more points, which I figured to get from taking a -10 in Spying. Now democracy already gets a hit there, but I figured by being Creative we'll be able to cover up our deficiencies there just fine by the time we need agents to do anything, and mostly we'll want to be defending our tech with them anyway not being aggressive. This is easier to see point values on - same shot from the first game earlier in the thread. So the question at this point is would you change anything from what I've outlined above? Should I get rid of Low-G and go with some other negative such as Repulsive? That has the risk of getting us into conflict early again, but Low-G hurts ground combat and, more importantly, will have us suffering penalties to production on most worlds until we have the tech to neutralize it. Perhaps take another couple negative points from ground combat and use them on Rich home world (or Large instead?). Take Artifact homeworld instead of the +1 research?(adds +2, so we'd research faster at the start but the racial bonus is a lot better once we grow). Within the Creative-Democratic framework there are a number of possibilities. I'm going to leave this open for a day or two, and then dive into the next game, but I wasn't certain what would be best here, so what say you? If this game goes well I'll put up similar discussions for the last couple of runs partway through it, but I don't want to count my chickens before they hatch. Naming Themes Almost forgot about this. ** Race Name: TechnoGeeks? ** Homeworld: ?? ** Emperor: ?? Any suggestions for these? I can always go with stock Psilon stuff for the HW/leader, but any ideas would be cool also. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 06:25 on Apr 25, 2019 |
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Apr 25, 2019 06:21
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PurpleXVI posted:I always liked to combo Creative and Lithovore. Being able to spread fast, because you don't have to give a drat about whether a given world can actually support farming, combined with Creative, will soon outweigh your disadvantages. Sounds interesting. However, it doesn't really fit with the whole maximum science thing, which I want to use for specific reasons. Given that, I can't justify spending that many points on a non-tech pick (Lithovore, being hideously OP, requires 10). Good points for the others on different ideas. I like the synergy mydad mentions between organic rich and aquatic, which is not one I was considering. I've never played an Aquatic race for even two seconds, so that's a point in it's favor. So: Positives ** Creative ** Democratic ** Aquatic This does sacrifice the +1 research, but I would think the extra population will more than make up for it in the long run. Negatives ** Farming ** Ground Combat These seem to be consensus selections. There is more of a difference of opinions on where to get the other 5 negative points from. Seems to come down to Repulsive (in which case I'd swap out Ship Attack for Farming to make the points work), Low-G World, Ship Attack/Spying, or Ship Attack/Ship Defense/ Poor HW. Four different ways to go. Problem with Repulsive is that yeah I'm going to kill the AIs anyway, but being able to butter them up early on if the start isn't favorable - like, you know, last time - is a useful thing. The others all have negatives potentially but I'm going with: ** Ship Attack ** Spying The point about being vulnerable to espionage is well-taken, but I'm going to aim to not have enemies for a while. I don't want a Poor HW to hamstring early production esp. when I'm already taking a farming hit, Low-G will make expansion harder when we are already in an industry-poor galaxy, and I'd prefer not to take the hit to ship defense. So I'm sticking with the idea that this is the 'least bad' limitation to accept. The TechnoGeeks, led by Emperor Kelvan from his throne on Mentar have thus proceeded. The early stages of their (mis?) adventure will be coming next.
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Apr 26, 2019 07:28
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TechnoGeek Opening This time we're not in a corner. Remains to be seen if that's good or bad, but at the very least we'll have more exploratory options. Everything looks a little smaller because of it being a huge galaxy.  I have to talk about this, since there were no brown stars in the first galaxy. What even is this description? This is just lolrandom - I'm sure they were trying to funny, but I would have preferred if somewhere in there was the slightest inkling of what, in gameplay terms, brown stars are likely to have.  We have four stars we can reach initially. Two red, two blue-white. Everything within several parsecs is a hostile star type. So much for organic rich. We are in the worst part of this galaxy it would seem in terms of habitability.  At least we have a starting fleet. Two Scouts and a Colony Ship, just like in the original. Scouts will head out to the blue-white possibilities, and I'll keep the colony ship around until I get more information.  Our starting planet. Ocean. We are underwater. Don't think too much about the background, or you'll realize that, for example, our Starbase is submerged. One would think that would hamper the effectiveness. Aquatic here gives us a farming boost so that we only need three farmers to feed eight citizens instead of the usual four, and population growth is a little higher than normal as well. Two workers to stockpile industry until we have enough (60) to build the first thing we're going to research. That'll take a full year, everyone else taking the Scientist job. That's what our skinny blue smartdudes are best at. Having our second planet be Toxic sucks, but the fact that it is Rich is very nice. Should be a fine incubator planet quite early on.  All of the 'everybody gets these' advances have been granted us, but that's it. Here you can see Creative in action, as we don't have to choose. Optronics first to start us on the path to getting basic research and industrial improvements.  This will be a fine planet ... eventually. But it's too early to make effective use of a toxic, high-gravity world.  Better, but we'd still need to import food. I'd like a second farmable planet in order to build up and then use that to spread people throughout the surrounding area. I decide to wait a few turns to scout the red stars, hoping for something more along those lines. Hilarious to me that we have the inhospitable, industry-rich area of an industrially-challenged galaxy.  Ooh, Natives! Nice little early boost to the work force. The pop-up here pretty much says what they do.  This is where they are. Obviously the planet being poor isn't great but I can't complain about anything else. I think we need to grab this, take the extra labor, and work on this being a farming colony initially while Mentar builds stuff. The others are a gas giant and two Low-G worlds; Tiny Tundra Poor and Medium Barren Ultra-Poor. So they'll suck at everything. Two turns to the final scouting location in range, but I'm not waiting. Vela it is.  A good candidate for buying stuff early, since everything will take a longer time to build.  Here's what happens if you test the game and try to move the Natives. They don't pay taxes either, the lazy louts. Still, we have three million of them! We are forced to have plenty of extra food here. No freighters to move it, but soon. Could start stockpiling, but I think it's more valuable to accelerate our early research. So the Natives are going to free us up to do that and give us some extra cashola for our early reserve.  This is definitely OP IMO. Why is a more primitive race better at farming than a more advanced one? I get that they are an agricultural society ... but certainly a warp-capable race would have the technology and equipment to more than make up for that. At any rate, it won't last but we now have a 467% profit margin. 17 BC income, 3 BC going out to support the starbase and barracks on Mentar. For less than a year into the game, that's pretty darned incredible. I began to ponder whether or not I should just build a freighter fleet or two right away, since that would allow shipping food back to Mentar and even more productivity there. I decided not to do it just yet, but this kind of find does provoke some decidedly non-standard strategic considerations.  Dang. I still picked the right place to settle first, but yeah. Food will most definitely not be an issue for us assuming we get this. The other two are medium planets, Barren Abundant and Desert Ultra-Poor LG.  Below Vela at the bottom of the map, and our first friendly-type start system. The third planet here is an excellent fit for us. Also: ** Medium Desert Rich ** Medium Swamp ** Medium Barren Rich I'll take 'em all, thanks. I'm already shelving concerns here about whether we'll have enough good places in range to land. Now it's more of a 'how do I get enough Colony Ships out to all these juicy targets' deal. SD 3501.0 - With enough industry stockpiled to build the Research Lab, I would normally switch to having everyone as a scientist to wrap it up. I this case though I keep stockpiling, because I want to get some freighters going immediately afterwards. I'm not sure if that's best or not, but it seems right.  Last scout for now. Figures to be a fine industrial world through sheer size.  SD 3501.3. Optronics is in a turn earlier than expected, and now we'll beat a path to Automated Factories.  With as much money as we're making right now, I see no reason to turn this down.  Well ... that kind of stinks. The way the math works, tipping us over into pollution territory, we actually gain nothing from him quite yet. 3501.5 - I spend 40 BC to get a freighter fleet three turns early. A bargain as far as I'm concerned, as it will allow us to ramp up quicker.  The next turn. Now we've got a whole lot of research happening, and still plenty of excess food. SD 3501.8 - Advanced Engineering is in. One more project till we get our factories. SD 3502.0 - Another 40 BC to get another batch of freighters in early.  SD 3502.4. Advanced Construction, the automated factory and other goodies are in. I still like the idea of Astro Biology here, both for price and for getting Biospheres available this time.  A bit expensive but I don't want a delay. About half our annual profits are being eaten up by the food transfers, and I'm pouring a lot of cash into getting things going faster. Also, Vela I isn't growing at all now that I've recalled our colony citizen to the homeworld - natives apparently only reproduce enough to sustain their numbers. Too busy in the fields I guess.  We've a lot to do here, and have encountered no resistance. The main question is finding the best order to do it in that I can.  One other thing - MOO2 was a bit ahead of its time on this screen, which I didn't show before. Game and IRL date being thrown in there is a useful thing.
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Apr 27, 2019 21:13
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Libluini posted:not really hot enough for fusion. They're basically Jupiter-like planets just barely large enough they're silently smoldering. There are a lot of them around, they're just hard to find since they're so cold and dark. Guess they should have hired you to write the in-game text, because that tells me a million times more than they did  PurpleXVI posted:I'm surprised you aren't going full hog on colony ships like I'd expect you to do in MoO1 if you found a cluster of nice habitables like that. Aside from the answer you got to your own question, you're right here but it was just too early. That's coming soon. MOO2 is a little different: I view the getting of automated factories and research labs the same as I did maxing out industry on your homeworld in MOO1. That happens first, then you have the infrastructure to expand. At the start, maxing out industry with a default race means 4 people producing 9 industry … and 3 pollution. 6 from the first two citizens, while the last two have half industry and half pollution. At that rate I'd need 56 turns to build a Colony Ship. So it just really smacks you around early in the game for trying to build anything big quickly. IMO, that first colony ship you start with is an even bigger deal in the sequel because you ain't replacing it anytime soon. I remember my first game when I was building them instead of Colony Bases because I didn't know how the in-system bases worked … oh I felt massively stupid.  mydad posted:You lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky bastard. That's Mr. SixTimesLucky to you! But as Torrannor pointed out, haven't I earned it after the last one? @ nweismuller - That's some high-quality justification there. I'll go with it! sebmojo posted:We demand death stars You'll get em - assuming I don't screw it up. Thing about a promising start is it brings a lot of pressure with it. Last time it was like 'oh well that sucks, yeah would have been tough to win blah blah blah'. It's like the Mrrshan MOO1 game I had when I got early artifacts - there's just the responsibility now of 'you better freaking win this, because you're not going to get a better chance'. But I'm glad it's going well - so far, there's plenty of chances for crap to happen. I wouldn't mind at all if this just ended up being a fun romp of a game - that would actually facilitate my goals for it quite nicely. Also, I really need to eat my words when it comes to space monsters somewhat. Clearly they aren't nearly as omnipresent in good-planet systems as I thought. I either had a really bad memory, or more likely just bad luck with them the first few times I played MOO2. So I'll help myself to an extra-large slice of humble pie on that score. Strategic Sage fucked around with this message at 09:37 on Apr 28, 2019 |
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Apr 28, 2019 09:34
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