Uninspired name, I know, but what can I say. :)

Team Two - ROSTER

Zed-F
Kylearan
Ozymandous
Kabuki
JMB
EDIT: TBC Added here!


Possibilities for the open slot: Caesar Augustus, LKendter, last-second signups...

Parameters:
Ten turns per player. 24 hours Got It, up to 48 hours to play and post. (Note that ten turns can go by awfully quickly, so we may need to adjust this for future games, but we'll see how this plays out first. Also note that you can find out the year number by looking at the top left corner of the Status dialog on the Races screen.)

Difficulty Level: Average
Map Size: Large
Race: Bulrathi
Opponents: Five
Color: Red
Minimum Victory Level: Conquest

This last one means we must achieve 2/3 of the population BY OURSELVES to win by vote. No wimping out and taking ally votes unless we're over that threshold on our own anyway. We're here to prove our might on the bodies of the AI races with our booted heels, not our writing hands! :)

Please use save slot 3 or 4 for this event, though personally I would prefer to go further than that and stick solely to save slot 3. Save file naming convention examples for upload purposes:
osg1-team1-2320ad.zip
osg1-team2-2480ad.zip
osg1-team1-2303ad.jpg
osg1-team2-found-the-bloody-psilons.jpg
osg1-team2-zeds-missile-boats.jpg

Inside the zip file should be either save3.gam or save4.gam, of course. As Sirian mentioned, double-check what you are doing by looking at the contents of the zip file before extracting.

I've got the start file and will post the results of my 10 when I have completed them.

Ok, here we go. Someone wanted to name a planet Chicago, but that might make it hard to compare with team 1's game once both are complete, so I think we should stick to the default names for of our colonies.

Also, be aware that 10 turns is not very long in MOO. Don't be surprised or dismayed if nothing happens in your turns, and above all don't feel the need to "get something done." I know most of you are experienced enough Civ3 SG players not to fall into that trap, but if all you do during your 10 turns is research, that's FINE; it likely means everything is humming along nicely, and at 10 turns per player you can be sure to have plenty of cracks at more interesting times.

What we get from the map: We're up against the Psilons, the Sakkra, the Silicoids, the Darloks, and the Alkari. We're on a large map, which isn't my specialty, but I figure I can hack it. :) Certainly for 10 turns at a time, at least. We're in the NE corner, and our best expansion opportunities as far as chaining colonies at range 3 goes are to the west and south, which is good as we won't need much tech to get the leapfrogging going. To the north is a whole lot of nothing, but there are a few stars to our NE and to our E which could make for a nice little backyard to fill in as we get the chance.

As far as other yellow stars our opponents might be starting from goes, there's one next to us which is almost sure to be vacant, there's one in the far NE corner (pity the poor sod that starts there, if there is one), there's a cluster of 6 to our west which should have a couple start locations in it, and 5 more spread fairly evenly across the bottom half of the map. I'm guessing we will have two or three very cramped starts for the AIs and a couple with lots of room to grow, mainly in the south.

2300: We have 3 choices for our colony ship, the aforementioned yellow right next door, and two green stars. I send our colony ship toward the yellow as it has the best probability of a habitable world, and our scouts to the other two. I could send the colony ship toward the westward green instead, but we should have at least some time to get our expansion mapped out anyway.

2303: Sending the colony ship to the yellow pays off as it an Ocean 80, named Gion. The westward green is a Barren 45 and the southward one an Ocean 55. We have 58 pop at Ursa, so I send 8 to Gion, and will follow up with more as new pop grows until Gion's at around 25-30 pop. I've been building factories, and plan to continue to do so until I can build a fair-size scout wave.

2308: I design a new scout and build some for 2 turns, to get enough scouts to send one to every star in range. The naming convention I use is typically name x.y, where name is a descriptive name denoting the role or main weapon, x is the warp number, and y is the "mark" or version number of that design, in case I get new tech and want to modernize the design. So, the new scouts are called Scout 1.0. If you like that naming convention, feel free to borrow it, but I'd at least like to see the warp capability of any design in the name somewhere, as I find this makes it much easier to coordinate fleet movements. In 2310 I set production back to factories and give the second wave of scouts their movement orders. I wind up with a couple of spares which I send to Irma, the Ocean planet to our south, as that's likely where our second colony ship will go; they can explore further from there.

Save file: http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2310ad.zip

Next player will get the oh-so-exciting job of building factories... lots and lots of factories. You might also get a start in on our second colony ship (you will need to design a new one since I scrapped our starting design to save a few BCs in construction.) We will have a tough time expanding west or southwest until we have either range 5 tech or barren environment, but we might be able to get a couple colonies to our south and southeast more quickly. I wouldn't start building colony ships until we can get the construction time down to at most 6 years, though. How low to shoot for on the construction time depends on how many outbound colonists you think you will need, relative to how many ships you will need. We won't know that until our scouts report in.

Zed-F << Done
Kylearan << UP NOW
Ozymandous << On Deck
Kabuki
JMB
TBC

Good luck, Team 2! Have fun with the Bears! Fun race to play (actually, I enjoy all except the humans and Psilons, but who's counting).

TBC added to the roster; welcome aboard!

Checking in, and got it! I'll play tomorrow and not today as I have a bit of Easter stress going on here at the moment.

Checking in...

Checking in... I'm very curious as to how we'll find the 10 turn splits... I'm wondering if maybe Charis' North Korean game model might work better... but that is for another day. Let's go pound some alien scum... in an... Ursine fashion.

The first turns were uneventful - our two systems were busy building factories and our scouts arrived at their various destinations. We scouted several habitable words, but also several poor and ultra poor ones. In 2315, one of our scouts arrived at Gienah, a size 40 minimal artifacts planet - and we got very lucky!

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/OSG1-Team2-Gienah.jpg

That's like a free settler in civ, right? :D

One year later, we meet the Sakkras at Incedius, a size 30 tundra world and scare away their colony ship. Another year later, we meet the Sakkras again in a system in the nebula, and this time it's us who is running...

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/OSG1-Team2-Sakkras1.jpg

Only now I remember that we have some extra scouts sitting around, and send them away to unexplored systems who are now in our reach thanks to the deuterium cells. I also expose Ursa and Gion and send their scouts away as well - I hope that's not :smoke:, but I figure the chance to find another artifact planet first is greater than an alien race scouting our two systems and invading them with ground troops.

I have designed a new colony ship named colony 1.0. In 2318, Ursa could produce one every 6 turns, but I decide to wait and build more factories. We have a lot of systems to settle, and most of them are to the south, uncontested for now, so I like to have enough factories for a colony ship every 5 turns.

In 2319, we send an Alkari scout running at Moro, west of the Nebula, and another Sakkra scout at Rotan north of the Nebula.

On my last turn, Ursa is ready to produce a colony 1.0 every 5 turns, so I switch production. Here's the map...

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/OSG1-Team2-2320.jpg

I had planned to name all the planets in the map and give their stats for planning, but I ran out of time - sorry. But at least I have found a program to take screenshots in the XP compatability DOS full screen mode. Zed, if you're still looking for a way to do it, I could post a link and instructions tomorrow in the RBMoo forum if you wish.

Expand our empire! (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/OSG1-Team2-2320.zip)

Roster:
Zed-F
Kylearan
Ozymandous <-- UP
Kabuki <-- on deck
JMB
TBC


-Kylearan

Duplicate post.

Great, Ky, please do. Looks like a solid set of turns as well. I would build another round of scouts, probably out of Gion, as we are likely to need more soon. I would think we want to backfill the scouts at Gion at least and possibly Ursa as well to prevent them from scouting us with single scouts, that's easily preventable and would be quite embarrassing. The AIs are much more likely to target a planet they have already scouted than one they have not.

OT: Zed, have you figured out how to do screen shots in XP yet?

Is it really necessary to build even more scouts? I know that preventing the AIs froms scouting a planet is a Good Thing, but won't a ring of scouts around our core be enough for that? They would need very advanced range tech to bypass our scout ring to reach Ursa and Gion, for example, and soon armed scouts and colony ships will arrive anyway and render our scouts obsolete.

-Kylearan

Armed scouts? Crazy talk... :) We are bears not birds...

On the other topic... Keeping one scout at every discovered system is a good habit. And it doesn't cost us much. On a well developed planet one or two ticks of production is usually enough and even if we don't need them for Gion, we will need them for the next set of expansions.

What I meant was armed scouts from our opponents, not from us. ;) Once their scouts and colony ships are armed, our scouts are useless and will be driven back to our systems, rendered useless.

True, but for 8BC knowing the exact timing of the armed scouts/colony ship can be quite useful... for mmm... some attractive real estate deals.

I have found that not keeping a fleet in orbit encourages the AI to send a fleet to scout the planet as soon as it can. Early on that scout fleet will just be scouts, but later it can include armed ships. The AI will try to scout planets it has decided it wants anyway, once it has run out of expansion room if there are still some uncolonized systems with scouts in orbit, but at least this way they aren't all over the map, but focused on one or two systems at a time that you can conceivably defend against. Since the tech pace goes faster on large maps, you can't be sure a planet in your back lines is "safe" from scouting for very long anyway. It costs little, is a good habit, and better to be safe than sorry.

I usually will have a scout for every planet I can possibly reach, at least until all planets are settled and I have at least one missile base up on all my planets.

Will get this tonight.

Is the Jungle planet to the North in range, or not? Do we want to get that now as opposed to later, or make a beeline for the Artifact planet? I'm thinking go straight to the Artifact planet if possible and then expand coreward since the Sakkra's would need quite a long tech to reach past that empty system to get the jungle world, but just curious what others think. :)

Roger on the scout issue - despite this SG's title, I still feel like a n00b so I like to discuss these things in detail. :) My line of thinking was that once the AIs have enough range to bypass an outer ring of our scouts, all of their ships would be armed anyway and so additional scouts in our core would be useless. But if the mere presence of ships in orbit of a system will keep the AI's fleets away for a bit longer, I should adapt my playstyle to that fact, thanks.

Regarding the jungle planet to the north, a 75 poor world, it's 6 parsecs away and thus not in reach. This is unfortunate because it's surrounded by hostile worlds, and there's a yellow star in the northeastern corner which could be another nice system (a scout is on its way). But I agree that the Sakkras will need several tech advancements to cross the gap to the jungle world, so that may not be a problem.

Zed-F, see the RBMoO forum for a post about how to take screenshots.

-Kylearan

Well this was a short round of turns.

Built some factories and 2 colony ships.

Highlights:

2320 - 2325 or so: Built a scout per turn out of Gion since it would be where our 'seed colonists' (SC?) would be coming from for the next few colonies we found.

2324 - Discover the Alkari at a Artifact planet, Yarrow, to our West.

2327 - Imra founded (last action on that turn).
2328 - 19 million colonists sent from Gion to Imra, due in 5.
2329 - Had Gion start a little research, 11 BC per turn, to see what our initial selections are. If we could get Barren environment, we could colonize the planet that's right next door to Ursa.
2330 - Second colony ship built and tasked to goto our close Artifact planet (forgot the name, sorry.)

There is a size 80-85 Jungle planet to our North above the poor world, so that might be good to go that way eventually. There are three scout 1.0 heading to the red star south of Imra to explore down that way. I built them out of Gion as the last group to go.

Not much else to report for now.

2330 Save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/OSG1_team2_2330.zip)

Got it, I'll get to it tonight hopefully. Have a couple of things to finish up first.

One thing we could do is send pop from Gion to Ursa, and send pop from Ursa on southwards. Chaining pop transfers is an important trick when you have long distances to cross at slow speeds. It's not exploitative like in Civ3 either as we're not actually transporting units on the transports, just population.

Once we have a reasonable amount of population at Imra we should max out Ursa's factories and let Imra be a pop colony for the south, with some pop chaining help from Gion.

I thought Ursa's factories were maxed? If not then that's my bad, but I figured since we were building colony ships from there that the factories had already been completely built...

I did think about chaining transports like that but figured to keep Ursa pumping out colony ships we'd need to wait until the turn before the transports arrived from Gion anyway and with the initial delay like that it was about the same speed to send them from Gion anyway. Unless we'd want to take population from the only planet we have that's complete for now and leave factrories idle for a few turns, slowing colony production, etc, just to prop up a colony faster?

What's best?

No, Ursa's factories are not maxed yet - sorry for not stating this more obvious. I just built enough factories to be able to produce a colony 1.0 every 5 turns and decided to settle some important planets first before finishing the factories. My reasoning was that waiting longer could be dangerous, and that this way the pop from Gion could have something to do while still in the "strong" area of the bell curve.

I hope that wasn't :smoke: ...

-Kylearan

Well if the factories were maxed then the colony ships might have been built in 5 turns instead of 6 like they were when I played my round (now I know why.)

Usually the homeworld you want to max out in pop and factories ASAP, and let the first colony worry about spreading colonists around, at least after the initial group(s) go to stand-up the first colony.

No problem with the factories since I should have checked, but in the future, yeah, you want to max out the homeworld ASAP.

No, it's not :smoke:. Figuring out when to max out your home planet's factories is a tradeoff exercise. Do you get some colonies done sooner at the expense of decreased total ship production at the homeworld, and if so for how long? It's not a bad idea if you expect to be sending pop away from the homeworld anyway, since you can't really use any extra factories that might have been built while that pop is gone. If we plan to backfill with pop from Gion, though, then it makes sense to build up factories to the max to get colony ships out sooner as we don't expect to be below max pop for very long. Another thing to consider is how far your colony ships have to travel from the homeworld, and whether you can use relocate to get them on their way or not. If you need to wait for colony ship X to arrive at its destination before you can send colony ship Y to its destination, because you need the extra range from colony X to be able to reach planet Y, and you can't send colony ship Y at least partway there before X gets settled, then it doesn't help much to get colony ship Y done any faster than the amount of time it takes for colony ship X to arrive at its destination. Fortunately, it's often the case that you CAN get colony ship Y partway there while colony ship X is still in transit. Still, this sort of thing is worth keeping in mind.

Regarding transport chaining, it works out more nicely when there are several developing worlds to chain between without having to use a fully developed world, but even then the benefits can be worthwhile, depending on the length of the chain. Sending from Gion to Irma, chaining via Ursa, might not be worth it, if the chain is short and if Ursa is full-up on factories. However, sending colonists from Gion to a planet south of Irma is obviously painful since the colonists would take on the order of 8 years to arrive. Instead of sending a few colonists from Gion to the new planet and a few from Irma, it might be better to send a lot from Irma and then backfill whatever we would have sent from Gion to Irma. In fact, we can even send colonists from Gion to Irma in anticipation of colonies being settled, so that Irma can immediately send a sizeable number of colonists to the new colony as soon as it is settled, instead of dribbling them out over several turns.

Nice discussion here, I'm almost glad my computer had a minor breakdown now... if not I would have played by now. I'll hopefully have a working computer again tonight. However, if I don't post another message before 12pm EST, skip me, because I might not have a copmputer for a while.

Ok, I'll get in my ten turns before I reformat this baby.

Finally!

After all the stuff going on in other games, my computer misbehaving and so on, I finally got my sorry butt around to playing my 10 turns.

First things first, I have a bunch of nice screen grabs, but paint won't handle them. Can anyone suggest a good programme for manipulating my little sweethearts?

In any case here we go (without the screenshots for now):

2330 CE (Inherited turn):
I check out the map and look at the locations of all the planets we can settle - there are three relevant clusters (the single T-95-Poor is out):

NE - Two Jungle planets (75P & 85) at 6 and 8 parsecs. Both are back lines and can be safely ignored for some time yet.

SE - 4 planets (plus several unexplored, but in range of scouts): The M40 artifacts, A30 poor, O70 and a J90UPoor. Ranges are 4, 3, 6 and 6 parsecs. This is safely on the back lines and can wait as well.

SW - 3 Plantets, with Klystron (A65UP) as the gateway to a D45 and O80. These planets are coreward and exposed, and regardless of us having to take a UP planet, the cluster is worth the effort (and even UP planets produce population). The next colony ship is going for Klystron, with a follow up to Helos (O80) and Jinga (D45) in that order if I have it my way... the second ship won't be mine to send.

Ursa is currently at 97pop with 145 factories, producing a Colony Ship in 6. I shift it to factories for 11/t (until we can build ships in 5 years, not six.

2331 CE
Ursa from 11fpy to Colony Ship in 5 years.
Gion is changed from 13RPT (not doing anything) to 20RPT which will let us see our research choices.

2332 CE
Tech choices:
Computers: Deep Space Scanner and ECJ I - choose the DSS as it is higher up the tree and I want factory enhancements...
Contruction: Reduced Industrial Waste 80%
Force Fields: Class II Defence Shields
Planetology: Barren Environment and Improved Eco Restoration - I choose IEC as there aren't enough Barren planets to justify it... if it had been Tundra it would have been a tough choice.
Propulsion: Hydrogen Fuel Cells (4) and Inertial Stabilizer - Go with the Stabilizer as Hydrogen Cells are, well... useless at this point.
Weapons: Gatling Laser

Adjust research to focus on #1 Planetology, #2 Computers and #3 Construction. There is research in all the trees, but it's very minimal in some trees.

2333 CE
Zzzzzzzz

2334 CE
A scout discovers Dunatis (Yellow in the SE) to be a T95.

2335 CE
Zzzzzzzz

2336 CE
Colony ship produced at Ursa

Colony Ship arrives at Gienah
13 Mil are sent to Gienah from Imra, and 27 mill from Gion to Imra. That gives Gienah 15 and the 27 are needed to keep Imra well stocked as it will be our primary supplier of pop until Klystron is online.

Colony Ship sent to Klystron.
Ursa set to produce 10 Scout 1.0 and 7.1 factories.

2337 CE
10 Scout 1.0 produced.
Proteus M15Rich and Tauri T20 are scouted in the SE.

Ursa is set to produce a Colony ship in 5 years + 0.8 factories.

3338 CE
Nutin'

3339 CE
Zzzzz

2340 CE
Scouts discover Tyr - T20, Rana D50 and Thrax R25Rich.

Colony ship will arrive at Klystron in two turns, and another colony ship will be ready at that point. It can then be sent (my preference) to the O80 SW of Klystron, after securing that cluster and any interesting planets in that direction, I would start backfilling to the SE, but by then things should be getting interesting...


The save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/OSG1_Team_2_2340.zip)

I thought I had Ursa ready to produce a colony ship every 5 turns, but now I realize that this only appeared to be so because some BCs have spoiled over from producing scouts before. Have to remember this, I'm still in the civ3-mindset of shields wasted after production. :)

Regarding screenshots, I admit I never really used "paint", but it looked like it could do at least cropping and resizimg, dunno about adding text. Another small program to crop, resize and convert to jpg is IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com). It's "only" a viewer but can do simple image handling quite well and is small and fast.

If you really want to edit the pictures and don't want to spend much money on programs like Photoshop, you could try out The Gimp (http://www.gimp.org). It's freeware and has a lot of powerful functions, but the GUI is something that can easily drive you nuts. ;)

And now, have 'fun' reformatting and reinstalling your system. :p
-Kylearan

Comments:

We have enough pop sources other than Ursa now that we should definitely max out Ursa's factories, especially since Ursa is just sitting there at 100 pop. We only want to let Ursa stay under max IF we need to send Ursa's pop elsewhere. We have lots of ships to build yet so we should be sending them at the best possible rate.

Looking at your tech spending ratios, we are still early going. At this point, focusing on a couple critical areas is fine, but I'm not sure what the long term strategy for tech will be -- are we going to "set and forget" mainly after the first couple techs come in, or are we planning to be more dynamic in our tech spending ratios? It looks like you have it set up more for the latter. In any case, I would forget computer tech for the moment as it's more important to get the first couple waste management techs done and a head start on (hopefully) industrial tech 8 before we get our 2nd level computing tech. We don't want to get Improved Robotic Controls III too soon! This will stunt any new colonies we found or are still in the early stages of development. Team, please chime in on whether you would prefer to adopt a relatively dynamic or a relatively static tech approach over the long term.

The only possibly controversial tech choice is skipping Barren, but since we got range 5 out of the artifact planet, I agree with your call. If we had not, Barren would have been the better choice. I also agree we want to expand coreward sooner rather than later, but I'm glad you got the artifact planet settled first. However, we shouldn't ignore decent-sized planets in our core for too long. Remember that time saved on colony ship travel and on colonist travel equals faster colony development. We don't want to settle over-reach planets we can't possibly defend in preference to core worlds we can... but we also don't want to give up limit-of-our-reach worlds we could defend just to get those core worlds settled a couple turns sooner. Deciding just how far our reach extends is the hard part. Ideally I'd like to get Gion up to speed and build colony ships out of there to settle our back lines, while Ursa's ships expand our frontiers, but that's looking several years into the future and the situation may well have changed by then -- especially if (when) we meet someone else down south.

Regarding Klystron, settling there was needed in order to open the gateway south, but we probably can't hold the planet against any meaningful attack -- we know there's Alkari in the neighborhood, and the planet is pretty exposed. We have two options: build factories extremely slowly, trying to improve production there somewhat at the risk of possibly giving up tech if the planet is captured with factories intact, or just take what we can get out of the planet without building factories -- i.e. put all production into RP. With any race other than Bulrathi, I'd say skip the factories, as I don't want to give up tech. With the Bulrathi, though, there's a good chance we could hold on to the planet long enough to force the Alkari to wipe out all the factories before they can successfully invade, assuming we can't chase them off before that happens. Still, if that were to happen before we can max out the planet and start getting some returns from all those factories, we'd have nothing to show for our (many) years of investment. Either way, the next player gets to decide which course to pursue.

Regarding manipulation, in XP, when I double-click on the BMP files that ScreenThief saves, it brings up a viewer. There's a "Save As" icon at the bottom (floppy disk), so I just save them as JPEG images. Then Paint has no trouble manipulating them.


Roster:
Zed-F
Kylearan
Ozymandous
Kabuki
JMB <-- UP
TBC <-- on deck

I've got the save and will play tonight.

I'll see what I can do wrt filling in our core-lands without giving up distant planets. WRT research, I think I prefer mostly static, but occasionally play with the sliders to get certain things more quickly.

JMB

I'll see what I can do wrt filling in our core-lands without giving up distant planets.

Hi,

in my solo games I tend to play with a rather static approach regarding the tech sliders, at least after the first two or three critical techs like new fuel cells have been prioritized. I tend to forget to change the sliders when playing alone, so the static approach is a must for me so that I don't have to realize I have no force field tech once the first war breaks out. :)

In an SG however I favor a more dynamic approach since this format lends itself better to micromanaging. But I have no idea how drastic the in-game penalties are for changing the tech spending in a given area (or how big the bonus is you receive for spending the same amount of RPs over a longer time), so that may influence my vote.

-Kylearan

Until the first war or potential conflicts loom I usually keep pumping Planetology and construction tech until at least the first few terraforming and waste reduction tech's.

I have no problem with static tech discoveries, but I'd rather get that +10,+20 or +30 pop boost, with less waste and lower factory cost in addition to warp 2+ engines, than I would worry about getting the second generation of shields or maybe gatling lasers when we're not fighting.

I usually leave 2-3 'clicks' in force fields, weapons and computers and concentrate on propulsion, planetology and construction until I have met a few of the above examples and then balance them out more, but can deal with having static discoveries, even if they won't help much at the time they are discovered.

Originally posted by Kylearan
In an SG however I favor a more dynamic approach since this format lends itself better to micromanaging. But I have no idea how drastic the in-game penalties are for changing the tech spending in a given area (or how big the bonus is you receive for spending the same amount of RPs over a longer time), so that may influence my vote.

I have never tried to determine the exact figures, but my impression is there is no penalty for switching tech priorities unless you completely eliminate funding to a given area, other than that you will get less bonus research. However, I also have the impression that that bonus research is a significant factor.

I don't know if it works this way or not, but if I were designing MOO and I wanted to give out bonus research to counteract the usual "I research one thing at a time at 100% so I can get the benefits faster" paradigm, I'd design in diminishing returns on the bonus research. That way you'd get more total research done if you spread funding out relatively evenly rather than one big dollop in one field and small dollops everywhere else.

I generally use a static research model after the initial techs, but as we are in an SG I would love to go with a dynamic model.

The reason for the focus on computers was that it is our weakest area and needs the extra help and that good computer techs help us steal stuff later, and I love espionage. Improved Robit controls, too early is bad, but we need to know where they are in our tree. If IRC III isn't there we need to hunt for the next one up asap, not having III or IV and being able to time the switch could be very painful. Oh, and yes, I never would not have skipped barren if we hadn't had deuterium fuel cells, as even one extra planet could have jumped us into a cluster.

W.r.t. Gion, it can be ramped up completely as soon as Irma is can do 20rp without sacrificing too much factory production, or Gienah is in the same situation (far more cost-efficient). Ursa can afford to sit pumping ships for a good while, although another two turns on factories would allow it to finish its factories while building ships.

And Zed, thanks for the critique and the info on the images. I'll see if I can get some up a bit later.

0 - MM a few of the sliders. Most notably, it appears that Gion is already using its maximum number of factories (pop 48, factories 116), so I turn off factory production for a short while so that our population can catch up to our factory growth. This results in an additional 40 BC towards research.

1 - Our scout is forced away from Yarrow (another artifacts planet; it has been colonized by the Alkari) by Alkari fighters. Klystron is founded. I'll leave the decision as to whether Klystron should build factories for the team to make as it isn't an essential decision right now (I doubt we'll ever be able to get anything useful out of this planet other than population and range. In the even of a war with someone else, I would imagine that if they couldnt take the planet within a couple of ground assaults, they'd just raze it...)I like Kabuki's suggestion of colonizing the O80 next, so I relocate our ships to Klystron. I send 25 colonists from Imra (50 of 55) to Klystron with the intention of using the extra colonists to help settle the O80 once it comes online.

2 - Our scouts encounter the Alkari's at Incedius (T30 Hostile) and force them to retreat. Now that our colony ship has been completed and is on its way, I pause to max out Ursa's factories (it should take slightly over two turns).

3 - We find the Sakkra's. They are living on the yellow star inside the nebula. We need to begin filling in the planets to our NE... We explore another hostile tundra planet (Nitzer, size 40) in the far west. Not much else to do...

4 - Not much.

5 - Ursa has maxed out on factories. Nothing much else of note.

6 - Alkari's try to scout Iranha (the green star outside of the nebula in the NW). (Pause for copyright protection...). I try to decide where we should send our next colony ship. I think I am going to send it to the A70 poor planet in our core. My reasoning was as follows... We should be able to get the colony found and colonized rather quickly, allowing other planets to continue building up their populations. By the time our next colony ship is ready, we can send it to the O70 planet and seed its growth with the citizens of the Arid planet. Then our third colony ship can be sent to the T95 planet and the colonists from the A70 and O70 can enhance its growth. By this time, Gion should be able to produce colony ships at a decent rate. Gion has now grown enough that I shift to producing factories.

7 - Not much.

8 - At the yellow star in the center of the map, we encounter the Psilions and force them to retreat. The planet is a Fertile Arid planet (size 80; Esper). The red star to the East of the yellow star is a Hostile Barren planet (size 30). Well, now that there's a fertile planet, I think I will send our next colony ship out to get it. I also think that this is an important planet because it is so centrally located (which, I think, will important for contacting other races...) I ship another 18 million colonists to Klystron (from Imra).

9 - We build a colony on Helos. Our colony ship will reach Klystron in 4 turns; it should then be sent to Esper. 17 million colonists are shipped from Klystron to Helos.

10 - Not much. In the near future (but after we've begun to settle our core), I think we should send a colony ship to the M15 Rich planet south of Imra to open up more exploration options. Once the colonists from Imra arrive on Klystron, send them onto Helos, and then to Esper. The next colony ship produced (3 turns) should, imho, be sent to the mineral poor Arid planet in our core.

Here's the save: http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/RBOSG1_Team2_2350.zip

Zed-F <-- on deck
Kylearan
Ozymandous
Kabuki
JMB
TBC <-- UP

Have fun TBC! (Tasty Burnt Chicken) :)

JMB

Note that Jinga (Desert 45) is within range 5 of Yarrow, the Alkari artifact planet. We should try to grab that one soon before the Alkari get to it. There's also an Arid planet down there (Esper) that would be good to grab.

We can't grab Proteus (the minimal 15) yet as it's out of range. However, there is an Ultra-poor down there we could grab instead.

Gion is close to max factories. We could put Klystron on research to keep our investment going, get Gion maxed out, and build a couple colony ships there to fill out our back lines.

Zed,

I didn't notice that Jinga was within range of Yarrow... There is already a colony ship heading towards Esper, but it could be diverted towards Jinga instead if that is more desireable.

A question about using Klystron to fund our research... Seeings as Klystron produces to0 few BCs (due to being an ultra-poor planet), I don't think we'd be able to get more than 10 BCs out of it right now... Would it be better, once Gion maxes out (population and factories), to shift our research to Imra instead or perhaps the artifacts planet?

Also, by "Gion is close to max factories", do you mean that it has almost topped out (both pop and factory-wise) or do you mean that we should just produce colony ships from it while allowing the population to grow and then once we've completed a ship, build up the factories again. Rinse and repeat. If the latter, that I definitely messed up during my turns as I shifted Gion to research instead of having it produce colony ships when it had more factories than its population could use (and have since left it producing almost exactly the number of factories its population will be able to use next turn...). If so, the next leader should change this and shift our research over to Imra.

JMB

Re: Klystron -- Klystron can't handle all our research on its own in the long term or even intermediate term. What it can do is make a small contribution. That would be enough to keep our existing research investment from decaying, but not much more. This is just a stopgap measure, but expansion takes priority over research at this point in the game. At some point, Imra will reach the halfway point on factory development, and since we expect to continue to use it as a population source, Imra will then be able to contribute RP as well. We want to wait for Imra to be at half its max factories, though, so we can get the most use out of the planet that we can while it continues to act as a pop source. Moreover, there are a limited number of backyard colony ships we will need out of Gion before it too can go primarily on research. IIRC from my brief look at our artifacts planet, it is still on early days as far as development goes; I would like to see it max out its development before we go on research there, to get the most bang for our buck out of that planet. Unlike Imra, we won't want to be stripping it for population to use as colonists.

Gion is close to max both for population and for factories. I would build it up to max factories and simultaneously build up its population with a bit of ecology spending -- we can't really afford to send population back from anywhere else to Gion since that population is all needed for outward expansion. Since we are close to max on Gion, a couple turns of spending there to build pop should be affordable and better than waiting for it to grow naturally at the top end of the curve.

TBC, you out there?

Yep. Got it, will play this afternoon.

TBC

Sorry to have to do this, but I'm going to have to ask to skip me this round. About an hour after I responded "Got it!" I got called into work to help with a problematic Microsoft Exchange 2000 migration -- seven hours and still counting. I probably won't be home until after 1 AM tonight. So the only fair thing to do is skip this round.

TBC

Ok, I can't play tomorrow morning, so if you can grab it then, go for it. Otherwise, I will try to get it tomorrow afternoon.

Until then, this is not a got-it post; I'll be back later for that if TBC hasn't gotten it before me.

Got it...

2350: Decide to leave Gion on research for now. We really do need Improved Eco Restoration pretty badly. Adjust spending to decrease computers and increase planetology spending. Reallocate spending on Ultra-poor Klystron to research.

2351: Psilon Starfighter (initial design, lazer popgun ship, no reserve fuel tanks) chases us away at Incedius, but doesn't seem to still be in orbit. Maybe a temporary alliance that has now expired? I send our scout back to Incedius.

2353: A scout reaches a yellow star south of Tyr and SW of Proteus, and discovers it is a Silicoid colony with 8 missile bases. Given that there are no other yellow stars in the area and that none of the surrounding stars we have scouted have Silicoid colonies, it is almost certain that this is their homeworld. This will likely put a limit on our southward expansion. There is an Alkari scout heading towards Barren Exis. Improved Eco comes in, which was quick. I start research on Barren (not Tundra) as it will come in much more quickly and we do have a couple Barren plannets. I boost construction spending to get Reduced Waste 80%.

2354: Discover a Psilon colony at Phantos, SW of our planned colony at Esper, and our scout withdraws. No sense provoking them by keeping a fleet over their colony. Another possible limiter on our coreward expansion...

2355: Send a colony ship to Dunatis in the SE.

2357: Psilon small ship chases off our scout at Esper. Again, he doesn't show up as being there, so I send our scout back to Esper. Our colony ship is due here soon, and another should arrive at Jinga shortly. Reduced Waste 80% comes in, and we start work on Industrial Tech 8.

2358: Now that we have these two critical early techs, and Imra has gotten to half max factories and can take over on our research efforts, I decide to shift Gion over to colony ship production to help us colonize our backyard.

2359: Colonize Jinga, we are now in contact with the Alkari, who are Xenophobic Expansionists. I propose a minimum trade agreement and they accept, but then propose increasing its value and they decline. That is ok, as the minimum value trade agreement is still worth a relations uptick, which is the important part for now. We can improve the trade agreement later. They will only offer Hydrogen Fuel cells (range 4) and Hand Lasers for trade. They have 4 planets, and are behind on production, and are merely our equals in technology and fleet strength, despite our lack of focus in these areas.

2360: I colonize Esper, and we are the first to 8 planets. We meet the Psilons, who are Honorable Technologists. They have 6 planets in the lower left part of the galaxy. We propose a trade agreement for the maximum, and they accept. They are slightly ahead of us in technology and production, but we have more planets and I expect will colonize additional ones more quickly than the Psilons, so I am not unduly concerned. I send out scouts to explore what we can without annoying our neighbors, and there are several spares at Helos.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2360ad-psifleet.jpg

However, I do spot a Psilon colony ship and a small fighter on the way to Esper, so they may opt to try to take the planet from us. If so, we should be able to give them a good fight. Fortunately, their fleet strength is in the toilet at the moment, so we have an opportunity to build up our own fleet and establish our claim to the planet on more than just paper. However, to do that, our control of the planet on the ground must be solid -- the Psilons must not be allowed to get a foothold on the planet or any attempt to retake it will lead to war. I send half the population of both Klystron and Helos to start with. The fact that Esper is Fertile should help as well, but if it comes down to it, we may need to reinforce with more population from Helos, and then backfill Helos from Klystron.

The Psilons seem to be favouring small ships at the moment. This suggests that (a) we want a large ship to start with, which can hold off a small number of opponents (remembering to retreat if it looks like it is getting into trouble), followed by a missile base with class II shields ASAP on the planet's surface, which can hold off any number of laser-armed fighters. Pretty much the only thing that will fit on a small fighter right now is a laser, so that should be a good start. Barren Colony bases are due to come in soon at ~20%, so I switch research to Force Fields for our bases, design a large ship with many lasers, a scanner, battle computer, and shield, and switch Gion to its production, with a relocate order to Esper. The ship should be done in a couple turns but it will take a long time to arrive. We should probably only build one or two of these before switching Gion back to colony ship production; hopefully our ground troops can hold the planet until the ship arrives and a base can be built.

We have colony ships on the way to Dunatis and Xudax in the SE and S, respectively; Xudax is an ultra-poor world but gives us access to Proteus, a minimal rich 15 world. Dunatis gives us access to Rana, a pop 50 desert. We don't have the range for either of these latter two yet, so the next couple colony ships should likely concentrate on our backyard until Dunatis and Xudax are colonized. We should also shortly be able to colonize Trax and Exis, which are Barren worlds. There is a scout 1.0 on its way to Trax, and once it arrives we can scrap the original scout design to free up a slot for military ships, should we need them. Also, once we get Barren bases, we will have to research Tundra bases next, which should give us the ability to design a colony ship with extended fuel tanks on it, giving us the reach to colonize Spica and Bootis to our north, and perhaps Rotan and Moro to our NE, if the Sakkra don't leave their nebula home and snag them first.

I have not initiated spying on anyone as we are not really looking for war yet; we should try to get at least our initial wave of colonization done before considering annoying our neighbors. Normally I would prefer to devote our mature worlds to tech research until we have enough mobility to make conducting fleet operations over a large empire not quite so painful as it is right now with only warp 1 engines. However, if people are interested in trying out the pointy stick to see what we can accomplish with it, I'm willing to entertain the idea.

Here's a map and a look at our planets. Note that the cursor is pointing to the Silicoid homeworld:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2360ad-map.jpg

Gion and Ursa are maxed, Imra is just doing research and waiting for colony ships to arrive so it can ship off population. I expect Imra will have its hands full providing population all over the place soon as our ships arrive at Dunatis and Xudax and we start colonizing our backyard as well. Currently Imra and Klystron will be the ones primarily tasked with pop duty, but Helos and Jinga may kick in some as well. Gienah, our artifacts world, is just past the halfway point on factory construction and nearly full up on pop, so it should be transferring to full research sometime in the next player's turn.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2360ad-planets.jpg

And here's the save:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2360ad.zip

Zed-F <-- complete
Kylearan <-- UP
Ozymandous <-- on deck
Kabuki
JMB
TBC

Got it.

I start with a diplo round and increase our trade agreement with the Alkaris from 25BC to 125BC. Then I take a look at our systems. Esper is indeed a nice one: A fertile system for the Bulrathi on the Psilon border? It would be great if we could keep that! Nothing is changed.

2361: Controlled Barren Environment comes in, and our only option what to research next is Controlled Tundra. A colony ship is produced and sent to O70 Argus in our backyard.

2362: The Psilon starfighter and armed colony ship arrive at Esper and drive away our scout. An Alkari colony ship escorted by a "Falcon" can be seen - not sure where they are heading, looks like Jinga. Maybe we need more than one Laz 1.0 ship...

2363: A colony ship and a Laz 1.0 are produced. 23 Psilon pop are on their way to Esper! :eek: &nbsp; Good thing our first 24 pop points will be there next turn, too. I decide to send 15 pop from Imra to Jinga, either to strengthen it against Alkari attacks, or to chain pop from there to Esper. The colony ship heads towards poor A70 Gorra.

2364: :zzz:

2365: The Alkaris arrive at Jinga with their armed colony ship and their 18hp Falcon (medium ship?) and drive away our scout. Then, the Psilons arrive at Esper - their 23 against our 31. They have no gropo tech, so we lose only 5 pop. I think Esper is safe. :D &nbsp; GNN reports us to be first in empire populations, followed by the Psilons and the Alkari.
I relocate our next Laz 1.0 ship from Gion to Jinga, to counter the Alkari threat. I shift research from force fields to construction; that keeps the Class II Shields at a break-through chance of 15%.

2366: Ah, that was quick - the shields come in. The only choice are Personal Deflector shields, which is fine. Dunatis and Xudax are colonized, and our scout finds Omicron, a rich inferno 55 system in Psilon space. Gienah has maxed factories and is on full research now. Imra sends 12 pop to Dunatis, but ultra-poor Xudax has to grow in its own since the other systems need to grow first, and pop may be needed against the Alkari. A colony ship is dispatched to rich M15 Proteus, and scouts are ordered to explore more systems now in our reach.

2367: Thanks to an alliance with the Psilons, an armed Alkari scout chases away one of our scouts at Omicron - I order him to return to the system immediately. Poor A70 Gorra and O70 Argus are colonized. 20 more Psilon pop are on their way to Esper *snicker*. Also, 19 Alkari pop can be seen near Jinga, let's see if they put up a better fight. Our reinforcements from Imra will arrive there in time.
As much as I want to transfer population to Argus and Gorra, I have no systems from where to do this. I don't want to shrink Ursa, Gion or Gienah, and the other systems are either too small or awaiting ground combat.

2368: Morrig, a D65 system near Psilon space, is scouted. A second Laz 1.0 is finished, and since I'm an optimist, I switch Gion to a newly designed barren colony ship.

2369: A colony ship is sent to D50 Rana, south of Dunatis. I test if we already can design a LR colony ship, but we can't.

2370: A scout finds the Silicoid home world in the south with 10 bases and several ships - or did we know this already? I can't remember. ;) The evil Alkari bomb Jinga and destroy 1 factory. Then, they attack with their 19 pop points with hand lasers, but manage to kill only 5 of our 42. The 20 Psilon pop impale themselves on Esper, killing a whopping three of our ground troops. I think I like the Bulrathis already. :)

The map:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/OSG1-Team2-2370.jpg

Notes to the next leader:

Gion will produce a barren colony ship next turn, so if you think we need more warships, you can still change production. Our two existing warships will arrive in three turns at Jinga and four turns at Esper, respectively. Imra can send population this turn; I haven't done so yet. We will have break-throughs soon in computers and weapons tech; consider increasing planetology to get Controlled Tundra then.

Secure our Systems! (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2370ad.zip)

Roster:
Zed-F
Kylearan
Ozymandous <-- UP
Kabuki <-- on deck
JMB
TBC


-Kylearan

Sounds like some good turns. We really do want to send pop from somewhere to our new colonies, even if just a few. Getting over that initial 15% hump is important to get pop growth going at a decent clip, but I appreciate that competing priorities might make this challenging.

Tundra is a good thought as it may well give us extended range colonies, as well as allowing us to colonize the two Tundra worlds I see on the map. We'll need extended range colony ships to colonize the north side of the map. If Tundra isn't enough for that purpose, then Tundra + Industrial tech 8 will be.

Regarding the Alkari and Psilon poaching attempts, a single large ship may or may not be enough to scare them completely off. They may come back with a real fleet of their own to chase our Laz 1.0s off, so we need at least one missile base on each of these planets soon. Making a couple more Laz 1.0s as well as deterrent might not be a bad idea. Be sure to check their fleet strength ratings to see if they are building up, and their race reports to see who they are allied with. You might want to ask one of them to go to war with the other -- they are bound to have contact with each other.

Ozymandous, you out there?

Yes I am here. Sorry about the delay, I meant to get this on the 21st but was swamped and forgot about it. I'll get it and try to play in the next hour or so.

No hurry I can at the earliest get to it late Saturday or Sunday.

Kabuki, JMB, if Ozy is done today, do you guys mind swapping for this round? I'd prefer to keep the game moving if possible, especially since turns are so short.

I have no problem with that, in fact I'll pop in when I have time, which may not be until Monday... so just keep it moving and we might get in a full rotation or so this weekend (even if that means I take a skip).

My RL is harsh at the moment, once the 6th or 7th rolls around... gaa! Ok, not going there, I'll try to keep up, and I'll keep you informed.

As a side note once the 6th hits I switch time zones for good... I switch from PST to JST a 17hr difference, I suspect this won't affect this game at all, but just in case.

Hmm, Let's see, discovered three things, fended off invasions and had war declared on us!

2370:
- Added one 'tick' to each race for spying. It's nice to know what everyone else has and the cost is minor.
- Sent 10 million colonists to Dunatis from Imra.
- Sent 24 million colonists to Xudux from Helos.

2371:
- Deep Space Scanner discovered! Robotics Controls three chosen next over ECM 1 & 2 and BC 3. BC3 more expensive than RC3 and we should be ready for the increased factories by the time it comes in.

2372:
- Nada happens other than ships and colonists moving.

2373:
- 20 million Psilons land on Esper. 20 million die. 5 or go Bulrathi hero's die to preserve the homeland. Psilons accuse of us of not playing fair threaten to run home and tell our mothers! *grins*

2374 (end turn):
- Psilons, who were upset that mom laughed at them, declare war! We think it's a good time to pay them a visit... On their turf. :)

2375:
- 24 million troops launch from Helos to go say hello to the Psilons, eta 7 turns.
- Discover the second Silicoid colony, south of their main system. New system is ultra poor! Ouch!
- 16 million colonists sent to Argus from Imra.
- Gatling laser developed. Anti-missle rockets chosen next over Ion Cannon.
- Proteus founded.
- 8 million Psilon troops make it through our Laz 1.0 in orbit and die while unbuckling their transport seatbelts.
- Defended Jasper, or whatever the Alkari had the two ships over. We won that fight, 2-0 and destroyed all Alkari transports before they landed. (Not sure when this happened forgot to note the year.)

2376:
- Meet Silicoids & arrange 100 per year trade due to founding of Proteus. They are aggressive/expansionist and Proteus is only 5 parsec's away. We need to beef that planet and maybe defend all the planets in our south to keep the Silicoids contained.
- Maxed Planetology & Construction to hurry and get the last two advances.

2377:
- Industrial tech 8 discovered, Choice is Duralloy or reduced waste 60%. I chose 60% reduced waste since that will help everything due to increased spending in other areas.
- Trax founded (Barren near the homeworld.)

2378:
- 13 million colonists sent to Trax from Klystron.

2379:
- 26 million troops sent to join the earlier 24 million on the way to pay the Psilons a visit. Target planet has a Laz 1.0 in orbit now, and can hold 80 million people so our 50 million should have plenty of room once they "cleanse" the Psilon contamination.

2380:
- Colony ships are still enroute to Exis (Barren) & Rana (Desert), due in one turn.
- Tech is rebalanced since Controlled Tundra is now at 15%.
- Laz 1.0 is enroute to Jinga, will make two there when it arrives.
- 2 Laz 1.0 enroute to Esper to replace the one that's orbiting the Psilon target world now.
- Ursa has been scaled back to produce it's ship in one turn still but to help with research. WATCH THIS AND ADJUST NEXT TURN.
- Helos is almost at 1 factory/pop so can be adjusted for defense or research while it supplies troops/colonists.
- TWO SHIPS DESIGNED: One standard/long-range colony. One Large size with 3 banks of gatling lasers, 4/4/3 or something like that. I thought about putting long range tanks on this ship but decided not to. LRCOLONY S1 are being built at Ursa and Gion for colonizing northward from the homeworld.

Hope I didn't goof anything this turn. :) Troops should hit the invasion target in one turn, maybe two.

Have fun! (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2380ad.zip)

Alright, without looking at the save, sounds like a good job so far Ozy.

The only quibble that sticks out, is that I would tend to think Ion cannons would be a LOT more useful than anti-missile rockets. Our lasers and gatlings are going to go obsolete pretty quickly, considering that Class III shields is a 2nd tier tech! Even Class II shields is enough to mostly negate them.

Two important notes now that we are at war:
1) Try to sign up the Alkari to also go to war with the Psilons. We don't want a two-front hot war if we can avoid it.
2) It's time to increase spying on the Psilons since we don't need to worry about the repercussions of a failed spy attempt now. Check what they have so we can see what fields we'd be interested in grabbing stuff from. Improved max population, better engines, better computers, better missiles, planetary shields... lots of things would be nice right now.

The Psilons must really want Esper if they are willing to go to hot war over it! Unless, perhaps, we built a spy and it was caught, and they didn't like it. (Honorables and Xenophobics take extra umbrage to spying against them.) Another important note on spying against the Alkari, if we don't want war with them we should drop spending to zero once we have one spy in their empire. That first spy will be enough to tell us their current tech sitrep, but if it gets caught, continuing to replace it will just make the Alkari angry with us, especially since they are Xenophobic. Of course, if we don't care about making them mad, then we can spy all we want... but let's see how the war with the Psilons goes before we cross that bridge.

I debated about the Ion Cannon/AMR thing but decided that we'd learn some of the tech's when we started whipping on the Psilon systems, and that since we've not (or plan to I believe) researched any ECM tech's they AMR would be better than nothing.

With one tick in all the races I had yet to get any current update for any of the groups, so if there was a spy actually inserted it was caught before it could even update the sit-rep!

Do we want to increase espionage spending or just take over world with more factories? The target world has 50+ factories, so we should get some stuff from it, hopefully some of the tech's I am sure we're missing.

Good luck to the next leader. :)

I can certainly switch with Kabuki today... I've got it and will play sometime a bit later on today.

JMB

Even if the Psilons did have Ion Cannons and we captured it from them, we would be better advised to go that route as it gets us started on the next highest tech all that much faster. Anti-missiles really are pretty useless. By the time they are miniaturized enough to be even worth considering, you're going up against missiles that are high enough tech to pretty much ignore them.

We probably want both spying and to capture worlds. 50 factories gives us a chance of getting one tech, but the Psilons should be up on us by a lot more than that. We can always turn down the spying later once we've captured a few worlds if we decide they don't have anything we want, but remember that every extra tech is a bit more miniaturization...

*nods to Zed-F's posts* Thanks, you covered what I wanted to say.

One additional issue Ozy, when you said:
Maxed Planetology & Construction to hurry and get the last two advances.

What exactly did you do? Maxing, as in removing all research from some trees or simply reducing the other trees to one tick? In the same vein what were the percentages of the techs, as a consideration it is usually more cost efficient to reduce the tech committment to when you have a breakthrough potential.

A very wordy, poorly written report...

0 - Ok, in terms of research, we are researching all fields at an equal rate. Our research on Controlled Tundra Landings is about to mature though (16%). Our force field (personal deflector shields) and propulsion research (inertial stabilizer) are about 50% completed. I am going to leave the sliders alone for this turn and plan on changing them once I get an idea of how big our research projects are...

The Alkaris reject our plea for aid against the Psilions. Let's see how receptive the Silicoids are... Hrmm. For some reason, we can't even talk to them about attacking the Psilions. I up our espionage efforts against the Psilions.

1 - Our scout encounters the Psilions at an unexplored planet; we retreat. Our Laz 1.0 encounters a Psilion colony ship (one laser) and two Star Wings (1 gatling laser and an inertial stabilizer) at Phantos. I think our ship can take them (9, 9, and 8 lasers and 100 hp), so we attack and destroy all three ships. We build colonies on Exis and Rana. I consider bombing Phantos, but decide against it since even though that would decrease the number of troops we will encounter (63), it'll also likely destroy some factories perhaps decreasing our chance of getting a tech from our invasion. I send 10 colonists from Xudax (size 37 of 90; ultra poor) to Rana and 8 from Helos (42 of 80) to Exis. Well, about the only place I can see where wher should send our LR colony ship is to the Terran jungle planet in the NE corner of the map, so I send it there. We finally planted a Psilion spy. The Psilions are up: Mark II, Industrial 9, Class III and IV shields, Improved terraforming and Death spores, Hydrogen fuel cells, Inertial Stabilizer, and sub-light drives, hyper v-rockets, and ion cannon.

2 - At Phantos, our Laz 1.0 comes up against a Star Streak (2 ion canons, inertial stabilizer, beam defense 4, shields 2, missile defense 4, attack 2, speed 2, and 18 hps). We make short work of that ship. Our scientists make a planetology breakthrough. Hmm. Controlled inferno (4320 RP) or Enhanced Eco Restoration (5070 RP). I seem to remember that there were a few inferno planets around that we could colonize, but I imagine by the time we complete this research, the silicoids will already have claimed those planets. So, I begin researching Enhanced Eco Restoration. Again, we avoid bombing the Phantos. Our troops land, 30 survive and we discover a new tech. GNN comes on and we are now in control of 17 star systems. From the ruins of Phantos, we discover the secrets of the Mark II Battle computer and Death Spores [dance]. The Alkaris again refuse our plea for aid against the Psilions. As I am not really sure what our goals are wrt this war against the Psilions, I see if they'll accept peace straight up. They aren't interested.

I'd like to finish researching anti-missile rockets, so I decrease our propulsion and construction spending (only until we've made our next weapons advance). I scrap our Bcolony ship in favour of a Tcolony ship and then swap Gion and URSA from LR colony ships to Tcolony ships (to get the two tundra planets by the Alkari core). I also send 20 colonists from Klystron (our UP planet) to Esper.

3 - Cool. Our spying efforts against the Psilions pay off and we steal Hyper V-Rockets from them. Not much else to report.

4 - The Psilions retreat a small fighter from Phantos. We manage to place a Silicoid spy and find that they are up ECM Jammer 1, Industrial 9, improved terraforming, and hand lasers on us. There's no need to continue spying on them, so I decrease our spying rate. Geeze, we still haven't managed to plant a single Alkari spy... I increase our spending there. I also decide to send our laz 1.0 forward to Mobas to check it out...

5 - Jinga maxes out on factories and I begin building bases on the planet (the first one will be built in 5 years). Gion's LR colony is sent to the poor terran planet just outside of the Sakkra homeworld. I design a new LR Bcolony ship and notice that we have an unused colony ship hanging around in our backwaters. I am not exactly sure what to do with it, so I send it to URSA and will decide later. We finally managed to plant a spy in the Alkaris. They are up ECM jammer I, robotic controls III, Hydrogen fuel cells, nuclear engines, hand lasers, hyper-X rockets :eek:, and fusion bombs on us. They again decline to declare war on the Psilions. The Psilions have industrial tech 9, class III deflector environment, class V planetary shield, class IV deflector shields, improved terraforming, hydrogen fuel cells, inertial stabilizer, sub light drives, and ion cannon.

6 - As there are no more planets that we can colonize nearby, I take URSA off of colony ship production and shift our spending to research (our weapons research is now at 15%...).

7 - Our weapons research bears fruit and we begin researching Merculite missiles.

8 - Mobas is an ecologically fertile steppe with a max population of 67. There are currently 61 million psilions there and 72 factories. I send 30 "colonists" Esper and will send another 20-30 from Phantos in 2 turns.

9 - We kill another 2 Psilion Star Wings, and our force field research ripens (Personal Deflector shield). We begin researching Class V planetary shields. Our colony ship finally arrives on Bootis, the jungle planet in the NE corner of the map.

10 - We destroy a Star Wing and build a T colony on Incedius. We make contact with the Sakkras. The Alkari's decide to declare war on us... I set up a trade agreement with the Sakkras for 75 bc/year and ship 15 colonists from Phantos to Mobas. The Sakkras ally with us against the Alkaris.

The next leader might want to consider upping our espionage spending against the Alkaris (to 2/y), but that will cost us a fairly substantial amount of planetary production (~ 4-5%). The Psilions are attempting to take Phantos again, but will fail. Our troops will arrive at Mobas in 4 turns and should be able to capture the planet.

That's about all I can think of... Here's the save: http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/RBOSG1Team2.zip

Have fun Kabuki!

JMB

I have no problem with that, in fact I'll pop in when I have time, which may not be until Monday... so just keep it moving and we might get in a full rotation or so this weekend (even if that means I take a skip).

My RL is harsh at the moment, once the 6th or 7th rolls around... gaa! Ok, not going there, I'll try to keep up, and I'll keep you informed.

As a side note once the 6th hits I switch time zones for good... I switch from PST to JST a 17hr difference, I suspect this won't affect this game at all, but just in case.

I think this means Kabuki wants his turn to be postponed or skipped until further notice.

Roster:
Zed-F <-- On deck
Kylearan
Ozymandous
Kabuki <-- postponed
JMB <-- done
TBC <-- UP NOW

A good turn overall. Here's some answers to your questions, and some comments...

The Alkaris reject our plea for aid against the Psilions. Let's see how receptive the Silicoids are... Hrmm. For some reason, we can't even talk to them about attacking the Psilions.
That would be because the Silicoids don't have contact with the Psilons yet. :)

Our scientists make a planetology breakthrough. Hmm. Controlled inferno (4320 RP) or Enhanced Eco Restoration (5070 RP). I seem to remember that there were a few inferno planets around that we could colonize, but I imagine by the time we complete this research, the silicoids will already have claimed those planets. So, I begin researching Enhanced Eco Restoration.
I would not be too surprised if we did beat the Silicoids to some inferno worlds, had we researched that tech. They don't seem to be very interested in expansion for an Expansionist empire. Besides, by now they must be well behind in tech; we could take any planets they did claim away pretty quickly. However, we may get an opportunity for controlled Toxic or Radiated bases next time, so all is not lost. Enhanced Eco is good too, albeit a bit less of a priority than it would have been if we had not gotten both Improved Eco and Reduced Waste 80%. We shouldn't need to research any further waste reduction techs after this, unless we have no choice.

We finally planted a Psilion spy. The Psilions are up: Mark II, Industrial 9, Class III and IV shields, Improved terraforming and Death spores, Hydrogen fuel cells, Inertial Stabilizer, and sub-light drives, hyper v-rockets, and ion cannon..... As I am not really sure what our goals are wrt this war against the Psilions, I see if they'll accept peace straight up.
Our goal with the war is to take as many planets as we can with the ships and tech we have on hand. They started it, but we'll finish it! We want to get ahold of some of those juicy techs, especially Class IV shields, a better weapon tech, some improved terraforming, and most especially sublight drives. One of the best ways is to capture them.

The Alkaris again refuse our plea for aid against the Psilions. They aren't interested.
Check the relative power meter on the status screen and see what the story is. If the Alkaris are weak, military-wise or total power-wise, then that's likely the answer. Asking repeatedly on subsequent turns probably won't help; wait a few turns between each attempt. If their power is low, we don't need to push it; they probably won't jump in on a war against us if we're stronger, unless they are allied with the Psilons. If it looks like they might be a threat, we can give them a gift to get them in on our side if necessary.

I'd like to finish researching anti-missile rockets, so I decrease our propulsion and construction spending (only until we've made our next weapons advance). Even once we finish anti-missile rockets, it will still be a while before we can finish researching the next item in the weapons tree. What's your motivation for getting AMR sooner? Inertial stabilizers, we could use right now...

Our spying efforts against the Psilions pay off and we steal Hyper V-Rockets from them. Not much else to report.
It would be useful to know what your options are, so we can try to figure out what it was possible you could have stolen. Missiles are useful, so no complaints on that score, but if sublight drives had been possible, they would have been better. We have a large empire, which is a logistical mightmare with only retro engines. I suspect that we could not have gotten Sublight drives, though, so probably this was a good choice.

We finally managed to plant a spy in the Alkaris. They are up ECM jammer I, robotic controls III, Hydrogen fuel cells, nuclear engines, hand lasers, hyper-X rockets :eek:, and fusion bombs on us.
The hyper-X rockets are not so worrisome from a defensive standpoint as the fusion bombs. :) The rockets are only a problem if we have to try to crack their bases.

The Psilions have industrial tech 9, class III deflector environment, class V planetary shield, class IV deflector shields, improved terraforming, hydrogen fuel cells, inertial stabilizer, sub light drives, and ion cannon.
This is why we want to press the war with the Psilons now, while we have a chance. We have nothing that even comes close to penetrating planetary shield V + class IV deflectors, other than the Death Spores we stole from the Psilons. Even once we finish merculites, those will only do 1 point apiece. If we have to attack a planet with bases, then we will have to send our transports through the missile bases' fire -- not a good situation if they have more than a small number of bases. We want to take as many Psilon planets that don't have bases up NOW as we can, before bases start coming up in numbers.

The Alkari's decide to declare war on us... I set up a trade agreement with the Sakkras for 75 bc/year and ship 15 colonists from Phantos to Mobas. The Sakkras ally with us against the Alkaris. Well, we did everthing we could short of bribing them to prevent it, so ok. We'll give them the same end of the stick as we gave the Psilons.

The next leader might want to consider upping our espionage spending against the Alkaris (to 2/y), but that will cost us a fairly substantial amount of planetary production (~ 4-5%). The Psilions are attempting to take Phantos again, but will fail. Our troops will arrive at Mobas in 4 turns and should be able to capture the planet.
I think we definitely do want to spy against the Alkari, and a total of 4-5% spying is definitely sustainable. Fusion bombs would be just the thing to crack shielded bases, and Hyper-X rockets would be great too, at least until our merculite missiles come online. Even nuclear engines would be useful until we can capture/steal/research sublights.

Good job, and good luck to TBC!

Got it and here is the post, I'll have to keep it short and sweet as my exam is in mmm... five and a half hours.

IHT - 2390
Refilling Planets:
Esper -> Panthos 15m
Helos -> Esper 15m
Gion -> Incedious 15m

Sitrep: We have no reserves!!!! I always leave one tick on industrial production. Reserves are very, very useful, among other things they allow standing up of worlds that are going to be hit soon at twice the normal rate... Which definately can make or break a defense. Also it allows for bribes... I set a couple of our more developed worlds to one tick of industry for reserves.
I would miss both of these abilities during my turns...

Change tech spending, evening it out and creating a three tiered system: Computers/Contruction, Planetology/Propulsion/Weapons and finally Force fields (I'm hoping we steal here).

Spy spending is good.

Colony 1.0 from Ursa to Moro. The two yellow stars may have a suitable planet.

Helos is set to base production as there is the (faint) possibility that some ships are heading there.

1 - 2391
@ Mobas our Laz destroys a medium
@ Phantos we loose a Laz, but our missile base destroys the enemy (the Corona completely outmatches us and we have no safe orbital superiority).
29/31 Psilons make it through our defense, none make it out of the gravity well.

I run through and tweek som production settings, mostly making sure that we aren't sacrificing too much on defensive spending.

2 - 2392
@ Phantos we destroy one medium
@ Gorra the Sakkara spies destroy 6 factories (another good reason to leave one tick on industry... as you now don't have to jump back and mm it as it will produce those factories in short order with one tick).
Build colonies at Rotan and Nitzen and populate from Gion (20) and Klystron (15) respectively.

3 - 2393
@ Mobus we destroy 2 mediums
We then steal from the Alkari and choose Computers (as so long as there are computer techs to steal these have priority as they enhance your future steal potential unless you are guaranteed a specific key tech from another field). We get ECJ Mk I - crappy, but it's +1 computer tech, and that matters.

4 - 2394
We steal again from the Alkari, and although computers are showing, we are 16% into their only Computer tech (IRC III) and I choose Propulsion. And we get Nuclear Engines!
@ Mobas we land 45 of 45 troops and have 31 left at the end of it. We capture 83 factories and get teh following techs: Hyper-X rockets! Duralloy Armor, Inertial Stabilizers and Class IV Defense shields.

Our propulsion research is set to Dotomite crystals (R7).

5 - 2395
We research IRC III and set industry to 25% empire wide. We set research to BC Mk IV.
We colonize Spika and Gion sends 15m.

The Psilons have Fusion drive. We really need some serious pointy stick teching.

6 - 2396
Alkari put 42 small fighters into the orbit of Incedius... We loose 2million and 1 factory there.
@ Phantos we destroy 7 mediums.

We check out Beta Celtsi: Min 30.

7 and 8 - 2397 and 98
Alkari bomb Incedius (loss total)

9 - 2399
@ mobas 7 medium ships were blown to scrap.
The Sakkara demand that we cease and desist.

10 - 2340
Can't hold the orbits of Nitzer and Incedius.
Our Scout Laz 1.0 retreats from Xendalla which has 46 pop and 76 factories.
The Ssakkara acquire range 4 or 5 and declare war on us (as we just occupied their entire neighbourhood).
I hire the Silicoid vs. the Psilons.

And that is it.

The only advice I'll leave is that we need another attack or two on the Psilons, we need both of the better drives and their FF techs.

Here is the save (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/OSG1_Team_2_2400.zip)

Note: The Alkaris are allied with the Psilons.

All this pointy stick research sounds great - especially the nuclear engines (although we could need even faster ones) for our transports, and the Hyper-X rockets and the Class IV Shields are nice, too!

What's not so good is that we are now at war with three races; maybe we can cultivate friendship at least with the Silicoids?

Alkari bomb Incedius (loss total)

Does this mean we lost Incedius completely?

Good luck on your exam, Kabuki!

-Kylearan

Sounds good overall, but some comments:

While I agree that having some in reserves is good, I usually prefer not to take one tick from every mature planet. A more efficient way to do things is to have those rich and ultrarich planets that are not busy building ships contribute to the planetary reserve, and leave everyone else on tech.

I'm not sure why we would want to put construction as a top priority tree, unless there were something in particular there you were going for. Normally planetology is a better bet. In this case, since we are at war with most of our neighbors, we might want something else that will help us prosecute that war.

The Sakkra are pretty weak, being a 2PE. We might want to take Sssla from them, as they are reasonably close and we should be able to stand up defenses on a big planet like that pretty quickly. We may also get a few techs from it. The Sakkra can't have much up on us, but every little bit helps.

Stealing ECM from the Alkari... I agree that if you don't know what the enemy has or if you're just looking for spare tech levels and not for stuff that will help you immediately, then stealing from computers is a good idea. In this case, however, there were other things that would help us more right now than ECM 1. ECM 1 only helps us a tiny bit with stealing tech via spies; right now most of our efforts are focussed on protecting what we have and on pointy stick research. Even Hand Lasers would have been a better choice at this point. Stealing computer tech just because it's computer tech is fine for cold war scenarios, but not for hot war scenarios!

Roster:
Zed-F <-- On deck
Kylearan
Ozymandous
Kabuki
JMB
TBC <-- UP NOW


EDIT: We still have Incedius, but it has no factories and the Alkari are in orbit with 45 sparrowhawks and more on the way. The planet is still set to build factories, which is IMO a waste of time since the Alkari will just bomb them until we chase them away or take over the planet. It should go on ships, bases, eco, or RP -- probably one of the latter two, since it has no chance to build anything useful as far as ships or bases go anytime soon.

If we attack at Yarrow, the Alkari artifact world, we will cut off any fleet at Incedius from needed supplies. Yarrow does show one base, but only one, and we have scouted it in the past, so we can send troops now without waiting for a fleet to scout it. If we send enough troops, that one base won't be able to shoot down enough to matter.

On the Psilon front, we have scouted Morrig and it has 50+ factories so that looks like a logical next target. If we can deny them access to the space behind the Silicoids, all the better. It'll make the Silicoids happy too. :) We should send some scouts to the far south on the other side of the silicoids, as the Psilons will settle there if we don't and there may still be planets we can settle back there. We can probably scrap all our colony ship desgns (even the one that we have one of) and build a speed two colony ship. We should also consider building some warships with nuclear engines, probably with missiles on them since our beam technology is way behind now.

Got it!

TBC

Originally posted by Kabuki
*nods to Zed-F's posts* Thanks, you covered what I wanted to say.

One additional issue Ozy, when you said:


What exactly did you do? Maxing, as in removing all research from some trees or simply reducing the other trees to one tick? In the same vein what were the percentages of the techs, as a consideration it is usually more cost efficient to reduce the tech committment to when you have a breakthrough potential.

I concentrated all spending on those two categories EXCEPT for 2 ticks everywhere else. They weren't in percentages at all when I did this, and I believe I left them like that until they reached at least 15%, but more like 20%.

My definition of "break through potential" is roughly 20%, because if you get to 3% let's say, then reduce spending to 1% because you've equalled everything out you could wait for many turns before you discover that technology.

If you'll notice we still hadn't gotten Controlled Tundra even with things concentrated (all was in Planetology except 2 ticks each once the construction tech came in), but we were very close to it when I handed off the turn.

I know some like to equalize everything and not worry about it, but I felt the necessity of getting those two tech's in justified the means, and now we have ships with reserve fuel tanks on standard colony ships to show for it. :)

Thanks Kylarean, I appreciate your comments, it's exaclty why I love SGs. I'll try to respond to some of them to flesh out my thinking as my report was written both before I saw your prevfious post (which I only read just now) and while "taking a break" from my studies.

While I agree that having some in reserves is good, I usually prefer not to take one tick from every mature planet. A more efficient way to do things is to have those rich and ultrarich planets that are not busy building ships contribute to the planetary reserve, and leave everyone else on tech.

I disagree (obviously), I find that one tick is generally less disruptive of production plans. If it affects production of defense and/or ships by one turn I don't do it, and I avoid (as a rule) doing it on artifact planets. Rich planets may get two ticks if I don't have them producing ships. I only occasionally use the empire wide slider (on the planets screen) as I feel it is too disruptive and invisible. The reduction in MM is a big thing too for me, as I find managing the sliders in large empires (17+ planets) all the time to be annoying at best. The one click takes away the problem of factory destruction from spying as a side effect, one I appreciate very much, although possibly inappropriate in SGs. The early build up of a treasury that the one click allows often allows an early concentration of force as planets can be stood up with missile bases earlier and being able to redistribute production in general allows standing up planets faster, especially in a hot war situation that is as population intesive as ours.


I'm not sure why we would want to put construction as a top priority tree, unless there were something in particular there you were going for. Normally planetology is a better bet. In this case, since we are at war with most of our neighbors, we might want something else that will help us prosecute that war.

It was specifically to reduce the economic strain on our planets as IRC III was coming in. Also with the huge lead the in FF that the Psilons had I felt a reduction there was beneficial.


The Sakkra are pretty weak, being a 2PE. We might want to take Sssla from them, as they are reasonably close and we should be able to stand up defenses on a big planet like that pretty quickly. We may also get a few techs from it. The Sakkra can't have much up on us, but every little bit helps.


I thought they were a 1PE... where is their 2nd? And I think they have two or maybe three techs on us. However another T100 is a good deal, although getting enough ground forces there is going to be hard as our planets are still refilling from the recent settlements and ground attack.


Stealing ECM from the Alkari... I agree that if you don't know what the enemy has or if you're just looking for spare tech levels and not for stuff that will help you immediately, then stealing from computers is a good idea. In this case, however, there were other things that would help us more right now than ECM 1. ECM 1 only helps us a tiny bit with stealing tech via spies; right now most of our efforts are focussed on protecting what we have and on pointy stick research. Even Hand Lasers would have been a better choice at this point. Stealing computer tech just because it's computer tech is fine for cold war scenarios, but not for hot war scenarios!


I actually was aware of what they had, and what the Psilons had up on us. Computer tech would help in espionage vs. both the Psilons and Alkari as well as quickly maxing us on that tree with IRC III coming in. Yes, there were other techs that were potentiall more useful, but I don't believe there was an armor or ground attack tech available as I didn't see one used against me from them. As we are not about to be over run by either the Psilons or the Alkari this is really not much of a hot war. In the south east we will not loose a planet as long as we can put in missile bases, and the two tundra planets were too late and too close, and when they were settled (with no treasury) it would be almost impossible to stand them up in time. Overall I will stand by my decision although I definately understand your objection.


EDIT: We still have Incedius, but it has no factories and the Alkari are in orbit with 45 sparrowhawks and more on the way. The planet is still set to build factories, which is IMO a waste of time since the Alkari will just bomb them until we chase them away or take over the planet. It should go on ships, bases, eco, or RP -- probably one of the latter two, since it has no chance to build anything useful as far as ships or bases go anytime soon.


Yupp, my mistake, I should have seen that.


If we attack at Yarrow, the Alkari artifact world, we will cut off any fleet at Incedius from needed supplies. Yarrow does show one base, but only one, and we have scouted it in the past, so we can send troops now without waiting for a fleet to scout it. If we send enough troops, that one base won't be able to shoot down enough to matter.


A good move. I suspect it will have more bases (5+?) so we need to send a good lump of troops. Again, offensive operations are tough and to mount a soild operation quickly we will cut into core world populations as I had to for populating the front lines. I think Yarrow is higher priority than Sssla and Morrig.

On the Psilon front, we have scouted Morrig and it has 50+ factories so that looks like a logical next target. If we can deny them access to the space behind the Silicoids, all the better. It'll make the Silicoids happy too.

I think hitting Morig and then Beta Ceti in rapid succession is a very good idea. Grabbing just Morring won't do the trick.

W.r.t. to the new ship designs I wanted to leave that for a bit as I am very bad at early game ship design as I rarely fight before the late mid-game, choosing not to contest (I also haven't been forced to do so as I haven't played alot of smaller maps on hard, prefering Large maps which means you don't usually have to fight until later). Althoguh a new colony design is in order, the missile boat (our beams suck) is in order, although I think we may want to wait for our weapons tech and two next assaults to come in before we commit to it as right now we are far enough behind that our ships will be eaten alive unless they are in massive numbers. My turns saw the Psilons come in with their new Large designs, and we can't fight them yet without missile bases.

There is probably a cross post here, I'll edit if needed.

Yupp - it was.

Ozy: Makes sense. I just wanted to know your thinking behind it, as that is what it's all about :). And I think the percentage cut off (mine is generally 10-15%) is mostly a personal preference, although if I'm doing focus research (like early propulsion) I'll just run it till it pops so as to get the range I need that one or two turns earlier for an expansion jump...

I disagree (obviously), I find that one tick is generally less disruptive of production plans.
Actually those were my comments. :)

Do you understand why I prefer to use rich and ultra-rich planets to build up the reserve? I appreciate that you might find it saves micromanagement to do it this way, but I don't find rebuilding factories to be a big deal. However, any money I take away from non-rich worlds will be halved when it goes into the reserve, relative to the number of RPs I could have bought with it. Rich worlds will get the same number of BCs into the reserve as they could buy in RPs. Ultra-rich worlds will get MORE BCs into the reserve than they could buy in RPs. In fact, if you send money from the reserve to an Ultra-rich world that is pumping the reserve, you will actually get back more money than you put in! Hence, you get far more cash into the reserve by focusing your reserve pumping at your Rich and Ultra-rich worlds, rather than spreading it all over.

I will put spending into the reserve from non-rich worlds, if I don't have a rich world to do it from, exactly for use to bolster defenses or whatnot as you described. Nevertheless, even then I still tend to pick one or two worlds to do it from. If I then capture a rich world, it's easier to shift pumping the reserve from the regular world to the rich one.

It was specifically to reduce the economic strain on our planets as IRC III was coming in. But what are we researching there? Reduced Waste 60%. That won't make it any easier for us to build factories. We already have Industrial Tech 8, which is good enough for IRC III. We do want another level or two of Industrial Tech before we get IRC IV if possible... but we can capture IT 7 from the Psilons, and since we're already researching Enhanced Eco, Reduced Waste 60% isn't going to do much for us.

I thought they were a 1PE... where is their 2nd? You're right, they are a 1PE. Not sure why I thought they had a 2nd planet.

I actually was aware of what they had, and what the Psilons had up on us. Computer tech would help in espionage vs. both the Psilons and Alkari as well as quickly maxing us on that tree with IRC III coming in. Yes, there were other techs that were potentiall more useful, but I don't believe there was an armor or ground attack tech available as I didn't see one used against me from them. Well the Alkari definitely had Hand Lasers up on us at one point, I'm not sure whether we have them as well yet or not. Right now we're starting to run out of options for places we can send troops to without parking a naval force in orbit first, though, and our naval force is suffering from lack of firepower, defenses, and mobility, so you can see why ECM might be a lower priority. :) We may not be about to be overrun, but it would be nice to be able to continue to make gains, right?

Althoguh a new colony design is in order, the missile boat (our beams suck) is in order, although I think we may want to wait for our weapons tech and two next assaults to come in before we commit to it as right now we are far enough behind that our ships will be eaten alive unless they are in massive numbers. My turns saw the Psilons come in with their new Large designs, and we can't fight them yet without missile bases.We have enough room in our fleet if we scrap all the current colony ship designs that we can afford a new colony ship design, one warship design now, and another warship design when we get more tech. Once we get a number of newer ships up, we will probably be able to scrap our old laser and gatling laser designs as being pretty much useless.

Yupp, I totally agree with the preference for using rich or ultra rich planets. We are unfortuantely a bit short on them, and I actually prefer to have all planets contribute, and yes I am aware of the limitations and problems here.

*notes the limitations of his argument and chalks one up for ingrown habitual strategies*

All the landings we were up by at least 5 as far as I could tell, then again at 3am I might have missed something.

And ayupp, totally agree with you on the boats, and will stick with the fact that I suck at early boats and leave it at that.

Well shoot, I had thought that I could have a nice relaxing weekend (as opposed to last weekend) and get some MOO'ing in, but this was not to be -- more emergencies at work (gotta love Microsoft "security"). My facilities are fine, but of course I am a SME (subject matter expert) for all things security and have been tasked to advise/consult for other branches -- less stress, same number of hours.

Having just now sat down to look at this turn, I find it sufficiently complex that it would occupy a good chunk of the rest of my limited time today. So in other words, I'm going to have to be skipped again and since that makes two in a row, and things don't look to be getting better, it would be best if I bow out of this game and let another person who can devote more time, play instead.

Be seeing you...

---> TBC (Things Being Crazy)

Hey, TBC, no sweat on RL problems. I don't know that it warrants dropping out -- we can always just postpone your turn & fit you in where when you have the time. If you're constantly busy, that's one thing, but if you just happen to be busy when your turn comes up, that's something else.

Anyway, I will get the game later tonite, but feel free to just jump in when you can and grab it.

Notes for the start of my round:

- Change Incendius spending off of factories which will just get bombarded
- Make an effort to capture Yarrow & Morrig, also possibly Beta Ceti and Sssla
- Get some new ships built as our current ones are obsolete
- Re-evaluate tech spending

2400: Ok, here we go. Tech evaluation:
Psilons have up on us: Battle Comp III, Industrial Tech 7, Class III Shields, Class V Planetary Shield, Sublight Drive, Fusion Drive, Ion Cannon, some early techs we've outpaced.
Alkari have up on us: Hand Lasers, Fusion Bomb, Hydrogen Fuel Cells.
Silicoids have up on us: Improved Terraforming +10, Hand Lasers, Industrial Tech 9.
We don't know what the Sakkra have, we need a spy.

Obviously we want to continue focusing efforts on the Psilons for the most part. I trade Gatling Lasers, Shield II, and Deep Space Scanner to the Silicoids for their 3 techs. Kind of sad that Improved Terraforming +10 is the best terraforming tech in play at the moment...

A lot of our planets are building new factories, but slowly. I usually build new factories with at least 50% of my income on a per planet basis. I drop research spending across the board in favor of more factories. Also, a few of our planets fairly close to the front have no bases at all! I usually leave at least a tick or two allocated to bases on any planet that's even remotely possibly in range. The Alkari are naturally strong in propulsion and the Psilons are already up to Fusion Drive -- either of them could come up with a range tech at any time, and we really don't want to be stuck with targets with no bases when they do! I up spending on defensive bases on several planets.

Research-wise, I see that we are fairly close to breakthroughs in planetology and construction, both waste-reduction techs. We're getting to the meaty part of the planetology tree soon, though, with lots of tech we might like to research potentially showing up in our tree. I think a planetology focus is better than a computer focus for the moment, especially since we are so poor in Improved Terraforming tech. I'll let the construction tech complete before removing some focus from that area, however. I'm not convinced we want to be ignoring force field tech and hoping for steals and captures in that area, but I'm willing to let it ride until I'm presented with evidence that this really is a bad idea. In fact, given the reduced priority on research at the moment in favour of infrastructure, I reduce funding to all areas other than construction and planetology. Since we have reduced focus on research of our own right now, I increase spying efforts on the Psilons, devoting a total of 6% of our economy to spying. I see this as a temporary measure until our research engine is back in gear, as normally I prefer to keep espionage spending closer to 4%.

Scrap all 3 colony ship designs, and design a new LR Tundra 2.0 to replace them. It also has a battle scanner in case it gets into a fight, so we can at least see what we're up against. I would like to design a new warship to replace our Laz 1.0s as well... the problem is, until we get this infrastructure build underway, I don't have anywhere to build one. I will hold off on designing a new ship for a bit longer. However, I would still like to send an assault force to pester the Alkari and Psilons at Yarrow and Morrig. I decide to play a gambit and send unescorted transports. One thing I can do is build some new scouts to take a quick boo at our invasion targets and scout out some planets at the bottom end of the map we have not yet colonized.

Start coordinating invasion forces for Yarrow and Morrig.

2401: Our scout discovers Nazin (Darloks homeworld,) with 10 missile bases, almost due west of Moro. We retreat.

The Sakkra send a small fleet to Moro, we have nothing in the area to prevent it. The Alkari are sending transports from Altair to Incedius, we can only hope to hold on, but they are sending a LOT of troops -- 50 to our 15. At least that wil hurt their production pretty badly. They are also sending 12 troops from Yarrow to Nitzer; please do!

2402: Nitzer defends against the 12 Alkari assaulting it with no casualties. Our transports attempting to reinforce Moro, however, do not meet with as much success, and are all destroyed.

2403: A Coronara (Ions/Heavy Ions) and 3 medium ships with Gatlings assault our base at Mobas, we trade a Laz 1.0 for the Coronara and hold the planet.

2404: Yarrow is confirmed to only have one missile base. More Alkari transports are enroute to Nitzer and Incedius. We successfully defend Nitzer against 28 Alkari transports, incurring 5 losses of our own.

More unwelcome news: the Silicoids decide to declare war on us! We were at relaxed relations and were already at war with the Alkari and Psilons, but they are Aggressive Expansionists. Maybe they learned a new range tech and decided they needed more elbow room. If we are successful at taking Yarrow and Morrig, perhaps we can patch things up with them. Regardless, our border with them should be pretty secure, but we will definitely want a fleet before we think about colonizing too much more down south. They may well attack Proteus, but we can build bases there pretty quickly and should be ready for them.

2405: The Sakkra send 55 pop to capture Moro and succeed against our 4 defenders. Rotan will be next on the list, but we have considerably more population there. Next turn will see us try for Yarrow and for Morrig.

2406: We successfully capture Yarrow and Morrig, and defend Incedius, but unfortunately learn no new techs. I send some of the Morrig victors to assault Beta Ceti. I need to design and start production of new ships soon, if we are to defend our holdings and make any more significant advances; we need to be able to defeat the Psilons and Alkari in space, not just on the ground. We should be getting a construction advance soon, however, so I will wait for that to come in first. I had been hoping for a new tech on capturing Morrig, but no dice.

2407: The Psilons are colonizing everything in sight. Fortunately it will take them a while to get all these planets stood up. I send a few pop where I can to try to steal some of their planets from under their noses.

2408: Nothing much.

2409: Yarrow now has a missile base up and successfully defends against a small stack of Sparrowhawks. Enhanced Eco restoration comes in, and I have to make a difficult decision about what to pursue next; we have Improved Terraforming +40, Soil Enrichment, and Radiated colony bases. I choose Soil Enrichment this time, for faster troop growth and more production at fertile worlds, but we need Radiated bases as well. That should be our next priority.

I'm not sure why the Silicoids declared war on us, they don't even have the range tech to reach any of our worlds! In fact, they are still stuck at range 3. Not sure what's up with that...

2410: We defend Nitzer, and capture Willow and Beta Ceti, both new Psilon colonies, prompting the message that we now control 27 star systems. I leave our new colonies and Nitzer working on terraforming/ecology until we can get a fleet in to cover them while they build up their industry; otherwise, the Psilons are likely to just bomb those colonies back to the stone age rather than sending troops. Incedius is behind the lines relative to the Alkari and Psilons now, at least for the moment, but the Sakkra have decided to send a small stack of fighters at it. I had already switched it over to factories, but I think we can get a defender there soon. We may also need one at Rotan on the top edge of the map, which has also switched back to factories, despite being unable to defend itself, in anticipation of defenders arriving soon if need be.

Also, Reduced waste 60% coms in, and we get Industrial Tech 6 as our next option. Time to reallocate spending and design a new ship! Unfortunately, we have not been successful either at spying or at capturing tech during my round, but several of our planets are now done infrastructure for the moment and back on research or available for shipbuilding. I reduce our spy spending back to the 4% range; we will have to make do with what we have for our current generation of shipbuilding. Unfortunately, that's not a lot in terms of offensive options, but we will see what we can come up with. Hopefully once we capture some more built-up worlds, we will get some better options.

Tech spending adjusted as follows: Higher emphasis on Planetology, moderate on computers and weapons, lower on construction, force fields, and propulsion. I am still hoping to capture/steal some useful force field and propulsion tech from the Psilons. Emphasis is on planetology as there are several nice techs in there right now we could use in the short term.

Ship design: I design a large ship Gatling 2.0 with the following: Class II Battle Computer, Class IV Shields, Duralloy Armour, Nuclear Engines, Inertial Stabilizer, Battle Computer, 5 Gatling Laser, 6 Nuclear Bombs. These should be more than sufficient to tackle the Silicoids and the Sakkra, neither of which have missiles better than Hyper-V or any battle computer worthy of the name. They will be highly resistant to enemy ship-based fire as well. These ships might even be sufficient to take on the Alkari, as a large portion of the Alkari combat power is based on small popgun fighters, whose lasers can't penetrate Class IV shields.

The Psilons, however, won't have too much problem handling this design with their own large ships, as it doesn't have the ship-ship firepower to really compete with them. For that, we will need something else. Unfortunately, we will need something we don't currently have -- something to penetrate a planet with a shield of 9. We could use death spores, of course, but we won't gain any tech that way. Worse, the Psilons now have Scatter Pack V technology, which combined with their half-decent computer tech means any assault we could send in would be suicidal. We really need to either steal Fusion Engines, Fusion Bombs, and get enough miniaturization to build small fast bombers in large quantities, or else we need at least Stinger Missiles, which on a fast enough ship could do hit and run raids on their bases and wipe them out that way. So, rather than try and attack the Psilons directly, we should go after the Sakkra, Silicoids, and Alkari, and try to get enough of the galaxy under our control that the Psilons become irrelevant. We will still need to defend our own colonies from Psilon attack, however. To that end, we need a missile boat with enough firepower to penetrate Psilon shields and enough maneuverability to have an initiative edge and to be able to keep itself out of trouble. I design a medium missile boat Rocket 2.0 with Battle Computer II, Titanium Armour, Nuclear Engines, Inertial Stabilizer, a single Hyper-X rocket with 5 shots, and a Nuclear Bomb. When paired in sufficient quantity with one or more of our gunships, it should provide the hammer to the gunship's anvil, but be careful with exposing them to enemy fire as they are pretty fragile. It will also help with taking care of pesky Alkari, Silicoid, and Sakkra targets, of course.

I've started a few planets on some Gatling 2.0s, but no-one on Rocket 2.0s yet. We are nearly done infrastructure on several worlds, though, so some of them might be allocated to the task. Be careful to leave a good number of planets performing research, however, or the Psilon tech lead will begin to widen.

Some images...

Status screen:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2410ad-status.jpg

Overall map:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2410ad-map.jpg

Silicoid front:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2410ad-silic.jpg

Sakkra front:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2410ad-sakkra.jpg

Alkari front:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2410ad-alkari.jpg

Psilon front:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2410ad-psilon.jpg

And the save:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2410ad.zip


Roster:
Zed-F
Kylearan <-- UP NOW
Ozymandous <-- On deck
Kabuki
JMB
TBC

Except the fleet strength graph, I really like that racial stats screenshot! :D

Got it.

Note: That the Psilons now have fusion bombs and scatter pack V to mount on their ships means we need better shields for our planets... but they did not send much of a fleet our way during my turn. That may change in the near future, however. We do want to complete research on Class V planetary shield as we are not going to be capturing it anytime soon -- to get it, we would need to steal it, and propulsion/weapons tech would likely take priority over shield tech for theft right now. Maybe I should have bumped shield research a bit higher... time will tell.

Looks like the Silicoid and Psilon have contact via the Psilon colony down south. The Psilon probably asked/bribed them into a war against us.

Diplo status: Our best relations are with the Alkari, who feel troubled about us. We are at war with all four of our contacts. It's nice to be liked... ;)

Psilons are up Batte Computers III, Improved Industrial 7, Class V Planetary Shields, Controlled Dead, Hydrogen Fuel Cells, Sub-Light and Fusion Drives, Fusion Bomb, Ion Cannon and Scatter Pack V Rockets.
The Silicoids and Sakkra are behind.
Alkaris are up Fusion Bomb.

27 colonists will arrive at Incedius in three turns while the planet already has 14 pop and can hold only 40 max - some precious Bulrathi will die here.

2411: I wish the game would show the relative movement of enemy fleets - on such a large map with different fronts, I have no idea where exactly the Psilon fleets had been before compared to where they are now.
Imra, Esper, Jinga and Phantos have maxed factories. Imra, Phantos and Esper go on ship production, Jinga on research.
I reduce construction research by two and weapons research by one tick and increase force field research instead, to get planetary shields sooner.
The paranoid Psilons have caught all five of our spies.

2412: Incedius gets bombarded: 2 factories destroyed. 22 Psilons land on Willow and kill four of our 23 Bulrathi. We land on Aurora - our 10 vs their 38 - and we capture the planet, five Bulrathi left. This is sick. :)
Helos has reached its population maximum and is now on max industry.
I notice that the Psilons are also at war with the Silis and the Sakkras.

2413: Our spies have infiltrated a Psilon base! I go for propulsion and...we get Hydrogen Fuel Cells. :(
2 out of 14 Alkari manage to land on Yarrow and die. 40 Alkari land on Nitzer and kill 8 of our 21 troops.
Helos and Exis have max factories, Xudax max pop. Helos is producing ships now, Exis is set on research.
Alkaris have a new tech: Sub-Light Drives. Wish we had faster engines, too. Go spies, go!
I transfer 400BCs to Rotan - it's a poor system, but it's reasonably large (105) and is already building factories, and the Sakkras are sending a small fleet towards it. It will have a base in a few turns.

2414: Sakkras chase away our scouts at Rotan, and one of our Gatling 2.0 chases away 11 of their small fighters at Incedius. Nitzer gets bombarded, and we lose 10 millions. The Alkari seek peace, and I accept. Relations are back to neutral, and I ask for a trade agreement of 100BC/year - and they accept only because we helped them to develop Anti-Missile Rockets. I decide to continue spying on them, though, for a chance to steal Sub-Light drives.
Only now I notice that Nitzer has only four pop left and that 13 Alkari pop are on their way to the system, so we may lose it.

2415: 37 Psilons land on Willow, and we lose 12 of 24 ground troops. Then, the Psilons ask for peace as well, and I accept - we need more tech to advance on them, and peace will help consolidate our gains on that front. I don't initiate any trade and continue spying on them, though.
Two Gatling 2.0s are sent to Willow to chase away the Psilon armed colony ship.

2416: The 13 Alkari don't manage to kill our 5 Bulrathi at Nitzer, and we keep the system! :D
Now the Sakkras come and beg for peace too, and I accept. Trax and Rana have max factories now and go on research.
Dunatis and Gion switch production to LR Colony 2.0 ships to colonize Antares in the south and Tau Cygni northwest of Sakkra space, and one Gatling 2.0 is sent to Tau Cygni to keep the Sakkra away until the colony ship arrives.

2417: Spies destroy 4 factories on Esper. 51 out of 55 Sakkras land on Incedius, but we defend the system, despite them being better prepared than our other enemies, having personal deflector shields and hand lasers. 34 out of 39 Alkaris then land on Incedius as well, but we resist again with 23 Bulrathis still breathing.
The two colony ships are produced and sent away.

2418: Nothing.

2419: Rotan has a missile base now, which drives the Sakkra away.

2420: We discover Merculite Missiles. Our choices now are Ion Cannon, Ion Rifle, Mass Driver, Anti-Matter Bomb, or Stinger Missiles. While we need a better bomb tech as well, I decide to go for the Stinger Missiles because they are more versatile; they will help our bases defend against the Psilons, they will do enough damage to overcome planetary shields, and they will be nice against enemy ships as well.


There's still the Alkari SoD of 160 Sparrowhawks, 11 Falcons, 5 Space Gulls and 4 Colony Ships at Nitzer. Gatling 2.0s are gathering at Yarrow and Incedius to drive them away once we feel we have enough of them.

Phantos is the gathering point for Gatlings for the Psilon front; I chose that system instead of Mobas or Willow so not to annoy the Psilons too much, and the ships can be sent in against the Silicoids from there as well. With our amount of spying, war could break out again anytime soon. Because it's peace at the moment, I have set Willow to factory production and transferred some money from our reserve to stand it up faster.

Cryslon and/or Obaca can be attacked soon. Gatlings are gathering at Proteus, and ships from Phantos could be used as well. The Silis have several of large/huge ships in orbit, though.

Since we haven't built any of them yet, I have scrapped and redesigned the Rocket 2.0 ship design, now with Merculite Missiles.



Sorry for the lack of aggressiveness on my turns, but I felt we needed to take a break and consolidate our gains. Let me rationalize a bit here, so we can better discuss if this was :smoke: or not.

Against the Psilons: We haven't been able to send ground troops to more Psilon colonies as we haven't scouted them yet, and we don't have the tech to attack or scout full-grown colonies. So by taking peace, we now have some breating room to fortify our new border worlds, probably using our planetary reserve. Heavy spying and our large number of systems will lead to war with them again soon anyway. If we manage to spy on them again, I'd vote to take propulsion as only the faster engines are left for us in that tree.

Against the Alkari: They have a large SoD at Nitzer and were slowly eating away at our population there, and we were not be able to send in reinforcements because of the fleet in orbit. Nitzer was under pressure from the Sakkra as well, so I felt we needed a break there, too. Once we have enough warships, we may attack again, and spying continues to tick them off and for a chance to steal Sub-Light Drives.
Alternatively, we could shut down spying, up our trade and try to cultivate their friendship - they are at war with the Sakktas and Silicoids, if I remember correctly, so pounding on the Silis should improve relations.

Against the Sakkra: Here I thought longest about accepting peace or not, but their ground troops are the most dangerous of the bunch, and I had no real feeling for their fleet strength. Maybe I should have said no to take a look if they were willing to bribe us for peace.

Against the Silicoids: I wouldn't have accepted peace even if they had asked for it. They only have two worlds, one even without bases I think, and now with them as our only real enemy, we should be able to conquer them soon. They have a fair number of large ships, though. After they are gone, I guess we will have enough ships and hopefully enough tech to attack the others again - if they haven't done so on their own already.

But maybe we have enough votes to win already at the next election or the election thereafter? We have an impressive number of stars, not counting Tau Cygni and Antares which we will have colonized in two and three turns, respectively. Do we want to win the election? Or are we going for extermination?


Smash the Silicoids! (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2420ad.zip)

Roster:
Zed-F
Kylearan
Ozymandous <-- UP
Kabuki <-- on deck
JMB
TBC


-Kylearan

Originally posted by Kylearan But maybe we have enough votes to win already at the next election or the election thereafter? We have an impressive number of stars, not counting Tau Cygni and Antares which we will have colonized in two and three turns, respectively. Do we want to win the election? Or are we going for extermination?

The victory condition is CONQUEST. This means we have to have 2/3's of the vote OURSELVES as a minimum. We're going to have to win this by war anyway, so might as well get it over with before the enemies take the time we give them in peace to become stronger as well...

I'll see what I can do with this sometime today.

Officially "got it".

Whoops, I forgot to check the victory condition, thanks Ozy for the reminder. So conquest it is! :hammer: &nbsp; (Just for the record, this hadn't influenced my decisions to agree to peace on my turns)

-Kylearan

Peace with the Psilons: I wouldn't have objected to remaining at war with them at least until they develop an SoD that can actually hurt us. Remember peace just means we are at cold war instead of hot war -- and that the AI won't attack unless it thinks it can win. In this case, getting peace doesn't really mean that much as far as whether they will attack us or not goes. The Psilons already seemed more focused on colonizing and on defending his core than on attacking us, so there was relatively little to gain from peace. I think this was a ruse on their part to buy them some more time to colonize planets, and we fell for it. If the Psilons had had a big fleet with which to smack us, accepting peace would have been the right call... but they don't. If they did, they would already have used it, and we would see it on the fleet power status graph anyway. Just because we can't hurt their core, doesn't mean we should not keep a hot war going. This is a somewhat subtle point, though, so no smoking on this one.

For instance, if we had remained at war, we could have sent some of our larges around as scouts so that we could popstorm his new colonies before they get off the ground. We might want to do this anyway, despite having taken peace -- especially since we need to win by conquest anyway. Even though we can't make much headway against their fortified worlds right now, we should not be afraid of the Psilons, and we should still be looking to take targets of opportunity away from them! Even if they retaliate by destroying those colonies, all it costs to delay them is a few pop, which are easy to regrow. Plus, as soon as they resettle the colonies, we can just start the whole deal over again, until we DO have the combat power to defend them long enough to stand them up. Even if we never get to that point, those baby colonies still contribute to the vote; better that we hold them than the Psilons.

This is a good example of a population-based war. What we are doing is sending a relatively small investment (some population which can be regrown easily) off to delay enemy expansion and force him to waste MORE resources and MORE population trying to retake those worlds. Because we have wicked ground strength relative to the AIs, this works largely in our favour. The Bulrathi and Sakkra excel at this kind of warfare, Silicoids usually are fairly vulnerable to it. We don't actually care that much about defending all these worlds we're sending pop to, until we get to the point where we have the wherewithal to do so or they are out of range of enemy attack. What we care about is denying the opportunity to expand to the AI. Taking a break to consolidate our gains is the wrong approach; as long as a fluid war is in our favour, why mess with success?

Peace with Alkari: No way. Remember, in my report I mentioned that that their SoDs of small laser-armed ships are USELESS against our larges! What do they have left other than that? Check their fleets out by clicking on them -- nothing significant. A few mediums and one or two larges. We only need a couple Gatling 2.0s to decimate their fleets! They aren't really a threat to us. Even if they were to blow Nitzer of the map, so what??? It just means that their fleet will leave, either we will resettle it or someone else will, and we can take it again with a minimal troop investment. In a population-based war, Nitzer is bait -- we can afford to lose it. Peace with Alkari is definitely sub-optimal; we will want to break this peace and soon. We can capture a couple of important techs from them if we take Altair, and we have ample force with which to do so.

Peace with Sakkra?!? :smoke: They have been sitting on one planet all game and don't have the tech to hurt us. Even if they have the best ground tech among the AIs we still hugely outclass them. Moreover, clicking on their fleets to see what they contain reveals that they are also composed largely of small ships. The Sakkra have abysmal tech; the only thing they can do with a small hull at their tech level is to build a speed 1 laser popgun with at most a MK1 computer on it! Again, we only need a couple Gatling 2.0s to decimate their fleet, and their planetary missile bases aren't much better. We should have had a fleet in orbit and troops on the way by now.

Silicoids: Again, I would have expected a fleet in orbit and troops on the way. While their fleet is composed of larges, and not smalls, they still don't have much tech to put on them, espeically in the way of computers and beam weapons; one of our Gatlings is a match for several of their ships. At least we're still nominally at war with them! :)

Checking the save, we have a whole bunch of Gatlings in play already. In fact we have enough to simultaneously begin campaigns against all 3 of our main targets. We should switch all ship production off of Gatlings and onto our missile boats, which we don't have any of yet. (What happened to combined arms?) Even if we have to take Gatlings away from defending the Psilon frontier (assuming there are some way out there) that's fine! The Psilons will likely not try to attack right now, unless someone draws them into the war with us, and even if they do attack, it will probably be at one of our bait worlds.

Go for the throat, Ozy!

Thanks for your detailed comments! I was hoping for something like this when I wrote down my thoughts about war and peace - I was very unsure what to do.

Remember peace just means we are at cold war instead of hot war -- and that the AI won't attack unless it thinks it can win.

I have the impression that the state of "cold war" means that smaller amounts of defenses (bases/ships) are sufficient to prevent AIs from flying their ships into orbit and following up with ground troops. Had there been more scouted Psilon colonies we could have conquered with transports, I would have rejected their offer. But given the defense techs they have, I had the impression that we won't be able to go into the offensive immediately, and we can return to hot war anytime we want to, right? Or are there any diplomatic penalties if you "break" peace too soon? If this would have been civ3, I probably wouldn't have made peace with the Sakkras and Alkaris, but here it seemed like there's little cost involved?

This is also related to your other comment on this issue,

For instance, if we had remained at war, we could have sent some of our larges around as scouts so that we could popstorm his new colonies before they get off the ground.

I had thought about that. Problem was, we got out first large after three of my turns IIRC, and meanwhile had problems on other fronts (Nitzer mainly), so I felt we wouldn't have any ships to spare for at least 10 turns.
But your point about population-based wars is well taken.

Reading your thoughts about the other peace deals, and thinking about it again now, I accept the :smoke: -badge and chalk that one up to my inexperience with guns. Most of the time I fight with missile-boats, at least in these early stages of the game, and absolutely have no idea of how weak or strong gunships are. When I saw the AI fleets, experienced the bombing of Nitzer and the near loss of it, and saw too few ships for too many fronts, my instincts told me to go back to turtle mode a bit and come back later. But you're right, turtling to come back later weakens our racial strengths.

Nitzer is bait -- we can afford to lose it

Okay, that's another thing I have to get used to. In civ3, I tend to avoid losing cities at all cost, but in MoO, losing a system without factories normally has not much consequence. I have to remember that and adapt.

Regarding the rest of your comments, that we should already have ships in orbit of our three enemies and should already have produced missile boats, I'm a bit surprised of how strong our Gatlings 2.0 should be! The Silicoids, for instance, had over 10 large (huge?) ships, and I thought we needed at least 4-5 Gatlings 2.0 to destroy these - but again, I don't have much experience with early gun combat. I also believed we would need a similar amount of ships for the Alkari SoD, and 2-3 for the Sakkra - given the additional objective of continuing our research, I thought we simply hadn't the resources to start building missile boats.

So I'm really looking forward to Ozy's (hopefully more aggressive) turns, and will probably replay them so I actually see our Gatling 2.0s in action, to get a feel for their strength. :hammer:

Hm...maybe I should play a private game where I never build any missile boat. That should give me some experience...

-Kylearan

I have the impression that the state of "cold war" means that smaller amounts of defenses (bases/ships) are sufficient to prevent AIs from flying their ships into orbit and following up with ground troops. Had there been more scouted Psilon colonies we could have conquered with transports, I would have rejected their offer. But given the defense techs they have, I had the impression that we won't be able to go into the offensive immediately, and we can return to hot war anytime we want to, right? Or are there any diplomatic penalties if you "break" peace too soon? If this would have been civ3, I probably wouldn't have made peace with the Sakkras and Alkaris, but here it seemed like there's little cost involved?
Cold war doesn't necessarily mean you need fewer defenses before they will attack you. The AI will take what it thinks it can get, regardless of whether war has been declared. What it *might* mean is that if the AI has another opponent it is at hot war against, it will pursue that war first, but even that is not a sure thing. However, if the Psilons do decide to go to war again, we will continue to be their most likely target, as the fact that our empire is so large will no doubt be a source of great annoyance to them, they have a past history of warfare with us, we are not doing anything to further improve relations with them, AND we are continuing to spy upon them. Any one of those factors would be sufficient cause for a future war declaration, let alone all four.

There are diplomatic penalties if you break agreements -- the AIs will be less willing to sign agreements in the future, or more precisely will require a higher level on the relations meter before they will agree to sign them. Enemy of my enemy diplomacy will get around that, of course, but since we want to be attacking everyone in this case, that mechanism probably won't help us. In general, I would rather leave a state of declared war as is rather than sign a peace I have no intention of maintaining. If I intend to honor the peace agreement for at least the immediate future, I will sign it. In this case, with exposed Psilon colonies to be scouting with our new fleet and then nabbing, we don't intend to remain at peace for long.

Unfortunately, the AI is not very good about remembering who was at fault for broken agreements in the past -- it always assumes that the player was the culprit. So, as time goes on and your empire grows, and other empires get impatient with the size of your empire, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain any kind of agreement without invoking enemy of my enemy diplomacy.

Regarding the rest of your comments, that we should already have ships in orbit of our three enemies and should already have produced missile boats, I'm a bit surprised of how strong our Gatlings 2.0 should be!
Note here, it's not so much that our Gatlings are strong, as that they are tough relative to the weapons available to our opponents. They have good maneuverability and good shields, and the enemy has weak computers and weapons available, meaning many misses and not much damage when hits are scored. The Silicoid ships are large, and are numerous, but that only matters if they have a ton of Hyper-V missiles to throw at us, which seems unlikely. Most of those ships probably have nothing better than Heavy Lasers to throw at us, which with our beam defense and heavy shields we can mostly ignore.

2420: I check our empire and change the following things.

- ALL ship relocation orders sent to Nitzer. It may just be me but having three different, or even just two different rally points makes me forget that percentage of my ships when I get ready to move. So all newly built ships are going there.
- 1 Gatling (Gat) 2.0 sent to Nitzer to chase off Alkari fleet.
- 1 Gat 2.0 sent to SSsla (Sakkra).
- 3 Gat 2.0 sent to Ajax (Alkari).
- 4 Gat 2.0 sent to Cryslon (Silicoid).
- Science looks ok, I leave the ratio's where they ae.
- ALL Gat 2.0 production swapped to Rocket (Roc) 2.0 instead since we have 22 Gat 2.0.
- 200 BC sent to Yarrow to speed production of factories/defenses since it's on the front lines and is an artifact world.

2421:
- 53 Roc 2.0 produced this turn.
- 1 Gat 2.0 and 8 Roc 2.0 sent to Ajax.
- Antares (tundra) founded.
- Galactic council formed.
- Vote is held. Darlock abstain, Sakkra vote for us, others vote for Psilon. We have the most votes 19-11.

2422:
- 16 Roc 2.0 made.
- Destroy the Sakkra fleet over SSsla.
- Attack Cryslon, lose 1 Gat 2.0, destroy 5 of his ships. Retreat (but keep on station) awaiting reinforcements.
- Tau Cygni (Tundra) founded.
- Contact Darlocks. They are doing some OPE (one planet empire) action.

2423:
- 13 Roc 2.0 made.
- Darlocks don't want to trade.
- Destroy the Sakkra reinforcements over SSsla. Declare space superiority over the planet.
- Psilon want to trade for 375/year. I agree. Not sure how long this will last once the fleets arrive over Aklari worlds but might as well try.

2424:
- Yarrow, former Alkari Artifact world, max factories builds bases.
- Fleets and transports (which I didn't really record) enroute or clearing out enemy force each round.

2425:
- Class V planetary shield developed. All planet put on 25% build orders. Next choice is between repulsor beam or clas V shields. Choose the shield tech.
- EVENT! A virus strikes our main force field research facility destroying ONE point of research!.:lol: As Sirian has said, it's better to be lucky than good at times.
- Vote is held again, same resuls, 19-11 as the first time. (32 possible votes)

2426:
- Steal Psilon tech. All fields available, so take a chance on propulsion, get Sub-light (warp 3) drives!
- Redesign Roc 2.0 into Roc 3.0, identical except for the warp speed.

2427:
- Steal Psilon tech again. All fields but propulsion available. They have a nice ion cannon which we could use.. I choose weapons, get Scatter pack V instead. :(

2428:
- Invade Sssla with 14 troops, kill off 39 before the forces die.

2429:
- Steal Alkari tech. Fusion bomb.

Summary:
- 73 troops enroute to Altair.
- 90 enroute to Ajax.
- 61 enroute to Cryslon.
- 85 enroute to Sssla, 35 within a few turns, 50 will be there in 7 turns to help stand it up or kill off the last of them (35 should it).
- 19 Gat 2.0 left (lost three, 2 to the Silicoids, 1 to Sakkra)
- 102 Rocket 2.0 available
- 37 Rocket 3.0 available.
- At WAR with everyone but the Darlock now. Psilon declared on us within two turns of moving our ships over Ajax.
- Scouts are headed to the two unexplored planets in the SE, but will be there 7-8 turns into next players turn.

I had all sorts of troops in transport, but most of them were sent before sub-light engines were stolen, hence all the inbound groups and no planets being taken.

We should take all 4 of the planets we have troops enroute to unless something very bad happens. We should, IMO, take the Psilon colony below the Silicoids because it seems to be isolated, but they may have the range to reach it, I am not sure.

Invasion time! (http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2430ad.zip)

Roster:
Zed-F
Kylearan
Ozymandous
Kabuki <-- UP
JMB <-- on deck
TBC

Hey, don't diss those Scatter Packs! They are a great thing to have if the enemy brings a poorly shielded stack. Of course, they're a little past their prime now, but still good to have.

Sounds like a good turn overall!

Regarding the shield tech, I would have picked Repulsors. We already have Class IV shields, Class V won't help that much more. Besides, Repulsors are a good thing to have to combat enemy small beam ships and bombers.

In a normal game, I would probably stop building warships now, or at least soon. What we have on hand should be ample to deal with the minor powers and contain the Psilons for now; we don't want to overinvest and spend too much on fleet maintenance if we're just going to have to scrap the ships later when we want to build a fleet to take on the Psilons in their home systems.

Kabuki, don't forget to spare a few of our warp 3 ships to go check out the Psilon colonies in range so we can popstorm them -- even ones on the other side of their core if we can get to them. Ideally we'd like to be able to send troops anywhere within our fuel range. Also there are a couple planets south of Silicoid space that we could go send a warp 3 colony ship to.

Unfortunately, we won't want to completely eliminate all of our current foes' planets. We should leave at least one of them in an OPE situation, probably the Alkari. We don't want to be in a situation where the Psilons wipe out our last opponent other than themselves -- if we do that, we will have to go for an extermination win rather than a conquest win, as the vote will only be held if there are 3 or more empires still in play.

Kabuki,

If you can't grab it and play tonight, can I swap with you (I am going away tomorrow afternoon until Monday (Singapore time...))?

Thanks,

JMB

JMB, go ahead and grab it and play if you want, and if Kabuki says he has it, you can just toss out the results. :)

Ok, I've got it and will play later this afternoon (early morning back in the States...)

JMB

Sounds good, Ozy, I see now how I overestimated our enemy ship designs. :hammer:

Psilon want to trade for 375/year. I agree. Not sure how long this will last once the fleets arrive over Aklari worlds but might as well try.

No criticism intended, I just want to confirm if I understand the concept of trading right: Was that decision wise? As I understand it, a trade agreement begins with both parties having to *pay* an amount of BCs per year first, which will gradually decrease over time before both start to actually receive money. So, for an AI we know we will attack rather sooner or later, signing a new trade agreement would cost us money, right? (Don't know how long it takes before it gets positive?)

-Kylearan

Yeah, you're right, Ky, it will cost us money, if not a ton relative to our GNP (the trade agreement is limited by the lesser economy, in this case the Psilons.)

If we intend to stay at peace, the trade agreement is a more an attempt to normalize relations than an attempt to get real value out of it, unless we're playing as Humans. If not, you're right, it's a waste of time. I expect the Psilons to declare war on us or us to declare war on them at some point anyway, so it might not have been the most useful of moves, but at least it hurts the Psilons as much as it hurts us to lose that income. It will increase our untrustworthiness when that agreement breaks, but as I said that tends to happen over the long run anyway.

Yeah that was a bad move more than likely, but I thought maybe we could leave the Psilon alone for now while we go after the other three races. As mentioned they apparently didn't like me bombing the Alkari.

*sigh* Well I was thinking of the Repulsor Beam instead and could hear your voice in the back of my head saying "Now why did you do that? The Psilon have beeter weapons than we , we need better shields!", hence my choice! :)

We weren't making very many Rocket 3.0 ships each turn but's a combination of the fact I had almost all the plaets that could building *some* missle bases for defense, and the Rocket 3.0 was more expensive than the Rocket 2.0.

Most of our planets had ZERO defense bases when I started the turn and were pumping everything into ship building. This is great if they are forever out of range of enemy fleet's but is a bad habit to get into if you play games where the enemy discoveres range tech's very quick at all.

Nah, what do the Psilons have: Ion cannons, Scatter packs, and Fusion bombs (at least last I heard, they might have more now.) Class IV shield + Class V planetary negates both Ion Cannons and Scatter Pack V completely. One extra point of shielding won't make that much difference against bombers, where repulsors would.

Shoulda gone with your gut that time, Ozy. :)

Well that certainly took longer than I expected...

2430 - In terms of tech, we don't really appear to be that far behind the Psilions or the Alkari. Everything else looks pretty good. I transfer some of our reserves to our artifact planets.

2431 - We steal Class III deflector shields from the Alkari and our scientists discover the secrets of Dolomite Crystals. We begin researching Fusion Drives (our only option). I bomb Altair (pop 92, fact 271; 73 troops inbound), killing 18 million and destroying 70 factories (I am always hesitant to bomb because I never know how many people I will end up killing. Is there any good way to judge this?). I don't bomb SSSLA though as it has only 17 million and we have some 86 million troops en route. We bomb the other Alkari planet (pop 99, fact 144; 90 troops inbound), killing 12 million and destroying 48 factories. We bomb Cryslon (pop 110, fact 217; 61 troops inbound), killing 6 million and destroying 21 factories. Our troops (45) arrive at Ajax and kill over 80 million biods only losing approximately half of our numbers. 96 factories were captured, but no techs were found. I send a scout from Mobas to scout Mentar and one of the Gatlings from Willow to Rayden.

2432 - We force the Alkari with their ~300 Sparrowhawks to retreat from one of their planets. Our Gatlings force the Silicoids to retreat (although, I think they probably could have killed the Gatlings...). We make a breakthrough on Soil Enrichment. I shift our sliders to +25%. It doesn't look like we'll need it, but I decide to choose cloning (out of controlled inferno, controlled radiated, terraforming +40, Atmos Terraforming, Cloning, and Advanced Eco Restoration) so that we can grow our population more rapidlly for ground assaults... We bomb Altair again, killing 17 million and destroying 57 factories and Crysalon for 6 million and 22 factories. 23 million Bulrathi land on Altair and kill about 48 million Alakari; unfortunately, 12 million are left. 61 Bulrathi land on Crysalon and destroy about 100 million silicoids (with 39 troops remaining). 174 factories were captured, no techs were discovered (not that they have any for us to discover...).

2433 - We capture Altair and discover Battle Computer Mark IV (which we were just about to discover I believe...). GNN comes on and informs us that we nearly control a majority of the galaxy. We begin researching Improved Robotics IV. I'll leave the Alkari with one planet remaining. I change our Reloc point to Mobas as we have enough ships in the north. I design a new scout ship (without scrapping the old one) with warp III engines so that we can scout out a few planets more quickly... (it only costs 1 BC more than our other scouts...) We steal Ion Cannon from the Psilions. I also decide to build a new gunship (large, duralloy armor, 6 heavy ion cannons, 1 ion cannon and 2 fusion bombs).

2434 - Not much.

2435 - We capture SSSLA.

2436 - Not much.

2437 - We send 42 troops from Crysalon to Denubius.

2438 - The Alkari finally force us fron Nitzer with their 300 Sparrowhawk and destroy the colony. The Psilions attempting to land on Willow were all destroyed. 70 troops are sent to Moro to destroy the Sakkras; the ships will arrive in two turns.

2439 - The Alkari bomb Ajax with their >300 Sparrowhawk, killing ~ 31 million.

2440 - We destroy the Sakkra and capture Denubius from the Psilions. Not much else. The next leader should feel free to scrap the scout 3 design in favour of a fast bomber as our missile boats aren't doing much damage against the Psilion defenses...

Sorry about the rather poor set of turns (imo).

Here's the save: http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/RBOSG1Team2.zip

JMB

I bomb Altair (pop 92, fact 271; 73 troops inbound), killing 18 million and destroying 70 factories (I am always hesitant to bomb because I never know how many people I will end up killing. Is there any good way to judge this?).
You only bomb a planet if (a) you don't want to be bothered to capture it and stand it up, or (b) you want to capture it but can't send enough ground troops to overwhelm the defenders, even by coordinating invasions from multiple worlds. In this instance, neither applies, so bombing Altair was definitely sub-optimal. Capturing it intact would have been far better to our cause as we could have stood it up much more quickly. If, in fact the Alkari still have tech we do not, capturing it intact would be even more important to give us an opportunity to capture even more tech from those factories.

We bomb the other Alkari planet (pop 99, fact 144; 90 troops inbound), killing 12 million and destroying 48 factories. We bomb Cryslon (pop 110, fact 217; 61 troops inbound), killing 6 million and destroying 21 factories. Our troops (45) arrive at Ajax and kill over 80 million biods only losing approximately half of our numbers. 96 factories were captured, but no techs were found. I send a scout from Mobas to scout Mentar and one of the Gatlings from Willow to Rayden.
Again, none of those bombings were needed, and reduced our chances for tech capture as well as making it harder to stand up the planets. We won't capture tech from those races who don't have any tech advances left that we don't know ourselves, of course.

2432 - We force the Alkari with their ~300 Sparrowhawks to retreat from one of their planets. Our Gatlings force the Silicoids to retreat (although, I think they probably could have killed the Gatlings...).
The AI will retreat from any fleet that either it can't hurt or is much stronger in terms of combat power. If the AI retreated its ships, then at least the AI thinks the Gatlings would have won the fight. Since I don't know what was there, I can't comment other than to say our Gatlings are pretty tough customers on defense, so I wouldn't be surprised if they could have held the day.

We make a breakthrough on Soil Enrichment. I shift our sliders to +25%.
Here's a good opportunity for micromanagement to save some funds. Soil Enrichment takes a fixed amount of money per planet to build. If you go through your planets individually, it is possible to tailor them to spend exactly the right amount on it to complete it. On larger planets, this often takes only a single turn, with the leftover going to research. Once that's done, you can adjust spending as you see fit to grow the planet to its new mature value. After building Soil I will usually set larger planets to 50% of their income in RP and the rest to standing up the new factories and growing the remaining pop. Note that pop growth by ecology spending is more efficient on fertile worlds, so the pop tends to grow pretty quickly.

It doesn't look like we'll need it, but I decide to choose cloning (out of controlled inferno, controlled radiated, terraforming +40, Atmos Terraforming, Cloning, and Advanced Eco Restoration) so that we can grow our population more rapidlly for ground assaults...
With the number of worlds we have at our disposal, the power of our troops, and the fact that soon the majority of our worlds will be fertile, I would have picked something else. In particular, I would have picked Radiated bases, as we know the Psilons have some colonies on Dead planets by now, which we can't land on at the moment as we only have Tundra environment ourselves. Cloning and Advanced Eco Restoration are probably the two least useful techs in that selection for us right now. The other 3 will all give us significant increases in total production.

We steal Ion Cannon from the Psilions. I also decide to build a new gunship (large, duralloy armor, 6 heavy ion cannons, 1 ion cannon and 2 fusion bombs).
Ah, good, finally a decent beam weapon. :) Be careful about using up all our designs building incremental improvements, though -- we will have to scrap some of our fleet if we want to make a quantum jump in technology to go after the Psilons.

I am not overly keen on heavy versions of weapons unless the enemy has repulsors or very good shields on their ships, as heavy weapons are less space-efficient, but if you can build up a big stack or have a significant movement advantage they can be useful. That, however, is purely personal preference. The most important questions are (a) what is the role the ship is intended for, and (b) how well will it fill that role? If it's for space superiority, it may well perform quite adequately. We will have to see it in combat with current Psilon designs to tell for certain.

2438 - The Alkari finally force us fron Nitzer with their 300 Sparrowhawk and destroy the colony. Any particular reason we didn't just leave 1 Gatling 2.0 here to prevent this? :) Not that the loss of the colony hurts us significantly, but we will have to build a new colony there now & send over some more people... the annoying part was how preventable this was, if all they had was a bunch of laser fighters.

2439 - The Alkari bomb Ajax with their >300 Sparrowhawk, killing ~ 31 million.Same thing here...

Sorry about the rather poor set of turns (imo).It's ok, we're here to learn, right? :)


Roster:
Zed-F <-- On deck
Kylearan
Ozymandous
Kabuki <-- UP
JMB <-- just played
TBC <-- skipped?

Zed,

Thanks for the info on bombing.

About the Gatling not being at Nitzer or Ajax, I believe I decided to move them so that we could concentrate on the Psilion front. I see now that it was definitely :smoke:.

About having to build a new colony ship, we could always let somebody else build one and then take the planet from them...

About the new Ion Cannon ship, feel free to scrap it as none have been produced yet.

JMB

Kabuki, are you out there? Haven't heard from you in a while... are you still on "skip me unless I say otherwise" mode?

I will get it tonight unless we hear from Kabuki.

Originally posted by JMB
Zed,

Thanks for the info on bombing.

About the Gatling not being at Nitzer or Ajax, I believe I decided to move them so that we could concentrate on the Psilion front. I see now that it was definitely :smoke:.

About having to build a new colony ship, we could always let somebody else build one and then take the planet from them...

About the new Ion Cannon ship, feel free to scrap it as none have been produced yet.

JMB

Just to reiterate what Zed said, *I* only bomb a planet if I'm not going to capture it, but merely destroy it. Even if I have a tech lead but still plan to capture the planet I will NOT bomb it because you will always destroy more factories than population, unless you have 99% bioweapons on the ships.

Bombing is pretty much useless if you plan to use the planet for anything at all yourself, unless you want to wipe it out and colonize it yuorself, which is a waste in resources at times because you have to allocate some planet to build a new colony ship, possibly scrap one of your warship designs for the slot it uses, move the ship into position, etc. This is usually much easier to accomplish without having to do all this by just invading and taking it over that way.

Regarding moving the Gatling 2.0 ships to the Psilon front... THe Psilon's already have better tech than we do, and I believe their shielding on their newest ships may bebetter than the Gatling Laser's can punch through. I know the Gatling ships would be useless in assaulting the Psilon planets, so why move them?

As Zed already mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the Gatling ships are better than anything everyone else has, other than the Psilon's so no worries there for now at least.

I am still confused about Nitzer since it was where all the ships were relocating to, and I thought was working on it's defense bases... *shrug*

One last thing... It is usually sub-optimal to destroy a colony and then make one yourself instead of capturing because unlike Civ3, there is no way to almost immediately stand up the colony like there is in Civ3 via cash rushing. Even when you dump reserves into a planet to build it will still take a while to build all the factories, defense bases and possibly terraform to your current tech level. The only instances where it's been almost as fast to stand a new planet up instead of capturing was in the very late game, where the factories are extremely cheap, there is low/no pollution and tech's like cloning, atmospheric transforming, etc, are in play. Usually by then capturing a world is still cheaper and faster.

Of course these are my thoughts, and not to be confused with Sirian or Zed who have a lot more experiecne with the game than I do.

Regarding moving the Gatling 2.0 ships to the Psilon front... THe Psilon's already have better tech than we do, and I believe their shielding on their newest ships may bebetter than the Gatling Laser's can punch through. I know the Gatling ships would be useless in assaulting the Psilon planets, so why move them?
In general I agree to a point. I would have put a couple ships down there for (a) scouting purposes so we could send troops to their fledgling colonies, and (b) to bolster the apparent (not so much actual) strength of our defenses on that front. The AI will sometimes respect the presence of a defensive fleet in orbit and choose a different target. However, I wouldn't have sent more than a couple ships down there, as I would have wanted to use most of them on the Sakkra/Alkari/Silicoid fronts, where they would bring the most gains.

Nitzer had no factories. It was one of the Tundra worlds that we had nabbed earlier but couldn't reasonably defend from Alkari SODs (prior to getting a Gatling 2.0 in orbit.) If it was working on a defense base, it was going to take a long time. :)

Ah, got it. I think Nitzer was building pop when I last saw the game.

I thought I had left a few ships (might not be correct) down on the Psilon front in case we needed them but can't remember now.

Got it.

EDIT: JMB, you can't use the same file name more than once, or the file upload system will rename it for you. The file is actually located here:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/RBOSG1Team21.zip

Notes for the start of my round:

Check fleet composition & see whether we want a new design now or in a few years, also whether/what to scrap.
Check what Psilon planets have been scouted or are in scouting range, & see whether we want to invade them yet
Not much other than work towards a conquest win by growing pop as quickly as possible.

We should be in striking distance of a conquest win soon. There is a vote at the end of my turns (2449) but I don't know whether we have the wherewithal to get our pop up high enough by then, as I am writing this before I check the save. A few strikes on Psilon positions may lower their pop enough to do the job -- perhaps even bio strikes if we can't penetrate their shields? Their scatter packs could be a problem though...

2440: Turn off most ship production, and scrap our scout designs; I will send several of our warp 3 missile boats to scout a number of unknown systems. We have only 3 of our new Ion cannon design, but I will decide whether to scrap it after a couple more techs come in. Rather than building more of those, I design a new, temporary design: the biggest, most expensive huge ship I can. I plan to build up ship production points at a few of our planets close to the front by setting ship production to this new design for now, and then switching it to what I really want to build when the techs I'm waiting for come in. We have a construction tech and a weapons tech due soon, so I will wait until those come in before designing new ships to go on the offensive against the Psilons. I reallocate research spending to focus on those two techs, and immediately get them both up to a 3-4% breakthrough chance. Several of our new planets and some of our older planets which had sent troops off recently boost eco spending, even at the expense of factories; we don't really need more productive colonies, and I want our population as high as possible for the upcoming vote.

I note that Obaca, the remaining Silicoid colony, is ultra-poor, whereas we don't know what the Alkari colony is. I want to at least scout out the Alkari colony, as if we refrain from taking the Silicoid colony, that will be sufficient to keeping the vote alive -- it's well out of reach of random Psilon violence. To that end I send an expedition to Ukko to punish the Alkari for their actions at Jinga and Ajax. I also send a small expedition to Obaca to wipe out the Silicoid fleet defending it and prevent them from forming another, as we do have a couple of defenseless colonies in the neighborhood.

2441: Industrial Tech 6 comes in, all research but for a couple clicks in each category set to weapons. The Silicoids sent their fleet to Cryslon, so our fleet that moved to Obaca returns to Cryslon. The Psilons have recolonized Nitzer, we send troops from Jinga to take our colony back. Jinga goes to eco spending to regrow pop, and should be done within a few turns.

2442: Our fleet successfully defends Cryslon, losing one Rocket 2.0 in exchange for 3/4 of the enemy fleet. The enemy retreats its remaining large ship to Obaca, and most of our fleet pursues, leaving behind one Gatling to defend Cryslon. Ukko, the Alkari colony, is a size 50 world, better for our purposes than the Silicoid ultra-poor. We opt to invade, and do not bomb its factories. The Alkari are so short on funds that the planet is a waste dump; we will have to clean it up. Troops are enroute from Ajax and Yarrow; Altair will not contribute this time as it needs to build a Planetary Shield and a base to defend itself from an incoming Alkari small ship SoD.

2443: We successfully defend Altair, otherwise not much happens. An Alkari SoD chases away our missile boats at Ukko, as I didn't have a Gatling available to escort them at the time I sent them. However, Gatlings are now on the way, and will arrive in time for our 2nd wave of troops to capture the planet next turn. That should put an end to these thorny little beasts. Stinger missiles are at 30%, so I shift our research focus to propulsion for Fusion engines.

2444: Stinger missiles arrive! I start on Antimatter bombs next, so that we will have something with which to crack Psilon missile bases; after that we will want Megabolt Cannons for a better beam weapon. Of course, the Psilons haven't been idle either during this time. They have gotten Armoured Exoskeleton, Energy Pulsar (death on small ships) and Fusion Beams, as well as some other less important techs. However, we have now scouted Escalon, which has no bases, and may be able to nab it with an unescorted troop assault. 40 transports from Ajax are on the way. Lots of population moving around the Alkari sector, with much Eco spending to regrow the pop.

2445: Our Gatlings can't kill the Alkari SoD very quickly but that doesn't matter; since their popguns can't hurt our Gatlings at all, they flee, despite having nowhere to flee to. Our troops capture Ukko with ease, the planet is ours, and the Alkari are now a footnote in history, with a few captured specimens left alive in our exobiology zoos. :) We immediately start soil enrichment on the planet.

The Psilons are starting to send Star Blades to harass our planets -- these are medium ships armed with Death Spores, and to combat them we need bases in volume. Fortunately, they are poorly shielded, so Scatter Packs work well against them. I also note we are at war with them again, though I don't recall anyone reporting that during their turns (but it makes sense if we took Denubius.)

2446: Fusion Drives come in, and I readjust spending to a more even distribution, still favouring Planetology, Computers, and Weapons technologies, however. Fusion Drives should give me the ability to build some potent (i.e. fast) small bombers. Indeed, we can build FusB 4.0s with Battle Computer II, Fusion Engines, Maneuver 6 including Inertial Stabilizers, and a Fusion Bomb. I would like a better computer but one will not fit. Still, this is a powerful little bomber, as you can bet the Psilons will use Scatter Pack V missiles against them... and this bomber can outrun them. In sufficient quantities, and with judicious care in movement and use of the wait button, this bomber can reach firing range in 2 moves, without eating any missiles enroute. I immediately start production with my saved-up production points allocated to huge hulls -- we just carve them into pieces and strap on a bomb, I suppose. :)

Should I also build a space superiority ship? Our Ion cannon warp 3 ships can't keep up with these bombers, after all... and then I notice our Ion cannon ships have no shields. Not good on a large ship with beam weapons, which is expected to fight a protracted engagement at close range. Missile boats can get away with no shields, but not beamers. The Ion 3.4s get scrapped then, and replaced with Ion 4.0: Battle Computer 4, Class IV Shields, Duralloy Armour, Fusion Engines, Maneuver 4, Battle Scanner, 18 Ion Cannons, and 6 Fusion Bombs. Not the best ship to be going against Fusion Beams in Psilon hands, but they shouldn't have many ships with those onboard yet. I could also design a missile boat to replace our aging Rocket 2.0s with, but we still need them to fend off Psilon Death Spore attackers in former Alkari space. I'll decide later if I still need those ships or not once I've dealt with a couple incoming attacks. For now, we have close to 400 bombers coming off the lines, due next turn. They have enough strategic movement speed that if the Psilons leave one of their planets uncovered by their fleet, they will feel our sting. :)

2447: Psilons attack Altair, with 3 missile bases and 16 Rocket 3.0s defending -- another 55 Rocket 2.0s were enroute but didn't make it in time. Here's what they brought:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2450ad-psifleet1.jpg

If they had had a bigger fleet, they might have done serious harm to Altair, as the defenses in place were able to take out the Star Blades handily but were insufficient to make much of an impact on their Nova huge death ship. Stingers will prove more effective against these heavily shielded designs. Our northern frontier is quite weak against these attacks, which is a bit worrisome. We are still rebuilding these planets and our fleet is more concentrated at Mobas on the Psilon frontier; I would like to get some more, faster ships into the area to deal with the threat. On the other hand, any distraction preventing the Psilon fleet from being fielded against our upcoming bomber strike serves our purpose. Moreover, the Psilons really don't have the industrial capacity to field these in significant numbers.

Our own attack against Escalon fared much better, and we were able to capture some tech -- Armoured Exoskeletons, to be precise. :) We thus retain our godlike advantage in gropo action. Unfortunately, Willow gets a Nova event, but this scarcely matters much at this point. I allocate some reserves to speed up factory construction for a couple turns, and will then switch to research.

2448: The Psilons have 45 Star Blades at Mentar; however, that will not help them against our bombers. I know they have reinforcements arriving at Xentalla next turn, retreating from their attack at Altair, so I will not strike there just yet. Besides, I know Mentar is a size 100 planet, so it is a valuable place to strike. I send our entire fleet in the area, composed primarily of 425 FusB 4.0 bombers, plus 33 Rocket 3.0s, 8 Rocket 2.0s, and 6 Gatling 2.0s, into the fray, in two groups, with the bombers arriving ahead of the other ships by one turn.

On the Alkari front, the Psilons have a couple Star Blades at Nitzer, and a couple Rocket 3.0s are enroute to chase them off. However, they also have a Nova headed to Ukko, which has neither shield nor base built yet, as we but recently captured it from the Alkari. It is building them as fast as it can with reserves allocated, but it will be a turn or two before they complete and are able to chase off the Nova. I have what ships can reach in time there, but I don't think it will be enough.

2449: At Ukko, our planet gets spored, but our Gatling 2.0s are able to stay the course; despite not being able to damage the Nova, the Nova doesn't have enough firepower to kill both Gatlings within the time limit, and is forced to retreat. Our bombers strike at Mentar, and find it defended by only 2 Star Blades and 12 missile bases. Our bombers evade the bases' fire and destroy the planet's defenses in one volley of bombs without losing a single ship, and the ineffectual Star Blades flee.

I would like to invade Mentar with a ton of population but... the vote is this year. Maybe I should have bombed the planet instead, but if we are not quite at the vote threshold, I don't want to miss this opportunity to grab Psilon tech as the spoils of war. Mentar is likely their best world, with the most factories -- it's too juicy a plum to pass up. Still, I can't afford to send off a massive invasion force right now. Instead I will send off enough to hopefully take the planet, but no more, and will follow up with another wave later. The Rockets and Gatlings should arrive at Mentar this turn to defend the planet, and I will move the bombers on to glass another one or three. I decide to be bold and split the fleet in thirds, sending one third to each of 3 nearby worlds, Romulas, Xendalla, and Rayden with a few new construction bombers reinforcing the attack at Xendalla. I don't know if that will be enough force at each world to win through, but I guess we will find out...

IT: We successfully defend Nitzer, and all 3 of our bomber fleets are successful at destroying Psilon planetary defenses around Romulas, Xendalla, and Rayden, bombing the planets and killing about 90 million Psilons. That should make a significant impact in the voting numbers, speaking of which...

Psilons 5 (themselves), Silicoids 1 (Psilons), Darloks 2 (Psilons), total 8.
Bulrathi: 32 votes.

There you have it, folks! A conquest victory in 2449. Pretty good time to completion! :) Good game, everyone, and hopefully you had fun and maybe picked up a trick or two. Unfortunately our new Ion ships never came into play, as the first two would have rolled off the lines for 2450, but we managed without them. Bomber stacks can be quite the powerful force for ending the game, as you can see, but the real star of the show was fighting a population-based war. With the Bulrathi, I don't go out of my way to start wars, but when one does come along (as it inevitably does) this is a great trick to pull out of your bag, especially on larger maps where it's easier to coordinate large invasion forces.

The map of the galaxy at the time of the vote:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2450ad-map.jpg

The status screen:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2450ad-status.jpg

And, our victorious fleet:

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2450ad-ourfleet.jpg

Here is the save from 2449. This should give you a chance to play with a big stack of fast bombers and see what it can do, if you are so inclined. You can decline to vote for yourself if you want extra time to play. An extermination win is not too far off at this point, should we choose to pursue it. Our bombers can hit the Psilons anywhere they are weak (which is pretty much everywhere) without too much to fear in terms of a counterattack; the Psilon fleet is largely useless at preventing us from bombarding their worlds, as it is highly focussed on bombarding ours. :) Moreover, the new Ion ships should be quite capable of taking out any space superiority ships they do manage to field, as they don't have the industrial base to field them quickly or in quantity.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads7/osg1-team2-2450ad.zip

Originally posted by Zed-F
I also note we are at war with them again, though I don't recall anyone reporting that during their turns (but it makes sense if we took Denubius.)


See the second to last item on my turn summary. They declared on us again during my last turn when I bombed the Alkari planet.

EDIT: That was over quicker than I expected, but right on time since we could have rolled over everyone else at that time.

Good game all.

Good job guys -- sorry I couldn't participate this time, but maybe next time. Onward to Imperium Two!

TBC

Thanks for heading up the game Zed and everyone else for playing... I think I need a few more SGs to work on the stuff I learned about in this game. So... When does the next game start? :D

JMB

Yes, thanks to Zed-F for all the lengthy replies and posts, I learned a lot! :thumbsup: &nbsp; That had been fun.

Glad to be of help. :) I imagine the next game will start up when team 1 is done. Want to keep all the players on the same page... :)

Congrats on a fine performance, you not-quite-n00bz, you. :lol:

Team One got a nice tech from the artifact planet, Industrial 8. I thought we made decent use of it. Your Range 5 really got put to good use, though, as your land grab was much more successful. You were able to reach toward the AI's immediately, while we were expanding south to what we had within 3 parsecs, before we teched our way westward. That made a significant difference, perhaps the decisive difference in Team One needing an extra vote to get to conquest.

That should highlight the value of expanding toward your rivals, even at the expense of back line colonies more easily reachable. Well done!

Your game deserves a lot more commentary, but I haven't had as much free time lately. Took me a couple of days just to read through. :)

I'm still offline as far as MOO goes. Had other irons in the fire -- especially a yard growing out of control on which I had to catch up with my mowing -- to have time for setting up an old P1 for MOOing (and Descenting -- oops, probably shouldn't admit to that urge). I may ask Zed for help in launching Imp3. I'll see how the next two days go.

In the mean time, feel free to start up another SG (without me) if folks are ready for one. Plenty of SG vets around, and OSG1 is in the can, so if anybody has the urge to take initiative, the light is green. :goodjob:


- Sirian