OSG 14b - Cold Blooded Killers

[dathon78]

Oh man you guys were slow (2500 vs 2464)

First of all, very nice job guys; your team played a great game. I think most of the difference in time, though, was due to the vast differences in our AI's. Your AI's were slackers We finished this a few days ago, so I lurked your thread. Our AI's, except for the Bulrathi, expanded MUCH faster. The Darlok's in particular were speedy. You guys colonized Kulthos in 2348, and Tao sometime in the 2380-2390 turn. Our Darlok's nabbed both worlds by 2337! Similarly, your Vox got settled on the same 2380-2390 turnset, while our Meklars poached it on the 2360-2370 turnset. Because we never got Kulthos, we never had a chance at Hyades, but I'm pretty sure the Humans grabbed it pretty quick.

I'm not at all trying to belittle your win -- you guys did a fantastic job finishing in the time you did Running these multiple comparison SG's is a lot of fun. For instance, it's interesting that you guys chose to go with lots of small spore ships, opting for production to outweigh attrition, while we went with large ships to minimize attrition. We could have fit spores on a small, but given our lesser empire, we chose a sturdier platform, noting that not nearly as many spores are needed as bombs to eradicate a planet.

So, what's next?

dathon

 

[Blake]

Okay instead of idel speculation I decide to put my money where my mouth is and actually SEE how long it takes to win a total war (not final war, just spending everything on military). I decided to start from your 2450 save. I'm not doing this to say "I'm better than you!" (na-na-na-nah!), just mainly as another comparison - how long does it take from mobilization to the end of the galaxy.

It took until 2459 to get the last round of techs in...
I note how much more advanced you were... the ONLY tech field we out-teched you in was planetology, this is how we fit out spores on a small easily. I suppose another advantage being warp5... which doesn't help that much since you only get move 3 still (we used Fusion). I decided to finish off this round of tech so I can get impulse drives and fit spores on a small.

Two Ships:
Death 5.0 - Small, Death Spores, Move 5, Comp II. SWEET. For 17BC.
(17BC per Spore)

Caticide 5.0 - Large, 17 x Death Spores, Shield 5, Move 4, Comp 5, Battle Scanner. For 790 BC (46BC per Spore)

The Catcide is hoping to rely on shields to survive the Cats, since dodging is futile.


In 2564 Sol falls. Producing a good 400 sporeships a turn and a few of the bigger ones.

A darklok colony taken out suffering just 3 small spore losses (a stack of caticide took out the planet while the smalls ran around)

I also flew 350 small spores into a heavily defended (by fleet) human system and sniped the world, with 260 smalls surviving. had to dodge some repulsar beams but once the stack got up to the planet...

2470: Cat extermination. They kept recolonizing the world as I bombed it out (like the colony ships literally sat in orbit recolonizing) meaning they lived a few turns extra. I had targetted the Darklorks more heavily than the cats, after sweeping around the dark worlds the death fleets descended on the cat worlds and destroyed them. The darks lived longer because they had a world out of range until I colonize the cat homeworld.

I reluctantly admit that I can't defeat the repulsar beam heavy races without resorting to some range, so I design a medium scatterpack ship and throw on some deathspores so I can pretend it's legal to bomb worlds with them (not during battles, just when orbiting the planet when there was no enemy fleet to induce combat, making it impossible to select WHICH ships bomb the world).

Embarrassingly, the humans actually managed to take one of my worlds! But it was bound to happen... then they took another one! (Meklon). The problem was I couldn't actually hurt their ships... so they'd force my fleet to retreat then the transports would come in...
Although I did notice you can fake out their ships with large death fleets! I would have pure-death ships, none able to do any damage at all to the human ship, and it'd run away! Curious. They'd run both from my worlds and from their own worlds. However I didn't mange to fake them out when transports were incoming.

Anyway despite the fact that the humans got Scatterpacks from me they STILL couldn't do anything, because it's easy to outrun scatters, so the base would shoot at my small deaths while my big deaths erased the world. So a couple of turns later the humans were reduced to just a few mature worlds, which I picked off over the next few turns with massive fleets (I had enough Caticide to take out a world in a single volley).

2477: Researched Range 10, and founded a colony which brings everything into range. GG universe. I was putting all research into Range 10 incidentally and the turn before turned most worls back onto research. Shoulda done it earlier.

2479: Humans and Bears extinct. Both at the hands of the Sakkras (if you bomb their last world from the galaxy map you get proper credit).

2480: Extermination Victory as the last joke of a Mekklar world (2 pop) is bombed from orbit.

Anyway the ONLY ships I killed were a couple of bear ships which thought they could take some ionfighters I trained. I could have quite easily won this without training ANY of the combat vessels... in fact it would probably have gone faster. Shoulda spent a bit more on propulsion research a bit earlier. So I think I'm correct with my assertion (hmm did I remember to make that assertion?) that the higher tech doesn't actually MATTER, they die all the same. Our pathetic Mrrshans pretty much put up more resistance at their worlds than your uber Humans, against death fleets it doesn't matter what their tech level is.
On the other hand the Mekklars were very annoying - however their extermination was straightforward despite their blanket policy of repulsar beams - just meant that a single stack had much trouble navigating to the planet - two stacks could do it easily.

So yeah, a total war ended 20 turns faster, and I think from an earlier save 30 turns faster would be possible, that is not putting any research into anything other than planet/propulsion. Losing a dozen techs to the humans was dumb, but of no consequence - although it does aptly demonstrate that the concept of stealing tech from the tiny worlds goes both ways. It's darn hard to prop up a new world unless you can actually fight their fleet. This makes range tech essential.

Anyway I did learn some interesting things, like faking the AI fleets with non-combat ships. How you get credit if you bomb from galaxy map but not if you bomb from combat screen.. interesting that. Also just how easy it is to fly past a fleet and bomb the world out and fly back out, especially with two stacks. It was also interesting watching the AI fleets poof out of existence at points, as they went out of range of colonies - but a colony ship if it broke through could reestablish supply. Very whack-a-mole.


The final galaxy pic from the last turn, notice how many freaking slow Mekklar ships their are out cruising? I seriously doubt they can actually AFFORD those ships with their 2 pop, so I think something odd is going on. In any case most of them would poof if they got the chance to actually land (and thus run out of fuel), still odd though.

 

[OlorinStormcrow]

Just some random thoughts concerning some of the issues in your last post.

@running out of fuel: As you said, a fleet that is out of range that includes a colony ship will be able to establish a new colony before disappearing due to lack of fuel. Another tidbit is that if an enemy SoD is coming at one of your planets, and you take out their fuel planets, the SoD will still get to fight a battle when they arrive, and if they win (or are uncontested) they can bombard the planet for a turn. Then they disappear. More frustrating, if they retreat from the battle screen, they will be able to return to their closest planet left without running out of fuel.

---I believe that the check to see if any fleets are out of range is the last thing that happens IBT. First you have all the fighting, then colonization and bombardment, and finally, check to see if anyone is out of fuel (only if they are in orbit). This does allow you to glass an enemy planet, and have their exposed fleet taken out by out-of-range if they are orbiting somewhere. But it also allows colony ships to set up new colonies and change the range situation. This is also why enemy transports will still get to invade a planet, even if their fuel supply was taken out while they were in transit.

@Annihilation speed. I've also noticed in our OSG's that once we get serious about extermination, the game is over within two or three rounds (20-30 years). Once you have an effective small bomber (or spore) design, and enough production, it's easy to just drown the AIs under massive bomber waves. Of course we go slower if we try to occupy and stand up the worlds we take, but if we just want to kill everything, it's a fast process.

@"Faking" out enemy fleets: The AI decides to fight or flee vs. ships by comparing your fleet and its fleet based on how much they cost. If your fleet is much more expensive than theirs, they will run (so large bomber stacks will sometimes scare off AI fleets).

 

[Sullla]

I'm not at all surprised that Blake was able to take our situation and play it into a relatively quick Extermination win. The AI does not handle swarms of small ships well at all. About the only thing of interest there was more info on just how bad the AI is at dealing with the "two identical stacks of the same ship" phenomenon. That sort of thing is so effective, I won't be using it in my solo games. Personal preference, of course.

I'd like to make comparisons between the two games, but the incredibly feeble performance of the AIs in the "A" game makes that difficult. We had three credible opponents (Humans, Darloks, Meklar) that demanded at least some respect, compared to only a single race (Bulrathi) that did ANYTHING in the other game. It would be one thing if that were due to the actions of each team, but the AI performance mostly seems to have been random. The 2PE Darloks in the "A" team were the really big difference, as their inertness allowed that team to grab easily a dozen additional planets compared to the "B" team. There's not much you can say when one team is walking uncontested into regions that were deep within enemy territory for the other one!

As a final point on the "speed" issue, you also have to take in mind that I spent most of my turns building dozens of defense bases everywhere. Obviously that turned out not to be needed here, but we didn't KNOW that at the time. Master of Orion has no clock or scoring, so I never feel any real need to rush things when playing. And I'll point out that the "B" team never lost any planets in OUR game!

 

[Blake]

Heh loss of cities: playing speed turns results in a lot less attention to detail.

Also something I forgot to mention is your darloks. They sucked as much as ours. I mean they were a lot bigger, but they still couldn't do diddly squat to the attacking ships. Their missile bases simply... missed... you don't see that often. Dunno what happened to their comp tech.

Still I rather enjoyed playing against your humans (with their impenetrable shields) and Mekklars (with their Megabolt cannons???? wtf? did they get derelict?). I feel it was a better test of legitimate use of spores than what I got in the Agame, where we could have defeated the AI easily be any means.

By the way I never used two identical ships, I simply used the small spores and a large twinked-out spore design. I also had colony ships stacked with spores which would sometimes see some action. All my ships had a definite role though. It would have mostly worked with automate battles too, except automate being forbidden by variant rules (could result in missile boats shooting the planet).

OOhhh one final thing.

I STILL haven't figured out quite HOW a ship decides whether it should drop spores before retreating. Like you have a stack next to the planet, it hasn't moved or anything. You order it to retreat. Sometimes it drops spores and then retreats, other times it just retreats without dropping spores. I suspect it MIGHT have something to do with whether or not it has any missiles flying towards it.

 

[IamI3rian]

Blake, in my experience gassing, when given the order to retreat, the spore 4.0's ALWAYS fired before retreating. I was usually being fired at by missiles while retreating, but occasionally the shots were directed to colony ships, or ion fighters. The only reason I can think of that they didn't fire when you were retreating was maybe you were out of shots? Grats on the win btw, I hadn't had a chance to mention that

As for the AI's, the reason I think ours played so much worse was sheer apathy. They knew from the start that they were doomed, so gave up early.

Seriouly though, I bet that Bulrathi artifact planet made a big difference with what tech they pulled. Also the Darlock's early tech choices. All in all, great fun, and a great idea for a variant.

 

[Blake]

Blake, in my experience gassing, when given the order to retreat, the spore 4.0's ALWAYS fired before retreating.

In my experience, every time I NEEDED them to drop the spores when retreating, they failed to! I hate things which work on principles similar to Murphy's law....

 

[OlorinStormcrow]

Actually, I think that I figured out the retreating ships issue. My observation was that ships always dropped spores before retreating when the planet was already gone. If there were still some pop left, they retreated without dropping the spores.

I suspect that it might have to do with the initiative levels. Beam ships will fire on enemies as they move into range if they have greater initiative than the target, otherwise they won't fire. I suspect the same holds true for unloading a last round of shots during a retreat.

I never remembered to scan the missile bases after gassing the planet, but I'm guessing that the bases lose some part of their initiative level when the pop disappears (probably the battle computer). That way, even our lowly spore ships with BC0 or 1 now had enough initiative to unload a parting shot (but they wouldn't do so when you needed them to; when there was any pop remaining). Potentially, the colony ships with spores might have been able to fire and retreat vs. live colonies, since they had better computers, and scanners, but it would depend on the AI's computer tech.

 

[StuporMan]

All right, my take on why there was such a discrepancy in the two games ending time is twofold. First, B had a much more credible threat from the Humans than A did from the Bulrathi. This was mainly due to the Humans ever present election threat in the early goings and their much better tech curve.

The other factor was our unwillingness to start a war. We could have successfully fought a war earlier than we did, but we were afraid of the dogpile. We waited until we had victory assured before we fired a shot. Had we taken some risk, we would have had a better ending time.

What I am taking from this game is that Spores are nearly game breaking in a human players hands and that I need to play more aggressively.

Now, what should our next variant be?

Stup

 

[IamI3rian]

I posted at RB the OSG15 discussion thread. I've an idea that might be a fun game, and if not, well.... we need to play SOMETHING . There's always that great Darlok start that was posted before.

 

[PlzBreakMyUmMap]

Yes, I could predict you would not want the spreadsheets. I was mainly posting that for the benefit of any lurkers who might be interested.

:listens to the sound of chirping crickets: Erm, yeah....

This is my first post. Can I has?

I apologize for the necroing

Edit: A WHOLE LOT of bugs/exploits have been mentioned that appear to be easy to 'fix' for someone with the assembly mapped out. I hope this has all be given over to our fan update patch.