OSG 15a - Puissant Psilons

[dathon78]

First up, I have to decide what to do with Sol. Looks to be as secure a poach as we're ever going to get, so I decide to commit 45 troops (20 from Ajax, 25 from Kronos), and a couple hundred from the reserve to get it going. Two turns later, a Bulrathi fleet comes in scanner range from the far NE, 18 larges and 16 mediums No way we can handle that, so I waited until they were two turns away, then threatened. Dicey move, but it paid off; they backed off, relations only went to Neutral, and they threw in Merculites.

Our other poaching prospects went down the tubes for the moment. The bears never did leave Xengara, and both they, the Sakkra, and Alkari have colonization fleets inbound. BTW, bear huge and large designs are mixes of Fusion and Heavy fusions, with the Warbears featuring dissipators. The Sakkra never did glass Altair, and now they're aligned with the birds. Never had any ships that I could spare to try for Rotan.

Tech completed on my watch:
Rng 9 --> Impulse Drives (Star Gates, Ion Drives next)
Hard Beam --> Omega-V's (Fusion Rifle and Megabolt next)
Terra +40 --> Atmos Terraforming
BCV --> Adv Scanner

All worlds are terraformed and maxed. Rha went fertile in a minor break of good luck. Tyr is giving us tons of reserves, so I plowed about 2000 into our artifacts world.

Now for the other bad news. The birds brought the Sakkra into war against us. There's an incoming fleet of 62 Spectres (Heavy Blast Cannons, IIRC) and 10 Hydras (large unknowns) from the Lizards incoming at Ajax. I cranked the base spending, but did not pump from reserves; that's at the discretion of the next emperor. The birds have a fleet with lots of smalls arriving next turn at Sol. Sol should complete a shield and base in two turns, so a 1 turn retreat should be fine, unless those are bombers. It is already maxed out from reserves for a few turns to come.

Roster:
Zed
Dathon <-- Just played
StuporMan <-- UP NOW
ignatius <-- On Deck

dathon

 

[StuporMan]

Preturn: I dial up Alkari to see if I can negotiate peace. They demand 1325 BC. Since we have a high amount in reserves, I elect to pay them off. This is a small price to pay to keep Sol, and we only need a couple of turns to get defenses up. I have a feeling we will be swimming in BC for a while anyway.

First turn Armoured Exos > Andrium Armour. Second turn Class X Planetaries > Class IV (We lucked out not to get this first turn), Sol completes its initial base just in time.

For the next several turns I reserve pump into Klystron, Sol, and Our Artifacts planet. It turns out my paying the Alkari has reaped dividends as the Sakkra decided to send a fleet after a few turns. Because we did not get bombed out by the Alkari fleet, we had enough time to get a Class X shield in place and a couple missile bases.

Impulse Drives (to Star Gates) come in at just past the Halfway point. I decide to wait to redesign until Omega V's (21%) fall to get some extra miniaturization. Omega V's (to fusion rifle) fall soon after. I make a beam design and a bomb design and start building some beam ships at our rich worlds. Also around this time the Rocks bomb out Xengara (the artifacts spud) and I send our current outdated fleet there to see if we can snag it. At the end of the turnset, we have 3 beam ships that were just set to go to Xengara in the very last turn. The next leader can choose not to if they want the bears to colonize it for us. I personally would rather use up our outdated LR Rad col designs settling these spuds. The vote was predictably uninteresting, we could have voted ourselves in (again) but I abstain. My non-vote for the Sakkra was sending them a clear message. The gnats you sent to test our worlds were not appreciated, prepare to meet our swatters!

Alkaris choose unwisely again in the pentultimate turn, but I think the payoff in the preturn was more than worth the BC we paid. Sol is secure, and we now have a forward base to attack ALL the other AIs. Note, I have yet to build any bombers, so the next leader can edit that design if they feel the need. Victory should not be too far off now.

 

[dathon78]

Good turns Stup; peace was definitely the right call. Looking forward to going on offense

dathon

 

[StuporMan]

I know it was the right call, but paying off the AI made me feel icky.

I will take great pleasure in watching the Alkari get genocided.

 

[ignatius]

2500

• Turn on spying on all races (our intelligence is over 30 years old).
• Increased def spending on Ajax, Sol and Klystron

2501

• Sakkras repelled at Ajax
• Bulrathis fleet destroyed at Xengara (lose 1 Beam5), Bears from relaxed down to unease
• none of the spotted designs can handle our bases, so I tune down defense spending again; our old MBs will be next to useless against their shield5 warbear design, though
• Order one bait ship from Kronos for Ajax

2502

• atm. terra pops, terra50 next, queue: doom virus, adv. soil
• Bears flee from Xengara
• spys report on Sakkra: no planetary shields and no missles - they are still firing nukes!!!!

I update the bomber design: add battle scanner, max out on maneuver (this will reduce CTH of the Sakkra designs between 33% and 50% and is a much better deal than shields5) and I also add a 5-rack of scatter pack V to enable the design to cheaply mop up tiny fleets by itself w/o the need for an escort. The idea here is to air-raid as many worlds as possible before they develop a real missle, postponing actual invasion until we have a fleet that can handle theirs SoDs. (Yet another SP-V missle boat design is probably not worth it b/c of their ineffectivness v/s the Bears.)

2503

• adv. scanner pops, ecm6 next, queue: rc5, bc7
• shields6 pops, cloaking dev. next, queue: shields7
• Xengara founded which triggers the 12-planet newsflash
• Sakkra fleet with 12 Hydras incoming at Xengara (ETA 5), Bears and Birds also send ships
• send pop to Tyr, Kronos and Xengara
• adv. scanner shows that Sakkra have 1 rich and two UR

2504

• Sakkras repelled at Ajax, some 20 larges destroyed thanks to bait ship (could have killed more if I had sacrificed the beam5.0) which get sent to Kronos for next encounter, also beef up defenses there.
• build 3 more beam5.0 at Tyr for Xengara, just to be sure ...

2505

Another Sakkra Sod with 24 larges and 152 smalls incoming at Xengara (ETA 6). Their small Cyclops design with its 6 HPs and no shields is a perfect fit for the old MBs, but we don't have enough firepower to reliably deal with the Hydras and I'm not sure if we can manage to get a base up in time ... Seems like the bombers will have to wait even longer.

last spy report is in (on Coids), turn off all spying except on Sakkras

2506

Andrium pops, Tritanium next

2507

Seems like we will be able to get the shield in time (with max reserve spending) but maybe not the first base - anyway Xengara should be safe which means that the time has come for the offensive and there's no time to waste if we want to take advantage of the Sakkras current lack of missles. Obvious targets are Toranor and Vega, the Sakkra UR planets. Both are exposed at maximum distance from the Sakkra core and should be stripped off their missle bases ASAP and if possible conquered.

I update the bomber design to pack 2 small SP-V racks instead of the single big one but leave it unchange otherwise - the latest shields, armor and bc seem too expensive and not worth the money for our intended targets (defenseless bases and baby fleets fresh from the assembly line)

2508

• 1st Sakkra wave at Xengara destroyed w/o losses, 2nd wave due in 3 turns, 3rd wave (53 Hydras) in 6 turns
• payback time :thumbdown : 12 beam5s sent to raid Toranor, a single amb/spv sent for a field test to undefended Gienah.

2509

• Toranor: The Sakkra Valkyrie design features 2 doom virus. beam5s destroy 4 ships and all bases with neutron basters
• Gienah: the single bomber takes out 9 missle bases before running out of ammo
• Send 66 troopers from Sol and 20 from Mentar to Toranor
• 4 bombers + 2 beam5s sent to Escalon to lure the fleet from Vega, the other UR
• ship production halted to fill the reserve for Toranor

2510

• fusion rifle pops (just in time ), megabolt next, queue: auto blaster, pulsons, Tachyon beam
• Toranor captured! got gatling, rc5!, duralloy, adv. soil!!, range6, it6. Only incoming fleet is a lone colship, so we will easily be able to fortify it.
• Xengara will also complete its first base next turn (built by hand as there has been no time to construct factories).
• The 46 Hydras left Vega for Gienah!!!!

Attacks to Vega and Escalon are underway. Xengara has Alkari and Sakkra fleets incoming. Toranor and Xengara have enough reserve money left for this turn. Since we've learned rc5 and adv. soil, I leave the sliders for the next emperor to sort out.

Roster:

Zed <-- UP NOW
Dathon <-- On Deck
StuporMan
ignatius <-- Just played

Good luck, Zed!

ignatius

 

[Zed-F]

I'll try to get this tonight or tomorrow.

 

[Zed-F]

Well, I didn't genocide the Sakkra. Quite. I left them Primodius, an UltraPoor tucked away at the bottom of the map, with no factories, a ton of waste, and 6 pop. Then I made peace with them. Of course most of their fleet is flying around near our planets, and many are on the way to Gienah (their last world near the middle of the map) but they should all turn around and head for Primodius as soon as they get there due to the peace treaty.

We actually did lose a couple ships to them. They have one design called Valkyrie, a large with a couple Doom Virus and a few Hard Beams, which they could in theory mount an offensive with, if they had more than a handful and their economy wasn't a complete ruin. Otherwise, most of their ships can hurt our navy but are toothless against our bases.

I also took Altair off the birds' hands, because I could. They had Stinger missles and so were able to take out some of our bombers, but they lacked the latest generation ECM (which has been what had removed a lot of our bombers' bite against the Sakkra) and thus their bases went down quickly enough regardless. The birds are down to one planet, Rigel. I made peace with the birds since they were allied with the Sakkra and I wasn't sure we wanted to exterminate them, but Rigel is a pretty nice planet if you'd like to grab it anyway. We'll need a few more bombers in the area though.

During my turns, the Bulrathi also had an erratic brain spasm and declared war. We send them a .wav of the sound of guns swiveling to track a new target... Our northern colonies start building a new bomber to tackle the bears, who have scatter packs and merculite missiles so aren't quite the pushover the lizards were missile-wise. I gather a fleet and put the smackdown on Ursa. Unfortunately I didn't realize it's in a nebula, and our shields didn't work; fortunately our attack succeeds anyway and we steal what pitiful tech the Bears have up on us as well as taking the planet. However, the bears only have RC 2! It will take quite a while for us to stand up any planets in their empire (good thing we don't need any more tech off them.) This is especially true for Ursa, which doesn't benefit from a planetary shield, though at least it can build lots of missile bases quickly to compensate.

Anyway, Ursa is building Gaia at the moment (due this turn) and will probably be a long time building factories and bases. The bears have a couple huges incoming but if we can get a decent complement of bases up quickly we can probably repel them. Other problem spots include Gienah and Altair, other recent conquests with enemy fleets incoming. Gienah in particular is vulnerable, since it's only got about 10 pop at the moment and we can't send any more via transports until the Sakkra and Alkari fleets incoming there clear out (even though we are at peace and they won't attack the planet, they will still shoot down the transports.) However, both Gienah and Altair ought to be safe due to recent peace treaties.

I have a few pics attached, including Primodius, the Sakkra homeworld-in-exile, plus the current map of the galaxy. Since the bears don't have any terraforming tech, the rocks just have Terra+30, and the human, bird, and lizard empires are all tiny, we can probably win the next election by conquest (i.e. we hold 1/2 the planets and 2/3 of the vote by ourselves) if we bulk up on votes as much as possible in the next 4 years before the vote in 2525.

Roster:
Zed <-- Just played
Dathon <-- UP NOW
StuporMan <-- On Deck
ignatius

 

[StuporMan]

Haven't we won this thing by vote already (5-6 times over)?

I thought we were continuing to extermination victory, or are we going to consider conquest sufficient?

It shouldn't take too many more turns to just bomb out the remaining AI, taking only 1 or 2 refueling stations.

 

[Zed-F]

Different levels of victory, Stup. We've won by diplo several times, this is the first time we conquest win on this map. (We also win domination at this point.)

I consider there to be four levels of victory. There is extermination victory, all rival species wiped out to the last sentient. There is conquest victory, reaching the point at which you could vote yourself emperor on the strength of your own votes alone, without need for any support from rivals. This means you account for two thirds or more of all population. There is domination victory, where you possess half or more of the stars in the galaxy. (The GNN news will report when a species reaches that point). This victory may or may not overlap with the conquest victory. Then finally, there is the lowest level of victory, the diplomatic victory, in which you've won the vote by gaining the support of other empires through diplomatic means.

There's no challenge left at this point; from here on out we will steamroller the opposition. Some people consider that fun, I consider it rather dull. Of course we can continue to exterminate the bears, rocks, birds, and apes, if that's what people want to do, but I personally would rather get on with the next challenge. Besides, isn't the other team pretty much done anyway?

 

[StuporMan]

Thanks for the clarification Zed. I just wanted to check to be sure we were all in agreement on accepting victory. I have no problem assuming we will win easily at this point.

If I could make a request, I would have the Alkari genocided for making me pay them off a few turns ago. After that is done, I am happy with any victory. Take us home Dathon!

Stup

 

[ignatius]

Conqest is fine with me, if we can pull it off in 4 turns - if not, it will be extermination anyway, as it should be faster than waiting for the next vote.

ignatius

 

[dathon78]

Time's past me by on this one; skip requested. Sorry for the delay!

dathon

 

[StuporMan]

Well, I guess I will just need to do my best Dathon impression. I have the save and, ...

Wait a minute, why is it still 2510? Zed, I think you posted the wrong save. There are still a bunch of Sakkra around.

 

[Zed-F]

A-um? Hm, ok I will repost it tonight.

 

[Zed-F]

Ok, this should be the save...

 

[dathon78]

I can actually probably get this tomorrow.

dathon

 

[dathon78]

Looks like the consensus was for a conquest victory, so that's what I took. Built some colonists, nuked a few bear worlds to reduce their vote, and fulfilled Stup's request Pictures attached. Now to see how team b did

dathon

 

[StuporMan]

Yay Dathon! Anyone else have an urge to get some BBQ Chicken?

At any rate, this game would have been more interesting if 2/3 of the Major powers hadn't been Erratic. The AI's beat themselves this game, and they freely admitted it by giving us an early Diplo Win.

I hope the others had a more interesting time.