RBMoo SG1 - Oh the Humanity - Team C

[Zed-F]

Got it. (Drasca, where are you??)

Well, TF requirements depend on the TF size you are trying to make. Generally, ground TFs you just send whatever number of transports you need, so transport TFs are usually small enough not to need extra escorts and stuff. I have not figured out how to send different transports that arrive on the same turn after different planets -- I am not sure how the "unload troops" button works so I have been using "unload all" -- so I want my transport TFs to be small and arrive on staggered turns and anyway. Military TFs tend to be larger and thus have rules regarding formations, and those rules seem reasonable to me. The problem is when we are building a large variety of ships, if we are not building them quickly (e.g. are not controlling our ship-production centers directly and don't make an effort to figure out how to direct the AI to build them quickly) then it becomes difficult to obey formation rules for new TFs due to lack of ships.

It helps that SR and LR ships can be used as escorts. Recon ships are the only ones that can be used for recon, however. Also, LR and SR TF have fewer rules -- they don't need any ships in the escort ring since the game presumes the LR and SR ships in the core may already have enough PD to take care of themselves.

One approach to resolving this is to make sure you are always building enough of the various ship types to be able to field the TFs you need to field. Another approach is to simplify your TF design by labelling all your main fighting ships as, for instance, LR ships, regardless of what weapons they actually carry. This does not affect their ability to do damage and attack targets, but it does affect their AI for target selection, preferred combat range, and so forth. You can get away with this if you expect to fight all your important battles manually or if your numerical/quality advantage is so great that you can overwhelm the enemy regardless.

As for the cruisers in that system, either they are system ships or they are already in a TF. You can't make TFs with ships that are in play; they are always drawn from the reserves. You can't split up TFs that are in play other than by disbanding them, waiting for them to return to the reserves, and reforming them into new TFs.

 

[Drasca]

I've been hanging back my opinions. The game itself doesn't interest me anymore, but this SG1 does. It is less of a matter of playing the game than discussing it. I think I'll try some crazy non-optimal stuff. Be be assured, if you guys are in it, I'll be too.

Its been a while, so I'll need to update a few things, as I've left my Moo3 unpatched and modded, but I've been lurking, just too ambivalent about my feelings on the game to post.

 

[Zed-F]

Turn done, file here. Report, short version: captured a couple Harvester planets, captured one Eoladi planet, captured a number fo Icthy planets, troops landed on another couple Icthy planets & on one Silicoid planet. Lost a couple stacks of ships taking out the Icthy home system but it should be pretty clear now. Ran out of troops to take things over with, waiting for some to come back from the delay box.

Drasca, if you want to do wild and wacky things, that fine with me; experiment away! I'm continuing to feel like there's not much focus to the game, partly because of the turn handoffs (I'm finding them much harder to handle than in Civ mainly because of the complexity of the game), partly because we're at war on so many fronts, and partly because we still don't have a real plan going to win the game (other than maybe sole survivor.) Moreover, this game is supposed to be one big experiment anyway. Accordingly, if we louse this one up by experimenting too much it won't bother me greatly.

One thing we might want to consider for future SGs -- institute a no economic micromanagement rule. This could speed up play and make for a more civ-like feel for the handoffs. The problem is that every participant would have to be fairly familiar with how to accomplish things (like convincing the AI to build larger spaceships, build useful DEAs in the right places, etc.) using only the macromanagement tools. Also, it might put a cap on how difficult an SG we can run, though that shouldn't be a real problem for a while. Anyway, it's a thought for the future.


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EDIT: Turn Summary

Economy: Lowered imperial tax to 5% and system tax to 0%. Raised planetary tax at our better-developed planets to compensate. Set empire-level financial policy to spending, it had been on savings. Went through and adjusted our larger planets to start production of more ships at a decent rate. Our best planets had been building single support troops, even though they can build battleships in just a couple turns... and probably will start to do so again once the ships I've set it to build are done. Something tells me we will need to figure out this macromanagement stuff a little better, or else turn off the econ AI, for the next game.

Intelligence: Our spy queue was empty so I started some more. Umm... that's it.

Diplomacy: I gave the Zibal system to the NOs. I had a couple offers refused by various parties. Umm... that's it.

Tech/Ship designs: I removed all my mods from the Classic_01 directory and that made a difference to the tech rates. We're still in the negative by a couple hundred percent on most tech areas but we're doing active research in Math and Social Sciences. Math is behind by a few levels so I set it to 25% and the rest to 15%. I considered redesigning our ships so that we only needed a couple designs, but I decided not to.

Military:
Aulavuana (Eoladi) - I finished off our conquest in the Malec system. I don't think we really need any more of their territory right now, and they are down to 7th on the powergraph, so Iidn't spend a lot of effort on this front.

Chachan (Silicoids): Destroyed all planetary defenses in the system at the cost of a few ships. We have troops on the largest planet in the system. Didn't spend a ton of effort here either.

Kar-Zinoaur (Harvesters): Sent over a modern carrier to boost our fighter presence. Destroyed all planetary defenses in the system and captured the Kar-Zinoaur homeworld. Again, not too much attention paid to this front.

Eritria (Icthys): Captured two planets in Indu San, destroyed all planetary defenses, troops en route to capture the third planet. Also captured a couple planets in Tabit. Repulsed a Pesite (Psilon) counterattack at Sirrah. This is where most of our forces are concentrated.

Other: There is an outpost formation at Trilar that should head to Paquient to suppress unrest.

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Drasca, you are up, followed by Brackard. Let's try to get back on a standard 24/48 rotation, ok?

 

[Zed-F]

If we are back to a 24/48 rotation, then Drasca should have got the game by now... Brackard, if there's no got it post by this evening, we'll skip Drasca again and you can take your turn.

 

[Brackard]

Roger that.

 

[Brackard]

Got it.

 

[Brackard]

It's amazing how much difference a 20 turns makes. The game looked entirely different when I opened it up again.

The only thing I really did this turn was continue assaults currently in progress. I did put together a carrier task force to use at Indu San and 5 or 6 ground transports but everything else is pretty much as it was.

War effort -

Siliciods - we finished taking the planet that was currently in progress. It was extremely close. We had one region left to take, they had 56 points of defense compared to our 48 of offense. I took them with a trap and took the planet. It was actually kind of fun.

Icthys - The entire Indu San system is now ours. I also took a Tabit planet (or two). There is still some prescence there and I have more transports just outside the system (Drasca or Meldor) waiting for orders.

All the gropos that were used in ground assaults have been disbanded and should be ready for action again shortly although I don't think we have any shortage of them....

All in all, it was a good test of ground battles. At least I can honestly say now that a statement I made on ground battles and massed assaults was incorrect.

Save file can be found here

 

[Zed-F]

Meldor, you are up. Drasca, if you are ready to take a turn and post got it before Meldor does, you can slip in before him.

 

[meldor]

Got it.

 

[meldor]

Don't have time for a big write up.

Attacked anything that moved.
Captured Albali III.
Lots of TFs headed for were I thought they were needed.
Got troops headed for the planets.

I will do better next time, but time is tight. I wanted to get my turns in before I left and get them posted.

The Game

 

[Zed-F]

Ok, got it.

 

[Zed-F]

 

[Zed-F]

Some key factors in our loss:
- Not enough focus on diplomacy -- in most cases, the reasons we didn't have good relations with various AI civs was mainly due to lack of consistently trying to improve relations, and we attacked the only people who were inherently inclined to be friendly with us
- Lack of focus economically. I deliberately stayed as much away from micromanagement as I could, but I noticed that our performance was much stronger when I did micromanage than when I let the AI manage things. Probably this is in part because we did not make a strong effort to manipulate the AI into doing what we wanted -- i.e. we didn't pay much attention to development plans, the "proper" way to manage ship designs so as to convince the AI to build what you want it to build, and especially make more use of the different economy settings so that our larger planets would build more ships
- We should have started on a X victory path much sooner. I started 8 armadas on their way during my turn but it was far too late.

In general, I'd say the last 1/3 or more of the game we were mostly just going through the motions, which is understandable considering entusiasm for the pre-patch game has waned all around. Perhaps next game will be better. Still, it does seem inherently more difficult to run a MOO SG than a Civ SG, if only because there are more things to do in MOO, more things to keep track of, more things to coordinate over turn breaks. Where one player feels weak, they are more likely to neglect that area and let teammates take up the slack, but because MOO is new and not easy to learn, this makes for a much more serious problem than it is in Civ.

Anyway, it seems likely that the best course is to wait for the patch, and try again, or stick with Imperiums where at least we don't have to worry about the problems associated with handoffs, until such time as the general level of understanding of the game improves (and the game is more worth making a serious commitment to.)

 

[JaxomCA]

Sorry for your loss but thank you for playing it through waning interest.

I had an idea to run the next Moo SG. At the moment it is very rough and need some adjustments but I think it may make the SG format more interesting. What if each player was in charge of a specific area of the game? Sort of like ministers working in their area of expertise to achieve the goals set by the emperor. In a 5 players team, it would go something like this:

• One player in charge of the economy, whose task is to oversee the economic development of each planets until they achieve maturity.
  
• Another in charge of the military. His tasks include ship design, fleet composition and prosecuting the wars requested by the emperor. He gets full control of the MBQ slider for planets designated as military shipyards.
  
• The third player is in charge of Science. He controls the research sliders and take full control of planets designated as research centers. His tasks include keeping track of the Alien's scientific progress, key technologies missing from our tree and finding a source to acquire the missing tech.
  
• The fourth player is in charge of foreign affairs. It is his job to deal with alien empires, either diplomatically or through undercover operations. He must staff the secret service and issue directives as to what stance to use with each Alien.
  
• Finally the Emperor is in charge of the empire expansion. He is in charge of scouting new systems, drawing borders, deciding on a global strategy to win. He makes the final call as to who is a friend or a foe.
  

By focusing on a specific area of the game, each player will have a better idea of what to report on his turn. He will issue directives for the other players to follow, report and comment on previous directives given and make requests for proper funding/infrastuctures to the appropriate player.

I am not sure how well such an SG would run, obviously it would depend on the individual player involvement. I know it provides a great opportunity for role-playing and I think it should make for more interesting reports and a smoother transition between players.

Sorry for putting this in your thread. I have been thinking about this for a while and your comments triggered my desire see what others would think about this.

 

[Brackard]

First of all, I'd like to thank you Zed for keeping this on course as best you could. This being my first SG, it was an...interesting experience to say the least. If nothing else, I learned that there was much, much more I need to learn to get on the same level as some of you here.

A few comments on Zed's end game notes:

The last 1/3 of the game was going through the motions: I believe that is 100% accurate. But in our current setup, that's pretty much all we had to do. We didn't have any relations with anybody. Those people we DID have good relations with were in the senate so we had to attack them. It was simply a race against time. We had more than enough in terms of ships and gropos to handle the many fronts that I personally didn't see any real reason to have to adjust much in my turns.

Based on what I've read from the Civ SG, yes, a MOO SG looks much more difficult to implement. You may be right in one aspect though from a previous post. Longer turns might be needed as well. However we lost in turn 242. So if we were playing with 20 turn "turns", with 5 people, that means each player would have gotten to play 2 or 3 times before the win/loss.

I will have to say yes, I did neglect certain aspects of the empire on my turn in areas I felt weak. Let's take ship design (and naming conventions) for instance. Holy moly. Hopefully we'll get more characters for naming, but to put together a TF of LCR15dc65x. Shoot, I was just looking for a couple carriers. As to the designing of ships themselves? I'm generally going to redesign out of necessity (or if I get a better engine tech). I think if I'd have been pressured more, I'd have had more reason to HAVE to redesign ships. As it stood? There was really no reason to have to. We were always ahead in tech (8 levels at endgame?) and we generally had decent numbers of these ships at all the right places to get stuff done.

Jaxom: It would be interesting to see how that works out because the current state of the MOO SG needs to be tweaked just a tad. It does sound like fun though.

All in all, I'm glad I participated here. I learned a lot and I hope I didn't drag everyone here down too much. I tell you what though, after this and the 600+ turn unfisihed Imperium, I think I'm MOO'd out for awhile. I'll wait and watch to see what happens with the patch. Thanks everyone!

 

[Zed-F]

@Jaxom:

Might be worth a shot. The main problems I see right now are:

- We need to have an overall strategy defined fairly early in the game. Civ SG games often specify the target victory condition at the outset. More discussion amongst team members is needed to define strategy than we have seen so far.
- We need to have an active player presence in every significant area of play and not let things sit on auto-pilot unless we have deliberately chosen to do so. If we have chosen to let stuff go on auto-pilot we need a reasonable way to ensure that things will not fall apart too badly.
- One thing that will help with both of the above is if people are more familiar with all aspects of the game and feel comfortable (a) having an opinion on strategy questions and (b) digging into understanding all areas of the game so they won't let anything slide because they don't feel comfortable with it.
- We, as a group, need to get more comfortable with the macromanagement aspect of the game. We can't afford to let the AI run without effective guidance (which happened a fair bit this game) but without a turn-by-turn understanding of what has gone on previously it's difficult to get a feel for what's going on in the game at a micro level. In Civ SGs, people often spend a good amount of time before their first turn examining all the cities and figuring out what's going on; that just won't fly here except in the earliest parts of the game.

An SG is (usually) not a competition game, and certainly is much harder to maintain continuity in. Where an Imperium can be played quite effectively relying on micro control (and in fact since it is a competition you may want to engage more in micro control if it will improve your results,) an SG is better-suited to macro control so there are fewer interface points between the players and the AI -- since players can usually only transmit relatively high-level information across turn boundaries, it makes sense that that information should be about the highest-level interfaces in the game. In general, in an SG we want simple strategies that can be executed by everyone well.

Some examples of simplifications that can be applied to the game:
- If we don't want to focus on spying for a particular game, we can build defensive spies (political/economic/diplomatic) and leave them on security -- but everyone should remember to keep filling up the spy queue. Several times I would pick up a game and find nothing in the queue, or find scientific spies sitting around uninserted into enemy empires. We need to agree to an approach beforehand and stick with it -- if it needs to be changed then it should be brought up, changes discussed, and then everyone commits to implementing them.
- Fleets should be made as simple as possible. I don't think most players want to have many different kinds of ships to juggle when building fleets. We should only have a couple of utility designs that can handle any situation, so we can be reasonably confident of having them on hand when needed. Having only a few ships to worry about also means it's easier to make sure we design them in such a way that the AI will be more likely to build them.
- Beyond the initial few colonies, we should be relying on development plans after a certain point, and everyone should understand the basics of how to use them. The same applies to the war settings.

Bottom line: your idea might be good as a training tool -- if each player has a certain area of responsability, it might help them become motivated to learn about their area of responsability and hopefully help teach others about it, as well as provide direction in the game itself. However, we want every player to have a good grasp of all areas in the game in order that intelligent suggestions can be made, so each player should ultimately try to learn how to do each others' jobs. Even so, it may still be useful to have a single person who is responsible for that area to arbitrate any discussions.