RBO OSG7: Always War Hard

[ToddMarshall]

2454 - The big scary stack flies southeast Xendala was theirs for the sporing.

2455 -

2456 - Yet annother attack at Reticuli. This time we have a better response, thanks to the lack of spore ships.

They all die, we lose

Anti Matter torps hit, we go for a REAL MISSILE. SCATTER PACK VII

Xendala finishes its Shield

I switch most of the builds back to bomber. Everything except the fleet in the northwest is sent to Xendala.

2457 - I decide to go for the Silicoids Planet Primordius next. Its right next door to Xendala, so should be protectable. I go ahead and send 40 million from the Military Academy

2459 - So the Psilon fleet I've been preparing to meet for ages at their old Nebula terran shows up.. Well, the first of 3 waves does anyway. Whats it got?

If this wasn't a nebula, I'd have nothing to fear. Problem is, it IS a nebula

But, umm, they run

The next wave is due next turn. It's got 42 Star streaks and an unknown Huge. We may not be as lucky

The big, scary stack has returned and settled Antares.... It's a bit of a risk, but I send some of the fleet to assist the Marines arriving at Primordius next turn.

2460 - Oh swell. That Psilon Dread has 5 missile racks and 14 racks of spores... but it's no problem for us (whew) Only one large ship escapes out of that whole stack (1 dread 12 Larges, 42 mediums)

Class V Deflectors hit, we go for Personal Absorption over Class VI

It's 50 million vs 20 million at Primordius. We win with 36 million remaining. Looks like 16 million are sucking vacuum =/

Well, I didn't take nearly as many planets as I hoped. Partially because I wanted to wait for Fusion Drives to make the bomber (probably not needed). Partially because we don't have the antidote tech and I wanted to try to avoid losing annother planet to the cowardly Alkari.....

I hate races that use bioweapons. I don't mind if they can out us, but turning kitties into pudding from orbit?? Now thats just wrong

Looking forward, I think we'll be able to finish this thing in the next 30 or so turns. In looking at the map, all we really need to do now is take the races homeworlds to get enough range to glass the rest. And we now have the bombers to glass about anywhere, and the fighters/missile boats to guard planets from recolonization.

Here is the save: If anyone wants to lead us to victory, go right ahead. If not, I'll finish it sometime in the next few days.

http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads10/RBO7_Twilight.zip

 

[vmxa]

Alright I will take a spin, not going to be verbose on the report.

 

[vmxa]

Whoops got vetoed on that. I have not been able to finish my chores from she who must be obey. I am still working on my civ4 game. So go ahead Manic.

 

[Zed-F]

I'll get it quickly then.

 

[Zed-F]

Pre-turn look over: I find it ironic that a bomber named after me would have AMR on it, when I think it's a fairly useless special. I build another design that skips the AMR and instead takes BC2, Fusion Engines, Stabilizer, and a second Fusion Bomb for double the firepower. So I go ahead and make that design, and start production. Having 2 stacks of bombers to shoot at will make the AI's job that much harder -- they shoot at one, the other stack moves in and waxes the bases, causing the missles to disappear, at which point the AI usually retreats.

Goals: capture enough planets to give us the range we need to wipe the galaxy, then do so.

Everywhere that's building fighters, switches to bombers. We are not going to need more fighters than we already have for this; we only have a couple more planets we need to take and hold. We will glass the rest. The key is to strike with strategic speed at planets where the enemy fleet is not. For this we will not bring along fighters or missle boats; those will be used to defend those few planets we will capture rather than raze. Some of those planets will need to be razed more than once as they get resettled, but that's ok. I will make sure to have plenty of bombers on hand to accomplish that little task.

Transmission from Mrrshan to all citizens of all other races in the galaxy:

The hour of prophecy is at hand. Resistance is futile. You will be eliminated.

2462: Eliminate Antares. Steal Mass Driver from Bulrathi.
2463: Eliminate Rana. Steal Merculites from Psilons.
2464: Destroy missle bases on Altair. Send in the troops. They will take a while to get there.
2465: Eliminate Gion.
2466: Eliminate Phantos.
2467: Eliminate Irma.
2468: Eliminate Mentar, Zhardan, and the Psilons. Other races give me an attaboy.
2469: Eliminate Ursa, Ryoun, Antares. Destroy missle bases on Sssla. Send in the troops, again the slowest part of this whole operation, especially since we have no Advanced Scanners to pre-scout the world for us. Other races give me an attaboy for attacking Bulrathi.
2470: Eliminate Imra, Omicron, Yarrow. Decide to build a LR small bomber for Esper, a planet that's out of range from Altair. It has fusion engines, stabilizer, a fusion bomb, BC3, and tanks.
2471: Eliminate Argus, bomb Trax but not enough to eliminate it. The Alkari had 2 artifacts worlds! Too bad for them the operative word is had.
2472: Eliminate Pollus, Gion, Trax. We have enough ships; maintenance is at 16%. Stop shipbuilding.
2473: Eliminate Ryoun. Capture Sssla. More planets can now be targeted for destruction, goody!
2474: Eliminate Volantis, Raydan, Omicron, Gion, and the Bulrathi.
2475: Atmospheric Terraforming comes in. Eliminate Nyarl, Kronos, Esper, the Silicoids, and the Alkari. Sakkra only last another round because they colonized Phantos this turn. Soon to be rectified.
2476: Learn Impulse Drives. Eliminate Phantos.

There, that didn't take too long. See, I can conquer stuff quickly if I put my mind to it. Note, I didn't talk too much about the Alkari 'death fleet' that Maniac talked about. For the most part, it was preoccupied running from fire to fire as I wiped out the planets that the Alkari left unguarded. It could only be in one place at a time! That's the weakness of the 'one big fleet' approach, especially if your strategic speed leaves something to be desired. Ultimately I did wind up facing off against that fleet with ~350 fighters and a hundred or so missle boats, and wiped them out (though it did cost a couple hundred fighters and a couple dozen boats.) They didn't have enough computers on their fighters to really be able to hit ours all that well, whereas our gunnery bonus and computers overcame their defensive bonus much better as their ships were lower-tech.

For the curious, the save from the penultimate turn:
http://www.civfanatics.net/uploads10/RBO7_Twilight2.zip

 

[ToddMarshall]

Impressive. I didn't expect them to last 30 turns, but I did think it would take more than 16 simply because of the transit time for the marines.

I hadn't thought about making a 2nd bomber stack. That made sense as we had the slot and weren't going to need it for anything else. The fighters were to defend that UP we took from the Psilons, as if the Alkari stack which had over 1k fighters at that point had come for it, they would have spored us to death and we'd have lost supply range. Thats one reason I took Primordius, so we'd have a 2nd base planet if things went sour.

AMR is worthless?? vs the crappy nuke missiles they had?? It takes almost no space and costs almost no BC. I can't agree that its worthless.

I won't argue that your design wasn't better however. Not sure how I missed that I could design a bomber with 2 racks of bombs. That was

Also, I don't use the wait button, which I believe you do. If you use the wait button, then yeah AMR is worthless.

Edit: Bah. I thought I'd take a quick crack at it myself. Should only take 20 minutes w/o report writing. Zed owns me. I only managed to get the Bulrathi/Psilons down to 1 planet and the Alkari to 2 in his victory year. I didn't make any new designs, however. The Bomber we had was more than sufficient as 17 bases would kill like 3 per shot....

 

[vmxa]

It think a new design would have allowed 4 parsec engine and the old had 2 nuclear engine iirc. So if you could send the slow ones to the closer planets and the new ones could cover more space in the time frame.

Even if you had to give up something in the new ship, not having to use those slow ones could make the difference.

 

[ToddMarshall]

The bombers we had warp 4. The other ships had warp 3. Must be my style. I hate having planets get recolonized so I tend to leave a small force behind at planets to shoot down arriving colony ships.

It's not like I did a TERRIBLE job. I would have had it over 3 turns later. Not a big deal. Still, I've got a ways to go to become as efficient as he is. I knew that going in.

 

[vmxa]

Ah I got my wires crossed. I thought I saw 2 speed bombers, but it may have been another game or just dementia. Anyway I never see any need to be in a hurry to finish TBS games.

Well mite be if it was a large map lol.

 

[Zed-F]

Actually, I didn't use the wait button at all. You do not need to use the wait button if (a) you will not take significant casualties from enemy missle bases on your way in, or (b) you have 2+ bomber stacks in your attack fleet, and can still paste the missle bases in a single volley from your bombers less the one stack the missle bases shoot at on the way in. (The one being the decoy just moves to evade the missles while the other stacks take down the bases.) The latter is what I did here; with two stacks of bombers, the AI missle base fire never reached its chosen target before the missle bases were vaporized by the stack they didn't target.

If you have good missles relative to the enemy shields, you can often present the same sort of dilemna to the AI. They will usually choose to shoot the bombers, which can give your missle boats enough time to lay down serious punishment. Of course this applies more if you favour 5-racks rather than 2-racks; the latter don't need a decoy for shoot-n-scoot tactics to work well.

AMR is worthless?? vs the crappy nuke missiles they had?? It takes almost no space and costs almost no BC. I can't agree that its worthless.

The question is, what are you going to put AMR on? A small bomber? 90+% of the time you can fit in a second/better bomb in the space the AMR would take, or else your opponents have high enough tech missles that AMR would not be terribly efficient at stopping them. Besides, the job of the bomber is to not allow the missles to reach the stack in the first place, if possible -- and it often is. While there may be some cases where where AMR is justified, I'm hard pressed to think of any where more firepower, better maneuverability, or better shielding wouldn't be a more useful way to use that space. To me, AMR is like a Jammer -- something you throw on for anti-missle defense only when your options are limited due to tech gaps elsewhere.

 

[ToddMarshall]

Well, in my experience its not 90%, more like 50% of the time AMR is useful. Here, the 2nd bomb fit and I just didnt see it. I nearly allways check for that before straping AMR on, I dono what the heck I was doing

I haven't usually made 2 stacks of the same kind of bomber, though I suppose it would work well for decoy. Thats something I usually use my fighter stack for. Same principal, diffrent execution

I hardly ever build 5 shot missile boats actually, because I prefer to make small platform boats when possible, or fit the state of the art racks on mediums, which, by the time you are talking Scatter V or Stingers takes ages for a 5 shot + good BC. The extra speed is also hard to ignore.

This was a rare case where I felt the 5 shot rack was very justified however. When we started those, they were our ONLY warship, so I reasoned the staying power of the 5 shotter was important