Imperium 20, Timmy

[timmy827]

The peaceful ideal was tried, and found wanting

Conquest victory in 2500. Will have the whole report in a couple of days; was out of town all weekend and will probably take until Wednesday to catch up with all of those pesky higher priorities than putting together a writeup. Sorry, should have done this in advance.....

[timmy827]

Apologies for the short report and few pictures. I enjoyed this game a lot and think I blew through it in just a couple sittings. I was not in the mood to write a lot or log many pictures as it was just after I put together a pretty detailed writeup of Adventure 37 in the Civ4 section. Also MOO is less conducive to reporting too since you have to manually switch away from the game and save your printscreens, as well as clicking through a few screens to find the ingame date. Civ4 is a lot easier for me to write up now - never switch away from the game, just hit printscreen about 100 times. Only about 10% of those will get cropped for the report, but it's great for logging enough information to reconstruct a narrative 3 weeks after you've played, without breaking the flow of the game at all.
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Hmmm...Actually I can forsee having more problems defending our worlds than taking over others. Nuke bombs can actually be effective for a while, and we can use bioweapons as a replacement.
Other weapons - the pulsars in the Propulsion field may be of use, although they are unlikely to do anything against large/huges. I can forsee repulsors and warp dissipators being of use. Of course, I'm praying that each planetary sheild is present.

I wrote northing about the opening, as far as I remember it was a pretty standard one for Hard - mostly farmer's gambit, tried to get 1 or 2 bases in border worlds to stop early AI attacks. In this 2312 map you can see that we've been given a nice start with many habitable worlds, and they were on the whole pretty large too.



Stupid Erratic Klackons DOW'd me in 2349, the date of the above map. Seeing as how they still haven't kicked my scout off of Endoria (the closest red flag to me), I'm not exactly afraid. Well, they did cause problems by sending small attacks to virtually every world I owned, had to scramble some popguns and nuke bases. Got through without losing a planet, one invasion fought off. 20 turns later the bugs offered a treaty and I accepted, first vote was also held with the Mrrshans drawing a worrying amount of support against me. Then the blasted Silicoids declare, and I nearly lose the 2375 vote, thankfully Klackons did not vote for Mrrshans.

Klackons eventually come back, and I am in trouble as they have ships armed with both fusion bombs and death spores than can get past my sheilds.

Mentar and 3 other worlds come under siege; fortunately while the Klackons can slice through pathetic Nuke bases with impunity, they can't kill colonists fast enough to bomb out the worlds, and I fight off a round of invasions. This pattern would continue through the whole game - I was unable to rely on planetary shields to keep missile bases alive, but worlds could never really bombed out and would have to be taken by invasion. I had big worlds from good starting territory plus a tech lead, and enough gropo from the Construction and Force Field trees to make losing any worlds very doubtful, although of course the economic cost of the causualties was pretty high and I didn't want to play the whole game with AI fleets plinking away at my people.

Finally the tech breakthrough comes that gets me past this current deadlock:

I rarely use Repulsors normally but here they are practically gamewinning. Current Klackon designs have no 2-space weapons so this is invulnerable. Unfortunately, Klackon larges with autorepair are equally invulnerable to single ships of this design, but eventually this can force draws in battles. This convinces the bugs to sign peace again.

I'm in some phony wars with Darloks and Mrrsshans for a while, plotting my next moves. Darloks draw the short straw, weak Hyper-V missiles and no planetary shield. I raze and refound Whynil with nuke bombers escorted by an Autorepair-Repulsor-HvyLaser update of the above design, then repeat at Nazin with death spores. Finishing advanced soil was actually kind of irritating as a spored world must complete the Fertile and Gaia terraforming before cleaning up the biowaste, if you could clean up first and ship in more settlers, standing those worlds up would go a lot faster. I also took the 2nd to last Darlok world, Quayal, but that may have been a weed move as it's in a nebula so I am totally reliant on a fleet to defend it. I decide to let it fend for itself, I need to move now on the Klackons and Silicoids before they get ships immune to my heavy lasers.



The game theme unfortunately got kind of lost with neighbors that were Erratic (Klacks), Aggressive (Silicoids), and Xenophobic (Darloks, Mrrshans. Never formally met the Bulrathi). Got freqent DOW's and it did not seem like a mostly-peaceful approach would yield a win. In fact, I don't think I've ever managed a true Diplo win by RB standards, it seems you'd have to sort of luck into one (or use the Human diplo bonus). I left the Mrrshans alone due to logistics and started moving on Klackon and Silicoid worlds in my vicinity as they kept DoWing. I felt I had to cash out a win soon or would get stuck with some AI's finally making ships that were truly invulnerable to heavy lasers and suffering a slow decline. I toyed with the ideas of making my own golemships - huge, double-armor, strong shields and ECMs, autorepair, max maneuverability, warp dissipator, repulsors, no weapons whatsoever. I think I could hold out quite a while longer by mostly dancing these around while the autorepair worked and freezing enemy ships until the battle round limit was reached. However I was afraid that the automated battles would not act accordingly (either retreating, or staying close to the enemy ships), and having to do more than about 3 of those with manual control would drive me nuts. So a vengeful win it would be, and with the technology restrictions the obvious choice was huge swarms of death sporers. Here's an example of those at work:

I was still using Heavy Laser ships as escorts, but had retreated them here since the enemy had no credible ships here. You can see my speed-3 could get mostly get around the slow Scatter Pack missiles; they'd still take volleys since the missile bases do not get destroyed until the end of combat (regular Fusion bombers would be able to first-strike the bases with sufficient numbers and never take hits) but those losses could easily be replaced.

Also, I know sporing worlds from the tactical screen is considered exploitative normally (not sure where I picked this up, upon writing the report I could not find an exploit list), but here there wasn't really much option as the AI's were getting planet shields online, enough to virtually neutralize nuclear bombs. The big deal is that you don't get the diplomatic hit from using them if it's not in the strategic bombing part of the turn. However I don't think it had that big of an effect on my game; I was already pretty despised and usually at war with 3 of the 4 met AI's anyways.

During the offensives, I was somewhat hampered by the fact that I kept going for shiny advanced Planetology things and forgetting to research Radiated. I was stuck at just Barren for the longest time - fine for expansion as there were no intermediate-hostile environment planets and the Silicoids grabbed the Toxic/Radiated well before I could research those, but not good when I'm trying to take more worlds. I was also concerned about being spread out as I really needed fleets to mount fully credible defenses, although getting Impulse Drives meant that each fleet could cover several worlds with diligent use of F8. In 2475 I tried for a peacefulish win just after taking Kholdan, signing peace with all except the Silicoids, who were the vote rival and disliked by most. Some more fighting bumped relations with the others into the positive range, but the Mrrsahns would not vote for me and I didn't have enough. So it was back to the warpath, although building up spored worlds was slow. I would have preferred to normal-bomb to avoid the pollution cleanup issues but as mentioned above the AI shields were too good. Since I couldn't get it done quickly by just by taking worlds, I sent all research to Planetology (getting to +100 along with Atmospheric & Advanced Soil) in conjunction with sporing out all but one Silicoid world a few years before 2500. That was enough:

[RefSteel]

Sounds like a great game! Our games went in very different directions from an early date, as I felt I had to go for very early war to be sure of winning on my own terms. (I always avoid using Death Spores if I can help it, not necessarily for fear of being exploitive, but for purely idiosyncratic reasons.) My first conquest, of a Silicoid world, came in the early 2350s! On the other hand, you did a very impressive job of turning your peaceful start into a decisive victory!
(Oh - and the Bulrathi you never formally met were Aggressive too.)
I remember after Imperium 12, there was a fair amount of debate over whether a no-weapons-tech game would be doable. Looks to me like we've demonstrated pretty well that it is ... or perhaps that anything is possible when playing the Brains with a start this strong!