Imperium 35 - be gentle, nad!

[Nad]

Hey guys,

it's a pleasure to see all your incoming reports!

Well, I hadn't played MOO for more than a year, so I thought about warming up with the gentle map and then switch to the extreme one. I played with kyrub's latest patch. Unfortunately, I suffered from a serious headache on the playing day, so deduct 5 - 10 % from my original playing strength.

Well, I kept the pre-game analysis short. At first I thought about entirely focussing on planetology in order to outbreed our enemies, but with only few planets available that didn't sound reasonable. Let's jump straight into the game:

2300 First gamble - sending the colony ship to the left green planet, started to flag all surrounding systems with scouts
2303 Well, wrong decision (size 10 planet to colonize), finally sending the col ship to Vulcan
2305 Opening up techs - selecting waste-80% and seeding +10 terra
2306 Seeding range4 (deciding for the short-term advantage)
2309 Settling Vulcan (the loss of time hurt despite my headache)
2310 Popping +10, cheering on tundra in the tree, but took eeco first
My mighty empire was setup:
   
2321 Hitting range4 (had bad luck) / going for nuclear and started assembling laser 1
2328 Hitting eeco / seeding tundra
2333 Settling Beta Ceti
2336 Maxed Sssla ("wasted" a couple of turns on early research) / seeding scanners
2337 Psilons have 6 systems (lovin' runaway Psilons)
2338 Popping tundra / seeding +30
2344 Settling Laan (tundra world to the south)/ Meeting Humans
2348 Settling Ukko
2354 Landing nucear engines / assembling laser 2 for Proteus (greenstar south of Laan)
2356 Darloks settle Kronos - coudn't hold it any longer and start a desperate spying attempt
2357 Beta Ceti turns fertile!
2358 Settling Proteus / receiving expansion warning from Humans
2665 Popping +30 / soil in tree
2373 Popping irc3
2384 First council vote: rbo35 against Humans
2390 Meeting the mighty Psilons
2393 Assembling npg 2 and popping merculites
2395 Popping soil / seeding atmospheric
2400 Routine Council vote: 19/29 for Humans (that was close!)

Meanwhile I had ordered our generals to prepare an attack fleet. We were in good shape and ready to go to war against the Humans!
   
2440 Invading Mobas with major tech grab
2446 Invading Omicron and stripping the Humans
   
At this point I had produced a large bomber fleet (grabbed am bomb) and even had a couple of huge hulls with ARS, heavy blast canons and repulsor beam. Basicly I felt safe and was preparing for a massive assault on the Psilon Empire, but the game had something different in mind:
2449 Council vote against Psilons, everyone loved them and of course hated us. Psilons won the election and I wasn't in the mood to fight a final war against runaway Brains, hence I accepted...

So I lost the gentle Imp35, but that shouldn't be a bad omen for the extreme one, right?

[Brackard]

Haven't read through all the reports yet, but I don't feel so bad about losing in the normal game now.

Thanks for that!

[Nad]

My pleasure! It is never a shame to lose an Imperia game. MOO punishes every mistake and I made many. I had reached a winning position (could have invaded at least one Psilon planet in the next turn for major tech grab), but messed up with the diplomacy throughout the whole game which cost me the victory...

Thanks for your report. I like the parallels of our games, especially that we both lost the Council vote in 2449.

[Brackard]

I was trying to figure out how you got those two human colonies, then saw you got them right before end game. My humans had allied with the Darloks and expanded way up into Psilon territory. They also had these monster ships running around that I had no chance of defeating at the moment. It would have taken quite awhile longer (if ever) to be able to sneak into that mess. My hope was that the monster fleet would move and I could invade. Never happened.

[Nad]

Yeah, I played way too pacifisticly and should have gone for the Humans much earlier. Just a tip: Sometimes you can even scare away a stack of monster ships with a decent bomber fleet (they sometimes retreat after overwhelming planetary defenses), otherwise the Humans offered at least two targets so one can run a fake attack...

[RefSteel]

I love all the different styles of report here; you did a great job of maximizing the detail you provided in the minimum number of words! I think you could have won your Final War here, but I can definitely empathize with accepting a loss AS a loss, especially with another map ready to be played!

[Nad]

You're right, I could and should have won the final war, but decided to take my headache to the extreme game.