RBSotS1 SG2

[haphazard1]

Looks pretty good, Tyrmith!

PD not in the tree...ick. This will be a problem down the road, although there are other options. Or we might get lucky with salvage later.

Nice work with the big battle. They have taken substantially more casualties than we have, and are running out of their latest ships and will have to start using their older stuff. Also, I suspect the "Hirru" type is their CnC so they are down to the last one, and the "Shuulsi Ma" types are probably tankers. So at the rate we have been killing them they may have 1 more turn's worth of fighting ships and then it will be mopping up. And if we get their last CnC then we will really be able to smash them at a bigger advantage.

Atalanti...this is a problem. This is an independent Tarka planet, right? (I get confused between the two independents.) So the local Morrigi should not be able to just absorb it, even if we are not there. They will have to face the planetary missiles and the sat ring's missiles, and will take losses. And even if they win they end up with a planet with a handful of imperials and no defenses, which we could bring our Izakis fleet over and smash.

The biggest issue is that if they take the planet they will almost certainly kill our gate, and then we can't do much to them. So I think we probably want to have a substantial presence at Atalanti, which will have to come from our forces at Izakis. But we should have enough. I would send a couple CnC, a couple gates, and maybe 35 ships -- would that be enough to face them down, given they will be fighting the planet as well? I am not sure how auto-resolve would affect the results, and we have to auto-dove to avoid getting hit by the planet ourselves. Maybe send more ships, using some of our older models to increase the bulk of our force?

Anyway, very solid results Tyrmith! Let's see what the rest of the team thinks.

[Mardoc]

Also - for general consideration; it seems the Liir have gone all-in on lasers. Therefore we should eventually pick up Reflective Coating. When's a good time? When we've got trade in, and are putting most of the budget to freighters?

Another general consideration question: our colony development budget is down to 2K, probably 0 next turn. When do we want to grab another world? And which should it be? Personally, I think this one is ripe for the grabbing, well, now:


If we dump a colship here every turn, I don't think it'll be long before it's managable cost, and that's a decent size, very nice amount of resources planet. Plus it's right in the CH band where both Liir and Tarka will want it, and fairly close to their region of space; as Tyrmith just demonstrated, it's a lot easier to hold onto a world once we have colonists there.

[haphazard1]

Do we have a gate there, Mardoc?

I remember sending one there during my turnset as it did not have one. But with so many fleets getting intercepted....

Assuming we do have a gate, I agree we should grab it. It denies a very nice planet (for two of them, anyway) to our rivals and gives us a place to drop the colonizers we will be builing anyway for morale reasons. And as you note it will eventually be a pretty nice world.

It will cost us some cash during development, but not too much. Especially as we can focus entirely on terraforming as our surplus colonizers provide all the infra we need. And we need to keep expanding, keep grabbing more systems, to keep pace with our rivals.

Reflective Coat could be useful, but I think we need to stay focused on getting to trade, then to cruisers. RC will also increase the cost of building new ships, although it would give them better durability against the local Liir. Are any of the other AI using lasers heavily? All these small skirmishes at least keep us informed what our opponents are using.

Edit: What about Etos'che? Has it hit maximum civilians yet? If so, we need to start building a colonizer per turn there as well. So we will have heaps of colonizers to use.

Also, what is our total income now? Would it be worth taking a few turns after Cybernetic Interfaces comes in to build a million credit reserve, and offset these morale problems?

[Mardoc]

Do we have a gate there, Mardoc?

I remember sending one there during my turnset as it did not have one. But with so many fleets getting intercepted....

It's always the little things that get you. No, and there's a note for '5 Tarka DD's', which I'm guessing is the reason why not. It's...probably too late, then.

Next best is probably this one, but it's much less of a slam dunk case:


I think it's still worth grabbing, but probably not until we've built up more of a backlog of colonizers, or maybe even not until we make it to Biomes.

Reflective Coat could be useful, but I think we need to stay focused on getting to trade, then to cruisers. RC will also increase the cost of building new ships, although it would give them better durability against the local Liir. Are any of the other AI using lasers heavily? All these small skirmishes at least keep us informed what our opponents are using.

The last turn, the Tarka and Morrigi were both using ballistic weapons. So you've probably got a strong point there, too. We can just suffer through the Liir and swamp them with numbers, rather than specialize on taking them out while the others hit our expensive mirror finishes with rocks and BB's

[Mardoc]

Edit: What about Etos'che? Has it hit maximum civilians yet? If so, we need to start building a colonizer per turn there as well. So we will have heaps of colonizers to use.

Also, what is our total income now? Would it be worth taking a few turns after Cybernetic Interfaces comes in to build a million credit reserve, and offset these morale problems?

Yes, Etos'che is full up too; Morale down to 47. Income, net of required expenses, looks about 500K/turn; so maybe you're right, maybe this is a good time and place to stop that worry. And once we stop fighting at Izakis, it is up to 300/400 million civilians, so it's close to the limit too.

What does morale do, exactly? I'm heading off to the wiki to try to answer that.

Edit: ah, it's significant. These only apply to Civilian production, but we're starting to get a significant amount of Civilians:
20 At this level or below there is an Output Penalty of -50%.
25 At this level or below there is a chance of a Rebellion starting.
50 The starting morale level. Also the level morale resets to when the civilian population is below 100 Million.
85 At this level or above there is an Output Bonus of +50%.

[Tyrmith]

We do have quite a few laser ships still. Using those up first could be cost effective long term if we don't feel they'll be useful soon, especially since we're still using basic lasers on those ships.

Edit: Our budget

[haphazard1]

Yes, morale is pretty important to keep an eye on. And as multiple planets start getting penalized due to max civilians, I think we should go ahead and build up the 1 million reserve fund. We could stop building the colonizers and stay even, or keep building them and get a slow increase in morale.

OK, our budget is looking nicer than I remember. Building up the million reserve should only take 2-3 turns if we stop research spending. So after we finish Cynernetic Interfaces (and get a 20% IO boost everywhere ) we can take a couple turns and that should solve our morale issues.

Noshu looks like a decent enough candidate to me -- a bit higher CH, a bit lower resources. But it has an asteroid belt which will mean more resources once we reach Asteroid Mining tech. Certainly we should take it for continued expansion and to deny it to our enemies -- as happened with Niishini. We don't want to grab a bunch of high CH worlds at once until we have biomes, but one at a time we can afford.

If the Morrigi and Tarka are using mostly ballistics, then we probably do not want to put the research into Reflective Coating. At least not right now. There might be a case for Polysilicate Alloys, but again I think we should keep along our path to trade (more income) and cruisers (lots of different goodies).

[Mardoc]

We do have quite a few laser ships still. Using those up first could be cost effective long term if we don't feel they'll be useful soon, especially since we're still using basic lasers on those ships.

I agree - the question is where to use them that we're willing to be less effective as a result? Maybe stack them with MD ships as part of anti-VN pickets, and put them out front so they get eaten first?

Edit: Oh, and in case it wasn't clear before: Tyrmith, I think you're handling the empire well; go ahead and finish up your turnset.

[antisocialmunky]

We do have quite a few laser ships still. Using those up first could be cost effective long term if we don't feel they'll be useful soon, especially since we're still using basic lasers on those ships.

Edit: Our budget

So... has anyone amused themselves yet by animating Pacman via dragging the research slider?

[Zed-F]

Good discussion all! You've pretty much come to the same conclusions as I would have advised, so it shows you've come up to speed pretty nicely on some of the basics of research prioritization.

Yes, trade and cruisers is more important than reflective coat at this juncture.

I also agree with the plan to save up our $1M nest egg for morale purposes after Cyber Interfaces completes -- or rather, since Cyber Interfaces is close to completing now, turn down research to 25% or so and start saving, hoping for a breakthrough.

Should silent scream have the tech to be able to turn fleets around mid-flight?

Liir don't need any tech to do that, but the AI generally doesn't.

I don't think I executed this battle even close to perfectly, though the gate did hold up better to missile fire then I thought it would (I did have 3 extras in the fleet, so we weren't going to be screwed even if they did kill it), additionally their fleet was extremely obsessed with the gate, the missiles from the enemy fleet was targeting our gate the entire time, our CnC was totally ignored, which I used to shoot down missiles heading to the gate.

With such simple ships as we have on hand, the only real tactics we need are to stick together for mutual protection, try to get close, and pound away. It's hard to say from your description how close you were able to get, but enemies being obsessed with the gate is expected. It is worth noting that deployed gates do get a defensive bonus from being anchored to space and time, so they are tougher than they might otherwise appear -- at least the mission section is.

I agree - the question is where to use them that we're willing to be less effective as a result? Maybe stack them with MD ships as part of anti-VN pickets, and put them out front so they get eaten first?

Don't forget there are a couple uses we can always make of obsolete ships like our old red laser DDs:
1) Outnumbering bonus! Whenever we need to mass a significant fleet, these can give us a numerical boost that will help us field more of our newer ships.
2) Cardboard cutouts on the walls: If the AI wants to attack somewhere and has scanner range to the planet in question, the AI will delay attacking until it feels comfortable it can defeat whatever forces it can see stationed there. The more ships we have manning the borders of our empire, the longer we can defer enemy aggression.

Edit: Oh, and in case it wasn't clear before: Tyrmith, I think you're handling the empire well; go ahead and finish up your turnset.

Sounds fine to me. About the only thing I would have done different at the strategic level is finish Cyber Interfaces first and then get VRF, since when we pause researching a tech like that we gradually lose invested research points every turn we are not researching it. We probably went from 72% complete all the way back down to 22% complete by that detour, and we just showed that while VRF was nice it certainly wasn't critical to the outcome of the battle.

Go ahead and split the fleet and send a little more than half to Atalanti to deal with the Morrigi there. We'll probably want about half the newer ships and all the older cardboard cutouts for outnumbering purposes, to make certain to keep our gate safe. Up to you whether to fight in manual or peaceful autoresolve -- the latter would be better for our relations with the Morrigi of course. If you do fight manually there, make sure not to approach the planet and just let the Morrigi take the brunt of it. We'll probably have to eat some planet missiles but hopefully not too many.