RBSotS1 SG2

[Tyrmith]

Interturn
Everything looks shipshape, I offer ceasefire to Silent Scream and Jadewing, the two Morrigi races and they accept proclaiming a new era of peace between our civilizations. We toast, then go back home making bets on how many minutes this "era" would last.

Turn 1
-If you bet half a turn you just won. Color us shocked at their duplicity.


-Research on deflectors goes overbudget.


Turn 2
-Deflectors comes in. We have shields Mk1 and inertial cannon available off of deflectors (inertial cannons don't even seem to actually do damage- are they basically just useful if you're planning on kiting constantly?)



In any case I start research on Asteroid mining, four turns away.


Turn 3

-We get an invitation to a ceasefire. As far as I can tell they're on the other side of the galaxy, so I agree.


-I'm pretty much done placing jamDDs at our worlds. I'm building several more to add to the worlds where we just have a lonely gate and for use in our fleets.

Turn 4
A couple of our relic old DDs we sent out exploring awhile ago run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, there's no tankers anywhere near so they may be there awhile.

Turn 5
- Asteroid Mining comes in early. I set research on steelsong (four turns). We have the advanced stripmining available for research.


I've been moving a substantial amount of the fleet to an outpost gate near the tarka/purple morrigi to attack once we get a significent enough fleet through our gate system.

Turn 6
More random stranded obsolete DDs, more moving the fleet, etc.

Turn 7
More of the same.

Turn 8
Translate Steelsong comes in a turn early, I get us a NAP with the Liir (warriors of the mind) and start research on fusion, 10 turns away.

For kicks I see if I can get a ceasefire the Morrigi empires. The Yellow tell us where to stick it. The purple (Silent Scream) however agree to give peace a chance. (Spoiler alert! it's just for a turn)

Turn 9
Fleet of 22 Cruisers incoming to Shononu from "our" Tarka. I have a fleet of DDs and a fleet of cruisers set up to defend.

Turn 10
Annnnd I screw it up... Somehow the destroyer fleet is the one that is given priority over our cruiser fleet to be the first in battle? I had thought I had changed which fleet would defend first, but aparently not.

This sucks, and means we lose quite a few destroyers. We do end up taking out their first wave of cruisers, they do end up taking more damage then we do pointwise (and we can easily repair anything damaged but not destroyed), but it's very painful as we lose 16 APMD DDs + the CnC for the DD fleet as well as the gate (we have two more backup gates in the cruiser fleet, so at least I didn't strand a large part of our navy) as well as a significent amount of population. I did change things so our DeflectorAPMD ships are our reinforcements for the destroyers during the battle, which mopped up quite well, but this was needless to say very frustrating. What is the right way to choose which fleet is defending and which is held in reserve? I thought it had to deal with those star things at the top of the fleet on the sidebar (and I was sure I had done it that way in a private game... ), but aparently I fail at life.



Anyways, Apologies for sucking at defending right after watching Zed do a maginifecent defense from a far more worrying threat.

Conclusion
-We are 8 turns from Fusion. If we absolutely max out research we're barely able to close it to 6 turns, but it doesn't seem like the investment would be worth it.

- I have a fleet of DDs and a fleet of cruisers + auxilieries ready to launch an attack on what I was thinking Kuo'Dai, which is 11 turns away. From Zed's message it seems like he would have wanted an attack my turn set (or at least about to hit the planet in the next couple turns), but we wanted to just send a heavy scouting party or something, it forced me to take forever to get all our fleet through the gates, as cruisers suck up an insane amount of gate space/spectrum/quota/whatever that we have in limited supply. That combined with the diversion of Shononu means I'm only ready now to send them out. Right now they're targetting Kuo'Dai, which is a really nice looking world from our last report on the planet. Taking this out (or at least substantially reducing it productivity) would be useful.


- I've continued producing and sending out gate/tanker combos out to the other side. We do have several lazDDs that were sent out as sentries? and ran out of fuel far away from their destination. They're crazy outdated (still using red lasers I think), so I'm not even sure it's worth it to spend the time to gather them up again. Incidentily, The yellow morrigi who is nominally at war with us has been following some of our exploring fleets, but every time I've autopeaced he's left them alone, so hopefully as long as we continue doing that we'll be okay.

- We should have JammerDDs at just about every gate now. There were two colonies who had DDs that were intended for them and got diverted, they should be done making their own next turn.

- How do we intend to use the Deflector Cruisers? Should they be used as mainly the head of the fleet to soak up damage so the locust Cruisers can get in their damage with out getting hurt? Or are they intended to be the main battle fleet? I have quite a few in several of our battle fleets, with quite a number in the raiding force heading to the Tarka planet where there should be heavy missile damage. Feel free to comment on optimizing the composition of the fleet.

-Diplomatic relations:

Finances:

As of the save right now we'll be adding quite a bit to the treasury next turn as I don't have the planets set to build much next turn. This can be easily adjusted to either build more defector cruisers, locust cruisers, increase research, etc as I wasn't sure which direction we want to take things.

- None of our special projects have come through yet. Hopefully next turnset.

-Having shields mk1 available to research (not to mention deflectors) is quite a steal for us - both have quite a low percent chance of being available for us to research, so that is really nice to see. Are they something we will intend to integrate more fully into our fleet? Additionally what should we be aiming for for our fleet composition? I'm assuming we'll be weaning away from destroyers, but are we going to totally drop including them as we get further into the cruiser era? Also at the moment we have seperate destroyer and cruiser fleets, would it be better to integrate them?

Edit: Doh- I just realized that I didnt change the slider for Shononu- we probably want to set it to max terraforming, right?


The save:

[Zed-F]

Overall sounds like a decent turnset, Tyrmith. Don't worry about combat losses at Shononu; we can replace those easily enough. You're right that I would have liked to get the fleet launched during your turns, but at least we are in position to do so now.

If you bet half a turn you just won. Color us shocked at their duplicity.

Yep they are just too hemmed in to be willing to make peace. Silent Scream is the local pink Liir, BTW, not Morrigi. The Morrigi are white and yellow.

Deflectors comes in. We have shields Mk1 and inertial cannon available off of deflectors (inertial cannons don't even seem to actually do damage- are they basically just useful if you're planning on kiting constantly?)

Or if you want to pin someone to a particular area of space... for instance if you want to keep the range open for your big long range guns to do their work, or are planning to dump a whole load of corrosive missiles on them. Enough inertial cannon hits will slow enemies to the point where they can barely move.

A couple of our relic old DDs we sent out exploring awhile ago run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, there's no tankers anywhere near so they may be there awhile.

That's fine, they can just sit there, acting as interception bait.

What is the right way to choose which fleet is defending and which is held in reserve?

When the battle card comes up (where you select manual combat, auto-resolve, peaceful auto, etc.) it shows you a list of the fleets with command ships you have present in the system. By default the top fleet in the list is highlighted (the game will try and put the obvious fleet at the top if the choice is obvious.) If the choice is non-obvious, scroll to the fleet you want to use and click it to highlight it; the highlighted fleet will be the one that shows up initially.

How do we intend to use the Deflector Cruisers? Should they be used as mainly the head of the fleet to soak up damage so the locust Cruisers can get in their damage with out getting hurt? Or are they intended to be the main battle fleet? I have quite a few in several of our battle fleets, with quite a number in the raiding force heading to the Tarka planet where there should be heavy missile damage. Feel free to comment on optimizing the composition of the fleet.

Deflector cruisers are very good at soaking missile damage if you can predict where the missiles are coming from, less so in a furball. So you've got the right idea, we just want one or two of these on the field at a time to put at the head of the fleet while our locusts stay behind it and try to kill stuff as it approaches. We should expect our deflector cruisers to take a lot of punishment relative to the amount they dish out, but they are there to be shields, not swords. Also, we should expect that once we get close enough to a planet to be able to bombarding it, the deflector shield will be less useful since missiles will be coming in at a high arc (and planet missiles don't always target the closest ship anyway.)

Having shields mk1 available to research (not to mention deflectors) is quite a steal for us - both have quite a low percent chance of being available for us to research, so that is really nice to see. Are they something we will intend to integrate more fully into our fleet?

At this point we are past the point where Mk1 shields would be very useful; Mk2 shields might be a bit more useful against early Fusion era weapons, but they tend to drop quickly against late fusion era weapons like Lancers. On the whole, though, Hivers tend to do better looking into armour techs than shield techs. We missed the link to Magnetoceramics from Polysilicates, but we have another shot via mega-stripmining that we'll eventually want to pursue. If we also miss that link, then shields might be worth pursuing on the off chance that we can continue to climb the shield tree; otherwise I think we're better off waiting until we get AM to pursue shields as the really good shield techs all require AM.

Additionally what should we be aiming for for our fleet composition? I'm assuming we'll be weaning away from destroyers, but are we going to totally drop including them as we get further into the cruiser era? Also at the moment we have seperate destroyer and cruiser fleets, would it be better to integrate them?

I doubt we'll ever totally drop destroyers for specialty tasks, such as jammers, scouts, wild weasels (when we get the tech), long-range gate attempts, etc. Plus adding destroyers is the easiest way to ensure our fleets are not outnumbered and gain as much outnumbering bonus as possible. It's true that eventually we will probably be fighting mainly with cruisers, but there are a couple bottlenecks that mean destroyers will continue to be important to us defensively for quite a while yet. Firstly, as you noticed, there is gate capacity -- cruisers are very expensive gate-wise and we can't shift many around. As a result, DD fleets are much more mobile defensively, which is why our cruiser fleets are mainly separate from our DD fleets at the moment. Once we get Gate Amplifiers, start establishing more gates in the far side of the barbell, and start conquering worlds in our side of the barbell so as to put up gates there, this should improve. Secondly, our fleet maintenance budget continues to be a sizeable dent in our overall economy, so fundamentally we can't really afford a much bigger cruiser navy than we have right now. In order to fix this problem we will need to start picking up some fusion-era economy buffers, starting with mega-freighters. It's also why I am not worried about taking combat losses sending cruiser fleets to attack enemy worlds just now; eventually we will want to replace them with better ones anyway.

Fusion will allow us to build police ships and propaganda ships. Each of our colonies should have one of the former, and we should build one of the latter for each NAP'ed faction where we have a gate at one of their colonies, to improve relations.
Upcoming useful techs after fusion (in whatever order seems best):
- Mobility: Gate Amplifiers, Tarka Language 2 (more gates)
- Economy: Megafreighters -> Modular Construction, Environmental Tailoring -> Arcology Construction
- Defense: HCL

I normally go after Tyrmith but I just played in Haphazard's place; I think I will skip in order to get back to our usual rotation. The next turns should be Mardoc -> Haphazard -> Tyrmith if that's ok with everyone. If so, good luck Mardoc!

[Mardoc]

I normally go after Tyrmith but I just played in Haphazard's place; I think I will skip in order to get back to our usual rotation. The next turns should be Mardoc -> Haphazard -> Tyrmith if that's ok with everyone. If so, good luck Mardoc!

Hmm, ok. I don't want to steal haphazard's spot...but I have been looking forward to my next turn. And I've got a good chance of finishing up before he's free to play anyway.

So, goals for the upcoming turnset:

• Kill the Tarka invaders (deja vu!)
  
• Attack the Tarka
  
• Research a bunch
  

It's a lot shorter of a list than it used to be; I suppose that's a consequence of not being able anymore to grab anything without sending along a fleet, so there's no peaceful expansion bullet points.

[Tyrmith]

Awesome, thanks Zed, learned a lot this turn set.

Take it away Mardoc! Show the Tarka the error of their ways!

[Mardoc]

T160 - wow, we asked for a slower game, and Zed delivered. 30 turns past our victory there, and still no sign of the game ending here. Heck, we've still got a lot to do.

I decide to stick with Tyrmith's plan to invade Kuo'Dai, although the fleet shouldn't arrive until haphazard's turnset. Maybe I can also set us up for an invasion of the Liir world in our space, Sunoma; I expect the Liir to crumble more easily, and anything that reduces the range of their fleets is a good thing too But they have 3 worlds to the local Tarka 7, so they should be lower tech and lower IO, hence cheaper conquests.

It looks like nothing's been done about Atalanti. Have we missed the boat on an easy reconquest here? Are we willing to risk 3 hot wars, simultaneously? I'm tempted to send out invaders here, too. About the only real thing holding me back is the cost of our fleet maintenance. Well...maybe if I wait until Fusion, redesign, and send out faster ships, we'll have taken casualties by then.

Aside from that, defend and tech.

T161 - The Breath of Huracon finishes! We now have light emitters .
Thunder of Chintamini also finishes, granting us Disruptors. Wait; it looks like these projects haven't granted us the technology, just the opportunity to research it? Still, it's good . Two more options, two fewer expenses.
[SIZE="1"]Would have been nice if these came in before the Locusts...grumble grumble stupid researchers...[/SIZE]

I swap to our Locust fleet at Shononu, and the battle goes much more smoothly:

Fortunately, we took out their CnC before they took out ours, so we were still able to outnumber them throughout the battle. We killed half their fleet and damaged most of the rest, at the cost of our gate and our CnC; everything else is repaired interturn.

I decide to redesign the light defense platform to include polysilicate armor and AP mass drivers; I won't put them up anywhere we're not fighting (and thus, not except as the old style are destroyed), but it seems a cheap way to improve our effectiveness a bit.

I notice that a couple of our trade sectors have grown to be able to accommodate an extra route, so I start them on filling those.

T162 - We have way too many fleets and ships. I decide to grab a handful of them, make sure they have support ships, and throw them at Sunoma; even if we lose, it's better than paying a third of our budget in maintenance each turn. But this is Liir, so I figure we have good odds.

The only thing I will add to this fleet are tankers and shuttles.

At Shononu, the Tarka have no CnC remaining, so we fight 8 of us to a pair of them. Although it's a slaughter, it takes long enough that 2 of their ships aren't in combat by the time it's over. One more turn.

There's interesting stuff going on in the middle of the galaxy - fleets at the Swarm planets; presumably the swarm are cleared. And our Hiver brethren have a fleet at a local enemy Tarka planet too! Maybe it'll change ownership. Meanwhile, we send out a gate to where their gate is, presumably it's safe to park over.



T163 - Finish off the Tarka at Shononu. One good thing about this world being a focal point - it's getting lots and lots of resources. Up to 7500 now, and it'll probably just keep climbing. We now have a total of 3 incoming ships, in our whole empire. I haven't felt this secure in ages! That said, I don't want to send off any more defense ships to invasions for the time being. And none of the invasions will arrive in my turnset. So...I'm predicting the rest of this to go pretty quickly, with teching as the main goal, and maybe occasionally a little bit of gate spam.

[Mardoc]

T164 - :zzz:

T165 - :zzz:

T166 - Fusion comes in!

Chak An'Ta comes in too, enabling Point Defense.

Lots and lots of tech options, all of which I want yesterday.


Top of the list are Gate Amplifiers, Point Defense, Enviro Tailoring ->Arcologies and Megafreighters. Eventually I settle on Megafreighters; improving our income will make everything else come faster, and for the moment we seem to have sufficient military tech. I assume it's possible, maybe even straightforward, to replace normal freighters with Megafreighters on the trade routes?

Now that we have Fusion, all our ships will need a redesign. I'm not feeling quite that ambitious, but I do redesign our gate/tanker ships. Everything else - well, I don't anticipate much building in the near future. Not until we clear out some of the expenses we currently have through victory or death. But redesign whatever it is before you build any new ships. Our strategic speed jumped from 0.6 to 0.8, which ought to make gate fleets and invasion fleets both much nicer to operate. Fusion ought to improve our tactical speed, too, which will help in fights.

T167 - :zzz:

T168 - :zzz:

T169 - VN's at Ir'idan. Fight them off with no losses.

T170 - :zzz: Megafreighters is overbudget.

This was a very quiet turnset, after clearing out the remaining Tarka at Shononu. I pretty much just teched.

Our invasion fleets should arrive at T171 and T172 (Tarka and Liir, respectively). You will probably want to shuffle around the fleet organization and formations before they arrive. Good luck with these, haphazard! But even if you lose, that should clear out our budget well enough for a second try, this time with Fusion and point defense.

Once Megafreighters are in, I anticipate a lot of busyness, as you replace all the DD freighters with CR freighters. Aside from that, we've still got the debate of which econ techs to go for, or which military ones.

If you go military, I would put Gate Amplifiers and Point defense at the head of the list, that would enable us to mostly switch over to fast CR fleets that can handle missiles. I would probably only do this if we lose our invasion fleets; otherwise we won't be building new ships in the near future anyway. And, of course, if you win, then build some Biomes and grab our new colonies, then set up another invasion or two .

If you go econ, I think I would follow Zed's advice, and quickly grab modular construction (looks like a 1-2 turn tech for a free 5% income boost), then over toward arcologies.

And, the save: Save

[haphazard1]

Looks like a good turnset, Tyrmith! And going well so far in Mardoc's turns too.

I should have time available to play both tonight and tomorrow, so whenever Mardoc finishes his turns should be good with me.

Light emitters...definitely would have been useful earlier. They might still be useful now for some purposes, although they are not much as anti-cruiser weapons. Should we take the time to grab them? As an early tech they should be very cheap.

Lots of stuff to grab once we reach Fusion. But it sounds like Gate Amplifiers probably should be first, as limitations on moving cruiser fleets around has been a major bottleneck for us. Also, this will let us build cruiser gate ships for much tougher gates.

So multiple invasions upcoming for my turnset...should be interesting. Kuo'Dai looks pretty tough, at size 7 with light and medium sat rings -- lots and lots of missiles, with fusion warheads. I will do my best, but we shall see how much damage we take.

What is the best way to deploy the deflector ships? I am thinking of a sort of arc in front of the locust cruisers, with deflectors in front and also one to either forward side of the formation. The planetary missiles are going to be a problem, though.

Good luck with the rest of your turns, Mardoc!

[haphazard1]

Ah, cross-posted with the rest of Mardoc's report. Nice work, Mardoc!

Point defense...very nice to have that available! But you are correct that we are not going to be building a lot of combat ships right now, so other techs presumably come first. If Modular Construction is that cheap we should grab it immediately, then probably Gate Amplifiers to ease our cruiser movement bottlenecks.

Plans for the upcoming turnset:

- Invasions of Tarka and Liir worlds. If successful, follow up with biomes to consolidate them into our empire.

- Complete Megafreighters tech, design an appropriate ship and start cranking them out. Shuffle existing freighters as necessary, which is easier as Hivers than for most races fortunately. If our invasions are successful maybe we will have some new routes which can be filled out.

- Continue pushing to get gates into new systems on the other side of the barbell.

- Tech after Megafreighters: Modular Construction, Gate Amplifiers. If more time/budget available, Point Defense and Environmental Tailoring.

- Do we have any mining ships built? Should we get some out to the never-to-be-colonized worlds we have gates over and start gathering ore for our homeworld? Or should we wait to complete Mega-Strip-Mining first for greater efficiency?

- Fight off any invasion threats, and maybe start prepping for further expansion of our own.

Comments, suggestions, random thoughts welcome.

[Mardoc]

Light emitters...definitely would have been useful earlier. They might still be useful now for some purposes, although they are not much as anti-cruiser weapons. Should we take the time to grab them? As an early tech they should be very cheap.

Personally, I think not. We have point defense, finally, but I would stick with ballistics and just keep powering up that tree.

Lots of stuff to grab once we reach Fusion. But it sounds like Gate Amplifiers probably should be first, as limitations on moving cruiser fleets around has been a major bottleneck for us. Also, this will let us build cruiser gate ships for much tougher gates.

If the galaxy hadn't quieted down so much, or if it weren't looking like gates might get through to our brethren, I'd have done this already. Megafreighters will be good too, though.

And regardless, you're right that we shouldn't delay this one too much.

So multiple invasions upcoming for my turnset...should be interesting. Kuo'Dai looks pretty tough, at size 7 with light and medium sat rings -- lots and lots of missiles, with fusion warheads. I will do my best, but we shall see how much damage we take.

What is the best way to deploy the deflector ships? I am thinking of a sort of arc in front of the locust cruisers, with deflectors in front and also one to either forward side of the formation. The planetary missiles are going to be a problem, though.

Yes, I'm not really sure if this one will work or not, but I really didn't want to spend the time to redeploy the invasion fleet somewhere else, letting it grow more and more obsolete every turn. At the least, this seems to have distracted the Tarka from invading us for the moment.

The Liir invasion, on the other hand, I have much more confidence in. It's a smaller planet, smaller fleet, older tech...it all adds up to better odds.

I did not build any mining ships, which was probably an oversight, and would have given me something more to do, as well . I don't really know how they work, but especially as Hivers, that would have been worth figuring out.

[Tyrmith]

For mining ships you basically just send them to a planet you want to mine, then activate just like you activate gate ships and colony ships. They'll run till they're full, then you send them to the planet you want to receive the permanent mineral bonus. Then you activate them again in the same way, and the next turn send them out again.

I did put a lot of deflector ships in the tarka invasion fleet, hopefully that'll make them a bit more durable.