RBSotS1 SG2

[Mardoc]

Otherwise everything is going smoothly so far. I am worried about DNs and AM, though. Should we alter our tech path?

Personally, I don't think so. AM is something like 30 turns of research at our current rate, so what we really need is to boost that rate - and that calls for econ techs and a focus on freighters. Arcology Construction might pay for itself very quickly with such a large empire as we have; we know how fast CR freighters pay back - and both these potential foes have Morrigi to deal with before we have to worry.

[haphazard1]

Interim report for the first 5 turns of my set. I will play more, but have a couple questions on strategy.

Turn 190 (inherited)

- The distant Tarka downgrade us to an NAP. Oh well.
- I add a third TR at Izakis plus 2 at Kuo'Dai. Checking our freighter and sector status, I decide to add 6 TRs at the home world to absorb our excess and earn more income. This reduces IO there from 3 mega freighters per turn to 2, but we have other planets which can build a mega freighter per turn with IO unused due to money limitations. We can always reverse those TRs later when we need the homeworld's IO; for now it is cash in the treasury so why not?
- Shuffle freighters all over the place to refill the new sector limits.
- Shuffle some spare jammers around to cover Sunoma, Kuo'Dai.
- Review morale throughout our empire, and it is mostly excellent (100). But we have a few worlds where trade is not maxed out that are only stable rather than increasing. I design a Police Cutter and plan to build one each for Izketot, Ke'Pranum, and Peten.
- Build more gate fleets for the far side of the galaxy, plus 1 more mining ship. And more mega freighters of course.

- IBT we observe combat at Xhycho'tox. The other hivers have DNs!



Turn 191

- Checking the diplo screen, we see that the far Tarka have AM warheads (and thus AM drives).



The other Hivers have Gamma Warheads, whatever those are. (Need to check the wiki.) Also note that the two Morrigi factions have allied.

- Send 2 miners back to Miirio; it will have only a partial ore load left after they are done and will need a singleton later.
- Send 1 miner apiece to Ekkep, Xhubasos, and Ke'Sothrum to spring possible mining traps.
- Adjust Izakis for one more TR after the latest ore dump. Note that due to its earlier resource depletion, we set civ pop to grow here and it is now over-harvesting 6 per turn. I move the slider to stop further civilian growth, but can we actually reduce the over-harvesting? It sort of defeats the purpose of dumping ore here.
- Continue mass shuffling of freighters, we should have full sectors again next turn.
- Continue building gate/tanker pairs, mega freighters.

- IBT...nothing. I had forgotten that was even possible.

Turn 192

- The other Hivers downgrade us to an NAP.
- We get an early breakthrough (~70%) on Environmental Tailoring. :dancing5: Start Arcology Construction (8 turns).
- Design a Propaganda ship and build one for the far Tarka. Damn these things are expensive! Almost 20K IO, and around 1/2 million credits.
- Build 3 more mining ships. The trap testers start mining their worlds, with all other ships moved away.
- A gate fleet arrives at Lomoshu, which is a great planet. The far Tarka have just colonized it (few thousand pop), it is pretty harsh for them. Oh well...at least we get another gate, and farther into the far side of the galaxy.
- Activate one more TR at Sunoma and shuffle freighters. Trade income breaks 2 million.

Turn 193

- Our total income breaks 4 million. (At least before ship building begins.)
- Send our Far Tarka Propaganda ship to Lomoshu, as the farthest gate from the Morrigi and thus hopefully safe. We do not have a gate at a far Hiver world yet; once we get one remember to build another Propaganda ship and send it. We need all the diplomatic advantages we can get, even small ones.

A question: should this ship move into deep space near the far Tarka world? The wiki indicates it reduces morale of the system it is in (since it is not our system, where it would boost morale). We get the diplo boost either way, but I wonder if hurting morale in this system will hurt diplomacy?

- Build lots of mega freighters.

- IBT Raiders hit Tototchic. Zed-F was apparently correct that this is a recurring thing now that the event has happened. We lose 2 freighters (1 CR, 1 DE) and a couple DEs (old junk was all we had to defend with). But the planet missiles kill one raider and take out the engines of another -- hopefully this means fewer to deal with in the future?



Turn 194

- I shuffle some of our older ships to form anti-raider patrols at the three planets in the raided trade sector: Xha'chak, Tyrinas, and Tototchic.
- I find some new-model gate ships sitting around, and build some tankers so we can send them to the far side of the galaxy. Another few turns and we will have gates on the way to every planet in the other barbell.
- More mega freighters -- must have more income!

- IBT a gate fleet arrives at Komxhen, which has a note to send another. A local Morrigi fleet is waiting and wipes us out, which presumably is the second time this happened. I tried to hide the gate in the asteroids, using the tanker as a decoy, but was hunted down.

Turn 195

- Komxhen is a marvelous world for us, harsh for Tarka and Liir.



Should we send a gate fleet with heavy escort and claim it for colonization? It might upset the far Tarka to take the system, or the far Hivers. But this is a very nice world.

- Similarly, what about Argos?



Close to Komxhen, and while it can not be colonized right now it might be possible after Gravitational Adaptation. Alternate idea would be to send our miners and strip it of resources before the far Hivers or Tarka do the same.

Advice from the team on how to handle this would be appreciated!

- And a quick look at our budget:



Trade income now over 2.4 million! :dancing5: Our ongoing mega freighter construction program is definitely paying off. We still have a long way to go to replace all our DE freighters -- with new trade routes opening we have some excess freighters but not as many as you might expect. We still need well over a hundred mega freighters to displace all the DE freighters.

Save attached for your examination. Let me know what you think, especially about Komxhen and Argos.

[Mardoc]

The other Hivers have Gamma Warheads, whatever those are. (Need to check the wiki.)

They appear to be an upgrade to fission-era missiles, not quite as strong as Fusion but close.

Should we send a gate fleet with heavy escort and claim it for colonization? It might upset the far Tarka to take the system, or the far Hivers. But this is a very nice world.

- Similarly, what about Argos?

Close to Komxhen, and while it can not be colonized right now it might be possible after Gravitational Adaptation. Alternate idea would be to send our miners and strip it of resources before the far Hivers or Tarka do the same.

Advice from the team on how to handle this would be appreciated!

Personally, I think I would leave them alone. We're not prepared to fight the far races yet - we need at a minimum to have finished our CR freighter network so we can spam combatant instead, and preferably to also catch up to their tech levels. If we're really lucky, we could even want them to fight each other while we sit back and calmly tech (although I'm not sure how we could arrange that).

So I wouldn't antagonize them by grabbing real estate in their front yard. We have plenty of real estate in our own backyard, both already owned and with pesky dolphins and lizards and crows inhabiting them - and we're in a very vertical growth stage with the megafreighters and soon Arcologies. Fact is, we can be growing exponentially by dumping our income into more investments, or we can grow arithmetically by grabbing another world - and maybe not even that fast if it requires a garrison that costs more than it brings in. Neither of these will give us trade routes without war, either, so they'd have only the bare planet income to show for the aggression.

[Zed-F]

We at least want gates at those worlds if we don't have them, if they are uncolonized worlds and not too heavily guarded. If we would get into a big fight with the Morrigi to claim them, I would prefer to work on our side of the barbell first.

Re: AM warheads, those do not require AM engines. Tarka definitely have only Fusion engines because we have deep scan ships & gates in their empire & would see evidence of AM power if they had built any.

Re: propaganda ships, they will only hurt morale for enemies and will actually help morale for allies; for NAPed races I expect they have no morale effect. I would leave them at the planet so they can be shifted elsewhere if need be.

Re: Izakis, yes you can set the civilian pop back to baseline level. It will hurt morale for awhile until they get back to the default level but it's probably for the best.

[haphazard1]

They appear to be an upgrade to fission-era missiles, not quite as strong as Fusion but close.

OK, that is positive news. I hope that we are ahead of the far side empires in economic and development techs and building our empire vertically. And if they have gone for DN construction and AM warheads and such, they must have skipped some techs we probably have.

Personally, I think I would leave them alone. We're not prepared to fight the far races yet - we need at a minimum to have finished our CR freighter network so we can spam combatant instead, and preferably to also catch up to their tech levels. If we're really lucky, we could even want them to fight each other while we sit back and calmly tech (although I'm not sure how we could arrange that).

So I wouldn't antagonize them by grabbing real estate in their front yard. We have plenty of real estate in our own backyard, both already owned and with pesky dolphins and lizards and crows inhabiting them - and we're in a very vertical growth stage with the megafreighters and soon Arcologies. Fact is, we can be growing exponentially by dumping our income into more investments, or we can grow arithmetically by grabbing another world - and maybe not even that fast if it requires a garrison that costs more than it brings in. Neither of these will give us trade routes without war, either, so they'd have only the bare planet income to show for the aggression.

We at least want gates at those worlds if we don't have them, if they are uncolonized worlds and not too heavily guarded. If we would get into a big fight with the Morrigi to claim them, I would prefer to work on our side of the barbell first.

OK, very good points. I will leave those planets alone for now. We have a gate at Argos, and would have to fight to get one at Komxhen. So we will just continue pushing gates to other systems.

Re: AM warheads, those do not require AM engines. Tarka definitely have only Fusion engines because we have deep scan ships & gates in their empire & would see evidence of AM power if they had built any.

Ah, another new thing learned. I am still not familiar with all the effects of deep scan, but you are correct that we should have seen something by now.

Re: propaganda ships, they will only hurt morale for enemies and will actually help morale for allies; for NAPed races I expect they have no morale effect. I would leave them at the planet so they can be shifted elsewhere if need be.

OK, so we should be good for now. Once we get some more gates on even more distant Tarka worlds, I will shift the propaganda ship further from the Morrigi just to be safe.

Re: Izakis, yes you can set the civilian pop back to baseline level. It will hurt morale for awhile until they get back to the default level but it's probably for the best.

I will make sure we have a Police Cutter there, then reset the civilian pop slider. We certainly don't want to be burning our resources there when we are dropping ore to get trade routes.

On to play 5 more turns.

[haphazard1]

Played to T200 to finish my set.

Turn 195

- Reduce civilan pop slider at Izakis to stop overharvest. Send a police cutter to keep morale high.

Turn 196

- Build more mega freighters (7 per turn is our current rate, with solid research spending).
- IBT the Liir "intercept" our fleet heading for their home world with 2 damaged DEs.



The big damage taken was from an exploding Liir ship, but none of our ships were lost fortunately.

Turn 197

- A gate fleet arrives at Uulani, now a far Tarka world but originally Liir by the name. About 2K pop. A lot of the far Tarka worlds we are reaching are like this -- they still have a long way to go to get these new worlds developed. But over time they will become stronger, assuming their budget is not getting eaten up too badly by development costs.

Turn 198

- Build more gate/tanker pairs for the far end of the galaxy, plsu 6 mega freighters.
- Some mining ships complete work and head for Izakis, which should now be stable on resources but is barely holding on to the last TR.



- IBT VNs attack Knossai, a far Tarka world where we and the other Hivers have gates. We have our gate and a jammer DE, so I auto the fight and hope the computer can keep us alive.



Well, the gate survived -- barely. We need to replace it, plus the jammer. Interestingly, the other Hivers' CR destroyed the VN mother ship! Knossai may get additional unwated visitors...maybe we should put a reserve gate 1 turn out of the system, in case we need a quick replacement?

Out of curiosity, I reloaded the save after I finished my turnset and tried this battle manually. The VNs start between our gate and the planet, and go directly for our gate. No chance to survive manually, even trying to use the jammer as a decoy. And from the damage totals, the same thing happened when the AI was in control. Why target us? Is this a "drag the #1 empire back to the pack" kind of thing?

Turn 199

- Xhubasos mining ends ahead of schedule -- the other Hivers have sent miners here. We must watch unclaimed systems carefully and strip them before they can establish gates.
- Out of boredom (amazing how fast turns go when there are no major battles to fight ) I redesign many of our DE ships. We won't build many of these (i.e. DE freighters), but we needed a new jammer so I went ahead and did the lot.
- Arcologies goes over budget.

Turn 200

- The far Tarka tell us to attack Dzaxhab. I take a look:



It is a solidly developed far Morrigi world. The far Tarka have 18 CRs and 2 DEs inbound, split about half and half over the next 2 turns. Enough to take the planet? Probably not, as the far Morrigi have Fusion warheads for their planetary and satellite missiles.

- The Liir call us up to say we have potential.
- Izakis needs maybe one more ore load to get 1 more trade route. That would be 5 TRs there. I decide to start dumping ore on the home world and building it up instead, but we should send one more mining ship here later.
- Empty mining ships head to Miirio (to scrape a partial load and zero it out) and Ekkep (full loads, but that will leave only a partial load). We also have Ke'Sothrum to mine out (maybe 3 ships worth?), then we will be out of obvious mining targets. There is always Argos on the other end of the galaxy....
- The home world gets 3 partial loads of ore from Xhubasos.
- A gate fleet arrives at Kor'Hakaan and deploys.
- We have 2 gate/tanker pairs at Peten, which should be enough to have gates on the way to every world in the far end of the barbell. Wait one turn and then send them via the new gate at Kor'Hakaan.
- Arcology Construction completes. I adjust many worlds' civ pop sliders, as the planets we were overharvesting do not auto-update. I put these back to default. We will need to watch the trade screen carefully and activate new trade routes as they become available. And when odd-size planets reach max civilians we will want to set them to over-harvest just slightly, grabbing one extra TR each. We have quite a few excess freighters now, so shuffle them around as needed.
- Speaking of which, I add a TR at Kuo'Dai which is still growing to full pop.
- I set tech to Advanced Robotics (1 turn) for the 5% ship savings. But nothing has been invested yet, so feel free to change priorities. But for 1 turn (more likely 2 unless we get lucky) the boost would be useful.
- A replacement gate is ordered to Knossai. Remember to scrap the damaged gate next turn and then redeploy the following turn.
- I have already set the mega freighter builds for this turn. Feel free to cancel if we need other construction, but you will see the planets I have been using. All can build 1 mega freighter per turn (Izketot builds 2 per) and in total we have enough to spend all our available cash each turn. I have avoided partial builds at worlds with less IO, but if you can find the cash we have many additional planets which can support builds.
- And our current budget:



The trends are strongly positive. :dancing5: Except for fleet maintenance, which is now over 1 million per turn.

[Zed-F]

Re: VNs attacking our gate, this is not really an attack the #1 player thing but an artifact of how the game lines up fleets in tactical. The VNs attack whatever is closest and when there are no enemy faction ships to fight the game puts the planetary defenders opposite the player position 1 forces iirc. It then puts the VNs in front of the planetary defenders. So the VNs show up closer to us than the defenders and attack us. In most cases the game does not distinguish between an AI-led empire and a live player empire, but when it has to make arbitrary decisions about fleet placement, player position is used to aid the decision process.

Re: Liir - very small empires can trend upward diplomatically as they are worried about getting wiped out. They are wanting to avoid getting pasted by our incoming fleet. These guys are ripe for being asked to surrender outright. Of course we don't have the xenotech for that yet.

I will be back tonight but may not have time for turns until tomorrow. I can probably get the save before Tyrmith though.

[haphazard1]

Re: VNs attacking our gate, this is not really an attack the #1 player thing but an artifact of how the game lines up fleets in tactical. The VNs attack whatever is closest and when there are no enemy faction ships to fight the game puts the planetary defenders opposite the player position 1 forces iirc. It then puts the VNs in front of the planetary defenders. So the VNs show up closer to us than the defenders and attack us. In most cases the game does not distinguish between an AI-led empire and a live player empire, but when it has to make arbitrary decisions about fleet placement, player position is used to aid the decision process.

Hmmm, OK. In this case there were no defenders, as the planet owner (far Tarka) had no ships present. So we were definitely closer than the other Hivers' gate.

Re: Liir - very small empires can trend upward diplomatically as they are worried about getting wiped out. They are wanting to avoid getting pasted by our incoming fleet. These guys are ripe for being asked to surrender outright. Of course we don't have the xenotech for that yet.

Well, we have Liir xenotech #2. IIRC, we could get xenotech #3 with about 3 turns research. #4 would presumably be more expensive than that, but probably not hugely so. Call it double, and maybe 9-10 turns to get Subjagate Liir -- worth doing to grab two worlds?

We might want to grab Liir xenotech #3 so we can grab any remaining civilians, even if we don't decide to go for #4 and try to grab the worlds intact (although without imperials).

I will be back tonight but may not have time for turns until tomorrow. I can probably get the save before Tyrmith though.

We have been progressing at a pretty good pace, so no worries on the next turnset. I guess if he has time and wants to fight the Liir homeworld Mardoc could always take another turnset.

[Mardoc]

Looks like solid progress, again. I'm glad to hear the tech situation isn't quite as dire as it sounded.

And...looking at the save, it doesn't seem obvious where we should go next, techwise. Maybe Fusion Warheads and up the ballistics tree? Maybe head for DN's ourselves? Well, Zed's up next, I'm sure he's got a better sense of direction here.

We have been progressing at a pretty good pace, so no worries on the next turnset. I guess if he has time and wants to fight the Liir homeworld Mardoc could always take another turnset.

No, getting three before Zed and Tyrmith each get one is a little greedy . Besides, I've got other things to occupy myself with today - I've got guests inbound on Thursday, so I have cleaning to do, and probably keeping everything in my signature moving as well.

[Zed-F]

Ok, I am looking at our save.

The first thing I notice is how passive we have been with respect to our immediate neighbors since my last turn set. I hadn't really focused in on this during the turn descriptions, but in the last 50 turns we have attacked exactly 2 worlds, with a third attack fleet only now arriving. That's really quite slow expansion. Of course we have had challenges such as being hit by the Locusts, and lacking PD. But to put this in perspective, in the last 50 years the far Tarka have increased their total number of colonies by 50%, to the point where they now have about the same number of colonies we do. Our rank in colonies has dropped to 2, where we used to have the number 1 spot locked up by a sizeable margin. This will make it considerably harder to convince them to knuckle under via diplomatic means; we need to outnumber rival empires by a factor of about 3 for them have a chance of joining us by diplomatic pressure.

Moreover, the far Tarka are starting to use that economic power to further increase the size of their empire, at the expense of the Morrigi. If we want to have a chance to snag Morrigi worlds in the barbell we will have to move quickly, or the far Tarka will likely squeeze them out.

Now the good news is we have had other things going on as well such as building megafreighters, so I am confident we are not losing ground economically as well as by colony count. Yes, the other races have DNs... that is, stations. There is no sign of actual DN warships among enemy fleets as far as our deep scan ships have observed so far, and DN warships are a lot harder to research than DN stations are. So I don't think we are falling behind technologically, though we probably are just treading water as far as military tech development goes.

What should we do from here? First up, continue to push our trade investments. These will only get easier as time goes on and our income continues to grow, and will help power our way to an eventual AM-era economy. Beyond continuing freighter builds, though, what might we work toward?

Option 1: Further xenotech with the goal of conquering small races near us via diplomatic means. Advantage: We haven't shown a lot of inclination to manage multiple simultaneous attack fronts this game, as we did in the Humans game. If people don't feel like having to deal with organizing and fighting multiple attacking fleets at once, this would be a reasonable approach. Downside is that Xenotech is expensive, so this will probably continue to be slow going for a while yet, and we could easily lose some of the center part of the barbell to the far Tarka while we work on it.

Option 2: Start being more aggressive. We have the tools we need now to really put the pressure on the smaller factions. One of the big problems we've had so far is "one big fleet syndrome". Massing all our ships in attacking only one or two places is generally inefficient overkill -- especially now that we have PD. Rather than sending 31 cruisers(!) to attack the Liir homeworld when they only have 2 planets and can't afford any reasonable defense fleet, we should have built some extra PD ships to help those cruisers deal with enemy missiles, and attacked at least 2 or 3 places with them. Just because our fission-era cruisers are old, does not mean we shouldn't support them with newer designs where appropriate in order to stretch their useful lifespan even further.

Option 3: Turtle up and power through the tech tree to the AM era. This option pretty much ignores the rest of the galaxy and assumes we will wait to break out of our corner of the map until we have Farcasters to go on a massive blitz assault across the entire map. We'll eventually get to this point no matter which option we choose, but option 3 is specifically focusing on bringing that about as soon as possible.

Obviously there is some room for blurring the boundaries of these approaches together to some degree, but we should decide on an overall focus. Which option looks most appealing overall?