RBSotS1 SG2

[Zed-F]

Hmmm, I have not tried over-populating my worlds yet. Can you explain the pros and cons of this in a bit more detail?

Overpopulation with your own native civilians. This will consume between 1 and 20 resources per turn off your planet, depending on how large a percentage overpopulation you've done (%overpop / 5 = resources consumed, IIRC, and you can't have more than +100%.) You get all the extra tax income from overpopulated civilians that you would from normal civilians, and in fact IIRC overpopulated civilians give double tax income. They also give more I/O in the short term, and allow more trade routes. Since money now is often much more powerful than more money later, this can be a tempting prospect.

Downside is, of course, the lost resources and hence lost I/O. If you don't need the I/O, this is not much of a problem, though it's worth bearing in mind that you usually need a lot of I/O to build out your freighter networks and staff trade routes, and that in the late game I/O tends to be harder to come by than cash does. Plus you can always use mining to offset any I/O lost by overpopulation.

My take on overpopulation is usually something along the lines that if I've got my trade routes staffed, and I'm not building a lot of military builds at a world, it's a good time to get some extra trade routes by overpopulation. More money is more money after all, and at backline worlds I usually don't need I/O for too much other than maintaining trade routes, at least once my trade networks are staffed. I am hesitant about employing a lot of overpopulation while I am still needing to build a lot of freighters for trade routes, though if I have a lot of high resource worlds around I might be more comfortable with the idea.

An alternative to overpopulation is to research enough xenotechs to encourage alien civilians to migrate to your worlds. This is in theory a great long-term option to use instead of overpopulation, since alien civilians don't eat resources off your planet as they don't live in the same biomes that your own race likes to live in. In practice, though, you tend to need so much xenotech and alien civilians tend to grow so slowly on worlds terraformed for your imperial pop (which you always want to do anyway) that it takes forever to pay off the research investment.

My understanding is that growing your civilian pop over the "50% of imperials" default causes automatic overharvesting. But more civ pop also means more income (taxes) and once we have the tech may allow for additional trade routes as well. And it can avoid morale penalties. What other effects does this have?

That's pretty much it!

Moving through the barbell...does anything prevent us from taking a LONG slow trip across the void to the other half of the barbell, without going through the center? Might need a couple tankers rather than one, and it would take a long time. But if the center is too contested/dangerous we can just go around.

Difficulty is that even trying to go around may still incur interception either in the middle region (aliens will intercept ships quite a ways away from their colonies if they see them as inside their territory) or once they approach their target world on the far side, whereupon they'll have made the trip for nothing. I'd rather wait until we can get some techs going that will make it harder for enemies to intercept our gates or encourage them not to do so by way of diplomatic relations.

[Zed-F]

In particular, what weapon should I go for? I figure it's probably between Green Lasers and Mass Drivers.

I would tend to think that we are more likely to have luck pursuing ballistics weapons than laser weapons, generally speaking. Since our economy is starting to heat up a bit I would probably pick snipers or mass drivers over green lasers at this point.

[haphazard1]

Looks like some very solid turns, ZedF! Not that this is a surprise.

OK, if our economy and cash flow is picking up then let's get a decent weapon upgrade. I like mass drivers, especially given that Hivers get decent odds for the tree. We can pick up some extras like VRF and AP eventually as well, improving effectiveness further. But after Mass Drivers I think we need to hit economy again with Cybernetic Interfaces. 20% IO boost is pretty substantial, and 5% savings on ships does not hurt either.

A question: you have mentioned "back line" planets in your overpopulation discussion. As Hivers with instant gate transport, we don't really have back line planets in the sense other races do. New construction can always reach the front in one turn.

For trade routes, do they work for Hivers as they do for other races? Range limitations, I mean. Or is it assumed they can use the gates? Deciding where we should devote freighter efforts and where to focus on military builds is a bit more fluid than for other races, I am guessing.

The plan sounds good to me, Mardoc. Good luck!

[Tyrmith]

I'm not sure that we should take a break for cybernetic interfaces- that's a very expensive tech if I remember right, teching not only that, but then mass drivers before starting to build a useful fleet seems a bit risky to me, especially in this confined of a galaxy.

[haphazard1]

Tyrmith,

I guess I was not clear. I agree with teching a weapon upgrade next (sounds like mass drivers is the general choice). Then we can start building some improved ships. But I think we should go after Cybernetic Interfaces after that. CI is not all that expensive, and it gives a 20% boost to IO for all our planets -- this should be worth several thousand IO per turn across our empire, benefitting both established planets and developing worlds.

[Zed-F]

But after Mass Drivers I think we need to hit economy again with Cybernetic Interfaces. 20% IO boost is pretty substantial, and 5% savings on ships does not hurt either.

Agreed that we need to continue focusing on economy as well. In fact I would not be averse to CI before mass drivers at this point. It's only slightly more expensive than mass drivers.

A question: you have mentioned "back line" planets in your overpopulation discussion. As Hivers with instant gate transport, we don't really have back line planets in the sense other races do. New construction can always reach the front in one turn.

While this is true, you still have to maintain a balance of income to fund building and I/O to build with. Because Hivers can always dump mined resources at the 200% infra homeworld, they tend to just use that as their main forgeworld. High resource worlds other than the homeworld are sometimes used as ship building centers, but medium to low resource worlds are pretty much just for cash generation, same as everyone else. Low resource worlds can't afford to overpopulate or they will degrade their ability to fill trade networks as a result, but medium resource worlds usually can and do.

For trade routes, do they work for Hivers as they do for other races? Range limitations, I mean. Or is it assumed they can use the gates? Deciding where we should devote freighter efforts and where to focus on military builds is a bit more fluid than for other races, I am guessing.

Hiver routes do have the same sort of range limitations as everyone else. Most trade for hivers is in-system to abstracted settlements off the planet itself. The range limit for hivers is probably an abstraction of how much gate capacity is available for trade, since the military gets priority. As far as trade goes, most races tend to fill as many routes as they feel they can get away with, the exception being if a trade sector is under threat of conquest by another empire; so, where to build freighters is in fact not all that dissimilar from other races.

[Mardoc]

Ok, for reference, here's my list of goals, again. We'll see how many I can manage to check off

• Claim Kaa'Vaalu. Bring along a lot of colonizers, sink the extras built each turn here for a while, see what we can accomplish. If it goes faster than I'm expecting, add in another colony, whatever's next best. Odds are Kaa'Vaalu is expensive enough on its own, though.
  
• Claim Cho'Zanti
  
• Claim Tototchic - need a fleet. Can't happen until the CnC comes in, so I might have to settle for setting this up for haphazard.
  
• Make good on "what we have, we keep" But auto-peace when it's just scouts
  
• Keep teching, including Mass Drivers if possible
  

T50 - IT - nothing much needs to happen. Start a col ship, as I will every turn from here out.

T51 - Tuathal of the Jade Wing...grr...intercepts 4 of our Gate fleets and ER ships headed down the barbell, and also fights us at Tototchik - Tototchik is on their side! I decide to autopeace them all - which somehow works out for us. We lose one gate ship fleet in deep space, and apparently the Jade Wing ship at Tototchik commits suicide - I can't explain how he took damage when no one dealt it any other way:


Kaa'Vaalu instantly goes to 18 infrastructure, but costs 55K/turn - as much as the rest of our colonies combined! Flip it entirely toward terraforming, of course, and send some more colships here to turn into infrastructure.

T52 - easily blow up the Tarka ship at Chozanti; next turn the gate should arrive and this planet will be ours!

We autopeace the rest of our battles, but end up fighting Tarka at Ozoris anyway; send the damaged ship home for repairs while replacements come from home.

T53 - I can't explain this one - but we find another independent colony, Tarka this time, at Atalanti. How the heck have the Tarka not found this yet? In any event, we're deploying the gate and will add in a picket ASAP.

It's, of course, not a very attractive planet for us, but we can play keepaway with the best of them!


I'll use it to gamble on more gate fleets down the barbell, I think, in addition to keeping the Tarka out. It looks like all the systems in our half have been probed and either gated or found hazards (like Tarka or Swarm), so I won't be bothering sending gates to our half; we need to be sending along invasion fleets if we're going to do that!

T54 - Deploy gate at Chozanti.

We find a nice planet at Shononu - will be colonizing this as soon as the Gate arrives! Did I mention, Zed, how prescient you were that colony ships would be needed all over the place, so it accomplishes both morale at home and progress away? Heck, between Shononu and Chozanti we've got a lot of places for colonists to go!


T55 - We've got an awful lot of old-style tankers. We're also pretty much done with the unescorted explosion of gates style of expansion. I decide to scrap half of them to save on maintenance.

T56 - Little happens. Tuathal's been following our ships up the barbell, but auto-peace every turn seems to work just fine.

T57 - Cho'zanti is founded. It costs all of 4K/turn, at the moment . I put it all to infrastructure, although I know it doesn't need the infra at the moment, I predict a population explosion here!

We find the Morrigi homeworld at Uxhmal, and therefore send the gate back home. We also find the 2nd Morrigi faction, past the first, called Tohkta the Just, but auto-peace works here too. We meet them at Xhubasos, which is a rock - and that's actually probably fortunate for us - 1215 Hazard means no one will care about this place except our Gate fleets .

T58 - We finally get CnC, and I queue up a bunch of command ships, and some gauss cannon and shuttles for you, haphazard. I don't see myself finishing this project in time. Start on Mass Drivers.

We accidentally kill a Tarka colony at Ke'Sothram. It's a -900 Hazard world, so I'm not sure what we should do with it. Back off and let the Tarka slowly colonize it again? Just establish a gate and pretend it's any other rockball?

T59 - Colonize Shononu - it costs ~15000 at the moment, quite acceptable . Compare to Kaa'Vaalu, which is now down to ~50000 cost.

T60 - Our first encounter with Von Neumann ships - and it doesn't go so hot.


Fortunately Izakis is a colony, so we can replace the gate ship immediately, but we lose the entire garrison and 96 resources, to boot!


So, back to the goals - what did I accomplish?

• Claim Kaa'Vaalu. Bring along a lot of colonizers, sink the extras built each turn here for a while, see what we can accomplish. If it goes faster than I'm expecting, add in another colony, whatever's next best. Odds are Kaa'Vaalu is expensive enough on its own, though. Got it! And Shonunu. Probably still can't afford another ~400 Hazard colony, though.
  
• Claim Cho'Zanti *sniff* Its...so beautiful...
  
• Claim Tototchic - need a fleet. Can't happen until the CnC comes in, so I might have to settle for setting this up for haphazard. Definitely didn't happen. I have the start of a fleet, but probably not even enough yet.
  
• Make good on "what we have, we keep" But auto-peace when it's just scouts Except Izakis, this worked. We need better ships now that we know VN's are around, though.
  
• Keep teching, including Mass Drivers if possible Made it to CnC (overbudget again). We're 16% of the way to Mass Drivers, but it'll still be quite a while.
  

What makes sense for future? Well, of course it's about time to grab Tototchic. I think our expenses are coming down fast enough that we can probably grab Noshu shortly, and maybe Xha'chak after that; they're both around 400 hazard as well, but it's expand or die. We're making good progress on our cheaper colonies and Kaa'Vaalu, and the requirement to train a colony ship every turn to keep morale up means that we can jumpstart these bad boys.

We've got 8 colonies plus our homeworld; 3 of them are positive income, 2 are -4000, then -13500, -15000, and -50000. I expect very shortly for at least 1, if not 3 of those to flip to being profitable, which means it's time to take on more expenses

We're probably also getting to the point where we can start to pick some fights - and frankly, I'd like to see the Tarka going down! And the swarm planet. And we need to put up enough picket force our colonies, at least, to prevent a repeat of the Izakis debacle.

Ok, maybe that's a little optimistic. Maybe we should stick with defense and the neutrals for the moment. These 400 Hazard planets are enough of a battle, without having to shoot the Tarka off them first.

And the save

[Tyrmith]

Looks like we're well on our way (or already there?) to getting a defenseable position. Nice and quick turns Mardoc!

Random questions:
1) For our ship design we're maximizing projectile weapons, correct? How well will we do when we're facing missiles? With the laser ships those can be picked off pretty easy, but it seems like mass drivers would have trouble with that. Are we going to need to build "anti-missile" ships for assaulting planets or attacking empires that use missiles?

2) I was messing around with an old save from the first SG to try to learn more about combat and I was wondering somethings- when using shuttles to attack planets do you leave the fleet far out from the planet and just send the shuttles in once the defending fleet is gone? I did notice that the enemy planet did seem to target the shuttles with missiles if the fleet wasn't attacking the planet as well. I suppose this isn't as much an issue with us in this game where we're using mass drivers which are actually useful for assaulting planets, but when using the otherwise amazing weapons you guys were using in the first SG, wet noodles seemed to work better at attacking planets then the emitters.

3) Other then just saying "close in and attack" for the fleet or telling them to stand off how do you place your fleet to attack optimally? How much micromanagement is helpful? Or can you trust the AI to find the best angle/distance to attack with with the weapons it has once you tell them to engage?

[Mardoc]

I'm not an expert, so take all of this with a grain of salt:

We're up to 9 planets out of 90, and we're likely to very shortly have at least a 10th (the independent Morrigi), if not 11th and 12th (the two 400 hazard worlds, if we think we can justify them). That means we're up to our 'fair share' of the galaxy, the initial land grab phase - now it's time to start taking stuff that isn't ours by fair share .

Micromanagement becomes more important when you have things, like, say, CnC and shuttles . You don't want the shuttle carriers to be trying to fight gunships, so you need to withdraw them after they launch, or bring them in once the main fight is over, etc. In terms of other micro, I personally haven't found it worth while, but theoretically if you can concentrate your fire to take out a ship while the opponents are dispersing theirs among everyone, that would give us an advantage.

Usually I don't manage to keep up with the action, though, so telling everyone to close to attack is as much as I can manage. Or telling my scout to book it away from the planet and hope that lets him live a tad longer.

[haphazard1]

Looks pretty good, Mardoc!

A question: how do you "accidentally" kill a Tarka colony?

What to do about these independent worlds? The first one we found is much more attractive to us, but I agree we should do all we can to keep the Tarka from claiming the other. No free worlds for our rivals!

But given that the Morrigi independent world will resist, I assume we will lose our gate there even if our attack is successful. So a reserve gate one turn out-system is a must. How much force will we need? 60 million imperials is not too much -- 3 or 4 shuttles should be plenty I would think, although we may need more to make sure that many reach the planet. But how much damage will we take during transit from planet missiles and the light sat ring? Even with squadron CnC we are likely to take quite a few losses. I know ZedF had a very elegant distraction tactic, with the CnC sneaking up on the planet and the distraction group then withdrawing to be replaced by shuttles right by the CnC (and thus the planet). But I am not sure I could manage something nearly that well. Or that the planet and sats would not pick off my CnC rather than attacking the distraction group.

As for the swarm world, maybe there is a way to defeat it using auto-resolve? Without light emitters or PD fighting it tactically is likely to be extremely painful.

General goals:

- Military buildup? (Or should we wait for mass drivers before investing a lot in fighting ships?)
- Defend what is ours, including systems we don't want to colonize ourselves but are attractive to our rivals
- Claim the independent Morrigi world (if we can gather enough force)
- Continue researching Mass Drivers for a weapons upgrade, then go for Cybernetic Interfaces for economy

I am not sure where to focus our efforts right now, I guess military buildup and claiming the independent Morrigi world and the swarm world if we can manage to do so.