RBSotS1 SG2

[Zed-F]

The other victory condition is alliance victory. If everyone who is left in the game is allied with us then we win. Usually this means getting most factions in the game to ally together against whatever faction(s) everyone likes least, and then trying to line up a knockout blow against the designated enemy before the alliance splinters; this is not always as easily said as done. The trouble arises because as a designated enemy wanes in power, the other factions start remembering old quarrels and looking around to see how much expansion room they have and who else they would have to fight to claim more space.

However, we can also win a conquest victory without necessarily having to fight everyone; if our empire is large enough, and rich enough, and we have enough xenotech, we can encourage other empires to surrender to us and join our hegemony -- sometimes without firing a shot, other times with a little encouragement. This is empire building in the style of ancient greece and rome (and many others): the use of soft words as well as the sword, to gather your neighbors under your banner.

[haphazard1]

Some unexpected work issues have come up today, and I am not going to have time for any turns today and maybe not tomorrow either. I am going to have to request a skip, or at least a swap.

[Tyrmith]

That puts me up next correct?

[Mardoc]

That puts me up next correct?

Yep. Will that work for you?

[Zed-F]

I think a swap would be fine if Tyrmith is good with it.

[Tyrmith]

Yeah, tonight's a good day to do it

[Tyrmith]

Turn 101
- We fight at Shononu, pretty easily take down their fleet, bad news though is that we face another cruiser- acting as a tanker it looks like.


Turn 102
- Another fight at Shonou. I don't know if it's been noted before, but Silent Scream is using Light Emmiters.


Turn 103
- Just building more freighters...

Turn 104
-Move a couple DDs to defend against a one ship poke, other then that nothing exciting.

Turn 105
-Our fleet gates into Ko'Rorkor ready for a battle to the death, with bated breath they look for danger, and find... noithing. In the end there's nothing there, and it looks like it's for a reason as the planet is at the far end of our hazard rating (617). Yes it's possible to colonize, but it'll require a significent investement sadly. In the short term however it is at least another planet we can leave a gate at fairly easily.


Turn 106
- Biological Transfer comes in! I redisign colony ships, I set research on Expert Systems, 5 turns away.
-Figure I might as well set up designs for a refinery, Biome colony and a basic MD armor cruiser. I'm not building any at the moment so feel free to change as needed.

Turn 107
-Nothing much.

Turn 108
- We detect a fleet of 11 ships heading to Knossai, which is a dustball planet at the start of our end of the bridge between our section of the galexy and the other "bulge". It is however 8 turns out, so shouldn't be a problem for awhile, and we have 10 swarmDDs there anyway.
- Aparently I miss a 1 ship poke and it guns for a gate, which promptly kills the scout on it's own. I suppose it's a better to be lucky then good, especially when you follow the way of the noob aparently. The gate does take severe damage however, so I send another gate to replace it, though fortunately the gate portion is still working.

Turn 109
-Finally something interesting- fleet of 39 ships incoming to Kaa'Vaalu from Jade Wing. It has an ETA of 3 turns away.

Turn 110
-We have an incoming fleet of Silent Scream (morrigi) of 9 ships to Ko'Sothram (3 turns away).

Finances:

Basically the turn consisted of building freighters, and moving ships against random poke fleets. Expert Methods is ~1 turn away however, so we should plan what we want to research next turn.

We do have 2 significant fleets incoming over the coming turns which I haven't yet moved fleets for.

The save:

[Zed-F]

I am a bit surprised we got away so lightly from the Liir light emitter fleet. I wonder if they were not using light emitters in all their mounts? That seems like quite a small amount of damage taken... unless we autoresolved peacefully? That would explain it if so.

Nevertheless, it sounds like our economy is set to start really taking off now. Good job overall Tyrmith! I did notice an important point about the trade situation, though: see the following picture, this is the trade tab (notice top right corner.) Just building freighters isn't enough, they must also be assigned to routes, which you can easily do here. You can also quickly build freighters from this tab without going into each planet's build queue to build them. There is also a limit to how many freighters we can use in any given sector based on the number of routes we have available.

It looks to me like we are about done our freighter builds for now; we have more than enough to fill every available route other than the homeworld's routes, so that means it's time to concentrate on biome colonizers rather than freighters. There are some planets where we could overpopulate just slightly (just a smidge, so we lose no more than -1 resources per turn) to get an extra route for these freighters to occupy: Etosche, Chozanti, and Izakis. We could do the same with Shononu but it would have to get just over 100M more civilians for another trade route, which would eat up considerably more than -1 resources per turn, and we are not so high on production overall that I think it's worth it just yet. Watch for spare freighters in orbit around planets like Isketot rather than in a trade sector, too.

I would remove all freighters we haven't actually started yet from build queues, shuffle the ones we have around so they cover all the routes we have and are going to overpopulate civilians to engender, and fill up on biomes instead. Speaking of which, I note our Biome design has a missile on it and pulsed fission engines... probably want to get rid of those as they add a fair bit of unnecessary expense. Our biomes will gate everywhere and consequently don't need combat speed or extra range.

Our fleets could use a bit of re-organization as well in some cases. The fleet at Peten needs to withdraw for repairs, and the Knossai destroyers could stand to be reintegrated into an actual fleet -- they lack a command ship and won't be able to deal with the incoming Tarka fleet too effectively as a result (at least unless it's just another colony fleet.) And we might want some extra ships to help defend Kaa'Vaalu in order to retain our outnumbering bonus. We should also try to explore Mitrou, even though there is an enemy monitor in the system, as it's preventing us from opening up another trade sector. If we send say a squadron of 15 or so destroyers with the intent not to kill the monitor (probably tough to do with our current tech) but to scatter so that at least one of them lives long enough to scout the system, then that will open up somewhere for more of our extra freighters to go.

Which tech to research next? I would tend to think this is a good time to pick up atmospheric adaptation since we are about to go on a major colony push. But we also want to get Data Synergy for cruisers command vessels since I expect we should be start seeing enemy strikeforces soon. I would get those two techs next (in whichever order seems best) and then start on salvage technology.

[Mardoc]

Aside from not using the freighters yet, it looks like a pretty good turn. We didn't lose anything, got 1.9 techs, and an 8th world that will be colonizable with Biomes .

I definitely agree that once Expert Systems is in, it's the perfect time for Atmospheric Adaptation, and for spamming Biomes anywhere with sufficient civilians (last game I made the mistake of occasionally taking the whole civilian pop of a world to go colonize a new world, when I could have instead had a miniscule fraction of an older world). Of course Biomes aren't perfect, only something like 22 hazard reduced each, so we still need to put many of them into each world rather than spreading our efforts, but I wouldn't be surprised if whoever's up next can almost double our current empire.

So, the main question is - haphazard? Any chance of you playing in the next couple of days, to leave this as a swap, or does it need to turn into a skip?

[Tyrmith]

Yeah sorry, I was looking around and it seemed like some of the freighters were being absorbed into the trading network but others weren't and it was really confusing me.

There's 2 biome colony ships at our capital btw, we had the spare I/O and I figured we might as well.