RBSotS1 SG2

[haphazard1]

Ceasefire only applies when we meet at uncolonized worlds; for us to avoid fights at colonies we need a full NAP, which is why they are so valuable to Hivers who want to put gates everywhere and be able to help defend friends (or stab them) at will.

I had not realized the unclaimed world/claimed world differences with ceasefires and NAPs. Very helpful info!

Look for big flat extendable radar blades. They don't rotate but they fold in and out; there should generally be 1 CnC and 5 armour per fleet (mission sections) so look for the odd man out! The Tarka may hold it back or run it away from combat if they only have one though, so in that case they would be sending 5-packs your way rather than 6-packs.

When I was fighting 6-packs at Shononu, the Tarka CnC would usually move in with the rest of the CRs but then hang back right at the last minute and let the other 5 handle most of the fighting. I guess this gives some of the advantages of keeping the CnC safe but also keeping the reinforcement spawn point close by. I was able to move our forces a short distance and attack the CnC ships once the other Tarka CRs completed their first pass.

At this rate we might even want to pick up better lasers if we want to keep using destroyers! This is a bit unusual since small mounts are more often used for PD, but we don't have it. The Tarka certainly don't seem to be using any sort of reflective armour though, and early laser techs up to UV are not that expensive any more; it could be a good investment as long as we are a bit worried about gate capacity.

An interesting idea. We will need new designs anyway for either AP ballistics or lasers, and with the Tarka armor lasers might be the better option for now. As Hivers we are more likely to get later techs in ballistics than in lasers and energy weapons. But we need more effective firepower now, and the green and UV laser techs are cheap.

[haphazard1]

More cross-posting.

Nice work, Mardoc!

It has been a while since we have fought a larger Liir force. I wonder what toys they are bringing to the party? If it is mainly destroyers it should not make a big difference, but there could be surprises of the unpleasant kind.

[Mardoc]

T134 - AP drivers are now up to 130% overbudget! Still no sign of them actually completing. I think I like the laser idea, though; given how solidly even red lasers performed against the Tarka, Green/UV ought to be pretty effective. Meanwhile I keep manufacturing replacement current tech ships, so that we're not left completely naked.

We finally fight the yellows at Ir'idan; here's the battle report for weapons info:

Looks like they have a little bit of everything, but obviously not a decisive amount of anything.

But I miss seeing this fleet sneaking in at Atalanti, and, well, ouch!


I set up a light defense ring for next turn, but I have a feeling that Atalanti's eventually doomed . I'm not really sure what we can do here, if anything.

Edit: I think that might be a sign that I should quit for the night and play in the morning with more care.

[Mardoc]

Yeah, I'm going to call it a night with that. Here's the save in case anyone wants to look at it; I'll play in the morning and hopefully accomplish a bit more.

Save

[Zed-F]

Oops! Sorry to hear about Atalanti. There has been a lot of combat this turnset and more is coming, it seems our gobbling up every habitable world in this part of space has not gone unnoticed. That, and the alliance between the two Morrigi could be meaning extra trouble for us. Certainly we are seeing a lot more heat coming our way now than we were during Haphazard's and my turns.

Light sats are not going to help Atalanti; that fleet will just blow through them. The only thing we could in theory try would be to build a few ships designed to be as fast as possible, hoping to lure the Morrigi fleet into chasing them away from the planet until we could build enough defenders to stand a chance in a real fight, or until reinforcements arrive from elsewhere. However, given that we are Hivers fighting Morrigi, that seems at best a slim hope; Morrigi are usually faster than Hivers and reinforcements are a long way away. Still, it stands a better chance of being useful than light sats do.

Nevertheless, Kaa'Vaalu is not too far away from Atalanti; we should be able to reclaim and resettle it.

Why are we building more MD DD 6.01? Those are our old unarmoured gauss/mass driver ships; we should probably be building more of the newer Swarm 6.02 ships instead, I would think. Also, the coltrap fleets are full of totally obsolete ships that don't even have mass drivers, so don't depend on them to defend against anything other than single scouts. I am concerned that Ke'Pranum may be under-defended given what happened at Atalanti, since everything you have there or enroute is a cardboard cut-out, without even any semi-modern ships to support.

[Mardoc]

So, Atalanti is going to be dead, most likely, and I was building the wrong ships - yeah, it's definitely a good thing I slept instead of pressing on. Well, time to see if I can redeem any of my mistakes:

T134 (con't) - Swap the ships being built to Swarm instead. As it happens, there are some newer ships headed to Ke'Pranum, so that should be ok.

We fight the Tarka fleet at Shononu, and they have HCL!
Fortunately, it's only a couple of the ships, and taking out their CnC works its usual magic.


T135 - AP drivers finally come in, and I design a ship to use them, start mass production at the homeworld. I have a debate over the best path from here, but decide to head up the laser path for the moment. I can't imagine anyone would grant us a NAP until we manage to prove that aggression is a bad idea, and right now the Tarka are the main threat. Besides, Green Lasers are a 1 turn tech at half our research

We spot a 46 ship Jade Wing fleet also going to Atalanti. I think it's dead. I'll focus my efforts on getting our defenses up so that's all we lose, and the next player can consider going back on the offense.


More killing at Shononu. At the moment, with focus on killing CnC's, we seem to have reached parity with the Tarka. Presumably lasers and AP MD's will finish the job.


T136 - Green Lasers come in, and I start on Integrated Sensors; with AP mass drivers and green lasers, I think we should be in decent shape so long as we have sufficient warning of interlopers.

Speaking of which


I assume this is because of their successful battle at Atalanti, they want to hold it and/or think we're weak. Atalanti is finished off this turn, and presumably will be a hot potato for a while. Eventually we should definitely plan to take it back.

More spamming of our newest design everywhere. Once we get caught back up to having a reserve of defense fleets, I'll back off to just Isketot building, but for now, everywhere that's not working on freighters is working on AP MD ships and/or Cruiser CnC.

Silent Scream really doesn't appreciate us slaughtering the fleet that only wanted to kill millions of our citizens: "Why are you so broken?", he says.



This fleet used mostly emitters, so I probably should have spread out more, but we seemed to absorb the damage without too much trouble. Hopefully we can finish it off next turn. Since it didn't even kill the Gate, I don't think that'll be an issue .

We spot another 47 ship fleet of his en route to Shononu, 3 turns out. We're deploying a new gate there this turn, and should be able to bring in reinforcements with plenty of time.

T138 - We kill some Morrigi trying to kill a Gate, and a lot more Liir. The fleet attacking Cho'Zanti is down to 12 ships now . This time I notice that the lasers are bouncing off the Liir ships; they must have reflective armor. So we should probably eventually aim for separate fleets to handle Liir and Tarka, since they're resistant to different weapons. For the time being, though, I just keep building APMDs - the Tarka scare me more.

Integrated sensors comes in, and we start on Advanced Sensors. We also get to start our first special project on combat debris, 'The Breath of Hurakan'. No idea what it will be, but I go for it anyway.

And, we spot an 'alien menace'.


I've got no idea what it is or where it's headed, but that can't be good! It is, however, clearly in our sphere of influence, so I assume it'll be our problem when it arrives. I'm taking a break here; comments are welcome.

[Mardoc]

T139 - We start another special project: Chak An'ta. We must be getting these from the Liir fighting at Chozanti

Our last colony finishes its terraforming; we're now on a 0 colony development budget.

More Liir killing; we're now limited primarily by the fact there's only so many of them on the combat screen at once. Maybe one more turn will finish them.

The alien menace either didn't move, or moved very slowly toward Izakis, I'm not sure. Still no official track for it, though.

T140 - We finish off the Liir at Chozanti. Then we kill the first group of Liir at Shononu. AP mass drivers work pretty well against them:

Yes, that's approximately an 8:1 damage ratio in our favor . The only trouble is getting them to provide enough targets to clean them out in a timely fashion, really.

Their standard tactic has been to try to head to the right, around our fleet, then come back left to the gate, but they're not really fast enough to pull that off; I keep making them run the gauntlet of our ships.

So, overall status: Trade is approximately full, but there's still a few sectors that could use a few more ships. Things really calmed down toward the end of the turnset; there are still Liir in orbit at Shononu, but they're easy pickings, we've got the next generation of combat tech and built a couple defense fleets out of it. There's still that Alien menace, well, menacing near Izakis; it seems stationary so far, but I don't trust it.

Sensors are overbudget, so should come in any turn now. After that...I'm not sure. Maybe back to Xenotech to see if we can get any NAP's? Does reflective coating work against HCLs - if so, that might be a good place to go. Just because we haven't seen Tarka doesn't mean they're not out there, plotting our doom. . Mostly the turnset felt like frantically trying to put out all the fires; I don't feel like I made concrete progress on anything but that. Things feel more stable, now, so maybe it's time to invade somewhere, like Atalanti.

And, haphazard is up! The save: here.

Edit: I checked, we can move ships to the menace if we want, and if we do, it's described as 'A Cloud of Ships'. I'm getting the feeling we may want to build a bunch of lasers or hope to get lucky on point defense from a project before we take that on.

[Zed-F]

Re: NAP/Ceasefire prospects -- the problem is more that we are competing with all these smaller empires around us for living space than anything else, I suspect. They are all looking for somewhere to expand to and the only place to do it is through us. We should certainly be more likely to be able to make friends in the far part of the galaxy though, which is what we should be aiming for in the medium term, starting once we have Advanced Scanners.

Re: Green lasers, sounds good. I would be tempted to press for UV since those are a significant improvement over greem, but better sensors are important too! We should of course make sure to redesign as lasers don't auto-upgrade like warheads do.

Re: Atalanti -- well we can't say it wasn't expected once we lost the gate. Fortunately Atlanti was a small planet in an unsecure sector so this isn't a bad blow to our economy, however stinging it is to our pride and to the security of the more valuable nearby world of Kaa'Vaalu. We should certainly see about contesting for control of Atalanti in the short term though; the more entrenched the Morrigi get there, the more effort it will take to dislodge them later. Ideally I'd like to get a fleet there before they are able to colonize it, though that could be difficult with so many other races taking runs at us.

Re: Separate fleets for Liir vs. Tarka? Maybe; with gates we can manage the logistics, but that's potentially a lot of extra ships to be building. I'm not really worried about Silent Scream, though; their economy can't be that strong and they'll never be likely to hit us with anything we can't handle. AP drivers should do a good job putting paid to them for the foreseeable future; I'd be more inclined to just make sure we can handle what the Tarka throw our way and the rest should take care of itself.

Re: The Breath of Hurakan, as I recall that's an energy weapon tech. If we got it from the Liir, that's probably light emitters, which would be good news. But it will take a while to figure out. I'm not sure off the top of my head what the other one is.

Re: Techs after this: I agree we at least want to be able to NAP with Warriors of the Mind or whoever the other Liir is. It's even more important now to get gates up in the far side of the barbell, 'cause we might be needing a place for refugees to go...

Re: Alien menace: You're right, that's not good! This is one of the dangers of turning down the economy settings; Grand Menaces start having the potential to show up around T100 and later, no matter how well-developed your empire is or isn't by then. Most Grand Menaces are built with the assumption that your empire is pretty well-developed and you are probably in the late Fusion or the AM era by the time they show up in the game. Between the reduced econ settings, the relatively cramped map, and being Hivers who rarely expand super-quick to start with... Fusion is still a ways out.

The good news is, the menace doesn't take sides, so if anything this is even worse for our AI neighbors than it is for us, if they get targeted. The bad news is that we are a lot more likely to be hit than our neighbors are, given that it starts out by heading for whatever world is closest, and we have more territory than anyone else for it to hit. The even worse news... well I don't want to spoil anything for you guys, at least until you see it in action a bit.

Sending a scout group to go check it out would be a good idea, to see what we're up against in a bit more detail. Make sure to take pics! We'll want to discuss what this is and what we might do about it once we know a bit more about it. this will very likely influence our tech choices after getting Translate Steelsong.

Also, you can use distance measuring tool to see where it is going; IIRC it moves 1 LY per turn toward the closest planet. Sending ships to backtrack its course is the surest way of our scout group making an interception. To use the distance measuring tool, click and hold on an object (planet, ship, etc.) and drag to where you want to measure to.

[haphazard1]

Other than Atalanti it looks like a solid turnset Mardoc.

Re: NAP/Ceasefire prospects -- the problem is more that we are competing with all these smaller empires around us for living space than anything else, I suspect. They are all looking for somewhere to expand to and the only place to do it is through us. We should certainly be more likely to be able to make friends in the far part of the galaxy though, which is what we should be aiming for in the medium term, starting once we have Advanced Scanners.

What is our best approach for using Advanced Scanners, once we get them? This enables Deep Scan sections, right? I presume these will mainly be used on specialty ships, as it looks like Hiver Deep Scan sections are really lightly armed. How widely should we spread these around? Would it be worthwhile to station them at all of our colony worlds?

Re: Green lasers, sounds good. I would be tempted to press for UV since those are a significant improvement over greem, but better sensors are important too! We should of course make sure to redesign as lasers don't auto-upgrade like warheads do.

I think we should go ahead and get UV lasers. They are less likely to be reflected, are longer ranged, are more accurate, and do more damage. And they are not very expensive.

Re: Atalanti -- well we can't say it wasn't expected once we lost the gate. Fortunately Atlanti was a small planet in an unsecure sector so this isn't a bad blow to our economy, however stinging it is to our pride and to the security of the more valuable nearby world of Kaa'Vaalu. We should certainly see about contesting for control of Atalanti in the short term though; the more entrenched the Morrigi get there, the more effort it will take to dislodge them later. Ideally I'd like to get a fleet there before they are able to colonize it, though that could be difficult with so many other races taking runs at us.

I agree that the longer we wait the harder it will be to take back. But it seems we have more pressing worries with this grand menace.

Re: The Breath of Hurakan, as I recall that's an energy weapon tech. If we got it from the Liir, that's probably light emitters, which would be good news. But it will take a while to figure out. I'm not sure off the top of my head what the other one is.

Let's hope we get something soon from these, rather than waiting and waiting and waiting....

Re: Techs after this: I agree we at least want to be able to NAP with Warriors of the Mind or whoever the other Liir is. It's even more important now to get gates up in the far side of the barbell, 'cause we might be needing a place for refugees to go...

OK, so Translate Steelsong needs to go on the list as well.

Re: Alien menace: You're right, that's not good! This is one of the dangers of turning down the economy settings; Grand Menaces start having the potential to show up around T100 and later, no matter how well-developed your empire is or isn't by then. Most Grand Menaces are built with the assumption that your empire is pretty well-developed and you are probably in the late Fusion or the AM era by the time they show up in the game.

Late Fusion or AM era? Uh...not exactly.

Between the reduced econ settings, the relatively cramped map, and being Hivers who rarely expand super-quick to start with... Fusion is still a ways out.

The good news is, the menace doesn't take sides, so if anything this is even worse for our AI neighbors than it is for us, if they get targeted. The bad news is that we are a lot more likely to be hit than our neighbors are, given that it starts out by heading for whatever world is closest, and we have more territory than anyone else for it to hit. The even worse news... well I don't want to spoil anything for you guys, at least until you see it in action a bit.

I have not encountered this grand menace before, but from reading about it...we are probably completely screwed.

Sending a scout group to go check it out would be a good idea, to see what we're up against in a bit more detail. Make sure to take pics! We'll want to discuss what this is and what we might do about it once we know a bit more about it. this will very likely influence our tech choices after getting Translate Steelsong.

Also, you can use distance measuring tool to see where it is going; IIRC it moves 1 LY per turn toward the closest planet. Sending ships to backtrack its course is the surest way of our scout group making an interception. To use the distance measuring tool, click and hold on an object (planet, ship, etc.) and drag to where you want to measure to.

What would make a good [STRIKE]ritual sacrifice[/STRIKE] scout group?

[Tyrmith]

That's a very solid turn set Mardoc, real nice!



Zed- So you made me look up unknown menace on the sots wiki. First of all it was interesting to see the kind of mythology the game has for just 1 incarnation out in stores. Secondly however,(spoiler about the menance in case you want to find out for yourself)

its looking more and more like that menace is perfectly the kind that we can't defeat easily. From what wiki was saying about the menace that fit the picture Mardoc had, it's lots of little ships, with the mother ship consuming resources to make more as the battle goes on. It looks to me like the ideal ship would be one with emitters and shields, which is kinda the opposite of our fleet's design choices. Hopefully the alien tech pans out? Is there anyway to speed it up?

Killing it though would be pretty awesome, as it apparently gives 2,500 resources to the planet it's destroyed at. We just can't let it stay at any of ours as it apparently takes 20,000 away/turn if it isn't destroyed!

Wasn't sure if people want to be spoiled or not, so I put it in spoilers.