RBSotS1 SG2

[haphazard1]

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 would add that you can encounter mining traps, similar in concept to colony traps. So the first time you start mining a new system, it is helpful to have a few fighting ships along as a cover force. Also, I believe Mega Strip Mining tech makes mining ships more efficient in terms of ore produced and total time required.

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

OK, I will definitely take a look at the invasion fleets before they reach their targets and make sure the organization puts the deflector ships in the right places. But it sounds like the deflectors will provide less offensive fire power, so we don't want too many of them compared to regular ships or we won't have enough striking power.

Good thing these fleets are expendable, since this will definitely be a learning experience for me. But hopefully we can succeed with our attacks and begin absorbing the rest of our end of the galaxy into our empire.

[Mardoc]

OK, I will definitely take a look at the invasion fleets before they reach their targets and make sure the organization puts the deflector ships in the right places. But it sounds like the deflectors will provide less offensive fire power, so we don't want too many of them compared to regular ships or we won't have enough striking power.

Yes, but surprisingly, it didn't cost as much as I would have expected. A deflector has 4 small, 9 medium, and 1 large APMD, while a regular Locust ship has 4 small, 14 medium, and 1 large.

Good thing these fleets are expendable, since this will definitely be a learning experience for me. But hopefully we can succeed with our attacks and begin absorbing the rest of our end of the galaxy into our empire.

The way I see it, these ships have already served their purpose, in ensuring we only lost one world to the Locusts. We're now just trying for bonus points .

They're very much not optimized for invasions, without much planetary bombardment capability or anti-missile, but maybe numbers will outweigh that. Or clever tactics . I would certainly prefer you succeed, and at least the AP mass drivers and armor ought to mean you have superiority over the fleet presence.

[Zed-F]

More comments later, but AP mass drivers are actually quite decent bombardment weapons.

[Tyrmith]

I would add that you can encounter mining traps, similar in concept to colony traps. So the first time you start mining a new system, it is helpful to have a few fighting ships along as a cover force. Also, I believe Mega Strip Mining tech makes mining ships more efficient in terms of ore produced and total time required.

Okay, I didn't know that could happen. In my personal game I just got too irritated by the random events and just turned them off.

How do you decide which worlds to dump the ore at? Can you make a substantial enough difference they'll be substantially beneficial to worlds that arn't producing ships? Also is it generally best to have multiple stacks of mining ships running around, or do you want one big stack of mining ships?

[haphazard1]

Helpful info on the ships, Mardoc, thanks. I will have to review our current designs, since they are new since the last time I played. It might be helpful to know what I will be fighting with.

Since we are Hivers and can gate our mining ships around, we can put all of our mined ore onto our homeworld and get the 200% infrastructure bonus for the resources. For most races it would take too much time to ship every mining ship back and forth to the homeworld, so the ore gets spread out a lot more.

We may want to put some ore onto Izakis, so it has enough IO to support all the trade routes it is capable of having. (I need to check this and see where the planet stands, compared to potential trade routes.) But other than Izakis, everything should go to the homeworld for one massive forge planet.

I am still stuck at work (minor crisis today), so I am unlikely to get more than a few turns in tonight. But I should be able to fight the big invasion battles. Depending on how much time that takes, I may need to finish the turnset tomorrow.

[Zed-F]

Catching up to questions from Mardoc's turnset and following...

It looks like nothing's been done about Atalanti. Have we missed the boat on an easy reconquest here?

I dunno about Tyrmith but I was a bit preoccupied with the Locusts to spend much thought on Atalanti. It's a small world though -- only size 2 -- so I would be tempted to leave it be if we have enough other priority targets to take care of first. In fact I would rather look at worlds that will get us more secure trade sectors.

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.

Sounds good for now. We probably want to eventually put light emitters or PD on these now that the techs are available for research, in order to help with defense against missiles and shuttles.

I assume it's possible, maybe even straightforward, to replace normal freighters with Megafreighters on the trade routes?

Yep, any Megafreighters we build in a sector that already has active trade going on will be used in preference to regular DD freighters.

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.

Probably I would grab PD in preference to light emitters at this point.

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.

Probably just one or two deflectors to the front of the formation should be sufficient. If we really want missile protection we could grab Quantum Chaff to build wild weasel destroyers to stick behind our deflector cruisers and suck missiles into the shield, but I would grab PD first.

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?

We can build mining ships prior to getting mega-strip mining with no penalty as it's a free upgrade for mining ships.

Regarding the mining traps that were mentioned, a good way to pre-scout worlds that you want to mine for mining traps is to send a refinery there and refine fuel. If it has a trap, the refinery will trigger it and you'll only lose one refinery rather than a whole mining fleet. Saves needing to escort your mining ships (and mining traps are nasty enough that they will often take out escorts anyway!)

How do you decide which worlds to dump the ore at? Can you make a substantial enough difference they'll be substantially beneficial to worlds that arn't producing ships? Also is it generally best to have multiple stacks of mining ships running around, or do you want one big stack of mining ships?

In our case, as noted, we will want to dump most of it on our homeworld, excepting only worlds that need more resources to fuel trade routes. For other races without the Hivers' logistical flexibility, the choice is less clear and depends on where the action is. Generally speaking, though, I try to pick an average of 1 high resource forge world per trade sector for freighter construction and to take care of any military needs in the area; this is a natural target for mining drops taken from worlds in or near that sector. But as the front line shifts, this can change for non-Hiver races.

Hivers can certainly do the one big stack of miners thing, but other races generally don't in my experience. You usually want your mining ships to be working worlds near as many active borders as you've got.

I am still stuck at work (minor crisis today), so I am unlikely to get more than a few turns in tonight. But I should be able to fight the big invasion battles. Depending on how much time that takes, I may need to finish the turnset tomorrow.

Ok, sounds good.

For future reference, I am going to be out of town in cottage country and unavailable to take turns -- perhaps out of communication entirely -- starting on Friday morning and continuing to Sunday. I expect to be back in town Sunday afternoon or evening. I'm not sure what my availability will be like Thursday night as there may well still be preparations ongoing, but hopefully I'll at least be able to post.

[Tyrmith]

I'll be gone as well this weekend, starting friday into late sunday. (fourth of july!)

[haphazard1]

Played 3 very combat-heavy turns. The rest of the turnset will have to be tomorrow.

Turn 170 (inherited)

- While loading the save, I see that we are #1. Distant Tarka are now #2, other Hivers are #3, local Tarka #4. The rest are riff-raff, who cares.
- Checking our trade sectors, I see we can add routes at Ozoris, Ko'Rorkor, and Eretria. I also overpopulate Chozanti to gain another route there. (Will need to check this to see if I was able to get only -1 overharvest.)
- Shuffle some freighters from over-equiped sectors to under-equiped sectors.
- I find a CR in Izketot's guard fleet and free it for use. Similarly we have a 13 ship guard fleet at Ke'Pranum for no obvious reason. There are probably more such stray ships, I did not really focus on pulling together military. I assume we will want to build some new ships with PD and Fusion engines when we are ready to send out more forces.
- I design a mining cruiser and build one.
- Reorganize the fleet coming in to Kuo'Dai. We actually have three separate fleets coming in, so more reorg will be needed after the first round of battle.

- Speaking of which...fight! The Tarka have 20 sats (full light and medium rings), 28 DE, and 18 CR, plus the large fully developed planet. This should be...interesting.



We killed ~6 million imperials and about half that for civilians, but most of the focus was on cruiser vs. cruiser action. We killed 8 of their CRs (plus 1 medium sat and 3 lights) for 12 of ours, a bit painful but not too shabby given the planetary missile storm. The deflectors definitely made a big difference.

The Tarka are using missiles (but not from their cruisers), particle beams, stormers, and HCL.

Turn 171

- A surprise pop up.



Someone has been busy in the other end of the galaxy.
- Mega Freighters completes, and I design the new class. We start Modular Construction (2 turns).
- Build some more mining ships, and start filling our remaining open trade routes with the new mega freighters.
- Reorg the Kuo'Dai fleets now that they are together, and also reorg the Sunoma fleet. Nice name, whoever did that one.

- IBT at Sunoma the Liir have 73 DE and 10 CR to our 50 DE and 16 CR. No sats, interestingly. They definitely have Strikeforce CnC as we face a 6-pack of cruisers. But their CRs turn out to be missile-heavy designs and our deflectors provide excellent cover.



- At Kuo'Dai the fighting is again heavy but the balance is a bit more favorable this time:



Well, at least those fleet maintenance costs will be coming down. We inflict minor (~8.5 million imperials) losses on the planet, but we are not really breaking through given the CR vs. CR action.

Turn 172

- The local Liir call to say we cannot be allowed to sing blackness. I think they are upset.
- Start our first mining ship working at Miirio with a cover fleet.
- The local Tarka destroyed one of our gate fleets in deep space.

- IBT Miirio turns out to be a mining trap. I had never actually encountered one of these before...should have had the mining ship go in alone. Ouch.



Sorry, complete noob error here on my part and it cost us some good ships.

- At Sunoma we smash up the Liir now that their cruiser force is essentially gone.



No losses, always love to see that. I wish we had a second repair ship with this fleet, though; we use all but 9 of the 16000 available repair!

- At Kuo'Dai we lose our CnC early. We get a replacement, but it starts far out at the original spawn point and additional reinforcements join it there. So our assault on the planet is weak this round. We still do some damage, but this was not a good round overall. We do seem to have finished off the Tarka cruiser CnC, so their forces are also less effective.



Turn 173

- Modular Construction completes. I start Gate Amplifiers, but....
- The distant Tarka call and say they will listen if we want to talk. Should we try for improved relations and work on the next Tarka xenotech instead?

I have not made any additional builds yet this turn. Our open trade routes will have been filled with mega freighters by next turn -- should we continue building mega freighters to replace existing DE freighters? Or would it be better to push research harder?

Which way should we go for tech? If we could get an NAP with the distant Tarka, we could spread more gates...assuming any survive their journeys. We do have one gate fleet 2 turns from its target, maybe it will survive long enough we can deploy and start pushing gate fleets from that system, with much lower risk of interception. Let's hope it makes it.

Our rankings are looking good.



And our budgetary situation:



Progress at Kuo'Dai is slow but I think we can break through and really hammer the planet now that most of the Tarka cruisers are destroyed. I just hope we do not run out of CnC ships. Sunoma is going well and we should crush the Liir in another round or two. Just lots and lots of fighting still to be done.

Save attached for your examination. Input, ideas, and thoughts are much welcomed!

[Tyrmith]

Nice turns so far.

As for trade, at least for the moment while we're not producing ships from Isketot we can change the slider to open trade routes for excess freighters that are pushed out when we produce cruiser freighters. Or we could just set it to producing mining cruisers.


That's too bad the Liir bit the dust, they seemed fairly amiable towards us, having two races at that end might have allowed us to set up some sort of dog pile, but perhaps that happened instead to the Liir.

(and man that's a nice name Mardoc for the sunoma fleet )

Also we should probably continue trying to get gate/tanker pairs through to the other end of the barbel, correct? I don't see any being built.

[Zed-F]

I had never actually encountered one of these before...should have had the mining ship go in alone. Ouch.

Yep... as I mentioned it's often a good idea to send a single refinery around to all the worlds you plan to mine and refine at each of them, making it safe for a follow-up mining fleet.

Should we try for improved relations and work on the next Tarka xenotech instead?

I don't know about instead, but we should definitely put it somewhere high on the list.

should we continue building mega freighters to replace existing DE freighters

Absolutely, yes, we will need the income for later teching and fleet production. We should be building megafreighters with whatever income isn't going to military needs and we should have at least half our budget available for freighter construction.

Which way should we go for tech?

I would probably finish Gate Amps first and then get Tarka Language 2, but possibly in the reverse order if we could gate a Tarka world immediately with a NAP. After that, more economy, or PD and HCL, whichever seems more appropriate.

Also we should probably continue trying to get gate/tanker pairs through to the other end of the barbel, correct? I don't see any being built.

Absolutely, but at this point if we are a couple turns away from potentially establishing a gate, we can build a few and wait to see if that gate gets established before sending them out. Looking at the save though there is a white morrigi fleet at that planet we would have to fight, so I don't think that gate is going to happen -- might want to redirect the fleet heading to Nakbe somewhere else. If we can get a NAP with the Tarka then we should be able to redirect some of our fleets to their worlds. There is a fleet very close to Adena just now that would be a great candidate if we had a NAP.