RBSotS1 SG2

[haphazard1]

A few thoughts:

- Tougher gate ships is a very good idea, especially for assaults on enemy systems. I thought about adding such a design, but was not sure of the best way to go about it. Deflectors for the command section would certainly be an interesting variant, and presumably as much PD as we can get. Pushing tech to Quark Resonators probably would be a good idea as well.

- We can probably squeeze out a few more TRs by checking our planets for candidates to use minimal over-harvesting. I saw at least a few planets where arcologies have allowed growth to an even multiple of 200 million. I meant to do this but forgot.

- Rather than scrapping our older cruisers, maybe we can shuffle these around to planets where the other Hivers have gates? Use them as a pre-positioned "kill their gates if/when war starts" forces? Although maybe we need modern ships for this...the other Hivers have been sending out gate ships with DN escorts.

[Mardoc]

- Tougher gate ships is a very good idea, especially for assaults on enemy systems. I thought about adding such a design, but was not sure of the best way to go about it. Deflectors for the command section would certainly be an interesting variant, and presumably as much PD as we can get. Pushing tech to Quark Resonators probably would be a good idea as well.

Thinking about this - I would design a CR gate, with Fusion power, Quark Resonators, as much shield tech as we have (currently just deflectors, but we might research actual shields), as much PD as we can fit in, and the longest range weaponry we have. After all, the primary purpose of the Gate ship is to survive, so stack as much survivability as we can. It's probably not urgent, so we can wait for Quark Resonators and a decision on shields. It would be nice, though, to have Gates around that I don't just assume are dead the moment the battle starts.

- Rather than scrapping our older cruisers, maybe we can shuffle these around to planets where the other Hivers have gates? Use them as a pre-positioned "kill their gates if/when war starts" forces? Although maybe we need modern ships for this...the other Hivers have been sending out gate ships with DN escorts.

My vote is to go ahead and scrap them. I just don't think that they have enough impact on battles anymore, and although the maintenance cost isn't a lot(3,000/turn/ship), it's still something. I'd rather spend that money on new ships.

Also - I don't want them around when I'm looking for a Zone Defense fleet because the Tarka are 1 turn out; I don't want to accidentally grab a fleet that'll get chewed to pieces instead of one that's got odds.

[haphazard1]

Good points on the older CRs. Scrapping sounds like the way to go then. What about old DEs? We have some scattered around as VN targets/decoys at most of our worlds -- I was pulling a couple at a time from the old zone defense fleets for the new worlds, while building jammers and police cutters fresh. But we still have a fair number of APMD DEs, and even just plain MD DEs, sitting around.

Looks like a good set of turns, haphazard! I'm quite impressed that you were able to go against the same defenses as wiped a whole fleet under my command, and lose only 4 DD's.

Mostly this was the difference between having enough PD and not have much (or any) with the older ships. I dropped one CR from our formation and added three more PD DEs (so six of them). And I shuffled ship positions a bit to keep the front line CRs closer to the PDs. The Tarka were sending clouds of missiles at us, especially the first turn when they still had some combat ships and all their sats. But our PD just wiped them out.

Occasionally a leaker would get through, and if it was targetted at a DE then the DE usually died. And this is just fusion warheads, I hate to think what AM warheads will do.

One semi-problem I ran into with the PD DEs getting killed is that we did not get reinforcements. I am guessing this was probably my fault, as I had more CRs at the top of the fleet list and losing a DE or two does not free up enough command points for a CR. But we were also getting one extra CR at the start of combat due to out-numbering bonus -- when you take losses, do you get new ships equivalent to what you have lost, or only once your active command points drop below your normal CP limit? (If that wasn't clear, do I have to lose/withdraw ships equal to all the out-numbering ships plus the number of CP points I want to bring in? Or just ships equal to the number of CP points I want to bring in?)

[Zed-F]

I do apologize for forgetting about resetting the planetary CH desired. Is there a good summary somewhere for managing multi-racial empires?

Not really. The multi-racial empire ability is a fairly recent addition to the SotS-verse (as of AMoC) and the UI for it suffers a bit from being tacked on. It's quite workable but some of the quality of life features regarding managing multiple races on your worlds don't have a lot of built-in intelligence. There is a global population manager, but you pretty much have to manage each world individually if you want to do any kind of tailoring at all.

I've got a question for Zed - the income screen lists 'foreign trade' as a suspiciously small number. Is that our routes? Or is it maybe the 20% share we get of someone else's trade routes into our empire?

The latter, I believe.

Note that many of our worlds now have routes to foreign worlds but we are getting less trade revenues from these than we are to our own worlds. (This is because we haven't researched Addict Tarka yet.)

On the bigger picture, where do we go from here? Well, of course it's really up to Zed. My thinking is to continue the bribes for another 5 turns, try again for alliance, then give up on them and cut those back to a token sum. If a historical friendship and a ton of money isn't enough to overcome Realpolitik, we might as well stop financing the fleets they'll use to hit us with. But for the moment, focus on economy and teching; we should be well ahead of the far factions in income, so it's time to apply that to getting ahead, or at least parity, in tech as well.

I was going to let it go for the remainder of my turnset, because diplomatic changes tend to be pretty slow in coming without something dramatic to push them along (e.g. common enemy battles) but otherwise that pretty much aligns with my thoughts on the matter. I might also see if there are any special research projects we can offer the Tarka to boost relations further.

Given that stations and Megafreighters have similar payback periods, depending on the station, I would focus on Megafreighters first.

Except for trade stations at a few of our largest worlds I would probably agree. We do want to make sure to get both going in parallel though because it can be hard/expensive to build a lot of stations all at once, e.g. when the megafreighter push is nearly done, because of the need for lots of expensive constructor ships all at once. If you build a few constructors and spread the station builds over a longer interval it's more cost-efficient.

I agree we need at least DN CnC, and probably Farcasters as well before we want a war. Aside from that...beats me! It'd probably be nice to pick up some new weaponry or defenses to put in our dreadnoughts. Accelerator Amplification looks like another good boost to our current techs; Siege Drivers simply look fun - and they'd force the enemy to come to us. Oh, and if we haven't picked up Quark Resonators yet, that's be fun too! It's of course all lower priority than getting to Armada control and Farcasters, though.

Pretty much once we've got Farcasters, Armada CnC, and Addict Tarka, it'll be whatever we feel like that might be useful next. Agreed that Accelerator Amplification would be a good way to go; Impactors are quite handy (once we have AM of course.) We might want to pick up the by-now-ultra-cheap Predictive Gunnery tech for Fire Control sections in that event.

Also - I don't want them around when I'm looking for a Zone Defense fleet because the Tarka are 1 turn out; I don't want to accidentally grab a fleet that'll get chewed to pieces instead of one that's got odds.

I can rename/reorganize our ZoneDef fleets if you want to make our current assault fleets into Zone Defense. I'll keep our old DDs in Fission fleets because they are still useful for outnumbering purposes and to pad our military power graph, as well as to pull ships from for garrison purposes. They are cheap to maintain, so I'm not concerned with that, but you'll want to know which combat fleets are beefier and which are full of older DDs (though it should be pretty obvious from the designs in the fleets anyway.)

Occasionally a leaker would get through, and if it was targetted at a DE then the DE usually died. And this is just fusion warheads, I hate to think what AM warheads will do.

The leakers were probably heavy planet missiles if they could kill one of our DDs in a single hit. If you have the tech your planets launch an additional 50% of their normal planet missile capacity as heavy planet missiles, and for a big world that can be a lot. The same also applies for Multi-warhead missiles, if we ever research them (doubtful since you need drone techs and we have better things to get.)

We don't have heavy planet missiles tech, but it would be pretty trivial to get, as we almost certainly have a link from shaped nuclear warheads for it. On the other hand, we don't really need it at the moment either. Maybe once war breaks out again, if we don't have other more pressing concerns.

One semi-problem I ran into with the PD DEs getting killed is that we did not get reinforcements. I am guessing this was probably my fault, as I had more CRs at the top of the fleet list and losing a DE or two does not free up enough command points for a CR.

Correct, you would need to drag some PD DDs to the top of the reinforcement queue to get some to appear mid-combat -- pause key helps with this.

But we were also getting one extra CR at the start of combat due to out-numbering bonus -- when you take losses, do you get new ships equivalent to what you have lost, or only once your active command points drop below your normal CP limit? (If that wasn't clear, do I have to lose/withdraw ships equal to all the out-numbering ships plus the number of CP points I want to bring in? Or just ships equal to the number of CP points I want to bring in?)

It depends on whether you have an active CnC with a working mission section. If you have a working CnC you will always fill out as many CP as you can have at max including outnumbering bonus. If your CnC(s) has a busted mission section or has been destroyed, then you won't be able to bring in reinforcements until your total CP in play has dropped to the point where you could fit a spare CnC into the battle without considering outnumbering bonus. After that, once the CnC is in, you will get another round of reinforcements to fill you back up to where your outnumbering bonus would put you.

Note -- if your CnC is busted you won't be able to withdraw any ships to the back lines either until that happens, so this can be dangerous if you have a lot of wounded ships in play you'd like to try and keep around. Another reason why being on the ball when your CnC is getting pummeled and moving a spare CnC to the top of the reinforcement queue can often be a good idea. If that reinforcing CnC can get on the field before the damaged CnC goes up, it can save a lot of headaches.

[Zed-F]

Turns 250-251: Reorganizing fleets to even them out a bit. We wind up with:

• 5 old-style Fission 6.0x fleets, which each have around 20-25 fission era combat destroyers of various types plus command and repair cruisers (total maintenance is about 7-8 cruiser-equivalents per fleet)
  
• 7 modern ZoneDef 8.0x fleets, which each have around 16-17 fusion-era cruisers and a dozen or so destroyers (total maintenance is about 18-20 cruiser-equivalents per fleet)
  

Considering we have over 650 cruiser freighters... that's not really all that much. Less than a fifth of our total fleet maintenance is warships. It's also worth noting that the Zone Defense fleets could all easily be sent back on the attack pretty much immediately if necessary, though a couple extra gates each would probably be a good idea.

Continue researching DN Construction. Build a trade station at Isketot. Offer Suspended Animation tech to the Tarka and Jammers to the other Hivers for diplo purposes; in neither case do I think they will get much use out of the tech, the former because most worlds are already settled, and the latter because AI empires rarely build DDs in the DN era (though it might eventually give them access to EWar DN command sections, I suspect that will come too late to matter much.)

Adjust population figures on a number of our worlds for maximum alien civilians and for extra trade routes by minimal civilian overpopulation where we don't have alien civilians.

Otherwise, mainly building megafreighters and a second construction cruiser. It will be a while before we want to build more than 1-2 stations at a time, so I don't plan to build any further construction cruisers in the next few turns.

[Zed-F]

Turns 252-255: Nothing much other than building freighters. DN Construction goes overbudget but eventually completes. I am tempted to get Addict Tarka but decide to get Armada Command first; we will definitely want Addict Tarka soon though as more Trade stations come online. Of course we are ridiculously wealthy as it is; we are pulling in over 12M credits per turn. With a trade station, our homeworld alone is a million of that. I am almost to the point where I can't spend all our income every turn on megafreighters.

Small Tarka fleets enroute to Ku'Van and Mitrou; neither look threatening. The other Hivers appear to like us but the Tarka are still at NAP level of relations.

[Mardoc]

Looks good so far! I look forward to the day when our APMD cruisers are old tech and we're debating if we want to keep them or scrap them . Which...at the current rate we're teching, might well be before my next turnset. After all, if we can't plow any more into building ships, and we run out of construction ships for our new stations - tech's the only other place to dump our money .

All assuming, of course, that you don't hit 'alliance request' and have it work.

[Zed-F]

Turn 256-260: We get a breakthrough on Armada CnC and I start Addict Tarka. Still building stations and megafreighters; I build a third construction cruiser.

Otherwise, not much happens; far Hivers still are willing to ally (I can tell by what they say when I ask how our diplo relations are), but Tarka want to keep at NAP levels. I decide not to pull the trigger on the Hiver alliance as I suspect it might tick off the Tarka; I would rather get them in an alliance first and then try to get the Hivers in an alliance. Both have up arrows for relations every turn, but it's impossible to say up by how much -- probably very little in the case of the Tarka. I opt to cut aid to each to 100K per turn, which won't build very many dreadnoughts very quickly. At this rate things seem stable for the moment. Maybe we can get Addict tech for both of them (grabbing Temperance for ourselves if needed) and see if we can reduce their willpower that way.

Once we have the Addict techs, it might be worth building a few trade stations in the far side of the barbell, just for the purpose of spreading drugs everywhere... *pimp*

Save is attached. Good luck spellman! I anticipate you should have some very quiet builder turns, working on our trade net and building stations, so it ought to be a nice gentle introduction to the game. Just keep an eye on the diplomatic arrows on the race screen; if we start to see them dropping instead of rising, then we will know things are starting to heat up a bit.

[haphazard1]

Sounds like some very positive turns, Zed-F!

Are we getting random combat events, since we are not involved in major fighting against the AIs? I have gotten to the point of disliking a turn with no combat, because it almost always means something random will pop up and hit us.

Addict Tarka and Addict Hiver sound good, with a couple trade stations in the far barbell to spread drugs everywhere. I assume Ku'Van is now a prosperous world of our empire -- it looked like it would be in its own trade sector.

As long as the relations arrows remain positive, I agree we should just continue building and developing and hope we can get that alliance. How often should we check relations? And can you provide a bit more detail on what you were seeing with the relations to indicate if the AIs would agree to an alliance?

[Zed-F]

Sounds like some very positive turns, Zed-F!

Are we getting random combat events, since we are not involved in major fighting against the AIs? I have gotten to the point of disliking a turn with no combat, because it almost always means something random will pop up and hit us.

Since we have gates everywhere, anytime anyone gets a random, we have a combat too. So yeah we are getting involved in random fights regularly (every few turns) but most of them are not at our worlds.

Addict Tarka and Addict Hiver sound good, with a couple trade stations in the far barbell to spread drugs everywhere. I assume Ku'Van is now a prosperous world of our empire -- it looked like it would be in its own trade sector.

It's up and running, though of course the population is still growing. Currently it has 3 routes but this will climb fairly quick (at least for the imperial pop, civilians will take longer.)

As long as the relations arrows remain positive, I agree we should just continue building and developing and hope we can get that alliance. How often should we check relations? And can you provide a bit more detail on what you were seeing with the relations to indicate if the AIs would agree to an alliance?

I was checking relations by asking them what their feelings were toward us every few turns or so, I don't think just asking for info bugs them.

The Hivers will say something like "our hives are not unalike" or "the queen would like to forge new ties" if they are feeling like a NAP, and "the galaxy is vast enough to share' or "what can we do together that we can't do apart" if they want an alliance. Come to mention it I think they were more inclined to NAP during my turns than ally.

The Tarka will say something like "We don't care about you either way" or "we will listen if you talk" if they want a NAP, and "you are worthy to fight alongside" or "you posess honor" if they want to ally. I'm sure these guys always responded at the NAP level.

If you see down arrows and they say something else, it means they are probably wanting to downgrade to a cease fire. But as long as we don't do anything to annoy them that seems unlikely at this point. I think things are going to be stable until we ultimately decide either to declare the game a "peaceful win" or pull a pearl harbour on someone. More trade routes may help relations, though, and addict tech may soften their wills.