Imperium 18 - Just because I'm paranoid...

[timmy827]

Traits chosen (not with dice, but my trusty TI-83, which seems almost as old-fashioned these days): Xenophobic Expansionists. Looking them over, I decide to add another restriction to Expansionist - whatever tech spending not in Propulsion must go into Planetology until I have Radiated or whatever the highest environment in the tree is. I assume this applies recursively - if there are more planets in range initially, no teching until they are settled, then whole hog on range/environment research, as soon as breakthrough allows more colonization back to ships/factories only, etc. Also, I will bend the rules slightly - if I have to turn tech off to expand, I will allow one world to put in a pittance to prevent partial research from decaying. I also allowed terraforming as an allowed action while worlds are available since it enables building more factories.

Initial move - colony to green, scouts to purple and red. That turned out well. By 2309 enough scouting reports have come back - no habitables in range, so I can turn on tech, select +10 and no choice on range5. By 2318 the former has trickled in, and with my Expanionist bent go for Dead over Improved Eco. Also have a map:

The habitables are all good and reachable with range 5 - two large and one small but Rich. The infernos are both UR! Psilons encountered at the radiated, and as players of course know the unscouted star NW of Sssla is Orion. By 2328 Sssla maxed and prebuilding colony ships as Range5 in %s. In a normal setup this would be a cakewalk - the NW yellow is too isolated to be a start location and there have been no AI scouts sighted besides Psilon, they must all be crammed in the south and I will be able to grab 1/2 of the worlds.

2335: Ryoun founded, and most of the scouting reports from range5 in:

Conveniently 2nd colship is ready to go towards Dunatis in the SW. Altair is at cursor despite never seeing any of their scouts; scouts of the Humans and Bears found indicating former in the SW and latter in south-central. When I settle Dunatis, I meet the Humans and Alkaris and have to start the spying tax.

2350 Situation:

Have colships for all the non-settled reachables, so can finally turn tech back on, working on both Dead and Nuke Engines from scratch. Humans are invading at Dunatis, here again I bend the rules allowing all-out eco spending to prevent a takeover.
A few turns later I fight off 29 humans losing 34 lizards. I put Sssla on popguns for a turn (humans have only a single Medium + unarmed colship in orbit) and then commit half of the homeworld's pop as well thanks to a radiation accident.

Dead in 2364, so start on another round of colony ships. Nuke engines was already at 20% so a pittance of continuation funding allowed it to come in next turn; Toxic and range 7 are next targets. Disaster strikes on the turn my first pair of Dead ships are built (the radiation accident has left Sssla exactly equal to Xengara in production):

The closest Meklar and Psilon worlds were settled that very turn, and I am cut off in that direction to the south and east. At least I have one target in the west so one ship doesn't have to sit around. (The barrens in the west and ocean in the corner are all out of range at 6 parsecs.) With the expansionist rules it isn't easy to build early skirmish fleets, and my one round of fleet build went to defending Dunatis from the Humans (good investment, shooed away the medium and have not been bothered there since). Still, if Sssla hadn't been irradiated it could have built the ship 3 turns faster and probably would have discovered the tech a couple of turns sooner; that would have gotten me the Meklar barren and kept a route to the south open. Very unpleasant luck there...BTW the 1st vote was triggered, I am against the humans and do not hold a veto, not a good situation, but Meklars and Psilons abstain.

Well, I decide that my expansionism and hatred of other races means I should immediately invade that Meklar world (hoping they don't have a big fleet in orbit when the lizards arrive). The good news is that its 2371, so when the invasion hits in 5-6 turns we will have just passed a vote. Meklars seem to anticipate and DoW before the invasions are close to the planet. I forget that the planet is too far away for me to see if a fleet is there and my lizards are blasted out of the sky before landing. A colony ship intended to go south if I took the world finds the fleet gone so a 2nd wave is sent, but the Psilons take that world (and the one to the south) before I arrive. Fortunately they do not declare war. This cuts me off from further expansion until I get range 7 (reach some in the west) or Toxic. It also makes me lose contact with the Meklars, but they are still able to hit me through an alliance. 2 larges swat down Xengara's pitiful no-tech missile bases, but are easy handled by a swarm of 50 laser fighters a couple turns later. But soon every race joins in on the war (save the Bulrathis, still haven't met them). Seems like our xenophobic views are well-founded...

Not much else happened, one minor Alkari attack repulsed. Psilons offered peace which I accepted. They were nominated against me in the 2400 election and only a Bulrathi absention saved me. Good news was that I had gotten both Toxic and Range 7 so I should have several more worlds by the next vote. Good/bad news is that radiated was an option, so by my rules I still cannot research anything besides P&P (took Energy Pulsar over range 8 ). 2412 is a banner year as radiated comes in and I can actually make research decisions, but go for IER before any weapons. A couple turns later...well I had been getting all nice and secure, then I see this fleet.

The 15 larges have 10 death spores. And Duralloy with Auto-Repair. Needless to say this doesn't go well..Everyone was dead after 2 volleys, but apparently that doesn't really register until combat is over, and since they had few weapons good against the bases I did shoot down all but the death spore doomstack. In less dreadful news, the Alkari took a barren world on the west side only to be overwhelmed by my incoming colonists, which prompted them to offer peace. This was revoked when I reinvaded Dunatis which they had recolonized, but it was a great deal as I picked up several techs from the sporing exploit. But soon the crap hit the fan, Psilons were taking one of my UR Infernos (they had a 4-shield ship and I did not yet have Hyper-X's) and Bulrathi took one of my worlds on the far west side. It really did seem like they were all out to get me, then it became official:

If only I hadn't extended the variant rules, I would have researched +40 by this time instead of radiated, and may have gotten enough pop to block.

Psilons immediately take two of my best worlds - Dunatis (still full of factories, but haven't been able to get it populated after the sporing) and Tauri, one of the UR Infernos. I'm saved at another world by time running out on a battle - nuke missile bases useless against a 4-sheild ship, but the ship only able to do 1 point of damage per turn to the bases! On the tech front, the Psilons swiped Radiated (great, no world is safe now) but at least I got to Hyper-X so I shouldn't have problems with dinky ships establishing orbit, allowing brains armed to the teeth with gropo to fry scores of lizards. Chose SPV next, but shifted research over to Computers, so I could actually use all the money I have to put into spying, instead of getting hit by sabotage each turn.

After getting some hyper-X bases up I was feeling reasonably safe against aggression (except for my one Radiated world; with everything going on I forgot to switch it over to base building, and was rewarded by an out of the blue message that it had been destroyed. Down to size 10, so I guess it was the human death spores.) Continued research into computer tech, taking the cheap way up with the first two ECMs, turning spying active after the second.

Was very surprised to see six options - thought my computer tech meant I could only take first-tier stuff. Went with comps and got BC 2.

The AIs now had a positively scary tech lead with their sharing, but only the Psilons were throwing stuff at me, and not enough to get past 5-8 bases per world. I massed some 30 Hyper-X boats and retook Dunatis (at my gropo tech deficiency it wasn't easy, one wave failed against only 10 defenders!). The world still had 200+ factories for more texplotation, especially since invading would have been impossible had the AI terraformed it back to size and flew it more colonists like a human would. Definitely cheap, but I didn't see any way around it (I could only bomb 2 factories per turn!) This gave me Fusion Beam, Inertial Stablizer, and Planet Shield V (!) along with some more goodies. A long research project on Impulse Drives also came in, so by rule I had to scrap my 2-move missile boats immediately instead of having them defend the world

Planet Shields made me truly invulnerable for a while, although poor Dunatis could not get one up before swarms of Psilon ships blasted it away (score one to the AI for jumping all over my weakest point). Of course there were enough factories left for them to steal Impulse Drives on invasion, my one area of tech superiority. After BCIV I found there was no RC4 in the tree, so turned efforts to stealing an RC from the AI's. Several misses, one netting BCV (huh? that's definitely higher than my tech level), and never got one. I got complacent, and finally the Alkari started building new model ships. I lost Moro, the world at the west edge (which had even gone Rich!) to larges with Hercular missiles (and the AI's got +40 and Star Gates out of the deal). It was beginning to look like winning was simply impossible, was making no progress on catching up enough to go on the offensive and had suddenly become quite vulnerable. Maybe without wasting 10% of income forever on spying and half of research on Propulsion (Impulse and Star Gates were absolutely useless as any ships I built got wasted) this may have been possible, but I gradually lost more and more worlds:

I gave up when about half of them had been taken - I was only falling further behind in tech, and couldn't see any way back; frankly if I survived 10 more years it would only be to AI inefficiency.

Thanks to Sullla for the game idea. I have no experience with Always War in this game but was surprised how hard it was with the AI's getting further and further ahead.

[sargon0]

Bad break timmy. The Expansionist trait is difficult to handle and the extra emphasis on controlled environments, although thematic, seems to have opened the door for the vote loss. Your expansion was good and would have provided a good platform for success otherwise. Better luck next time.

[RefSteel]

Oof - that's some harsh luck. My analysis before starting the game was that Xenophobic would be the hardest diplomatic personality to play by a wide margin, and this game seemed to bear that out. Ruthless and Erratic emperors who are required to "go to war" before they're capable of actually taking an enemy world basically just turn into Xenophobes toward the target race; you were effectively "at war" with the entire galaxy from first contact on, and had to throw resources away on low-odds spying besides. Of course your added research restriction didn't make it any easier, but I think it would have been doable with any other diplomatic personality. And then Sssla going radiated early on in an already-difficult game is a nightmare, obviously.

On spying: Yup, it turns out there's nothing preventing you from stealing techs above your own maximum tech level, regardless of field. Sargon and I tested ths a bit - the discussion is buried in an old thread somewhere - and in a series of test games, I was able to steal things like Shield 4 and Warp Dissipator when my tech level was 1 in every field!

Final War is always a challenge (at least on the higher difficulties) - especially when you're playing catch-up to begin with. As far as I can tell, the best bet is to go on the offensive swiftly and decisively (for instance, against an opponent that only just got planetary shields from the Galaxy-wide Alliance and hasn't had time to build them or a state-of-the-art fleet yet). If you're not in a position to do that, things could get ugly in a hurry unless you've gotten a great landgrab and have been playing the game up to that point with a Sirian mentality. (When Sirian was playing Orion, he believed in bases. Lots of bases. And giving them teeth.)

Anyway, in spite of the outcome, this looked like a great game, and was a lot of fun to read! Thanks for reporting it!