My report is posted at the Meklon Gambit (my Orion site/blog) as usual. Notes from the sponsor will be added shortly, below. Beware however: They do contain spoilers about the result of my game, so please read the report first! Also, if you're worried about a long read, worry no further: I believe this is the shortest Imperium report I've posted to date!
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Imperium 24 - Report & Notes from the Sponsor
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In terms of the idea behind the game, there's really not much to add to the game page, apart from apologizing for my sea of typographical errors. Orion balances some of the AI's weaknesses by giving them advantages like free colony ships and alliance cheese, but also gives the player advantages to which the AI doesn't have access, usually providing more interesting tactical options than the AI can deal with properly. The idea here, apart from honoring the great Purrratio Nelson (whose name is sadly misspelled on the game page) was to just take all of the player's bonuses off the table (erring on the side of forbidding tactics rather than leaving them in) and see how the game would play out. I may revisit (or improve on) some of these restrictions in future Imperia, but I certainly don't plan to revisit all of them!
The scoring idea was adapted from sargon0's suggestion in discussing my notes on Imperium 21. If you found anything about it cheesy or foolish though, it's a good bet it was one of my additions! I like the system overall (though it may not have been the best match for this Imperium - we'll see) and may revive it for future Imperia, perhaps with a few tweaks, if others agree with me. Now, as for my own play-through: Truth be told, though I playtested this game longer than the last one - all the way up to 2372 - I'm still sort of sorry I sent it off so soon. Following the game's first inconclusive election that year, I decided the map looked good enough to run, and sent the files to "press." So, of course, three turns later.... I did think about continuing with Final War. It would have been a serious challenge, but not unwinnable, I think. Trouble is, my heart just wasn't in it. Though I'll play out a "total victory" when it serves the story and theme of a game, I prefer not to actually exterminate the AI races from the galaxy (and getting my own empire exterminated, the only other - and not unlikely - option here, isn't exactly my preferred alternative!) and many of my recent games ended up going that way; I wasn't interested in a "kill or be killed" endgame when the AIs had so kindly handed me a victory. I'm satisfied with my own game, fortunately. If the election had been inconclusive, I would soon have been in a winning position anyway, and I actually had already experienced most of the variant's effects: Scout blockades are mainly an early game tactic, several of my ships had already retreated the long way, and as mentioned in my previous report, I never used the Wait button throughout the many wars in my previous game! There were diplomatic challenges built into the game too, of course, but ... yeah. Following that election, those weren't going to come up in a meaningful way. So I'm actually pretty happy with the early diplomatic win. The only trouble is, had I known it would happen, I could have waited to send out the files until I finished the game and did some more quick playtests and ALT-GALAXY checks and so forth to make doubly sure it would be a fun game for everybody! I hope it turned out to be so nevertheless.
Nice game RefSteel. I went the opposite way with an early diplo loss in 2400 when every race voted against me (and I was only at war with the Humans!)
Looks like I might have done decent in the scoring anyway. I hit the 6 planet mark in 2351-2 and #12 in 2395-6. I was easily the largest empire in my game. Psilons only had 3, Darlocks 5, and Humans 4 (though to be fair I did take away two of their planets 
Horist Wrote:Great read as always. Beat me by 5 years for the 6th planet.Thanks for the compliment. And you beat me to the 12th, 18th, and 23rd planets by infinitely many years! Olorin Wrote:Looks like I might have done decent in the scoring anyway. I hit the 6 planet mark in 2351-2 and #12 in 2395-6. I was easily the largest empire in my game. Psilons only had 3, Darlocks 5, and Humans 4 (though to be fair I did take away two of their planetsYup - nicely played, in spite of the pRNG-fueled voting loss! Scoring was looking a lot tighter when you posted your report, before Sargon showed up and blew everyone away! sargon0 Wrote:Good game, I liked the scoring system! Expanded out to Nitzer & Obaca nicely, shame about the early victory. One time it pays not to be popular!Thanks; I liked the scoring system too (and most of it was your idea originally!) I do think it would have been better to roll up a map with the kittens in the center of the galaxy though (with better potential for five worlds to bring everything to within ~12 parsecs). Either that, or edit the tech tree to make sure the player has Thorium. Shooting the moon wasn't just a fun option but a way to prevent cheesy use of the +1 bonus per extra planet beyond the benchmark number in the same year. Even without a moonshot option, the best possible score would be achieved by sitting on 5 planets, glassing everything in range, and then colonizing as many worlds as possible simultaneously. (Assuming you go on to win, you would wind up with 51 points for going 5 -> 25 in one year, for instance, independent of date and others' finishes). The trouble is that tossing out 20+ LR colships set to colonize simultaneously just for score seems rather silly. So, if Thorium or a central start had made the Moonshot equally viable, it would have obviated that scoring "strategy." As it was, I'm just lucky we had a shadow moonshot to prove it wasn't completely impossible, and that no one tried the cheesy strategy!
On scoring, I wanted it to reward good early play whatever the eventual outcome. However even simple expansion was manipulated for score. Certainly for the Moonshot I think Thorium should have been added to the player's tech tree (easily done). As mentioned, no-one actually tried to max the bonus score, maybe not recognising the full potential. One idea:
Benchmark: 6 for first to benchmark, maximum 24 points Bonus planets: 1 per extra planet, max 6 per benchmark, overall maximum 24 points Moonshot: extermination from 5 planets, 24 points This way you have 3 ways to get max score - by expanding aggressively, by staged expansion or by extermination without expansion. Of course someone may try to combine benchmark with bonus planets for higher score but risks not getting top score. You could also have a tie-break, if desired, perhaps who has had to deal with the fastest expanding AI's if possible to be measured (Votes?). The competition between the 3 methods would have been interesting.
Just a note that results have been posted for this one. (Thanks, Griselda!) Congratulations to Sargon on his resounding win, and to Horist for his strong second place finish and incredible Shadow Moonshot!
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