Timmy's imperium 40

[timmy827]

EDIT: Used Kyrub's patch.

Interesting our start techs do not include BCII, so can only build 3 more (sheild I + II, BCI).
Despite RC3, the factory payoff is almost same as normal game - with IER and IIT9, factory cost should be 13.5 and profit 2/3rds, so payoff time of 20.5 yrs. Also with much cheap early tech gone, I don’t expect to get any benefits from research early, so the factory building will be priotized on the 2nd world as well (typically I stunt the 2nd world’s factories and have pull the trickle-research load on IER, range, or construction tech).

I really liked the choices we were presented, some interesting dependencies between what fits on the colships we can produce at the start, the map, and the “generation” requirement.

After initial scouting, I started a colony ship for Proteus (the tundra rich far west) in 2317. Did that one first since LR + Tundra were spacious and could only do with the first one. (And I really didn't want to spend a colony ship on Poor Uxmai if I could hop over it).
Reconsidered for a bit after finding good worlds to the north, but decided to try that with 2nd ship:

(Heh, heart attack on writing the report seeing no weapons on this picture. Then I read the scenario again, remembering that was OK only for colony ships )
If I got the minimal with this LR, the Rich Barren Celtsi would be accessible for the 3rd and last colony ship I could build with the starting tech.

But just missed it. That Klackon fleet was enough to chase my popguns and just a turn or two ahead of the picture reinforcements. However, the settlement of Proteus brought lots of worlds in range and I settled Nordia instead. (Nordia was close to Proteus so a ‘waste’ of LR tanks, but their BC cost is low. Unfortunately not sure if I lost transit turns due to the change in destination). Past that Spica was in range 4, so here’s 2351 when the last of my starting-tech colony ships has landed:

(Yes, the Meklar razed or invaded that world soon after the Klackons settled. I may have lucked out by losing it before planting my flag; getting a planet wiped out would be far worse than normal when you effectively can’t build a replacement ship!)
Klackons have gotten a colship through to the Arid Poor Uxmai that I bypassed, argh, was a turn late getting guard scouts back there. This is rather frustrating, I have about 22 LR popguns in the north, where the lateness means they were useless, and left worlds uncovered. (As an aside, klackons had range 6 from tech, but I don’t see how they got a colony ship to Uxmai unless they have LR colships this early? even with that, it should have poofed because they lost their world...grrr).

By this point Fierias has finally maxed factories and I have opened some research:
BCII for obvious reasons
Nuclear engines because I’m very spread out and don’t think range 7 is all that appealing except as gateway higher.
Controlled Barren, just because our selections were facepalmy (all 4 possible controlled environments, and none of the + terraforming), and selection of inferno vs. toxic I really didn’t want to commit to. Barren would be a minimal waste way of deferring that. (I really don’t like that you can’t abandon a tech choice in this game, and this was a reason I waited so long to open any research here.)
Also built a base at Fierias because of a klackon large - but apparently was just flying by to one of the southern worlds, the AI loving to send a fleet off to nowhere…map geometry just happened to make it look like it was coming for me.
Psilon scounts encountered west. Still no sign of Darloks, but Nazin got plauge event, sucks for them.

2355: BCII done, go on to III, obviously due to variant rules. Proteus has just about maxed out, so I can keep heading west with a Rich and closer world building

Actually, nuke engines came in before it finished and upgraded accordingly. Continue to dodge event bullets:


2369: BCIII, allowing another colship, hopefully going for a gem 85/fertile world that the Silicoids have mysteriously ignored, as have their AI allies Meklar and Klackon. Until now I had been using the rich world reserve to speed up the growth of my western half, and pretty quiet otherwise.


2378: Finished inferno, but not planning on settling any; closing in on sheildIII in (done 2383) and that colship went to Keeta, size 70. BarrenRichCelsti was still open and I was close to range 7
but decide to take Keeta. I think it makes sense to power up by fighting the Silicoids, so want on more pop-growing planet in the west over a rich shipyard near the klacks/meklar. The reason for the silicoids is that all 3 met races have similar fleet strengths but right now rocks have +10 terraforming now and better chance of popping +20/+30. (neither Klack or Meklar have any +terra yet, no do I). The rocks have considerably more planets too, which means they seem more likely to eventually run away, and that their fleet would be spread out quite thin since the AI loves to move ships for no reason. (Although those extreme west worlds of the Klacks and Meklar would strand a lot of their fleets too...all 3 races only have warp 1 still, ouch).
With BC IV costing 9000bc, and the next shield costing more (no sheild 4 availble, shield v would be 16000 bc and may not even be in my tech tree) I think I am done researching those techs for colonizing worlds.
Keeta and Orion are the highlighted purple and green stars below.

The Psilons were a recent hello, seems like they must have been stuck with the dreaded ‘paired gap’ (missing range tech, and the dead space confining them to 3 worlds)
Poor Darloks. I haven’t seen any evidence of them and if they were the west yellow they would have gotten some worlds - must be the lone yellow up by Klackon and Meklar. I know the map generator gives the human some breathing room but I’m still kind of floored that it can put 3AIs on top of each other on a Large map! At least the poor shapeshifters got the merchant donation event a bit later.


Phew! Nearly lost Keeta here to the Psilons. The actual fight wasn’t close - my scoutfighters dodged some missiles in the asteroid and blew up the colship, psilons then retreat. However the movement was such that the brain fleet nearly arrived one turn earlier, when my stack would have been 20 instead of 63. I had gotten complacent because all of the klackon/meklar/silicoids were spread out and warp 1 only - very small fleets running around and easy to build more or shuffle fleets if need. Psilons have better engine tech and I almost didn’t notice this fleet in time. They are rapidly settling worlds across the south of the map now. I am 2nd in pop to silicoids and starting to worry about a vote...Indeed first vote in 2397. Lucky me everyone abstained. Same dance in 2400.

2405 - fusion drives in, massive fleet building starts. unfortunately can’t fit IS plus weapons on a small yet. Goal is be safe with a blocking vote % by 2425. Visible silicoid worlds don’t have that many bases and I think I should be able to wreck them with swarms of high-speed ion cannon fights and fusion bombers. (Thanks, starting techs!)

not much to worry about there - the Mantas are potential planteary threat but I should be able to scramble fighters. But the Silicoids just got energy pulsar. Those designs should be old enough to not have it, but needed to be VERY careful to keep my token-armed scanners around looking for it.

First win, 35 against 44 - good for the sustainment of the ground campaign. I have the 4 nearest worlds now doing half EcoPop and half ships or bases. War continued without incident, took several nearly worlds. Some tech looting allowed a 2nd generation Inertially Stabilized fighter and bombers too.
Argus was a huge prize in tech - they had just gotten IT+30 AND IIT5, great companion as I have a lot of factories to build!

I wanted to peace out at this point, because I had the silicoid tech and wanted to attack the Meklars (specifically to loot RIW40), but no dice. Was also a little worried about AI alliances leading to other DOWs. Psilons came (in cold war mode)

I wanted to peace out at this point, because I had the silicoid tech and wanted to attack the Meklars (specifically to loot RIW40), but no dice. Was also a little worried about AI alliances leading to other DOWs. Psilons came (in cold war mode)

Reserve spending to finish a class V sheild and a few missile bases was sort of useless. 170 scrambled fighters were not; I got one of the Novas destroyed at the cost of about 45 felines spored to death.


phew. Had this in my notes for invasions:
“maybe don’t build the factories first after soil enrichment - still a 20 turn payoff, and pop growth is about that (Planetology 17 -> each pop is about 1 point clean production)”. That plus Darloks abstaining saved me in 2425. But Psilons and Klackons both DOW immediately following the vote!

Lots of shuffling things around 2425-2440; I lost focus not sure who to target. (I really wanted to invade the western half of the Meklar; they had some good techs and with them spread out it looked fairly easy; but decided adding a 4th war not totally prudent). Psilons were really not that scary; appeared they scrapped the Huge with death spores soon after the DOW and I was not troubled by it. Their other designs were mostly gun-based and mostly not dangerous to any world with a shield and a couple bases.

This was a bit of a problem - the ship had auto repair, in fact it was perfectly balanced (2 merculite bases, 5 shields on the ship, I have enough Battle Computer + Mrrshan advantage to always hit) - 30 pts damage and 30 pts auto repair every single round. The ship had one heavy blast cannon, enough to poke for 1 or 2 damage some turns, but the turn limit came before it could destroy a base thankfully (Not pictured are a bunch of psilon ships that ran away from my base; the fleet wouldn’t be easy to push away with fighters. The lower design was observed by a “scout scanner” ship and would be a serious problem, but fortunately was not sent at me until much later. )

My research decisions got pretty weedy too. I initially went Soil Enrichment at 4th tier, and was not utnil this game that I realized that Fertile worlds don’t help. Only cloning at 5th tier, and I actually did +40 instead of advancing because I hadn’t looted much. Then the Silicoids got and I looted +30 right before finishing +40, so rather wasted there, grrr.

2440:

yeah, invading them is a bit hard at the moment; I did get three worlds off of them but costly invasions. Good as this was the very next screen I saw:

So despite indecision I gradually made gains. Klackon and Meklar fleets were almost all guns and not threatening to planets. Silicoids had some bomber designs but never amassed a good sized stack of them. And the gropo situation rapidly tilted - each race researched one fairly advanced bit in complementary trees, so after one or two ‘hard’ invasions per race I would loot it and start flipping worlds faster. Eventually the Klackons got to 16 points of shielding mostly stopping my fusion bomber swarms, but that was fine, easy to keep taking other worlds while I wait for AM bomb. (Eventually got to add Cloaking too courtesy of the Silicoids).

There was a dead Rich planet to the south, so I almost used BCIV to build the level-7 ship - first one in some 50 years. But then the bugs settled it, which was easy to invade

Nice to confirm, I have a comfortable blocking %. (I do wish the game would let you see numbes instead of graphs for this).

Also happy to report good news on events. I got Radiation Accident at the newly conquered Xendalla world! No, really, I’m thrilled each time one comes up that isn’t terrible; this is a minor annoyance this late and with so many worlds.


Resounding victory. Psilons retreat 1 huge, 1 large, and half of their nuke launcher medium. I lost some fighters but still had 430 of the newer ones and 100 of the old. The latter spent most of the battle outrunning the slow hyper-v rockets. Looting planet shield X from the Silicoids should make me pretty safe again. My world Galos had gotten bombed/invaded down to 13 pop, (I waited a few turns to assemble a big counter stack) so a closeish call on losing the planet (only a major problem if they pull a good tech upgrade).
Time to hit back now; I already have a gropo advantage, Psilons don’t have anything to scare fighter swarms (no energy pulsar, warp dissipator, scatter pack) and AM bomb is at 39%.


Sweet, dual invasion of Hyboria and Rigel give me most all their toys, including this just-found gem.

Time to pick my weapon to kill the guardian with...I wanted to calculate but realized I couldn’t without looking up my engine/power goes . So I chose MBC, then did the real math, oops I chose poorly so actually went to GAC after too. About this time I stopped attacking AI’s with the large majority under my heel, figuring any more worlds wouldn’t pay off by time of the Guardian showdown. Passed on a Conquest victory in 2475:


Here’s the design I build about 250 of for fighting the guardian:


I misestimated badly. Tactics were to stay cloaked until it ran out of missiles. I did not anticipate that I would be able to dance-dodge all those. and I got so caught up in defensive thinking, I didn’t realize that ~200 of my ships (how many left after the missiles gone) would one hit kill the guardian, even though my earlier math on how much damage a GAC would do on average would have told me

Oh well, I have little idea how to fight it since usually you wrap up the game first. And the extra delay was only a few turns as I could churn about 35-40 per turn. Final map from the turn after the battle:



In the end I think I benefitted from hugely from losing those worlds to the Klackons early, and not just by dodging the possible Meklar invasion and ‘wasting’ of a rare colony ship slot. If I took those, I wouldn’t have gotten as far west, and not been in position to attack the Silicoids when I did, or deny the Psilons some of those good worlds while they were still range limited. The direction of expansion somewhat forced on me seemed to set up well to take advantage of the big head start we had, and made the rest of the game pretty easy despite the expansion constraints. Thanks to Catwalk and RefSteel for putting together! Although it wasn’t the hardest game, it was a well conceived variant (considerably different, not too complicated, and fun to play through).

[Zieman]

Wow, well played! I screwed up my attempt by taking those northern worlds and failing to utilize rich-reserve cash flow, thus leaving the west untouched and for Psilons to take at will -> runaway Psilons

[toddestan]

Nicely done. Your emphasis of pushing west really paid off with some good worlds, and keeping the Psilons in check. Were you playing with Kyrub's patch by chance?

As for the Guardian, I don't have a good feel for what it takes to take him out either, but I do know that if I can amass a decent number of ships with the gauss autocannon he's pretty much a goner. It doesn't really matter much though, as by the time I feel I'm in the position to take Orion the game is pretty much mine to lose anyway, much like your game.

[Catwalk]

Lots of raw muscle here! Well played timmy

[Ianus]

GREAT game Timmy! I don't know how you lucked into those stunted Psilons, but your total domination is pretty telling!
What year did you end up killing the Guardian?
Your game illustrates how much work I need to do on my own aggression issues! Well done!

[Zygot]

Bravo, well played. Like the cartoon snowball continuously picking up speed and size as it hurtles down the mountain.

Weird to see the Klackons get a foothold in the west and south, and the Psilons to not be runaway. Was there an element of scout blockading or picketing their potential worlds?

And that first Council vote -- that's from 2424? Interesting to see you have 12 votes vs the 8 votes I managed to scrounge up. I thought I was doing well by focusing on taking high-pop planets, but clearly there was more to be had from the population perspective out west.

[timmy827]

@toddestan:
Yes, used kyrub's patch. (thanks, edited header too)

What year did you end up killing the Guardian?

2485-2486 interturn. (Is there a standard convention for event reporting?)

Your game illustrates how much work I need to do on my own aggression issues! Well done!

From the reports, northern conquest tended to be a losing strategy.

Well, I lucked into a pretty good situation for aggression. And sympathies for the people that went for northern conquests - with the colony ship restriction plus starting tech bonus, early war sounds like a good general idea. But besides the extra worlds it yielded to the Psilons, it can be hard in circumstances of this map - the production bonus AI (klacks and meklars) get some of the largest fleets early, and when they are hemmed in it is a lot more likely you will have to face large fleets head on. Seems like several people were able to do this and take some worlds but imagine it wasn't cheap. Silicoid conquest was easy for me because of their large number of worlds and warp one engines - they had a good number of ships but the AI is woefully unable to concentrate them effectively in that situation. One other aspect that worked in my favor is the Silicoids had some mediums with one fusion bomb (and slow), a bad design from the AI standpoint. They will try to attack worlds with missile bases instead of running but are not much threat; so each time that happened the bases could thin out their fleet some. I've had more trouble when the AI can't crack your worlds at all and keep retreating; eventually they can concentrate enough ships then to be a big obstacle to your offensive fleet and slow a conquest.

And that first Council vote -- that's from 2424? Interesting to see you have 12 votes vs the 8 votes I managed to scrounge up. I thought I was doing well by focusing on taking high-pop planets, but clearly there was more to be had from the population perspective out west.

The pictured was 2424 but it wasn't the first - there were boring ones (all abstaining, me vs. Silicoids) in 2397 and 2400. By 2424 I had conquered several Silicoid worlds, had Soil Enrichment and (looted) +30. Also I built 6 colony ships (after starting-colship-to-Crypto) and those western worlds had nice base sizes.

And the million dollar question: how did I avoid having a runaway Psilon? Almost definitely luck. Yes I went further west with my expansion, but I want to reemphasize how much of an outlier my game was. My Psilons settled their 4th world in 2387.
(Before then, I did chase some scouts but don't think I chased any of their colony ships. Since I was building for a Silicoid invasion, it did not occur to me to try a systematic world-blockade once the Psilons got their breakout range, though that might have been a good plan too).
Comparisons from other games:
Zieman-Psilons get the '17 worlds' GNN, sometime between 2393 and 2410 apparently.
Ianus - 2392 map shows Psilons with 16 worlds
toddestan - 2363 map shows Psilons with 14
zygot didn't have exact dates, but sounds like Psilons hit the 17 worlds roughly around Ianus's 2392 if not earlier.

From the map, looks like they needed range 6 to get past their first three worlds. I assume I just got very lucky with them choosing other techs than range 6 and range 7. (I also assume the AI just rolls dice for tech choices, and isn't smart enough to recognize that one range tech would open a whole swath of the map.)

There was a little bit of skill involved - although I mentioned some 'target indecision' between 2425 and 2440, eventually did concentrate some on the brains. That first Psilon war took 3 worlds from them, certainly didn't permanently cripple them but helped me stay ahead on them on the overall power curve. But again, mostly luck

"What if my Psilons broke out and expanded like the mean case from the other games?" Best guess:
So, in 2351 I have Nordia and Spica settled. I almost definitely get Phantos, maybe I get Mu Delphi (I started that colship in 2369, so I think I settled in 2375), do not get Keeta. And I quite possibly lose one or two of these planets depending on how much the Psilons go to brush-war mode.

Because I went west early and avoided early war to the north, I would be in a better position than the other games to try to stop the Psilons before they hit full runaway (no idea if I'd actually be able to do it. And I might not have realized the full scale of the threat - not sure if I saw any Darlok scouts at that point; quite possible I would incorrect assume Darloks in the west and they would counterbalance some as well) And I had a strong Silicoid counterweight, so a Ianus-like approach might have worked too. (Poor Zieman - how were your Silicoids such duds!). But needless to say, a much harder proposition!

[Zygot]

I didn't take turn-by-turn notes during my game, just some screenshots, so I couldn't tell you the exact year a lot of things happened. (What I can do next time is just make sure to get more screenshots with the year at regular intervals, either at start-of-turn ship production or from the races status screen). Anyway, I estimate GNN reported Psilon 17 at 2387 or 2388. Of course, I gave them full reign; it was a big oversight, I figured I would wipe them out at my leisure.

Luck could have been a factor in your tame Psilons, especially if they did something odd with their tech. But the butterfly effect is strong in this game too, and the combination of AI cheese alliances and the choice to let various races live or die can have profound effects. Maybe your Psilons were a little delayed, but because you let the Klackons and Meklars settle so far west, they blunted the Psilon expansion explosion if they weren't overly friendly with the brains. Whereas maybe my Psilons and Silicoids were allied, and the Psilons could take advantage. It's hard to predict these things.

[RefSteel]

Just to echo the others: Really a well-played game! Avoiding early war with the Meklar and Klackons was key, and picking your times and targets when you did go to war, as well as everything you did to position yourself for it. Nicely done!

I suspect your analysis of your Psilons' situation is correct, but the result was probably a lot closer to the galaxy Catwalk intended than what most of us got to play, so I'm glad it worked out the way it did!

(More data for your comparison, digging into my old screenshots: My Psilons had 19 worlds when I met them in 2388, but two of those were built within the past year or two, as they'd gotten the 17 planet warning shortly before that. The rocks were first to 9.)