OSG-27: Lumbering Rocks

[Ianus]

Way to close it out Ref! I can't wait for your report.

As for another game, I would be alright with the Alkari idea but I'm not sure I see the point. I don't know about everyone else but I play the Alkari that way anyway. It would be nice to try something a little bit more interesting, although again I don't have any ideas at the moment. It would ALSO be nice to play with a bigger group. I know that that is probably wishful thinking, but three is just a little bit too much like work for my taste. My free time is quite limited these days. That said I will absolutely take part in whatever game we come up with!

[RefSteel]

OSG-27, Final Report:

(I did what I could to include some details about tactics and ship design choices. It ... may have run a little long. I hope you all enjoy it!)

2438: There was a shifting among the stones of Cryslon - a shift that was felt all throughout the galaxy. For the Mountain King had sung once more from his perch upon the high plateau of a new Silicoid to lead its people, dreaded already by every carbon-based sentient lifeform that had survived their latest rampages ... thus far. The shifting came with a rumble and then with a terrible roar, and then the sky was blotted out by the presence of the Silicoids' latest leader: A creature not of rock and stone from the deeps of Cryslon's core, but shaped instead from the burning gases of a stratovolcano's pyroclastic surge. Where it stepped, mountainsides crumbled in thundering avalanches. Where it breathed, the air caught fire. And the Silicoids heard the thundering and set to work fulfilling its commands.



All five of the Longrock colony ships the empire had produced in recent years went up in bursts of flames, consumed by the furnaces in which new Avalanche dreadnoughts would be forged. There would no longer be any need for new wartime colonies: All the remaining worlds in the galaxy could be colonized later on, once peace the extermination of every carbon-based lifeform in the galaxy ensured the mountains' peace. There would likewise be no need for Avalanches to deal with enemy fleets, either with ship-to-ship weapons - each mounted only a token ion cannon, and only because no space remained for anything else on the ship - or with repulsor beams: Those tasks would be reserved for dedicated warships committed to the purpose, replacing the hopelessly outdated and out-of-position Lava Mixers whose fusion bombs, sub-light engines, and obsolete shielding would have argued for their extinction even had both not been left way out on the galactic rim beyond what once had been Psilon and Alkari space, and political observers suggested there was every chance that the remainder of the old, slow Sublight ships in the fleet would suffer similar fates to the Longrocks and Lava Mixers in the course of the next few years as well, depending on their positioning and alien fleet composition, and indeed the entire surviving fleet of Rocksalt neutron fighters had been added to the scrap heap by year's end.

The remainder of the year was spent redeploying the SIlicoid fleet, hurrying everything toward the Meklar front that might be useful against such advanced cybernetically-enhanced organisms and might arrive in a reasonable timeframe, while dispatching a trio of old Rock'N'Roll bomber dreadnoughts all around the Sakkra core to speed the exploration of their worlds and the destruction of their infrastructure - to say nothing of their reptillian lives - and assigning nearly every Silicoid in the galactic empire to contribute further to the fleet.



No new ships would complete that year, but the parts being assembled in different forms around the galaxy would ultimately contribute to starships designed especially to meet the needs of the wars then raging across the galaxy. The Tyr system, known for its potential vulnerability to Sakkra attack since before it ever harbored a Silicoid colony, was one of the rare exceptions: The new Silicoid leader permitted it to continue building missile bases in accordance with the orders last given it by TheArchduke; violent though the energy of the pyroclastic surge might be, it was aware that its predecessor had probably understood the threats posed by Sakkra fleets better than it yet could itself in the first moments of its reign. There were other exceptions too of course: Espionage agents attempting to infiltrate alien space, and and even lab workers - and at Berel, industrial developers - at worlds ill-suited to starship construction, preparing the empire in case of a future in which their wars might stall. But by the end of the year, the entire Silicoid empire had effectively been converted into an enormous military machine. There would be no turning back.

2439: The first space battles of the new Silicoid administration were extremely enlightening: The cowardice of Sakkra pilots and the helplessness of their missile bases ensured that the Rock'N'Rolls were in no particular danger, but the sheer number of bases at Esper, together with their heavy shielding, were too much for the old bomber that turned up in its space: Though it destroyed more than half of the bases, and never even had to deploy its auto-repair nanites, the Rock'N'Roll was ultimately forced to retreat merely because its payload was exhausted and it needed a resupply back at a Silicoid base.



The case at Rhilus was different, with a much smaller number of bases, but conveyed the same general idea: The planet's defenses were destroyed, to be sure, and its colony bombed from orbit, but all the fireworks did precious little harm to the swift-growing, hard-scaled lizard people, burning down more than a third of the planet's factories, but still leaving more than half intact, to say nothing of the planet's Sakkra population, of which the bomber managed to kill little more than a fifth. Decades-old Silicoid designs simply didn't represent enough of a threat to their enemies. The situation was even worse in Meklar space, where much more advanced missile bases had been assembled by cybernetic engineers in unprecedented numbers: At Tao, where the previous administration had ordered a Rockthrower some years back, the latest finished model of Silicoid warship was forced to retreat by volleys of nearly nine hundred individual missiles. Thanks to its heavy shielding and electronic counter-measures, the Rockthrower would be able to absorb one or two of these, but with its auto-repair nanites hopelessly outraced by hundreds of scatter pack pinpricks, it ultimately would have to retreat without deploying even one of the five hundred anti-matter bombs in its racks.

Of course, the Sakkra attack was even less effectual against Tyr's nearly-five-dozen scatter pack bases, and the new Silicoid leader was gaining valuable information with every fight, but the first battles of its reign were entirely inconclusive, as it readily acknowledged itself - only adding, in a burst of pyroclastic fury, "So I guess we'll have to have a lot more battles to get the idea straight!"

In addition to all the space battles, the Silicoids did get involved in another fight that year - this one on the ground of Proxima. They had all but evacuated the planet ahead of Meklar transports, having had little population there in the first place the previous year and no ships in range capable of intervening.



The few who remained were obviously doomed, leaving the Meklar in control of just a handful of factories, but the conquerors would not have many years to enjoy their victory. Silicoid preparations were already in train to burn through the Meklar defenses they had just probed for the first time in the pyroclastic surge's reign, and among them were plans not only for Avalanche bomber-dreadnoughts, but for a new assault shiip that would take the Avalanche's pure bombardment design to an even greater extreme.



Originally conceived as a method to rapidly deploy bombs in sufficient numbers to decimate Sakkra bases and population without waiting through the long production cycle of a dread, the Rockfall cruiser was the first true dedicated bomber in the Silicoid space fleet: A ship mounting nothing but warp and maneuvering engines to let it close in as quickly as slow-moving rock ships could, the most advanced targeting systems the Silicoids could devise, and as many anti-matter bomb racks as could be crammed aboard, leaving room for nothing else - no electronic counter-measures, no self-repair systems, no beams of any description, not even the advanced armor that had become standard on Silicoid starships - except for the shielding they would need to weather the storm of Sakkra nuclear missile bases and heavy-laser fleets. Rockfalls would be ready to deploy to the Sakkra front almost immediately - but still more were ordered to the Meklar front as well: Though they couldn't survive under fire from Meklar scatter bases, the Rockfalls would represent so great a threat to their targets if not neutralized that the enemy would have no choice but to fire on them, buying larger bombers with stronger defenses time to close in before taking heavy fire - unless the Meklar were fools enough to target the behemoths in the first place, in which case the Rockfall cruisers could make them pay for that mistake most dearly.

2440: The third Rock'N'Roll to reach its destination in core Sakkra space met what at first appeared to be heavy resistance at Jinga, whose eleven irrelevant nuclear missile bases were supported by a Valkyrie cruiser and Titan dreadnought, each specialized for ship-to-ship combat.



The Valkyrie couldn't hold off a Rock'N'Roll's triple heavy blast cannons forever, but with the help of its tractor-repulsor beam, it could certainly keep the enormous bomber away from the planet's bases long enough for the Titan's heavy fusion arrays to burn the Silicoid menace from the Jinga's skies. Unfortunately for the Sakkra however, their pilots failed to identify the correct tactics for the fight. What their pilots did instead was to hastily retreat, leaving the Rock'N'Roll free rein to hammer at Jinga from space. By the end of the year, between Jinga and Rhilus, nearly forty million lizard lives, together with well over a hundred of their factories, would burn in antimatter fires.

It was only going to get worse.

2441: The Rock'N'Roll arriving at Sssla found the same number of missile bases as at Esper - too many for it to crack - and a Valkyrie repulsor cruiser in orbit. The situation was a little different than it had been at Esper though: The Valkyrie retreated almost immediately, and the bases all ceased to exist before the Rock'N'Roll could even close to bombing range.



Five Rockfall dedicated lizard-killing cruisers will have that effect. Two others, arriving at their waypoint of poor Gienah at roughly the same time, facing only a single Sakkra nuclear missile fighter above a small and recently re-established colony, casually turned the sand of the steppes to glass in passing en route to their next interstellar targets. In total, more than 110 million Sakkra were slain by orbital bombardment that year - the first in which the Rockfalls were deployed - and more were coming, while the bulk of the newly-designed starforce was being deployed across the galaxy on the Meklar front.

Lest it be imagined that the carbon-based lifeforms of the galaxy were just sitting idly by while the Silicoids bombed them into a fine, black paste, it should be mentioned that a Meklar fleet carrying 390 fusion bombs and one third as many lasers, all guided by powerful mark-4 battle computers, made a desperate attack on the fully-industrialized - but only partially-shielded - Silicoid Stalaz colony that year. Defending the old inferno world was a single Silicoid cruiser - but as it was one of the Stonewall 3s, built along the same lines as the lone cruiser that once had battled the entire Alkari starfleet to a standstill, none of the Meklar destroyers came anywhere close to bombing range, nor even so much as reduced the gloss of the Stonewall's freshly-waxed hull, and less than fifteen percent of the assailants survived to limp back home toward Gienah.



It would take a little while for those remnants to arrive: Long enough that another fleet might beat them down there. That other fleet, much faster and a great deal more diverse, would have a stop to make along the way however, at an exceptionally dangerous waypoint where it had an important errand to run - important and inevitably deadly ... to someone.

2442: The fleet arrived, with far less sheer combat mass than the enormous Meklar fleet that spent the year chasing a Rock'N'Roll from the skies of their nascent Cygni colony, but with greater force than had ever before been deployed in a single location by the Silicoid people.



Unlike the Meklar at Stalaz the year before, they arrived with a little bit of everything: A single Stonewall cruiser that had departed early to join the rest of the fleet on approach, which retreated almost as soon as the battle was joined in part because the Meklar presence consisted only of eleven helpless bomber destroyers which would shortly retreat themselves, and in part because in spite of the efficacy of the Stonewall design, demonstrated again and again in recent years, it was simply and totally outclassed by the other combatants in the system.



No less than fifty-two Scatter Pack bases built into solid Zortium bunkers behind fourteen layers of planetary and base-installation shields, with class-6 ECM jammers to go with their mark-6 battle computers, could throw such an enormous weight of explosives at incoming starships that no Silicoid fleet had ever dared to attempt a serious attack there before. Arrayed against them were a Rockthrower dreadnought-class bomber, the Pyroclasm space-superiority dread, the Avalanche, and seven of the Sakkra-killing Rockfall cruisers.

The Rockfalls took point, roaring forward under cover of highly-concentrated local asteroids, with the dreadnought-class bombers joining in formation, coming in on its flanks, and the Pyroclasm quietly closing, keeping out of their way. The Meklar Defense Force had no choice but to fire on the Rockfalls: They were capable as a squadron of doing more damage than anything else in the Silicoid attack fleet, and were the most vulnerable to the bases' weaponry as well. Trying to fire on anything else first would have been a grave error, since the Rockfalls were the only ships in the fleet that lacked automated repair systems: The first volleys would have no chance of killing any of the dreadnoughts in time to also prevent the Rockfalls from reaching the planet, and whenever the bases finally did switch to firing on the Rockfalls if they didn't begin immediately, they would only start falling behind the repair nanites aboard the ship they'd gone after at first.

In response, the Rockfalls took cover behind the asteroids, forcing the scatter packs to travel through the thickest parts of the field and lose innumerable rockets in order to maintain target lock on them. Still, the maneuver cost the Rockfalls their momentum toward the planet, and not all the rockets were lost. Though the dreads were still moving forward, the bases had at least bought a delay in the arrival of the Rockfall squadron and its 1,750 anti-matter bombs - directed by the most advanced computer systems, outside of the Guardian itself, in the entire galaxy.

They did what they could with that very first salvo, but even if they could destroy the Rockfalls altogether, there were well over a thousand other similarly-guided anti-matter bombs still coming in - and after their promising start to the battle, the Meklar strategists appeared to collapse completely.They launched a second volley of scatter packs after the first, to keep the Rockfalls at bay and try to reach them through the thick of two different asteroid fields, instead of firing at the starships actually pressing the attack. Then as the Rockfall pilots were already running the retreat vector calculations through their navigational computers, preparing - unbeknownst to the Meklar - to jump through hyperspace to safety and out of combat range, all the bases unloaded their payload in pursuit of the same ships yet again, leaving both dreadnoughts the chance to close and bombard the bases twice before the next volley could be loaded. Then, recognizing the greater threat of the two remaining, the panicking base commanders ordered their crews to fire on the Avalanche, failing utterly to allow for the attrition they would take as the fight continued: As more and more anti-matter bombs fell, their missile bases dwindled in numbers, and the dreadnought-bombers' auto-repair systems would be gaining on their damage output with every volley. The Rockthrower's might not have gained quite fast enough to save the ship from an ignominous retreat had they targeted it instead, but the Avalanche was a dedicated bomber in more ways than one: Where the Rockthrower mounted five heavy blast cannons and a repulsor beam for fleet combat purposes, the Avalanche instead carried almost a third again as many bombs ... and mounted anti-missile rockets that destroyed nearly as many scatter rockets as both ships' advanced electronic counter-measures diverted harmlessly. As a result, both dreadnoughts could stay in the fight as long as their bomb racks held out - while even the Pyroclasm helped a tiny bit with its heavy fusion beams - as the Meklar bases dropped below the threshold needed to do any permanent harm to their self-repairing assailants. The result of that...



...was the end of Meklar civilization on their ancient homeworld, and the end of a climactic chapter in galactic history. Gion would prove to have as many bases as had Mekon, and Tao was known to have a few more even than that, but with another Avalanche already in production at Drakka, another Rockthrower ready to join the main fleet when needed from the vicinity of Nordia, and yet more Rockfall cruisers coming in from everywhere, there was nothing that any missile bases in the galaxy still could do to stop the Silicoid offensive. That task would have to fall to the enormous Meklar combat fleet.

With most of the latter temporarily stationed at Cygni, where the colony ship they had accompanied was busy disassembling itself on the surface to establish a new colony base, the Silicoids had free rein for a time, destroying the Sakkra colonies of Jinga and Rhilus, and wiping out most of the Proxima colony the Meklar had conquered in the first year of the then-present Silicoid administration, before anything could be done to save it but evacuate as many as possible of its people before the Meklar exterminated the few millions who remained. At the same time, a small fleet near the nebula closest to Silicoid space had very nearly managed to cleanse the Sakkra homeworld of life moments before that fate befell Meklon the mighty. Only four million Sakkra would survive on the blasted surface of their once-thriving homeworld in the Sssla system by the end of the year, wandering the wilderness and struggling to survive without the modern infrastructure they had come to take for granted before Silicoid anti-matter bombs erased every trace of their cities, power plants, wastewater treatment facilities, warehouses, pumping stations, and pipelines from the world.

2443: A fleet of four Silicoid war ships arrived at the Cygni colony less than a year after dozens of Meklar colony transports arrived there and rendered the place much more valuable to its empire's leadership. The largest single fleet in space - the bulk of the Meklar space force - remained in orbit to meet them.



Fully a dozen dreadnoughts - more than would ever be present again across the entire Silicoid space fleet - were supported by four Nexus cruisers and almost 400 Penetrator destroyers. Unfortunately for the Meklar however, virtually their entire starfleet was built around fusion bombs and various forms of laser technology. The bombs could be devastating against any Silicoid world that hadn't completed its planetary shield, and could even occasionally do a little damage from against those that had, but none of that was of any use above a Meklar colony, and the laser weapons were all but useless against heavily-shielded Silicoid starships, with even the heavy lasers too few and too weak to make any serious headway. That left the Scatter Pack rocket launchers mounted aboard the Devastator dreadnoughts, and though those could put the equivalent of some 1,880 Hyper-V rockets into space, it would take so long to reload between salvos, and the Silicoid auto-repair systems worked so quickly, that there was no way for even the entire Meklar fleet to destroy a single Silicoid dread. The same could not be said in reverse: The lone Silicoid dread that reached the Cygni system that year was the Pyroclasm 5, mounting twenty heavy fusion beams, plus six neutron pellet guns to help it deal with large numbers of smaller ships as well. Ship after ship in the Meklar fleet went down under its guns once the battle was joined until the remnants fled the system - and then, with help from a Rockfall, it also ensured the total destruction of the Cygni colony.

It was that kind of year. A fleet of Rockfalls arrived at Esper around the same time, out in Sakkra space, and the bombers that had destroyed Meklon, joined by yet another Rockfall just arriving from the Silicoid core, struck hard at Gion, where bases equivalent to those that had protected Meklon itself had the advantage of an asteroid-free system through which to fire. The Gion defense force's decision-making was no better than Meklon's had been however, and the result was identical by year's end. Proxima merely rounded out the set as anti-matter bombs fell everywhere.



Only Tao and Dolz survived among all the Meklar worlds: The only two to which the Silicoids were yet to send a significant fleet. In fact it was the lowly Sakkra who put up the most tenacious fight, with a star fleet heavily focused on the use of heavy blast cannons that had no trouble punching through even the most advanced shields the Silicoid people could fit aboard a starship. The colonies protected by the Sakkra fleets at Sssla and Kronos were so tiny that they barely even existed, but their few million people survived, together with the small colony of Paladia - by then the most productive remaining in the Sakkra empire - nestled deep in Meklar space, out at the galactic rim.

The Sakkra and Meklar empires were crumbling, but like many collasing empires throughout galactic history, their military forces clung on at the expense of their civilian population and anyone else from whom they could manage to steal anything, constantly attempting raids on Silicoid colonies or attempting to re-establish colonies they could exploit on the crater-covered worlds that had already felt the anti-matter fury of the Silicoid fleet. Not wishing to waste massive dreadnoughts dealing with these pinprick fleets, Silicoid high command had been sending old Stonewall cruisers to fill in, but the Stonewalls' creeping sublight engine speed was creating logistical nightmares thanks to the sheer numbers of raiding fleets - and the rapidity with which Sakkra and Meklar core worlds were turned into uninhabited husks awaiting recolonization attempts. Patience and time would resolve these problems naturally, but the sentient pyroclastic surge that led the Silicoid people had a different solution in mind: It ordered all the Stonewalls scrapped in favor of a faster defensive fleet.



The Ejecta 5.0, like rocks hurled in blazing fire from the mouth of a volcano, would make approaching Silicoid bases or the empty worlds they claimed a dangerous proposition indeed. Though it mounted only four weapons, including a neutron pellet gun for point defense, the other three were hard-hitting heavy fusion beams directed by state-of-the-art fire computer technology - and with a repulsor to herd enemy fleets away from vulnerable planets and away from close-in firing range, together with all the rest of the Silicoids' most advanced beam defense technology, the Ejecta would have all the time it needed to hammer away at large enemy fleets unless and until they fled to hyperspace, admitting defeat. Occasionally, a truly massive colony fleet would face off against one of these Ejecta above an empty world - too much for any one ship short of a Pyroclasm to destroy - but it hardly mattered: The Ejecta could take out any colony ships sent in by the enemy, and the rest of the fleet would be welcome to sit around in space, looking forlornly down upon the mineral wealth of a planet where they could not land, just out of their reach.

2444: In spite of the odds against them, the Sakkra kept fighting to the bitter end, fielding starships that proved in many ways superior to the Meklar fleets in spite of the machine beings' technological advantages.



The Titan and Valkyrie designs first encountered by the then-present Silicoid administration some four years before were the pride of the lizard fleet, and at the other end, their Goblin nuclear missile boats were completely worthless maintenance drags on the already-nonexistent lizard economy, but everything in between was of real defensive value, with Spectre destroyers in particular making up in numbers what they lacked in individual efficacy and posing a real threat by the sheer weight of heavy blast cannons they hauled into space. With most of the Silicoids' war machine focused on the Silicoid front, there were times when losses were inevitable in any attack, and when they simply couldn't dislodge Sakkra warfleets.

Unfortunately for the Sakkra, they didn't have to.



The Valkyrie repulsor cruisers, if piloted correctly, could hold off the Rock'N'Roll indefinitely, and between them and sixteen Spectres, they could almost certainly have destroyed the lone Rockfall 5 before it reached bombing range. They couldn't hand both at the same time however, and the Silicoids were content to retreat once the last remnant population of the Sakkra homeworld was burned from the face of their world. The only other Sakkra colony still standing in their core was destroyed a little earlier in much the same way, while a cutting-out expedition destroyed a well-protected Sakkra colony ship approaching the glassy surface of another once-Sakkra world, and the lizards were left with only a pair of distant colonies: A miserable, newly-formed, insignificant speck at Volantis in the Colassa sector, across the galaxy from Cryslon ... and Paladia, safe behind Meklar space: The only remaining industrialized lizard colony.

Of course, with the bulk of the Silicoid fleet rapidly exterminating the Meklar, that location was no longer quite so safe as it once had seemed. In fact, transit times were such that it was easier for the fleet that had just glassed Gion to make a brief stop-over on its way to Tao, the largest and strongest of the Meklar colonies.



There was no need for the main Silicoid assault fleet to use any fancy tricks at Paladia: They just flew in and killed everything.

2445: In a move of desperation as the Silicoid doom fleet systematically destroyed their core worlds, the Meklar high command had sent a series of bombers after the nearest Silicoid worlds. The latest of these machine fleets was the largest by far, and used an only slightly inferior version of the tactics employed by the Silicoids themselves against the Sakkra: Even an Ejecta 5.0 cruiser couldn't hold off two separate bomber groups when one of them as maneuverable as itself and carried its own repulsor beam - meaning the Ejecta's own repulsor could at best only hold it at bay; there would be no opportunity to approach and force it further away. There were three important differences however between the Silicoid attack on Sssla of 2444 and the Meklars' on Stalaz in 2445: First, Stalaz was still a large and thriving world, where Sssla had been only a bombed-out remnant with just a few million Sakkra still huddling among the craters of its surface. Second, the Silicoid ships had been dedicated anti-matter bombers, while the Meklar ships were armed with only fusion bombs and ship-to-ship weapons that utterly failed to impress the Ejecta cruiser defending Stalas. Third though, and most importantly, the Ejecta's Silicoid pilot understood how to prioritize its defense.



Hundreds of slow-moving bomber-destroyers, carrying fifty times the payload of the Devastator dread, were obviously the greatest threat, and the Silicoids understood that this meant they must not be allowed to reach the planet no matter what. The Ejecta's pilot also realized though that it should fire on those destroyers only when it couldn't hit the dreadnought - because unlike the Meklar missile base commanders, it understood that its target should always be the greatest threat among those it could actually destroy, and of course among those that would ever be given a chance of reaching the planet at all. The Devastator did manage to drop about half of its payload of fusion bombs before it was destroyed - but destroyed it was, and the Spectres suffered heavy attrition afterward without getting anywhere close to Stalaz.

Soon thereafter, at Tao, the Meklar provided another object lesson in how not to defend, again wasting three full volleys of scatterpack rockets on the admittedly terrifying squadron of fifteen Rockfall bombers that broke off their attack after the first volley was launched, and then even wasting another firing on the old Rock'N'Roll that had arrived to join the fight in hopes of getting a little extra bombing if the bases forced the Rockthrower to retreat. Instead of doing so even after that wasteful display however, the base commanders again insisted on firing upon the twin Avalanche bombers that - with auto-repair systems straining but bases burning rapidly under their anti-matter bombs and the Rockthrower's combined - ultimately just shrugged off all the attacks.



For the Meklar, the end was nigh.

In fairness to them, the end was nigh for the Sakkra too ... and would have been for anyone in the face of a fleet like the one assembled by the Silicoid empire...



...in a galaxy already inhabited almost exclusively by rocks:



In the final year of the pyroclastic surge's reign, it deployed fleets to every star that could conceivably be reached by a cloaked enemy colony ship, as well of course as each of the tiny colonies that such ships had already built a year or two before. Then it stepped down in answer to the Mountain King's song in favor of the 27th Old Silicoid Gathering itself: The ancient, slow-moving ruling body whom the individual emperors had always represented beside the Mountain King itself.



The newsdroid spoke of a ruthless tyrant who would rule the galaxy with a stony fist, purging its pristine rocks of carbon-based life....

And that, I'm afraid, is the way it was.

[RefSteel]

On the next game: I'd love to have a bigger group too; we could ask in the Gaming Table forum, or see if we could lure someone like Reformations into joining us. (Or just play at a more relaxed pace, I guess; I certainly took long enough to play and post in my last couple of sets....)

The Alkari rule could be made a lot more challenging in a number of different ways if we want; for instance:

1) Add another simple but significant restriction; maybe something about diplomacy.

Or...

2) Make TheArchduke's rule even simpler: We can't build large or huge ships at all! I chose "build" to allow us to use the starting colship instead of scrapping it immediately, but after that, the only way to get new worlds would be by conquest. We'd want to play this one in a small galaxy unless as a group we're collectively even more insane than me, and probably with at least four opponents - but it still might not be doable with the Alkari! (Might be interesting with Klackons actually if the bird-brains are too daunting: Ants with ant-sized ships!)

(Reformations, this game we just finished rarely featured any small combat ships - just some laser fighters at the beginning and some ion fighters in the middle, both of use but neither especially game-changing. If you want to play your suggested variant and report on it here, I'd love to read it!)

[Reformations]

Just had kid #2 a few weeks ago. I do get time in for gaming now and then but the problem is I never know when I'll have time available.

[TheArchduke]

Only tiny and small designs, sounds fun, except for our first colony ship.

But, afaik small design are capable of building colonies, but only very much down the tech tree through minituarizations.

[RefSteel]

Congratulations on the new(ish) member of the family, Reformations!

And yeah, of course you're right, TheArchduke: If we get deep enough into the tech tree before the game ends, we'd be able to build medium-hull colony ships. I don't think we'll get there without a lot of conquering first though!

[TheArchduke]

Sounds like an insane challenge then, something for an OSG to beat then.

Who opens the game?

[RefSteel]

I'd like to see if we can recruit another player or two, and what Ianus and anyone else who does join thinks of the variant, but once we have a roster and the variant set, anyone can volunteer to take the first twenty turns.

[Ianus]

This is something that I have been meaning to do ever since the game ended, but for a wide variety of reasons haven't gotten around to until now.  I spent some time thinking about the game and rereading the reports, and although the reporting styles differed significantly I tried to piece together what happened over the course of the game, how we played it, and what if anything we could have done better.

To recap: we played as the Silicoids on a Medium map, Impossible difficulty, with the restriction that we (basically) couldn't use improved maneuverability on our ships.  I notice looking back through the game reports that RefSteel put Maneuver 2 on his endgame designs, but at that point the game was already won and (unless he says differently) that added maneuvering speed didn't make any major difference in the outcome of his battles as he purged the galaxy of our enemies.  Basically we won the game using Maneuverability level 1, in spite of possessing decent engines (thank you Humans!).

How did we do this?  Well aside from the tactical brilliance of our battle commanders, the thing that allowed us to win this game as easily as we did was our acquisition of Automated Repair System and Repulsor Beam.  We did not research either one of these two technologies although I think that we did have Repulsors in our tree, but we stole or traded for them anyway.  This allowed us to build the classic and nigh-unbeatable MoO staple Huge design which is basically unbeatable in ship-to-ship combat, and dedicated bomber designs can even stand against missile bases.  At least they could in this game, which brings me to the second factor which allowed us to beat this game: lack of enemy missile technology.  I don't believe that any AI race in this game managed to advance beyond Scatter Pack V missiles, which are still basically Hyper V rockets, just a lot of them.  Thus even though the AI built loads of missile bases (60+ in some cases) their lack of damage output allowed the Autorepair to keep our ships alive long enough to close with enemy planets and bomb them out before our bombers could be destroyed.  Obviously without Autorepair we would have been forced to build many Many MANY more ships than we did here.  In our game 1-2 Huges were able to take a planet without losses.  Without Autorepair we would have had to build 10x as many, and we would have lost a lot of them at each planet.  This would have slowed down our conquest significantly, allowing our enemies more time to acquire better missiles, and then we would have been in big trouble.

The result of these two factors was a game that did not feel any more challenging than a standard game.  While we were required to play battles with a high level of strategic analysis I don't think that the outcome of the game was ever really in doubt once we had conquered the Humans and started beating down the Psilons.  If the player is ever able to destroy Impossible level Psilons (and ours had picked up a good number of planets by the time we got around to destroying them) the game is usually over.

Obviously this is not to say that the game was EASY, and our collective play was very strong.  I proved once again that threats against the AI are VERY powerful in the right situation.  I used them to stop a Sakkra incursion that would certainly have cost us a planet and maybe more than that, and would certainly have proved to be Very Bad for our early economic development.  Thanks to Thrawn's excellent micro-management our empire was able to slingshot into a strong position early, overcoming the Silicoids' primary handicap, and after about a century of peace we conquered the galaxy in the span of roughly 50 years.  Our war with the Humans began with TheArchduke's attack on Laan in 2399 and the game ended on 2445.  Over the course of those 46 turns we conquered 3/4 of the galaxy and lost fewer than 5 Huge ships.  Not too bad!

From a Technology perspective we basically got everything we needed, either through research or conquest/espionage.  We didn't have any major holes in our tech fields, and although we didn't get to particularly high levels (I don't think that we exceeded level 25 in any field) we fielded strong ship designs that countered everything the AI could throw at us.  One underappreciated tech that saved us many headaches was Bio Toxin Antidote which allowed us to ignore all Death Spore ships to concentrate on other threats.  I find that Bio Toxin Antidote is almost always worth researching, both for security but also because the AI tends to trade a lot for it, much like Inertial Stabilizer but less dangerous.

To conclude: we stayed out of early wars until we had reached a position where we could take the fight to the enemy, and from there it was a straightforward romp across the galaxy.  Well played everyone!

[Ianus]

As for another OSG, I'm still not particularly excited about the Alkari restrictions.  As I said before restricting hull size with the Alkari is NOT a significant handicap, and if NPGs wind up in our tech tree we won't have any problem attacking or defending.  And while eliminating colony ships would certainly slow us down I don't think that it sounds like a whole lot of fun.  Then a large portion of the game would come down to the quality of our second colony.  A large strong world would let us advance much more quickly while waiting for the AI to come to us, while a size 30 Minimal world would slow us down but not alter our overall strategy in any significant way.  Either way it will all depend on who moves in next to us (not Bulrathi!) and how well they could meet our prepared invasion force as we started out to belatedly acquire new worlds.

Personally I would rather play something more unconventional (Imperium 27: One Planet Meklar comes to mind) as a way for me (us) to learn more about the game beyond how to play the Alkari at a handicap.  Of course that is just my opinion, and if we can get a consensus I will be happy to play along.

Cheers!