huge muscles, no brain - the tale of a lucky bear

[Gockel]

Hi again!

first off i'd like to say: i love your idea of challenging yourselves with different "scenarios"! never even thought of that possibility... and usually my games always went straight towards a boring high-tech-overkill end. which finally made me stop playing moo, though being one of my 3 all-time-favourite games.
i'm really glad that you gave me some new inspiration how to make it more interesting again...

so when i saw "imperium 9" yesterday at night, i couldn't resist trying it immediately (though the deadline had already passed). and although i can't offer a detailed report, i'd like to make a few remarks about my game:


i made one huge mistake in the beginning, and actually i was really surprised that it didn't mean the end of my dreams of tyrranizing the galaxy:
as you all stated, one problem in the beginning is the absence of range 5 fuelcells to cross the gap on the right of our two colonies. and i guess all of you were smart enough to simply build a huge ship with reserve fuel tanks... not me...

instead of building a huge ship with reserve fuel tanks i decided to rely on miniaturization - of course i was completely happy with the feeling[i] that it might work out... having my paws in the honeymug i couldn't be bothered with actually [i]checking how much effect miniaturization has...
and i kept researching for a long long time... when i realized that the next techs would cost about 5000 each (???) and still i couldn't jam colony base AND fuel cells into a large ship, i finally became smart enough to build a huge ship, too...

the only problem was that by that time there wasn't much space left on the other side of the gap anymore. i could take the one planet 5 parsecs on the right of my homeworld, but the rest was occupied by mrrshans, darloks and, luckily, a few klackons.

the klackons being the strongest race by far, it shouldn't seem like that was so lucky. what made me enjoy it was the fact that to my right there was a belt of mrrshan planets keeping a distance between klackons and me, and on my side of the belt, one single shiny klackon star. cut off from the rest of their planets (could it be that they used reserve fuel tanks on their colony ships?) and quite weakly defended... not defended at all actually, unless you call the poor ant troops a defence(which a good bulrathi for sure doesn't). so, being quite safe from any retaliation i conquered the planet together with some tech, and contact broke off with the klackon empire... no war declaration, nothing. and behind my security belt of friendly mrrshans i felt completely secure...

the same happened again twice with hostile worlds, klackons colonized them before me, i developed/traded the necessary planetology tech, conquered the world, and whoops... contact was broken...which was really convenient because at that point all other races were so far beyond in tech/planets/production - well, in everything - that i didn't feel up to facing a war with any of them...


after that the game wasn't very spectacular, apart from one phase when my lovely mrrshan belt declared war on me and the only rich world i possessed got depleted. as it was right next to the mrrshans, together with 2 more poor worlds i had quite some hassle defending them. but then the game rolled quite smoothly towards... arg, my usual technology-overkill-end... seems i really have to work on my play-style...

hope it wasn't too confusing, next time i'll try to make notes and maybe give a detailed description of my game... i hope for now it's ok the way i did it.
thanks again for all this inspiration and all the interesting reports, seems like there's LOADS to learn for me in the strategies department

[RefSteel]

Thanks for reporting, even if it's a little late! (A late report is far better than none at all, in my opinion!) Some quick thoughts before I leave for the long (U.S.) weekend:

Miniaturization was indeed workable; codehappy and I went that route, for instance. The trick is knowing what you're miniaturizing. For a colony ship, you want Planetology tech to shrink down the colony base itself and Construction tech (especially as the Bears, who are quite good in the field) to shrink the reserve tanks and make more room on the ship for everything. Researching computers, force fields, and weapons won't help because the colship won't have anything on board that those fields can actually shrink. (By contrast, weapons tech is critical for fitting a bomb on a small ship, and computer tech is critical for efficiently fitting battle computers and/or a battle scanner on any combat ship). Researching propulsion tech helps a little (it miniaturizes the retro engines) but you'll get actual range tech long before your prop tech levels have a major effect on the size of a colship.

If you don't want the game to drag out through the ends of the tech tree, it's usually best to form a plan for when and how to attack at lower tech levels. Your ground wars with the Klackons (they probably used an alliance to get to those reach colonies, but the AI does eventually outfit its colony ships with reserve tanks) sound well-executed; working out what you need to win an early space war demands similarly decisive action ... and of course lots of planning. For some examples of how to win low-tech wars, check out the reports for Imperium 20. Here's my victorious starfleet from the final turn of that game:



Note the super high-tech lasers and nukes on those things. (Heh.)

There were also a couple of ridiculously quick wins in Imperium 15: mine and especially sargon0's, but of course most of the games played here are finished long before the tech tree is finished.

[Gockel]

oh, wow... really didn't expect it would be possible to win with these ships... impressive!!
about miniaturization: i realized that researching another tech tree won't help, my (stupid) mistake was to think that reserve fuel tanks would belong to propulsion tree. well, it's easier to learn from a mistake if you realize what your mistake actually was so thanks for pointing out (otherwise i would simply not have tried to miniaturize next time)...
thanks again for your feedback, tomorrow will be report reading day!!