Imperium 27 report (codehappy's diplomatic OPE)

[codehappy]

Hi, all. I'm new to this site but not to MoO; I played it quite a lot back in the day. I've recently come back to it and have had a good time with it. I'm fond of playing conducts to make my game a little spicier ("conducts" from the Roguelike world, I'm still proud of my six-conduct NetHack Tourist ascension.)

While searching around on the Internet for MoO resources, I found this Meklar one world challenge, and it looked irresistable. I read several of the other Imperium reports here and I was pleased to find other people enjoy playing MoO as much as I do. So, did I lead the robots to victory? I played this Imperium game over the weekend and wrote down almost everything I did. As a result my full report is altogether too long and has something like 200 illustrations:

http://www.codehappy.net/games/rbo27/

The report above is very, very long. The short, short version follows:

At the start I had to choose from two overarching strategies: first, to simply strafe any new colonies that were settled nearby, keeping the AIs out of range and completely forestalling the council, or second, to play as an insane diplomat, let the AI expand close to me to be in constant contact with as many races at once as possible, relying on espionage to climb the tech ladder rapidly, and cautiously managing relations to keep the council votes indecisive. I opted for the latter because it sounded like a lot more fun to me. It was a blast.

This did introduce a larger element of chance to the game as the xenophobe warlord approach would, as there were a couple of early council votes I could not do much about. But in the end I made it through seventeen votes. I accomplished this by frequent (very frequent) espionage frames, a couple of small bombing wars, throwing my council votes one way or another, and later on, gifting or trading planetology techs to the laggard civs to keep them close in pop ("Anti-Missile Rockets for Atmospheric Terraforming? Well, Mr. Durpp, we find your offer fair and equitable.")

The Darlok and I were BFFs, since I couldn't spy on them very well I used trade to boost my one world economy fairly significantly.

The Alkari were the dominant race for most of the game, and they did a lot of my Propulsion research for me, including a few key discoveries. Also, their toy cannon war fleets were huggable, not fearsome. Emperor Farseer and I may have had a few disagreements along the way but my robots really owe a lot to him.

The Bulrathi were the #2 force for most of the game, and we had a love/hate relationship when we were in contact. I shouldn't have wasted time trying to trade with the bears, but I did anyway. Their fleet made the final ten turns of the game a little more interesting.

I didn't see anything of the Mrrshan except their colony ships scouting Aquilae, the radiated world, and a few council votes, where they mostly favored the Alkari (they were at war with the bears and the Darlok both early on.) Despite their council support, the birds genocided them early.

Most of my research was in our specialty Computers to keep my espionage effective, with a few notable exceptions early on; I filled in the tree with a crazy army of spies. Once I had Omega-V bombers, Thorium cells and Sub Space Teleporter it was all over but for the shouting. Extermination victory 2798.

I made some ridiculous mistakes, as you can read in the full report -- my MoO game is a bit rusty and I think I was playing far too much in the wee hours of the morning -- I spotted a few going over the report after the game so and I'm sure the players here can spot many more. But I am also sure there are some enjoyable bits.

This was a great game!

[timmy827]

Good to see a new member, well done. Also fascinating how your Alkaris were the biggest in the galaxy for quite a while, whereas mine were wiped out before ever making contact.

However, I do want to point you to our exploits thread: http://realmsbeyond.net/forums/showthread.php?t=2006

You used the world "suicide" for many of those early Alkari attacks on Meklon (in contrast to later ones when you note the AI retreating immediately) when they had early weapons that couldn't get past a class V planetary shield, which makes me expect you were following the baiting exploit.

I don't mean to sound accusatory, that thread is quite old, but thought it would be good to point you there.

[codehappy]

You used the world "suicide" for many of those early Alkari attacks on Meklon (in contrast to later ones when you note the AI retreating immediately) when they had early weapons that couldn't get past a class V planetary shield, which makes me expect you were following the baiting exploit.

I don't mean to sound accusatory, that thread is quite old, but thought it would be good to point you there.

No, I wasn't baiting the AI. There was a scout inadvertantly left at Meklon at the time of the first Alkari attack (it had just retreated there from a colship with escort at either Endoria or Misha, IIRC) but it was blown up by Alkari missile boats, after which the birds retreated. For all subsequent Alkari attacks, until I think the ones with the Space Gulls, the Alkari retreated immediately, as described in my account. I didn't construct any new ships at all until the fusion bombers.

I described them as "suiciding" themselves because those were simply crazy attacks; it took them a long time to build anything that could get past my shields and even when they did they didn't build nearly enough boats to get past the bases at Meklon.

[Horist]

Wow, great read.

Strong Birds, who ALLIED with the cats for over 100 years? Such an unusual game. You had to dodge a lot of potentially scary votes as well. The amount of micromanagement I saw you use was astonishing!

I really liked your after game thoughts. The summary's showed a lot of clarity. I laughed at the comparison of what was stolen from brids vs shifters.

gg

[codehappy]

Wow, great read.

Thank you.

Strong Birds, who ALLIED with the cats for over 100 years? Such an unusual game.

Yeah, strong Alkari are unusual, but this was an unusual game on an unusual map.

I think Paranar was a key world for the AI on this map. Whichever faction settled that had a nice staging point to take both the worlds in the SE and the very nice worlds in the NE before anyone else. And there were three AIs starting right down there; any of the Mrrshan, Alkari and Darlok could have potentially taken it. My thinking was that whichever one settled and held Paranar would get to be the strongest AI empire; if I played this game again it could easily be strong cats or strong shifters next time. Darloks settling there first would probably have meant scrapping the diplomatic strategy and going to "raze from orbit" tactics, so I was happy to let the birds have it when I saw their colony ship coming in. I did not expect them to expand as fast as they did, though -- I figured for sure the bears would find their way over to me as well! (Heh, the bears were too busy beating up on the cats to expand eastward, I think.)

You had to dodge a lot of potentially scary votes as well. The amount of micromanagement I saw you use was astonishing!

The votes in the 2600s were the worst; by that point the birds were far ahead of the other two AI races and would have easily run away if I hadn't constantly stirred up hate and discontent via spies and actually blowing up a couple of bird worlds. I would have liked to go without the bombing entirely until the very end, but I decided I liked winning the game more. The bears and shifters picked up votes throughout this time period, mostly by building up their worlds, and by 2675/2700 I looked pretty safe in the vote, but I also knew that the birds controlled too many planets so that wouldn't last forever.
If the game had gone on too much longer I would have been forced into perpetual bombing war (not too much different from playing the xenophobe warlord, after all) or letting the birds win the vote and test my mettle in Final War. I had basically juggled the diplomacy until I couldn't keep it going anymore. Fortunately I was plenty ready to blow things up by that point!

I really liked your after game thoughts. The summary's showed a lot of clarity. I laughed at the comparison of what was stolen from brids vs shifters.

It was a challenging enough variant to require some planning beforehand, and I didn't want to play it entirely straight and fight off everything that got too close. I hope some of that shows through in the report. A few of the things I did had me smacking myself afterwards, though.

gg

It was a great game, lots of fun. Thank you for an interesting scenario! (How many attempts did it take you to get this map?)

[Horist]

It took me a ton of trys to get a map that would work, and when playtesting it, i didn't turn events off and my population got reduced to 10 from an event, so a couple hundred rolls later i got this one.

One thing I forgot to mention: If you lost one of those votes especially the 2600 ones, were you still going to attempt victory from final war? I don't think it would have been that difficult with your strategy.

[RefSteel]

I finally finished reading your report, and it was terrific! Your diplomatic strategy sounds like it was a blast; I got very lucky in a number of ways in my own game, and a big one was a set of AIs I didn't have to juggle too heavily ... but I was glad I did, because it's been a long time since I got to play a game quite like that one.

Boris and Natasha were brilliant, and I loved all your commentary as well as the details. I don't think I've written up a report at all like it since the pre-new-Imperium challenges over at CivFanatics, and it's always fun to read that style of reporting.

Also, it's a pleasure to meet another MoO enthusiast - the well-played game and terrific report are just bonuses! Any chance we'll see you around for Imperium 28? (I'm hoping to get it posted by Monday, but the game I'd like to sponsor will need some extreme map editing - I'm still working with sargon to get it set up properly - so I might have to save the idea and use an alternative idea in the interim.)