I did play the Average game to a winning position (quickly, few notes and no pictures)
What I recall was lots of fertile planets for the variant made it pretty easy; think I did need to buy my way out of one or two potential vote losses (Average means it's easy to be top 2 in pop, but the variant meant it took a while (and some burning) to get over 1/3rd.
The Psilons expanded the most of the AI and were quite aways in tech for a while, but failed to do much with the tech lead or build too large a fleet. After taking the green worlds from the weaker AIs, a modest military buildup let me glass half of the Psilon developed worlds without coming close to losing any of my own. OK, time to move to real difficulty:
EXTREME MODE
After early scouting, decided to go with a Huge Extra-Range colship for Rayden (the nonpoor far green)
2321: Sssla pauses factories, 2 2 LRLasers to Rayden , LR Col started. IT+10 has been in a few turns and applied; heading towards IER (popped 2329, very nice) and still trickling into IIT9. Huge ship done 2335 and I did get it:
![[Image: 1.jpg]](http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff82/timmy827/Imp35/1.jpg)
However the Meklars obviously blocked further east (two of their worlds in that vertical line were green-star.)
Poor Tyr was 4 from Rayden; I remember Range4 took an annoyingly long time to pop but was able to get Tyr. The SW green was 8 parsecs away, I traded Bulrathi IER for Range5 (felt comfortable since the bears were weak) though had to wait a long time for enough tech to get a Large Extra-Range colship. So I was at 5 worlds.
I was able to have some success in delaying AI colonization of worlds offlimits to me by the variant. Largely gave up in 2367 after an intefrace bug let the Meklars finally plant at Rigel (the yellow right between us). One one turn in ~2360, I chased an unarmed Meklar colship and had to retreat from a Human superior fleet (but without colship). The human fleet poofed - must have lost the range due to breaking alliance - but the #$%# Meklar ship meant I couldn't select my fleet on the map and tell it not to retreat. I flew some replacements but couldn't return the stronger deterrent force before an armed colship bested my single LR-laser. Maybe would have beaten it had I still those popguns...
As a general question, anyone know how to do this? After a 3way encounter, both your fleet and one AI's is in the 'moving away from planet' spot and you can't select your own fleet to change its path?
In votes the elections were always Humans vs. Silicoids. I feared angering one more than I anticipated friending the other, so I always abstained. However it generally felt like the Meklar were the overall strongest AI in tech/production/fleet. So I don't know why the game felt like smacking me around:
![[Image: 2.jpg]](http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff82/timmy827/Imp35/2.jpg)
Of course, as you might guess this was immediately after founding, and basically zero-cost since colonists en route killed the lone (erm, lone million rebels). I wonder what that trip was like - 'you may have thought you were like Pilgrims on the Mayflower, but actually we need to guys to become Redcoats, only do better and actually crush the colonial uprising. Oh and by the way, this is brutal MOO warfare; you can't rout their militia but must actually kill half the colonists before they'll quit'.
More detrimental was that the Meklars sent an armed colony ship to Drakka after I settled it. I had fighters in orbit and blew it up; they declare war. Sigh, are you supposed to retreat and let the AI invade in this case? Wish they were only touchy about fleet-to-fleet losses if you send ships to their worlds...
The Meklars were scary, but seemed to be at war with everyone basically the entire time (though for some time they were too far to fight the weaker birds and bears). I did get a fair number of attacks, as well as plenty of tussles between Meklars and other races in the non-green worlds on my quadrant of the map. Here is a good sample of what I had to deal with:
![[Image: 3.jpg]](http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff82/timmy827/Imp35/3.jpg)
This set up a very weird sequence. I had Merculite missiles but no planet shielding, and quickly discovered that bases were pretty useless. I could 'win' each battle as I amassed some laser fighters, and they had almost zero ship-to-ship power....but they would drop 10 rounds of fusion bombs on my worlds and cause pretty significant pop/factory damage just from the tactical screen (my laser fighters couldn't really dent a Ajax with shields and auto repair). I traded for Ion Cannon which allowed stronger fighters, and Improved Scanner came in ~2410 allowed better shifting of them in response; this helped at least shoot down some ships but was still spending a lot of production on rebuilding factories. Poor Tyr was nearly destroyed from the tactical screen in a particularly bad case!
Round 1 of this war ended in 2420. A big trade came through as Alkari gave me Fusion drives for RIW60%. Eventually sent them Soil Enrichment for Range 8, which gave me enough to target their green world Crypto. I was worried for a while - though birds backwards in all but Propulsion, they had some pretty big stacks of unhittable fighters. But I was able to war them on the cheap - at some point they had a world bombed out by the Meklar, which range-poofed 500 fighters. Crypto itself was an easy target, only 10 nuke bases and even gropo tech; rather surprsingly the Alkari didn't even declare war after bombing out the bases, waited until my invasion succeeded. That was all I could take from them, but got a lot of tech as well (spying was pretty easy, they had bad computers)...nothing huge but good for clearing out a lot of the low tiers if I ever got to the other races.
However my position didn't really improve - Meklar came back and added a design with 6 sheilds, cloaking and Hard Beams, a stack of those drove away my fighters from Tyr and it was glasses by their accompanying bomber ships. Fortunately they didn't send a major stack of those to any other of my worlds...
I had always hoped that with the Meklar so hated and owning green planets, they would be my path to victory...certainly a tall order to invade a few of their worlds but thought their was a reasonable chance that it would get me into 2nd place pop and get enough brownie points to squeak out a Diplo win. With the Meklar fighting other AIs as usual, I made one serious go at an invasion target:
![[Image: 4.jpg]](http://i236.photobucket.com/albums/ff82/timmy827/Imp35/4.jpg)
I have two different stacks of fusion bombers (the newer ones had enough miniturization for IS+Fusion, combat speed 4 -> reach planet and bomb on 2nd turn). But this was nowhere near enough. Those bases are Scatter Pack V's, and (as expected) they were smashing ~200 of my ships per turn. But I was surprised that my bombers were weak, in this pic one stack had already fired and only gotten 2 bases. I knocked it down to about 25 bases before retreating with 1/2 my ships
I think (but forgot to check) that they got an armor upgrade soon before this battle - I had previous scanned the planet at 75HP bases, and think they were up to 125HP - but even without that I just didn't have enough. And that huge, while lacking many beam weapons, had Repulsor + Auto-Repair so I almost certainly couldn't kill it with fighters. So, I went back to teching, finishing IT+40 and fusion beams and some others, but wasn't sure how to proceed. Was able to grab Tyr back at some point (didn't bother building factories, just get what tech I can out of it, as long as my fighter swarms can repulse the minor AI attacks), and eventually lost it.
Although I have occasionally been able to glass a new Meklar plant on a nearby non-green, it didn't seem to help too much in terms of AI relations. (Of course it was frustrating as Alkari+Bulrathi were often allied with Humans and/or Rocks, and they refused to sign peace for very long times despite a total inability to hurt me). Eventually the Silicoids declared war on me (now fighting all but Humans); probed one of their worlds for an invasion but also looked very unlikely.
At this point I decide to throw in the towel. Being able to pull some tech trades with the AI-prized Soil Enrichment, RCIV, and (brokered) IS has kept me from falling too far behind despite small empire. In particular, being up to 16 points of sheiding meant that I could profitably build bases again, and be pretty safe from the Meklar Fusion Bomb ships (and Silicoid Pulson-boats, though I gave up for now before they sent any real effort against me). I had ~15 on the non poor worlds and ~5 on Crypto (it's far from Meklars, so seemed enough for the moment).
But aside from taking Crypto off the Alkari, it just seems very unlikely I'll be able to push hard enough on Meklar or Silicoids to take a green world, my potential targets are like
44 Pulson, 150 HP, 11-shield bases
OR
38 SP-V, 125HP, 16-sheild bases
and I can only spam about 110 small fusion bombers per turn - I'd need something like 35 turns allout production at that rate to even attempt, and who knows if the the AI would get even better defenses... (The bears have Zhardan in the north, but it's too far, and in a nebula anyways so would be very hard to defend and profit from.)
And of course without the variant I would have been able to take Altair, other Alkari worlds in my corner, and mostly likely Ursa which I think would be enough to move up the 'ladder' (eat the weak AIs, use their worlds to power up enough to fight the next strongest, etc).
The counterpart to this is that the developed Human/Silicoid/Meklar worlds have been stable for the whole game, and it seemed unlikley that any of the 3 AIs had a chance of eating another one or assembling a winning vote. Both those races have Cloaking Device and other goodies which makes ship-to-ship fights look pretty hard as well.
Also being at war with all but the humans, I was getting major factory sabotage almost every turn, which while not lethal gave the feeling that I would be treading water for LONG time.
Unfortunately my day job blew up with about a week left and so while part of me wanted to follow the RB "where there's life, there's hope" to the end, I couldn't really justify spending the time.
So official result: retired in 2492. Did enjoy playing again, and hope to do another Imperium or try to finish this at some point in the future.
What I recall was lots of fertile planets for the variant made it pretty easy; think I did need to buy my way out of one or two potential vote losses (Average means it's easy to be top 2 in pop, but the variant meant it took a while (and some burning) to get over 1/3rd.
The Psilons expanded the most of the AI and were quite aways in tech for a while, but failed to do much with the tech lead or build too large a fleet. After taking the green worlds from the weaker AIs, a modest military buildup let me glass half of the Psilon developed worlds without coming close to losing any of my own. OK, time to move to real difficulty:
EXTREME MODE
After early scouting, decided to go with a Huge Extra-Range colship for Rayden (the nonpoor far green)
2321: Sssla pauses factories, 2 2 LRLasers to Rayden , LR Col started. IT+10 has been in a few turns and applied; heading towards IER (popped 2329, very nice) and still trickling into IIT9. Huge ship done 2335 and I did get it:
However the Meklars obviously blocked further east (two of their worlds in that vertical line were green-star.)
Poor Tyr was 4 from Rayden; I remember Range4 took an annoyingly long time to pop but was able to get Tyr. The SW green was 8 parsecs away, I traded Bulrathi IER for Range5 (felt comfortable since the bears were weak) though had to wait a long time for enough tech to get a Large Extra-Range colship. So I was at 5 worlds.
I was able to have some success in delaying AI colonization of worlds offlimits to me by the variant. Largely gave up in 2367 after an intefrace bug let the Meklars finally plant at Rigel (the yellow right between us). One one turn in ~2360, I chased an unarmed Meklar colship and had to retreat from a Human superior fleet (but without colship). The human fleet poofed - must have lost the range due to breaking alliance - but the #$%# Meklar ship meant I couldn't select my fleet on the map and tell it not to retreat. I flew some replacements but couldn't return the stronger deterrent force before an armed colship bested my single LR-laser. Maybe would have beaten it had I still those popguns...
As a general question, anyone know how to do this? After a 3way encounter, both your fleet and one AI's is in the 'moving away from planet' spot and you can't select your own fleet to change its path?
In votes the elections were always Humans vs. Silicoids. I feared angering one more than I anticipated friending the other, so I always abstained. However it generally felt like the Meklar were the overall strongest AI in tech/production/fleet. So I don't know why the game felt like smacking me around:
Of course, as you might guess this was immediately after founding, and basically zero-cost since colonists en route killed the lone (erm, lone million rebels). I wonder what that trip was like - 'you may have thought you were like Pilgrims on the Mayflower, but actually we need to guys to become Redcoats, only do better and actually crush the colonial uprising. Oh and by the way, this is brutal MOO warfare; you can't rout their militia but must actually kill half the colonists before they'll quit'.
More detrimental was that the Meklars sent an armed colony ship to Drakka after I settled it. I had fighters in orbit and blew it up; they declare war. Sigh, are you supposed to retreat and let the AI invade in this case? Wish they were only touchy about fleet-to-fleet losses if you send ships to their worlds...
The Meklars were scary, but seemed to be at war with everyone basically the entire time (though for some time they were too far to fight the weaker birds and bears). I did get a fair number of attacks, as well as plenty of tussles between Meklars and other races in the non-green worlds on my quadrant of the map. Here is a good sample of what I had to deal with:
This set up a very weird sequence. I had Merculite missiles but no planet shielding, and quickly discovered that bases were pretty useless. I could 'win' each battle as I amassed some laser fighters, and they had almost zero ship-to-ship power....but they would drop 10 rounds of fusion bombs on my worlds and cause pretty significant pop/factory damage just from the tactical screen (my laser fighters couldn't really dent a Ajax with shields and auto repair). I traded for Ion Cannon which allowed stronger fighters, and Improved Scanner came in ~2410 allowed better shifting of them in response; this helped at least shoot down some ships but was still spending a lot of production on rebuilding factories. Poor Tyr was nearly destroyed from the tactical screen in a particularly bad case!
Round 1 of this war ended in 2420. A big trade came through as Alkari gave me Fusion drives for RIW60%. Eventually sent them Soil Enrichment for Range 8, which gave me enough to target their green world Crypto. I was worried for a while - though birds backwards in all but Propulsion, they had some pretty big stacks of unhittable fighters. But I was able to war them on the cheap - at some point they had a world bombed out by the Meklar, which range-poofed 500 fighters. Crypto itself was an easy target, only 10 nuke bases and even gropo tech; rather surprsingly the Alkari didn't even declare war after bombing out the bases, waited until my invasion succeeded. That was all I could take from them, but got a lot of tech as well (spying was pretty easy, they had bad computers)...nothing huge but good for clearing out a lot of the low tiers if I ever got to the other races.
However my position didn't really improve - Meklar came back and added a design with 6 sheilds, cloaking and Hard Beams, a stack of those drove away my fighters from Tyr and it was glasses by their accompanying bomber ships. Fortunately they didn't send a major stack of those to any other of my worlds...
I had always hoped that with the Meklar so hated and owning green planets, they would be my path to victory...certainly a tall order to invade a few of their worlds but thought their was a reasonable chance that it would get me into 2nd place pop and get enough brownie points to squeak out a Diplo win. With the Meklar fighting other AIs as usual, I made one serious go at an invasion target:
I have two different stacks of fusion bombers (the newer ones had enough miniturization for IS+Fusion, combat speed 4 -> reach planet and bomb on 2nd turn). But this was nowhere near enough. Those bases are Scatter Pack V's, and (as expected) they were smashing ~200 of my ships per turn. But I was surprised that my bombers were weak, in this pic one stack had already fired and only gotten 2 bases. I knocked it down to about 25 bases before retreating with 1/2 my ships
I think (but forgot to check) that they got an armor upgrade soon before this battle - I had previous scanned the planet at 75HP bases, and think they were up to 125HP - but even without that I just didn't have enough. And that huge, while lacking many beam weapons, had Repulsor + Auto-Repair so I almost certainly couldn't kill it with fighters. So, I went back to teching, finishing IT+40 and fusion beams and some others, but wasn't sure how to proceed. Was able to grab Tyr back at some point (didn't bother building factories, just get what tech I can out of it, as long as my fighter swarms can repulse the minor AI attacks), and eventually lost it.
Although I have occasionally been able to glass a new Meklar plant on a nearby non-green, it didn't seem to help too much in terms of AI relations. (Of course it was frustrating as Alkari+Bulrathi were often allied with Humans and/or Rocks, and they refused to sign peace for very long times despite a total inability to hurt me). Eventually the Silicoids declared war on me (now fighting all but Humans); probed one of their worlds for an invasion but also looked very unlikely.
At this point I decide to throw in the towel. Being able to pull some tech trades with the AI-prized Soil Enrichment, RCIV, and (brokered) IS has kept me from falling too far behind despite small empire. In particular, being up to 16 points of sheiding meant that I could profitably build bases again, and be pretty safe from the Meklar Fusion Bomb ships (and Silicoid Pulson-boats, though I gave up for now before they sent any real effort against me). I had ~15 on the non poor worlds and ~5 on Crypto (it's far from Meklars, so seemed enough for the moment).
But aside from taking Crypto off the Alkari, it just seems very unlikely I'll be able to push hard enough on Meklar or Silicoids to take a green world, my potential targets are like
44 Pulson, 150 HP, 11-shield bases
OR
38 SP-V, 125HP, 16-sheild bases
and I can only spam about 110 small fusion bombers per turn - I'd need something like 35 turns allout production at that rate to even attempt, and who knows if the the AI would get even better defenses... (The bears have Zhardan in the north, but it's too far, and in a nebula anyways so would be very hard to defend and profit from.)
And of course without the variant I would have been able to take Altair, other Alkari worlds in my corner, and mostly likely Ursa which I think would be enough to move up the 'ladder' (eat the weak AIs, use their worlds to power up enough to fight the next strongest, etc).
The counterpart to this is that the developed Human/Silicoid/Meklar worlds have been stable for the whole game, and it seemed unlikley that any of the 3 AIs had a chance of eating another one or assembling a winning vote. Both those races have Cloaking Device and other goodies which makes ship-to-ship fights look pretty hard as well.
Also being at war with all but the humans, I was getting major factory sabotage almost every turn, which while not lethal gave the feeling that I would be treading water for LONG time.
Unfortunately my day job blew up with about a week left and so while part of me wanted to follow the RB "where there's life, there's hope" to the end, I couldn't really justify spending the time.
So official result: retired in 2492. Did enjoy playing again, and hope to do another Imperium or try to finish this at some point in the future.
