Sad days...

Quote:Guillermo Del Toro announced today that he is no longer directing the two movies based on J.R.R Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”, but will continue to co-write the screenplays. Out of respect to the legions of loyal Tolkien fans, both Guillermo and Peter Jackson wanted to break the news to The One Ring first. They are both committed to protecting The Hobbit and will do everything in their power to ensure the films are everything that the fans want them to be. “In light of ongoing delays in the setting of a start date for filming “The Hobbit,” I am faced with the hardest decision of my life”, says Guillermo. “After nearly two years of living, breathing and designing a world as rich as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, I must, with great regret, take leave from helming these wonderful pictures. I remain grateful to Peter, Fran and Philippa Boyens, New Line and Warner Brothers and to all my crew in New Zealand. I’ve been privileged to work in one of the greatest countries on earth with some of the best people ever in our craft and my life will be forever changed. The blessings have been plenty, but the mounting pressures of conflicting schedules have overwhelmed the time slot originally allocated for the project. Both as a co-writer and as a director, I wlsh the production nothing but the very best of luck and I will be first in line to see the finished product. I remain an ally to it and its makers, present and future, and fully support a smooth transition to a new director”.
“We feel very sad to see Guillermo leave the Hobbit, but he has kept us fully in the loop and we understand how the protracted development time on these two films, due to reasons beyond anyone’s control – has compromised his commitment to other long term projects”, says Executive Producer Peter Jackson. “The bottom line is that Guillermo just didn’t feel he could commit six years to living in New Zealand, exclusively making these films, when his original commitment was for three years. Guillermo is one of the most remarkable creative spirits I’ve ever encountered and it has been a complete joy working with him. Guillermo’s strong vision is engrained into the scripts and designs of these two films, which are extremely fortunate to be blessed with his creative DNA”.
“Guillermo is co-writing the Hobbit screenplays with Philippa Boyens, Fran Walsh and myself, and happily our writing partnership will continue for several more months, until the scripts are fine tuned and polished” says Jackson. “New Line and Warner Bros will sit down with us this week, to ensure a smooth and uneventful transition, as we secure a new director for the Hobbit. We do not anticipate any delay or disruption to ongoing pre-production work”.
The Hobbit is planned as two motion pictures, co-produced by New Line Cinema and MGM. They are scheduled for release in Dec 2012 and Dec 2013.

Hi guys, sorry this is late. Been very busy.

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First things first, send the colony ship to the one planet in colony range and build enough scouts to blockade every system in reach. Given this really weird corner start and that my second colony will not bring any new systems into scouting range, that means I have to build a grand total of 2 scouts. I also put one click into research so I can immediately open up the planetology and propulsion fields. Second turn I put full spending into research. Third turn I start building factories again, but keeping research at a strong 30 RP per turn.

After colonizing Denubius, I decide to send only 10 colonists. Given the late start, I want to avoid slowing down Ursa. But then I find that the yellow star of Darrian to the south, the only planet within 4 parsecs, has an inferno planet. During the previous imperium, I had gotten myself trapped for a long time by relying on technology to miniaturize my components so I could fit extended fuel tanks on a large colony ship.

Not this time. I went ahead and let range 4 pop so I could see what was in the next tier. With range 6 missing, I decided to go for the huge ship. In 2344 the Mrrshan became the first empire to six systems. In 2352 I colonized my third colony (Spica), roughly 20 years earlier than in the previous imperium. Denubius finished building factories in 2359 and started building colony ships alongside Ursa. I managed to colonize in 2366, bringing me contact with my first alien race.



How I managed to get Klystron is beyond me. The kitties had spread far from their homeworld, having grabbed 7 worlds at this point. I couldn't spread any further to the east. The cats were already spreading south and fast, so I built more colony ships to go on one world while using the other world to build laser ships.

I grabbed Rotan in 2371. In 2374 the first galactic election happened, with Mrrshan versus Darloks and every race abstaining. 2375 brought a bit of a surprise with the Alkari voting in favor of the kitties. I settled Imra in 2376, bringing me in contact with the Darlok.



I planted a flag on Uxmai in 2383. The same year, a Silicoid colony ship came zooming out of nowhere, destroyed my scout at Yarrow and planted their flag there.



I was glad to have contact with them though. The Mrrshan had alliances all over the place and I worried that they would be powerful enough to win the elections without intervention. I grabbed Quayal in 2384. I had initially given up on Talas since it was a poor planet at range 6, but when I ran out of planets down south, I built another long range ship and colonized Talas in 2392.

Using their alliance with the Mrrshan, the Alkari sent a colony ship to my world of Quayal. Having some laser ships nearby, I sent them to the world to drive off the colony ship and deal with the impending invasion.

In 2396, I began getting edgy. I was getting enough population to overtake the Darloks, and with the Mrrshan having alliance with the Darloks and two other races, I thought the next election would end badly for me. So I broke the rules and tried to initiate a spectator war between the Darloks and the Mrrshan. It didn't work, but a couple turns later the Darloks broke the alliance of their own accord. Interestingly enough, I found that the Mrrshan weren't my election opponent at all; it was the Klackons. They grabbed Dunatis in 2408, bringing me first contact with them.

Silicoids declared war in 2429. Frustratingly, the other races refused to help me out at all, and after finally researching radiated planets and settling Darrian, the Mrrshan declared war on me in 2439. Here's a look at the galaxy.



Not a bad land grab for starting 20 years late. Thankfully none of my opponents are runaway. The silicoids started testing my defenses, managing to get a fleet in orbit of newly-found Darrian. I managed to get a fleet of bombers over Yarrow, bomb out their missile bases and invade it, cutting off their fleet at Darrian from supplies.

The 2450 election was close. Very close.



Only with Darlok support was I able to narrowly avoid disaster. I wanted to invade more worlds, but the Mrrshan were using their superior accuracy and graviton beams to make my small fighter ships totally ineffective. So, unusually for myself, I started building some large ships.

At some point, both the Darlok and the Klackons declared war on me. When the Alkari colonized the glass world of Dolz and established contact for the first time, they declared war as well just a couple of turns later. Thankfully, the Mrrshan and Silicoids were tired of war and I was able to make peace with them.

I invaded the worlds of Dolz and Incedius. However, the Klackons sent a huge stack to my rich planet of Yarrow. I destroyed nearly the entire fleet, but lost all my missile bases to it and they had a bigger fleet right behind it.

When 2475 came around, I found that I had 22 out of 39 votes with Mrrshan and Silicolid support. The Darlok worlds of Nazin and Xudak proved to be difficult to attack with their scatter pack missiles taking down my fleets, but with my economy in very good shape I built a large fleet of small bombers and overwhelmed their defenses, allowing me to invade them and loot anti-matter bombs. I then took my fleet of bombers and, despite being against Stinger missiles and planets with class 12 shields, managed to invade and take the Klackon world of Dunatis. I followed that up with an invasion of Paladia. In about 2498, the Klackons took the Darlok's last world, destroying the shape-shifters once and for all.

The 2500 elections came and went. I had 24 out of 37 votes with rock and kitty support.

Since I knew my opponents could no longer stand up to me, I started pounding on the Klackon worlds, managing to invade and hold 6 of their worlds. I then glassed two of the bird worlds before the 2525 election, where I found I no longer had any support and did not have enough population to win by myself.

So I started invading every world in sight and managed to steal nearly all of the Mrrshan and Silicoid worlds. Fleets regularly came by to glass the worlds I'd taken, but eventually I invaded so many worlds that their fleets were cut off from fuel supplies. When 2550 came around, I had 53 votes out of a possible 60, so I was able to elect myself emperor.



Here's what the galaxy looked like the turn before.



Right on the last turn, the Klackons had destroyed the last Silicoid world. I find it interesting that they genocided 2 races this game. Usually genocides only happen when I make them happen.

The Mrrshan were surprisingly powerful this game. They were fielding huge fleets with the latest technology, and even during the mop-up phase I could not stand up to them directly, even with thousands of small ships. But once again, the computer just cannot deal with large fleets of bomber ships. As soon as I could break through the toughest Kholdan world, I was rampaging across the entire galaxy.

I didn't feel that the variant really added too much to the game. Since the home world was still building factories during those 20 turns, it really only felt like I lost maybe 5.

From the getgo I expected this imperium to be as difficult as the last one. Alas it was not so.

I despise building Huge Colony designs so I rushed the range tech I needed for normal colships. Probably not the best move in retrospect.

And as soon as I finished my expansion phase I won the game courtesy of a lucky vote.

The game design was excellent, but this time around I was way too lucky.

Quote:2320

Every star except one is out of range? I smell editing..

2321

After waking up the research department I see a lot of standard tier one techs range 4. Full stop research is ordered.

2323

Research is dialed down after Denubius, fertile is uncovered.

2324

Darrian is a worthless inferno world making range 4 initially useless but better range tech is direly needed if we do not want end up with 2 planets.

2329

LRLAS 1.0 is designed to secure at least some planets whilst I rush to a serious range tech.

2320

INERTIAL STABILIZER? Ungh....
I need a new plan.

2321

Inferno means range tech is my plan. I dial down all other research to 2% budgets..

2341

I am first in population. Being hard maybe not all is lost. I try out if barren is a dead end.

2345

Death Spores, yes planetology is a dead end right now.

2348

Datamite Crystals are next (Range 7).

2368

They are researched after 20 long years. Colony ships are ordered. We have to expand.

2375

At speed 1. Warp Dissipator is next it is awful to watch my colony ships arrive.
I decide to make the best of the worthless initial stabilizer and start building inertia, laser ships.

2376

Finally we escape to Klystron and meet the Silicoids and the Mrrshans who are at peace.
I decide to go with total overkill and fill it up with 50 pop from Ursa which is filled up from Denubius to secure it.

They both agree to trade of +125 BC and I manage to get imp.eco.rest. from the Cats with Inertial Stabilizer.

2379

Spica is colonized. The Klackons are encountered who managed to colonize Talas to the north. Damnit. One turn away is my col ship. I should have secured even a poor planet with lasers.

2389

Rotan is colonized. New planets to the south are explored.

2391

Even a terran planet is uncovered. Colony ships are sent to the far south.

Yarrow our tundra rich frontdoor is protected by 20 patrols from the Klackons.

2394

Another planet to the south is colonized. Irma.

Our next tech is 5BC/eco.

COME ON? REALLY? No Tundra? Inferno? Sigh..

2396

I decide that computers and espionage are my only hope.

2398

Good news. I score Uxmai, the terran to the south. My expansion phase is over. It turned out not quite as bad as I feared.

All other planets are taken or inhabitable.

2400

I decide to put 4% on Klackons and Silicoids each. One of them got nuclear engines, the other terraforming techs.

2405

Score! Nuclear Engines are taken from Silicoid labs.

2406

Score! Klystron becomes rich and I hit Robot Controls III. It starts to look better.

2407

I exchange Range7 for Terraforming 20 from the Klackons so I can dial down espionage. I also get deep space scanner for Death Spores from them. Also a NAP.

My next priorities are merculite missiles so my defense packs a punch.

2410

Despite the bad odds, the Darloks miss a cpu tech and have scatter pack missiles. Espionage is commencing.

2420

I snatch EC Jammer 1. I was wondering when my luck would turn sour. They immeaditly warn me and I retreat my spies. Damn..

My new target toxic enviroment by the Cats.

2424

Merculite Missiles come in. I backtech to Pellet Guns.

And the Council in 2424 decides to vote the sleepy Bears to diplomatic victory of them all to the Emperors against the evil 6 planets birds!

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

James waves the ban hammer!

Quote:This is an important day for Guild Wars.

Today we terminated more than 3,700 accounts for botting and match manipulation. In cases where guilds were found to be involved in these activities, the guilds were also disbanded. More than a dozen such guilds were disbanded and many others are under continued investigation. Today’s actions are significant not simply because of their immediate impact but also because they represent a new era in enforcement for us.
As many of you know, Guild Wars has seen a significant increase in the number and sophistication of bots in recent months. Particularly visible were new types of bots used in PvP. As with any hacks or exploits, our primary concern is the potential negative impact on the experience of other players. To a varying degree, cheaters hurt other players by inflating the economy, devaluing hard-earned accomplishments, or annoying everyone with RMT chat spam to sell gold gained through botting, but cheating in PvP is especially odious because it so directly affects the play experience of others.
As anyone who’s followed online gaming knows, bots and hacks are difficult to fully address. Every game of decent size works to keep the problem in check, but no single, absolute solution exists. Although our support team has worked for years to combat bots and actually bans accounts for botting every day, we realize the fruits of their efforts are not visible to players. Further, this new upswing in bot activity showed that our existing processes were not adequate to address the problem. Having made that determination, we’ve been working to improve things on several fronts: staffing, identification, detection, visibility, and enforcement.

On the staffing side of things, we’ve increased the number of people dealing with bots and brought in people with a wider range of skills and backgrounds in order to be able to tackle these problems in a more proactive and thorough way. For obvious reasons, we will not go into details about all of the changes, but this batch of account terminations was made possible by our staffing improvements.
We’re now working more aggressively to identify hacks and potential exploits much more quickly. In addition to our efforts in house, we’re asking all of you to help us identify issues. Many of you have done so before on forums, but we will now provide a clearer way for you to get this information to us directly:

• Please report game abuse to [EMAIL="support@guildwars.com"]support@guildwars.com[/EMAIL] using one of these exact subject lines: Botting, Match Manipulation, or Game Exploit. That will ensure the message is quickly routed to the right personnel and will expedite a review of the issue. You will be sent a confirmation that we’ve received your report, but in general we will not give out more detailed responses directly to individual players. In a situation like this, information is power. We maximize our ability to catch offenders if we operate in a confidential manner.
  

In order to deal with bots efficiently, we need strong methods of detection. Again for obvious reasons, we will not go into detail about anything we’ve done so far or anything we are planning for the future, but rest assured that bots of all different types can be identified. With our new commitment to bot detection, no hack is safe.
We know that the visibility of our actions is important to the Guild Wars community. While we were preparing for today, our Community and Support teams were not very vocal about these new bots. This was both because we did not want to tip our hand and also because we did not want to make promises that might ring hollow due to our lack of highly visible bot bans in the past. Moving forward, as with any security-related issue, we will not be able to talk about these matters with complete transparency, but we will look for opportunities to make clear to you our commitment to protecting the game from cheaters.
All of which bring us back to the beginning and to our strong enforcement of our policies against game abuse of any kind. Let me make this clear: We have no tolerance for using bots or hacks. It’s cheating, it harms other players, and there’s no excuse for it.

We know that the approaches we used to determine this particular list of terminated accounts did not catch every single bot or hack out there, but we now have many tools and options at our disposal internally, and we have the Guild Wars community itself as a resource to help identify potential exploits. As with this current round of enforcement, we may ban users of a particular hack in batches in order to better disguise our methods, but there is no expiration date for breaches of the User Agreement or RoC. If you cheat today, your account may be terminated at any time in the future.
If you have any doubts about whether or not something is allowed by the User Agreement, don’t do it. Don’t take that risk. Account termination means losing not only everything you’ve built up in Guild Wars, but losing the ability to have those accomplishments recognized in Guild Wars 2. Let me give you a real example from today. Here’s an actual account we just terminated: 2,469 hours, 38 titles, 913 plat, 268 ecto, Eternal Legendary Vanquisher monument, Mini Gwen, Chaos Gloves, Mallyx’s Strife, The Holy Avenger, etc., etc. It’s all gone now. Forever. You will not want that to happen to your account.
For those of you who raised concerns about this issue, we’re sorry it took as long as it did to put these changes in place. We should have been faster and more prepared. With your help, we will be more responsive in the future. We are listening, and we are ready to take action.

Have I mentioned that those images always take me longer than I expect? Well, they're finally all ready. My report is up in the usual spot! I tried to write this from the (mostly) in-character perspective of a starship designer, and include various notes on ship design in general, but I'm not sure it really worked, for a number of reasons. I really enjoyed the game nevertheless.

SPONSOR'S NOTES:

The idea for the game was pretty simple at first; I figured for our 20th Imperia since skipping #9, we'd bring it back with a 20 turn delay. At first, I wanted to run it on Average(!) difficulty, with just the usual 30 factories and 50 population after 20 years of AI expansion. That would have required a specially-made savefile edit though, and when I tried just putting everything into the ECO slider each year (so as to wind up with 100 pop but still just 30 factories) I never seemed to get a galaxy that seemed appropriate to me. The truth is, too, our veterans can spot the AI more than just 20 turns on Average difficulty; the AI just never puts together enough defenses to stop a dedicated human assailant below Hard difficulty.

So I decided to move up to Hard but let the planet build factories normally (minus the constant maintenance cost of an unmoved colony ship) - I wasn't looking for an Extrem Imperium here, right on the heels of an Impossible game. The first map I rolled up was this one, which I thought fit the bill quite nicely. The idea was to emphasize the impact of skipping 20 turns: We'd have a great second world (once we got it up and running) for overall imperial development, but remain far behind the other races in scouting and expansion due to all the empty space around Ursa and the lack of early range tech above 4 in our tree. I didn't actually edit anything except to delay events, but I was happy with the outcome anyway.

One other thing about starting twenty years into the game: Our AI opponents were probably far more comparable to each other than in other Imperium games, if only because the first twenty turns of their opening were the same for each of us! There will always be major random factors in Orion, but this is one way to cut down on one of them.... Of course, I'll see how well the theory holds when I finish reading everyone else's reports!

Overall, I found it a very enjoyable game, and I hope others did as well! Comments, criticism and questions are welcome as always, as well as suggestions or sponsorship ("sponsoring" just means dreaming up and coordinating something with me, and hopefully doing some playtesting) for future Imperia; I'll try to get the next one up, with the results from this one, by next Monday.

Deleted..

With kyrub's excellent patch it's now possible to closely monitor the research bonus (investing up to 7.5% of your current investment total triples your research points). How many of you make use of it? I used to check this with an editor, but it was far too much of a hassle.

I did some basic analysis on the research bonus earlier, and I arrived at the conclusion that the best approach is to dump a significant amount of RP into a new project and then ride the bonus all the way to completion. It doesn't generally pay off to invest past the bonus threshold after the first turn, if you wanted to do that then you would have been better off investing more in the first place. Posting more later.

Pregam thoughts - well, I will probably play this one (I have a better participation record in the Imperiums than Civ4 events, partially because I don't have other MOO activities whereas I am in a couple of SG's and a PBEM now, and partially since MOO goes much faster usually.) But I'm not expecting too much challenge, as long as I avoid my trademark "lose the first vote" that seems to happen on most Hard-with-variant games. Yeah, it stinks that our pop has not grown as much as it could have and that we've paid maintenance on the initial colship for 20 extra turns, but still the game mechanics are such that we shouldn't be all that far behind; certainly better off than Spain or Japan in the Civ4 "stagnation" scenarios. Now if Ref had put all our first 20 years of production into researching BCII and Gatling Laser...

The big problem was not the "hibernation" variant but the local terrain and tech tree. We had a very nice 2nd planet (105, fertile) and then nothing else within range, had only Barren of the early environment and nothing between range 4 and 7. Had to go with several Huge-Reserve Tank ships to break out of this.

Elections 1st in 2392. Both that and 2400 have a lot of abstention, so I can vote twice for my new Darlok neighbors, hopefully adding time to build up the southern worlds.

Landgrab not done until 2440, rather late:

Despite the early challenges, the game turned out to be very easy because the AI races fought each other a lot and left me completely alone besides swiping one Poor world a few turns before my colship arrived. You could say we semi-hibernated for another 150 years Also making it easy was a large area to peacefully colonize once the inital hurdles were leapt. (Those Darlok colonies in the SW were well-established when I found them; must have been AI range bug that left the other habitables in the region to me). Was nominated each vote but the abstentions continued, was able to suck up to my opponent most of the time.

Finally in 2471, Warp5 is in (no engines before this!) and I can think about attacking. Darloks draw the short stick as they are already getting dogpiled; Nazin has been destroyed by a big Klackon fleet. Go with autorepair huge with gravbeams, plus small fast 2-fusion bombers. Ground combat was a bit unbalanced:

That yielded a 10-1 ratio.
In short order I've wiped them out (Klackons got the blame though); first offensive against the bugs takes Yarrow (rich tundra world on my side, lost because of no planetology options between barren and radiated) and the spud of Nazin.

Mrsshans now loved me, so I signed alliance and went to war against the remaining races. By 2500 it's all but over:

I've taken Cryslon and Kholdan; AI's can't really do anything to respond. Fortunately the Alkaris are the highest pop (voting was interesting, the opponent varied almost every election) so Jasana can give me the win:


Thanks to RefSteel. Even though this one was not difficult I appreciated having it to play; I'm pretty busy in RL and often it's easier to squeeze in MOO games than Civ4. (A shame that I'm not going to be able to even start Adv. 45 before it's due).

The starting tech tree was nice in that Barren/IIT 9/IIT 8 is a really cheap way to get reserve fuel tanks on a large hull colship. I didn't get lucky on researching the tech, though -- Controlled Barren took quite a few turns and IIT 8 didn't pop until something like 30%. That means I didn't get Klystron, my third colony, until 2357.

Despite only having retro engines, I managed to scout all the way down to Terran 125 Xudax, Quayal and Regulus before any enemy colonies were founded in the southwest. Unfortunately the Darloks managed to settle Quayal and Xudax, just a few turns before I would have made it. (If I had just been just a little luckier on the first three techs popping, I would have had all three -- there were colships already en route. And if nuke engines were available, or if the game started in 2300, I would have easily had the whole western part of the map to myself.)

I let the cats have Dolz. I wasn't about to try and defend a small poor planet like that with lasers and nuclear missiles.

I did snag Regulus in the far southwest, and with all the pre-scouting I had done, that was bad news for the Darloks, as everything except Nazin was in transport range. I traded for nuke engines, researched neutron pellet guns and IS, built an NPG fighter fleet and built up my colonies in the southwest for a while. (Hand Lasers -> Neutron Pellet Guns has to be one of the best tech jumps in the game.) Then I fought the Darloks down to one planet. In invading the Darloks I not only picked up several very good planets, but they also generously provided me Sub-Lights and some shiny computer technologies.

The Alkaris cheerfully traded me Controlled Tundra on first contact, which allowed me to get Rich Yarrow ahead of them.

Then, the spy game. Bears may be rated badly in computer research, but that doesn't ever stop me: I had made sure to obtain every computer tech that I reasonably could via invasion or trade, and had researched a few myself. Once my spies took Controlled Dead from the birds I took their Rich planet; I later would research Radiated and colonize the other two.

GNN ranked me dead last in tech in 2399, and in 2467 they ranked me first. Ho ho.

Could have voted myself High Master in 2500 but I was having too much fun, so I decided to throw my votes to Ariel and fight the Final War. Further, I decided to plant my flag on every single planet, so for the next few decades followed lots and lots of bear ground invasions and Guardian-busting. At one point the Klackons actually caught me with my pants down with a surprisingly absurd non-32K bug fleet (read and you'll see). Techwise I made it to class 13 deflectors, neutronium bombs, IT+100, pulse phasors, robotics VI, black hole generators and sub space teleporters. Pretty much the entire war was fought with bombers and bear muscle, backed by ARS/repulsor battleships, though. The NPG fighters stayed in play, incidentally, the entire game. This is because NPGs are awesome.

End result was a 2577 extermination.



The entire grisly (grizzly?) story can be read here:

http://www.codehappy.net/games/rbo9/