Things I learned playing as the Mrrshans

[Psillycyber]

First lesson: Don't despair if an AI gets air superiority over one of your colonies in the early game when the AI has slow engines.

Let's imagine that you see an opponent in the early game (pre-2375) massing a nice little fleet. What should you do?

A. Build preventative missile bases. These are expensive early on. It will severely harm your growth curve. Plus, missile bases are kind of an all-or-nothing kind of thing. If you just build missile bases at some of your threatened worlds, the AI will just target one that you haven't built bases at, and your bases will have proven useless. Although...if you build just, let's say, 1 base at your low-production and/or frontline worlds, and leave your backline and/or high-production worlds without bases, then that might be a useful way to lure the AI into sending a slow fleet against one of your stronger planets that will be able to rushbuild plenty of bases to deal with the threat, now that you can be certain where the fleet will be going.

B. Build a preventative counter-fleet that can move to where the enemy goes. This only works if you have a narrow frontier zone and/or you have faster engines than the AI. This also eats up resources (probably not as much at first as building missile bases at every planet), but what's worse is, those preventative ships will have to be scrapped at some point...possibly without ever seeing battle.

C. Build no defense of any sort until you are sure that the AI has a fleet coming for you. This strategy lets you build and tech faster, which means, when you do finally start building bases or a counter-fleet in response, you'll be able to do it cheaper, faster, and more effectively. Even if the AI initially gets air superiority over a planet of yours before you have assembled a response, it's not the end of the world. The AI will probably bombard for 1 turn and then send in a slower-than-molasses transport wave. In many cases, it will be possible to re-obtain air superiority before the transport wave hits in order to shoot down all of the incoming transports.

Option C is what I went with in my latest ongoing Mrrshan game. Let me show you what I mean:



The year was about 2370. The Klackons and I actually had relaxed relations, but that doesn't necessarily stop the AI from attacks of opportunity when they want to poach a random planet.

At this point, I could tell for certain that this Klackon fleet was incoming against Zoctan at warp 2. I had no fleet at the time and no missile bases anywhere. Zoctan was a new-ish tundra colony that had no chance of getting even 1 missile base up in time.

I still think it was the correct move, in any case, to focus purely on building up to this point because, as it turned out, I was more than able to destroy the invading Klackon fleet before the ensuing transport wave hit by assembling a counter-fleet from scratch in time.

Here you see that transport wave crawling in at warp-1, some ~8 turns later:



In the meantime, the Klackons only chose to bombard Zoctan once, killing 7 million colonists and 3 factories. After they decided that they were going to try to seize the planet with a ground invasion, they stopped bombing. This seems like a reliable AI pattern. If they get air superiority over a planet that they CAN invade, they WILL invade. And once they decide to invade, they will not want to spoil their prize with further bombardment. And early game bombardment is not too harsh; even a sizable fleet like this only killed 7 million. And you can usually survive something like that.

Plus, it seems like the AI will generally not target planets that it cannot invade in the first place, so for example, nearby Draconis was a new dead planet that I had colonized, and the Klackons only had controlled tundra, not controlled dead. So I was fairly certain that Draconis would be safe for a while. In other words, the AI will generally not go out of its way to glass an enemy planet out of spite that it has no hope of invading. So if you like peaceful buildery strategies for the early game like me, this observation should fill you with some confidence in the Option C of doing nothing for preventative defense in the early game.

By the time the massive 65 million transport wave hit, I had assembled a force to intercept them and dispense with the orbiting Klackon fleet. I timed this fleet to converge on the turn that the Klackon transports would arrive in order to give myself as much time as possible to build a response fleet:





Here's what I was up against:



The result: I lost only a couple of medium cheetah ships. The Klackons lost all of their fleet, AND:



In all, this strategy ended up being way more effective than trying to build a preventative fleet or missile bases because:
A. In the meantime until this fleet arrived, I could build and tech, making my subsequent build-up much stronger.
B. By tempting the Klackons into sending half of their homeworld in a futile attempt at invasion of Zoctan, I put a serious dent in their production for a while.

However, I would not push this strategy past 2400 because the AI will start to get its hands on better engines by that time, and you won't have enough time to assemble a counter-fleet from scratch. At that point, you really do need to build preventative missile bases and/or a preventative, standing fleet, even if you are trying to go the peaceful builder route.

Second lesson: gatling lasers can be useful.

Say what??? Now, make no mistake: gatling lasers are still my least-favorite of the tier-1 techs to get saddled with (hand lasers is almost always my favorite to pick, followed by Hyper-Vs, then gatlings. Gatlings are just too expensive. None of the tier-1 weapon techs is going to make-or-break your game, so really my first consideration with tier-1 is just to get ahead to tier-2 as soon as possible. And so hand lasers, being so super-cheap, win out against the others regardless of whatever qualitative use those hand lasers will have. You really ought to get a peek as soon as you can at whether you have the real goodies in tier 2 like neutron pellet guns or fusion bombs. THOSE are techs that can single-handedly carry your weapons strategy for a large portion of the game).

But gatling lasers give you 4 laser shots for about the cost of 3 normal lasers at first, and it seems like that ratio gets better and better for gatling lasers as you advance up the tech levels (probably having something to do with power requirements or something else scaling better with miniaturization). 1-4 damage lasers and gatling lasers are also relevant for longer than you'd imagine: I'd say, up to about 2400. After that point, the AI will probably be fielding some ships with class III and class IV deflector shields. But up until that point, lasers will work just fine. Against unshielded enemies, gatling lasers are actually better than everyone's favorite neutron pellet guns. Up until class II shields, they are about equal (NPGs are slightly better).

Assume class II shields:

Gatling lasers: 0-2 damage x 4 = 0-8 damage.
Neutron pellet guns: 1-4 damage x 2 (NPGs are about half as expensive) = 2-8 damage.

Higher than class II shields, NPGs become MUCH better, of course!

But as you can tell from the Mrrshan game above, gatling lasers will seriously tear up enemy transports and the enemy's early game unshielded small designs.

In the Mrrshan game above, I actually had gotten hand lasers as my tier-1 pick. Then I had researched anti-missile rockets (it was either that or ion cannons), and I was halfway through mass drivers (no other choices for tier 3). But I had a chance to trade some insignificant tech like deep space scanners to one of the more backward races in exchange for gatling lasers because I thought, hey, why not give myself just a little more of an edge over using just regular lasers? And I think that 33% boost in firepower helped. I don't even think ion cannons or neutron pellet guns would have been better against what I was facing here. Gatling lasers paid off nicely for once.

[RefSteel]

Neat report - thanks for posting it! It should be noted that going defenseless until thevery last minute like that works a lot better for the Mrrshans than any other race: Even the Alkari can't shoot down as many transports with as few guns in space as the cats can, for instance. Darloks trying to scramble defenses together at the last minute would face much steeper odds, especially when the enemy attacks the front lines (unlike you your game, where they flew deep into your territory) or has real engines. The particular strategy you employed will often work great though ... but if the enemy has bombs or especially spores on their fleet, you may be in trouble!

One other small correction: NPGs are significantly better than gats against anything with any shields at all. Against shield 2, two NPG hits will average 5 damage, with results of 2 or of 8 equally (un)likely. A gat's 0-8 spread for four hits in the same situation only averages 3 damage though, and you're 16 times as likely to roll a 0 as an 8 (roughly; MoO's actual damage formulae are a little weird according to report) because each 0-2 die roll is actually a 1-4 roll that becomes "50% chance of 0; otherwise 1-2." Class 1 shields mean four hits from a gat average a total of 6 damage, but since NPGs treat shield 1 as 0, they're averaging 7 for a pair of hits. Gats of course win against shield 0 though (including transports) and they're easier to get in trade and come earlier in the tree.

(I think I would take Hand Lasers over Hyper Vs and Gats even if they all cost the same number of RP; the gropo bonus is much more helpful for much longer. But I'd never take AMRs over Ion Cannons unless my enemies were flying up the force fields tree.)

[Psillycyber]

I have found some use with anti-missile rockets. They make a nice addition to early game bombers. Whereas ion cannons tend to leave me feeling...meh. I much prefer waiting to see if I can get neutron blasters or fusion beams instead to fill my niche for a standard laser that has a 2-space version that can deal with repulsor beams. Those latter will remain relevant for the rest of the game. Ion cannons...not necessarily. (Such as in my recent playthrough of that Bulrathi game, where the Psilons quickly got class XIII shields. Ion cannons wouldn't have been very helpful against that, eh?)

[Ianus]

Regarding AI bombing strategies:
I can't speak to... call them spite attacks against planets the AI can't settle and can only glass as they don't happen very often, but in my experience the AI will generally NOT attack a planet for the purpose of glassing it. The AI's attack pattern against a planet they have identified as a target tends to go like this:
1. AI sends fleet to planet
2. Fleet arrives at planet and engages defenses
3. Air superiority obtained, one round of bombardment
4. If colony survives begin invasion protocol
5. While awaiting invasion force analyze defender population. There is some threshold here that I don't know that will cause the AI to initiate orbital bombardment again. If anyone knows specifically what that threshold is (percentage of max pop, etc) I would love to know.

[Psillycyber]

Great info, Ianus! That indeed matches my observations.

Also, now for my third observation about this game as the Mrrshans that I've been playing:

Third lesson: The Mrrshan innate battle computer bonus makes certain ships viable when they otherwise wouldn't be, thus allowing for cheaper designs, which is indirectly an economic bonus.

The Mrrshans often get compared badly with the Alkari since they both have combat bonuses, but the Alkari bonus seems more useful in many situations. For example, if you have a small fighter at the start of the game, it will already have a defensive rating of 2. Enemy ships without battle computers or scanners will only hit these suckers 30% of the time. But add the +3 defense rating of the Alkari on top of that, and those same enemy ships will only be hitting your small Alkari fighters only 5% of the time. That's six times the survivability, six times the number of shots you can get in before your ships get taken down. By contrast, in this same situation playing as the Mrrshans, a small fighter of yours will go from 50% chance to hit to 90% chance to hit against a basic large design of the enemy's in the early game. That's not even twice the number of shots that you'll get in before your ship goes down.

However, the Mrrshans really shine when you would be starting out with a low hit%. For example, consider this design in my latest ongoing Mrrshan game:



Thanks to the innate attack bonus of +4 of the anti-matter torpedoes, this ship would normally have an attack rating of 4.

In general, I would hesitate fielding a ship with this low of an attack rating at the point where I am in this game (2460). By this point, enemy ships are routinely sporting defensive ratings of 5-8 or so.

Imagine that you are going up against an opponent with a defensive rating of 8. At this stage of the game, I am fighting just these types of ships from the Psilons. They are a bit ahead in tech, and they are fielding their own missile boats with:
*inertial stabilizers (+2 def)
*what must be class 5 maneuverability (+5 def) from their impulse drives,
*medium hull (+1 def).
= +8 def total.
These things are zooming around the screen, and for most races they would be hard to hit (only 10% chance) with the torpedo boat design that I have above. With most races, I would have to go up to a large hull to fit the anti-matter torpedoes + the necessary battle computers, which would be a much less efficient way to get torpedo racks up in the air.

Only the Mrrshans can field this sort of efficient medium hull design with any reasonable chance of effectiveness thanks to their extra +4 in attack rating, which will give my torpedo boats an attack rating of +8, which will be enough to hit the Psilon boats about 50% of the time. In other words, that's four times the effectiveness. If the enemy ships had a defense rating of 9, then we'd be going from 5% chance to hit to 40%, or 8 times the effectiveness!

My overall point is that the Mrrshan attack bonus is not necessarily just a tiny add-on. There are some situations where the extra +4 attack bonus allows for a discrete jump in effectiveness (in this case, the difference between being able to field ultra-efficient medium-hull torpedo boats or having to move all the way up to much less efficient large hulls in order to fit on the necessary battle computer additions).