(April 30th, 2020, 06:27)Cyneheard Wrote: Ref, Jinga already has 21 bases - we have visibility on them.
Yup. The AI stops building bases sooner on Hard than they do on Impossible though; they need more population before they can build more bases there. That said...
Quote:I'm not sure how we're building a large enough fleet to chew through the existing defenses with the tech we've got.
You're right: We're not. We really do need something before we can attack ... if we can manage it at all. If we can win this one at all, it's going to be a very difficult road, and I don't know when (or if) we'll be able to take on Meklar worlds.
(April 30th, 2020, 07:03)utwig Wrote: What if we build two bombing fleets each with around 60 medium missile boats and +2 speed 2-rack missiles.
Against the Meklar? As Cyneheard noted, the Meks have Class-V Planetary shields. Our best missiles right now are hyper-V rockets, which do zero damage against any base that's protected by a planetary shield. The weapons tech we're researching just lets us fire more hyper-V rockets at once. The only chance we have to crack anybody's bases is with Fusion Bombs (hopefully Scatter-V miniaturization will let us fit one on a small ship) - but against the Meklar, even those will do extremely limited damage. We would need a lot of them, and I'm not sure where we'd get them from....
It's possible we can take worlds from someone else, but I didn't set us up for that on my turnset; I tried to move us closer, but...
Being alone, I talk to myself - for who else is there to listen? Once, for a while - I don't know how many decades now - I refused to communicate even with myself, meditating alone, emptying my mind of thoughts. It was peaceful, when I could sustain it, but I could never keep it up long: Awkwardly, I kept remembering; I kept wondering, and only after trying to work out answers to complicated questions that occurred to me did I realize I was no longer meditating, my mind no longer empty. And I realized after a time that I had taken a wrong turn: Meditation was a way, perhaps, but not my way. And so I went out to observe and to experience, and I talked to myself about it, and in all of this, I changed. I dimly remember, long ago, some decades in the past, watching over the fleets of a Darlok people clinging feebly to a tiny empire as to the edge of a precipice. Since then, we have built that little empire larger, stronger - and we have lost our grip on the edge. I who was before, driven by hope of a great Darlok future, could not have ruled such an empire as this. I who have been these past ten years have reveled in this opportunity: To help along and defend as I can, mistakes and errors and failures and all, a Darlok people who face their certain doom. This I could do and yet live with myself - and more than that, this I can think back upon and relive without shame, talking to myself though no other will hear of what I have done, and what has become of my people.
In the year 2430, I draped myself in the cloak of state: The mantle of the 35th Occult Strategic Guideposts, the OSG-35 by whose subtle wordless form we can infer the need for this position I twice have filled, with half a century of time unspooling in between, and in so doing, eschewing the folly of collective thought as ever, I wrested our people from their previous course into one of my own making. The most powerful empire in the entire galaxy had just declared war on our people, and my response, longing as I did for the peaceful development of our infrastructure and technology, was to dismantle almost our entire starfleet.
I started with the Scout 2.0s that I designed in an earlier, only half-remembered form; only two remained, and they had no further mission to complete. Our bombers were the next to go, already obsolete, too slow and ill-protected to survive in the face of enemy defenses, too expensive to be thrown away wholesale just to get more of their kind close enough to hit enemy missile bases from orbit, and useless for defending our own worlds as we must do soon, they were a failed experiment: One that would have been glorious had it succeeded, but one without hope decades later, in the present galaxy. That done, I spent a long time debating with myself, just staring at this screen:
I still don't know if I did the right thing. The maintenance we were paying on all those missile boats, the scrap material I wanted to use to fuel our industry, the ease with which I feared enemy fleets would be able to dodge those slow 5-rack rockets and blast the ships themselves out of space all told me it was wisest, but they still had potential value, and we were in a two-front war, and those ships represented the bulk of our defensive fleet. Perhaps it would have been better to preserve them, but now we'll never know.
In the meantime, I reorganized our empire, building factories with the help of our planetary reserves on both potential battle fronts, leaving our back-lines worlds and poor Keep Out to carry our research load, where I made a critical mistake, thinking much too defensively, neglecting to remember our real danger and our greatest real needs. With the extra funds I generated for laboratory building beyond sustaining and supporting our existing science teams - knowing we were desperate to get more research done - I decided to push Force Field research forward when our greatest need - as I now believe and should have realized then - was for weapons technology.
In the meantime, I was redeploying the forces that remained: I sent our fastest combat ships down to Keep Out for its central location, and when they arrived there two years later, I redeployed them from there to our homeworld, the closest planet to the Meklar front, just as the first intelligence reports were arriving, 2433.
As part of my initial redeployment, I had sent a single Mask 2.0 up to Gorra, where it found just four missile bases but a significant Mrrshan fleet. The three Panther cruisers were quick - either stabilized or built with better engines than Mrrshans were thought to field - but the two colony cruisers were slower, and the lone Tiger cruiser retreated from battle immediately, suggesting it was a bomber with no other armament. I would have sent a scanner ship instead of the lone old Mask, but even before I started scrapping ships, we didn't have a single battle scanner in our entire fleet! I didn't actually realize this until later on, or I'd have built one myself. I figured that though our lone Tarantula cruiser wasn't likely to be much good against enemy ships - I expected all of them to have superior firepower, defenses, or both - I could send it to one of the worlds that should have been ours, near our own home star, to get a look at what we'd be facing on that front. By the time I remembered that even it had no scanner, it was too late.
It might not have mattered anyway; by 2434, all six of the cruisers our Mask had encountered at Gorra were on their way to fight for Waters Edgian orbit, and it turned out tthe Meklar weren't using Jinga or Yarrow as muster points. Jinga was protected "only" by its 21 missile bases and planetary shield, and though I did send a single ship up to check out Yarrow, that ship too found only bases, with no orbital fleet.
The Meklar did have a muster point though, and they were definitely coming after our worlds, as I was to discover in 2435.
You can tell where that fleet is going just by the geometry: Three Annihilator dreadnoughts and 17 Ajax cruisers all bound for our homeworld from the Meklar muster point at Vega. Lacking Improved Scanners, I had no idea what their ETA would be. I had no idea what their ships would be carrying. What I did know, from the spy report I managed to gather - of course without direct contact or physical espionage! - was what could be on their fleet.
I won't go through the whole laundry list. There's too much there. Suffice to say that none of our worlds are safe from them, and that everything in our entire empire, compared to their technology, is hopelessly obsolete. These tech levels aren't even surprising; this isn't the case of a shocking run-away technological giant - not now, in the 2430s! It just serves to underscore the fact that our own technology is decades behind the curve. We have fifty or sixty years of catching up to do, and while we were trying to get started, we had to deal with the Mrrshans and that incoming death fleet!
So look at that fleet again. What exactly was I supposed to do about that thing?
I still had some reserves saved up, kept aside for exactly that type of emergency: I knew better than to just trust the Meklar to leave us alone. I also knew that if their fleet came equiped with all their best new toys - or really even any of them to speak of - there would be nothing we could do. If they fitted those huge ships with Class 4 deflectors or automated repair systems, all our weapons would be worthless: Our Hyper-Vs would be trying desperately to plink their armor away with too little damage to shoot down a fighter with each hit, or trying to outrun enough repair systems to practically rebuild an entire cruiser between each missile volley. I will also note in passing that we have no hope of cracking their missile bases, with their nine levels of shielding and four of ECM, firing Merculite missiles directed by battle computers twice as advanced as our own. They had the tech to move their ships around at warp 2 and maneuver them in combat as quickly as our own if so designed, and their weapons tech is enough to tear anything we can build to the shadows of confetti. So the best I could do was hope that their fleets were specialized against one particular type of threat, and try to make them chase two or more different kinds of shadows at once, in the hope that they wouldn't be able to catch us all. Yet still I wouldn't neglect our research; I wasn't going to pour all our empire's strength into a battle that might come too soon for distant planets to help anyway, and might be a lost cause no matter what we did. Our planteologists reported an 11% chance of a breakthrough on enhancing our ecological restoration techniques by 2436, but we didn't get lucky that year; on the contrary.
At this point, I gave up completely on our Keep Out colony. Another dreadnought, of a whole new Devastator design, with 24 more Ajax cruisers, another cruiser called a Tornado, and a couple of colony cruisers on top of the rest, were discovered on their way down there from Vega, still the Meklar muster point. We had poured literally trillions of credits into the Keep Outian economy, and even built two missile bases there, with its full 95 million Darloks living on the surface - as many as the planet could support - and yet building a third missile base there, were I to try, would still have taken seven years, meaning it would come at least four years too late. It might have been possible, maybe, depending on the speed of the enemy fleet, to have finished one just in time if I had fed the poor place with reserves, for all the good that would have done ... and if I could have gotten reserves from somewhere. I was already pouring everything I had left into our homeworld. Instead, I just let Keep Out go right on doing research, while I continued my desperate plan to build as many missile bases as I could at our homeworld and send as many tiny, nimble, feeble Mask 3.0 fighters over as I could from nearby stars, sending over the Mask 2.0s within reach as well, though separately, hoping beyond hope the Meklar ships carried planet-busters, they at least wouldn't also have enough fly-swatters. Our chances of a planetology breakthrough had doubled since the previous year, and it would certainly have helped our production if it came through.
It didn't, but at least in the midst of the Meklar war, I remembered that the Mrrshans were due in Waters Edgian space too, in 2437.
Remember how I thought the Tiger was some kind of dedicated bomber? Well, either they scrapped, redesigned, and built a new one really fast, or I misremembered something, or its retreat from our lone ship at Gorra was completely insane. In fact with all those graviton beams - 35 in all between the four cruisers, plus a neutron blaster and 9 fusion bomb racks carrying ten bombs apiece - they matched up well against any ship we could have fielded against them and even against our barely-shielded missile bases, thanks to the Panthers' quickness.
I threw everything at the Panthers first, even though they were the best-defended ships in the Mrrshan fleet, keeping my fighters out of their range while dodging the colony ship's laughable 5-rack rockets, but I would certainly have lost a base if the Panthers hadn't insisted on chasing after our little fighter fleets. The colony ships escaped after exhausting their useless payload, but we burned the rest. The cats aren't actually very scary in smaller numbers like these, since in some ways they're almost as primitive as ourselves in technology. The scary guys are the Meklar - thanks in large part to the planets we let them have many decades ago, more or less for free - as GNN reported that same year.
We still trail them in population by a significant margin, with the Bulrathi growling at the trailing hems of our cloaks and the Alkari flying desperately to catch up with them, we are far ahead of the slow-growing rocks and of course the utterly hapless Mrrshans who have spent roughly the last century prosecuting a war against our Waters Edgians that has only left both of us far behind the rest of the galaxy technologically.
By 2438, I knew more or less when to expect the Meklar death fleets to arrive, based on their rate of travel across the screen, though the fact that they'd been navigating the nebula did add to the uncertainty. Since I didn't know for sure, I sent all the Waters Edgian ships with sublight engines down to Keep Out, whence they could redeploy to our homeworld without any more delay than if they'd gone directly, but could still turn around in case of an attack on our distant colonies, or in case they arrived too late to help stop that first death fleet. Unfortunately, there was more bad news:
Another Meklar assault fleet, about a third the size of the one coming after our homeworld, but still incredibly deadly, was on its way to defy the big sign reading, "Keep Out" at our first interstellar colony. If I hadn't given up on the place already, this would have been the last straw. I made another big mistake with our fleets though, building several more Distance destroyers - the kind with twin hyper-V rocket 2-racks - when the damage our rockets could do in the course of a battle would be insignificant in comparison with the costs. In my limited defense, I needed some kind of fleet, and I had no idea what I was facing - but hyper-V rocket boats weren't going to be the answer no matter what the Meklar were fielding on ships like those.
Research funding had finally taken a hit the yea before as I struggled to find the resources to protect everything, and I chose to keep up our investment in techs that weren't yet breakthrough-ready instead of pushing planetology, so the chances there still hovered around 22%, but we finally also had a chance - if a slim one at 3% - for a stroke of luck to finish our force field research. At least it would have been something, but of course it didn't happen. What did happen in 2439 was the Meklar attack on our Keep Out colony.
What you're looking at here is a cloud of 120 hyper-X rockets, plus 5 more hyper-Vs, all targeting our Mask 3.0 fighters before we even have a chance to react. Those are all launched from 2-racks like ours, but the Devastator dread has 25 more 5-racks of Hyper-Vs. Now, that's a lot of rockets, but here's the thing about that: Rockets are not good weapons! Yes, they could wipe out our bases in a heartbeat, even if I were already shape-shifted in advance into something that had a heart, but only if they fired their rockets at the planet, and only because our shielding levels are basically nonexistant at this point. Their Ajax cruisers are dedicated rocket boats, with a weak and pointless shield to make matters even worse for them, the Tornado is almost as bad, with no other weapons aboard except a couple of death spore dispensors - horrible, unspeakable weapons of pure evil, to be sure, but the nature of the atrocity they represent is that they kill millions of innocent civilians with a horrifying disease and don't affect our ships or bases in any way! With their Devastator designed along the lines of a scaled-up Tornado itself apart from a handful of Heavy and normal lasers, the twin colony ships were actually the greatest threat to our bases as long as the missiles targeted our ships!
Fortunately, those colony ships are shieldless, and neither their single hard beam nor their twin neutron blasters is much threat to tiny fighters, even with the most advanced targeting present in their local fleet (and, coincidentally, the best we could achieve with our most advanced computers and battle scanners combined). For that matter neither is anything else in this battle, and even their best-shielded ships here have no better shields than we do, with no auto-repair, nor even duralloy armor! If the Meklar send a truly modern fleet at us, we're doomed, but this is not a modern fleet, and though I had given up on the planet, once I saw the junkyard rejects I was facing, I decided to defend it with everything I could, even if it only delayed the inevitable until the arrival of that second fleet!
The colony ships went down first while my Mask fighters dodged the rockets. Then our next target was the only thing left that could pose any threat to our fighters or bases: The Devastator dread. The Ajax cruisers retreated when their rocket pods ran out, having accomplished nothing except to let my Masks lead their munitions on a merry chase, and I literally just ignored the Tornado since I had to stop the dreadnought and knew I didn't have the firepower to take them out in time to stop their death spores from ravaging the planet. Wherever they fell, our people self-isolated in virtual quarantine, so that, dying in their millions, they saved tens of millions more all across the planet's surface who had not been exposed to the death spores but might otherwise have been exposed to them. The Devastator contributed its own war crimes as well, and it caused further mayhem when one of the volleys from its 25 hyper-V rocket pods targeted the planet instead of the Masks, but hyper-Vs being hyper-Vs, even against our miserable shielding and nonexistant ECM, it still only took out one of the two bases. And unlike the Tornado, which survived to retreat, the Devastator went up in a blaze of rocket bursts and laser fire as our Masks and one surviving base burned it out of the sky, reinforcing the name and motto of this, our poorest world: Keep Out!
Before we could cheer our victory or assess the horrific damage, a special news bulletin came in from GNN.
It would have been poetic justice (and maybe, maybe given us some hope) if it had happened at Keep Out instead, but of course it was not to be. The Silicoids of Ryoun found neutronium deposits, adding another mineral-rich world to their rocky clutches, but we still have to deal with Keep Out's poverty.
That wasn't really bad news though - in the grand scheme of things, it barely made a blip. No, the really bad news came from a different source entirely.
That's three races at war with us now that the Bulrathi have joined in: Our two most-powerful rivals joining our weakest just in the course of the decade. So that should be exciting. Not my problem though; I'm going to go shelter in my place of residence, as far away from everyone else as I can get.
That's the present though; the Bulrathi declared war last year, and I still had a homeworld to defend. I kept stacking our bases as high as I could, and added a few more Masks, and that was the best I could do. I saw to it that Keep Out would commit the resources needed to completely sterilize the areas affected by Meklar death spores so they could be rebuilt and resettled over the coming years, restoring living space that had been virtually removed from the planet by the necessity of the quarantine. I pushed research where I could - where planets weren't threatened - just to keep our investments going, with planetology at breakthrough odds of 23%, pushing the class 3 deflectors that might make the difference for our bases up to 14%, and getting neither one. At least construction and (finally) weapons technology are starting to mature - not as quickly as I could wish, but almost more quickly than we can afford. This year, we had to fight the Meklar with what we had. So, what was on those Annihilators (all three of them!) of theirs?
So this looked bad. I don't care about the hyper-X rockets. If those were going to kill us, the Ajax cruisers would have been enough. As I said once before, rockets are not good weapons. But each of those three(!) Annihilators has 28 guns, any and all of which can pierce our planet's shielding. They will cut our Tarantula to shreds if we let them fire on it. They will cut our bases to shreds if they fire on them. There's just one thing in our favor: No fly-swatters! 28 guns is a lot, but that thing doesn't have the Meks' best battle computer; our Mask 3.0 guns are aimed as well as those things. And they'll fire from maximum range with their 11 heavy blast cannons, cutting their accuracy further ... and our Mask 3.0s are stabilized, and fast, and those dreads only have one layer of shielding. Our Masks start by dodging missiles, then move in as the Ajax cruisers uselessly retreat, and the Annihilators take the bait! They fight our fighters in space, far from the planet, trying to shoot down pilots flitting and darting like shadows all around them, and at the cost of just ten(!) of our Mask 3.0 fighters and about 20 of the obsolete 2.0s, we destroy all three dreadnoughts! And what's more, though with many times fewer missile bases, against just one Annihilator, we can do it again! The cost in fighters may be high, but there's still time for our Mask 3.0s (and the Tarantula, though I'm not sure if it'll be any use) to reach Keep Out before the smaller Meklar fleet arrives there next year! I give the order, but I won't see it executed. I'm going into isolation, and whether to follow through will be up to my successor.
Okay, so: Situation report, with current pictures:
Here's what the Meks have got heading down to Keep Out. The overlapping fleet on the same spot is the stack of retreating cruisers from the battle of 2439, so you don't have to worry about those yet; you should be able to see them properly again next turn. I don't see any other incoming fleets yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time, from the cats and 'chines and bears alike. I ordered some ships to meet that fleet there, but whether you want to carry out those orders or try something else is up to you.
We aren't doing very well. Our planet count is okay, and we're better off than the Mrrshans (faint praise) except in technology (That's right: We're worse than the barely-existant cats in tech!) but we are so, so far behind in technology that - especially with no diplomatic tools on the table, including espionage - we're very much at risk of getting run over and destroyed. Especially, of course, by the Meklar.
Where do I even start? How about with this: They could be teching class 6 deflectors right now! If they do, and put them on a ship, we will be literally incapable of damaging it - except with Heavy Lasers, which will average one seventh of one point of damage when we hit! In reality, even with the tech they already have, a competent ship designer would have rolled us up already, even with the AI piloting their fleets.
So this is our empire. You might notice that we have no reserves left, and none of our worlds are maxed on factories - but almost all of them are almost maxed. I was trying to squeeze every last drop of production I could out of these places, and this was one of the consequences. It won't take much production to finish the facs on the seven worlds that are nearly finished, so if you push IND on any of them, most of that will go into the reserves.
And here's our fleet. I'm not sure what to do with the Tarantula; it can't stick in a fight with almost anything we're fighting, and I should probably have scrapped it in 2430, but it's there if you have a use for it. I would not recommend building any Avoidance 3s; they're better than the Tarantula, but not actually good; I'm hoping we can wait on a new design until more tech comes in. The Distance 3s aren't very effective either, because the Hyper-Vs never are. Even with 2-racks, they just don't have the range and speed and power to make a real difference. I regret building even as many as I did. The Mask 2.0s are just warm bodies to absorb heavy weapon hits at this point, though they can do scratch damage to big ships with poor defenses. The Mask 3.0s, weak as they are, as Alkari-style fighters, are the mainstay of our fleet because they're hard to hit and at least can hit the broadside of a battleship themselves.
The galactic map is more or less unchanged, I think, except that Silicoid Ryoun (which I don't think we'd scouted anyway) turned Rich.
I ... don't think I have any suggestions here. Good luck! We're going to need it. Almost everything we really need now is at least two techs away. I'll be honest: When I read that we went for Scatter Packs, though it might have been the best (read: only) option - I don't know what else we had in that rung of our tree - I figured that was our death blow. I should have remembered that and pushed the tech much sooner than I did so we could get past it and make a desperate play for an actual ship-to-ship weapon. We're playing from way behind here, in spite of our planet count and population. I like that! It's fun to try to fight our way out, and if we lose, okay; it was still a fun ride, and we'll learn what we can (such as actually settling size 90 worlds that are already in range) and those who want to can try again, with this variant or another, in a whole new game!
But if the AI somehow keeps making just enough mistakes that we can sneak through and get a win ... well, that will be a really amazing comeback!!
ROSTER:
- Ianus - UP!
- shallow_thought - on deck!
- Arnuz
- utwig
- Cyneheard
- RefSteel - just played!
From this lurker's perspective, whether you ultimately win or go down fighting to the last socially distant shapeshifter, this has been a fine read. Best of luck taking on the Horde Of Attacking Xenos!
Good report! The beauty of classic Master of Orion is that there are no magic bullets against something like this. If you've made strategic mistake or have fallen too far behind you will loose worlds.
Good job fighting dreadnoughts.
We can't hold Keep Out perhaps, though we may hold our other planets with missile bases for a few more turns.
After Scatter pack we can research Fusion Beam which gives us a chance.
I hope everthing's okay, Ianus! Do you need a swap/skip?
(May 1st, 2020, 01:16)utwig Wrote: We can't hold Keep Out perhaps, though we may hold our other planets with missile bases for a few more turns.
We should be able to hold even Keep Out against what's coming; for the future ... that remains to be seen. The question is whether we can catch up in time!
Quote:If we loose, do we shadow?
Once the game is over, anyone who wants to can go back and play a shadow game and see how it comes out with different decisions, but if the team wants to go on playing (or split into smaller teams) after this one is lost or won, we'll probably want to go with a new map and varriant for another game.
I want to focus on this one first, but yeah, I think this performance demands a follow on SG. Personally, I'd be tempted to just go for a non-variant Impossible game - and not a weak race either: I'm that rusty.
BTW, if Ianus needs a skip, I won't be able to pck this uop straight away. I've got a set of turns to play in the EitB succession game.
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
I hope Ianus is doing okay. I also see that shallow_thought finished his EitB SG turns, so hopefully we won't need a second consecutive skip/swap and I can update the roster to:
- Ianus - skipped for now; I hope all is well! - shallow_thought - UP!
- Arnuz - on deck!
- utwig
- Cyneheard
- RefSteel
