Looks good, Haphazard! I'm sorry to hear the less-fun stuff has gotten busy again (same is true on my end, sadly) but I'm glad you got to play some more turns of the game!
jez9999, I'm glad you're having fun with FTL! It definitely seems like a cool game - I've never played it myself - though comparing it to MoO is definitely an apples-to-oranges thing: One will be to some people's taste, the other to other peoples', even though many people do enjoy both (like Haphazard and Sulla to name just two!) - because though the setting for each involves space combat, that's about where the similiarity ends! (And for that matter, it's possible to win a game of MoO without ever firing on an enemy ship ... if the circumstances allign that way and that serves the strategy you choose!) I'd love to read about your FTL games if you feel moved to write about them over in the Gaming Table subforum; it's been a while since we had a good FTL report over there. It sounds like you're saying strategy games like MoO aren't really your flavor, but I'm glad you gave this one a shot, even if I do feel like I/we have done an inadequate job describing how to go about choosing a strategy (it's admitedly complex because you won't play quite the same way in any two galaxies with any two different tech trees!) Contributing to that of course is the way that the first turn in a set as the game goes on can be especially daunting in a succession game unless the previous players' report gives you a much better sense for the flow of the situation than I feel we managed here Sorry about that! And of course, this being a good strategy game, there's no such thing as a comprehensive "walk-through." And, unfortunately, though an SG like this can be a great way to learn, I think it works better if the players all have time to report, discuss and comment a lot more extensively than any of us did here. (Definitely including me: My excessively-long in-character stuff doesn't count as "extensive" for learning-the-game purposes, I suspect, even though it's fun for me to write!) Thanks for playing with us in spite of these shortcomings, and for bowing out instead of trying to keep it like a chore when you found you couldn't really get into the game! I've definitely enjoyed this one, and I hope you enjoyed the parts you took part in (and the parts you read about) too!
On the part where we actually Finish This Game: I haven't checked the save yet, but I'll try to familiarize myself with the situation and post at least a pre-flight report sometime tomorrow! With jez9999 skipped, I no longer expect the game to end before we get back to DaveV, but I intend to try to ensure his is the last set of the game at least!
Errr ... Haphazard, it looks like you accidentally attached the 2360 save instead of the 2460 one (not just a typo; I loaded it and found it was really 2360 in-game).
No worries; from my experience, I think there's a law of the universe that a save mix-up has to happen at least once during every SG! In any case, I'll check the new save and try to get started on it later tonight!
Okay, I was able to load the new save and confirm it's the right one, so I've officially got it! I'll try to get at least part one of a report up later tonight.
The situation in the save looks chaotic at a glance, but none of it is actually a problem, and we're obviously and thoroughly winning; the only question is how we want to go about ending the game - so my goal for my set is going to be to make the situation decidedly less chaotic for DaveV! In ... a certain way.
(April 20th, 2022, 02:45)RefSteel Wrote: Looks good, Haphazard! I'm sorry to hear the less-fun stuff has gotten busy again (same is true on my end, sadly) but I'm glad you got to play some more turns of the game!
jez9999, I'm glad you're having fun with FTL! It definitely seems like a cool game - I've never played it myself - though comparing it to MoO is definitely an apples-to-oranges thing: One will be to some people's taste, the other to other peoples', even though many people do enjoy both (like Haphazard and Sulla to name just two!) - because though the setting for each involves space combat, that's about where the similiarity ends! (And for that matter, it's possible to win a game of MoO without ever firing on an enemy ship ... if the circumstances allign that way and that serves the strategy you choose!) I'd love to read about your FTL games if you feel moved to write about them over in the Gaming Table subforum; it's been a while since we had a good FTL report over there. It sounds like you're saying strategy games like MoO aren't really your flavor, but I'm glad you gave this one a shot, even if I do feel like I/we have done an inadequate job describing how to go about choosing a strategy (it's admitedly complex because you won't play quite the same way in any two galaxies with any two different tech trees!) Contributing to that of course is the way that the first turn in a set as the game goes on can be especially daunting in a succession game unless the previous players' report gives you a much better sense for the flow of the situation than I feel we managed here Sorry about that! And of course, this being a good strategy game, there's no such thing as a comprehensive "walk-through." And, unfortunately, though an SG like this can be a great way to learn, I think it works better if the players all have time to report, discuss and comment a lot more extensively than any of us did here. (Definitely including me: My excessively-long in-character stuff doesn't count as "extensive" for learning-the-game purposes, I suspect, even though it's fun for me to write!) Thanks for playing with us in spite of these shortcomings, and for bowing out instead of trying to keep it like a chore when you found you couldn't really get into the game! I've definitely enjoyed this one, and I hope you enjoyed the parts you took part in (and the parts you read about) too!
On the part where we actually Finish This Game: I haven't checked the save yet, but I'll try to familiarize myself with the situation and post at least a pre-flight report sometime tomorrow! With jez9999 skipped, I no longer expect the game to end before we get back to DaveV, but I intend to try to ensure his is the last set of the game at least!
Not your fault at all, I just think there's something about MOO that fails to draw me in, and I generally do like 4x strategy games. I think the combination of complex ship design, micromanagement of sliders, and the fact that because ships can travel from one end of the galaxy to the other by the end of the game you feel you need to keep track of the entire galaxy rather than just worlds near your borders, brings it into unintuitive and chore-like territory for me. I'll have a look a tthat other forum regarding FTL.
(April 21st, 2022, 16:01)RefSteel Wrote: Okay, I was able to load the new save and confirm it's the right one, so I've officially got it! I'll try to get at least part one of a report up later tonight.
The situation in the save looks chaotic at a glance, but none of it is actually a problem, and we're obviously and thoroughly winning; the only question is how we want to go about ending the game - so my goal for my set is going to be to make the situation decidedly less chaotic for DaveV! In ... a certain way.
Glad I did not get the wrong file twice. The galaxy is a chaotic mess, as I was mainly focused on building up our existing worlds (atmospheric, advanced soil, IRC4) and grabbing the three new radiated worlds. Plus dealing with the nova situation at Rana. Once we start going on offense, things should start getting simpler again.
Good luck!
jez9999, there is a lot of good FTL material around the site. You may have to go back a few years in the topics, but there was a lot of discussion at the time the game first came out. Also, if you enjoy FTL, have you tried Into the Breach by the same devs? Giant time travelling robots fighting monsters -- fun stuff.
Okay, here's part one of my report! As usual when changing gears completely this late in the game, the first turn is very complex - so this first report will cover just that one turn, with a pretty good indication of what's to come. I'll try to post the rest by tomorrow night, but I have yet to play most of the turns and the pictures take a long time, so I may have to limit them for the rest. We'll see....
So at last we approach the present day - and the present crisis: A crisis beyond our control, though it may be foreseen. As we once ruled the galaxy from our throne world of Orion, so the Sakkra have built their Interstellar Imperium into a galactic one, with the fate of all the other sentient peoples at their mercy - all peoples including our own. With the election of their Fifteenth Speaker in their year 2360, their ascendance over the galaxy, already convincing, was about to enter a new phase, like nothing ever seen before in galactic history.
Sakkra spy reports of the time - the very brief time, lasting only a matter of years - suggested a significant technological edge for the Bulrathi in weapons technology, together with a number of secrets that the Sakkra couldn't yet duplicate, but also didn't especially need. Diplomatically isolated by the sheer fact of their growing power, the Sakkra had few immediate avenues for correcting what they perceived as their deficiencies, since only the Alkari and Klackons - the other egg-laying species, though scholars believe this was due to sheer coincidence - were willing to so much as speak with them, but the Fifteenth Speaker made use of even these minimal opportunities to lay the groundwork for the overwhelming power the Sakkra would shortly display to the galaxy.
Fusion rifles soon were flooding across the border as fast as Alkari merchants could ship them, knowing as they did that once the first arrived, it wouldn't be long before Sakkra reverse-engineers would be building their own reptillian versions, and the window for profiting from Alkari rifle sales would be strictly limited as a result. The advanced ecological restoration techniques the Alkari learned in exchange would cut their waste costs in half, but the enormous Sakkra Imperium no longer cared about benefiting its rivals' economies: Its own was still going to be better by an unassailable margin. More importantly, perhaps, with the advent of such highly-advanced planetology technology as the Sakkra had just provided, the Alkari became willing at last to trade what had - up until that moment - been their own state-of-the-art technology in the field: The secrets of biological cloning. With this technology between their teeth, Sakkra breeders on gaean worlds - meaning virtually, and soon actually, every world they controlled - would be able to birth a new generation from eggs and cloning vats for about the same cost as raising a pet cricket ... and do so about as quickly. The warp dissipator that Sakkra propulsion engineers taught the Alkari to install on their starships in exchange would be a dangerous weapon if deployed against Sakkra fleets, but not a decisive one - especially since it wouldn't fit aboard anything smaller than a cruiser with the miniaturization levels any race in the galaxy had yet obtained, and the Alkari pilots are most effective when piloting smaller ships. Some observers questioned the wisdom of these deals, especially from a Fifteenth Speaker who prior to election had railed against the idea of paying Sakkra to breed when they do so with such alacrity for free, but the real reason behind them would become apparent shortly.
Following the destruction of its defenses by the Twelfth Speaker of the OSG-37, the Mrrshan homeworld had changed ownership repeatedly since the Sakkra themselves refused to commit genocide themselves, and had attempted no invasions following the conquest of Crypto. By the time of the Fifteenth Speaker's election, after years of bloody fighting, the entire Fierias system harbored only three million Bulrathi citizens, but retained fully 177 intact factories originally built by the feline people for Shandra, their one-time Imperial Queen. Any Speaker of the Sakkra could have conquered the world with the merest flick of the tongue, but doing so would lead inevitably to war with the powerful Bulrathi people, and potentially with the allies Grunk could be sure of making soon. It was for this war that the Fifteenth Speaker was preparing with the technological exchanges of 2460: Sakkra confidence in their present and future defensive fleets at Selia was so high that they had no expectation of needing fusion rifles to defend it - in fact, the Selia colony itself stopped building fighters as soon as the new Speaker took office, in favor of ecological efforts to turn it into a virtual gaea - and with nearly all Sakkra worlds fully populated already, there seemed very little for the new cloning vats to do ... unless they were going to be depopulated somehow. With every planet in the galaxy already claimed by someone - including this, our home-throne-prison world, though the question might be raised of whether the claimant is our people or the Guardian in our skies - if the Sakkra were going to start leaving their planets en masse, it took little imagination to realize where they might be going.
Each of four different worlds within two parsecs of Fierias sent a fifth of its population to claim what had been the Mrrshan homeworld, each budgeting a trivial amount to restore its population to what it had been before the assault transports left over the course of the following year. With the exception of Collassa's transports, which the Speaker negligently forgot to countermand after learning they would arrive a year too early, all were coordinated to reach the Bulrathi colony at the same time as a space support fleet drawn from those stationed at Obaca and Reticuli. Yet conquering Fierias was sure to be easy in itself; if no other consequences were expected, the a previous Speaker for the OSG-37 would have taken the planet long since. Indeed, had the Sakkra planned to end their new conquests with the Fierias system alone, there would have been no need to bother spending even a little money to vat-grow replacements for the lost population. On the contrary, the 2460 trades and cloning spending was all done in preparation for the longer war to come.
Like the earlier afterthought trade for fusion engines from the Alkari - radiated environment controls might have seemed like a high price to pay for a thoroughly obsolete design, but it must be remembered that no uncolonized planets remained in the galaxy, and that every Sakkra world was or soon would be entirely habitable and indeed virtually gaean, protected from severe radiation along with everything else by its terraformed atmosphere - learning the thoroughly outdated secrets of the Klackons' class-3 shield technology would improve miniaturization for the Sakkra ever so slightly, and - perhaps more importantly - clear away some chaff for Sakkra spies and military reverse-engineers, who in the future would recognize these outmoded designs and therefore be free to ignore them while searching for more-important files on alien technology. If the Klackons, passed masters of construction research themselves, would benefit from winning the most-efficient Sakkra factory construction technology in exchange, saving a little money on such factories as they still had room for in their tiny, insignificant, and utterly-backward empire, the Sakkra simply couldn't bring themselves to care. The Bulrathi however were a different story; knowing all-out war would inevitably follow the conquest of Fierias, the Fifteenth Speaker was already making preparations for the war's next stage.
All the old Phract bombers were on their way to Selia, where they would contribute nothing to the colony's defense against Bulrathi transports, and wind up completely out of position for any attack on the Bulrathi, perhaps because a previous Speaker mistook them for starfighters in trying to scramble defenses to that remote star. The Fifteenth Speaker didn't mind: Both versions were already long out of date in any case, and any serious attack on the Bulrathi colonies, with their ten layers of shielding, was going to require a lot of bombers of the most-advanced available variety. The new Phract 5.2s were much like the earlier versions, but included a slight battle computer upgrade even over the 5.1s: By no means the Sakkra state of the art, but all that would fit on the new bomber at the time. Replacing a no-longer-needed colony cruiser design in the fleet's requisitions database, the Phract 5.2s would be built en masse in the region of space where the new Speaker felt they would do the most good.
It was hoped that the new Phracts could destroy planetary defenses and scout planets whose atmospheres and terrain were still too-little known for automated assault transports to launch, with no way to program their landing patterns - but this would be necessary only when a colony hadn't been scouted previously. In the case of Nordia, though it was still protected by fifteen missile bases, the Sakkra were ready to send long-range transports immediately. Of course, the attack there would not be nearly so straightforward as at Fierias; the troops would be have to fight through nearly fifty million deadly Bulrathi warriors on the ground, and though this was a problem the Sakkra might be able to address through the weight of sheer numbers, it was not their preferred technique.
"Wasteful" and inefficient though it might be, the Sakkra people began building numerous new research labs to speed development of armored exoskeletons for their troops even though their materials engineers were reporting a chance of a breakthrough before any new labs were built. Knowing they would soon be at war with arguably their greatest rival - to the extent they still had any meaningful rivals - in the galaxy, the Sakkra people were prepared to devote every possible effort to victory.
Here's part two of the report, spoilered for ease of scrolling past it, like part one above:
In the year 2461 by their own calendar, Sakkra agents in Alkari space were the first to strike a blow on the new Speaker's behalf: When a long-planned diversion involving a massive helium leak, a tanker plane loaded with custard, and several thousand gallons of water-soluble paint gave one of their chameleonic operatives an opportunity to slip into a top-secret laboratory on Omicron, the thoroughly-briefed agent knew the only available weapon design not already known to the Sakkra would be the state-of-the-art Alkari tachyon beam ... but when security records revealed an unknown force field development project, fully complete, the operative realized it had to be something entirely new: Every variety of force field technology known to the Alkari when the most recent reports came in had already been discovered by the Sakkra people, and would have been recognized immediately.
The resulting shield upgrade was small but significant: Any starship equipped with the new Alkari - and now Sakkra - deflector shields would be completely immune to hyper-V rockets like those still mounted on swarms of Alkari rocket fighters, as well as to their MRVing scatter-pack cousins, just for instance. Once the specs were sent back to Sakkra space, their starfleet engineers were eager to take advantage of this new technology.
The Fer-de-Lance 5 cruiser, with the most-advanced targeting computer, shields, engines, and single-layer armor available to the Sakkra people at the time, a battle scanner and stabilizer, and - though not quite up to the highest Sakkra standards of evasion capabilities - the equal of anything else in the galaxy for strategic and tactical speed, highlights the advantages and drawbacks of a "fast gunship" design: Thanks to its Impulse-powered "doom drives" and highly-advanced targeting, it can react and move fast enough for "cutting-out" missions, to burn down overmatched enemy starships before they have time to retreat, while its shields, armor, and maneuverability minimize or eliminate attrition in a contested battle. Five fusion beams will hit hard even through the most-advanced shields in the galaxy, and a backup ion cannon can help a little to clear out other fleets, but the weaknesses of the fast gunship design should also be apparent: A standard gunship would give up the stabilizer in favor of sheer firepower, mounting more guns for its advanced targeting systems to direct, and might even cut back on its shielding for the same reason, substituting a good offense for conservative defensive measures, but the Fer-de-Lance cruisers would still be a powerful addition to Sakkra Imperial fleets ... even if the Fifteenth Speaker did regret mounting such a small total number of beams. In any case, they were designed to accomplish a relatively limited set of mostly-defensive missions, and took no part in the main Sakkra attacks.
Nearly seven hundred of the new Phract 5.2 bombers had been produced by 2461, and most of them were already being dispatched - along with a Dragon battleship and yet more transports, this time from Kronos and Misha - toward the nearest Bulrathi colony to core Sakkra space. Nordia's primary inhabited world was still so small that a fleet of about a quarter the size could have done the job; the speed of Sakkra conquest was actually slowed early in the Fifteenth Speaker's reign by attacking too conservatively! The old sublight-drivenCrocodile cruisers were no part of the Nordia attack, though they would provide some ineffectual space support at Fierias: The remaining Crocodiles in the Escalon sector were mostly being used as scouts, taking advantage of their battle scanners to assess enemy fleets, scheduled to arrive at several different Bulrathi worlds at the same time as the attack on Fierias would begin the war officially.
By early 2462, the Crocodiles had done their job, scanning the bulk of the Bulrathi fleet in various places almost simultaneously before retreating. The Bulrathi designs turned out to be almost perfectly suited to be countered by the new Sakkra Fer-de-Lance cruisers, consisting mostly of merculite missile cruisers that would at best get one volley off before the swift Sakkra ships could close and take them. That single volley, or even more than one, would be completely ineffective in any case, since even if the Bulrathi mustered their cruisers in numbers so immense that they could actually overcome the new Sakkra cruisers' defenses, the Fer-de-Lance's doom drives would allow it to simply outfly the incoming missiles in a pinch. The Sentinel destroyers wouldn't be much better off: More than twenty Sentinels would be needed to eventually defeat each Fer-de-Lance in a fleet, at the cost of nearly all the Sentinels, even if the Sakkra cruisers actually stuck around long enough to be destroyed instead of winning slowly by attrition or completely avoiding the Sentinels' beams with the help of a repulsor ship like the old Dragons. The Warbear, with its energy pulsar, could pose a serious threat to Sakkra bombers - the other ships, including the Sentinels, would never be able to hit fast-maneuvering Phracts enough to do meaningful damage to the fleet - but would do no better against a Fer-de-Lance than any other missile boat. Yet the Fer-de-Lance hadn't been designed to defeat such fleets as these, but only for general utility; in fact, their first task was in effect a special case of their classic "cutting-out mission."
While a small Sakkra fleet - if any fleet involving a Dragon can honestly be counted as small - guarded just over a hundred transports screaming down through the skies of Fierias, with more than twenty additional transports a year behind, another Dragon and all four new Fer-de-Lances, with whatever Lithium fighters and Crocodile cruisers the previous Speaker had managed to bring to the Selia system in time, "cut out" all of the nearly-forty Bulrathi transports trying to land and take over the colony, destroying them in space. Thanks to the aforementioned Dragon at Fierias, the invasion there was rather more effective.
Dug-in, fortified Bulrathi soldiers are incredibly difficult to dislodge, even when - as here - the attackers have superior shielding, and especially when - as here again - the bears have luck on their side. No amount of luck could overcome the overwhelming Sakkra numbers though, and in 2462, in spite of five-to-one casualties, the lizards claimed Fierias for themselves. Then, when the dust had settled over the fallen colony, Sakkra reverse engineers began sending back reports that instantly made the new Fer-de-Lance cruisers obsolete.
The energy pulsar device they learned to build - the same one that made the Warbear cruisers priority targets for overwatching Dragons during Sakkra attacks on Bulrathi worlds - might have had some utility for clearing the skies against Alkari fighters armed with beams, but since none had been encountered, the Sakkra were unlikely ever to use it for anything. Bulrathi ecological restoration techniques on the other hand were a big step up for the Sakkra, fully twice as efficient as their own, with the important caveat that there's very little advantage to cutting a number in half when it's already practically zero. The effective efficiency of Sakkra factories had risen from roughly 50% to roughly 60% when they developed reduced waste technology years before, and then leapt from there all the way up to 96% with their own advanced waste-cleanup techniques. Raising it another notch to 98% was nice for the few remaining waste workers the Sakkra still needed, but didn't affect the empire as a whole materially. The biggest development from the capture of Fierias was therefore the particle beam. Years would pass without any of those powerful weapons deployed on Sakkra fleets, but the sheer knowledge acquired with them led to enough miniaturization to begin another total overhaul of the entire Sakkra fleet.
The latest, no-longer-greatest new ships wouldn't be scrapped immediately though - not yet: Almost eight hundred more Phract 5.2 bombers and the four new Fer-de-Lance cruisers were much too large an investment to simply throw away - and more importantly, they were good enough to do their job, already in space, and - in the case of the bombers at least - mostly in position to do so immediately. The war had begun in 2462...
...as Grunk belatedly noticed and announced after the fall of Fierias, but it was still just getting started, and accelerating rapidly.
I've played about half the turns so far, and am still being pretty undisciplined about the images; I'll try to at least post the save sometime tonight!
My apologies: I won't be able to finish the set until tomorrow; too many things I had to do, and too little sleep this week. I admit I could have played more conservatively and just quickly finished the turns, but I enjoy the logistical planning and execution so much in a late game situation like this that I couldn't bring myself to just defend and end turn a few times. Thanks for your patience with the delay!
Terribly sorry about that. Hopefully I have the proper file this time.
The galaxy is a chaotic mess, as I was mainly focused on building up our existing worlds (atmospheric, advanced soil, IRC4) and grabbing the three new radiated worlds. Plus dealing with the nova situation at Rana. Once we start going on offense, things should start getting simpler again. 
