Remnants of the Precursors Succession Game?

[Fenn]

Unless my eyes fail me, I don't think the save was uploaded? Guess it was premature of me to say "got it" here.

[Brian Shanahan]

Unless my eyes fail me, I don't think the save was uploaded? Guess it was premature of me to say "got it" here.

Sorry Fenn. Completely forgot. Here it is.

[Fenn]

Wasn't feeling up to a big in-character writeup, so just the basics this time. We made a lot of progress on the next generation of military tech, but first:

We're firmly in the driver's seat of this game, with the Meklonar almost finished off. My plan is to capture 18 Sextans, then consolidate and build up a new fleet - our Nuclear Bombs are reaching the end of their useful life, but Omega-Vs are in the percentages and should pop any time now. I do spend a turn building more bombers from Teeth of Aries, Blast Crater and Not Extant, however, as I don't feel confident that our current number will crack 18 Sextans's missile bases.

On the interturn, our spies steal Dotomite Crystals from the Mentarans - none of the other available trees had anything worth taking, while Propulsion could have instead yielded Warp Dissipator. Range 7's a decent prize, I think. In other news the Humans ask for Advanced Eco Restoration in exchange for Class X Planetary Shields. I think about it for only a moment before hitting yes - the Humans are no danger with or without Eco Restoration, and Class Xs will take us to Cloaking on the next tier of Force Fields, which could make our ships irresistible to the rocks.


The main body of our fleet sets off, along with this turn's production from Not Extant and Blast Crater - all of them two turns away. On the very turn after, Omega-V Bombs come in. We have a lot of choices for next weapon tech of course, but the top ones are Phasors and Tachyon Beams - I go for the Phasors since we already have Gravitons in our pocket.


While waiting for the fleet to arrive, we get another tech steal, this time against the Humans. There's only one worthwhile tech to take - Energy Pulsar - but more notably we're able to frame it on the Mentarans. Maybe they'll stir up some trouble with each other. Next turn, the battle...


But not before this newsflash spooks me for a moment. Thankfully it's no bad news for us.


Anyway. The Meklonar fleet is horrifically outmatched here, only a few ships with Scatter Pack Vs and Heavy Lasers, so there's no point in fancy tactics - all ships advance. The enemy focuses their limited fire on the bombers, but the bombing begins in earnest and on schedule, although it takes several turns with our outdated nukes.


The Splitter bombers took quite a beating, but they're destined for the scrapyard soon anyway.


Immediately afterwards, the Humans ring us up again for another tech trade. I grab Hard Beam this time - this will be a great upgrade to the Ion Cannons our old designs are using. Thanks, humanity!

I signed peace with the Meklonars after that, and the rest of my turn was mostly uneventful. We teched Advanced Space Scanner (giving visibility on 33 new planets!) and Impulse Engines, which was my cue to scrap the old designs and start on new ones. We also stole Terraforming +20 and Warp Dissipator, from the Altairi I think, and Personal Deflector Shield from the Humans, giving us a +10 combat advantage over the Mentarans - at least for now.


Our new ship types, plus the old Monitors. Experimenting a little with this Huge design here, mix of Hard Beam with some Gravitons for races who field Small ships, but if it's no good feel free to switch to something else as none have finished yet. Sadly Omega-V bombs aren't compatible with Small hulls so our new bombers are Mediums, but I figure it's a worthwhile price for a design that could take us through to the endgame.

I think we're ready to take on the Mentarans, once our new fleet finishes building anyway, and I'd strongly lean towards fighting them instead of the Cryslonoids; the brains are weaker in every category but especially in production, planets and fleet size.

  RSG-01-T180.zip (Size: 149.25 KB / Downloads: 3)

[Dp101]

Turns look overall quite good! Though, if I might do some minor ship design critique (again):

You forgot to do the mentioned thing of splitting the weapons over multiple slots to allow them to be fired separately, and the odd-numbered manoeuvre is again something I wouldn't do (it gets more and more expensive to increase manoeuvre the larger the ship is, then again the difference is only 2 gravitons or 1 hard beam so it's not as big a deal as I thought). I'd also have put bombs on to allow it to be a truly general-purpose design, though I'd actually have put on antimatter bombs over omega-Vs because the miniaturisation on the new stuff isn't up to par with the efficiency of the old (vs mentaran shields it's 16 damage/antimatter compared to 26 damage/omega-V, but omega Vs are 87 space compared to 35 so they'd need to be dealing over twice the damage to be worthwhile), though that might reduce the shelf life a tad. Not enormously, antimatter to omega Vs isn't as big a jump as most of the other increases in bomb tech, but still somewhat (e.g. if we used these against current leading shields elsewhere of a total of 15, antimatters deal 10.5 average damage compared to 20, but even then rn antimatter is still better). There's also a feature where on the military screen, it'll tell you the relative counts of ships of different sizes, which shows that no race actually uses the smalls that would make graviton beams good (strange, I figured at least the birds might be) so there's no need for them instead of more hard beams. I hadn't realised just how damn heavy hard beams are though, over twice that of gravitons! They're at the same tech level! But looking at the expected damage it does make sense. Into current shields, we're looking at 8 damage on the hard beams, compared to 4.4 on the gravitons, so while hard beams are actually less efficient rn than gravitons, that won't stay the same for very long at all (class V shields shifts it to 7.5 vs 3.66) so it's probably the better armament, given how minimal the difference currently is. So I guess in the end, what I'd have made would have looked quite similar, with the only difference having the weapons loadout be 14/14/13 hard beams and 27 antimatter bombs. I don't really like medium bombers, so I'd also go with small designs with BCV/titanium/manoeuvre 4/antimatter/stabiliser, the current zortrium/manoeuvre 5 is 5 space short of fitting an antimatter bomb on a small (though Zortrium would be getting dropped no matter what). Can also drop to BCIV while keeping manoeuvre 5 to halve the chances of enemy missiles hitting, which would make our chances of bombs hitting into current ECM go from 60% to 50%... decisions!

Honestly a lot of this is getting to more doctrine-type stuff rather than actual problems with ship design, but I figured I'd lay out my thought processes. Probably will still swap to the designs I prefer, since there's time, but I also hate this constant feeling of uh, every turnset feels like me kicking over the sandcastles of prior players. I really hope my critique of the designs isn't coming off as too meanspirited or anything, I worry that I'm too consistently negative about the decisions of others such that the actual benefits of said critique stop being as impactful as the effect on player morale. I'll probably play tomorrow, was exhausted yesterday and am still a tad wiped out.

[haphazard1]

Looks like some pretty good turns, Fenn. The machines are penned in on their poor planet, lots of new tech to play with. Good stuff.

On ship design, I agree with most of Dp101's points. The odd-numbered manouvre rating is probably not worth it, but it is not a big thing. I do like the idea of having bombs on our big ship to make it more of an all-purpose design. This can simplify shuffling fleets around, particularly with the nebula effect making it more difficult to coordinate getting the right ships to the right targets on time. And splitting the weapons over more slots can be useful. Omega-Vs vs Anti-matter bombs...depends on how future-proof we want to be.

One concern I have is that none of the big ship's weapons are range 2; if one of our enemies brings out a repulsor design it could be rendered ineffective. I have not looked at the save to see if any of the AIs have the tech to do so. But past experiences (in MOO and not RotP, admittedly) have made me paranoid about AI repulsor designs.

[RefSteel]

Nice - looks like you've been leading us to our rightful place in the galaxy, Brian and Fenn! It looks like we have the tools to make more big gains soon, too!

Dp101, I like your ship design proposals! I can also see the utility of Fenn's version, e.g. in case future enemy ships include swarms of smalls, but I also do prefer designing ships to defeat the enemy ships we're facing now. I usually specialize my ships (e.g. to haphazard's point, if we started seeing repulsor ships, I'd be likely to come up with a specialized repulsor-killing design to support the rest of our then-existing fleet) but there are good cases for "all-purpose" dreadnoughts; in particular, as I think I mentioned with someone's ~~~similar design in our most-recent MoO SG, a huge gunship with some bomb racks thrown on can have very long utility, especially for cases like Meklon at the end of my last set and the beginning of Brian's: Even after the megaship's engines can no longer keep up with the fleet, it can still be a one-ship spaceforce we can plant above a world to handle any and all rebuilt bases and incoming fleets without suffering attrition while the main attack force rushes forward ahead of it. (Back to haphazard's point, it might be worth using a few Heavy Ions in case of enemies with repulsors if we really want this ship to be able to take on anything, but I'd have to look at the design screen to see if I think that's worth the difference in firepower overall....)

Probably will still swap to the designs I prefer, since there's time, but I also hate this constant feeling of uh, every turnset feels like me kicking over the sandcastles of prior players.

Well, others may feel differently, but to me, part of the point of an SG is that we're all working on the same sandcastle, and since we all build things differently and all are building on each other's work, it ends up looking different from anything any one of us would ever have built alone! If I envisioned a towering spire as being capped with battlements but you decide it'll lead up to a zepellin landing platform instead, you didn't kick over anything; you just made my tower cooler in a way I wouldn't have on my own!

So if I wanted to criticize the past two sets, the place I'd start would be holding on to my designs too long without scrapping and replacing them! If our existing fleet wasn't enough to take the last defended Mekletc world, much better than building more nuclear bombers would have been scrapping something (the need for the Monitors was largely obviated once the Charges hit the scene; the Splitter 3.1s were comparatively few in number; and the Sparks were not only few but - after the very early turns - out of position for the real fighting, so up to three slots were available without seriously weakening our fleet) and making Fusion Bombers in place of one of them!

So I would say: Our existing Omega Bombers and Beamer cruiser can contribute unless/until the design space is needed; if they're not designs haphazard would normally use, seeing how well they do can be fun and a way to learn about the advantages they bring, and in the meantime there are four other slots open to play with (the Monitors are old and slow and few, and as Fenn pointed out, there are zero Motherships yet built) - so most or all of the ships built during the upcoming sets can be the ones each new player likes the best while the others the team has already built support them. For instance, in my set, I never built another Sweeper (admittedly you did say to feel free not to) or Glitcher, but I used all of the ones we had to good effect (and ultimately was going in with more Glitchers than Charges; I just wanted to have at least one of the latter with each fleet, partly for reasons we discussed, partly (as I should have mentioned) exactly because having them around meant our few Monitors could be scrapped as soon as the design space was needed.

[Dp101]

oh i .entirely lost track of the place we were in turns. please forget anything I said about playing turns lmao. god i'm an idiot

[Fenn]

All good on the ship design criticisms Dp101, I joined this SG to improve my play and I'm learning a lot from everyone here. WRT the Mothership design, I did see that the brains were mostly on mediums but I wanted to hedge in case they changed tack or if we had to fight the birds too...but on second thought if we do conquer the brains we're probably already on the doorstep of winning. Also thought about putting a couple Omega-Vs on and probably should have, but held back because I had the bombers building anyway and couldn't think of a situation where we'd have a Mothership around and not at least a couple bombers too. Can definitely see the utility of a ship that can bomb and tank missile base hits indefinitely though.

[haphazard1]

Dp101, if you want to grab the next turn set feel free. We can swap places this time through the turn order. Or if later is easier for you, I can go ahead and play. Just let me know which you would prefer. You seem to have a lot of good throughts on the ship design, so this might be a good set for you to handle.

[rgp151]

I'd also have put bombs on to allow it to be a truly general-purpose design, though I'd actually have put on antimatter bombs over omega-Vs because the miniaturisation on the new stuff isn't up to par with the efficiency of the old (vs mentaran shields it's 16 damage/antimatter compared to 26 damage/omega-V, but omega Vs are 87 space compared to 35 so they'd need to be dealing over twice the damage to be worthwhile), though that might reduce the shelf life a tad.

I'd advise against putting bombs on anything but dedicated bombers. The reason is that having bombs on a ship will cause that ship to be prioritized for targeting. This means that by adding bombs that ship will more likely take damage. If instead you go with a fleet composition of like 1 or 2 air superiority ships and 1 or 2 bomber designs, then those bombers will draw all the fire, leaving your air superiority ships to attack with relative impunity. 

So what you can do is load up your bombers with maximum defenses, like max ECM, max maneuverability, max shields, and they will draw all the fire while taking little or no damage. Then for air superiority I typically do 1 heavy beam ship that is also defensive, which can be used for both offense and planetary defense, and one "light cavalry" ship that is mostly for offense. I typically use huge for the "heavy fighter" and Large for the "light fighter". The Huge will have max shields, but not max maneuverability or any ECM. It will hopefully also have Auto Repair and Repulsor Beams The Large may not even have any shields or ECM, but will have max maneuverability. Both are loaded out with beam weapons. 

You'll find that the fighters are hardly ever targeted as long as you are on offense with bombers present. But if you put bombs on your fighter, then they will be targeted and will require more defenses, which then reduces the offensive power. Also, bombs are of no use defensively. When you take a planet, you can move the bombers and some of the fleet on to take other planets, while leaving one or 2 of the heavy fighters on defense to guard the newly acquired planet while it builds up.