OSG-38 - Renaissance Psilons

[RefSteel]

Not at an Orion computer, so just some quick takes for now:

- Uxmai going rich is a big event that might help define the future of the galaxy!  I'm looking forward to seeing how that plays out, and taking an active role in deciding its future ourselves!

- If I were playing this solo, I'd have taken Controlled Dead instead of IT+20, but that comes down to playstyle as much as anything:  I'd have wanted to contest those Tundra worlds (especially Uxmai now!) as soon as I could, but I think this game will be more fun taking a more-measured approach.

- Good to know that the Warship carried a missile rack (presumably in addition to other armament)!  That'll be useful information for my turns.  Thanks for reporting it!

- "Your transports were all destroyed" isn't exactly a bug; it's telling you that one of the stacks of transports you sent was too small and got wrecked.  Since the Humans were expected to show up at the same time as our main population infusion (sent from Nature by haphazard a while ago) I assume what happened was that most of those got through, while a smaller stack you sent from Stepstone the year before were all destroyed:  Fleets in orbit get to attack each stack of incoming transports separately each turn this way.

- It's early days yet, and I'm sure the Silicoids or somebody will surpass them before too long, but it's neat to see the Mrrshans leading for a change!

- Nuclear engines are a huge step forward for us; I'm glad we waited to build a war fleet until after they came in and made all our older ships obsolete!  Sublights will be terrific too, especially now that we know there's nothing within seven parsecs we can colonize before we get at least two more techs in Planetology....

- Speaking of which, good job with the exploration - this really is looking like the map-making pRNG fell in love with the Silicoids this game....

- Ground combat is just a bunch of random die rolls; we should indeed have averaged only about 40 dead to their 49 on average, but I've seen much more improbable kill ratios than that.

I'll stop here after ten turns, still on the final digit of 9.

Sounds good.  This isn't quite a got it since I can't download the save from here, and I may not have a chance to play until tomorrow night, but hopefully that leaves time for discussion between now and then.  First thing:  I'm probably going to build some terrible nigh-obsolete junk fleets.  Because we fought off the first wave, but the enemy's still in orbit, and that just means the second's on its way....

(I'll have to check the tech situation though - and good point, haphazard, also to see what the Silis will trade: I don't want to build laser boats or hyper-v hit-n-runners if I don't have to!)

Roster:

- RefSteel (UP!)
- shallow_thought (on deck)
- haphazard1
- DaveV (just played)
- One slot's still open

[RefSteel]

Okay, GOT IT!

Now that I can look at the save, a couple of things stand out:

1) Something weird happened during DaveV's turns: Alexander is now a Ruthless Diplomat? He was definitely a Pacifistic Ecologist at least until 2349. I'm not sure how much difference it makes, or whether it's a bug or some kind of improbable revolution where he got replaced with another guy with the same name or an accidental use of the scramble personalities code or what; I've never seen this happen before.

2) We're not especially close to any new tech upgrades (maybe by the end of my turns, but not soon) and there were no useful trades available from the Silicoids - nor the Humans: We're not officially at war, and in fact Alexander is Amiable toward us and continuing to profit from our trade!

Unless there are objections or better suggestions, my plan will be to send a battle scanner ship ASAP to see what that cruiser is packing, then plan a fleet accordingly. Once that's done, I can focus on the economy again. (I'll try to do economic stuff in the meantime too, but it won't be as easy.)

Any thoughts/opinions/idea-what-happened-with-Alexander's-Personality?

[DaveV]

I remember reading in the OSG that the AIs could have a revolution if they were doing badly enough, but after a couple decades I'm hazy on the details. The human economy definitely took a hit after they sent off half of their homeworld's population to die on Paradise.

Alternatively, maybe I messed up the installation? I followed the directions and everything worked, but for the first time in a long time the copy protection quiz popped up during my set (Identify this ship, pp 31-35).

Pseudo-edit: I loaded up some of the autosaves to check, and the personality flip appears to have taken place on the last turn of my set, after 49 million humans died in the invasion.

[haphazard1]

Interesting to see the human AI personality change. I was not aware that could happen during a game. Neat to still be learning things about this game after all these years.

Good luck, RefSteel! With nothing else we can colonize until better tech and enemies in our skies, building some combat ships sounds good. I wish we had better tech to do it with. But we will just have to manage as best we can.

I have no idea what is going on with the Mrrshan, but they had six planets early in my turnset. Maybe most of this galaxy's habitable worlds are all near their homeworld, wherever that is? We certainly seem to have a lot of hostile environments in our part of the galaxy.

[RefSteel]

I remember reading in the OSG that the AIs could have a revolution if they were doing badly enough, but after a couple decades I'm hazy on the details.

I checked the OSG, and it says you'd see the report on GNN in that case: It happens when half their worlds go into revolution.

Pseudo-edit: I loaded up some of the autosaves to check, and the personality flip appears to have taken place on the last turn of my set, after 49 million humans died in the invasion.

Oh - cool! Thanks for checking! Would you be willing to check the autosaves for the Silicoids' personality too then, and see if that changed too? My instinct right now is that you might have accidentally hit [ALT]-P, which (also according to the OSG) changes all the AIs' personalities randomly. (I knew that existed, but didn't know it was just a two-key command!) If that's it, I wonder if we should play starting from your last autosave prior to the switch instead, since it sounds like it's just one turn. (You could replay that one, take the next turn if you want, and I could take it from there, or you could just upload that one and I could play from it, depending on which works better for you.)

Or we could just take the sudden change in Alexander's (or everyone's?) personalities as a quirk of fate, and I could play from the already-posted save (though I admit if it is everybody, it would be a shame not to see what the Mrrshans' objectives were that got them to six worlds ahead of the Silis!) - whatever the team prefers.

[shallow_thought]

Nice defense Dave! Let's keep our planets out of the hands of those damn, dirty apes.

From the very theoretical cheesy ideas department: if the large warship is armed with missiles, and missiles only (uncertain), is it possible to overload it by sending in lots of stacks by designing multiple, differently named fighter types? 


Given the importance of the events of the last turn played, I'd be tempted to leave things as they are, although I don't feel to strongly about it.

[DaveV]

Would you be willing to check the autosaves for the Silicoids' personality too then, and see if that changed too?  My instinct right now is that you might have accidentally hit [ALT]-P, which (also according to the OSG) changes all the AIs' personalities randomly.  (I knew that existed, but didn't know it was just a two-key command!)  If that's it, I wonder if we should play starting from your last autosave prior to the switch instead, since it sounds like it's just one turn.  (You could replay that one, take the next turn if you want, and I could take it from there, or you could just upload that one and I could play from it, depending on which works better for you.)

I suppose it's entirely possible that I hit alt-P instead of alt-Prt Scrn. Unfortunately, I was inspired to play a solo game yesterday and overwrote all the autosaves.

It ended up being a typical game for me: a promising game snuffed out by an election loss, with the AI alliances causing unending war declarations, making it impossible to establish good relations with any of them.

[RefSteel]

Sounds good; we'll just play it as it lies then. (And yeah, when I saw what the hotkey was, I had to triple-check that the change was in the posted save and not just in the game I'd loaded to look around: I had "copy just this window to the clipboard" mapped to [super]-P, and was afraid I'd mistyped it myself! (I've now remapped the shortcut to [super]-S in hopes of minimizing the chance of this happening to me - although I should make sure none of the programs I screenshot regularly do anything weird on [Alt]-S, heh.)

It ended up being a typical game for me: a promising game snuffed out by an election loss, with the AI alliances causing unending war declarations, making it impossible to establish good relations with any of them.

I hope it was a fun game anyway! Cheesy alliances can lead to frustrating losses, but sometimes getting there can be as much fun as getting to a win - at least for me...

[RefSteel]

From the very theoretical cheesy ideas department: if the large warship is armed with missiles, and missiles only (uncertain), is it possible to overload it by sending in lots of stacks by designing multiple, differently named fighter types?

Clever idea! I doubt if that will be necessary (and like you said, the AI doesn't often design a large ship with only missiles) but I'll keep the possibility in mind just in case!

[SpaceOWL]

I suppose it's entirely possible that I hit alt-P instead of alt-Prt Scrn. Unfortunately, I was inspired to play a solo game yesterday and overwrote all the autosaves.

I always make a fresh copy of the entire MOO+DOSBOX installation folders for each game I start. Each folder takes about 17 MB - that would be 25% of my HDD back in the 90's, but today....