Anyone interested in a new SG?

[Zed-F]

More than that, vxma - if you get a scout there before a given AI has range to reach a given planet, and keep it there, that AI will often never bother to even consider sending a ship to that planet. Still, I think we should keep A2 even on Impossible and see how it goes. We lost OSG5 due to several factors; lack of ability to keep scouts around unoccupied planets probably contributed but was by no means the sole factor and possibly not the most important one. I'm in favour of trying this out again.

I guess the rules lawyer in me could quibble about how big an attack force we have to have before we ask an ally in, but since this is for an SG and not an Imperium, it's probably not a big concern, as we can discuss our attack plans amongst ourselves and come up with something sensible.

[Olorin]

I've also thought about the issue of attack fleet size. I wish that you could simply dial up a race and formally declare on them, that would make this much easier. I do still want to allow for the possibility of getting another AI to declare, and THEN kicking off a war on your mutual target. This allows starting a war that you couldn't win alone, but have a chance with an ally. The alternative of having to start the war first, and then ask for help can leave you in a very bad spot if they turn you down the first few times.

The requirement of having an attack ready to go is only to get around the fact that you can't declare war through the diplo menu. So the only real requirement is that your attack needs to be strong enough to get the AI to declare war on you. The basically guaranteed methods include taking over a colony with troops, or glassing a planet. Landing troops or bombing a planet without finishing it off might not get a war declaration the first time, but repeated bombings will do it.

The spirit of the 'no spectator war' variant is that you do your best to get the target AI to declare on you once you set two AIs on each other. There may be times where you send out an attack fleet that can't do enough damage to tick off the AI enough; the AI might get a defense fleet in position before you arrive at the target, a new force field tech might make your fleet impotent vs. their bases, etc. If that happens, just keep trying. Redirect the fleet to a colony of theirs with fewer defenses, put spies on sabotage to blow up missile bases for your fleet, which might result in the declaration by itself if they catch you.

What we don't want happening is someone starting a war between two AIs, and then sending one retro engine bomber to the AI homeworld as their obligatory "attack". We just need to use our best judgement as to whether we can do enough damage to get declared on. It doesn't really require a whole lot of firepower, if you catch a new colony without a defense fleet.

[Olorin]

Regarding A2. If we want to run with it, that's fine. It will make for a very interesting game

[Dufkos]

Good news

[StuporMan]

So when do we start? And what map settings do we want?

I went ahead and played a 'quick' game w/ Meklar on a Huge map as a warm up (no variants used). I ended up with a fairly easy go of it, and got an election victory on the third vote (after some very interesting diplomatic developments).

I learned a few things in the game. For instance, Meklars do better when you don't wait for them to get all their factories up early on. Also, I learned that missing out on missile techs can be quite painful (Hyper X and Scatter V were the only ones I could research).

StuporMan

[Olorin]

We are planning on starting near the beginning of September. I'll post a new thread the last week of August with a summary of the game and as a call for people to sign-up. I think we'll be using a medium map to balance having room to expand with keeping it small enough that an extermination win doesn't drag on forever.

You're definitely right about not maxing factories immediately as the Meklars. I ran a bunch of experiments and posted my thoughts in a thread on the CivFantatics MoO forums here

My preferred method is to build factories up to around 200 (max for normal races), then start pushing out colony ships. The neat thing about the Meklars is that they can have 200 factories on the homeworld, and still use it to transport pop to new colonies, since they only need 50 pop to run those factories. Once the second colony reaches a similar point, or new targets for colony ships run out, then I max out the factories on Meklon.