Question about artifact planets

[Kylearan]

Hi,

what are the chances of getting a free tech from first scouting an artifact planet? I just started a game where my two initial scout explored artifact planets on the same turn, and I only got one free tech. Is this because you won't get a free tech every time you scout an artifact planet, because you cannot get more than one free tech per turn, or because you cannot get more than one free tech per game?

-Kylearan

[Zed-F]

I've never had two scouts explore two different artifact planets on the same turn, so I can't say exactly what's going on there. I do know that if you explore 2 different artifact planets on different turns, you will get 2 techs. Also, there's nothing inherent in the game that prevents you from getting more than one tech on a turn in general, as you can often research or capture more than one tech at once.

Is it possible someone else could have scouted one of the artifact planets before your scout got there? If so, that would account for it, as only the 1st person to get to the planet recovers a tech from it.

[Kylearan]

Hi,

the two artifact planets were the first two planets I scouted with my initial scouts and were both three parsecs away from my home world. Other homeworlds were much farther away, so I'm sure I was the first to explore both, and also checked the "tech" panel afterwards to make sure I "only" got hand lasers, and no second tech.

It's not really important since something like this won't happen very often, but I was curious. This was a hard game, medium galaxy as the Meklars, and as it turned out these two artifact planets (45 and 75 IIRC) were the only planets I managed to grab. Several habitable worlds were outside my initial reach and once I had discovered range 5 tech (at full speed!, both were taken by the Darloks and the Silicoids at the time I had produced another colony ship. (Both had driven away my scouts with armed ships)
Thanks to both artifact planets I managed not to fall behind in tech too much, but what I still have to learn is to judge when I will be able to attack, and what weapons will be enough for that task. When I finally took over the two habitable planets from the Darloks, the Silicoids had been emerged to be the real threat. Problem was that I lacked both dead and inferno planetary tech in my tree, and the only planets of the Silicoids in reach were dead and inferno! (Or was it toxic and inferno? I forgot.) I also lacked good bomb tech and was too scared of their fleets to oppose them directly. The only race besides the Darloks (who I couldn't really spy on...) who had these techs were the Sakkra. I didn't want to spy on them either, as they were my only friends, so I tried to trade for the techs. I find it a bit annoying that you cannot pick the tech you want to have in a trade, so it was "ask them to trade techs, and hit escpape if desired tech isn't on the table"-time, which I could do three times per turn before the ambassador was gone. When I *finally* managed to trade for inferno tech, the Silicoid won the election in their fifth attempt. Hrmpf.

I have yet to learn to assess the strengths of both my enemy and my own, and have to learn to choose friends more wisely. That had been my second MOO-attempt after 10 years, both at hard, and both lost by the election. But I'm too stubborn to go back to average. Until the Imperium, that is. :D

-Kylearan

[Zed-F]

You should always plant at least one spy in any empire you plan to attack, even if you just have him hide, as this will tell you what techs your opponent has.

You should have a good idea from their attempts to seize your colonies (e.g. via cold war attacks) as to whether your missile bases are sufficient to defend your planets. If not, beef them up before attacking, or make sure you leave behind enough of a defensive fleet to secure your planets (unless in the late game your ships are strategically fast enough that it doesn't matter.) Comparing your bases' capabilities to the enemy tech list helps here too.

When comparing capabilities, you look for the same things going on the offense that you would categorize as a threat on defense, just in reverse. Some things to look for:

1) Check missile tech in comparison to shield tech. If one side doesn't have enough shield+planetary shield tech to negate or mostly negate the other side's missiles, that's a vulnerability for their missile bases. The attacker can run in with a bunch of missile boats, shoot-n-scoot, and be reasonably sure of wiping out at least some bases. Rinse and repeat. Alternatively, the attacker can bring along a stack of missile boats and a stack of bombers, putting the defender in a double bind. On defense, the AI will usually target the bombers first, giving your missile boats time to get their volleys off.

1a) Check missile tech in comparison to straight shield tech. If the shield tech is high enough, and missile tech is low enough or concentrated solely on scatter pack tech, the attacker may be able to make his ships completely immune to defensive fire from the bases. This is very bad for the defender. Even without complete immunity, if the defender can't do enough damage per turn to get through the auto-repair ability of a sturdy huge ship, that's similarly bad for the defender.

1b) The presence of scatter-pack technology on the defender's bases is cause for concern if the attacker's shields are NOT sufficiently strong to completely negate the scatterpack missiles. In this instance, even if the attacker has enough shielding to negate 2/3 of the defender's damage per missile, the defender may still come out ahead over firing normal missiles. Moreover, strategies which call for lots of small or medium ships won't often work well against scatterpacks unless another advantage is also present, especially because small and medium ships often sacrifice shields for weapons and/or speed.

2) Check battle computer tech in comparison to propulsion tech. If one side is weak in computers while the other side is strong in movement, it's quite possible to make it so that the side with weak computers misses almost all of their shots. If there is a difference of something like +5 in offense vs. defense, or offense+missile bonus vs. defense+ECM bonus, then only 5% of shots fired will find targets. A difference of 5 in the opposite direction will mean that 95% of shots fired will hit, and a difference of 0 means 50% of shots fired will hit. The amount of damage a beam weapon will do is similarly affected by computers.

3) Check bomb tech in comparison to shield+planetary shield tech. A bomb of a given tech level will beat the shields available at the same tech level, but even older bombs can work if the defender is weak in shields. Note that you will need quality battle computers on your bombers to get high yields (i.e. top of their damage range) with your bombs. Here you want as much speed as possible not only to reduce the defender's chance to hit your bombers, but also to (i) give him as few opportunities as possible to shoot before dropping bombs, and (ii) to outrun enemy missiles, preventing them from hitting before the bombs can be dropped. Note that the AI cannot take advantage of (ii) as he usually comes straight in, though there are both legitimate and questionable ways of preventing him from doing so. Legitimate ways usually involve use of repulsor beams, stasis fields, or similar technology on defensive ships supporting the planet. Questionable ways involve the use of slow-speed missiles fired from ships to convince the AI to try to outrun a low-threat missile swarm while giving the (usually more potent) planetary batteries extra opportunities to fire.

3a) A similar proposition is to check for biological weapons versus biological defenses. In principle these operate similarly to bombs except they target the planetary population rather than bases. They will also cause a big reputation hit against the user. These can be effective if the attacker doesn't have a way to crack the bases, but the defender can't destroy the attackers quickly enough to prevent them from getting off a large number of bioweapon attacks. If the pop of a planet falls to zero, the colony is usually destroyed. (Exception - Crystalline Entity attacks.)

4) This usually makes more difference for ship-ship battles, but checking out what beam weapons are available never hurts. Recall that planetary base shields are doubled against beam weapons and torpedoes. Still, sometimes late-game beam weapons or heavy versions of earlier-game beam weapons will have enough punch to get through base shields, in which case big stacks of ships armed with these weapons will pose a problem for the defender's bases, with the added problem that they are also able to take out any ships the defender has at the planet. This can be especially problematic for the defender in the early game if Class V Planetary shield is missing from his tree. While beams are less efficient against planetary targets than bombs are, they do contribute to space superiority as well, and they can also fire up to 50 times, while bombs have an ammunition limit (10 for conventional, 5 for bio-weapons.)

Most of these concentrate on ways an attacker can deal with the defender's bases or how the defender's bases can put the hurt on the attacker. While the ability to defend a newly-captured planet in ship-ship combat can be important in some cases, and should not be ignored, I don't plan to give specific advice for this. That's because in general, the principles are similar to what I've described above, and because comparing attacker ships to defender bases is the most important part of analyzing a campaign. As a player, you will always need to be able to defend your planets or suffer the consequences of endless cold war attacks, especially if you keep your fleet small to avoid paying a lot of maintenance on ships that go obsolete quickly. As a player going on offense, it is usually possible to strike where the opponent fleet is not, so the enemy missile bases are your primary oppostion. Once you have captured an enemy planet, often a primary priority is to use your reserves to get planetary defenses online quickly, at least to the point of having a planetary shield and a couple missile bases up, so that you can defend against attacks that can't penetrate the shield. Once you've done that, you may or may not want to move your fleet on for additional conquest, depending on how vulnerable you feel the colony is even with the addition of the shielded bases. Alternatively, as a player on the offense, you might decide that your primary goal is not to capture planets, but to cripple an AI's economy; in that case, all you need is a sufficient stack of attackers to wipe out an enemy colony, without regard for the ability to hold the system afterwards. This is often easier to achieve, especially in the late game with large stacks of fast and potent bombers.

[Isit]

The way I understand it is that the first race to explore the planet gets a free tech. You will always get the tech if you go there first. If you didn’t get the tech then its because another race scouted the planet before you did.

[Sirian]

Originally posted by Isit@Mar 31 2004, 05:22 PM
The way I understand it is that the first race to explore the planet gets a free tech. You will always get the tech if you go there first. If you didn?t get the tech then its because another race scouted the planet before you did.

No. In the case of exploring more than one artifact planet on the same turn, only one tech is learned. Maybe this is a bug, maybe it's a feature, but it's so rare as to be a nonfactor. The only time I've ever run into it is with two artifact planets at Range 3 from my homeworld. Oops. Nothing to be done about that, though. I suppose every rule has an exception. In this case, fortune may not favor the bold.

Other than that, though, the chance of finding a tech if you are the first to scout an Artifacts planet is 100%.


- Sirian

[Isit]

It does sound like a bug. Like you said, its so rare that I have never even come across it before. Thank you for the correction.

[Justus_II]

Originally posted by Sirian@Mar 31 2004, 02:26 PM
No. In the case of exploring more than one artifact planet on the same turn, only one tech is learned. Maybe this is a bug, maybe it's a feature, but it's so rare as to be a nonfactor. The only time I've ever run into it is with two artifact planets at Range 3 from my homeworld.

Well, it may be a bug, but if I got two artifact planets at range 3 from my homeworld, I'd gladly settle for one tech and count myself lucky! I think they would make up for that tech over time!

[Sirian]

Check battle computer tech in comparison to propulsion tech. If one side is weak in computers while the other side is strong in movement, it's quite possible to make it so that the side with weak computers misses almost all of their shots.

On higher difficulty, this is only possible against extremely small, weak, outmoded empires. Such empires are common on crowded small maps, but are not to be found often on larger maps. The AI prioritizes computer tech because of spying. There are no strategies that lead an AI to neglect computer tech. Militarists will neglect planetology. Industrialists will neglect force fields. Ecologists will neglect propulsion. Diplomats will neglect construction. (I may be mismatching these to some extent, but you get the idea). Nobody neglects computers or weapons. The player needs to be more concerned about not letting HIS computer tech fall behind than about capitalizing on weak enemies. Usually if you are far enough ahead to dominate via defense-vs-offense, you are far enough ahead to dominate across the board. Exception: playing as Alkari.

If there is a difference of something like +5 in offense vs. defense, or offense+missile bonus vs. defense+ECM bonus, then only 5% of shots fired will find targets. A difference of 5 in the opposite direction will mean that 95% of shots fired will hit, and a difference of 0 means 50% of shots fired will hit.

A difference of more than 5 means autohit and EXTRA DAMAGE for beam weapons. A Mrrshan fleet at the end of the tech tree with Class XI Battle Computers, Battle Scanner, and loaded with long range beam weapons, is the most terrifying thing you will ever get to see. Moves before anything, may move three times before the enemy moves once, rips through entire fleets like a hot knife through butter. Of course, getting to the end of the tech tree as Mrrshans is the hard part, so it's not like there's any kind of exploitable loophole available here.

The amount of damage a beam weapon will do is similarly affected by computers.

The saving grace for missiles is built-in to-hit bonuses for better missile types. That tends to counter ECM, but missiles will not do bonus damage. Only beam weapons will. This is why leaving off ECM is OK. The worst that will happen to you is that all the missiles will hit. If you can't pull your defense to within five points of the combined computer + bonus attack rating of the enemy's missile, don't bother. In my view, ECM is only worthwhile if you also max maneuverability first and pile the ECM on top of it.


The game ultimately favors offense in terms of technology, but usually by the time one can translate tech into a fleet, the target has had the chance to catch up on defensive tech and restore the balance. Fleets go obsolete, so there is always a limited window of opportunity to use them before tech passes them by. If a game approaches the end of the tech tree, missile bases become less and less able to defend on their own. Their main purpose is to get you TO higher tech in one piece. Then fleets with high speed engines tend to take over as the most powerful force, and can usually pick up the slack on defense. Using fleets defensively is one of the AI's true weaknesses. If a remake of the game is ever made, the AI needs to place more emphasis on speed. Building ships with warp one engines when high speed is available, just to pack on more firepower, is one of the dumbest things this AI is known to do. Of course, that doesn't always happen. So when the AI does make all fast ships, it can be formidable. Especially a runaway AI with a major tech lead.


- Sirian

[Kylearan]

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