For Science! - Sareln & Nicolae as the Consciousness

[Sareln]

Think Maniac will bury the hatchet after all your griping and huffing?

Not a clue!

[Sareln]

Well, the die is cast, let's see how it goes...

[Sareln]

Quick Hits:

• Iskender ate Sian, we weren't really in any position to do anything about it.
  
• Maniac seems okay with a peace, given we're stuck in #3 & #4, it's probably solidly in our interests to work together for a coalition victory. I don't really see either of us catching up effectively to either of Mardoc or Iskender.
  
• Trudging towards atmospherics while building up a supply of formers and extra bases. Really have just been spamming pods and formers of various types in our pre-food era. Also placing a lot of solar panels for the boosted commerce.
  
• Active trading with both Mardoc and Maniac.
  
• Game has gotten quite boring IMO, but to swing into Maniac again would probably lose the game for both of us.
  

[Sareln]

I have Atmospherics! I need more formers.

Next tech is probably boreholes to fix any damage I do later. Really that's the trick right? Pick any tech that'll let me build up my econ as hard as possible.

[Sareln]

Oh joy, I finally have a tile that generates more than 4 food...

[Sareln]

Note for posterity, I actually do not have a clue what Mardoc means here.

[Sareln]

Intriguing. I'm not quite sure what to do and I'll need to sleep on it as I'm not at highest cognition right now.

Quickest thought is to throw in with Mardoc though, mostly b/c of the lay of the land. I've got the weakest military I'm pretty sure, since I've been churning out formers and bases for the past 20 turns basically trying to power hard.

Siding with Iskender is going to get me killed fast. I've got both Mardoc and Maniac nestled up against me, and I'm not ready to fight. That and I get something like ~100 commerce per turn from trade with Mardoc that the rest of the world simply can't replace (Mardoc trade routes are worth 3. Others are worth 2).

Siding with Mardoc means I might still be able to pull it out. So that's the first thought. But yeah, sleeping on this one.

[Sareln]

Some overarching strategic thoughts.

This looks like a war, and it is, but it's also a race to Planetbusters. Iskender has the lead here, btw, but I don't know how I'm going to communicate this across to Maniac and Mardoc. Basically we need to have the tech in hand by the time he finishes the supercollider, or build the supercollider ourselves. Once planetbusters come into play, broad advances across a front are going to be the preferred form of combat. High concentrations of troops will get nuked.

For the actual war-fighting, right now we have a bunch of 7-move Iskender subs floating around. They can't threaten land holdings, but they can really mess up sea bases. So in the short term, I'm churning ships and drop troopers to secure my own territory. It also means that Iskender can do bypass-strikes on Mardoc, which is going to be a nightmare to defend against. I really don't envy Mardoc here, this is going to be a hard problem! On the bright side, bases can't be razed, but they're going to lose a pop each time Iskender takes them. Yuck. This also means that on any given turn, Mardoc is going to be retaking bases and trying to reduce the number of boats that Iskender has while increasing his own (net) stock. I don't know how the relative industrial bases add up, but Mardoc can build ships from all his bases, whilst Iskender can't, he can only build off his coastal bases. From a map perspective then, success for Mardoc will come from killing off wandering fleets while bottling up the Spartan fleet away from his core.

For me to pull out a transcend win I need a couple of things:

1. Non planet-friendly factions either dead or neutralized (Iskender, Yang, Miriam)
2. Mardoc to be blocked from other victory conditions (Domination, Science, Diplo?)
3. Enough land so that we can get enough hybrid forest/fungus/communes down to get the planet rating up to the required level.

This is not going to be easy.

[Sareln]

This game move kind of slow eh? Trying to work on my end of the bargain, but I could see how the war-fighters (Isk & Mardoc) would be taking a ton of think-time to make their moves. Anyhow, my moves so far have been to ship Mardoc submarines whilst keeping my drop trooper production at home. With his latest message, I wanted my "Okay" to mean that I would swap off ships and start making only land units and shipping them to him instead. Maniac, of course, didn't get the memo.

My comments on range and the zero-point module are my lame attempt to communicate to Mardoc that he needs to be teching to nukes as fast as humanly possible because they will break the stalemate.

[spellman]

Gods. Don't you just love trying to be all sneaky and strategizing with public-only diplo? It's like totally funsies.