OSG 26 - The Bearperor Returns

[Psillycyber]

Bravo Ref! What a legacy! With impulse drives, you've just increased the speed and fun of our warships by +150%! Oh, and, you know, quadrupled the speed of our transports....

It's also quite sweet, sweet satisfaction to be out-classing the Alkari in propulsion speed. Hehehe....

Truly masterful! Pointy stick research for the win!

Things I loved from your report:
*The Swat 2.0 design. Very effective! And the whole idea of attacking the Psilons was genius.
*I love how you edited the battle computer V techsteal screen to show the techsteal options on the infoscreen next the bear. Really neat touch!
*The Growl 2.0 design was brilliant. So pathetic for the other side, not even being able to scratch you with their hundreds of fighters. Good thing that one fleet didn't have even one long-range cannon on it, or else they could have taken out the Growl and then gone on to the other ships!
*I loved the standoffs between our Care Bear dreadnought and the Sakkra Colossus ones. It felt like I was reading about the battle between the HMS Hood and the Bismarck during World War II, or watching Master and Commander. Great drama! Great puns too!
*Nice Galaxy 5.0 design at the end, although I would personally take off the neutron pellet guns and slap on a missile of any sort to give it added maneuverability options.

We are set to start blitzing through the rest of the galaxy! The rest of this game surely cannot take long now. Sakkra worlds will be tough to take if they have any Colossus ships on defense, so we should wait until they are shuffling between planets to strike.

We might even be ready to dine on some bird feathers soon! (Although I'd imagine they'll be coming up on some nasty technologies like high energy focus pretty soon. Cloaking is already a bit scary... )

I suppose Ianus is back up, eh?

[Ianus]

Oh man have I ever GOT IT!!!! Now then, lets see what this Lark can do!

[Ianus]

Do we have ANY idea what current Alkari ship designs look like? I'm just curious. In a purely academic sense.

[RefSteel]

*The Growl 2.0 design was brilliant. So pathetic for the other side, not even being able to scratch you with their hundreds of fighters. Good thing that one fleet didn't have even one long-range cannon on it, or else they could have taken out the Growl and then gone on to the other ships!

Aye, I love this design when it works, but it's no cure-all. In this case, I knew what the Psilons were fielding, and had back-up plans in case their colships had been updated with heavy beams or missiles, but it's not a force of nature like the Care Bear or Galaxy designs.

*Nice Galaxy 5.0 design at the end, although I would personally take off the neutron pellet guns and slap on a missile of any sort to give it added maneuverability options.

I know; I stopped putting maneuvering missiles on my designs years ago - around the same time I stopped using the Wait button in combat and for basically the same reasons - but they're absolutely allowed, and they're obviously really useful. To be honest though, the Galaxy dread - even more than the others - was only meant as a placeholder design for "Whatever Ianus wants in the fleet!"

Thanks for all the compliments too; I loved writing the report for this one, and the turns were a blast to play!

Do we have ANY idea what current Alkari ship designs look like?

I don't think we've met them in the field in ... decades? A century? So ... only what the tech reports suggest.

I'm just curious. In a purely academic sense.

Oh dear. Perhaps my reading-between-the-lines skills are rusty, but otherwise ... it sounds like this game is going to get interesting!

[Psillycyber]

Hmmm, I was reading up on the mechanics of attacking with unescorted transports, and I was enlightened about several important things:
*Combat transports have base armor of 15 hp, not 50 as I used to assume.
*Their combat speed is half their warp speed.

Given all of that, here's what ours would look like with their duralloy armor and impulse drives:
HP: 22
Warp: 4
Speed: 2
Turns to close on the enemy planet: 4

So, let's assume 1 merculite missile base.
1 base x 3 launchers = 30 damage / turn.
30 x 4 = 120.

So each missile base would do 120 damage, killing about 5.5 transports.

10 merculite missile bases: 55 transports killed.
20 merculite bases: 110 transports killed.
30 merculite bases: 165 transports killed.
40 merculite base: 220 transports killed.

From this, I conclude that storming a planet with only 10 or even 20 merculite missile bases should be quite doable. It would take somewhere from 150 to 220 transports to leave enough bears on the other side to do some ground-pounding.

Just something to think about....

[RefSteel]

Hmmmm ... if they run it like a regular combat (and I don't know if they do) at first blush it looks better than that: Merc damage is invariable and doesn't carry over, and they do have to hit first, so each base would kill only ~2.8 transports if they have BC5 and our 'sports have maneuver 4.

But in fact there's one factor that makes it much worse: I do know that they get a separate chance to shoot down each stack of transports coming in. So if the above is correct (dunno) and we send 60 from one planet at a ten-merc-base planet, roughly 32 would get through, but if we sent 300 divided equally among more than 10 different planetary sources, basically none would get through.

[Psillycyber]

Does the game really calculate each stack separately? That's kind of weird. One would think that the game would pool all of the stacks together in the same way that it does on the combat screen when several fleets converge on a planet on the same turn. Strange.

[RefSteel]

Does the game really calculate each stack separately? That's kind of weird. One would think that the game would pool all of the stacks together in the same way that it does on the combat screen when several fleets converge on a planet on the same turn. Strange.

That's my understanding. (I think the last time I tested this was Imperium 14 or something, but still...) It makes sense from a game balance perspective: The player's ability to coordinate transports from multiple planets - something the AI will never even attempt - is very powerful already, and if they all went in as a single stack, it would (in some cases greatly) reduce the value of maintaining space superiority, an important and way-more-challenging-and-enjoyable-than-fiddling-with-transport-timings part of the game.

(Of course you could add flavor justification too, as they can't possibly be that well coordinated and unlike spacecraft, have no measure for last-minute coordination; they're on a one-way trip short of Hyperspace Comm, with no way to retreat. But that's just justification-after-the-fact for a decision that was all about balance.)

[Ianus]

You can see it if you send two stacks to one planet and one to another and they all get shot down. The game will show the notifications:
"Your transports attempting to land at A were all destroyed"
Click
"Your transports attempting to land at B were all destroyed"
Click
"Your transports attempting to land at A were all destroyed"

[Ianus]

OSG-26 2440-2450
Now THIS is more like it! THIS I can work with! First an overview:

Our empire is huge. We currently hold 28 planets, only a few of which are still getting up and running. Our income is 11,502BC/turn, and our current expenditures are only 3.3% of that, or 379.566BC/turn. That leaves roughly 11,122BC that can be spent on ships. To that end I design a new bomber, the Homewrecker.

Time to bust some skulls!
Techwise, we have IIT5 in the percentages, and nothing else even close. A perfect time to go to war!
A quick note about the AI’s current situation:

These 12 transports left (I think) Gion a few turns ago bound for Omicron all the way across the map

due to arrive in 27 turns. Lack of engines is a killer on this map, so as long as we have the best engines I need to leverage that advantage to put this game to bed.

2440: I design a Scanner ship to have a look at the Alkari fleets. While that is happening I put all available planets onto bomber construction.

2441:
Surprise! How nice.

And I build a few bombers. And a Scanner ship which I dispatch to check out the Alkari ship designs. I can only identify 5 designs that they are currently using, but I’ll find out what they are next turn.

2442:
Or I will get to see half of them. I retreat my scanner and order it to stick around for a major battle group due in next turn.
IIT5 comes in and that is all of the (conventional) research we are going to do for a while. I assign all spending to Computers so that Advanced Space Scanner will get all our research efforts, currently 562 BC. Someday…

2443:
Wait… THIS is the race we have been worrying about for so long?! Those Warhawks are the only design that can threaten our Repulsor ships, and honestly I’m not worried. A quick survey of all visible Alkari fleets reveals only around a dozen Warhawks total. The sixth ship design is a small Sparrowhawk, which is their newest design as it appears after the Warhawk in the fleet listing. Again though there aren’t too many of them.

Also Little Sal becomes Rich. So that’s nice.

I design the Birdshot cruiser (notice that efficient use of space) and assign some planets to build some.
Let me just interject here that the prudent course of action at this point would be to prosecute the war with the Sakkra and Psilons which would make the Alkari very happy with me, giving me time to build up a supreme force to crush the birds. That is basically the strategy I have advocated since the game began; rolling up our adversaries one by one as we snowball to victory.
But forget that noise! If I haven’t made it clear by now I DESPISE the Alkari more than any other AI race, and I will do everything in my power to eliminate them from this galaxy! So lets do that shall we?

2444: Not much to report. While I wait for my Birdshots to start rolling in I send my bombers off to Mentar for a test drive. This may be a mistake as the Alkari just destroyed the Phyco colony the brains used to have, although they have transports which may eliminate the Silicoids in 2 turns. I hope so anyway.

2445:
Here is Mentar. It only had 11 bases, and the Psilon ships in orbit fled from my Carebear’s mighty stare. I’m sending transports because I don’t care if everyone else hates me for killing the brains and they might still take Rotan from the Silicoids, although 16 vs 44 is not particularly promising. Oh well.

2446:
Alas, it was not to be.

Redwing saved me the trouble of breaking our NAP myself. Also what a hypocrite! Our relations went from Neutral to Affable when I destroyed the Psilons’ missile bases, and then dropped all the way to Feud when I killed them. That seems a bit extreme to me. Just because I can I am going to destroy the Silicoids in two turns too.

2447: An interesting fact: Repulsor Beam won’t fire against cloaked ships. Knowing is half the battle!

And in other news: GAME ON!!!!!

Also, THIS is that Sparrowhawk I was worried about. Did somebody dope their birdseed this morning?

2448: Look out there Redwing, bears are raiding your nests and stealing your eggs!

Also, I killed the Silicoids.

And dominated the galaxy.

And stole 3 techs, only two of which are worth anything. But those that are, WOW!

And there was much rejoicing.

Yay.

2449: I gain space superiority over Altair. I will try to take it before I leave office, but I may not have enough troops in range. Advanced Space Scanner is in the percentages, and when that comes in invasions will go A LOT faster. I also got peace with Tyranid, as I have been ignoring him for the last 9 years and I’m not worried about him. He does still have some nice techs, so a future bearperor may want to smack him around and steal his stuff too.

2450: I capture 3 Alkari planets including the big one:

Among the spoils are Stinger Missiles, Range 9, Cloaking Device, Advanced Soil Enrichment, and IRC5.

In the election I am nominated against Redwing, who votes for himself for 15. My new chums the Sakkra vote 9 for me, and the Meklar vote 3 for me. I have a comfortable 27 votes myself, which I abstain with. Lets play one more round and see how far we can take our control of the galaxy.

Although that may have been a mistake. We are in a clearly dominant position.

And I’m not sure that this game will last another 25 turns. The only thing slowing conquest of the Alkari is the heavy shielding on their planets: 9+5 and our Fusion Bombs only do 20 max. So cracking their planets takes a while. I attacked Altair with 1200 bombers and failed to break through. I had to return next turn. Full disclosure I did not retreat my bombers back to a nearby planet, as MY fleets travel WITH manufacturing and supply ships (also it is tedious).

We currently have twice as many bombers, but they are scattered all over our empire. I leave rounding them up to my successor.

Notes for the next bearperor, in no particular order:
• The fleet up in the northeast corner just captured Gion and is on its way to Seidon, where it should have no trouble getting space superiority, but I have NOT sent transports.
• Our main battle fleet is currently at Altair. Do with it what you will.
• A mini fleet is departing Sanders for Pollus, and may or may not get there next turn (stupid nebula!). Again I have not sent transports.
• The closest ships to Phyco the brand new Alkari colony in the galactic center are either the Carebear 2 at Mentar or the two Birdshots at our primary assembly point at Tannenberg. Both are 2 turns away.
• My efforts to push the birds out of the southwest corner have had mixed results. A Birdshot and transports will arrive at and presumably take Omicron next turn. There are more troops and another Birdshot due to arrive at Crius on the NEXT turn, so be sure to send the first Birdshot on to reinforce and push out the Alkari fleet orbiting there.
• Rhilus the Rich Tundra world between Shardik and Willow is a well-established Alkari fortress with 16 bases and will require a substantial force to conquer. That force is currently waiting to be assembled.
• Newly discovered IRC5 and Advanced Soil could be implemented but I don’t really see much point. It would be a lot of fun to get Atmospheric Terraforming and see just how huge our empire can get but we are currently humming along just fine without all of that.

That is everything I can think of. Roast some pigeons for me!