No problem, Ianus. I believe I am next after you, and I would not be able to play until late Thursday at the earliest (and more likely Friday) anyway.
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OSG 30 - It's just a number, nothing to worry about
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OSG-30
2379-2390 Its been a while! The Alkari are being pests to the north. They have a bunch of planets and are sending swarms of fighters to our border colonies. We have been building laser fighters to combat them, but I think that this is a mistake. They are the ALKARI! We cannot hope to match their defensive bonuses without serious research so I don’t plan to try. We have Scatter Pack V missiles which is exactly the counter to small fighters that we need. I’m going to build a couple more missile bases on Mu Delphi and then get Beta Ceti up and running. I’m amazed that such an immature world has a base already built, but that is exactly what the Reserve fund is for! Well done there! Elsewhere I readjust our research spending. I don’t like the idea of putting such minimal trickle spending into so many of our projects. We need progress in ALL fields, even if its just to advance up the tree. That is the only reason to be researching Controlled Dead after all. Escalon certainly isn’t an important strategic objective! Dumb old Sharpclaw isn’t willing to talk to us, but that is ok by me. I see that we are spending on Spying, but not doing anything with our spies. I change over to Espionage because why not? Its not like I need to maintain relations with that featherbrain, and we may get lucky! The birds have some techs I’d love to get my hands on. Speaking of that, the birds are not messing around! How does Celtsi have 23 bases right now?! I’m going to give up on plans to attack the birds until we get some more techs in. Sub Light Drives are a very high priority right now! Oh and I notice that there is a Human colony on Jungle poor Imra off to our east. It is 6 parsecs away so no contact yet, but others are out there! I can also see 18 Alkari trasnports heading… somewhere off to the southeast. Stupid birds! 2380: The birds flee from my missile bases. it looks like a batch of fighters are heading for poor Trax. Damn birds! They also have just discovered Warp Dissipator tech. Still no engines though! 2382-2387: I repel the birds at Beta Ceti, Rotan, Mu Delphi and Trax again and again. While they are still mostly fielding laser fighters I have seen a few small and medium designs with Ion Cannons. Which could be a problem because Class V Planetary Shields are not in our tree. Personal Deflectors are in and Class IV Deflector Shields are the only option to move forward. That sucks! On the positive the birds don’t have Planetary shields either as they have Class IV shields already. 2388: I steal Ion Cannon from the Alkari. Yay! I immediately cut funding to our Graviton Beam research! Just you wait until our new engines are ready! 2389: And Sub-Light Drives are discovered! I select Warp Dissipator for the next project and cut funding to it. We can get it from the birds instead In shipbuilding news we can’t fit Ion Cannons on a warp 3 small hull, but planetology and construction are both in the percentages so that should change soon. We can build a sweet nuke bomber though! 2390: An unknown race (which one of the races we are in contact with could have done it?) destroys a missile base at Rotan, and my turns are over. The Alkari have a new Large design with Heavy Ion Cannons, but they get shredded by our bases. Even poor Trax with its single base will be able to kill the one arriving there next turn with no trouble. Notes for the next player: Our war with the Alkari is basically over at this point. They can’t crack our defenses and have pretty much given up trying. They have a big stack of ships at Altair and a smaller one at Celtsi so they are still a formidable adversary, but this is when we need to switch into hot war mode and try to take them out. How to do that is a problem as they have Ion Rifles for ground combat and their fleet won’t be a pushover, but we are stuck until we go through the birds. I’m starting to rethink passing up Range 8 a few turns ago. Ah well. Computers, Construction and Planetology are all in the percentages and should pop very soon. I haven’t allocated any reserve funds this turn, and I haven’t been as good at standing up Beta Ceti and poor Trax as I should have been so you have some cash to work with. Thats all I can think of. Good luck! I can't get images to work so I'm attaching a pdf of what I just posted here but with a few pictures in it.
Looks good!
Note that it's best to put the max maneuverability on our small fighters and bombers, even if it doesn't increase our movement speed in combat, as it will give us better evade for minimal cost. Who's up next?
August 13th, 2017, 21:24
(This post was last modified: August 13th, 2017, 21:26 by haphazard1.)
Looks like some good turns, Ianus.
 Getting a tech steal from the birds is very good news, we need all the tech boosts we can get.OK, I have the save. I will try to look at it later tonight and post more detailed thoughts, but it sounds like our general needs are: - Continue defense against the birds, mainly by bases with our scatter pack missiles. - Stand up Beta Ceti and Trax further. - Keep pushing tech and get the current group of projects completed. Plans after that depend on what is available in the next tiers of the tree. We would like to go on offense against the birds, but it sounds like it is not quite time yet.  We need the current group of techs to improve our potential designs, then we need to decide how we are going to crack the Alkari defenses. 23 bases is not going to be easy with just nuke bombers, and a ground invasion would also be quite tough with our current gropo tech deficit. But I agree that we need to do something to break this stalemate with the birds. The rocks are out there somewhere with lots of planets, and giving them time to grow their population and develop all those worlds would be very bad in the long term.
23 bases will melt faster than you think, even with nuke bombers. If taking losses weren't a factor, then we'd only need to destroy 3 missile bases on average per turn of bombing to take out those bases in one attack. Our nuke bombers that hit will be doing about 3 damage per turn. 30% might hit, so about 1 damage per turn per bomber. In other words, we'd need 75 bombers to kill a base per turn, or over 225 bombers to kill 3 bases per turn. (This is before considering our losses that we will take in the meantime).
The real deciding factor is probably our maneuverability vs. Alkari attack level. 23 bases will be firing 69 missiles per turn. If we have sublights and inertial stabilizers with max evade on a small, that's 3+2+2=7 evade. The Alkari missiles will have 1 attack level from battle scanners, at least 1 level from Hyper-X, plus however many battle computer levels they have. Let's say they have BCIII, so an attack level of 5. They will only be hitting our nuke bombers 30% of the time. Once again, the 69 missiles per turn gets reduced down to about 23 that will actually hit. So, if we start the battle with 500 bombers and take 3 turns to close with the planet, our first and second volleys will involve about 425 bombers. That's 5+5=10 bases gone right there. We will win the battle easily. On the other hand, if the Alkari suddenly get better missiles or battle computers at the last minute, that could change the calculation considerably. For example, if they had BCV and merculites for an attack level of 8, then suddenly they'd be hitting 60% of the time and taking out ~50 bombers per turn. Still, we'd get to hit the planet with about 350 bombers on the first and second volleys, knocking out about 4+4=8 bases. With 15 bases, the Alkari will only be taking out 30 bombers per turn or fewer from then on, and we'd probably still win. I think we can amass 500 nuke bombers with no problem. That, plus about 200 fast ion fighters (max maneuverability, forget the battle computers) would probably do it. That might sound like a lot, but that's only going to be about 10,000 BC, which we could get ready in about 10 years if we go whole hog. And I think it would make sense to go whole hog as long as we think that there is no chance of the Alkari getting class V planetary shields. As for gropo, we will be -10, which sucks, but that just means we will need to invade with 140+ to have a comfortable margin of victory. And I wouldn't mind emptying half of our frontier worlds if it means getting a developed Alkari planet with a lot of tech captures.
Apologies to everyone for the delay.
Life has gotten frantically busy all of a sudden. I think I am going to have to ask for a skip, as I do not think I will be able to get to the save for several more days.
(August 16th, 2017, 04:52)haphazard1 Wrote: Apologies to everyone for the delay. Ouch. Hope it's at the least for tolerable reasons. (August 16th, 2017, 12:27)Psillycyber Wrote: OK, I've started playing the round. It's going well so far! Cool beans. Thanks for stepping up so promptly!
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
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