[Let's play] RFS-81 doesn't wait for a damn firing solution

[Cyneheard]

It's too bad they're already deploying Fusion Bombs -- otherwise you could potentially try to stalemate the Sakkra with good planetary defense.

True, but even Mercs + Planetary V + Deflector V would be enough to handle anything less than a full doomstack of Fusion Bombers.

2-speed No-Shield Bombers will just die to 5 missile bases well enough.

This looks like a good position.

Question - how likely are you to try and invade the stranded Sakkra world in the SW corner in the medium turn? Once you get the missile bases, the AI won't be able to effectively protect it or attack it, so once you grab it you've got it forever.

Certainly a tougher map than the Mrrshan Impossible Medium game (Kyrub's patch) I finally one, started with a size 80ish Artifact world, like 10-12 mostly big worlds in my corner that only needed Range 4 to access and were all safe from AI access. Was glad to get the "win" but it felt like that was an outlier map - one of the friendliest I've had in the past 50 games. This looks like an above-average one - the clear space to the NW is a huge benefit but nothing truly out of the ordinary.

[RFS-81]

It's been a while... I played the turns until the next election yesterday and survived it. Well, not much of a surprise. Still no veto block (11/35 votes).

Question - how likely are you to try and invade the stranded Sakkra world in the SW corner in the medium turn? Once you get the missile bases, the AI won't be able to effectively protect it or attack it, so once you grab it you've got it forever.

Quite likely. I didn't get it yet, but it's probably going to be my first conquest. Capturing an ultra-poor world that an enemy has already industrialized for you just feels awesome

Certainly a tougher map than the Mrrshan Impossible Medium game (Kyrub's patch) I finally one, started with a size 80ish Artifact world, like 10-12 mostly big worlds in my corner that only needed Range 4 to access and were all safe from AI access. Was glad to get the "win" but it felt like that was an outlier map - one of the friendliest I've had in the past 50 games. This looks like an above-average one - the clear space to the NW is a huge benefit but nothing truly out of the ordinary.

I don't know if my map is really above-average difficulty. The map is unusual with a belt of hostile systems partitioning the map. This limits opportunities for early expansion, but it also keeps most of the AIs out of my hair for the first part of the game. My tech options were not great overall, but I did get a solid selection of hostile environment techs. Without that, it might well have been impossible for me. Finally, my neighbours chose to make war with other AIs instead of me in the early game and allowed me to settle my corner of the map in peace. Oh, and the Psilons ended up being stunted so they're a great tech trade partner but not a big danger.

Now on to the report.

---

Checking the reports in 2415 revealed that the Alkaris are BFFs with the Sakkras again. In typical AI fashion, they're oscillating between Alliance and NAP. (This is a bug that's present in both kyrub's patch and 1oom. It was fixed in an earlier version of kyrub's patch, but the cure turned out to be worse than the disease, making any early-game cheese alliances practically unbreakable.) They still won't talk to me, so no chance to get them to break the alliance. I did take it as my cue to start spying on them. A few turns later, I had a report on their techs:




(They also got Fusion Drives later on.) Nothing terribly tempting, so I left my spies in the "Hide" mission in the hopes that I could turn the Alkaris to my side again after the current border war is over.

I defended Talas (with 18 surviving pop) and fought off all Sakkra ships before they could get space superiority on my planets after that. They were kind enough to send their Titan ships in ones and twos. Five missile bases can rip them to shreds before they come in bombing range, so I didn't have to run out the combat turns with my Shield 3 ships very often. My weakest spot was Selia, the toxic, ultra-rich system near my home star. It would need some terraforming to get population up from only 15 before it could reasonably build defenses. It could also be destroyed completely if a Titan decided to ignore my ships and just bombard the planet on the tactical screen. My solution to that was to design small ships with nuke missiles (I ran the numbers and the older missiles gave me the most bang for my buck). With 150 of these present, the Titan didn't even want to fight and just retreated on the first turn.

Seeing a new Sakkra ship design on the map worried me a bit since they have bioweapons, but it turned out to be just a beam ship. It does a good job against my anti-Titan ships, but nothing against planets.



In the frontier war with the Alkaris, it turned out that they wanted the poor planet at Gion. They got space superiority with a large beam-ship and have an invasion fleet with less than 20 transports underway.

I did not get much tech progress with most of my planets being busy building ships or defenses. I got Hyper-X rockets in 2416 and Robotic Controls III in 2418. After that, I just started pumping everything into Automated Repair System. I traded Personal Deflector Shields for Fusion Bombs with the Psilons and stole Atmospheric Terraforming from the Sakkras. From now on, I should start picking fields other than Planetology. They still have Complete Eco Restoration, which I really want, but they also have a bunch of junk that I don't care about. If I get the chance, I'm going to steal their Computer tech for a higher spying success rate so I can hopefully clear out the junk faster. Atmospheric Terraforming is of course great to have, but it turned out to be a bit of a poison pill for Selia, because it has to complete the project with only 19 pop before it can increase its population maximum further.

I've signed up the Psilons for a NAP, and tried to do the same with the Meklars, but they declined. The Alkaris' ambassador returned in 2424, declined my request to break the alliance with the Sakkras, and was recalled immediately, so their votes went to the Sakkras in the 2424 election. The full breakdown was as follows:
35 votes total
Sakkras: 11 votes for Sauron, Emperor of the Sakkras
Psilons: 2 votes for Mirana, Emperor of the Mrrshans
Meklars: 2 votes for Mirana, Emperor of the Mrrshans
Alkaris: 3 votes for Sauron, Emperor of the Sakkras
Bulrathis: 6 votes, abstained
Mrrshans: 11 votes, abstained

Still a bit to go for the veto...

What are my plans now? Well, firstly, the Alkaris painted a target on their back here. Even if I get them to break their alliance, they are still likely to vote for the Sakkras due to the "stickyness" of votes. Unless another random war breaks out between them, of course. I've activated my spies in the hopes of stealing their Fusion Drives. Their ships are weaker than the Sakkras', but they have Class V Planetary Shields (thanks to me ), so I'm going to need more bombers to crack them. Meanwhile, the Sakkras' missile bases have only Class IV Shields and Duralloy Armor. I've calculated that I need to drop 36 Nuclear Bombs on average to destroy one missile base (factoring in misses), and the nukes give a better bang for the buck than Fusion Bombs. The Sakkras' core planets have over 40 bases, but the ultra-poor planet in the South-Western corner has only two. I'm going to focus on the Sakkras for now, I think. I should be able to make peace with them whenever I choose (relations are up to Wary again), and destroying more of their stuff will only make it more likely.

Also, just after discovering RC3 is a great time to launch invasions because you won't leave your factories idle!






By the way, does anyone know if the Alkaris' defense bonus applies to bases?

[haphazard1]

Great to see an update on this game.

Atmospheric Terraforming is of course great to have, but it turned out to be a bit of a poison pill for Selia, because it has to complete the project with only 19 pop before it can increase its population maximum further.

It is always kind of painful when that happens. Still, Atmospheric is a very useful tech to have.

Also, just after discovering RC3 is a great time to launch invasions because you won't leave your factories idle!

Every little edge helps. Good luck with the invasion!

By the way, does anyone know if the Alkaris' defense bonus applies to bases?

I have no idea. I thought it only applied to ships, but maybe it is all defense. Hopefully someone will know.

[RefSteel]

Great to see this continuing, and it looks like you're well-positioned for the coming war of conquest! Now to see if you can convert that into success!

By the way, does anyone know if the Alkaris' defense bonus applies to bases?

It does not! Alkari pilots provide their bonus to their ships only; their bases get the standard base defense level of 1 + ECM against missiles, bombs, and spores, and a flat 1 against everything else. Good luck teaching those bird-brains not to cower behind missile bases when they should be fighting with Alkari honor in the skies!

[Bionic Commando]

Great to see this continuing, and it looks like you're well-positioned for the coming war of conquest!  Now to see if you can convert that into success!

By the way, does anyone know if the Alkaris' defense bonus applies to bases?

It does not!  Alkari pilots provide their bonus to their ships only; their bases get the standard base defense level of 1 + ECM against missiles, bombs, and spores, and a flat 1 against everything else.  Good luck teaching those bird-brains not to cower behind missile bases when they should be fighting with Alkari honor in the skies!

Ref, was curious enough to look through the 1oom code and found the function that seems to add stuff to a battle. I'll be honest in that I haven't traced the code all the way through but it looks like 1oom sets up defenses for ships and planets in different spots. You can see that the Mrrshan bonus is applied in the same exact spot.

Anybody know if this is the same behavior in the original game?

Code:

static void game_battle_prepare_add_ships(struct battle_s *bt, battle_side_i_t side, uint8_t planet_i)
{
   const struct game_s *g = bt->g;
   const empiretechorbit_t *e = &(g->eto[bt->s[side].party]);
   const shipdesign_t *sd = &(g->srd[bt->s[side].party].design[0]);
   bool flag_shield_disable = (g->planet[planet_i].battlebg == 0);
   shipparsed_t sp[1];
   int num_types = 0;
   for (int i = 0; i < e->shipdesigns_num; ++i) {
       shipcount_t s;
       s = e->orbit[planet_i].ships[i];
       if (s > 0) {
           bt->s[side].tbl_ships[num_types] = s;
           bt->s[side].tbl_shiptype[num_types] = i;
           game_parsed_from_design(sp, &sd[i], s);
           if (bt->s[side].race == RACE_MRRSHAN) {
               sp->complevel += 4;
           }
           if (bt->s[side].race == RACE_ALKARI) {
               sp->defense += 3;
               sp->misdefense += 3;
           }
           if (flag_shield_disable) {
               sp->pshield = 0;
               sp->absorb = 0;
               sp->shield = 0;
           }
           game_battle_item_add(bt, sp, side);
           ++num_types;
       }
   }
   bt->s[side].num_types = num_types;
   bt->s[side].flag_human = IS_HUMAN(g, bt->s[side].party);
   bt->s[side].flag_auto = !bt->s[side].flag_human;
}

What's interesting is you can see in the planet function where the Mrrshan bonus IS applied to Missile bases:

Code:

void game_parsed_from_planet(shipparsed_t *sp, const struct game_s *g, const struct planet_s *p)
{
    const empiretechorbit_t *e = &(g->eto[p->owner]);
    memset(sp, 0, sizeof(*sp));
    strcpy(sp->name, p->name);
    sp->comp = e->base_comp;
    sp->complevel = e->base_comp + (e->race == RACE_MRRSHAN) ? 4 : 0;
    sp->shield = e->base_shield;
    sp->absorb = tbl_shiptech_shield[e->base_shield].absorb;
    sp->hp = game_num_base_hp[get_best_armor(g, p->owner)];
    sp->defense = 1;
    sp->misdefense = game_get_best_jammer(g, p->owner, e->tech.percent[TECH_FIELD_COMPUTER]) + 1;
    if (p->missile_bases > 0) {
        uint16_t m = (1 << SHIP_SPECIAL_BOOL_SCANNER);
        sp->num = p->missile_bases;
        if (e->have_sub_space_int) {
            m |= (1 << SHIP_SPECIAL_BOOL_SUBSPACE);
        }
        sp->sbmask = m;
    }
    sp->pulsar = e->antidote;   /* HACK */
    sp->look = p->infogfx;
    sp->pshield = p->shield;
    sp->wpnt[0] = e->base_weapon;
    sp->wpnn[0] = 3;
    sp->wpnt[1] = game_get_base_weapon_2(g, p->owner, e->tech.percent[TECH_FIELD_WEAPON], e->base_weapon);
    sp->wpnn[1] = 3;
    if (p->battlebg == 0) {
        sp->pshield = 0;
        sp->absorb = 0;
        sp->shield = 0;
    }
}

[RFS-81]

Good luck teaching those bird-brains not to cower behind missile bases when they should be fighting with Alkari honor in the skies!

Heh, now that you mention it, they're the only ones that have a smaller fleet than I do Their bases will probably need Fusion Bombs, though, but I'd prefer nukes against the Sakkras. Not sure if it's worth it to future-proof my disposable bomber fleet...

Ref, was curious enough to look through the 1oom code and found the function that seems to add stuff to a battle. I'll be honest in that I haven't traced the code all the way through but it looks like 1oom sets up defenses for ships and planets in different spots. You can see that the Mrrshan bonus is applied in the same exact spot.

Anybody know if this is the same behavior in the original game?

Checking probabilistic stuff in the original game is annoying The difference makes sense, flavor-wise: Mrrshans are "Superior Gunners", but Alkaris are "Superior Pilots". Personally, I thought that applying the Alkaris' bonus to missile bases wouldn't have made sense. I just asked because I don't expect MOO to always make sense. (And I was too lazy to actually check the 1oom source myself...)

[RFS-81]

This, recruits, is a state-of-the-art targeting computer! Look how huge it is! It's taking up hull space that could be spent on another gun! And that's not the the end of it! It draws so much power that the eggheads have to put a second engine into the ship! That, recruit Shandra, is why we still aim like "stone-age people" and don't use "modern technology"! A battle computer means fewer guns at your hands, and fewer pilots by your side. Remember: The best defense is overwhelming and indiscriminate offense!

- unknown Mrrshan space flight school instructor

So... at some point I got lazy about taking screenshots because I thought the game was basically over, but then it went on much longer than I expected. It was quite a slog and probably not all that interesting to read about in detail, though.

Well, let's start where I left off last time: I gathered Nuke bombers near Reticuli, the ultra-poor Sakkra planet. Only a handful where needed to take down the bases. The invasion took a long time: I sent half of Vox's population and refilled it with ECO spending and from other systems. Quite a lot of population grew back between turns, but I wore it down over many turns. At the end, I was rewarded with Advanced Cloning which was incredibly useful for later invasions. Nothing beats pointy-stick research! Not wanting to build thousands of bombers at this point, I decided to make peace with the Sakkras shortly after.

Meanwhile, I was building up Fusion bombers near the Alkari empire. At that point, I still couldn't fit Fusion Bombs on small hulls, so I had to build mediums which is pretty inefficient. Luckily, they didn't have all that many missile bases, so I could quickly roll up the Alkari empire. Through spies and pointy-stick research I caught up in tech tremendously and I caught up to the other races on the bar graph (though I still was behind the Sakkras a bit). All while hardly investing anything in tech myself! I could switch to small fusion bombers while my conquest of the Alkaris was ongoing, which sped it up dramatically. In the end, I left the Alkaris with one planet at some point after 2450.

At that point, I turned my attention to the Sakkras again. I thought I had this game in the bag and played a bit more sloppy. The problem is that the game sometimes leaves the bag if you're sloppy! So yeah, the exact thing that I wanted to avoid with my write-up happened. I still made some small conquests with my small fusion bombers, but that relied on using fast engines to dance around missile stacks, and one mistake could spell doom for the whole bomber stack. (And I made more than one mistake here...) At some point, I was shocked to notice that the bombs were doing nothing! The Sakkras finally got planetary shields, and it was class XV!

The Sakkras meanwhile were obsessed with bio-weapons and played whack-a-mole on my colonies in the former Alkari empire using thousands of spore ships. I scrambled some ships with repulsor beams - huge ships that also equipped the automated repair system. Although sometimes, these where overwhelmed to, and sometimes I made embarrassing mistakes that let them get to my planets. The Sakkras were racing up their Planetology tech tree. My spies stole the Advanced Planetology I tech - one of the dummy techs at the end of the tree that do nothing but increase your tech level. I don't remember ever stealing one of those. This was actually another lucky break because it unlocked all of my Planetology research options, which included the universal antidote! This turned the situation around, together with Neutronium bombs (first on mediums, then on smalls) and fun toys like cloaking fields and teleporters.

The Sakkras still continued exterminating the other races (admittedly, I helped, but the Sakkras always got the kill). Especially sad: the extinction of the Psilons was announced by GNN in the "Also in the news" segment, after informing the galaxy that there are still pirates in the Proteus system. I only found this system towards the end of the game, some star with no planet on the eastern border of the map.

At the end of the game, the Bulrathis were the only minor race left alive. But after getting the Neutronium bombers ready, the game slowly tipped and I slogged through the Sakkra empire. It took me until 2600 to get the 2/3 majority to vote myself Master of the New Republic with 59 out of 85 votes (the Bulrathis added 3 which were not needed).




"Two thirds of the galaxy want me to rule because the ones who don't are dead. This is how you democracy, right?" I don't know if this sentence is the most sarcastic or the most tone-deaf sentence written in a game, but I love it.

---

Even though I think now that MOO1 is better than MOO2, I really love the ending narration of MOO2. "Your fleets patrol the skies of every planet in the galaxy. This galaxy. But other challenges await!"

What now? One thing I'd like to do would be to play impossible on a small map, which is supposed to be even harder. I guess I could work my way down from the Klackons and Psilons to the Mrrshans and Darklos. I also would like to play Dominus Galaxia again, a spiritual successor to MOO1. I've been the worst beta tester ever for this game... I could do some written Let's play/review for that too, if anyone's interested.

[haphazard1]

Congrats on the victory, RFS-81! Grinding it out to 2600 takes real persistence.

Pirates event in a system with no planets? Don't think I have ever seen that happen before.

Invasions against Sakkra who have advanced cloning? Just how fast was their population growing back?

A let's play or review of Dominus Galaxia would be interesting. I have not played it; sounds like it is still in development?

[Cyneheard]

One thing I'd like to do would be to play impossible on a small map, which is supposed to be even harder.

It is and it isn't harder - more maps are unwinnable, but the good maps are MUCH friendlier. A good 2nd world + being able to get to 6-8 worlds off of Range 4/5 and maybe Controlled Barren = easy victory with any race.

[shallow_thought]

Congratulations! No win on impossible is to be sneezed at, and one with the cats is always to be treasured.

One thing I'd like to do would be to play impossible on a small map, which is supposed to be even harder.

It is and it isn't harder - more maps are unwinnable, but the good maps are MUCH friendlier. A good 2nd world + being able to get to 6-8 worlds off of Range 4/5 and maybe Controlled Barren = easy victory with any race.

I normally play on small maps because I usually play this game while on holiday and in short bursts - small maps are much easier to get back into. And while I'm currently mucking about back on Hard (been away from the game for a while), I agree that the thing with small maps is the variance. I started playing in the airport yesterday - Psilons, two planet choices, one clearly "towards" the rest of the galaxy, but toxic, the other poor and lead to no new worlds. Then more and more hostile worlds, one colonisable world at range 4 - ultrapoor. And the Sakkra beat me to that. So I'm afraid I quit, re-started as the Klackons and had half the galaxy to myself, including a Tundra 50 Ultra-Rich in my backlines. Was slowed down slightly by Inferno being my first control tech aftre Barren, but the game has been a snoozefest. May have to go to medium maps after all...