Dealing with the bears early?

[haphazard1]

Another advice request for the MOO vets here at RB: How do you deal with starting close to the Bulrathi?

In my latest game the bears' home world is to my east, with one system in between us about 4 light years from each home world. This system has a habitable planet. Trying to claim this world will open me to a half-the-bear-homeworld invasion force if they ever get space superiority, which would crush any defense I could build in a reasonable time frame.

I don't really want to expand that direction, even, or at least not at first. There is a different planet to my west, a terran 120, that I would much prefer to target for my third planet. But I don't want the bears taking the system to the east and then going for my home world, either.

What would you do with this situation?

[Nelphine]

Super long time lurker. Finally decided to give in and start playing MoO1 again, and post here outside of my usual Caster of Magic haunt. 

So I'm not a vet and my advice might be totally wrong, but you get to hear how a non vet is dealing with Bulrathi!

My last 3 games (all on Hard, Large) have seen me with Bulrathi as my closest neighbor, although never so close as you describe.

In each game they've become the number 2 empire in the galaxy (myself as number 1) although in one game, our near permanent state of war eventually allowed the Psilons to become number 2. (In both other games, I ended up inadvertently defeating all the other races at roughly the same pace as the Bulrathi simply because I could invade them, and since I had to stay ahead of Bulrathi, number 2, for fleet and tech, the others all ended up being weaker by default).

I've found that building a bunch of missile boats (medium, maybe 5-10 to get started) and going straight on the offense with them has allowed me to ensure that the bears don't have the ability to go on the offense.  I often lose my closest planet to them despite space superiority, and have regularly lost 2-3 other planets as well. However, I've always been able to retake everything except maybe the closest one to them.

So, I would suggest, go west, and expand. Try to make the planet between you the fourth planet you colonize (leave a scout on it to try to prevent them from colonizing it in the interim.) 

Use that planet as your 'line', and expect to lose it (and probably retake it and lose it and retake it) but try to reinforce your Homeworld preemptively so that you don't lose it to the bears.

I've also found that I don't try to take bulrathi planets anymore, but instead I bomb and recolonize. My first game I did try full ground war, and I followed that plan in the second game, until I realized I'd spent 350 population without actually taking a planet. It just takes too much ground tech, and they usually pick up their own ground tech (particularly if they are grabbing any expansions of yours, then they get your ground tech too easily). So save your own people and use the extra production to build dedicated bombers (small or medium) and actively grow more people.



All that being said, if you're on Impossible, you're beyond my skill, so all of the above may be useless.

[haphazard1]

Thanks, Nelphine! Always good to see more people playing (and commenting on) MOO.

If it was anyone but the Bulrathi, I would be happy to fight it out for the in between planet. Some ships in orbit to try to keep space superiority and maybe shoot down a fraction of incoming transports, along with the defender's ground bonus to give me a decent chance of holding off the invaders or at least costing them pop on better than even terms. It would be doable. But against the Bulrathi?

Also, I have played a few more turns and I do not have range 4 in my tree. So I will need to tech to range 5 before I can reach the planet with anything but long range ships. Makes the entire process much more difficult and expensive to put any kind of defense force over the planet to delay the Bulrathi.

[Nelphine]

Right, with anyone else, you could expect to fight, and reasonably hold, the planet. With bulrathi, you expect to fight, lose the planet even if you win space, and bomb out the planet. Then you try again whenever you believe this time you can hold, and the process repeats! Great fun! And you get to share tech with your bulrathi friends too!

But better to lose that planet because 10% of the bears hit ground alive than your Homeworld.

[Bionic Commando]

Your best bets in this scenario:

• The most economically efficient is to wait for the Bears to colonize and send a massive force to conquer when they only have pop 2.
  
• If you don't want to risk the war, then you really need to make a rush to colonize it and mass populate it yourself. Otherwise, they're too dang close to your homeworld.
  

In either case, I would recommend using the colony to grow pop and research only, until you can stand-up enough of a defense to ward off any transports. This would minimize any tech loss and losing industry investment and most openings have a colony following this pattern anyway.

[Nelphine]

Noob question here:

Research without factories? Isn't that just really slow? I can understand not wanting factories in this case, so they don't steal your tech, but you say most openings have this kind of thing: why would you generally want to do that?

[Bionic Commando]

Noob question here:

Research without factories? Isn't that just really slow? I can understand not wanting factories in this case, so they don't steal your tech, but you say most openings have this kind of thing: why would you generally want to do that?

That's a pretty reasonable question. When you're really trying to min/max the opening 25-50 turns or so, typically you're trying to optimize for overall population, having one planet with a strong industrial base, and performing enough research on key early game techs using a method referred to as "seeding". A usual opening would look something like this:

• turn 1: send out your scouts and put 1 RP into planetology. Typically you're looking for IIT10 or ER3 as both boost your overall production AND reduce the cost of subsequent colony ships. Don't put any more RP into it at this point.
  
• turn 6-8ish: you should have your second colony with 10-12 pop. For 2 turns, put all your production on both worlds into RP. Then switch back your home planet to IND. The game gives you a 2x bonus on 7.5% of already generated RP on a project and this basically gives you 15% free RP each turn.
  
• Turn 15: IIT pops
  
• Turn 25: if you didn't get IIT then hopefully ER3 pops and you move to propulsion or construction
  

So a lot of openings have the 2nd colony drop all production into research so you're picking up really key techs on the cheap while focusing industrialization on the home world, so that you can generate 4-6 turn Colony ships around Turn 30. Usually sometime around 50-60, you have other industrialized colonies to do research and can then convert your original colony to industrializing.

The above isn't necessarily gospel and gets adapted based on available tech, habitability of nearby colonies, early arriving AI, etc but is my general archetype.

[haphazard1]

One helpful aspect of Bionic Commando's approach is that it works if your second planet is poor or ultra poor, as sometimes happens. Just use the world to grow pop for better planets and to generate a trickle of research while you industrialize the home world.

[kjn]

Noob question here:

Research without factories? Isn't that just really slow? I can understand not wanting factories in this case, so they don't steal your tech, but you say most openings have this kind of thing: why would you generally want to do that?

Not necessarily. At game start, a factory generates 1 BC and 1 waste, requiring 0.5 BC to clean up. A single pop, however, generates 0.53 BC and no pollution. (0.5 is what each single pop create, and then each level of planetology research adds 0.03 to their productivity.)

Since pop cost 20 BC to "build" and reproduce naturally, it's usually much beter to build factories for 10 BC each, but it's certainly possible to do trickle research using only pop. One advantage of doing that way is that you can start the trickle earlier than if you are first building factories.

[RefSteel]

Since pop cost 20 BC to "build" and reproduce naturally, it's usually much beter to build factories for 10 BC each, but it's certainly possible to do trickle research using only pop. One advantage of doing that way is that you can start the trickle earlier than if you are first building factories.

More generally, factories and techs are investments with different costs and rates of return. The actual "rate of return on investment" is actually very complicated and situation-dependent, due to the research bonus for current spending and prior investment (highly relevant to "trickle research") and the many interactions between factories, production, and different techs. (If a new level of IIT is about to come in, the value of research seeding is higher relative to new factories; if a new level of waste reduction is about to come in, new factories will have a higher return, and those are just the simplest examples...)

The upshot is that tech before factories is not always "really slow" - it depends on your situation and what you want out of it. That's one of the things I love about this game.

(The "normal openings" to which I think Nelphine was referring, bearing in mind that there are several different kinds of "normal openings," not all of which go this way, involve using the second planet to do "trickle research" early on instead of building early factories, freeing the homeworld to build up its factories quickly without giving up on early research entirely. This is often a useful strategy, but not always.)