(March 30th, 2022, 12:42)DaveV Wrote: Planetary shields and deflector shields are additive. So after we research Planetary V and spend the money to build them, our planets will have 5+2=7 total shields. This will make us immune to beam weapons for a while, but still vulnerable to missiles (Merculites will do 3 damage if they hit), bombs, and bio weapons.
Edit: right now, with the starting armor, our missile bases have 50 hitpoints. So invaders have to do 50 damage to remove one base, and 50*(number of bases) to clear our defenses entirely. Once we research Duralloy, the hitpoints increase from 50 to 75.
The manual says:
Quote:Planetary Defense Shield: Planetary defense shields protect populations,
industrial factories, and military bases from enemy attacks. Planet shields are
the only defense that populations and factories have from space attacks. Without
a shield both take full damage from attacks. Missile bases add the planetary
shield to their force fields when absorbing damage. Planetary shields are
automatically built when the proper technology is acquired and sufficient
resources have been allocated to defense spending.
Is the first half of that referring to orbital bombardments? It then goes on to talk about missile bases being different from "populations, industrial factories, and military bases." I've seen better manuals, to be honest.
Ugh, lacking both early engines always hurts. We'll have to hope for Fusion Drives, but I agree with DaveV that if we find another race with engine tech we can trade for or steal, we should try to get it ASAP!
(March 30th, 2022, 14:13)jez9999 Wrote: I've seen better manuals, to be honest.
There are indeed better manuals. There's even a better manual for this game, published under separate cover and generally known as the "Orion Strategy Guide" or "OSG" - but even it includes a number of errors. And in case these continue to be of use, following tests in new games I started for the purpose since you aroused my curiosity, I'll present some further notes from some of our (air quotes optional) helpful junior members of the OSG-37:
Admiral Ssssslin Kaway, Governor of Kronos:
Thank the stars and dragons we've had a couple of emperors who knew how to defend! I particularly liked the way the Sixth Speaker recognized that our missile bases could handle a couple of Warbears in their sleep, and let our poor Pop1 pilots retreat on an emergency escape vector so they wouldn't get shredded to pieces. Sad to say, he was exactly right: The shields on those forty fighters might look like they'll add to their survivability, but even against gatling lasers, they don't offer [b]enough[/b] protection to save the fleet against the kind of superior firepower they'd have been facing. And as for the Seventh Speaker, much though I hate losing pilots, saving a planet from Bulrathi invasion at the cost of half a dozen of our little Gecko fighters is a trade I'll take every time.
Now, I've been threatening to retire for decades now, and maybe I really will, so before I go, let me tell you about a couple of things. First: When that fifth emperor said the whole missile-dodging thing didn't work for him, and maybe the aliens have gotten wise? That was just the rust talking, and a cavalier attitude. Let your ship advance too far and forget what I mean by "perpendicular," and sure, that'll happen to you. Let me catch a pilot I trained messing around like that, and they're going to get a talking-to! If they survive the missile barrage, that is. But second, I'm hearing a lot of talk about defensive shields. You read the manual for our S-Tech-osaur colonial defense shields, and it warns right there about their energy profile: You have to charge 'em up while the enemy is approaching through hyperspace, and then you only have a limited time before they lose their charge and have to shut down again, so you have to kill the enemy or run 'em off before that time. I didn't actually believe it, but I ran some tests on one and found out it's - basically - true! While combat's going on, they can fire their little gatling lasers all they want, and they won't get through: Won't scratch our bases, won't hurt our factories, won't kill our people on the ground; doesn't matter how many they fire. As long as we have a defender alive in space or on our bases, the enemy will have to retreat before our shields go down. But if they take control of our skies, that's a whole other story: All they have to do is wait us out and when the shields go down, open up with orbital bombardment: They can take out some of our factories that way - and even our population - if they've got enough guns up there, even if they're only gats! Now, I heard a rumor that this is actually a dumb bug in the system and the shields work all the time if we get the energy bug patched with a Ankyrubsaur 4.0M capacitance system, but I haven't tested that; I might be confusing it with a whole different bug. All this tech stuff, you know, it's pretty much a big old collection of bugs held together with candy wrappers, more or less. So anyway, Governor DaveV is of course correct: If our tech boys ever get their planetary shielding project figured out, it'll mean five more layers of shielding during battle, on top of the two we've already got. And supposedly they'll even work against orbital bombardment with the five layers they've got, since they're never supposed to run out of charge even when they lose the support of the two from our class-2 S-Tech-osaurs, but I'll believe that when I see them protecting our worlds, and not before!
And a final word(y dissertation) from Ssssstah Deessssscho, Governor Emeritus of Rayden:
To the Seventh Speaker, I would recommend assigning priorities more through principle and instinct like those that led you to focus Rayden's work on technology and to question a fourteen-year missile base project, than by close imitation - even of excellent leaders like your predecessor the Sixth Speaker. Those you follow may have idiosyncratic habits that you needn't assume for yourself, and may also make mistakes, as the much-ballyhooed First and Fifth Speakers, for instance, certainly did. Perhaps the best suggestion I can offer is to consider first and foremost what your goals are for the empire as a whole. Rather than, "What should I prioritize here?" the question when considering how to direct the governor of each world should be, "How can this place best serve my larger goals?" Yes, Rayden will surely be working on research as long as its infrastructure is complete because that's what the colony does best, and there will almost always be important technologies to pursue, whatever the empire's other needs - and because it's so far from the front that it's unlikely to be able to contribute anything other than research even in an emergency! But everything else depends on what you're aiming to accomplish as Speaker. Let's look at some of the details then:
Sakkra on mineral-rich worlds like ours in the Celtsi and Obaca systems can research, clean up waste, and perform terraforming just as quickly as they could in a system like Sssssla or Reticuli, but thanks to the mineral deposits alongside which these colonies are built, they build ships, defenses, and reserves twice as efficiently. Doing research directly on our homeworld is indeed twice as effective as contriubting its wealth to the imperial treasury reserve and then using that wealth to boost research spending on Reticuli later on - but Obaca can contribute so much wealth to the treasury that doing so and spending the gains to help Reticuli's research efforts yields the same result as doing the research on Obaca directly. Of course, using this roundabout approach would mean at least a one-year delay, and is frankly silly, apart from some other, subtler drawbacks - but remember Rayden II, whose incredible store of technological artifacts from the Golden Age of the Ancients make its research efforts more efficient than any other world's! If mineral wealth from Celtsi and Obaca is used to fund treasury spending at the Rayden colony, it's like having a second Rayden in place of some of your rich-world population whenever you'd rather do research than build fleets!
That's one reason to build reserves on rich worlds; another is that new worlds - like our amazing new Laan colony, whose neutronium-covered surface can actually produce more research power by funding laboratories on on other worlds through the reserve than by doing research of its own once its factories are all complete - can't do much to help the rest of the empire until they're fully developed, with terraforming and factories - and preferably, especially if they're near the front, defenses of some kind. Sending population as you did for Laan helps with this a lot; the other way to help them is with spending from the imperial treasury. For an important world on a potential battle front (and doubly so for a world as rich in rare earths as Celtsi or Obaca, and triply so for the likes of Laan!) getting the place up to speed fast, so it can build its own defenses and contribute to other needs - like building the right fleet in the right place at the right time - it can even be worth funding it at "inefficient" prices, in effect paying a premium to transfer a core world's productivity to a critical front. With our rich worlds though, it's even more valuable, since they produce the funds so much more efficiently.
And one last reason to add funds to the reserve, especially from mineral-rich planets when you have them, but even from those like our homeworld whose deposits are "merely" abundant: Just as you can use your treasury to move the produtcs of Sakkra labor across space from a core world to a key outpost on the fringe, you can use it to carry wealth forward through time from a period when you can spare a few hundred billion credits to concentrate them at exactly the right time and place in case of a future emergency. If one of our stars threatens to explode and destroy its colony, or a plague breaks out, or an enemy sends a gigantic attack fleet toward oneof our worlds, if we planned ahead and had a reserve against emergencies, we can double - in fact more than double, since the clean-up costs for our factories only need to be paid for once - the effective output of the threatened world, and potentially of neighboring worlds as well if the emergency is of a type (like an attack fleet or a comet) to whose solution they can contribute, if we have enough warning, and if we have a large enough treasury. I must add as well that the future for which you are planning need not be an emergency or even a surprise: You can build up reserves in anticipation of new planets needing help from them, but there's yet another use even closer to my heart as the long-time governor of Rayden: When you're working on critical research projects so expensive that you don't expect to be able to fully fund all the scientists needed to fill up your labs by the time the project is nearly complete, your rich worlds can spend the period in the middle of the project - after you've spent heavily to get the first labs built, while the staff they require is still limited - salting cash away for the future, to hire more scientists toward the end than your worlds would otherwise be able to afford.
Ah - but you asked more specific questions. There are indeed times when it's not a good idea to ask for a trade agreement: Though the initial costs of a small agreement aren't onerous, they are costs; if you're in the middle of a critical period when you need every credit you can spare, or if you intend or expect to be at war with your potential trade partner very soon anyway, it's better not to sign trade agreements with them (or in the first case, to delay until you can spare the start-up costs more comfortably). ECM research is sometimes useful as well: It's usually the quickest way to advance the tree to the next tier, which has value in itself, and advanced ECM makes planetary defense bases harder targets for missiles, torps, and - most importantly - bombs and bioweapons. There are times when getting better ECM is trememndously valuable - but it's true that incremental improvements are not often worth a major investment, whereas an Improved Space Scanner provides excellent defensive intel - and is helpful for offensive planning too!
As for robotic controls spending, that's a bigger subject than it appears. Rich worlds should get their factories up at full speed (and this is another eventuality for which it's helpful to plan ahead by building up a planetary reserve to spend on them) but other mature colonies have three options: Get on that factory spending right away - especially if they're near the front but not under immediate threat, or a special world like Rayden that we'll want going at full power ASAP - or wait, doing research or whatever else needs doing, until their latest project is complete (especially if improved industrial tech is due to come in shortly) ... or take advantage of the new controls to staff the factories you already have with a smaller number of Sakkra, sending the suddenly-"unemployed" remainder out on transports to help build up new worlds ... or conquer one if you've readied an invasion fleet! Of course combinations are possible too, as you did here (combining the first two, to some approximation). How much to spend on what and where again comes down to your strategic assessment of your situation in the galaxy.
All these possibilities, with spending and with reserves, are just tools to keep handy in your toolbox, possibilities you can bear in mind until you need them to help hatch an important plot. If the question is how to choose your big-picture strategic priorities, or how different planets can best serve them, that's indeed an enormous subject (or set of subjects) for another night. The heart of the matter however is: What do you most want to be able to do? And what will it take to get there?
[EDIT: And a Roster!
- RefSteel (on deck)
- DaveV (still laughing at the incompetent engineers who designed the Warbear cruiser)
- jez9999 (just played) - haphazard1 (UP!)]
(March 31st, 2022, 02:10)RefSteel Wrote: You can build up reserves in anticipation of new planets needing help from them, but there's yet another use even closer to my heart as the long-time governor of Rayden: When you're working on critical research projects so expensive that you don't expect to be able to fully fund all the scientists needed to fill up your labs by the time the project is nearly complete, your rich worlds can spend the period in the middle of the project - after you've spent heavily to get the first labs built, while the staff they require is still limited - salting cash away for the future, to hire more scientists toward the end than your worlds would otherwise be able to afford.
Do you have a rule of thumb about how much to squirrel away each turn, and/or how much to hold overall in the reserve?
(March 31st, 2022, 02:10)RefSteel Wrote: You can build up reserves in anticipation of new planets needing help from them, but there's yet another use even closer to my heart as the long-time governor of Rayden: When you're working on critical research projects so expensive that you don't expect to be able to fully fund all the scientists needed to fill up your labs by the time the project is nearly complete, your rich worlds can spend the period in the middle of the project - after you've spent heavily to get the first labs built, while the staff they require is still limited - salting cash away for the future, to hire more scientists toward the end than your worlds would otherwise be able to afford.
Do you have a rule of thumb about how much to squirrel away each turn, and/or how much to hold overall in the reserve?
As Ref said, sometimes you'll make deposits, and sometimes you'll make withdrawals. I guess my rule of thumb during deposit time is "as much as I can spare" - my default setting is one click on all non-poor planets.
As far as recommended balance, 16 * turn number. According to the OSG:
Quote:Only if you don't have a technology that they haven't got will they consider taking a cash inducement instead. The amount they'll want is equal to the sum of two d8 rolls, times the game turn number (with the result rounded down to the nearest whole 25 BCs).
I've had a number of occasions where I've been willing to pay a big cash bribe for a key tech or a declaration of war against my enemy, and it's nice to know you have enough in the bank to make that possible.
It looks like I am up. I have the save, and can hopefully find time to play late today or tomorrow morning. Most of today is going to be very busy, though.
RefSteel and DaveV have provided excellent responses to jez9999's questions. I will add a few thoughts of my own:
- ECM tech is a useful thing to have, since it helps missile bases defend. But it is rarely a high priority. In this specific case, the choice was ECM I which would not advance the tech tree or the better space scanner which would advance the tree. Taking the space scanner was definitely the right move.
- Trade deals with newly contacted races are usually a good idea. Trade deals take time to mature and become profitable, though, so if you are in need of every possible credit then holding off can be the better choice. The costs of the initial stage of a deal act as a tax on all planets; you can see the current cost (of all your trade deals combined) on the planets screen. So remember to check your spending everywhere on the turn you sign (or increase) a trade deal to make sure you do not end up with waste. This may be a time when the governors can help, if you have them set for eco spending.
Increasing a trade deal resets the maturity, I think partway and not back to the start. (Hopefully someone can correct me on this if needed.) The max size of a trade deal depends on the size of the two races' economies, with the smaller economy limiting what is possible.
The humans' racial bonus to trade deals allows their deals to become profitable much faster than anyone else's, but only for them and not for their trade partner. So dealing with humans can be a mixed blessing, as they always get more out of the deal. You do still benefit, though, so it can still be worth doing.
Also, erratic races tend to change their minds (or sanity) so often that I usually refuse to do trade deals with them unless I am playing the humans. Deals with erratic races almost never last long enough to pay back the initial investment.
Now for a couple general thoughts on the galaxy:
- Cats with crummy weapons tech? Well, they did not draw their usual militarist personality this game. Weird, very weird.
- Birds with almost no tech except weapons? Even weirder. I wonder if the birds drew the event that grants advanced weapons techs? In any case, look out for the Alkari! Stinger missiles? Neutron blasters? Ouch! They might be a juicy target for some spying, but it risks them declaring war on us with those nasty weapons. Hmmmm. If they declare because of alliances I will pile on the spy spending and hope to get lucky.
- Cats on the warpath and incoming. Wonderful. And they (like seemingly all the AIs in this galaxy) have death spores. Not good.
Well, I will do the best I can. It will be most of the day before I can look at the save, so all suggestions are welcome. I do not think we are ready to go on offense, so holding our worlds against whatever gets thrown at us while completing our factory upgrade build out seems like the top items on my agenda.
Good luck (belatedly) with the turns, Haphazard! For defenses, perhaps too late now, I would suggest a scanner ship to see if we can find out what the cats are fielding, and at least one missile base on any world within seven parsecs of Mrrshan space (...I suppose including Kulthos...). I'd be inclined to put production into prebuilds at our rich worlds while we wait to learn what the cats are fielding: If gats and nuclear bombs, then large, shielded ships might be needed, hoping to be able to delay them at least long enough to get ion cannons and duralloy. If no bombs ... a small number of bases (even one unless they have enough missiles and/or heavy lasers to break through) should be enough. If mostly heavy lasers and bombs, a lot of Geckoes should still do okay against them, with sustainable losses. Apart from that, I'd really love to get engines somehow....
(March 31st, 2022, 05:17)jez9999 Wrote: Do you have a rule of thumb about how much to squirrel away each turn, and/or how much to hold overall in the reserve?
I handle this a little differently from DaveV: I don't put away a consistent amount every turn, even by default, but do try - when other needs don't demand otherwise - to put in enough that I'll be able to double the production of any one planet in the empire if necessary ... or more than one in a situation like we're developing here, with an ultra-rich planet, an artifact world, and enemies on multiple fronts. With rich worlds in my empire, I'm more likely to be adding reserves every turn but spending them as fast as they come, trying to make sure I do have a reserve to work with each turn. Without them, my cash reserve tends to be smaller and also more static: Saved for emergencies (or "emergencies") instead of getting spent regularly, except that I do like to help new planets along that way.
Also, thinking about some of your questions a bit more, I decided I was leaving out a lot of basic assumptions and actually-usable details - so I thought I might bring in some fresh perspectives, starting with a long exposition from...
Lehssss Twanin, lately-appointed Governor of Misha:
With all due respect to Rayden's Governor Emeritus, you need to know what you're doing before you can even make sensible strategic goals, never mind executing them. The Seventh Speaker asked for rules of thumb and that kind of thing, so let's suggest some rules of thumb instead of platitudes and promises. Just remember that a rule of thumb isn't exactly a law of physics! These are points of departure for the plan you make and follow, not hard-and-fast rules to follow slavishly - but you do need a reference point somewhere, or where is your plan departing from? So let's take this on, okay?
First rule of thumb: When in doubt, build more factories! Look, we're Sakkra, so we're going to have the population to work the things unless we're shipping people off-world like we're Kulthos on a bad day, but even while we're struggling with just the colonists off the landing ship, still waiting for the transports - probably from Kulthos - to come in, or even on a barren rock like Reticuli where we can hardly breed any faster than other aliens on their homeworlds, the idea is to build up factories until the whole population's employed - and usually even more if there are transports about to come in! - and only then turn around and do other things. Follow this rule slavishly, and you're going to get in trouble - but follow it most of the time, as far as you can without sacrificing everything else, and you won't go too far wrong. The more factories we build, the more of everything else we can do in the future. This is a good thing.
So why don't we really follow this? Why do we ever build anything other than factories before our planetary infrastructure's done? The honest answer is, it's pretty much an exception every time - it's just that the galaxy's a pretty complicated place, so there are a lot of exceptions! The point of a rule of thumb like this one is pretty simple: Always remember, you want to be building factories until your whole population's fully employed there already. You can't always do it - they can gett overridden by higher priorities - but you always want to if you can. If you don't know what else a place can do, and it has the workforce to spare, go for factories. That's what your governors want to do anyway mostly when you put them in charge of their planets, so the hard part is mostly doing everything else the empire needs, and figuring out who you can spare from factory building to do it! So instead of putting it off forever, let's look at both sides of that.
Okay, so what's more important than factories? The glib answer's anything and everything at the right time, and nothing at the wrong time - but I'm not here to be glib. I'm going to try to make a list - not exactly comprehensive - from most-urgent and most-localized to least. Usually "localized" and "urgent" do tend to go together, by the way - call that another rule of thumb, maybe - but there can always be exceptions. Anyway, let's get started, shall we?
First up: Direct and immediate threats to a colony. Is your star about to go nova? Is a comet the size of a dwarf planet on a collision course with your habitation domes? Is a Bulrathi or Mrrshan war fleet vectoring in on your star - or worse yet, in orbit with transports incoming - or even just hanging out at the nearest star with more force than you can handle with the warning you expect to have when it leaves? If so, then you have got yourself a genuine local emergency, and unless your planet's another Laan with the threat still years away, you don't have time to build any new factories: You have to respond immediately, and maybe get help from the treasury, and maybe the neighboring star systems need to drop everything and contribute too, if that's something they can do. This one seems pretty obvious and even easy, so I doubt if I have to go into any more detail - unless you ask me!
There's a corollary here though: There's such a thing as imminent threats that haven't been realized yet. If that Bulrathi death fleet's mustering far enough away that your own ships can fly over as soon as they're needed, or if Laan, Obaca, and Celtsi can turn their shipyards over to your defense and get a bunch of new firepower out to you in time too, but that enemy fleet keeps getting bigger - or if you can't see their fleet mustering, but know it might show up on your scanners at every moment - that probably means you do want more factories more than most other worlds in the empire! You can only build up defenses so fast, and the speed you can do it goes way up when you have a lot of factories. That means a place like Kronos, or even Reticuli - since Grunk won't be going without controlled environmental tech forever - wants more people (mainly immigrants from Kulthos) and more factories, during periods of nominal peace, so they'll be able to scramble defenses in an emergency. That was one of the Fifth Speaker's big goals way back in the 2360s, for example, with cash infusions from Obaca and Celtsi through the imperial reserves and everything.
Okay, so let's talk case number two: Suppose you're planning an invasion, and you're at or near the staging star. You need all the force you can gather to hit the enemy hard and fast, and you're probably going to ship transports out to take their colony away. Factories don't do any good toward building a fleet for next year, and even if your launch date is still a few years out, you're better off building your ships directly than waiting for more factories - especially because your ground invaders won't be working your factories when they're in cold-storage transports hurtling off through space! That's a time and colony where factories can wait.
Next up, we've got the other kinds of infrastructure: Terraforming, soil enrichment - throw waste clean-up in here if you want to, except I usually take it for granted that we're doing the minimum on that outside of the direst emergencies - and all those kinds of things. They're a little more complicated, and governors don't usually understand them too well, but the point is, if your people are threatening to run out of space or your planet's gotten productive enough to knock out a big chunk of a project like that all at once, it's almost always worth getting that done before you finish your factories. Relatedly, there's the question of colony ships: If you're going to need half a dozen of the things to grab a bunch of planets that are pretty much equivalent to each other, you probably want to build them at colonies with maxed-out factories. If you need one colony ship to make a super-important claim that you couldn't build before, whatever planet can get it built and sent across the fastest should hold off on factories until the ship is ready, as long as building it won't take a crazy number of years. (Your own rule of thumb, that you can look ahead maybe five years, isn't too shabby for this, although I can think of cases where I'm willing to put up with more.) Anyway, the point of all this is that getting your population potential up to speed - meaning more voting lizards, more ground defenders or invaders-to-be, more people to help build up new colonies, and more workers for future factories - and taking advantage of natural breeding rate (we Sakkra are especially good at this, but any race can benefit) to get all those extra people for "free" is usually worth doing as soon as it can be managed without too long a lead time and too much bureaucratic waste.
Now, this list won't be comprehensive no matter what I do, so I'm going to call it good enough with one last, vitally-important entry: Scientific research is immensely valuable, and as long as we're pursuing important technologies - or stepping stones toward them - keeping our research going with our laboratories staffed can be way more important than factories. Working out what techs to prioritize and how and when is a big subject (or three) on its own, but if you're handling that part of things well, then keeping your labs at least close to full staffing is where you want to be, at least until you're starting to get good enough chances of a breakthrough every year. During the long run through a research project, this basically means increasing total science funding, empire-wide, by a little more than a fifth (in the ideal case, 22.5%) every year. Sometimes this can happen naturally through population growth and keeping up with factories, or by swapping from building up reserves on rich worlds to adding research and finally to spending reserves on research worlds. But at different times, you might be scrambling to find the research power you need. Where to find it is what I wanted to talk about next, but this is getting long already, so I'll summarize: Start with Kulthos, since it's bad at everything but research and population. Then look for a planet as far as possible from the front that isn't very special, and see what it can do temporarily. Then if you just can't find the research power anywhere that doesn't want more factories desperately, acknowledge that you (or in this case, maybe your predecessor) spent more on start-up laboratory costs than the empire could support long enough to justify the early price with speedy completion, and do what you can with the research power you've got ... unless you want to take the risk of doing research at still-vulnerable worlds because the tech you're hoping for is just that important! You could argue for instance that this was exactly what the Fifth Speaker did a couple of times at Xengara in the '60s.
(April 2nd, 2022, 02:09)RefSteel Wrote: During the long run through a research project, this basically means increasing total science funding, empire-wide, by a little more than a fifth (in the ideal case, 22.5%) every year. Sometimes this can happen naturally through population growth and keeping up with factories, or by swapping from building up reserves on rich worlds to adding research and finally to spending reserves on research worlds. But at different times, you might be scrambling to find the research power you need.
To clarify, this presumably only applies to certain research projects in areas you want to get tech progresses quickly, because there are a permanent 6 research projects going on...
Everyone, I have been ridiculously busy the past couple days and have not been able to get to the turns. I think I am going to have to ask for a skip this round. Sorry for taking so long to realize I was not going to be able to get to this in a timely fashion.
(April 2nd, 2022, 11:13)haphazard1 Wrote: Everyone, I have been ridiculously busy the past couple days and have not been able to get to the turns. :( I think I am going to have to ask for a skip this round. Sorry for taking so long to realize I was not going to be able to get to this in a timely fashion.
No worries; thanks for letting us know! I hope the busy days have been of the enjoyable variety!
I think that means I'm UP, so I'll try to have a look at the save and post a got-it and pre-flight analysis and plans later today.
(April 2nd, 2022, 04:27)jez9999 Wrote: To clarify, this presumably only applies to certain research projects in areas you want to get tech progresses quickly, because there are a permanent 6 research projects going on...
Well, the ~20-25% rule doesn't apply when you're "seeding" a tech (spending a lot early on to "get the labs built" so you can get a bonus on future spending) nor when you're dialing down spending in a tech e.g. because it's well into the percentages. Tht point is that if you want to get the maximum research bonus while teching as quickly as possible, you want to keep the "LEDs" within a click of being lit (just barely lit means you get the maximum bonus per turn; not quite lit means you get the bonus on every research point you spend - but within one click either way, the difference is really small). The bonus is huge when you get it (double the amount you put in) so this is very valuable, but of course there are times when you can't or shouldn't push to get it all. As long as the LED isn't lit and you're spending enough to do anything at all, you're getting the bonus on every RP you put in - the tech will just take longer to finish than if you got the maximum bonus each turn.
So what does 22.5% have to do with all this? It's just that if you're still in the variously-lit-or-unlit lightbulbs stage (or lower in the percentages than you want to be) of everything you're researching, and you balance things out so you have nearly-or-just-barely-lit LEDs in every field and want to keep getting that same balance every turn, you don't have to touch the tech sliders until a tech hits or you want to dial spending down in something: Increase your total empire-wide tech spending (shown in the lower-right corner of the tech screen) by a fifth to a quarter each turn, and you'll be there. Now, that doesn't have to be your goal any more than maximizing your factories ASAP has to be, but it's valuable and a good exercise for thinking on an empire-wide scale: When you know you want to find 245 RP somewhere since you spent 200 in this way last turn, changing spending on every world by a little bit might do the trick, but would be tedious and silly. Instead, what I do (when doing this) is to look for the planets I'm willing to use for research funding, and increase their tech spending until I get where I want to be. Factories are an investment in the future of each planet, and tech is an investment in the future of the empire as a whole, so the question I'm effectively asking is: Which worlds do I need to make as strong as possible, as fast as possible? (Usually front worlds, rich worlds, artifact worlds, etc.) and which can spare something for the greater good of all the rest?
What have I gotten myself into this time? We've got an immense empire, spanning ten different star systems, with plans in train to add some more, our ships are still crawling around between them at warp 1 because our propulsion engineers can't figure out how to design anything but ever-more-complicated fuel cells, the two neighboring empires whose people are happiest with us are nevertheless refusing to talk to us through official diplomatic channels - though I notice their merchants and ours are perfectly happy plying the space lanes between us - and we're expecting every year to see them both send in attack fleets! As for the third, their spaceflight engineers are supposed to be the best in the galaxy - except maybe the Psilons' - and they still have no better engines than we do!
What they do have is enhanced waste cleanup abilities that would save us something like three hundred billion credits a year - almost fifteen percent of our annual budget - if we could implement them ourselves, not to mention some good combat computer technology, amazing weapons, and a hyperspacial stabilization device that allows their ships to generate artificial inertial fields, substantially increasing their combat maneuverability. I want all of this, so though I doubt if they'll trade much of it to me, I'm going to try getting Ariel on the holo-line at the earliest opportunity. I do notice one other thing of interest here: In spite of the mutual loathing in which the general population of Alkari and Mrrshan people hold one another, Ariel here is allied to Shandra for the moment! We'll see how long that lasts; the only possible explanation is their mutual love for unusually pungent varieties of cheese.
Unsurprisingly, their stabilizers aren't for sale, though they're happy to trade away deadly weapons like neutron blasters and horrifying nightmare devices like death spores! I'd love to get our teeth on those blasters, but there's no way I'm giving Ariel the one thing I can imagine he'd accept in trade for them - our new robotic controls - so I settle for a much smaller deal, offering to exchange the secrets of the Hyper-V rockets we picked up from their Mrrshan "buddies" for a working, if minimally effective, ECM jamming device. I have no idea what they want those rockets for - I suppose they take up less space on a ship than their own Hyper-X rockets and Stingers? - but I'll take the little defensive boost for our missile bases - and more importantly, the little offensive boost to our secret agents! Because I may have said I wanted practically every kind of technology the Alkari have, but they're nothing to the Bulrathi!
Yet another member of Shandra's Alliance of Cheddar Afficianados, Grunk has even more battle computer designs, various improved options for factory building, better shields, different ways to improve the environment, and missiles second only to Ariel's Stingers, but the big prize comes from his propulsion laboratories: Sub-light engines three times as powerful as our own plodding retro rockets would be a huge leap forward for us, tactically and strategically. It's going to be a while before he's willing to trade them to us even if his diplomat ever returns, but I'd still be trying to make deals for something if Grunk were willing to even talk with me! The same holds true for Shandra, though she has nothing quite as appealing - apart of course from our large and newish trade agreement and her alliances with every alien civilization whose starships we've ever seen - but it looks like instead of exchanging technological secrets, in the cases of both these furry peoples, I'm going to have to defend against their fleets! So here's my plan for doing that:
Obviously it's not going to do the job all on its own, but the Monitor 1.0 here is among the most powerful tools at our disposal - with our current limited technology - for overcoming a potentially violent enemy. It's not armed because at best it could mount a single laser, and even though adding one would be cheap, we're long past the point where a scanner ship with a laser is going to accomplish anything important by firing it on somebody. I'd like to avoid building anymore lasers anywhere in our fleet, but that's going to depend on people like our weapons engineers ... and the Mrrshans and Bulrathi. Right now, apart from those execrable Warbear junk ships, and to a lesser extent the ugly thing - another ill-designed missile cruiser - that killed some of our Gecko fighters at Kulthos, we can only guess, based on their known technology, what the enemy is fielding on their war fleets. The job of the Monitor here is to meet as many enemy ships as it can, wherever it can find them, get a scan of their combat specifications, and retreat, sending the specs on ahead for us to analyze so we'll know what we're up against and what we'll need to defeat it. Thus the design: The battle scanner is what lets us see what their ships are carrying; the reserve fuel tanks let it search for ships further out from our territory; anything else we can put on board would increase its cost without contributing to its mission, so we're not adding anything - I would use better engines, but ... you know ... we don't have any! I am going to try to change that at least!
It isn't likely that my agents will actually manage to steal sublight drives - or perhaps even anything else - by the time I'm termed out of office at the end of the century, but at least I'm trying! I've increased our espionage budget heavily, and turned all our spies loose to actually start looking for opportunties - including the three already in Alkari space, who for now don't need any more help than they've already got - in case someone on a world they're visiting accidentally leaves a secret lab's door unlocked! It'll risk our good relations, but the Mrrshans and Bulrathi seem eager to attack us anyway in spite of relations that are good enough to absorb a little diplomatic faux-pas like getting caught with a sticky tongue in one of their high-tech cookie jars - hopefully! As for the Alkari, they've certainly never promised not to come after our worlds, and anyway it seems like a waste to have so many spies running around on their worlds if they're not going to do anything!
You can see our spy budget outstripping our ship and missile base maintenance combined when we look over what seems like a very healthy empire to me. We had a lot of cash in the treasury, so I burned some of it on a few special projects, boosting Laan and Rayden's factory building as much as I possibly could to get them running at full strength as soon as I can, but also helping with research, trying to keep our research running smoothly from all around the empire while we're waiting for Rayden to be ready to take over the heavy lifting in a couple of years. One problem with this display though: It doesn't recognize that there's anything in the space dock because there's no new line-item in the budget for the Monitors at Obaca: Its shipyard contractors have already received advance payment for what turns out to be nearly enough to build three, so they're going to put two together for us with enough of the contract left over to get a jump start on whatever ships we build there next. I've seen better displays that would list the Monitor 1.0 in the space dock under circumstances like these, but this one doesn't work that way, so you have to be more attentive to each world when you go over them one by one to make sure none of them are producing anything you didn't intend them to. Fortunately, I don't mind that anyway. But I mentioned research.
The basic problem is that, right now, I want every research project finished and then some! Planetary shields will provide a huge boost in the defenses of every one of our colonies once they're built ... and right now, I regard them as my lowest research priority! I admit that dotomite crystal fuel cells aren't likely to excite anybody, and there's always still a chance that our propulsion engineers still won't have any idea how to build new engines even once they understand those crystals thoroughly, but they're just so important to sending our transports around and getting our ships where they're needed quickly - and for bombing runs if it comes to that against enemy colonies - that I'm eager to take the gamble on them! I admit this will become a lower priority if we manage to get Grunk's best sub-light drives, but that's not something I can count on ... or rather ... it might be, but not until he makes another leap forward in propulsion or we have dotomite crystals to trade! I'm sure everyone knows the value of our other maturing projects, from doubling our terraforming capabilities to finally giving our bases and capital ships some real armor and our gunships some real guns to shoot, but I'm also starting an Improved Space Scanner project now: When it's finished, it's going to be a huge boost to our military intelligence and our espionage capabilities, and it'll lead the way to other critical computer technologies. We can't afford to really go all-out on specialized laboratories for design simulations, given all our other priorities, but we can at least get things started, and I think it's worth the effort, even though it's costing us the chance to build some more factories - at least for now, since our factories are so expensive and still produce so much waste....
Goals for this set: Defend if anything comes our way, finish at least ion cannons, duralloy armor, and terraforming +40 while making progress in all three other fields, strengthen our economy ... and try to find some way, somehow, to acquire some waste clean-up and/or engine technology!
Roster:
- RefSteel (Now Playing!)
- DaveV (on deck)
- jez9999 (just played)
- haphazard1 (skipping until next round)
Stinger missiles? Neutron blasters? Ouch! They might be a juicy target for some spying, but it risks them declaring war on us with those nasty weapons. Hmmmm. If they declare because of alliances I will pile on the spy spending and hope to get lucky.
And they (like seemingly all the AIs in this galaxy) have death spores. Not good.
I do not think we are ready to go on offense, so holding our worlds against whatever gets thrown at us while completing our factory upgrade build out seems like the top items on my agenda.
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