Sounds like solid turns, DaveV. The humans are reduced to just one irradiated planet and hopefully will no longrer be a problem. We are mostly safe from the endless probing attacks by the rocks. If we can somehow get our hands on a decent bomb, we should be able to start expanding again.
Looks great, DaveV! And looking at the save, I see that Selia is an artifacts world, so conquering it is doubly terrific news! I'll hold off on "getting it" for now in case shallow_thought can (and wants to) play sooner than I can. I wouldn't mind a set of quiet builder turns (even if they include defending against various incoming fleets) but I'll also be on the lookout for ... opportunities!
Roster:
- RefSteel (UP!)
- shallow_thought (on deck - unless you'd rather swap with me)
- haphazard1
- DaveV (just played)
I think I mentioned that Selia was an artifacts world when I cleared the bases there. The humans certainly had a stronger second world than we did.
Whoever plays next, good luck! Until we can get a better bomb, I am not sure what opportunities we can find. But maybe our spies can do something, or something will turn up.
Sounds like fine turns to me; tech choices feel sound (we already have IIT6 IIRC), and it's always good to have picked up an Artifacts world. Having Antidote ticks solves another problem for us. I note that the Meklar picked up Neutronium Bomb some time during my set - what I'd not realised is that it's from two rungs above Pulsons, which we have just started on. That's some very focused research, unless they either stumbed across an unvisited Artifacts world (that late in the game?) or I didn't notice them getting the "weapons" event (and I think I would have made a note of that).
I'd say Ref should go ahead and play when he gets a chance - I don't see any urgency to mess with the schedule. But I might download the save and do some analysis of which races might still be able to pick up better bombs short of Neutronium. Maybe a reason (in addition to diplomacy) to keep the Humans alive?
Otherwise, it's push on in tech ourselves and hope, spy as heavily as is possible on the Meklar or eventually try to trade (and that will cost). I'm assuming the cats are no better a target than the rocks at the moment ...
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
(July 5th, 2023, 23:22)haphazard1 Wrote: I think I mentioned that Selia was an artifacts world when I cleared the bases there. The humans certainly had a stronger second world than we did.
You totally did - and then I managed to forget it since my brain couldn't process the idea of DaveV conquering an Artifacts world and still calling his turns a "meh" set, so I had the pleasure of rediscovering it again! (Like shallow_thought, I'm also happy with the tech choices.) Also, I was able to clear more time than I feared today, so:
(July 6th, 2023, 02:07)shallow_thought Wrote: I'd say Ref should go ahead and play when he gets a chance - I don't see any urgency to mess with the schedule. But I might download the save and do some analysis of which races might still be able to pick up better bombs short of Neutronium. Maybe a reason (in addition to diplomacy) to keep the Humans alive?
Otherwise, it's push on in tech ourselves and hope, spy as heavily as is possible on the Meklar or eventually try to trade (and that will cost).
All this sounds good to me - I think it'll go faster than it might at first appear, especially if...
Introduction:
Psilons of the OSG-38, my name is Thylako , not that you should know it or know me, just taking advantage of the right of public access and everything, and I'm here with a suggestion - a small suggestion, nothing big - for your consideration. I mean to say. I've noticed a kind of trend among the military leaders you've selected over our interstellar history: We tend to keep pulling in these quiet Psilons from the labs or the diplomatic corps or, I don't know, students of xenohistory. And that's cool; lots of nice, smart Psilons all over those fields, they do great work. Not complaining. But like. These are the Psilons directing our military production, our assault transports, our combat fleets - and practically all of them would rather be down at the university, lecturing or running experiments or something. So, okay, I get that: University's great! Spent some of the best years of my life there; lots of fond memories to reminsce about with buddies I made those years. And let's be real, research is a good background for almost anything, right? It's pretty much the lifeblood of Psilon society. But I mean. Maybe sometimes let people do the work they want to, maybe? Like, when you're picking military leaders, maybe try to go for someone occasionally - just as your military director, I'm saying! - who feels like taking an interest in the military? I mean, I'm not suggesting any candidates or anything, not making any nominations. Just, like, half the people you bring up to the post would rather be doing something different, and for all their book-smarts and - let's face it - all-around smarts, it's not like they're staying up late nights dreaming up evil plans for making new conquests or anything. I mean, they can't be, because they're already staying up late nights dreaming up new microhybridization protocols or whatever they like. You know the kind of thing. And it's not like I know what the commander-in-chief should be actually doing; I'm just a regular factory tech, mostly optimizing waste scrubbers every day and keeping our output efficiency up to speed. I couldn't do any better than the lab geniuses certainly; just like, maybe find a professor of military history who gets excited about like tactical maneuvers and strategic initiatives and anything really to do with war - like anything. Someone who makes that kind of evil plan all the time and wishes we could implement it or whatever. I mean, I don't even know what I'm doing, and I've already come up with three! Just, you know, for your consideration. In case you want a kind of outside-ish perspective on the thing.
... I don't get it. What do you mean, you'll take that as my acceptance speech?
Interim Commander-in-Chief Thylako 's Report, part 1:
Okay, okay, so what am I supposed to be doing? I mean, who hires a military director almost sight-unseen on the basis of a wild claim about having like three evil plans when someone who loves that sort of thing would have at least thirteen! It's like they want people who think about more than one different thing!
Anyway, let's get started with this: We have Selia! This is frankly amazing. We're talking about a world littered in artifacts of an ancient culture we'd never encountered before except when one of its working artifacts turned one of our Scouts at Orion into a very small amount of plasma and a lot of electromagnetic radiation. There's the Shattered Stakes down there, this field of like shard-shaped projections that change their elemental composition in a net-zero-energy nuclear reaction involving neutron and proton exchange when exposed to different wavelengths of light! Nobody has any idea how it works or what it's for or what it was part of before it all went to ruin - I mean, lots of ideas, but nothing that's stood up to experiment yet - and that's just one of the more obvious features in one little part of the world!
So obviously, we need more scientists down there, studying the thing! I'm not going to leave any factories idle on Sol - I know better than anybody, those factories are no good for anything unless they've got Psilons using them - but that's still thirteen million people free to set out and learn more about everything. I mean: The Humans set up religious shrines around the Shattered Stakes - all kinds of different religions - because it was this big, beautiful, amazing thing their scientists didn't fully understand yet.
Anyway, we're not putting any new shrines down there. (We do have archaeologists and anthropologists studying the shrines the Humans left, because even if I never will, there definitely are Psilons who want to understand Humans; there are Psilons who want to understand everything!) What we are putting down there are all the factories we can build for local manufacturing of laboratory equipment and whatever else the different kinds of scientists need - and they're going to get all the help we can send them, because Selia is amazing.
The whole treasury isn't too much; it's barely enough, I'd say. And other things going on at a glance: Trade seems to be going well with both of the M peoples, still with room to grow, and Nature ... ugh, I was warned that something like that had happened. I'm getting ten million more people out of there to help out at Sol - the transports on their way to Selia already are just a start; we'll send more as long as there's any space for them to live - but also we're not losing any more population there to the Silicoids on my watch. The Pushback dread en route to evict their current fleet there is also just a start.
Nature's not the only problem though: The last person in this office called my attention to an incoming Meklar fleet at Proteus, which is ridiculous: We've been friends with the Meklar forever, trading ever since we first met, fighting Silicoids and Humans together, everything! So I figured I should do something about this whole "attacking us" thing.
I know this won't stop the fleet already on its way, but I figured we should formalize the whole "we're on the same side; we shouldn't be fighting one another!" thing. So we officially have a non-aggression pact with them now, and hopefully it'll last longer than the one we made with Alexander's treacherous Humans way back when.
Also, it might contribute to one of my evil plans. (The first one. Out of three. I am so underqualified for this.) If they ever get enough range for it to matter, I mean. Probably asking too much, but you never know: Sometimes a longshot will come through!
This is not an example of a longshot coming through. This is an example of speculatively clearing out a distraction for spies and reverse engineers and slightly improving our engine miniaturization by teaching Mirana how not to get her worlds turned into tiny, miserable spuds by death spores. It was the best I could find to do since the Meklar wouldn't even trade "weapons" like anti-missile rockets for anything less than ecological restoration technology - which is not a trade I was willing to make with them. But at least it's kind of sort of maybe another contributor to evil plan number one. (This is such a bad plan. Ignore it. Look, a military-minded Psilon would have so much better plans....)
I mean. It's less a plan even really than just noticing where our attack fleet is, and getting really annoyed by the way Human attack fleets have been trying to kill us every few years since the beginning of time. There's an idea here that I count as an evil plan, but the part I hate is, it isn't up to us. Anyway, learning things is fun. So let's find out what Maalor looks like from orbit, right?
So I was hoping to trap their whole fleet there and wipe it out on the spot - our Pushbacks really are that good - but instead, it ... left. I found out later it was going to Sol, so it's still going to be bouncing around for a while, so already this isn't going great. Plus our fleet is now even farther from everywhere else I want it to be and there's also about ten percent less of it - of the part that matters at least - so ... well, it'll be great if something comes of it anyway.
I'm not sending any transports down to Maalor, by the way, even though its bases are all gone. It may be an evil plan, but it isn't xenocide. I mean, you can argue it's worse: I'm making it easier for someone else - Psilon or otherwise - to commit xenocide if they feel like it. In case we have a way to take advantage of it. In the meantime, the fleet's taking a tortuous route to someplace else it might be useful now that Maalor's taken care of. And the rest of the empire? Well, some places are building factories. Even Nature's getting a few. (Oh, did I not mention the Silicoid fleet in orbit? That's because we got a Pushback out to meet them. They weren't worth mentioning.) But mostly ... I mean, we're Psilons. Mostly, we're researching.
So I'm going to level with you: Speaking from direct personal experience here, our factory scrubbers? They're not great. Better than they were a hundred eighty years ago, okay, but that's not saying much of anything. So it's a good thing all the junk that gets through them can be cleaned up so easily! I figured we weren't spending that much on waste cleanup already, but when I went back and checked the difference after our lab teams came up with these new advances in ecological restoration? It was honestly a pretty huge savings. Good job to whoever got that project started and all the people who worked on it over the years - especially since it looks like our next research project here means Nature's gorgeous fertility is going to be superseded! Gaian environments on half (or whatever it is) of our worlds sounds like a pretty good deal to me. And no matter how evil my plans might be, they aren't Silicoid-evil: If anyone ever learns how to build a doom virus on purpose, that person won't be me!
Oh, right - also this year though. That Meklar fleet my predecessor mentioned? This is the year it hit Proteus. And remember how everyone was so excited about how the Meklar can build neutronium bombs?
Yeah. That's almost 700 total bombs, at ten per rack, in their fleet. Oh, and I'd kind of love to have an Annihilator of my own to play with: That ship can really do space superiority. If we didn't have a Pushback or three in the system, we might have been in real trouble here. Or at least lost a single solitary anything. I mean. That's a pretty nasty fleet all around: At one point we almost lost a Pushback when the pilot underestimated how bad a full barrage of missiles and torps could be. But then the autorepair got everything back under control and we blew everything up before any of it could reach the planet, so.
These ships aren't staying at Proteus though. I have some more evil plans to execute. (Two of them. Mostly.)
Oh! Hey, wait, look at that! It's actually evil plan number two! Maybe I didn't mention, but I'm not too excited about stealing Silicoid technology. We have practically all their stuff that I care about. So I asked our spies to try for something else instead. Their missile bases look pretty tough behind their class X planetary shields, but good spies can work from their side of the shield, and that's more than a third of the bases on rich Denubius down in one blow! So if ... well, if I had an attack fleet in range to take advantage; if ... anyway, it would be really great. We're getting there though, okay? Slowly - or like really, really fast, with warp-4 engines; just not fast enough for me!
I'll tell you a secret though: I would have had a fleet in place ... except we're so, so tantalizingly close to better engine technology, I wanted to wait to build one until ... you know, until we had it ready. That's ... well ... it sounds good on paper, but more ships now would probably have been a better thing. But the chances are getting so good now of getting it every year! Just a little longer - a little longer - and we'll have some great new technology!
Okay, so our ground troops are going to ro... ... um, no, they're going to defeat rocks. If they get the chance to fight them. Is the point. But I mean, they're going to be great! And someday we'll be able to build a zyro shield because - and frankly only because - we have literally no other choice. But the eagle-eyed among you may detect that none of this is a new engine.
Oh - right, and I keep not mentioning Nature. I didn't really see a lot of more important duties for most of our Pushbacks right away, so...
I like it better when their suicidal assault transports all die like this: Out in space, where they can't kill any of our people. The Silicoids have more of their junk ships coming to attack us, but I don't care. (We've been blowing them up, chasing them off, or both basically every year.) One of the Pushbacks can stay above Nature and stop this from happening again: We have plenty.
Seriously, the rocks are pathetic. Unless they get some real ship designers on board, I don't see how they can hurt us anymore.
Gnnnnnnf. Stupid poetic justice. Okay, okay, so rocks are really important and we live on a bunch of them out in space, with water and plants and atmosphere on them and everything, and that's great! I meant the Silicoid rock people can't hurt us right now, okay? Ouch though: 38 million Solans and 210 of their factory cities going down in a single quake? Must be the Declan Traps revisited or something. Wow, I'll bet our geologists are going to have a field day learning what happened with that! And with our geologists on it, I'll bet we never lose another Psilon in a quake!
That's all I've got for now; the rest will have to wait for tomorrow - but these were really fun turns, and quick to play! (The report on the other hand ... uh ... you may have noticed it's long.... Also super fun (for me) but ... you know. One day, I'll succeed in keeping one short and to the point, right?)
Thanks for the entertaining report, RefSteel. That quake event. Ouch.
Advanced soil will be excellent once we finish researching it. Zyro shield is not a tech I have used very much, but sometimes you only get one choice. The improvement to waste clean up is also very useful -- we have enough factories (and will get more with IRC5) to make the savings pretty significant.
Interim Commander-in-Chief Thylako 's* Report, part 2:
* - Traditionally, the "extra" space in many Psilon names (Zygot 's name, which ends with one, like Thylako 's, is perhaps the most famous) is pronounced as a brief, contemplative silence, different in character rather than sound from a pause for breath. Most non-Psilons exclude the space entirely, though a few scholars interested in Psilon lore try to emphasize it by replacing it with an underscore instead.
Oh, hey, I haven't mentioned the Ultimatum in a while, have I? It was behind the main fleet, but I did send it down to Maalor, just about a year behind - and just kind of left it there ever since. Every year, the Maalorites build a destroyer or two or three or four, which run away, find they have nowhere to run to, and disintegrate in hyperspace for lack of a targeting beacon, or build a missile base, which the Ultimatum promptly destroys - nine or ten stinger bases would wreck it, but the number this place can build in a year are no problem for it with their flimsy shielding - or both. It's too slow now to keep up with the rest of our fleet, and weapon and shield technology have left it far behind most state-of-the-art fleets, but against what's left of Alexander's forces, short of their main fleet returning, it's more than enough. Oh - and Nature's all done with all the factories I ever intend to let it build, but I've got it working on a planetary shield just to see if it can ever finish the job, and to prevent accidents like the one from just before I took over a little more permanently - in case it ever finishes. The place couldn't contribute that much research anymore anyway, so I figured there was no great harm: The main thing Nature's doing right now is sending population where it's needed - while research hurries on practically everywhere else!
You may notice that these fancy new robotic controls are also not ion engines. This ... is starting to get embarrassing. It's 2487 already, we've supposedly had chances of finishing the project for years ... but ... well, at least Uxmai and Selia will get to build some more factories! (And yes, just those two: The rest can wait! We have more research to do!) Hyperspace communication is a really cool idea, and I'll bet there are some information theorists who are really disappointed they won't get to research it right away, but I figured it's kind of a luxury, and a better battle computer would be great for fighting anything with good defenses, such as, just for instance, a fourth evil plan that I couldn't possibly execute in three years no matter how much I wanted to!
It would be the fourth one though: The third, such as it is, commences next year.
See, so this is the problem with attacking the Silicoids: Their bases are so tough, our fusion bombs can barely penetrate their shields, and it takes forever to even knock one base down. Our Pushback retreated since there were no enemy fleets for it to play with and it couldn't even touch the bases, and the older bombers just provided plink damage and minor distractions, but even with only nine bases here at Denubius, we were able to take down two thirds of them before we ran out of bombs altogether! And I'm afraid that's my whole third evil plan right there: To attack them with all these old bombers anyway, losing more than forty to get rid of six more bases. Just because my theory is this: In a war of attrition where we lose some bombers and they lose important planets that we take over from them, I'm pretty sure we win! It's just that we have to find planets where the base count is low enough that we can win the war of attrition.
Plus, plus! Evil plan number two came through again! My saboteurs were all ready to take out the last of the defenses on Denubius! Maybe the last ones. For now. Buuuuut ... I mean. I checked around in case there were any other places with few enough missile bases that it might be worth trying to hit them next? You know, just in case? And there was this one, pretty nearby, with just seventeen, so I...
Okay, okay, okay, but: The last time, at Denubius, they got five, and the Silicoids haven't been rebuilding any since. And our bombers can still take out three bases, easy, when they get back from Longlast in a couple of years. And I didn't want to, you know, waste the extra destructive power in case it was a good penetration that could have blown up lots of bases! I didn't know they were only going to get two! But. But! Check out Willow, will you?? It's small, obviously, like Denubius - that's why it had so few bases - but it's another rich world! For us! I mean, for us if we can take it! And we can! I'm pretty sure! All we need is evil plans two and/or three and/or hopefully something better that somebody smarter comes up with after me!
Anyway, that definitely wasn't the biggest disappointment of the year. Not even Still No Ion Drives. The biggest disappointment was that apparently I hadn't checked around carefully to see how many different places had been building Pushbacks and if some of them might be nearly done. I checked Uxmai really closely, but ... apparently the Paradisians took into into their giant heads to finish one this year just because the new factory controls from before made it so easy. So ... I said before we have plenty, right? Because now we have PLENTY! That could have been sooooooooooo many ion bombers though! If we'd figured out how to make them....
Anyway, I'm not overconfident or anything, right? 'Cause, what did I say Nature was good for again? If I said "shipping sixty three million idle workers off to conquer a rich planet off the rock-heads" then I think I got it right. Definitely not overconfident here. They're going to get to Denubius right when the same fleet that's fleeing its three surviving bases gets back, re-armed and ready!
And ... finally! After years and years of nothing, just in time for me to either still not be able to use them or saddle whoever succeeds me with my own designs instead of letting them choose new ones or whether to build any or anything, we've got Ion Drives!! And Pulson missiles, because when they're not each sitting on all four of their hands, our scientists are amazing! High energy focus is the only way forward in propulsion technology, and it's not like I'm complaining. Hercular missiles might someday be our only option for penetrating shields if the Silicoids and Meklar keep improving that way, so we're heading that way, hoping neutronium bombs aren't just proprietary Meklar-only technology: I don't think we'll have much use for particle beams or plasma cannons anytime soon. And ... that's it! It's time for my last year as under-qualified military director of the Psilon people! Finally!!
So, how I was saying the Silicoids weren't building any new bases here? I guess they changed their minds. Um. And rich worlds can do this pretty fast. So they've got seven, and I know we don't have enough bombs to take care of those on this fleet. In fact, we ended up losing about a hundred bombers just to get them down to three. So, well ... remember how I was saying I was definitely not overconfident? Well, yeah, hang onto that, maybe.
This is not an evil plan, by the way. This is a game I am playing for fun. While I wait to see if the Humans develop any technology I actually care about, I've been asking our spies to sabotage them instead of stealing a fat wad of nothing. But this is the kind of sabotage: I'm tired of ruthless Alexander attacking us constantly, and I'm thinking maybe the Humans on the street might want someone else in charge now that his policies have led to their few remaining radiation-choked lives being entirely at our mercy. So I'm having our spies see if they can start a little revolution on the side. You know, for funsies. And maybe diplomacy. We're like a thirteenth of the way there, so...
Anyway, that's not the good news this year.
This is the good news: Andrium armor for our bases, our future gunships, our transports, and our troops! Next up is improved industrial technology because it's cheaper and I'm one of those stuck-in-the-mud Psilons who says, "Our old, trashy factory waste scrubbers are fine! We don't need any newfangled four-times-as-efficient technology!" (Really this is just because I don't care either way; the savings is going to be so small with our advanced eco cleanup technology, I just figured, whatever happens soonest so the miniaturization might have a chance to impact anything. But look, I liked working on those old, cranky scrubbers! It's a skill not many Psilons have learned! Or ever, you know, wanted to!)
Anyway, so you kept that whole "not overconfident" thing in mind all this time, right?
Yeah, we were lucky: We're way better at ground combat than the Silicoids at this point, but not this much better! After their mercs shot down ten of our transports in space, we should have fallen just short of fully repopulating the world after also defeating all of the Silicoid soldiers who faced us. Instead, we overfilled it to the point where nearly as many of our people died from lack of life support resources on the planet after we won as fell in actual battle. So the overconfidence thing? Well, if I'd sent dribs and drabs from a bunch of different planets, that would have been overconfidence: The mercs would have killed ten transports from each! But I sent everything from Nature, and that made the difference. I was correctly confident!
Also we got some tech upgrades from the laboratories down on the planet. I won't get to make much use of either of these, but we've got field mechanics enthusiasts who are going to love the new class-7 deflectors, and factory engineers who'll feel about the same about class-5 industrial technology! Not big upgrades exactly, but that's the kind of thing the Silicoids have got! They just aren't as good as we are at technology. Also not as good at making fleets.
I scrapped the useless remnants of our older bomber fleets, leaving only the Apehurts and our giant gunships. The Nova is mostly to be a placeholder and show off how far we've come technologically since the Pushbacks were designed. The other two new designs are just suggestions: Quantity 6 bombers will be more than three times as effective against Silicoid bases as Apehurts should be able to literally fly faster than Mercs. The Artemis fighters are speculative and we probably shouldn't build any: A thousand or so might be able to achieve tentative evil plan number four, but it's tentative for a reason, and as long as the Silicoids can be hurt at all by fusion bombs, we might want to keep focusing on them. (Or pick a new target that's easier anyway!) Hopefully whatever we do, the other galactic empires will see reason in ten years, because we'll definitely still have a veto at the Council, and we're kind of taking over the galaxy.
Technology is the backbone of Psilon victory, but also we finally have more planets than the Silicoids do!
And this is what the galaxy looks like now. Notice the little toxic rich world "scouted" by our saboteurs? All I'm saying, you know, having designed those "Quantity" bombers, is, it's there.
I'm only saying.
Notes:
- Any colony building a dreadnought still has some BCs into shipbuilding, though none are in immediate danger of accidentally finishing a dread.
- I haven't yet fed reserves to any planet this turn, though I would definitely have done so at Denubius if I weren't handing it off.
- I probably would also have built a lot of bombers, which are not currently queued. It's only a matter of time before the Silicoids become immune, but they're not quite there yet!
- Only Uxmai and Selia have maxed factories so far (with new IRC 5). Do with the extra pop what you will (and/or build additional factories...)
- I've sent a Pushback to Maalor (you can veto this if you want) to make completely sure the main Human fleet due to arrive there in two turns can't destroy our Ultimatum. Other than that, I've left fleet movements up to you.
- I'm not sure if we can win the election at the end of your turns, but there may be a chance this time at least. Either way, I suspect this is your last turnset this game!
The humans are reduced to just one irradiated planet and hopefully will no longrer be a problem. We are mostly safe from the endless probing attacks by the rocks. If we can somehow get our hands on a decent bomb, we should be able to start expanding again.
.
Psilons being Psilons, where would we find such a leader?
Ouch.
