Remnants of the Precursors Succession Game?

[Brian Shanahan]

Ok the turns are played, sorry for the lack of pictures or a story. It was mostly uneventful. I did make a few tech decisions that may be wrong (e.g. going for range 6 rather than pushing the tree forward), but hey, it's a learning game. And I'd say I could have done a bit more on diplomacy, it's definitely my weakest area from MOO.

Inter-turn: Right first things first, change the colour!
Spent our meagre reserve on Jeruth and Garuga 40BC is not enough to hold onto & changed priorities slightly on Sssla Heralth and Rinnenth just to get pop grown this turn

T 61: Hyper-Vs pop - get full choice, go with Ion cannon (know it's dear but best choice too)
Change tech priorities mindful of the discussion re keeping balanced tech to get best return. But take one tick from everything and put to propulsion as that's the priority
catch spies, let slide
Increase trade with Meklonar to 175BC try for NAP no.

T 62: Get Nuke engines, don't redesign anything - Sublight only option to move forward go for Irridium (range 6) after much thought, we need to settle Mesarth and especiallyAvantador

T 64: combat at Taenth Transistor Ftr-04x retreat has beams, no damage to our ship renamed Transistor fighter (Meklonar lasers small fighter design)

T 65: Class 2 deflectors - only Class 3 to move
Up the trade with Kholdan to 200BC - more trade better diplo points

T 66: Caydranth Venom Med fighter (Kholdan lasers) 1HKs our scout retreat from second Venom at Mesarth
Death Spores come in IT 30 or Colonize toxic - Go with toxic allows 4 more colonies - 5 with range

T67: Retreat from Tessith Venom again
RW80% comes in, more money Duralloy over IIT8 to move the tree forward
In a fit of paranoia, push my mature colonies to building a base The Venoms are moving coreward from the looks of it

T 68: retreat from Calculator Med fighter at Avantador Is missile boat (Melklonar medium missile boat, may have lasers)- Valstrath maxes factory

T 70: handover, Sssla Heralth and Rinnenth have all a base Valstrath will finish at eot have set extra to grow pop. There are scouts retreating which should be sent back out.

In case anybody's wondering how I changed the colour to green, click on the colour button beside our portrait in the Diplomacy screen and it will give you a few options to choose from.

[rgp151]

Just curious (as I haven't loaded the file and am not playing), when you said you needed to get range tech to settle some planets, I assume you mean they are within the range of Extended Fuel Tanks, but you can't reach them without. If so, then I would typically take Sub-lights in that scenario and just build a Colony Ship with Extended Fuel Tanks. Either bite the bullet and just build a Huge ship, OR get the techs needed to miniaturize enough to fit it all on a Large, which I think you get once you have around Tech level 10 in Construction and Planetology (like you've researched your second tier in Construction and Planetology). I'm not sure exactly what it takes to be able to fit it all on a Large, but anyway, that's how I usually go about it.

[haphazard1]

Sounds like some productive turns, Brian Shanahan. Factories built, tech discovered, no major bad news. Good stuff.

Since we have Warp 2 engines, going for range rather than Warp 3 seems like a solid choice. We may have enough tech to put fuel tanks on a regular colony ship (not sure), but would not have enough to do so for a hostile environment colony ship. A huge hull can be built to grab a critical world or open up an area, but it is a very large cost. Putting those BCs into researching range instead works.

Thanks for the note on changing the colors. I had not realized you could do that in RotP.

[Dp101]

We have basically exactly enough tech to make a large ER colony ship, funnily enough nuclear engines make the difference in the end for saving power and thus space. No hostile colony ships possible, but it's not like we need more than the couple of ER larges. Controlled toxic would also allow leapfrogging to everywhere we need to go without range 6, so even if there weren't nonhostile planets near the hostile ones we'd be able to get to them. I always forget how surprisingly early large ER colony ships become buildable, though I still don't disagree with grabbing range 6 regardless given that impulse engines aren't that big an upgrade.

I did mention the transistors were fighters back in my session and suggested renaming them at the time after Ref's first turn, but I haven't had the save since then, so couldn't actually handle it myself. Regardless, all sounds good so far - I wouldn't be surprised also if those venoms have battle scanners, the AI tends to like having a medium battle scanner design. Overall, looks like good turns!

[Fenn]

Got the save, will try and run through it tomorrow evening.

[Fenn]

Turned out to have some extra time tonight. A fairly successful ten turns were had:

Here we are at Turn 70. In our vicinity are three more habitable, uncolonized planets, but the other races could grab them at any time - the #1 lizard priority is to make a play for them, especially the size 85 Tessith. Happily, further developments in ship design have opened up the possibility of building reserve fuel tanks and more advanced engines using the old colony ship hulls at only slightly greater expense, despite the limited production run we can expect. Work on the new designs begins immediately.

...So yeah, thanks to miniaturization we can indeed have Large Colony Ships with Reserve Fuel Tanks and Nuclear Engines. I'm also worried about the AI putting armed ships above Tessith and Avantador like the Kholdan have done with Mesarth, so I also design a long-ranged Medium ship with Lasers to at least put up a fight if we need to, along with a Large with Hyper-Vs and a Battle Scanner.


After a couple turns, colony ships from Sssla and Heralth make their maiden voyage towards Tessith and Mesarth, with the first of the long-ranged Laser fighters accompanying them; a third ship bound for Avantador leaves two turns later.

When the first ship arrives on Tessith on Turn 75, no enemy vessels are in the area, and in fact the Kholdan ships that were at Mesarth are nowhere to be seen, so we needn't fight for them at all - at least not yet. Mesarth and later Avantador are indeed colonized without incident, and transport ships from pretty much every developed planet set flight to kickstart the colonies while our scouts head for the two new systems in range.


One of these is between two Kholdan planets and probably occupied already, but the other is a red star quite close to Mesarth I have some hope for - unfortunately the Kholdan beat us to it by a few turns, for all the good this Ultra Poor planet will do them. it's no big loss, but with this we're just about boxed in from further peaceful expansion, unless the worlds north from Avantador turn out to be empty still. It might be time to consider attacking one of our neighbours - the Meklonar especially seem technologically backward and only possess four planets.

Otherwise, no techs popped and diplomatic efforts proved unfruitful; we signed up both to an increase in trade up to 250BC, and while the Meklonar were willing to trade Deuterium Fuel Cells (range 5), they wanted Reduced Industrial Waste or Improved Eco Restoration for it, which did not seem a good trade for us.


This didn't fit in well anywhere, but - look at all those criss-crossing lines! It's a busy corner of space here.

[Dp101]

Looks like things went about as well as we could have reasonably hoped! I take it the white planet was already owned by the bugs? I'd suggest in future flagging places that we've been pushed back from if we didn't get a scout off, just for future reference. Hopefully the LR Lasers on Avantador can go scout the neighbourhood shortly.

[haphazard1]

I will second Dp101 -- looks about as good as we could have expected, Fenn. Nice turn set.

Our local area is certainly looking pretty crowded. Going to offense is a possibility, but do we have the tech and production to do so successfully? I need to take a look at the save and think a bit, hopefully more comments in an hour or two. Any suggestions from the team are most welcome.

[haphazard1]

OK, I have looked over the save. Lots of stuff going on....

Our lizards are up to nine worlds. Three of them are brand new colonies, still waiting for seed pop to arrive. One of these (Avantador) is sadly poor. Do we want to make the effort to industrialize it? It will take a long time, and opens the possibility of it being captured and tech taken from us unless we can defend it properly.

We are not currently doing any spying on our neighbors. Do we want to try any? Xenophobic empires are especially unhappy about spying, so there would likely be a diplo hit to doing so. But we would learn more of their tech and could potentially try some trading if they have anything useful.

Important notes: The bugs know the rocks. The machines know the humans and the brains. So that gives us a pretty good idea who is out there in our galaxy.

I have updated some of the system flags. I removed the flags from our new colonies, since they are ours now. Systems with no planets are still purple. Systems with worlds we can not currently settle but which will become habitable with our current Controlled Toxic research are yellow. (There are 5 of these, so pushing planetology research could expand our empire by more than half. High priority.)

Do we want to be building missile ships? We are spending 9% of our empire production on ship maintenance already. If we do not have definite plans to use them soon, I am not sure if more fleet is better than putting more BCs into research.

Our only research project that is even somewhat close to completion is IRC3, which will be a big help for our developed worlds. It is unlikely to pop during my turn set unless we significantly boost research. Nothing else is likely to pop soon.

OK, those are my initial thoughts on the save. I should be able to play later today, with a focus on getting our new colonies started. I would appreciate any thoughts from the team on spying, whether to industrialize poor Avantador, and the general situation.

[Fenn]

Yes, the white planet was already owned by the bugs and I didn't want to get into a fight over it, so it's unscouted for now.

Spying, I think we could hold off for now - if the bugs get angry and start a war over it things could get ugly. Would tentatively prefer to avoid making trouble until we have more worlds to work with, like after Controlled Toxic comes in. Avantador I do think is worth building some factories on at some point - it's only regular Poor after all, and decently sized. Probably best for growing pop to send to other worlds for now, though?

As for the ships, we can probably stop building more for now - I just felt that having 5 Laser Fighters as our entire military was asking for trouble.