Thanks - I'm glad the intro was fun! (And I'll fix the typo; thanks for pointing it out!)
I fear the turns are indeed taking me a long time; I hope not too long, but if y'all want me to wrap up ASAP and hand off whatever I've got, I'll do so. As if now, I'm just up to turn 204, and have only written up half of those! Here's the report for that half though, just closing the book on one front while preparations are made in the background for a different front entirely:
Report, Turns 201-202:
Jenner-Bound, Deep Space
The combat fleet is showing off again. Easy for them to do that when they're not the ones who have to land on the planets and clean out enemy resistance. I am glad they killed the three Parallax cruisers with their stores of antimatter bombs, and of course that they cleared the missile bases out of our way, but they not only showed off their engines, getting in there a year ahead of us, but showed off their everything, overkilling the defenses with probably at least five times as many ships as they really needed. It's good they're there to watch over us on our way in anyway: There are Silicoids right next door who are probably going to smell an opportunity - or ... feel its vibrations? Whatever it is those Crysties do when they sense things.
I'm sure the fleet have plenty of good reasons for showing up early. If nothing else, it means most of them can redeploy early too, to wherever command thinks they're needed - and early is absolutely the name of the game here. Our research labs back home are going at full blaze, and that means the clock is ticking before the old-generation bombers and blind hard-beam cruisers - never mind the Monitors, all six of them, half a century old already, still limping along at sub-light speeds, trying desperately to keep up with the real fleets so we'll have a chance to see what we're up against when we reach enemy space. Our fleet may be the most effective fighting force in the galaxy - they'd better be, considering the inexplicable obsession with scatter-pack missing-boats that seems to have infected everybody who isn't a lizard whose ships we've seen - but we're going to be able to build new ships soon that'll make our current designs look like old wastepaper scraps ... so maybe only three or four times as good as an enemy starfleet!
It's nice to think about, but for me, the technology that matters is the kind I'm training with right now: My best protection once we hit the ground will be my fellow lizards - but my next-best protection will be the heavy armored exoskeleton with in-built energy shield capable of absorbing the full force of a Psilon ion blast, and with strength enough to mount a full-sized fusion rifle to blast straight through the deflectors Psilons use in their battle suits. It's going to be a bloodbath down there, I already know - or rather, it's going to be a blackened crater full of charred equipment and vaporized corpses, considering the firepower both sides are bringing to bear - but hopefully on our side, there will be enough survivors to tell stories of the horrors of war.
Central Holo-Chamber, Pasteur
I understand you wish to speak with me, Ambassador Pyrite? It's an honor to receive you, even virtually. Of course I realize there can be no question of actually meeting in person; I am aware of your cultural tradition that any contact with non-silicon-based life contaminates the internal structure of the being, and I respect your beliefs, no matter how ours may differ from them in every possible respect. Moreover, I am prepared to confirm the outcome of the battle for Jenner, right at the edge of your space, and to express our appreciation for your people's decision to leave the star system rather than being blasted into their component minerals by the energy-to-matter weapons on our Beamer ships. Indeed, now that our troops on the ground have actually claimed the Jenner colony for themselves, I have every hope and expectation that you will respect the system's boundaries in accordance with our standing non-aggression pact. So - with all that established, was there anything else you wished to discuss?
Ah - I see you were paying about the same attention to my opening speech as you have been to the affairs of the galaxy. If by our "wish to join" what you call your fight against the Mentaran, you mean our already-fulfilled, single-handed conquest of nearly ninety-five percent of the Mentaran Republic's territory while you were making occasional, pointless, uncoordinate, and inadequate attacks with a bunch of scatter boats and associated garbage, then I will gladly show you how we conduct ourselves on the battlefield: Just have a look at the backfile of embedded reporters' footage. And if I were not aware that raising our status in your imperial court, given that we are not silicon-based beings, is a feat roughly on the order of raising a stone higher than the center of its planet, I might be a little more grateful for the back-handed compliment. As it is, I'll assure you that you are welcome to thank all your magmatic deities for the intervention of the nebulae between our territories.
Ssssssth - I'm glad to be rid of that thing ... and a little disappointed that I haven't heard more from the labs. I don't suppose....
Sadly, no: It seems no one is willing to predict a weapons breakthrough within the next year or two, though every other field of research seems promising. I won't hold my breath on any of them: I've heard promises before - I am a diplomat you know - but if we don't get a slate of new technologies soon, we may not be able to hold off much longer before building ourselves a new fleet. Of course there's nothing to be done about that now - and while I'm thinking of it, it's best that I make another holo-call.
...
Greetings, o wiseacre and knobbly ambassador! I trust my recollection of the proper terms of address selected by your gracious leader are still correct, after all these years of silence between us?
Good, good. You see, I have a proposal, and I really hope you'll like it, because I was just speaking with the crystalline ambassador not long ago, and he liked our war against you so much, I felt almost sick to my stomach about prosecuting it further. Besides, Dynalon is running out of places to hide, and if we were to continue this war, the only target we'd have left would be the planet where he's living - along with all the other millions of your people, apart from a few hanging out in orbit aboard your exicrably-designed ships. So what say we give you a break and let you concentrate on not getting genocided out of existence by the rocks next door?
Excellent! I'm glad you could see reason in spite of the loathing and terror in which lizards are now held by every living member of your civilization! Is it true that when Menta ... ah, excuse me, make that Vesalians see a shooting star in the sky, they cower in case it turns out to be one of our transports? No, no, don't tell me; some secrets, I imagine, are best kept for yourselves. Really though, you have no cause at all for fear: I sincerely hope this peace will last a millenium or more, and even that some of you will live long enough to see it play out! All it will really take will be for the rocks to decide not to kill all of you off, since we certainly don't plan to waste time doing it ourselves. Of course, if they do destroy you, that might earn them enough ire among the other peoples of the galaxy that we might be selected to rule the galaxy in name - let's be honest here, we already do in fact - and rein the vile rock-spawn in. So really, it works out for us either way!
I'm tempted to also include a picture of what our fleet (including transports) looked like that turn, but if you just imagine three games of cat's cradle getting tangled up together, you'll be most of the way there!
[EDIT:
(May 26th, 2024, 10:01)Dp101 Wrote: Do you know if the formula for that kind of generic construction-based miniaturisation exists anywhere?
According to the OSG, and assuming RotP's is the same as MoO's, the amount of available space on a hull of each size increases by 2% per tech level in Construction, in addition to miniaturization of armor, reserve fuel tanks, autorepair, etc.]
Very nice write up, RefSteel. Nice to see proper court etiquette being followed in our diplomatic holo calls.
Also nice to see the war with the Mentarans has concluded, leaving them a single poor planet like we did with the Meklonar. Annexing our neighbors' planets has expanded our empire to a position of power in the galaxy. It is a big galaxy and we have a long way to go; we have not even met a couple of races. Depending on how things develop, we may never meet them...which feels a bit odd.
No worries about time from me. I am fine with whatever works for the rest of the team.
Thanks! I finished the write-up and pictures for what I've played so far. The rest will probably have to wait until at least tomorrow, so if Brian is eager to take on this ... ah ... interesting situation sooner, I can post the current save. It's actually mostly a natural hand-over point if you want it to be: A whole new situation to plan around thanks to the Sol people's declaration or war, and only a few (and shorter-distance, more-straightforward) attacks-in-progress still in space. If everyone's willing to wait on me though, I'd be more than happy to play out the rest of my turns as time and health allow in the next day or two!
Report, T203-204:
Tyranid Memorial Nebula-Effect Observatory, Oviraptoria
It's a good year for discovery. I knew our scientists - of course with the approval of the military intelligence division, which has its own uses for the data that comes back that way - was installing advanced scanners on all our ships. What I didn't realize was that they'd even extended that to our transports, and that the built-in planetary survey package worked as well as the huge nine-parsec scanning modules at our colonies!
The dead world at Aldea V harbored one of the few Earthonian colonies we'd never seen before, and I assumed it would be another year before we could get the equipment installed to scan it at a distance from a new world, but it looks like some of the trailing Enya transports - must have been a mix-up in there somewhere; they shouldn't be trailing, but that's not my problem, you know - got a close-up view of the place as it went by. That, or ... looking at it now, it may not have been the transports after all: They show up close by in the image because it's compiled with our current fleet positions, up to date, but the scan of the actual planet would have taken time to process and produce, and it may have come from the small fleet that passed by the opposite side of Aldea earlier in the year. Either way, it's nice to know. I always like filling up holes in our picture of the galaxy.
Of course, here in the nebula, our main concern is observing its disruptive effects on starship and planetary shielding, with all its implicatios for field mechanics generally. I've long said that outside of a planet's magnetosphere, nebulonic effects dominate to such an extent that there's no way for any theoretical deflector shield to function, such that if we want to defenses of that kind, we must find a way to build them along different lines entirely. So we've been working on that. Protecting a planetary mass at the bottom of its own gravity well from orbital bombardment is obviously a hard problem in a nebula, but we're making real progress nonetheless!
One of the most promising ideas for a new method of shielding starships has been a field that would alter quantum interactions to render a curved space around each ship the effective least-time path for all quantum purposes, thereby in effect bending energy around the ship itself, limiting its interactions with the visible universe around it to the minimum unavoidable effects of quantum uncertainty. A ship designed along these lines would be nearly impossible to target effectively with ordinary weapons, could evade the detection-reaction protocols of repulsor beams, and would be impossible to detect even with advanced scanners prior to entering combat range! Sadly, the ship's own weapons would be equally affected, and in fact would bend back upon the ship itself, which made it impractical for combat use - until we were able, just this year, to devise an energy field interaction that will allow the pilot of such a ship to lower our "cloaking field" at a moment's notice and fire normally, and even - though of course it takes longer to re-establish the field - to re-establish it again during combat! More than that, though my dreams of "cloaking" an entire planet, due to problems of scale and gravitational effects, would require the generation of a few orders of magnitude more energy than are currently produced by all the power plants currently known to exist in the entire galaxy, I believe there are applications of some of the field interactions we had to solve along the way that could boost the effective protection of all our planetary shields in other ways! Sadly, these theoretical new planetary shields, code-named Class-XV, would be as inoperable here in our nebula as any other shields in the galaxy, but our other worlds could benefit from them, surely!
Altair Sector Command Flagship, Sato Orbit
It's time we stopped being coy, and that our reporting services quit burying the lede. Our fleets have arrived simultaneously, and attacked without fear and without mercy. We lost about twenty percent of our little anti-matter bombers, and the sacrifice of those brave pilots will be remembered for all of history. Thanks to their efforts, thanks to their courage, flying already-obsolete eggshell hulls into the teeth of clouds of missiles, without the loss of a single other ship, we were able to achieve total victory. The Conclave now rules at the garden world of Sato...
...as at Nishio, near and lush as this world and larger still, at the oceans of Aduchi with their still-gleaming remnants of ancient precursor cities, at Enya and Nikki with their incalculable mineral riches, at fiery Aoki and Sano, the nearest links to our old territory, and at Ando by the galactic rim with such mineral wealth as we would have called glorious were it not for the likes of our Bevurth, the colony we slyly named "Not Extant," and now Enya and Nikki. Even Ashina's seas and Ishida's cold, dead landscape are ours, taken as stepping stones to future targets. Our fleets orbit all these worlds now uncontested: Ten star systems claimed in a single alpha strike to lead off the war, with no need to hold in place as the enemy tries to rebuild missile bases and defense fleets, because our transports are already going in right behind our main fleets!
The battle is still raging on the surface of Nishio, the largest world we claimed this year, but as you see, it's a foregone conclusion: We have superiority in numbers, armor, and shielding, and they have nothing on us but the desperation of needing to defend their decadent eyries. Already, we've eliminated avian resistance on the smaller worlds, and we're already recovering the secrets of Adachi's labs: The enemys most-advanced, necessarily, since it was there alone that they could study the Ancients' cities. Environmental controls for colonies on worlds like Ishida, anti-matter torpedos which might be fun to combine with the new cloaking fields from Oviraptoria's observatory, another incremental step forward in deflector shield technology, and hilariously mis-iconed anti-missile rocket technology - I can see the reverse-engineering squads put their presentation together in a hurry - but I'll let their squad leader show off the reason they were so eager to get their specs out to the rest of the Conclave ASAP:
Thanks to these new robotic controls, our shipyard worlds are going to be able to use a lot of factories: Fully a third again as many as they could work previously. That's it: We've now matched the Altairans' technology everywhere except where we already exceed it. The fighting is over down below, as on all nine other worlds we've just claimed. I'll let the scene at Ashina stand for all, at what used to be a critical border world with another of our former enemies - and therefore a border world with us until today:
We sent a lot of transports in. We had to: We're well past our old frontier out here, and there are more worlds to conquer, out towared the galactic rim! Word is getting around, meanwhile, of what we've accomplished today. I see that ambassador from the planet whose name seems to translate as Soil has something to say:
I like these Soilans. They're just so direct and honest in their dealings. Their ally in the corner of the galaxy, in the course of a single day's fighting, went from equal partner to collapsing remnant of a former power, and so the Soilites dutifully declared war. Yet they know what they're getting into: They realize their declaration will irritate our people and that compared to ours, their capabilities are negligible. And so they offer their actions to us as a lesson on what not to do under any circumstances! They even took time out with their final sentence to commiserate with our aging ambassador's ongoing struggles with his personal health, recognizing the sad fact that if he dies in bed within the next few years, he might not - quite - live long enough to see the full fruition of the object lesson in why one should never do what the Soilers are demonstrating.
Now it's time to make plans for how to do that though, redirecting our fleets accordingly. For the purpose, here's a look at where most of our fleet resides, in and around Altairan space.
Up until this year, this wouldn't have included all of it: One of our conquests, rich Ando, out by the rim, is far off at the edge of the galaxy. We can't possibly keep up this pace, these four years of intensive efforts and planning all coming together simultaneously, but I'd say we've made a pretty good beginning. Now to continue it - and to see if our new enemies have a counter-attack in them!
Very nice work, RefSteel! Ten planets in one huge strike, and the war with the birds is already pretty much down to mopping up. The humans' diplomatic response is rather ironic, given the balance of power in the galaxy. Maybe Triumvir Alexander is color blind, and mis-read the graphs?
We can see if Brian wants to take over here, or whether you continuing with the turn set would fit schedules better. Whatever works best for him is fine with me.
(May 27th, 2024, 14:13)RefSteel Wrote: Thanks! I finished the write-up and pictures for what I've played so far. The rest will probably have to wait until at least tomorrow, so if Brian is eager to take on this ... ah ... interesting situation sooner, I can post the current save. It's actually mostly a natural hand-over point if you want it to be: A whole new situation to plan around thanks to the Sol people's declaration or war, and only a few (and shorter-distance, more-straightforward) attacks-in-progress still in space. If everyone's willing to wait on me though, I'd be more than happy to play out the rest of my turns as time and health allow in the next day or two!
Report, T203-204:
[i]Tyranid Memorial Nebula-Effect Observatory, Oviraptoria[i]
It's a good year for discovery. I knew our scientists - of course with the approval of the military intelligence division, which has its own uses for the data that comes back that way - was installing advanced scanners on all our ships. What I didn't realize was that they'd even extended that to our transports, and that the built-in planetary survey package worked as well as the huge nine-parsec scanning modules at our colonies!
The dead world at Aldea V harbored one of the few Earthonian colonies we'd never seen before, and I assumed it would be another year before we could get the equipment installed to scan it at a distance from a new world, but it looks like some of the trailing Enya transports - must have been a mix-up in there somewhere; they shouldn't be trailing, but that's not my problem, you know - got a close-up view of the place as it went by. That, or ... looking at it now, it may not have been the transports after all: They show up close by in the image because it's compiled with our current fleet positions, up to date, but the scan of the actual planet would have taken time to process and produce, and it may have come from the small fleet that passed by the opposite side of Aldea earlier in the year. Either way, it's nice to know. I always like filling up holes in our picture of the galaxy.
Of course, here in the nebula, our main concern is observing its disruptive effects on starship and planetary shielding, with all its implicatios for field mechanics generally. I've long said that outside of a planet's magnetosphere, nebulonic effects dominate to such an extent that there's no way for any theoretical deflector shield to function, such that if we want to defenses of that kind, we must find a way to build them along different lines entirely. So we've been working on that. Protecting a planetary mass at the bottom of its own gravity well from orbital bombardment is obviously a hard problem in a nebula, but we're making real progress nonetheless!
One of the most promising ideas for a new method of shielding starships has been a field that would alter quantum interactions to render a curved space around each ship the effective least-time path for all quantum purposes, thereby in effect bending energy around the ship itself, limiting its interactions with the visible universe around it to the minimum unavoidable effects of quantum uncertainty. A ship designed along these lines would be nearly impossible to target effectively with ordinary weapons, could evade the detection-reaction protocols of repulsor beams, and would be impossible to detect even with advanced scanners prior to entering combat range! Sadly, the ship's own weapons would be equally affected, and in fact would bend back upon the ship itself, which made it impractical for combat use - until we were able, just this year, to devise an energy field interaction that will allow the pilot of such a ship to lower our "cloaking field" at a moment's notice and fire normally, and even - though of course it takes longer to re-establish the field - to re-establish it again during combat! More than that, though my dreams of "cloaking" an entire planet, due to problems of scale and gravitational effects, would require the generation of a few orders of magnitude more energy than are currently produced by all the power plants currently known to exist in the entire galaxy, I believe there are applications of some of the field interactions we had to solve along the way that could boost the effective protection of all our planetary shields in other ways! Sadly, these theoretical new planetary shields, code-named Class-XV, would be as inoperable here in our nebula as any other shields in the galaxy, but our other worlds could benefit from them, surely!
[i]Altair Sector Command Flagship, Sato Orbit[i]
It's time we stopped being coy, and that our reporting services quit burying the lede. Our fleets have arrived simultaneously, and attacked without fear and without mercy. We lost about twenty percent of our little anti-matter bombers, and the sacrifice of those brave pilots will be remembered for all of history. Thanks to their efforts, thanks to their courage, flying already-obsolete eggshell hulls into the teeth of clouds of missiles, without the loss of a single other ship, we were able to achieve total victory. The Conclave now rules at the garden world of Sato...
...as at Nishio, near and lush as this world and larger still, at the oceans of Aduchi with their still-gleaming remnants of ancient precursor cities, at Enya and Nikki with their incalculable mineral riches, at fiery Aoki and Sano, the nearest links to our old territory, and at Ando by the galactic rim with such mineral wealth as we would have called glorious were it not for the likes of our Bevurth, the colony we slyly named "Not Extant," and now Enya and Nikki. Even Ashina's seas and Ishida's cold, dead landscape are ours, taken as stepping stones to future targets. Our fleets orbit all these worlds now uncontested: Ten star systems claimed in a single alpha strike to lead off the war, with no need to hold in place as the enemy tries to rebuild missile bases and defense fleets, because our transports are already going in right behind our main fleets!
The battle is still raging on the surface of Nishio, the largest world we claimed this year, but as you see, it's a foregone conclusion: We have superiority in numbers, armor, and shielding, and they have nothing on us but the desperation of needing to defend their decadent eyries. Already, we've eliminated avian resistance on the smaller worlds, and we're already recovering the secrets of Adachi's labs: The enemys most-advanced, necessarily, since it was there alone that they could study the Ancients' cities. Environmental controls for colonies on worlds like Ishida, anti-matter torpedos which might be fun to combine with the new cloaking fields from Oviraptoria's observatory, another incremental step forward in deflector shield technology, and hilariously mis-iconed anti-missile rocket technology - I can see the reverse-engineering squads put their presentation together in a hurry - but I'll let their squad leader show off the reason they were so eager to get their specs out to the rest of the Conclave ASAP:
Thanks to these new robotic controls, our shipyard worlds are going to be able to use a lot of factories: Fully a third again as many as they could work previously. That's it: We've now matched the Altairans' technology everywhere except where we already exceed it. The fighting is over down below, as on all nine other worlds we've just claimed. I'll let the scene at Ashina stand for all, at what used to be a critical border world with another of our former enemies - and therefore a border world with us until today:
We sent a lot of transports in. We had to: We're well past our old frontier out here, and there are more worlds to conquer, out towared the galactic rim! Word is getting around, meanwhile, of what we've accomplished today. I see that ambassador from the planet whose name seems to translate as Soil has something to say:
I like these Soilans. They're just so direct and honest in their dealings. Their ally in the corner of the galaxy, in the course of a single day's fighting, went from equal partner to collapsing remnant of a former power, and so the Soilites dutifully declared war. Yet they know what they're getting into: They realize their declaration will irritate our people and that compared to ours, their capabilities are negligible. And so they offer their actions to us as a lesson on what not to do under any circumstances! They even took time out with their final sentence to commiserate with our aging ambassador's ongoing struggles with his personal health, recognizing the sad fact that if he dies in bed within the next few years, he might not - quite - live long enough to see the full fruition of the object lesson in why one should never do what the Soilers are demonstrating.
Now it's time to make plans for how to do that though, redirecting our fleets accordingly. For the purpose, here's a look at where most of our fleet resides, in and around Altairan space.
Up until this year, this wouldn't have included all of it: One of our conquests, rich Ando, out by the rim, is far off at the edge of the galaxy. We can't possibly keep up this pace, these four years of intensive efforts and planning all coming together simultaneously, but I'd say we've made a pretty good beginning. Now to continue it - and to see if our new enemies have a counter-attack in them!
No rush with things, it sounds like the turns are being handled well! Minor typo though, the italics at the top of the spoiler are broken. And looking at the report before this, I feel like at some point I need to actually properly fiddle with the sliders so I'm running a less mindless config when I hand over the save given how you prefer focusing on a few specific techs at the time lol. Like I firmly believe that your approach is better than mine, yet old habits die hard and I've proven incapable of actually changing anything.. ah well, not like it matters given how this game is going lol.
The tech spending distribution is definitely different in RotP than it was in MOO. (At least if I am understanding correctly.) In MOO there was no penalty for focusing heavily on one tech, and the previous investment bonus effect could make it a very effective approach. In RotP you miss out on the potential bonus for even research distribution, so there is opportunity cost even if not direct costs to doing so. Unless there is an urgent need (range tech early, etc.), I do not see much reason to not go with an even distribution of research.
(May 27th, 2024, 23:13)haphazard1 Wrote: The tech spending distribution is definitely different in RotP than it was in MOO. (At least if I am understanding correctly.) In MOO there was no penalty for focusing heavily on one tech, and the previous investment bonus effect could make it a very effective approach. In RotP you miss out on the potential bonus for even research distribution, so there is opportunity cost even if not direct costs to doing so. Unless there is an urgent need (range tech early, etc.), I do not see much reason to not go with an even distribution of research.
From the manual:
Quote:Note that the first 1/6th of each bar applies a 25% bonus to the
conversion from BCs to research points. This means you'll optimize research spending by
keeping all six bars equal.
So yeah, it does sound like that's the case. However I typically don't. For races that are Poor in an area I typically boost that area a little, and I also typically put a few extra clicks into Computers regardless. Certainly I think it does discourage heavily skewed research spending, but generally what I do is I hit =, then back off any areas I want to by 1 click and then redistribute those single clicks to other areas, so you aren't really losing out on much of the bonus. For Sakkra my typical allocation by mid game is to have backed every area off by 1 click except for Computers, and I put all of the extra clicks into computers. So -1 to to all areas, but +5 to Computers.
Also, on a side note I was really surprised to see the choice of Particle Beam over Gauss Auto Cannon. I always consider Gauss Auto Cannon to be the single best weapon in the game, and have never ever picked anything over it.
Oh, the turns are definitely fun - just really time-consuming at a time when my gaming time is pretty limited. I've now played up to turn 207 and caught up the report through the previous year, and I'm hoping to close out the set tomorrow. Seriously though, with the size of our current empire and everything going on, each turn feels like about five of them ... admittedly in no small part because of complexity introduced by ... well, me. Thanks again for your patience with me!
(Also, thanks again for pointing out some of my typos, Dp101! I've fixed the italics above now.)
(And I do intend to respond to rgp151's ship design breakout thread and to the tech discussion here, but ... sleep first, and then more Real Life Stuff, and then turns and the report, are all ahead of them in queue!)
Report, part 3: Turn 204, continued, through 206:
NMATDD-242 Orbital Spaceyard, Meklon
Well, we knew it was always a possibility, even at the time. When the Conclave ruling council finally broke down and admitted they needed new ships now, and couldn't wait for any more new technology, they were all too well aware of investing over a trillion credits in ships that would soon be completely obsolete. Just the same, for their time, I must say that those new ships were awfully pretty!
We had - by and large we still have - no real idea of what the Earthling starfleet is mounting, and our old Monitors are just too old and slow and far from this part of space to be much immediate use for scanning, but a Chameleon-class destroyer is far more than a scanning ship. In spite of its eggshell hull, it can hold its own in battle because with stabilizer, cloak, and maneuverability maxed, it's practically impossible for enemy weapons to track. It can sweep in right past deflector screens if necessary, drop cloak, and open up with twin phaser batteries at point-blank range, directed by the most-advanced targeting system in our entire fleet. With enough of these, if necessary, we could have taken on anything in space. That was the theory, and a good one, I thought ... and then suddenly everything started happening this year.
So let me talk a little about strategy here: The war against the Earthonians isn't anything like the bird war we started with a devastating alpha-strike ... except in the ways it is. The key is that we aren't out to kill Earthers, even if we do intend to eventually restrict them to a single humble star system in this galaxy: We're here to dismantle their ability to make war! That means we're hitting their production centers first - or as "first" as we can - and thanks to our advanced scanners, we know exactly where those are: Two rich worlds, including one almost on top of our original home space and one much nearer the Crystal front beyond the galactic core, plus their largest worlds, like Earth itself, Catulla, Acamar, and one other, named Akaali, even closer to Silicon space. We also wanted to scan as much of their fleet as we could, as quickly as possible, so we could plan how to deal with it more effectively, which is what the new Chameleons are all about - but we also had other targets for reasons of galactic geography: Our fleets and transports can't converge on our preferred targets right away, and unlike inthe Altair sector, where we could take our time to line things up and strike at most of our highest-priority targets simultaneously, we're at war with their allies already now, before a shot has been fired in anger between us, and that means we have to act quickly to minimize their ability to strike and to build up their war machine, so to an extent, we have to take what we can reach.
Even in the war we started last year intentionally, we weren't able to hit everything at once: Our leadership believed it would be better to strike when we did, when we could take control of critical targets like Adachi with its ancient cities, Enya and Nikki and to a barely-lesser extent Ando, with their untold mineral riches, and other key worlds in strategically valuable positions or with vast and fertile terrain, than to wait, giving the enemy another year in control of each while delaying our own possession for a year, just in hopes of hitting another key planet or two simultaneously. The delay was minimal in any case:
First, our Altair sector fleet moved in on its namesake star system and took control of the skies above an enemy homeworld with minimal losses - much like at Meklon decades ago and Mentar more recently. Thanks to our skeleton strike force - much of our fleet was already moving back toward Earthian space - we were able to keep the planet's surface mostly intact as well, taking out only six factories along with the three missile bases. At the same time though, the rest of the fleet was moving in - and met with disaster immediately! We thought we had sent enough ships to Acamar, the populous ape system on the galactic rim, to handle their three missile bases with ships to spare. Luck wasn't with us though, and many more of the scatter rockets from the enemy bases tore through far more of their targets than we had expected while our bombers were still closing for their initial attack run. Then more ill fortune, in the form of unpredictable and sudden high-atmosphere gusting took just enough of our bombs off-target that the surviving ships failed even to destroy a single missile base before the limping remainder, barely more than a third of the number that had arrived, were forced to retreat. Then at Aldea too - a comparatively small colony we had targeted exclusively because it was in easy reach of our fleets, we lost twenty bombers just to take out the planet's lone missile base. Everything still was going smoothly for the Altairan sector fleet - more than prepared, for instance, for Akechi's completion of an extra defensive base - and then there was no problem at Xendi, another small world near our fleets, since it had no bases at all, so all our Beamers had to do was paste a monkey Cruiser apparently designed by the same missile fetishists who served our other enemies so poorly, but there was real cause for concern as our ground troops went in. Altair held, as expected - it was simply too far from our primary hatchery worlds to get enough soldiers there in time - but the population that survived the slaughter was too small to represent any further threat, but Akechi fell to overwhelming numbers, and in our first invasion of an ape world, trying a quick strike on a minor world to remove one advance military base and a fraction of their production while fishing for reverse-engineering opportunities, in a battle with equivalent ground combat technology, our forces outnumbered theirs by more than three to two.
Against all odds, they wiped us out, scoring nearly two kills for every one of ours, denying us control of our first ex-Ape star. They did have the advantage of defending their home ground, but that effect doesn't even begin to explain the results. Somewhere, Teela Brown is laughing: Earth's natives, it seems, are born with incredible luck. So, for those of us who, grumbling, may have complained that with all our specialized expertise in planetological science, we might be expected at least to come up with a better strain of four-leafed shamrock than the Earth-bound variety, I should point out that in the labs where such discoveries, if anywhere, would take place, everything was still going swimmingly - which brings us back to the irony of our beautiful Chameleons.
None of them ever saw battle - none of them even left orbit at the planets where they were produced - before they became completely obsolete. The principles behind andrium armor would have allowed for a more potent design on their own, even without using the armor itself - and it's entirely possible we would have won the battles for Altair and Xendi by building exoskeletons from it for our troops if we'd finished work on it a year sooner than we did - but the key result, the critical result of the way we handled research, was the development of ion drives for our ships. Every single starship crew in our entire fleet is already on notice: They can finish their present missions, but thereafter, they're going to be transferring to new ships! The old ones are all already destined, before much longer, for the scrap heap.
All of which brings us to the present day, and the project we're unveiling here - and at several other key shipyards around the Conclave simultaneously! Last year, strokes of ill fortune for which we had inadequately prepared showed how our bombers are aging, all now already decades old. It's high time that we built a fleet that needn't worry about advanced scatter-packs, no matter whose, and that won't fall short of destroying enemy missile bases.
Behold - until its cloak is engaged and you can't anymore - the Ghost 6.0! With our most-advanced battle computer onboard, its smart munitions should be on target five times to the old bombers' three, meaning each of these can do more than three times as much damage as each of the old-style bomber, thanks to a second bomb rack on each. The racks are carefully separated for precision bombing runs, enabling a careful pilot to minimize collateral damage to valuable factories, and of course the cloaking device itself cuts missile hits against Ghosts on approach to the absolute minimum. With hundreds of new Ghosts due to be added to our fleet by this time next year, I am tempted to say we have developed a working solution to the problem of bad luck!
Sslobyrn Biochemical Laboratories, Rinnenth
I don't know why, but I just got a shiver down my spine - in spite of the constant tropical climate we maintain here in the lab to ensure some of our experimental strains of seeding plants are thriving. It's the feeling I get whenever someone says something prideful or semi-innocuous that no one should ever, ever say. Maybe they're repeating one of the lines our engineers were saying last year - I don't know - but what gave me the chills was seeing the latest from Tessith on the news.
Nearly three fourths of our once-copious trade is being eaten up by pirates, which might have been much more discouraging if not for the way roughly fifty percent had previously been lost simply by dint of the double war declaration that cut off all trade with the birds and nasty ape things. Naturally, we'll have to get rid of them when we can spare the ships, but I don't see why we should give them any kind of priority, no matter how heavily invested we are in our Hive and Imperium trades. We have better things to do than to worry about a few merchants getting harrassed, even if triangulating on their attacks does already suggest their base of operations must be in the Tessith system.
We're still fighting our way into Solese space, where in spite of making sure our fleets are heavily reinforced where possible, we've been taking more losses than expected consistently, but I'd like to point out that by "consistently," what I really mean is, "in a sufficiently small sample of cases that random variance could very easily explain everything we've seen," so I would advise deep breaths and refraining from pannicking.
For instance, if your ancestors used at one time to live on a planet named "Altair 3" or "Earth," or especially if you happen to be living on the latter yourself, you should consider that of all the transports - just a shade shy of a thousand strong - described on this display, en route to nine different worlds that once belonged to your people or your ally, and over which we now have orbital control, you must consider that many of those transports make up a second wave, a year or perhaps even two behind the first. Admittedly some, like Altair and Xendi, had been softened up by a prior wave already, and we tried to make quite sure when it came to the mineral riches of Alastria and Akritiri, but not all of these will have fallen by the end of the year.
I suppose if you were viewing this from Altair itself though, you would be busy with other things just at present.
As, for instance, drifting about in the form of fusion-cooked ashes on the wind. But you should realize, the joke's on us as much as on anyone. Just for instance, the brave agent who entered Hive space, daring their labs, risking their wrath and a third front to this devastating war of ours - mostly devastating to our enemies, but we've certainly lost a lot of swiftly-rebred military lives - finally penetrated to a major weapons database, and of the four advanced technologies available there, the one with which he came away...
...was a particle beam on which we would soon have completed research ourselves anyway. Secretly, too, while the glory and death mostly belonged to our bombers and troops, with Beamers flying space support over everything and burning any enemy ship that dared the skies, another vital mission was being performed by Chameleons, and even by the few Monitors that managed to limp back toward the front lines.
I've seen much worse starfleets than what the bird-brains are fielding - really! Not than the Falcons: Destroyers with armor, a token shield, and a huge stack of electronic counter-measures to protect a pair of five-pack scatter tubes would actually in the running for worst design in history if the Meks and Psilons hadn't already demonstrated that this kind of thing is routine. The Thunderbird battleships I was worried about are sort of like seven Falcons on a much-bigger, tougher, easier-to-hit hull, but they're so big, they can also mount some fusion bombs to mostly bounce prettily back into space off of our planetary shields, and enough neutron pellet guns to make it look like it might be a pretty good space-to-space combat ship if only they stripped off all the other garbage and scaled it down, with the same number of those, into a cruiser. The result is that their Sky Hawk bombers have to carry the entire fleet, but they're much more serious business: Destroyer hulls carrying three anti-matter bombs apiece, protected by twin neutron pellet guns to help them take out ships that try to stand between them and their target, they move at high speeds and their armor, minimal shielding, and ECM protection would help them survive missile strikes if only we were foolishly relying on bases in spite of already knowing that every single alien ship designer in the known galaxy has mistaken ECM jammers for something that helps a ship conduct its actual primary mission effectively. Those Sky Hawks are actually dangerous, and enough of them together would be scary, so it's a good thing for us that the birds have mostly been building exactly the wrong kinds of missile boats instead. You can see why we've been burning through bird space like a high-intensity laser beam through rice paper ... but of course, you didn't come to the labs to ask about alien starfleets, most likely.
In addition to ripping the enemy soldiers apart, our lizards on the ground have sent examples of Earthelian blueprints our way from the rich cities of Alastria for our analysis, including these for Scatter-7 rockets. If you are chuckling to yourself about the spelling of MIRV, please be aware that these rockets' primary purpose is to shoot down ships in space: They are emphatically not "multiple re-entry vehicles," but Multiple Independent Rocket Vehicles. Either way, especially if better deployed, they're much more dangerous than the Scatter-5 garbage most of the Altair fleet is carrying. We also picked up ECM jammers - both of classes 5 and 6 - which we might imaginably mount on a ship someday in the unlikely event that it would serve an actual purpose, but will be very useful for our spies and defensive bases, plus another level of waste reduction technology, which would make me glad we're working on a cheaper project to advance our state of construction science than yet another waste reduction technology if that cheaper project weren't just a way to reduce the cost of building more factories that won't be finished until we've hopefully been elected what we clearly are already: The rulers of the entire galaxy.
Admittedly, there are still a couple of things in the way first. For starters, even after our attempts to get scans in, we still know very little about the Earthorian fleet.
Surveys are quick, unarmed scout ships that elected to sit still and be destroyed rather than retreating from a recent fight, for reasons best known to their suicidal pilots, while the Frigates would be pretty decent bombers against missile bases that were sufficiently out of date, and though not technically scanned, we know from experience their Cruisers are yet another example of how not to build a good missile boat. (Seriously, the missile cruisers we built when we had no other ship-to-ship weapons but lasers, well over a hundred years ago, were better than these modern missile fleets!) But they have at least one Dreadnought on the board as well, as large as a Thunderbird, and based on superior technology, and we won't know what it's mounting until we meet one in battle - which is expected to happen within the year!
And as for me? Well, when I'm not busy coordinating with our espionage and reverse-enginering teams or snarking about our enemies' fleets, I putter around with my own little side-garden projects in planetology.
When the year began, our factories were already 94% efficient; we've come a long way in a mere two centuries from the days of 50% efficiency. But thanks to the Earthenvolk waste reduction techniques and now my project's fruition with the most-advanced wast clean-up in the galaxy, we've pushed it all the way up to 98%! You might say that means we're only saving an extra billion credits a year for every twenty-five factories, but have you seen the size of Conclave space? We have a lot of twenty-fives of factories! Now I'm thinking about something new though: With nothing else in particular apparently available as a possibility, and in case any of the aliens decides to stop pretending to be civilized and come after us with bioweapons, I'm thinking we may be able to someday develop an antidote - not just to bio toxins as we've been saying was a possibility for decades, but to pretty much universally everything! And thanks to our spy rendering a decade or more of weapons research completely redundant, since anti-matter and omega bombs should work just fine for the foreseeable future, we're noting the potential for neutronium bombs only in passing while our weapons labs try to devise a way to build a long-range disruptor weapon that doesn't simultaneously disrupt itself out of existence! All of it looks very promising, so it looks to me like we're cruising and everything's going to be great and there's really no need to worry about anything!
Oh. When will I ever learn not to say that kind of thing? On the plus side though? Even now that the lava rocks have broken their non-aggression pact with us, I don't see any of their fleets heading our way - just a bunch of Earthopians and Altairoids trying to get back to what used to be their fuel bases - and if the rocks do want to come at us, they'll have to make it through the nebula first too! Except, you know, for that one place, where our territories meet, and are about to be snuggled a whole lot closer...
...way out at the far edge of the galaxy....
(Don't worry: That fleet heading up to Orion is just an old Monitor, sent to have a look on a whim. It'll be scrapped en route this year, long before it actually gets there.)
That bomber design where the first slot is blank with the 2nd and 3rd being used deeply disturbs me, it's a sacred tradition to fill weapons from the start! Impressed by the rate of tech discoveries occurring, and despite how hectic the everything is, I have faith in our eventual victory. There's just a *lot* of stuff to chew through...
Also, while I don't seek to repoen the whole ship design discussion, it's interesting seeing the variety of ship sizes everyone here has used. When I play solo, I basically have 4 varieties of combat ships: small fighters (usually with NPGs), small bombers, medium missile boats if I need a stopgap defence and techs have been unkind, and huge general-purpose autorepair designs. This entirely leaves out larges, and as a result I don't think I've ever built one and put guns on it, yet others have designed several this run and the above report segment mentions a cruiser (which from context is a large) would be a good thing to scale the Thunderbird down into, and I just.. don't quite get it? Like, this isn't me saying it's bad or anything, I've just literally never had the thought "I really wish I had a large" before, and am not sure what would cause said thought to occur. Off the top of my head, the biggest benefit seems to be greatly reduced attrition compared to smaller designs while not having as much latency involved in building them compared to huges, and they do seem to be large enough such that you can justify putting a lot of defensive tools on them like shields and armour without it being a waste (and again, without having to take the time to build a huge) but I dunno what the actual reasons/ideas involved are, beyond the variety being neat.
Though I guess on that note, what are you thinking regarding the new warp 6 generation of designs outside of the already-designed bombers (side note: is it still the case that even vs less backwards empires it's *still* better to use antimatter bombs over omega-Vs? I can fully believe it but am a bit surprised if it hasn't changed yet)? Something exactly like the chameleon but with new engines? I guess not much has changed in terms of the context besides that, though we did get particle beams which present another option.
Nice to see proper court etiquette being followed in our diplomatic holo calls. 
Annexing our neighbors' planets has expanded our empire to a position of power in the galaxy. 
It is a big galaxy and we have a long way to go; we have not even met a couple of races. Depending on how things develop, we may never meet them...which feels a bit odd.
The humans' diplomatic response is rather ironic, given the balance of power in the galaxy. Maybe Triumvir Alexander is color blind, and mis-read the graphs? 
