I strongly agree that these turn sets should be fun. Anyone should feel free to ask for a skip or swap if time is tight or they are not feeling up to playing. SGs should be enjoyable. If the worst happens and our poor virtual birds get conquered or whatever...well, them's the breaks. We can always try again in another galaxy. I do hope we can pull this one out, though, after getting the eco tech early from the artifacts planet. Our region does have a sizable number of systems with no planets, which is a big negative. But maybe we can still manage something from this beginning.
I do appreciate the well-wishes, and at the same time feel like I might have had the wrong tone in my post from the reactions. It wasn't an incredible chore to play or anything, or unfun, the problem was I'd not had the time/energy to focus on the game at all since it started due to being busy/stressed, so I was going in basically cold (I did read the thread in advance) and the further complications from sickness (which ftr is just a cold, but that doesn't make it any less unpleasant) led to mistakes, and I tend to be extremely self-critical even at the best of times. So the overall result was me feeling less than great, but I don't regret playing the turns and not asking for a swap instead, it was overall good.
Edit: Maybe the clearer way to put it (might be a bit blunt but isn't intended to be rude, just straightforward) is that if I need to be skipped/swapped, I'd have requested as such. Since I did not, I was fine with playing the turns. Therefore people don't need to be concerned about whether I wanted to or not, because I already made a statement via acting.
Cool - I sort of assumed it was something like that, but wanted to make sure we were all on the same page (and, uh, remind myself; I have been known, just for instance, to play very late at night when I ought to be sleeping, which is very much not good for my health!) - and while I'm glad it's just a cold, I hate colds; feeling sick is awful, and I still hope you feel better soon in terms of work, stress, and the justacold!
(I'll also confess that my first instinct on reading your message was to immediately to want to apologize for overreacting, before I realized this was a symptom of my own tendency to self-criticism - which apparently was trying to get into a tug-of-war with yours over the glorious prize of self-blame!)
ALSO: I successfully loaded the save, had a look around, and realized what you mean, Dp101: We ... may be in a little trouble! There may have been a couple of things that you wouldn't have missed if you were at 100% that are going to make my early turns ... interesting. (And fun!) Some of it's good news, and some of it's bad news, and I'll let our newly-instated Sovereign introduce them (and my own initial perhaps-mistakes) in my...
Inherited Turn Report:
My nerves are shaky, almost twitchy, my feathers sticking out at crazy angles like a hatchling's down from sheer worry: The idea that I'll have to direct and defend not only my own sovereignty but that of all our people across the galaxy is terrifying. Like every other who ever has held this dreadful post in our people's history, my predecessor resigned the office when the responsibility became too much to bear with honor, but now I must shoulder it in turn, and I fear the many demands of office, borne too long and heavily, may have taken too great a toll. Our outgoing Sovereign just now spoke with me about the state of the galaxy, and kept saying things like, "I have no confidence in the things I did," and "It may not even matter," speaking with and of despondence rather than the joys of discovery and flight. I have no illusions that my task will be easy, nor that I can succeed alone. Perhaps nothing can be done, but so long as I can hold up the office, like my predecessor, I have to try ... and I needn't face these trials on my own!
Both of our pacifistic friends among the leadership of the galaxy are interested in trading for our advanced engines, and Alexander actually has an offer worth considering: By improving on our own lately-completed terraforming technology - the Earth version is 20% cheaper to implement, and offers 50% greater maximum yields before losing its efficacy - this trade will complete the process of firmly establishing the point, voiced by one of our former Sovereigns, that our choice of that terraforming project long ago was, retroactively at least, a complete and unmitigated waste. A review of our planets shows that in the past two years, we have made precisely zero use of our new terraforming techniques ... and I'm going to continue that policy for one more year to take advantage of the lower cost of Alexander's version once his scientist help us get the infrastructure for it into place ... and partly for other reasons.
Before I made this deal, I thought I was going to advise immediate terraforming on all our worlds, even sending a couple of transports forward from Monte Arenoso to Yonezuin anticipation of getting it done. I imagined we would need - and be able - to maximize our voting power for the upcoming election to prevent Alexander himself from ascending the throne of the galaxy. I was going to - but then I noticed two important things: First, some good news that I'll get to later, when we find out if it's really good enough. But second, there's some very, very bad news that I hadn't - and maybe should have - anticipated.
That's an armed Fiershan fleet, one cruiser and three destroyers strong, where no fleet should be, and from its hyperspace readings, I don't see how it can possibly be going anywhere but Hoshina, probably due to arrive in about three years. Our defenses and capacity to build them in that part of our space ... well, there isn't much to them; those colonies are still just too new and ill-protected to do much about that fleet! Three years with sublight engines is almost enough time to throw together a kind of response, but our options there are limited, and we know very little about Jasana's fleet.
This is how I even know what class of ships they are, but it also demonstrates our ignorance: Any or all of the Cheetah, Lynxes, or Catamount could carry beams or bombs or both - and though we can see ... somehow ... that their big Cheetah wasted space on counter-measures to missiles that don't exist and all of those ships are slow, even missiles fired with feline reflexes may be dangerous, depending on what kind and what they shoot at and when. This would be a dangerous fight, and we would need all our resources from that part of space to fight it with any hope of winning. All that would be true, and urgent, were it not for...
...Jasana's other attack fleet. There's no Catamount in this one, but with four of her destroyer-class Lynxes and a second cruiser - this one a Panther about which we know no more than about the Cheetah - it's hard to see any way we can stop this fleet ... especially since, if my estimate of their arrival date is true, that date is going to be sometime next year! I first did my due dilligence, to make sure I wasn't panicking unnecessarily: If they were hanging out in the Ando asteroid fields and just heading back to their presumptive homeworld through our space, they might possibly be positioned right around there. But on reviewing my predecessor's report from five years ago, and seeing no such fleet at Ando, nor anywhere else in our scanner range where they could have been en route, I had no choice but to conclude that they left Jasana's colony the following year, and are headed for Katsura as I feared.
So, with due dilligence confirming that it was necessary, I proceded immediately to the stage that, as explained, I had delayed until that work was duly complete: Blind and total panic.
After flying around in what my most-generous supporters might call "somewhat erratic circles," frequently rebounding from my holomap room's walls with all the grace of a blind fledgling caught in the midst of an electrical storm, shrilling the ancestral warning calls of every tribal people ever studied by the Altair University Department of Ornthropology, and waving all my limbs so wildly in all directions that I wound up with an attractive new carpet of feathers for the holomap room, I smoothed those portions of my plumage that were still attached to my body, breathing easier with the panic temporarily out of my system - I've only repeated the scene, more or less, once or twice an hour ever since - I leaned back on my perch to request a new ship design from our Bureau of Fighty Things. The result, the Chase 3.0 whose specs are displayed above, is never going to win any awards, though worlds better than our seventy-year-old 1.0 Chasers: The poor things are still firing lasers, still can't hit much with only class-1 computer targeting, and in spite of our pilots and their top-of-the-line maneuverability, will be facing feline gunners who refer to us by the names of their favorite cuts of meat. Still, they're what we've got for now, and we need something at Katsura, just in case the enemy has nothing but missiles and bombs at least, so we'll have a chance, maybe, to save the colony ... even if the ships we build there are going to be obsolete almost immediately.
If nothing else, the other pacifists - the militaristic ones with the giant and ... uh ... complicated ... brains - are going to see to that with the missile designs they're sending over for our engine technology. We won't actually be able to install those five-fold scatter rockets on our ships, but if we ever have the production facilities to build a missile base, they might help, and the attendant miniaturization necessary to fit so many Hyper-V rockets into such a small space should make our future fighters more potent, let us build more of them faster, or both. And though I hate to give away the secrets of our most-powerful drives, either here or for terraforming, they were our only real trading chip, and as you can see (excuse me while I take another panic break EEEaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii) - ahem - I felt it was kind of an emergency, and we were going to need all the weapons know-how and production base we could get, ASAP! I will note that these trades also mean that if we want to, when our next weapons and planetology projects complete, we'll have the choice to skip ahead to more-advanced projects than we could have contemplated even with those projects in, if not for these trades ... assuming we ever reach that point alive. I'm doing my best to ensure we do at least in the matter of weapons though: I doubt if lasers are going to be very effective against the incoming fleets, and if our new technology is going to have anything worthwhile to miniaturize...
...we'd better do our best to have something worthwhile for our fleets! Putting all our research efforts into neutron pellet guns, the only things we're doing apart from cleaning up our worlds' factory waste, finishing the ERCol-3 at Monteverde, and trying to assemble counter-forces near the front, brings our chance of a breakthrough by next year up to a good 25% - so there's hope we'll be able to build a real ship sometime soon. I'd better hope so anyway: These cats are mean!
So, yeah: GOT IT! Our extremely limited access to habitable planets (none beyond our first pair without range, a total of four worlds, one of them small and poor, without second-tier range) and the presence of the Cats next door with Humans in the center and Psilons in position to run away have put us way behind the curve ... so catching up (if we can!) is going to be exciting!
Ah yes, I see what I missed lmao. Much easier to miss things like that without improved space scanners... hopefully NPGs pop fast, then back to controlled dead, but survival is first priority.
Also, on the terraforming note - firstly, when we've been in this tech/settling race I really didn't want to slow down to terraform anything, might have been a mistake, dunno. Secondly, what's this about +30 being more efficient than +20? I thought it was always 5BC per 1 size.
Life is looking a bit more exciting than is ideal.
NPGs will be very helpful, if we can get them on some ships...and if we can actually hit anything with them, given our ancient battle computer tech. Good luck to our brave pilots flying those laser pop gun fighters. (I think they are going to need it.)
(June 16th, 2024, 04:17)haphazard1 Wrote: Life is looking a bit more exciting than is ideal.
NPGs will be very helpful, if we can get them on some ships...and if we can actually hit anything with them, given our ancient battle computer tech. Good luck to our brave pilots flying those laser pop gun fighters. (I think they are going to need it.)
TBH my assumption is that even if we did have better BCs we'd not have the space to mount them, but that could be wrong. Maybe BCII would fit? At least the incoming targets seem pretty large and ponderous, in contrast to our glorious fighters. And ofc everything about which computers do and do not fit will have to change once NPGs come in.
(June 16th, 2024, 01:16)Dp101 Wrote: what's this about +30 being more efficient than +20? I thought it was always 5BC per 1 size.
Yup; terraforming techs come (mostly) in pairs: +10 and +20 cost 5BC per extra million people of space, +30 and +40 cost 4BC per million, +50 and +60 cost 3, then the rest each cost just 2 per million!
Annnnnd...
Report:
I give you welcome on this joyous day, Sovereign: You are most welcome to the High Eyrie, and we hope and trust you will serve our people well for as long as you can bear to - perhaps a full decade like your most-recent predecessors. I regret that your most recent predecessor was not able to attend this welcome ceremony, being urgently engaged with the sanitarium workers and therapists trying to sort out the ... ah ... creatively-organized furnishings of the insides of that great leader's ... brain. Oh, forgive me, please! Am I starting to sound like a Mentaran? There are reasons for that, of course. I'll try to explain. You see, I was serving until recently as our primary ambassador to that nigh-unstoppable people, before being asked to brief you, being ... apparently ... the member of the outgoing administration who comes nearest to having the faintest idea of what's going on.
Allow me to recapitulate. You will of course recall the dreaded feline attacks that began your predecessor's term in ... office? How we saw the reports of the new fighters we produced just in time to meet them, together with the long-range colony ship at Monteverde, with Jasana's attack fleet already visible arriving in orbit at Katsura? And how all of us away from the front waited with arching wings for the first sight of the battle that might hint we had a chance ... and then what came instead.
Speaking only for myself, I was so astonished when an Earthling showed up on the holodisplay instead, carrying out her people's promise to share their terraforming discoveries, all I could do for a few seconds was blink uncomprehendingly at the helpful graphical displays she provided. Even when I snapped out of it and recognized what I was seeing, and heard the enthusiasm with which our planetology teams were greeting the detailed technical specs she sent over with them, I still couldn't understand what had happened at Katsura, and - terrified that some interface error had caused our fleet to retreat from battle without even confronting the enemy without my even seeing what it was doing - had to check the strategic dispatch display at my first opportunity. Of course, you already know what I saw there.
Somehow, for reasons best known, I presume, to their cowardly admiral of the fleet, the cats were retreating! They declined even to close to combat range against our tiny, hastily-assembled fleet! Our entire defensive force there consisted of fewer fighters than they had cruisers and destroyers, plus a couple of unarmed Scout ships - and yet the cats fled without even testing our defenses! I still don't understand what they were thinking: Even if we'd had a defensive base in place - and we didn't, and wouldn't be able to for years - it wasn't until well after they made their decision and could have completed their attack run that we got real weapons to install at such a base!
That, of course, was thanks to me and my Mentaran negotiations. I had hope that, if they didn't bomb us too heavily, with some help from other worlds feeding the treasury, we might have been able to defend the world before Fiershan transports could reach it even if they won the battle that year; I wasn't expecting the battle to just ... not happen! The best guess I could make was that Jasana had only launched the attack because her statisticians told her that our starfleet was so weak - and then by the time it arrived, saw that our fleet had apparently grown much more robust ... not so much because of nearly doubling our fighters' numbers sovereignty-wide and more than doubling their efficacy, as because Monteverde had just completed a brand-new cruiser of a design she knew nothing about and had never seen, artificially inflating the apparent size of our "starfleet." I don't know if that can be correct; if anyone else has an explanation, I'd love to hear what it is!
At the time, still mystified, I got back in touch with my counterpart in the Hawking system to investigate another anomaly I had encountered - this time, diplomatically. After securing the trade for those scatter-rockets, I had checked with the ambassador for other possible trades, and she suggested that their techniques for surviving on barren worlds would be available. Always interested in improving our people's productivity - the only benefit to be expected once we learned to live on dead worlds, which would hopefully happen soon - I asked what sort of knowledge her people might accept in exchange, and she suggested our Hyper-V rockets. Now, since we had just learned how to use a more-advanced missile system from her people, I knew it was a very fair exchange - a little miniaturization for them, and an option for a smaller missile system on ships without room for a full Scatter bay, but nothing sky-shattering, much like what we'd be getting from them - but when I agreed, she suddenly told me that no deal was possible after all! I suppose this sort of thing must seem normal to pacifists who extol their military, but it made no sense whatever to me ... until I decided they probably were just being coy, suggesting the kind of deal they were willing to make in principle, but too cautious to ever agree to hold more than one exchange symposium simultaneously. And sure enough, after the scatter trade was fully complete and I asked again...
My counterpart happily confirmed the trade she had mentioned but refused to actually approve just the previous year! As you see, I have been learning much from and about these Mentaran people during my tenure. But what we learned from the Earthling I mentioned earlier - that was truly extraordinary - and a cause for celebration, retroactively justifying the long-ago semi-accidental choice of Controlled Dead research, our cheapest then-available project in Planetology!
This image is from a little later on when my office first observed what our planetologists already knew, but the notes that incredible Earthling scientist produced on terraforming were so complete, she not only made the work itself immediately comprehensible to everybody, but even allowed our researchers to infer right away what kinds of future project it might lead to - and that future project is exactly the one we need to survive on the incredibly mineral-rich and hostile worlds deep in our own space! As you can see by the time we realized this, we had made our full investment in neutron pellet weaponry - it was by then too late for them to help repel the other incoming Fiershan fleet anyway - and given planetology its proper priority! And after all, as I'm sure you're aware, with supposedly 25% annual odds, it didn't take long to get the new weapons going anyway.
In addition to real weapons available to mount on our ships, this gave us innumerable options for weapons research - thanks in large part to the scatter-pack trade I had made! Our engineers ultimately decided against trying one of the new high-level projects immediately, pursuing research into fusion bombs instead as the quickest way to get a major upgrade to our potential future attack ships, but we can see the wide range of options that will still be available when those are ready.
Anti-matter bombs will then be the easiest way forward, but won't fit on one of our little fighters for quite some time afterward. Still, the advance in technology will help a lot with our fighters and bombers, as would graviton beams which eventually would fit on a fighter and be of some use, or stinger missiles, to give our bases a way of hurting well-shielded ships. I don't mention hard beams, of course, because they're far too expensive, and designed to be used aboard giant ships that no honorable pilot would ever consent to fly into combat in the first place!
As you know, all this happened slightly after Jasana's fleet reached Hoshina. I was nervous: If my guess was right about the reason the first had turned away, the ratio of our fleet strength might well have swung past whatever threshold she had chosen as she built more ships of various kinds and we mostly didn't - just sending the fast new fighters from Harad and Katsura down to help while Hoshina itself put all its efforts into preparing to finish missile base in case the enemy attacked for real! Our planetary scanners had apparently gotten a reading on the fleet that retreated from Katsura, and we knew that in spite of their cowardly behavior, they could have utterly pasted our little fleet!
Here's an up-to-date image from this year, showing all of them, including the Catamount that we hadn't yet scanned before it reached Hoshina with a Cheetah and a pair of Lynxes. The point is that it would have taken dozens of our new Chases to destroy even the Cheetah alone, with extremely heavy attrition. A single scatter base could have handled either fleet now that we know what's on them by focusing down the Lynxes and then Catamount or Panther - the Cheetah, with no weapons that can penetrate the base's shield, would have to retreat - but we didn't have one yet. Maybe they knew we could and would before their transports arrived, and that's why they too declined to fight. I don't know. It's equally possible they just have no idea what they're doing.
You may not remember after most of a decade, but another threat we thought we were facing early on was the galactic High Council: With the monkeys' nearly-universal non-aggression pacts, there was some concern that they might take over the galaxy! I was actually the one who dispelled that little myth. I counted up our population, compared it to the graphs our spies had put together, and realized there was no danger: If Alexander was nominated at all, it would be against Dynalon, who had more population by far than the apes did, and therefore - if Alexander were nominated at all - than anyone else in the galaxy! Since we knew Jasana's people were of insignificant size, a little math showed that as long as we either voted for Dynalon or abstained from the voting, Alexander couldn't win. Meanwhile, Dynalon couldn't possibly match Alexander's popularity. As it happened though...
Alexander wasn't even nominated. Ixitixl and her Hive, somewhere far across the galaxy, drew votes from the Triumvirate - I can only hope that soured their relations with my associates in the Mentaran Republic - and later, the shadowy 'loks of whom we hadn't heard until the meeting. Dynalon drew the Crystal Emperor's vote as well as his own, and thanks to another calculation and my own successful campaign, ours too, as of course you know. I reasoned, though with nothing very specific in mind, that having the favor of by far the most-powerful faction in the galaxy would make our frontiers much safer and perhaps open up new opportunities - whereas the bugs would be likely to have forgotten all about this vote by the time their starships could reach any of our worlds. Of course, the way the vote was split, there was no danger of either of them actually being elected high master of anything. Of course we officially met their diplomats at the High Council itself, but with no way to get in touch except by relay through the Mentarans or Earthlings, that still doesn't really mean anything. Of much greater importance to us was of course the other major event of the Council year:
The beautiful, verdant home that had been so difficult to reach, far off at the edge of the galaxy beyond hostile and uninhabitable star-systems now known as Shangri-La would receive help both from the treasury and from our oldest sister colonies - Green Mountain and Dusty Crag, as the local joke goes - immediately.
You can also see Jasana's attack fleets still on their way homeward, and how we weren't concerning ourselves with the movements of Republic and Triumverate fleets, trusting them to leave us alone, trusting our spies' reports that they couldn't colonize anything but Satake, and knowing we didn't have the force to contest anything with them anyway. Also, off to the right of the screen, you can see the vast expanses held by the likes of Ixitixl and the other peoples we hadn't yet met across the galaxy. And there was the special project from Monte Verde en route to its Satake waypoint: Just two little ships. And while they were moving to their destinations, I was constantly busy fielding requests and friendly greetings from our Mentaran friends! First, their ambassador called to thank us for our wisdom in voting for Dynalon and their Republic. Then they offered planetary shields in exchange for our Earthling-style terraforming, which I couldn't accept for two reasons: First, they were frankly running away enough already, but second, the shields would mean we'd be much further away from finishing missile bases on the Fiershan front where they might be needed at any moment but had plenty of shielding for dealing with Cat ships without them. My counterpart had other proposals to make though:
Her trade proposal was entirely in alignment with our policies: Investing in future production and keeping the powerful Mentarans on-side as true friends in keeping with their pacifistic tendencies - especially in light of their deadly milistaric fleets! I accepted the 350 billion credit trade deal, but apparently my colleague in Earthling space neglected to pursue a similar increase. What we hadn't neglected was the project I mentioned, taking advantage of Shangri-La's fuel base to make fascinating new discoveries way out on my side of space.
Adachi, with a small inferno world, is too small and distant to be likely to be of much use to anybody, but in the unlikely event it's still available when we someday learn to land on any world, even if irradiated, of course we'll want to revisit that - which would put us in touch with the Hive, who we'll have to hope will by then have forgotten or forgiven our voting for Dynalon recently. As for the farther world though - that turned out to be Orion, so the warp-3 Scout that found it...
...retreated successfully before the Guardian even tried to do anything.
I suppose that means it's living up to its name as a "Guardian," and not even afraid enough of our little unarmed Scout to bother swatting it. But ... unless it decided to just sit there staring at our pilot until she made a false move or ran away, does this mean we're already reacting faster than it is? That seems a little hard to believe.
So ... that about wraps things up, right? Except ... well, I hope you won't be too upset with me. You see, I was given broad authority for dealing with our Mentaran friends by your predecessor, our ... hopefully soon to be fully ... ah, sane again ... ex-Sovereign. And this time, they didn't ask even for the Earthling's highly-advanced terraforming techniques, but only our own simpler ones, which meant sort of ... giving those a reason to have been researched after all, if you see what I mean. And it was only a small advance over their own existing techniques, comparatively. And they have no more planets than we do on which to do the terraforming. You see, I was tempted, because they were offering very nice technologies, including a stabilizer that would have been incredibly useful had we been planning an attack on somebody - or even for our fighters to defend against Jasana and company. And, well, some other things. Certain other things.
I ... ah ... I gave in. So they have better terraforming now than they used to. Not as good as ours and the Earthlings', but better. But you see ... you have to understand...
...they did teach us to improve our robotic factory controls in exchange! I don't know, but I think it's possible these will be useful for something. You see....
We've nearly caught the Mentarans in population, with lots of room still to grow, and matched them in planet count - though who gets the hostile worlds around us will make a big difference in the galaxy! We're way behind in technology still, but we've been catching up, thanks in part to our trades, with yet more on the horizon. Our starfleet, since our old warp-1 designs were all scrapped and our colony was built instead of flying around in space pretending to be a cruiser, looks even more pitful than ten years ago, but at least we can build real ships now - like Talon 3.0s - if necessary, and the worlds the Mrrshans ran away from each have a nearly-finished base ready to complete in case they ever get attacked again, together of course with more production capability. Where we're really behind - though, again, catching up steadily - is production! And, if we handle this right, we may ... we may be able to make up that deficit too! It's going to be a balancing act, so ... well, happy balancing!
You'll notice Jasana is mustering another major fleet, though none of it has come our way. With all those Lynxes, we'd probably need two missile bases to stop them without losing anything. We have quite a long way to go here - a long way to fly up-wind - but we're moving in the right direction, I think!
Notes for our next Sovereign:
- Monteverde has a fair amount in its ship-building reserve that may help build a Dead colony ship for Satake if it's still available when the tech completes. (Or for other uses; up to you.) Hoshina has some too, originally intended for a defensive fleet.
- Hoshina and Katsura have each nearly completed a single missile base. I preferred to leave them unfinished instead of paying maintenance and leaving them vulnerable to sabotage when we won't need them unless/until an attack starts our way, but you don't have to live on a knife's edge with watching and guessing the destinations of alien fleets just because I do!
- The only planet I currently have set to refit its factories is (Artifacts) Yonezu. I've been slowly feeding it pop from Monte Arenoso (2 more transports will arrive next turn, but I haven't launched anything yet this turn, nor spent any of our reserves) while keeping up on factories, and with its double research power, it can do great work for us once fully industrialized. You'll almost certainly want to also invest this way in other worlds too, but I didn't set them up that way since I didn't know how, when, and where you wanted to get started.
- I have been feeding Shangri-La reserves each turn to help it get started, but haven't done so yet this turn. Note that reserve spending ignores the special qualities of a planet, so there's a lot to be said for spending reserves at Yonezu specifically while it's refitting or building factories and not researching, and spending reserves on Monte Arenoso is no worse than anywhere else even if you're building factories there. But spending at a place like Shangri-La can help speed it up its production curve, and you might want to save some for hopefully-Satake and/or emergencies. Note if you want to build more reserves, you can do so even when factories aren't maxed by setting the planet's missile base target number to 0 and spending on Defense. (I haven't tried this on planets that have production into a missile base already banked, so I don't know what would happen, but I wouldn't imagine you'd want to build reserves at those two front worlds anyway.)
- You might want to change our research allocations. I ... don't actually remember how I set them for this turn. (I tend to shift tech priorities when one of them is in the percentages, depending on how far in.)
- I haven't set any spying, and our spy reports with Earth's Finest are getting a little out of date. With RC3 in hand and the Mrrshans apparently prepared to hate us forever anyway (I tried to propose trade on T70 and T75, and they wouldn't even discuss it - not refusing a request, just not even giving me the option to select a trade package!) I might try espionage on them too. Up to you, obviously!
- Our starfleet is tiny, and their weapons are out of date. Our only current enemies will hate us forever as mentioned, and are better thwarted by bases anyway, and our friends are both pacifists who won't attack just because of our weak fleet, but it's something to be aware of, especially if you want to try to hold Satake by force without adding the words "a token."
- Good luck! (Including with whatever I inevitably missed!) The save is attached to this post!
Roster:
- RefSteel (just played) - Fenn (UP!)
- haphazard1 (on deck)
- Brian Shanahan
- Dp101
Interesting turns. Nice job getting us through the council meeting and acquiring lots of tech, RefSteel.
I have no idea what was going on with the cats. If I had not seen the xenophobic trait earlier, I might have guessed erratic given their strange behavior.
TBH I'm not actually *that* surprised by their behaviour because the rotp AI loves to do this thing constantly, so you never know when an attack is actually coming, but I still think caution was warranted, there was no indication whether it was a bluff or not. Glad everything is goodish now.
