Race: Psilons Difficulty: Impossible Galaxy Size: Medium Opponents: Five Color: Blue Map Generation: Random Events: On Game Version:1.4M patch with Display Bug Fixes (see below) Variant: No adjusting tech sliders: On the starting turn, we must go to the Tech screen, hit the = key on the keyboard to equalize spending across all six fields, then lock them all and leave them locked for the rest of the game! As usual, we'll also be avoiding the known exploits, though several of them have been fixed (and thus rendered irrelevant) by kyrub's patch.
(Also, of course, never "play ahead" (nor replay already-played turns) of the canonical turns while the game is ongoing - that is, don't do anything with the save (like using the Audience button or hitting "Next Turn") that will give you more information or a chance at good or bad RNG unless it's your turn to play - and then play your turns out with the consequences of whatever you do without reloading. Likewise, obviously never use the [ALT]-WHATEVER cheat codes. This stuff does go without saying around here, but it's sometimes worth reitterating.)
There are no actual "spoilers" below; I'm using the spoiler tags just to cut down on scrolling for anyone who's already read parts of this and wants to get down the page.
Patch install instructions:
Get Master of Orion (v1.3) if you don't have it already, e.g. from GoG or the backup folder you made for whatever patch you've installed already. Make sure you've backed up the game folder so you can revert to it in case you want to in the future. Then download the patched files and overwrite the equivalent files in the MoO folder you're going to be using to play the game. (Depending on your operating system, you may need to make sure that the capitalization of each of the filenames matches the ones you're overwriting so they do get overwritten, including the file extensions - e.g. "STARMAP.EXE" might not overwrite "STARMAP.exe" if your operating system allows both to coexist in the same folder.) That's it; you should be good to play from there! Please let me know if anything goes wrong or if these instructions seem insufficiently clear.
Hilariously Lengthy Scenario Description Because (it's fun for me and) I Have a Reputation to Live Up To:
We do not possess the largest brains even among species we have encountered already: That distinction belongs to the migratory vacuum-adapted paracetaceans who inhabit the outer planetesimal cloud surrounding our home system of Mentar - and even theirs may well be smaller than those of other creatures as yet undiscovered around the galaxy. We do not possess the most-numerous arms, nor the most-dextrous thumbs and fingers: What distinguishes us from the other peoples of the galaxy - what gives us such strengths as our civilization does possess - is the result not of our anatomy, but of the use to which we put it, culturally. The vast majority of our beautiful paracetacean neighbors' neurological activity is bound up with supporting and maintaining their internal equilibrium and bodily functions, and with locating and acquiring the necessities of their existence in the face of the vast emptiness of their home in trans-stellar space. The deep sea icosopods of Curiosity Deep use their twenty assorted limbs primarily for feeding and locomotion and prying Cephalian Jet Clams out of their shells. We, by contrast, use our comparatively small brains to think about the world around us, to consider where we may be wrong and test our assumptions rigorously and relentlessly, and use our mere six limbs for innumerable means of exploration: Two - or more when needed - help us hike the wilderness regions we've preserved to learn from their biodiversity; four help us hold pipettes and beakers and Erlenm eyer flasks; all six, with all their digits, our voices, and sometimes our brows and elbows or tongues, are used to learn more about our immediate environment, to operate electronic devices we have designed especially to reveal the world in more detail than can any organ of our bodies, and to pilot spacecraft with which we can explore the very stars! If our researchers achieve more than other species', it is not because of anything in our genetic heritage, nor in the details of our bodies: It is in the culture that permeates our lives here on Mentar and soon - so we hope and trust, and so we work to achieve - across the galaxy.
There have been advocates over the years, among our people as no doubt among others, for focusing our research efforts on the most-appealing technologies: Those that seem to offer the greatest or swiftest return on our investment, those that seem most necessary for our future and the strength of our civilization, those that spark the least controversy or conflict with politics or religions, those that are expected to have the most-widespread application, and those that for these and other reasons are most likely to result in further public support for scientific work generally. There have been entire continent-spanning, even world-spanning cultures on our world that embraced one or more of these principles in the past. Our archaeologists have uncovered their primitive artifacts, ranging from pottery shards to fossilized pocket computer-phones, and our linguists have deciphered their languages to unspool their history and their debates, and how their cultures died, sometimes merely overwhelmed by other cultures, but sometimes growing dominant enough to set progress back by centuries - and once by a matter of millions of years - with ninety percent population collapse, mostly from starvation and disease due to the loss of critical infrastructure, on a timescale of less than a year.
We will be the first to leave Mentar - the first to live long enough and learn deeply and broadly enough - to reach the stars. Our ancestors did not set out to conquer the vastness of interstellar space, of which many as yet knew nothing, all knowledge on the subject having been lost long before with the collapse of the latest civilization obsessed with short-term profit and divided by a confluence of cultures that each set shared opinions and loyalty above accuracy. Our ancestors did not and could not choose which special field of research would carry them beyond their home more swiftly or surely than any other or lead to the greatest health and happiness among our people over the wide course of time; no specialty would have served them so. They and we were only able to achieve both by enquiring in all directions always, without restriction, without fail, never sacrificing any one for the others, always looking to learn more - and so we shall pursue our own future, favoring no field of research, embracing them all.
So I've rolled a map, and it looks interesting and unpredictable to me. Here's our start:
And here are my thoughts in the form of an introduction, with more pictures and strategic planning:
The 38th Order of Scientific Genius has officially convened: The latest in a long line of Psilon leadership guiding our people down the path of courageous inquiry, and the first to reach the stars! Unfettered by the biases of any inferior culture - because, as you can well imagine, our culture has no biases or fetters that will get in the way of learning - we leave the limits of our world behind, crossing interstellar space in search of a greater future of our people: A future so scientific that for now and the foreseeable future, it will include ... absolutely no science budget of any kind.
That is definitely not a fetter or a bias or anything! We would definitely not already be working toward learning more about planetology in hopes of discovering more about the worlds we hope to claim if not for our strident insistence on never permitting focused research on a single critical "Psilonhatten Project" without equal funding for every other field! Our culture is far above petty considerations of "budget" and "resource availability" and "the physical limits of what we can do at any given time!" There's definitely no need to search for exceptions and ways to improve on our cultural traditions under new conditions as rigorously as we test everything else we know and do!
...
Yeah, okay, so maybe when I'm questioning our traditions, I should do it a little less sarcastically: I can just imagine someone from another culture smugly reading this and thinking, "Ha! Those hypocrites! If only they accepted the unquestioned cultural beliefs with which I was brought up, they would know the error of their ways!" Mark my words though, in three hundred years, we'll be shaking our heads at the folly of our modern day mores as surely as we shake our heads at the fools of three hundred years ago today. I hope so, anyway: To know enough about our history and adapt and change enough to do that, we'll have to make a lot of progress between now and then! And survive. We'll have to survive first, and we can't take anything for granted here.
We know from deciphering galaxy-wide transmissions from something called GNN that we share the galaxy with five other space-faring races: There are two-armed grinning ape people more adept at lying - and therefore at trade and diplomacy - than any other people in the galaxy, already a favorite for tricking the other sentient peoples into voting their leader permanent dictator of everything. There are lithovoric rock people capable of surviving on any planet's surface, no matter how hot or cold or bathed in hard radiation, and therefore swift to spread from start to star until they blanket the entire galaxy. Hives of tirelessly-working insect beings indelibly united in their pursuit of power, are out there producing hordes of ships, intent on supplanting every other species. The five-limbed catfolk of Fierias - five including the long prehensile tails they frequently use as weapons - are the most warlike spacefaring people known to the galaxy, and perfectly suited to the role thanks to the ... cat-like ... reflexes that grant them their extraordinary innate skill at gunnery. Yet the most dangerous of all perhaps is the cybernetic melding of life and machine that has developed on Meklon into its own more-than species: A bioelectromechanical collective in which it's nearly impossible to distinguish the people themselves from the factories in which they're willingly embedded. Each originates at a yellow star at least seven parsecs away, but with eleven such stars spread out across the galaxy, any of them might be spreading toward us from almost any direction except the near galactic rim. Clearly the coreward red star will be a vital stepping stone if we are to claim a part of the galaxy ourselves as they are doing, but whether that will be possible and what we will find there - or beyond - is impossible as yet to say. The only way forward, to find out, is to go there!
These are all the stars within ten parsecs, though not the whole galaxy. Numbers are the distance from Mentar - in green for colony range, yellow for scout range, and red for out of range, with the ships shown indicating where I plan to send them initially.
Though three different stars are in reach for our colony ship, that one is the most important: Both directly coreward and as likely as its rimward twin - and something like ten times as likely as the neutron star nearby - to warm the surface of a planet where we can live! Our colonists are planning to that way, due to arrive within three years, with one of our scout ships to escort them in case of catastrophe: If we should encounter a military force that threats the two million Psilons on their way to build our first colony, the Scout can try to distract it while our Colony Ship flees and - hopefully - escapes into hyperspace. It isn't much, but it's the best we have for now, so it'll have to do! Meanwhile, the other scout pilot plans to head for the neutron star in case of a much smaller catastrophe: If our preferred destination is uninhabitable - at least by anything but Silicoids with current technology - the neutron star would be our next-best option, and though it's very unlikely to support a planet where we can live, we'll want to know right away if it does so the colonists can head there directly: If it doesn't, they'll be making the long trip to the red star nearest the rim, and knowing whether that's necessary will be urgent in that case too!
If we can colonize the coreward star, that should open up at least one more, and probably two, within our standard fuel range - though the prospects aren't too promising since both are blazing-hot blue stars - and bring at least two more into the reach of our long-range scouts. There are plenty of other stars to scout now though, including some we may be able to reach in time to get there before any other space-faring race if we act quickly - depending on where the other homeworlds are around the galaxy - so with both of our existing Scouts needing to go roughly the same way, the plan will be to start assembling some new Scouts right away, at the same time as more factories. Research will have to wait until we can fund it seriously, and probably until we know more about when and what our specific needs will be - which might mean after we've scouted everything in reach, or might mean in response to an obvious, urgent need, or might mean not at all until after 2320!
I'm hoping to have the turns played, pictures uploaded, and report posted within the next 24-32 hours, but hoping this intro provokes discussion, suggestions, thoughts, random musings, encouragement, or skepticism in the meantime!
[EDIT: Attached the starting save to this post, in case others want to play through it for themselves!]
Roster:
- RefSteel (has the save!)
- shallow_thought (play order still TBD)
- haphazard1 (play order still TBD)
- DaveV (play order still TBD)
- One slot's still open in case someone else sees this and wants to jump in!
Edit: yes I would like to have the 2300 save, if I find myself some time in the not-so-near future I was thinking on replaying this game all by myself.
That's a fun set of oppo you've picked for us there . Both of the other two top-tier races, rocks so that no unclaimed system is safe, cats to make the early game militarily lively and the race most likely to draw Erratic. Should be fun!
It may have looked easy, but that is because it was done correctly - Brian Moore
Looks good, RefSteel. Thanks for getting us started, and nice work on the history of our (hopefully soon to be growing) empire.
Looking at the galactic map, I am thinking 2 AIs in the central yellows, one in the far west, one to our south/southeast, and the last one anywhere. Or is the closer yellow to our south too close to possibly have an AI homeworld? If so, the center of the galaxy is likely to be very crowded.
Sending our colony ship towards the core is the right move; hoprefully we will not regret it and end up backtracking to the eastward red star. Getting some scouts out to try to interdict stars for a while and get more info is good, along with factories. Research will have to wait a bit, even though it is painful to delay it as Psilons. With our always equalized research we are not going to go for a quick focused push, so waiting until a bit more funding is available seems like the right approach.
Thanks for the feedback! I should be able to post the report by tonight. This map is just the first one I rolled, by the way (well, technically the second: I clicked through the leader name too fast the first time and rolled this one with OSG-38 as our name without looking around to see what that one was like) and I didn't select the opposition - they just came out that way! Looks like they could make for quite an interesting game though!
(June 5th, 2023, 20:54)SpaceOWL Wrote: Edit: yes I would like to have the 2300 save, if I find myself some time in the not-so-near future I was thinking on replaying this game all by myself.
Sounds good; I'll hold onto the 2300 save then, and post it when we're done with our run through the game!
I forgot to comment on the opposition. Having the rocks always makes things interesting, and our equal research is likely to mean we are slow(er) to get to colonization techs. So the hostile planets are going to be an issue. Humans are always a diplo threat, Klackons will be tough as usual, and Meklar can be dangerous if given time to build their factories up to max. Mrrshan are probably not too big a threat _IF_ they are not next door. An early fight with them would be bad.
Also, let's hope we do not have both erratic Klackons and erratic Meklar. Diplo might get crazy in that case.
Well, there was never much chance for a neutron star to support a habitable world, but especially for a planet of this size, not knowing where the Silicoids may be, finding one this hostile so close to our home star is especially worrying: There's room for something like forty million rock people on Tao II, and room for zero Psilons until we can develop the technology to keep the toxic dust that fills its atmosphere and icecaps from choking our air filters and generally just getting into everything. That's a problem for the long term, but at our coreward red star, we have a very different kind of problem right away:
Looking at it from one side, it's great that there's such a thriving jungle spread all across the first planet of the little M-class star, with so much space to live and such a comfortable atmosphere, to establish our first extraterrestrial Nature preserve and study countless fascinating new creatures; our colonists landed and started transforming their colony ship into a scanner, comm relay, fuel base, and habitation structure right away. Take a look at the other side though, and this planet - like its star - is already over ten billion years old, and such heavy metals as it ever possessed have had a long, long time to migrate downward toward the core. Though it can support nearly as many people as our homeworld itself - up to eighty-five million if our surveyors are correct - Nature Prime here is never going to have much in the way of useful mines, and that's going to cut severely into its industrial productivity. It's so poor in fact that any attempt to build factories there - for the moment at least - would accomplish nothing: There's just not enough to work with down there! And with the administrative costs of our oversight committees - theoretically established to make sure every galactic credit of research spending is perfectly divided between the six known fields of advanced technology, but actually in effect at spending levels like these making sure every credit goes to paying the committee itself - there's no point in trying to do research here just yet, so the people of Nature's jungles are committing their efforts to the one thing they can do usefully: Supporting and modifying the planet's ecology to further expand the colony.
Just a year since our Nature preserve was founded, and its scanners have already picked up a bogey. This looks like first contact coming, probably flying in from that yellow star, probably toward the blue one closest to Nature - and it's trouble. Scan readings say it's just an unarmed scout, but it means the Silicoids are close by, and it won't be long before they're contesting those blue stars for real: Stars whose planets are second only to neutron stars in their chances to bear rich and hostile worlds - hostile, that is, to everyone not made of rocks. Worse still, that puts the Silicoid rock people very close to the center of the galaxy, which could let them expand in all directions rapidly, cutting us off at the same time that they claim a huge fraction of the galaxy for themselves. It's early to speculate, and we may yet prevail both locally and in the wider galaxy, but they certainly have me worried.
It looks like we're going to have a convention next year. The Silicoid scout's movement since we detected it last year has only confirmed my suspicions, but there's a new alien scout ship on the scene which may well reach the same destination at just about the same time! Our own scout, finished and dispatched at the same time we established our Nature colony, will make it three if so, and if I'm right, we'll have our first chance to meet not only the rock people of Cryslon but the Human apefolk of Sol at the same blue star!
This ... may be a problem. As expected, our Scout did meet representatives of the Human and Silicoid peoples in turn, but "met" them only by the loosest definition of the term: Each of those representatives, aboard their own little scout ships, failed to respond to hails and engaged their warp engines to retreat into hyperspace before our pilot could do anything more. And then after that cold welcome, we got our latest scouting reports, where early returns are suggesting this galaxy may have been made to order for the Silicoids! Uxmai, the blue star where all the excitement happened has just one world in orbit of any note, and that planet is covered in ice and snow to a depth of at least fifty meters across the entire surface, including carbon dioxide ice in a wide region surrounding the poles. The system can support nearly as many rock people as could Tao, but there's no way we can survive there with our current technology. Still worse is the green star nearest Mentar, just four parsecs away, which we scouted earlier this year: Zoctan's only significant world is even larger than Tao II, though barely, and thankfully lacks the endless clouds of dust toxic to all organic life, but the place is geothermally dead, with surface conditions that make Uxmai IX look by comparison like a luxury ski resort. We'll have to hope for better when our reports come in next year, but the blue-hot star in the system closest to Silicoid space doesn't look very promising from here....
Holy Heisenberg! Don't mistake me: That blue star I was worried about, now called Proteus, is just as bad as I feared, with another frigid ice world - this one so small it could barely support a quarter of what Mentar can even if we could ever live there - and nothing else in the system even worth discussing. But will you have a look at Vulcan, out on the galactic rim? If most of the star systems we've encountered seem to be express-built for the Silicoids, Vulcan Prime looks more like someone designed it just for us! Perfect living conditions with a climate almost identical to our homeworld's, and with virtually identical surface gravity, but just enough larger, thanks to a slightly less-dense composition to offer twenty percent more living space! It's six parsecs from home, but if we can get there, Vulcan is going to be a dream system for us! Imagine all the research we can do! It's going to take some work in advance even to get there though; let's hope there's a path through one of the other stars along the way....
In the meantime, here's the latest scan from Nature: You can see our Scout on the way from Uxmai to the white star in between it and Human space - another good candidate for a hostile world, I'm afraid - and the Human scout on almost but not quite the same course, meaning it's definitely heading for that yellow star beyond it, which therefore must be their home star of Sol. The Silicoids are on their way home too, and our own Scouts are closing on new destinations, though next year's, yet another fiery blue star, and a long way from both of our worlds, isn't looking very promising....
Okay, so maybe it's a little worse than unpromising. What exactly is that thing, and why is it attacking our tiny, unarmed Scout? I was expecting hostile planets, but not a hostile "Guardian" - whatever that even is! It's nowhere on the list of races we learned about from GNN!
...oh. Oh, that Guardian. I think it did get a mention, not as a competing race, just in passing: "The Guardian of Orion." It's ... um ... very, very big. And in spite of trying to retreat as soon as she possibly could, our Scout pilot is now very, very dead. That's ... a lot of missiles. Maybe one for each of the tiny particles into which our Scout was blasted by ... a lot of incredibly-long-range beams. So let's ... um, let's not visit that star system anymore, at least anytime soon, okay?
At least there's still some hopeful news: Our Nature colony's population has grown enough to start making meaningful contributions to factory construction - even if it's only at a rate of one tenth of one per year - so they're getting started on that project finally. And the rest of this year's scouting got us some better results than dead pilots at least! There's only one Guardian after all, and those other reports came from more-hospitable stars: One yellow like our own, and one green. Mind you, I didn't say they were great results exactly!
So bad news first: If the Silicoids claim those tundra worlds on the way into our part of space, they're going to take control of everything! Even that class-G yellow star between us and the apes doesn't have a single planet where either of us can survive for ten minutes without an asbestos suit. Laan II isn't a dead world like Zoctan V by any means: It's so geothermally active the entire surface is constantly criss-crossed by lava floes pouring slowly into lava pools large enough to count as seas. Between that, the dense greenhouse gasses that fill the atmosphere, and its proximity to its star, it's if anything going to be even harder to survive there! But now the good news: Yarrow, the green star at the galactic rim, just five parsecs from home, and practically on top of Vulcan and its paradise world, has a habitable planet of its own: A desert, to be sure, and no larger than toxic Tao, but with breatheable air and the hope of water we can extract from deep-buried ice and the atmosphere! It might not be much, but it's going to be our gateway to Vulcan - and the good news about Laan is that the Humans can't live there either, so if we're quick, we may have a chance to actually claim these worlds!
We're finally - at long, long last, five years after it was founded - launching transports to support our Nature colony. The few extra factories the will-be immigrants have built on our homeworld in the meantime will certainly help our development here, but the delay in getting Nature Prime's population up and growing as rapidly as it can could still be costly. I realize its mineral poverty makes industrial development there look unappealing, but that doesn't reduce the importance of future Psilons to our efforts in the galaxy - nor vice-versa! The one good thing about the timing is that all nineteen million should arrive very shortly before our back-lines Scout reveals whatever's at the very last star we'll end up exploring within our range: The rimward red star so close to home, we could have sent the Colony Ship up there instead of to Nature from the beginning! In the meantime, we'll be getting reports from much-more-distant stars as well though: They should come in by next year, hopefully with news of more-hospitable planets than most of what we've seen!
Next time, somebody remind me not to hope for anything. Mind you, Denubius I-B, at that red star way out beyond green Zoctan, will be a great world with enough environmental controls and terraforming - it's just going to take a huge amount of both! The place has about the same atmosphere as the inside of a blast furnace that's been running full-time two notches above factory specs - and about the same amount of space. In theory, Silicoids could cram a tenth as many of their people there as onto our homeworld, but in practice we're not letting them test the theory if we can help it - not at Denubius, and definitely not here! The incredible thing about that planet though is the mineral wealth still accessible on its surface: If we could live there, the industrial output for each Psilon there could be twice what it is here at Mentar - or four times what they can manage over at our Nature preserve.
And then there's Anraq, the white-hot star directly between us and Human space: Its best world is no larger than little Proteus XII, and the only reason it has no ice on the surface is that its lack of any magnetic field, proximity to its star, rate of rotation, and axial tilt all conspire to bathe it in such intense radiation, you could roast a steak by opening the lead box you'd have had to store it in. If there weren't any Silicoids around, and if our research teams would concentrate on planetology, our aptitude for technological discovery would give us an excellent chance of claiming the vast majority of our hostile surroundings - but as things stand, we're in a race to reach Vulcan before the ape people develop the range technology they need - and a race with the rock people to develop our own technology and build the colony ships we need before they claim basically everything else in this half of the galaxy!
Wasn't it just last year that I was talking about a race against the apes? They have another scout ship entering our space, just now showing up on the Nature colony's scanners, and I can't be sure of where it's going! If they started down at Sol and they're heading for the neutron star, they're frankly welcome to learn all about that toxic wasteland - which is why we haven't bothered to station a ship there in advance, and couldn't get one there in time now. The course doesn't look to me like it quite lines up though, and there's another possibility: If its last stop was at the inferno world down at the yellow star of Laan, it could be heading directly for Nature itself! That doesn't seem very likely - their nearest star is awfully far away - but since they'll rush assault transports up there if they reach it unopposed, it's not a risk we're willing to take, and Mentar is going to replace the Scout we lost at Orion by launching a new one with relocation orders for the Nature system: If that is somehow the Humans' destination, it should arrive in time to meet them there.
There's more confirmation that the panic over Nature two years back wasn't warranted - the Human scout is bound for one of the blue stars, though I admit it's a little worrisome that it must have come from Vulcan, having scouted it during the brief period when we had no ship there - but we've also got terrific news from that red star out toward the rim: Zhardan II may be cold, but it's nothing like Proteus or Uxmai; the ground may be hard and rocky, but there's breatheable air, and enough water and arable sections of the surface to support fully half as many people as our dream planet, Vulcan Prime! The steppes of Zhardan II are already within our colony range, and we'll be able to reach at least Yarrow and then Vulcan itself with pretty much any kind of new propulsion technology! And thanks to some forward planning, Nature's very first factory - and probably the only one it'll build for a long time since any more would contribute enough to pollution to demand clean-up work from a major fraction of the planet's population - completed right around the time this scouting report came in. So with new technology needed fairly desperately and a clear idea of what kind will be needed, Nature and Mentar alike are ready to spend a year pushing everything they can into research tools for our scientific academies: Education programs and experiments at the Nature preserve that will hopefully continue indefinitely, with equipment and laboratory components supplied from our homeworld this year before it goes back to work on its heavy industry. We're finally starting on scientific research after all, with only a dozen years' wait at the start of the interstellar age, and I can't wait to find out what's in store for us there!
I just got back from the live coverage of the big symposium! The computer scientists led off of course with their ingenious plans for advanced new targeting systems, talking casually about the wide array of other possibilities their field had in store: A full slate of three projects, from which they chose the most challenging! There were some who would have liked to extend our scanner range into space, for more warning of possible Human or Silicoid raids, but the majority argued it was better to be able to do something about any that came, and some added that the extra time it would take to complete the more-complex project would ultimately be a good thing in case they could develop the project into better robotic factory controls at some point in the near future: More time to finish more factories and improve our rate of factory construction would be real boons in that case. Then the materials engineers had the perfect follow-up, proposing to improve our inustrial technology in just that way - although I did observe the conspicuous absence of any kind of discussion of - or even the faintest suggestion that there could be - any possible alternative. The field mechanics experts followed right in their footsteps with a proposal to double our energy shield capacity and absolutely nothing else - and that's when we got to the part we'd all been waiting for since the symposium started: Our planetological research teams and propulsion engineers, each with a full set of possibilities, dilligently prepared and ready to get started on right away! For almost the opposite reason - or the identical one, depending on how you look at it - that the computer scientists went with their most-complex project, the stars of the symposium each went with their simplest, hoping to finish the research quickly and move on to still-better things - or at least learn what would be possible that way! - while providing the best and fastest benefits they could to the Psilon people at large! Our new terraforming research will most likely be the first we finish, with the planned industrial tech and hydrogen fuel projects hopefully not too long after that. Then, last of all, frankly shame-faced, came the lead weapons engineering team, describing the benefits of a kind of rocket they called "hyper-vapoware" in deference to the late, great Maniac Marshall, while studiously neglecting to discuss the absence - expected in the case of field mechanics scientists given the state of their art, and unsurprising from the construction engineers given theirs, but never from weapons manufacturer R&D divisions like these! - of any possible alternative. Not the best note to end on, but the whole thing was a thrill! We might never see a symposium quite like it again in this galaxy!
It's a funny thing: Just two years since the tech symposium, and just three since the first big fleet of transports reached our Nature preserve, and already they're starting to ship people back here! There has got to be a mistake in there, one way or the other, but that's the way it's going anyway. I suspect the real problem is this plan to start building a colony ship for Zhardan in a couple of years: No, we don't have to wait until Mentar is completely packed with factories, but it would help to have more than what we've got and can add in two years' time, and to wait to get started until we have a better shot of seeing our new planetology research first. I'm sure the Order knows what it's doing - mostly sure anyway - but that doesn't mean I can't second-guess it and maybe come up with some better choices for next time something like this comes around! Other than that, it's been pretty quiet, with Scouts mostly in place where their pilots think they'll do the most good, research ongoing all over our Nature preserve, and industrial infrastructure going up all-out here at Mentar. I just think it would go better if we kept that up longer than we plan to right now. Even once the new Colony Ship goes under construction in a couple of years, it's going to take a while before it's actually finished. Projections say about 2323, which means there'll be another election in the 38th Order of Scientific Genius about halfway through the project!
So here we are! It's certainly looking like a hostile galaxy - on our side of it anyway! - but we've got a lot of valuable information already. Silicoid Cryslon and Human Sol pretty much have to be where they're listed here, and obviously there's no doubt at all about Orion, but if we're going to claim enough planets to compete with all these alien species, or ever to find out what's out beyond Cryslon and Orion, we've got our work cut out for us already! Whoever the Order elects is going to have a lot of difficult choices to make in planning our strategy!
(As before, I put it in spoiler tags to make it easy to scroll past this lengthy report; there are no spoilers here unless you want to wait for the 2300 save and play an unspoiled shadow of this same game! The save for 2320 is attached to the next post down.)
Thanks for the additional comments, haphazard! And now that we're up to date to 2320, here are some notes for possible discussion on the save:
- I maaaaaay have played a somewhat unorthodox opening here. I think it was warranted, but that's definitely open to debate! In the year 2320, we have a total of just 116 factories empire-wide (though at least all but one of them on are on our homeworld...) while we've built basically half of a colony ship for a back-lines world and - in spite of the research spending being divided among six different fields per our variant rule - spent a pretty hefty amount on tech. This is partly because our second world is so poor, and partly because of the rest of the details of our galactic neighborhood.
- The blue star (a long way) directly "west" of Mentar is Orion; that's why it's the only unscouted star in range.
- I've been making do with just six Scouts even though that means leaving some worlds uncovered. (In fact, the Humans have a scout of their own at Uxmai, one of the two tundra worlds beyond Nature.) I guess I've basically committed us to this policy at least until we finish our colony ship (due in three turns) but I felt that as long as Nature is protected and the AIs can't scout any worlds they can actually colonize, it should be safe.
- I do have a Scout at Zhardan (the red star "northeast" of Mentar) to hopefully scout the red star all the way back in the upper right-hand corner of the galaxy once we colonize the star it's at now (if not now then at least when we tech Range 4) and another at Zoctan (the green star "northwest" of Mentar) to get the earliest report on the red star way off to its "west" once R4 comes in. Obviously you can send these elsewhere if you think they have more-urgent roles to play.
- Improved Eco is in our tree (we're currently teching IT+10) but we can't focus entirely on early planetology the way we might without our variant. Depending on what's in our tree and what the Silicoids do, it might be worth skipping it - at least temporarily - to get something like Controlled Tundra or to keep pushing up the tree. Could be a tough call here!
- Range 5 is also in our tree; I picked Range 4 as the fastest way to advance the tree since it lets us hop from Zhardan to Yarrow to Vulcan, and I think I'd take Nuclear Engines if available when R4 comes in (or R6 if the engines aren't available, or even Stabilizer over going back for R5) but it may depend on what else we learn in the coming turns!
- Reduced Waste 80 isn't in our tree, and if we have both choices at the next level, that could be a tough one. If the little more exploration we're likely to be able to do before Improved Industrial Tech 9 comes in doesn't suggest a need for long-range colony ships (and therefore Duralloy Armor) soon, I'd be inclined to go for II8 in spite of the partial redundancy, hoping to claim more hostile colonies - and for robotic controls to show up in our tree!
- In retrospect, I made a few mistakes, and should definitely (and for various reasons) have waited to start building the colony ship, and built factories instead up until 2320, then made starting the colship now a suggestion the next emperor could accept or reject more easily. Sorry about that! I think what I did with tech was pretty much the right thing though, and I look forward to seeing how it plays out from here!
- I'm curious to hear other people's thoughts, either on my choices or our best way forward!
Roster:
- RefSteel (just played the first 20!)
- shallow_thought (UP if you're first to post a "Got it!")
- haphazard1 (UP if you're first to post a "Got it!")
- DaveV (UP if you're first to post a "Got it!")
- One slot's still open in case someone else sees this and wants to jump in!
If anyone has a specific request for where to slot into the roster, please don't hesitate to say so! (I just hope I haven't scared anyone off from cleaning up the mess(es) I (tend to) mad(/k)e....
The save (just rename it to SAVE7.GAM and overwrite the one in your patched folder to overwrite the auto-save, and you can load it with "Continue" from the main menu or the Starmap command from that folder in DOS) is [EDIT: now...] attached below.
. Both of the other two top-tier races, rocks so that no unclaimed system is safe, cats to make the early game militarily lively and the race most likely to draw Erratic. Should be fun!
Thanks for getting us started, and nice work on the history of our (hopefully soon to be growing) empire.
Having the rocks always makes things interesting, and our equal research is likely to mean we are slow(er) to get to colonization techs. So the hostile planets are going to be an issue. Humans are always a diplo threat, Klackons will be tough as usual, and Meklar can be dangerous if given time to build their factories up to max. Mrrshan are probably not too big a threat _IF_ they are not next door. An early fight with them would be bad.
Diplo might get crazy in that case.
Maybe I will try again tomorrow. 