Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » Game stories » Stone Age Slaughter 7 Has ended
| Re: Stone Age Slaughter 7 Has ended |
Tue, 14 May 2013 17:01   |
|
 ManicLurch |
 | Lt. Junior Grade |
Messages: 462
Registered: May 2009 | |
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Here is the Navi story.
SD, habs 1/5, 2 wide narrow rad
IFE, NRSE, OBRM, NAS, BET, RS
14/9/14 factories, g box checked
10/4/15 mines
Cheap EN & Con, rest expensive
My idea with this race was taking relatively wide habs (to help with low planets per player), with one narrow field to help find an ally to intersettle with. The highly efficient factories helps them build faster to make the race a little faster to be ready for war. Not as fast as factoryless, but fast enough for a factory race.
I started in the center of the map, which meant I had a lot of choices for allies and also borders to protect. Most players were letting my scouts in their space. The undead were shooting my scouts down early. Then they settled a planet really close to my HW. The planet was red to me, but I didn't want an unfriendly IT to get up a gate so early so close to my HW. So I pop dropped it just to keep them away.
Right after this I started negotiating NAPs with most neighbors including the Undead, Aiel, Sprockets and Manticorians. My habs were almost a perfect match to intersettle with the Aiel, but the Manticores had many good greens for me in their space while the Aiel had almost none. The Sprockets had some descent greens for me in their space, but they were mostly interested in an NAP and border. They seemed to have too wide of habs to make a good intersettling partner. Plus the Manticores were JOAT, attractive since I didn't have pen scans. So I made an alliance rather early in the game with the Manticores and made short term NAPs with the Aiel, Undead and Sprockets. Part of my NAP with the Undeads is I vacated the property that I pop dropped (which I would have anyway since it was red for me).
The Manticores were factoryless and ready for war early. He basically ran over the Uberts by himself. I was going to contribute to the HW hit, but I wasn't ready soon enough, so I just supplied minelayers and bombers. So I greatly benefited from not only allying with a JOAT for pen scans, but combined with the good greens in his space and the Manticores taking the Ubert space left me with lots of room to grow.
With this room to grow and my good factories, my rank went to first and the Manticores went to 3rd while we assumed the Ubert territory. After taking most of the Ubert territory we started running into the Nightbugs, an SS race in the bottom left of the universe. We kept going back and forth, should we strike up an agreement with the Nightbugs, or attack them. We had just struck a short term agreement with the Nightbugs when they went and attacked the Undeads, lost their main fleet and dropped. So we scrambled to take what Nighbug planets we could. Since we had I think we got more than 1/3 but less than 1/2 of the Nightbug territory.
The Undeads and I had a scuffle over the last Nightbug planet and I realized that war would begin soon against the Undead and Aiel. So I gave my notices to terminate the NAPs.
We had some battles with bazooka CCs and took a few planets. The Aiel and Undeads defeated our main bazooka CC fleet when we were attacking. So I started a W10 CC fleet. We lost a couple of the planets that we took and they were building a lot of beamer CCs, they had more than us. I believe I had the resource and tech lead at the time, so I researched Jihad tech. I had prop expensive, so I was stuck with 100/250 gates, so I built Jihad DDs and just in time. The Undeads were attacking (from the planet I had originally pop dropped I think) with a superior beamer CC fleet. However I had just built the Jihad DDs and gated them in un-stacked and won the battle.
I don't recall all the details, but I think we took a few more planets after that and both teams researched Con for BB tech. I think the Undeads got there first, which gave us the opportunity to put a comp in the nose of our bb to counter their BB with 7 en caps. While the undead had a head start, the Manticores and I quickly overtook them in BB fleet size, or so we thought. It looked like we would have an easy time, marching through their space.
Then one turn, one that I had tested thoroughly and knew they had no shot of winning that battle, they destroyed most of our BBs by sending in an overcloaked BB stack, I think they had overcloaked about 300 BBs. I remember looking at that turn shocked. First I thought, was there a bug? Did Mac find a new bug? Then I got it, he was IT, he could build heavy and more efficient gateable overcloakers and had sprung a great trap.
So I congratulated him on a great trap and went to work on strategy with the Manticorans on how to recover. I had about 40k in resources at this point, but it would take years to build a large enough fleet to stop them. We had options and we still had about 150 BBs that hadn't been stacked yet. We talked about getting Nubs and ran the numbers on how long to get there. But that would need like 15 turns of just research. We could keep building the same BB. While Macs BB stack would shoot first, ours had EN14 shields compared to their EN10 shields. Or we could research W.
W chose to research W and started building a W14 stack while they advanced. We lost a lot of planets, including my HW. We still had a shot of turning it around. My tests were similar to Macs, we were close to having enough W14 BBs to completely defeat his W10 BB stack. Then the Aiel got the ED, which really messed things up. Going with a range 2 beamer is dangerous against an enemy with range 3 beams and the ED. Many of my tests showed the undead would get 2 free shots off in many situations. Those 2 free shots meant I needed a lot more ships to win. But I started finding situations with certain battleboard positions and ship attractiveness that would prevent his 2 free shots and allow my ships to win.
My tests on the last battle showed just that. They were going to attack a Manticore planet. By having him build a very attractive starbase, my tests showed the Undead ship movement would mean no free shots and I would win easy.
Unfortuantely the last battle didn't work out that way. The Undead didn't get their free shots, but they did move way from my ships at first, which meant it took many more turns to close. During this time his Jihad ships killed all my sappers. Our ships also had the same initiative and he got the first shot. I lost all my ships and killed about 2/3rd of his.
During the late stages of our war with the Aiel/Undead/Kobolds we started talking with the Sprockets again. I had thought they would go the whole game without a war. But they seemed interested in joining our war all of the sudden. I think it was because they had no one to ally with, since the Kobold had joined forces with the Aiel and Undead. The Kobolds did give them some nice toys. CS FFs are great cheap sweepers in SD hands. Plus they started supplying pop for pop drops. The Sprockets had built up a nice sized Jihad BB fleet and had the ED to go with it. We were just about to start taking planets back, including my HW with the Sprockets help in the north, while trying to stop the undead BB fleet in the south with our W14 BBs when the final battle happened.
What is interesting about this last battle is Mac's tests showed he would always win and my tests showed I would win most of the time. After talking about it, we had the host regen the last turn about 10 times. I didn't count all the results, but I saw some of the results showed what my tests showed with movements and I won. Some of the results mirrored Macs tests and he won easily. And some of the results were just like the actual result, the Undeads won, but suffered heavy casualties.
Well after this battle I realized they would get the salvage and with an IT on their team they would have it distributed to production centers in just a few turns. Even though we would be unopposed for a few turns in the north, we wouldn't be able to stop them in the south and with the mineral advantage it was only a matter of time for them to win.
If we had won that last battle, I was only a few turns from W17 myself, so the game would have gotten interesting as we could have taken planets in the north and south for a while.
Even though I lost in the end, this was one of the better games that I have played in. Something I realized is instead of researching W tech, we might have been better off building more W10 BBs. Collodials and Jihads seems to be adequate tech to win most SAS games.
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