Hi everyone,
please forgive me for posting before the official announcement by the host. But if I don´t post this tonight I´ll probably never get around to doing it.

To sum up the gist of the game: the winning move was made in 2404 when the Culture offered an alliance to the Consulari (two ITs seeing each other from the beginning with overlapping habs). Both of us were hoping for a CA ally (of course...) but thought they´d be hard to come by (boy were we wrong!) so we settled on what we both considered second best.

Our partly overlapping hab never proved much of a problem and the Culture with pen scans, IFE and CE for hordes of minesweepers proved a very efficient complement to the Consulari that had NAS, no IFE but con cheap.

The map in 2474 looks like this (I´m pretty sure Greg or Altruist will post some more to show the progress of the game, here´s only the final tally with HWs for reference)



Overall, like the alliance, it was a diplomatic victory. Greg and me decided pretty early on after we learned that the Hornets were a -f CA that we´d fight our war in the middle of the BB age after more or less fully built econ and when our IT gating could be used to the best effect. And even though the Culture eliminated the Mikotaj very early and even though with PPS everyone could see that #1 and #2 were allied we were left in peace with NAPs and trade agreements with most races. No big alliance was built in mid-game to go after us which could have made a difference so we were free to follow our plan to devastating effect.

The cast of the game:
#1: Trix, a TT CA (yellow)
#2: Pingguo, another CA, no TT AFAIK (green)
#3: Ousters, AR (red)
#4: Mikotaj, another AR and early victim of the Culture
#5: Hornet, -f CA
#6: Consulari, IT (light blue)
#7: Culture, IT, (dark blue) (IFE, NRSE, CE, OBRM, 0.31-3.2, -120 - +120, 42 - 86 (1/5), 19%, 1000/12/9/14G, 10/3/14, all expensive, W cheap, start at 3 not checked, 100 leftover points (factories).

A note on CE: For most of the game not a problem at all, maybe a colonizing mission delayed for a turn or so but overall very easy to live with. Only when the shooting really started did it become very annoying and some Hornet planets survived longer than they should have because the fleets didn´t move.

As for the game:

In 2405 the first Mikotaj scout was spotted and from the 17kt weight and a warp 4 jump deduced that they were AR, soon to be confirmed. Since they were boxed in the north-western corner it was clear that there´d be war (at least it was clear to the Culture, not so the Mikotaj who didn´t prepare for an attack, forge any alliance or offer trade while colonizing everything in sight without any communication. Not a way to make friends...)

A NAP with the Hornet neighbors to the East was forged to keep that border secure with the Consulari in the south securing that side. 17 beta-DDs were built that took out the Mikotaj HW in 22. They had one turn of warning when the planet hopping fleet was spotted but the not-even upgraded starbase was an easy victim. I was hoping to get that kill before scores became public but just couldn´t manage it.

Then things settled down a lot, Consulari and Culture were happily building their econ and trading tech back and forth while the Hornets started push south and fought the Ousters who had been running a pretty good AR econ till then, hat tip from me! No further warships were built till BBs except for some 6 or so single yak FFs and single gattling FFs that I used for minesweeping later on and planet covering guards.

The peace was sorely needed as I had run the Culture like a -f for at least 15 of the first 20 years: first elec research, then a huge wave of scouts (almost 30 in the first 10 years), then the warfleet against the Mikotaj. Obviously it paid off. With the large number of scouts in the air every planet was scanned by around year 23 or so and I had enough ships for repeat visits to keep intel updated. This also made it easy to egg people on against each other and leave us in peace...

As far as we could tell the Pingguo allies never helped much in the Hornet-Ouster war and the Ousters were almost wiped out. We offered sanctuary for Ouster colonizers in our space, gave them tech (hopefully in secret... ) and even built a mini-bomber fleet for the Ousters in the hope of slowing down the Hornet -f advance without tipping our hand, breaking our NAP or getting into the shooting war too early for us. Didn´t help much and the Ousters were almost wiped out.

We were pretty worried about the Hornets for a long time, especially in the 30s and 40s when their -f and RS would have been very useful against us while we were still building our econ. That´s why we successfully tried to keep the east at each other´s throats and supporting the SE against the Hornets without actively joining the fight.

By then the Consulari had also struck a great deal with the Trix to obtain OAs for us and our econ received another boost. Then finally MTs arrived, the first one gave the Langston shell and was met by almost everyone. Then second one gave tech and that made us cancel the NAP with the Hornets a couple of turns before schedule in the mid-50s as they were set to meet it with 9800 kt. Another tech MT came pretty close afterwards which was missed by the Hornets so two fully built IT econs coupled with 2 tech MTs headstart met with 9800 kt made it a pretty uneven fight once things got ugly.

By then the Hornets had I guess around 300 of their Cookie Cutter CCs (CC, TGSS, 3 bears, 2 OTs, 1 jammer, 4 Mark IV) plus around 150 with sappers which with their RS is a damned powerful ship for the mid-game. They definitely taught me newfound respect for CCs and gave me quite a few headaches coming up with counter designs and testbeds. In the W16 age they are really good and are difficult to counter-design with their great speed and high init from range 2 beams, only when W20 came available they were outclassed by Dooms. Ironically they were below 150 kt in weight and with the 150/600 gates available the Hornets had equal if not better mobility than the ITs with their inf/300 gates!

Things were a bit tense till we had a counter fleet and there was a lot of hopping back and forth to cover things but while both sides couldn´t really attack time was on our side.

The Culture built 75 Mugger BBs (A8, 6 caps, OT, 6 organic, 8 LS, 8 PS, 12 HBs) which were only meant as a stopgap design because the Consulari already had higher weapon tech from the second MT. When tech 20 was traded 21 Killer BBs (IS10, 4 SBC, 3 jammer 20, 4 PS, 16 dooms, 6 organic, 8 LS) were built. By then the Consulari had enough defensive ships to cover their planets so the Culture went on the offensive on the Hornet´s eastern border with most of the above ships in a big planet killing fleet accompanied by Consulari bombers.

Then in a babarian horde style attack around 25-30 Psychopath BBs (IS10, 6 caps, 1 SBC, 6 organic, 8 LS, 4 SS, 16 Mega-Ds) were thrown at the front every turn while the Consulari also attacked from the south with bombers to assure planet killing in one turn along as well. The combined bombing attacks with Consulari Cherries and LBUs followed by Culture Cherries proved very effective. Overall 243 of the Psychopaths and 7 more Ragnaroks with Armageddons were built in the war and only 25 Muggers and 7 Psychopaths lost.

It took too long for the Hornets to catch up with tech, against the Psychopaths CCs just didn´t cut it and the doomsday BBs which finally hit the scene were too few and too late to make a difference. It was a pretty clean sweep and we opened up some of the conquered planets for the Ousters in case anyone is wondering about the red planets on the map.

The Culture´s minesweepers proved very effective (FF with FM and single gattling) and hordes of them managed to sweep fields for both offensive navies though at the cost of around 450 ships lost to skirmishers and minefield hits. Only the micromanagement was a nightmare and in the end turns took >3 hours.

The game ended with the Hornets completely wiped out, fighting valiantly to the last planet. Great game and worthy opponent who caused us quite a few headaches. Maybe not played aggressively enough so that the -f advantage was lost when our factories were up.

In the end when we cancelled the Pingguo NAP they conceeded. They were ranked #2 with 53k resources against the Consulari 58 and the Culture´s 48 but with 87 against our 115 / 104 tech levels and with only 21 capital ships against our standing navies with 203 / 313 capital ships and around 170 B52s and Nubs available next turn for the Consulari.

In hindsight a pretty clean sweep, but again mostly achieved through careful diplomacy and trading that gave us exactly the game we wanted and planned for. Greg and me also spent a lot of time on strategizing, ship designs, micromanaging econ and whatnot but I´m sure the Hornets and Ousters were played just as well if not better on an operational level. It was the diplomacy that carried the day.

Thanks everyone, I learned a lot of things such as respect for CCs, the importance of loads of support ships and fear of the B-crunch which I never expected. See you again soon, well, at least when Babylon 5 is over which might take forever the way the Vorlon Alliance is playing...

[Updated on: Mon, 09 July 2007 14:12]

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[Updated on: Sun, 08 July 2007 22:58]

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horza wrote on Mon, 09 July 2007 13:41

The Ousters started off well, or so I thought. The first ~12 turns had me apparently doing well economically and technically. Lack of experience meant I didn't spot the neighbouring -f CA for what it was, and without a WM next door I thought I had the time to develop my economy further.

Having testbedded various AR approaches in the weeks before the game and almost joined with one (in the end I decided for IT to reduce MM since I was also playing in Babylon) I can tell you that from my perspective the econ and tech ramp was very impressive.

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I lost a lot of weak docks and freight unnecessarily. If my Weap tech had been better I could still have survived - oh mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Yes, that was really sobering to watch, a great econ and then several planets lost that could have been saved with a single X-ray laser on a dock / fort. There we were rooting for you to stall the Hornets and then that happened to our champion...

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Most of the remaining turns I spent in curiousity at the diplomatic situation - didn't everyone see how C/C were clearly on course for victory? I fully expected a joint Trix/Hornet/Ping assault that would have been very interesting for me to be a part of as a defender, and was disappointed when it never happened.

We were waiting for that as well but fortunately Greg had cemented very good relations and trade with the Trix by then. Hornet advances to that effect were thankfully rebuffed but we did expect a full-fledged Hornet / Pingguo alliance, especially when the Pingguo obviously withdrew their warships from the previous battlefront. Fortunately for us this was only a NAP and not a full alliance, a fact which we tried to promote with several messages but never fully understood!

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Interesting reading, from all of you. Sounds like you all had a blast

Urticator wrote on Wed, 11 July 2007 06:42

The hab was very wide, so much so that in the end I only had one non-habitable planet in my space ... and I might have been able to take it too if I'd colonized and waited for two deep terraformings. But, maybe it was too wide, reducing the average planet value or something?

You'll get more better planets. You'll also get more worse planets. It won't worsen the average.

10 cost mines, ouch Trying to keep to the spirit of the race design as much as possible, shifting to something like 10/9/14/4g 10/3/10 probably would have felt a LOT faster. Not quite as high capacity, but you would've got there much faster (Generate 24 instead of 30 resources per 10,000 pop. Costs 156r+56g instead of 300r+60g to get there.)

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Hornets were a -f CA:

Hornet
CA
IFE, ISB, CE, OBRM, RS
1in3 Hab 0.33/4.40g, -116/140°C, 25/85mR
19% Growth, 1/1000 pop eff
5/25/5 Facts, G box NOT checked
10/3/12 Mines
Weapons + Con: Cheap
En + El + Prop: Normal
Bio: Expensive
Start @3 NOT Checked
100 points left over - surface minerals

I'll run through the high points of the game, as I remember them, concentrating I what thought was happening: (Sorry if some of the order is a little mixed up - I didn't keep a diary and, when it comes to it, I have trouble remembering what happened last week let alone at in March...)

The First surprise was the low G start - A nice bonus for a -f race

Things went well in the early years: Not having to build factories meant I could get an initial wave of 15 DNA scanners built by 2404 and also be pushing most of my resources in Tech.

Within the first decade I'd found the Culture, the Consulari and the Ousters. I'd mentally assigned them the roles of ally, backup ally and first target. Little did I know that before my scouts were a year out from my HW, the first two options were already off the Table !

As we came in to the PPS years I tagged the Pingguo as the second target and the 'grand plan' was set. If I could take the eastern planets I would be set to tackle all comers. I'm not sure if I was specifically aware of the C/C alliance at this point - at least for a while I was hoping that they were involved in an unrestrained competition for planets - with the interesting potential to exploit this situation but as I watched it became obvious that the intersettling was co-operative, not competitive and I quickly signed NAPs with the both of them.

Mikotaj was already on the way out and the Trix were a) diagonally opposite me and b) not especially speedy in responding. (Maybe they were already aligned with the C/C ?) So I was without a potential ally.

Just before I kicked off my attack on the Ouster, the Ouster and Pingguo approached me with the offer of an eastern alliance - but I turned it down. In hind sight this was probably the turning point of the game; the last chance to build a 'grand alliance' against the C/C threat.

However, I couldn't tolerate being confined in the corner - I had to have more space so in 2426 I sent a "Cry 'HAVOC' and let slip the dogs of WAR !" message to the Ouster and the first War began.

Some early armed scouts, sent to investigate Ouster designs actually ended up killing the Ouster bases! From the Ousters report it seems I could have been a lot more aggressive at this point and made much quicker in roads in the early years of the war.

It did seem to take longer than I was hoping - and now I know I was also covertly battling the C/C alliance too It was extremely frustrating to see the Ouster re-establish new planets deep within the C/C territory where I was forbidden by treaty to send armed ships, even as I was finally taking his HW.

At some point during the Ouster offensive I turned off the view of friendly minefields so I could see more clearly - unfortunately for me I left it that way, which would give me a nasty surprise later on...

I made the required War fighting tech in 2444 and began to stamp out Cookie Cutters (CC, TGSS, 3xBears, 2xOT, 1xJ20 & 4xMkIVs) these are lovely fighting ships, cheap light, good init from range 2 beams, fit through a 150/600 gate and you can build them at Docks and the mineral requirements are pretty balanced - eventually I would build just short of 300 of them.

In 2447 I declared War on the Pingguo and the second War began. Ironically again I was offered the chance to join with him against the C/C just before the war begun but again I turned it down - My growth curve had been linear for far too long, I need more SPACE and the Pingguo had plenty of it

I _hoped_ I had enough years to grab a big chunk of fresh space before I had to deal with the C/C - boy was I wrong!

Around this time I happened to turn on the view friendly minefields filter and the C/C had been _really_ busy! A thick band of overlapping small minefields was carefully between us, real defense in depth stuff at least 150 LY deep, as far as my penscanners could see. Now that didn't look very friendly ! And my own minelaying was _way_ behind, it was all concentrated to the south the the 'enemy' was...

I fought the Pingguo for a while making some in-roads while he countered with a fine little mini blaster frigate - all but useless as an attacking vessel but superbly tailored as a defense against the Cookie Cutter and damn was that thing cheap - I hated it!

It was about this time that the C/C decided I shouldn't have all that lovely tech from the MT - I was sent the inevitable "excuse" message - every time you end a NAP you have to pick and Excuse This was absolutely superbly done by Andreas, even as I read the partial truths and deliberate misrepresentations that the message contained, I had to appreciate the smooth way it was done - it gave me a great deal of pleasure to read, even as it spelled out my inevitable doom with the salutation: "Kind regards, former Contact Ambassador Edwin ne Dolmi (now Special Circumstances)"

The third Hornet War had begun - and the second one was certainly far from over, and to top it all the Pingguo resource curve went ballistic - he reached my resource score during the C/C NAP countdown and he was rising _fast_!

I was perhaps unfortunate enough to discover Dooms lurking on a Consulari Ultrastation and this had a devastating effect on my thinking. I test bedded any number of battles which would all go quite well (I had a _lot_ of Cookie Cutters to play with and also around 100 of a Sapper based variant) but when I ran the same battles with even a few Doom BB's the results were just awful - I hadn't actually seen and on BBs yet but I reasoned that if they were on Stations then they would be on BBs any minute now!

This contributed to me being - from the Consulari write up - _way_ to cautious in the first few years of the war and I took the decision to run for a better tech position before I invested more metal in ships. It became a race, could I get a tech parity quickly enough to produce enough fighting ships ?

Well - No, as it happens! The war degenerated into a painfully slow crawl for more tech set against and increasingly confident attacks of the C/C attack fleets with their awful double whammy of doubled up bomber fleets giving them single year kills on my planets.

This was set against the most incredibly intense minesweeper/hunter battle. I initially had a few 'conventional' sweeper-hunters (DD based, Bear shield, organic armour, gattlings) but these were woefully inadequate against the hordes of frigate sweepers - not that they were ineffective - they were great, but they were just too expensive to keep up with numbers I needed to hunt down.

I switched to my own FF design, almost identical to the Culture design but shielded to give them the edge in 1:1 fights and set about _trying_ to stop the waterfall - with, it felt like at times, a tea cup and a leaky bucket!

I could finally target every sweeper I could see, but this was no were near enough! More would appear from strongholds, the ones I was chasing would pull back to planets and I'd lose the hunters. I started giving low speed chase orders - so the hunters wouldn't reach the planets but could still intercept the sweepers if they went forward but the sweepers would group together. I started using my CCs to hunt them down - a single CC could kill a group of up to 10 FFs but then the sweepers pulled back to friendly BBs. It was carnage I killed what seemed like hundreds of the little beggars (450 from Andreas' write up!) but still they swept my fields.

I was losing planets way too fast - it was all over but still there were small victories to be had A truce developed with the Pingguo, it turned into a tech trading alliance - I fed him weapons and he fed me everything else using wolf/lamb trading so it wouldn't obvious what we were doing.

Andreas produced a counter CC against my use of Cookie Cutters to kill his sweepers - to beat the init of the MkIV's it had to be a gattling and that meant a tech 20 gattling. I did my damnedest to ambush them whenever I could and got 3 free weapons levels which I passed on to the Pingguo - However, there's only so long you can hold out against an invasion that kills 4 planets a year!

Eventually I just ran out of planets...

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Triple_Point wrote on Wed, 11 July 2007 01:35

Within the first decade I'd found the Culture, the Consulari and the Ousters. I'd mentally assigned them the roles of ally, backup ally and first target. Little did I know that before my scouts were a year out from my HW, the first two options were already off the Table !

Well, if I had known you were CA I´d have gone for the alliance in a flash, but by the time I found out I was already committed.
That would have been a very different game!

Quote:

It did seem to take longer than I was hoping - and now I know I was also covertly battling the C/C alliance too It was extremely frustrating to see the Ouster re-establish new planets deep within the C/C territory where I was forbidden by treaty to send armed ships, even as I was finally taking his HW.

That´s why it´s called Sanctuary!

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Around this time I happened to turn on the view friendly minefields filter and the C/C had been _really_ busy! A thick band of overlapping small minefields was carefully between us, real defense in depth stuff at least 150 LY deep, as far as my penscanners could see. Now that didn't look very friendly ! And my own minelaying was _way_ behind, it was all concentrated to the south the the 'enemy' was...

He he, yes, I remember that mail when you finally realized.

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It was about this time that the C/C decided I shouldn't have all that lovely tech from the MT - I was sent the inevitable "excuse" message - every time you end a NAP you have to pick and Excuse This was absolutely superbly done by Andreas, even as I read the partial truths and deliberate misrepresentations that the message contained, I had to appreciate the smooth way it was done - it gave me a great deal of pleasure to read, even as it spelled out my inevitable doom with the salutation: "Kind regards, former Contact Ambassador Edwin ne Dolmi (now Special Circumstances)"

Yup, that was fun, thanks for the compliment. The situation: A tech MT was heading north (and from PPS everyone knew it was tech) and the Hornets were gathering LFs to meet it with 9800 kt at the border of my space.

Unfortunately even though it was slow it wasn´t slow enough cancel the NAP and shoot down the ships because of the long grace period we had established. Since the game was so peaceful there wasn´t even any fleet that could shoot it down, all I had were some minesweeping FFs with single gattlings I had stationed on planets as scouts to prevent planet hopping, nothing that would stand up to even a token escort should the Hornets send one in.

I was in a bit of a bind till I remembered that the NAP had been only for unarmed scouts in the other´s space. Other ships were allowed only after asking for permission. In practice our spaces had been quite open and I´m sure we both broke the precise terms a couple of times before without any hassle. So I accused the freighters of being invasion forces fully loaded with pop targeting my newly established yellows in that region of space and breaking the NAPs terms. Since they were illegally in my space I had the right to shoot them down even before the grace period was over and I also ran a countdown with friendly / neutral / enemy settings during the grace period that´d mean that the freighters would have to fly through minefields in the last year of meeting the MT.

So that was a huge win for us, I got a tech boost, Consulari knew it was a tech MT and could meet it with a full mineral load plus buy up on some cheap levels while the hornets didn´t meet it at all.

For the non-Banks-readers: until then the Ambassador ne Dolmi persona had always been from the Culture Contact section which is the sort of general explorer / diplomat / standby military in a pinch fraction of the Culture while Special Circumstances is the nasty secret service / special military / dirty tricks wing.

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This was set against the most incredibly intense minesweeper/hunter battle. I initially had a few 'conventional' sweeper-hunters (DD based, Bear shield, organic armour, gattlings) but these were woefully inadequate against the hordes of frigate sweepers - not that they were ineffective - they were great, but they were just too expensive to keep up with numbers I needed to hunt down. I switched to my own FF design, almost identical to the Culture design but shielded to give them the edge in 1:1 fights and set about _trying_ to stop the waterfall - with, it felt like at times, a tea cup and a leaky bucket!

Yes, my "Clear the Path" FFs were great, even though quite costly with 450 built and lost through 10 years of war or so. But they did the job perfectly, I´d send them out in batches of 20-30 and then split to stacks of 5 and when they were in sweeping range down to single ships. Biggest challenge was actually getting them into sweeping range even as IT. It was a lot of hassle with all those fleets and debris fields right next to planets. In the end it took me more than an hour each turn just to direct my sweepers.

I had originally planned for a conventional sweeper / skirmisher as well but your Cookie Cutters were just too good as skirmishers and to beat them I needed a lot of resources. Just not efficient so I decided to go with the throwaway ships. Of course I also ruthlessly had them jump at Warp 10 most of the time.

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Andreas produced a counter CC against my use of Cookie Cutters to kill his sweepers - to beat the init of the MkIV's it had to be a gattling and that meant a tech 20 gattling. I did my damnedest to ambush them whenever I could and got 3 free weapons levels which I passed on to the Pingguo - However, there's only so long you can hold out against an invasion that kills 4 planets a year!

Yes, I was very unhappy with that design, fortunately for me I didn´t build a lot, only around 20. Just too mineral expensive, when I designed them I still didn´t realize I was B-limited and they cost half the minerals of a BB at a lot less firepower and survivability. Should have used them more as a bait I realize in hindsight!

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