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Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » Game stories » Second Beginner Game (as told by the Wheat Farmers)
Second Beginner Game Sat, 31 March 2018 20:05 Go to next message
talkingbologna is currently offline talkingbologna

 
Senior Chief Petty Officer

Messages: 86
Registered: November 2016
Location: 1947
To be announced. I actually had a story written up, but new evidence suggests we may yet play on, so I'll edit it out till we're done.

[Updated on: Sat, 31 March 2018 20:12]

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Re: Second Beginner Game Thu, 19 April 2018 05:33 Go to previous messageGo to next message
talkingbologna is currently offline talkingbologna

 
Senior Chief Petty Officer

Messages: 86
Registered: November 2016
Location: 1947
As our planet's supply of enzymes dwindled, we struck out across the universe to find similar microorganisms which could give our crops the nutrition we needed to survive. This is our story.


After scouting rigorously, we settled what few planets we could find with the values we needed, but with nothing having more than 60% livable conditions, we knew we needed to push hard and fast. It didn't take long to meet the neighbors. The Humanoids were a strange people whose mining corporation had them living on their starbases. They were grabbing up every solid rock from 3M TA3 to the black edge of nothing and throwing a structure in orbit. Another race, the Twi'Leks, had deployed explosives and warp interdictors around what they thought was to be theirs--we lost several Hay field prospectors in those d### things. But before either of them were the Graylings.

A wormhole, spitting distance from our home of Vox, opened right onto their backyard. Our first message was an invitation to our 212th annual pie eating contest. There was no response. After the contest, I asked if he'd heard me. Of course, all this was just pretense to obtain a record of their language for our translators to decode. At the time, I had no idea yet whether or not I'd be joining them or wiping them from the universe. In their first reply, their ruler noted the extra speed of my vessels compared to his, and I explained about our fertilizers which double as powerful, but colder burning fuel, allowing for a greater push from each engine. But they issued a challenge!

Quote:
Photon wrote, "Wormholes are fickle. Wouldn't want to send your fleet across the galaxy with no way home.


Life is a big place with many dangers, and going it alone would not be feasible. The farming guild enjoyed the Gray fire, and convinced me to offer to split the worlds evenly between them and ourselves. To our dismay, the wormhole shifted and we had to consider more conventional expansion options. The Graylings were beating around the bush, anyway.

In every way the Humanoids to our galactic south were our opposites. They ate different, they slept different, and could only tolerate a narrow band of existence. And they were more amiable than the Grays, too. We sent them the same invitation to the same contest, and in an otherworldy language called Dutch they said, "What?" Turns out, they were eager to find an ally. We became fast friends, initiating some high level diplomatic marriages to improve relations.

Every man must be a warrior, and the hard life of scraping a living out of dirt makes him even more so. As such, the Wheat Farmers developed a rigorous, fast paced lifestyle. We honest folk prefer to live and let live, but a field needs space to spread, and we needed those enzymes. Once we had decided on an ally, the rest of the cosmos were ripe for harvest. The great expansion on part of the Humanoids was an even greater need for habitable worlds than we had, so we offered them Schubert, a mid level world for us and amazing for them, in place of Kitaro, marginal for us but deadly to any Humanoid. We even set up a tech co-op at 3M. The endeavor was ill fated till the advent of stargates, implemented across our networks and speeding up everything but colonization.

For many years life was good. The Humanoids focused on and traded us construction and energy tech, and brought us up to their weapons level, while we worked to shore up their secondary techs of propulsion, electronics, and biotechnology, with the ultimate goal of helping them produce a mineral fountain, a fable among their people and impossible for any other race. Our factories could build weapons at a phenomenal rate, so we were to build the fleet which would pave the road to conquest.

https://preview.ibb.co/jOAzE7/Alliance_Trades.png

As it turned out, on two of the finest looking planets in space were planted the first orchards of the Graylings and Twi'Leks. Prude was 76%, and Mallard was 69%. The Graylings had colonized a world blocking us from southwest expansion, Lube, and erected a simpler form of these Twi'Lek 'minefields.'

https://image.ibb.co/fcX1SS/Lube_Cluster.png

So, I thought it best to go to war over the green worlds of my smaller opponent. My huntin' dog, Blue, went after any Twi'Lek scouts or colonizers which left his space, and I proceeded to drop my angriest citizens on Scott, Murat, and Fubar, using Forrest as a beachfront. None of his worlds had forts or docks to stop me. The Grays had already used the wormhole which was once near Vox to take Raster, and considering how similar our habitation needs were, I assumed the mineral rich world of New was their next target. Apparently, a formidable comet had struck its surface in the recent past, and it would serve wonderfully as a stumbling block to southern Grayling advances, just as the fort on Fubar was to his northern movement.

https://image.ibb.co/jkrvnS/Twi_Lek_War.png

As the Humanoids and we were producing fleets, the Grayling master, Photon, saw an opportunity to strike through an opening in our defense and laid waste to the Humanoid fort at Forward just south of Wainwright with 2 destroyers.

In the 29th year since my people began this journey, my hayfield prospectors, which in wartime were doubling as scouts, had continual surveillance of all his space, and my ally and the guild were convinced he had no fleet, nothing to stop the grinding progress of our research and production engines. The Graylings knew this, too, and formally surrendered.

https://image.ibb.co/b1e4gn/2429.png

This was a fun game, guys.

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Re: Second Beginner Game Sun, 22 April 2018 12:22 Go to previous message
mrvan is currently offline mrvan

 
Officer Cadet 1st Year

Messages: 220
Registered: May 2014
@talkingbologna: great story, I like the writeup.

I'm not as good at producing pretty prose I'm afraid, but I can do a brief writeup from the #1 Humanoid perspective.

My race was AR, 1 in 10 1i 17%, IFE ISB ARM NRSE NAS, 10 divisor, WCN cheap rest expensive not start@3.

AR doesn't really have a lot of viable design options in my opinion. I wanted relatively high growth, but 19% is not really needed as pop is in the sqrt anyway. NRSE and NAS are nasty, but in a short game I probably won't be getting to L research and it's a long way to ultrastations, so I figured it was worth it, and helped paying for the +IFE +ISB needed for speed and bases.

1 in 10 is doable, with temp narrow for quick terra. With +/- 11 terraforming it is 1 in 3, and AR is good with yellow (and red) worlds.

I started with aggressive scouting, as the sooner I would fine worlds the sooner I could spread around and increase resources. Research something like N5, P2 (mizer), C4 (dock), B2, W5 (terra), N10, W10.

After a bit of scouting it became clear to me that (1) I was lucky with some good nearby planets, (2) there was an incredibly good cluster (the 3M cluster) to the N close to the Farmers, who I knew to the WMs (not the best neighbour for AR), and (3) that W of Wainwright there wasn't a lot to gain.

Screenshot of final year map is below. Of course my core planets are fully terra'd, so I wasn't that lucky, but I was really lucky in the sense that most green planets were actually relatively close by:

https://i.imgur.com/xChzwhV.png?1

As you can also see I pretty aggressively colonized reds. The game allowed for 8 (?) cheap colonizers for AR, so at the cost of 27 resources I got 12 resource/turn plus 4 mines, which is a pretty good deal as many reds had decent iron. Also, the early warning system is nice, and rivals can't get tech from killing my pop.

So, after initial diplo I decided to ally with the Farmers, both to secure the 3M cluster and because I thought it would be a good alliance: a WM for early defense and battle which I could feed with C and N in return for protection. The tech trading was very instructive and somewhat painful before gates. I guess in later games I will just self-research until gates are up, or use pop-dropping (which is impossible with AR, of course).

By that time I had already exchanged a number of messages with the Graylings, but the tone was mostly "if you go beyond that line I will blow you up". I did manage to snatch Wainwright and put up an armed fort, which proved to be very strategic in the tensions with Gray.

After not too long it was obvious that it was going to be war with Gray. We had hoped to jump on Lube to secure the center, but he was always a couple turns ahead of us in defending it. Our game plan was to defend on our front and grab as much as Twilek space as possible, so we would be able to control the majority of stars.

Unfortunately the game was over before we saw any real action, as Gray realized he was outnumbered and did not see a route to victory.

This was 2429, I had a pretty decent 4.4k resources, and tech levels 10/10/5/10/4/4. Ultra stations and super miners were 4 turns or so away (with Farmers researching having researched L while waiting for me to transfer W10 to him), which would have really helped as both mining and resources were plateau-ing. I did not want to build more potato bugs with better bots around the corner, although I did build 5 extra bugs somewhat early to remote mine beautiful, which was right next to my HW and had alround good concentrations.

Fun game, very instructive, looking forward to FA!

[edit: BTW, one thing that really helped me since I don't use stars notebook was setting up an automatic m-file merge script, which every turn downloaded my and TalkingBologna's files, merged them, and put them on a pwd-protected website. https://github.com/vanatteveldt/starstools/blob/master/merge .py]



[Updated on: Mon, 23 April 2018 03:34]

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