Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » New Game Announcements » Basic Training
| Basic Training II |
Tue, 15 May 2007 09:16   |
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I am now taking start ups for Basic Training II, since I have 11 players, and only 9 spaces. Have your races ready for inspection by 5-21-07.
Kheldhren, sorry but Micha received your file after the dead line, and Basic Training I is now full, so I'll add you to game 2, if that's ok with you?
Conrad
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| Re: Basic Training |
Tue, 15 May 2007 09:40 |
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Initial game setup allowed for 30 planets per player. Including you as a 9th player has put this back to 27, and this has been said to be going towards claustrofobic.
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After doing extensive reading on multi-play this game setting 25-30ish planets per player in a small or medium seems to be the most popular. Most people have busy lives and can't devote more than an hour a day to managing their empires.
Once I read this, and started practicing in smaller spaces (and changing my race designs to fit that space) I found the game to be much more enjoyable. More excitement, less of a chore.
I suggest that people test their race in a tiny dense universe, with one expert AI. That will give you a good feel for how your race will develope with this much space. Try to get 25K resources and take the AI home world by turn 50. Once you make that, you don't belong in basic training!
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| Re: Basic Training |
Wed, 16 May 2007 05:20 |
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| Soobie |
 | Officer Cadet 3rd Year |
Messages: 270
Registered: May 2007
Location: Australia | |
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Traveller, you're a total champion for offering to set up a second beginners game once you're comfortable with hosting the game you're playing in. If you decide that it's all to much, that's fine too - you had heart enough to offer, which is plenty good.
Let me add a clarification and an apology for confusion: I totally understand that the game was closed, and wasn't trying to be included. Given I (wrongly) thought that Stars! was no longer played by anyone except me (against those bloody silly AIs), I didn't expect to have the opportunity to play in a live game at all. A couple of months here or there - pffft - I can wait, no sweat. To find a living & breathing community focused on the game is like: Yay!! I apologise for the misunderstanding.
Being completely - and I mean completely - new to the forum, I appreciate NingunOtro clarifying that planet ratios arevery important to race design and that including a late-comer will (1) set a bad precedent and (2) disrupt the planet-ratio balance that is important in race design.
Cheers,
S.
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| Re: Basic Training |
Wed, 16 May 2007 05:24 |
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Why wouldn't it be more accurate to just play a game in a small packed universe with 8 AI's? Then you get a direct look at how it'll be. How much you'll have to contend with your unfriendly neighbors. Early fighting affects economy too, so if you plan to fight early, then test for it. Else try to just work around the AI as if they we friendly. (This doesn't include having to stomp their destroyers however.)
[Updated on: Wed, 16 May 2007 06:40]
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| Re: Basic Training |
Wed, 16 May 2007 08:21 |
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| Quote: |
Why wouldn't it be more accurate to just play a game in a small packed universe with 8 AI's? Then you get a direct look at how it'll be. How much you'll have to contend with your unfriendly neighbors. Early fighting affects economy too, so if you plan to fight early, then test for it. Else try to just work around the AI as if they we friendly. (This doesn't include having to stomp their destroyers however.)
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The AI does not colonize efficiently and makes little effort to prevent you from colonizing inside it's space, so it leaves you with way too much room to be a real test of this game density. It also colonizes with 2500 pop, so any planet the AI gets to 1st you just pop drop with little loss of pop, and actually avoid the cost of the colony ship. It's less realistic, not more.
The idea of a tiny dense is that there's only 40 planets total, which is about as much space as you can hope to occupy in our game, and that assumes you intersettle with an ally.
The only reason to include an AI in the test, is so you have a reason to build a fleet and bombers to take the homeworld. Plus a tiny dense test only takes about an hour to complete, giving you a very quick idea if your latest racial tweaking improved things any.
In my tests I always include a build of 50 escort class warships which I build between turn 25 and 30, to simulate the investment I'd make defending my space, and escorting my freighters.
I also try and get weapons 10 by turn 30 and upgrade my HW station, not because the AI is dangerous, but because Captain Maim might be 
I used to test in a small packed and got some very inflated ecconomic results. After confining myself to a smaller space I am confident my race will perform ok with no more than my share of planets.
I am a beginer, so anything I write should be read with that thought in mind..
[Updated on: Wed, 16 May 2007 08:32] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Basic Training |
Wed, 16 May 2007 22:02 |
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I choose small packed because it:
1) gives me a feel for how close the other players are in relation to me.
2) if you don't go pop dropping everyone and just assume that it's first come first serve. You end up with a fair assessment of inter human relations. That is, you only pop drop people you either don't want as friends or those who aren't your friends already.
3) Getting colonies in the AI's space is similar to intersettling, though eventually it'll turn ugly as the AI tries to kill everything that comes from those worlds.
4) It also gives you a proper grasp of interstellar distances.
5) There's no such thing really as "fair share" in this game. You take what you can maintain. If you have say, a 1 in 8 hab setting, you need to cover more space than if you had a 1 in 4 hab setting.
6) Only a tri immune and races that can live everywhere are capable of using the 30 nearest planets around them. For everyone else red worlds will be covering some or most of their 30 worlds.
Basically, expect your territory to be greater or less than 30 worlds.
One of the few games I played I tried colonizing everything in reach with 2500 colonists. Most of it was worthless to me and never made over 200 resources. But I had my 30 planets and only 15 were of any use to me. Doing that also drains your economy big time I've noticed. I wouldn't recommend colonizing the first 30 worlds you see, unless they're green or at least yellow depending on play style. Red worlds are basically planets with a 5% capacity and also the addition of being toxic to your form of life. If your AR then the red worlds are equal to a world with 25% capacity.
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| Re: Basic Training |
Thu, 17 May 2007 09:32 |
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"5) There's no such thing really as "fair share" in this game. You take what you can maintain. If you have say, a 1 in 8 hab setting, you need to cover more space than if you had a 1 in 4 hab setting."
What you need is not relevant IMO. What space is availible to you is determined by the quality of your early scouting, the speed and range of your colony ships, diplomacy (narrow offset habs an advantage) and how fast you can be ready for war.
You could test in a small packed with 8 AI if you made some reasonable restrictions on yourself.
1: Immediately declare one AI your enemy.
2: Immediately declare one AI your ally.
3: You can intersettle with your ally AI but not any worlds that would be a good green to him with full terraforming.
4: You can settle any world or invade any world in your enemies territory.
5: You don't attack any of the other AI or invade their planets, unless any of them settle within 100 LY of your home world, if so you can pop drop that colony.
6: You don't settle within 100 LY of any other "neutral" AI's home world.
If you followed these simple rules, you'd have something close to what I immagine to be real game territory, which should allow you about 60 planets to land colonies on (hence testing in a tiny unviverse). All these restrictions would slow your moves down a crawl though, so it would be less about tweaking the race design than developing a play style to fit the race / game parameters.
The main reason I test in a tiny is because it's fast, and allows me to focus on the one or two things I am interested in improving without all the distractions of a "game". In a test my turns take 60 seconds, in a "game" they might take 5-minutes to several hours each. The idea of a test for me is to quickly determine the impact of say "how would the race do without the G box checked" or "how much slower start I would have if I traded a point of pop growth and a few mines for improved star bases".
Also since I am used to a tiny galaxy the small map looks huge to me, not clostrophobic 
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| Re: Basic Training |
Thu, 17 May 2007 19:41 |
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Someone once told me to test in environments that were worse than what you'd be going into..
I went through that tweaking stage a while go, before I had any games to join. It takes a while, but it shouldn't take hours per turn, at least not until your fighting humans. I just tested from 0 to 50 over and over again until I got a good feel for what I could do and what works. I tried remote mining, I tried fighting early, I tried using more or less mines or factories. I tried increasing my habs, or increasing my tech costs. I'm not saying your way is wrong or not as good. I'm just saying it's not the only or best way possible. I don't know the best way, yet. But I do know what's worked for me.
The last game I played in I had an IT race that I'd tweaked and tuned running a map with the same number of AI's as players and the same size and density configuration. I made on average 15k by 50. But when I went into a real game I scored 18k by 50 because I could spread out into my ally's space via stargate. I used some of his leftover worlds as our habs didn't sync up perfectly, which is good.
It's very good to set some goals for testing, such as weapons 10 by 30, or construction 10 by 40 or 15k or more by 50. And then see how many you can accomplish. And maybe next game you'll know you needed more of this or that than you'd expected.
I've also found, that setting some expectations for your race, an overall strategy is also very important. Do you want to be a recluse who fights his neighbors? Or a race designed to trade goods, like say tech, remote miners, pen scanners, minerals, worlds, etc... Setting up habs so that you can A) live anywhere, B) intersettle nicely with say 1 immunity C) or save as many points as you can. I used to C until I found I was just making things harder on my self. A nice irregular hab setting can be a real boon in some situations such as intersettling.
I say there's no fair share, because I haven't seen a game yet where the players were divided up equally. Some races need less space to thrive, such as HP races. Others like -f races need LOADS of worlds to survive. The map's I've seen have always had territories irregularly distributed so I figure having 30 worlds per player is nice. But it probably won't work out to every player having 30 worlds. On the other hand you could claim 30 worlds and just stop there and defend them all. Using the reds for remote mining (or trading if you prefer) and the yellows and greens for living. Or you could do a lot of wheeling and dealing and spread those 30 worlds out over several racial territories. That's what's so great about this game, there's so many possibilities.
I don't want to argue with you Traveller, I'm just stating a different opinion based on my experience.
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| Re: Basic Training |
Thu, 17 May 2007 21:20 |
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I don't want to argue with you Traveller, I'm just stating a different opinion based on my experience.
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No argument Capt, just a healthy discussion. The main reason I continued it was to get the rest of the players thinking and hopefully testing, since Micha gave us a chance to redesign our races. It's a beginers game after all, so lets use this opertunity to learn as much as we can from each other.
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| Re: Basic Training |
Fri, 18 May 2007 04:07 |
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Agreed.
As a note that would have been nice to have when I first played, "Don't skimp on the mine settings." And unlike my first game, do actually max out your mining capacities on your worlds or the points you spent the race wizard are worthless. With mines being affordable at cost 3 there's no reason you shouldn't be able to max them out or spend a few points to get at least 15 or 16 mines in the race wizard. That's just my pointer. Cause it doesn't matter if you've got a better design and or better tech. If you can't afford to make anything, or enough of anything. Than your tech and ship designs are worthless. Not understanding this caused my first mutlplayer race to crumble almost immediately after I entered a war. He had ore, and I did not. So he had big armadas and I had skirmishers.
Also, again, unlike my first game, take the time to ship ore from world to world so all worlds have some of every mineral. If you build factories, keep freighters going to every world that needs germanium. And keep building factories when you have the ore, and mines when you don't. Max out your factories and mines everywhere you settle if you can. (And don't forget to terraform too once your worlds have at least 100 or 200 resources.)
Just some handy tips that could save your empire.
[Updated on: Fri, 18 May 2007 04:10]
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| Re: Basic Training |
Fri, 18 May 2007 09:43 |
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Also, again, unlike my first game, take the time to ship ore from world to world so all worlds have some of every mineral.
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This is clearly a weakness in my play style still, and it comes from so many games against the AI where I can defeat them just using a small % of my worlds for production. For a long time I played IT which just made me even more lazy, since if I could react at the last minute and have minerals where needed.
When I started playing a -f (no factory) race recently, it helped me get a grip on this somewhat, since they need to produce from all worlds (very low overal resources) and they need a large fleet early to gain the territory they need. Playing -f also really helped me improve my initial colonization drive and popoulation movements, since that was my only source of income it had to be optimal.
When I went back to a factory race I found my ecconomy developed much faster, I also found myself thinking about how dangerous the -f races would be with the very high tech at turn 25 and started building some defensive measures into my play a lot earlier. Not because I could stop a -f with my race at turn 30, but because if I display 50 odd escort class ships where we can see them, he's more likely to A: Attack someone else, or even better B: Ask me to join in on his side for the share of the planets.
[Updated on: Fri, 18 May 2007 09:44] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: Basic Training |
Fri, 18 May 2007 17:00 |
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Micha tells me tonight is the cut off for race modification, he will gen the game and send me the files. Get ready for gore and glory folks, it's starting soon.
Conrad
happybeachboy@yahoo.com
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| Re: Basic Training |
Fri, 18 May 2007 19:24 |
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Here's another handy tip.
If you want to terraform a planet fast, fill it up to it's capacity with colonists for at least as long as takes to do the job.
If your HP this might also require building factories up before terraforming.
Check your planet's capacity by left clicking on the percent value just above your mineral bars.
As it terraforms you can add more colonists to speed it up more.
If it's red/yellow, you can fill upto 15% capacity to max out resources by population.
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| Re: Basic Training |
Sun, 20 May 2007 09:49 |
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Good luck everyone, you should all have your 1st turn. We are now just waiting for Ron to get the game up on autohost. I have requested a Game forum so we will have a way to communicate as a group, once we get underway.
happybeachboy@yahoo.com
happybeachboy on yahoo messenger (prefered way to discuss in game politics).
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| Re: Basic Training |
Wed, 23 May 2007 07:49 |
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I will definately be hosting the second game. 3 people so far have expressed an interest in Basic Training II (I have received 1 race), so we have room for 5-6 more people. I'm not setting a deadline until I have at least 7 people signed up. You can send your races and passwords to happybeachboy@yahoo.com. I am not playing in game II, so I don't need a 3rd party to review races.
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Re: Basic Training
Re: Basic Training
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