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Fledgling Admirals VI |
Mon, 27 July 2009 14:14 |
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The winner of Fledgling Admirals VI is the alliance of Sentient Cheese and the Concilium!
Congratulations to kaloth!
Kaloth was already part of the victorious alliance in FA4. I guess we need to kick him out of the FA-series intended for beginners *grin
FA6 had quite some problems with dropouts, was nevertheless very fast paced and thus as soon as 2457 the game was finished and a winner declared by consensus. This is also the first FA-game in which a CA (without restrictions) is part of the winning alliance.
I hope the players enjoyed the game and will write some lines about their experience. I know that via email already some thoughts were shared, please, post them here perhaps.
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Re: Fledgling Admirals VI |
Mon, 27 July 2009 18:46 |
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I definitely learned a lot. It was a worthwhile experience even though I started losing interest later in the game.
In the course of this game, I have become a Starcraft junkie, so some of what I write will reflect that.
1. DIPLOMACY!!!!! Wow. Learned a lot from observing the various styles of diplomacy employed. Probably the most important thing to learn.
2. Scouting and information warfare - scout early and aggressively (which I did not manage to do very well). Deny scouting (which I didn't do AT ALL). Then keep on scouting to keep tabs on your neighbors.
Because I place such great importance on this, I have to say that I LOVE playing SS. With my starting scanner range (NAS included), I had a very picturesque view of Bureaucrat and Cheese scouting action and could immediately deduce that Cheese was JoAT.
3. Not starting at tech 3 is VERY annoying.
4. Hab draws are unfortunately a big factor.
5. Starbases make scrap boranium out of horde frigates.
6. TIMING! Time your FF push before effective starbase defenses are up or else wait for the cruiser/BB era. Correspondingly, if you want to sit still and tech/ramp factories, make sure the opponent is in the horde-FF phase and throw up some starbases.
7. Micro -- blargh lots of micro. But what can you do? It's an empire building game after all.
8. Your options in the game are attack, tech, expand, or ramp economy. You can probably get away with doing two at once and still have them be effective. Being an -F allows you to drop "ramp economy" more or less.
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Re: Fledgling Admirals VI |
Tue, 28 July 2009 08:17 |
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Kaloth | | Chief Petty Officer | Messages: 72
Registered: September 2008 Location: Brisbane, Australia | |
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Can I say a big thank you to Altruist for hosting the FA series and spending so much time dealing with the many problems that come up in a Stars game. Looking forward to the eventual Rheumatic Admirals I will also definitely stop signing up as a beginner, in fact I am going to join SAS3 as an intermediate so I am preparing to get slaughtered..
Also credit should go to Traveller (Conrad) who picked a really nasty race design and took excellent advantage of his early territory to easily be #1 the entire game (and as a grav immune +F CA with 3.5 tech what else would you expect?). It was unfortunate that real life got in the way and he wasn't able to enjoy the big wars and mudslinging that decided the game, but I had fun steering both empires awaiting his return
I really enjoyed this game as I got to employ all of the tactics I've learned from playing with and against some great players and reading just about every article I could find. I wrote a summary of what I learned from this game in an email to the players, I will repost some of it here in case it is of use to anyone. These are some points that I hadn't learned from just reading up.
In my opinion diplomacy won the game for me. My strategy was to grab an ally ASAP (preferably in the first 10 years, or as soon as a suitable neighbour as found) and hunker down until the midgame. With this ally I was able to negotiate with double the threat behind my words! And I was sending a lot of messages, 3-4 per turn until the expansion phase was over. All my neighbours agreed to NAPs because they did not want to fight 2v1 against us, and themselves started to look for allies (while I made sure that the Bureacrats were not going to be assisted by anyone by telling everyone else how threatening they were, how they planned on attacking my neighbours and were asking me for help in doing so - this gave me credibility while weakening the credibility of the 'Crats). This peace allowed us to negotiate for a larger slice of territory in return for not attacking our neighbours. Which in turn allowed us to be bigger at the start, and combined with the fact we only fought small weak empires while maintaining peace with anyone remotely threatening allowed us to expand greatly while still not slowing our factory growth significantly. By 2440 we had almost the top half of the map, our factories were ramping hard and it was pretty much decided. Keep in mind that I put a lot of hours into micromanaging, I made sure every planned attack was going to be successful with testbeds, I searched the entire map every turn to make sure I knew about every fleet and where they were going, I planned out my attacks on enemy territory so that every attack had a follow up, so that I was at least killing a planet completely every single turn and never wasted any time in orbit bombing over multiple turns if it could be helped. This mean producing a lot of support ships/bombers, often enough to kill 200% of colonists. And all those ships required a bunch of fuel, so planning refueling stops, repair stops, places where gates can be established to reinforce through, all these things required detailed planning 5-10 years before they happened. At the end of the game I was killing 3 user worlds per turn, it only took about 5 years to destroy his production worlds.
This is the first time I've played JOAT, very impressed with the early expansion and scouting ability, but other than that it feels very flavourless. If you make use of all the up to date information you get from your hordes of penscanners, you can make more informed decisions and spot attacks coming many years before they arrive. It also makes assessing an opponent's weaknesses easy. However this is also the first time I've made use of a wide hab non immune race. This race is designed to win in the midgame, using explosive early expansion (made easy by knowing every single planet in my sphere of influence within the first 10 years) and good factory settings to achieve monster resources. My job was made a lot easier by my next door neighbour and ally being CA. Unfortunately we had pretty much overlapping habs, so we had to share out planets. Imagine if our habs were compatible we would have been able to occupy twice as many planets! I did not like the slow growth of a non-immune race, so many planets were very low value they were only practical due to my CA ally. And the whole thing required enormous amounts of MM to cope with the low achieved growth % spread out across many planets. Next time I would field a 1 immune varient of this race (if I ever even played JOAT again..). Also tech settings were pretty lame, and this would have hurt me badly if my ally didn't happen to have 3.5 cheap tech
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Re: Fledgling Admirals VI |
Sat, 01 August 2009 13:29 |
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Taka Tuka | | Master Chief Petty Officer | Messages: 102
Registered: March 2004 Location: Germany | |
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I played WM +f and finished rank 4, but in third place of alliances (together with huntsmen). My race had a hab of 1/6. But I had only 1 green (29%) within warp9. Another disadvantage was the bad choice of no ISB because of my penalty.
My offers of alliance were denied by Family and Concilium (he already had the JOAT Cheese as his ally). Both races were CA! I was located at the right edge in the middle. I was sandwiched by Concilium and Users (another CA!) in the north and by Family and Yapyaps (HE) in the south. An offer of Cheese, to let him watch my empire and to exchange information about other empires, was denied by me. The downshot of his first scout gave me 1 tech in elec .
Users I met after my alliance with huntsmen and Yapyaps I met after he was allied with Family (we would have had a perfect hab for intersettling, even if nearly all (!) planets within his empire were red for me until end of the game.
The last opportunity was an alliance with Huntsmen (SS), who was my neighbor at the left edge of the map. Unfortunately he had a disadvantage in planets nearby his HW and he played -f. He didn't have time for micromanagement and didn't ship his pop to newly colonized planets quickly. So he had a low popgrowth as well. Our alliance wasn't that strong in economy.
After the early NAP with Concilium and later with Users I agreed an border with my neighbor Yapyaps.
After huntsmen agreed NAP with some neighbors as well and Family moved forwards into my area of interest, Family was the logical target. As well his planets were green for huntsmen and Family didn't want to agree a border in the middle of the distance between my and his HW.
First attack was successful on my side only and I conquered first planet of Family (green for me, more close to my HW). Huntsmen lost his fleets and important planets after very fast. Because of conquering first planet I was nearly sure, that Family played -f. So I wanted to force Family to invest into warship-production, because Huntsmen couldn't support me with warships anymore. I wanted to improve my economy/research for better warships and better resources - as well because of my shortage in mins. I had only 11 yellow/green planets at the end of the game .
At the end of the game the long lasting war with Family/Yapyaps didn't change much for me. I kept all planets, including the one, I conquered first from Family, but couldn't win anything else. I have lost important fleets and Family had lost them as well. I was sure, I would have been able to handle the two incomming main attacking fleets of Family and Yapyaps with my stations amd my new DNs. But I wasn't able to attack before a main victory in battle because of the pressure by enemy and the shortage in minelayers because of weak huntsmen economy. I was busy in defending my planets .
I tried to explain Family/Yapyaps, that the game will be decided (for Cheese/Concilium) because of our long war, if we not agree to cooperate against Cheese/Concilium and to have NAP until end of the game. The replacement player for Family didn't want to have NAP until end of the game and didn't want to give (back) one planet to me and one to Huntsmen. The alliance Family/Yapyaps was second and wanted have peace with ranked 3 alliance for free. They didn't understand, that we all had no chance to win the game without cooperation and they didn't want pay for the chance to win the game.
At least Cheese/Concilum won the game, because their first enemies did not ally with somebody and were weak because of corner positions. They could beat one after the other. Rank-2 and rank-3 alliance were back in development because of their long lasting war.
So early alliance, good coordination (mostly because one player played both races most time), good location, good economy (!), weak non-allied neighbors, NAP with the neighboring alliance and expansion in the south of the huntsmen empire, allowed by huntsmen (why?), were the bareason for a clear victory of the Cheese/Concilium alliance, imo. But their biggest advantage was that the ranked 2 and 3 alliance were not able to cooperate against Cheese/Concilium .
Congratulations!
Taka Tuka
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