Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » Game stories » All Quiet has ended
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| A Buggy history, Bug views on the All Quiet game |
Tue, 11 May 2010 16:43   |
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I was keeping a log file for a good number of years, but I cannot seem to find that, so I will write a brief history of the game from the Bug perspective. Please forgive if dates are not exact, as I will probably not be looking up the details.
To begin with, this was my first game in at least 3-4 years. Life had been keeping me too busy to play. I finally thought that I had enough time, and All Quiet sounded like a good game to get back into things.
I built the Bugs to be an economic monster. I cut corners a lot of places in the design to maximize economy. The reason for this is that my best skill in Stars! is probably economy building. (In one team game with Micha I managed to have a bigger economy than him for much of the game, and I was WM and he was SD...). So I took a JoaT with IFE, NRSE, LSP, OBRM, and RS. I could not take NAS because I had played too many games to qualify (even if none of them were recent).
The start was reasonable good. I was in the NW corner. My habs were roughly 1 in 4, and I found a few greens close to my HW. None were big enough to be breeders though. My problem was that after those planets there was a really big gap (4+ years travel) to get to the next set of greens. IFE was a help, but getting my freighters back to reuse them was proving very difficult.
Around turn 10 Vedin and I ran into each other. Neither of us had seen any other players, and we got along fairly well and became allies. This early alliance helped me tremendously. Vedin had taken Prop cheap (which I thought was strange but was VERY happy with) and we started to trade technology via Wolf/Lamb at a very early date. The Prop levels that I got from him helped me to reach the next level of planets more efficiently.
My alliance with Vedin also worked well as we were very similar in many respects. Neither us had played in a while. We were both playing JoaT, and we were reminding each other of the many things that we had forgotten in our years of not playing.
It was not long before I ran into two other races, Alpheus/Lacon in the center, and Rancor to my south. Dealings with Rancor were a bit tough from the start as I felt he was being rather abrasive, not uncommon for a WM. Dealing with Alpheus/Lacon went rather well, as I think he was already having problems with Ellurid on the other side from me.
I continued to expand as quickly as possibly taking as many planets as I could. I realized that Alpheus/Lacon had very similar habs, and that was a problem as he was stopping my expansion by taking all the planets that were good for me. So I started a war and quickly grabbed a few planets. Alpheus was having trouble with Ellurid still, and was not very interested in a war with me. I was happy with the new planets I had taken, so I stopped attacking, but I do not think we had a formal peace agreement.
So I continued to grow, and also met other races. Rancor stayed annoying, and I almost went to war with him over some border disputes. I found a number of good planets near Vedin space, but unfortunately a number of those were already taken by Alpheus/Lacon again. And it seemed that the problems between Ellurid and Alpheus continued.
I made an agreement with Ellurid that he would pay me in Electronics tech (via W/L) to attack Alpheus to take some of the pressure off of him, as Alpheus was JoaT and able to create more ships then the SS Ellurid. The thing I liked best about this is that I wanted to attack Alpheus again anyway, and take a few more of his planets. I let it be known that someone was paying me to attack. Surprisingly that did not seem to get people to dislike me for being a mercenary, but made others want to find who the payer was. That worked fine for me. I built more ships than what I had guaranteed Ellurid, and attacked and gained a number of new planets, some within 150 ly of the Lacon HW. Once I had completed my agreement with Ellurid, I again stopped attacking Alpheus/Lacon and consolidated my position. The two brief wars with Alpheus/Lacon are what really helped me to get a better than average number of planets.
By this time I was clearly in first place, probably because of micromanaging my economy. I took a look around and saw that all 10 of the races had paired off. There were a number of conflicts, but no really big wars involving lots of races. The Eagle and Lurkers to the south of Rancor were working on taking Rancor planets with gusto, and for some reason Alpheus (his ally) was not moving in to support him, probably because of his own problems with the Ellurids and Sofians.
To this day I am not really sure of the reasons, but Rancor and Alpheus/Lacon decided to split, so that Lacon could join the Bug/Vedin team as the third and last ally. This was a move that was potentially political suicide for the Bug/Vedin (JoaT) alliance. If the other three pairs of alliances all attacked our three-way alliance at one time, we would have major problems. The first problem would have been that Alpheus could get crushed in the middle.
About that time I was also making trade agreements with Rancor. He was providing me with minerals (primarily Germ for my factory starved planets) and planets in exchange for ships and protection. Basically I set my southern border with Eagles/Lurkers in such a way that they would be crossing my border to attack Rancor. This really really really annoyed the Eagle/Lurker alliance.
Again I am not sure of the details, but the Eagle/Lurker and Ellurid/Sofian alliances both went to war with the 3-way JoaT alliance. I think they they decided to attack Alpheus/Lacon, which made Vedin and I take the two extra years to formally end the starting NAP before we could counter. I quickly built some fleets, and came to the rescue and saved some Lacon planets from Ellurid and Sofian attacks.
One of the important points here is that the M&M alliance (Mycelium and Maera) decide to stay out of the war for a while (I presume) to continue building their technology and economy, and to see how things would go. What I think they did not know was that with my strong economy (technically a monster as I did reach 25K by year 50) I has reached nubians about year 68, probably 10 years ahead of any other races. So I proceeded to build my first nubian fleets. I stole a trick from Micha and built overcloakers and sent them out with minelayers, chaff, sweepers, and generally a beam nubian or two as an escort (all my smaller ships having built-in scanners, so no scanner ships needed). I then built my first attack fleets. The plan was for my ships to attack the Lurker/Eagle alliance, Alpheus/Lacon to attack the Sofian/Ellurid alliance, and Vedin to provide some support to each as needed, but to keep up defenses in case M&M attacked.
Unfortunately about this time my work got really busy and stressed, so my time available to play was reduced. I had more economy than both of my opponents together, and better technology. While I did win the war, it was with losses much greater than I should have taken. I will add that I greatly underestimated the strength of missile DNs, and lost hundreds of first generation beam nubians to the Lurker fleets. Unfortunately the original Alpheus/Lacon player faded out over this time, and while there had been some attacks made into Ellurid/Sofian space, those races were far from dead.
While I was attacking to the south, Rancor had taken advantage of the situation and colonized planets into Bug and Vedin space (without permission). He had attacked a good number of Eagle/Lurker planets, and had taken a number of them. By the time the Eagles/Lurkers were mostly dead, the Rancor were a strong force again. While I played minimal turns and tried to keep up with RL and also attack the Sofians and Ellurids, Rancor ran over much of the remaining Sofian/Ellurid space. Rancor then started to attack Lacon/Alpheus planets, which annoyed me. While there was no active player there, the race was still technically my ally.
At this point there was an option that I gave Rancor: he could join the Vedin/Bug alliance as the third ally, and the host could drop the Lacon to neutral. He declined, and via cloaked scouts I saw some cloaked loaded freighters returning from M&M space. I knew that he was trying to play both sides, with the idea of growing while we were fighting. So I found a replacement for Alpheus much to the dismay of Rancor.
I will note also that I really did intend to crush Rancor, and that while I was shielding him from the attacks from Lurker/Eagle, I came up with several plans to do so. I just never seemed to have the time to do it, either because of game factors or RL.
An interesting part of the southern wars is that when I started to take the Lurker/Eagle planets (both -F), and later the Ellurid/Sofian(-F) I found surprising amounts of minerals remaining. While I had stopped factory production in most of my early planets for lack of Germ, I was able to build factories at these planets and build them up to full production worlds. The minerals from these worlds helped to build a good portion of the nubians that later went to the war with M&M.
I do not remember how the war with M&M started (maybe a sign of my stress levels at the time) but I knew that I had been way too slow and inefficient taking out the southern races. M&M had built two mineral fountains, and was building many many nubians to counter the forces that I was building.
A side note on one of my biggest mistakes of the game: I had built a 98% cloaked fleet, with missile and beam nubians, and chaff to attack the Maera HW. I had gotten the fleet most of the way around the minefields and was in back of my target, maybe 5 years away. My mistake was not watching the fleet carefully. A minefield grew, and my fleet clipped the edge of it. This destroyed all my chaff, and brought attention to the fleet that had been very carefully hidden to this point. If I had been watching closer, and had avoided the edge of that minefield, I had (I guess) a 50/50 shot of attacking the (at that time) lightly defended Meara HW and killing all the remote miners.
Somewhere after the new Alpheus leader came in, Rancor effectively gave up. He scrapped many of his ships, and transferred his beamers and DNs to M&M, and set up his MDs to fling all remaining minerals to a few of my planets (at W10 so my MDs could catch them). He gave something to each side, which may have been balanced, but lost any way of influencing the course of the game. Granted, I did not realize that Rancor had transferred his ships, and because of that lost a very big battle and about 2000 nubians to M&M when the previously-Rancor ships arrived and turned the battle (which I had been testing for days before actually attacking...).
With the Rancor minerals, minerals from the dead -F races, and from the few taken M&M planets, I was able to continue to build more ships. And with the help of my allies was able to turn the tide against M&M again. Taking back the planet where I had lost the 2000 nubians was important as that was enough minerals to build over 1000 new nubians. I had lots of production power, just needed more minerals. I was able to continue building ships, take more planets, and build a few bases with gates in M&M space. I was able to pull in more ships and continue to scorch more M&M planets, and pull up the minerals, with no intention of ever being able to rebuild them.
Other notes: I do have a tendency to be lucky, and where my luck came in this game was with the MTs. The first three (or four?) all entered the universe in (or close to) bug controlled space. I was able to meet every MT. The Tech MTs helped me to get to Const 26 a few years earlier, and the MFP helped me to add a little cloaking to all of my nubians. I generally get ready for MTs to show up, building up stockpile of Bor and having freighters sitting with them. So as soon as they show up I am ready to meet them.
I had a 10 year notice set up with both of my allies, so I would have 10 years to get ready if they did want to split and continue the game after M&M were dead.. I could have brought all my ships home and built another 1500 nubians in that time.
I found that colonizing and mining red planets helped. As a JoaT I could build 99 mines on each planet. While this did not generate huge mineral piles, it did help significantly over the course of many years.
There were also a good number of changes in players, probably more than I have seen in any other game. Often a game ends when a good number of people leave. We even had the host change for a while! Thank you to everyone to stayed in the game and continued to play their best! Thanks to Micha and John as hosts!
It was a long game, a lot longer than I had expected (137 turns!). It is the longest game I have even played, and the only game where I have gotten to nubians on my own (I have gotten there in team games before). It went way better than I expected. And while I do not plan to get in another game for at least a few months, I hope to see many of the players again, though I expect you will be more wary of me in the future...
Eric/AH Raindancer/The Big Bug leader of The Bugs
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| Re: A Buggy history, Bug views on the All Quiet game |
Tue, 11 May 2010 20:06 |
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I was the replacement found in very late game, for the Alpheus/Lacon. This race came second... But second rank just means I lost too, in a one-winner game.
I entered the game under the instruction that the race was allied with Bug and Vedin. However I immediately noticed an old in-game message from M&M declining a request to ally, so I realised things were a little more fluid than the other players & host had thought. I also noted the game was 'one winner only', with my race still ranked second despite about 10 missed turns, so I started plotting how I might turn the game around.
Step one was to halt the attacks of the Rancor, a previous ally who was deeply intersettled. He agreed to a ceasefire immediately, and returned a couple of the worlds he'd taken most recently. Our diplomacy was quite aggressive for the remainder of the game though, as we each slowly came to the conclusion we were would be on opposed sides, despite being intersettled.
Rancor wanted to take on the Bug, the monster JOAT in rank 1. I wanted to take on the M&M alliance - AR and 3i HE are very dangerous races once you pass the 2500 mark, both typically with strong late game minerals, while I knew the other JOATs were already doing mineral alchemy. I quickly came to the conclusion Rancor was probably allied with M&M, as M&M cloaked minelayers seemed to pass his minefields and plugged gaps that I had negotiated open with Rancor. This was backed up when cloaked freighters were spotted. With the max-three-ally rule, this seemed to explain M&M declining my predecessor's request to ally.
Even so, I decided my best odds were to have the Alpheus decline to rejoin the Bug alliance under their new leadership (mine), and to wait to see how the first big battles between the two alliances played out. My hope was was for Bug to reduce M&M's territory enough that their resources shrank to the point that their mineral fountain did not matter so much, while Bug lost irreplaceable ships - gradually leading to the point that my fleets would become dominant and I could make a play for the universe.
I hoped Rancor would attack Bug, but I figured they would probably sit still as long as I did, for fear of my stepping in.
The first really big battle came up, with Bug apparently losing the battle itself, but able to secure the world the following year - and thus the scrap.
I was finally crunching on minerals at this point, my fleets at a peak. It was time to get off the fence... I 'kindly' offered to send a hundred or so freighters to pick up some of that battle scrap from Bug. I think Bug recognised there was a hint of threat in there - I was going to get a big chunk of that metal one way or the other - but he took an assertive stance, and asked me to commit to an alliance with Bug & Vedin before he would give me a share. I knew I could TAKE the whole lot, so I approached M&M at this point, seeing what they could offer me.
The best offer I got from M&M was 'a share' of mineral output, until the Bug were dead. This seemed like a poison pill to me, receiving an unspecified share only long enough to bring down the opponent. I tried to explain that I needed an *unfair* share, so I wouldn't have to fear getting stomped by a mineral fountain after depleting my ships against Bug, but my diplomacy was unsuccessful.
I committed to the Bug alliance, hoping that Rancor would distract Bug enough that I could hope to make the main gains against Maera - and thus control the captured wealth - myself.
Sadly it wasn't to be, with Rancor spectacularly bailing out of the game. This opened up a vacuum in the middle of my space, nearly every Rancor world was red to me, and I'd already committed to a limited alliance with Bug (until Maera was dead) so there was no way for me to prevent Bug & Vedin swarming into these worlds. Rancor's metal even went to Bug in slow mass packets, so I couldn't claim them myself (although Bug shared some of this back to me.) Bug also made much faster progress again Maera than I expected, with my own overcloaked fleets trailing one jump behind him, so I lost the chance to seize a mineral advantage... There was also the Vedin to contend with, who had made it clear they would support Bug to the bitter end.
At this point I acknowledged my chance to win had vanished, and began to idle, just directing my fleets to help mop up M&M, so the game could end.
The scores shown at game's end backed up this assumption. Bug had a significant - but not unassailable - fleet advantage at this point, but triple the economy and territory, and crucially, he had control over vast amounts of captured metal at the dead mineral fountains. All he'd have to do is secure those stockpiles - easy enough with a fleet advantage - and soon he'd have ten times my fleet, even if I made rapid progress bombing.... Game over.
[Updated on: Tue, 11 May 2010 20:09] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: All Quiet has ended |
Wed, 23 June 2010 08:10 |
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 magic9mushroom |
 | Commander |
Messages: 1361
Registered: May 2008 | |
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The Mycelium actually didn't have particularly great minerals.
Here's my race specs.
HE
ISB, NRSE, OBRM, RS
3i 6%
1/1000
13/8/16/3g
10/3/23
W, C, N cheap L normal P & B expensive
no start at 3
-Perry/magic9mushroom, creator and former leader of the Mycelium.
[Updated on: Wed, 23 June 2010 08:32] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: All Quiet has ended |
Wed, 23 June 2010 09:15 |
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| magic9mushroom wrote on Wed, 23 June 2010 22:10 |
The Mycelium actually didn't have particularly great minerals.
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The high mineral output was from Maera's AR mineral fountains. It doesn't really matter much in the late game what mineral settings Mycelium had, by the end the M&M alliance was drowning in minerals due to the Maera's AR mineral fountains producing more minerals than both races could spend.
[Updated on: Wed, 23 June 2010 09:15] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: All Quiet has ended |
Mon, 28 June 2010 12:48 |
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| Micha wrote on Mon, 28 June 2010 22:39 |
| [email |
m.a@stars[/email] wrote on Mon, 28 June 2010 13:53]| Micha wrote on Sun, 27 June 2010 22:54 |
Sure! Free minerals for your starving enemies. 
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Indeed. Easy minerals in exchange for all their pop. A real bargain! 
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Euh? Load and drop again. Loss in resources? <shrug> You don't have the minerals to use them all anyway! Tech is maxed out and you're doing mineral alchemy ...
mch
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Exactly. It'll take well over 20mt of metal, spread amongst multiple packets, to kill a world with max defence but only one driver for catching packets. Around half that metal will be left on the surface (assuming only 1 driver is catching.)
I would've (repeatedly) sacrificed a million colonists without hesitation, to collect 10mt+ of metal. Of course, the actual sacrifice would be much less, since it'd be easy to lift off most of the population. Remember, by the end of the game everyone except the AR+ally were doing mineral alchemy.
Some packets were indeed thrown, to take down gates in strategic positions, but even these were considered quite welcome 'setbacks' by the targets.
EDIT: I suppose if they'd thrown nothing but boranium, they could've had some impact, without helping their opponents so much... But with a carefully balanced build out, I was left crunching on all three minerals, so even getting a surplus of boranium would've made me pretty happy (and would've lead to some rather odd extreme-bor-expensive designs entering the field.)
[Updated on: Mon, 28 June 2010 12:53] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: All Quiet has ended |
Sat, 27 November 2010 21:20 |
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| Eagle of Fire | 
 | Lt. Commander |
Messages: 809
Registered: December 2008
Location: GMT -5 | |
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Hummm... This game is really far in the past in my memories. But I'll try to fill in the gaps as the original Eagles o Fornax player.
This was pretty much my first game against humans. I devised a -F IT race with one immunity and somehow decided that it would be a wise choice to go with immunity to temperature. Looking back at the race file, I can't understand why as there is no real advantage to that. Newbie mistake, I presume.
While I don't remember much, I do have the habit of preserving all my turns. So here is what I pieced together by looking over old turns.
I started in the middle southern of the map and I had what I considered at the time a very good start. Being IT, I had two homeworlds to start with. Generation luck gave me a big immediate advantage on one of my neighbors, the Sofians: my second planet was in gate range of his primary planet. By 2401, I knew I had another IT neighbor and where his homeworld was. What I used most in this game was my diplomacy skills, and very early Sofians and I began to discuss how to divide our borders. By arguing that the second planet of an IT player was in fact only the extension of his starting territory, I managed (only using diplomacy) to claim for myself most of the space nearby his HW. I was pretty happy about that for I learned afterward that his secondary planet was north of his HW and thus not in my way.
So I used the early game by expending a lot in every direction, without having to fight or to worry about fighting my neighbors. I met the Alpheus/Lacon far to the north of my territory but they were not really interested in serious talk nor in conflict. Shortly after I had to cross a big void of space to the west of my territory and I then met the Lurkers.
At that time in the game, I did not worry about fighting at all and didn't even started building warships yet. I had learned that the Sofians had already decided to ally themselves with another race (the SS Elurids) and the proximity of my borders with the Sofians as well as the new alliance made me worry of a surprise attack on their part. A short time and a lot of discussions later, I managed to bring a very happy Lurker player to form an alliance with me. Tensions about a possible surprise attack slowly dissolved and we took time to exchange tech and inter-colonize our territory.
If there is one mistake I did in this game, especially playing as -F, it was to be so peaceful. I should have been way more aggressive from the start to gobble up more territory to be able to compete with the other +F players... But I was new to the game and rather clueless and everything was working very very well for me up to the point when -Rancor- decided to try to "steal" planets very near my HW. -Rancor- was the first player I met in that game who was pretty oblivious to diplomacy... And by that time me and my teammate were building our fleet, looking for a target to expend our territory. The Lurkers had already "scraped shields" with -Rancor- and all my other neighbors were very friendly and true to their words... So it didn't take long to decide that they were our next target.
-Rancor- was, at the time, allied with the Alpheus/Lacon and the only reason why we hesitated to attack -Rancor- right away was because while I had peaceful contact with them, we didn't know about the status of their military. We knew we would have to use the majority of our militaty in -Rancor- space at first, and my territory was then in danger of being attacked by the Alpheus/Lacon in return. Strangely (and hopefully for me), Alpheus/Lacon was just as tired of -Rancor- as we were (or at the very least that's what I understood of our diplomatic contacts) and when we finally launched our attack on -Rancor-, Alpheus/Lacon simply detached themselves from the alliance and allowed us to proceed.
It is at that moment, as we plowed thru -Rancor- space and that the Alpheus/Lacon became single again among all the other dual alliances around, that the game shifted. All Quiet rules were pretty specific about alliances in the game, and three players in the same alliance was the maximum. After a short while we realized that, even though we had destroyed his homeworld and most of his territory, -Rancor- was in fact growing stronger instead of weaker. It became quickly apparent that someone was helping them fight back on us, and we knew that the Alpheus/Lacon was not that someone... So we assumed that the Bugs were helping -Rancor- slow us down and we understood this as a three-way alliance. We were pretty annoyed by this and alliance discussions were initiated with Alpheus/Lacon so we could ensure to be able to fight back the first 3-way alliance in the game.
After a short time thereafter, it became apparent for most alliances in the game that the Bugs were the real threat of the galaxy. He was +F, we had estimated by recouping information that he occupied by himself more territory than mine and Lurkers combined (and thus pretty much more than any other alliance too as we thought we were the second biggest alliance in term of territory) and they had the technology to fight us effectively. It was impossible for us to draft a third alliance member other than Alpheus/Lacon as all other alliance were happy with their dual status... And -Rancor- managed to hold us back very efficiently with hit and run guerrilla tactics. It was thus status quo until the final coup the théatre (and my alliance coup de grace) as Alpheus/Lacon finally announced that he had chosen his new alliance partners: the Bugs/Vedins alliance.
At this very moment, me and the Lurkers became quite disgusted by the game because of the fact that we believed that the Bugs/Vedins alliance had cheated the 3-way alliance max rules by sheltering, protecting, giving away planets and providing -Rancor- with new technology at the same time as creating what they claimed was a 3-way alliance with Bugs, Vedins and Alpheus/Lacon. Claims were made, we requested that Bugs either stop protecting the fifth wheel of their wagon and either attack or allow us to attack -Rancor- head on... But those claims remained unanswered.
I was getting really busy with work at that time, and I admitted to Lurkers that I was growing tired of this game and rapidly losing interest because of what I considered cheating of the pre-established rules of the game. Lurkers admitted similar feelings and added that if I were to drop off from the game that he would also lose complete interest and drop off too.
Is this then I sent for a replacement call, and we both stopped playing. The last turn I have in my archive is 2479.
I did learn a lot in this game. While extremely excruciating to fend off, my analysis of -Rancor- guerrilla tactics as well as the counter I devised against it became part of my standard strategy on the field in later games and, while I can say that his diplomacy was practically non-existant... -Rancor- tactical expertise on the field was just as equally unmatched.
-EoF
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