Home World Forum
Stars! AutoHost web forums

Jump to Stars! AutoHost


 
 
Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » Game stories » "Unreal" (an all-AR game) has ended
"Unreal" (an all-AR game) has ended Sat, 23 October 2010 08:17 Go to next message
iztok is currently offline iztok

 
Commander

Messages: 1202
Registered: April 2003
Location: Slovenia, Europe
... in year 2465 with Lazy Eight, played by the Marduk as the winner. Congratulations! Cheers

Some short notices about the game: it started in small dense uni with 4 players and with AcBBS on, and with (IMO) less-than-optimal distribution of players and stars. So one player, being boxed, dropped around 2440, without the replacement. Some 20 turns after that, the player in second place announced he had to stop playing due to RL issues, and no replacement could be found.

Since I as a host knew the status of all players, I sugested calling the game, since the Lazy Eights already had over 400 Super Robo Miners and were researching weap-24 Weights , while the second-place player had only ~40 Maxi-robots, and the remaining player has only about 40% resources of the leading one. Uh Oh

I was also the initiator of this game, so I hope all players had a good time while playing, and also had a good learning experience, as I had.

BR, Iztok

Report message to a moderator

Re: "Unreal" (an all-AR game) has ended Sat, 23 October 2010 11:22 Go to previous messageGo to next message
Marduk is currently offline Marduk

 
Ensign

Messages: 345
Registered: January 2003
Location: Dayton, OH
All Hail the Lazy 8, masters of the universal dude ranch!

For context, I was in the middile in the south, the Plebs in the middle in the north, the Eternals in the west and the Malcontents in the east. South of my cluster was a large open space with only a few scattered systems in it, and the gaps between were pretty far unless I took a long loop well out of the way to the east. So the south went undeveloped for quite a while as I was picking up systems to the east and west, and following that loop.

I was slow to start scouting, figuring that initial research was more important to an AR, and so the first contacts with enemy scouts occured much closer to my worlds than theirs. For one thing, my colonizers were only a couple of years behind the scouts... once I started expanding, I did it quickly. My priorities were first systems in good locations (regardless of hab values) for docks to make further expansion faster, second systems with good habs, third, systems with good minerals, chiefly iron and secondarily germ (run into germ constraints as an AR and you never forget), and finally every other system.

I didn't follow my priorities as well as I should have; I paid too much attention to hab values. Given that even a small population can do useful things with an AR, I should have been more concerned with expanding faster and farther. Get a chain of docks up and even QJ5 ships can keep up W8 or W9 travel indefinately. Anothing thing I didn't do is travel at W10 once I got large freighters. I should have been sending some colony missions out with a colonizer and a large freighter loaded up as much as they could manage W10 travel with instead of accepting two year travel to a lot of worlds. Sure, losing 10% of them would be bad; but getting an extra (and earlier) year out of some of those colonies would have been more than worth it. And those colonies could have used the extra minerals to not only build a dock, but another colonizer and a cheap armed ship as well. I'd have lost very little minerals from colonizing with the LFs, and by the time I was colonizing in earnest I could spare the resources. Especially since I would gain about as many from that extra year as I spent building the LF in the first place.

To the east, a large open space formed a natural border with the Malcontents. I did take a system out there which was closer to them than to me, and despite the difficulties caused by distance I managed to keep it and eventually turn it into a good production center. That was important as a threat against the Malcontents, keeping them distracted from going around to the west or south as much; they had to worry about that system. They did still send quite a few ships west of it, to systems that much have had good habitats for them; all red to me, but I had no intention of allowing them to pick up any system where I could prevent it. A few ships bought those colonies enough time to build up thier orbitals so they could stand off armed scouts and the like, and later dealt with ships trying to sweep the minefields.

The Eternals were the most annoying in terms of constantly sending ships and annoying me. The path west was a bit easier to travel then either the way east or the way north, so I concentrated on the west more at first. They clearly felt as I did, that reds were worth having both on their own merits and for denying them to the enemy. Fortunately I had enough of a tech lead that I won every significant battle, and only lost a few lightly-armed orbitals.

When the Eternals dropped out, I stopped attacking them and only expanded a little bit into their territory - basically slowly finishing off the cluster I already had several systems in, except for a couple of systems the Eternals owned. I did keep a respectable military force over there just in case they came back in and to be fair to the other two races. As it turned out, it was a good thing I'd done so since the Plebs continued to take out Eternal systems and were advancing south towards me in the west.

The way north was difficult because of the distance between worlds, and the lack of greens or yellows on the way. I worked at it anyway, and did manage a foothold in a large cluster a bit north of the center of the map. I had a terrible time building it up, though, as it had horrible mineral concentrations and the Eternals kept cutting me off from the west. That left me with a three-year trip most of the time to send anything to the cluster. As well, the Plebs were there in some strength and managed when I got a couple of other systems colonized to knock me back down to the one world.

By the time the Eternals dropped out, the Plebs had made their way into the cluster between my empire and my northern foothold, and eagerly took over when the Eternals were no longer in a position to keep me from reinforcing the north. Because I had to keep a fair number of ships in the east and west to protect production centers, and because of two wormholes that popped up in the south and stayed there forever, I couldn't concentrate enough ships in the north to knock the Plebs out and get a safe corridor to my northern system. As well, they were uncomfortably close to me in tech, so I didn't have the advantages I had against the Eternals.

It turned out that the Plebs and Malcontents had been fighting quite a bit, and were doubtless benefiting from tech trading thereby. As the tech leader I didn't get tech from battles, and that was one reason I was slow to deploy higher-tech ships unless the advantage was great enough to justify the risk of giving away tech levels. At one point I still had only weapon 12 and ran into a Malcontent ship with weapon 14; I was focusing on getting deathstars at the time, and figured no one could get to weapon 16 before I finished deathstars and got there myself. As it turns out I was right, but that was the beginning of the end.

I raced to weapon 16 and spent a couple of years building beam battleships. Then while those were cutting down most of what got in their way I continued my weapon research in earnest. When I hit weapon 22 in this last year I was actually going to stop research in favor of building 30+ MegaD BBs each year. I could have torn a huge hole in both the Plebs and Malcontents with a force like that, and why go for max tech when you can go for a knockout instead?

I was slower than I should have been this game, I screwed up some of my early MM as well as something like four years of my research while trying to get jihad missiles (I kept thinking I had it set to weapons only to find that I finished a level in something else and mostly had the excess go to con). Then with a comet hit sending Inside-Out to absurdly high mineral concentrations I built a lot of miners to send there. That was a mistake despite the very high concentrations; I spent quite a bit extra on transport for the minerals and the delay in getting minerals moved around rather than having more produced locally slowed down my building of ultrastations and deathstars. As well, I spent a great deal on miners earlier than I would have otherwise, and that slowed my research too much, which meant I took too long to get to deathstars and the better growth they provide.

If I hadn't screwed up my research, I would have had jihad missiles at least four and probably five years earlier than I did. As it is, I didn't reach them far enough ahead of the rest of the pack to be worth building them right away. If I had them available on schedule, they would have seen Lazy Eight jihad cruisers something like eight years earlier than they did, and more of them to start with. That would have slowed down other things, but I think the gains I could have made in territory would have more than made up for it. Especially considering that would have slowed the rest of them down at the same time since they would have been losing territory.

And now, the Lazy Eight race design:

0 points remaining
AR
ISB, NRSE, NAS, RS
0.19 to 5.60g
56 to 136C
Rad immune
16% growth (1-in-5 hab)
/10 efficiency
Energy, Weapons, Con cheap
Prop, Elect, Bio expensive

I used to go with IFE and a higher growth rate, but once I accepted the extra micromanagement of lousy engines with some boosters (I always put docks everywhere anyway, so that was no extra trouble) I got a 40% boost to my typical 2450 resources. With the grav field wide and knowing that I'm going to have terrible engines until my economy really takes off (and planning for that), prop expensive is a no-brainer. Thanks to Kotk for the idea; I don't think I would have ever considered using high fuel capacity as a substitute for engines.

I was really tempted to go with CE for this race. Having NRSE meant a lot of iron for engines compared to the typical scoop-using AR, and CE would have dropped iron costs down to about match scoops. Expecting a large early lead, I could have put up with the W6 travel as far as warships go - I would have had numbers enough to not worry about delaying the occasional attack a year. As long as the flight can be made in one year, or two years with the second leg a reliable 36ly or less, it isn't that much of a problem. The real problem is in slightly slower expansion, and when I'm doing just about everything else I can to ensure faster expansion I can't accept CE. Having lousy engines is bad enough even with the large freighter, and I get that only a couple of years after I'm starting to colonize anyway.

But if I could accept CE, and horde ships, I could potentially be on the attack as early as any other -f race. Superior shields on early ships would make them more dangerous, in general, until the targets get delta torps (or Jihads if you go with destroyers or cruisers instead of frigates). You wouldn't have as many ships in your horde, but they might be enough better to make up for it.

Elect expensive because there is virtually nothing useful it provides until you get to higher levels anyway, and by the time I can spare significant resources for elect research my economy should be able to deal with the higher costs.

Energy cheap because early energy research is the foundation of an AR economy. Later on it doesn't matter so much because of the square root, but getting those early levels fast is extremely important to being able to afford a good ramp speed.

Con cheap because the large freighter is the real engine for this race... it has so much fuel that even a QJ5 can get a worthwhile distance at W9 with the kinds of loads they'll have early on in the game. The faster the race gets to con 8, the faster it can quickly spread pop around.

I seldom go with ARM because I almost always have extreme mineral concentrations around my homeworld, either very low or very high. If they are very high I don't need ARM miners and the cost of it has dragged down my economy, and if they are very low I can't afford the miners and am better served getting farther out to systems which actually do have minerals.

No TT because of the combined expense of the LRT and lowering the cost of bio. I suppose I could leave bio expensive and trust the 70% cost of terraforming to be worth the cost of TT until I can spare the resources for expensive bio research, but I hate to spend so much on TT and wait that long to make the most of it. It is very nice, though, cutting the cost of terraforming in half in terms of the population required (100 resources divided by 70 is about 1.43, or 43% higher cost, and you need about 2.04x the population to generate 43% more resources). Considering that the planet value sits outside the square root, that makes it even more attractive. But that is a lot of race wizard points, and in absolute terms I am generally spending at most 450 more resources (1500 instead of 1050) per system that starts in my grav range. (I didn't bother terraforming grav until a system was pretty developed otherwise and I felt I could spare the resources from research.) Figure I'm losing a couple of hundred more to lower productivity until I catch up on terraforming, and it still doesn't really add up to that much compared to the race wizard cost. Getting a yellow turned into a green faster makes more of a difference, but still not enough for me. Turning a red into a green is worth a lot more, but I don't get that until I reach the higher bio techs. Hopefully I've won by then. Very Happy

Well, that's my race, most of the reasoning behind it, and my whining about not winning faster. Crying or Very Sad If any of you would like my game files (1.4mb - they include the reports and universe info for each year), let me know. It might take a while for me to respond since I'm busy settling in to my new job, but I will get around to it eventually.



One out of five dentists recommends occasional random executions to keep the peasants cowed and servile.

Report message to a moderator

Re: "Unreal" (an all-AR game) has ended Fri, 29 October 2010 21:11 Go to previous message
Marduk is currently offline Marduk

 
Ensign

Messages: 345
Registered: January 2003
Location: Dayton, OH
So you don't have to pester me for the file, and then wait for me to notice being pestered, you can download it here:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14021605/Unreal.zip

This is that Dropbox thing that Ron mentioned in the Circular File. I recommend it for things like Stars! game files. For team games, for managing a game across several computers, for storing old game files in a place that is harder to lose, uhm... I'm kind of reaching now, aren't I?

Anyway, if you are interested in signing up, go to the Circular File forum and follow Ron's link. Both he and you will get 250MB bonus capacity. The free limit is normally 2GB, maxes out at 8GB.

Files are not normally shared with others, just yourself; you have to take steps to share so it is as secure as any other data storage on the web.



One out of five dentists recommends occasional random executions to keep the peasants cowed and servile.

Report message to a moderator

Previous Topic: Creche 2 (AKA LIES 2) has ended
Next Topic: Altum Silentium has been ended!
Goto Forum:
  


Current Time: Thu Mar 28 09:00:38 EDT 2024