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No Monsters Allowed: The Tall Tails Win

Sat, 19 October 2013 11:41

skoormit

Lieutenant

Messages: 665
Registered: July 2008
Location: Alabama

By unanimous vote, the Tall Tails (played by Trader) have won No Monsters Allowed.

Many thanks to all the players for a very engaging game with a quick pace.

Many thanks also to XAPBob for initial game setup.

Post your notes, thoughts, and musings on the game here.

What we need's a few good taters.

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Re: No Monsters Allowed: The Tall Tails Win

Sat, 19 October 2013 11:49

skoormit

Lieutenant

Messages: 665
Registered: July 2008
Location: Alabama

My brief recap:

I played a TT SD with the goal of securing a large area early, and then turtling to grow econ.

I had a favorable starting position, just left of center, close to the northern edge. I had very good luck with close planets: two natural breeders within 81ly!

I scouted heavily in the very early game, and managed to secure the NW corner.

Things were progressing more or less according to plan by the early mid-game. I had sealed off the NW corner all for myself and was filling up the greens. I made at least two major strategical blunders.

First, I did not scout enough after my first wave of early scouts were picked off. As a result, I had no idea at all what was going on anywhere other than very near my own borders.

Second, I did not defend my border planets from a packet attack. Every turn I would decide that I needed those resources for something else (usually tech) besides defenses. Eventually the Tall Tails took advantage of my laxity. He hit me with a simultaneous packet attack along several developed but defenseless border worlds, and followed up with strong war fleets that quickly took over those worlds. The result was about a 15% drop in my economic output.

I will post more later.

What we need's a few good taters.

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Re: No Monsters Allowed: The Tall Tails Win

Sat, 19 October 2013 17:04

Vostromo

Petty Officer 1st Class

Messages: 68
Registered: June 2010

I played a 26% growth HE race. I too started in a good position with a lot of available space in the south-east quadrant and of course expansion was going to be the name of my game. I'm reasonably happy with my play but there were a few factors which affected me.

1) My pals the Sushis were a constant pain along my border but neither of us really got anywhere. At one point his main fleet could have taken more of my worlds but strangely repositioned itself. At the finish of the game our border was virtually the same as it had been at year 2430.

2) The Tomasoids quitting. In my opinion he quit too early and left a vacuum in the middle of the galaxy. Now i'm guessing that it was pressure from the Tall Tails and myself that caused him to abandon but unfortunately i was in no position to take advantage of it. The Monkey-lovers moved in quickly and those minefields were a right pain.

3) This one is about as pathetic as excuses get for a HE....no star-gates Embarassed

Trying to plan 6 years ahead where to send my forces was very difficult and quite frankly i wish i had chosen another race.

Signed up for the next one though.. Cool

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Re: No Monsters Allowed: The Tall Tails Win

Sat, 19 October 2013 20:55

trader

Crewman 1st Class

Messages: 21
Registered: September 2012
Location: Toronto

Thanks guys, good game. Skoormit, a fascinating set up, nothing like anything I have played before. I see some of the regulars have signed up for a rematch, I am interested too.

I generally consider Stars to be roughly 50% diplomacy, 25% resource management, and 25% fleet operations. If I understand Skoormit's intention correctly, by doing away with diplomacy, and strictly limiting resource parameters, he hoped to create a game which would focus on the fleet fighting component. That did become much more important, but in my view this also had the unintended consequence of magnifying the significance of starting positions.

The initial draw always shapes the early strategic decisions, but normally a bit of bad luck can be mitigated with skilful diplomacy. In fact, I've seen players with weak opening positions get an excellent start because they are spurred to make an effective early alliance. In NMA there was no opportunity to make such counters. I know we went through a lot of galaxies to try to find something fair, but I can't see that the Zemmels, Tomasoids or Fricken had much of a chance right out of the gate.

With the Fricken HW just 259 ly from my own, there was never a shadow of doubt about how to proceed. Hemmed in as he was, 262 ly from McClellan and 360 ly from Neon, the poor guy was screwed. All I had to do is kill him, then the next two would be very vulnerable, though admittedly the early exit of the Tomosoids simplified things greatly for me. After I had absorbed those three, it would have needed full cooperation from the remaining players to stop me.

So my conclusion is that for the no diplomacy/limited resource scenario, a reasonably level playing field at the start is essential. I know galaxy shaping and HW moving in Stars is tedious, but I've attached an example of a galaxy shape which should even things up if the HWs can be well placed.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7Ry9Tz6M9XUdUU3LVZIZTlxQ28/edit?usp=sharing

Trader Mags

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Re: No Monsters Allowed: The Tall Tails Win

Mon, 21 October 2013 04:27

XAPBob

Lt. Commander

Messages: 957
Registered: August 2012

Interesting shape - Rather "single exit" though.

And a specific race type fighting for the centre - Maybe put a smaller ring there - rather than a tiny dot.

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Re: No Monsters Allowed: The Tall Tails Win

Mon, 21 October 2013 09:57

skoormit

Lieutenant

Messages: 665
Registered: July 2008
Location: Alabama

XAPBob wrote on Mon, 21 October 2013 03:27

Interesting shape - Rather "single exit" though.

And a specific race type fighting for the centre - Maybe put a smaller ring there - rather than a tiny dot.

Err...was this post meant for a different thread?

What we need's a few good taters.

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Re: No Monsters Allowed: The Tall Tails Win

Mon, 21 October 2013 10:00

XAPBob

Lt. Commander

Messages: 957
Registered: August 2012

No - it was a response to the (non obvious) picture in the post above.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7Ry9Tz6M9XUdUU3LVZIZTlxQ28/ edit?usp=sharing

Stupid anti hotlinking...

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Re: No Monsters Allowed: The Tall Tails Win

Mon, 21 October 2013 13:20

skoormit

Lieutenant

Messages: 665
Registered: July 2008
Location: Alabama

trader wrote on Sat, 19 October 2013 19:55

...if the HWs can be well placed.

Aye, there's the rub.

If we could place HWs where we wanted them, I'd vote for a regular octagon with a radius of 1/4 the universe width, and leave the rest of the planets alone.

I'd be happy with just getting close to that. For example, find the planet closest to the location of each vertex of such an octagon, then swap each HW location with one of the "nearest to vertex" planets.

But is there yet a tool that can do such a thing?

What we need's a few good taters.

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Re: No Monsters Allowed: The Tall Tails Win

Tue, 22 October 2013 23:55

trader

Crewman 1st Class

Messages: 21
Registered: September 2012
Location: Toronto

I've been doing some experimenting to understand better how the utility redistributes the HWs. It appears to me that the smoothness of that distribution is correlated to the pattern along the x axis in the original map. XAPBob, in the other thread you mentioned that nice script you have for generating a 100 maps and turning them into text. If I could get a hold of that I could test my theory.

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Re: No Monsters Allowed: The Tall Tails Win

Wed, 23 October 2013 02:52

XAPBob

Lt. Commander

Messages: 957
Registered: August 2012

Do you have a linux box?

Else I can just set mine off to do a big pile of gens...

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