Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » Game stories » AR Need Love ended
| AR Need Love ended |
Thu, 19 February 2015 18:34  |
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 dlrichert |
 | Chief Warrant Officer 1 |
Messages: 136
Registered: January 2012
Location: US | |
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Congrats to Iztok for win by victory condition achieved in year 2493. He colonized 150 planets and had close to 100K in resources. Game had a wide mix of player skill levels and design strategies. Players please share your game stories.
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| Re: AR Need Love ended |
Sat, 21 February 2015 04:24  |
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| Mac1 |
 | Chief Warrant Officer 2 |
Messages: 159
Registered: November 2008 | |
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Hi
Congrats to Iztok!
I played Undeads.
I was just about to kill Iztok  , fleet was ready, but it seems he killed others too fast.
Or actually i should say, "other's helped him too much ...  "
What i really hate in such games is that people can't unite vs winning players, instead they even help him ..
Look at Inamorato, they were helping Arrrs all game long.
Look at Humanoids, the only other skilled player in this game, but brainless. He was attacked by Arrs and instead of striking back, 3 times he decided to lose entire fleet on me, so pathetic .... And everytime instead of killing him, i let him alive, showing him clearly that I'm not the enemy, but he attacked again and again
And Archonts ?, i also let him peacufully develop entire game, so he can fight Arrs, but he just died in 10 turns to small pack of BS's  . But i guess he was a new player, so i dont blame, it's just that i hoped for more ... 
So i guess my biggest mistake in this game was not killing Humanoids and Archonts, when I could, lesson learned ....
I don't know if that could change final outcome, Arrs were expanding really faste, probably faster that I would.
But in that scenario to have 150 planets he would need to take some from me, or Inamorato, but for sure we would clash before 150 planets cap is reached.
And all game long I was toe to toe in regards of tech and production, so even despite of planet disadvantage i would be able to stand a good fleet. It would all come to a tactics.
This is what i miss the most from this game, I hoped for a final war with Arr's for which i was preparing since many years. To decide this in old fashion, on the battlefield. But I missed the rule of 50% planets and he took a sneaky win
For the future i must really push the rule to be like 60% and also this tech victory at 22 is a bad rule. This game should be decided on battlefield and last 3 game i played were won by someone without having a real fight, it's wrong !
[Updated on: Sat, 21 February 2015 04:30] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: AR Need Love ended |
Sat, 21 February 2015 17:19 |
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| iztok |
 | Commander |
Messages: 1205
Registered: April 2003
Location: Slovenia, Europe | |
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Hi!
> Congrats to Iztok!
Thank you both!
>(Mac1 said:)
> I was just about to kill Iztok
You obviously haven't checked my files, but I did yours. In the current turn I've put in production about 1000 ARM and AMP nubians (did that before I've noticed the game-over message), which would be built in 4-5 turns (about 200 per turn). I'd direct all of them at Undeads (you) exclusively. If you'd also check my minerals and miners and calculate how much more of nubians I could produce, I'd get additionall 1000 just from existing minerals  . There's also a problem with your low-ish tech - before you'd have needed tech to counter my designs I'd already be attacking you with 5 fleets of ~200 nubians each. And your nubians would cost you about twice in germ (you have only elec-11) than mine do cost me.
At this stage of the game my real enemy was not human players, but Stars! limitations, mainly the 512 fleets limit. About 120 planets being remotely mined, while they produce ships and I need to lay minefields to protect them, takes away 360 fleets. That makes only 150 fleet slots available for all shipping, sweepers, chaff producing (currently stopped for just that reason) and fighting. I could deal with that (I AM a MM freak anyway ), but that'd require some 2-3 hours per turn, for a game that was from my PoV just a mop-up.
> What i really hate in such games is that people can't unite vs winning players ...
Ah, so you too see the problem with the no-comm's game. You can't organize a coalition vs. The Monster in any workable fashion.
> What i really hate in such games is that people can't unite vs winning players, instead they even help him ..
> Look at Inamorato, they were helping Arrrs all game long.
Umm? I had a peacefull border with them for nearly all the game and they served as a nice buffer against Humanoids. That was the only "help" a "received" from them. Do you know anything else about this issue?
> And Archonts ?, i also let him peacufully develop entire game, so he can fight Arrs, but he just died
> in 10 turns to small pack of BSs
Umm, you lack some info. It was 2 fleets of ~35 W-16 BBs plus support vs. his W-12 cruisers most of the time, and he lost his main fleet very early. At that point of the game was 35 BBs a real force no small empire could easily afford. I had 3 fleets.
> So i guess my biggest mistake in this game was not killing Humanoids and Archonts, when I could, lesson learned ....
Yep. When you have the advantage you use it or lose it. If I may speculate, your early taking of Seaguls's space has made you a bit overconfident. Double the space, two HWs... who wouldn't be relaxed. OK, I wouldn't, which is obvious from the size of "my" space.
> I don't know if that could change final outcome, Arrs were expanding really faste, probably faster that I would.
That's the advantage with 2-immune AR. Whatever planet was initialy green, was fully terraformed in 3-4 turns (when I dropped at it 2-3 LFs of pop - 14% PGR also helped with this), became producer 5-6 turns after I colonized it and pop-exporter some 3-4 turns thereafter. Ultimate -f.
> But in that scenario to have 150 planets he would need to take some from me, or Inamorato, but for sure we would clash
> before 150 planets cap is reached.
Indeed. But then you wouldn't have so much tech and miners, because you'd need to invest MUCH more in warfleets, because I too would play differently. I'd saw someone is gaining the upper hand "down under", and would surely interverne, as I did when Inamorate came under attack. But what happened was "down under" was quite quiet until around 2475, so I could keep growing in peace... errr ... just keep growing.
More later
BR, Iztok
[Updated on: Sat, 21 February 2015 17:39] Report message to a moderator
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| Re: AR Need Love ended |
Mon, 23 February 2015 02:46 |
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| iztok |
| Commander |
Messages: 1205
Registered: April 2003
Location: Slovenia, Europe | |
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Hi!
Mac1 wrote on Sun, 22 February 2015 01:46> Look at Inamorato, they were helping Arrrs all game long.
Umm? I had a peaceful border with them for nearly all the game and they served as a nice buffer against Humanoids. That was the only "help" a "received" from them. Do you know anything else about this issue?
From my point of view this is help 
By this logic we BOTH are guilty of the same crime, because we too had a peaceful border most of the game.
Quote:Anyway I guess Humanoid's play turned the tide.
If he didn't continuously attack me while already fighting with Inamorato...
If I may speculate again, he likely knew you've taken the space of Seagulls, so you were a known threat to him, while I was a complete unknown, but a peaceful one... at least for a while.
BR, Iztok
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| Re: AR Need Love ended |
Mon, 23 February 2015 05:58 |
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| iztok |
| Commander |
Messages: 1205
Registered: April 2003
Location: Slovenia, Europe | |
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The Arrrrr!'s perspective
Race
The main idea behind Arrrr!s was "get many good planets up'n'running fast", hence 2-immune with narrow left-shifted temp. They should get about 25% greens without any terra, 2/3 of them breeders. I paid for that hab with resource divisor 25, making Arrrr!s slow to start, but sparse uni should make game slower anyway, so I gave them "only" 14% PGR. Arrrr!s would need some 30 turns of peace to catch 1-immunes, but then all those huge greens should start making difference. And they did. I also had a bit of luck I NEVER had and any previous Stars! game - the first planet I scouted was 97% breeder  . With colonizing it in the second turn I erased 50% of my resource_divisor_25 lag.
Game
In my opinion the "geography" of the stars has made game decided at the time the first turn was generated.
I started near the center of the map in the upper right (Norht East) quadrant. At first I thought "Cr@p, I'm boxed! ", but in about 15 turns it became clear I have more stars available than I should (about 40 just to NE direction from my HW), because my left neighbor ShaiWei was in the upper left quadrant, and my right neighbor Inamorata was at the lower edge of "my" quadrant, but below a large gap, that could form a natural border between me and him ... if I'd beat both of them at colonizing all those stars. There was also the "juicy" center with lots of big greens, but contested by ARmadilo, my lower left neighbor.
So after collecting needed tech I went on a colonizing spree. I didn't care much for far-flung colonies, because with AR it easier to defend early colonies than to cost-effectively attack them, esp. if attacker is another iron-restrained AR. I also had some experience about what's needed for such a task, so I lost only 2 colonies, but attackers lost 6-7 fleets. Saved resources were put in expansion and research (colony development mostly, with weapons next and 100/250 gates as the last goal) and soon I had lots of big green planets producing resources and population. Around turn 30 Arrr!s took off the bottom or the Player Scores list and in about 8 turns got to the top, where they stayed for the last 50+ turns.
I have to mention I did build only a small amount of early remote mining robots: 6 "normal" miners to help run colony drive and 20 "maxi" ones to get enough iron for my Jihad DDs and Bazooka FFs to remove ShyWeis. I went on serious building only when I've hit my ultimate miner Super robot, and even then I haven't started any mineral fountain, because most other planets had better minerals than my 4 HWs(  ) had.
Also, the Mystery traders were reluctant to show up in our game. I've had a luck to trade with both of them. IMX the first one usually gives tech, so I decided to keep my tech below 80 in order to get 7 levels from it. I did get them, but 3 of those were bio-5, 6 and 7. 
And the second one... Let me ask you a question: what would be the least useful MT part you could get in an all-AR game, where you don't need bombers to destroy planets? Yes, it gave me a Hush_A-Boom bomb. Evil bastard. 
Fighting
I was lucky with my neighbors: I had peaceful border with Inamorata for the whole game, the ShyWeis were lead by an inexperienced player, so I was able to contain them with skirmishers only. ARmadilo, after losing some fleets while attacking my armed Space Docks in center of the map, probably went for better tech, giving me time to build enough FFs to take center from him. The Undeads in the center were also peaceful, so in my first war I was basically fighting only inexperienced ShyWeis. I didn't start that war unprepared. I went after him with just more skirmishers - some 40 bazooka FFs and 10 Jihad DDs (I wanted mobility and Jihad CCs aren't gateable through 100/250 gates).
Meanwhile my big greens were making so much free resources, I decided I'll skip colloidal CC warships and go for BBs instead. Peace on other borders allowed me that, and lasting peace allowed me to even skip Colloidal BBs and later the MegaDisruptor BBs. Having gates everywhere also allowed me to save on early ships, because that defense fleet of bazooka FFs and Jihad DDs could gate to any planet in the next turn, and attack fleet could return for defense in 2-3 turns max.
So after I removed ShyWeis in North from the game and crippled a bit ARmadilo with some more of the FFs & DDs, I've build about ~70 weap-16 BBs plus many support ships (chaff, SFX, colonizers and freighters) and with two new fleets and the old one went after ARmadilo. In the north my old FFs and DDs met Archont's ships for the first time and after some peaceful "eye-ing" I lost all of them to his main CC fleet (some 60 colloidal and Jihad CCs with 120 single-colloidal FFs) that attacked one of my new colonies there. But that gave me a nice cassus belli and soon after that defeat he made a miscalculation and lost his main fleet to my BB fleet. After that I just "walked" both fleets through his space in the North-West and West, punishing him for not putting minefields around his core planets and not upgrading his Starbases to armed designs (I destroyed 4-5 of them with my DD sweepers and about 8 with my single "suicidal" BB). When he finally collected enough tech and build enough BBs to counter my 35-BBs fleet, I've simply joined fleets together, adding my reserve BB fleet (some 30 beam BBs) and kept going. But he was already reduced to less than 10 planets and no real threat anyway.
At that time I also saw my "NAP"-ed neighbor Inamorata come under serious attack from Humanoids and I didn't want Humanoids to gain too much territory (my frontline would become 400 LY longer and I'd get another strong potential enemy at the gate), so I used my reserve fleet to push him out of the center. However he didn't try to counter my attack and also stopped attacking Inamorata, so I too stopped after taking some 8 planets from him and established a beachhead to lower part of the universe and the Undeads, that were becoming more and more clearly the second strongest player.
But I didn't want to fight that war - too time consuming when I'd have to "battle" mostly the 512 fleets limit. I already had over 110 green planets, so I decided to proceed with psychological warfare with an overwhelming force no one would want to fight. First step was to collect needed tech for my ultimate Nubian (which was already available for some 10 turns). The problem was any design would cost large amount of germanium, so I needed to push electronics higher (which would also decrease cost of remote miners). At elec-20 I've hit my goal and 've put in production some 1000 Nubians, while re-colonizing quite some red planets to trigger victory condition and made scores public. The idea behind was to show my huge strength and thus end the game, because I really didn't want to do again some 4 hours of MM per turn to just clear the opposition. Fortunately host called the game and I wholeheartly agreed.
Analysis
In retrospect I could've used 13% PGR and 3 clicks wider hab (gaining 7% more planets), but I really wanted to alleviate my resource_divisor_25, and faster-growing pop was one solution.
In late mid-game (after UltraStations were built) I also nearly abandoned all pop management, but moving pop for new colonies. There simply were too many planets to be managed properly, so I just let all those UltraStations and DeathStars crowd. Being an AR was a consolation, because proper pop management would yield 15% more resources while demanding 200% more time.
I also could've build in the second turn one small freighter and started moving pop from my HW to the 97% second planet, thus in 2 turns negating ALL "divisor_25" lag, but hey, this happened the very first time in all my games and I simply wasn't mentally prepared for such a luck. Usually my race with 1_in_4 theoretical hab gets 1_in_5 or 1_in_6 actual hab.
So much about. If you think I missed something, please let me know.
BR, Iztok
[Updated on: Mon, 23 February 2015 08:14] Report message to a moderator
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