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The full parameters/announcement of the first TWW game can be found here.

(Sources of the quotes can be found in the announcement thread of the second TWW game.)


Diplomacy and alliances :

multilis wrote on Tue, 16 August 2005 02:35

Quote: my race was the only one that completely died, could have survived but refused to make any diplomatic compromises Diplomatic comprimise? Trash (Micha) was allied with Germ all game and also traded or worked with DR and Void for parts of game. Given impression Trash asked at least DR and Germ to attack friendless -F race that previously tried to take him out. (Germ was also allied with Void, ~>< -F race seemed to have some unknown friendly relationship with Void for part of game)

That's not what I meant with diplomatic compromises.
Knowing everybody else was going to be tech trading I looked for one true ally/partner (usually enough because you can only get one tech per year), I didn't want to end up in a big alliance (hate those things).

I became friends with DR in the start, there was mentioning of making plans to take out Vloz but then the original player went missing and as host (and player) I didn't find it ethically to quickly take out an inactive player and take advantage. So a replacement was found (multilis). By that time DR didn't seem interested anymore and focussed on the Elerians, I in the mean while I got attacked by the ~><}{\|`* (the -f race) but my losses were relatively small. (vonKreedon, the ~><}{\|`* emperor explained later in a mail that he somehow got his designs for his croby FF horde wrong (twice) and when he got it right his window of opportunity had passed).
There was one more trade with the DR for penscans (him being JoaT I was sure he had some because in the rules JoaT could not take NAS), we dit not work together in any other way, like manipulating battle board positions or whatever, he didn't help me in any wars and I didn't help him, we both minded our own business.

So I started looking for another partner and found that in the Germs. They were the only other one race close to me, except for the Vloz of which my race already decided it would never join forces with and except for the ~><}{\|`* that already attacked me (somewhere 2425-2430) which made him an enemy for the entire game, that's the way Trash feels and role plays. I reluctantly allied with Germs ... reluctant because I know Eric of the Germs too well, we've played several team games together and we wanted to be enemies for a change, though I didn't had much of a choice. Note it was already past 2455 before the Germ/Trash alliance really got into effect and decided to go for the ~><}{\|`* HWs. During that time nobody except ~><}{\|`* and DR had made a move to another HW, so we figured it was about time to get into some action instead of all the talking that had been going on.

Germ had another ally with which they were tech trading, the SS Void, I had never talked to them and did not consider them to be my direct allies. I believe that Germs primary ally always was Void, me being secondary, again because of being to used to eachother and not wanting to lay such strong relations as we had in teamgames, always keeping in mind that if we both survived long enough we would be fighting eachother. Owning 8 HWs was the VC and we both were determined of sticking to that, breaking up the alliance when the time was there.


The attack on ~><}{\|`* :

Quote:

At the time, Trash and Germ attacked the -F, who was basically nearly defenceless (few warships ever built, believe had given up)... either Vux or I singlehandedly may have been able to save the -F, and if we had both it would have been slaughter (we were only 2 WMs and our ships were counterdesigns. Mostly beamers at that point, and my beamers would come into range of 1 enemy at a time and first strike destroy most in 1 shot). Diplomacy with the -F was difficult, and was concern that ~>< and Void would later gang up on Vux leaving Germ and Trash to gang up on me. Saving the -F would have cost 10% of my fleet from overgating losses (compared to 0% losses to just cruise in at warp 9 and take them out after). Vux was right beside so he could have chosen to save -F if useful.

multilis had in the mean while been "balancing the game", constantly giving techs to ~><}{\|`* (weap16 and con16 IIRC) and I feared military assistance as well, possibly even from Vux since ~><}{\|`* was giving elec scrappers to them. Vloz also had started sweeping my minefields, along with ~><}{\|`*.

Like multilis notes he or Vux might have singlehandedly saved the ~><}{\|`* and that was the reason that I wanted the Germ to help me since I expected Vloz/Vux ships to protect the ~><}{\|`* HWs . So I don't consider to be the Trash/Germ alliance to be a "gang up" because we could be facing 3 races ... 2 of them being WM! We also didn't know ~><}{\|`* was -f until our troops invaded their first HW. We expected at least some resistance of him ...

The first ~><}{\|`* HW was captured succesfully, my OAs dropped defenses to only 10 operated and my smart bombs killed most of his cols. Germ stromtroopers finished the job.
The first planet was mine to take, the second Germs. The attack on the second HW was succesfull as well but when the IS troopers arrived the Germ battle fleet got killed by both Void and Vux large and high tech fleets. The Germ fleet didn't have a chance against such superior power, the Trash battle fleet had retreated to the first ~><}{\|`* so it didn't got killed, but it wouldn't have changed the outcome ...
Void sent me a message we were now officially enemies. He cancelled his alliance with the Germs in a 5 year period, him attacking Germ that turn already was not intended but happened due some of the relation/battle plan settings, that never got solved. Though Vux attacking Germs _was_ intended ... so Void in fact already was acting against Germs. However it turned out that due to some miscommunications Void believed Germ was turned against him by me, while in fact he was still ally number 1 for the Germs. They solved their differences and got friends again.


The end of Trash :

Vux, Void, Vloz, ~><}{\|`* now were all against me however Void was still against Vloz. My only ally Germs was now toothless. My fleet couldn't match any of the enemy fleets alone so I considered it to be dead. It was just a matter of who would kill it, so I sent it to my HW so at least _I_ would be the one with all the salvage. I also uploaded all iron from the first ~><}{\|`* HW and sent it to my first HW.

Quote:

Trash only faced my warships 1 on 1 over his HW and he lost. Mine were natural counterdesign and WM outdoes CA in dreadnaught era. I got bit of help in bombing from others, but was pain in butt, would have been easier to just built the right bombers and done by self from start.

It turned out that Vloz reached orbit of my first HW as first, he had the "honour" of reducing my ships to the salvage that I could handle on my junkyard. Void arrived in orbit of the first ~><}{\|`* HW and at a warp9 from my HW in the same turn as Vloz in orbit of mine, so he was one turn late.

Knowing Vloz was paranoid about the Void SS and after Void and Germs became friends again I suggested to the Void that he would send his fleet in orbit of my HW to have a chance to kill the Vloz fleet (at that moment inferior to the Void battle fleet), else the paranoid Vloz would get all the minerals from my HW and use it against Void since he seemed to dislike SS the most.
Void did but Vloz retreated into DR minefields where Void couldn't follow him.

The turn the Void/Vux killed the Germ fleet I knew that not just my fleet but my entire race would die, no way I could face all those more or less combined enemies, and no way I would try to talk to keep my race alive, that was not how I wanted to play, diplomacy already had been a too large part of the game. Being in their place I would totally finish off any race that got his battle fleet defeated, just as I had planned to completely destroy all ~><}{\|`* ships and colonists, no talking, no mercy, no chit chat over a cup of coffee.

Quote:

I had offered to let Trash keep one of his HWs, ...

Indeed you did, my race took that as an insult (that would be one of the comprosises I was talking about), Trash never responded, hoping you got the message. And seems like you did, you finally got some of what I had hoped was the spirit of the game and started killing me off.

Quote:

... he was up to 3 after gang up on -F race, but he was toast after I successfully took out his fleet, then dodged the SS suprise gangup help for him, then in turn organised a gangup on the SS. (Couldn't stop Trash iron horde from going to Germ).

I was toast the minute the Germ fleet died.
Like you said bombing didn't went well, it went very very sloooooow. I was able to destroy (bases don't leave salvage) all of the iron (from the first ~><}{\|`* HW and from my dead fleet, that was a lot!) on the HW you were bombing with several races. You'd indeed better bombed me more quickly. I also didn't even bother to fix the battle board postions so my bases would have a shot at your bombers, Trash was beyond diplomacy and awaiting death as a reward.
The iron from my second HW went to Germs, figured they might be able to use it since they would live a bit longer.

Quote:

Germ offers Vux (then strongest player) to get support of him, Trash and Void against me and DR... 4 on 2, to supposedly crown Vux as supreme leader.

Don't remember that part, or it was outside my knowing ... by that time Real Life had taken it's toll ...

Quote:

Then 24 hours later after Vux refuses he is complaining about "big alliances". (At that time Germ could nearly match Vux in firepower from minerals he was given or took)

Heh, big alliances were always a terror lurking beyond the horizon ...

Quote:

Game was into 80+ years, Vux wanted to move on, everyone else was neutral to xcontinuing. We followed DR suggestion to send all our fleets into one spot, I got lucky and won despite missing sending my biggest stack in.

"Moving on" came up ealier as well, when it first showed that relations were getting to intermingled (or what's the word?) ... Hence the relation restrictions in the new game ...

Heh, started this reply at 8.30 am, it's now 3.45pm ... wrote a few sentences every 15 minutes, so if things seem out off order ...

mch

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[Updated on: Mon, 08 January 2007 09:34]

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The Penta game ended last week. The full parameters/announcement can be found here. In short: a team game with 5 teams of 3 in a universe remapped into a pentagon shape.

Victory conditions:

There will be five Target planets, one at each outer corner of the pentagon, and one Target planet in the center (six in total). The winner of the game is the team that owns the most target planets at the year 2500. If there is a tie, then the game will be extended in 10 year sections until the tie is broken. If at any time one team owns 4 or more of the target planets, then that team is declared the winner immediately. To own a Target planet, it must be colonized and have population there.

The team of the Things captured 4 Target planets in the year 2494.

mch,
Penta host

[Edit: added picture]

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[Updated on: Mon, 08 January 2007 09:40]

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There are more than a few guides and posts around the place that make reference to the concept of "disposable income". Some people don't entirely understand what that is, and I must confess I didn't really get it - at least in the case of AR - until relatively recently. So, I'm writing a bit about it.

What is disposable income? It's the portion of your resources (both in the strict Stars! sense and to a lesser degree minerals) that you can throw down the drain (in any of various ways) without adversely affecting your economic growth. You can do anything you like with these resources and your curve won't know the difference (unless you get invaded ).

So, in the strict sense, disposable income is resources you can't spend on your economy. In a slightly looser sense, it's resources you can't spend on your economy with an appreciable rate of return.

What counts as spending resources on your economy? In rough order of directness, and assuming a relatively-standard race:

*Factories (directly gives resources)
*Mines (to improve your mineral output, which improves how many factories you can build)
*Terraforming (to improve your pop growth, which improves your future resources)
*Freighters (up to the amount you need to manage your pop and - for factoried races - Germanium; this is to improve your pop growth and to improve how many factories you can build)
*Colony ships (to give valid targets for your freighters)
*Scouts (to find targets for the colony ships)
*Economic technology research (i.e. that necessary to unlock better terraforming and better freighters, up to the point at which each is sufficient for current purposes)

(Note that some of these also need minerals; those minerals aren't disposable.)

Everything you can't spend productively on any of those is disposable income. In theory, nobody has disposable income until they've maxed out their terraforming tech and have the best freighters possible at maximum miniaturisation, but the last levels of terraforming don't have an especially-high rate of return (unless you're CA) and neither does freighter research beyond "LF that can go Warp 9 with a decent load" or even "privateer that can go Warp 9 without a zillion boosters".

Of course, removing some of these from the equation will increase your fraction of disposable resources. Some examples:

*-f don't need to build factories (which also drastically reduces "economic" mineral demand and thus the need for mines)
*CA don't need to build terraforming
*IFE and HE don't need to research Prop 9 to get "good enough" freighters

And now of course we come to the trap: Alternate Reality.

It's easy to think that AR has a ton of disposable income since they have no planetary installations. It's also wrong. Here's what you can do as AR to better your economy, again in rough order of directness:

*Research Energy (directly gives resources)
*Terraforming (directly gives resources and improves pop growth)
*Colony ships (to spread your population, which directly gives resources, as well as getting more minerals)
*Bigger starbases (to improve your pop growth, which improves your future resources)
*Freighters (to manage your pop and thus improve your pop growth, as well as recycle colony-ship minerals; there's also a direct spreading effect but it's not super-huge)
*Economic tech besides Energy (unlocks terraforming and bigger starbases)
*Remote miners (to get more minerals, although AR's innate mining fulfils most of its economic needs if you're good at recycling)
*Scouts (to find targets for the colony ships)

That's a different list, but it's still quite a list, and two of them (Energy and colony ships) are extremely open-ended and can be built by any planet. In the strict sense, therefore, an AR has zero disposable income until they reach Energy 26 and have colonised every planet available. In the looser sense, they still need to colonise every planet available (Pinta-ing a red has a payback time in resources of ~3 turns + travel time with Ener

[Updated on: Mon, 02 March 2020 05:12]

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[Updated on: Sun, 17 September 2006 11:42]

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Greetings, fellow space travelers,

I recently dug out a few tidbits from ancient rgcs posts. I'm posting them here for their possible interest to modders, tinkerers, and/or clone coders.

The Battle Speed for any given engine is determined by its fuel consumption at every warp. The "Best" Speed will be the last warp *before* fuel consumption rises above 120% (as the Stars! helpfile hints). Some rgcs posts mention 125% or even higher, so tests with modded fuelusage tables would be welcome. That "ideal" warp will be used to compute Movement points in the Battleboard.

Battle Movement (for the engine alone) = (ideal_warp - 2) / 4. So, Warp6 gives 1 square of movement, and every warp above it gives another 1/4 square. The full Movement Formula (for a ship design) is outside the scope of this post.

For some engines, that Battle Speed should be 10, but is only 9. Why? Because they're unsafe at warp 10. And it seems "Warp10-safety" is determined thru fuel consumption, too. Thus, any engine that burns fuel over a 105% "safe" rate will be unsafe for Warp10 travel. The cutoff isn't clearly stated, but 108% fuel consumption makes an engine unsafe, so the margins are small.

Enjoy,

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Ages ago Jason Cawley wrote in RGCS newsgroup about minerals per concentration point (if mined with remote miners or 10 efficency mines):

> So my guess is it is supposed to be something like this ->
> con greater than 30 -> 12500 kT * ln (starting con/ending con)
> less than 30, greater than 3 -> 456 kT per point

Later there were made tests that from 4 to 3 and from 3 to 2 were about 1000 kT minerals and from 2 to 1 about 2000 kT of minerals.
On case the mine efficiency is not 10 then these amounts have to be multiplied with mine efficiency/10.
It seemed correct enough back then.

My recent testing however shows that the logarithmic formula does not fit for concentrations above 100. There seems to be like 123 or 124 kT of minerals per point above 100. I am not sure if it was always so or only in latest patches.

The maximum mineral conc possible seems to be 200 (even huge comet does not push it higher).

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LEit mentioned to me that ships disengage after 8 moves rather than 7 as mentioned in the help file. To confirm this I fired up the game and gave it a try - the battle viewer showed my scout with tactic "Disengage in 7 moves", so I thought "phoey - what does LEit know anyway ?".

I've just looked a bit closer, and noticed that after the 1st move the scout still says "Disengage in 7 moves". After that it does count down though. So, LEit was right, and disengaging takes 8 moves. The help file and the battle viewer are wrong

Jason Cawley mentioned this in rgcs on 26 Feb 1997, so it's not exactly news, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway.

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What is your favorite PRT[ 39 votes ]
1.	HE	1 / 3%
2.	SS	4 / 10%
3.	WM	3 / 8%
4.	CA	2 / 5%
5.	IS	2 / 5%
6.	PP	1 / 3%
7.	SD	4 / 10%
8.	IT	10 / 26%
9.	AR	7 / 18%
10.	JOAT	5 / 13%

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Autohost is down - I feel[ 16 votes ]
1.	With my fingers	1 / 6%
2.	I need my daily post on AutoHost	0 / 0%
3.	Without AutoHost I am toast	1 / 6%
4.	Big deal, I have a life you know	3 / 19%
5.	Panic, nail biting, withdrawal symptoms	3 / 19%
6.	Easy come, easy go	0 / 0%
7.	Someone's gonna pay for this	1 / 6%
8.	Shh, it happens	2 / 13%
9.	(Several of the above)	5 / 31%

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[Updated on: Thu, 10 January 2013 01:48] by Moderator

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Had a play with this. Did OK. Quite OK tech. Bit slow at the start (about 2.5K at 2420), but did make sure I had crappy HW in the 2 tests I ran (30% min concs, nearest planets over 81ly - oh, the tiny/normal had 1 planet which was 65% hab @ 78ly and the HW germ conc was 35%). Quite low MM for an HE.

HE
ISB, NRSE, OBRM, NAS, RS
G: imm
T: -196°C - 196°C
R: imm
7% PGR
1/1000 pop eff
14/9/14 // 3g facs (tossed a coin b/w this and 14/8/14/4g)
10/3/15 mines

En, W, C cheap. All else expensive. (Would have liked the extra 0.5 cheap, but meh.)

Easily beat 25K in tiny normal. Just beat it in tiny sparse (25,059:P) No MM after 2430 except moving germ and hadn't particularly balanced pop early, so it was a mess. Did no terraforming at all. (Did fully backfill the HW and the 3 worst planets in the sparse test or wouldn't have made the 25K benchmark - didn't bother with any backfilling with the normal). Probably should have done some terraforming in the sparse, too.

Tech was OK (14/16/11/11/13/11/4) and came pretty much when expected. Exactly half the planets in both sparse and normal were better than 90%. Worst was 41% in normal and 43% in sparse. Took it up to En16 after 2450 and all the 90%+ went to 100% if terra was done and only the ones under 50% start never hit 80%. Was pretty surprised at getting 25K in tiny sparse with only 7%(14%) PGR and with quite messy pop control.

The race is no superstar QS job, but it was pretty easy to mess around with. Yay for HE

edit: checked pop and facs for the sparse. Closing pop was 8,56mill, so CAGR was 9.42% - possibly about the same you'd expect for a 5% 3-imm if you could hold everything at 25% cap (which I don't think you could with only 24 planets)? Facs built were 11,786 of a possible 11,985 - not sure what happened there - must've run out of germ somewhere).

[Updated on: Sun, 27 January 2008 12:11]

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