| Re: Fledgling Admirals VI |
Tue, 28 July 2009 08:17   |
|
 Kaloth |
 | Chief Petty Officer |
Messages: 72
Registered: September 2008
Location: Brisbane, Australia | |
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Can I say a big thank you to Altruist for hosting the FA series and spending so much time dealing with the many problems that come up in a Stars game. Looking forward to the eventual Rheumatic Admirals  I will also definitely stop signing up as a beginner, in fact I am going to join SAS3 as an intermediate so I am preparing to get slaughtered.. 
Also credit should go to Traveller (Conrad) who picked a really nasty race design and took excellent advantage of his early territory to easily be #1 the entire game (and as a grav immune +F CA with 3.5 tech what else would you expect?). It was unfortunate that real life got in the way and he wasn't able to enjoy the big wars and mudslinging that decided the game, but I had fun steering both empires awaiting his return 
I really enjoyed this game as I got to employ all of the tactics I've learned from playing with and against some great players and reading just about every article I could find. I wrote a summary of what I learned from this game in an email to the players, I will repost some of it here in case it is of use to anyone. These are some points that I hadn't learned from just reading up.
In my opinion diplomacy won the game for me. My strategy was to grab an ally ASAP (preferably in the first 10 years, or as soon as a suitable neighbour as found) and hunker down until the midgame. With this ally I was able to negotiate with double the threat behind my words! And I was sending a lot of messages, 3-4 per turn until the expansion phase was over. All my neighbours agreed to NAPs because they did not want to fight 2v1 against us, and themselves started to look for allies (while I made sure that the Bureacrats were not going to be assisted by anyone by telling everyone else how threatening they were, how they planned on attacking my neighbours and were asking me for help in doing so - this gave me credibility while weakening the credibility of the 'Crats). This peace allowed us to negotiate for a larger slice of territory in return for not attacking our neighbours. Which in turn allowed us to be bigger at the start, and combined with the fact we only fought small weak empires while maintaining peace with anyone remotely threatening allowed us to expand greatly while still not slowing our factory growth significantly. By 2440 we had almost the top half of the map, our factories were ramping hard and it was pretty much decided. Keep in mind that I put a lot of hours into micromanaging, I made sure every planned attack was going to be successful with testbeds, I searched the entire map every turn to make sure I knew about every fleet and where they were going, I planned out my attacks on enemy territory so that every attack had a follow up, so that I was at least killing a planet completely every single turn and never wasted any time in orbit bombing over multiple turns if it could be helped. This mean producing a lot of support ships/bombers, often enough to kill 200% of colonists. And all those ships required a bunch of fuel, so planning refueling stops, repair stops, places where gates can be established to reinforce through, all these things required detailed planning 5-10 years before they happened. At the end of the game I was killing 3 user worlds per turn, it only took about 5 years to destroy his production worlds.
This is the first time I've played JOAT, very impressed with the early expansion and scouting ability, but other than that it feels very flavourless. If you make use of all the up to date information you get from your hordes of penscanners, you can make more informed decisions and spot attacks coming many years before they arrive. It also makes assessing an opponent's weaknesses easy. However this is also the first time I've made use of a wide hab non immune race. This race is designed to win in the midgame, using explosive early expansion (made easy by knowing every single planet in my sphere of influence within the first 10 years) and good factory settings to achieve monster resources. My job was made a lot easier by my next door neighbour and ally being CA. Unfortunately we had pretty much overlapping habs, so we had to share out planets. Imagine if our habs were compatible we would have been able to occupy twice as many planets! I did not like the slow growth of a non-immune race, so many planets were very low value they were only practical due to my CA ally. And the whole thing required enormous amounts of MM to cope with the low achieved growth % spread out across many planets. Next time I would field a 1 immune varient of this race (if I ever even played JOAT again..). Also tech settings were pretty lame, and this would have hurt me badly if my ally didn't happen to have 3.5 cheap tech
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