Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » Game stories » All Quiet has ended
| A Buggy history, Bug views on the All Quiet game |
Tue, 11 May 2010 16:43   |
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I was keeping a log file for a good number of years, but I cannot seem to find that, so I will write a brief history of the game from the Bug perspective. Please forgive if dates are not exact, as I will probably not be looking up the details.
To begin with, this was my first game in at least 3-4 years. Life had been keeping me too busy to play. I finally thought that I had enough time, and All Quiet sounded like a good game to get back into things.
I built the Bugs to be an economic monster. I cut corners a lot of places in the design to maximize economy. The reason for this is that my best skill in Stars! is probably economy building. (In one team game with Micha I managed to have a bigger economy than him for much of the game, and I was WM and he was SD...). So I took a JoaT with IFE, NRSE, LSP, OBRM, and RS. I could not take NAS because I had played too many games to qualify (even if none of them were recent).
The start was reasonable good. I was in the NW corner. My habs were roughly 1 in 4, and I found a few greens close to my HW. None were big enough to be breeders though. My problem was that after those planets there was a really big gap (4+ years travel) to get to the next set of greens. IFE was a help, but getting my freighters back to reuse them was proving very difficult.
Around turn 10 Vedin and I ran into each other. Neither of us had seen any other players, and we got along fairly well and became allies. This early alliance helped me tremendously. Vedin had taken Prop cheap (which I thought was strange but was VERY happy with) and we started to trade technology via Wolf/Lamb at a very early date. The Prop levels that I got from him helped me to reach the next level of planets more efficiently.
My alliance with Vedin also worked well as we were very similar in many respects. Neither us had played in a while. We were both playing JoaT, and we were reminding each other of the many things that we had forgotten in our years of not playing.
It was not long before I ran into two other races, Alpheus/Lacon in the center, and Rancor to my south. Dealings with Rancor were a bit tough from the start as I felt he was being rather abrasive, not uncommon for a WM. Dealing with Alpheus/Lacon went rather well, as I think he was already having problems with Ellurid on the other side from me.
I continued to expand as quickly as possibly taking as many planets as I could. I realized that Alpheus/Lacon had very similar habs, and that was a problem as he was stopping my expansion by taking all the planets that were good for me. So I started a war and quickly grabbed a few planets. Alpheus was having trouble with Ellurid still, and was not very interested in a war with me. I was happy with the new planets I had taken, so I stopped attacking, but I do not think we had a formal peace agreement.
So I continued to grow, and also met other races. Rancor stayed annoying, and I almost went to war with him over some border disputes. I found a number of good planets near Vedin space, but unfortunately a number of those were already taken by Alpheus/Lacon again. And it seemed that the problems between Ellurid and Alpheus continued.
I made an agreement with Ellurid that he would pay me in Electronics tech (via W/L) to attack Alpheus to take some of the pressure off of him, as Alpheus was JoaT and able to create more ships then the SS Ellurid. The thing I liked best about this is that I wanted to attack Alpheus again anyway, and take a few more of his planets. I let it be known that someone was paying me to attack. Surprisingly that did not seem to get people to dislike me for being a mercenary, but made others want to find who the payer was. That worked fine for me. I built more ships than what I had guaranteed Ellurid, and attacked and gained a number of new planets, some within 150 ly of the Lacon HW. Once I had completed my agreement with Ellurid, I again stopped attacking Alpheus/Lacon and consolidated my position. The two brief wars with Alpheus/Lacon are what really helped me to get a better than average number of planets.
By this time I was clearly in first place, probably because of micromanaging my economy. I took a look around and saw that all 10 of the races had paired off. There were a number of conflicts, but no really big wars involving lots of races. The Eagle and Lurkers to the south of Rancor were working on taking Rancor planets with gusto, and for some reason Alpheus (his ally) was not moving in to support him, probably because of his own problems with the Ellurids and Sofians.
To this day I am not really sure of the reasons, but Rancor and Alpheus/Lacon decided to split, so that Lacon could join the Bug/Vedin team as the third and last ally. This was a move that was potentially political suicide for the Bug/Vedin (JoaT) alliance. If the other three pairs of alliances all attacked our three-way alliance at one time, we would have major problems. The first problem would have been that Alpheus could get crushed in the middle.
About that time I was also making trade agreements with Rancor. He was providing me with minerals (primarily Germ for my factory starved planets) and planets in exchange for ships and protection. Basically I set my southern border with Eagles/Lurkers in such a way that they would be crossing my border to attack Rancor. This really really really annoyed the Eagle/Lurker alliance.
Again I am not sure of the details, but the Eagle/Lurker and Ellurid/Sofian alliances both went to war with the 3-way JoaT alliance. I think they they decided to attack Alpheus/Lacon, which made Vedin and I take the two extra years to formally end the starting NAP before we could counter. I quickly built some fleets, and came to the rescue and saved some Lacon planets from Ellurid and Sofian attacks.
One of the important points here is that the M&M alliance (Mycelium and Maera) decide to stay out of the war for a while (I presume) to continue building their technology and economy, and to see how things would go. What I think they did not know was that with my strong economy (technically a monster as I did reach 25K by year 50) I has reached nubians about year 68, probably 10 years ahead of any other races. So I proceeded to build my first nubian fleets. I stole a trick from Micha and built overcloakers and sent them out with minelayers, chaff, sweepers, and generally a beam nubian or two as an escort (all my smaller ships having built-in scanners, so no scanner ships needed). I then built my first attack fleets. The plan was for my ships to attack the Lurker/Eagle alliance, Alpheus/Lacon to attack the Sofian/Ellurid alliance, and Vedin to provide some support to each as needed, but to keep up defenses in case M&M attacked.
Unfortunately about this time my work got really busy and stressed, so my time available to play was reduced. I had more economy than both of my opponents together, and better technology. While I did win the war, it was with losses much greater than I should have taken. I will add that I greatly underestimated the strength of missile DNs, and lost hundreds of first generation beam nubians to the Lurker fleets. Unfortunately the original Alpheus/Lacon player faded out over this time, and while there had been some attacks made into Ellurid/Sofian space, those races were far from dead.
While I was attacking to the south, Rancor had taken advantage of the situation and colonized planets into Bug and Vedin space (without permission). He had attacked a good number of Eagle/Lurker planets, and had taken a number of them. By the time the Eagles/Lurkers were mostly dead, the Rancor were a strong force again. While I played minimal turns and tried to keep up with RL and also attack the Sofians and Ellurids, Rancor ran over much of the remaining Sofian/Ellurid space. Rancor then started to attack Lacon/Alpheus planets, which annoyed me. While there was no active player there, the race was still technically my ally.
At this point there was an option that I gave Rancor: he could join the Vedin/Bug alliance as the third ally, and the host could drop the Lacon to neutral. He declined, and via cloaked scouts I saw some cloaked loaded freighters returning from M&M space. I knew that he was trying to play both sides, with the idea of growing while we were fighting. So I found a replacement for Alpheus much to the dismay of Rancor.
I will note also that I really did intend to crush Rancor, and that while I was shielding him from the attacks from Lurker/Eagle, I came up with several plans to do so. I just never seemed to have the time to do it, either because of game factors or RL.
An interesting part of the southern wars is that when I started to take the Lurker/Eagle planets (both -F), and later the Ellurid/Sofian(-F) I found surprising amounts of minerals remaining. While I had stopped factory production in most of my early planets for lack of Germ, I was able to build factories at these planets and build them up to full production worlds. The minerals from these worlds helped to build a good portion of the nubians that later went to the war with M&M.
I do not remember how the war with M&M started (maybe a sign of my stress levels at the time) but I knew that I had been way too slow and inefficient taking out the southern races. M&M had built two mineral fountains, and was building many many nubians to counter the forces that I was building.
A side note on one of my biggest mistakes of the game: I had built a 98% cloaked fleet, with missile and beam nubians, and chaff to attack the Maera HW. I had gotten the fleet most of the way around the minefields and was in back of my target, maybe 5 years away. My mistake was not watching the fleet carefully. A minefield grew, and my fleet clipped the edge of it. This destroyed all my chaff, and brought attention to the fleet that had been very carefully hidden to this point. If I had been watching closer, and had avoided the edge of that minefield, I had (I guess) a 50/50 shot of attacking the (at that time) lightly defended Meara HW and killing all the remote miners.
Somewhere after the new Alpheus leader came in, Rancor effectively gave up. He scrapped many of his ships, and transferred his beamers and DNs to M&M, and set up his MDs to fling all remaining minerals to a few of my planets (at W10 so my MDs could catch them). He gave something to each side, which may have been balanced, but lost any way of influencing the course of the game. Granted, I did not realize that Rancor had transferred his ships, and because of that lost a very big battle and about 2000 nubians to M&M when the previously-Rancor ships arrived and turned the battle (which I had been testing for days before actually attacking...).
With the Rancor minerals, minerals from the dead -F races, and from the few taken M&M planets, I was able to continue to build more ships. And with the help of my allies was able to turn the tide against M&M again. Taking back the planet where I had lost the 2000 nubians was important as that was enough minerals to build over 1000 new nubians. I had lots of production power, just needed more minerals. I was able to continue building ships, take more planets, and build a few bases with gates in M&M space. I was able to pull in more ships and continue to scorch more M&M planets, and pull up the minerals, with no intention of ever being able to rebuild them.
Other notes: I do have a tendency to be lucky, and where my luck came in this game was with the MTs. The first three (or four?) all entered the universe in (or close to) bug controlled space. I was able to meet every MT. The Tech MTs helped me to get to Const 26 a few years earlier, and the MFP helped me to add a little cloaking to all of my nubians. I generally get ready for MTs to show up, building up stockpile of Bor and having freighters sitting with them. So as soon as they show up I am ready to meet them.
I had a 10 year notice set up with both of my allies, so I would have 10 years to get ready if they did want to split and continue the game after M&M were dead.. I could have brought all my ships home and built another 1500 nubians in that time.
I found that colonizing and mining red planets helped. As a JoaT I could build 99 mines on each planet. While this did not generate huge mineral piles, it did help significantly over the course of many years.
There were also a good number of changes in players, probably more than I have seen in any other game. Often a game ends when a good number of people leave. We even had the host change for a while! Thank you to everyone to stayed in the game and continued to play their best! Thanks to Micha and John as hosts!
It was a long game, a lot longer than I had expected (137 turns!). It is the longest game I have even played, and the only game where I have gotten to nubians on my own (I have gotten there in team games before). It went way better than I expected. And while I do not plan to get in another game for at least a few months, I hope to see many of the players again, though I expect you will be more wary of me in the future...
Eric/AH Raindancer/The Big Bug leader of The Bugs
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