Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » Game stories » Sophisticated has ended (please share your stories here)
| Re: Sophisticated has ended |
Mon, 13 July 2015 11:30   |
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| rolfverberg |
 | Master Chief Petty Officer |
Messages: 103
Registered: March 2006
Location: Ithaca, NY, USA | |
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I played !@3$%s, a HE race slightly tweaked (made a bit faster) 7% growth, 2 immune HE with factories from one that I successfully played before. Not having gates, I picked NRSE to get the IS10 in the late game. The rest is fairly straightforward. I had mini colonizers for fuel, so no IFE. I needed docks for expansion and hoped for a lucky MT for penn scanners later in the game so NAS. I knew no gates in a strictly one player game was very likely a dead sentence in the late game, but I figured I would give it a try and play it aggressively for as long as I could and have plenty of fun that way.
I found the Avenger's HW in 2416 at Talking Desert, I already new he was SS. My first big mistake was in 2424. I guess I haven't played an SS opponent for a while... I should have left a scout at Hodel, the key route between his HW and the crucial cluster for my early expansion around Pheson and Forest. On top of that I should have build a basic fort as soon as possible. I didn't do either and got hit in 2425 at Pheson and lost it to a single blue laser DD and a couple of PPs with pop. I got pop-dropped and would lose control over that cluster in the foreseeing future. Sure enough, he could have sent more ships, but a fort against blue laser DDs in that stage could have held of quite some fire. On top of that I had just build my first set of blue laser DDs to send to that cluster as extra support. They of course didn't make my mistake and put up a dock in no time with enough shields and lasers to make any recapture change in the short term impossible. Still, despite this setback, things progressed well. I expended towards the center as far as I wanted and could reasonably support and I had established a pretty decent and steady border with my Southern neighbor. Given the struggles at my Northern border and a pretty quiet center, I figured early on that I was going to look North for trouble. Around 2440, the Avengers had gates, but still only red lasers and beta torps, so I wasn't too worried yet. They did start to press at my border and got another planet in the Pheson cluster, so I started to build beta DDs myself and do a lot of research. I had a pretty fast race so I was hoping to keep ahead of them with tech (I knew by now with reasonable certainty that they were -f, so fast as well). I hit a rough patch against them and lost the entire cluster due to me holding off on shipbuilding and doing research. I got sappers in 2448 and CCs in 2450.
I just worked on containing him and averting more damage. I figured I might as well get CPs then, so in 2452, I got those and started building CP CCs. With EN 10 in the mean time that made for a design that had little trouble against his laser and beta DDs and I had not spotted anything beyond that.
Than came the year 2453, where I rediscovered that I'm not really learning from my mistakes... Here I was, an SS as neighbor and I didn't put scouts in orbit of all my unoccupied controlled planets. There was a big void East of my HW between my Northern border and my Southern border and he used it. He sneaked in colonies at two planets well inside my controlled space: Vega at W9 from my HW and Scotty almost at my Southern border with the Patriots. Oops. And of course, he had gates and I didn't... So instead of building CCs to attack my border with him, I had to scramble to kick him out of my space. Vega I had scanned recently, so a gate in one or two years was unlikely. My Scotty report was old though, so a gate could appear any year. Indeed Vega proved easy. At W9 from my HW, I could send CCs right away, I just had started building them in numbers, so I kept control of the orbit without ever facing a gate. A few years later I bombed it and in 2458 hit it with a packet and reclaimed it. Scotty was harder. In 2453, I had 6 unstacked CCs in range when I spotted them, so I faced a tough choice. Stack, build more and wait a year while risking a gate, or send them in with kill base orders. I chose the latter and it proved the wrong choice. He evidently arrived with plenty of pop to get a dock up with bazooka's, or he had indeed already been there longer than a year. So he easily killed those CCs and all I did was give him minerals. Not irrelevant given that the planet was poor in minerals. Next year I spotted 33 beta DDs and 67 bazooka DDs. I had a fair amount of production nearby, but he could hit any of those planets easily. I could not defend them all. So I collected CCs and hopped around a bit, hoping he would either risk attacking and meet me or would do nothing at all. He did the latter. Then in 2459, I withdrew all to a planet a little further out, but kept Scotty swept from mines. I was hoping to set a trap and attack the next year. I would have 29 sapper CCs and 93 CP CCs in a single stack, enough to hit what he could gate in according to my best intel. Alas, he saw it coming and evacuated the planet. That left me with a lesson learned and all my ships at the wrong front without having gates...
Still, the universe wasn't that big, so I flew North without resistance and finally reclaimed the control of the Pheson cluster around 2465 that I lost 40 years earlier. By that time I had about 50 sapper CCs and over 200 CP CCs and the Avengers hadn't really showed their hand. They did have sapper and CP CCs, but only recently, so I had a big head start in building them. But it was too quite, I didn't quite trust it. I had control of their orbits, but not yet bombed them out, so I was somewhat devided. I should have left a minimal force at the planet furthest out, but I did have scouts in place now, so I thought I was reasonably save. Then they hit me with 160 JJ DDs in 2467. They must have come overcloaked or my scanner ranges weren't what I thought they were. Oops.
Lost about 80 CCs. Not good. Also, I was still one year away from W12... Needless to say, I had to give up control again and keep what I had save. So I ran with what else I had. I got Jihads right away and started building MMs with JJs and BSCs. Those are pretty powerful against JJ DDs and BBs were still way out. I built fast and we played cat and mouse for a bit. Then in 2480 I had 81 MMs and some 200 CCs, ready to reclaim Pheson with intention to keep. But I did learn something after those earlier mistakes. So I pinged it first and lo and behold, I escaped a beautiful trap! They did have quite a few Jihad CCs, but they were inferior to my MMs, so I wasn't too worried. Well, they had secretly started building BBs and the year I could have attacked, but chose to ping it first, they gated in 113 JJ CCs, 36 CP BBs, 157 of the old JJ DDs, 110 FF sappers and close to 1000 chaff. That would have gotten me nicely and likely removed me from the game... Instead I ran, again... Then I had a lucky stroke with the MT. So far, MTs had been totally useless to me, one alien miner and the rest on the other side of the universe out of reach. Now I had another change.
I intercepted in 2480 with 9800 cargo and it was a tech trader. I went from 14/12(13)/9/13/11/7 to 15/15/10/15/12/9. One level weapons by my own and 2 from the MT. So I waited two years, while I ran from their trap and got W16/C16. Then I started building beamer BBs with IS10, 16 HB, 4PS, 3J20, 3FC, 1 BSC, 8GD and 4V. Speed of 1 3/4 and 3000 armor. I figured I can't gate anyway, so why worry about weight. I needed the speed of the IS10, so that would already make me heavy and likely loose last move against a FM BB, so I added the armor. It made for tough ships to kill and it would end up being the design that I build in volume in the following years. In 2494 I reclaimed (again) Pheson. They started building a counter with W14 blasters that would move last, making my range 3 of little advantage and worse would fire first. Still it was slow ship and I still had lots of missile support so I went for his HW, which I captured in 2497. What followed was another cat and mouse game and another nice trap by them. I attacked 3M TA3 with a fairly large fleet: 63 sapper CCs, 110 CP CCS, 94 JJ MMs and 104 blaster BBs. They countered with about 92 JJ CCs, 200 W14 BBs and their newest design: 69 Jugg Galleons. They should have destroyed me utterly, even though their BBs were not all stacked, but they made their only crucial mistake this game as far as I can tell: They had their largest stack of 86 BBs and 78 of the JJ CCs on disengage. The CCs made sense, they were expensive, my beamers were fast enough to close to their missiles, but not fast enough to get them on disengage. So they would get a few rounds and then withdraw. But the BBs was I think a mistake, maybe they came in one stack? I ended up loosing only the 104 BBs, they lost all but the 86 BBs and 79 CCs. Plus the minerals were in my reach if I could get there fast enough with support and I could. I brought reinforcements and pushed them back to what was probably my biggest claim to their space around 2510.
I saw trouble heading my way though. They already had W16 and the tech MT decided to make a second pass. I saw them intercept and my worst fears became true a little later when I spotted W20 beamers. It turns out that they got 3 W levels and did the last themselves. Had the game continued, I would likely have gone under against them in the end. I did not even get to W20 myself when the game was decided with the Smile being victorious.
Now, the Southern front was a different story. It was all quiet, which suited me well, until I spotted that the Patriots where looking to go under against Player 6 around 2490. I didn't want P6 to take over their entire space and have a potentially nastier enemy to the South so I started to prepare a blitzkrieg. I got ships in place with pop and launched 5 packets in 2494 for 5 outright kills of nice green planets for me. I colonized those right away with structures intact and followed through and took out what was left of the Patriots after they where already weakened by P6 and my packet attack. At the end of the game I was playing cat and mouse with P6 over the spoils of war.
I never really encounter the Smile, but it was clear that they would move on unopposed to win the game. They had almost more capital ships than the remaining players and kept going on in research, whereas we just couldn't. Every neighbor crushed would simply make them stronger. I had a lot of fun this game, but decided I would call it the day and congratulate the Slime on a game well played and won.
Some lessons learned: Scout more aggressively against SS... No gates in a strictly single player game is real tough (read: pretty much impossible to win), but HE can still be fun for a long time. The MT in a game like this is too much of a game changer. Tech at crucial points went to fast. I expected more bang for the buck from my JJ MMs, but they were obsolete too soon. I got a lift at a crucial time, I likely would have gone under without it, but then againt the Avengers got one late in the game and reversed the tables. I never got some of the real nice goodies that some others got. I ended up with the Hush-A-Boom and the Alien miner, not really exciting...
Thanks for a nice and well run game!
[Updated on: Mon, 13 July 2015 11:57] Report message to a moderator
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