Home » Stars! 2.6/7 » Game stories » EYITYOTG has ended
| Re: EYITYOTG has ended |
Mon, 06 June 2016 18:20   |
|
 ManicLurch |
 | Lt. Junior Grade |
Messages: 462
Registered: May 2009 | |
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I also played a CA race in this game. CA is banned so often (for good reason), so I wanted to give it a try, even with the growth rate handicap given to it. The GR restriction was simple, take your CA race that has positive RW points, and deduct 4% from the growth rate. This meant a max GR of 16%. So I started trying out races and test bedding them. I had a hard time getting a race as fast as I normally like them. My resources at 2420 in my testbeds were below normal with any lower growth CA I could come up with, but I noticed that after TT10, it started to catch up in testbeds.
With the game allowing allies, and taking a race that would be slower than most at the beginning, I knew I would be looking for an ally early. So I made my habs easy to intersettle. All 3 were shifted to one side or the other an made fairly narrow. Most players pick one narrow hab, this way no matter which hab variable they chose as narrow I had a shot at having a narrow complimentary hab. I think my starting hab was 1/21, but with TT7 it was about 1/8 or 1/9 I think. To help make up for the low growth rate, I had very good and fast factories. 15/9/15. I took Bio cheap, rest expensive knowing that W was expensive for all and my ally would likely have a cheap tech or two.
The first player I ran into was the Illumaniti. I was very anxious to see if his habs were compatible with mine. I started talking to him early and we exchanged vague information. My hab idea worked, he had narrow left shifted rad, I had narrow right shifted hab. And as a plus, I was his ally in a different game, so we had already played together and I knew we wouldn't have any problems being allies. So we made an agreement and started to intersettle and I sent a few Coh ships to his planets. The Illumanati were SS too, which was a bonus.
Soon after I made an alliance with the Illumaniti, I started getting concerned about the Traders, the player on the other side of the Illumaniti. They were a very fast HE, dual immune, like 26-30% GR. And their rad range was similar to mine. They also offered an alliance to the Illumaniti. But being able to give an ally free terraforming surely helped him choose me instead. I am sure the Traders were in first place for most of the early game and I was worried about being an early target.
But then a bigger threat came from the Dream Clouds / Guard alliance. They had taken over half of the middle and were advancing fast. If they were able to take the entire middle, we believed they would win the game. So we made some agreements with the Traders. We had an NAP of course, we worked out some tech trading, which was good because the Traders had much better Weapons tech then we did. And kind of unusual, the Illumaniti set the Traders to friend and me to neutral (the rules say you can have only one friend at a time) so they could use Illumaniti gates to get warships to the center. We were doing everything we could to stop the DC/Guards from owning the entire center, which was a difficult task since they had more than double our fleets, the main enemy fleets at this point were bazooka cruisers and collodial cruisers. We didn't even have Con9 yet. The Illumanti researched Con9, which we traded to the Traders for W10.
Sometime during all this I made contact with my other neighbor, the Crushers. He was a WM, and I didn't want an early war with a WM so I started working on a border agreement. Then I saw his habs. My hab scheme was working out nice, he had narrow right shifted temp, I had narrow left shifted temp. His habs were a perfect match for mine too. The game rules said that only a 2 player alliance could be the winner. But the game rules also said that you were allowed one person set to friend and one to neutral. A 3 person alliance would have its challenges with these rules, we wouldn't have access to everyone's gates. But considering the threat of the DC/Guards and deciding I would rather have the Crushers as an ally than another border to watch, I started talking to both the Crushers and Illumaniti seperately about the idea of a 3 way alliance. There would be some hab overlap between the Illumaniti and the Crushers, but not too bad. I am sure the DC/Guard threat, free terraforming, plus more space to intersettle sealed the deal.
Because I could only have one player set to friend, I could only terraform one ally at a time. The game rules said we can change friend status every 10 turns. So every 10 turns I would change who I had set to friend and terraform their planets. We were required to email the host every time we changed friend status. So every 10 turns I did this, and I got some funny responses back, once he accused me of being a polygamist.
Back to the wars, I had no planets in the middle, the Illumanati and Traders had several. But they were losing them fast to the DC/Guards. The Illumanati had CC tech and were building bazooka CCs, but were behind. I got to EN10, but was still too far from CC tech. So I built 100 EN10 bazooka FFs and used them as an escort to settle Mandrake in the middle. That planet would become our most important settlement.
Both the Crushers and I finally got W10 and con9 tech and started building CCs. We had smaller fleets becuase we started later, but that also allowed us EN10 shields and a comp to shoot first vs there CC. The enemy had their CCs in many fleets, trying to conquer the middle as fast as possible. We were down to one planet in the middle, Mandrake. They attacked with one of their smaller CC fleets and we were able to defend and win the battle. If they had their entire CC fleets in range, we would have had no chance. So I thanked the Guards for the minerals at Mandrake  and we were able to catch out breath for a few turns.
That bought us a little time. The Crushers and I continued building CCs while the Illumaniti researched Con13. I was able to start building BBs just as they were able to gather their CCs together for an attack on Mandrake. If I had gotten Con13 one turn later, we would likely have lost it there. But I was able to build BBs and gate them to Mandrake every turn. The enemy was faced with a tough choice, build CCs or get Con13.
They didn't attack Mandrake and researched Con13 themselves. Because the DC/Guards built so many CCs, likely 2 times the number we built, and because we had more than 2 players to share the tech research load, we always had a slight tech lead after that point. When they started BBs, they were W10, EN10. We started W16,en14 BBs. They still had a resource advantage though.
Both our alliance and the DC/Guards attacked the Culture who had the unfortunate position of having no allies and being in between us. We were hoping to get the Culture HW. But the DC/Guards had given up on taking Mandrake for the moment and put their fleets in the ring and captured more of the Culture space and we were forced to retreat. During this time of retreat is when the game tipped in our favor. The Crushers had EN cheap and got EN18. So we started building a W16, EN18 fleet. The enemey was still building W10,EN10 BBs. We were retreating in the ring, holding onto Mandrake and building these new BBs. Finally we had enough to challenge them.
We gathered all those ships to the front and the following turn attacked. They should have retreated, but I think they didn't see our fleet, or had to submit a turn in a hurry. We won the battle, killed most of their fleets including their Jihad BCs. The game was quite a bit easier after that. We started to slowly take a few planets in the middle and in the ring. Our economy was growing quite fast now, with all 3 of us having good factories and free terraforming. Our economy surpassed the enemies, and after the battle our fleets did too. From there we gained momentum very fast until we got the to point we were taking multiple planets per turn. With orbital adjusters and smart bombs, we were taking the DC planets and inheriting lots of factories. The DC/Guard team did start to build a lot of jugger dread ships, which was a little concerning. So I built 4000 chaff, plus we had started W22 beamers, we would be fine. We could have had Con26 and W26 in 4-5 turns. We were a little concerned about the rest of the universe ganging up on us, like we all did on the DC/Guards, but the momentum changed so quickly in our favor that I don't think they realized we were winning until it was too late.
This was a fun game setup. I enjoyed playing a slowed down CA. I greatly misjudged the importance of getting a fast start into the middle. The DC/Guard team was running away with the game early. We just barely hung on and survived to the point where our slower races built up their economy to the point that we could fight back. We also wouldn't have survived without the help of the Trader/Zoo team early. It was one of the few games I have been in where the rest of the universe was able to successfully work together to beat the monster who was going to take over the universe. Another interesting thing that could have changed the game, the DC/Guards had similar habs. If their habs had been more compatible, they would have been even stronger early. So really everything kind of worked out perfectly for us to hang on and turn the game around, otherwise the DC/Guards would have won about 2450.
When it was time to decide on the winners, we drew straws. So congratulations to the Illumaniti and Crushers 
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