I miss playing multiplayer in this game. We should try getting some games going again.
I'll start logging back into the steam group, though work is kind of crazy this week.
Darkchampion3d on
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence --Thomas Jefferson
I was very surprised at how hard things would be in the next galaxy without a fully developed homeworld. One thing seems odd, even with a fully developed planet, at 9,000 IO or so, the research times seem way out of whack, even if a starting game might have put me at 10,000-12,000 IO. Or maybe I'm also feeling the pinch of the much smaller planet compared to the size 10 you normally start with, not sure.
Any recommendations on whether or not I should have loaded up way more than 6 biome colonizers to transfer over?
Over a third of your ships should be colonizers when you're preparing fleets - and probably a lot more than third except in extreme scenarios. I would say at least half, maybe 2/3rds. The only other ships you should take are freighters, unique drive ships (nodebore/gravboats/gates), scouts (if applicable, ie not hiver/zuul), and a token defense force of as few ships as possible. Minelayers are good for that because you can kill a disproportionately large amount of low-tech unintelligent AI ships with them.
And don't drop them all on one world. Drop about half on the first good world you run into, drop a fourth on the next one, and then the last fourth on the next one.
Zuul are good to practice that scenario, since they can develop worlds very very quickly, have extremely high population growth, and their main downside (running out of resources) will not happen before you switch to the next map, which will have fresh, unsullied worlds.
I was very surprised at how hard things would be in the next galaxy without a fully developed homeworld. One thing seems odd, even with a fully developed planet, at 9,000 IO or so, the research times seem way out of whack, even if a starting game might have put me at 10,000-12,000 IO. Or maybe I'm also feeling the pinch of the much smaller planet compared to the size 10 you normally start with, not sure.
Any recommendations on whether or not I should have loaded up way more than 6 biome colonizers to transfer over?
Over a third of your ships should be colonizers when you're preparing fleets - and probably a lot more than third except in extreme scenarios. I would say at least half, maybe 2/3rds. The only other ships you should take are freighters, unique drive ships (nodebore/gravboats/gates), scouts (if applicable, ie not hiver/zuul), and a token defense force of as few ships as possible. Minelayers are good for that because you can kill a disproportionately large amount of low-tech unintelligent AI ships with them.
And don't drop them all on one world. Drop about half on the first good world you run into, drop a fourth on the next one, and then the last fourth on the next one.
Zuul are good to practice that scenario, since they can develop worlds very very quickly, have extremely high population growth, and their main downside (running out of resources) will not happen before you switch to the next map, which will have fresh, unsullied worlds.
I could see hivers possibly being either the worst or the best race for that scenario. You only get like 90-something turns per galaxy ircc, so depending on the density you'd only get to maybe 5 layers of planets before you run out of time. But then in the later galaxies you could use all of your planets' production to construct the colony fleet just a few turns before departure so they have the most recent tech. Intriguing.
Also don't zuul only have like a 10% total chance at biomes?
I want to start playing this again. We totally should get people to dig through their saved games and find ones worth continuing, and then pestering all the players with promises of awesome.
[tiny]Fake Edit:[/tiny]
Oh, but zuul don't need biomes, silly Woggle. :overharvest:
Or hold the cursor over a ship and press 'f'. Tab will allow you to cycle through friendly ships, and there's some key combo that will let you cycle through enemy ships as well.
I should be in, provided that my download continues at its present, albeit disappointing, rate.
edit: reinstall completed, I'll be there.
Edit the second: an early AI gambit can be hilarious if it rebels before anyone has decent weapons or CRs. On the other hand, its also a good way to lose friends.
I find mass driver to be a very good starting weapon. You have 100% chance of getting it, it does very good damage well into the cruiser era and although not too terrible accurate against destroyers, it only requires a few hits to bring one down.
For their cost, and how early you can get them, they are one of the underrated and surprisingly effective choices for planetary bombardment. A pair of Strafe/ER Cruisers are cheap, so you can make enough of them to hit several enemy colonies at once, and strike sooner and deeper into enemy territory than expected with enough force to cripple or destroy a lightly garrisoned colony.
Hey, I don't suppose I could get in on the Steam group or something? I've had this game since the original came out and I couldn't ever get any of my friends to buy the expos. I'm kind of desperate for some multiplayer.
I find mass driver to be a very good starting weapon. You have 100% chance of getting it, it does very good damage well into the cruiser era and although not too terrible accurate against destroyers, it only requires a few hits to bring one down.
For their cost, and how early you can get them, they are one of the underrated and surprisingly effective choices for planetary bombardment. A pair of Strafe/ER Cruisers are cheap, so you can make enough of them to hit several enemy colonies at once, and strike sooner and deeper into enemy territory than expected with enough force to cripple or destroy a lightly garrisoned colony.
I don't think I ever got to the point where I found efficiency of bombardment to be good. If there's an enemy fleet, it doesn't seem like a good idea to focus any destructive power on the planet barring certain specialty weapons like viruses or asteroids. If you do focus on and defeat the enemy fleet, one more turn of auto-battle with any weapon is going to finish the job of destroying the colony.
It depends, against a hiver it can actually be very efficient to use assault shuttles and bio missiles against their planets since they will always have full force on defence. If you get 5-8 nimble destroyer fleets with overdrives armed with that onto their planets in one turn you can seriously affect their industry.
Make sure to state it clearly in EST and GMT, so people won't show up +/-5 hours off. I think early afternoon EST/noon-ish PST fits most common schedules? At least that's when we've usually done games.
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence --Thomas Jefferson
I find mass driver to be a very good starting weapon. You have 100% chance of getting it, it does very good damage well into the cruiser era and although not too terrible accurate against destroyers, it only requires a few hits to bring one down.
For their cost, and how early you can get them, they are one of the underrated and surprisingly effective choices for planetary bombardment. A pair of Strafe/ER Cruisers are cheap, so you can make enough of them to hit several enemy colonies at once, and strike sooner and deeper into enemy territory than expected with enough force to cripple or destroy a lightly garrisoned colony.
I don't think I ever got to the point where I found efficiency of bombardment to be good. If there's an enemy fleet, it doesn't seem like a good idea to focus any destructive power on the planet barring certain specialty weapons like viruses or asteroids. If you do focus on and defeat the enemy fleet, one more turn of auto-battle with any weapon is going to finish the job of destroying the colony.
Actually getting too close to the planet can kind of fuck over your fleet. They waste shots at the planet when they should be shooting at things that matter. If you have the option to turn off bombardment, it's almost always a good idea to do it until their fleet is mostly dead.
Darkchampion3d on
Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence --Thomas Jefferson
It depends, against a hiver it can actually be very efficient to use assault shuttles and bio missiles against their planets since they will always have full force on defence. If you get 5-8 nimble destroyer fleets with overdrives armed with that onto their planets in one turn you can seriously affect their industry.
Not true, there's a way to fake hivers out.
Build your main attack fleet (and include a sensor jammer), then about 5-10 other fleets consisting of:
Necessary support ships
A couple assault shuttle cruisers
A sensor jammer DE (important)
Launch all the fleets so they hit all the worlds at the same time. Since all the fleets are jammed, he can't tell which ones are the decoys and which one is the real fleet. And no matter what he does, he'll lose at least one world - either he guesses right and kills your main fleet, letting you take all the other worlds with the assault shuttle CRs; he guesses wrong and your main fleet pulverizes one of his worlds; or he sends a little bit to everything, in which case your main fleet will still overpower whatever it's up against and take the world.
It depends, against a hiver it can actually be very efficient to use assault shuttles and bio missiles against their planets since they will always have full force on defence. If you get 5-8 nimble destroyer fleets with overdrives armed with that onto their planets in one turn you can seriously affect their industry.
Not true, there's a way to fake hivers out.
Build your main attack fleet (and include a sensor jammer), then about 5-10 other fleets consisting of:
Necessary support ships
A couple assault shuttle cruisers
A sensor jammer DE (important)
Launch all the fleets so they hit all the worlds at the same time. Since all the fleets are jammed, he can't tell which ones are the decoys and which one is the real fleet. And no matter what he does, he'll lose at least one world - either he guesses right and kills your main fleet, letting you take all the other worlds with the assault shuttle CRs; he guesses wrong and your main fleet pulverizes one of his worlds; or he sends a little bit to everything, in which case your main fleet will still overpower whatever it's up against and take the world.
Or being a hiver he could have tons of ships already made and enough ships to be able to effectively defend all his planets.
Dunno about other hivers but if I don't get fucked by starting areas (looking at you every planet within 40 turns of me being uninhabitable or barely habitable) i tend to keep at least 10 ships at all my important planets.
Hivers should keep a spare gate, a jammer and a deep scan on every planet, and I like to leave 5-6 destroyers for any random encounters that might want to steal my stuff.
Can we assume that most people have a fairly good idea how to play?
I was thinking that the next game ought to start us off with a lot of starting colonies so we can get right to the parts where we kill each other.
EDIT: Just messed around with a bunch of game start settings. 10 colonies, 10 techs seems like a pretty good way to go; 10 techs is not enough for limited tech rolls resulting in someone starting with fusion for free.
DOUBLE EDIT: I guess I should clarify that of course the number of starting colonies should scale with map size; e.g. if there's about 20 stars per player then 10 is a good number but if there's only about 10 per player, then 5 might be better.
extra starting colonies really helps the hiver / morrigi though, and sorta negates some of the early expansionist powers of humans. (my limited take at least).
What Gnome said. Some races get alot more from extra starting colonies then others (hivers take forever to get anywhere to colonize til they get a gate setup and morrigi take alot of money to terraform planets). When we were doing some headstart games we found out morrigi especially benefit from more planets because A) they don't have to spend money terraforming so they get to spend more on research teching faster and they have ready made networks to start trading in. Hivers also benefit from it due to having more gates to launch explorers from so they can expand faster.
You can always give different race different starting bonus. For example, human would get 3 extra starting colony while Morrigi get two or something..
That is also really hard to balance, since the slow growing races rely on the breathing room that the early growth phase of the game to get their empires up to speed.
Also, races with lower tech probabilities get better results from starting techs. They have less branches on the tree, so the starting techs reach higher instead.
I'm in favor of small starting bonuses in order to get the game going sooner. Say 1-2 planets and 2-4 techs. I don't think it unbalances the game at that level, and it does speed things way up. The slower races don't have to wait around as long and the faster races can gear up for a bum-rush right now.
I think I liked Hegemonia better. Or in the same theme, Nexus : The Jupiter Incident. What's so special about this game?
It's got tremendous depth and replayability.
The things that seem to set it apart from other 4E games are the randomized tech tree, the Command & Control mechanics, and the very different playstyles between races. The rock/paper/scissors nature of ships and technologies is nice, too. There's no single strategy which will always win a game for you; you are kept guessing and on your toes from game start to game finish.
i appreciate the seesaw effect that the technology tends to cause in battle. one race will come out with a tech advantage, may take the upper hand, but if the other race responds cannilly, the tables can be turned strongly. In an even match, this exchange of power can repeat itself over and over, leading to truly awesome battles.
Posts
I'll start logging back into the steam group, though work is kind of crazy this week.
Over a third of your ships should be colonizers when you're preparing fleets - and probably a lot more than third except in extreme scenarios. I would say at least half, maybe 2/3rds. The only other ships you should take are freighters, unique drive ships (nodebore/gravboats/gates), scouts (if applicable, ie not hiver/zuul), and a token defense force of as few ships as possible. Minelayers are good for that because you can kill a disproportionately large amount of low-tech unintelligent AI ships with them.
And don't drop them all on one world. Drop about half on the first good world you run into, drop a fourth on the next one, and then the last fourth on the next one.
Zuul are good to practice that scenario, since they can develop worlds very very quickly, have extremely high population growth, and their main downside (running out of resources) will not happen before you switch to the next map, which will have fresh, unsullied worlds.
I could see hivers possibly being either the worst or the best race for that scenario. You only get like 90-something turns per galaxy ircc, so depending on the density you'd only get to maybe 5 layers of planets before you run out of time. But then in the later galaxies you could use all of your planets' production to construct the colony fleet just a few turns before departure so they have the most recent tech. Intriguing.
Also don't zuul only have like a 10% total chance at biomes?
I want to start playing this again. We totally should get people to dig through their saved games and find ones worth continuing, and then pestering all the players with promises of awesome.
[tiny]Fake Edit:[/tiny]
Oh, but zuul don't need biomes, silly Woggle. :overharvest:
MWO: Adamski
Tab key to cycle the focus through friendly ships. 'e' to cycle the focus through enemy ships.
Click the middle mouse button on what you want to center on.
Get in the steam group chat. Ultra-convenient chat linky is [URL="steam://friends/joinchat/103582791430398460"]here[/URL].
edit: reinstall completed, I'll be there.
Edit the second: an early AI gambit can be hilarious if it rebels before anyone has decent weapons or CRs. On the other hand, its also a good way to lose friends.
I don't think I ever got to the point where I found efficiency of bombardment to be good. If there's an enemy fleet, it doesn't seem like a good idea to focus any destructive power on the planet barring certain specialty weapons like viruses or asteroids. If you do focus on and defeat the enemy fleet, one more turn of auto-battle with any weapon is going to finish the job of destroying the colony.
What he said.
Make sure to state it clearly in EST and GMT, so people won't show up +/-5 hours off. I think early afternoon EST/noon-ish PST fits most common schedules? At least that's when we've usually done games.
Actually getting too close to the planet can kind of fuck over your fleet. They waste shots at the planet when they should be shooting at things that matter. If you have the option to turn off bombardment, it's almost always a good idea to do it until their fleet is mostly dead.
Not true, there's a way to fake hivers out.
Necessary support ships
A couple assault shuttle cruisers
A sensor jammer DE (important)
Launch all the fleets so they hit all the worlds at the same time. Since all the fleets are jammed, he can't tell which ones are the decoys and which one is the real fleet. And no matter what he does, he'll lose at least one world - either he guesses right and kills your main fleet, letting you take all the other worlds with the assault shuttle CRs; he guesses wrong and your main fleet pulverizes one of his worlds; or he sends a little bit to everything, in which case your main fleet will still overpower whatever it's up against and take the world.
Or being a hiver he could have tons of ships already made and enough ships to be able to effectively defend all his planets.
Dunno about other hivers but if I don't get fucked by starting areas (looking at you every planet within 40 turns of me being uninhabitable or barely habitable) i tend to keep at least 10 ships at all my important planets.
I was thinking that the next game ought to start us off with a lot of starting colonies so we can get right to the parts where we kill each other.
EDIT: Just messed around with a bunch of game start settings. 10 colonies, 10 techs seems like a pretty good way to go; 10 techs is not enough for limited tech rolls resulting in someone starting with fusion for free.
DOUBLE EDIT: I guess I should clarify that of course the number of starting colonies should scale with map size; e.g. if there's about 20 stars per player then 10 is a good number but if there's only about 10 per player, then 5 might be better.
MWO: Adamski
That is also really hard to balance, since the slow growing races rely on the breathing room that the early growth phase of the game to get their empires up to speed.
Also, races with lower tech probabilities get better results from starting techs. They have less branches on the tree, so the starting techs reach higher instead.
I'm in favor of small starting bonuses in order to get the game going sooner. Say 1-2 planets and 2-4 techs. I don't think it unbalances the game at that level, and it does speed things way up. The slower races don't have to wait around as long and the faster races can gear up for a bum-rush right now.
It's got tremendous depth and replayability.
The things that seem to set it apart from other 4E games are the randomized tech tree, the Command & Control mechanics, and the very different playstyles between races. The rock/paper/scissors nature of ships and technologies is nice, too. There's no single strategy which will always win a game for you; you are kept guessing and on your toes from game start to game finish.