Any update on the warfront?  Have you hit the Illdrians yet?  I'm wondering if their strength is more show or if they're really a threat.  I'm wondering if you'll need fleets to take their individual ships out or if they're just concentrating on a single defense type.

 

On mine, a little has happened.  I just got the MCC in early year 1, so my economy should start perking along.  I've been below -500 a few times now.

I got econ treaties with the 3 minors in Dec Year 0.  Not bad.  I kept trying with the main AI, but no dice.  

It's now Feb 2227 and I just met the last main AI, the Krynn.  They have a huge corner cut out of the galaxy for themselves.  I didn't actually go out and meet them, although I was trying to get there.  They came to me with their scouts.

I also met one more minor and got the tech and econ treaties from them.  It's costing more than it did when I was the Terrans, but it's working out anyway.  4 minors will be a big help as I expand.

The AI is ahead of me in some tech, but I have the upper hand in diplo.  With the MCC, I'll be able to raise my production slider above 50% and gain on them.

 

I've been in active combat against them now for about 6 game months. they had over 200 planets, so it's a long slog, but their bark was much worse then their bite. My main ship for the engagement is/was a large hull with about 40/70 att/def, and that ship alone outgunned all but their largest fleets. They have been producing ships with extrodinary ratios of att/def.
24/180 is something like what i have been seeing on their capital ships, all beam. I too was beam but i have just moved over to missile tech and am now producing huge hulled ships with 200/300 (roughly) figures.
My mil starbases starting to pay off!!

I'd say the illdirians have about 40 or so planets left, so i'm already moving against the Torians as well. I managed to get the Drath and Korx to go to war with each other, since between the two of them they had the lions share of resources, so i'll let them beat each other up and pick up scraps with out being actively involved.

All minors are gone, their inf base spamming was getting annoying.

I still maintain war with all races and have done so all game, my mil rating is back up over 300 and the best AI, Illdrians is at about 40 now, so i don't know how this will score, i'm not puffing up the stats with SCC. It is in use, but ships not in use sit under it, not purpose built weaponized hulls.

It's been a fantastic game!

My econ is in pretty good shape, and has been all game, ive been building my planets out that i have taken all econ, much like the old mumblers.
1 Xeno Farm III, 1 VR Centre the rest econ, except where influence and research bonus tiles appear, those have been put to use. I kept one planet manu, the illdirian home world, had 700% and 300% manu tiles along with their manu cap, and the rest had Industrial Sectors and a power plant. So i kept that one and just built a VR centre....that planet builds a troop transport for me every turn.

I had all econ and tech treaties from the minors, before i wiped them out, they didn't seem to be offering me much, i am getting more use of their class 18 HW!

Which is one thing i did do to the AI, i gave them all max points in PQ. All their HW are class 18 and on average all their planets seem to be 1 or two tiles higher...One planet in particular that i have my eye on, an illdirian planet is a class 34!!!! It is orbiting a purple sun, but still, PQ 34!!! Even with PQ points, you dont get that high, they must have got a colonization event that gave a bonus to PQ.

your game is sounding like one that will take some time too, which is good, i'm not minding a 5 or 6 year game (or longer), no matter the net return on score.

You know...i wish i never learned anything about mumblers and ZYW's....the game chat we have now is much more intriguing and enjoyable than it ever was!

If only we could get others (TOE or otherwise) into straight up gaming again!

And...WOOT! where did all this karma come from!?!?! Have i become a forum favorite once again!!! LOL

IIRC, PQ ability only affects ownership.  That is, a PQ10 with a 10% bonus will be a PQ11 for them, but a PQ10 when you take it.  Haven't tested this in some time, though.

With 5x morale resources, all morale techs, all morale trade goods, and 10 inherent morale, you don't actually need any VRCs, though they can help with levels needed for growth.

Ofc..once my pop is maxed out, i delete the VR's and replace with stock exchanges. the VR's help keep the 100% so you can really kick ass with breeder!

That's something to think about.  Maybe using just a couple of fast huge hulled beasts and upgrading them as time goes on.  I'm thinking the experience upgrades should make them legendary after they single handedly take on entire empires.  That would make for a rather long game, but the resulting ships would be incredible.

Maybe I should start them with psionic beams and go from there.  For a change, I'll put some decent defense on them.

I should probably name the ships as well, since they'll be there for the whole game.  At least I hope so.  Imagine losing the Enterprise along with Kirk, Spock, Sulu, etc.  That would hurt.

I've always liked Achilles and Agamemnon as ship names.  Yeah, that's the ticket.

I'll have to discipline myself into not building any more warships other than troop transports.  Getting from one end of the galaxy to where a war is going on and then getting a distraction from another area could be challenging.  Maybe I'll build some defensive ships without engines to protect the planets as needed, but only use my two mobile ships for projected combat.  This might even be a good game to take advantage of the defensive structures that we usually dismiss.  I might even scrap the small fighters I took in trade to purposefully lower my military level.

Thanks for the idea, Neilo.   +1k   

Experience

Yes, I'm linking to my own post. 

Best way to do it is to get large/huge hulls early on, slap one or two low-grade weapons on them, and go to town on Super Dominator Corvettes.

Yup, i have one ship at level 17 (iirc), it's a large hull ship but its got near to the hitpoints of a huge hull! It's now, as much of those 40/70 beam ships are, a missile ship with about 150/200. I keep gifting beam defence techs every few turns or so to all the AI, though the Illdrians have now minimal missile defense on their frigates.

And yeah i name my ships, mainly Star Trek ship names, with Galactica and Pegasus thrown in too. Ohh and i have some from the Stargate canon as well.

I don't need planet defense at all. The AI has thrown some transports at me, but none with more than 1k troops, and since just about every planet is at 13B, they don't have a hope. i just let them come and in a turn or two, i have regrown the loss pop.

 

SS, not at all keen to join in on some straight up gaming are you? Be nice to have someone else join the game chat and have another game going we can hear about?!

I upgraded all those to small constructors.

 

Just a few pics of the upgraded missile ships. i have 15 of these, and 4 huge hulled ships. the huge hulls haven't seen any real combat yet, but every one of these Predator Class are over lvl 10.

 

I'd love to; KP was starting in on these as well when his system died.  But I've got a project in GC2 at the moment, plus an RL project that's taking precedence even over that and may well tie me up for the next several months.

-

Thing is, having already played The Most Epic Game Ever™, in which I had to fight off 3+ incarnations of the Dread Lords, Peacekeepers with fleets of 20-strong huge hulls with 700 attack/1400 defense per ship, in addition to the Jagged Knife and at least one appearance of the I-League, while in 500 million bc of debt because the AI couldn't handle it themselves, without knowing about the focus in debt bug and without having had a fleet built or weapons research done when the 500 million debt bug hit...

Well, what's left?

And while playing straight up, no gimmicks is certainly more ethereally satisfying, I'm almost too good at it to even enjoy it anymore.  If you'll recall, back when (nearly?) everyone else had moved up to Suicidal and diplomafied their way through it, I was still hanging back on Tough, out colonizing the AIs individually 9-to-1 (that is, all AIs combined).  And I didn't even know then what I know now.

Then again my playstyle has always been about high research values early on; more akin to a ZYW-style game even if not quite at that ridiculous level of spending.  And the hidden bonus to a player's research higher than Tough makes it easy for me to wipe the floor with the AIs.  I've only ever lost one Suicidal game-my first-and that was in a Tiny galaxy.

But if either of those two qualifies as a gimmick-and while I maintained for a long time that the second did, there isn't anything that can really be done about it-then I suppose I need to go back to the drawing board.

The real question is, how badly must I handicap myself?  What's fair?  What's fun?

And the answer is, I don't know anymore.  Suggestions are welcome, of course, but as per above, it may be some time before I can do anything but spectate.

Anything different? Who have you played the least? Maybe you should take a race and play it the complete opposite to how it's structured..

Try playing with tech set to slow and play evil, your goal though is to be good and win with an alliance victory, with all 9 AI.
Oh, and play as either the Korath or Drengin.

I see what your saying, but play by forgetting everything you know about the game, do something in game not because the game mechanics require it, or it's the most efficient, but because it's weird.
Maybe i'm finding it easier to play this way since i had so much time away from the game. In all honesty, i couldn't pull a high score game now even if i wanted to, or a decent ZYW. I've forgot so much, and i'm happier for it!

If we had a few more peeps, between us we could start a mini MVL...that would be interesting, playing within very strict and odd parameters.

So, I should never research anything...

Sounds fun!

Actually, I've been playing Europa Universalis III off and on for several months, and I've gotten to the point where I pretty much only play as nations that are supposed to be doomed from the outset-South American pagan tribal nations, Albania (one province minor) at war with the Ottomans at the fall of Byzantium, etc.

But there's really no parallel to that in GC2, aside from playing a minor race maybe, which I'm not even sure how to manage.

I don't think I'm familiar with that bug.  Not that it'll matter though.  If it's an exploit, we're not looking for that sort of thing.

Your knowledge of the game mechanics might kill the fun for you, but I guess that depends on your goal.  If you're trying to win, you'll default to the math.  If you're playing it along the lines of a role playing game, it can take on a different feel.  At least that's how it's going from my perspective.

If you're in it for the fun of it, anything is fair.  For instance, I'm still using diplo skills to get money and planets, but I'm putting a limit on what I can sell.  No warships is my self imposed limit.  Neilo might have a different limit, such as no attack techs.  We're both limiting our military capabilities.

If it makes for a fun game, why not?  You can probably find a balance for yourself in there.  With your knowledge, you might need to limit yourself more than we do.  That's up to you though.  You might want to treat the AI as respectable beings in an alternate reality.  You might want to roll over them like a bug under your car's tire.

Maybe, but the last one started out fun and got bogged down with lawyerish rules.  I got tired of the team captain micromanaging each player's style.  It's not about how one person can control each member of his team like they're his dogs.  I'm not mentioning any names, but I won't be a willing sub to Silverbeacher.

 

 

There was a weird bug in DA 1.7 where the game lost track of how much money you had when you were rush buying things, and wound up setting your money to a few hundred million in debt.

Fortunately there was also a weird bug in DA 1.7 where once you researched Xeno Ethics if you didn't have enough to switch ethical alignment your cash was set to 0 even if you were in debt, so I got out of it eventually.

But with no research it took me a great deal of time, and I didn't even know about the second bug until it happened.

My understanding is the first bug was fixed when the second bug was fixed, though, as I haven't seen it happen again yet.

And getting yourself into 500 million bc of debt is hardly an exploit   It certainly doesn't help you!

Motti, my brain works differently; it always defaults to the math.

I really think the only way to make it remotely challenging is to never research a tech myself.  This means relying on the AI to research -everything-, so I don't have tech superiority over all of them, although I might have tech superiority over one or two targets.  It also means I'll need to make enough money from my planets in order to buy techs in the first place.

I guess it's debatable whether research treaties should be allowed.

That's about as old-fashioned colony rush as it gets, I think. 

Ouch.  I'm glad they fixed that then.

That would certainly be a challenge.  Fun?  Maybe, but that's up to you.  Sounds a little too restrictive to me, but that's just me.

As far as research treaties go, if you got one, you'll be doing research even if you don't want to.  Still, it wouldn't be a lot and the restriction would probably be more than anyone else has ever tried.

 

On my Torian game, I built the Achilles and Agamemnon.  I then saw that I should have built the hyperian thingamajig that gives a base +1 to your speed for ships built on that planet.  I built it on my homeworld and upgraded the huge warships to survey ships.  That felt really weird.  I then built a new Achilles and Agamemnon on Toria.  

I was going to go to war with the weakest race first (Iconians) to get a feel for it, but the Thalans took 2 of my planets with their influence while I was rebuilding my ships.  They're the strongest race BTW.  

So I started it off with the Thalans.  I've only been able to reach one of their colony ships so far.  No fighters are within reach for me yet.  The Thalans have a lot of speed and a huge area to play in.  I saw one of their colony ships zip past me and go back into the fog of war.  No chance in me chasing them down.

I'll try to catch more and build up some experience as I can.  1 down anyway.