Aroddo
Posts: 125
Joined: 11/7/2009
Status: offline
|
Another game from the beta phase.
Race: Hoon Yon
Difficulty: Normal
Scenario: Twelve Races
Version: Beta 2
The Hoon Yon look very interesting because of their many traits and penalties: They are immune to bio attacks (not that I care) and psychic attacks (that's neat) but vulnerable to nano attacks (so what?). They are orderly at level 6, are warlike and don't suffer from bureaucracy.
This means that your colonies will barely ever riot, no matter how high the taxes and how vile the pollution. On the other hand you get zero research at psi tech, a general research penalty at level 2 and serious level 6 penalties for skunkworks and bio research.
They are definetly something different and I intended to make the most of their strengths in my next game.
Also, having learned from previous games, I decided beforehand on some strategies and management patterns I would try to use in my game:
- Poor and normal planets with habitable or ideal environment would be designated as Breeding Pits, which meant that I would always keep the taxes at low, construct no buildings other than growth rate boosters and a few research centers, if space permits. I would keep them at a minimum population of 20 and shuttle excess pop to my productive worlds (beta note: at this time shuttling wasn't implemented yet. You had to transport all population manually).
- Poor and otherwise undesirable planets would be designated as Gulags where I would build no building at all. These planets would be a dumping ground for the population of conquered systems. I'd fill the planets until they burst and ignore whatever riots would happen there.
- Rich planets of all flavor would be used as shipyards and economic boosters, with taxes permanently on high. Population would be imported from Breeding Pits, using vast transporter fleets.
- Conquered colonies would gradually be stripped of their population and replaced by my own, according to the above colony management rules.
- I would nurse one other race as a permanent ally. He would be the happy buyer of Gulags with maximized population. These planets are completely useless to me but my buddy would pay tens of thousands of $ for them (beta note: At that time the AI would pay incredible sums for fully populated planets - even if they were so unruly that you could never make them productive. I assume that changed by now.).
- Highest priority to colonization! I'd settle every single system that fit my scheme. As soon as possible. Since Hoon Yoon don't suffer from bureaucrazy, they can afford spreading out like crazy.
[li]Maintain peace as long as I have open tasks in regards of above colony management.
These rules would experience some slight additions during the actual game but in essence they carried me unchanged through my most successful game yet.
To make a long story short: I was unstoppable.
My economy was soaring from the start, my population exploded and my fleet grew within a short (about 60 turns) period of peaceful expansion.
After my first conquests, the Gulags proved to be an absolute success story - as were the Breeding Pits. Alien diplomats were like butter in my hands and couldn't wait to hand over their underdeveloped and underpopulated rich systems - even neutron stars - for planets filled with 100 POWs of three different races.
My financial planets were productive beyond belief and my research was on par with all other races despite my penalties.
And even though I couldn't research psi-tec, I could trade it. And in evenly matched battles where enemy ships would flee in psi-induced fear while my ships were psi immune, I inevitably prevailed.
By turn 250 I had four times the number of occupied systems than the next race ... and thats even though I gave many Gulags away to a splinter faction of my race (one Gulag actually rebelled, so I befriended it by giving it even more Gulags).
I practically owed the upper half of the map in addition to the lower third, leaving only a thin stripe of systems not yet belonging to me.
I was the Master of the Universe and after about 100 turns of mopping up, I got rewarded with a victory animation. Military victory!
No kidding, the Hoon Yon rock!
While the colony roles I listed above can be applied to other races too, only the Hoon Yon can nearly permanantly tax strongly populated systems. They swim in money. And due to the no-bureaucracy trait they can expand like mad. Their research penalties barely slow them if you expand aggressively and their psi immunity is very useful.
My game was certainly helped by the fact that I knew exactly where my opponents were, where wormholes and good systems were located and how easy prey early AI empires tended to be when you know what you are doing.
Research is noticably slower, too, so your economic surplus will go into lots of cheap corvettes if you plan on early conquest. And if the enemy would have bothered to infect my colonies with nanobots, I'd have a hell of a time getting infected colonies cleaned up again. I understand that only with later versions an AI strategy called "leper" was included. That would be interesting.
Anyway, the Hoon Yon are a great race for very large maps and players who prefer very large empires. The trait "no bureaucrazy" really helps - especially in combination with orderly. In smaller maps, they might not fare as well.
    
_____________________________
|
Printable Version
After action report #3: Hoon Yon - 
New Messages
No New Messages
Hot Topic w/ New Messages
Hot Topic w/o New Messages
Locked w/ New Messages
Locked w/o New Messages
Post New Thread