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Spidey -> RE: Friendly Challenge (1/29/2014 3:02:22 PM)
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So I sort of had a go at the Icy challenge, just to get a feel of what it's like, and I did manage to break past the half million point breakmark that I'd hoped for, but with some caveats. I was only playing on very hard difficulty, for one, and I did cheat a tiny bit with the editor, just to find out what was going on after I'd met my 20th pirate faction and still hadn't seen more than three other regular factions. Another diversion is that I used whatever derelicts I found useful to try and contain pirate activity a tiny bit. I wouldn't normally need to do this but with slow research, it took ages for me to match their staying power.
Regarding the game progression, I did the usual stuff early on. It was my first Quameno game so I wasn't quite sure what to expect but they're a decent enough race. Lost my ultra genius early on because my leader sucked and of course my genius scientist decides to convert into yet another really crappy leader. I tried sacking my leader a few more times and each time it cost me a scientist. So yeah, this provided an amazing start.
I tried to so manual scouting to some extent and it worked out okay but I can't keep doing it very long before I lose the will to live. I scouted the huge central cluster I was in but then softened up a bit and semi-automated beyond. Unfortunately the going got extremely tough once I pulled beyond the galactic center.
In a 1400 system universe with abundant independents and Shadows pirates, the indies essentially become pirate food. Abundant indies means abundant income for the pirates, which means many, many pirate ships everywhere and as a consequence even more oppressed indies. And unless you micro the hell out of your scouts, they'll in turn get caught in a cycle of super-dense idiocy where they first try to explore a system, then they notice the 10+ pirate frigates coming at them, then they'll run away a short bit, and then they'll consider themselves safe and go back to work. Meaning the exploration of the system that's clearly full of pirates.
Anyway, this scouting limitation resulted in no WotA during the first 30 years, no system-wide bonus ruins, and no super luxuries. Total bummer, really. I did have a good bit of room, though. And I was lucky enough to stumble over some Slukens early on, which then ended up being my grunt source. I tried doing what I normally do in less pirate-intensive games (I usually have fewer colonies and less indies), teching up while doing nominal military action, but I had some issues getting my economy going.
The civilians were doing fine but with all the hardware needed to fight the pirates and all the troops requires to kill off pirate facilities on the independents that I take over, I just wasn't generating much of a positive cashflow. I built the bazaar, of course, and I could keep the skin on my nose but it never snowballed. Of course, I also only ever managed to grow a couple of moons to the tax-friendly size, so that probably didn't help.
In retrospect, I should've taken the cashflow hit and made a priority out of invading the rival homeworlds I came across. While these wouldn't have a pop size anywhere close to that of my homeworld (since I tax less and built the growth wonder), they'd still have enough pop to make taxation worthwhile.
And something I hadn't picked up on, but corruption is actually a right pain in the backside. I thought I'd be making a fortune off of a Teekan homeworld, but it's located two and a half pirate-infested sectors away from my capital and has a corruption of 60%. Well, had, I should say. I made a push for regional capitals and that really sorted out a lot of problems, though it came much too late to have any impact on my 30 year score.
Something else I'll be doing differently next time is my approach to eliminating pirates. In this game I've thrown everything I had after them for something like 15 years and I could barely make a dent. Even though the pirates don't respawn, there are so many constructors around that blowing up one pirate base means absolutely nothing if you don't occupy the system it was in. In other words, I'm thinking I'll have to colonize-crawl through pirate space instead of just trying to blow up their bases with attack fleets.
I might also be going back to my typical Ackdarians. It means a fairly hefty loss of research bonus but it also means much faster construction speed. They have TurboThrusters for racial tech, which are nice enough, even if they don't offer the benefits of NovaCore reactors, and then there's a maintenance reduction for econ purposes and +20% size allowance on military ships, which is very nice. It means I can stop at component prefabrication and still build size 480 ships, which is just about the size I'll want my destroyers to be anyway.
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