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Spidey -> RE: Random ramlings of a rookie regent (12/16/2013 8:13:59 AM)
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So my harddrive sort of died on me, leaving me in a hairy spot for a while. Turns out it's not entirely dead, it just craps itself whenever it reads certain sectors and it just so happens that Windows was installed on some of those sectors. Oh well.
Fortunately I managed to salvage most of what was on it, including my tutorial game, which means I've been pressing on over the last few days. Anyway, to make the story as unrambly as possible, I spent a few minutes putting together a picture, since they're worth probably several thousand of my words. :-)
[image]http://i39.tinypic.com/j180sn.png[/image]
I'm the Teekans in the middle. Last time I posted, the Mortalen held the red-hued systems that are now pleasantly blue on the map. The Legendary pirates were around as well, and they were quite keen on blowing my attempts to build starports to kingdom come. The Haarkons, presumably related to the Harkonens of Dune-fame in mind if not in body, didn't like me too much then and still don't. The map makes it look like I've got a rather dense cluster of systems but last time I really didn't have much expansion that far south, and the top right corner of D6 contains some fairly poor systems as well, so I was feeling a bit vulnerable and claustrophobic.
So that's where I was, more or less. To get from then to now, I obviously needed to push back some reptile redcloaks only the buggers didn't want to declare a war on me. They hated my guts and wasn't too fond of them, but they didn't care to agree on an honorable bout of fisticuffs to settle the dispute, which made me impatiently give them an ultimatum, either give me these here bases or face a war!! Well, truth be told I just wanted to saber-rattle a bit but apparently this constitutes an actual declaration of war if they say no. Sort of annoying when one of the Teekan victory conditions is to declare the fewest wars in the galaxy, but hopefully the factions less warlike than me (66% at this time, apparently) will get wiped out in time.
Unfortunately, at the time I still had not fully sorted out those damn legendary pirates and the last thing I cared for was to send off my fleets and then have a bunch of marauder heavies go on a rampage in my barely defended core systems. So despite having started the war weariness timer, I decided to push a fleet up to kill off a third pirate base, which turned out to be the last one they had. My fleet took it out well enough, but of course those scurvy scummers took that as a cue to race into my core systems and start blasting away at everything. While my fleet was away, killing their base. Yeah.
Rather amusingly, the very thing I did to avoid something unpleasant actually triggered that unpleasant thing I was trying to avoid. Lesson learned: Safety first. Never assume that enemies with warp drives will respect your borders and stay out of undefended core worlds.
I did manage to reign in all their bigger ships but not until after they'd taken out my second large space port in a system right next to my capital. So much for having expanded my retrofitting capacity. And the war weariness is of course slowly adding up while I'm spending the time at war fighting a group (and rebuilding and repairing) that I'm not technically at war against anyway. Sort of AI-level brilliant planning, coordination, and general exeuction on my behalf, I suppose.
It wasn't all bad, though. I also managed to build a pair of troop transporters and recruit some troops. Unfortunately, I may have gotten a bit overboard in my troop recruitment because all of a sudden, my cashflow is going down faster than a female protagonist in a James Bond movie. Well, I know of that link between troops and cashflow problems now but back then I thought it was the war weariness. Oops.
The situation deserves a bit more description, if only for nostalgic laughs and whatnot, so here goes. I'm seeing increased war weariness, I've been banged up a bit by the pirates, and what was left with no damage by them got banged up a bit in early skirmishes against the Mortalen. Suddenly I'm hovering at 0 cashflow and I'm thinking "What the heck is this? Dammit, I'm nowhere near done yet. Gotta rush, gotta rush!!"
So I get some troops onto the transporters, get them going towards the invasion area to the left, kick massive amounts of reptile butt, and then shift my attention towards the upper part of the area on the right, which is about a quadrant and a half away. And while I'm focusing everything on taking over those two systems (involving three planet invasions in total), I'm suddenly getting a message about a general getting killed back at one of the invaded areas.
Apparently the general and a few friends had stayed behind on the planet as my troop transports moved on for greener pastures and other invasions, with the flock of a secondary fleet circling above for protection, and apparently the flock were about as useful as sun lotion in a snowstorm in terms of preventing a Mortalen troop transport from landing a force on the planet. We're talking about one freaking transport and the damn snot-for-brains failed to take it out. *sigh*
So I'm rushing another pair of troop transports along with more combat ships, rushing troops to put on them, feeling decidedly stressed by being down to -20k cashfl, wait, what? MINUS TWENTY??! HOW CAN IT BE DOWN TO MINUS TWENTY??! And while I was rushing and doing anything but thinking straight and being calm and rational, the cashflow dropped lower and lower.
Despite my panic, the war was actually going quite well. The Mortalen are supposedly fierce but they weren't putting up much of a fight, at least not once I got reorganized from the pirate problems. It really came down to their fleets and strike forces being too scattered and way too small. I was using size 320 ships at that time, and I had them in groups of 15-20. The Mortalen managed to put together a few cruisers of a comparable size and beyond that destroyers and frigates, but never in any serious kind of numbers. The attrition did end up wearing out a few ships but my casualties weren't anything too severe.
The real problem was ultimately the negative cashflow. As it turns out, it really didn't have anything to do with the war dragging on per se, but rather with me building a massive amount of ships and a truly ridiculous number of troops. I found this out after my cashflow hit 60k red, at which point I had finally managed to take over the red-hued areas in the picture above, and at which point the Mortalen had very little left to fight with. If I'd known better, I'd probably have killed them off, but I didn't. So I asked for peace and they laughed at me. I had to trade them some old crappy tech for peace in order to make it happen. Wonky diplomacy much?
And then came the peace and... Nope, still freaking sixty thousand negative cashflow. Then I finally pulled my head out of my butt, looked at the empire summary screen, noticed that my troops had about as much upkeep as my entire fleet, and managed to figure out that I probably could do something about that. Turns out that having hordes of ground forces everywhere didn't do much good at all and it costs a fortune as well.
Lesson learned: Be careful with your troop recruitment and don't feel bad about disbanding troops if you're not going to use them in the near future.
Anyway, the end of the war also marks the end of all the exciting military action, more or less. There were a few regular pirates trying to spice things up but they're so puny at this stage of the game. Numerous, yes, suicidally determined, no doubt, but they're so puny that it's almost impossible to take them seriously. Why are they asking me to pay protection money instead of asking me for permission to pay me to not blow them up?
Aside from pirate jokers, the action has been quite limited. The Mortalen were pushed back and for a period of time, they really loved me despite hating me since we were doing well over 100k trade. I suppose the hilarious amount of trade could have something to do with me taking out a gratifying number of their civilian ships as they tried in vain to pull off resources from a planet that once had a star port. You'd think civilians could figure out that anything able to kill star ports is likely also able to kill tiny civilian vessels, but maybe that's just a Darwinian logic that escapes Mortalen and AIs alike.
On the other sides of my empire, the Zenox were being quite cool about everything, which is how they've acted all game. The Haarkons were giving me on and off trade sanctions. The Shandar are sort of happy on their side of a rather barren quadrant-wide void and the same is true with the Ikkuro. Consequently I've been using the time since the end of the war on organizing and building up. Getting mines on everything. Colonizing. Colonizing even more. Salvaging derelicts. And speaking of those, it really is quite a nice tech boost they provide, isn't it? Perhaps a tiny bit overpowered?
My brief exposure to diplomacy also lead to me noticing the numbers written next to tech names in the trade negotiation screen. Those very large numbers. Almost phone-number like numbers. I wonder if the AI would be silly enough to pay even half that number for my incredibly useless "improved fission"?
Lesson learned: OH MY GAWD! Holy freaking mother of cashcows, what the heck? What is wrong with these clowns?
Well, to skip all the useless expressions of surprise, it turns out that I did have a few techs that some of the AI didn't. Not all of them cared to trade, of course, but I'd managed to make contact with another rodent race, the Ugnari, and we got along really great.
"Cheers buddy. What you wanna do to tonight?"
"The same thing I do every night, Pinko. Try to take over the galaxy! By the way, I've got this old railgun tech that isn't good for anything, wouldn't you like to give me all your money, your galaxy map, and those couple of nice techs in a trade?"
And the best part? They've got the color to go along with it. So until their neighburs squish them, it's literally going to be Pinky and the brain, brain, brain, brain...
That settled, I also took my time to browse what other factions had to offer but none of them cared to trade tech. Oh well. Almost all of them were overjoyed to take improved fission off my hands, though most of them had very little money on hand. Of course, after a bit of trading I had half a mil on hand, so if they didn't have money then I could gift them 200k and then the grateful dunces were happy to trade me back my money for a useless tech. I'm sure this could be exploited even further, but come on?
With my nice bit of cash, I crashed the research on ocean planets that I'd had going for what seemed like ages. It came through. I colonized some more. Colonizing ocean planets made it possible for me to push back Haarkonish borders a bit, since they can't do that yet. I'm not sure that made them like me more, though. I've got by far the most colonies at this point but my population was tiny and my strategic value was in the bottom. So I read up on stuff and I looked through my settings and it turns out that the AI rather stupidly tries to raise money by taxing percentages of really tiny colony revenues. Contrasted with zero tax growth rates, this makes less than no sense whatsoever.
Lesson learned: Kill your AI tax assistant. Kill him with fire. Nuke him from orbit. Put him on a collision course with a supernova. Or you could just fire him, but never use AI tax rates. It's very simple to manage anyway. Just go for zero tax until colony population hits max. The homeworld on high taxes should be able to fund you well enough, perhaps with the aid of some of your oldest colonies, while all the other colonies build a taxpayer base that is actually worth the effort of taxing.
I've put all but six of my ~35 colonies at zero tax and the revenue loss? Maybe 10k or so. Growth bonus at about 30 colonies or a +10k cashflow bonus? It really isn't a hard choice, at least not for me. I suspect the AI factions do things differently, putting them at an even larger disadvantage. If this turns out to be too much of an AI hindrance then hopefully setting ColonyTaxRateMediumColony to 0 in the race policy files will improve things slightly. It's too bad that the policy files don't include parameters for specifying what high or low tax levels are and what constitutes a large and a medium colony.
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